But having Greedo shoot first was a significant change to Han Solo's characterization, and really it seems that Lucas was looking more to direct marketing of the film towards a gullible child market than preserve a solid artistic vision.
I can't believe you are talking about "solid artistic vision" in the same sentence as you mention Star Wars. Nay, in the same Slashdot post. Nay, on the same day!
For the first time ever, Dvorak got an issue right from start to finish. Not only that, he has shown himself as a decent human being while at it.
I live in one of the countries that will/should/would buy these things. We need better teachers, and a way to keep them willing to work in education. That would solve our problems. Right now we are in a situation where the bad teachers of today breed the worse teachers of tomorrow. Find a solution to that problem and you will end poverty. Give kids laptops and they will only play Tetris until their toys break or get stolen.
I didn't know most of these games so I randomly clicked a game. What kind of idiot would have that Loco Roco music on his iPod? I am as geeky as anyone else on Slashdot, but I have to concede you deserve to be bullied.
Also, the best song in all Sonic games is Ice Cap Zone. Anyone who does not agree with that is a fucking idiot.
Clearly the author of that Forbes article hasn't tried reading too many of the books on Google books. While there are some really nicely formatted ebooks on there, most of the collection consists of horrendous scans of esoterica only useful to researchers with a tolerance for photographs that may be blurry, noisy, or shot at funny angles.
Not to mention you can get Bleak House from Project Gutenberg for ages now. Not that anyone would mention that as it does not contain the OMGGOOGLEZERS aspect that passes for covering technology these days.
I know more stalinist nerds than libertarians. And that's not to say that there are many stalinist nerds - maybe the question should be rephrased as "why does such a small group make so much noise on the Internet?"
I've never seen anyone over about twenty-five worrying about whether games are "kiddie games". By thirty, people are enjoying Mario games because they're fun.
As someone who became a Mario fan at 26 (blessed Virtual Console), let me be the first to say amen.
In Brazil, Microsoft brought a lot of their partners to vote. You know, people who make a living installing OEM copies of Windows were suddenly so worried about the finer points of office format standardization...
Fortunately the issue was not decided by vote. The chair (who is a permanent member of the standards body, not related to any sides) informed everyone that decisions were always achieved by consensus. Obviously, there was no consensus, which surprised him a lot, and to avoid ballot stuffing, he took upon himself to review the discussion and make the final choice.
While no justification for the NO vote was given, it seems clear that he noticed the technical arguments against OOXML went unchallenged by the YES-side.
If you think about it, taking a vote for this kind of thing is rarely the correct thing to do, which is why the weight should be given to technical issues and whether they were properly addressed. Other than that, it is hard to determine a metric for "fairness" w/r/t who should be able to cast a vote. Let Microsoft's buying so many national standards bodies serve as proof.
Please note I am not expecting targeted sales. If Google Video were to really target my country, they would _have_ to add at least two more payment options that just don't exist anywhere else. But what happens here is that Google accepts Visa credit cards, I have a Visa credit card, and still I can't buy stuff from them. I use this credit card to buy stuff at Amazon (physical stuff, but not Unbox videos!) and Virtual Console games, but I can't use it at most bit-delivery stores because they check the billing address.
In fact I understand that probably Google, Apple and all would probably be happy to sell stuff to anyone, and probably the content providers are to blame. But I would expect they would find some solution some time - like, some years ago.
All of the complications in international commerce also exist for physical goods - and I can buy physical CDs and DVDs from American stores but not from American online stores. Something is wrong here.
Yes, I'm sure if people had known they were going to get a check-out credit and their money refunded, they'd have actually used the service.
Ok, I am the guy that actually tried to buy one of their videos. Unfortunately I couldn't because I needed an American credit card. Brilliant.
