You shouldn't have to convert a book published in a standard format into a proprietary format and risk screwing up or losing formatting in order to read a book. It would be a relatively simple matter for Amazon to support EPUB but they choose not to. After all EPUB is after all basically XHTML content, CSS and some meta data zipped up and not far removed from what the device is already capable of supporting in random HTML files or even Mobipocket.
I expect eventually they'll be compelled by market forces to do it. Though I doubt they'll implement any DRM such as Adobe Digital Editions or if they do it will be proprietary. I certainly see no reason to give them a pass for a blatant attempt to lock people into their own format until it happens.
The interesting part will come when Amazon shoves out an Android tablet as they're undoubtedly intending to do. Will they stop rival ereaders appearing on their app store? Will Amazon become another Apple dishing out the same kind of control freakery and anticompetitive hurdles to the competition? If this comes to pass will Amazon recognize the blatant hypocrisy considering the boo hooing when they received similar treatment at the hands of Apple?
Or, here's an idea and I know this is crazy but, you could download one of the dozens of task manager applications and terminate the program manually. Calm down! Calm down! Yes, it's a radical idea that almost no one would ever think of, but it just might work, you fucking idiot.
Those task managers terminate the process but often they're started right up again. Android permits applications to contain services which are long-running background processes. Services can be sticky so they survive the activity dying. They can also be restarted by broadcast receivers which are woken by system events and if you kill the process the service is running in, Android may start it right up again.
Some task managers have auto kill lists but then this interferes with the times when you DO want to run the service. Basically Skype and other offending apps should be more configurable and allow a user to sign off Skype after a period of inactivity if they wish, or in certain conditions such as 3G vs wifi connectivity, battery / mains power etc.
Buy a mifi device or tether through your phone. Chances are in either case it would vastly simplify things allowing you to use the same network connection to operate multiple devices. A single pay plan, a single SIM. Aside from being easier to set up, it's probably cheaper too not least because the tablet is not encumbered with a ludicrous $100 markup for a 3G modem that you don't need.
In Europe at least 3G is relatively affordable assuming you don't roam. A couple of euros on a pay as you go setup will do it for a day's worth of access, or monthly plans are everywhere for less. Even for roaming there are options - I used a Three 3G mifi device while roaming from Ireland to the UK last week and it cost me 10 euros for 7 days of access with & 2GB limit. Plenty for what I needed it for. Device hooked up with my netbook and phone no trouble.
The only reason I would consider 3G in a tablet is if the price to me of including it was zero. i.e. tablet manufacturer and network operator subsidize the 3G modem but lock it down to the operator who then profits from exclusivity when selling 1-day, 7-day, 30-day internet passes.
Well that would be an amazing coincidence. People worship metric like its some kind of universal standard and forget that its based on measurements that we choose to use like the size of our planet, heating water at our atmosphere's pressure, etc. I'm sure aliens would have their own "universal system" too.
No, people "worship" metric because is a consistent standard. An arbitrary length & mass has been chosen as the base unit and everything is expressed in base 10 relative to it. It's easy to use and calculate values from. This is obviously not the case for imperial.
The anonymous post that is the parent of this comment is marked as a troll, but, honestly, it's just a statement of fact. The truth is that in the U.S. politicians are afraid of offending the majority of people, and a significant amount of them are just a bunch of redneck morons. We tried this in the 1970s, when the President was from Georgia and we thought we might be able to sell it to the rednecks, but they went apeshit. The only thing we got out of that was soda in two-liter bottles. (Glass in '76... plastic in the early 80s.) But you can't blame this problem on urban drug dealers. They sell their coke in grams and kilos.
Britain is quite resistant to metric too. It still maintains miles, pints, acres but most other things are now in metric. One can understand that pints (as in pints of beer) and acres have little significance to international trade. I would think that miles do though, especially for tourism. Ireland converted from miles to kilometers virtually overnight (all speed limits changed instantly and road signs were changed in under a week). Civilization didn't collapse as a consequence.
