This is really a problem with the concept of a driver. We shouldn't have to install drivers for most hardware. Drivers are tied to a particular operating system and API and are a piss-poor substitute for a paper specification which can be implemented by everybody
Well, AMD have published rather complete specifications. Where is this "everybody" you're talking about? While there are some external contributors to the open source drivers, any delusion that the "community" would conjure up as many developers as AMD or nVidias's closed source teams have clearly been put to rest. Reality is that they're overworked trying to produce one working OSS driver even with everyone collaborating.
Actually, that's only partly true. Gallium3D now has a Direct3D state tracker, so WINE can use the GPU directly for implementing the high-level parts of Direct3D, rather than going via OpenGL. Of course, this only works with drivers using the Gallium3D infrastructure (so, not the nVidia drivers).
Except the WINE guys have said they're not going to do that. And when the problem is lack of manpower to begin with, it's highly unlikely someone else will either. But hey, it's open source so prove us wrong...
You do realize that people lived at the same time as mammoths right? That we have cave paintings of hunting them? If they were superlethal to us, we'd know.
I think it's more of a preference, personally. I played Doom and Doom 2 and I'm still playing Fallout and Oblivion.
I played through Oblivion but I've no idea how you can call that a FPS, most people would put that squarely in the RPG category even though most RPGs have bows and arrows as well as ranged spells. When I think FPS I think more like Crysis, Call of Duty, Bioshock or Far Cry 2. Fallout is something of a FPS-RPG crossover. I'd say the essence of an FPS is that it's a high intensity adrenaline rush game that requires good aim and staying on the move, not just good equipment and high level. Most game modes particularly in multiplayer is one big rush from start to finish, there's never a second downtime. The further you get from that formula the less I consider it an FPS. In any case, I never said it was one size fits all - but I think many people consider that too much stress after a while..
To be under any obligation to distribute source under the GPL, you must have distributed a binary under the GPL. Since they haven't, they aren't obliged to do anything at all. But assuming they had then obviously the art assets aren't derivative of the binary nor the binary of the art assets, they would be what in copyright law is called a compilation.
A "compilation" is a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship. The term "compilation" includes collective works.
It seems fairly clear that while each piece of graphics, sound, code etc. have their own copyright the arrangement of them all together into a game constitutes a compilation. This is what the GPL says:
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.
Even the GPL FAQ is rather muddy on what this means since obviously lots of software call other software in various ways. None the less, for a game it's quite easy to see that they're all intimately adapted and coming together with a single purpose - to give you the game. However, in this specific instance it says "which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program" not work which may be interpreted that it only means combining it with any form of library/plugin/module/object code/binary patch, not data assets. Nobody really knows until you've tried arguing it court though...
Despite the tone, that's not what the GP said. He said DirectX 9 was when it surpassed OpenGL and I'm inclined to agree. This is around 2002, when the last big OpenGL games like Neverwinter Nights and Unreal Tournament 2003 were released. Version numbers are a little irrelevant when pretty much every major game made since has chosen to use DirectX and still do. May I point you to this story from 2008 - six years later when OpenGL 3.0 finally comes out and people call it a great disappointment? And that if you port it to OpenGL 4 only people running blobs can run it because mesa doesn't support OpenGL 3/4 and so neither do any open source drivers?
Be honest and admit that the OpenGL game market has been microscopic. While certainly there are a few OpenGL games, nobody has taken a serious interest in improving OpenGL for gaming use in many, many years and the fact that OpenGL 3 and 4 exist at all is more due to workstation and CAD/CAM use than anything else. Best proven by the fact that AMD and nVidia support it in their drivers - meaning they have a business case for it, while the community lack people and interest. True, OpenGL has seen some interest lately with mobile platforms but they live on limited hardware and OpenGL ES is much more a port of OpenGL 2.x than an effort to compete with DirectX.
What I miss is that Ultima ]I[ was not an FPS. I am sick and tired of FPSs. I haven't actually played a video game for more than an hour since the first release of Half-Life. After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang. Half-Life was still appealing because it was such an enormous improvement over DOOM (which was great because it really brought the FPS concept to life) because the hardware video card technology was once again on the perfect timeline (3D accelerating algorithms were beginning to stabilize). After Half-Life it was all the same; more whizz-bang, more glitz and glimmer, more anime, prettier girls, more graphica fantastica, more innuendo to keep the teenagers drewling.
