They will do a Mac/Linux port if they reach £1,400,000. I never played the original Elite, and I'm really curious as to how the procedurally generated stuff mixes with the ability of players to affect the game universe.
Not trolling, genuinely interested to know why one would choose the proxy path over Tor.
Tor is frequently very slow. Totally worth it if you want industrial strength anonymity and use it correctly. But if you just care about your own government censors it's overkill.
Also, you can get very strange an unpredictable results from geographic targetting of Internet services. Oftentimes things will ignore any information you give them about what language you want to see the site in and decide that you should be seeing it in German because the IP you came from was in Germany. But then the next page load will be shown in Russian because the next connection came from a Russian IP. Which is very odd because all the session information is the same. But it still happens.
Actually, a surprisingly large amount of the time I end up hacking a page to pieces in the browser's HTML editor until the visual cruft goes away and I have something I can read.;-) I'm likely not a typical user though.
I bought myself a nice retina mac recently. Likely the last mac I'll ever buy unfortunately. Apple is becoming too despotic for me to support even if their laptops are still open enough for me to consider using.
But that aside, I'm very disappointed to learn that Apple has to play a number of tricks to deal with applications that are written to do things in pixel units. I found this to be something of a surprise. I thought developers were better than that nowadays.
I've not done much application development, but when I have I always try to be careful to specify the application's layout in some device-independent way. It's really disappointing that so many applications (web pages most emphatically included in this list) decide that things should be sized in terms of pixels. That's a unit that really makes no sense at all to use unless you're specifying a line-width in terms of it (I want he smallest line width that I can draw and have it show up).
Unfortunately, even if app developers wrote their applications properly, there's still the problem of icons and pictures. Those are almost always bitmaps. And that's really not the right format for them, especially not for icons. IMHO, if you MUST use a bitmap for something, use one that's way obnoxiously large for any display you might anticipate using, then scale it to the right device-independent size in device dependent coordinates using a high-quality scaling algorithm before you display it.
Or better yet, use a vector drawing for your icon.
I've seen a lot of people clamoring for extremely high resolution displays. I'm among them. But with application developers developing things like they do, I can see why it hasn't happened. It would be a total mess.
So, I went and looked it up myself, and it's an Open Source fork of NX, which started its life as Open Source then was closed. Yay! I shall have to check it out sometime. NX was an excellent idea for making X much faster over high-latency networks. I'm pleased it's seeing the light of day again.
(Are you confusing wealth and income? Are you confusing tax rates and tax amounts?)
Wealth is what's needed to execute the strategies. But the strategies shield income from taxation. You are right, I wasn't crisp in how I was using the terms.
You might start by being angry at the size of the burden.
Yes, that's really quite upsetting. Waste and corruption abound. The whole thing is very ridiculous. Unfortunately, it's there, and it's going to take a long time and a lot of money to get out from under, no matter what changes are made to government or how much it's shrunk.
But, I want to know, should I be cheering Google on for being able to shield their income from taxation, or should I be upset that they're forcing more of the burden of paying off the fruits of this ridiculous overspending onto me?
Well, I agree with that. But it currently seems that people who have enough money can completely avoid having to pay taxes on most of it. Should I be congratulating them on being able to avoid a necessary evil, or should I be angry at them for using their wealth to shift more of the burden onto me?
I've never heard of 'X2Go'. Is it available with source code? Or do I have to trust someone not to keylog all my interactions with an X application that uses it?
*chuckle* So, what do you propose? Should we just take everybody who makes less than 30000 a year and chop them up for spare parts and sell them to those who don't? What system do you think is reasonable for handling the problem?
This is not a tax avoidance strategy available to people with incomes below a a couple of hundred thousand dollars, which is almost all of you. We have a massive debt, and infrastructure we currently (rightly or wrongly) rely on the government for. Someone has to pay those things. If large corporations and high-income individuals aren't, that means we're forced to pick up their burden simply because we can't afford the same tax avoidance strategies.
So, regardless of how you feel about taxes being theft or whatever, this should be outrageous and unconscionable.
I've run Linux at home for ages. I use my Linux computer at home for email, development, and a whole host of other things. I don't need a remote desktop. The whole concept of one is completely foreign to the Linux world. Nobody would ever make one because the idea is pointless in a Linux environment.
ssh and the command line are all you really need, and they are significantly more flexible and powerful than any GUI I have used. And if you really need a GUI, that's what X11 is for. X11 is completely network transparent. You can run an X11 program on any random computer and have it display just fine on your desktop.