The funny part is watching so-called "metric martyrs" in Britain. It's usually market traders getting themselves fined or thrown in jail by selling goods in pounds & ounces on illegal scales. In Britain weights & measures are set by law (so traders can't sell people short with dodgy scales) and if you use illegal scales you can be prosecuted. FFS how stupid do you have to be to do this? It's not like the law requires customers to ask in Kgs, they can ask for goods in pounds and the trader weighs out the equivalent in grams.
Great to see Apple's architecture agnosticism is catching on.
Android has always been reasonably portable. The kernel is Linux after all, and most of the user land doesn't care too much aside from JIT / interpretter code. Indeed Android has been running on x86 and MIPS processors for a while now.
Biggest issue are probably native apps. I don't understand why there is no LLVM target so that devs don't have to care or worry what processor is running in the tablet / phone / box but still benefit from native runtime performance. Curiously Renderscript (a new API) in 3.0 does use LLVM but not the NDK.
How did you determine this? Oh it was made up. Okay cool.
I "determined" it by stating an obvious fact. Many companies do use Iron Mountain & similar services. I didn't say the majority, or 85%, or just those with sub $10 million. I said many. Go look up Iron Mountain's website. I'm sure they have stats that give you a ball park estimate if you are bothered to get a more specific figure.
Spoken like a true cloud operator. How does a crappy piece of misinformation like this get up-modded? Oh wait, you have 8 accounts.
Yes of course. I have 8 accounts, all rolled today. Moron.
Actually, if you are paranoid you don't back it up. or you have a really well-thought out plan long before you start encrypting. And it doesn't involve saving to the cloud, clod.
Ah genius. So you don't backup and if you do you have a "well thought out plan". Genius. And you are complaining about my comments.
And do you think these 25m market cap companies would be contemplating cloud services anyway? I think it's clear that most cloud services are explicitly pitched to companies that can't afford offsite facilities or the equipment & staff to run them.
Everyday I get a corporate client asking me why they can't just do all their work on the cloud. Here's the perfect reason why.
Well it's not a perfect reason. Many companies traditionally send their backup tapes or their shred bins or boxes of old files to an operator like Iron Mountain to store / destroy them. I expect Iron Mountain would comply with a court order just as readily as a cloud operator. I suppose with cloud operators the jurisdictions are more likely to differ which could be considered an advantage or not depending on why the court order is being served.
It's certainly an important consideration though. I think in either case if you're paranoid about your data you encrypt it first.
If they're made of glass maybe the answer is to spin the drives up while bombarding them with a resonant frequency and watch them explode. More fun than shoving a spike through them.
I could make a game containing flowers and ladybugs and spangly stars that would mess a 5 year old's mind up and give them nightmares. Conversely I could have a game which has themes of sexuality and violence that an early teen would have no trouble with.
How does a questionnaire and automated system deal with the tone and nuance of a game through a bunch of questions? Maybe it might work as a prescreening system but there still has to be some measure of human review. If necessary charge games developers to receive their rating and hire staff according to demand.
Even with human intervention, transparency is paramount.The rule base and the source code should be publicly disclosed. If they can't do that then it really shouldn't be trusted at all. After all, how were these rules judged to be representative of public opinion. What does public opinion mean anyway? I expect public opinion in most cities is vastly more liberal than it is in the middle of the bible belt.
The new app menu in Unity are a mess. It uses massive icons, it wastes space for crap like the app store, it's not configurable. To display icons within a group equivalent to a classic app submenu means messing around with a second drop down to filter the list. Aside from the recently used list, it requires more mouse travel, more mouse clicks and more concentration than doing the same in the classic app menu. It needs reworking. It's shoddy.
Example ways it could be improved. Icon size should be configurable by a slider in realtime and remembered. The expand icon should double up as a resizer so user can toggle behaviour. App groups should be more obvious, e.g. an open step style "shelf" of groups under which the contents are shown. All spring loaded so a single click, mouse around, release launches an app. The app store group should have a close button so it's never seen again. A simple config dialog e.g. launched from a button next to the icon scaler should allow the user to restore defaults, change other relevant settings and just generally feel in control of their desktop.
It simply needs work. I believe Gnome Shell 3 and Unity have a kernel of a good idea but it needs a lot more work. Compare to Windows 7 or OS X and both have a long way to go and it's a shame. The worst edges on Unity could probably be fixed in a few weeks and if it means delaying, they should delay.
