All of that text and yet you still deny natures irrepressible 8 sided time cube!
When I have finished reading your crap, Jesus will have just started reading, Socrates will be modding it down, and CmdrTaco will be itching to ban you! All this proves that TIME HAS 8 SIDES.
Theres enough documentation to write your own document import/export for Word for j-pimp-editor's super open format. Have you considered that they don't really want to open their.doc format, because they want to be able to change it whenever the hell they feel like?
I completely agree that DRM is a terrible idea. I don't choose DRM media. I do have an OS that is capable of playing it, but I don't use that feature, as it plays non-DRM content quite well (thank-you TPB).
The parameters of the box that I'm in are fairly well defined, and I do have faith that MS won't shrink it (for commercial reasons). (When it comes to "playback of hi-def movies" MS controls a tiny tiny percent of that market, btw).
The main point is that at any time I can change to a new box, open or otherwise. I'll be picking the platform that gives me the lowest friction when I use it, frankly none of the Free alternatives I have used in the past have lasted longer than a week before I had to delve into a config file (and yes, I'm a programmer, I just prefer to do that at work, when I'm getting paid).
I say "Hey Idaho, if you want to use these tools, then you have to promise not to talk about any emails you get from me regarding them."
You say "Sure, man". Then later you try to claim that you didn't really mean the bit about not talking about emails from me. Hey, its an agreement. No backsies. Don't like it, GTFO.
Either that or you can claim you took the software from their website without the agreement. IIRC that opens you up to all the nasties of Illegal Access To Another Mans Internets (5 years jail) or Digital Trespass As In Bits And Bytes And Not Really Finger In The Ass, But You May Get That With (2 years in jail).
Did you RTFA? The user was never able to play HD content. The content he purchased required a protected media path to play in HD. He purchased a new television which did not support HDCP. He then attempted to play the content on a non-PMP setup, and acted surprised when he couldnt.
This was not a Vista problem. The user should have chosen to purchase non-DRM content.
Aside from your paranoid ramblings of how MS might choose to stop just putting in the minimum level DRM to keep the content owners happy, and go with some crazy take over the world scheme, and somehow get their keys revoked for all future hi-def releases...
I doubt you ever exercise your "control". I have never, in the entire time I have used Windows or Linux been slightly tempted to make modifications to the source code (and I contract for a large enough company that we have access to the Windows source as well). My time is worth more than that.
Your "control" is a warm fuzzy blanket that undoubtably helps with your unjustified paranoia that Microsoft is the big bogeyman that is out to get you. You think a company that size is going to listen to a bunch of loonies over probably 99% of their home customers want the option of playing the latest HD movies?
Another good idea, instead of scoring on a 50-100 scale and set the passing grade at 75, is to say, score on a scale of 0-100 with the passing grade at 50.
Or does reducing the passing grade make for bad politics?
Then don't purchase and attempt to play content which requires protected media path. DUIIIEEE.
I don't use those features either. I'm kinda happy they are there - I know at some stage I'm going to end up with a blu-ray super DRM++ disk in my hand, and I'm going to be able to play it, with x% overhead because of some shitty DRM system.
Sounds like when your hot friend comes around with "this, like, totally cool movie I want to watch with you", then you are going to give her a lecture on the evils of DRM, and how Debian is more Free.
I, on the other hand, will be giving her a seat on the couch, some popcorn, and my cock.
I'm pretty certain VAC works of known hacks, not hack-creating possibilitys or heuristics.
Mainly because theres a large amount of hacks doing obviously dodgy things to the running game that don't get picked up... until they are specifically put on the "detected" list.
Also I tend to leave my whole dev suite running when I want a quick game of TF2:P
Steam being bloated? Steam takes up under a hundred meg of the 12 gig of steam games I have installed.
Have a louder cry about the DRM. I'm sure you'd love games costing several million dollars to develop shoved up on FTP with an honesty box, but someone with any brainpower whatsoever would realise that its fucking retarded.
The entire friction the steam DRM setup gives me is having to type a password once, and then tick the "remember me" box. Its a hell of a lot more convenient than CD-keys, its a hell of a lot more convenient than CDs, and I can happily play games offline (despite what the whingers say).
The biggest selling point is they have put in just enough protection to attract A-list games for distribution, rather than the rather crappy lineup Impulse offers.
