Personally, I'd have him autograph one of his inventions. You know, like his now-obsolete flying machine.
Having an artist autograph their current chosen medium seems reasonable to me. Yes, the XBox 360 is going to be obsolete - but that won't mean that, retroactively, Red Vs Blue wasn't made on an XBox 360. That way you get both the autograph and a nice slice of history.
"Yessiree, this is an actual autograph by one of the creative minds behind Red Vs Blue! And even better, you're looking at a real XBox 360, just like the one Red Vs Blue was made on!"
Same argument goes for any game developer or designer, obviously.
No, it's easy to condemn MS in general, even without the unknowns.
Someone asked a specific question of a customer service representative. That representative gave a clear and unambiguous answer. Either that answer was incorrect, or a serious mistake was made internally.
It doesn't matter which of those was the case. If you bring a car to an auto shop, and they rip out your engine, do you let them get away with "oh well someone made a mistake"? "Our customer service representative wasn't authorized to make that promise"? "Our company's just too big man, there's nothing you can do about it! These things just happen."
Fuck that.
Microsoft support screwed up. I don't know what section they screwed it up in, but I honestly don't care. The details don't matter. Microsoft support screwed up and should take responsibility - figuring out where the mistake was made is their problem.
I'm not so sure this would be possible. I admit I haven't examined the issue in great detail, but it would seem to violate the terms of the proposed 'system'. More specifically, it allows for the existence of IP that is not itself taxed. However, it might be possible in a static form.
I disagree - the IP has value, and the fact that it's not public-domained has value. I think the only way this would work is if failing to pay your copyright dues simply dumped it straight into the public domain, which means that "keeping it GPL'ed", and thus requiring that companies not import it into closed-source products, may have quite a bit of value to people. Also, keep in mind that buying Linux and not re-licensing it to anyone would mean that Microsoft could integrate Linux code into its OS, and Apple couldn't. This may have quite a bit of value to them as well. That's where the value comes in.
This, however, would not be possible, for a variety of reasons. Primarily, every addition or modification to the source code would constitute another piece of value which lands you back at square one. It is, of course, pointless to release the code under the GPL and then instantly release it into the public domain; holding the copyright leads you back into a shotgun situation.
Well, I agree with everything here except the first line:) Yes, every single bit of code added puts you back at square one . . . the point where Microsoft has to fork over even more money in order to buy it from you, and if they do - as long as you've sent it to one other person before that - it's already licensed under the GPL. In other words, it's a "square one" which is perfectly suited for us.
IP ownership is actually pretty clear on a lot of these matters. The person who writes the code owns the IP. The person downloading a GPL'ed version from them doesn't. I'm not a lawyer, but I do study this stuff pretty closely, and I'm about 99% sure that my description is how things would play out legally.
Hundreds of people do. Everyone who's ever contributed to Linux does. Each one of them owns "intellectual property" in Linux, and in order to "lock down" Linux, Microsoft would need to buy out each and every person . . .
. . . except that that wouldn't help. Linux is under the GPL. The GPL is irrevocable. Every person who's downloaded a copy of Linux would still be able to use it, distribute it, and modify it.
So, imagine Microsoft somehow buys all the property rights to a version of Linux . . . the community merely "forks" it, keeping the same name (which isn't a copyright, note! It's a trademark! Microsoft can't buy it!) and keep developing, with the same version, leaving all the same code in place, without even skipping a beat.
The only things Microsoft could do with its new property would be to license it under a different license, such as integrating the code into closed-source apps or providing it public-domain. Honestly, if MS is willing to pay the open-source groups the millions of dollars it would no doubt cost for even a small segment of the code, I'm okay with that.
Which is why you rearrange the DRAM sticks before reinstalling them. (Obviously this doesn't work if the computer decides to interleave bytes, but I seem to remember that most systems only have 2x parallelism, so moving sticks 0 and 1 into slots 2 and 3 should be quite safe.)
Or, which is why you build a simple DRAM reader/dumper, and read the data without ever booting into that RAM.
Or, which is why you find a non-x86 system that uses the same RAM - or an x86 system that doesn't use BIOS. (Does EFI do the same thing? I don't honestly know.)
