I'm really quite proud of Google for taking on China over this issue. I understand that China is a big search market and Google is just trying to ensure that it gets every last click out of it, but having uncensored access to Google search is something that Chinese citizens really should have. It's one of their only ways to find news and information that hasn't been filtered through the government's propaganda machine. Obviously, that's why China doesn't want them to be able to use it.
This is all because of their recent failed security simulation where they couldn't repel a cyber attack. Now that they feel vulnerable they have what they think is adequate motivation to screw the rest of us. I guess we'll just have to wait and see how this plays out...
Maybe that senator didn't realize that NASA had lots of plans that it was working towards, up until Obama killed them all with his new budget. The death of the Constellation program nixed everything that NASA had been working on for the last few years.
Realistically though, the senator probably *did* realize this and was just being a jackass and trying to score some political points by "demanding results" and making NASA look bad in the process. Hooray for politics.
I've seen other articles about failure being good for the creative process, namely the cover story of Wired a couple months ago. The thing is, if these people had continued failing and never had a success, we would never have heard of them. Of course successful people think that failure is good for you: they stopped doing it.
Even if global warming is absolutely false in every way, having more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does nothing positive for our air quality. Whether we're warm (or underwater) or not doesn't make a difference if we're having trouble breathing. Air quality is already an issue for many asthmatics, and it will be moreso in the future.
Good for them, way to grow a spine, Europe! Now if only American banks had the same motivation to protect its customers data from the very same agencies.
I wonder how many false positives this will generate? The thing is, for every person who pirates Windows 7, there is a fairly decent chance that they will be doing so with an activation code which a genuine user may have purchased. I wonder if MS has figured out some way to deal with this issue? I wouldn't bet on it.
Most of the companies on that list were intelligent purchasing decisions by Microsoft, even if all of them didn't pan out in the end. Most of them even have examples included of where their input has specifically improved Microsoft's products. I think that Dick Brass's article in the Times was fairly harsh, but if what he says is true and Microsoft no longer has the capability for innovation, then buying innovators with their still-impressive supply of cash and then successfully integrating their work into their products is a good substitute for coming up with those ideas themselves. It's certainly not ideal, but it can work as long as they still have the funds to do so.
I'm sure this will go well. If you have any government work that you need to do, make sure it's in before next Tuesday! Or maybe you should wait until afterwards in case they lose everything somehow.
As Google grows and expands into different markets I personally am more and more suspicious of their activities, especially the tracking that is inherent in their Chrome browser. However, there are constantly things like this were Google seems to be standing behind its principle of "Don't be evil". I hope that they never forget it.
The SC2 beta should be fairly enjoyable judging from the early versions of the game that we've seen in the videos that they've released already. There may be a few balancing issues, but the game looks pretty solid overall. Although, you never know how much you can trust the media released by a game developer, especially one with the technical wizardry of Blizzard.
Macmillan was simply feeling greedy because they were offered a sweeter deal from Apple for their iPad ebook store. Amazon shouldn't be forced to raise the price on electronic books that don't cost any more today than they did when the deal was made in the first place. No matter what their evil practices may be, I'm with Amazon on this one.
I was just listening to NPR, and they ran a short news item that said that Apple was going to announce a new version of the iPod, the "iPod 3d". It is supposedly a "portable holographic projector". Now, either this is really cool, or it's an April Fools joke being played by Apple or NPR (tommorow is also April Fool's Day). I hope it's the first, but I'm almost sure that it's the second.
Alot less is done server-side on Everquest in the interest of reducing lag which can be very annoying if you happen to be travelling in a group. Thus, almost the entire game is handled client-side. Don't try to tell me how it works, I've played it for years and have read all of the technical documentation about it. Other games may be different, but Everquest is *not*.
This isn't just some "stupid hack", it's an emulator of Verant's servers which is quite possibly illegal, but it's not some hack to ruin the game, just an attempt to copy it which isn't going to work very well since you can only run one zone at a time. They aren't trying to "ruin the game", they're merely attempting to free it from Verant's evil clutches which get very annoying if you've ever played the actual game for any length of time. It'll probably fail where all others have because of all of Verant's legal BS (yes, they WILL find a way to get rid of it, no matter what the actual laws say, they have better lawyers and they know it).
BTW, I never hacked on Diablo, heheh, I may have duped items from time to time, but I'm not going to just sit by while you try to tell me that my lvl 50 char wasn't the product of good old-fashioned hard work and having nothing better to do. =]
Ok, here's the problem with your arguement. You obviously don't know how Everquest works internally. All of the software/graphics/important stuff goes on on the user's machine itself. The emulator merely emulates the Everquest servers, which don't actually do much at all except for tracking the players and the mobs in the game. The only thing which could possibly be a copyright infringement issue is if they somehow could copyright the protocols which communicate between the servers to the clients, which is doubtful. The server emulator is only 400k in download size by the way, while the Everquest client itself is >200MB...somehow that shows you the relative importance of the two...I doubt that Verant ever copywrote the server because of its unimportance, just the client. Their loss.
