Or they may take steps to ensure they're within the bounds of the license, just like they would have to for pretty much any other alternative proprietary library. I'm very glad that corporations use GPL code; they just need to understand it.
I think you hit it on the head. Hard core gaming is dying not console gaming.
I don't think that's true at all. "Hardcore" gaming (I hate that term) isn't declining, it's just being OVERSHADOWED by the massive growth in the entire gaming market. It's a smaller piece of a vastly larger pie. That may bother some egos, but isn't really a bad thing. Probably good for the industry.
I don't know where you live, but in my state it is illegal to leave an unattended car running. And it is illegal specifically because it presents an easy target for thieves.
I've honestly never heard of such a thing, and find that bizarre.
Not gonna look very readable on your laptop screen, and forget about reading the book's footnotes.....
No, it's fine. A laptop screen is 1400x900 or thereabouts; even a cheap camera will have better resolution than that. It's not going to be a problem unless you're doing a fair amount of zooming in.
At 1200dpi, an 8.5" x 11" document will be 10,200 x 13,200 resolution. That may be useful for some purposes, but for simple text browsing it's overkill by nearly a whole order of magnitude.
You might want to read the front matter of just about every book published to see that they specifically address feeding the book into a computer in any way possible and say it is a violation of the copyright if done without permission.
It doesn't matter what they say. It matters what the law says, and if they tell you that you can't do something the law says you can, the law wins. The more books add legal crap in order to be more like software EULAs, the more lies they will incorporate, like software EULAs.
I doubt there's much of a chance at all that you would be found guilty of copyright infringement for making a format change of your own book, for your own use. That's nearly the most straightforward example of fair use you could imagine. If you distributed it, sure; that's not fair use.
Then ask why the USA spends more on 'defense' than the next 5 countries on the list combined.
The USA projects its power well. That tends to have an effect on decisions made elsewhere.
Have you never played Civilization? The player at the top of the game is the combined target of ALL other players. If you are in 1st place, you need to make sure you're in 1st place with a VERY comfortable margin.
Re:Sloppy editing, but indispensable.
on
Slashdot Turns 100,000
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think there is some sort of sociological principle at play here... some sort of emergent property of systems. As the number of people frequenting the internet, and social networking sites, grow... there's an effect that both drives most sites toward absolute mediocrity, the most populated part of the bell curve... but if you are sufficiently above or below the middle, you may be pushed further to that extreme.
The smart people need a site, and there's more smart people than ever... so there is a demand for something on the high edge. But there's absolutely no need for a 'halfway smart' site, like, say, Digg... at that point, the site joins millions of others in vying for the attention at the populated middle. I THINK there might be something like that happening with slashdot... at least I hope.
I think something similar happens with movies and tv.
You do realize that America has over 2 million of its people in jail, with a good proportion in there for political reasons.
No, I don't think a good proportion of 2 million people are in jail for political reasons. If you're referring to the laws against drug use... I completely agree with you that they are ridiculous, and should be repealed. But the people in jail for selling/possessing drugs are not in jail for 'political' reasons. It's nothing quite so noble; they just wanted to get high or make money, and broke a law. A stupid law, yes; but they weren't trying to make a political statement or stand up for their rights. You do a disservice to those who ARE in jail on principle when you lump them all together.
I think we already do too much age segregation. While mixing adults and children can lead to some problems, it can also have extremely beneficial effects on both. I would also prefer a school system that included children of all ages, in addition; having 3rd graders in the same school as 12th graders gives the younger kids more guidance, and the older kids more of a sense of responsibility (assuming that social behavior hasn't already completely broken down). Keeping people primarily isolated to their age 'tier' doesn't seem healthy, and can promote 'lord of the flies' type behavior to a certain degree.
The same applies with mixing senior citizens in with younger people; both benefit.
It seems like patents and copyright were introduced around the time industrialization kicked in, and the ABILITY to massively and inexpensively copy art appeared. The two probably go hand in hand.
Right. Cloning gameplay elements should be fine, and my understanding is that (sans patent), it's perfectly legal. Things such as characters, level design, and so forth are (automatically) copyrighted creations, though, and that IS illegal without permission.
Nobody should be forbid to make a side-scrolling platformer that plays like Super Mario Brothers; but if they include actual Mario characters, that's a problem... at least of copyright, and perhaps trademarks as well.
The Wii has a massive amount of crap (because it's both the most popular console, and the least expensive to develop for), but if you can narrow the search down to the quality games, it has a selection as good as the other consoles. I think you're doing yourself a dis-service by not checking it out again.
I totally agree that it's hard to notice a gem like "a little king's story" when it's surrounded by mediocre games that look so similar.