I don't know how to find a good X11 'server' (yes, the thing that runs on your desktop and actually pushes pixels around on behalf of GUI programs is a 'server' because it performs services (manipulating your display) on the behalf of clients) for Windows is. But you should investigate and get one if you really must have a GUI.
I actually find Windows reliance on remote desktops to be really primitive and constraining. Whenever I try to mess with how Windows is supposed to work through a GUI I'm always left wondering what really just happened. So many little invisible things and no way to really see how they all interact. You just have to trust the partial fiction displayed to you to be a reasonable reflection of the underlying reality. It's very frustrating and cumbersome.
But I'm not so sure that this is the right solution. I think that maybe RMS should encourage someone to fork Ubuntu and have a version of Ubuntu without the objectionable feature. Positive change often tastes a lot better and is easier to rally people around than change involving a negative action.
*nod* I don't typically demand that my games be free software. But I can definitely understand your point of view, and I'm a bit conflicted about mine.:-)
They've had several Android bundles before after all.
Well, Android is an open platform. I could potentially install my own version of Android on a device and play those games without having to give money to anybody. Heck, I could compile it all from source if I wanted. The thing I care most about is not exactly that it be cross-platform, but that one of the supported platforms be a completely open non-proprietary one. This has always been the case until now.
I'm taking it personally because a big part of the reason they've gotten so much press from so many people is the fact that they've always supported an open platform and they've always been DRM-free. It's like they took all that free attention and advertising and betrayed the goals of the people who gave it to them.
There is a huge value in insisting that open platforms be supported. The network effects applicable to coffee brands are somewhat minor. The network effects for software platforms are the dominating factor in their success.
There is a huge struggle in the computer industry right now between open and proprietary platforms. I fear for a future in which proprietary platforms are dominant.
With Humble Bundle insisting that the people who sell games through them at least provide some kind of support for open platforms was a huge boost to the network effects surrounding those platforms. It encourages the creation of supporting libraries. It encourages people to take the platform seriously for games. It has an enormous number of positive beneficial effects. I gave a ton of money to Humble Bundle because I wanted to push those network effects.
And it's these network effects that will control which platform dominates. Most people don't understand or don't care about their software stack being open and free. They don't understand or don't think the consequences are terribly important. They are wrong, and very short-sighted. But the wonderful thing is, I don't have to convince them if I can encourage network effects that make the open platform more convenient.
So, Humble Bundle abandoning these principles was a huge blow. It means that they don't actually care about encouraging these network effects at all, and like most in the industry are happy to take tons of money and ignore what's actually in everybody's long-term best interests.
I know of someone who had to fight tooth and nail and basically go around management to use development tools like Mercurial or Jenkins in-house. And this wasn't because "Well, why don't you use TFS?". The reasoning was more "We need 5 levels of approval for you to use any Open Source tool at all, no matter if no code in the tool ever makes it into our stuff.".
I've been waiting for years for Microsoft to turn over a new leaf. There keep on being hints, but it never really happens.
I happen to know that internally, Microsoft is petrified of using any FOSS. This has the effect of keeping their culture back in the old days when FOSS was a virus to them. It still is, no matter what they might say on the outside.
The problem is that they get bought, sold and traded to increase the monopoly position of the corporation. Additionally, the 'work-for-hire' system seems to me likes it's pretty heavily abused. Especially in the case of the music industry.
I'm fine with a corporation owning physical assets as long as they don't own all (or the vast majority) of a particular physical asset.
Yes, you're right. What do to with such large-scale collaborative work is a difficult question. And maybe you're right that my idea causes more problems than it solves.:-/
Actually, no. The first purpose of a business is to serve their customers. If they do that well and are careful about expenses, they will make money. Businesses who's first purpose is making money are invariably businesses I despise and avoid if I possibly can.
It's pretty trivial to come up with ways to make money that make a lot of people really unhappy and angry. Those aren't the kinds of businesses I want to see in the world.
I want to see businesses that are creating happy customers and making money doing it. In fact, those kinds of businesses, I want to give money to because I want them to stick around.
IMHO, the major problems in IP law come from corporate ownership. It shouldn't be possible for corporations to own copyrights or patents, they should only be able to be granted strictly limited rights by the individuals who do own the IP.
Slashdot Mirror
Control freak parents or not the kids were under their roof so their word was law.
Well, there are definitely limits there. But imposing a 22:00 Internet curfew is well within the bounds.
Is it possible to buy it anywhere anymore?
Oh, oops, you're right. *sigh* Well, that's something of a disappointment. Oh, well.
