I remember back in the day when GLQuake was first released. A house mate had what was then a top of the line machine - PPro 200MHz, a whopping *64*meg of RAM, etc. No 3d accelerator, though - they were just too new.
For a laugh, he downloaded and installed the GLQuake patch, and got it running. Two things I'll never forget:
1) It was utterly, utterly gorgeous. This was the first time I'd ever seen a GL-rendered game, and it blew my mind.
2) It was the slowest game I have ever seen. Utterly unplayable - we couldn't get as far as the menu! The demo where you grab the grenade launcher and then round a corner and take on a group of zombies ran at something like 0.3fps.
But is that really enforceable, or just there to scare people off? After all, I can put anything I like in a licence (or even a real contract), but that doesn't necessarily mean that a court will hold you to it.
Definitely vote b). I've not read the patent (well, this *is*/.), but assuming that there's nothing OS-specific in it, this would apply to just about any GUIfied automatic update tool, including those that are increasingly featuring in applications. (Doesn't Eclipse have an option to check for updates at startup?)
Not only that, but RedHat at least has an equivalent tool to the Windows automatic updates tool, at least as far as I can tell from looking over a coworker's shoulder (I'm a Mandrake guy myself, when using Linux)
We recently bought a bunch of new Dells, and they all come with Quadro FX 500 cards. Not that we need them - but to get the other specs we need (gig of RAM, 3GHz proc - we do server-side Java, and run every locally while developing, including the server), that's what comes in the machine.
It's really not worth our while getting them swapped out, though; our IT dept seems to have a fear of non-standard configurations. At least this way, if a machine dies, we can have an exact replacement here within hours (theoretically, at least).
I don't suppose you'll need a gig and a half, but you are right about the minimum spec generally being the bare minimum. I have 512MB in my machine, and UT2k4 takes a geological age to load a level while playing online if I have "preload all skins" on. Without it, it loads much quicker (but still not exactly quickly), but has the odd pause now and then in game while it loads up a skin (which to me is far preferable).
1) Install AVS and keep it updated; 2) As that will inevitably let the occasional, brand-new virus slip through, hire more clueful employees
Seriously - in all my years of computer usage, I've never once caught a virus from opening an infected mail attachment. Why not? Because I know better.
Oracle would sue them from here til next Tuesday, that's what, and that's exactly what would happen in China.
C'mon, people, the law is the law - do you seriously think that China has no leagal concept of contracts? That the Chinese government would piss off the US government and companies by allowing something like this to go unpunished, were it to happen?
The benefits (stealing a few secrets from $largeSoftwareCompany) would be completely swamped by the potential loss of foregin investment, etc.
I never thought it was funny, personally, and really don't see why it became such a popular meme. Sure, the translation work was awful, but there's a huge amount of awful work done, and no-one finds any of the rest of it funny...
We tried firefox but with w2k's 256 color limitation on terminal sessions
I've used Win2K Terminal Server quite a bit, and I've never seen a 256 colour limitation. You can choose to limit the colour depth (eg to save bandwidth), but it's definitely not a hard limit. I'd suggest you take a look at the configuration of your server (and possibly clients)...
I couldn't agree more. I remember playing this when it first came out, until around 2 am one morning before finally having to stop. Before I went to bed, I went down to the kitchen to grab a drink.
Our kitchen has a glass back door, letting out onto the patio and garden; pitch dark outside, I couldn't get the thought out of my mind that a hybrid would come smashing through the door any second, moaning "Silence the discord..."
No game has creeped me out as much, before or since.
JK Rowling did not create Harry Potter because she hoped to become the best selling author in history.
That may or may not be the case (if your other respondent is to be believed), but I dare say that the money the books bring in is quite an incentive to keep churning them out...
The life of the author plus 70 years is NOT a limited time
Yes it is, assuming that the author dies at some point. You can argue that it's too long (and it is, imho), but you cannot argue that it's not limited. Doing so just makes it look like you don't know what the word "limited" means...
I have a feeling Blair and the Labour party will politely ask the Americans to go shove it where the sun don't shine
I doubt it somehow. This issue affects UK companies and people too - as the (seriously biased) article mentions, the copyright on a lot of Beatles stuff will be expiring over the next few years, amongst that of other UK artists.
