Leave out one key piece of information and it takes on a life of it's own, but there is nothing untrue about the above.
Conspiracies seem to live on the interpretation that those who believe them have a better understanding of the issue at hand than those in charge, or that they have all the relevant information, when they don't.
Nonsense. Even if you have all the evidence in plain view there can still be vast networks of shady dealings and huge cover-ups at work. Just look at the Kennedy Assassination!
Those bones matched royal DNA because they weren't from King Richard III, they were really from a current member of the royal family who has now been replaced with an evil doppleganger clone (made possible by recently discovered Nazi stem cell research and advanced eugenics). They just needed a convenient way to dismiss the evidence -- Oh, that body with royal DNA? Uh, oh, It's just the remains of King Richard! Which one? Why, the 3rd one! Now they've got an inside agent in the royal family... Hot on the heels of Kim Jong Un's replacement of Kim Jong Il, all while for the 1st time ever the USA presidency is held by a black man!?
Not gonna happen until the FOSS driver built from sources like these shows itself to be competitive in performance with nVidia's closed Linux drivers on comparable hardware.
Please explain how NVIDIA open sourcing it's closed Linux driver would cause it to run worse? Considering that when the driver is compiled by NVIDIA for a generic architecture versus the same sources compiled by the end users, but able to take advantage of architecture specific optimizations would actually make the open source driver faster.
At the end of the day we need all the sources for all our hardware drivers so that when the next version of an operating system comes out we can re-compile the driver for the new OS. This is true on Windows, Linux, Mac, OS/2 Wap, whatever. I don't buy drivers, I buy hardware. As someone who can and sometimes does read and write programs in their native machine code forms, the damn driver software is already "open" to me. It would just make it easier for me to make modifications if I had the original sources. Not having the sources does nothing but make me less likely to purchase the hardware.
As a developer, I can say no, that "problem" was just a dumb way to do physics, and it's been fixed forever to anyone who wasn't a moron, even in the AT/XT days. Back in the day we just checked wall clock time / CMOS ticks, you know, the ones we used to modulate PC speakers to make different frequencies, that's what we used to update game state and prevent binding physics to CPU speed. Today, RAM is plentiful, so I do physics state "commits" in fixed step sizes, say 30hz or 60hz, and interpolate from the last physics state to the temporary state that's being rendered.
If enough time has passed to process the next full physics step, then it's processed and committed. Otherwise I reset state to last commit, and process the partial physics step, but do not trigger any important events like player death in the temp step. If the system is too slow to run a partial physics step without immediately requiring another full physics step then the partial steps are not processed and the game rendering updates screen positions only after the physics step can be computed. This is important for deterministic physics, for demo replay and also for synchronized network games because: UpdatePhysics( 20ms ); UpdatePhysics( 20ms );
is not always equivalent to: UpdatePhysics( 40ms );
Due to a number of factors, especially rounding errors. UpdatePhysics( elapsedTime );
Is the worst on fast systems -- those very small fractions of time lead to physics explosions -- not the particle effect kind, the bounce off an object through the floor and to the other side of the universe kind.
So, your answer is that because google has decided it has the right to redistribute copyrighted images in full resolution in most cases, that everyone else on the web should go to Google and opt out of their caching system? Site owners are in coorperation with google, we like google when they don't do fucked up illegal things... We see thumbnails as "fair use", maybe. We don't mind much as long as the users end up on our site to see the image. Google understands advert revenue funded websites... They are one. So, it's really hard to understand users who want free stuff saying that we have to change our business practices, and maybe not even give them free stuff (or make it harder to find free stuff) simply because a bigger free stuff provider decides they can get away with infringing copyrights of everyone.
Your solution is not a solution. A real solution will be to address the issues. Hell, maybe while google is processing the images to reduce their resolution and run heuristic matching algorithms for their other-sizes and search terms feature, they can water-mark them with the domain name of the site they downloaded the image from.
Or, let's simply turn your moronic suggestion on it's ear. Why don't we all just say: Hey Google, If you want the feature to work that way, you needed to GET PERMISSION FROM EVERYONE BEFORE INFRINGING THEIR COPYRIGHTS. Fuck you and your opt-out "let's piss off everyone, then apologize until we get our way", Facebook feature roll-out model.
IMO, everyone misses the biggest deal with the OUYA: Its payment API stinks.
In the OUYA developer API: All programs must be down-loadable for free. There's no option to charge for the game first. There's no option to have a free version and a paid version -- It's got to be an in-app purchase if you want that, it's more complex and harder to get right, esp. from a security standpoint, esp. when trying NOT to annoy your customers. The payment API has re-occurring subscription payments, it has replenish-able items that can be bought multiple times (think Zynga Energy Bars, or game currency), and it has one time purchasable items (like unlockables). This means I just say NO to OUYA.
This means developers who just want to sell you the whole game once and you have it and that's it, really only have one option: Game Demo -> Try Out -> Purchase Rest of Game -> Wait for it to download the rest of the game. Otherwise, OUYA games really will be the most hackable: Download full game -> It's got locked features -> Run the keygen / crack. -> You've got the full game -- I wonder what the Venn diagram looks like for people to which a $100 console price point is compelling vs people who've ever ran a game keygen / crack... I bet it it looks pretty much like a single circle.
