I disagree. Classes and levels can, and do, work very well for coherent and fast gameplay. They have their limitations, but D&D does epic fantasy well.
By contrast, GURPS "epic fantasy" tends to be a long battle of blocks until someone scores a single instant-incapacitate critical. Sort of tedious, IMHO.
If every time you didn't download MP3s, people died, being scalded alive until their skin comes off, or chained to a bed while cockroaches feed on them, that would be totally comparable.
This isn't about whether or not you can get away with doing something entirely for your own benefit. This is about whether you care enough about the rest of the world to do something about it.
Can the CoS sue a lot of people? Maybe they can. And every time they do, it'll become more news, and more ammunition for everyone else to use to establish them as a dangerously litigious group. The second big difference (apart from the CoS killing people, or neglecting even basic medical care until they die) is simply that, in the case of downloading MP3s, a case could be made that the downloaders were genuinely doing something wrong. You might agree, you might not, but there was an honest argument there.
There is no honest argument that someone politely holding a sign across the street from a CoS building, who has even gotten a permit for the protest, is doing anything wrong or illegal. Frivolous and abusive suits are worth standing up to.
Maybe you should have asked Mechanical Turk about what Linux can do.
Mostly, of course, the question isn't "can" vs. "can't". It's all about efficiency. It took me at least half an hour to learn to use find, and I found it just as confusing as you did. That first time. Back in 1989 or so.
Since then, I have performed thousands upon thousands of searches, and I can search twenty gigabytes of disk before the helpful little search puppy is done asking you if you'd like to search for a file. I can perform searches which are simply impossible using the standard Windows search tool, and I can perform them fast. Return on investment? Hundreds to one, easily.
I think this comes down to the dispute about the respective merits of bumper cars and more conventional gasoline engines. Yes, bumper cars are much easier to use, they're much faster to learn, and they're much safer. And really, there's nothing a gasoline engine car can do that a bumper car can't; I mean, they both go forwards and backwards, and they both turn. So pretty much they're the same thing, right?
People do not like Unix because it is easy to start with, but because, if you're willing to invest time in learning how to use a computer effectively, you end up being able to get your work done much faster. I don't know why the concept of investing time to learn to do something well seems so odious when it comes to computers, even though we're used to it in every other field of human endeavor. And no, you can't just "make it easier". The way you make it easier is to remove options, and replace fast interfaces with slower ones.
Bennett, when you write, do you touch-type at all? Do you type words, using an elaborate array of probably a hundred labeled "keys", or do you use a brilliantly simple interface which simply presents you with a pop-up menu of words? Wouldn't it be easier to use a pop-up menu, instead of memorizing literally tens of thousands of words, learning to spell them all, and then training yourself to type?
Imagine, if you will, that all of us Unix users are people who view computer processes, such as finding files, or manipulating their contents, as being just as important to our work as emitting sequences of English words is to yours. And imagine that we, like you, have been willing to put in serious time -- not ten or twenty minutes, but days or months or years -- to learn to do this faster, more efficiently, and with less wasted effort.
And you'll note that we're pretty much all using Unix. Maybe I use more NetBSD and OS X, and someone else here mostly uses desktop Linux, but we've all found that, compared to XP or Vista, the Unix systems offer us dramatically better efficiency and power, if we are willing to put in the time to learn to use it.
Better stories, and stories which have the potential to be influenced in some ways by character choices.
I care a lot more about whether a villain gets killed if I don't have to worry about him respawning and jumping me before I'm done looting his minions.
FWIW, I'm using WoW under plain-old-WINE, and the microphone works great. I'm using a plug-in USB audio and a regular cable headset, and it works fine.
Cedega had rendering problems, especially when rotating the camera (it would slow down to a slide show). Might be related to GL extensions or something, but the net result is, I liked WINE better.
Would you call his one-click lawsuit from a few years back a "defensive measure"? I would not.
The fact is, he's lied on every last thing he's said on the issue, and swallowing these lies given his clear, repeated, public contradictions of every such claim is just pathetic. I mean, it's long past "stupid".