Buying stuff on the Internet is hard as hell. I don't mean buying stuff that gets delivered in a package - that is easy enough to do over the Internet and works just fine worldwide. But when it comes to buying bits and bytes, nobody wants to sell you anything. None of the music stores support my country. None of the video selling/rental stores support my country. What the hell? Limiting your availability geographically is harder than just doing nothing. They walk the extra mile to have _less_ customers? I think the only stuff I can actually buy online that gets sent electronically is Virtual Console stuff on the Wii.
Yeah, Slim's phone co is the only one to provide flat-rate GPRS/EDGE in Brazil. I don't have a problem with the "do something right and get paid for it" business model.
Not to mention that around the same time (and even later on) AMD was pumping out crappy processors that did floating point approximations so horrible you could be pretty sure to find the errors pretty much every time. But nobody cared.
All they did was survey how big the broadband Internet markets are. Nobody claimed this or that country was better.
Americans and their affirmation problem...
1. Can I do it with Linux today (GPL2) and tomorrow (GPL3)?
Yes.
2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.)
Depends on the license. Your problem is with the GPL: do not link to GPL libraries at all, ever! Closed apps can't use them. You can, however, use LGPL libraries if you link to them dynamically (or provide another way for the user to relink the library himself). I don't think you can statically link to them unless you provide that mechanism, which is weird.
You can, however, ship your own dynamic libraries if you wish. You don't have to use the system's libraries. This is as good as static linking and avoids the legal problems by allowing the user to change the GPL'd portion, which is the point here.
Also notice that some libraries have special exceptions to the GPL: the Linux kernel itself and the GNU libc are two of them. (You can link proprietary code to the Linux kernel, and you can statically link the libc, IIRC).
3. Can I obfuscate my code (e.g. encode it)?
Yes, but there's no point in doing so.
4. Could I be forced to publish this code by some 3-d party?
The GPL attempts to be viral - that is, if you do something wrong like statically linking to a GPL library, it tries to force you to license your code under the GPL. This has not been tested in court. What GPL vigilante efforts usually try to do as a first step is get infringers to clean up their code. So, do not willingly violate the GPL, and if you do get one such notice from the community, do stop everything and be sure you are clean and forthcoming about it.
(This makes GPL compliance look harder than it really is - GPL infringement is, I am sure, intentional and usually made by people who think they can get away with it. This is not your case.)
5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?
No. It all depends on which libraries you use. BSD systems usually rely more on BSD-licensed libraries, while Linux systems usually rely more on GPL-licensed libraries, but there are BSD and GPL libraries on both sides of the fence, so you should be careful either way. Hell, even if you do Windows development you have to carefully consider every license for every library you use - and there are GPL'd libraries under Windows too. As a developer, you have to respect copyrights and licenses no matter what platform you are developing for. That's boring, but that's the way we get along.
To all you people who think Apple's vision of a "Web 2.0 app" is running Safari and clicking on a bookmark, I suggest you take a look at Dashboard.
Dashboard is a HTML renderer, based on Safari. Yet it doesn't look like a browser. Its applications do not look like web pages. Dashboard applications are installed locally through a special type of package. They can store data locally and access OS APIs which a browser is not allowed to grant access to for obvious security reasons.
A end user has no idea that what's really behind all that is just HTML + JavaScript.
This sucks compared to doing Cocoa development, but it's not as bad as some people expect - and certainly there are far more programmers who can write HTML and JavaScript than Objective-C. iPhone will probably do the same: permit locally-installed HTML/JS apps with special access to APIs like Telephony, Address Books and iCal.
The reason: the emerging markets of countries such as Brazil, China, India or Russia, which will be responsible of 775 million new PCs and laptop computers. Part of them, of course, coming from projects like the OLPC's one.
Yeah, like.001% of them maybe if you are optimistic?
If you want to look at the facts rather than the hype, look at the Brazilian government's recent tax breaks on computers and its commitment to making computers as universally owned as televisions and making every school broadband-connected. I am sure there are equivalent reasons in Russia, China and India. Maybe even the falling dollar has something to do with that.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe you are talking about "solid artistic vision" in the same sentence as you mention Star Wars. Nay, in the same Slashdot post. Nay, on the same day!