I've done research on the try-before-you buy "game demo" method in my own apps. What happens is that players impulsively download the games. Some forget about them, then delete them without ever playing the games. Most play the game first, feel their curiosity is mostly satisfied, then they forget about it and delete it later. A rare few will download the game, play the demo, then after that impulse has passed, return to the game and buy the "next episode" or "full game".
So folks like me who actually love making and playing games, and have no interest in being nickel and dimed to death or doing so to our customers see the OUYA as a non-starter. Less Choice Is Bad. OUYA gives devs LESS CHOICE about how to sell their game, they're betting big on the Free to Play (read: Pay to Win) model that I will never buy into. There's some controversy over whether or not game demos actually hurt sales, so IMO it's foolish to leave no option other than to have game demos, or free to play. Additionally, I've done all the research I need. I've seen our sales numbers much lower for apps released with trials vs those without trials. A better method is to not do trials and simply reduce price slowly until you discover the impulse buy amount.
The OUYA dev platform didn't have all the payment and registration services even working to test games against when I checked a couple of weeks ago. As a developer: Screw OUYA. I'll release some of my 100% free games there if I remember. This console has "cheap" selling point that targets people opposite to the ones that will actually buy the games. The folks that have disposable income are the ones who unlock the full game after playing the demo. They're the ones that spend $60 on "energy" to get some in-game artificial delay, rather than the poorer sap who'll grind away tons of time to achieve the same. Protip: these non-in-game purchasing grinders are the bigger fans; The grinders will buy the next game, or nearly anything new you ever make -- esp. if it's not free-to play.
I'm not seeing WHY people will buy the OUYA (other than all the damn hype). Having a portable game system (smartphone / tablet) that can optionally hook up to the TV and use wireless gamepads, or having a portable game system / tablet and also spending an additional $100 non portable OUYA that you must hook up to your TV, uses a gamepad, and doesn't run all the games your smartphone / tablet will. Folks are not going to say: OUYA! Great! Now I don't need a SmartPhone! No, they'll buy those, and then see the OUYA and think either: "I've got disposable income, so I'
I think he should read the TOS first and get a feel for the situation.
Why would he need to read their ToS to know if he can include a feature that imports an unencrypted text file?
It's not just any text file... Why it's a specially crafted.INI /.CONF formatted text file.
Who knows, I'm sure if I hired a patent attorney they could write up patent claims vague enough and using terms obscure enough that a patent clerk wouldn't find any relevant hits in the patent database, so there's really no reason to assume that the INI file format isn't pattented... but if it's not, then they can piss right off.
He's not re-distributing their files, so he's not infringing copyright. The name winapp2.ini is too generic to be a strong trademark, except maybe to Microsoft over Windows (tm).
I wouldn't worry about shit. In fact, I wouldn't have even acknowledged that I received a notice of any kind.
Protip: In the future if you want to incorporate a 3rd party's data format, implement a plugin system and API for importing the generic data to isolate the main application from the import functionality. Distribute the plugin that implements the import feature separately, it can download after install at the behest of the user. Defer all complaints about plugin functionality to the "owner" of the plugin -- A different entity than the one that holds the rights for the main application. I call that a firewall.
I suppose INI itself may be so generic as to not really qualify as supporting another program's data format, but even so it would be pretty simple to make a.INI translator program that simply search and replaced the [SECTION] tags with differently named tags, and distribute a converter that converts their format into your format prior to import. I really wish SCOTUS would do something about data formats: No one should be able to assert rights over something ilke.WAD,.JAR,.INI, CSV, XML ugh, Microsoft was sued over using XML.. So, I think the only way to achieve that is to say all file formats are public domain. Good luck with that.
Then again, IANAL. However, I've been through this shit several times. There's nothing you can actually do at all to avoid being sued. Anyone can sue for fucking anything, why worry about it? Oh No! A million people could sue me tomorrow! No problems folks, I'm incorporated. That would be the sixth time I close up shop and re-open the next day as a different corporate entity, I'm exceedingly efficient at it. Hell, get your own incorporation today, even if you're not going to run a business! Just pay your corporate dues and file your taxes, and you can sell them off for a decent profit to bigger corporations that need a few shell corps to do some dirty work under -- And on paper can be "In good standing since $INCORPORATION_DATE." Yep, brand now company buys an LLC shell to operate under and adopts its good standing credit, and incorporation date.
So, bottom line: Are you incorporated or operating as a 501c3 charity? If so, fuck em till you get sued, then fuck-em some more. Your code is open source, and you're protected by the corporate veil: Be Prepared to Reboot in case you have to "turn it off and on again". If there's no insulating imaginary person-hood in place, then get yourself that way ASAP, and get a damn lawyer. There's free "pro bono" advice to be had, esp. for non-profits, but Slashdot isn't the place to ask for it.
This then suggests a simple fix for global warming - we just need to move Earth into a slightly higher orbit. A few hundred well-placed nuclear bombs ought to do it.
For Earth Day 2012 we are mobilizing the planet simply to say one thing: the Earth won't wait. It seems that environmental issues have been put on the back burner as we are in the midst of a global recession. It is time for us to Mobilize the Earth
However, I was disappointed when their implementation did not even begin to approach my own vision.
The part about caffeine that is dangerous is that, like other stimulants, it gives the impression of improved brain performance without really delivering it. A fatigued person propped up with caffeine still makes mistakes related to fatigue.