Our New Labour government has quite the track record of ignoring the wishes of the people in order to further their own current pet cause (fuel tax levels, national ID cards, the RIP Act, etc). I don't see why this should be any different, especially as this time there will be large, powerful companies lobbying hard, against maybe one or two little, easy to ignore consumer groups.
Besides which, the Beatles, and especially "Sir Paul", are still very popular - a lot of people, I think, are quite proud of such influential, famous artists being British. I can see popular opinion swinging behind extending their copyright, as a lot of people will not understand the deeper issues, and will just think that "our national musical heroes" need to be protected from "those evil internet pirates"... (I can almost see the story in the Daily Rant^WMail now...)
That's not really a very good analogy, unless you consider society to be the sole owner of any created non-physical works (ideas, songs, etc). I know that some people do, and that they make some quite strong arguments in their favour (building on what has come before, owing your education and inspiration to all those around you, and them to others, and so on, etc), but I personally can't quite make the leap to thinking of anything that I create being the property of everyone, with me having no rights over it at all.
I see copyright as a reasonable compromise - let me say who can and cannot copy stuff I create, for a limited period of time, so that I may profit from it. Like money or loathe it, we all need it - our modern way of living just doesn't lend itself to a pure barter economy.
I'm not leasing anything from (or to) anyone when I create a copyrightable work. I am entering into an agreement with society, that people may not copy what I did verbatim for some period of time, so that I may (attempt to) earn sufficient money to make my living creating more things, such that everyone benefits. I get to live and do what I enjoy, you get to enjoy the fruits of my labours.
I agree that copyright holders should not be granted essentially indefinite extensions. I also think that the period should be different for different types of work - there seems little benefit to society to opening up 50 (or even 10) year old computer code for copying, for example. I don't think that that invalidates the concept of copyright, however; I can't see how else the creators of such works could be compensated if not for copyright. Musicians can tour, but authors, etc? Patronage would work for a small number of creators, but then only the truly exceptional and truly lucky would be able to create full-time. Sure, some people would do so, no matter the hardships they had to endure (and I consider them to be truly exceptional). I still think that the nett result would be a drastic decrease in the number doing so, however, and the amount of stuff being created. How that would enrich society escapes me.
I guess I must just be lucky. I've had a domain, complete with "catch-all addressing", for about 4 years now, and I get maybe a few dozen spams per week. Almost all of those, too, go to an address I was foolish enough to use in plain text on kur05hin a couple of years ago.
I am anti-spam, but not particularly vehement about it. I can imagine thought that if I were getting that many mails, I'd probably be howling for blood...
Thus there is no reaonable way you can expect everyone to know Portuagese, or any other language. However you can have a reasonable expectation that most people will have at least a functional proficency in English.
Those two statements are mutually exclusive. Either you cannot reasonably expect everyone to know any given language, or you can reasonably expect everyone to know English.
And never the twain shall meet, or get to know each other...
I strongly believe that a great many problems (especially wars, terrorism, etc) could be solved by people just getting to know each other better. Seeing that while yes, there are differences between them (some irreconcilable, perhaps), there are also a great many similarities; we're all human, after all.
If you can get the general population to realise that actually, there's nothing to hate or fear of people just because they're different, you'd find that the leaders have a much harder time of causing trouble. Not forgetting that tomorrow's leaders are today's Joe Bloggs - get them understanding other cultures now, you'll have less trouble if they end up in positions of power. (That works both ways, of course - each culture should understand the others)
But no, you're right - you just continue to foster your separatist attitude and separatist communities, and let other people do the hard work of trying to get people from different cultures interacting.
Do you want Free software? Then you cannot seek to prevent anyone from using it. Don't want software to be used for purposes that you consider evil? Then give up the idea of it being Free.
A couple of months ago I decided it was time to try out a differnt distro (from Mandrake 9.1), so I downloaded gentoo. Well, I've grown impatient in my old age, so no, I did not want to read all 50ish pages of the installation instructions, so I read the quick start and got stuck in.
