Game publishers spend huge amounts on marketing. Opening a couple of storefronts for a couple of months doesn't even make a dent in their budget. The total cost of this stunt would have covered the salary of one or two programmers for a year, tops.
Which is not to say that this was a good marketing ploy. Indeed, it strikes me as pretty dumb. But it's hardly proof that EA is rolling in cash.
Well, assuming that the behavior you describe isn't configurable (I'm pretty ignorant of Solaris CIFS) then yeah, there would be applications for which Samba is a better fit. But there are also applications where this isn't an issue. IMHO, sharing files between Windows and Unix-like systems is one of these, especially when you consider that doing a better job of supporting Windows is the main reason Solaris CIFS even exists..
You'll notice that the blog posting I just linked appeared a couple months after Sun and Microsoft buried the hatchet and agreed to (among many other things) work together to improved Solaris/Windows interoperability. Probably not a coincidence.
You're talking from a position of ignorance, as someone who's never had to deal with weaponry or with the Geneva Conventions.
Assuming that you're not an expert in international law, I assume that means that you're a service person who's had training on interpreting the Geneva Convention in the field. That entitles you to speak with authority on practical steps to take to comply with the Geneva convention on the battlefield. That does not make you an authority on how Protocol IV applies to a hypothetical weapon, any more than passing a drivers ed course makes you an expert on traffic law.
(U.S. personnel will probably never go before an international war crimes tribunal. But if it should ever happen to you, don't tell the lawyers that they're wrong because it contradicts your training. Doesn't work in traffic court, either.)
You keep parsing texts differently from me, and claiming that your parsing is "obvious" while mine is illiterate. That's a cop out. Especially when (as in that other thread) you make silly claims about the meanings of very common words in order to avoid with the very argument you yourself started.
Also, when you quote something, don't just quote the parts that you can twist around to back up your argument. The protocol also says "It is prohibited to employ laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions [italics mine], to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision..." If a weapon only burns and blinds people, you can't just say that the burning makes the blinding OK. The clause you quote is clearly designed to allow laser weapons that are designed to destroy equipment, not people — and even there, you're supposed to make every effort to avoid blinding people while using it.
I only mentioned the title because your reference to the protocol seemed to imply that you were unaware of the fact that it was specifically about lasers. You claimed that it just banned weapons that were designed to blind (you used those exact words). Sounds to me like you hadn't read the protocol either.
Yeah, I'm tired of arguing semantics too. Especially since you've been arguing with me for a dozen messages without making it clear what point you were trying to make.
You're talking backward compatibility with existing applications. By that measure, Windows is the most perfect OS in the history. But if you ignore the specific applications that are currently only supported on current OSs, the limitations you mention don't exist. ITunes might not run on a web-based OS, but there are certainly web-based ways of doing the same thing. There are already a lot of video games that run in web browsers. (The high-end games never will, but then they won't run on most home machines now.) No reason a web app couldn't access memory cards or USB devices. And if your job requires you to run some workplace application that is only available on Windows, you can run on a workplace machine via a terminal server — something your IT department would prefer that you did anyway.
I think it would be pretty hard to argue that a weapon based on intense light is not designed to blind.
Hey, here's a fun fact! The full title of the protocol is Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons. Next time, RTFT before correcting somebody about what it says.
I have problems with your semantics (lying and cynicism are not mutually exclusive)
Never said they were.
OK, my bad. When you said "there's nothing cynical about using the beliefs of others as camouflage in order to attain your own goals." I should have pointed you at a dictionary that that clearly contradicts you.
and there's no real difference between the old USSR and the new Russian Federation.
Never said that, either.
Really? Then I have no idea what point you're trying to make.
I have problems with your semantics (lying and cynicism are not mutually exclusive) but that's a secondary issue. You basic argument is that the USSR never lived up to its socialist ideals and therefore was just another dictatorship, and there's no real difference between the old USSR and the new Russian Federation.
But there are lots of differences. Private enterprise is no longer illegal, and indeed now dominates the Russian economy. The Russian Orthodox Church is no longer persecuted. (Sadly, the same can't be said for some other faiths.) Travel in and out of the country is no longer tightly controlled.
