Check out Advent Children. Yes, the dubbing was terrible, and the story is a bit disappointing and difficult to follow, but the action scenes are incredible - both in the sense of "that's awesome" and "I can't believe that". It's only a "good movie" to fans of the franchise, but it does show the possibilities for non-kid-oriented CGI. For one, it proves that "nobody complains that a crazy scene looks cgi if the whole movie is cgi" - more people complained about the drawn-out emotional scenes than the use of a skyscraper as a projectile weapon.
Not just Warcraft. Almost every Blizzard game is doing this - Starcraft 2 did it, Diablo 3 will probably do it when it's released. And then there's all the multiplayer games that use P2P for actually playing the game - Call of Duty did it big-time, but tons of others do so as well. That's not even getting into all the perfectly legal uses for BitTorrent - I personally got a few gigs of music from OCRemix and a few Linux distros that way.
This college better be reviewing each and every case before forwarding it to the authorities, or they'll be facing big problems.
You seem to be overestimating how "united" the US actually is. Really, it isn't - saying "Louisiana is banning evolution, the whole US is next" is like saying "Serbia is banning evolution, all of Europe is next". Yes, we're united militarily and economically, but many things are decided at the state level or lower. As far as education is concerned, it's pretty much as follows:
The Federal Gov't sets certain basic standards such as "what basic skills need to be taught", and provides some funding.
The State Gov'ts set standards like "what textbooks can be used" and "what specific things need to be taught", and provide some more funding.
The County Gov'ts control most practical things like "how much do we pay teachers" and "what textbooks do we use", and provide the majority of the funding.
Besides, it is extremely likely that, should Louisiana "remove" evolution, it will be challenged in courts, and thrown out. The case Epperson v. Arkansas did so back in '68, with a rather strongly-worded decision.
Well, as soon as you figure out a simple, reliable and accurate method to figure out something's radius from 14 billion kilometers away, tell the astronomers.
Don't forget - the choice isn't between "buy from store, no DRM" and "buy from Steam, get DRM". The choice is "buy from Steam, get DRM" and "buy from store, STILL get DRM". And often the Steam DRM is the less restrictive - unlimited installs, no computer-id-checking, encryption only used before the game is released, etc.
So, your choice is: buy from store, get DRM; buy from Steam, get DRM; don't buy games.
I think you have the numbers backwards. From a report I cannot find at the moment, Valve usually takes a cut between %10 to %30 of the gross. Even for GMod, the contract was "we'll sell your game on Steam AND license you our normally-$200,000+-engine for half the cut".
blah blah paranoid ramblings blah blah. There's already cracks to neutralize the DRM in Steam - if the company shut down, using them would then become ethical, possibly even legal. So, in a way, there's already a No-DRM patch for every game on Steam, and every game that will be on Steam.
Re:My Real Problem With DLC is that it drives DRM!
on
When DLC Goes Wrong
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· Score: 1
Actually, not really. The only DLC I really bought was from Bethesda, and the DLC itself has no DRM. Found that out when I bought the DLC for Oblivion on Steam, then just copied the files over to my existing disc-based install of Oblivion. Worked seamlessly. Same for Fallout 3. While DLC could potentially be used to add more DRM, I haven't seen it happen.
I had something related happen with Oblivion. I bought the "Game of the Year" edition, which had the 2 biggest DLC. I put about a hundred hours into it. I kept considering the DLC, but it was just overpriced - about $20 for the seven or so bits of DLC I didn't have. Then I noticed that the "Deluxe" edition (full game and all the DLC) was on sale for $10. It was actually cheaper to buy the whole game again than to buy the DLC. Go figure.
Bethesda is exceptionally bad about it. See Oblivion, where the user-made patch to fix things has a changelist several dozen pages long, and that's just what can be fixed with the public SDK. There's an entire wiki full of workarounds for the other bugs. Some of the bugs are minor - subtitles not matching the dialog, objects out of place - but some are game-breaking - there's dozens of ways to make the game "unwinnable" - and some are just program-breaking - there's a long-standing bug that makes interior cells pitch-black on nVidia cards. At least other companies would have the decency to eventually fix the bugs.
After giving it a bit of thought, I don't think consistency is too much of a problem. Things that 100% of people like will be up 100% of the time. Things 99% of people like will be up 99% of the time. If only half of people think it is proper, it will be removed half the time. And so on, until we reach the things everybody hates, which will be immediately removed. What happens is that things some people dislike will be reduced, but still available, giving us a compromise - people who disapprove will not encounter it as often, but those who desire it can still seek it out and obtain it. Sure, edge cases may be problematic - if only one in a thousand people considers something acceptable, it will be difficult to find; people who are easily offended will still be often offended. But those are the outliers - for the majority of the probability distribution, it will be relatively fair. Much more so than letting a select few moderate all the content, at any rate - by increasing the number of moderators, you decrease the effect any one has.