I think FPS games are more of a phase... I played lots of them probably starting with Doom (1993) and mostly ending with Unreal Tournament (1999) - my teens to my early 20s. If I had been born a decade later, I'm guessing I'd be playing the FPS games of a decade later but today they have no appeal to me. The fact is, if you take of those rosy glasses you were pretty easy to entertain as a teen. Give you action, give you splatter and you're entertained. In retrospect it's quite amazing how much I liked some rather braindead action flicks too, same thing. Particularly the single-player mode got all the complexity of Rambo, one man against a million of them. In the end I think it was "Capture the Flag" and my clan that kept me on UT, because they brought a bit of strategy and cooperation, pure deathmatch lost the appeal long before I quit.
So to sum it up, I don't think the games changed I think you changed. And there'll always be a generation of teens that want to play these games, just like there's always a generation of children to play children's games. Of course there are FPS games that appeal to a more adult gamer, that resemble real life where you have to sneak and cover and a few shots will kill you and there's real penalties for dying. But the whole "fantasy" FPS games where you dance around each other trying to hit the other guy with the rocket launcher and pocket nukes to get a MU-MU-MU-MULTIKILL and it's all about your mouse twitching skill are things I doubt appeal to many people over 25. Well, less so than other game types anyway as I still play games of Civilization and have done so since the original in 1991. I wouldn't be surprised if I sit these on the nursery home bored and whip up a game of Civilization XVII.
The "List Price" for an App is an amount that does not exceed, at any time, the lowest list price or suggested retail price for such App (including any similar edition, version or release) available on any Similar Service or the lowest actual price at which you make such App available for sale through any Similar Service. You will update the List Price for each App as necessary to ensure that it meets the requirements of this section 5i.
Well, it seems obvious that if you sign two Amazon-like contracts you're pretty damn screwed. Let's call them A1 and A2, you sign a contact with both for a MSRP of $100. Now A1 sells it at $30 instead, meaning A2 can now demand you lower the list price to $30. After that, A2 can decide to sell it for $6. Now A1 can demand you lower the list price to $6, then sell it for $2. The only way you can sanely satisfy this contract is if you only sign one such contract, meaning Amazon is the only stored allowed to sell for less than your List Price. Make no mistake, this is a contract to give Amazon a monopoly on holding sales on your product.
By contrast, here in California, we apparently get to pay full sales tax on the imaginary MSRP dreamed up by some marketing guy smoking crack. Even if you get it for free, or with a discount, or whatever. I was mildly interested in taking up Verizon on a 2-for-1 Blackberry sale, before they told me I'd have to pay $70 in tax for the "free" phone, since the MSRP on a free phone was apparently around 700 dollars. I don't know if that's just cell phones or what, but it's just ridiculous.
That smells very fishy to me. I don't live in the US, but I know that if say my employer gave me a "free" phone as a fringe benefit I'd probably have to pay income tax of it in value of the MSRP - as there was no actual sale. But if I go down to the clothes store and buy some shirts at their "buy three, pay for two" offer the sales tax is always a straight percentage of the sale. I would not be surprised at all if this is Verizon trying to make $70 off your "free" phone.
This is a world apart from companies that actually allow users to be in charge of their own computer - and that typically is only practical, and only occurs, where there is a high level of tech savvy. Like Google, who will buy you the computer you ask for and let you install what the hell you like on it.
For general employees yes, fortunately it's more common in IT departments because they do so much changes and testing and whatnot. Many companies I've been to have had the policy "You work in IT. You should be able to manage your own desktop. You have local admin rights. If you fuck it up, we will wipe it for you but we will not support it in any way." Also I've experienced that doesn't have to be a strict rule, just a rule of thumb and IT can get you on that list if you make too many legitimate requests where you paint by-the-numbers steps for them. Also works for server admins once they realize you're not going to make a mess for them.
IT costs vs human costs have gone down, down, down and this trend is likely to continue. The tools to manage a large group of machines through Group Policy or other means are becoming more and more advanced with minimal staff supporting a huge number of computers. Of course you could have your employees bring in their own computers and use tons of company time - or IT time - to meddle with their computers, because that's work now right? This goes against all sanity of why you have support departments in corporations, it's not because you couldn't have them do the janitor and cleaning duties on rotation. It's because you want them to do their job, which they're hopefully good at and that you're paying way too much for them to go around playing jack-of-all-trades. And I swear in practice some of the smarter people would become the "go-to" guys which will clog up their time, when they should have been busy making the company money. But please tell me companies that are considering this so I can short them.