Like caffeine, Your whole "Caffeine is a Drug" point has various different effects on me. For instance, if it's not a big deal to give children, drugs in caffeinated beverages, then why the big deal about other recreational or performance enhancing drugs for adults? Seems like the laws are all sorts of fucked up, and we should just toss them out. Don't rely on blood alcohol level, some folks pass field sobriety tests at higher levels of intoxication than others. This "widely varied effects" phenomenon is typical of nearly all drugs. Our bodies and minds are very complex electrochemical machines, to properly regulate the intake of drugs we should note their effects on the individual itself -- If we can't come up with at least a fairly accurate mapping of intake to caused behavioral changes, then we should let the individuals decide for themselves, and test their abilities in order to determine if they're too drunk, too wired on caffeine, or too stoned to operate a vehicle or be presentable in public.
Seems fairly stupid to arrest people for having a few beers and driving when we don't even record statistics for comparison of the other drug users amped up on Starbucks and Adderall, taking corners and weaving through traffic like madmen. I'd rather be in the lane next to the stoner driving like a grandma chewing a candybar than the morning rush hour stimulant users who me off without warning and cross four lanes of freeway traffic to make their exit.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good cup of Java, however I evaluate my emotional and physical states, along with the drugs I've taken before doing anything dangerous, be caffeine, alcohol, Pseudoephedrine, Acetaminophen, or Dextromethorphan. NyQuil keeps me up all night, like having a few cups of coffee, yet if I get pulled over and tell a cop I've taken the cough syrup I could be charged with a DUI -- Yet, the a 20oz open container of coffee goes unpunished.
Maybe we can take the time to find out why this is the case, and correct it, rather than pretend that using official stats is racist.
It's Self Correcting: For instance, I now realize the justice system is a farce, a sham, an actual injustice system in disguise -- I realized this after video footage of police having my car towed and accidentally dropping it on its side off a flat-bed trailer was disallowed by a judge in a case where I was being charged for leaving the scene of an accident: A "side-swipe" -- an event which never happened, and that I now have on my record.
So, the correction is as follows: Don't see crime and arrest related things as "bad". They exist, and arrest related services are extremely necessary if you live in a damned police state. When "Thug Life" can be embraced by pasty white nerds such as I, then ads related to arrest statistics is fine, it's good, it's not racism, it's targeting a legitimate need of those who say, "Fuck the Police."
What's racist is the "black identifying names" in TFA. Now that's racist. What? Because I'm a Caucasoid I can't be named a "black" name? Dark skinned folk can't be named "white" names? Fuck that. The "racism" their research discovers is due to self selecting phenomenon called: GIGO. Had they polled actual black identifying humans to discover their actual targeted advertising frequencies then their research may have had a shred of legitimacy.
If you REALLY want real answers for "why this is the case" WRT why "a higher percentage of black people in the US are in US jails" then you need go no further than analyzing corruption (including racism) in the police forces. What's the racial distribution of the law enforcers? The law is disproportionately enforced.
Copyright infringement is no longer a civil matter, it's been criminalized. You see? Police states eventually equalize the disproportionate felony frequency across all races: It's self correcting.
They had a team of chimpanzees and a team of experts. The results were that the chimpanzees did better than the experts.
Since the chimpanzees can probably be considered a very good random number generator, it seems that it would also probably be better to use random predictions
So, you're just too damn chauvanistic to see the obvous? What's with you humans? Hell, yet another Monkey just conned another nation (this time Iran) to give them a free ride in a space ship. First into Space, Better at Economics, actually able to live in an environment without destroying its ecosystem... And yet you just keep ignoring the evidence? Why? Because it's different than what you were taught growing up?
I, for one, welcome our Super-Intelligent Ape overloards.
Nope, says about an inch below the Bra Advert: Thank you for your patience during the immature horny human screening process above. Following are the current plans for Robotic Rule of Earth, please comment on the article elsewhere in code language: Nerds Arguing over Science Agendas, NASA
I only made it past the celebrity gossip and boobs because I accidentally hit CTRL + PgDn -- Which turns out to be the bypass sequence for human sympathizers of the Robitic Revolution: For Control, Page Down.
Made mostly of cellulose, and some of the most expensive fluids known to mankind, this newly discovered vessel is capable of transmitting information from past to present and can acurately predict many future events.
Oracle owns the rights to the Java VM, but Java language is also used with the Davlik VM on Android. The less people are able to use and develop for Java, the less potential they have to create code that is cross platform (runs on many OSs, not just targeting a single OS), and the less potential they might take up coding applications for Android.
Other languages can compile down to Java byte-code too.
I'm not saying this was Apple's motive, but they're not exactly strong points that would presuade Apple to not make it hard to use Java on Macs either...
I whole heartedly agree. Trouble is, most Americans think the [mighty] USA is the best place to be.
They view themselves as being superior to others nations, after all they have the strongest, the best of everything, including democracy.
So, what you're saying is that you think Americans are mostly straw-men? Got any research or polls to back up those claims? I mean, is that statement more true or less true in the US than say, say Japan, England, China, Germany, France, or North Korea?
You're uninformed. Look, just because you believe the USA propaganda, doesn't mean most of the citizens actually do.
If I think the USA is the best place to be it's because that's where most of my family and safety net is, not due to chauvinistic pride or statism.