One thing that would be nice is to see some Linux games.
Good news! Unless my sources are incorrect, Rage, an upcoming and rather anticipated game by id, will be released (but not supported) on Linux. That's a step in the right direction.
- Interface design that specifically and completely bars programmers from participating
Uh, what? If the GUI is just a fancy, specialized program for editing the various dotfiles and stuff crammed in/etc, then it does no harm to the person who actually likes messing around with baretext config files.
- Abandonment of 99% of the distros
Why abandon them? Call Ubuntu "Linux Home", Debian "Linux Professional", and "[favorite distro here]" "Linux Ultimate". There's no need to eliminate pro-friendly distros - that's the beauty of it. You just make a new one that caters to the beginners, and let it take care of that market. The Roadrunner doesn't run the same distro as the Droid, to put it poetically.
- Acceptance of proprietary drivers when offered (normal people don't give a damn about open source philosophy)
I believe in open-source, not because it is ethically mandated, but because it produces better results. As such, I expect that, eventually, open-source drivers will be better than the proprietary ones, at which point the natural choice would be to use them. Whether the manufacturers choose to assist the open-source team is up to them.
- Provision of real, available, phone-based technical support
I fail to see how this is a negative. At the very least, we get a scapegoat to point the boss at while we go fix the actual problem.
- Real, complete documentation
Again, how the hell is that a bad thing? I have NEVER heard someone say, "This is great and all, but I really wish the documentation was shoddy, incomplete and half written in Spanish." I mean, look at OpenBSD - plenty of detailed man pages, yet it's a very pro-oriented OS.
I have seen someone mocked for buying one package when some pinhead thought another would be more appropriate for the application. It was something like, "Well, what did you expect picking that? It's like you wanted to fail." Most people here have seen PLENTY of derision of new users.
Open-source is actually quite newb-friendly. I, being a fool, started my open-source experience with OpenBSD. I couldn't figure out how to mount my USB drive - a quick email, and I got a kind response from Theo de Raadt, the "benevolent dictator" of OpenBSD, telling me what I needed to do. Despite the Weird Al song, it is completely impossible to phone Bill Gates up at home and make him do your tech support.
Why not? Because a lot of the community is poison for end users. That's why not.
You see it as poison, I see it as potential. There's things you can learn from closed-source people. Game developers know quite a lot about squeezing performance out of hardware - that would be beneficial. Windows application developers are used to following a standardized interface - that would be nice, as well. There is always something to be learned from everyone.
Consolidate, standardize, and corporatize. Staff and support. Advertise. Court developers. In other words, build a better Microsoft.
I see nothing wrong with being a better Microsoft. Arguably, Linux is the Microsoft of the open-source world - you can't get anywhere with your project unless it runs on Linux, it's squeezed out a good chunk of the other open-source OSes, and it's pretty much mandatory for open-source admins to know Linux.
Or, remain "pure", disjointed, and niche on the desktop. Rule the world from the server. Personally I think linux should abandon the desktop. By the time they get there, technology will have made the point moot.
If we don't spread Linux to the desktop, we'll be supporting Windows clients until we do spread Linux to the desktop. Is that really what you want?
People who care about security hate it too. As does anyone trying to fully uninstall an uncooperative program. Things can stay hidden there essentially forever.
Besides, it's a bunch of settings that is completely unorganized, does not exist as a single file anywhere on the hard drive, and is essentially hidden from normal users. It should be hated on principle.
Linux has a 90% share in supercomputers, a 50% share in servers (+/- 10%), and a pretty good share of cell phones and other mobiles, if you include Android and other semi-proprietary systems. The only place to expand into it the desktop, where the market share is at most 5%. So, why not?
file://c:/cygwin/bin/xterm.exe also prompts to save file (with a warning the.exe's are potentially dangerous), on Vista, using Chrome. Looks like even Windows is smart enough to not blindly execute URLs.
If Wikipedia is correct, she is currently Queen of Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu. She is also an Admiral of Nebraska, but that's not really important. The Monarchy will pass to Charles; I could find nothing of countries planning to end the monarchy when Elizabeth dies.
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I'm hoping it's shuffling deck chairs on the Hindenberg - it will be more fun to watch.
