The pathing is rediculous. I agree with you completely there (Why would a character take the long route taking damage through a burning object instead of walking straight ahead?), but...
The only people I ever hear complain about the camera are WoW players. There is nothing wrong with the camera at all. Hold down the middle mouse button and set it how you want. What's the big deal? Indoors it is a little iffy, but not terrible. You're playing multiple characters. not one, so you can't have a chase camera (nor do I see why you'd want one, since that wouldn't give a D&D feel at all).
If you like WoW better, than by all means go play WoW.
There was a Rumsfeld press conference a few years back where somebody asked him is we had plans for a war with Syria. His response was something along the lines of "I can't say 'no' to that because we have plans for just about anything you can imagine, but I know of no plans to execute".
Had I never owned a copy of 3D Studio Max, how would I associate that with anything but a crappy prime-time, mainstream TV show staring an unhealthy looking skinny chick?
What can be considered a reasonable distance between cars stops growing when you reach a certain speed. Just because you can travel the distance between the two cars in less time at a higher speed doesn't mean the car in front of you is going to be able to reduce its speed relative to yours any faster.
The following distance doesn't have to be as great on multi lane roads, either, since you have an option other than stopping if it car in front of you slams on the breaks... You can change lanes.
If stopping at high speeds were as perilous in real life as it is in the simplistic mathematical examples give in drivers-ed or high-school physics, considering how most people drive, we'd all be dead.
The reason ACPI is so ridiculously convoluted for the simple tasks it needs to perform is that it was developed by Microsoft in order to easily map to Microsoft Windows registry constructs.
If they can't figure out how to make their own technology work correctly, I don't see how it can possibly be anybody's fault but theirs.
Very interesting. Thanks for the link. That's much cheaper than most low-noise rigs. Still not what I'd consider 'cheap', but not ridiculous like most options.
MythGame is a little rough around the edges though. You'll spend hours setting up keymappings and such. It took me several days before I got min how I like. Plus you won't have the feel of the original controller unless you want to hack some hardware. Also, unless you spend a small fortune, media center PCs are really loud.
There are plenty of patents for fictional descriptions of objects that cannot possibly exist. This occurs because the patent office does not require a working prototype to issue a patent. Issued patents can be listed as prior art in applications for new patents. I'd give you a reference, but this stuff is so common that I'm sure you'll have no trouble doing the legwork in short order.
It's ironic that it's your side of the argument that now relies on nothing but FUD.
I'm left wondering if you think that simply because you are too young to understand what it means to base an opinion on experience, or because you've read so much Microsoft Press literature that you've been brainwashed.
Here's the thing about Microsoft standards, languages, and APIs. The way it works for you on the outside isn't the way it has to work for Microsoft's own applications. I'm not going to get into a semantic argument with you over "I never said", or "I actually meant", and what it really sounded like you meant in context. You're really drawing at straws here with things like "Had you thought that an in-house server would be under the organisation's control?". Think about the business model that would go with that. The spec can say whatever it says... How are they going to make money with it? Why would anybody buy that?
They did have 4 PS3 20 GB units on sale but no one wanted them.
Ok, I'm going to have to call bullshit on you.
Given what PS3s are selling for on eBay, you would have to be a complete fool not to buy one if it was available to you. There are far too many enterprising people in the world for you to not be making this up. Even if none of the people there wanted to own a PS3, they all would have sold out (and then been re-sold).
If, by some odd chance, you're not lying, you cost yourself a minimum of $500 in profits from a re-sale. Good job there turbo.
What is wrong with remote servers? Find a business that will trust Gmail for their corporate communications. What good is an app that can only message with itself? A business application that works with documents needs to be able to open arbitrary files from any source. It needs to be able to do it without the user 'blessing' the file, or copying the file to a trusted location.
You are mistakenly thinking that I don't understand how this stuff works, when in reality I do understand how it works, and I'm saying that it is unacceptable given users current expectations for how applications are used.
Microsoft will poke a hole in their security model in order to satisfy (temporarily) their customers, or their service oriented applications will fail. Business users will never tolerate the inconvenience of a sandboxed application, and while they may eventually trust remote storage for sensitive information (SalesForce.com seems to pull it off), they are never going to buy it from Microsoft. They just don't have that level of trust; even with the most rabid Microsoft supporting CIOs.
I was at Circuit City (Leominster, MA) on Sunday and they had what must have been 150 Wii Remotes in stock. I didn't actually count them, but it was half an isle, 10+ columns, 4 rows of hooks and each hook had 3+ controllers on it. This was around 5:00PM, so the store had been open all day...