It's very simple. You are paid to think. The quality of your thoughts after 8 hours working in a day is not nearly as good as in the first few hours.
Yhe first hour or two are the hours I get nothing done. Not only because I check my mail and get various other tedious things done, but because my mind is just not awake yet. I'm passed the peak when I go home at the end of the day, but I could easily work 12+ hours and still get more done than in the first...
No, the boss is a manager of people but does not understand that working them into the ground for a sustained period isn't going to save the company. He is either desperate or stupid or both.
Of course he's desperate. His company is tanking, and he's got a helluva lot more invested in it than the employees who have been paid for time worked. Calling it quits, folding the company and taking that loss is the very, very last option - driving his employees into the ground is actually a step up on that list, if it works. If you can't survive in the here and now, nothing else matters - no matter how much you crash your long term chances, burn your bridges with employees - you're not going to be around to see it. Long term you pray that the market will turn and jump on your product and that people can be replaced. Just the way it's suggested makes me think they're on the last page of options already, I mean everybody must understand being asked to pay much much more for the same pay is the same as cutting your hourly salary by a lot.
If Microsoft only supports H.264 and Google/Mozilla/Opera only supports WebM, the winner is - beyond a shadow of a doubt - Adobe and flash. There's no need for Microsoft to play nice, the video tag is not established and they can in practice delay it indefinitely.
Well, personally I think it's a huge difference between the proprietary only-for-licensed-parties "standards" like say BD+ for BluRays and standards that are made by a major standards organization and is published, open for all to participate and under RAND licensing - on a scale of open to closed they're much more open. Like for example there's a huge difference that for H.264 you have x264, while trying to reverse engineer proprietary formats is pure hell. I think you're far too optimistic as to how uniquely "open" or "open stanadard" is defined.
The dictionary lists 23 uses of open, many of which apply to that. And the expression itself is no clearer, from Wikipedia:
For example, the rules for standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the IETF, ISO, IEC, and ITU-T permit their standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees. Among these organizations, only the IETF and ITU-T explicitly refer to their standards as "open standards", while the others refer only to producing "standards".
BESIDES the licensing fees will disappear very soon. MPEG1/2/JPEG are already public domain if I recall correctly, and MPEG4/H264 will soon be an open standard too
MPEG1? Check. MPEG2? *bzzzzzzzzt* 2023. JPEG? Yep, was never patented to begin with. H.264 soon? Well, if 2027 is soon.
And you didn't mention MP3, but that is 2012/2017 depending if you think the submarine patents are valid or not.
Major reform is needed. One thing I learned from my GrandDad[among many, numerous things], was that only stagnant water breeds mosquitoes. Think about the concept seriously for a moment, it is enlightening.
The trouble if you apply that logic is that it cuts both ways. Long standing rights and principles can be cut down just as easily as old relics that have lost their purpose and meaning. And the answer depends extremely on who you ask, others would say copyrights and patents are more important now than ever in the "information economy". Some would say the second amendment is an old relic from the days of the minutemen, others think it's a vital civil right today. It's only an argument that appeal to people that already agree with you.
I suspect the statistic is even simpler, what they receive takedown requests for they count as illegal and everything else is by default assumed legal. I doubt RapidShare would permit anyone to rifle through a representative selection and try to determine a real percentage, after all it's a private sharing service and they have no business trying to open them.
If YOU break the law working for the corporation, YOU pay the bill/serve the time. Even if you are the CEO, the fines and lawyer expenses are not going to be paid by the shareholders (who, in the whole part, do not know what is happening). If the chain of command imposes rules/objectives that cannot be reallistically meet (like driving from coast to coast of the USA with the due rest and without breaking speed limits in 24 hours), then they are held liable, TOO.
While there's planty of corporate scape goats to go around, I'd see a hell of a legal mess if you tried imposing personal liabilities for normal employees while still having loyality to the company. Is it the salesman, the project leader, the team members, the project owner - I mean you can have his signature on the dotted line, but in my world that's usually just an executive that approves the expense and is barely part of the project at all. The only thing he could do was charge a huge risk premium for doing it, but it wouldn't change anything.
Honestly, as a developer taking a paycheck would you like the possibility that one day they go after you personally for introducing a bug? What about QA and testing? What about the short deadline you were given? You know it won't matter. Plus you'd have lots of doubtful "it wasn't my fault, I called some code and it failed" vs "he used the code in a way I never meant for it to be used" cases. In the end, it's only the corporation that is responsible for the whole product working as advertised and sold.