I'm sure long term Mac users don't even think about the issue. I guarantee that long term Windows & Linux users do. QT & GTK have traditionally followed the Windows paradigm of sticking the menu on the related window. I'm sure it could be argued that this makes the screen more cluttered, but on the flip side it means a LOT less mouse travel especially on a large screen. I have no objection to doing it on a netbook screen where most windows are likely to be maximized anyway.
What I do believe however is the dist must provide a simple preference screen to toggle the behaviour. Even if toggling means the user must log out and back in to see the difference. Likewise Unity's dock has some incredibly irritating behaviours that could be solved with a few settings. Some people might like their dock on the left, but others might prefer it centered on the bottom, maybe even want to move it to a second screen. If the OS X dock can offer various configuration options then there is no excuse for Unity not to either.
Microsoft might be many things, but a patent troll isn't usually one of them. That's one reason that Apple and Google are siding with them on this issue, the other being that these big technology companies are the primary targets for genuine patent trolls like i4i.
They might be patent trolls but they hold such a massive and broad range of patents, many of which I expect most reasonable software engineers would not consider novel or specific. They can and have waved those patents around in a threatening manner and it's not hard to see how they could bury any potential competitor (especially a startup) in lawsuits if they felt like it.
I'll grant this: Unity seems to be a OK interface for netbooks and possibly touchpads.
You don't want the full desktop experience on those environments.
You don't really care or want Alt+Tab. You'll likely only be doing a few things at once.
My experience of Unity is it is a useful UI for netbooks. It is a compact UI. Problem is it's inflicted on EVERY desktop regardless of size and doesn't appear to have configurable settings that would make it more tolerable/useful on large desktops. I don't want the single Mac style menu or the dock on the left, or indeed the behaviour it uses to hide itself. All these things should be configurable through a UI. I'm aware there are settings in text files that control these things, but they have to be in the UI. The app menu is also entirely absent and the ordered collection of apps it offered has been replaced by a horrible unordered list of apps that must be filtered to reduce the clutter. It's just very ugly.
The consolation prize is Ubuntu still lets you drop to a "classic" desktop and I do agree with the principle of eating dogfood to iron out the bugs. I just hope they do it with Unity before releasing. Delay by a month or two and get it right. I do think GNOME 3 and Unity have the grains of a usable desktop but they need a lot of polish.
The only way you're going to wean people of vanilla Java is to produce a Java++, something which compiles syntactically correct Java with no modifications, supports all existing Java libs with no modifications, but offers some rich extensions that reduce the amount of crud / boiler plate developers have to write and hopefully eliminate a bunch of potential bugs too.
This isn't copy protection, this is cracker protection. The cracker would go in and strip the copy protection, release the crack and then experience the embarrassment when their crack didn't work. So they'd spend an age a reported issue only for another to turn up, and another, and another. Meanwhile pirates waiting for the crack would get pissed off, disheartened, confused and some might even go buy the original game if it's worth playing.
The point is to make the entire exercise a timesink. And woe betide anyone turning up to report the issues on popular forums because they'll become sport for gaming blogs to make fun of.
Obviously you'd have to extensively QA test any potential checks and the consequences and prevent false positives
Just like every other DRM scheme to date? I mean, if it is as simple as "doing extensive QA testing", it must be done today already, and no reports of false positives of DRM schemes can be found.
Plus, as other people have pointed out, if it isn't clear that the behaviour is because of DRM, people will assume the game is just buggy as hell, and avoid buying anything from that distributor in the future.
Not necessarily. Do you think Garry's Mod is bugged because it can't render normals? What about Batman Arkham Asylum after people complained they couldn't glide over a particular gap?
Scala is not a superset of the Java language. It may be byte code compatible which is not the same thing at all. By that definition Jython would also be a superset of Java since it too generates bytecodes and runs on a JVM.
There are so many ways to fuck up the experience for pirates that you could keep them busy for weeks. The game could slap in the usual coarse copy protection / DRM routines but then do inline checks that only trigger in esoteric ways and exhibit faults seemingly unrelated to the trigger. So some guy switching from a 800x600 to 1024x768 screen triggers a check which causes a specific glitch 35 minutes later. Another guy walks over a hidden trigger on level 4 which disables the free() routine and causes memory leaks. Someone else runs on XP and triggers a check which causes saves past level 10 to be corrupted.
