Seconded. When I had a solo, with a bad battery, they refused to swap the battery for a few months, because I was running Unix, and they were sure it was a Unix problem. Finally, I got them to swap the entire fucking *CHASSIS* (including the LCD display and 32MB ram) twice, and that didn't work, so I called and said "okay, now, how about we just *try* my crazy theory that the battery itself is dodgy".
Not very helpful. When I called a while later to ask about a non-Windows laptop, the sales guy *laughed at me*. Not "hah-hah, that's funny", but "what the fuck are you smoking, not using Windows".
Let's just say I'm no longer a Gateway customer, huh?:)
It hits everyone in the industry,fairly consistently. Let's play the question the other way: Do you have any evidence that their games were *NOT* pirated?
Of course they don't list it as a specific reason; the exact numbers aren't known, and it's hardly unique to them. It's just that the smaller studios have a harder time making ends meet to begin with.
I have yet to hear of a game company which isn't suffering at least some from piracy. I don't see why we should assume this particular company is immune.
And yes, I used this as a platform, because slashdot has a number of users who, to borrow Mr. Wall's phrase, can't tell the difference between giving and taking.
They will never willingly admit that stealing from people has any connection to good companies going under, but you can remind them, and maybe occasionally a few will grow up.
"strong sales". So, if something does well, that proves that there are no conditions under which it would have done better?
If there are people who decided not to buy the game because they could warez it, that's less money for the company. If there were enough of those people, that would make the difference.
Do you think that only unpopular games that no one likes are copied? Do you think warez dudez sit around saying "I need a suckier game"? They steal the same things that other people buy, by and large. If a game is cool enough for a couple hundred thousand people to buy it, it's cool enough for some people to steal it.
The video game industry is full of close calls, full of companies "on the edge". That little margin is often a lot smaller than the amount of warez involved.
Keep repeating it, maybe someday you won't feel guilty anymore.
(Disclaimer: I know full well most pirates don't feel guilty anyway.)
*sigh*.
"Designed from the ground up for..."
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 5
That's the kind of thing that terrifies me. I already have Windows. Why would I want another system that wants to devote its existance to a single platform?
Now, this system is probably better than Windows. Hell, I can't *imagine* how it could be worse.
But what *IS* it with this idea that designing for a specific platform is anything but a short-sighted, ill-considered, idea? Do you remember the amount of trouble Linux/alpha was? The amount of effort that the *BSD's had to put into getting the early Alpha and PPC ports? It's a *HUGE* amount of work to redesign. Design from the ground up for *generic computers*, and let the individual machines cope. You'll end up better off.
(Remember the Apple ads based on using 486-optimized Bytemark code on PC's? Same problem. If you tie yourself down, well, you're tied down.)
Heh. "As long as all apps use Ctrl+click the same way". Of course, they don't; many, many apps use command-click. Quite a few use option-click. One uses keypad-=, or command-R.
I have a four button mouse, and three of its buttons are dedicated to providing right-clicks for various applications which I find important.
This is a tribute to the difference between UI consistency (won't always work) and OS support (will always work, but may surprise you).
I would not call the illusion of supporting multiple buttons "seamless" on a Mac. Netscape doesn't use ctrl-click for pop-up menus... Right there, boom, no standard interface. None of my word processors do it, either.
I really wish they'd gone the other way; establish multiple buttons, then let the user configure some modifiers as equivalent to buttons, or something like that.
You can buy a multi-button mouse, but the only way to use it is to bind the buttons to things like modifier-clicks, because the OS still has no concept of additional buttons.
They actually yanked all the 2-button support from NextStep to make OS X. Go figure.
Also, while the mac install may be "easy", if it doesn't want to do the right thing, you're screwed... so, it has two settings, "easy" and "impossible". No middle ground.
You make a very good point about the user bases. Is MacOS 9 a good platform for Unix development? No. Is Corel Linux a good platform for photoshop? No.
Systems tend not to be be-all/end-all projects. If you have a number of widely different needs, you may need to run more than one OS.
Next on C|Net: "Screwdrivers vs. Hammers: A tool deathmatch."
I wouldn't say you can *ignore* C89; you have to expect a lot of systems to be using it for a few years yet.
Anyway, the issue is, many systems already returned "success" automatically, and it's painfully easy for a compiler to do; gcc already had the code, and it basically makes up for one of the most common problems newbies ran into. It also encourages compilers to shut up about falling off the end of main, so people don't get the mistaken idea that main can return void in portable code.
