I, and many actual lawyers, don't think that they can. These clauses *probably* will not stand up in court, at least against a legitimate grievance. It may work, either directly or indirectly, to stop money-grab class actions, but it may not work if there's a real case.
I am told (IANAL, remember?) that it is already unenforceable in the EU, and that several states in the US are considering making it unenforceable as well.
Yeah, normally I'm a big Valve fan, but I've gotta admit, I can't defend this one. I mean, they're right about "class actions only make money for the lawyers", but still...
I may not start boycotting you now, Valve, but you just lost a few points of rep with *this* faction.
I've had one fail on me, recently even. Although I literally went into the Best Buy, grabbed the cheapest mouse they had (a small Logitech wireless), and bought it with the express intent of "if it fails, I'll just buy a new one".
And given how long it lasted (~ two years, constantly being tossed into a bag or otherwise abused), and how well it fits my needs (fitting into bags), I'm satisfied. I'll probably buy another.
Normally I like Microsoft hardware. Their mice and keyboards are good (not the best, but the best for a reasonable price), and the Xbox controller is one of the best controllers you can find (I have two and I don't even own an Xbox!).
But these?
SHIT on a fucking STICK these suck. The wedge looks unusable. It was obviously aimed at being tiny (for laptops), but it's not much smaller than the Logitech wireless I have, which has ergonomic contours and a proper mouse wheel.
The small keyboard combines the worst parts of a bad laptop keyboard with none of the advantages. Half the keys looked too small to even hit reliably.
The full-size mouse was the closest to being decent, but it made the mistake of thinking expensive, fancy touch surfaces HAVE to be better than anything else. It's not. After using Apple's no-button mouse, I can say for sure that I will never use any mouse without an actual fucking wheel. It's just not usable.
And then there was that curved, "ergonomic" keyboard. Which looked about as comfortable to use as a keyboard made of razor blades and used needles. Maybe it's just me (not a fan of so-called "ergonomic" keyboards), but I wouldn't take one of those even if it was free.
So that's zero products out of four that I'd even think about buying. Which is about what the rest of Microsoft is batting - so at least they fail consistently.
Because: * Ammunition is hard to come by in London. Not so much in Afghanistan. * The guns are quite a bit more likely to explode in your face (particularly if you use ammunition that's actually up to spec, instead of the low-power crap you find over there). Criminals, at least the ones who plan ahead far enough to obtain a gun, seek *profit* - they're generally more risk-averse than rebels/insurgents/terrorists, who generally are willing (if not planning) to die for the cause. * Legality. You can legally own an assault rifle in Afghanistan and Iraq (although I recall a one-gun-per-household limit was imposed by the occupation). So unless you're actually seen using it illegally, you can own one with no legal hassle. Not so in London.
Interestingly, the AK isn't the only gun so cloned. One of the most common is actually the old British Lee-Enfield (SMLE Mk. 4). Apparently long-range accuracy (and reliability) trump the ability to spray 30 rounds into the ceiling.
The tooling needed to produce a really bad copy of a bolt-action rifle is pretty simple. If I don't have it myself, I can probably find it at Home Depot. I could make myself one relatively easily, and I believe even legally (I've been told that self-made weapons are unregulated, as long as you don't sell them, but IANAL and the person I heard it from WNAL, so don't take my word for it). I just wouldn't fire the thing without a two-inch-thick steel plate between me and the weapon.
At this point, it's pretty obvious that they aren't sticking to things that were in the books. They're making up new material, new stories. It was a stretch to make The Hobbit into two movies (they were already going to add at least half a movie of new material, probably closer to a full movie). But three? They're making shit up. Totally new material.
Tolkien would probably be happy about that. I'd ask him myself, but... you know...
Tolkien was a student of myths and legends, and of languages. He was obsessed with the interplay between languages and stories, and held a theory that the original primary purpose of language was to tell stories and legends. He thought any language without legends was a dead language. He didn't invent Elvish to help tell the LotR stories - he invented the Lord of the Rings to complete his languages. It was a bit of a linguistic experiment to him, actually.
Tolkien believed in the old way of stories, of men telling tales around a campfire, like the poets and bards of old. He tried to replicate that in his classroom (reading Beowulf et al. in the original languages). And possibly the most important difference between modern stories and ancient tales is that, in the old way, you can change it. You can change words, change stories, add verses, remove characters. You aren't supposed to do that with modern stories. Even in the fanfic culture, you generally don't take the original story and throw in a new subplot, new people, new places.