For the first time ever, Dvorak got an issue right from start to finish. Not only that, he has shown himself as a decent human being while at it.
I live in one of the countries that will/should/would buy these things. We need better teachers, and a way to keep them willing to work in education. That would solve our problems. Right now we are in a situation where the bad teachers of today breed the worse teachers of tomorrow. Find a solution to that problem and you will end poverty. Give kids laptops and they will only play Tetris until their toys break or get stolen.
The cake is a lie.
At least they got an appropriate name.
Also, the best song in all Sonic games is Ice Cap Zone. Anyone who does not agree with that is a fucking idiot.
I think nothing says the PS3 and Xbox360 are geared towards a teenager audience more than the fact that they have so many "mature" games.
Not to mention you can get Bleak House from Project Gutenberg for ages now. Not that anyone would mention that as it does not contain the OMGGOOGLEZERS aspect that passes for covering technology these days.
The free is just a matter of reciprocity. Brazil does not have its own sets of rules towards foreigners, it only returns the treatment it gets.
Buying a PS3 seemed like a bad idea before, now it takes a PhD and a few hours browsing fanboi websites that use terms such as "SKU".
So, is there a model that has good backwards compatibility, a large disk and built-in Wifi? How do I recognize it?
Please, don't film Tintin. Thanks.
They have patented an unethical behaviour. Does that mean it will be harder for other people to do what the patent describes? Please?
I know more stalinist nerds than libertarians. And that's not to say that there are many stalinist nerds - maybe the question should be rephrased as "why does such a small group make so much noise on the Internet?"
As someone who became a Mario fan at 26 (blessed Virtual Console), let me be the first to say amen.
I thought that was T.S. Eliot's quote. Now who stole whose quote?
In Brazil, Microsoft brought a lot of their partners to vote. You know, people who make a living installing OEM copies of Windows were suddenly so worried about the finer points of office format standardization... Fortunately the issue was not decided by vote. The chair (who is a permanent member of the standards body, not related to any sides) informed everyone that decisions were always achieved by consensus. Obviously, there was no consensus, which surprised him a lot, and to avoid ballot stuffing, he took upon himself to review the discussion and make the final choice. While no justification for the NO vote was given, it seems clear that he noticed the technical arguments against OOXML went unchallenged by the YES-side. If you think about it, taking a vote for this kind of thing is rarely the correct thing to do, which is why the weight should be given to technical issues and whether they were properly addressed. Other than that, it is hard to determine a metric for "fairness" w/r/t who should be able to cast a vote. Let Microsoft's buying so many national standards bodies serve as proof.
Please note I am not expecting targeted sales. If Google Video were to really target my country, they would _have_ to add at least two more payment options that just don't exist anywhere else. But what happens here is that Google accepts Visa credit cards, I have a Visa credit card, and still I can't buy stuff from them. I use this credit card to buy stuff at Amazon (physical stuff, but not Unbox videos!) and Virtual Console games, but I can't use it at most bit-delivery stores because they check the billing address.
In fact I understand that probably Google, Apple and all would probably be happy to sell stuff to anyone, and probably the content providers are to blame. But I would expect they would find some solution some time - like, some years ago.
All of the complications in international commerce also exist for physical goods - and I can buy physical CDs and DVDs from American stores but not from American online stores. Something is wrong here.
Ok, I am the guy that actually tried to buy one of their videos. Unfortunately I couldn't because I needed an American credit card. Brilliant.
Buying stuff on the Internet is hard as hell. I don't mean buying stuff that gets delivered in a package - that is easy enough to do over the Internet and works just fine worldwide. But when it comes to buying bits and bytes, nobody wants to sell you anything. None of the music stores support my country. None of the video selling/rental stores support my country. What the hell? Limiting your availability geographically is harder than just doing nothing. They walk the extra mile to have _less_ customers? I think the only stuff I can actually buy online that gets sent electronically is Virtual Console stuff on the Wii.
