There's a reasonable set of people who were waiting for a price drop (who might have bought at $600 if they'd been SURE there was no price drop coming), or who would have bought at any time for $500, but not for $600. And, of those people, some don't care enough to find out immediately about the price drop... But most of them will have seen PS3's in a store at $500 in a month.
Actual hardware emulation seems to have been close enough to flawless that I've yet to hear of a PS2 game not working with it; software emulation seems to work on something like 50%-80% of games, assuming you skip cut scenes and otherwise go easy on it. Unit would be "games you can play through completely", and it's about 99% to about... less. Maybe 80%, optimistically. Don't be fooled by "I put in the game and got the splash screen". As an example, a software emulator for the PS1 I had some years back ran Wild Arms fine -- until you wanted to teach the magic user a new spell. Then it locked up. There was no workaround for this. It just couldn't be made to work. The game could not be completed, but you wouldn't know until several hours in.
Hotmail's blocking people who don't pay. No one's proposed blocking people who don't use goodmail; they've proposed whitelisting people who do.
Hotmail's deliverability is unreliable even when you're "clean", so I'd just write it off; do not use hotmail for business services, and do not accept hotmail addresses for anything where you need reliable delivery.
I suppose in theory I could. I posted the changes to a list or something, I think. I don't have them anymore. It's not like it took more than about five minutes of work.
Long since. My changes are rejected on the grounds that they are not compatible -- on a real Windows machine, F13-F24 exist. WoW doesn't support them, though, so it ignores those keysyms. I hacked my version of WINE to pass them in as Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F(N-12). That is not acceptable to the WINE project, and for good reason; it's an undesirable feature, and the correct fix is for WoW to accept the full range of function keys. (Windows supports up through F32 in theory, and USB keyboards have well-defined values up through F24).
It's more accurate than your pro-Sony nonsense. The software emulation is far from complete, while actually running games on their original hardware was fairly effective.
If you're faking them, you can correct your errors, but you'll botch badly when you're inattentive or overworked. NTs are pretty good most of the time, but... When their skills don't work, they're useless, because they don't have a functional cognitive model of what they're doing.
I just got diagnosed formally yesterday. I'm thirty-five. While there was some suspicion that I had a "learning disability" in grade school, I was evaluated about ten years before knowledge of high-functioning autism was widespread in the US, so they just wrote it off to "weird gifted kid". I've been functional enough, but the fact is, I can do a lot better with more information. (Honestly, if anyone had TOLD me early on that other people have feelings, which they do not describe, but which you can learn about by observing their behavior, I would probably have been pretty decent socially by college.)
Can you still tell? Hell, yes. I freak out if people unsort my carefully-sorted candy. I twitch and jitter and rock. I refuse to try new foods. I also, as it happens, turn out to be a star engineer that other engineers turn to for kibitzing and second opinions on a broad variety of topics. That's part of it too.
If everyone were like me, that'd be bad. If no one were like me, that'd be bad too. Vive le difference!
Okay, who wants to try to come up with words which provide network neutrality, without preventing me from blocking spammers.:) (Note: I would, of course, be willing to let someone who wants to put up some money to back his claim that his mail is legitimate send me mail. After all, the problem with spam is that, since it's free, it grows without bounds. If it costs money, he's not going to send tons of crap.)
I maintained a personal branch of Wine so I could have more function keys in World of Warcraft -- Linux supports more function keys, so I remapped them into modified keys WoW could handle. I've learned programming languages to work on games. I semi-regularly put in 16-hour days of gaming when I'm looking to destress. I have not one, not two, but THREE game-playing devices with me everywhere I go.
I could give a shit about another "40-hour" FPS, but surgery or hypnotism would be involved.
The Wii is the best thing to happen to my console gaming experience in years. The PS3 is utterly irrelevant to me as a gamer. Yeah, yeah. Cue the people claiming I just can't afford one; I've had one since last December. I run Linux on it. The games are just more derivative crap. The total interesting play time of every PS3 game I've seen put together can't come within a full working week of what I've gotten out of Wii Sports Tennis alone. Paper Mario is the first platformer since the Genesis Sonic era to do something I haven't already gotten bored with.
You think I should consider kids who can't get off on a game unless it's gory and their parents don't want them playing it to be "hardcore" gamers? I don't. When they're into gaming enough to write games, when they've been playing games more than a few years, then they can talk. Until then, they're just wannabes.
Maybe it would help if you understood that logic is a kind of mathematics.
Math is a much broader field than you seem to think, and a great deal of it has nothing to do with numbers.
Can you explain why bubblesort is often worse than quicksort? That's mathematics. Can you estimate whether ethernet's "random delay and retry" collision handling is likely to resolve a collision in milliseconds, seconds, or hours? That's mathematics, too.