Program A writes a bunch of stuff to RAM. Program A goes idle. OS says "okay, they're idle, I need more working room" and flushes Program A's state to disk.
Does the OS necessarily wipe the data at this point?
If not, is there some way that Program A can realistically "erase its data", obviously pulling a working copy back into main memory, but without hitting the same page? (Theoretical chain of events: OS needs more disk cache pages, OS uses Program A's old memory for this, OS only uses half the memory leaving Program A's old data still intact but with the other pages still allocated, Program A decides to clear its memory and ends up merely clearing a new copy. Obviously if the OS decides to give pages to Program B they'll be wiped before Program B gets them, but if the OS is planning on using them privately does it still bother?)
I don't actually know about the details of this, but it all obviously requires OS-level guarantees that I've never heard of before. (Admittedly, partially, because I've never gone looking for them.) So, is this guaranteed not to occur?
Doesn't matter. There's only so much gravitational potential energy - you can't invent more, no matter how you do it. Ten generators will generate the same amount of power, just split ten ways.
(Actually, more likely they'll generate *less* power simply due to added resistance and complexity.)
The problem with many ideas like this is that, yes, you can get energy out of it - but the cost of building and maintaining the machinery involved often far-overshadows the energy you'll get back. One megawatt hour in a machine's lifetime is a lot less interesting when the machine took five megawatt-hours to build.
He's not paying Google a cent for this, he's not giving Google an iota of information on his private life. Google is giving out free stuff. What's the harm? Is Google actually going to say "ha ha, Joe User has downloaded our free products! This means we can infringe on *more people's rights*!" No. They're not.
If he really hated Google he'd be hoping that they provided *more* free stuff, to bankrupt themselves faster.
As a guy, the biggest problem I have with dating sites is the fact that the girls never respond. (Never is an exaggeration, but I'd honestly be surprised if I got responses more than 10% of the time.) I've talked to girls I know in real life, and they all say my profile is good, and they all say they get lots of messages, and they all say they don't respond to many of them.
What does this lead to? It leads to shotgun messaging. If I know 90% of the people I send messages to won't even bother responding, it leaves me with very little incentive to put together a good, carefully-targeted message. I've started just sending out random stream-of-consciousness bizarreness, because, hey, why not, if someone gets interested in it they might be a good match. I can't say my response percentage has gone down any either, and my effort spent has gone way down, so it seems to be working.
But, fundamentally, you know why girls get so many messages? It's because guys don't get any responses. Do you respond to more than or less than 10% of the messages you receive? You do the math.
(UN: ZorbaTHut, if you have comments on the profile go for it I'd love to hear 'em. Or, hell, send me a message, you seem to be 83% match with me which is pretty high, and we all know that romantic potential can be accurately distilled into a single percentage.)
While I agree with some of your points, I disagree with your details. There's no proof that compilers can't be made smart enough for that - just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it couldn't. The biggest issues with Itanium were that it was incredibly slow on "non-native" code and incredibly expensive. There was no reason for anyone to buy one without having a compiler built specifically for it, and there was no reason for anyone to spent the effort to write a compiler for it without someone having bought one.
It's possible that if Itanium had been able to execute x64 or even x86 code at a competitive speed, we'd all be using IA-64 by now (or at least hoping that new programs were recompiled with it.)
Also, I don't actually think we'll have a shift back to single-threaded apps. The fact is that most programs run "fast enough" now, even single-threaded on quadcore systems. The ones that don't (mostly games and some professional software) are frequently relatively easy to multithread. I suspect most programs will stay single-threaded, and the ones that need maximum speed will become extremely multithreaded.
What "nod" are they trying to win? They lost the nod, and they lost it bigtime, if you take a look at the countries who didn't show up just for that one vote. The only question is whether or not they paid enough to "buy the nod".
I'm hoping that the non-bought votes that voted "yes" last time figure out what's going on and vote "no" this time. We'll see.
I mean, okay, there's a review process - that's awesome, it's above and beyond what many products to.
