Å, ä and ö have been usable in.se domain names for quite some time actually, it's just that support for it in various development tools is absolutely pathetic (unless you want to change your language and library choice solely based on which one has support for that specific feature).
I actually built my own url shortening site the other day and the only part I felt was missing as of last night was that it didn't handle international domain names properly (and the language I used to put it together seems sorely lacking in an easy way to convert to punycode, it's got a whole bunch of functions for punycode to utf-8, iso-8859-1 and other charsets but nothing for the opposite).
Well, there are still limitations which require ugly hacks regardless of what you say. It should also be noted that CSS is fairly "recent" (not to mention that it's only in the last year or two that all major browsers have started to actually support it in a somewhat sane way which means that pretty much any website designed more than two years ago has a bunch of hacks in place to deal with weird browser behavior (IE6+7, I'm looking at you!)).
The main problem is that a lot of games "reward" laggy player. The parent used the term "lag armor" which is quite fitting, basically a player who's always half a second behind can be really hard to hit because even though you fire a burst straight at them you miss. In a lot of games there seems to be a limit to how high your latency can be before your movement in-game starts appearing to others as though you're "warping" around, basically they don't see you moving forward 2 meters and then strafing 3 meters to the left, the see you teleporting 1 meter forward and then teleporting 1 meter forward and 3 meters to the left. There's also the issue of where the character model is pointing, low latency players will often not get an accurate view of which way the high latency players are facing which makes it even harder to track movement. So good luck trying to kill that.
Of course the main problem with this is with crappy network code in games that tries to compensate for high latency connections in a way that gives advantages to those with high latency (they shoot at someone who's no longer there? HIT! Low latency player shoots at a high latency player who's no longer there (even though the server thought so when the shot was fired)? MISS!).
Wrong, Steve said it was a electronic appliance. Any rumour that it is a full fledge computer with software lock is wrong.
I think you're talking about the iPad, not "macs" which would be Apple's product line of, you know, full-fledged computers ranging from the compact Mac Mini to the workstation-class Mac Pro, all running their own UNIX operating system known as Mac OS X.
Also, there is no "software lock" on OS X, you can install any software you want, they even include a ton of open source software and their full development tools (XCode) with the operating system and if you're not happy with that and want something a bit geekier you can always install macports or some other package management software.
Well, one thing this will hopefully cut down on is all the extra images and associated markup that's being used today when attempting to create something that doesn't just look like a flat, ugly and ancient chunk of text (hint: the web has evolved past being the equivalent of a bunch of networked text files). It also means that designers can more easily make sites that don't break for some users because they don't have the right fonts (this is a major issue, the default serif and sans-serif fonts are rarely the same between operating systems and a lot of times even versions of the same operating system).
Dismissing websites that have actually been designed as opposed to just latex2html-ified as "art" really just makes you come off as a grumpy person with no sense for estetics and good presentation of the information.
I'm not saying this won't be abused, everything that can be abused will be abused, most likely by some teenager who just took his/her school's "intro to web design" course that teaches only the basics of "how" and not the "why" (as in, "how" to use web fonts, not "why" you should use them). Also, with a little luck this will be a feature that you can disable for those sites that insist on misbehaving.
Well, the.info domain was cheap as dirt in a lot of places when it first appeared (some were dumping it at $5 for two years and similar deals) so a lot of geeks seem to have grabbed themselves a few.info domains for various personal projects and such (as have I).
Other than geeks and shady characters it's pretty dead though.
Yes, let's all regulate things we don't personally approve of, I'm sure that will turn out to be a wonderful idea.
So what's next? All companies must use.com or.biz? All personal websites should be in.person? How about forcing national registrars to institute.xxx.cc and force all services with porn onto those domains?
This is a trick, the first part is to come up with a useless but at first glance harmless "protect the childrun!" action and once this is in place it is used for step two, which in this case would be to force porn onto.xxx.