Obviously you'd have to extensively QA test any potential checks and the consequences and prevent false positives but the intention would be to pepper the code with these things. Just when the cracker thinks they've fixed the game, another one turns up. Confound and annoy the crackers and pirates and just generally waste their time. And when a patch comes out, introduce a few more. And rebase the code so everything moves around. And of course shame anyone stupid enough to complain on official boards.
J2EE costs time and money, it doesn't save time and money.
Every language costs time and money to learn. In Java's case it's not the language so much as all the technologies that are built with it. That, in a nutshell is why any replacement for Java has to be as close to 100% compatible as possible. You literally want to be able to sit a Java developer of any competence in front of MiracleJ or whatever the language is called and for them to not notice much difference. It should feel comfortable, familiar. It should build the mass of code they likely have to maintain.
As time progresses of course, you can wean them off the horrible crud / boilerplate they're used to and show them all the shortcuts, notations & new features that cut down the code they have to write. Much in the same way as happened in C to C++ migration. C++ was seen as C but better (yes I know there are very slight differences) so virtually every developer migrated across in due course. It should feel so natural to migrate that you have to have very explicit and esoteric reasons for staying put.
Let's not forget that Microsoft has thrown its weight behind the.NET platform which is arguably superior to Java in many (but not all) ways and they still haven't even dented the popularity of Java.
Part of the issue is that Java just works. It may be verbose, horribly broken in some respects but it still works. The only way you're going to wean people of vanilla Java is to produce a Java++, something which compiles syntactically correct Java with no modifications, supports all existing Java libs with no modifications, but offers some rich extensions that reduce the amount of crud / boiler plate developers have to write and hopefully eliminate a bunch of potential bugs too.
No language which is not a superset of Java really stands a chance. People promoting Scala, Google Go, Ruby or similar are pissing into the wind on this matter. It has to be a superset, or close to one of what already exists. Arguably even Groovy isn't close enough. I hope Red Hat take this on board and look at the limited success that other Java wannabes have enjoyed so far.
Aside from the language aspect I think Apache & Google would be the natural partners to promote this language. I don't know how that sits with Red Hat but really there needs to be a consortium of heavy weights to promote mind share amongst developers and popularise a migration. I expect most Java developers would be happy for walk away from Oracle / Suns pathetic stewardship if there were something better and compatible to go to.
Three in the UK & Ireland has reasonable rates too. 7.5GB monthly costs €25 prepay, or you get 15GB for €20 under contract. Inclusive of VAT. Roaming is same price too to other 3 networks.
I have to wonder what is wrong with the US. Not that Europe is perfect, the roaming rates for most data plans is criminal.
Now I have started use steam, I dont anymore buy any physical games.
I can understand for special offers. I have to wonder who the hell in their right minds ever pays full whack for games on Steam. In virtually every single instance, you can find the exact same game in a store at 30% off the price MSRP / RRP listed on Steam. In some cases, such as Valve's own games, the game is Steam powered anyway so you're saving money, getting a disc backup and a manual for less. e.g. Portal 2 is €28 + free postage on Amazon.co.uk, and €44.99 through Steam.
Steam has occasional good deals but the price of brand new retail titles is nothing less than a scam.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect eventually they'll be compelled by market forces to do it. Though I doubt they'll implement any DRM such as Adobe Digital Editions or if they do it will be proprietary. I certainly see no reason to give them a pass for a blatant attempt to lock people into their own format until it happens.
The interesting part will come when Amazon shoves out an Android tablet as they're undoubtedly intending to do. Will they stop rival ereaders appearing on their app store? Will Amazon become another Apple dishing out the same kind of control freakery and anticompetitive hurdles to the competition? If this comes to pass will Amazon recognize the blatant hypocrisy considering the boo hooing when they received similar treatment at the hands of Apple?
Or, here's an idea and I know this is crazy but, you could download one of the dozens of task manager applications and terminate the program manually. Calm down! Calm down! Yes, it's a radical idea that almost no one would ever think of, but it just might work, you fucking idiot.
