Is this guy actually claiming that Enter the Matrix (which was very successful commercially) was not a bad game? What about Black and White?While having significant sales numbers, I thought that when all the numbers were run through the calculator that these games were in fact Water World-esq commerical failures.
I have 125 (windows) computers across our student labs, soon to be 165. They all have at least 5 Gig of (wasted) space on their hard drives. Newer PCs have 20 or 30 Gig free. Average is 15Gig per PC, or will be when we hit the 165 mark. That's 2.4 TeraBytes. Even if we made 10 copies of everything students would still be able to share in 40 times more storage than we currently offer them.
What I need is a system that can cope with very low reliability of the computers in the mesh. Also, they're not 24/7 so the system (MC-ed by a server I assume) needs to unmount at 10:30pm when the PCs shut themselves down then boot all the PCs and (re)mount at 7:30am. It needs to cope with an entire lab of PCs being swapped out at the end of lease.
Given that only about 10% of the data changes from month to month and we never used to take monthly snapshots at all, I'm not too concerned about the life of "r" media at this stage. (If I was, I certainly wouldn't be using my Plexwriter Premium to fit 830MBytes on a 700Mbyte CD.:)
Tape blows. At work we now do an overnight compression of (3.2Gig of) user data and it gets bunged on my iPod for off-site backup the following night. Four days are kept on the server, two weeks on my laptop and monthly snapshots are burned to disc (CD if it fits, DVD if it doesn't) at the beginning of each month to be put in a fireproof safe. Look Ma, no tapes.
My Big Archive Of Stuff now contains a copy of the Diebold mailing list. This gets burnt to CD and saved on a hard drive as backup. If one fails another copy is made as soon as possible. It's never going away. Unfortunately, even squished down to 6.something MB using 7z, it's too big to host on my tiny corner of the web, sorry.
we were standing in the LucasArts booth and Tycho was looking at Wrath and I was standing behind him listening to a conversation going on behind me. G4 was back there filming a little thing about KOTOR and some G4 Business guy was talking to some LucasArts Business guy.
G4 Guy: So you guys will give us access to whatever we need right?
LucasArst Guy: Oh sure, we love you guys. Who doesn't like G4?
G4 Guy: Tell that to Valve they won't give us shit. I don't understand why so many game companies don't want to work with us I mean we are great. If you give us some content we'll show it over and over again.
Gabe: HAHAHA! Uh...I was laughing at something I heard earlier.
I think it's great that they use their lack of programing as a selling point. Anyway I thought it was a funny story. As for G4 I think it's alright. Every time I see it they are showing a program I've seen multiple times already and it's usually about a game I played when I was in Junior high.
There's quite a significant software base for Series 60 applications. While yet another "standard" in this tiny niche market is ill-advised, one that isn't compatible with any existing software is suicide.
I have at least a dozen working devices in my house capable of producing an old analogue video signal (in your choice of RF, composite or S-Video) that don't require any broadcast anything. When TV switches to digital I'll either take the opportunity to watch less TV or I'll get a Digital TV tuner card for my PC, which has S-Video out. I'm only going to buy another TV if my current one breaks and it's too expensive to fix.
I'm glad Blizzard is throwing the Diablo II people a bone.
Unfortunately if they hit you with that bone, it does a lot more damage than it used to. Unless someone posts that the final 1.10 is easier than the two betas, I'm not even going to bother downloading it.
Probably because fan boys of the PS2 don't like it brought up that the system has a nasty little limitation that causes those jaggies.
Just as Xbox owners aren't fans of the opinion that it's an overpriced, underpowered PC and GameCube owners don't often like the relatively small software library and lack of DVD support being pointed out. The point is that the little dig was completely unnecessary.
(Personally, when I saw the complete lack of pop-ups in Wipeout Fusion I was happy.)
"We hope the lawsuit will encourage them to bargain in good faith,"
How very SCO of you.
Not sure if this helps
on
PDF Writers?
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· Score: 1
At work we use Ghostscript and "Redirection Port Monitor" to print PDFs on Windows desktops. It's all free, but I don't know that it's all open source.
Re 2.: There has been relatively little public debate on the issue of abandoning copyright. To do so now would adversely affect a large number of people that are currently conducting business in good faith. While it is heartwarming to see the occasional successful business person indicate that patents are so broken as to not be worth the paper they're written on, it is not the majority view.
While your comparison to slavery is overly emotive, given that it contains an element of ownership it might not necessarily be too far off base. However, works protected by copyright were created from nothing by someone at one time, so it's not like a company is holding a person ransom -- just our cultural heritage.