Did I mention that my dangerous dissenting mind was let onto the Internet back as a 12 year-old back in the first half of the 90s? completely unsupervised and yet I, like all of my friends who shared this horrible fate, survived and came out of it just fine. Isn't it amazing, how lucky we must consider ourselves. After all, the Internet is just a cesspool of filth and naughty bits!
How about you either trust your children or You, their parent, take actions to supervise them, don't force all of the world to conform to your prudish standards just because you're too lazy to pay attention to your children.
Of course. However, since OS X is a UNIX system it can hardly be said to be "typical" mac user behaviour to have such a setup, but any UNIX/Linux user who has migrated to OS X would be comfortable with doing things the *nix way and all the tools would be available. Thus the joke fails since it's like laughing at the reliability of a Volvo after someone who designs cars for a living tells of his Volvo that he has modded to make it go 350 km/h but also adds that "it tends to break down every now and then though".
I've been playing World of Warcraft for quite some time but I actually quit for a while when The Burning Crusade first came out because I just wasn't ready for another round of grind-a-thon just so I could get to the more fun parts, I did pick it up again after the recent "casualization" of the game, in my opinion they still have a bit to go before it becomes fun to level new characters when you already have a couple of characters at the level cap, it's bearable if it's on the same server since you can have your main character "donate" a couple of thousand gold to the new character (or let some guild mate tag along to make leveling faster and easier) but on a brand new server you're still stuck grinding away for countless hours (it doesn't exactly feel shorter when you've already battled your way through "ganklethorn vale" three times and find yourself there for the fourth time).
I suppose what I feel is missing from World of Warcraft is some kind of mechanism that lets you level alt characters faster, at least through levels 1-30 since these are very much "get to know the game and the world" levels, once you've been through it a couple of times there isn't much sense in spending many long hours trudging through that (I still the player should have to play through them, just not as slowly as someone who's created his/her first character). And yes, I am aware of heirloom items but they don't really give that much of a boost, maybe 5-10% faster leveling at best.
I suspect any actions like this on Blizzard's part are likely to provoke a violent reaction from the "teenage hardcore raider" segment of players though, they complain about anything and everything but they seem to especially dislike any changes to the game that detracts from their "leetness" (despite the fact that getting good all blue + purple gear doesn't really require any kind of extraordinary skill, you can just substitute some gameplay basics and lots of time).
Or they'll upload a javadoc/pydoc dump of their uncommented and undocumented code as well, which is about as useful as simply being told to figure it out yourself.
Another possibility is of course that the maintainer comes up with some fairly lame excuse for not working on the project ("my dog had puppies a year ago and I've been completely dedicated to playing with them...") complete with promises of getting the project up to date ("...but I've been looking at some of the patches that have been submitted and there's gonna be a big update any day now.") which means most people will hold off on forking the project.
Then there's the "it's in CVS" projects, you know them, those projects that are required by a whole host of apps yet they haven't had a proper release since 2006, and before that the last release was in 2003, but hey, you can just grab the extremely active development branch from CVS/SVN/Git!
The last one has a close relative, the "1.x is featureless and out of date (but still gets security patches) and 2.x has been in alpha for three years now" projects. Just like the "it's in CVS" projects the bulk of interesting code for these tends to be in source control or in the 2.x.y.z.alpha23.tar.bz2 releases, and if you dare use the dev/alpha branch and find a problem with it and file a bug report you'd better be prepared to be chastised for not also submitting a patch...
And last but not least there are the "closed" projects which rarely accept patches from "outsiders", they have a dedicated group of developers who will tell you to write your own patch and submit it when there's a bug that's been around for over a year with all reports closed as "WILLNOTFIX" or "NOTABUG", and when you do it will be rejected only to have one of the "regular" developers submit an almost identical patch a few days or weeks later (yes, this has happened to me a couple of times, can you feel the bitterness?).
Nice attempt at sarcasm but I didn't state what you claim I stated.