But it didn't work. There's an exploit. How did the exploit get through? Was there something which could have been checked, which wasn't? Is there a set of tests that isn't being run? I don't know, but I'd say these things need to be figured out.
"But see, Linux sucks! It has holes just like Windows does!"
The difference is that we know about this hole, and can now fix it - I'm just going to bed, and it will no doubt be fixed by the time I wake up. How many Windows security issues are known that haven't been fixed?
"Oh man, this is why Linux is great! We can find holes, and fix them, like, immediately!"
Yes, that's a strength of Linux. What I want to know is, what steps will be taken to ensure that bugs of this type - whatever they might be - don't crop up again? One advantage that a large paid organization can have is strict testing requirements - I'm honestly not sure if I believe the Linux kernel is held to the strong standards that a commercial kernel theoretically could be.
The existence of this bug is a failure on Linux's part. There's no way to get around that. Many mistakes were made, from the original code or design decision that caused this bug all the way up to it not being found until now. The bug will be fixed rapidly - but the process that let this bug be released needs to be looked at, casually at the very least, to figure out if there's a way to stop this class of error from ever happening again. (Whatever class of error it ends up being - I don't pretend to know.)
I'm sorry. I meant simultaneously hardware accelerated d3d. You know, so if one program has a spinning rendered textured and shaded cube at 120fps in one window, and you switch to another program in another overlapping window with its own rendered texture mapped shaded spinning regular polyhedron, the cube in the first one doesn't drop to a framerate you can count on your fingers... its 2008. They should both be able to spin at full speed. While a movie is playing in a 3rd window, on a desktop with 3d shadow effects if that's what the user wants.
I regularly run several copies of Eve Online in XP simultaneously. My record for "visible copies" is two on a 90-degree-rotated monitor, 800x600 each, with another one at nearly 1600x1200 on my main monitor. A bit of slowdown on the rotated monitor, but there's slowdown with just one running, so I assume 3d acceleration and 90-degree-rotated don't play nicely together.
I've run 5 copies simultaneously in windows behind each other, sometimes with some visibility between them. Works fine. I've played Youtube videos at the same time.
I would count both of those as having a little something miswired.:) Sometimes it's more obvious than others, but smart people are never *entirely* perfectly-built.
In my experience, the higher someone's IQ is the weirder their brain works. The number of brilliant well-adjusted otherwise-normal people I've met is zero. If someone's smart, they've got something weird going on in there, guaranteed.
(For reference with your comment, I sleep around 10-12 hours at a time, and stay up to 14-16 hours before needing - or being able to - sleep again. Obviously this presents problems with some employers, which is one of the reasons I'm now self-employed:) )
Personally, I find driving relaxing - sort of meditative in a way. I'd much rather be driving 30 minutes than sit behind someone yelling at his cellphone for 30 minutes, to say nothing about 90 minutes.
Actually, I don't know because the game - which isn't built on qt in any way whatsoever - isn't finished and I'm not sure what platform I can get it on. If I can get it on XBox Live Arcade, I don't need to release the editor at all. If I can get it on Steam, I'll release the editor as part of the game. If I can't, I'll probably open-source the whole thing.
However, much of that relies on convincing publishers to publish it for me. If it was just my efforts, sure, but it isn't. Big random factors there, especially as it's kind of a weird game with heavy network effects.
"You must purchase a Qt Commercial License from Trolltech or from any of its authorized resellers before you start developing proprietary software. The Commercial license does not allow the incorporation of code developed with the Open Source Edition of Qt into a proprietary product."
So, in fact, any project which did it that way was breaking Trolltech's license agreement. This is not something I'm willing to do.
Torque only exists in commercial form - there's no open-source version. If Torque had a "free version" and a "commercial version", but they didn't allow buying the commercial version later, I'd have the same objection. They don't - it's not a similar situation.
Also, most of the big dev packages have trial systems where you can get the code and try integrating it into your system, then buy it if it turns out to work well (I think Havok does, I haven't looked at Torque.) QT has the opposite of that, where if you ever try integrating it into your system you can no longer buy it.
I do understand the license, and I am playing by their rules - that's why I'm not playing. My entire point here is that their rules are kind of silly and have kept me from possibly paying them money.