They will do a Mac/Linux port if they reach £1,400,000. I never played the original Elite, and I'm really curious as to how the procedurally generated stuff mixes with the ability of players to affect the game universe.
Not trolling, genuinely interested to know why one would choose the proxy path over Tor.
Tor is frequently very slow. Totally worth it if you want industrial strength anonymity and use it correctly. But if you just care about your own government censors it's overkill.
Also, you can get very strange an unpredictable results from geographic targetting of Internet services. Oftentimes things will ignore any information you give them about what language you want to see the site in and decide that you should be seeing it in German because the IP you came from was in Germany. But then the next page load will be shown in Russian because the next connection came from a Russian IP. Which is very odd because all the session information is the same. But it still happens.
I agree. I've had horrible luck trying to find places the few times I've used Bing. It's an awful service.
Actually, a surprisingly large amount of the time I end up hacking a page to pieces in the browser's HTML editor until the visual cruft goes away and I have something I can read. ;-) I'm likely not a typical user though.
I bought myself a nice retina mac recently. Likely the last mac I'll ever buy unfortunately. Apple is becoming too despotic for me to support even if their laptops are still open enough for me to consider using.
But that aside, I'm very disappointed to learn that Apple has to play a number of tricks to deal with applications that are written to do things in pixel units. I found this to be something of a surprise. I thought developers were better than that nowadays.
I've not done much application development, but when I have I always try to be careful to specify the application's layout in some device-independent way. It's really disappointing that so many applications (web pages most emphatically included in this list) decide that things should be sized in terms of pixels. That's a unit that really makes no sense at all to use unless you're specifying a line-width in terms of it (I want he smallest line width that I can draw and have it show up).
Unfortunately, even if app developers wrote their applications properly, there's still the problem of icons and pictures. Those are almost always bitmaps. And that's really not the right format for them, especially not for icons. IMHO, if you MUST use a bitmap for something, use one that's way obnoxiously large for any display you might anticipate using, then scale it to the right device-independent size in device dependent coordinates using a high-quality scaling algorithm before you display it.
Or better yet, use a vector drawing for your icon.
I've seen a lot of people clamoring for extremely high resolution displays. I'm among them. But with application developers developing things like they do, I can see why it hasn't happened. It would be a total mess.
Google is my friend... sometimes. *sigh*
So, I went and looked it up myself, and it's an Open Source fork of NX, which started its life as Open Source then was closed. Yay! I shall have to check it out sometime. NX was an excellent idea for making X much faster over high-latency networks. I'm pleased it's seeing the light of day again.
(Are you confusing wealth and income? Are you confusing tax rates and tax amounts?)
Wealth is what's needed to execute the strategies. But the strategies shield income from taxation. You are right, I wasn't crisp in how I was using the terms.
You might start by being angry at the size of the burden.
Yes, that's really quite upsetting. Waste and corruption abound. The whole thing is very ridiculous. Unfortunately, it's there, and it's going to take a long time and a lot of money to get out from under, no matter what changes are made to government or how much it's shrunk.
But, I want to know, should I be cheering Google on for being able to shield their income from taxation, or should I be upset that they're forcing more of the burden of paying off the fruits of this ridiculous overspending onto me?
Well, I agree with that. But it currently seems that people who have enough money can completely avoid having to pay taxes on most of it. Should I be congratulating them on being able to avoid a necessary evil, or should I be angry at them for using their wealth to shift more of the burden onto me?
I've never heard of 'X2Go'. Is it available with source code? Or do I have to trust someone not to keylog all my interactions with an X application that uses it?
*chuckle* So, what do you propose? Should we just take everybody who makes less than 30000 a year and chop them up for spare parts and sell them to those who don't? What system do you think is reasonable for handling the problem?
We all have to contribute. Are you saying that anybody with the means to avoid paying should be allowed to avoid paying?
You should find this behavior reprehensible.
This is not a tax avoidance strategy available to people with incomes below a a couple of hundred thousand dollars, which is almost all of you. We have a massive debt, and infrastructure we currently (rightly or wrongly) rely on the government for. Someone has to pay those things. If large corporations and high-income individuals aren't, that means we're forced to pick up their burden simply because we can't afford the same tax avoidance strategies.
So, regardless of how you feel about taxes being theft or whatever, this should be outrageous and unconscionable.
I've run Linux at home for ages. I use my Linux computer at home for email, development, and a whole host of other things. I don't need a remote desktop. The whole concept of one is completely foreign to the Linux world. Nobody would ever make one because the idea is pointless in a Linux environment.
ssh and the command line are all you really need, and they are significantly more flexible and powerful than any GUI I have used. And if you really need a GUI, that's what X11 is for. X11 is completely network transparent. You can run an X11 program on any random computer and have it display just fine on your desktop.