The second part also suffer from "who is supposed to see this doesn't add up" issues. Like for example you're charged with setting up an overall plan for transporting goods. Now somewhere down the chain of command this doesn't add up, you have a trailer going too far and too long. I assure you the chief strategic planner at Wal-Mart has no clue about the schedule of any single trailer - he only plans how many tons of goods they need to move. If people then simply let themselves get pressured and don't offer feedback, the chain of command won't know what it leads to in reality.
Hitler and Stalin were allies long before he took power, and he received... let's say "physical" help from the KGB with his election. In public, of course, Hitler and Stalin were enemies
What a load of bullshit. Hitler and his nationalism opposed pretty much everything the Soviet tried to do to start a global communist revolution. And you are claiming Hitler was helped by an organization that was started in 1954. The rest of your post is also full of provable lies - especially to what existed before fascism and what they invented, pure rambling - did you mean to say the Volkswagen was a weapon design? - and the 100% tax rate shows you've never opened a history book, only taking things you think you know to fit your theory. Here's a few quotes, granted WP is not the best of sources but well:
Specifically, during the first four years of the new regime, from 1922 to 1925, the Fascists had a generally laissez-faire economic policy under the Finance Minister Alberto De Stefani. Free competition was encouraged. De Stefani initially reduced taxes, regulations and trade restrictions on the whole.
In June 1933, the Reinhardt Program was introduced. It was an extensive infrastructure development project that combined indirect incentives, such as tax reductions, with direct public investment in waterways, railroads and highways.
Within a few years of Hitler's accession, "middle-class socialism" had been defeated, collective bargaining had been banned and unions had been outlawed. Large companies were favored over small businesses.
Oh yeah, anti-unions. That is sooooo left-wing policy. Of course both Fascism and Communism was against the free enterprise, but you ignore massive differences. Fascism was more like a modern corporate serfdom, workers were for the industry to use, and the industry was for the state to use. Those who were industry leaders before fascism continued to be industry leaders under fascism and made massive profits. It is true they made massive government pushes in science, technology, infrastructure and industry - not unlike the Apollo decade in the US, I think. But it has a lot more in common with modern communist China than old communist Soviet.
I didn't say it was the only reason why they might sue. I said that was a very common explanation for why they don't sue, even though they claim to have patents that apply. Google has very clearly and loudly claimed WebM is patent free, if the patents have any credibility at all now is the time to use them. Google has gone all in, and it's time to either call or fold and there's really no other way to interpret folding than that your bluff has been called.
There are so many schools, etc in most populated areas how is someone supposed to get from one side of town to the next without coming within 1000ft of a schools property? Do they distribute maps? Obeying something like this would require so much effort that I doubt anyone who actually attempted it would be successful.
I checked how that would look in my town. I searched for primary school on Google Maps and tried envisioning 1000ft circles around the dots. The city is already almost unmanagable, you certainly have no hope with bus or tram. Maybe by car or on foot you could take small streets and long detours to make it happen. If you add secondary schools, parks, playgrounds, daycares there's no point even trying, downtown is all one giant red blob.
The insanity of it all is that it stlil means they won't be kept away from children. Children are everywhere, live on every street no matter what is or is not near. If you need them that badly kept away from children, you need a controlled environment without children. There are minimum security prisons like that, internally it's more like a village only the perimeter resembles a prison.
With everybody clamping down on limits and "excessive" usage, most of North America will need BluRay. Most other places too 50 GB is much cheaper to deliver by disc, not online. Sure, for the urban population in high tech countries moving to an all online solution will work but BluRay isn't going anywhere. That and torrents, until they get their head out of their ass and realize things are on torrents hours after broadcast and anything I like I will watch as soon as it is available, the only question is if they're in the business of making money or not. And with BluRays, I'm at least certain they'll play even if things can't call home to the mothership, I'm not putting any money into a system with a remote killswitch.
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This is really a problem with the concept of a driver. We shouldn't have to install drivers for most hardware. Drivers are tied to a particular operating system and API and are a piss-poor substitute for a paper specification which can be implemented by everybody
Well, AMD have published rather complete specifications. Where is this "everybody" you're talking about? While there are some external contributors to the open source drivers, any delusion that the "community" would conjure up as many developers as AMD or nVidias's closed source teams have clearly been put to rest. Reality is that they're overworked trying to produce one working OSS driver even with everyone collaborating.