You need to get out more, I know a number of atheists who not only lack belief in God, but specifically disbelieve. Try iidb.org. They're not a majority, but they're certainly not the empty set.
Some people don't collect stamps. Some people refuse to buy stamps on principle.:)
(Note that I'm not saying it's a religion, just that strong atheism exists.)
I see no evidence at all that anyone is actually successfully breaking it, or that if they did, that there would be any problem other than people switching providers.
Your proposed language is dangerously vague, overbroad, and implies a sort of hypothetical world in which all traffic is desired. You have not suggested a way to allow people to block or filter unwanted connections when they have good reasons to do so. You have not convinced me that I don't want people to have the option of paying extra to get better service.
Keep in mind the flip side; it's not just about possibly degrading service, but also about buying upgrades. The service we currently get is pretty degraded sometimes under load. If someone wants to pay extra to get bandwidth guarantees, that's fine by me.
You haven't made a case for this legislation at all. I am well aware of the alleged problem, and frankly, I don't think it's one that needs legislation. I think this is well within the scope of market forces to fix.
Every time someone proposes a "fix", it's worse than the actual problem. The mere fact that we don't like something a company might do does not mean we need legislation.
I am so glad you guys weren't around when New Coke came out. I could see the regular discussions on Slashdot of the need for legislation against changes to the recipe of well-liked products.
What's the problem this legislation is going to fix?
What happens when I want to run a spam filter, which blocks mail from large spam sources, but one of those sources has a single opt-in list that includes "requested information"? Right now, I can point out to my customers that, well, we have a spam filter. Under your wording, I'm in trouble for "interfering with the delivery of services and information". Sounds like a bad law to me.
Try again, and this time explain why we need this?
Look, I know that everyone here gets regular blowjobs from network neutrality, but I'm just wondering. Having looked at the Patriot Act, and the YES-YOU-CAN-SPAM act, and our "healthcare system" (I use the term loosely), and our current, uhm, whatever it is, but it's certainly not a war, over in Iraq...
Are you guys SURE you want the US federal government legislating this?
I have said it before, and I suppose it's time to say it again: Most of the time, when I see someone try to articulate what "network neutrality" means, that they want legislated, they end up with a set of words which, if they were a law, would prevent me from blocking spammers and DDOSers. There are good reasons for which networks are sometimes rather decidedly non-neutral about which traffic they carry, and there are real reasons for which people would like to have the option of paying for guaranteed bandwidth.
Most of the horror stories come down to "what if I only got the sorta dodgy networking I'm currently paying for, but other people were able to buy a better network." Not all; there's real potential for abuse. I just don't think I trust the US federal government to come up with something better, no matter how smart or good the people advocating it are... And honestly, a lot of the advocacy I see is knee-jerk reactions that haven't even bothered to gloss over the question of whether teergrubing should be illegal, or any of the dozens of other technical questions this raises.
When I did tech support many years back, we had a customer who lost a Sun workstation every couple of months. After a while, we got serious about investigating.
Turns out their building had two types of power plugs; ones that were on a separate service for computers and such, and plugs that were only suitable for things that were pretty tolerant, because they were used for some huge machinery, and had CONSTANT voltage spikes and drops.
The workstations were plugged into the wrong power bits.
This really, to me, sounds more like a guy whose setup is damaging machines than like manufacturing problems.
"Here, Allen has not shown that it is possible to distinguish the expression of the rules of his game manuals from the idea of the rules themselves. Thus, the doctrine of merger applies and although Allen may be entitled to copyright protection for the physical form of his games, he is not afforded protection for the premises or ideas underlying those games. To hold other- wise would give Allen a monopoly on such commonplace ideas as a simple rule on how youngsters should play their games."
For what it's worth, Puzzle Quest (a Bejeweled-engine RPG) is absolutely brilliant, and definitely constitutes real innovation. It's a real upgrade, and very clever.
Seriously, package integration (or removal) is NOT easy, in general, and trying to get it foolproofed is a major headache. What do you do if someone wants to "easily" remove some useless stuff he never uses (expat) but not the programs that depend on it?
You will eventually reinvent all the huge and occasionally buggy installers everyone's got, or something equivalent.
It's not going to be easy. It might be worth it, but think about it first; do you really need that level of customization? Why?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, someone played Rez.
There's a reasonable set of people who were waiting for a price drop (who might have bought at $600 if they'd been SURE there was no price drop coming), or who would have bought at any time for $500, but not for $600. And, of those people, some don't care enough to find out immediately about the price drop... But most of them will have seen PS3's in a store at $500 in a month.