My second point is not advocating endless copyright. I'm suggesting a token payment to signal active upkeep start from day one and be required every X years until the copyright runs out.
That a potentially critical mass of companies would experience immediate financial concerns should copyright be removed without warning should be a good enough reason that it's not something you "just do". A collapsing economy is not a pretty sight. The correct way to do it is to announce a gradual phasing-out of IP laws so that larger employers have time to make changes without massive unemployment.
A report has recently been commissioned to discuss the issue of increasing the life of copyright from 50 years after the creator's death to 70 years after the creator's death.
Leaving my personal views on the actions of major corporate bodies with significant Intellectual Property assets aside for the moment, I would like to make two points.
The first is that copyright is supposed to encourage creation of new material. That's what the artificial structure called copyright is all about. The basic question behind the existence of copyright is "Why would people create something if everyone can just copy it?" Ignoring that people do readily create works for which copyright is applicable, yet still give freely to the public domain, I would just like to say that if any extension is made to the life of copyright I can find no way to justify retrospectively increasing the life of copyright on works that have already been created.
My second point is that the reason for encouraging creation of works is to enrich the public domain, not line the pockets of big business. Government should always be on the side of the public domain and should be constantly striving for ways to bring more material into it, not less. As such, it is my belief that copyright should only exist on a work so long as the copyright owner actively maintains it. The most simple method of encouraging this it to require a token payment be made every, say, ten years to keep the copyright work registered in a central database. The payment need only pay for the upkeep involved in maintaining such a database. The result is that if any copyright work becomes abandoned, it enters the public domain before it becomes worthless.
Please consider these opinions should any relevant vote come before parliament.
Giving that all the corporations push this in to protect their existing materials, I doubt this is going to happen.
Well, quite. But I'd love to see how they, or better yet -- the government, justify retrospective copyright extension given that the original reason for the artificial structure or copyright is to encourage new products not to encourage people to create one thing then sit on their arses for the rest of their lives.
Unfortunately, most western economies are too reliant on IP laws. If copyright were to simply be abolished (which I agree is the right final outcome) then a signficant number of businesses currently rigged to take advantage of the existing situation would encounter financial difficulties. Fortunately, I don't work at such a company, but we may well be tied to a number of other entities that would be negatively affected by the removal of copyright. I therefore stick to my original suggestion as being the easiest solution.
Why do corporations insist on these kinds of PR lies when the majority of their target audience can see right through them?
There are three parties; Nokia, Consumers and Developers. Consumers like myself don't care how many were sold. (The wonderful thing about the N-Gage is that even if the big commerical games don't happen, it's my phone so it won't just sit in a drawer.) It's the developers that have to be convinced that there's a large market out there capable of making a big budget game profitable. Funny thing is, if the developers use a multiplatform development environment they won't care how many N-Gages are sold either.
The N-Gage never should have been such a big deal. It's basically an incremental upgrade in Nokia's Series 60 family with a physical UI designed to make games more enjoyable. It's not a 'revolution in portable gaming', or whatever Nokia's marketing department came up with in a white powder powered orgy. It's just a funky little phone with some nice modern features.
Don't make it retroactive. If it's really about encouraging new products, only make it apply to new products. Any extension to copyright lifespan shouldn't apply to anything created before the law is enacted.
Anyone got any details of any effect to Australia? I know we can't see the southern lights unless we hang ten off the bottom of Tasmania, but some info might be handy.
I have a bunch of autopayment options setup. My mobile bill is applied to my credit card a week or so after I get the bill. My credit card balance is automatically debited from my bank acound a few weeks after I get that bill. Being able to bung charges onto my phone bill is actually very handy. Also, since there's a bonus consolidation time, it can be months before I actually pay for anything and it's all interest free:)
(Mind you, it is a bit of a worry that my life would run quite well without me, so long as work keep paying me. I think there was something like this in the "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About" novel...)
Actually, on the Palm platform, I don't think you have to turn it off to insert the card. I think it's as easy as inserting the card and tapping on the icon.
Slashdot Mirror
What I need is a system that can cope with very low reliability of the computers in the mesh. Also, they're not 24/7 so the system (MC-ed by a server I assume) needs to unmount at 10:30pm when the PCs shut themselves down then boot all the PCs and (re)mount at 7:30am. It needs to cope with an entire lab of PCs being swapped out at the end of lease.
Anything like this?