I guess it also means that in ten years when valve shuts down and the person that buys their platform, decides that out of maliciousness they don't want to continue offering the service, and also that at that stage I am too poor to afford 3D Virtual Lesbian Extravaganza on my VR rig, then I might be saying "Well, damn, I can't play TF2 against the other three people that are still trying to play it". But thats fairly unlikely.
Especially when switching on Resharper whole-of-solution analysis. Visual Studio is a bit of a dog anyway - RS pushes my ram use for the VS process up to a gig and a half with a decent sized solution open:S
I find it useful to make a shortcut to explorer.exe with run as admin ticked. Similar to the elevated browser thingo in KDE. Otherwise you get about 3 UAC messages while trying to replace an exe in program files and rename the old one, in case you need to patch the game you are cracking^W^W^W^W^W SHIT.
I always ensure my devs are running dual core boxes. Dual core tends to shake out more threading issues than single core does. In my line of work (industrial automation) this can be a bit more serious than the odd 500 Server Error:P
Its Australia, we tend to purchase outright. I talked the shop down to 3 machines for ~1k AUD. Figured if they were crap I could give them to relatives. Turns out they worked fine;)
It true. 512meg is enough for light use. My partner's laptop is still at default spec, and it works fine for her, and the botnet shes part of (loves those toolbars);)
I use mine (same model - bottom end lenovo 3000) for development (VS, etc) - 4 gig ram though - about $80 AUD. The only downside is the shitty hitachi hard drive - terrible performance there, but superfetch does help.
These are bottom end $500 laptops, so its hard to imagine how cheap an equivalent desktop would be. ($250??) If you can't afford the hardware to run the OS - then, frankly, you aren't in the target market.
By the beginning of 2010 Vista will have hit its sweet spot in terms of hardware
The wha?
Tip: With ram at around $20 a gig, the people running around screaming that Vista won't run on ten bucks (512meg) of RAM should probably not be considering a $200 OS. It doesnt run on the free toy you get with a happy meal either.
More security is usually more annoyance unfortunately.
The cancel or allow bullshit comes up, in general, because some crappy program is trying to do something which really does require elevation. Windows does try to be nice, and has quite a few dodgy hacks - shoving writes to/Program Files/ in ~/AppData/VirtualStore/Program Files/ etc. Similar with registry virtualisation.
Theres probably a bunch of API calls that could be called with lower permissions, but it would be a pain to isolate them without introducing some serious local exploits.
You'd think after 5 years of developing under the XP guidelines that developers wouldnt be fucking up anymore.:S
I'd actually call a per-user XP VM coming preinstalled with some hacks to share/home pretty damn awesome. The "It looks like you are trying to run some crap software written by a monkey. Well, you can't. Go mess up this VM with your crap." and "Cancel" or "Aaargh!".
Good call. It was the same with Vista. The Aero desktop was an important upgrade to how compositing was done. It was also an opportunity to throw in some crap eye candy to assist in selling it to noobs.
The majority of Vistas upgrades were in the background - kernel improvements, better transaction support, better driver model, "improved" UAC and default security (pity Windows programmers, in general, suck at following the >5 year old guidelines). Stuff you cannot sell to the public because they don't really care.
It should be the same on the surface, slightly more polished, with better services avaliable so people can make better apps quicker. Hopefully soon they'll start removing legacy crud.
Seriously, its not like "Windows 7: Forget what you are used to and start learning how to Get On the Internets again!" is a great slogan. Or maybe "Windows 7: We replaced the Blue E to piss _you_ off Mr Sixpack. You'll never guess how to get Internets now!!"
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you have forgotton rule #1 and rule #3 of professional developers.
1) No freebies.
2) No backsies.
3) Give them the finger.
No overtime pay? Rule 1. No overtime work.
Bend over and take it? Hell no. Apply rule 3. Get a better job.
I saw a picture of a guy that deliberately a whole patty, and sideways! You can see his website at .cx!
Uh.... so you mean a company, who spends money to create things, and then gives them away, no strings attached?
I guess this is why you don't have shareholders...
All of that text and yet you still deny natures irrepressible 8 sided time cube!
When I have finished reading your crap, Jesus will have just started reading, Socrates will be modding it down, and CmdrTaco will be itching to ban you! All this proves that TIME HAS 8 SIDES.