You believe they have done "very little" of enforcing patents on "stupid obvious things". How much is okay? Would you say that demanding an injunction against a competitor running their existing web site, at all, during the holiday season is "very little"? Reasonable for you? You think it's no big deal to demand that someone suddenly, on no notice, stop accepting any orders on their web site until they revise their system not to conflict with a "stupid obvious" patent?
The fact is, Bezos is part of the problem, and actively so, and all his "crusading" for patent reform has consisted of, purely reactively in response to negative outcries over his abuses, saying sets of things that his critics would like him to say... And then doing nothing about it, and continuing to use the system, as is, to his advantage. Including filing suits.
You know why so many 419 scams have phrases like "in God's name" and "we are devout Christians"? Because there are millions of people who will reflexively assume that anyone who claims to be Christian is honest and trustworthy, as long as they use a few of the right buzzwords. Bezos has found the corresponding hole in your cognitive system; you simply can't be bothered to investigate the truth of his claims. Why? Because, if they were true, they would be exactly what you wish he'd think.
It ain't so. Amazon is an abuser of the patent system. Amazon is a spammer. Amazon is everything we hoped they wouldn't be, and they rely on our wishful thinking to convince us that, really, they're a great company, when they are actually systematic scumbags. They spam, and then they get caught and "fix" it. They abuse the patent system, and they don't even stop abusing it, they just say it's "defensive". They have filed suits against competitors who were not using patents against them since they first claimed this was defensive.
Why do you keep trusting them? What's your emotional investment in never, ever, considering the possibility that they lied to you?
Given the choice between concluding that the judge was an idiot, or the plaintiff lied, or Dave Ritz lied, I'd say that it was more likely that the judge and/or plaintiff were in error than that Dave Ritz lied. He's not a liar by nature. He could have been mistaken on something (so many spammers, it's hard to tell them apart sometimes), but I do not believe it likely that he intentionally lied.
I wonder if they timed this partially because of the recent blu-ray admission that none of the existing players but the PS3 will play new movies shortly? They may suddenly have a much larger installed base of players-that-can-play-new-movies.
But they won on blu-ray, apparently, and thanks to some short-sighted decisions by studios on that topic, we'll be treated to one of these every time anything to do with technology comes out, because Sony will make more on blu-ray than they have lost on all the others put together.
A fascinating theory, but one as yet unsupported by data, and indeed, contrary to the data.
Even if it were just "triggering" autism, the removal of thimerosal would, eventually, result in a change of the frequency of observed autism. It doesn't.
I want a large TV so I can see it easily from further away -- not so I can see more detail on it up close.
I don't really care about HD. The reason people get HD sets is that HD-ness is mandated by law, essentially, so people getting a large set gets HD, whether they care or not.
I was once told that, at a trade show a while back, a survey of PS3 owners with HDTVs showed that a substantial portion of them (close to half) were still using the composite cables that came in the box, thus, getting a 480i signal. Because, you know, you plug it in and it works.
It's not just the code isn't clean, it's that it went out of its way to REVERSE the way that anyone else would have done it.
The fact that the code had to be altered because the maintainers chose to replace UNIX headers with their own misconfigured variants IS an example of the code being unusually difficult to maintain or alter.
Consider the end users who suffered with various PINE bugs relating to not detecting incoming mail or truncating files, due to the offset bug described. Consider all the vulnerabilities, crashes, and so on, which necessarily entail from badly-written code.
Code style isn't purely for the convenience of programmers. Programmer convenience means more time spent actually working on the problem you're supposed to be working on, and less time fighting the computer... And that means fewer bugs and more features.
PINE was one of the most atrociously-written programs I have ever seen. It was built by people who absolutely failed to understand UNIX, at any level. It used to fail on big-endian systems that used 64-bit file offsets, because rather than using the STANDARD SYSTEM HEADERS, it manually misdefined every UNIX system call itself. Why? Because one of the programmers once saw a system, somewhere, where he claimed was wrong, so they made a consistent practice of, by default, including their own local definitions INSTEAD OF the standard system ones, except on a very few platforms that had to be specially identified.