(For the record, Schildt is an "observing" member, which means he pays dues and never shows up at meetings, and it's unclear that he "observes" very much.)
Long ago, when I was playing on a Mac SE in China, I had a chart of 68k instructions. So, one day, I decided that Wizardry I needed to give me more hit points, and dammit, I was going to make it give me more hit points. (You started with 8 in Wizardry, and I wanted 12, because I was used to hack. Stupid reason, I know.)
So, I searched through code segments until I found a pair of move-immediates moving 8 into two adjacent locations, and I changed the 8s to 12s, and it worked. I did a few other binary patches. I once did myself a custom-tuned version of "hack" where all the monsters were 2x-3x tougher than they are in standard hack. Interesting point: It gives you more XP's if you make a monster tougher.
That's how I learned to program. It never occurred to me that you weren't supposed to interact with binaries that way.;)
Citation, please? And if you tell me it's from a Schildt book, I'm not even going to respond, I'm just going to laugh at you.
You've seen a quote from the standard in this thread. It's a FAQ for comp.lang.c.
Also, it is *NOT* an error to fall off the end of main after declaring it type int. That code is *REQUIRED* to compile correctly. A compiler may warn you (and indeed, should!) but *MUST* accept the trivial program: int main(void) {}
In C89, that returns random nonsense; in C99, it's successful.
Well, C99. C89 doesn't define the return status without an explicit return from main or call to exit(). (In fact, one of the arguments for fixing this was that the old wording was that the termination status was "undefined", but only behavior can be undefined, and the intent was clearly not that the behavior be undefined if you fell off the end...)
Note that the "some other implementation defined manner" thing buys you nothing; there's no promise that such a manner remains defined, there's no implementations I know of that actually promise anything...
(And, of course, most of the people doing this are still using C89 compilers, and C89 didn't have the allowance for another format.)
I mostly do tools that make my life (read "work") easier, and I also cheat at video games. That's how I got started, and it's still the most fun part of programming.
Hack for hacking's sake. You'll find a project you want to do that no one has thought of. Don't try to pick a field. Play in them all.
The main obstacles are technical and political; the NetBSD people have insisted on a few substantial differences in kernel structures. Still, code has been shared in the past, and probably will be in the future.
Anyway, where do you think the Alpha port came from? Lots and lots of code was "borrowed". (In fact, this is one of the old grudges; some of the people who did the BSD-on-Alpha work originally feel they didn't get fairly credited for their work when it got borrowed.)
Anyway, the code is out there, and anyone can use it. Neat, huh? It's sort of like *actually* free software.
They may do an x86 later, but keep in mind, they started with BSD-on-mach running on 68k and x86. The PPC *is* the "new" platform. As to why they want to stick with it, probably because they've got a lot of useful hooks there that they've slowly been building over the last umpteen years, and they see no reason to change.
BSD kernel only? Wouldn't give them access to some of the mach features and device drivers they've put some effort into. Mach without BSD? Nothing would run.
BSD-on-mach is hardly a unique idea, and it's not a totally silly one, even.
So, here's my theory: Symantec and NAI, et al., are largely at fault for this one.
They put out a band-aid. Because there was a band-aid, millions of computers were not actually fixed. So, thanks to the anti-virus companies, people whose systems are still quite vulnerable *THOUGHT* they were safe.
If, instead of shoving out a band-aid, they had said "this isn't something virus software can stop, you need to turn off your scripting host", millions of people would not just have lost days or weeks of work.
Isn't that weird? Half-assed solutions don't really work.
You know the law that lets people sue you if their kids drown in your swimming pool, if you don't have a fence or anything?
It occurs to me that leaving a gigantic security hole in a system with millions of users is roughly similar. After Melissa, I think we knew about this, and I think Microsoft could have actually fixed the problem.
Come on, folks, did anyone *really* expect a company that once proudly proclaimed that they were sending email to 53,000,000 people in every run to suddenly get a clue?
RBL listings, plural, did not get these people to fix their problems.
My response? I donated a computer to http://www.free-expression.org/, and got my employer to donate them a license for another OS they might be able to target.:)
Give it a look, and if it seems interesting, get involved. If we replace RealAudio, RealNetworks will die quietly, which is pretty much the best they deserve.
The selection of phones is too confusing for me, but I've used the browser over a plain old modem, and I understand it works pretty well with a cell phone that does modem stuff.