Tolkien would be happy to know that his story has become legend in that aspect, that his story lives not just as words on paper, but as a living, changing story.
Doesn't mean I myself agree with this - I'm "cautiously reserving judgement until the actual work is shown", neither immediately loving it nor already hating it. But I think Tolkien would be happy.
Freakin' PING can be turned into a DDOS tool in like five seconds. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be distributed.
Also, I imagine it needs some form of authentication to actually turn your site off. Which means you'd have to already have a privileged username/password for each site you want to attack. Pretty poor DDOS tool.
You joke, but (IIRC) the Apollo 11 flag was accidentally knocked over during lift-off (rocket engines, unsurprisingly, generate "wind"). They tried to plant the flags further from the craft during later missions, but I guess they were never 100% sure it didn't happen again (I'm about to RTFA to find out).
I've got a Mac Pro. 2006 issue. Still runs fine, it's still more than powerful enough for anything I actually do. Sucks a good amount of juice, but I don't pay the power bill so what do I care?
I put a Windows partition on it (many of my machines dual-boot either Windows/Mac or Windows/Linux). Runs fine using Windows 7. It meets all the specs for Windows 8 as well, but I'm not upgrading.
But OS X, I can only go up to Lion (10.7). This is supposedly because they dropped a lot of 32-bit support, and the 64-bit support on this Mac is kind of crap. It's supposedly possible if I hack some shit to get 64-bit EFI and get a new graphics card with 64-bit drivers, but come on, Apple. Six years isn't that old, especially when it's that powerful for six years old.
I've said this before: DRM, in and of itself, is not evil.
If all the DRM does is check whether I have or have not purchased the [whatever], and reliably detects paying users as such (low false-positive rate; the false-negative rate is meaningless to me), and the only thing it does is conditionally run (or not run) the [whatever], and it requires minimal work on my own part, I'm fine with it. And, it seems, many others are fine with it as well.
Now, many, even most, DRM implementations fail at least one of those evilness checks. This Ubisoft one violates the "don't do anything on the system not related to your product" clause. Many others fail the "reliably detect paying users as such" clause - always-online systems detect offline-but-paying users as nonpaying, for instance.
Steam passes the evilness checks with only a few caveats (it's not perfect, but it's one of the better ones, and probably the best with that level and quantity of games). You will have to go online at least once to authenticate, you need to prepare a bit ahead of time before going offline (random internet dropouts or the Steam servers themselves going down can stop you), and it does encrypt pre-loaded games. And then there's the whole "no reselling/used games" thing, but honestly, I'm fine with that. I've never found selling my old games to be financially worth it, and the very phrase "used digital games" is an absurdity.
I use open source software. I like open source. I even believe in using it.
But I do those things because open-source, generally, produces better results. I don't think it's ethically better - I have no problem using proprietary software, or even releasing my own work under non-"free" licenses.
Games are one of the most common exceptions, and I believe that is because that are an art, not a science. Making the best web browser, or text processor? That's a science - you can define concrete rules to determine how well it works, and perform scientific tests. But games are an art - not just the textures and models, but the game design itself. And art works best with one or two people in charge (giving the work coherence), not ten thousand amateurs working towards divergent goals. There are exceptions, of course, even to that, but I speak of the general case.
Until you install that patch, whose purpose seems to be to make the game run worse, not look better. It's almost deliberately unoptimized. For instance, with the patch installed, if there is water anywhere on the map, the water is rendered across the full map, even when completely invisible. And certain objects have had their polycount bumped into orbit - I suspect they simply took the high-res meshes they used to bake normal maps, and used them as render meshes.
I'll take some screencaps next time I play, but yeah, it does look "better" than real life, in the same way that a big-budget movie looks better than real life.
Of course, it all falls apart if you can see anyone's face clearly (especially if they're talking). Or if there's fire. Or something breaking. Or rotor wash. Or a million other things that look almost, but not entirely, right.
The game looks awesome, especially for its age (it's about on par with Skyrim, which came out about three years later). In some limited situations, I would even say it is photorealistic. But I'll also say that in most cases, it's only *mostly* photorealistic, and that in some cases, it's just downright bad (Crytek cannot for the life of them figure out facial animation).
Update your jokes. I have literally maxed out Crysis on a laptop. All settings on ultra, 1920x1080, 16x MSAA, 16x anisotropic filtering. Doesn't dip below 60fps.
