So, at one point, I knew this woman who thought rock, paper, scissors was sorta fun, and every so often, she'd insist on playing it. Her boyfriend got sick of this, and he would just point a single finger and say "Gun. Gun beats everything." So, once, she was playing me, and I was winning, and she tried this.
The next round, I did a sprawling-hand-spider. She said "gun." I said "space alien. Space alien is immune to gun", and I won the round.
Eventually, we also added dynamite and little bunny foo-foo, and rules for interactions between all the things. Everything beat three things, and lost to three things, so it was still balanced.
I don't remember all of the interactions, but the ones I do remember are funny.
"Townspeople throw rocks at alien" (rock beats alien) "Little bunny foo-foo picks up alien and smacks it on the head". (lbff beats alien.)
The game has room for infinite complexity if your meal hasn't arrived yet.
That would be 10,000 per million, and keep in mind, not all people who click through buy anything. Some of them complain about the ads. Some of them realize the ad was misleading.
One of the most effective banner ad techniques was the little banners that look like a Windows error message with an "OK" button. They get about 10x the clickthrough of other ads, maybe more. They get an *astounding* rate of clickthrough.
And *no one* ever buys anything. People who come in through ads like that, if they go anywhere, go looking for contact info. Most just back out of the site. Most never come back, under any circumstances.
What are you talking about? They claimed it was a trade secret. In general, that means that the stuff in question is not protected by other things. Anyway, screenshots are probably not copyright violations in a review; that's fair use.
Copyright violation "used for commercial gain" may or may not get into the criminal realm, or the huge damages; it's totally dependant on other context. I doubt a court would award anything of the sort.
$30 for a USB card reader. I disrecommend the SanDisk "SDDR-05", because it's totally undocumented. They said they could probably document the SDDR-31 model.
That's 3DO, not 3D0. You know, audio, video, threedeo.
Anyway, the killer mistake in 3DO's setup was that the companies they licensed to all tried to make money on hardware. You can't make money selling consoles, but you can, possibly, make money licensing games for them. So, Panasonic (for instance) had no incentive to price their 3DO units competitively. End result, the system didn't get the mass market acceptance it needed.
Both Sony and Sega are addressing that; they are, themselves, providing units at reasonable costs. This way, if someone else wants to get into the market, the price won't become too high for consumers to pick up a system.
I really miss the 3DO; to this day, I have never seen another system which had games with the kind of depth they tended to favor. 3DO games were often dissed for being "slow" when they were actually "deep". (e.g., Need For Speed on the 3DO was an actual car sim, rather than a racing game. I tried NFS for the PC once, and in "simulation" mode you could hit a wall at 40-50mph and expect to keep driving.)
(Curiously, the company is still around, and actually doing very well; they sold their hardware division for about $100M, bought New World Computing, and now have a bunch of fairly successful brands.)
Disclaimer: I own a couple of 3DO console systems, and several of their games, and some of their stock. I'm a big fan.
I had been starting to evaluate laptops; I'm currently using an older Thinkpad. I was really hoping that I'd be able to get IBM to sell me a non-Windows laptop.
Now, it looks like all I have to do is wait one to three months.:)
SCSI: Dozens of SCSI devices fail to implement the spec correctly, many in fairly surprising or destructive ways. Read a quirks table sometime.
ATAPI: There are lots of devices labeled "ATAPI" that use proprietary EIDE extensions instead.
JPEG: Seattle Filmworks (whatever they're called now) has a JPEG format with a corrupted header they use for photos-on-CD.
ASCII: "Smart quotes" in many web pages (probably around 5-10%?)
TCP/IP: For years, Cisco and Linux routers corrupted any TCP transmissions using RFC1323. Microsoft boxes frequently ignore MTU's, or set them incorrectly.
SMTP: Dozens of commercial mailing list systems treat 5xx error codes as "try again immediately", when it really means "this message can never be delivered".
PCI: Many motherboards, even "good" ones, have one or more slots which don't support bus-mastering cards. Some video vendors abuse bus mastering to get marginally better performance for their cards while shutting other cards out, even when the bus could be idle.
ISO9660: Rock Ridge, Joliet.