I don't know how to find a good X11 'server' (yes, the thing that runs on your desktop and actually pushes pixels around on behalf of GUI programs is a 'server' because it performs services (manipulating your display) on the behalf of clients) for Windows is. But you should investigate and get one if you really must have a GUI.
I actually find Windows reliance on remote desktops to be really primitive and constraining. Whenever I try to mess with how Windows is supposed to work through a GUI I'm always left wondering what really just happened. So many little invisible things and no way to really see how they all interact. You just have to trust the partial fiction displayed to you to be a reasonable reflection of the underlying reality. It's very frustrating and cumbersome.
I completely agree with you here.
But I'm not so sure that this is the right solution. I think that maybe RMS should encourage someone to fork Ubuntu and have a version of Ubuntu without the objectionable feature. Positive change often tastes a lot better and is easier to rally people around than change involving a negative action.
*nod* I don't typically demand that my games be free software. But I can definitely understand your point of view, and I'm a bit conflicted about mine. :-)
They've had several Android bundles before after all.
Well, Android is an open platform. I could potentially install my own version of Android on a device and play those games without having to give money to anybody. Heck, I could compile it all from source if I wanted. The thing I care most about is not exactly that it be cross-platform, but that one of the supported platforms be a completely open non-proprietary one. This has always been the case until now.
I'm taking it personally because a big part of the reason they've gotten so much press from so many people is the fact that they've always supported an open platform and they've always been DRM-free. It's like they took all that free attention and advertising and betrayed the goals of the people who gave it to them.
There is a huge value in insisting that open platforms be supported. The network effects applicable to coffee brands are somewhat minor. The network effects for software platforms are the dominating factor in their success.
There is a huge struggle in the computer industry right now between open and proprietary platforms. I fear for a future in which proprietary platforms are dominant.
With Humble Bundle insisting that the people who sell games through them at least provide some kind of support for open platforms was a huge boost to the network effects surrounding those platforms. It encourages the creation of supporting libraries. It encourages people to take the platform seriously for games. It has an enormous number of positive beneficial effects. I gave a ton of money to Humble Bundle because I wanted to push those network effects.
And it's these network effects that will control which platform dominates. Most people don't understand or don't care about their software stack being open and free. They don't understand or don't think the consequences are terribly important. They are wrong, and very short-sighted. But the wonderful thing is, I don't have to convince them if I can encourage network effects that make the open platform more convenient.
So, Humble Bundle abandoning these principles was a huge blow. It means that they don't actually care about encouraging these network effects at all, and like most in the industry are happy to take tons of money and ignore what's actually in everybody's long-term best interests.
I think their attitude changed after Linux came to be popular in certain market segments.
I know of someone who had to fight tooth and nail and basically go around management to use development tools like Mercurial or Jenkins in-house. And this wasn't because "Well, why don't you use TFS?". The reasoning was more "We need 5 levels of approval for you to use any Open Source tool at all, no matter if no code in the tool ever makes it into our stuff.".
I've been waiting for years for Microsoft to turn over a new leaf. There keep on being hints, but it never really happens.
I happen to know that internally, Microsoft is petrified of using any FOSS. This has the effect of keeping their culture back in the old days when FOSS was a virus to them. It still is, no matter what they might say on the outside.
The problem is that they get bought, sold and traded to increase the monopoly position of the corporation. Additionally, the 'work-for-hire' system seems to me likes it's pretty heavily abused. Especially in the case of the music industry.
I'm fine with a corporation owning physical assets as long as they don't own all (or the vast majority) of a particular physical asset.
Yes, you're right. What do to with such large-scale collaborative work is a difficult question. And maybe you're right that my idea causes more problems than it solves. :-/
Actually, no. The first purpose of a business is to serve their customers. If they do that well and are careful about expenses, they will make money. Businesses who's first purpose is making money are invariably businesses I despise and avoid if I possibly can.
It's pretty trivial to come up with ways to make money that make a lot of people really unhappy and angry. Those aren't the kinds of businesses I want to see in the world.
I want to see businesses that are creating happy customers and making money doing it. In fact, those kinds of businesses, I want to give money to because I want them to stick around.
IMHO, the major problems in IP law come from corporate ownership. It shouldn't be possible for corporations to own copyrights or patents, they should only be able to be granted strictly limited rights by the individuals who do own the IP.