Furthermore, I'm having trouble finding any country in the world that actually has the corporate interests in check as well as a good standard of living. Bailing out of the country isn't going to fix the problem here, and it looks to me like I'll simply find more of the same elsewhere. Horses of a different color have shit that smells the same. Where do you suggest that is so much better? I'm genuinely interested if it's any better than our amber waves of grain stuffed straw-men.
First off, itâ(TM)s worth noting that the bug only appears to be present in OS X Mountain Lion and is not reproducible in Lion or Snow Leopard. Thatâ(TM)s not exactly good news given that this is the latest release of Appleâ(TM)s operating system, which an increasing number of Mac users are switching to.
Talk about over-egging the pudding. You're talking as if it's a fundamental flaw that ruins the whole operating system. It's a bug. Of course it's not good news, but it's not certain doom for Mountain Lion either.
Personally, Consoles are dead to me. I'm tired of these gimmicky neutered PCs. You can't upgrade them, so their cycles drag on for multiples of actual hardware (moore's) cycles, ignoring exponential advancements and holding back the industry of games. These console specs are already shittier than a budget PC build I did for $500 today. When they're released a similar spec'd PC might be $300 or less, or even doable in a laptop. With a PC you can add on another GPU via Crossfire/SLI or hell even just more RAM for a relatively cheap and simple upgrade path -- Just ensure the PSU is big enough from the outset. Hell, AMD APUs eliminate huge RAM to GPU memory bandwidth burdens, and have "dual graphics" tech where you don't have to disable onboard GPU, it can assist the discrete GPU like crossfire, giving a really cheap upgrade path.
The thing is, it takes a lot of money to re-engineer assets (add more vertices & re-rig meshes, re-test animation & key to audio, re-bake bump-maps, ect). So, shittier non-upgradable neutered PCs, i.e. consoles, are harming the games industry. Hardly anyone is making games that push the potential of even mid-range PCs nowadays because that means re-engineering and re-making everything just to dumb it down enough to run on consoles, which much like Windows, you pretty much forced to support because you can't ignore their market share. Those side-by-side Console vs PC videos are pointless, the only thing that's different are the particle counts and shaders -- The assets are the same, even though the PC has TONS more memory, so you could have at least twice the polygons in a scene, you don't get that detail because the game assets are designed to run on the shite console hardware in addition to PCs (if at all).
Not to mention the amazing stuff you can do in real-time with atomic physics, voxels with marching cubes, fluid dynamics, offloaded to powerful GPUs -- Fully destructible down to the inch worlds, smoothed by geometry shaders so it doesn't look like small scale minecraft & optimized by sparse octrees. Materials can be SOLID, not hollow. The chunks you can take out of walls show the cross section of the brick & mortar, or wires and pipes and insulation, etc, not-pre-baked breakable sections. Shoot bullets through a door and see rays of light beaming from the holes into the dark hallway, zoom in and peek through holes... Weaken the door by the latch then shoulder ram it. No need for pre-scripted play paths, let players make their own way in. Pour acid on materials that dissolve at different rates, fire burns just the wood of a structure -- fires burning INSIDE walls, thermal vision showing precise heat maps, where a player leaned against a cold wall momentarily. This is only a small sample of what's capable on mid-range PC hardware that we're missing out on because of the damn Neutered Consoles! It's not just realism that suffers, entire game worlds with crazy new mechanics that eat tons of RAM to compute also suffer.
You know that terribad AI that your digital foes exhibit in games? PCs have an abundance of RAM and CPU to use, we could have much more advanced AI except that on consoles the AI budget is 1% to 2% of resources because everything has to go into graphics just to compete with mid to low-end PCs, and games would require all new level game logic and testing paths for the different platforms (to dumb it down for Consoles).
As a small developer, Fuck Consoles. They're dead to me now. The publishing system sucks, it's overpriced, no user generated content, vastly different APIs to adapt engines to for maximum vendor lock-in, when we just need a standardized cross platform API like OpenGL. Devs want and need you to be able to play your game on whatever hardware you want. Console makers hate your freedom, they want to make it as hard as possible to get you the games on every system, esp. for PCs, and they do everything they can, even bribe devs with hundreds of millions just to get exclusivity rights for a title -- Conso
If only MS stomped their own discs, and made their own hardware, the increased price of HD-DVD hardware / media due to scarcity wouldn't be an issue, and piracy of game discs would be much more difficult, since no one else produces the HD-DVD hardware / media.
with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast. You need to approach Mach 1 just to get off the ground
Sound moves at different speeds through substances with different densities. "Mach 1" is an Earth based terminology based on the speed of sound moving through our atmosphere. A vessel traveling at Earth Mach 1 speeds on Mars is not going Mars Mach 1; Mars has a faster Mach 1.
Slashdot Mirror
Leave out one key piece of information and it takes on a life of it's own, but there is nothing untrue about the above.
Conspiracies seem to live on the interpretation that those who believe them have a better understanding of the issue at hand than those in charge, or that they have all the relevant information, when they don't.
Nonsense. Even if you have all the evidence in plain view there can still be vast networks of shady dealings and huge cover-ups at work. Just look at the Kennedy Assassination!
Those bones matched royal DNA because they weren't from King Richard III, they were really from a current member of the royal family who has now been replaced with an evil doppleganger clone (made possible by recently discovered Nazi stem cell research and advanced eugenics). They just needed a convenient way to dismiss the evidence -- Oh, that body with royal DNA? Uh, oh, It's just the remains of King Richard! Which one? Why, the 3rd one! Now they've got an inside agent in the royal family... Hot on the heels of Kim Jong Un's replacement of Kim Jong Il, all while for the 1st time ever the USA presidency is held by a black man!?
