I actually hadn't really looked at the PDF link, only the first one... I guess I should have, the second one is much more research-language oriented:)
I don't see Cilk on either chart, which is funny since I'd actually heard of it before today. One could probably argue that it isn't different enough from standard C, but I think the implications of parallelism are probably enough to merit its own place on the chart.
Well, Concurrent C got on the first chart, so I think sticking Cilk over somewhere near it wouldn't be uncalled for.
9. Funny, but you almost could do that... Is there any library or language that hasn't been grafted onto Perl at this point?
As of Perl 6, no... the language incorporates or supports basically every programming paradigm every devised, it transparently allows alternate conceptions of an "object" to be fashioned without changing the syntax, it includes among other things call/cc and the full set of APL operators, it allows you to freely change the syntax of the language grammar at runtime and if you read the design docs for Perl 6, you find that they honestly believe one of their foremost guiding principles to be that the interpreter and VM should be designed less as an interpreter for perl 6 specifically than as a general hosting platform for dynamic languages.
I do not know if it will be amazing or just frightening:O
Thanks for the wikipedia links... I'm still getting used to how great they've gotten lately, so I forget to check them:)
MP3tunes will use a service or tool called "MP3beamer", which Robertson said would reconcile the need to store music in a centralized file store with the ability to play back the music anywhere, on any device. He declined to comment further.
Is it just me, or does this sound almost exactly like the last thing he tried before he founded Lindows-- remember, my.mp3.com? And if I remember correctly, in the end that one shut down because the courts decided that never mind all that stuff we said in the early 20th century, you don't have first sale rights of all. I have to wonder if this new thingy will in some way meet the same fate.
Verilog, VHDL and ABEL! How can you leave those off? Cut out the hardware-definition languages and you've omitted not just a family of programming languages, but an entire use of programming languages. I'd say that's pretty important.
C#, ASP.NET, and VB.NET should be marked as linked, since all.NET languages are basically semantic sugar on the same abstract syntax tree.
ASP doesn't seem to be included on the chart at all.
Dylan doesn't seem to be included on the chart at all.
As others have noted, Hypercard is not included on the chart, which is unfortunate because it arguably had serious influence on Visual Basic and I do believe that products written in it (Myst) have more copies than, say, everything ever written in Haskell.
And if we start a "Hypercard" branch of the tree, I would say Director and Flash should get to go in it. Hey, they're at least as turing complete as sh.
Erlang doesn't seem to be included on the chart at all.
Cilk doesn't seem to be included on the chart at all.
Mercury doesn't seem to be included on the chart at all, but maybe that doesn't really matter.
At the end of the chart, there should be arrows leading from every single leaf node of the tree over to a single entry at the far, far right labeled "Perl 6".
Incidentally, I didn't realize FORTRAN was older than Flowmatic. I was under the impression that Grace Hopper had basically invented the idea of human-readable-keyword based languages. And what's "B-O"?
> But you could theoretically have an ID card which was anonymous, but presented to you as some sort of credential.
- BEFORE -
Hi, I'd like to buy a plane ticket.
Alright, please enter your name and government ID into this form.
I don't want to enter my ID number, that would allow you to link my ID number to my name and it's supposed to be an anonymous credential.
Then you can't buy plane tickets from us.
- AFTER -
GATOR BUDDY LICENSE AGREEMENT [300 lines of text] Customer agrees that GATOR BUDDY, INC will in the course of the operation of this program read your name, address, and government ID number from your Windows registry and transmit it back to GATOR BUDDY, INC as part of your customer profile. [300 lines of text] OK CANCEL
Man, what a pain, does anyone actually read these things?
There has never been a revolution of the powerless masses and there probably never will be.
The French Revolution fits this description perfectly well, for example. The French Revolution didn't actually end by putting the powerless masses in power, of course, but the powerless masses at least were the ones who revolted or were pushed to revolt.