It has merely been my experience that politicians, lawyers and many others have a tendency to throw themselves at issues that they don't really comprehend but which they're seemingly telling themselves they're experts in because they marginally touch on something that they're experts in. While this is certainly true in development as well I've found that it's a lot harder to be seen as an expert on say, designing network protocols, if your only knowledge of networking is "It comes with wires or not and there's these IP address things which are split into four parts that are all numbers no higher than 255". Compare this to a lawyer or a politician who becomes an "expert" on IT law simply he's had a lot of such cases/voted on a whole bunch of such laws.
Also, while there are definitely politics involved when it comes to stuff like the current h.264 vs. Theora thing I've found that there's not nearly as much backstabbing and opportunism from individuals (not corporations) as there is in "real" politics.
To be honest I'm not particularly impressed by most politicians, lawyers, prosecutors and judges. For some reason the vast majority of them seem like they don't really know what they're doing. Or maybe that's just because when someone with authority asks one of us developer/IT guys something we're expected to actually have a proper answer/solution.
Ah yes, because the "experts" never make mistakes or do counterproductive things just to get attention (and the advantages that may come with this attention)?
I'm replying to a troll here but anyway, no they don't have such a monopoly, there are plenty of major players selling/"renting" music online (I'm not sure of the actual percentages though) and the iPod/iPhone doesn't even have 50% of the market for potable media players.
And they'd do the same. This would not be a bunch of unorganized rebels with AK-47s and a few RPGs, it wouldn't even be the personal army of some tinpot dictator, it would be a real army with modern equipment and proper training.
1) A large number of UAVs were found to be transmitting their video streams completely unencrypted.
2) I didn't mention cracking the encryption, I did however use the description "huge flashing beacon" which implied that when facing an enemy that's not stuck in the middle ages it may not be such a good idea to have troops in the field use radio communication at all unless absolutely necessary since the radio signals will be "like a huge flashing beacon" to the enemy who will be able to figure out where the troops are.
I love all the self-promotional talk about how awesome these weapons are, I'd love to see what would happen when they deploy their unencrypted video streams and "secure" radio transmitters against an enemy that at least have weapon systems designed in the last 20 years. These "secure frequencies" would be like a huge flashing beacon when fighting an enemy that doesn't rely on AK-47s and blending in with the civilian population.
It's a physical device with the capability to decode MPEG2 video, that the manufacturer is required to pay for a license in that case is a bit different from forcing anyone who distributes video to pay for a license.
But that link is about Alcatel-Lucent and the MPEG-LA having a conflict over MPEG2 license fees for DVD players. From the first paragraph:
Could the manufacturers of DVD players (no, not just Blu-ray, but the original DVDs) owe back royalties to Alcatel-Lucent for the use of patented technology by way of the MPEG-2 codec?
Well, unless you sign a contract promising to use the camera only for non-professional work I doubt it would even hold up in court. It's sort of like selling you a car that has a note in the glovebox that reads "you are not allowed to use this car to transport women between the ages 20 and 28", it would never hold up in court, no matter what the fear mongers claim. They just try to squeeze as much as possible in there, while they'd probably love to be able to use it to their advantage it's most likely a CYA thing to avoid being sued by some professional who feels he lost a contract because of failings in the codec.
Somehow I find it very unlikely that them suing someone for not paying this extra "license" for professional equipment usage would work out in their favor. I suppose it might work in certain US jurisdiction known for siding with the patent trolls but in the rest of the developed world any such lawsuit is bound to be thrown out.
On the web you can at least use ad blocking software or simply avoid ad-supported content to a greater degree than you can with TV, I get ~15 channels via cable for "free" (included in the rent), of those 13 have commercials. I'd rather go without TV than suffer through 15 minutes of crappy german detergent commercials (poorly) dubbed to swedish every hour.