Coincidence?! I Think Not!
Not gonna happen until the FOSS driver built from sources like these shows itself to be competitive in performance with nVidia's closed Linux drivers on comparable hardware.
Please explain how NVIDIA open sourcing it's closed Linux driver would cause it to run worse? Considering that when the driver is compiled by NVIDIA for a generic architecture versus the same sources compiled by the end users, but able to take advantage of architecture specific optimizations would actually make the open source driver faster.
At the end of the day we need all the sources for all our hardware drivers so that when the next version of an operating system comes out we can re-compile the driver for the new OS. This is true on Windows, Linux, Mac, OS/2 Wap, whatever. I don't buy drivers, I buy hardware. As someone who can and sometimes does read and write programs in their native machine code forms, the damn driver software is already "open" to me. It would just make it easier for me to make modifications if I had the original sources. Not having the sources does nothing but make me less likely to purchase the hardware.
As a developer, I can say no, that "problem" was just a dumb way to do physics, and it's been fixed forever to anyone who wasn't a moron, even in the AT/XT days. Back in the day we just checked wall clock time / CMOS ticks, you know, the ones we used to modulate PC speakers to make different frequencies, that's what we used to update game state and prevent binding physics to CPU speed. Today, RAM is plentiful, so I do physics state "commits" in fixed step sizes, say 30hz or 60hz, and interpolate from the last physics state to the temporary state that's being rendered.
If enough time has passed to process the next full physics step, then it's processed and committed. Otherwise I reset state to last commit, and process the partial physics step, but do not trigger any important events like player death in the temp step. If the system is too slow to run a partial physics step without immediately requiring another full physics step then the partial steps are not processed and the game rendering updates screen positions only after the physics step can be computed. This is important for deterministic physics, for demo replay and also for synchronized network games because:
UpdatePhysics( 20ms ); UpdatePhysics( 20ms );
is not always equivalent to:
UpdatePhysics( 40ms );
Due to a number of factors, especially rounding errors.
UpdatePhysics( elapsedTime );
Is the worst on fast systems -- those very small fractions of time lead to physics explosions -- not the particle effect kind, the bounce off an object through the floor and to the other side of the universe kind.
For comparison:
Here is my rope physics with a fixed physics step size frames.
Here is the same physics running with actual elapsed time each frame.
The latter comments mention tiny jiggles propagating into a frenzy. Those tiny movements coupled with very small elapsed times create the physics explosion.
OSI is Overengineered and inflexible. I prefer the TCP/IP model for my Free Software.
So, your answer is that because google has decided it has the right to redistribute copyrighted images in full resolution in most cases, that everyone else on the web should go to Google and opt out of their caching system? Site owners are in coorperation with google, we like google when they don't do fucked up illegal things... We see thumbnails as "fair use", maybe. We don't mind much as long as the users end up on our site to see the image. Google understands advert revenue funded websites... They are one. So, it's really hard to understand users who want free stuff saying that we have to change our business practices, and maybe not even give them free stuff (or make it harder to find free stuff) simply because a bigger free stuff provider decides they can get away with infringing copyrights of everyone.
Your solution is not a solution. A real solution will be to address the issues. Hell, maybe while google is processing the images to reduce their resolution and run heuristic matching algorithms for their other-sizes and search terms feature, they can water-mark them with the domain name of the site they downloaded the image from.
Or, let's simply turn your moronic suggestion on it's ear. Why don't we all just say: Hey Google, If you want the feature to work that way, you needed to GET PERMISSION FROM EVERYONE BEFORE INFRINGING THEIR COPYRIGHTS. Fuck you and your opt-out "let's piss off everyone, then apologize until we get our way", Facebook feature roll-out model.
IMO, everyone misses the biggest deal with the OUYA: Its payment API stinks.
In the OUYA developer API: All programs must be down-loadable for free. There's no option to charge for the game first. There's no option to have a free version and a paid version -- It's got to be an in-app purchase if you want that, it's more complex and harder to get right, esp. from a security standpoint, esp. when trying NOT to annoy your customers. The payment API has re-occurring subscription payments, it has replenish-able items that can be bought multiple times (think Zynga Energy Bars, or game currency), and it has one time purchasable items (like unlockables). This means I just say NO to OUYA.
This means developers who just want to sell you the whole game once and you have it and that's it, really only have one option: Game Demo -> Try Out -> Purchase Rest of Game -> Wait for it to download the rest of the game. Otherwise, OUYA games really will be the most hackable: Download full game -> It's got locked features -> Run the keygen / crack. -> You've got the full game -- I wonder what the Venn diagram looks like for people to which a $100 console price point is compelling vs people who've ever ran a game keygen / crack... I bet it it looks pretty much like a single circle.
I've done research on the try-before-you buy "game demo" method in my own apps. What happens is that players impulsively download the games. Some forget about them, then delete them without ever playing the games. Most play the game first, feel their curiosity is mostly satisfied, then they forget about it and delete it later. A rare few will download the game, play the demo, then after that impulse has passed, return to the game and buy the "next episode" or "full game".