When you have two or more RFID cards in your wallet, chances are neither of them will work on any given attempt to use them unless you take the card you want to use out of your wallet....
RMS fanboy? Well, I use XEmacs, not GNU emacs, so that should answer your question.
If you are going for IDE-like features, you get them from emacs, but not so much from vi (which is an excelent text editor which I frequently use... It's not an IDE though). Emacs is not signifigantly more complex than vi, and it certainly isn't any harder to learn than vi, but it offers the most important features you'd get from any good IDE.
Visual Studio is terrible at integration into a multi-platform environment (unless all the "platforms" are windows), and it doesn't support many of the languages that I commonly program in, so I don't consider it a 'good' IDE.
Do you know anything about code access security in.net? Can you tell me, for instance if.net code off running the internet has permission to read and write arbitrary files? Hint: starts with a "n".
In order to have a successful application, Microsoft will either have to disable that protection, or require users to store their documents on a remote server. Additionally, single click 'installs' will eliminate the 'code running off the internet' problem. Microsoft has to face the classic problem of making their software secure, or remove the protections to make it stupid-simple to use. I know history doesn't always predict future performance and all, but which do you think they'll pick?
It is highly probable that over the lifespan of the PS2, they turned a profit purely on the base hardware alone. In other words the later revisions sold at enough profit to make up for any earlier losses. After that, licensing revenues and accessory sales are pure icing. These are the same economics that Microsoft has to deal with. They would have to do worse than you think to turn away from hardware development. They would have to not only lose exclusives, but lose developers entirely.
Many game companies have lived on licensing fees alone, but none of them have survived that way...
Your logic is backwards. It's the console with the most games made for it that wins.
The console wars are wars to win developers, not to win customers. That's why the vendors are willing to sell the units at a loss at first. If you have developers the customers will come. If you don't want to make a huge investment in the 'loser', wait until the games you want are out, and buy the console they run on. Otherwise, you risk making the wrong choice. That's the solution.
Sony doesn't care that they won't make a profit until they sell 30 games because that is the price they pay to build a user base that will attract developers. Since the majority of the PS3s the sell won't take nearly as much of a loss (most of them will actually sell at a profit if the console succeeds in the long term), it's not as big a hit as it may seem.
There is no historical evidence that suggests trash talk of competing consoles will make your console of choice be successful.
Last I checked, there was nothing in copyright law about profit.
Piracy in terms of copyright is a casual term, so it has many definitions, but the most common usage I've heard is the distribution of copies of copyrighted works without authorization. I've never heard anybody use the term 'exact' in the definition.
I'm not going to engage you in argument of any of your points because, frankly, I don't have the time to put in the effort required to make a well referenced case, and I may be wrong. I will say though that there is one of your points that I just plain can't believe:
(a) no real pirate would ever be so stupid as to use his own internet access and leave intact metadata identifying the pirated files
I know lots of people who pirate music. Most of them don't even realize that they are doing something wrong, or that their software of choice uploads as well as downloads. I would be willing to bet that most real pirates do use their own internet access. These people aren't breaking the law with intent, so why would they even consider trying to cover their tracks?
Tell me, when a powerful political figure states in public that the government may have to "reexamine" the idea of freedom of speech, the very bedrock foundation of your entire democratic republic, does that not ring a single warning bell to you?
Go back and read my initial post in this thread. It contains what has been my point this entire time.
I'll sum up though.
I'm all for helping defend the innocent. I'm completely against frivolous lawsuits. The fact of the matter is, though, that sharing music that you don't have copyrights to on the internet is currently illegal, and the law specifies outrageous damages. On top of that, music sharing is so common, and so easy to detect that it is difficult to give most accused individuals the benefit of the doubt when presented with basic evidence against them. Some of them are falsely accused (probably because they were the unwitting victim of a more clever user that spoofed their IP... Essentially, they were framed). By all means! Stand up and fight for those people! But don't tell me that I should offer my technical expertise in aid of the rest of these people, because if they're guilty it's not going to help them, it's going to get the book thrown at them. What they really need in order to be helped is to have the law changed so the penalty fits the crime.