Modem signals: v.90 came after flex and x2; in many cases, v.90 modems don't interoperate correctly with older hardware, and/or the special servers v.90 modems talk to don't interoperate correctly with older hardware.
DOC and PDF formats: Neither is sufficiently stable to be considered a "standard" in the same sense as the other things.
802.3: Almost no one actually uses this by default, although many stacks have it as an option.
ATA: There are multiple different and incompatible ways of handling large drives. No three OS's agree, so far as I know.
MP3: Many "MP3" players on the market today play only "encrypted" MP3's. The ID3 tags come in two major and incompatible versions; many software players can't play files that use the new ID3v2 tags, but some software only generates those. Lots of programs can't generate or parse VBR MP3's.
Let me add a couple of others:
C: I am not aware of an implementation with no conformance bugs. Almost no one writes correct code, even if we allow for a little bit of local color (like POSIX). Many books "on ANSI C" have painful errors.
Java: There are several implementations, which have incompatible bugs, even though they're supposed to get everything else right.
NFS: Some Linux boxes negotiate for NFS v3, but don't actually *support* v3. Lots of differences in handling of locks, when they're supported at all.
/bin/sh (the POSIX-like shell): Since this is typically "bash" on Linux systems, many shell scripts written on Linux turn out to have syntax errors when compiled with a POSIX shell which isn't bash.
HTML: Does anyone need to be told how awful HTML conformance is these days?
In summary, standards are *NOT* enforced. Thank God. While all of the above-mentioned deviations can be painful, in general, *every* one of the things listed is still a usable standard >90% of the time, and we get a little innovation in the process. Fine by me.
Actually, it wouldn't be justified anyway. You partially depend on food. Is it fair if I give you some food, then take some of your stuff without asking?
The unfairness comes from the idea that one party can conjure up an agreement out of whole cloth. Agreements require that both parties, well, agree.
(And no, I'm not a troll. I just happen to think copyright law is probably not intrinsically totally wrong.)
So, by the same reasoning the Offspring are using, I can send someone at Microsoft source to a "hello, world" program. Then, because I *GAVE* them some source, they have *NO RIGHT TO COMPLAIN* if I take their source, right?
No, sorry. They're ".exe" files, in the classic DOS/Windows format. They dynamically load symbols from DLL's. They are not native. The Corel people have confirmed that they are not native. They are Windows binaries.
Eco-taxation is a perfectly good part of an effective free market. The free market is made effective when people are making maximally-informed decisions. Eco-taxation is one way to make sure that people are aware of the costs of their actions.
It's popular to assume that only a totally and absolutely untouched market is somehow "free", but in fact, we expect all sorts of limitations. Laws against killing people for money restrict the free market too, but it turns out no one minds them.
I suspect that, if we do manage to live happily in our environment, it will be because we put a reasonable value on doing so and let the only effective system we know of figure out the hard parts.
Don't let the knee-jerk reaction to the idea of a free market keep you from seeing the potential wins.
Well, right now, I'm using StarOffice and ApplixWare, both running in emulation on NetBSD. Both work well. I have WP8, but it's a little clunky.
WP9/WP2000 *IS NOT LINUX NATIVE*. One person contacted me saying he had a native WP2000, as opposed to WP Office, but Corel denies all knowledge of such a thing, and claims to have no intention of doing Linux-native ports ever again, now that they've got WINE running their software.
I don't really like this. WINE is a cool idea, but shouldn't be replacing real native software.
Anyway, the biggest problem I had was handling change-bars/revisions; no program I tried was able to "correctly" handle MS's change bars. Applix came the closest, but it still wasn't exceptionally usable.
My mom's laptop is using StarOffice now, and has done pretty well at importing whatever files need to be read.
First, the lawyer at Apogee appears to be quite right; the way people are reading the document is not the way the legalese reads. Don't like it? Well, that's how technical matters go. The purpose of the license is to discuss legal rights. If you're worried about the license, you should probably have a lawyer, just as you'd need a lawyer if Apogee *hadn't* written the license, because Law Is Complicated.
Do you think that the average lawyer will go do sysadmin stuff, and then complain because the manuals use technical terms? Well, I do too, but that doesn't mean we're right to do it to them.