Actually, that's only partly true. Gallium3D now has a Direct3D state tracker, so WINE can use the GPU directly for implementing the high-level parts of Direct3D, rather than going via OpenGL. Of course, this only works with drivers using the Gallium3D infrastructure (so, not the nVidia drivers).
Except the WINE guys have said they're not going to do that. And when the problem is lack of manpower to begin with, it's highly unlikely someone else will either. But hey, it's open source so prove us wrong...
You do realize that people lived at the same time as mammoths right? That we have cave paintings of hunting them? If they were superlethal to us, we'd know.
I think it's more of a preference, personally. I played Doom and Doom 2 and I'm still playing Fallout and Oblivion.
I played through Oblivion but I've no idea how you can call that a FPS, most people would put that squarely in the RPG category even though most RPGs have bows and arrows as well as ranged spells. When I think FPS I think more like Crysis, Call of Duty, Bioshock or Far Cry 2. Fallout is something of a FPS-RPG crossover. I'd say the essence of an FPS is that it's a high intensity adrenaline rush game that requires good aim and staying on the move, not just good equipment and high level. Most game modes particularly in multiplayer is one big rush from start to finish, there's never a second downtime. The further you get from that formula the less I consider it an FPS. In any case, I never said it was one size fits all - but I think many people consider that too much stress after a while..
To be under any obligation to distribute source under the GPL, you must have distributed a binary under the GPL. Since they haven't, they aren't obliged to do anything at all. But assuming they had then obviously the art assets aren't derivative of the binary nor the binary of the art assets, they would be what in copyright law is called a compilation.
A "compilation" is a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship. The term "compilation" includes collective works.
It seems fairly clear that while each piece of graphics, sound, code etc. have their own copyright the arrangement of them all together into a game constitutes a compilation. This is what the GPL says:
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.
Even the GPL FAQ is rather muddy on what this means since obviously lots of software call other software in various ways. None the less, for a game it's quite easy to see that they're all intimately adapted and coming together with a single purpose - to give you the game. However, in this specific instance it says "which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program" not work which may be interpreted that it only means combining it with any form of library/plugin/module/object code/binary patch, not data assets. Nobody really knows until you've tried arguing it court though...
Despite the tone, that's not what the GP said. He said DirectX 9 was when it surpassed OpenGL and I'm inclined to agree. This is around 2002, when the last big OpenGL games like Neverwinter Nights and Unreal Tournament 2003 were released. Version numbers are a little irrelevant when pretty much every major game made since has chosen to use DirectX and still do. May I point you to this story from 2008 - six years later when OpenGL 3.0 finally comes out and people call it a great disappointment? And that if you port it to OpenGL 4 only people running blobs can run it because mesa doesn't support OpenGL 3/4 and so neither do any open source drivers?
Be honest and admit that the OpenGL game market has been microscopic. While certainly there are a few OpenGL games, nobody has taken a serious interest in improving OpenGL for gaming use in many, many years and the fact that OpenGL 3 and 4 exist at all is more due to workstation and CAD/CAM use than anything else. Best proven by the fact that AMD and nVidia support it in their drivers - meaning they have a business case for it, while the community lack people and interest. True, OpenGL has seen some interest lately with mobile platforms but they live on limited hardware and OpenGL ES is much more a port of OpenGL 2.x than an effort to compete with DirectX.
I don't think there can be any doubt that Microsoft puts a helluva lot more time and money into DirectX than anyone does for OpenGL. And the same goes for the drivers AMD and nVidia put a helluva lot more time and money into optimizing DirectX than they do for OpenGL. Because that's where the money is. Here's AMD in direct reply to "A single open source driver with feature-parity and equal performance to the closed source drivers would certainly satisfy all customers." and I quote Yep, it would. It would also cost more each year than our total Linux graphics revenues. I would have a tough time presenting a "we lose massive amounts of money but make people happy" plan to our executives. Nobody spends money on OpenGL unless it's a moneymaker for them, and unlike the kernel there aren't many of those.
What I miss is that Ultima ]I[ was not an FPS. I am sick and tired of FPSs. I haven't actually played a video game for more than an hour since the first release of Half-Life. After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang. Half-Life was still appealing because it was such an enormous improvement over DOOM (which was great because it really brought the FPS concept to life) because the hardware video card technology was once again on the perfect timeline (3D accelerating algorithms were beginning to stabilize). After Half-Life it was all the same; more whizz-bang, more glitz and glimmer, more anime, prettier girls, more graphica fantastica, more innuendo to keep the teenagers drewling.