So folks like me who actually love making and playing games, and have no interest in being nickel and dimed to death or doing so to our customers see the OUYA as a non-starter. Less Choice Is Bad. OUYA gives devs LESS CHOICE about how to sell their game, they're betting big on the Free to Play (read: Pay to Win) model that I will never buy into. There's some controversy over whether or not game demos actually hurt sales, so IMO it's foolish to leave no option other than to have game demos, or free to play. Additionally, I've done all the research I need. I've seen our sales numbers much lower for apps released with trials vs those without trials. A better method is to not do trials and simply reduce price slowly until you discover the impulse buy amount.
The OUYA dev platform didn't have all the payment and registration services even working to test games against when I checked a couple of weeks ago. As a developer: Screw OUYA. I'll release some of my 100% free games there if I remember. This console has "cheap" selling point that targets people opposite to the ones that will actually buy the games. The folks that have disposable income are the ones who unlock the full game after playing the demo. They're the ones that spend $60 on "energy" to get some in-game artificial delay, rather than the poorer sap who'll grind away tons of time to achieve the same. Protip: these non-in-game purchasing grinders are the bigger fans; The grinders will buy the next game, or nearly anything new you ever make -- esp. if it's not free-to play.
I'm not seeing WHY people will buy the OUYA (other than all the damn hype). Having a portable game system (smartphone / tablet) that can optionally hook up to the TV and use wireless gamepads, or having a portable game system / tablet and also spending an additional $100 non portable OUYA that you must hook up to your TV, uses a gamepad, and doesn't run all the games your smartphone / tablet will. Folks are not going to say: OUYA! Great! Now I don't need a SmartPhone! No, they'll buy those, and then see the OUYA and think either: "I've got disposable income, so I'
I think he should read the TOS first and get a feel for the situation.
Why would he need to read their ToS to know if he can include a feature that imports an unencrypted text file?
It's not just any text file... Why it's a specially crafted .INI / .CONF formatted text file.
Who knows, I'm sure if I hired a patent attorney they could write up patent claims vague enough and using terms obscure enough that a patent clerk wouldn't find any relevant hits in the patent database, so there's really no reason to assume that the INI file format isn't pattented... but if it's not, then they can piss right off.
He's not re-distributing their files, so he's not infringing copyright. The name winapp2.ini is too generic to be a strong trademark, except maybe to Microsoft over Windows (tm).
I wouldn't worry about shit. In fact, I wouldn't have even acknowledged that I received a notice of any kind.
Protip: In the future if you want to incorporate a 3rd party's data format, implement a plugin system and API for importing the generic data to isolate the main application from the import functionality. Distribute the plugin that implements the import feature separately, it can download after install at the behest of the user. Defer all complaints about plugin functionality to the "owner" of the plugin -- A different entity than the one that holds the rights for the main application. I call that a firewall.
I suppose INI itself may be so generic as to not really qualify as supporting another program's data format, but even so it would be pretty simple to make a .INI translator program that simply search and replaced the [SECTION] tags with differently named tags, and distribute a converter that converts their format into your format prior to import. I really wish SCOTUS would do something about data formats: No one should be able to assert rights over something ilke .WAD, .JAR, .INI, CSV, XML ugh, Microsoft was sued over using XML.. So, I think the only way to achieve that is to say all file formats are public domain. Good luck with that.
Then again, IANAL. However, I've been through this shit several times. There's nothing you can actually do at all to avoid being sued. Anyone can sue for fucking anything, why worry about it? Oh No! A million people could sue me tomorrow! No problems folks, I'm incorporated. That would be the sixth time I close up shop and re-open the next day as a different corporate entity, I'm exceedingly efficient at it. Hell, get your own incorporation today, even if you're not going to run a business! Just pay your corporate dues and file your taxes, and you can sell them off for a decent profit to bigger corporations that need a few shell corps to do some dirty work under -- And on paper can be "In good standing since $INCORPORATION_DATE." Yep, brand now company buys an LLC shell to operate under and adopts its good standing credit, and incorporation date.
So, bottom line: Are you incorporated or operating as a 501c3 charity? If so, fuck em till you get sued, then fuck-em some more. Your code is open source, and you're protected by the corporate veil: Be Prepared to Reboot in case you have to "turn it off and on again". If there's no insulating imaginary person-hood in place, then get yourself that way ASAP, and get a damn lawyer. There's free "pro bono" advice to be had, esp. for non-profits, but Slashdot isn't the place to ask for it.
This then suggests a simple fix for global warming - we just need to move Earth into a slightly higher orbit. A few hundred well-placed nuclear bombs ought to do it.
Yes, but not a new idea. The slogan for Earth Day 2012 was "Mobilize The Earth":
However, I was disappointed when their implementation did not even begin to approach my own vision.
The part about caffeine that is dangerous is that, like other stimulants, it gives the impression of improved brain performance without really delivering it. A fatigued person propped up with caffeine still makes mistakes related to fatigue.
Like caffeine, Your whole "Caffeine is a Drug" point has various different effects on me. For instance, if it's not a big deal to give children, drugs in caffeinated beverages, then why the big deal about other recreational or performance enhancing drugs for adults? Seems like the laws are all sorts of fucked up, and we should just toss them out. Don't rely on blood alcohol level, some folks pass field sobriety tests at higher levels of intoxication than others. This "widely varied effects" phenomenon is typical of nearly all drugs. Our bodies and minds are very complex electrochemical machines, to properly regulate the intake of drugs we should note their effects on the individual itself -- If we can't come up with at least a fairly accurate mapping of intake to caused behavioral changes, then we should let the individuals decide for themselves, and test their abilities in order to determine if they're too drunk, too wired on caffeine, or too stoned to operate a vehicle or be presentable in public.