So why not require one license for each developer who's contributed code to the project, or something similar to that?
I can afford it. I just don't see any point in spending thousands of dollars for something that may turn out to be completely useless to me - this particular subproject started as just a minor thing, and I certainly wasn't about to spend that much money at the beginning. It's evolved since then, and perhaps buying QT would have been the best choice in retrospect, but I'm certainly not going to rewrite it. So QT has neatly gimmicked themselves out of the running - this time at least.
(And of course, now I know wxwidgets a lot better than I do QT, so the cycle will continue.)
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Personally, I'd have him autograph one of his inventions. You know, like his now-obsolete flying machine.
Having an artist autograph their current chosen medium seems reasonable to me. Yes, the XBox 360 is going to be obsolete - but that won't mean that, retroactively, Red Vs Blue wasn't made on an XBox 360. That way you get both the autograph and a nice slice of history.
"Yessiree, this is an actual autograph by one of the creative minds behind Red Vs Blue! And even better, you're looking at a real XBox 360, just like the one Red Vs Blue was made on!"
Same argument goes for any game developer or designer, obviously.
No, it's easy to condemn MS in general, even without the unknowns.
Someone asked a specific question of a customer service representative. That representative gave a clear and unambiguous answer. Either that answer was incorrect, or a serious mistake was made internally.
It doesn't matter which of those was the case. If you bring a car to an auto shop, and they rip out your engine, do you let them get away with "oh well someone made a mistake"? "Our customer service representative wasn't authorized to make that promise"? "Our company's just too big man, there's nothing you can do about it! These things just happen."
Fuck that.
Microsoft support screwed up. I don't know what section they screwed it up in, but I honestly don't care. The details don't matter. Microsoft support screwed up and should take responsibility - figuring out where the mistake was made is their problem.
IP ownership is actually pretty clear on a lot of these matters. The person who writes the code owns the IP. The person downloading a GPL'ed version from them doesn't. I'm not a lawyer, but I do study this stuff pretty closely, and I'm about 99% sure that my description is how things would play out legally.
Except that Linus doesn't own IP rights on Linux.
Hundreds of people do. Everyone who's ever contributed to Linux does. Each one of them owns "intellectual property" in Linux, and in order to "lock down" Linux, Microsoft would need to buy out each and every person . . .
. . . except that that wouldn't help. Linux is under the GPL. The GPL is irrevocable. Every person who's downloaded a copy of Linux would still be able to use it, distribute it, and modify it.
So, imagine Microsoft somehow buys all the property rights to a version of Linux . . . the community merely "forks" it, keeping the same name (which isn't a copyright, note! It's a trademark! Microsoft can't buy it!) and keep developing, with the same version, leaving all the same code in place, without even skipping a beat.
The only things Microsoft could do with its new property would be to license it under a different license, such as integrating the code into closed-source apps or providing it public-domain. Honestly, if MS is willing to pay the open-source groups the millions of dollars it would no doubt cost for even a small segment of the code, I'm okay with that.
Which is why you rearrange the DRAM sticks before reinstalling them. (Obviously this doesn't work if the computer decides to interleave bytes, but I seem to remember that most systems only have 2x parallelism, so moving sticks 0 and 1 into slots 2 and 3 should be quite safe.)
Or, which is why you build a simple DRAM reader/dumper, and read the data without ever booting into that RAM.
Or, which is why you find a non-x86 system that uses the same RAM - or an x86 system that doesn't use BIOS. (Does EFI do the same thing? I don't honestly know.)
At best, your idea is an inconvenience.
Is it?
Program A writes a bunch of stuff to RAM. Program A goes idle. OS says "okay, they're idle, I need more working room" and flushes Program A's state to disk.
Does the OS necessarily wipe the data at this point?
If not, is there some way that Program A can realistically "erase its data", obviously pulling a working copy back into main memory, but without hitting the same page? (Theoretical chain of events: OS needs more disk cache pages, OS uses Program A's old memory for this, OS only uses half the memory leaving Program A's old data still intact but with the other pages still allocated, Program A decides to clear its memory and ends up merely clearing a new copy. Obviously if the OS decides to give pages to Program B they'll be wiped before Program B gets them, but if the OS is planning on using them privately does it still bother?)