I don't think I'm smarter than everybody else. In my last post I was trying to say that you don't need to be very smart to catch most people who pirate music online because it is easy to do. The reason you see people in this forum complain so much about the RIAA's tactics is because most of them are scared it will happen to them. Why are they scared? They let on that they think they may be falsely accused, but in reality they're scared because they pirate music, they know they can get caught, and they don't want to stop. Your argument seems to be that because a fraction of a percent of everybody accused by the RIAA is falsely, than they all must be... or at least that their system of catching people is massively flawed. A fraction of a percent doesn't seem like a very large error rate to me though. Perhaps just large enough to help a defense lawyer to get some guilty people off the hook? It would be enough if these were criminal trials, but they aren't.
1. Because they're idiots, and they're under the delusion that if they tell you how to do it you will figure out how to defeat their process.
2. What percentage of 20,000 defendants would you say you've got direct knowledge of?
3. You should register to vote.
4. You're full of shit. Either that or you haven't seen many defendants at all. You believe yourself though, so I'll give you a little credit.
I am sure you are well aware that most people who are actually 'pirating' songs would never get caught by the sham investigation which I just outlined for you.
Any geek worth a nickel could catch the average kazaa user pirating music in three seconds using TCP dump. If the geek is worth a buck fifty, they would be able to verify that the data segment of the packet contained mpeg audio data. For an extra quarter, they could verify that it contains audio data the uploader does not have duplication rights for. An hour's worth of scripting, and I could hook up the MusicBrainz database to the process, and automatically dump a real-time list of which IP was pirating what including the real song title (even if the user disguised the name), including the name of the actual copyright holder, without any user interaction or technical knowledge. This stuff isn't rocket science.
Yeah, it sounds ridiculous when you use 'somehow' to describe one of the steps, but really it is trivial to determine the source IP address of a non-spoofed packet. You can do it with freely available software. Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't make the process mysterious. You don't seriously expect me to believe that the majority of people using Kazaa are spoofing their IP addresses, or that the majority of Kazaa users aren't actually pirating music, do you?
The damages are ridiculous, sure. Perhaps the law is ridiculous as well. But if those things are the problem, then change those things. Don't cause another problem by helping people get away with breaking the law.
Slashdot Mirror
The pathing is rediculous. I agree with you completely there (Why would a character take the long route taking damage through a burning object instead of walking straight ahead?), but...
The only people I ever hear complain about the camera are WoW players. There is nothing wrong with the camera at all. Hold down the middle mouse button and set it how you want. What's the big deal? Indoors it is a little iffy, but not terrible. You're playing multiple characters. not one, so you can't have a chase camera (nor do I see why you'd want one, since that wouldn't give a D&D feel at all).
If you like WoW better, than by all means go play WoW.
There was a Rumsfeld press conference a few years back where somebody asked him is we had plans for a war with Syria. His response was something along the lines of "I can't say 'no' to that because we have plans for just about anything you can imagine, but I know of no plans to execute".
Ever heard of the Numa Numa guy?
No.
How about the dancing baby?
Had I never owned a copy of 3D Studio Max, how would I associate that with anything but a crappy prime-time, mainstream TV show staring an unhealthy looking skinny chick?
the Badger or Lama song?
No again.
What can be considered a reasonable distance between cars stops growing when you reach a certain speed. Just because you can travel the distance between the two cars in less time at a higher speed doesn't mean the car in front of you is going to be able to reduce its speed relative to yours any faster.
The following distance doesn't have to be as great on multi lane roads, either, since you have an option other than stopping if it car in front of you slams on the breaks... You can change lanes.
If stopping at high speeds were as perilous in real life as it is in the simplistic mathematical examples give in drivers-ed or high-school physics, considering how most people drive, we'd all be dead.
The reason ACPI is so ridiculously convoluted for the simple tasks it needs to perform is that it was developed by Microsoft in order to easily map to Microsoft Windows registry constructs.
If they can't figure out how to make their own technology work correctly, I don't see how it can possibly be anybody's fault but theirs.
Very interesting. Thanks for the link. That's much cheaper than most low-noise rigs. Still not what I'd consider 'cheap', but not ridiculous like most options.
MythGame is a little rough around the edges though. You'll spend hours setting up keymappings and such. It took me several days before I got min how I like. Plus you won't have the feel of the original controller unless you want to hack some hardware. Also, unless you spend a small fortune, media center PCs are really loud.
There are plenty of patents for fictional descriptions of objects that cannot possibly exist. This occurs because the patent office does not require a working prototype to issue a patent. Issued patents can be listed as prior art in applications for new patents. I'd give you a reference, but this stuff is so common that I'm sure you'll have no trouble doing the legwork in short order.
Now you are aware.
