They're giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free.
This quote deeply hacked me off when I saw it, because I was watching it on Sky, a subscription channel for which I pay money to watch as it's the only place to get new episodes of things like the Simpsons/Star Trek/Andromeda/Angel/Buffy/... (unless you want to wait a couple of years to get a cut-up-edited version on your local terrestrial station...)
And you know the adverts put on in between programmes? They aren't just there for fun, they do it because the broadcasters get paid for it; and the fact is you pay for that through the products you buy every day, most of which you see adverts for on the TV.
The summary is these programmes aren't "for free", some I pay to watch more directly than others, but I do pay to watch them all and that money goes into the pockets of the programme makers - If they want me to not complain then they should give them away for free - How about they stick 'em up as MPEG clips on a webserver and let me download them when I want for nothing?
No?
Thought not....The fact is the programme makers sell them and I buy them, if it turns out that what I was sold was junk then first I'll complain, next I'll stop buying, and I don't think many people from either camp want to see that..
The impact on the Midlands new town would trigger an explosion the equivalent of 15 hydrogen bombs, wiping Telford - birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and which now boasts "one of Shropshire's larger shopping centres" - off the map....
Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester and Nottingham would all be destroyed
I'm sold on the concept so far. So do they want donations to help now or what?
"Well, I disagree, but the producers of Robot Wars apparently agreed with you. In the first episode of "Robot Wars UK" (the new season) which KLRU showed, was 7 one-on-one duels (with the house robots, of course).
Yeah, the last couple of seasons of RW have been duels based, but the first couple of series had a few obstacle/challenge rounds up front, and to be honest they really just got real dull real quick (watching several badly damaged robots crawl around trying to push a football into a net is really not a whole lot of fun).
Although to be fair they also run special challenges like the pinball challenge (run your robot round a huge pinball course & score points) and sumo (push against a house robot) which are pretty neat.
Actually ISTR seeing a series on the making of RW where on one of the production people mentioned that the obstacle course stuff was introduced partially beause they were scared that a contestant might come up with a robot that just walked over everything (including the house robots) and that could have left them with a pretty short series:)
the announcer on robotwars is so annoying
Well, lister (Craig charles) is alright, but the guy who voice overs the matches is *really* annoying
...Quake 3 has a single player
In single player mode, of course, you don't need to authenticate. The game works fine without a network connection...
A LAN-party network may not even be connected to the Internet
More of a problem, but how often does this happen?
the Creative JukeBox still suffers from Creative's ugly corporate obstinateness
Eh? This might lose me all Karma ever but why is it that suddenly not going open source is "ugly corporate obstinateness"? Sure open source is a good choice for lots of companies/tool vendors/whatever but it's not automagically the right choice for everyone selling software/apps and not supporting an open source SDK ain't necessarily a bad decision for a corporation that maybe wants to make money selling SDK's to third party developers or that might be worried about firmware-nuking-field-return-inducing software uploads or whatever.
You don't like or agree with that? well buy a different player then (some people have mentioned the PJB-100), maybe Creative will go with an Open Source model when they find that the software available for the open source competition is way better than anything they have to offer and it's costing them sales...
Now using dubious legal means to prevent reverse engineering (see CueCat...) would probably qualify as "ugly" but I don't see any sign of creative doing that...
What use is this? Surely winning this competition is a sign you should never work again? Obfuscated code (aka elegant) is no faster, even if it is shorter, and may even compile into worse code.
Well, (IMO) you're completely wrong. IOCC code isn't just "bad code getting awards". the winners of the IOCC show an understanding of the subtleties of the way the C language work far beyond that of your average C programmer, or even your pretty good C programmer.
Or, to quote Peter Van Der Linden, "..[The IOCC] is a lot of fun and can extend your knowledge in surprising ways".
Spend a few hours or looking through the archives at things like "best one liners" and try and figure out what they do without reading the description - or maybe look through gems like the 1500 character BASIC interpreter. Deobfuscate some entries to figure out how they work and you might find you learn something about what the language can do and it might improve your day to day programming.
For me this shows the problm with open source - people are more interested in playing silly games than actually getting something constructive done.
Yuk, Trollish.
Slashdot Mirror
kinda Late in the discussion, but what the hell
They're giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free.