What perhaps you would be much more accurate in saying is that there has never been a successful revolution of the powerless masses.
The American Revolution wasn't a revolution, exactly. The people who orchestrated and lead the American Revolution weren't revolutionaries in the sense we normally use that word-- they were extant local political leaders, almost all of them elected local political leaders. The American Revolution wasn't the people rising up to overthrow a system, it was two empowered groups fighting over spheres of influence. The people generally happened to be on the same side as the empowered group that eventually won-- again, in large part they'd elected this empowered group-- but I don't think that's enough to call it a revolution.
The group who took control of Britain's holdings in America in the American Revolution-- the "founding fathers"-- were already established as the people who controlled America prior to 1750, 1750 being when Britain decided to stop taking a passive, absentee-landlord stance to its American colonies and instead assume a position of active control. The 26 years after that were basically a process of Britain's empowered group going going "hmm, you know, we own you, and we have the right to determine your affairs", and America's empowered group going "you don't have the right to determine our affairs, and you know what, come to think of it, you don't own us anymore either". We call this a revolution but "war for independence" would be a far more accurate way of putting it, since the American side of the war was 13 established and self-sufficient states and their goal was autonomy, not change.
Maybe, but more likely, like most of these software-based lawsuits, it's just to add enough confusion to the mediation to keep anyone who wasn't actually there from ever seeing the truth
Another possibility is that perhaps IBM subpoenaed Intel in order to gather evidence that might be relevant at trial.
It seemed to me that this started out as an extortion racket, hoping that IBM would just cough up and pay. They didn't, and now IBM is striking back by bleeding them: they have far more resources to continue this than SCO has.
This theory would make more sense if it was IBM that has been dragging this whole thing out. It hasn't. IBM's been forthright with what the court has ordered. SCO's missed quite a lot of their deadlines for producing things and seems to be doing absolutely everything they can to delay as much as possible; they keep changing their focus in the courtroom, they keep insisting they know things and then suddenly announce they need an undetermined amount of time to pronounce the things they know, they respond to every complied-with set of evidence from IBM with suddenly different and far expanded demands for evidence. They spent most of their time in court over the last year continually objecting, no matter the nature of things, that they couldn't go on because IBM had not produced a specific set of evidence that the court had repeatedly ruled IBM didn't have to produce, until finally in the last court ruling the judge finally ordered IBM to produce this, with the reason given being "to appease the rote objection by SCO".
IBM is not the one who is making this take so long.
I don't think that IBM will stop by simply winning, they will continue this until SCO is dead and in this respect, this approach makes sense:
Thing is, IBM doesn't have to stop with simply winning... they've filed a countersuit. When SCO's case against IBM ends, IBM's case against SCO will go on.
I am tired of my internet access options coming down to "would you rather pay money to the local cable monopoly? or the local dsl monopoly?". I exclusively use a cell phone and I don't watch television. I don't particularly want to do business with either of these companies. If there were some third way to get Internet, I wouldn't have to.
P2P wireless isn't terribly realistic given the scaling issues involved, I don't think, but I would LOVE a commercial WiMax provider if it became a viable option.
Unlike the music industry, television folks are trying to get ahead of the curve and offer TV downloads in a legal and easy to use manner."
Unfortunately probably not an affordable one. Have you priced TV DVDs lately? Something like Law and Order is like... 40 bucks a season or something. And there's like nine seasons. That's insane, and I don't think it's the cost of the media that's setting this price. I think it's that they're setting that price because they're expecting you'll pay it, and I think they can just as reasonably expect they can set comparable prices on internet media and you'll still pay it. Well, I for one won't pay it. And I don't think we're going to see TV downloads reasonably priced enough that the cost is less of an imposition than the bother of me paying money to see Aqua Teen Hunger Force on my computer instead of waiting until Adult Swim time, going downstairs to my neighbor's apartment who has cable, and saying "hey can I watch your tv for a little bit?"