Theres enough documentation to write your own document import/export for Word for j-pimp-editor's super open format. Have you considered that they don't really want to open their .doc format, because they want to be able to change it whenever the hell they feel like?
I completely agree that DRM is a terrible idea. I don't choose DRM media. I do have an OS that is capable of playing it, but I don't use that feature, as it plays non-DRM content quite well (thank-you TPB).
The parameters of the box that I'm in are fairly well defined, and I do have faith that MS won't shrink it (for commercial reasons). (When it comes to "playback of hi-def movies" MS controls a tiny tiny percent of that market, btw).
The main point is that at any time I can change to a new box, open or otherwise. I'll be picking the platform that gives me the lowest friction when I use it, frankly none of the Free alternatives I have used in the past have lasted longer than a week before I had to delve into a config file (and yes, I'm a programmer, I just prefer to do that at work, when I'm getting paid).
Oh thats a good one...
Why won't this stupid Enter Comment box read speech from my brain? Damn you Taco! You sure suck at the development!
I say "Hey Idaho, if you want to use these tools, then you have to promise not to talk about any emails you get from me regarding them."
You say "Sure, man". Then later you try to claim that you didn't really mean the bit about not talking about emails from me. Hey, its an agreement. No backsies. Don't like it, GTFO.
Either that or you can claim you took the software from their website without the agreement. IIRC that opens you up to all the nasties of Illegal Access To Another Mans Internets (5 years jail) or Digital Trespass As In Bits And Bytes And Not Really Finger In The Ass, But You May Get That With (2 years in jail).
Not people that have paid for them. ;)
Presumably GameSpy is either counting the myriad of mods for the old hl1 pre-steam-cracked version and/or bots.
Perhaps they should consider raping their customers in the ass harder then?
If EA tried that shit with Madden Yet Again 2009 then they'd get 10% of their usual sales.
Did you RTFA? The user was never able to play HD content. The content he purchased required a protected media path to play in HD. He purchased a new television which did not support HDCP. He then attempted to play the content on a non-PMP setup, and acted surprised when he couldnt.
This was not a Vista problem. The user should have chosen to purchase non-DRM content.
Aside from your paranoid ramblings of how MS might choose to stop just putting in the minimum level DRM to keep the content owners happy, and go with some crazy take over the world scheme, and somehow get their keys revoked for all future hi-def releases...
I doubt you ever exercise your "control". I have never, in the entire time I have used Windows or Linux been slightly tempted to make modifications to the source code (and I contract for a large enough company that we have access to the Windows source as well). My time is worth more than that.
Your "control" is a warm fuzzy blanket that undoubtably helps with your unjustified paranoia that Microsoft is the big bogeyman that is out to get you. You think a company that size is going to listen to a bunch of loonies over probably 99% of their home customers want the option of playing the latest HD movies?
Another good idea, instead of scoring on a 50-100 scale and set the passing grade at 75, is to say, score on a scale of 0-100 with the passing grade at 50.
Or does reducing the passing grade make for bad politics?
Yeah. I called it.
Then don't purchase and attempt to play content which requires protected media path. DUIIIEEE.
I don't use those features either. I'm kinda happy they are there - I know at some stage I'm going to end up with a blu-ray super DRM++ disk in my hand, and I'm going to be able to play it, with x% overhead because of some shitty DRM system.
Sounds like when your hot friend comes around with "this, like, totally cool movie I want to watch with you", then you are going to give her a lecture on the evils of DRM, and how Debian is more Free.
I, on the other hand, will be giving her a seat on the couch, some popcorn, and my cock.
OMG I claim Super-DMCA-Triple-Ass-Violation!
You linked to a site which links to files which tell you about a server which has a list of addresses for people which might have pirated software!!
YOU NASTY PIRATE
I'm pretty certain VAC works of known hacks, not hack-creating possibilitys or heuristics.
Mainly because theres a large amount of hacks doing obviously dodgy things to the running game that don't get picked up... until they are specifically put on the "detected" list.
Also I tend to leave my whole dev suite running when I want a quick game of TF2 :P
Steam being bloated? Steam takes up under a hundred meg of the 12 gig of steam games I have installed.
