Almost everybody I know that has played Planescape: Torment only ever managed to play it after Black Isle was shut down, having never heard about it before. Personally, I played it when it came out, but I remember friends who had a hard time finding copies to purchase when it was being made, let alone afterward. Strike it up to bad luck if you'd like, but, in my own experience, the game was neither marketed well nor distributed effectively to its target market, and that's why it didn't do better.
Also, it was NOT a commercial failure. The game managed to turn a profit, which is something most games never do. (Admittedly, the link is talking about significant profits, not whether they make a profit at all, but I'm willing to bet that, looking at the situation realistically, less than 50% of games actually manage to break even)
That doesn't mean it's not third-party. Third-party means that it's not made by the manufacturers or anybody sponsored by the manufacturers, so Linux IS 3rd-party firmware.
At the very best it could be 2nd-party firmware, but 2nd-party is such a lost concept in this day and age that I would hesitate to refer to it as such.
No, I have not looked at their code to make that statement. I'm basing my entire reasoning here on their previous actions, and I fully admit to that.
That being said, my gut tells me that the reason they are releasing code under the GPL is either:
To make themselves look better
For the projects they've currently done this with, they have to
I'm not going to pretend to know which reason it is, or even whether or not either is right. But I do know that Microsoft is not a bunch of idiots and that they are entirely capable of doing good things, but it is usually only when it is in their own interests to do so. They are a business after all, and it's hard to survive as a business if you help your competitors. Especially when most of your competitors hate your guts.
First, they introduce nice features that are confusing enough to use but simple enough that nobody feels like taking the time to improve upon them.
Then, they release proprietary, closed-source "extensions" for their own tools to access the services and utilise those features with incredibly useful, simplified methodologies. Their tools then become the tools du jour and they make like bandits.
No, it isn't. They're just utilising their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish methodology once more. They're reaching out to the open-source world by Embracing open standards, they'll Extend the abilities of certain products and services but in a way that those benefits can only be reaped by people using their hardware/software to use them, and then they'll Extinguish their competitors because Microsoft is in control of the extensions to those services that people depend upon.
It's the same old plan, they've just placed their Trojan Horse in front of some open-source projects this time.
People With Criminal History More Likely to Commit Crimes
Last I checked, people who are delinquent/criminal are not very easy to change, and have always been known to have a higher chance of committing a crime in the future. How is this new?
Are you dense? Nobody is saying they need these fonts. In fact, the very nature of how the rendering of these works (rendering the text in a default font first, downloading and caching the font, then re-rendering it in that cached font) proves that the content is being treated as king.
If you are trying to say that the readability of a web site cannot be increased by using a font other than the default fonts that come with your system (whatever wild variations those are, as the default fonts for each OS are quite different), then you are just being ignorant. Look at print design for instance. Just go outside and look at billboards, advertisements, newspapers, et cetera. Try to find the basic fonts that come with a default installation of, say, Windows Vista. They will be few and far between, and the ones you do see will likely look inferior to the ones that don't use them.
To be fair, one of the currently very successful arenas for independent musicians is college radio, where they still get tons of airplay because they're cheaper than the stuff from RIAA labels. CMJ used to put out it's full Top 200 weekly list for free so this was easy to see, but unfortunately you have to pay to get it now, as far as I know.
So, independent artists do get airplay, they're just pushed out of getting airplay that reaches the larger public. That being said, it's still a crying shame.
So... it's not a hiding technique, it's a disguising technique? I mean, I know what you're saying, but it feels to me like it would smell as sweet. In practice, both methods would be used as a means to the same end, and the difference would simply be that one is less immediately noticeable than the other and easier for the end-user.
Seems simpler, technology-wise, to me than encoding a torrent file as a PNG image, and all you would have to do to get the torrent file is change the extension on the file. Also seems safer. Unless this trick wouldn't be possible with.torrent files, that is?
They need to implement one codec and one alone because that leaves no room for varying support for codecs. If they define multiple, Microsoft will implement whichever codec they want, Google will do the same, Mozilla will do the same, et cetera, and content providers will have to make that content available in all of those different formats just so that they can guarantee that people will have access to it.
I completely agree that they need to specify this in the HTML5 specifications. The thing is, and I can almost absolutely guarantee that Google, Mozilla, and Opera will cooperate here, if they specify a format, the three will eventually conform to it. Apple and Microsoft are the outliers here, but Microsoft doesn't seem to care very much about W3C's specifications to begin with, and Apple has been steadily moving toward being incredibly W3C-compliant over the past several years, so I don't really see where the problem is.
If the companies can't agree, that's their problem. W3C isn't supposed to be an intermediary between the browser developers, it's supposed to be pushing each of them to support better standards. Apparently they need to be reminded what their mission statement is.