Look-- there's this place in New York. It's called the Museum of Television History or something and it's just this little nondescript place on the bottom couple floors of some skyscraper. They've got the entire last 60 years of television on tape. Not quite all of it, but all of it that's been preserved by anyone. That's what they do. They preserve television history. And if you go in and pay them... I don't know, It was like $8 or $12 or something rediculously cheap, they'll let you cram in as many people as you can fit into these little nicely furnished viewing booths and watch in comfort three television programs of your choice out of everything ever recorded. Now that's a nice offer.
That's not what we're going to get. By the time the dust settles and these services are up, we're going to get like.. select from this wide variety of random television programs, some of which are the ones you might actually want to watch, and we'll let you watch them once with periodic graphical glitches, hunched over in your cramped little computer chair with the tinny sound, after a 10-minute buffering session. You can watch that TV show you've forgotten from the 80s with the kid who can stop time because her dad is an alien for just a dollar an episode! Oh, what, you'd rather watch Law and Order? Well, that costs a lot more. You'd rather watch Sliders? Well, we have about six unlabeled episodes from different seasons, so good luck following the plot. But, hey, you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer? You can watch the show's entire run for just the equivalent price of a new XBox and two RPGs which cumulatively take 120 hours to finish! You like Sifl and Olly? Oh, sorry. Go watch the show from the 80s with the alien kid instead. But isn't our service great? Aren't you grateful that we're offering you on aribtrary terms and at relatively steep prices the same uneven entertainment that we offered at one time for free, and that you could continue legally to watch for free indefinitely if you or someone you know had just been forward-thinking enough to turn on their VCRs the first time they were broadcast? Man, those people who still download tv shows over bittorrent must just be so greedy.
Because most people don't have multi-button mice on Macs, developers don't put as much effort into right-clicking then they would if it were standard equipment....huh?
So in the closing days of OS 9, when there were still pre-contextual-menu legacy apps running around, this might have been a valid complaint. But have you actually used a mac in the last four years?
Right-click/control-click support is now universal to all apps. Most OS X applications are built up from the default interface objects, which apple built right-button support right into; and adding right-click menu support to anything else is dead easy, you just call setMenu: or override the - defaultMenu object on your NSResponder subclasses, and bam, you've got a contextual menu. And developers always do this, because while not all mac users have those third-party scrollmice, for some funny reason nearly all developers do, and we like being able to use our own applications.
Perhaps what you could have said is that developers don't design their apps around the second mouse button. I consider this a benefit, not a flaw. This just means that despite the presence of the contextual menus, the application must still be fully usable without ever clicking that right mouse button-- there must be a one-mouse-button path through the interface, contextual menu use is always an option, but never a requirement. This leads to more generally expressive interfaces, fewer gimpy interfaces. The existence of one-mouse-button users simply enforces the idea that the contextual menu serves its appropriate purpose-- that of a shortcut-- without becoming something to hide interface elements behind.
You're going to spend $3000 on a computer but can't handle going to the store to spend $40 on a mouse? Why does the mouse have to come with the computer?
I mean, it isn't like you're planning on buying your monitor or RAM from the Apple Store, are you? You are? Don't do that. They gouge.
I haven't played this, but what I'm hearing is odd
on
Steam Users Steamed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What I don't get is this:
Why do they have to do EVERYTHING in one place? I mean, I can certainly imagine, Steam goes down, some features of the network become unavailable. But why does the AUTHENTICATION server need to ever go down, at all? You'd think that would be the least difficult thing Steam does, and the thing most easily separable into its own always-available server.
But no, it appears when steam goes down, "Steam" goes down, all of it. You'd think that even if they couldn't fix their scaling problems, they'd be able to fix the availability of the authentication service.