Those task managers terminate the process but often they're started right up again. Android permits applications to contain services which are long-running background processes. Services can be sticky so they survive the activity dying. They can also be restarted by broadcast receivers which are woken by system events and if you kill the process the service is running in, Android may start it right up again.
Some task managers have auto kill lists but then this interferes with the times when you DO want to run the service. Basically Skype and other offending apps should be more configurable and allow a user to sign off Skype after a period of inactivity if they wish, or in certain conditions such as 3G vs wifi connectivity, battery / mains power etc.
In Europe at least 3G is relatively affordable assuming you don't roam. A couple of euros on a pay as you go setup will do it for a day's worth of access, or monthly plans are everywhere for less. Even for roaming there are options - I used a Three 3G mifi device while roaming from Ireland to the UK last week and it cost me 10 euros for 7 days of access with & 2GB limit. Plenty for what I needed it for. Device hooked up with my netbook and phone no trouble.
The only reason I would consider 3G in a tablet is if the price to me of including it was zero. i.e. tablet manufacturer and network operator subsidize the 3G modem but lock it down to the operator who then profits from exclusivity when selling 1-day, 7-day, 30-day internet passes.
Well that would be an amazing coincidence. People worship metric like its some kind of universal standard and forget that its based on measurements that we choose to use like the size of our planet, heating water at our atmosphere's pressure, etc. I'm sure aliens would have their own "universal system" too.
No, people "worship" metric because is a consistent standard. An arbitrary length & mass has been chosen as the base unit and everything is expressed in base 10 relative to it. It's easy to use and calculate values from. This is obviously not the case for imperial.
The anonymous post that is the parent of this comment is marked as a troll, but, honestly, it's just a statement of fact. The truth is that in the U.S. politicians are afraid of offending the majority of people, and a significant amount of them are just a bunch of redneck morons. We tried this in the 1970s, when the President was from Georgia and we thought we might be able to sell it to the rednecks, but they went apeshit. The only thing we got out of that was soda in two-liter bottles. (Glass in '76 ... plastic in the early 80s.) But you can't blame this problem on urban drug dealers. They sell their coke in grams and kilos.
Britain is quite resistant to metric too. It still maintains miles, pints, acres but most other things are now in metric. One can understand that pints (as in pints of beer) and acres have little significance to international trade. I would think that miles do though, especially for tourism. Ireland converted from miles to kilometers virtually overnight (all speed limits changed instantly and road signs were changed in under a week). Civilization didn't collapse as a consequence.
The funny part is watching so-called "metric martyrs" in Britain. It's usually market traders getting themselves fined or thrown in jail by selling goods in pounds & ounces on illegal scales. In Britain weights & measures are set by law (so traders can't sell people short with dodgy scales) and if you use illegal scales you can be prosecuted. FFS how stupid do you have to be to do this? It's not like the law requires customers to ask in Kgs, they can ask for goods in pounds and the trader weighs out the equivalent in grams.
Great to see Apple's architecture agnosticism is catching on.
Android has always been reasonably portable. The kernel is Linux after all, and most of the user land doesn't care too much aside from JIT / interpretter code. Indeed Android has been running on x86 and MIPS processors for a while now.
Biggest issue are probably native apps. I don't understand why there is no LLVM target so that devs don't have to care or worry what processor is running in the tablet / phone / box but still benefit from native runtime performance. Curiously Renderscript (a new API) in 3.0 does use LLVM but not the NDK.
How did you determine this? Oh it was made up. Okay cool.
I "determined" it by stating an obvious fact. Many companies do use Iron Mountain & similar services. I didn't say the majority, or 85%, or just those with sub $10 million. I said many. Go look up Iron Mountain's website. I'm sure they have stats that give you a ball park estimate if you are bothered to get a more specific figure.
Spoken like a true cloud operator. How does a crappy piece of misinformation like this get up-modded? Oh wait, you have 8 accounts.
Yes of course. I have 8 accounts, all rolled today. Moron.
Actually, if you are paranoid you don't back it up. or you have a really well-thought out plan long before you start encrypting. And it doesn't involve saving to the cloud, clod.
Ah genius. So you don't backup and if you do you have a "well thought out plan". Genius. And you are complaining about my comments.