I think FPS games are more of a phase... I played lots of them probably starting with Doom (1993) and mostly ending with Unreal Tournament (1999) - my teens to my early 20s. If I had been born a decade later, I'm guessing I'd be playing the FPS games of a decade later but today they have no appeal to me. The fact is, if you take of those rosy glasses you were pretty easy to entertain as a teen. Give you action, give you splatter and you're entertained. In retrospect it's quite amazing how much I liked some rather braindead action flicks too, same thing. Particularly the single-player mode got all the complexity of Rambo, one man against a million of them. In the end I think it was "Capture the Flag" and my clan that kept me on UT, because they brought a bit of strategy and cooperation, pure deathmatch lost the appeal long before I quit.
So to sum it up, I don't think the games changed I think you changed. And there'll always be a generation of teens that want to play these games, just like there's always a generation of children to play children's games. Of course there are FPS games that appeal to a more adult gamer, that resemble real life where you have to sneak and cover and a few shots will kill you and there's real penalties for dying. But the whole "fantasy" FPS games where you dance around each other trying to hit the other guy with the rocket launcher and pocket nukes to get a MU-MU-MU-MULTIKILL and it's all about your mouse twitching skill are things I doubt appeal to many people over 25. Well, less so than other game types anyway as I still play games of Civilization and have done so since the original in 1991. I wouldn't be surprised if I sit these on the nursery home bored and whip up a game of Civilization XVII.
The "List Price" for an App is an amount that does not exceed, at any time, the lowest list price or suggested retail price for such App (including any similar edition, version or release) available on any Similar Service or the lowest actual price at which you make such App available for sale through any Similar Service. You will update the List Price for each App as necessary to ensure that it meets the requirements of this section 5i.
Well, it seems obvious that if you sign two Amazon-like contracts you're pretty damn screwed. Let's call them A1 and A2, you sign a contact with both for a MSRP of $100. Now A1 sells it at $30 instead, meaning A2 can now demand you lower the list price to $30. After that, A2 can decide to sell it for $6. Now A1 can demand you lower the list price to $6, then sell it for $2. The only way you can sanely satisfy this contract is if you only sign one such contract, meaning Amazon is the only stored allowed to sell for less than your List Price. Make no mistake, this is a contract to give Amazon a monopoly on holding sales on your product.
By contrast, here in California, we apparently get to pay full sales tax on the imaginary MSRP dreamed up by some marketing guy smoking crack. Even if you get it for free, or with a discount, or whatever. I was mildly interested in taking up Verizon on a 2-for-1 Blackberry sale, before they told me I'd have to pay $70 in tax for the "free" phone, since the MSRP on a free phone was apparently around 700 dollars. I don't know if that's just cell phones or what, but it's just ridiculous.
That smells very fishy to me. I don't live in the US, but I know that if say my employer gave me a "free" phone as a fringe benefit I'd probably have to pay income tax of it in value of the MSRP - as there was no actual sale. But if I go down to the clothes store and buy some shirts at their "buy three, pay for two" offer the sales tax is always a straight percentage of the sale. I would not be surprised at all if this is Verizon trying to make $70 off your "free" phone.
This is a world apart from companies that actually allow users to be in charge of their own computer - and that typically is only practical, and only occurs, where there is a high level of tech savvy. Like Google, who will buy you the computer you ask for and let you install what the hell you like on it.
For general employees yes, fortunately it's more common in IT departments because they do so much changes and testing and whatnot. Many companies I've been to have had the policy "You work in IT. You should be able to manage your own desktop. You have local admin rights. If you fuck it up, we will wipe it for you but we will not support it in any way." Also I've experienced that doesn't have to be a strict rule, just a rule of thumb and IT can get you on that list if you make too many legitimate requests where you paint by-the-numbers steps for them. Also works for server admins once they realize you're not going to make a mess for them.
IT costs vs human costs have gone down, down, down and this trend is likely to continue. The tools to manage a large group of machines through Group Policy or other means are becoming more and more advanced with minimal staff supporting a huge number of computers. Of course you could have your employees bring in their own computers and use tons of company time - or IT time - to meddle with their computers, because that's work now right? This goes against all sanity of why you have support departments in corporations, it's not because you couldn't have them do the janitor and cleaning duties on rotation. It's because you want them to do their job, which they're hopefully good at and that you're paying way too much for them to go around playing jack-of-all-trades. And I swear in practice some of the smarter people would become the "go-to" guys which will clog up their time, when they should have been busy making the company money. But please tell me companies that are considering this so I can short them.