I agree. It would be LESS bloated if more functions were moved INTO addons. Things like the Awesomebar should never have been built into the core functionality of the browser. If that was done because addons didn't have the performance necessary, then they need to fix the addon structure.
is like watching NASCAR: people with nothing better to do with their time or money than to go around in circles for hours over something only they care about, all the while taking money from poor people who are too dumb to not want to pay for vicarious participation.
I understand it's way more trendy to rag on NASCAR, but how does your criticism not hold true for ALL sports?
I understood that todays kids sleep with each other much more easily that my generation did...I'd expect that # of different partners average to be MUCH higher for today's kids.
I think that's a myth. I don't think teens now are as promiscuous as teens in, say, late 60s/early 70s. That was a bit of a fluke. A lot of guys still follow the traditional pattern: Sex with a few different girls, get married... and then maybe that's it, maybe there'll be one or two others, a divorce. There's various cultural niches that have massively more or less, but those are niches.
I clicked 'reply' just to add a ME TOO about the "awesomebar", but I'll get modded down if that's all I say.
So I'll continue. That sort of functionality should always have been optional... preferably, an add-on; if not, at least allow it to be switched back to the older, more rational, behavior. Taking away a choice is nuts, and Mozilla has made enough weird decisions like that lately that I'm thinking of jumping ship to another browser. It would have been unthinkably a year or two ago.
As long as 'tabbed windows' defaults to a behavior where a single tabbed window is just a normal window, handling the same way, I'm all for it; but if the feature in any way hurts people who don't WANT the feature, then it's a bad feature.
If you plot the number of sexual partners, you'll find men have a curve that rises, peaks at around four (if I remember right), and then descends... a smaller number have had 8 partners, a still smaller 12, etc. It's a pretty normal distribution.
The chart for females is shaped differently. It has a larger peak at a lower number than men (say, three), descends rapidly... but then flattens. When you get up to HIGH numbers of sexual partners (15, 20, 30), there are more females at that level than males.
In other words, most women have fewer partners than men; but a small number of women have FAR more partners than most men.
A oneline that had multiple revision should be completely rewritten, because if you manage to get multiple changes in one line it surely is a mess... somwhere.
That makes me think of comparisons to sentence and paragraph structure. A sentence should enough words to express one thought, a paragraph enough sentences to express one idea. There are legitimate reasons to vary from those requirements at times, but in general it will improve your writing to adhere to those concepts. A lot of unreadable prose is generated by people that don't understand the function of paragraphs.
An obvious analog is lines of code and function blocks. I write what many of you would probably consider verbose code, because I prefer a line of code to always do just one thing. I'll increment x on one line and set y=x on another line, if those are (in an abstract sense) two unrelated operations. It feels conceptually cleaner to me to keep each logical step separate.
A one-liner seems to me to be reminiscent of one of those eighty-word sentences that you will read in a EULA... that are grammatically correct, legally precise, meticulously crafted, performs their function well, and yet is unreadable by a normal human. The lawyer that writes a sentence like that probably feels the same sense of pride that a programmer feels when they replace a twelve-line function with one clever one-liner.
If you're not comfortable with c, go back to interpreted languages like java and perl. (yes, java is interpreted at runtime - get over it already).
Hmm... you seem to have gone from discussing to ranting. I HATE Java, and cringe when I have to run a Java program... but even I know that Java is sometimes interpreted, sometimes compiled. And even if it was always interpreted, it's juvenile to get mad and start trying to insult people over it. Nothing wrong with interpreted languages in the first place, and they aren't innately less sophisticated or complex.
Other than about the pointers, I tend to agree with the author rather than you on the points you mention. Which is fine, I suppose; we don't all need to program the same way, and it's probably good that we don't.
But my thinking is that longer, more descriptive variable names are simply part of documentation; it can eliminate the need to look through the code and find the comment tied to the declaration. (Although I personally dislike the 'initial lower case, capitalize all subsequent words' standard.) As far as skipping the brackets on single line blocks after conditionals... I think that is ALWAYS a bad idea. It's a pointless, inconsistent shortcut that can cause a number of different mistakes, just for the convenience of saving two characters. Yes, you can learn to always watch for that; but that's a learned response to a problem that doesn't need to exist. Better to avoid the problem in the first place. Adding the brackets never hurts anything, it increases the consistency of your formatting, and reduces potential mistakes... that's exactly the sort of thing that belongs in a standard.
No, you're not alone, but neither is it a ridiculous concept. The game itself isn't particularly important; however, it signifies a government that believes it's ok to censor it's citizens. That's very wrong, and is certainly worth fighting over. Ethically, it may not be a problem to resort to violence when somebody is taking away a right... but practically, it would be a counterproductive thing to do at this point. I'm pretty sure this will be eventually corrected through the normal course of Australia's democratic process.
Slashdot Mirror
Or they may take steps to ensure they're within the bounds of the license, just like they would have to for pretty much any other alternative proprietary library. I'm very glad that corporations use GPL code; they just need to understand it.