To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.
Making a specification for a standard video codec does that. Being indecisive doesn't.
You're ignoring the significant health risks, though. It is simply not healthy for him to be working that much and working out any significant amount of time each day. He can do one or the other, and he has to make a choice. Otherwise he will just be grinding away years of his life.
Period. Even if you could find a way to manage to work out around your current schedule, you wouldn't be keeping yourself healthy. You would simply be wearing yourself down even faster.
Talk with your supervisor or whoever you can about getting a shorter work day (8 hours) and being able to work more often (say, 6 days a week, if you need to work around 50-60 hours a week). If they can't understand why that is a good idea (seriously, this is actually even better for your company due to the productivity boost and overall morale boost), then you should not be working there. Go find a job somewhere else, preferably somewhere closer to home that follows some sort of ethical guidelines about human labor.
It is not worth the years of your life you will kill off by trying to work out and keep up a 12-hour work schedule at the same time. You'll just be throwing away your life if you do.
Just because it's free doesn't mean users shouldn't complain about it. If it weren't for perfectly legitimate complaints, nothing would ever get done, and nothing would adhere to any sort of usability standard.
It's not the complaining users that need to sit down and shut up, it's the people who don't understand that complaints, for the most part, are symptoms of an actual problem that likely needs to get fixed.
This isn't exactly proof, but it very much so shows how little people actually care about even the smallest of technical details. Most people do not have any interest in understanding ANYTHING inside of their computer, let alone a programming language.
More importantly, as is the case with Super Smash Bros, there are several games on the Wii that have saves locked to the original memory device they are stored on. That means that if you saved your Brawl data on your Wii, then wanted to bring Brawl over to a friend's place to play, you have to lug your whole setup over to their place to have all of your unlocked stuff. Which is just pointlessly inconvenient.
I fully support the idea of companies building cheats into their games again. This was wildly popular in the N64/PS1/Dreamcast era, and I don't think there was a single person who complained (Goldeneye 64 just wasn't the same without paintball mode on, and DK mode just made everything better. Oh, and remember playing as the ridiculous variations of Banjo in Banjo Kazooie? That was AWESOME).
On top of that, because of some of the problems (like the above save-locking) that have come up in the latest consoles, I think that companies should really start looking at systems that allow you to use a potentially experience-ruining cheat (such as an UNLOCK ALL cheat for Brawl) that locks and freezes the game's save file, so you can both allow people to have those unlocks but still be able to have the experience of unlocking things. That seems like a happy medium, no?
Or you could set up something like a TVersity server to transcode the video (though I'm not certain how well this would work; I don't know how well TVersity works with 1080p video)
It has tons of applications, sure, but you can be darn certain that most of them will not work due to a combination of the Zune hardware and the "custom version" part. I mean, that's why EVERY other implementation of Windows CE is riddled with inconsistencies and has a whole set of apps that won't work for it. The problem is that they're using a development platform for multiple devices with vastly different hardware, so developers CAN'T just make an app that will work for Windows CE, they have to make it work for every single different version of it.
Knowing GameStop's policies, all of their locations in the area will have amazing deals on trade-ins and used game purchases until they drive out the competition.
They did exactly that when Best Buy set up a used game service in pilot locations, and it worked damn well. For GameStop, that is.
Freeform/. poetry? I've seen everything!
To be a little more constructive, you are bringing up very valid points. There are a lot of compatibility issues in Linux with certain hardware configurations.
However, there are also plenty of compatibility issues in Windows with certain hardware configurations as well. The reason these do not pop up as often is that a vast majority of Windows users come from a completely different frame of reference than most Linux users do.
You see, most Windows users have a hardware setup entirely determined by an OEM. These setups are constantly checked by the manufacturers to make sure they work perfectly or near perfectly with the Windows environment.
I'd venture to guess that the opposite is true for Linux users. In my own personal experience, they tend to have self-built or at least non-manufacturer standard setups, which opens up a whole new can of worms. Even in the world of people who build Windows desktops, there are tons of compatibility issues (especially with sound!)
In essence, you're not really arguing about whether or not Linux is more or less compatible with hardware than Windows is, but whether or not an ad hoc system built and tuned to run an operating system has less compatibility issues than an a la carte setup. And that just seems silly.
Unfortunately, 3G is still rather expensive in the US, due to the cellphone company monopolies.
Europe is leaps and bounds ahead of us when it comes to cell technologies, but there are not enough people that will call our companies out on the issue.
About 60% of the population voted in 2004.
I'd hardly consider that to be conservatives reelecting him, I'd consider it more to be liberals failing to push their candidate into power.