Secondly, I don't think he was unprofessional. I think he was human. The people flaming him were unprofessional in the most literal sense; they were flaming him about something they knew nothing about.
Get over it, guys. The license agreement offers you additional terms under which you may use their trademarks and their copyrighted material, and that's all good for you. Insofar as you don't need a license to use these materials, the license doesn't affect you anyway, really.
Sorry, but the only time I've ever sent a "picture" of a credit card was to a small business, and it was via fax; I killed the credit card a little later anyway.:)
Pictures of cards are not one of the things the credit card companies ask you to obtain, so I would assume it's a scam.
Sure, just like there's no market for sparcs with solaris pre-installed, because everyone wants to buy their own sparc (you can get them separately) and then install the OS.:)
Keep in mind, the entire *company* isn't in that little building. There are at least four of us in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, and I know a number of other people who are distributed around the world; we even have an engineer in Norway.
Interesting. As one of the support staff, I actually *prefer* email; I generally have much better luck troubleshooting via email, because people cut and paste. Exact error messages are very useful.
This is probably less of a problem with experienced techies, but with the newer sysadmins, it's almost impossible to understand problems from the descriptions you get.;)
I do like to think we're fairly knowledgable, though. Glad to know we give a decent impression to the customers.:)
Slashdot Mirror
So, everyone remembers "chroma-key" (aka bluescreen, and the thing that makes weathermens' ties invisible.)
I always wanted to see them use "porno-key", the system which replaces any pornographic material with a calm mountain lake.
So, you'd have this giant, thrusting, penis-shaped calm mountain lake scene superimposed on an empty bedroom.
But it'd eliminate the pornography.
So, at one point, I knew this woman who thought rock, paper, scissors was sorta fun, and every so often, she'd insist on playing it. Her boyfriend got sick of this, and he would just point a single finger and say "Gun. Gun beats everything." So, once, she was playing me, and I was winning, and she tried this.
The next round, I did a sprawling-hand-spider. She said "gun." I said "space alien. Space alien is immune to gun", and I won the round.
Eventually, we also added dynamite and little bunny foo-foo, and rules for interactions between all the things. Everything beat three things, and lost to three things, so it was still balanced.
I don't remember all of the interactions, but the ones I do remember are funny.
"Townspeople throw rocks at alien" (rock beats alien)
"Little bunny foo-foo picks up alien and smacks it on the head". (lbff beats alien.)
The game has room for infinite complexity if your meal hasn't arrived yet.
That would be 10,000 per million, and keep in mind, not all people who click through buy anything. Some of them complain about the ads. Some of them realize the ad was misleading.
One of the most effective banner ad techniques was the little banners that look like a Windows error message with an "OK" button. They get about 10x the clickthrough of other ads, maybe more. They get an *astounding* rate of clickthrough.
And *no one* ever buys anything. People who come in through ads like that, if they go anywhere, go looking for contact info. Most just back out of the site. Most never come back, under any circumstances.
Click through, alone, is a poor measurement.
http://slash.dot/.slash/
"aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot slash dot slash slash".
What are you talking about? They claimed it was a trade secret. In general, that means that the stuff in question is not protected by other things. Anyway, screenshots are probably not copyright violations in a review; that's fair use.
Copyright violation "used for commercial gain" may or may not get into the criminal realm, or the huge damages; it's totally dependant on other context. I doubt a court would award anything of the sort.
$30 for a USB card reader. I disrecommend the SanDisk "SDDR-05", because it's totally undocumented. They said they could probably document the SDDR-31 model.
That's 3DO, not 3D0. You know, audio, video, threedeo.
Anyway, the killer mistake in 3DO's setup was that the companies they licensed to all tried to make money on hardware. You can't make money selling consoles, but you can, possibly, make money licensing games for them. So, Panasonic (for instance) had no incentive to price their 3DO units competitively. End result, the system didn't get the mass market acceptance it needed.
Both Sony and Sega are addressing that; they are, themselves, providing units at reasonable costs. This way, if someone else wants to get into the market, the price won't become too high for consumers to pick up a system.