I think you hit it on the head. Hard core gaming is dying not console gaming.
I don't think that's true at all. "Hardcore" gaming (I hate that term) isn't declining, it's just being OVERSHADOWED by the massive growth in the entire gaming market. It's a smaller piece of a vastly larger pie. That may bother some egos, but isn't really a bad thing. Probably good for the industry.
I don't know where you live, but in my state it is illegal to leave an unattended car running. And it is illegal specifically because it presents an easy target for thieves.
I've honestly never heard of such a thing, and find that bizarre.
Not gonna look very readable on your laptop screen, and forget about reading the book's footnotes.....
No, it's fine. A laptop screen is 1400x900 or thereabouts; even a cheap camera will have better resolution than that. It's not going to be a problem unless you're doing a fair amount of zooming in.
At 1200dpi, an 8.5" x 11" document will be 10,200 x 13,200 resolution. That may be useful for some purposes, but for simple text browsing it's overkill by nearly a whole order of magnitude.
You might want to read the front matter of just about every book published to see that they specifically address feeding the book into a computer in any way possible and say it is a violation of the copyright if done without permission.
It doesn't matter what they say. It matters what the law says, and if they tell you that you can't do something the law says you can, the law wins. The more books add legal crap in order to be more like software EULAs, the more lies they will incorporate, like software EULAs.
I doubt there's much of a chance at all that you would be found guilty of copyright infringement for making a format change of your own book, for your own use. That's nearly the most straightforward example of fair use you could imagine. If you distributed it, sure; that's not fair use.
Then ask why the USA spends more on 'defense' than the next 5 countries on the list combined.
The USA projects its power well. That tends to have an effect on decisions made elsewhere.
Have you never played Civilization? The player at the top of the game is the combined target of ALL other players. If you are in 1st place, you need to make sure you're in 1st place with a VERY comfortable margin.
I think there is some sort of sociological principle at play here... some sort of emergent property of systems. As the number of people frequenting the internet, and social networking sites, grow... there's an effect that both drives most sites toward absolute mediocrity, the most populated part of the bell curve... but if you are sufficiently above or below the middle, you may be pushed further to that extreme.
The smart people need a site, and there's more smart people than ever... so there is a demand for something on the high edge. But there's absolutely no need for a 'halfway smart' site, like, say, Digg... at that point, the site joins millions of others in vying for the attention at the populated middle. I THINK there might be something like that happening with slashdot... at least I hope.
I think something similar happens with movies and tv.
You do realize that America has over 2 million of its people in jail, with a good proportion in there for political reasons.
No, I don't think a good proportion of 2 million people are in jail for political reasons. If you're referring to the laws against drug use... I completely agree with you that they are ridiculous, and should be repealed. But the people in jail for selling/possessing drugs are not in jail for 'political' reasons. It's nothing quite so noble; they just wanted to get high or make money, and broke a law. A stupid law, yes; but they weren't trying to make a political statement or stand up for their rights. You do a disservice to those who ARE in jail on principle when you lump them all together.
Which renders cheating mostly irrelevant, as far as the other players are concerned.
It's a puzzle when you have a specific image you're recreating. If you aren't, it is then just a toy... or perhaps an artistic medium.
I think we already do too much age segregation. While mixing adults and children can lead to some problems, it can also have extremely beneficial effects on both. I would also prefer a school system that included children of all ages, in addition; having 3rd graders in the same school as 12th graders gives the younger kids more guidance, and the older kids more of a sense of responsibility (assuming that social behavior hasn't already completely broken down). Keeping people primarily isolated to their age 'tier' doesn't seem healthy, and can promote 'lord of the flies' type behavior to a certain degree.
The same applies with mixing senior citizens in with younger people; both benefit.
It seems like patents and copyright were introduced around the time industrialization kicked in, and the ABILITY to massively and inexpensively copy art appeared. The two probably go hand in hand.
Seeing as you are a copycat of video games yourself, you should get the fuck out of this conversation.
Despite him being completely correct?
And conversely, that is the asset you have that you are using to purchase free services from Facebook, tv, radio, Google... It's not one-sided.
Right. Cloning gameplay elements should be fine, and my understanding is that (sans patent), it's perfectly legal. Things such as characters, level design, and so forth are (automatically) copyrighted creations, though, and that IS illegal without permission.
Nobody should be forbid to make a side-scrolling platformer that plays like Super Mario Brothers; but if they include actual Mario characters, that's a problem... at least of copyright, and perhaps trademarks as well.
The Wii has a massive amount of crap (because it's both the most popular console, and the least expensive to develop for), but if you can narrow the search down to the quality games, it has a selection as good as the other consoles. I think you're doing yourself a dis-service by not checking it out again.
I totally agree that it's hard to notice a gem like "a little king's story" when it's surrounded by mediocre games that look so similar.