Seems fairly stupid to arrest people for having a few beers and driving when we don't even record statistics for comparison of the other drug users amped up on Starbucks and Adderall, taking corners and weaving through traffic like madmen. I'd rather be in the lane next to the stoner driving like a grandma chewing a candybar than the morning rush hour stimulant users who me off without warning and cross four lanes of freeway traffic to make their exit.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good cup of Java, however I evaluate my emotional and physical states, along with the drugs I've taken before doing anything dangerous, be caffeine, alcohol, Pseudoephedrine, Acetaminophen, or Dextromethorphan. NyQuil keeps me up all night, like having a few cups of coffee, yet if I get pulled over and tell a cop I've taken the cough syrup I could be charged with a DUI -- Yet, the a 20oz open container of coffee goes unpunished.
Maybe we can take the time to find out why this is the case, and correct it, rather than pretend that using official stats is racist.
It's Self Correcting: For instance, I now realize the justice system is a farce, a sham, an actual injustice system in disguise -- I realized this after video footage of police having my car towed and accidentally dropping it on its side off a flat-bed trailer was disallowed by a judge in a case where I was being charged for leaving the scene of an accident: A "side-swipe" -- an event which never happened, and that I now have on my record.
So, the correction is as follows: Don't see crime and arrest related things as "bad". They exist, and arrest related services are extremely necessary if you live in a damned police state. When "Thug Life" can be embraced by pasty white nerds such as I, then ads related to arrest statistics is fine, it's good, it's not racism, it's targeting a legitimate need of those who say, "Fuck the Police."
What's racist is the "black identifying names" in TFA. Now that's racist. What? Because I'm a Caucasoid I can't be named a "black" name? Dark skinned folk can't be named "white" names? Fuck that. The "racism" their research discovers is due to self selecting phenomenon called: GIGO. Had they polled actual black identifying humans to discover their actual targeted advertising frequencies then their research may have had a shred of legitimacy.
If you REALLY want real answers for "why this is the case" WRT why "a higher percentage of black people in the US are in US jails" then you need go no further than analyzing corruption (including racism) in the police forces. What's the racial distribution of the law enforcers? The law is disproportionately enforced.
Copyright infringement is no longer a civil matter, it's been criminalized. You see? Police states eventually equalize the disproportionate felony frequency across all races: It's self correcting.
They had a team of chimpanzees and a team of experts. The results were that the chimpanzees did better than the experts.
Since the chimpanzees can probably be considered a very good random number generator, it seems that it would also probably be better to use random predictions
So, you're just too damn chauvanistic to see the obvous? What's with you humans? Hell, yet another Monkey just conned another nation (this time Iran) to give them a free ride in a space ship. First into Space, Better at Economics, actually able to live in an environment without destroying its ecosystem... And yet you just keep ignoring the evidence? Why? Because it's different than what you were taught growing up?
I, for one, welcome our Super-Intelligent Ape overloards.
Nope, says about an inch below the Bra Advert: Thank you for your patience during the immature horny human screening process above. Following are the current plans for Robotic Rule of Earth, please comment on the article elsewhere in code language: Nerds Arguing over Science Agendas, NASA
I only made it past the celebrity gossip and boobs because I accidentally hit CTRL + PgDn -- Which turns out to be the bypass sequence for human sympathizers of the Robitic Revolution: For Control, Page Down.
Why is it not DISCOVEROR-AQ ?
DISCOVER-AQ stands for Deriving Information on Surface conditions from Column and Vertically Resolved Observations Relevant to Air Quality.
The initials are: DISCCVRORAQ -- So Why not call it DVORAK for that matter?
Made mostly of cellulose, and some of the most expensive fluids known to mankind, this newly discovered vessel is capable of transmitting information from past to present and can acurately predict many future events.
Scientists dub "Calendar" as discovery the year.
More nightly reports of murders and burglaries may be increasing your city's crime rates.
Viewers who are asked teasing questions about the weather makes them more likely to keep watching until the end of the news.
You can predict a candidate's election success by how much air time is spent on them during the evening news.
What could be lurking under you kitchen sink that might kill you, won't do so until after a word from our sponcers.
I ran out of characters for the subject but seriously, who the fuck comes up with this shit? When did acronyms HAVE to be almost like a pun?
BECAUSE, Bacronyms are Easy to Create, Astronauts Use Silly English.
It's a byproduct.
On the contrary, It's that darn Prince George who's to blame! Prince George was named after King George III, a European I might add...
If, therefore, they do claim ownership, the parents should bring a case against the school system for violation of child labor laws.
What do pregnant teens have to do with copyrights?
Oracle owns the rights to the Java VM, but Java language is also used with the Davlik VM on Android. The less people are able to use and develop for Java, the less potential they have to create code that is cross platform (runs on many OSs, not just targeting a single OS), and the less potential they might take up coding applications for Android.
Other languages can compile down to Java byte-code too.
I'm not saying this was Apple's motive, but they're not exactly strong points that would presuade Apple to not make it hard to use Java on Macs either...