I really miss the 3DO; to this day, I have never seen another system which had games with the kind of depth they tended to favor. 3DO games were often dissed for being "slow" when they were actually "deep". (e.g., Need For Speed on the 3DO was an actual car sim, rather than a racing game. I tried NFS for the PC once, and in "simulation" mode you could hit a wall at 40-50mph and expect to keep driving.)
(Curiously, the company is still around, and actually doing very well; they sold their hardware division for about $100M, bought New World Computing, and now have a bunch of fairly successful brands.)
Disclaimer: I own a couple of 3DO console systems, and several of their games, and some of their stock. I'm a big fan.
>An agreement was made between Adobe and Person X,
>and Person X violated the terms of the agreement.
Yes, but do we know that Person X has any relationship to MacNN? If he doesn't, they're suing the wrong entity.
I had been starting to evaluate laptops; I'm currently using an older Thinkpad. I was really hoping that I'd be able to get IBM to sell me a non-Windows laptop.
:)
Now, it looks like all I have to do is wait one to three months.
Not so well followed as that:
SCSI: Dozens of SCSI devices fail to implement the spec correctly, many in fairly surprising or destructive ways. Read a quirks table sometime.
ATAPI: There are lots of devices labeled "ATAPI" that use proprietary EIDE extensions instead.
JPEG: Seattle Filmworks (whatever they're called now) has a JPEG format with a corrupted header they use for photos-on-CD.
ASCII: "Smart quotes" in many web pages (probably around 5-10%?)
TCP/IP: For years, Cisco and Linux routers corrupted any TCP transmissions using RFC1323. Microsoft boxes frequently ignore MTU's, or set them incorrectly.
SMTP: Dozens of commercial mailing list systems treat 5xx error codes as "try again immediately", when it really means "this message can never be delivered".
PCI: Many motherboards, even "good" ones, have one or more slots which don't support bus-mastering cards. Some video vendors abuse bus mastering to get marginally better performance for their cards while shutting other cards out, even when the bus could be idle.
ISO9660: Rock Ridge, Joliet.
Modem signals: v.90 came after flex and x2; in many cases, v.90 modems don't interoperate correctly with older hardware, and/or the special servers v.90 modems talk to don't interoperate correctly with older hardware.
DOC and PDF formats: Neither is sufficiently stable to be considered a "standard" in the same sense as the other things.
802.3: Almost no one actually uses this by default, although many stacks have it as an option.
ATA: There are multiple different and incompatible ways of handling large drives. No three OS's agree, so far as I know.
MP3: Many "MP3" players on the market today play only "encrypted" MP3's. The ID3 tags come in two major and incompatible versions; many software players can't play files that use the new ID3v2 tags, but some software only generates those. Lots of programs can't generate or parse VBR MP3's.
Let me add a couple of others:
C: I am not aware of an implementation with no conformance bugs. Almost no one writes correct code, even if we allow for a little bit of local color (like POSIX). Many books "on ANSI C" have painful errors.
Java: There are several implementations, which have incompatible bugs, even though they're supposed to get everything else right.
NFS: Some Linux boxes negotiate for NFS v3, but don't actually *support* v3. Lots of differences in handling of locks, when they're supported at all.
/bin/sh (the POSIX-like shell): Since this is typically "bash" on Linux systems, many shell scripts written on Linux turn out to have syntax errors when compiled with a POSIX shell which isn't bash.
HTML: Does anyone need to be told how awful HTML conformance is these days?
In summary, standards are *NOT* enforced. Thank God. While all of the above-mentioned deviations can be painful, in general, *every* one of the things listed is still a usable standard >90% of the time, and we get a little innovation in the process. Fine by me.
Actually, it wouldn't be justified anyway. You partially depend on food. Is it fair if I give you some food, then take some of your stuff without asking?
The unfairness comes from the idea that one party can conjure up an agreement out of whole cloth. Agreements require that both parties, well, agree.
(And no, I'm not a troll. I just happen to think copyright law is probably not intrinsically totally wrong.)
So, by the same reasoning the Offspring are using, I can send someone at Microsoft source to a "hello, world" program. Then, because I *GAVE* them some source, they have *NO RIGHT TO COMPLAIN* if I take their source, right?
Neat!