Change takes time. I have noticed that, after Valve brought Steam to OS X, the number of games for OS X went up - Assassin's Creed, The Darkness, Duke Nukem Forever...
Sure, right now there are still nowhere near as many games on Mac as on Windows (remember when I said roughly a quarter of my Steam library was Mac-compatible?), but it's rising. If Valve brings it to Linux as well, I expect we will start seeing other companies do so as well. Not all of them, but some.
Change starts small. Get L4D2, DOTA, TF2 on Linux, and the change will *start*.
Erm, I know HL:S and HL:DM:S weren't *immediately* ported to the newest engine, but I'm pretty sure they were eventually. I'm not on my Mac right now, but I'm pretty sure I have those games installed. Will reply later if I find it.
Constantly record to a certain section of memory, overwriting results from five minutes ago if needed (and it will be needed - the buffer will be sized to only have enough storage for five minute's recording). That memory doesn't even need to be persistent - RAM works fine.
If the panic button is pressed, copy that buffer into "recorded" memory (ie. disk or flash), and begin writing new frames to there as well for the next five minutes.
Think of it as a database write-ahead log, almost, except here the purpose is to allow you to discard unneeded information instead of to protect against failure.
1) They are already working directly with Intel to improve their drivers, and they have a history (Windows-side) of working with AMD and nVidia for their drivers.
2) They quite likely will not use WINE to run non-native games. They didn't do that when they ported to Mac - they ported Steam itself and all the games they themselves had made in the past decade, and made any Steam games that already had Mac ports available on Mac, but that's it. They apparently cannot, or will not, set up any sort of emulation layer (excepting DOSBox, apparently). I know there are rumors of them including WINE in LinSteam, but that's just a rumor. No substance to it yet.
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I, and many actual lawyers, don't think that they can. These clauses *probably* will not stand up in court, at least against a legitimate grievance. It may work, either directly or indirectly, to stop money-grab class actions, but it may not work if there's a real case.
I am told (IANAL, remember?) that it is already unenforceable in the EU, and that several states in the US are considering making it unenforceable as well.
I was aiming more at gently ribbing /.'s mod system. I metaphorically rated Valve's action "-1, Evil".
Yeah, normally I'm a big Valve fan, but I've gotta admit, I can't defend this one. I mean, they're right about "class actions only make money for the lawyers", but still...
I may not start boycotting you now, Valve, but you just lost a few points of rep with *this* faction.
"Fully operational" doesn't mean "well-tested, safe and reliable".
Just look at the Death Star.
Fully operational? Yes. Able to be blown up by craft a fraction of 1% of it's size? Twice in a row, even.
I've had one fail on me, recently even. Although I literally went into the Best Buy, grabbed the cheapest mouse they had (a small Logitech wireless), and bought it with the express intent of "if it fails, I'll just buy a new one".
And given how long it lasted (~ two years, constantly being tossed into a bag or otherwise abused), and how well it fits my needs (fitting into bags), I'm satisfied. I'll probably buy another.
Normally I like Microsoft hardware. Their mice and keyboards are good (not the best, but the best for a reasonable price), and the Xbox controller is one of the best controllers you can find (I have two and I don't even own an Xbox!).
But these?
SHIT on a fucking STICK these suck. The wedge looks unusable. It was obviously aimed at being tiny (for laptops), but it's not much smaller than the Logitech wireless I have, which has ergonomic contours and a proper mouse wheel.
The small keyboard combines the worst parts of a bad laptop keyboard with none of the advantages. Half the keys looked too small to even hit reliably.
The full-size mouse was the closest to being decent, but it made the mistake of thinking expensive, fancy touch surfaces HAVE to be better than anything else. It's not. After using Apple's no-button mouse, I can say for sure that I will never use any mouse without an actual fucking wheel. It's just not usable.
And then there was that curved, "ergonomic" keyboard. Which looked about as comfortable to use as a keyboard made of razor blades and used needles. Maybe it's just me (not a fan of so-called "ergonomic" keyboards), but I wouldn't take one of those even if it was free.
So that's zero products out of four that I'd even think about buying. Which is about what the rest of Microsoft is batting - so at least they fail consistently.
Ahem?
Because:
* Ammunition is hard to come by in London. Not so much in Afghanistan.