It's a nice idea; 640-pixel wide screen, fonts, zoom control for dealing with small fonts, email...
"fair use" is a term of art, it doesn't just mean "reasonable".
1. Fair use is what's called an "affirmative defense". You say "yes, your work is under copyright, and I did indeed copy it without your permission, but that's okay because...", and as such, you *NEVER* argue it until you lose every other point, because claiming fair use voids most of the other defenses. You admit that you did it to claim fair use.
2. How is this "fair use"? Fair use allows for, as an example, quotes to support a point. It very rarely allows for a wholesale copying of protected material.
I would not think this would be a good case to take a "fair use" angle. Slashdot's primary defense, IMHO (and I am not any kind of lawyer), should be:
1. The "trade secret" stuff is intrinsically meaningless to many members of the community. Some of them may, indeed, have protected MS's trade secret as well as they protect their own. MS should not publish trade secrets on the internet and expect to be taken seriously.
2. Slashdot did not post the material intentionally; users chose to use slashdot to post it. This is the "sort-of-like-a-common-carrier" defense.
3. Removing the material, at this point, changes nothing. Microsoft botched, Microsoft lost control of a proprietary hack, Microsoft is now trying to regain face by making someone suffer. Let's run this by Judge Jackson.
I dunno. I think slashdot is probably close to technically in the wrong... That said, I guess they could also try:
4. The specification, while it may be copyrighted, is covered by the merger doctrine; the idea itself of the spec extension cannot be protected by copyright. The text could be, but it is hard in this case to distinguish the extension from the text describing it, and thus, protection may not apply to the work.
5. Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that unauthorized copying has occurred, such copying is clearly in the spirit of the fair use clause, because it is necessary for people to see this material to manage compatability. Microsoft released this material after people complained about interoperability. They should cope.
Slashdot Mirror
Seconded. When I had a solo, with a bad battery, they refused to swap the battery for a few months, because I was running Unix, and they were sure it was a Unix problem. Finally, I got them to swap the entire fucking *CHASSIS* (including the LCD display and 32MB ram) twice, and that didn't work, so I called and said "okay, now, how about we just *try* my crazy theory that the battery itself is dodgy".
:)
Not very helpful. When I called a while later to ask about a non-Windows laptop, the sales guy *laughed at me*. Not "hah-hah, that's funny", but "what the fuck are you smoking, not using Windows".
Let's just say I'm no longer a Gateway customer, huh?
(Oh, and of course, they spam.)
It hits everyone in the industry,fairly consistently. Let's play the question the other way: Do you have any evidence that their games were *NOT* pirated?
Of course they don't list it as a specific reason; the exact numbers aren't known, and it's hardly unique to them. It's just that the smaller studios have a harder time making ends meet to begin with.
I have yet to hear of a game company which isn't suffering at least some from piracy. I don't see why we should assume this particular company is immune.
And yes, I used this as a platform, because slashdot has a number of users who, to borrow Mr. Wall's phrase, can't tell the difference between giving and taking.
They will never willingly admit that stealing from people has any connection to good companies going under, but you can remind them, and maybe occasionally a few will grow up.
"strong sales". So, if something does well, that proves that there are no conditions under which it would have done better?
If there are people who decided not to buy the game because they could warez it, that's less money for the company. If there were enough of those people, that would make the difference.
Do you think that only unpopular games that no one likes are copied? Do you think warez dudez sit around saying "I need a suckier game"? They steal the same things that other people buy, by and large. If a game is cool enough for a couple hundred thousand people to buy it, it's cool enough for some people to steal it.
The video game industry is full of close calls, full of companies "on the edge". That little margin is often a lot smaller than the amount of warez involved.
Thanks to the magic of software piracy, you'll still be able to get all the games they've released, at the same price you've always paid.
Remember, software piracy doesn't hurt developers, crappy and overpriced products do.
Keep repeating it, maybe someday you won't feel guilty anymore.
(Disclaimer: I know full well most pirates don't feel guilty anyway.)
*sigh*.
That's the kind of thing that terrifies me. I already have Windows. Why would I want another system that wants to devote its existance to a single platform?
Now, this system is probably better than Windows. Hell, I can't *imagine* how it could be worse.
But what *IS* it with this idea that designing for a specific platform is anything but a short-sighted, ill-considered, idea? Do you remember the amount of trouble Linux/alpha was? The amount of effort that the *BSD's had to put into getting the early Alpha and PPC ports? It's a *HUGE* amount of work to redesign. Design from the ground up for *generic computers*, and let the individual machines cope. You'll end up better off.