The whole program is like that. It's full of cargo cult nonsense, attempts to reinvent other languages in C, and so on.
If you like the interface, the thing to do would be to start from scratch and write a program with that interface, but to do it competently, using programmers who have some basic understanding of C. If you start from the PINE base, you are doomed.
You can only wonder how many systems the people claiming Nintendo is manufacturing this shortage think are being produced.
Re:Are the underwear gnomes in charge?
on
Where are Wii?
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't be totally shocked to find that some of those cheaper blu-ray players are also subsidized.
My guess has been that they'd rather, at any given point, break even on a thousand consoles and sell ten games for each, than make $20 on each of five hundred consoles and sell ten games for each.
So, some joker typed in a made-up email address on his xbox live account.
I now get spammed regularly by microsoft, and their internal abuse mailbox is behind a filter that rejects all mail from me as "obscene". (Apparently this is moderately widespread; it's quite easy to be on a Class C shared with someone else who spammed them once, and they have no procedure for getting unblocked from Microsoft; Hotmail actually does, but Microsoft proper doesn't.) So I can't complain about the unwanted mailings...
Sheesh. Whoever it is, I hope he realizes Microsoft is happily sending his personal information to me regularly.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. Classes and levels can, and do, work very well for coherent and fast gameplay. They have their limitations, but D&D does epic fantasy well.
By contrast, GURPS "epic fantasy" tends to be a long battle of blocks until someone scores a single instant-incapacitate critical. Sort of tedious, IMHO.
Nope.
There was a guy who tried to incite a riot (substantial evidence suggests he was a CoS agent trying to provoke the response you describe).
Instead, we had people peacefully holding signs and singing "Happy Birthday".
No threat == no credibility for the siege mentality. We're too harmless.
I have an article in the pipeline on OOXML. I SO hope it shows up in time. It'll be in the XML section on developerWorks.
KEEP PEELED EYES! Mmmm. Peeled eyes.
If every time you didn't download MP3s, people died, being scalded alive until their skin comes off, or chained to a bed while cockroaches feed on them, that would be totally comparable.
This isn't about whether or not you can get away with doing something entirely for your own benefit. This is about whether you care enough about the rest of the world to do something about it.
Can the CoS sue a lot of people? Maybe they can. And every time they do, it'll become more news, and more ammunition for everyone else to use to establish them as a dangerously litigious group. The second big difference (apart from the CoS killing people, or neglecting even basic medical care until they die) is simply that, in the case of downloading MP3s, a case could be made that the downloaders were genuinely doing something wrong. You might agree, you might not, but there was an honest argument there.
There is no honest argument that someone politely holding a sign across the street from a CoS building, who has even gotten a permit for the protest, is doing anything wrong or illegal. Frivolous and abusive suits are worth standing up to.
So, don't just laugh at this.
Get involved.
They can sue a few people. They cannot sue EVERYONE.
So join protests. Write your legislators. Stuff like that.
Maybe you should have asked Mechanical Turk about what Linux can do.
Mostly, of course, the question isn't "can" vs. "can't". It's all about efficiency. It took me at least half an hour to learn to use find, and I found it just as confusing as you did. That first time. Back in 1989 or so.
Since then, I have performed thousands upon thousands of searches, and I can search twenty gigabytes of disk before the helpful little search puppy is done asking you if you'd like to search for a file. I can perform searches which are simply impossible using the standard Windows search tool, and I can perform them fast. Return on investment? Hundreds to one, easily.
I think this comes down to the dispute about the respective merits of bumper cars and more conventional gasoline engines. Yes, bumper cars are much easier to use, they're much faster to learn, and they're much safer. And really, there's nothing a gasoline engine car can do that a bumper car can't; I mean, they both go forwards and backwards, and they both turn. So pretty much they're the same thing, right?
People do not like Unix because it is easy to start with, but because, if you're willing to invest time in learning how to use a computer effectively, you end up being able to get your work done much faster. I don't know why the concept of investing time to learn to do something well seems so odious when it comes to computers, even though we're used to it in every other field of human endeavor. And no, you can't just "make it easier". The way you make it easier is to remove options, and replace fast interfaces with slower ones.