There are many things about the current system that suck. But the things that suck are not the same things that sucked under the Soviet Union.
We could argue that, but it's kind of beside the point. It was officially socialist. And they did ban private enterprise for most of their history. Now it's officially non-socialistic and you can't get arrested just for starting a business.
Socialism is an ideology which they hid behind in order to suppress dissent and criticism.
You have a very comic book understanding of history. In real life, cynics don't win revolutions. Which is actually too bad — if Lenin had been more cynical, he wouldn't have been so willing to murder anybody who stood in the way of his dream of a Marxist Utopia.
What are you saying? That Russia is still "socialist" even though they dropped the word from their title? Recall that this thread started with a link to a private business in Russia, something that would have been plain illegal under the old rules.
I'm not saying that Russia is suddenly a free democratic place. But they're obviously not the same entity as the one that dissolved back in 1991.
I look at the Fedora web site, and I don't really see any discussion of server features. You can use Fedora as a server (I've done it) but that doesn't seem to be the emphasis.
But I'm really clouding the issue by talking about desktop-versus-server. It's enough to point out that Red Hat is neglecting Sparc and Itanium on all it's products. So there's no grand strategy for these architectures — Red Hat no longer considers them worth any attention at all.
The far left you're quoting is so non-mainstream, they'd never vote for Obama, or any major party candidate. Recall that "liberal" was a dirty word on the far left long before it was a rhetorical cliche on the right.
(Or maybe you don't recall. The term "far left" is itself a standard formula for conflating everyone to the left of Ronald Reagan with Karl Marx.)
Which is not to say that you're wrong. A lot of liberals are pissed at Obama for not being the kneejerk liberal they thought he was. A little time reading his books would have disabused them.
As for those of us who just want the guy to do a good job and don't care about his affiliations, well, his claim (backed up by his career, starting when the conservative contingent at Harvard Law School backed him for editor of the Law Review) and his rhetoric in favor of listening to all sides is what made me want to see him elected in the first place. I'm pretty much a lefty myself, but the system won't work without the right playing a role, since Americans are, all in all, a relatively conservative bunch. Unfortunately, Obama's consensus-building strategies can't seem to defeat the my-way-or-the-highway attitude that's dominated politics for the last couple of decades.
That would make sense if Fedora were a server OS. But it's not. Can you name a single in-production workstation based on Itanium or Sparc? Don't say "Sun" -- they dropped their last Sparc workstation over a year ago.
I don't know which platforms RHEL currently supports (redhat.com is quite unhelpful on that score) but Googling the site doesn't turn up anything for the Sparc or IA64 later than 2007. I suspect Red Hat is just not interested in non-commodity architectures any more.
It only becomes a problem when the communists think you're "creating problem", or in their terms, "affect the harmony of society".
That's the party line (so to speak). But "harmony" is just a euphemism for "control".
Your federal-state explanation doesn't jibe with the facts. For one thing, the PRC is not a federal entity — government is strictly top-down. And even in a federal system the central government has some control over local activities. Are you actually asserting that the Chinese central government has less control over the actions of local law enforcement than the U.S government?
You also seem to think that the central government has never put dissidents in jail just for being dissidents. Not true.
Don't fall for the "you don't know how we do things here" excuse. It's a standard feature of morally bankrupt systems.
They're not allowed to express political opinions. The government can't control what they think, except by controlling their access to contrary opinions.
DOSbox is indispensable for playing old DOS games anyway. It emulates old platforms, including old hardware, extremely well. And it's a lot less hassle than booting a physical machine into DOS.
Slashdot Mirror
Game publishers spend huge amounts on marketing. Opening a couple of storefronts for a couple of months doesn't even make a dent in their budget. The total cost of this stunt would have covered the salary of one or two programmers for a year, tops.
Which is not to say that this was a good marketing ploy. Indeed, it strikes me as pretty dumb. But it's hardly proof that EA is rolling in cash.