When it failed to boot, I shrugged, rebooted to XP and downloaded Fedora Core 1. Installed fine, booted - no support for my modem. Okay, shrug, reboot to XP, download the packages, reboot to Fedora. Ah; no NTFS module, not even read support. Try installing the kernel sources to compile it, and it wants to install another 400 meg of tenuously-related crap along with them; not on this small a partition, no. Shrug, reboot to XP, download Mandrake 9.2.
The morals of this story:
a) I can't remember the last time I "shrugged and rebooted Windows", yet in this particular week, various Linux distros caused me no end of hassles b) I should've stuck with 'drake:-)
Seriously though, it's getting tiresome. Sometimes I could almost believe that the people most vocally bashing Windows are the ones who haven't actually used it in years, and are basing their vitriol on out of date experiences.
If it's any consolation, I switched from Windows, to Linux, then back to Windows. I personally find XP to be more usable than Linux (at least as recently as Mandrake 9.2), and I prefer the look and feel of the GUI.
I'm no newb either - my first Linux install was slackware 3, downloaded at uni and taken home on floppies. Lots of floppies. I've hand-hacked modeline entries in my X config when an install failed to detect my monitor correctly, I've upgraded kernels and gcc, and even upgraded from libc5 to glibc2.
You know what? I can't be bothered any more. If I have to do any more than install the OS, install any required drivers then install the software I want to use, forget it. My time is too precious to me now to be futzing about. True, Linux is almost there; but that's the thing, it's almost there. For what I do, Windows is there now, not real soon. Cost? I already own a legally-licensed copy of XP Pro. Stability? XP crashes for me as often as Linux used to - that is to say, almost never. My home machine I switch off at night, but my work machine stays on 24/7. I reboot it when I need to move it, or when an update tells me to - and really, why care? Rebooting takes all of a minute, I don't even have enough time to grab a cup of coffee. Uptime obsessions are all very well for servers, but this is desktops I'm talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember back in the day when GLQuake was first released. A house mate had what was then a top of the line machine - PPro 200MHz, a whopping *64*meg of RAM, etc. No 3d accelerator, though - they were just too new.
For a laugh, he downloaded and installed the GLQuake patch, and got it running. Two things I'll never forget:
1) It was utterly, utterly gorgeous. This was the first time I'd ever seen a GL-rendered game, and it blew my mind.
2) It was the slowest game I have ever seen. Utterly unplayable - we couldn't get as far as the menu! The demo where you grab the grenade launcher and then round a corner and take on a group of zombies ran at something like 0.3fps.
Ah, nostalgia...
But is that really enforceable, or just there to scare people off? After all, I can put anything I like in a licence (or even a real contract), but that doesn't necessarily mean that a court will hold you to it.
Please stop spreading the FUD that you can't make money on software if you don't patent the hell out of it.
Dude, he was arguing against patenting languages and compilers in order to enforce the "no patenting stuff you write using this" licence...
Definitely vote b). I've not read the patent (well, this *is* /.), but assuming that there's nothing OS-specific in it, this would apply to just about any GUIfied automatic update tool, including those that are increasingly featuring in applications. (Doesn't Eclipse have an option to check for updates at startup?)
Not only that, but RedHat at least has an equivalent tool to the Windows automatic updates tool, at least as far as I can tell from looking over a coworker's shoulder (I'm a Mandrake guy myself, when using Linux)
No, but RedHat's automatic update thing at least is almost certainly in violation...
How many times has YOUR browser been hosed by the bloated and buggy Acrobat?
Acrobat takes down the web browser, and somehow that's Windows's fault?
We recently bought a bunch of new Dells, and they all come with Quadro FX 500 cards. Not that we need them - but to get the other specs we need (gig of RAM, 3GHz proc - we do server-side Java, and run every locally while developing, including the server), that's what comes in the machine.
It's really not worth our while getting them swapped out, though; our IT dept seems to have a fear of non-standard configurations. At least this way, if a machine dies, we can have an exact replacement here within hours (theoretically, at least).
I don't suppose you'll need a gig and a half, but you are right about the minimum spec generally being the bare minimum. I have 512MB in my machine, and UT2k4 takes a geological age to load a level while playing online if I have "preload all skins" on. Without it, it loads much quicker (but still not exactly quickly), but has the odd pause now and then in game while it loads up a skin (which to me is far preferable).
Either way, I definitely need some more memory...