Bennett, when you write, do you touch-type at all? Do you type words, using an elaborate array of probably a hundred labeled "keys", or do you use a brilliantly simple interface which simply presents you with a pop-up menu of words? Wouldn't it be easier to use a pop-up menu, instead of memorizing literally tens of thousands of words, learning to spell them all, and then training yourself to type?
Imagine, if you will, that all of us Unix users are people who view computer processes, such as finding files, or manipulating their contents, as being just as important to our work as emitting sequences of English words is to yours. And imagine that we, like you, have been willing to put in serious time -- not ten or twenty minutes, but days or months or years -- to learn to do this faster, more efficiently, and with less wasted effort.
And you'll note that we're pretty much all using Unix. Maybe I use more NetBSD and OS X, and someone else here mostly uses desktop Linux, but we've all found that, compared to XP or Vista, the Unix systems offer us dramatically better efficiency and power, if we are willing to put in the time to learn to use it.
Just a thought.
And indeed, ten times pi is thirty. That is to say, 1e1*pi = 3e1. (It can't be 3.1e1, or 3.14e1, because we don't have enough significant figures.)
Better stories, and stories which have the potential to be influenced in some ways by character choices.
I care a lot more about whether a villain gets killed if I don't have to worry about him respawning and jumping me before I'm done looting his minions.
FWIW, I'm using WoW under plain-old-WINE, and the microphone works great. I'm using a plug-in USB audio and a regular cable headset, and it works fine.
Cedega had rendering problems, especially when rotating the camera (it would slow down to a slide show). Might be related to GL extensions or something, but the net result is, I liked WINE better.
Bezos has said that, yes.
Would you call his one-click lawsuit from a few years back a "defensive measure"? I would not.
The fact is, he's lied on every last thing he's said on the issue, and swallowing these lies given his clear, repeated, public contradictions of every such claim is just pathetic. I mean, it's long past "stupid".
You believe they have done "very little" of enforcing patents on "stupid obvious things". How much is okay? Would you say that demanding an injunction against a competitor running their existing web site, at all, during the holiday season is "very little"? Reasonable for you? You think it's no big deal to demand that someone suddenly, on no notice, stop accepting any orders on their web site until they revise their system not to conflict with a "stupid obvious" patent?
The fact is, Bezos is part of the problem, and actively so, and all his "crusading" for patent reform has consisted of, purely reactively in response to negative outcries over his abuses, saying sets of things that his critics would like him to say... And then doing nothing about it, and continuing to use the system, as is, to his advantage. Including filing suits.
You know why so many 419 scams have phrases like "in God's name" and "we are devout Christians"? Because there are millions of people who will reflexively assume that anyone who claims to be Christian is honest and trustworthy, as long as they use a few of the right buzzwords. Bezos has found the corresponding hole in your cognitive system; you simply can't be bothered to investigate the truth of his claims. Why? Because, if they were true, they would be exactly what you wish he'd think.
It ain't so. Amazon is an abuser of the patent system. Amazon is a spammer. Amazon is everything we hoped they wouldn't be, and they rely on our wishful thinking to convince us that, really, they're a great company, when they are actually systematic scumbags. They spam, and then they get caught and "fix" it. They abuse the patent system, and they don't even stop abusing it, they just say it's "defensive". They have filed suits against competitors who were not using patents against them since they first claimed this was defensive.
Why do you keep trusting them? What's your emotional investment in never, ever, considering the possibility that they lied to you?
I'm sure I read this last year -- not December or something, but last summer or earlier.
Given the choice between concluding that the judge was an idiot, or the plaintiff lied, or Dave Ritz lied, I'd say that it was more likely that the judge and/or plaintiff were in error than that Dave Ritz lied. He's not a liar by nature. He could have been mistaken on something (so many spammers, it's hard to tell them apart sometimes), but I do not believe it likely that he intentionally lied.
This is an exceedingly bad ruling.