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Å, ä and ö have been usable in .se domain names for quite some time actually, it's just that support for it in various development tools is absolutely pathetic (unless you want to change your language and library choice solely based on which one has support for that specific feature).
I actually built my own url shortening site the other day and the only part I felt was missing as of last night was that it didn't handle international domain names properly (and the language I used to put it together seems sorely lacking in an easy way to convert to punycode, it's got a whole bunch of functions for punycode to utf-8, iso-8859-1 and other charsets but nothing for the opposite).
Well, there are still limitations which require ugly hacks regardless of what you say. It should also be noted that CSS is fairly "recent" (not to mention that it's only in the last year or two that all major browsers have started to actually support it in a somewhat sane way which means that pretty much any website designed more than two years ago has a bunch of hacks in place to deal with weird browser behavior (IE6+7, I'm looking at you!)).
The main problem is that a lot of games "reward" laggy player. The parent used the term "lag armor" which is quite fitting, basically a player who's always half a second behind can be really hard to hit because even though you fire a burst straight at them you miss. In a lot of games there seems to be a limit to how high your latency can be before your movement in-game starts appearing to others as though you're "warping" around, basically they don't see you moving forward 2 meters and then strafing 3 meters to the left, the see you teleporting 1 meter forward and then teleporting 1 meter forward and 3 meters to the left. There's also the issue of where the character model is pointing, low latency players will often not get an accurate view of which way the high latency players are facing which makes it even harder to track movement. So good luck trying to kill that.
Of course the main problem with this is with crappy network code in games that tries to compensate for high latency connections in a way that gives advantages to those with high latency (they shoot at someone who's no longer there? HIT! Low latency player shoots at a high latency player who's no longer there (even though the server thought so when the shot was fired)? MISS!).
Wrong, Steve said it was a electronic appliance. Any rumour that it is a full fledge computer with software lock is wrong.
I think you're talking about the iPad, not "macs" which would be Apple's product line of, you know, full-fledged computers ranging from the compact Mac Mini to the workstation-class Mac Pro, all running their own UNIX operating system known as Mac OS X.
Also, there is no "software lock" on OS X, you can install any software you want, they even include a ton of open source software and their full development tools (XCode) with the operating system and if you're not happy with that and want something a bit geekier you can always install macports or some other package management software.
Well, one thing this will hopefully cut down on is all the extra images and associated markup that's being used today when attempting to create something that doesn't just look like a flat, ugly and ancient chunk of text (hint: the web has evolved past being the equivalent of a bunch of networked text files). It also means that designers can more easily make sites that don't break for some users because they don't have the right fonts (this is a major issue, the default serif and sans-serif fonts are rarely the same between operating systems and a lot of times even versions of the same operating system).
Dismissing websites that have actually been designed as opposed to just latex2html-ified as "art" really just makes you come off as a grumpy person with no sense for estetics and good presentation of the information.
I'm not saying this won't be abused, everything that can be abused will be abused, most likely by some teenager who just took his/her school's "intro to web design" course that teaches only the basics of "how" and not the "why" (as in, "how" to use web fonts, not "why" you should use them). Also, with a little luck this will be a feature that you can disable for those sites that insist on misbehaving.
Well, the .info domain was cheap as dirt in a lot of places when it first appeared (some were dumping it at $5 for two years and similar deals) so a lot of geeks seem to have grabbed themselves a few .info domains for various personal projects and such (as have I).
Other than geeks and shady characters it's pretty dead though.
Yes, let's all regulate things we don't personally approve of, I'm sure that will turn out to be a wonderful idea.
So what's next? All companies must use .com or .biz? All personal websites should be in .person? How about forcing national registrars to institute .xxx.cc and force all services with porn onto those domains?
This is a trick, the first part is to come up with a useless but at first glance harmless "protect the childrun!" action and once this is in place it is used for step two, which in this case would be to force porn onto .xxx.