* The guns are quite a bit more likely to explode in your face (particularly if you use ammunition that's actually up to spec, instead of the low-power crap you find over there). Criminals, at least the ones who plan ahead far enough to obtain a gun, seek *profit* - they're generally more risk-averse than rebels/insurgents/terrorists, who generally are willing (if not planning) to die for the cause.
* Legality. You can legally own an assault rifle in Afghanistan and Iraq (although I recall a one-gun-per-household limit was imposed by the occupation). So unless you're actually seen using it illegally, you can own one with no legal hassle. Not so in London.
Interestingly, the AK isn't the only gun so cloned. One of the most common is actually the old British Lee-Enfield (SMLE Mk. 4). Apparently long-range accuracy (and reliability) trump the ability to spray 30 rounds into the ceiling.
The tooling needed to produce a really bad copy of a bolt-action rifle is pretty simple. If I don't have it myself, I can probably find it at Home Depot. I could make myself one relatively easily, and I believe even legally (I've been told that self-made weapons are unregulated, as long as you don't sell them, but IANAL and the person I heard it from WNAL, so don't take my word for it). I just wouldn't fire the thing without a two-inch-thick steel plate between me and the weapon.
At this point, it's pretty obvious that they aren't sticking to things that were in the books. They're making up new material, new stories. It was a stretch to make The Hobbit into two movies (they were already going to add at least half a movie of new material, probably closer to a full movie). But three? They're making shit up. Totally new material.
Tolkien would probably be happy about that. I'd ask him myself, but... you know...
Tolkien was a student of myths and legends, and of languages. He was obsessed with the interplay between languages and stories, and held a theory that the original primary purpose of language was to tell stories and legends. He thought any language without legends was a dead language. He didn't invent Elvish to help tell the LotR stories - he invented the Lord of the Rings to complete his languages. It was a bit of a linguistic experiment to him, actually.
Tolkien believed in the old way of stories, of men telling tales around a campfire, like the poets and bards of old. He tried to replicate that in his classroom (reading Beowulf et al. in the original languages). And possibly the most important difference between modern stories and ancient tales is that, in the old way, you can change it. You can change words, change stories, add verses, remove characters. You aren't supposed to do that with modern stories. Even in the fanfic culture, you generally don't take the original story and throw in a new subplot, new people, new places.
Tolkien would be happy to know that his story has become legend in that aspect, that his story lives not just as words on paper, but as a living, changing story.
Doesn't mean I myself agree with this - I'm "cautiously reserving judgement until the actual work is shown", neither immediately loving it nor already hating it. But I think Tolkien would be happy.
Freakin' PING can be turned into a DDOS tool in like five seconds. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be distributed.
Also, I imagine it needs some form of authentication to actually turn your site off. Which means you'd have to already have a privileged username/password for each site you want to attack. Pretty poor DDOS tool.
You joke, but (IIRC) the Apollo 11 flag was accidentally knocked over during lift-off (rocket engines, unsurprisingly, generate "wind"). They tried to plant the flags further from the craft during later missions, but I guess they were never 100% sure it didn't happen again (I'm about to RTFA to find out).
Why not? Maybe because I can't.
I've got a Mac Pro. 2006 issue. Still runs fine, it's still more than powerful enough for anything I actually do. Sucks a good amount of juice, but I don't pay the power bill so what do I care?
I put a Windows partition on it (many of my machines dual-boot either Windows/Mac or Windows/Linux). Runs fine using Windows 7. It meets all the specs for Windows 8 as well, but I'm not upgrading.
But OS X, I can only go up to Lion (10.7). This is supposedly because they dropped a lot of 32-bit support, and the 64-bit support on this Mac is kind of crap. It's supposedly possible if I hack some shit to get 64-bit EFI and get a new graphics card with 64-bit drivers, but come on, Apple. Six years isn't that old, especially when it's that powerful for six years old.
I would buy that argument more if it weren't also true of physical retail. Read the EULA next time.
I've said this before: DRM, in and of itself, is not evil.
If all the DRM does is check whether I have or have not purchased the [whatever], and reliably detects paying users as such (low false-positive rate; the false-negative rate is meaningless to me), and the only thing it does is conditionally run (or not run) the [whatever], and it requires minimal work on my own part, I'm fine with it. And, it seems, many others are fine with it as well.