And, no, I'm not some conservative jerk.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost everybody I know that has played Planescape: Torment only ever managed to play it after Black Isle was shut down, having never heard about it before. Personally, I played it when it came out, but I remember friends who had a hard time finding copies to purchase when it was being made, let alone afterward. Strike it up to bad luck if you'd like, but, in my own experience, the game was neither marketed well nor distributed effectively to its target market, and that's why it didn't do better.
Also, it was NOT a commercial failure. The game managed to turn a profit, which is something most games never do. (Admittedly, the link is talking about significant profits, not whether they make a profit at all, but I'm willing to bet that, looking at the situation realistically, less than 50% of games actually manage to break even)
That doesn't mean it's not third-party. Third-party means that it's not made by the manufacturers or anybody sponsored by the manufacturers, so Linux IS 3rd-party firmware.
At the very best it could be 2nd-party firmware, but 2nd-party is such a lost concept in this day and age that I would hesitate to refer to it as such.
No, I have not looked at their code to make that statement. I'm basing my entire reasoning here on their previous actions, and I fully admit to that.
That being said, my gut tells me that the reason they are releasing code under the GPL is either:
I'm not going to pretend to know which reason it is, or even whether or not either is right. But I do know that Microsoft is not a bunch of idiots and that they are entirely capable of doing good things, but it is usually only when it is in their own interests to do so. They are a business after all, and it's hard to survive as a business if you help your competitors. Especially when most of your competitors hate your guts.
It's simple, really.
First, they introduce nice features that are confusing enough to use but simple enough that nobody feels like taking the time to improve upon them.
Then, they release proprietary, closed-source "extensions" for their own tools to access the services and utilise those features with incredibly useful, simplified methodologies. Their tools then become the tools du jour and they make like bandits.
No, it isn't. They're just utilising their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish methodology once more. They're reaching out to the open-source world by Embracing open standards, they'll Extend the abilities of certain products and services but in a way that those benefits can only be reaped by people using their hardware/software to use them, and then they'll Extinguish their competitors because Microsoft is in control of the extensions to those services that people depend upon.
It's the same old plan, they've just placed their Trojan Horse in front of some open-source projects this time.
Stop the presses!
People With Criminal History More Likely to Commit Crimes
Last I checked, people who are delinquent/criminal are not very easy to change, and have always been known to have a higher chance of committing a crime in the future. How is this new?
Are you dense? Nobody is saying they need these fonts. In fact, the very nature of how the rendering of these works (rendering the text in a default font first, downloading and caching the font, then re-rendering it in that cached font) proves that the content is being treated as king.
If you are trying to say that the readability of a web site cannot be increased by using a font other than the default fonts that come with your system (whatever wild variations those are, as the default fonts for each OS are quite different), then you are just being ignorant. Look at print design for instance. Just go outside and look at billboards, advertisements, newspapers, et cetera. Try to find the basic fonts that come with a default installation of, say, Windows Vista. They will be few and far between, and the ones you do see will likely look inferior to the ones that don't use them.
To be fair, one of the currently very successful arenas for independent musicians is college radio, where they still get tons of airplay because they're cheaper than the stuff from RIAA labels. CMJ used to put out it's full Top 200 weekly list for free so this was easy to see, but unfortunately you have to pay to get it now, as far as I know.
So, independent artists do get airplay, they're just pushed out of getting airplay that reaches the larger public. That being said, it's still a crying shame.
Ah, okay, thanks for clearing that up! I dunno if most forum software and the like would have those kinds of scanners, though imageboards might.
So... it's not a hiding technique, it's a disguising technique? I mean, I know what you're saying, but it feels to me like it would smell as sweet. In practice, both methods would be used as a means to the same end, and the difference would simply be that one is less immediately noticeable than the other and easier for the end-user.
I don't get why they can't just use the old trick of hiding a zip file in an image file.
Seems simpler, technology-wise, to me than encoding a torrent file as a PNG image, and all you would have to do to get the torrent file is change the extension on the file. Also seems safer. Unless this trick wouldn't be possible with .torrent files, that is?
They need to implement one codec and one alone because that leaves no room for varying support for codecs. If they define multiple, Microsoft will implement whichever codec they want, Google will do the same, Mozilla will do the same, et cetera, and content providers will have to make that content available in all of those different formats just so that they can guarantee that people will have access to it.
I completely agree that they need to specify this in the HTML5 specifications. The thing is, and I can almost absolutely guarantee that Google, Mozilla, and Opera will cooperate here, if they specify a format, the three will eventually conform to it. Apple and Microsoft are the outliers here, but Microsoft doesn't seem to care very much about W3C's specifications to begin with, and Apple has been steadily moving toward being incredibly W3C-compliant over the past several years, so I don't really see where the problem is.
If the companies can't agree, that's their problem. W3C isn't supposed to be an intermediary between the browser developers, it's supposed to be pushing each of them to support better standards. Apparently they need to be reminded what their mission statement is.