Did I mention that my dangerous dissenting mind was let onto the Internet back as a 12 year-old back in the first half of the 90s? completely unsupervised and yet I, like all of my friends who shared this horrible fate, survived and came out of it just fine. Isn't it amazing, how lucky we must consider ourselves. After all, the Internet is just a cesspool of filth and naughty bits!
How about you either trust your children or You, their parent, take actions to supervise them, don't force all of the world to conform to your prudish standards just because you're too lazy to pay attention to your children.
Of course. However, since OS X is a UNIX system it can hardly be said to be "typical" mac user behaviour to have such a setup, but any UNIX/Linux user who has migrated to OS X would be comfortable with doing things the *nix way and all the tools would be available. Thus the joke fails since it's like laughing at the reliability of a Volvo after someone who designs cars for a living tells of his Volvo that he has modded to make it go 350 km/h but also adds that "it tends to break down every now and then though".
I've been playing World of Warcraft for quite some time but I actually quit for a while when The Burning Crusade first came out because I just wasn't ready for another round of grind-a-thon just so I could get to the more fun parts, I did pick it up again after the recent "casualization" of the game, in my opinion they still have a bit to go before it becomes fun to level new characters when you already have a couple of characters at the level cap, it's bearable if it's on the same server since you can have your main character "donate" a couple of thousand gold to the new character (or let some guild mate tag along to make leveling faster and easier) but on a brand new server you're still stuck grinding away for countless hours (it doesn't exactly feel shorter when you've already battled your way through "ganklethorn vale" three times and find yourself there for the fourth time).
I suppose what I feel is missing from World of Warcraft is some kind of mechanism that lets you level alt characters faster, at least through levels 1-30 since these are very much "get to know the game and the world" levels, once you've been through it a couple of times there isn't much sense in spending many long hours trudging through that (I still the player should have to play through them, just not as slowly as someone who's created his/her first character). And yes, I am aware of heirloom items but they don't really give that much of a boost, maybe 5-10% faster leveling at best.
I suspect any actions like this on Blizzard's part are likely to provoke a violent reaction from the "teenage hardcore raider" segment of players though, they complain about anything and everything but they seem to especially dislike any changes to the game that detracts from their "leetness" (despite the fact that getting good all blue + purple gear doesn't really require any kind of extraordinary skill, you can just substitute some gameplay basics and lots of time).
Or they'll upload a javadoc/pydoc dump of their uncommented and undocumented code as well, which is about as useful as simply being told to figure it out yourself.
Another possibility is of course that the maintainer comes up with some fairly lame excuse for not working on the project ("my dog had puppies a year ago and I've been completely dedicated to playing with them...") complete with promises of getting the project up to date ("...but I've been looking at some of the patches that have been submitted and there's gonna be a big update any day now.") which means most people will hold off on forking the project.
Then there's the "it's in CVS" projects, you know them, those projects that are required by a whole host of apps yet they haven't had a proper release since 2006, and before that the last release was in 2003, but hey, you can just grab the extremely active development branch from CVS/SVN/Git!
The last one has a close relative, the "1.x is featureless and out of date (but still gets security patches) and 2.x has been in alpha for three years now" projects. Just like the "it's in CVS" projects the bulk of interesting code for these tends to be in source control or in the 2.x.y.z.alpha23.tar.bz2 releases, and if you dare use the dev/alpha branch and find a problem with it and file a bug report you'd better be prepared to be chastised for not also submitting a patch...
And last but not least there are the "closed" projects which rarely accept patches from "outsiders", they have a dedicated group of developers who will tell you to write your own patch and submit it when there's a bug that's been around for over a year with all reports closed as "WILLNOTFIX" or "NOTABUG", and when you do it will be rejected only to have one of the "regular" developers submit an almost identical patch a few days or weeks later (yes, this has happened to me a couple of times, can you feel the bitterness?).
Nice attempt at sarcasm but I didn't state what you claim I stated.