Some background reading:
http://thespamdiaries.blogspot.com/2007/10/help-fight-spammer-slapp-suit-donate-to.html
http://www.spamsuite.com/node/351
And, of course, the legal defense fund, desperately needed for an appeal:
http://sfldf.org/
This contradicts the claim I saw from the Blu-ray people, that new discs would (or at least could) require a player with support for the new features.
As they put it, "early adopters knew what they were getting into".
I wonder if they timed this partially because of the recent blu-ray admission that none of the existing players but the PS3 will play new movies shortly? They may suddenly have a much larger installed base of players-that-can-play-new-movies.
But they won on blu-ray, apparently, and thanks to some short-sighted decisions by studios on that topic, we'll be treated to one of these every time anything to do with technology comes out, because Sony will make more on blu-ray than they have lost on all the others put together.
Simple strategy, really.
Doesn't matter.
If a major source of the "trigger" goes away, and the incidence rate doesn't drop noticably, the trigger wasn't doing anything.
A fascinating theory, but one as yet unsupported by data, and indeed, contrary to the data.
Even if it were just "triggering" autism, the removal of thimerosal would, eventually, result in a change of the frequency of observed autism. It doesn't.
I want a large TV so I can see it easily from further away -- not so I can see more detail on it up close.
I don't really care about HD. The reason people get HD sets is that HD-ness is mandated by law, essentially, so people getting a large set gets HD, whether they care or not.
I was once told that, at a trade show a while back, a survey of PS3 owners with HDTVs showed that a substantial portion of them (close to half) were still using the composite cables that came in the box, thus, getting a 480i signal. Because, you know, you plug it in and it works.
It's not just the code isn't clean, it's that it went out of its way to REVERSE the way that anyone else would have done it.
The fact that the code had to be altered because the maintainers chose to replace UNIX headers with their own misconfigured variants IS an example of the code being unusually difficult to maintain or alter.
Have you READ the code? I have. It's crap.
(http://www.angryflower.com/itsits.gif)
Bad code is unmaintainable code.
Consider the end users who suffered with various PINE bugs relating to not detecting incoming mail or truncating files, due to the offset bug described. Consider all the vulnerabilities, crashes, and so on, which necessarily entail from badly-written code.
Code style isn't purely for the convenience of programmers. Programmer convenience means more time spent actually working on the problem you're supposed to be working on, and less time fighting the computer... And that means fewer bugs and more features.
PINE was one of the most atrociously-written programs I have ever seen. It was built by people who absolutely failed to understand UNIX, at any level. It used to fail on big-endian systems that used 64-bit file offsets, because rather than using the STANDARD SYSTEM HEADERS, it manually misdefined every UNIX system call itself. Why? Because one of the programmers once saw a system, somewhere, where he claimed was wrong, so they made a consistent practice of, by default, including their own local definitions INSTEAD OF the standard system ones, except on a very few platforms that had to be specially identified.
The whole program is like that. It's full of cargo cult nonsense, attempts to reinvent other languages in C, and so on.
If you like the interface, the thing to do would be to start from scratch and write a program with that interface, but to do it competently, using programmers who have some basic understanding of C. If you start from the PINE base, you are doomed.
No idea what parent is talking about?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/29
That's what parent is talking about.
And I agree. Mod parent up!
You can only wonder how many systems the people claiming Nintendo is manufacturing this shortage think are being produced.
I wouldn't be totally shocked to find that some of those cheaper blu-ray players are also subsidized.
My guess has been that they'd rather, at any given point, break even on a thousand consoles and sell ten games for each, than make $20 on each of five hundred consoles and sell ten games for each.
So, some joker typed in a made-up email address on his xbox live account.
I now get spammed regularly by microsoft, and their internal abuse mailbox is behind a filter that rejects all mail from me as "obscene". (Apparently this is moderately widespread; it's quite easy to be on a Class C shared with someone else who spammed them once, and they have no procedure for getting unblocked from Microsoft; Hotmail actually does, but Microsoft proper doesn't.) So I can't complain about the unwanted mailings...
Sheesh. Whoever it is, I hope he realizes Microsoft is happily sending his personal information to me regularly.