To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.
Making a specification for a standard video codec does that. Being indecisive doesn't.
You're ignoring the significant health risks, though. It is simply not healthy for him to be working that much and working out any significant amount of time each day. He can do one or the other, and he has to make a choice. Otherwise he will just be grinding away years of his life.
Period. Even if you could find a way to manage to work out around your current schedule, you wouldn't be keeping yourself healthy. You would simply be wearing yourself down even faster.
Talk with your supervisor or whoever you can about getting a shorter work day (8 hours) and being able to work more often (say, 6 days a week, if you need to work around 50-60 hours a week). If they can't understand why that is a good idea (seriously, this is actually even better for your company due to the productivity boost and overall morale boost), then you should not be working there. Go find a job somewhere else, preferably somewhere closer to home that follows some sort of ethical guidelines about human labor.
It is not worth the years of your life you will kill off by trying to work out and keep up a 12-hour work schedule at the same time. You'll just be throwing away your life if you do.
Just because it's free doesn't mean users shouldn't complain about it. If it weren't for perfectly legitimate complaints, nothing would ever get done, and nothing would adhere to any sort of usability standard.
It's not the complaining users that need to sit down and shut up, it's the people who don't understand that complaints, for the most part, are symptoms of an actual problem that likely needs to get fixed.
This isn't exactly proof, but it very much so shows how little people actually care about even the smallest of technical details. Most people do not have any interest in understanding ANYTHING inside of their computer, let alone a programming language.
More importantly, as is the case with Super Smash Bros, there are several games on the Wii that have saves locked to the original memory device they are stored on. That means that if you saved your Brawl data on your Wii, then wanted to bring Brawl over to a friend's place to play, you have to lug your whole setup over to their place to have all of your unlocked stuff. Which is just pointlessly inconvenient.
I fully support the idea of companies building cheats into their games again. This was wildly popular in the N64/PS1/Dreamcast era, and I don't think there was a single person who complained (Goldeneye 64 just wasn't the same without paintball mode on, and DK mode just made everything better. Oh, and remember playing as the ridiculous variations of Banjo in Banjo Kazooie? That was AWESOME).
On top of that, because of some of the problems (like the above save-locking) that have come up in the latest consoles, I think that companies should really start looking at systems that allow you to use a potentially experience-ruining cheat (such as an UNLOCK ALL cheat for Brawl) that locks and freezes the game's save file, so you can both allow people to have those unlocks but still be able to have the experience of unlocking things. That seems like a happy medium, no?
Or you could set up something like a TVersity server to transcode the video (though I'm not certain how well this would work; I don't know how well TVersity works with 1080p video)
It has tons of applications, sure, but you can be darn certain that most of them will not work due to a combination of the Zune hardware and the "custom version" part. I mean, that's why EVERY other implementation of Windows CE is riddled with inconsistencies and has a whole set of apps that won't work for it. The problem is that they're using a development platform for multiple devices with vastly different hardware, so developers CAN'T just make an app that will work for Windows CE, they have to make it work for every single different version of it.
Knowing GameStop's policies, all of their locations in the area will have amazing deals on trade-ins and used game purchases until they drive out the competition. They did exactly that when Best Buy set up a used game service in pilot locations, and it worked damn well. For GameStop, that is.
Freeform /. poetry? I've seen everything!
To be a little more constructive, you are bringing up very valid points. There are a lot of compatibility issues in Linux with certain hardware configurations.
However, there are also plenty of compatibility issues in Windows with certain hardware configurations as well. The reason these do not pop up as often is that a vast majority of Windows users come from a completely different frame of reference than most Linux users do.
You see, most Windows users have a hardware setup entirely determined by an OEM. These setups are constantly checked by the manufacturers to make sure they work perfectly or near perfectly with the Windows environment.
I'd venture to guess that the opposite is true for Linux users. In my own personal experience, they tend to have self-built or at least non-manufacturer standard setups, which opens up a whole new can of worms. Even in the world of people who build Windows desktops, there are tons of compatibility issues (especially with sound!)
In essence, you're not really arguing about whether or not Linux is more or less compatible with hardware than Windows is, but whether or not an ad hoc system built and tuned to run an operating system has less compatibility issues than an a la carte setup. And that just seems silly.
Unfortunately, 3G is still rather expensive in the US, due to the cellphone company monopolies. Europe is leaps and bounds ahead of us when it comes to cell technologies, but there are not enough people that will call our companies out on the issue.
About 60% of the population voted in 2004. I'd hardly consider that to be conservatives reelecting him, I'd consider it more to be liberals failing to push their candidate into power. And, no, I'm not some conservative jerk.
They sent a peep up with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygpYWzKGN6c