Well, I suggest you do two things:
1) Install AVS and keep it updated;
2) As that will inevitably let the occasional, brand-new virus slip through, hire more clueful employees
Seriously - in all my years of computer usage, I've never once caught a virus from opening an infected mail attachment. Why not? Because I know better.
mail foraged
Yeah, I hate it when people forage through my email - it's bad enough that my girlfriend goes through my phone sometimes, but my email? No way!
Oracle would sue them from here til next Tuesday, that's what, and that's exactly what would happen in China.
C'mon, people, the law is the law - do you seriously think that China has no leagal concept of contracts? That the Chinese government would piss off the US government and companies by allowing something like this to go unpunished, were it to happen?
The benefits (stealing a few secrets from $largeSoftwareCompany) would be completely swamped by the potential loss of foregin investment, etc.
I never thought it was funny, personally, and really don't see why it became such a popular meme. Sure, the translation work was awful, but there's a huge amount of awful work done, and no-one finds any of the rest of it funny...
We tried firefox but with w2k's 256 color limitation on terminal sessions
I've used Win2K Terminal Server quite a bit, and I've never seen a 256 colour limitation. You can choose to limit the colour depth (eg to save bandwidth), but it's definitely not a hard limit. I'd suggest you take a look at the configuration of your server (and possibly clients)...
I couldn't agree more. I remember playing this when it first came out, until around 2 am one morning before finally having to stop. Before I went to bed, I went down to the kitchen to grab a drink.
Our kitchen has a glass back door, letting out onto the patio and garden; pitch dark outside, I couldn't get the thought out of my mind that a hybrid would come smashing through the door any second, moaning "Silence the discord..."
No game has creeped me out as much, before or since.
JK Rowling did not create Harry Potter because she hoped to become the best selling author in history.
That may or may not be the case (if your other respondent is to be believed), but I dare say that the money the books bring in is quite an incentive to keep churning them out...
The life of the author plus 70 years is NOT a limited time
Yes it is, assuming that the author dies at some point. You can argue that it's too long (and it is, imho), but you cannot argue that it's not limited. Doing so just makes it look like you don't know what the word "limited" means...
I have a feeling Blair and the Labour party will politely ask the Americans to go shove it where the sun don't shine
I doubt it somehow. This issue affects UK companies and people too - as the (seriously biased) article mentions, the copyright on a lot of Beatles stuff will be expiring over the next few years, amongst that of other UK artists.
Our New Labour government has quite the track record of ignoring the wishes of the people in order to further their own current pet cause (fuel tax levels, national ID cards, the RIP Act, etc). I don't see why this should be any different, especially as this time there will be large, powerful companies lobbying hard, against maybe one or two little, easy to ignore consumer groups.
Besides which, the Beatles, and especially "Sir Paul", are still very popular - a lot of people, I think, are quite proud of such influential, famous artists being British. I can see popular opinion swinging behind extending their copyright, as a lot of people will not understand the deeper issues, and will just think that "our national musical heroes" need to be protected from "those evil internet pirates"... (I can almost see the story in the Daily Rant^WMail now...)
That's not really a very good analogy, unless you consider society to be the sole owner of any created non-physical works (ideas, songs, etc). I know that some people do, and that they make some quite strong arguments in their favour (building on what has come before, owing your education and inspiration to all those around you, and them to others, and so on, etc), but I personally can't quite make the leap to thinking of anything that I create being the property of everyone, with me having no rights over it at all.
I see copyright as a reasonable compromise - let me say who can and cannot copy stuff I create, for a limited period of time, so that I may profit from it. Like money or loathe it, we all need it - our modern way of living just doesn't lend itself to a pure barter economy.
I'm not leasing anything from (or to) anyone when I create a copyrightable work. I am entering into an agreement with society, that people may not copy what I did verbatim for some period of time, so that I may (attempt to) earn sufficient money to make my living creating more things, such that everyone benefits. I get to live and do what I enjoy, you get to enjoy the fruits of my labours.