Have a louder cry about the DRM. I'm sure you'd love games costing several million dollars to develop shoved up on FTP with an honesty box, but someone with any brainpower whatsoever would realise that its fucking retarded.
The entire friction the steam DRM setup gives me is having to type a password once, and then tick the "remember me" box. Its a hell of a lot more convenient than CD-keys, its a hell of a lot more convenient than CDs, and I can happily play games offline (despite what the whingers say).
The biggest selling point is they have put in just enough protection to attract A-list games for distribution, rather than the rather crappy lineup Impulse offers.
I guess it also means that in ten years when valve shuts down and the person that buys their platform, decides that out of maliciousness they don't want to continue offering the service, and also that at that stage I am too poor to afford 3D Virtual Lesbian Extravaganza on my VR rig, then I might be saying "Well, damn, I can't play TF2 against the other three people that are still trying to play it". But thats fairly unlikely.
Especially when switching on Resharper whole-of-solution analysis. Visual Studio is a bit of a dog anyway - RS pushes my ram use for the VS process up to a gig and a half with a decent sized solution open :S
Pity SharpDevelop isn't quite up to par yet.
Agreed.
Still its as funny as telling a Texan than in Australia we have a single cattle ranch thats bigger than Texas :P
Completely agree, FYI ;)
I find it useful to make a shortcut to explorer.exe with run as admin ticked. Similar to the elevated browser thingo in KDE. Otherwise you get about 3 UAC messages while trying to replace an exe in program files and rename the old one, in case you need to patch the game you are cracking^W^W^W^W^W SHIT.
I always ensure my devs are running dual core boxes. Dual core tends to shake out more threading issues than single core does. In my line of work (industrial automation) this can be a bit more serious than the odd 500 Server Error :P
Its Australia, we tend to purchase outright. I talked the shop down to 3 machines for ~1k AUD. Figured if they were crap I could give them to relatives. Turns out they worked fine ;)
It true. 512meg is enough for light use. My partner's laptop is still at default spec, and it works fine for her, and the botnet shes part of (loves those toolbars) ;)
I use mine (same model - bottom end lenovo 3000) for development (VS, etc) - 4 gig ram though - about $80 AUD. The only downside is the shitty hitachi hard drive - terrible performance there, but superfetch does help.
These are bottom end $500 laptops, so its hard to imagine how cheap an equivalent desktop would be. ($250??) If you can't afford the hardware to run the OS - then, frankly, you aren't in the target market.
The wha?
Tip: With ram at around $20 a gig, the people running around screaming that Vista won't run on ten bucks (512meg) of RAM should probably not be considering a $200 OS. It doesnt run on the free toy you get with a happy meal either.
DAMN YOU RONALD MCDONALD... DAMN YOUUUUU!
More security is usually more annoyance unfortunately.
The cancel or allow bullshit comes up, in general, because some crappy program is trying to do something which really does require elevation. Windows does try to be nice, and has quite a few dodgy hacks - shoving writes to /Program Files/ in ~/AppData/VirtualStore/Program Files/ etc. Similar with registry virtualisation.
Theres probably a bunch of API calls that could be called with lower permissions, but it would be a pain to isolate them without introducing some serious local exploits.
You'd think after 5 years of developing under the XP guidelines that developers wouldnt be fucking up anymore. :S
I'd actually call a per-user XP VM coming preinstalled with some hacks to share /home pretty damn awesome. The "It looks like you are trying to run some crap software written by a monkey. Well, you can't. Go mess up this VM with your crap." and "Cancel" or "Aaargh!".
Good call. It was the same with Vista. The Aero desktop was an important upgrade to how compositing was done. It was also an opportunity to throw in some crap eye candy to assist in selling it to noobs.
The majority of Vistas upgrades were in the background - kernel improvements, better transaction support, better driver model, "improved" UAC and default security (pity Windows programmers, in general, suck at following the >5 year old guidelines). Stuff you cannot sell to the public because they don't really care.
It should be the same on the surface, slightly more polished, with better services avaliable so people can make better apps quicker. Hopefully soon they'll start removing legacy crud.
Seriously, its not like "Windows 7: Forget what you are used to and start learning how to Get On the Internets again!" is a great slogan. Or maybe "Windows 7: We replaced the Blue E to piss _you_ off Mr Sixpack. You'll never guess how to get Internets now!!"