(Remember the Apple ads based on using 486-optimized Bytemark code on PC's? Same problem. If you tie yourself down, well, you're tied down.)
Heh. "As long as all apps use Ctrl+click the same way". Of course, they don't; many, many apps use command-click. Quite a few use option-click. One uses keypad-=, or command-R.
I have a four button mouse, and three of its buttons are dedicated to providing right-clicks for various applications which I find important.
This is a tribute to the difference between UI consistency (won't always work) and OS support (will always work, but may surprise you).
I would not call the illusion of supporting multiple buttons "seamless" on a Mac. Netscape doesn't use ctrl-click for pop-up menus... Right there, boom, no standard interface. None of my word processors do it, either.
I really wish they'd gone the other way; establish multiple buttons, then let the user configure some modifiers as equivalent to buttons, or something like that.
You can buy a multi-button mouse, but the only way to use it is to bind the buttons to things like modifier-clicks, because the OS still has no concept of additional buttons.
They actually yanked all the 2-button support from NextStep to make OS X. Go figure.
Also, while the mac install may be "easy", if it doesn't want to do the right thing, you're screwed... so, it has two settings, "easy" and "impossible". No middle ground.
You make a very good point about the user bases. Is MacOS 9 a good platform for Unix development? No. Is Corel Linux a good platform for photoshop? No.
Systems tend not to be be-all/end-all projects. If you have a number of widely different needs, you may need to run more than one OS.
Next on C|Net: "Screwdrivers vs. Hammers: A tool deathmatch."
http://www-ccsl.cs.umass.edu/~barrett/bm/Viewer_Se ctions/Articles/15_BS2
BS/2. The world's fastest OS.
I wouldn't say you can *ignore* C89; you have to expect a lot of systems to be using it for a few years yet.
Anyway, the issue is, many systems already returned "success" automatically, and it's painfully easy for a compiler to do; gcc already had the code, and it basically makes up for one of the most common problems newbies ran into. It also encourages compilers to shut up about falling off the end of main, so people don't get the mistaken idea that main can return void in portable code.
(For the record, Schildt is an "observing" member, which means he pays dues and never shows up at meetings, and it's unclear that he "observes" very much.)
Long ago, when I was playing on a Mac SE in China, I had a chart of 68k instructions. So, one day, I decided that Wizardry I needed to give me more hit points, and dammit, I was going to make it give me more hit points. (You started with 8 in Wizardry, and I wanted 12, because I was used to hack. Stupid reason, I know.)
;)
So, I searched through code segments until I found a pair of move-immediates moving 8 into two adjacent locations, and I changed the 8s to 12s, and it worked. I did a few other binary patches. I once did myself a custom-tuned version of "hack" where all the monsters were 2x-3x tougher than they are in standard hack. Interesting point: It gives you more XP's if you make a monster tougher.
That's how I learned to program. It never occurred to me that you weren't supposed to interact with binaries that way.
"void main is perfectly valid", he says.
Oh, really?
Citation, please? And if you tell me it's from a Schildt book, I'm not even going to respond, I'm just going to laugh at you.
You've seen a quote from the standard in this thread. It's a FAQ for comp.lang.c.
Also, it is *NOT* an error to fall off the end of main after declaring it type int. That code is *REQUIRED* to compile correctly. A compiler may warn you (and indeed, should!) but *MUST* accept the trivial program:
int main(void) {}
In C89, that returns random nonsense; in C99, it's successful.
(Hint: Before you flame me, read my web page.)
envp never got blessed. POSIX says
extern char **environ;
and says nothing about "envp".
Well, C99. C89 doesn't define the return status without an explicit return from main or call to exit(). (In fact, one of the arguments for fixing this was that the old wording was that the termination status was "undefined", but only behavior can be undefined, and the intent was clearly not that the behavior be undefined if you fell off the end...)
Note that the "some other implementation defined manner" thing buys you nothing; there's no promise that such a manner remains defined, there's no implementations I know of that actually promise anything...
(And, of course, most of the people doing this are still using C89 compilers, and C89 didn't have the allowance for another format.)
Uhm. "int main".
Not "void main".
Thank you.
I mostly do tools that make my life (read "work") easier, and I also cheat at video games. That's how I got started, and it's still the most fun part of programming.
Hack for hacking's sake. You'll find a project you want to do that no one has thought of. Don't try to pick a field. Play in them all.