This quote deeply hacked me off when I saw it, because I was watching it on Sky, a subscription channel for which I pay money to watch as it's the only place to get new episodes of things like the Simpsons/Star Trek/Andromeda/Angel/Buffy/... (unless you want to wait a couple of years to get a cut-up-edited version on your local terrestrial station...)
And you know the adverts put on in between programmes? They aren't just there for fun, they do it because the broadcasters get paid for it; and the fact is you pay for that through the products you buy every day, most of which you see adverts for on the TV.
The summary is these programmes aren't "for free", some I pay to watch more directly than others, but I do pay to watch them all and that money goes into the pockets of the programme makers - If they want me to not complain then they should give them away for free - How about they stick 'em up as MPEG clips on a webserver and let me download them when I want for nothing?
No?
Thought not....The fact is the programme makers sell them and I buy them, if it turns out that what I was sold was junk then first I'll complain, next I'll stop buying, and I don't think many people from either camp want to see that..
I'm sold on the concept so far. So do they want donations to help now or what?
"Well, I disagree, but the producers of Robot Wars apparently agreed with you. In the first episode of "Robot Wars UK" (the new season) which KLRU showed, was 7 one-on-one duels (with the house robots, of course). :)
Yeah, the last couple of seasons of RW have been duels based, but the first couple of series had a few obstacle/challenge rounds up front, and to be honest they really just got real dull real quick (watching several badly damaged robots crawl around trying to push a football into a net is really not a whole lot of fun).
Although to be fair they also run special challenges like the pinball challenge (run your robot round a huge pinball course & score points) and sumo (push against a house robot) which are pretty neat.
Actually ISTR seeing a series on the making of RW where on one of the production people mentioned that the obstacle course stuff was introduced partially beause they were scared that a contestant might come up with a robot that just walked over everything (including the house robots) and that could have left them with a pretty short series
the announcer on robotwars is so annoying
Well, lister (Craig charles) is alright, but the guy who voice overs the matches is *really* annoying
55000 / 30 = approximately 1833 emails a day :)
And that number is expected to go up after the recount!!!
In single player mode, of course, you don't need to authenticate. The game works fine without a network connection...
A LAN-party network may not even be connected to the Internet
More of a problem, but how often does this happen?
Worst business model ever...
the Creative JukeBox still suffers from Creative's ugly corporate obstinateness
Eh? This might lose me all Karma ever but why is it that suddenly not going open source is "ugly corporate obstinateness"? Sure open source is a good choice for lots of companies/tool vendors/whatever but it's not automagically the right choice for everyone selling software/apps and not supporting an open source SDK ain't necessarily a bad decision for a corporation that maybe wants to make money selling SDK's to third party developers or that might be worried about firmware-nuking-field-return-inducing software uploads or whatever.
You don't like or agree with that? well buy a different player then (some people have mentioned the PJB-100), maybe Creative will go with an Open Source model when they find that the software available for the open source competition is way better than anything they have to offer and it's costing them sales...
Now using dubious legal means to prevent reverse engineering (see CueCat...) would probably qualify as "ugly" but I don't see any sign of creative doing that...
What use is this? Surely winning this competition is a sign you should never work again? Obfuscated code (aka elegant) is no faster, even if it is shorter, and may even compile into worse code.
Well, (IMO) you're completely wrong. IOCC code isn't just "bad code getting awards". the winners of the IOCC show an understanding of the subtleties of the way the C language work far beyond that of your average C programmer, or even your pretty good C programmer. Or, to quote Peter Van Der Linden, "..[The IOCC] is a lot of fun and can extend your knowledge in surprising ways".
Spend a few hours or looking through the archives at things like "best one liners" and try and figure out what they do without reading the description - or maybe look through gems like the 1500 character BASIC interpreter. Deobfuscate some entries to figure out how they work and you might find you learn something about what the language can do and it might improve your day to day programming.
For me this shows the problm with open source - people are more interested in playing silly games than actually getting something constructive done.
Yuk, Trollish.
You Mean http://partners.nytimes.com/2001/01/12/technology/ 12CYBERLAW.html?
(No reg version)
"You have registered your vote, please restart the electoral system for this to take effect"
Actually this has hard a fairly recent reprint as part of the SF masterworks series try here For a start