It's ironic that it's your side of the argument that now relies on nothing but FUD.
I'm left wondering if you think that simply because you are too young to understand what it means to base an opinion on experience, or because you've read so much Microsoft Press literature that you've been brainwashed.
Here's the thing about Microsoft standards, languages, and APIs. The way it works for you on the outside isn't the way it has to work for Microsoft's own applications. I'm not going to get into a semantic argument with you over "I never said", or "I actually meant", and what it really sounded like you meant in context. You're really drawing at straws here with things like "Had you thought that an in-house server would be under the organisation's control?". Think about the business model that would go with that. The spec can say whatever it says... How are they going to make money with it? Why would anybody buy that?
They did have 4 PS3 20 GB units on sale but no one wanted them.
Ok, I'm going to have to call bullshit on you.
Given what PS3s are selling for on eBay, you would have to be a complete fool not to buy one if it was available to you. There are far too many enterprising people in the world for you to not be making this up. Even if none of the people there wanted to own a PS3, they all would have sold out (and then been re-sold).
If, by some odd chance, you're not lying, you cost yourself a minimum of $500 in profits from a re-sale. Good job there turbo.
Please, know what you're saying before replying.
Take your own advice.
What is wrong with remote servers? Find a business that will trust Gmail for their corporate communications. What good is an app that can only message with itself? A business application that works with documents needs to be able to open arbitrary files from any source. It needs to be able to do it without the user 'blessing' the file, or copying the file to a trusted location.
You are mistakenly thinking that I don't understand how this stuff works, when in reality I do understand how it works, and I'm saying that it is unacceptable given users current expectations for how applications are used.
Microsoft will poke a hole in their security model in order to satisfy (temporarily) their customers, or their service oriented applications will fail. Business users will never tolerate the inconvenience of a sandboxed application, and while they may eventually trust remote storage for sensitive information (SalesForce.com seems to pull it off), they are never going to buy it from Microsoft. They just don't have that level of trust; even with the most rabid Microsoft supporting CIOs.
I was at Circuit City (Leominster, MA) on Sunday and they had what must have been 150 Wii Remotes in stock. I didn't actually count them, but it was half an isle, 10+ columns, 4 rows of hooks and each hook had 3+ controllers on it. This was around 5:00PM, so the store had been open all day...
When you have two or more RFID cards in your wallet, chances are neither of them will work on any given attempt to use them unless you take the card you want to use out of your wallet....
So what's the benefit?
RMS fanboy? Well, I use XEmacs, not GNU emacs, so that should answer your question.
If you are going for IDE-like features, you get them from emacs, but not so much from vi (which is an excelent text editor which I frequently use... It's not an IDE though). Emacs is not signifigantly more complex than vi, and it certainly isn't any harder to learn than vi, but it offers the most important features you'd get from any good IDE.
Visual Studio is terrible at integration into a multi-platform environment (unless all the "platforms" are windows), and it doesn't support many of the languages that I commonly program in, so I don't consider it a 'good' IDE.
I refuse to touch Emacs with a 39 and a half foot pole.
You refuse to use the best application out there for the task at hand, and then you complain that there isn't a good application out there?
What do potential employers think when they see "Intimidated by complex software" on your resume?
Do you know anything about code access security in .net? Can you tell me, for instance if .net code off running the internet has permission to read and write arbitrary files? Hint: starts with a "n".
In order to have a successful application, Microsoft will either have to disable that protection, or require users to store their documents on a remote server. Additionally, single click 'installs' will eliminate the 'code running off the internet' problem. Microsoft has to face the classic problem of making their software secure, or remove the protections to make it stupid-simple to use. I know history doesn't always predict future performance and all, but which do you think they'll pick?
It is highly probable that over the lifespan of the PS2, they turned a profit purely on the base hardware alone. In other words the later revisions sold at enough profit to make up for any earlier losses. After that, licensing revenues and accessory sales are pure icing. These are the same economics that Microsoft has to deal with. They would have to do worse than you think to turn away from hardware development. They would have to not only lose exclusives, but lose developers entirely.
Many game companies have lived on licensing fees alone, but none of them have survived that way...
Your logic is backwards. It's the console with the most games made for it that wins.
The console wars are wars to win developers, not to win customers. That's why the vendors are willing to sell the units at a loss at first. If you have developers the customers will come. If you don't want to make a huge investment in the 'loser', wait until the games you want are out, and buy the console they run on. Otherwise, you risk making the wrong choice. That's the solution.