I don't actually know about the details of this, but it all obviously requires OS-level guarantees that I've never heard of before. (Admittedly, partially, because I've never gone looking for them.) So, is this guaranteed not to occur?
Doesn't matter. There's only so much gravitational potential energy - you can't invent more, no matter how you do it. Ten generators will generate the same amount of power, just split ten ways.
(Actually, more likely they'll generate *less* power simply due to added resistance and complexity.)
The problem with many ideas like this is that, yes, you can get energy out of it - but the cost of building and maintaining the machinery involved often far-overshadows the energy you'll get back. One megawatt hour in a machine's lifetime is a lot less interesting when the machine took five megawatt-hours to build.
He's not paying Google a cent for this, he's not giving Google an iota of information on his private life. Google is giving out free stuff. What's the harm? Is Google actually going to say "ha ha, Joe User has downloaded our free products! This means we can infringe on *more people's rights*!" No. They're not.
If he really hated Google he'd be hoping that they provided *more* free stuff, to bankrupt themselves faster.
As a guy, the biggest problem I have with dating sites is the fact that the girls never respond. (Never is an exaggeration, but I'd honestly be surprised if I got responses more than 10% of the time.) I've talked to girls I know in real life, and they all say my profile is good, and they all say they get lots of messages, and they all say they don't respond to many of them.
What does this lead to? It leads to shotgun messaging. If I know 90% of the people I send messages to won't even bother responding, it leaves me with very little incentive to put together a good, carefully-targeted message. I've started just sending out random stream-of-consciousness bizarreness, because, hey, why not, if someone gets interested in it they might be a good match. I can't say my response percentage has gone down any either, and my effort spent has gone way down, so it seems to be working.
But, fundamentally, you know why girls get so many messages? It's because guys don't get any responses. Do you respond to more than or less than 10% of the messages you receive? You do the math.
(UN: ZorbaTHut, if you have comments on the profile go for it I'd love to hear 'em. Or, hell, send me a message, you seem to be 83% match with me which is pretty high, and we all know that romantic potential can be accurately distilled into a single percentage.)
On everything up through XP, at least, you can type "ftp" at the command prompt to get an FTP client.
While I agree with some of your points, I disagree with your details. There's no proof that compilers can't be made smart enough for that - just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it couldn't. The biggest issues with Itanium were that it was incredibly slow on "non-native" code and incredibly expensive. There was no reason for anyone to buy one without having a compiler built specifically for it, and there was no reason for anyone to spent the effort to write a compiler for it without someone having bought one.
It's possible that if Itanium had been able to execute x64 or even x86 code at a competitive speed, we'd all be using IA-64 by now (or at least hoping that new programs were recompiled with it.)
Also, I don't actually think we'll have a shift back to single-threaded apps. The fact is that most programs run "fast enough" now, even single-threaded on quadcore systems. The ones that don't (mostly games and some professional software) are frequently relatively easy to multithread. I suspect most programs will stay single-threaded, and the ones that need maximum speed will become extremely multithreaded.
What "nod" are they trying to win? They lost the nod, and they lost it bigtime, if you take a look at the countries who didn't show up just for that one vote. The only question is whether or not they paid enough to "buy the nod".
I'm hoping that the non-bought votes that voted "yes" last time figure out what's going on and vote "no" this time. We'll see.
Yeah, but it didn't work.
I mean, okay, there's a review process - that's awesome, it's above and beyond what many products to.
But it didn't work. There's an exploit. How did the exploit get through? Was there something which could have been checked, which wasn't? Is there a set of tests that isn't being run? I don't know, but I'd say these things need to be figured out.
"But see, Linux sucks! It has holes just like Windows does!"
The difference is that we know about this hole, and can now fix it - I'm just going to bed, and it will no doubt be fixed by the time I wake up. How many Windows security issues are known that haven't been fixed?
"Oh man, this is why Linux is great! We can find holes, and fix them, like, immediately!"