Check out Advent Children. Yes, the dubbing was terrible, and the story is a bit disappointing and difficult to follow, but the action scenes are incredible - both in the sense of "that's awesome" and "I can't believe that". It's only a "good movie" to fans of the franchise, but it does show the possibilities for non-kid-oriented CGI. For one, it proves that "nobody complains that a crazy scene looks cgi if the whole movie is cgi" - more people complained about the drawn-out emotional scenes than the use of a skyscraper as a projectile weapon.
Not just Warcraft. Almost every Blizzard game is doing this - Starcraft 2 did it, Diablo 3 will probably do it when it's released. And then there's all the multiplayer games that use P2P for actually playing the game - Call of Duty did it big-time, but tons of others do so as well. That's not even getting into all the perfectly legal uses for BitTorrent - I personally got a few gigs of music from OCRemix and a few Linux distros that way.
This college better be reviewing each and every case before forwarding it to the authorities, or they'll be facing big problems.
Besides, it is extremely likely that, should Louisiana "remove" evolution, it will be challenged in courts, and thrown out. The case Epperson v. Arkansas did so back in '68, with a rather strongly-worded decision.
Not really. There's not enough light that far away from Sol to see much of anything. I tried to do the math, but it kept rounding to 0.
The other solution, waiting for it to transit another light source, is what just happened, and is not exactly an "on-demand" occurrence.
Well, as soon as you figure out a simple, reliable and accurate method to figure out something's radius from 14 billion kilometers away, tell the astronomers.
Satellites, like the Moon (or the ISS, even) count as "cleared".
Don't forget - the choice isn't between "buy from store, no DRM" and "buy from Steam, get DRM". The choice is "buy from Steam, get DRM" and "buy from store, STILL get DRM". And often the Steam DRM is the less restrictive - unlimited installs, no computer-id-checking, encryption only used before the game is released, etc.
So, your choice is: buy from store, get DRM; buy from Steam, get DRM; don't buy games.
I think you have the numbers backwards. From a report I cannot find at the moment, Valve usually takes a cut between %10 to %30 of the gross. Even for GMod, the contract was "we'll sell your game on Steam AND license you our normally-$200,000+-engine for half the cut".
blah blah paranoid ramblings blah blah. There's already cracks to neutralize the DRM in Steam - if the company shut down, using them would then become ethical, possibly even legal. So, in a way, there's already a No-DRM patch for every game on Steam, and every game that will be on Steam.
Actually, not really. The only DLC I really bought was from Bethesda, and the DLC itself has no DRM. Found that out when I bought the DLC for Oblivion on Steam, then just copied the files over to my existing disc-based install of Oblivion. Worked seamlessly. Same for Fallout 3. While DLC could potentially be used to add more DRM, I haven't seen it happen.
I had something related happen with Oblivion. I bought the "Game of the Year" edition, which had the 2 biggest DLC. I put about a hundred hours into it. I kept considering the DLC, but it was just overpriced - about $20 for the seven or so bits of DLC I didn't have. Then I noticed that the "Deluxe" edition (full game and all the DLC) was on sale for $10. It was actually cheaper to buy the whole game again than to buy the DLC. Go figure.
I was aware of that; hell, I saw the announcement back at E3. However, it isn't out yet, and that's (probably) the only good Kong game since the N64.
Since there haven't been many good Donkey Kong games in years, might I suggest a new variant on the phrase?
It's gone like Donkey Kong.
The PS3 version of Oblivion WAS the patched version. The PC/XBox ones were even worse, until they patched it.
Bethesda is exceptionally bad about it. See Oblivion, where the user-made patch to fix things has a changelist several dozen pages long, and that's just what can be fixed with the public SDK. There's an entire wiki full of workarounds for the other bugs. Some of the bugs are minor - subtitles not matching the dialog, objects out of place - but some are game-breaking - there's dozens of ways to make the game "unwinnable" - and some are just program-breaking - there's a long-standing bug that makes interior cells pitch-black on nVidia cards. At least other companies would have the decency to eventually fix the bugs.
After giving it a bit of thought, I don't think consistency is too much of a problem. Things that 100% of people like will be up 100% of the time. Things 99% of people like will be up 99% of the time. If only half of people think it is proper, it will be removed half the time. And so on, until we reach the things everybody hates, which will be immediately removed. What happens is that things some people dislike will be reduced, but still available, giving us a compromise - people who disapprove will not encounter it as often, but those who desire it can still seek it out and obtain it. Sure, edge cases may be problematic - if only one in a thousand people considers something acceptable, it will be difficult to find; people who are easily offended will still be often offended. But those are the outliers - for the majority of the probability distribution, it will be relatively fair. Much more so than letting a select few moderate all the content, at any rate - by increasing the number of moderators, you decrease the effect any one has.