The main obstacles are technical and political; the NetBSD people have insisted on a few substantial differences in kernel structures. Still, code has been shared in the past, and probably will be in the future.
Anyway, where do you think the Alpha port came from? Lots and lots of code was "borrowed". (In fact, this is one of the old grudges; some of the people who did the BSD-on-Alpha work originally feel they didn't get fairly credited for their work when it got borrowed.)
Anyway, the code is out there, and anyone can use it. Neat, huh? It's sort of like *actually* free software.
They may do an x86 later, but keep in mind, they started with BSD-on-mach running on 68k and x86. The PPC *is* the "new" platform. As to why they want to stick with it, probably because they've got a lot of useful hooks there that they've slowly been building over the last umpteen years, and they see no reason to change.
BSD kernel only? Wouldn't give them access to some of the mach features and device drivers they've put some effort into. Mach without BSD? Nothing would run.
BSD-on-mach is hardly a unique idea, and it's not a totally silly one, even.
So, here's my theory: Symantec and NAI, et al., are largely at fault for this one.
They put out a band-aid. Because there was a band-aid, millions of computers were not actually fixed. So, thanks to the anti-virus companies, people whose systems are still quite vulnerable *THOUGHT* they were safe.
If, instead of shoving out a band-aid, they had said "this isn't something virus software can stop, you need to turn off your scripting host", millions of people would not just have lost days or weeks of work.
Isn't that weird? Half-assed solutions don't really work.
You know the law that lets people sue you if their kids drown in your swimming pool, if you don't have a fence or anything?
It occurs to me that leaving a gigantic security hole in a system with millions of users is roughly similar. After Melissa, I think we knew about this, and I think Microsoft could have actually fixed the problem.
Come on, folks, did anyone *really* expect a company that once proudly proclaimed that they were sending email to 53,000,000 people in every run to suddenly get a clue?
:)
RBL listings, plural, did not get these people to fix their problems.
My response? I donated a computer to http://www.free-expression.org/, and got my employer to donate them a license for another OS they might be able to target.
Give it a look, and if it seems interesting, get involved. If we replace RealAudio, RealNetworks will die quietly, which is pretty much the best they deserve.
The selection of phones is too confusing for me, but I've used the browser over a plain old modem, and I understand it works pretty well with a cell phone that does modem stuff.
It's a nice idea; 640-pixel wide screen, fonts, zoom control for dealing with small fonts, email...
While I tend to agree that the DMCA is probably not constitutional, it has *nothing* to do with free speech.
The ability to reproduce someone else's work has never been a kind of free speech. Same for the press.
Copyright *DOES*, in fact, trump free speech. You're allowed to say what you want, but you aren't allowed to stea someone else's words.
"fair use" is a term of art, it doesn't just mean "reasonable".
1. Fair use is what's called an "affirmative defense". You say "yes, your work is under copyright, and I did indeed copy it without your permission, but that's okay because...", and as such, you *NEVER* argue it until you lose every other point, because claiming fair use voids most of the other defenses. You admit that you did it to claim fair use.
2. How is this "fair use"? Fair use allows for, as an example, quotes to support a point. It very rarely allows for a wholesale copying of protected material.
I would not think this would be a good case to take a "fair use" angle. Slashdot's primary defense, IMHO (and I am not any kind of lawyer), should be:
1. The "trade secret" stuff is intrinsically meaningless to many members of the community. Some of them may, indeed, have protected MS's trade secret as well as they protect their own. MS should not publish trade secrets on the internet and expect to be taken seriously.
2. Slashdot did not post the material intentionally; users chose to use slashdot to post it. This is the "sort-of-like-a-common-carrier" defense.
3. Removing the material, at this point, changes nothing. Microsoft botched, Microsoft lost control of a proprietary hack, Microsoft is now trying to regain face by making someone suffer. Let's run this by Judge Jackson.
I dunno. I think slashdot is probably close to technically in the wrong... That said, I guess they could also try:
4. The specification, while it may be copyrighted, is covered by the merger doctrine; the idea itself of the spec extension cannot be protected by copyright. The text could be, but it is hard in this case to distinguish the extension from the text describing it, and thus, protection may not apply to the work.
5. Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that unauthorized copying has occurred, such copying is clearly in the spirit of the fair use clause, because it is necessary for people to see this material to manage compatability. Microsoft released this material after people complained about interoperability. They should cope.