I agree. It would be LESS bloated if more functions were moved INTO addons. Things like the Awesomebar should never have been built into the core functionality of the browser. If that was done because addons didn't have the performance necessary, then they need to fix the addon structure.
is like watching NASCAR: people with nothing better to do with their time or money than to go around in circles for hours over something only they care about, all the while taking money from poor people who are too dumb to not want to pay for vicarious participation.
I understand it's way more trendy to rag on NASCAR, but how does your criticism not hold true for ALL sports?
I understood that todays kids sleep with each other much more easily that my generation did...I'd expect that # of different partners average to be MUCH higher for today's kids.
I think that's a myth. I don't think teens now are as promiscuous as teens in, say, late 60s/early 70s. That was a bit of a fluke. A lot of guys still follow the traditional pattern: Sex with a few different girls, get married... and then maybe that's it, maybe there'll be one or two others, a divorce. There's various cultural niches that have massively more or less, but those are niches.
I clicked 'reply' just to add a ME TOO about the "awesomebar", but I'll get modded down if that's all I say.
So I'll continue. That sort of functionality should always have been optional... preferably, an add-on; if not, at least allow it to be switched back to the older, more rational, behavior. Taking away a choice is nuts, and Mozilla has made enough weird decisions like that lately that I'm thinking of jumping ship to another browser. It would have been unthinkably a year or two ago.
As long as 'tabbed windows' defaults to a behavior where a single tabbed window is just a normal window, handling the same way, I'm all for it; but if the feature in any way hurts people who don't WANT the feature, then it's a bad feature.
If you plot the number of sexual partners, you'll find men have a curve that rises, peaks at around four (if I remember right), and then descends... a smaller number have had 8 partners, a still smaller 12, etc. It's a pretty normal distribution.
The chart for females is shaped differently. It has a larger peak at a lower number than men (say, three), descends rapidly... but then flattens. When you get up to HIGH numbers of sexual partners (15, 20, 30), there are more females at that level than males.
In other words, most women have fewer partners than men; but a small number of women have FAR more partners than most men.
A oneline that had multiple revision should be completely rewritten, because if you manage to get multiple changes in one line it surely is a mess... somwhere.
That makes me think of comparisons to sentence and paragraph structure. A sentence should enough words to express one thought, a paragraph enough sentences to express one idea. There are legitimate reasons to vary from those requirements at times, but in general it will improve your writing to adhere to those concepts. A lot of unreadable prose is generated by people that don't understand the function of paragraphs.
An obvious analog is lines of code and function blocks. I write what many of you would probably consider verbose code, because I prefer a line of code to always do just one thing. I'll increment x on one line and set y=x on another line, if those are (in an abstract sense) two unrelated operations. It feels conceptually cleaner to me to keep each logical step separate.
A one-liner seems to me to be reminiscent of one of those eighty-word sentences that you will read in a EULA... that are grammatically correct, legally precise, meticulously crafted, performs their function well, and yet is unreadable by a normal human. The lawyer that writes a sentence like that probably feels the same sense of pride that a programmer feels when they replace a twelve-line function with one clever one-liner.
If you're not comfortable with c, go back to interpreted languages like java and perl. (yes, java is interpreted at runtime - get over it already).
Hmm... you seem to have gone from discussing to ranting. I HATE Java, and cringe when I have to run a Java program... but even I know that Java is sometimes interpreted, sometimes compiled. And even if it was always interpreted, it's juvenile to get mad and start trying to insult people over it. Nothing wrong with interpreted languages in the first place, and they aren't innately less sophisticated or complex.
Other than about the pointers, I tend to agree with the author rather than you on the points you mention. Which is fine, I suppose; we don't all need to program the same way, and it's probably good that we don't.
But my thinking is that longer, more descriptive variable names are simply part of documentation; it can eliminate the need to look through the code and find the comment tied to the declaration. (Although I personally dislike the 'initial lower case, capitalize all subsequent words' standard.) As far as skipping the brackets on single line blocks after conditionals... I think that is ALWAYS a bad idea. It's a pointless, inconsistent shortcut that can cause a number of different mistakes, just for the convenience of saving two characters. Yes, you can learn to always watch for that; but that's a learned response to a problem that doesn't need to exist. Better to avoid the problem in the first place. Adding the brackets never hurts anything, it increases the consistency of your formatting, and reduces potential mistakes... that's exactly the sort of thing that belongs in a standard.
No, you're not alone, but neither is it a ridiculous concept. The game itself isn't particularly important; however, it signifies a government that believes it's ok to censor it's citizens. That's very wrong, and is certainly worth fighting over. Ethically, it may not be a problem to resort to violence when somebody is taking away a right... but practically, it would be a counterproductive thing to do at this point. I'm pretty sure this will be eventually corrected through the normal course of Australia's democratic process.