Yeah, but I don't *want* a WINE binary - partially because I'm running all the other Linux programs I use on non-Linux platforms. :)
Applix works on my box; WP2K doesn't. That's all I see.
No, sorry. They're ".exe" files, in the classic DOS/Windows format. They dynamically load symbols from DLL's. They are not native. The Corel people have confirmed that they are not native. They are Windows binaries.
Don't believe me? Run "file wp9.exe".
Eco-taxation is a perfectly good part of an effective free market. The free market is made effective when people are making maximally-informed decisions. Eco-taxation is one way to make sure that people are aware of the costs of their actions.
It's popular to assume that only a totally and absolutely untouched market is somehow "free", but in fact, we expect all sorts of limitations. Laws against killing people for money restrict the free market too, but it turns out no one minds them.
I suspect that, if we do manage to live happily in our environment, it will be because we put a reasonable value on doing so and let the only effective system we know of figure out the hard parts.
Don't let the knee-jerk reaction to the idea of a free market keep you from seeing the potential wins.
Well, right now, I'm using StarOffice and ApplixWare, both running in emulation on NetBSD. Both work well. I have WP8, but it's a little clunky.
WP9/WP2000 *IS NOT LINUX NATIVE*. One person contacted me saying he had a native WP2000, as opposed to WP Office, but Corel denies all knowledge of such a thing, and claims to have no intention of doing Linux-native ports ever again, now that they've got WINE running their software.
I don't really like this. WINE is a cool idea, but shouldn't be replacing real native software.
Anyway, the biggest problem I had was handling change-bars/revisions; no program I tried was able to "correctly" handle MS's change bars. Applix came the closest, but it still wasn't exceptionally usable.
My mom's laptop is using StarOffice now, and has done pretty well at importing whatever files need to be read.
First, the lawyer at Apogee appears to be quite right; the way people are reading the document is not the way the legalese reads. Don't like it? Well, that's how technical matters go. The purpose of the license is to discuss legal rights. If you're worried about the license, you should probably have a lawyer, just as you'd need a lawyer if Apogee *hadn't* written the license, because Law Is Complicated.
Do you think that the average lawyer will go do sysadmin stuff, and then complain because the manuals use technical terms? Well, I do too, but that doesn't mean we're right to do it to them.
Secondly, I don't think he was unprofessional. I think he was human. The people flaming him were unprofessional in the most literal sense; they were flaming him about something they knew nothing about.
Get over it, guys. The license agreement offers you additional terms under which you may use their trademarks and their copyrighted material, and that's all good for you. Insofar as you don't need a license to use these materials, the license doesn't affect you anyway, really.
BSD/OS has SMP, too, and has for quite some time. :)
SMP is a really neat feature, but I admit it's not that heavily used; frankly, I'd guess 90% of the people I talk to don't need it and don't care.
Sorry, but the only time I've ever sent a "picture" of a credit card was to a small business, and it was via fax; I killed the credit card a little later anyway. :)
Pictures of cards are not one of the things the credit card companies ask you to obtain, so I would assume it's a scam.
Sure, just like there's no market for sparcs with solaris pre-installed, because everyone wants to buy their own sparc (you can get them separately) and then install the OS. :)
The USB code is nice, which is why, of course, I run NetBSD on my laptop. :)
I think the turning point was around the time when bus_space got integrated. Drivers have come out faster since then.
I don't think that counts. They didn't *invent* CSS. They just implemented. That's not research, that's *development*.
No new concepts. No new technology. Just an implementation, using old techniques, of a spec someone had already written.
Keep in mind, the entire *company* isn't in that little building. There are at least four of us in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, and I know a number of other people who are distributed around the world; we even have an engineer in Norway.
Telecommute rocks.
Interesting. As one of the support staff, I actually *prefer* email; I generally have much better luck troubleshooting via email, because people cut and paste. Exact error messages are very useful.
;)
:)
This is probably less of a problem with experienced techies, but with the newer sysadmins, it's almost impossible to understand problems from the descriptions you get.
I do like to think we're fairly knowledgable, though. Glad to know we give a decent impression to the customers.
Note to the clueless: The above is a joke, not flamebait, not a troll, and not "offtopic" in context. It's funny. Laugh.