Actual hardware emulation seems to have been close enough to flawless that I've yet to hear of a PS2 game not working with it; software emulation seems to work on something like 50%-80% of games, assuming you skip cut scenes and otherwise go easy on it. Unit would be "games you can play through completely", and it's about 99% to about... less. Maybe 80%, optimistically. Don't be fooled by "I put in the game and got the splash screen". As an example, a software emulator for the PS1 I had some years back ran Wild Arms fine -- until you wanted to teach the magic user a new spell. Then it locked up. There was no workaround for this. It just couldn't be made to work. The game could not be completed, but you wouldn't know until several hours in.
Sales are up after a price drop!
So. The real question is this: How much higher will they be a month or so AFTER the price drop?
Hotmail's blocking people who don't pay. No one's proposed blocking people who don't use goodmail; they've proposed whitelisting people who do.
Hotmail's deliverability is unreliable even when you're "clean", so I'd just write it off; do not use hotmail for business services, and do not accept hotmail addresses for anything where you need reliable delivery.
He harasses newspapers too.
I suppose in theory I could. I posted the changes to a list or something, I think. I don't have them anymore. It's not like it took more than about five minutes of work.
Long since. My changes are rejected on the grounds that they are not compatible -- on a real Windows machine, F13-F24 exist. WoW doesn't support them, though, so it ignores those keysyms. I hacked my version of WINE to pass them in as Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F(N-12). That is not acceptable to the WINE project, and for good reason; it's an undesirable feature, and the correct fix is for WoW to accept the full range of function keys. (Windows supports up through F32 in theory, and USB keyboards have well-defined values up through F24).
It's more accurate than your pro-Sony nonsense. The software emulation is far from complete, while actually running games on their original hardware was fairly effective.
If you're faking them, you can correct your errors, but you'll botch badly when you're inattentive or overworked. NTs are pretty good most of the time, but... When their skills don't work, they're useless, because they don't have a functional cognitive model of what they're doing.
I just got diagnosed formally yesterday. I'm thirty-five. While there was some suspicion that I had a "learning disability" in grade school, I was evaluated about ten years before knowledge of high-functioning autism was widespread in the US, so they just wrote it off to "weird gifted kid". I've been functional enough, but the fact is, I can do a lot better with more information. (Honestly, if anyone had TOLD me early on that other people have feelings, which they do not describe, but which you can learn about by observing their behavior, I would probably have been pretty decent socially by college.)
Can you still tell? Hell, yes. I freak out if people unsort my carefully-sorted candy. I twitch and jitter and rock. I refuse to try new foods. I also, as it happens, turn out to be a star engineer that other engineers turn to for kibitzing and second opinions on a broad variety of topics. That's part of it too.
If everyone were like me, that'd be bad. If no one were like me, that'd be bad too. Vive le difference!
Okay, who wants to try to come up with words which provide network neutrality, without preventing me from blocking spammers. :) (Note: I would, of course, be willing to let someone who wants to put up some money to back his claim that his mail is legitimate send me mail. After all, the problem with spam is that, since it's free, it grows without bounds. If it costs money, he's not going to send tons of crap.)
I maintained a personal branch of Wine so I could have more function keys in World of Warcraft -- Linux supports more function keys, so I remapped them into modified keys WoW could handle. I've learned programming languages to work on games. I semi-regularly put in 16-hour days of gaming when I'm looking to destress. I have not one, not two, but THREE game-playing devices with me everywhere I go.
I could give a shit about another "40-hour" FPS, but surgery or hypnotism would be involved.
The Wii is the best thing to happen to my console gaming experience in years. The PS3 is utterly irrelevant to me as a gamer. Yeah, yeah. Cue the people claiming I just can't afford one; I've had one since last December. I run Linux on it. The games are just more derivative crap. The total interesting play time of every PS3 game I've seen put together can't come within a full working week of what I've gotten out of Wii Sports Tennis alone. Paper Mario is the first platformer since the Genesis Sonic era to do something I haven't already gotten bored with.
You think I should consider kids who can't get off on a game unless it's gory and their parents don't want them playing it to be "hardcore" gamers? I don't. When they're into gaming enough to write games, when they've been playing games more than a few years, then they can talk. Until then, they're just wannabes.
Maybe it would help if you understood that logic is a kind of mathematics.
Math is a much broader field than you seem to think, and a great deal of it has nothing to do with numbers.
Can you explain why bubblesort is often worse than quicksort? That's mathematics. Can you estimate whether ethernet's "random delay and retry" collision handling is likely to resolve a collision in milliseconds, seconds, or hours? That's mathematics, too.