Meanwhile, why does it have to authenticate EVERY time you try to play singleplayer? There's the cheating aspect when you're doing mutliplayer, I get that, but for singleplayer it isn't like you're going to change from a nonpirated to a pirated copy in between plays. Why not just make it automatically switch to offline mode, thus obviating the authentication checks, when you're playing offline? Maybe loosening the online-mode authentication restrictions would make the game easier to pirate-- but, hey, the game's ALREADY BEING PIRATED DESPITE THE EXISTENCE OF STEAM, so that's not such a big deal.
There's some interesting things to be said for the digital distribution concept but you'd think Valve would have realized by now that Steam is the showcase app for digital distribution. If they don't convince us they can successfully sell Half Life 2 online I don't expect many people will buy Half Life 3 online.
Apparently you missed the bit earlier in the discussion where the original poster said that Microsoft should be prevented from doing this because they are a convicted monopoly.
But that is not the post you were replying to. And if I'm reading the thread right, it appears the post you were replying to outright said the original poster was wrong if they were considering Microsoft's current actions in this area illegal.
So I see it as a little odd you're complaining about people not reading the thread.
I don't know what backwards banana republic you're from, but in this country the idea is that you try people for the crimes they've done, not for the crimes you think they might do.
Sony and Nintendo had both already confirmed they would be demoing their consoles at E3 as far back as last July; we were just waiting on Microsoft. The only thing that's changed now is Microsoft, and that Sony's confirmed they'll have playable demos at E3 rather than playable demos around E3.
We must learn to work with the artists and record industry, along with the movie industry and others, instead of against them.
Why?
Let's say I don't give a shit how much money the RIAA makes, and in fact do not generally support them or their artists because I consider music from independent sources to be superior.
However, I do demand that I have the right to not face legal repercussions for something I type, and I do expect as a customer that if I buy a piece of audio equipment I am not restrained from exercising my fair use rights with it.
I don't see any way to "work with" the RIAA in this situation??
The RIAA has demonstrated they certainly aren't willingly going to compromise in terms of giving up some control over the exact nature of distribution in order to take advantage of new technology; I don't see why I should "compromise" rights I've had since birth so a music cartel whose products I mostly don't like can feel better about themselves. Saying "they have their rights" does not justify that they are using the scapegoat of digital music distribution to lay claim to new and unjust new rights, and you are apologizing for them.
The opening crawls in the original trilogy served as a method of allowing the movie to open in medias res without the audience having a sense of disorientation. In the latter two movies this included an aspect of establishing that time had passed since the previous movie-- but, no meaningful or potentially interesting-to-watch events were in this way "skipped", it is simply made clear to us that what we expected has occurred in the intervening time (the war continues, Luke continues to train, Vader turned Solo over to Jabba the Hutt) with perhaps one or two little bits of information that alert us as to the movie's focus (the Imperials are known to be building a weapon capable of destroying an entire planet).
In the prequel trilogies the crawls have served two purposes. The intentional purpose is to allow George Lucas to weasel out of characterization, establishing setting and place, and moving the plot along. Unlike the original trilogies, where the Star Wars universe's background and nature was established incidentally, through subtle details of what we see and hear during the movie, in the prequel trilogies they just use the opening crawl to say "plop, there it is", and disorientingly slam down the characters and setting they wish to put the movie in. After this point, since they seem to consider themselves thus freed from explaining themselves, they completely refrain during the movie from elaborating on the things the opening crawl sketches or filling in details beyond the crawl's bare outline (where is Naboo and why, if in any obvious way, are they important? who is the Trade Federation and why should we care? who is "count dooky", why would someone have heard of him, what does he claim he wants, and why does this all appear to be important to someone who does not know his true aspirations? who is "grevious", how and why is he starting a droid army, and what are the implications of this? most importantly what would the answer to these questions appear to be to someone within the movie-- not us the viewer, to whom the answers are "he's the bad guy and he wants to rule the world", what would an average citizen of the Republic think Dooku to be?) and so use the time freed up within the movie in this way to concentrate on roller-coaster-style but otherwise long, boring and irrelivant action scenes.