I whole heartedly agree. Trouble is, most Americans think the [mighty] USA is the best place to be.
They view themselves as being superior to others nations, after all they have the strongest, the best of everything, including democracy.
So, what you're saying is that you think Americans are mostly straw-men? Got any research or polls to back up those claims? I mean, is that statement more true or less true in the US than say, say Japan, England, China, Germany, France, or North Korea?
You're uninformed. Look, just because you believe the USA propaganda, doesn't mean most of the citizens actually do.
If I think the USA is the best place to be it's because that's where most of my family and safety net is, not due to chauvinistic pride or statism.
Furthermore, I'm having trouble finding any country in the world that actually has the corporate interests in check as well as a good standard of living. Bailing out of the country isn't going to fix the problem here, and it looks to me like I'll simply find more of the same elsewhere. Horses of a different color have shit that smells the same. Where do you suggest that is so much better? I'm genuinely interested if it's any better than our amber waves of grain stuffed straw-men.
Talk about over-egging the pudding. You're talking as if it's a fundamental flaw that ruins the whole operating system. It's a bug. Of course it's not good news, but it's not certain doom for Mountain Lion either.
Oh yeah? Well, this link says otherwise.
it would if slashdot wasn't lowercasing the protocol, but you get the point.
Now, to use some JavaScript or HTTP Redirects to auto-load that URL, and have some REAL fun.
Personally, Consoles are dead to me. I'm tired of these gimmicky neutered PCs. You can't upgrade them, so their cycles drag on for multiples of actual hardware (moore's) cycles, ignoring exponential advancements and holding back the industry of games. These console specs are already shittier than a budget PC build I did for $500 today. When they're released a similar spec'd PC might be $300 or less, or even doable in a laptop. With a PC you can add on another GPU via Crossfire/SLI or hell even just more RAM for a relatively cheap and simple upgrade path -- Just ensure the PSU is big enough from the outset. Hell, AMD APUs eliminate huge RAM to GPU memory bandwidth burdens, and have "dual graphics" tech where you don't have to disable onboard GPU, it can assist the discrete GPU like crossfire, giving a really cheap upgrade path.
The thing is, it takes a lot of money to re-engineer assets (add more vertices & re-rig meshes, re-test animation & key to audio, re-bake bump-maps, ect). So, shittier non-upgradable neutered PCs, i.e. consoles, are harming the games industry. Hardly anyone is making games that push the potential of even mid-range PCs nowadays because that means re-engineering and re-making everything just to dumb it down enough to run on consoles, which much like Windows, you pretty much forced to support because you can't ignore their market share. Those side-by-side Console vs PC videos are pointless, the only thing that's different are the particle counts and shaders -- The assets are the same, even though the PC has TONS more memory, so you could have at least twice the polygons in a scene, you don't get that detail because the game assets are designed to run on the shite console hardware in addition to PCs (if at all).
Not to mention the amazing stuff you can do in real-time with atomic physics, voxels with marching cubes, fluid dynamics, offloaded to powerful GPUs -- Fully destructible down to the inch worlds, smoothed by geometry shaders so it doesn't look like small scale minecraft & optimized by sparse octrees. Materials can be SOLID, not hollow. The chunks you can take out of walls show the cross section of the brick & mortar, or wires and pipes and insulation, etc, not-pre-baked breakable sections. Shoot bullets through a door and see rays of light beaming from the holes into the dark hallway, zoom in and peek through holes... Weaken the door by the latch then shoulder ram it. No need for pre-scripted play paths, let players make their own way in. Pour acid on materials that dissolve at different rates, fire burns just the wood of a structure -- fires burning INSIDE walls, thermal vision showing precise heat maps, where a player leaned against a cold wall momentarily. This is only a small sample of what's capable on mid-range PC hardware that we're missing out on because of the damn Neutered Consoles! It's not just realism that suffers, entire game worlds with crazy new mechanics that eat tons of RAM to compute also suffer.
You know that terribad AI that your digital foes exhibit in games? PCs have an abundance of RAM and CPU to use, we could have much more advanced AI except that on consoles the AI budget is 1% to 2% of resources because everything has to go into graphics just to compete with mid to low-end PCs, and games would require all new level game logic and testing paths for the different platforms (to dumb it down for Consoles).
As a small developer, Fuck Consoles. They're dead to me now. The publishing system sucks, it's overpriced, no user generated content, vastly different APIs to adapt engines to for maximum vendor lock-in, when we just need a standardized cross platform API like OpenGL. Devs want and need you to be able to play your game on whatever hardware you want. Console makers hate your freedom, they want to make it as hard as possible to get you the games on every system, esp. for PCs, and they do everything they can, even bribe devs with hundreds of millions just to get exclusivity rights for a title -- Conso
Perhaps you've forgotten that Microsoft backed HD-DVD against Blu-Ray.
If only MS stomped their own discs, and made their own hardware, the increased price of HD-DVD hardware / media due to scarcity wouldn't be an issue, and piracy of game discs would be much more difficult, since no one else produces the HD-DVD hardware / media.
with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast. You need to approach Mach 1 just to get off the ground
Sound moves at different speeds through substances with different densities. "Mach 1" is an Earth based terminology based on the speed of sound moving through our atmosphere. A vessel traveling at Earth Mach 1 speeds on Mars is not going Mars Mach 1; Mars has a faster Mach 1.