You need to get out more, I know a number of atheists who not only lack belief in God, but specifically disbelieve. Try iidb.org. They're not a majority, but they're certainly not the empty set.
:)
Some people don't collect stamps. Some people refuse to buy stamps on principle.
(Note that I'm not saying it's a religion, just that strong atheism exists.)
No, no, I understand how the internet works.
I see no evidence at all that anyone is actually successfully breaking it, or that if they did, that there would be any problem other than people switching providers.
Your proposed language is dangerously vague, overbroad, and implies a sort of hypothetical world in which all traffic is desired. You have not suggested a way to allow people to block or filter unwanted connections when they have good reasons to do so. You have not convinced me that I don't want people to have the option of paying extra to get better service.
Keep in mind the flip side; it's not just about possibly degrading service, but also about buying upgrades. The service we currently get is pretty degraded sometimes under load. If someone wants to pay extra to get bandwidth guarantees, that's fine by me.
Yes, I've followed the situation.
You haven't made a case for this legislation at all. I am well aware of the alleged problem, and frankly, I don't think it's one that needs legislation. I think this is well within the scope of market forces to fix.
Every time someone proposes a "fix", it's worse than the actual problem. The mere fact that we don't like something a company might do does not mean we need legislation.
I am so glad you guys weren't around when New Coke came out. I could see the regular discussions on Slashdot of the need for legislation against changes to the recipe of well-liked products.
And why do they need to say that?
What's the problem this legislation is going to fix?
What happens when I want to run a spam filter, which blocks mail from large spam sources, but one of those sources has a single opt-in list that includes "requested information"? Right now, I can point out to my customers that, well, we have a spam filter. Under your wording, I'm in trouble for "interfering with the delivery of services and information". Sounds like a bad law to me.
Try again, and this time explain why we need this?
Look, I know that everyone here gets regular blowjobs from network neutrality, but I'm just wondering. Having looked at the Patriot Act, and the YES-YOU-CAN-SPAM act, and our "healthcare system" (I use the term loosely), and our current, uhm, whatever it is, but it's certainly not a war, over in Iraq...
Are you guys SURE you want the US federal government legislating this?
I have said it before, and I suppose it's time to say it again: Most of the time, when I see someone try to articulate what "network neutrality" means, that they want legislated, they end up with a set of words which, if they were a law, would prevent me from blocking spammers and DDOSers. There are good reasons for which networks are sometimes rather decidedly non-neutral about which traffic they carry, and there are real reasons for which people would like to have the option of paying for guaranteed bandwidth.
Most of the horror stories come down to "what if I only got the sorta dodgy networking I'm currently paying for, but other people were able to buy a better network." Not all; there's real potential for abuse. I just don't think I trust the US federal government to come up with something better, no matter how smart or good the people advocating it are... And honestly, a lot of the advocacy I see is knee-jerk reactions that haven't even bothered to gloss over the question of whether teergrubing should be illegal, or any of the dozens of other technical questions this raises.
Now it will be impossible to get a $2,000 Macintosh discounted to $1,997.97!
When I did tech support many years back, we had a customer who lost a Sun workstation every couple of months. After a while, we got serious about investigating.
Turns out their building had two types of power plugs; ones that were on a separate service for computers and such, and plugs that were only suitable for things that were pretty tolerant, because they were used for some huge machinery, and had CONSTANT voltage spikes and drops.
The workstations were plugged into the wrong power bits.
This really, to me, sounds more like a guy whose setup is damaging machines than like manufacturing problems.
I noticed the thing with the same starting board too. It's a funny bug, but I don't mind getting a free head start on tough fights.
What "kind of software patent" do you think they would go for? How do you think they'd get it?
http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/copyright/cases /allen_vs_academicgames.html
"Here, Allen has not shown that it is possible to distinguish the
expression of the rules of his game manuals from the idea of
the rules themselves. Thus, the doctrine of merger applies and
although Allen may be entitled to copyright protection for the
physical form of his games, he is not afforded protection for
the premises or ideas underlying those games. To hold other-
wise would give Allen a monopoly on such commonplace
ideas as a simple rule on how youngsters should play their
games."
For what it's worth, Puzzle Quest (a Bejeweled-engine RPG) is absolutely brilliant, and definitely constitutes real innovation. It's a real upgrade, and very clever.
Have someone do it for you.
Seriously, package integration (or removal) is NOT easy, in general, and trying to get it foolproofed is a major headache. What do you do if someone wants to "easily" remove some useless stuff he never uses (expat) but not the programs that depend on it?
You will eventually reinvent all the huge and occasionally buggy installers everyone's got, or something equivalent.
It's not going to be easy. It might be worth it, but think about it first; do you really need that level of customization? Why?