Given that only about 10% of the data changes from month to month and we never used to take monthly snapshots at all, I'm not too concerned about the life of "r" media at this stage. (If I was, I certainly wouldn't be using my Plexwriter Premium to fit 830MBytes on a 700Mbyte CD. :)
Tape blows. At work we now do an overnight compression of (3.2Gig of) user data and it gets bunged on my iPod for off-site backup the following night. Four days are kept on the server, two weeks on my laptop and monthly snapshots are burned to disc (CD if it fits, DVD if it doesn't) at the beginning of each month to be put in a fireproof safe. Look Ma, no tapes.
My Big Archive Of Stuff now contains a copy of the Diebold mailing list. This gets burnt to CD and saved on a hard drive as backup. If one fails another copy is made as soon as possible. It's never going away. Unfortunately, even squished down to 6.something MB using 7z, it's too big to host on my tiny corner of the web, sorry.
There's quite a significant software base for Series 60 applications. While yet another "standard" in this tiny niche market is ill-advised, one that isn't compatible with any existing software is suicide.
Nevermind.
(Personally, when I saw the complete lack of pop-ups in Wipeout Fusion I was happy.)
At work we use Ghostscript and "Redirection Port Monitor" to print PDFs on Windows desktops. It's all free, but I don't know that it's all open source.
While your comparison to slavery is overly emotive, given that it contains an element of ownership it might not necessarily be too far off base. However, works protected by copyright were created from nothing by someone at one time, so it's not like a company is holding a person ransom -- just our cultural heritage.
My second point is not advocating endless copyright. I'm suggesting a token payment to signal active upkeep start from day one and be required every X years until the copyright runs out.
That a potentially critical mass of companies would experience immediate financial concerns should copyright be removed without warning should be a good enough reason that it's not something you "just do". A collapsing economy is not a pretty sight. The correct way to do it is to announce a gradual phasing-out of IP laws so that larger employers have time to make changes without massive unemployment.
Dear Mr Wilkie,
A report has recently been commissioned to discuss the issue of increasing the life of copyright from 50 years after the creator's death to 70 years after the creator's death.
http://www.allenconsult.com.au/resources/M PA_Draft_final.pdf
Leaving my personal views on the actions of major corporate bodies with significant Intellectual Property assets aside for the moment, I would like to make two points.
The first is that copyright is supposed to encourage creation of new material. That's what the artificial structure called copyright is all about. The basic question behind the existence of copyright is "Why would people create something if everyone can just copy it?" Ignoring that people do readily create works for which copyright is applicable, yet still give freely to the public domain, I would just like to say that if any extension is made to the life of copyright I can find no way to justify retrospectively increasing the life of copyright on works that have already been created.
My second point is that the reason for encouraging creation of works is to enrich the public domain, not line the pockets of big business. Government should always be on the side of the public domain and should be constantly striving for ways to bring more material into it, not less. As such, it is my belief that copyright should only exist on a work so long as the copyright owner actively maintains it. The most simple method of encouraging this it to require a token payment be made every, say, ten years to keep the copyright work registered in a central database. The payment need only pay for the upkeep involved in maintaining such a database. The result is that if any copyright work becomes abandoned, it enters the public domain before it becomes worthless.
Please consider these opinions should any relevant vote come before parliament.
Thank you for your time,
Chris Johnson
Unfortunately, most western economies are too reliant on IP laws. If copyright were to simply be abolished (which I agree is the right final outcome) then a signficant number of businesses currently rigged to take advantage of the existing situation would encounter financial difficulties. Fortunately, I don't work at such a company, but we may well be tied to a number of other entities that would be negatively affected by the removal of copyright. I therefore stick to my original suggestion as being the easiest solution.
The N-Gage never should have been such a big deal. It's basically an incremental upgrade in Nokia's Series 60 family with a physical UI designed to make games more enjoyable. It's not a 'revolution in portable gaming', or whatever Nokia's marketing department came up with in a white powder powered orgy. It's just a funky little phone with some nice modern features.
Don't make it retroactive. If it's really about encouraging new products, only make it apply to new products. Any extension to copyright lifespan shouldn't apply to anything created before the law is enacted.
Anyone got any details of any effect to Australia? I know we can't see the southern lights unless we hang ten off the bottom of Tasmania, but some info might be handy.
(Mind you, it is a bit of a worry that my life would run quite well without me, so long as work keep paying me. I think there was something like this in the "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About" novel...)
Actually, on the Palm platform, I don't think you have to turn it off to insert the card. I think it's as easy as inserting the card and tapping on the icon.