The unintentional purpose of the prequel trilogy opening crawls is to bash you over the head with how stupid all these character names are ("Grevious"? "Dooku"??? I mean come on!), just in case the majesty of John Williams' opening score might otherwise distract you from the suspicion that the entire plotline to the prequel trilogy was written by Lucas's 4-year-old child in a single sitting some years ago in crayon on a napkin.
...could you please try to rephrase that post so that it is actual english? I mean, all the words you use seem to be real english words, but the order that you put them in just doesn't make any sense. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually hadn't really looked at the PDF link, only the first one... I guess I should have, the second one is much more research-language oriented :)
:O
:)
I don't see Cilk on either chart, which is funny since I'd actually heard of it before today. One could probably argue that it isn't different enough from standard C, but I think the implications of parallelism are probably enough to merit its own place on the chart.
Well, Concurrent C got on the first chart, so I think sticking Cilk over somewhere near it wouldn't be uncalled for.
9. Funny, but you almost could do that... Is there any library or language that hasn't been grafted onto Perl at this point?
As of Perl 6, no... the language incorporates or supports basically every programming paradigm every devised, it transparently allows alternate conceptions of an "object" to be fashioned without changing the syntax, it includes among other things call/cc and the full set of APL operators, it allows you to freely change the syntax of the language grammar at runtime and if you read the design docs for Perl 6, you find that they honestly believe one of their foremost guiding principles to be that the interpreter and VM should be designed less as an interpreter for perl 6 specifically than as a general hosting platform for dynamic languages.
I do not know if it will be amazing or just frightening
Thanks for the wikipedia links... I'm still getting used to how great they've gotten lately, so I forget to check them
Otherwise, two problems could be solved in one fell swoop: ... use Pine
But then they would have a third problem.
MP3tunes will use a service or tool called "MP3beamer", which Robertson said would reconcile the need to store music in a centralized file store with the ability to play back the music anywhere, on any device. He declined to comment further.
Is it just me, or does this sound almost exactly like the last thing he tried before he founded Lindows-- remember, my.mp3.com? And if I remember correctly, in the end that one shut down because the courts decided that never mind all that stuff we said in the early 20th century, you don't have first sale rights of all. I have to wonder if this new thingy will in some way meet the same fate.
Well, at least he's a hero in my book for trying.
Verilog, VHDL and ABEL! How can you leave those off? Cut out the hardware-definition languages and you've omitted not just a family of programming languages, but an entire use of programming languages. I'd say that's pretty important.
Incidentally, I didn't realize FORTRAN was older than Flowmatic. I was under the impression that Grace Hopper had basically invented the idea of human-readable-keyword based languages. And what's "B-O"?
So in other words you want HARRY POTTER IN SPAAAAACE.
Oh.. The "after" I was referring to was Bill Gates' promise from the article about how the eID card will be integrated with Windows.
There has never been a revolution of the powerless masses and there probably never will be.
The French Revolution fits this description perfectly well, for example. The French Revolution didn't actually end by putting the powerless masses in power, of course, but the powerless masses at least were the ones who revolted or were pushed to revolt.
What perhaps you would be much more accurate in saying is that there has never been a successful revolution of the powerless masses.
The American Revolution wasn't a revolution, exactly. The people who orchestrated and lead the American Revolution weren't revolutionaries in the sense we normally use that word-- they were extant local political leaders, almost all of them elected local political leaders. The American Revolution wasn't the people rising up to overthrow a system, it was two empowered groups fighting over spheres of influence. The people generally happened to be on the same side as the empowered group that eventually won-- again, in large part they'd elected this empowered group-- but I don't think that's enough to call it a revolution.