Well, assuming that the behavior you describe isn't configurable (I'm pretty ignorant of Solaris CIFS) then yeah, there would be applications for which Samba is a better fit. But there are also applications where this isn't an issue. IMHO, sharing files between Windows and Unix-like systems is one of these, especially when you consider that doing a better job of supporting Windows is the main reason Solaris CIFS even exists..
You'll notice that the blog posting I just linked appeared a couple months after Sun and Microsoft buried the hatchet and agreed to (among many other things) work together to improved Solaris/Windows interoperability. Probably not a coincidence.
You're going to have some file semantics issues in any case. Those introduced by CIFS (don't see how ZFS is a factor) are pretty easy to deal with.
You're talking from a position of ignorance, as someone who's never had to deal with weaponry or with the Geneva Conventions.
Assuming that you're not an expert in international law, I assume that means that you're a service person who's had training on interpreting the Geneva Convention in the field. That entitles you to speak with authority on practical steps to take to comply with the Geneva convention on the battlefield. That does not make you an authority on how Protocol IV applies to a hypothetical weapon, any more than passing a drivers ed course makes you an expert on traffic law.
(U.S. personnel will probably never go before an international war crimes tribunal. But if it should ever happen to you, don't tell the lawyers that they're wrong because it contradicts your training. Doesn't work in traffic court, either.)
You keep parsing texts differently from me, and claiming that your parsing is "obvious" while mine is illiterate. That's a cop out. Especially when (as in that other thread) you make silly claims about the meanings of very common words in order to avoid with the very argument you yourself started.
(Takes a deep breath.)
Also, when you quote something, don't just quote the parts that you can twist around to back up your argument. The protocol also says "It is prohibited to employ laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions [italics mine], to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision..." If a weapon only burns and blinds people, you can't just say that the burning makes the blinding OK. The clause you quote is clearly designed to allow laser weapons that are designed to destroy equipment, not people — and even there, you're supposed to make every effort to avoid blinding people while using it.
I only mentioned the title because your reference to the protocol seemed to imply that you were unaware of the fact that it was specifically about lasers. You claimed that it just banned weapons that were designed to blind (you used those exact words). Sounds to me like you hadn't read the protocol either.
In other words, STFU you ignorant, egotistical jackass.
When you say something stupid, expect to be called on it. Insulting people only makes you more of an idiot.
Yeah, I'm tired of arguing semantics too. Especially since you've been arguing with me for a dozen messages without making it clear what point you were trying to make.
You're talking backward compatibility with existing applications. By that measure, Windows is the most perfect OS in the history. But if you ignore the specific applications that are currently only supported on current OSs, the limitations you mention don't exist. ITunes might not run on a web-based OS, but there are certainly web-based ways of doing the same thing. There are already a lot of video games that run in web browsers. (The high-end games never will, but then they won't run on most home machines now.) No reason a web app couldn't access memory cards or USB devices. And if your job requires you to run some workplace application that is only available on Windows, you can run on a workplace machine via a terminal server — something your IT department would prefer that you did anyway.
I think it would be pretty hard to argue that a weapon based on intense light is not designed to blind.
Hey, here's a fun fact! The full title of the protocol is Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons. Next time, RTFT before correcting somebody about what it says.
Cruel of you to spoil the joke.
That would be the system with no instructions at all!
I have problems with your semantics (lying and cynicism are not mutually exclusive)
Never said they were.
OK, my bad. When you said "there's nothing cynical about using the beliefs of others as camouflage in order to attain your own goals." I should have pointed you at a dictionary that that clearly contradicts you.
and there's no real difference between the old USSR and the new Russian Federation.
Never said that, either.
Really? Then I have no idea what point you're trying to make.
I have problems with your semantics (lying and cynicism are not mutually exclusive) but that's a secondary issue. You basic argument is that the USSR never lived up to its socialist ideals and therefore was just another dictatorship, and there's no real difference between the old USSR and the new Russian Federation.
But there are lots of differences. Private enterprise is no longer illegal, and indeed now dominates the Russian economy. The Russian Orthodox Church is no longer persecuted. (Sadly, the same can't be said for some other faiths.) Travel in and out of the country is no longer tightly controlled.