And do you think these 25m market cap companies would be contemplating cloud services anyway? I think it's clear that most cloud services are explicitly pitched to companies that can't afford offsite facilities or the equipment & staff to run them.
Everyday I get a corporate client asking me why they can't just do all their work on the cloud. Here's the perfect reason why.
Well it's not a perfect reason. Many companies traditionally send their backup tapes or their shred bins or boxes of old files to an operator like Iron Mountain to store / destroy them. I expect Iron Mountain would comply with a court order just as readily as a cloud operator. I suppose with cloud operators the jurisdictions are more likely to differ which could be considered an advantage or not depending on why the court order is being served.
It's certainly an important consideration though. I think in either case if you're paranoid about your data you encrypt it first.
If they're made of glass maybe the answer is to spin the drives up while bombarding them with a resonant frequency and watch them explode. More fun than shoving a spike through them.
How does a questionnaire and automated system deal with the tone and nuance of a game through a bunch of questions? Maybe it might work as a prescreening system but there still has to be some measure of human review. If necessary charge games developers to receive their rating and hire staff according to demand.
Even with human intervention, transparency is paramount.The rule base and the source code should be publicly disclosed. If they can't do that then it really shouldn't be trusted at all. After all, how were these rules judged to be representative of public opinion. What does public opinion mean anyway? I expect public opinion in most cities is vastly more liberal than it is in the middle of the bible belt.
Example ways it could be improved. Icon size should be configurable by a slider in realtime and remembered. The expand icon should double up as a resizer so user can toggle behaviour. App groups should be more obvious, e.g. an open step style "shelf" of groups under which the contents are shown. All spring loaded so a single click, mouse around, release launches an app. The app store group should have a close button so it's never seen again. A simple config dialog e.g. launched from a button next to the icon scaler should allow the user to restore defaults, change other relevant settings and just generally feel in control of their desktop.
It simply needs work. I believe Gnome Shell 3 and Unity have a kernel of a good idea but it needs a lot more work. Compare to Windows 7 or OS X and both have a long way to go and it's a shame. The worst edges on Unity could probably be fixed in a few weeks and if it means delaying, they should delay.
What I do believe however is the dist must provide a simple preference screen to toggle the behaviour. Even if toggling means the user must log out and back in to see the difference. Likewise Unity's dock has some incredibly irritating behaviours that could be solved with a few settings. Some people might like their dock on the left, but others might prefer it centered on the bottom, maybe even want to move it to a second screen. If the OS X dock can offer various configuration options then there is no excuse for Unity not to either.
Microsoft might be many things, but a patent troll isn't usually one of them. That's one reason that Apple and Google are siding with them on this issue, the other being that these big technology companies are the primary targets for genuine patent trolls like i4i.
They might be patent trolls but they hold such a massive and broad range of patents, many of which I expect most reasonable software engineers would not consider novel or specific. They can and have waved those patents around in a threatening manner and it's not hard to see how they could bury any potential competitor (especially a startup) in lawsuits if they felt like it.
As I said I'm aware of command line hacks, but we're talking about a GUI which should offer those things in a relatively simple config dialog.
I'll grant this: Unity seems to be a OK interface for netbooks and possibly touchpads.
You don't want the full desktop experience on those environments.
You don't really care or want Alt+Tab. You'll likely only be doing a few things at once.
My experience of Unity is it is a useful UI for netbooks. It is a compact UI. Problem is it's inflicted on EVERY desktop regardless of size and doesn't appear to have configurable settings that would make it more tolerable/useful on large desktops. I don't want the single Mac style menu or the dock on the left, or indeed the behaviour it uses to hide itself. All these things should be configurable through a UI. I'm aware there are settings in text files that control these things, but they have to be in the UI. The app menu is also entirely absent and the ordered collection of apps it offered has been replaced by a horrible unordered list of apps that must be filtered to reduce the clutter. It's just very ugly.
The consolation prize is Ubuntu still lets you drop to a "classic" desktop and I do agree with the principle of eating dogfood to iron out the bugs. I just hope they do it with Unity before releasing. Delay by a month or two and get it right. I do think GNOME 3 and Unity have the grains of a usable desktop but they need a lot of polish.