Woops, forgot source: games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=302231&cid=20671657
One thing that would be nice is to see some Linux games.
Good news! Unless my sources are incorrect, Rage, an upcoming and rather anticipated game by id, will be released (but not supported) on Linux. That's a step in the right direction.
The servers they connect to run Linux. The routers they connect to run Linux. They may not know it, but Linux is everywhere.
- Interface design that specifically and completely bars programmers from participating
Uh, what? If the GUI is just a fancy, specialized program for editing the various dotfiles and stuff crammed in /etc, then it does no harm to the person who actually likes messing around with baretext config files.
- Abandonment of 99% of the distros
Why abandon them? Call Ubuntu "Linux Home", Debian "Linux Professional", and "[favorite distro here]" "Linux Ultimate". There's no need to eliminate pro-friendly distros - that's the beauty of it. You just make a new one that caters to the beginners, and let it take care of that market. The Roadrunner doesn't run the same distro as the Droid, to put it poetically.
- Acceptance of proprietary drivers when offered (normal people don't give a damn about open source philosophy)
I believe in open-source, not because it is ethically mandated, but because it produces better results. As such, I expect that, eventually, open-source drivers will be better than the proprietary ones, at which point the natural choice would be to use them. Whether the manufacturers choose to assist the open-source team is up to them.
- Provision of real, available, phone-based technical support
I fail to see how this is a negative. At the very least, we get a scapegoat to point the boss at while we go fix the actual problem.
- Real, complete documentation
Again, how the hell is that a bad thing? I have NEVER heard someone say, "This is great and all, but I really wish the documentation was shoddy, incomplete and half written in Spanish." I mean, look at OpenBSD - plenty of detailed man pages, yet it's a very pro-oriented OS.
I have seen someone mocked for buying one package when some pinhead thought another would be more appropriate for the application. It was something like, "Well, what did you expect picking that? It's like you wanted to fail." Most people here have seen PLENTY of derision of new users.
Open-source is actually quite newb-friendly. I, being a fool, started my open-source experience with OpenBSD. I couldn't figure out how to mount my USB drive - a quick email, and I got a kind response from Theo de Raadt, the "benevolent dictator" of OpenBSD, telling me what I needed to do. Despite the Weird Al song, it is completely impossible to phone Bill Gates up at home and make him do your tech support.
Why not? Because a lot of the community is poison for end users. That's why not.
You see it as poison, I see it as potential. There's things you can learn from closed-source people. Game developers know quite a lot about squeezing performance out of hardware - that would be beneficial. Windows application developers are used to following a standardized interface - that would be nice, as well. There is always something to be learned from everyone.
Consolidate, standardize, and corporatize. Staff and support. Advertise. Court developers. In other words, build a better Microsoft.
I see nothing wrong with being a better Microsoft. Arguably, Linux is the Microsoft of the open-source world - you can't get anywhere with your project unless it runs on Linux, it's squeezed out a good chunk of the other open-source OSes, and it's pretty much mandatory for open-source admins to know Linux.
Or, remain "pure", disjointed, and niche on the desktop. Rule the world from the server. Personally I think linux should abandon the desktop. By the time they get there, technology will have made the point moot.
If we don't spread Linux to the desktop, we'll be supporting Windows clients until we do spread Linux to the desktop. Is that really what you want?
People who care about security hate it too. As does anyone trying to fully uninstall an uncooperative program. Things can stay hidden there essentially forever.
Besides, it's a bunch of settings that is completely unorganized, does not exist as a single file anywhere on the hard drive, and is essentially hidden from normal users. It should be hated on principle.
Linux has a 90% share in supercomputers, a 50% share in servers (+/- 10%), and a pretty good share of cell phones and other mobiles, if you include Android and other semi-proprietary systems. The only place to expand into it the desktop, where the market share is at most 5%. So, why not?
file://c:/cygwin/bin/xterm.exe also prompts to save file (with a warning the .exe's are potentially dangerous), on Vista, using Chrome. Looks like even Windows is smart enough to not blindly execute URLs.
If Wikipedia is correct, she is currently Queen of Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu. She is also an Admiral of Nebraska, but that's not really important. The Monarchy will pass to Charles; I could find nothing of countries planning to end the monarchy when Elizabeth dies.