The group who took control of Britain's holdings in America in the American Revolution-- the "founding fathers"-- were already established as the people who controlled America prior to 1750, 1750 being when Britain decided to stop taking a passive, absentee-landlord stance to its American colonies and instead assume a position of active control. The 26 years after that were basically a process of Britain's empowered group going going "hmm, you know, we own you, and we have the right to determine your affairs", and America's empowered group going "you don't have the right to determine our affairs, and you know what, come to think of it, you don't own us anymore either". We call this a revolution but "war for independence" would be a far more accurate way of putting it, since the American side of the war was 13 established and self-sufficient states and their goal was autonomy, not change.
Maybe, but more likely, like most of these software-based lawsuits, it's just to add enough confusion to the mediation to keep anyone who wasn't actually there from ever seeing the truth
Another possibility is that perhaps IBM subpoenaed Intel in order to gather evidence that might be relevant at trial.
Just a thought.
It seemed to me that this started out as an extortion racket, hoping that IBM would just cough up and pay. They didn't, and now IBM is striking back by bleeding them: they have far more resources to continue this than SCO has.
This theory would make more sense if it was IBM that has been dragging this whole thing out. It hasn't. IBM's been forthright with what the court has ordered. SCO's missed quite a lot of their deadlines for producing things and seems to be doing absolutely everything they can to delay as much as possible; they keep changing their focus in the courtroom, they keep insisting they know things and then suddenly announce they need an undetermined amount of time to pronounce the things they know, they respond to every complied-with set of evidence from IBM with suddenly different and far expanded demands for evidence. They spent most of their time in court over the last year continually objecting, no matter the nature of things, that they couldn't go on because IBM had not produced a specific set of evidence that the court had repeatedly ruled IBM didn't have to produce, until finally in the last court ruling the judge finally ordered IBM to produce this, with the reason given being "to appease the rote objection by SCO".
IBM is not the one who is making this take so long.
I don't think that IBM will stop by simply winning, they will continue this until SCO is dead and in this respect, this approach makes sense:
Thing is, IBM doesn't have to stop with simply winning... they've filed a countersuit. When SCO's case against IBM ends, IBM's case against SCO will go on.
I am tired of my internet access options coming down to "would you rather pay money to the local cable monopoly? or the local dsl monopoly?". I exclusively use a cell phone and I don't watch television. I don't particularly want to do business with either of these companies. If there were some third way to get Internet, I wouldn't have to.
P2P wireless isn't terribly realistic given the scaling issues involved, I don't think, but I would LOVE a commercial WiMax provider if it became a viable option.
Unlike the music industry, television folks are trying to get ahead of the curve and offer TV downloads in a legal and easy to use manner."
Unfortunately probably not an affordable one. Have you priced TV DVDs lately? Something like Law and Order is like... 40 bucks a season or something. And there's like nine seasons. That's insane, and I don't think it's the cost of the media that's setting this price. I think it's that they're setting that price because they're expecting you'll pay it, and I think they can just as reasonably expect they can set comparable prices on internet media and you'll still pay it. Well, I for one won't pay it. And I don't think we're going to see TV downloads reasonably priced enough that the cost is less of an imposition than the bother of me paying money to see Aqua Teen Hunger Force on my computer instead of waiting until Adult Swim time, going downstairs to my neighbor's apartment who has cable, and saying "hey can I watch your tv for a little bit?"
Look-- there's this place in New York. It's called the Museum of Television History or something and it's just this little nondescript place on the bottom couple floors of some skyscraper. They've got the entire last 60 years of television on tape. Not quite all of it, but all of it that's been preserved by anyone. That's what they do. They preserve television history. And if you go in and pay them... I don't know, It was like $8 or $12 or something rediculously cheap, they'll let you cram in as many people as you can fit into these little nicely furnished viewing booths and watch in comfort three television programs of your choice out of everything ever recorded. Now that's a nice offer.