Yes, that's a strength of Linux. What I want to know is, what steps will be taken to ensure that bugs of this type - whatever they might be - don't crop up again? One advantage that a large paid organization can have is strict testing requirements - I'm honestly not sure if I believe the Linux kernel is held to the strong standards that a commercial kernel theoretically could be.
The existence of this bug is a failure on Linux's part. There's no way to get around that. Many mistakes were made, from the original code or design decision that caused this bug all the way up to it not being found until now. The bug will be fixed rapidly - but the process that let this bug be released needs to be looked at, casually at the very least, to figure out if there's a way to stop this class of error from ever happening again. (Whatever class of error it ends up being - I don't pretend to know.)
I regularly run several copies of Eve Online in XP simultaneously. My record for "visible copies" is two on a 90-degree-rotated monitor, 800x600 each, with another one at nearly 1600x1200 on my main monitor. A bit of slowdown on the rotated monitor, but there's slowdown with just one running, so I assume 3d acceleration and 90-degree-rotated don't play nicely together.
I've run 5 copies simultaneously in windows behind each other, sometimes with some visibility between them. Works fine. I've played Youtube videos at the same time.
Welcome to 2008, enjoy your stay.
I would count both of those as having a little something miswired. :) Sometimes it's more obvious than others, but smart people are never *entirely* perfectly-built.
In my experience, the higher someone's IQ is the weirder their brain works. The number of brilliant well-adjusted otherwise-normal people I've met is zero. If someone's smart, they've got something weird going on in there, guaranteed.
:) )
(For reference with your comment, I sleep around 10-12 hours at a time, and stay up to 14-16 hours before needing - or being able to - sleep again. Obviously this presents problems with some employers, which is one of the reasons I'm now self-employed
it costs four times as much to ship something by truck compared to rail.
So that's why UPS delivers packages to my house by rail! I was wondering why they had that train track put in.
Personally, I find driving relaxing - sort of meditative in a way. I'd much rather be driving 30 minutes than sit behind someone yelling at his cellphone for 30 minutes, to say nothing about 90 minutes.
Actually, I don't know because the game - which isn't built on qt in any way whatsoever - isn't finished and I'm not sure what platform I can get it on. If I can get it on XBox Live Arcade, I don't need to release the editor at all. If I can get it on Steam, I'll release the editor as part of the game. If I can't, I'll probably open-source the whole thing.
However, much of that relies on convincing publishers to publish it for me. If it was just my efforts, sure, but it isn't. Big random factors there, especially as it's kind of a weird game with heavy network effects.
Technically, this violates QT's license. Yes I could do it if I was willing to knowingly violate their license. I'm not.
Take a look at their license, which nobody seems willing to do: http://trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/licensing/qtlicensing
"You must purchase a Qt Commercial License from Trolltech or from any of its authorized resellers before you start developing proprietary software. The Commercial license does not allow the incorporation of code developed with the Open Source Edition of Qt into a proprietary product."
So, in fact, any project which did it that way was breaking Trolltech's license agreement. This is not something I'm willing to do.
Torque only exists in commercial form - there's no open-source version. If Torque had a "free version" and a "commercial version", but they didn't allow buying the commercial version later, I'd have the same objection. They don't - it's not a similar situation.
Also, most of the big dev packages have trial systems where you can get the code and try integrating it into your system, then buy it if it turns out to work well (I think Havok does, I haven't looked at Torque.) QT has the opposite of that, where if you ever try integrating it into your system you can no longer buy it.
I do understand the license, and I am playing by their rules - that's why I'm not playing. My entire point here is that their rules are kind of silly and have kept me from possibly paying them money.
So why not require one license for each developer who's contributed code to the project, or something similar to that?
I can afford it. I just don't see any point in spending thousands of dollars for something that may turn out to be completely useless to me - this particular subproject started as just a minor thing, and I certainly wasn't about to spend that much money at the beginning. It's evolved since then, and perhaps buying QT would have been the best choice in retrospect, but I'm certainly not going to rewrite it. So QT has neatly gimmicked themselves out of the running - this time at least.
(And of course, now I know wxwidgets a lot better than I do QT, so the cycle will continue.)