Sony doesn't care that they won't make a profit until they sell 30 games because that is the price they pay to build a user base that will attract developers. Since the majority of the PS3s the sell won't take nearly as much of a loss (most of them will actually sell at a profit if the console succeeds in the long term), it's not as big a hit as it may seem.
There is no historical evidence that suggests trash talk of competing consoles will make your console of choice be successful.
I take it you only see a possibility for transfer of ideas in one direction in this conversation...
Last I checked, there was nothing in copyright law about profit.
Piracy in terms of copyright is a casual term, so it has many definitions, but the most common usage I've heard is the distribution of copies of copyrighted works without authorization. I've never heard anybody use the term 'exact' in the definition.
I'm not going to engage you in argument of any of your points because, frankly, I don't have the time to put in the effort required to make a well referenced case, and I may be wrong. I will say though that there is one of your points that I just plain can't believe:
(a) no real pirate would ever be so stupid as to use his own internet access and leave intact metadata identifying the pirated files
I know lots of people who pirate music. Most of them don't even realize that they are doing something wrong, or that their software of choice uploads as well as downloads. I would be willing to bet that most real pirates do use their own internet access. These people aren't breaking the law with intent, so why would they even consider trying to cover their tracks?
Tell me, when a powerful political figure states in public that the government may have to "reexamine" the idea of freedom of speech, the very bedrock foundation of your entire democratic republic, does that not ring a single warning bell to you?
Explain to me where I said it didn't.
Go back and read my initial post in this thread. It contains what has been my point this entire time.
I'll sum up though.
I'm all for helping defend the innocent. I'm completely against frivolous lawsuits. The fact of the matter is, though, that sharing music that you don't have copyrights to on the internet is currently illegal, and the law specifies outrageous damages. On top of that, music sharing is so common, and so easy to detect that it is difficult to give most accused individuals the benefit of the doubt when presented with basic evidence against them. Some of them are falsely accused (probably because they were the unwitting victim of a more clever user that spoofed their IP... Essentially, they were framed). By all means! Stand up and fight for those people! But don't tell me that I should offer my technical expertise in aid of the rest of these people, because if they're guilty it's not going to help them, it's going to get the book thrown at them. What they really need in order to be helped is to have the law changed so the penalty fits the crime.
I don't think I'm smarter than everybody else. In my last post I was trying to say that you don't need to be very smart to catch most people who pirate music online because it is easy to do. The reason you see people in this forum complain so much about the RIAA's tactics is because most of them are scared it will happen to them. Why are they scared? They let on that they think they may be falsely accused, but in reality they're scared because they pirate music, they know they can get caught, and they don't want to stop. Your argument seems to be that because a fraction of a percent of everybody accused by the RIAA is falsely, than they all must be... or at least that their system of catching people is massively flawed. A fraction of a percent doesn't seem like a very large error rate to me though. Perhaps just large enough to help a defense lawyer to get some guilty people off the hook? It would be enough if these were criminal trials, but they aren't.
1. Because they're idiots, and they're under the delusion that if they tell you how to do it you will figure out how to defeat their process.
2. What percentage of 20,000 defendants would you say you've got direct knowledge of?
3. You should register to vote.
4. You're full of shit. Either that or you haven't seen many defendants at all. You believe yourself though, so I'll give you a little credit.
I am sure you are well aware that most people who are actually 'pirating' songs would never get caught by the sham investigation which I just outlined for you.
Any geek worth a nickel could catch the average kazaa user pirating music in three seconds using TCP dump. If the geek is worth a buck fifty, they would be able to verify that the data segment of the packet contained mpeg audio data. For an extra quarter, they could verify that it contains audio data the uploader does not have duplication rights for. An hour's worth of scripting, and I could hook up the MusicBrainz database to the process, and automatically dump a real-time list of which IP was pirating what including the real song title (even if the user disguised the name), including the name of the actual copyright holder, without any user interaction or technical knowledge. This stuff isn't rocket science.
Yeah, it sounds ridiculous when you use 'somehow' to describe one of the steps, but really it is trivial to determine the source IP address of a non-spoofed packet. You can do it with freely available software. Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't make the process mysterious. You don't seriously expect me to believe that the majority of people using Kazaa are spoofing their IP addresses, or that the majority of Kazaa users aren't actually pirating music, do you?
The damages are ridiculous, sure. Perhaps the law is ridiculous as well. But if those things are the problem, then change those things. Don't cause another problem by helping people get away with breaking the law.