It's very simple. You are paid to think. The quality of your thoughts after 8 hours working in a day is not nearly as good as in the first few hours.
Yhe first hour or two are the hours I get nothing done. Not only because I check my mail and get various other tedious things done, but because my mind is just not awake yet. I'm passed the peak when I go home at the end of the day, but I could easily work 12+ hours and still get more done than in the first...
You assume you have weekends off... at 80 hours, you have at least a six day work week.
No, the boss is a manager of people but does not understand that working them into the ground for a sustained period isn't going to save the company. He is either desperate or stupid or both.
Of course he's desperate. His company is tanking, and he's got a helluva lot more invested in it than the employees who have been paid for time worked. Calling it quits, folding the company and taking that loss is the very, very last option - driving his employees into the ground is actually a step up on that list, if it works. If you can't survive in the here and now, nothing else matters - no matter how much you crash your long term chances, burn your bridges with employees - you're not going to be around to see it. Long term you pray that the market will turn and jump on your product and that people can be replaced. Just the way it's suggested makes me think they're on the last page of options already, I mean everybody must understand being asked to pay much much more for the same pay is the same as cutting your hourly salary by a lot.
If Microsoft only supports H.264 and Google/Mozilla/Opera only supports WebM, the winner is - beyond a shadow of a doubt - Adobe and flash. There's no need for Microsoft to play nice, the video tag is not established and they can in practice delay it indefinitely.
Well, personally I think it's a huge difference between the proprietary only-for-licensed-parties "standards" like say BD+ for BluRays and standards that are made by a major standards organization and is published, open for all to participate and under RAND licensing - on a scale of open to closed they're much more open. Like for example there's a huge difference that for H.264 you have x264, while trying to reverse engineer proprietary formats is pure hell. I think you're far too optimistic as to how uniquely "open" or "open stanadard" is defined.
The dictionary lists 23 uses of open, many of which apply to that. And the expression itself is no clearer, from Wikipedia:
For example, the rules for standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the IETF, ISO, IEC, and ITU-T permit their standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees. Among these organizations, only the IETF and ITU-T explicitly refer to their standards as "open standards", while the others refer only to producing "standards".
BESIDES the licensing fees will disappear very soon. MPEG1/2/JPEG are already public domain if I recall correctly, and MPEG4/H264 will soon be an open standard too
MPEG1? Check.
MPEG2? *bzzzzzzzzt* 2023.
JPEG? Yep, was never patented to begin with.
H.264 soon? Well, if 2027 is soon.
And you didn't mention MP3, but that is 2012/2017 depending if you think the submarine patents are valid or not.
Major reform is needed. One thing I learned from my GrandDad[among many, numerous things], was that only stagnant water breeds mosquitoes. Think about the concept seriously for a moment, it is enlightening.
The trouble if you apply that logic is that it cuts both ways. Long standing rights and principles can be cut down just as easily as old relics that have lost their purpose and meaning. And the answer depends extremely on who you ask, others would say copyrights and patents are more important now than ever in the "information economy". Some would say the second amendment is an old relic from the days of the minutemen, others think it's a vital civil right today. It's only an argument that appeal to people that already agree with you.
I suspect the statistic is even simpler, what they receive takedown requests for they count as illegal and everything else is by default assumed legal. I doubt RapidShare would permit anyone to rifle through a representative selection and try to determine a real percentage, after all it's a private sharing service and they have no business trying to open them.
If YOU break the law working for the corporation, YOU pay the bill/serve the time. Even if you are the CEO, the fines and lawyer expenses are not going to be paid by the shareholders (who, in the whole part, do not know what is happening).
If the chain of command imposes rules/objectives that cannot be reallistically meet (like driving from coast to coast of the USA with the due rest and without breaking speed limits in 24 hours), then they are held liable, TOO.
While there's planty of corporate scape goats to go around, I'd see a hell of a legal mess if you tried imposing personal liabilities for normal employees while still having loyality to the company. Is it the salesman, the project leader, the team members, the project owner - I mean you can have his signature on the dotted line, but in my world that's usually just an executive that approves the expense and is barely part of the project at all. The only thing he could do was charge a huge risk premium for doing it, but it wouldn't change anything.