Long time I don't see a LORD joke in the wild.
Yeah, Slim's phone co is the only one to provide flat-rate GPRS/EDGE in Brazil. I don't have a problem with the "do something right and get paid for it" business model.
Hah! Speak for yourself buddy!
Not to mention that around the same time (and even later on) AMD was pumping out crappy processors that did floating point approximations so horrible you could be pretty sure to find the errors pretty much every time. But nobody cared.
(glibc's tests always failed on AMDs)
That goes to show that by putting "Security" as part of the department's name they actually painted a huge target on their own ass.
May I suggest going low-key next time. Information security should be handled by the Department of Fishing.
All they did was survey how big the broadband Internet markets are. Nobody claimed this or that country was better. Americans and their affirmation problem...
1. Can I do it with Linux today (GPL2) and tomorrow (GPL3)?
Yes.
2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.)
Depends on the license. Your problem is with the GPL: do not link to GPL libraries at all, ever! Closed apps can't use them. You can, however, use LGPL libraries if you link to them dynamically (or provide another way for the user to relink the library himself). I don't think you can statically link to them unless you provide that mechanism, which is weird.
You can, however, ship your own dynamic libraries if you wish. You don't have to use the system's libraries. This is as good as static linking and avoids the legal problems by allowing the user to change the GPL'd portion, which is the point here.
Also notice that some libraries have special exceptions to the GPL: the Linux kernel itself and the GNU libc are two of them. (You can link proprietary code to the Linux kernel, and you can statically link the libc, IIRC).
3. Can I obfuscate my code (e.g. encode it)?
Yes, but there's no point in doing so.
4. Could I be forced to publish this code by some 3-d party?
The GPL attempts to be viral - that is, if you do something wrong like statically linking to a GPL library, it tries to force you to license your code under the GPL. This has not been tested in court. What GPL vigilante efforts usually try to do as a first step is get infringers to clean up their code. So, do not willingly violate the GPL, and if you do get one such notice from the community, do stop everything and be sure you are clean and forthcoming about it.
(This makes GPL compliance look harder than it really is - GPL infringement is, I am sure, intentional and usually made by people who think they can get away with it. This is not your case.)
5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?
No. It all depends on which libraries you use. BSD systems usually rely more on BSD-licensed libraries, while Linux systems usually rely more on GPL-licensed libraries, but there are BSD and GPL libraries on both sides of the fence, so you should be careful either way. Hell, even if you do Windows development you have to carefully consider every license for every library you use - and there are GPL'd libraries under Windows too. As a developer, you have to respect copyrights and licenses no matter what platform you are developing for. That's boring, but that's the way we get along.
To all you people who think Apple's vision of a "Web 2.0 app" is running Safari and clicking on a bookmark, I suggest you take a look at Dashboard.
Dashboard is a HTML renderer, based on Safari. Yet it doesn't look like a browser. Its applications do not look like web pages. Dashboard applications are installed locally through a special type of package. They can store data locally and access OS APIs which a browser is not allowed to grant access to for obvious security reasons.
A end user has no idea that what's really behind all that is just HTML + JavaScript.
This sucks compared to doing Cocoa development, but it's not as bad as some people expect - and certainly there are far more programmers who can write HTML and JavaScript than Objective-C. iPhone will probably do the same: permit locally-installed HTML/JS apps with special access to APIs like Telephony, Address Books and iCal.
Yeah, like .001% of them maybe if you are optimistic?
If you want to look at the facts rather than the hype, look at the Brazilian government's recent tax breaks on computers and its commitment to making computers as universally owned as televisions and making every school broadband-connected. I am sure there are equivalent reasons in Russia, China and India. Maybe even the falling dollar has something to do with that.
You can now go worship Negropoente's cute toy.