That's not what we're going to get. By the time the dust settles and these services are up, we're going to get like.. select from this wide variety of random television programs, some of which are the ones you might actually want to watch, and we'll let you watch them once with periodic graphical glitches, hunched over in your cramped little computer chair with the tinny sound, after a 10-minute buffering session. You can watch that TV show you've forgotten from the 80s with the kid who can stop time because her dad is an alien for just a dollar an episode! Oh, what, you'd rather watch Law and Order? Well, that costs a lot more. You'd rather watch Sliders? Well, we have about six unlabeled episodes from different seasons, so good luck following the plot. But, hey, you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer? You can watch the show's entire run for just the equivalent price of a new XBox and two RPGs which cumulatively take 120 hours to finish! You like Sifl and Olly? Oh, sorry. Go watch the show from the 80s with the alien kid instead. But isn't our service great? Aren't you grateful that we're offering you on aribtrary terms and at relatively steep prices the same uneven entertainment that we offered at one time for free, and that you could continue legally to watch for free indefinitely if you or someone you know had just been forward-thinking enough to turn on their VCRs the first time they were broadcast? Man, those people who still download tv shows over bittorrent must just be so greedy.
It's bullshit. Much as it pains me to say Russia got something right, we really need to copy their compulsory copyright licensing program.
Because most people don't have multi-button mice on Macs, developers don't put as much effort into right-clicking then they would if it were standard equipment. ...huh?
So in the closing days of OS 9, when there were still pre-contextual-menu legacy apps running around, this might have been a valid complaint. But have you actually used a mac in the last four years?
Right-click/control-click support is now universal to all apps. Most OS X applications are built up from the default interface objects, which apple built right-button support right into; and adding right-click menu support to anything else is dead easy, you just call setMenu: or override the - defaultMenu object on your NSResponder subclasses, and bam, you've got a contextual menu. And developers always do this, because while not all mac users have those third-party scrollmice, for some funny reason nearly all developers do, and we like being able to use our own applications.
Perhaps what you could have said is that developers don't design their apps around the second mouse button. I consider this a benefit, not a flaw. This just means that despite the presence of the contextual menus, the application must still be fully usable without ever clicking that right mouse button-- there must be a one-mouse-button path through the interface, contextual menu use is always an option, but never a requirement. This leads to more generally expressive interfaces, fewer gimpy interfaces. The existence of one-mouse-button users simply enforces the idea that the contextual menu serves its appropriate purpose-- that of a shortcut-- without becoming something to hide interface elements behind.
You're going to spend $3000 on a computer but can't handle going to the store to spend $40 on a mouse? Why does the mouse have to come with the computer?
I mean, it isn't like you're planning on buying your monitor or RAM from the Apple Store, are you? You are? Don't do that. They gouge.
What I don't get is this:
Why do they have to do EVERYTHING in one place? I mean, I can certainly imagine, Steam goes down, some features of the network become unavailable. But why does the AUTHENTICATION server need to ever go down, at all? You'd think that would be the least difficult thing Steam does, and the thing most easily separable into its own always-available server.
But no, it appears when steam goes down, "Steam" goes down, all of it. You'd think that even if they couldn't fix their scaling problems, they'd be able to fix the availability of the authentication service.
Meanwhile, why does it have to authenticate EVERY time you try to play singleplayer? There's the cheating aspect when you're doing mutliplayer, I get that, but for singleplayer it isn't like you're going to change from a nonpirated to a pirated copy in between plays. Why not just make it automatically switch to offline mode, thus obviating the authentication checks, when you're playing offline? Maybe loosening the online-mode authentication restrictions would make the game easier to pirate-- but, hey, the game's ALREADY BEING PIRATED DESPITE THE EXISTENCE OF STEAM, so that's not such a big deal.
There's some interesting things to be said for the digital distribution concept but you'd think Valve would have realized by now that Steam is the showcase app for digital distribution. If they don't convince us they can successfully sell Half Life 2 online I don't expect many people will buy Half Life 3 online.
Apparently you missed the bit earlier in the discussion where the original poster said that Microsoft should be prevented from doing this because they are a convicted monopoly.