There are many things about the current system that suck. But the things that suck are not the same things that sucked under the Soviet Union.
Russia was never socialist to begin with.
We could argue that, but it's kind of beside the point. It was officially socialist. And they did ban private enterprise for most of their history. Now it's officially non-socialistic and you can't get arrested just for starting a business.
Socialism is an ideology which they hid behind in order to suppress dissent and criticism.
You have a very comic book understanding of history. In real life, cynics don't win revolutions. Which is actually too bad — if Lenin had been more cynical, he wouldn't have been so willing to murder anybody who stood in the way of his dream of a Marxist Utopia.
What are you saying? That Russia is still "socialist" even though they dropped the word from their title? Recall that this thread started with a link to a private business in Russia, something that would have been plain illegal under the old rules.
I'm not saying that Russia is suddenly a free democratic place. But they're obviously not the same entity as the one that dissolved back in 1991.
You're saying that because they're still bullies, they're still the Soviet Union? Little things like abandoning socialism don't count?
Outside of lame Slashdot jokes, Soviet Russia hasn't existed since 1991. Elcomsoft is in the Russian Federation.
I look at the Fedora web site, and I don't really see any discussion of server features. You can use Fedora as a server (I've done it) but that doesn't seem to be the emphasis.
But I'm really clouding the issue by talking about desktop-versus-server. It's enough to point out that Red Hat is neglecting Sparc and Itanium on all it's products. So there's no grand strategy for these architectures — Red Hat no longer considers them worth any attention at all.
I can only repeat my question. I don't see "show me a link" or any similar statement anywhere in that post.
The far left you're quoting is so non-mainstream, they'd never vote for Obama, or any major party candidate. Recall that "liberal" was a dirty word on the far left long before it was a rhetorical cliche on the right.
(Or maybe you don't recall. The term "far left" is itself a standard formula for conflating everyone to the left of Ronald Reagan with Karl Marx.)
Which is not to say that you're wrong. A lot of liberals are pissed at Obama for not being the kneejerk liberal they thought he was. A little time reading his books would have disabused them.
As for those of us who just want the guy to do a good job and don't care about his affiliations, well, his claim (backed up by his career, starting when the conservative contingent at Harvard Law School backed him for editor of the Law Review) and his rhetoric in favor of listening to all sides is what made me want to see him elected in the first place. I'm pretty much a lefty myself, but the system won't work without the right playing a role, since Americans are, all in all, a relatively conservative bunch. Unfortunately, Obama's consensus-building strategies can't seem to defeat the my-way-or-the-highway attitude that's dominated politics for the last couple of decades.
That would make sense if Fedora were a server OS. But it's not. Can you name a single in-production workstation based on Itanium or Sparc? Don't say "Sun" -- they dropped their last Sparc workstation over a year ago.
I don't know which platforms RHEL currently supports (redhat.com is quite unhelpful on that score) but Googling the site doesn't turn up anything for the Sparc or IA64 later than 2007. I suspect Red Hat is just not interested in non-commodity architectures any more.
It only becomes a problem when the communists think you're "creating problem", or in their terms, "affect the harmony of society".
That's the party line (so to speak). But "harmony" is just a euphemism for "control".
Your federal-state explanation doesn't jibe with the facts. For one thing, the PRC is not a federal entity — government is strictly top-down. And even in a federal system the central government has some control over local activities. Are you actually asserting that the Chinese central government has less control over the actions of local law enforcement than the U.S government?
You also seem to think that the central government has never put dissidents in jail just for being dissidents. Not true.
Don't fall for the "you don't know how we do things here" excuse. It's a standard feature of morally bankrupt systems.
Well, that will solve the problem for the next few years. But those old CRTs will die eventually, and then what?
Also, having a second monitor just to play old games is a pain, especially when that second monitor is a space hog.
They're not allowed to express political opinions. The government can't control what they think, except by controlling their access to contrary opinions.
DOSbox is indispensable for playing old DOS games anyway. It emulates old platforms, including old hardware, extremely well. And it's a lot less hassle than booting a physical machine into DOS.