It has merely been my experience that politicians, lawyers and many others have a tendency to throw themselves at issues that they don't really comprehend but which they're seemingly telling themselves they're experts in because they marginally touch on something that they're experts in. While this is certainly true in development as well I've found that it's a lot harder to be seen as an expert on say, designing network protocols, if your only knowledge of networking is "It comes with wires or not and there's these IP address things which are split into four parts that are all numbers no higher than 255". Compare this to a lawyer or a politician who becomes an "expert" on IT law simply he's had a lot of such cases/voted on a whole bunch of such laws.
Also, while there are definitely politics involved when it comes to stuff like the current h.264 vs. Theora thing I've found that there's not nearly as much backstabbing and opportunism from individuals (not corporations) as there is in "real" politics.
To be honest I'm not particularly impressed by most politicians, lawyers, prosecutors and judges. For some reason the vast majority of them seem like they don't really know what they're doing. Or maybe that's just because when someone with authority asks one of us developer/IT guys something we're expected to actually have a proper answer/solution.
Ah yes, because the "experts" never make mistakes or do counterproductive things just to get attention (and the advantages that may come with this attention)?
I'm replying to a troll here but anyway, no they don't have such a monopoly, there are plenty of major players selling/"renting" music online (I'm not sure of the actual percentages though) and the iPod/iPhone doesn't even have 50% of the market for potable media players.
...other beacons to smoke them out.
And they'd do the same. This would not be a bunch of unorganized rebels with AK-47s and a few RPGs, it wouldn't even be the personal army of some tinpot dictator, it would be a real army with modern equipment and proper training.
1) A large number of UAVs were found to be transmitting their video streams completely unencrypted.
2) I didn't mention cracking the encryption, I did however use the description "huge flashing beacon" which implied that when facing an enemy that's not stuck in the middle ages it may not be such a good idea to have troops in the field use radio communication at all unless absolutely necessary since the radio signals will be "like a huge flashing beacon" to the enemy who will be able to figure out where the troops are.
I love all the self-promotional talk about how awesome these weapons are, I'd love to see what would happen when they deploy their unencrypted video streams and "secure" radio transmitters against an enemy that at least have weapon systems designed in the last 20 years. These "secure frequencies" would be like a huge flashing beacon when fighting an enemy that doesn't rely on AK-47s and blending in with the civilian population.
It's a physical device with the capability to decode MPEG2 video, that the manufacturer is required to pay for a license in that case is a bit different from forcing anyone who distributes video to pay for a license.
But that link is about Alcatel-Lucent and the MPEG-LA having a conflict over MPEG2 license fees for DVD players. From the first paragraph:
Could the manufacturers of DVD players (no, not just Blu-ray, but the original DVDs) owe back royalties to Alcatel-Lucent for the use of patented technology by way of the MPEG-2 codec?
I'd still like to see some examples of this that aren't in east texas, or even better, outside the land of lawsuits (AKA the USA).
Well, unless you sign a contract promising to use the camera only for non-professional work I doubt it would even hold up in court. It's sort of like selling you a car that has a note in the glovebox that reads "you are not allowed to use this car to transport women between the ages 20 and 28", it would never hold up in court, no matter what the fear mongers claim. They just try to squeeze as much as possible in there, while they'd probably love to be able to use it to their advantage it's most likely a CYA thing to avoid being sued by some professional who feels he lost a contract because of failings in the codec.
And you seriously think this would hold up in court?
Somehow I find it very unlikely that them suing someone for not paying this extra "license" for professional equipment usage would work out in their favor. I suppose it might work in certain US jurisdiction known for siding with the patent trolls but in the rest of the developed world any such lawsuit is bound to be thrown out.
On the web you can at least use ad blocking software or simply avoid ad-supported content to a greater degree than you can with TV, I get ~15 channels via cable for "free" (included in the rent), of those 13 have commercials. I'd rather go without TV than suffer through 15 minutes of crappy german detergent commercials (poorly) dubbed to swedish every hour.