Now, many, even most, DRM implementations fail at least one of those evilness checks. This Ubisoft one violates the "don't do anything on the system not related to your product" clause. Many others fail the "reliably detect paying users as such" clause - always-online systems detect offline-but-paying users as nonpaying, for instance.
Steam passes the evilness checks with only a few caveats (it's not perfect, but it's one of the better ones, and probably the best with that level and quantity of games). You will have to go online at least once to authenticate, you need to prepare a bit ahead of time before going offline (random internet dropouts or the Steam servers themselves going down can stop you), and it does encrypt pre-loaded games. And then there's the whole "no reselling/used games" thing, but honestly, I'm fine with that. I've never found selling my old games to be financially worth it, and the very phrase "used digital games" is an absurdity.
Exactly.
I use open source software. I like open source. I even believe in using it.
But I do those things because open-source, generally, produces better results. I don't think it's ethically better - I have no problem using proprietary software, or even releasing my own work under non-"free" licenses.
Games are one of the most common exceptions, and I believe that is because that are an art, not a science. Making the best web browser, or text processor? That's a science - you can define concrete rules to determine how well it works, and perform scientific tests. But games are an art - not just the textures and models, but the game design itself. And art works best with one or two people in charge (giving the work coherence), not ten thousand amateurs working towards divergent goals. There are exceptions, of course, even to that, but I speak of the general case.
So we're getting the Nazis to build this one too?
Until you install that patch, whose purpose seems to be to make the game run worse, not look better. It's almost deliberately unoptimized. For instance, with the patch installed, if there is water anywhere on the map, the water is rendered across the full map, even when completely invisible. And certain objects have had their polycount bumped into orbit - I suspect they simply took the high-res meshes they used to bake normal maps, and used them as render meshes.
No, because it only has three video outputs.
It might be able to do 2x2, but I actually don't have three more monitors to try it with.
I'll take some screencaps next time I play, but yeah, it does look "better" than real life, in the same way that a big-budget movie looks better than real life.
Of course, it all falls apart if you can see anyone's face clearly (especially if they're talking). Or if there's fire. Or something breaking. Or rotor wash. Or a million other things that look almost, but not entirely, right.
The game looks awesome, especially for its age (it's about on par with Skyrim, which came out about three years later). In some limited situations, I would even say it is photorealistic. But I'll also say that in most cases, it's only *mostly* photorealistic, and that in some cases, it's just downright bad (Crytek cannot for the life of them figure out facial animation).
Update your jokes. I have literally maxed out Crysis on a laptop. All settings on ultra, 1920x1080, 16x MSAA, 16x anisotropic filtering. Doesn't dip below 60fps.
Knowing our Congress, they'll try to ban teaching Geometry in schools.
After all, you can't print illegal shapes if you don't know shapes!
Change takes time. I have noticed that, after Valve brought Steam to OS X, the number of games for OS X went up - Assassin's Creed, The Darkness, Duke Nukem Forever...
Sure, right now there are still nowhere near as many games on Mac as on Windows (remember when I said roughly a quarter of my Steam library was Mac-compatible?), but it's rising. If Valve brings it to Linux as well, I expect we will start seeing other companies do so as well. Not all of them, but some.
Change starts small. Get L4D2, DOTA, TF2 on Linux, and the change will *start*.
Erm, I know HL:S and HL:DM:S weren't *immediately* ported to the newest engine, but I'm pretty sure they were eventually. I'm not on my Mac right now, but I'm pretty sure I have those games installed. Will reply later if I find it.
Constantly record to a certain section of memory, overwriting results from five minutes ago if needed (and it will be needed - the buffer will be sized to only have enough storage for five minute's recording). That memory doesn't even need to be persistent - RAM works fine.
If the panic button is pressed, copy that buffer into "recorded" memory (ie. disk or flash), and begin writing new frames to there as well for the next five minutes.
Think of it as a database write-ahead log, almost, except here the purpose is to allow you to discard unneeded information instead of to protect against failure.
1) They are already working directly with Intel to improve their drivers, and they have a history (Windows-side) of working with AMD and nVidia for their drivers.
2) They quite likely will not use WINE to run non-native games. They didn't do that when they ported to Mac - they ported Steam itself and all the games they themselves had made in the past decade, and made any Steam games that already had Mac ports available on Mac, but that's it. They apparently cannot, or will not, set up any sort of emulation layer (excepting DOSBox, apparently). I know there are rumors of them including WINE in LinSteam, but that's just a rumor. No substance to it yet.