I agree that copyright holders should not be granted essentially indefinite extensions. I also think that the period should be different for different types of work - there seems little benefit to society to opening up 50 (or even 10) year old computer code for copying, for example. I don't think that that invalidates the concept of copyright, however; I can't see how else the creators of such works could be compensated if not for copyright. Musicians can tour, but authors, etc? Patronage would work for a small number of creators, but then only the truly exceptional and truly lucky would be able to create full-time. Sure, some people would do so, no matter the hardships they had to endure (and I consider them to be truly exceptional). I still think that the nett result would be a drastic decrease in the number doing so, however, and the amount of stuff being created. How that would enrich society escapes me.
I guess I must just be lucky. I've had a domain, complete with "catch-all addressing", for about 4 years now, and I get maybe a few dozen spams per week. Almost all of those, too, go to an address I was foolish enough to use in plain text on kur05hin a couple of years ago.
I am anti-spam, but not particularly vehement about it. I can imagine thought that if I were getting that many mails, I'd probably be howling for blood...
Yeah, but it's funnier when people correcting the spelling or grammar of other people make mistakes themselves :-)
Thus there is no reaonable way you can expect everyone to know Portuagese, or any other language. However you can have a reasonable expectation that most people will have at least a functional proficency in English.
Those two statements are mutually exclusive. Either you cannot reasonably expect everyone to know any given language, or you can reasonably expect everyone to know English.
And never the twain shall meet, or get to know each other...
I strongly believe that a great many problems (especially wars, terrorism, etc) could be solved by people just getting to know each other better. Seeing that while yes, there are differences between them (some irreconcilable, perhaps), there are also a great many similarities; we're all human, after all.
If you can get the general population to realise that actually, there's nothing to hate or fear of people just because they're different, you'd find that the leaders have a much harder time of causing trouble. Not forgetting that tomorrow's leaders are today's Joe Bloggs - get them understanding other cultures now, you'll have less trouble if they end up in positions of power. (That works both ways, of course - each culture should understand the others)
But no, you're right - you just continue to foster your separatist attitude and separatist communities, and let other people do the hard work of trying to get people from different cultures interacting.
Do you want Free software? Then you cannot seek to prevent anyone from using it. Don't want software to be used for purposes that you consider evil? Then give up the idea of it being Free.
Choose carefully.
A couple of months ago I decided it was time to try out a differnt distro (from Mandrake 9.1), so I downloaded gentoo. Well, I've grown impatient in my old age, so no, I did not want to read all 50ish pages of the installation instructions, so I read the quick start and got stuck in.
:-)
When it failed to boot, I shrugged, rebooted to XP and downloaded Fedora Core 1. Installed fine, booted - no support for my modem. Okay, shrug, reboot to XP, download the packages, reboot to Fedora. Ah; no NTFS module, not even read support. Try installing the kernel sources to compile it, and it wants to install another 400 meg of tenuously-related crap along with them; not on this small a partition, no. Shrug, reboot to XP, download Mandrake 9.2.
The morals of this story:
a) I can't remember the last time I "shrugged and rebooted Windows", yet in this particular week, various Linux distros caused me no end of hassles
b) I should've stuck with 'drake
Seriously though, it's getting tiresome. Sometimes I could almost believe that the people most vocally bashing Windows are the ones who haven't actually used it in years, and are basing their vitriol on out of date experiences.
If it's any consolation, I switched from Windows, to Linux, then back to Windows. I personally find XP to be more usable than Linux (at least as recently as Mandrake 9.2), and I prefer the look and feel of the GUI.
I'm no newb either - my first Linux install was slackware 3, downloaded at uni and taken home on floppies. Lots of floppies. I've hand-hacked modeline entries in my X config when an install failed to detect my monitor correctly, I've upgraded kernels and gcc, and even upgraded from libc5 to glibc2.
You know what? I can't be bothered any more. If I have to do any more than install the OS, install any required drivers then install the software I want to use, forget it. My time is too precious to me now to be futzing about. True, Linux is almost there; but that's the thing, it's almost there. For what I do, Windows is there now, not real soon. Cost? I already own a legally-licensed copy of XP Pro. Stability? XP crashes for me as often as Linux used to - that is to say, almost never. My home machine I switch off at night, but my work machine stays on 24/7. I reboot it when I need to move it, or when an update tells me to - and really, why care? Rebooting takes all of a minute, I don't even have enough time to grab a cup of coffee. Uptime obsessions are all very well for servers, but this is desktops I'm talking about.