Honestly, as a developer taking a paycheck would you like the possibility that one day they go after you personally for introducing a bug? What about QA and testing? What about the short deadline you were given? You know it won't matter. Plus you'd have lots of doubtful "it wasn't my fault, I called some code and it failed" vs "he used the code in a way I never meant for it to be used" cases. In the end, it's only the corporation that is responsible for the whole product working as advertised and sold.
The second part also suffer from "who is supposed to see this doesn't add up" issues. Like for example you're charged with setting up an overall plan for transporting goods. Now somewhere down the chain of command this doesn't add up, you have a trailer going too far and too long. I assure you the chief strategic planner at Wal-Mart has no clue about the schedule of any single trailer - he only plans how many tons of goods they need to move. If people then simply let themselves get pressured and don't offer feedback, the chain of command won't know what it leads to in reality.
Hitler and Stalin were allies long before he took power, and he received ... let's say "physical" help from the KGB with his election. In public, of course, Hitler and Stalin were enemies
What a load of bullshit. Hitler and his nationalism opposed pretty much everything the Soviet tried to do to start a global communist revolution. And you are claiming Hitler was helped by an organization that was started in 1954. The rest of your post is also full of provable lies - especially to what existed before fascism and what they invented, pure rambling - did you mean to say the Volkswagen was a weapon design? - and the 100% tax rate shows you've never opened a history book, only taking things you think you know to fit your theory. Here's a few quotes, granted WP is not the best of sources but well:
Specifically, during the first four years of the new regime, from 1922 to 1925, the Fascists had a generally laissez-faire economic policy under the Finance Minister Alberto De Stefani. Free competition was encouraged. De Stefani initially reduced taxes, regulations and trade restrictions on the whole.
In June 1933, the Reinhardt Program was introduced. It was an extensive infrastructure development project that combined indirect incentives, such as tax reductions, with direct public investment in waterways, railroads and highways.
Within a few years of Hitler's accession, "middle-class socialism" had been defeated, collective bargaining had been banned and unions had been outlawed. Large companies were favored over small businesses.
Oh yeah, anti-unions. That is sooooo left-wing policy. Of course both Fascism and Communism was against the free enterprise, but you ignore massive differences. Fascism was more like a modern corporate serfdom, workers were for the industry to use, and the industry was for the state to use. Those who were industry leaders before fascism continued to be industry leaders under fascism and made massive profits. It is true they made massive government pushes in science, technology, infrastructure and industry - not unlike the Apollo decade in the US, I think. But it has a lot more in common with modern communist China than old communist Soviet.
xIn Capitalist America, government works for big business.
Wait, that's still not a joke.
I didn't say it was the only reason why they might sue. I said that was a very common explanation for why they don't sue, even though they claim to have patents that apply. Google has very clearly and loudly claimed WebM is patent free, if the patents have any credibility at all now is the time to use them. Google has gone all in, and it's time to either call or fold and there's really no other way to interpret folding than that your bluff has been called.
There are so many schools, etc in most populated areas how is someone supposed to get from one side of town to the next without coming within 1000ft of a schools property? Do they distribute maps? Obeying something like this would require so much effort that I doubt anyone who actually attempted it would be successful.
I checked how that would look in my town. I searched for primary school on Google Maps and tried envisioning 1000ft circles around the dots. The city is already almost unmanagable, you certainly have no hope with bus or tram. Maybe by car or on foot you could take small streets and long detours to make it happen. If you add secondary schools, parks, playgrounds, daycares there's no point even trying, downtown is all one giant red blob.
The insanity of it all is that it stlil means they won't be kept away from children. Children are everywhere, live on every street no matter what is or is not near. If you need them that badly kept away from children, you need a controlled environment without children. There are minimum security prisons like that, internally it's more like a village only the perimeter resembles a prison.
With everybody clamping down on limits and "excessive" usage, most of North America will need BluRay. Most other places too 50 GB is much cheaper to deliver by disc, not online. Sure, for the urban population in high tech countries moving to an all online solution will work but BluRay isn't going anywhere. That and torrents, until they get their head out of their ass and realize things are on torrents hours after broadcast and anything I like I will watch as soon as it is available, the only question is if they're in the business of making money or not. And with BluRays, I'm at least certain they'll play even if things can't call home to the mothership, I'm not putting any money into a system with a remote killswitch.