But that is not the post you were replying to. And if I'm reading the thread right, it appears the post you were replying to outright said the original poster was wrong if they were considering Microsoft's current actions in this area illegal.
So I see it as a little odd you're complaining about people not reading the thread.
I don't know what backwards banana republic you're from, but in this country the idea is that you try people for the crimes they've done, not for the crimes you think they might do.
This is not a court. It is a discussion board.
This is where there's a problem, though. ISPs don't provide multicast to the home.
Yeah but, well, Verizon is an ISP. They could start.
Sony and Nintendo had both already confirmed they would be demoing their consoles at E3 as far back as last July; we were just waiting on Microsoft. The only thing that's changed now is Microsoft, and that Sony's confirmed they'll have playable demos at E3 rather than playable demos around E3.
We must learn to work with the artists and record industry, along with the movie industry and others, instead of against them.
Why?
Let's say I don't give a shit how much money the RIAA makes, and in fact do not generally support them or their artists because I consider music from independent sources to be superior.
However, I do demand that I have the right to not face legal repercussions for something I type, and I do expect as a customer that if I buy a piece of audio equipment I am not restrained from exercising my fair use rights with it.
I don't see any way to "work with" the RIAA in this situation??
The RIAA has demonstrated they certainly aren't willingly going to compromise in terms of giving up some control over the exact nature of distribution in order to take advantage of new technology; I don't see why I should "compromise" rights I've had since birth so a music cartel whose products I mostly don't like can feel better about themselves. Saying "they have their rights" does not justify that they are using the scapegoat of digital music distribution to lay claim to new and unjust new rights, and you are apologizing for them.
The opening crawls in the original trilogy served as a method of allowing the movie to open in medias res without the audience having a sense of disorientation. In the latter two movies this included an aspect of establishing that time had passed since the previous movie-- but, no meaningful or potentially interesting-to-watch events were in this way "skipped", it is simply made clear to us that what we expected has occurred in the intervening time (the war continues, Luke continues to train, Vader turned Solo over to Jabba the Hutt) with perhaps one or two little bits of information that alert us as to the movie's focus (the Imperials are known to be building a weapon capable of destroying an entire planet).
In the prequel trilogies the crawls have served two purposes. The intentional purpose is to allow George Lucas to weasel out of characterization, establishing setting and place, and moving the plot along. Unlike the original trilogies, where the Star Wars universe's background and nature was established incidentally, through subtle details of what we see and hear during the movie, in the prequel trilogies they just use the opening crawl to say "plop, there it is", and disorientingly slam down the characters and setting they wish to put the movie in. After this point, since they seem to consider themselves thus freed from explaining themselves, they completely refrain during the movie from elaborating on the things the opening crawl sketches or filling in details beyond the crawl's bare outline (where is Naboo and why, if in any obvious way, are they important? who is the Trade Federation and why should we care? who is "count dooky", why would someone have heard of him, what does he claim he wants, and why does this all appear to be important to someone who does not know his true aspirations? who is "grevious", how and why is he starting a droid army, and what are the implications of this? most importantly what would the answer to these questions appear to be to someone within the movie-- not us the viewer, to whom the answers are "he's the bad guy and he wants to rule the world", what would an average citizen of the Republic think Dooku to be?) and so use the time freed up within the movie in this way to concentrate on roller-coaster-style but otherwise long, boring and irrelivant action scenes.
The unintentional purpose of the prequel trilogy opening crawls is to bash you over the head with how stupid all these character names are ("Grevious"? "Dooku"??? I mean come on!), just in case the majesty of John Williams' opening score might otherwise distract you from the suspicion that the entire plotline to the prequel trilogy was written by Lucas's 4-year-old child in a single sitting some years ago in crayon on a napkin.
What's a "TV show"?
...could you please try to rephrase that post so that it is actual english? I mean, all the words you use seem to be real english words, but the order that you put them in just doesn't make any sense. Thanks.