I'm really quite proud of Google for taking on China over this issue. I understand that China is a big search market and Google is just trying to ensure that it gets every last click out of it, but having uncensored access to Google search is something that Chinese citizens really should have. It's one of their only ways to find news and information that hasn't been filtered through the government's propaganda machine. Obviously, that's why China doesn't want them to be able to use it.
This is all because of their recent failed security simulation where they couldn't repel a cyber attack. Now that they feel vulnerable they have what they think is adequate motivation to screw the rest of us. I guess we'll just have to wait and see how this plays out...
Maybe that senator didn't realize that NASA had lots of plans that it was working towards, up until Obama killed them all with his new budget. The death of the Constellation program nixed everything that NASA had been working on for the last few years.
Realistically though, the senator probably *did* realize this and was just being a jackass and trying to score some political points by "demanding results" and making NASA look bad in the process. Hooray for politics.
I've seen other articles about failure being good for the creative process, namely the cover story of Wired a couple months ago. The thing is, if these people had continued failing and never had a success, we would never have heard of them. Of course successful people think that failure is good for you: they stopped doing it.
Even if global warming is absolutely false in every way, having more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does nothing positive for our air quality. Whether we're warm (or underwater) or not doesn't make a difference if we're having trouble breathing. Air quality is already an issue for many asthmatics, and it will be moreso in the future.
I'm glad that Utah thinks that anybody cares what they have to say. It's cute.
Good for them, way to grow a spine, Europe! Now if only American banks had the same motivation to protect its customers data from the very same agencies.
I wonder how many false positives this will generate? The thing is, for every person who pirates Windows 7, there is a fairly decent chance that they will be doing so with an activation code which a genuine user may have purchased. I wonder if MS has figured out some way to deal with this issue? I wouldn't bet on it.
Bungie and Visio joined Microsoft in 2000, and Great Plains Software was purchased in 2001, all of which are before the scope of this list.
Most of the companies on that list were intelligent purchasing decisions by Microsoft, even if all of them didn't pan out in the end. Most of them even have examples included of where their input has specifically improved Microsoft's products. I think that Dick Brass's article in the Times was fairly harsh, but if what he says is true and Microsoft no longer has the capability for innovation, then buying innovators with their still-impressive supply of cash and then successfully integrating their work into their products is a good substitute for coming up with those ideas themselves. It's certainly not ideal, but it can work as long as they still have the funds to do so.
I'm sure this will go well. If you have any government work that you need to do, make sure it's in before next Tuesday! Or maybe you should wait until afterwards in case they lose everything somehow.
As Google grows and expands into different markets I personally am more and more suspicious of their activities, especially the tracking that is inherent in their Chrome browser. However, there are constantly things like this were Google seems to be standing behind its principle of "Don't be evil". I hope that they never forget it.
The SC2 beta should be fairly enjoyable judging from the early versions of the game that we've seen in the videos that they've released already. There may be a few balancing issues, but the game looks pretty solid overall. Although, you never know how much you can trust the media released by a game developer, especially one with the technical wizardry of Blizzard.
Macmillan was simply feeling greedy because they were offered a sweeter deal from Apple for their iPad ebook store. Amazon shouldn't be forced to raise the price on electronic books that don't cost any more today than they did when the deal was made in the first place. No matter what their evil practices may be, I'm with Amazon on this one.
I was just listening to NPR, and they ran a short news item that said that Apple was going to announce a new version of the iPod, the "iPod 3d". It is supposedly a "portable holographic projector". Now, either this is really cool, or it's an April Fools joke being played by Apple or NPR (tommorow is also April Fool's Day). I hope it's the first, but I'm almost sure that it's the second.
Alot less is done server-side on Everquest in the interest of reducing lag which can be very annoying if you happen to be travelling in a group. Thus, almost the entire game is handled client-side. Don't try to tell me how it works, I've played it for years and have read all of the technical documentation about it. Other games may be different, but Everquest is *not*. This isn't just some "stupid hack", it's an emulator of Verant's servers which is quite possibly illegal, but it's not some hack to ruin the game, just an attempt to copy it which isn't going to work very well since you can only run one zone at a time. They aren't trying to "ruin the game", they're merely attempting to free it from Verant's evil clutches which get very annoying if you've ever played the actual game for any length of time. It'll probably fail where all others have because of all of Verant's legal BS (yes, they WILL find a way to get rid of it, no matter what the actual laws say, they have better lawyers and they know it). BTW, I never hacked on Diablo, heheh, I may have duped items from time to time, but I'm not going to just sit by while you try to tell me that my lvl 50 char wasn't the product of good old-fashioned hard work and having nothing better to do. =]
Ok, here's the problem with your arguement. You obviously don't know how Everquest works internally. All of the software/graphics/important stuff goes on on the user's machine itself. The emulator merely emulates the Everquest servers, which don't actually do much at all except for tracking the players and the mobs in the game. The only thing which could possibly be a copyright infringement issue is if they somehow could copyright the protocols which communicate between the servers to the clients, which is doubtful. The server emulator is only 400k in download size by the way, while the Everquest client itself is >200MB...somehow that shows you the relative importance of the two...I doubt that Verant ever copywrote the server because of its unimportance, just the client. Their loss.