The only way you're going to wean people of vanilla Java is to produce a Java++, something which compiles syntactically correct Java with no modifications, supports all existing Java libs with no modifications, but offers some rich extensions that reduce the amount of crud / boiler plate developers have to write and hopefully eliminate a bunch of potential bugs too.
The point is to make the entire exercise a timesink. And woe betide anyone turning up to report the issues on popular forums because they'll become sport for gaming blogs to make fun of.
Obviously you'd have to extensively QA test any potential checks and the consequences and prevent false positives
Just like every other DRM scheme to date? I mean, if it is as simple as "doing extensive QA testing", it must be done today already, and no reports of false positives of DRM schemes can be found. Plus, as other people have pointed out, if it isn't clear that the behaviour is because of DRM, people will assume the game is just buggy as hell, and avoid buying anything from that distributor in the future.
Not necessarily. Do you think Garry's Mod is bugged because it can't render normals? What about Batman Arkham Asylum after people complained they couldn't glide over a particular gap?
Scala is not a superset of the Java language. It may be byte code compatible which is not the same thing at all. By that definition Jython would also be a superset of Java since it too generates bytecodes and runs on a JVM.
Obviously you'd have to extensively QA test any potential checks and the consequences and prevent false positives but the intention would be to pepper the code with these things. Just when the cracker thinks they've fixed the game, another one turns up. Confound and annoy the crackers and pirates and just generally waste their time. And when a patch comes out, introduce a few more. And rebase the code so everything moves around. And of course shame anyone stupid enough to complain on official boards.
J2EE costs time and money, it doesn't save time and money.
Every language costs time and money to learn. In Java's case it's not the language so much as all the technologies that are built with it. That, in a nutshell is why any replacement for Java has to be as close to 100% compatible as possible. You literally want to be able to sit a Java developer of any competence in front of MiracleJ or whatever the language is called and for them to not notice much difference. It should feel comfortable, familiar. It should build the mass of code they likely have to maintain.
As time progresses of course, you can wean them off the horrible crud / boilerplate they're used to and show them all the shortcuts, notations & new features that cut down the code they have to write. Much in the same way as happened in C to C++ migration. C++ was seen as C but better (yes I know there are very slight differences) so virtually every developer migrated across in due course. It should feel so natural to migrate that you have to have very explicit and esoteric reasons for staying put.
Sounds attractive but very ambitious.
Let's not forget that Microsoft has thrown its weight behind the .NET platform which is arguably superior to Java in many (but not all) ways and they still haven't even dented the popularity of Java.
Part of the issue is that Java just works. It may be verbose, horribly broken in some respects but it still works. The only way you're going to wean people of vanilla Java is to produce a Java++, something which compiles syntactically correct Java with no modifications, supports all existing Java libs with no modifications, but offers some rich extensions that reduce the amount of crud / boiler plate developers have to write and hopefully eliminate a bunch of potential bugs too.
No language which is not a superset of Java really stands a chance. People promoting Scala, Google Go, Ruby or similar are pissing into the wind on this matter. It has to be a superset, or close to one of what already exists. Arguably even Groovy isn't close enough. I hope Red Hat take this on board and look at the limited success that other Java wannabes have enjoyed so far.
Aside from the language aspect I think Apache & Google would be the natural partners to promote this language. I don't know how that sits with Red Hat but really there needs to be a consortium of heavy weights to promote mind share amongst developers and popularise a migration. I expect most Java developers would be happy for walk away from Oracle / Suns pathetic stewardship if there were something better and compatible to go to.
I have to wonder what is wrong with the US. Not that Europe is perfect, the roaming rates for most data plans is criminal.
Now I have started use steam, I dont anymore buy any physical games.
I can understand for special offers. I have to wonder who the hell in their right minds ever pays full whack for games on Steam. In virtually every single instance, you can find the exact same game in a store at 30% off the price MSRP / RRP listed on Steam. In some cases, such as Valve's own games, the game is Steam powered anyway so you're saving money, getting a disc backup and a manual for less. e.g. Portal 2 is €28 + free postage on Amazon.co.uk, and €44.99 through Steam.
Steam has occasional good deals but the price of brand new retail titles is nothing less than a scam.