Nobody can "join ODF". It's a physical impossibility. ODF is a format. You can't join ODF any more than you can join RTF, CSV, etc. Microsoft could join the OpenDocument Alliance (ODA), perhaps. But they have little interest in doing so. And they haven't. They've joined INCITS. It's a technical committee that steers the ISO adoption process. Joining ODA would mean they support ODF. Joining INCITS can mean any number of things...most likely that they want to slow down ODF ratification as an ISO standard. Any other reason they give has about as much truth in it as "Read my lips...no new taxes."
Could you PLEASE fix the headline?! Microsoft most definitely DID NOT JOIN the OpenDocument Alliance. ODA is the group who is trying to push for ODF adoption. Microsoft can join if they want, but they don't want.
They joined the INCITS/V1 Technical Committee. They're not even remotely the same thing and don't even look remotely similar (ODA vs INCITS). Way to go on the asinine headline Zonk.
Am I the only person who thinks Iwata is being quoted out of context? Perhaps he's saying they have other reasons for attempting a global launch and couldn't give two shits about what Microsoft and Sony are trying to do. It's like saying, "I don't think it's necessary to post comments on slashdot simply because others are doing this." Maybe I think it's necessary to post comments on slashdot because every post contains a link to my web site and I'm trying to bump up my page rank on google. But you could quote me as saying, "killmenow doesn't think posting on slashdot is necessary..." and add your stupid bit of guesswork that perhaps I'll stop.
Get Oracle to buy you. Because, you know, as Larry Ellison says, "Open source becomes successful when major industrial corporations invest heavily in that open source project."
Here's my SWAG: The Xbox 360 will survive, not dominate. However, the third iteration of Microsoft's console will be the one to finally have a chance at knocking Sony out of the #1 spot. Why's that? It was this comment:
...delusion that just because this is Microsoft's second console...
that got me thinking this. It made me think of Microsoft's track record. Their second iteration of any given product is not the one that is so successful. It's their third. Look at their products. Historically, versions 1 & 2 are dismal. It's version 3 that breaks through. MS-DOS 3, Windows 3, VB 3, etc.
I think for Microsoft, truly the third time is the charm. And the cool thing about my prediction is that it's as well reasoned as those put forth by this article's author and I just pulled it out of my ass.
I've talked to panhandlers that take in over $60 an hour tax free every day.
That may be true and all; but, my experience tells me that for every Shaky Lady there are a dozen legitimately homeless people either mentally ill or drug addicted or something along those lines. I'm sick of hearing from people how we're being duped by unscrupulous cheats who just don't want to work and will sit there and scam people out of cash all day. You know what I think: more power to them. If it's such a lucrative career and will earn a person a cool $60/hr tax free every day, the "homeless" problem would be of epidemic proportions as millions of people living on $10/hr "changed careers" so to speak.
The homeless you see sleeping on the street are typically the mentally ill. They have options available to them for shelter but due to their mental condition they end up leaving for one reason or another.
I know. I actually spoke to some local Toronto(ans? ites?) and they said the same thing. In fact, I even watched a van with blankets and food stop by to check on several of them a couple times. I was told that's basically what the social services people do for them. They won't stay at the shelters so there's really little more they can do except just check on them, make sure they have food and blankets, etc. It's a fair bit more than what we do for them here in my little city.
I bet within 5 years of the wireless system being implemented you'll hear someone in office suggest that we should tag the mentally ill homeless so they can be located and retrieved when they wander from shelters.
I wouldn't be surprised. And in an ironic sort of way, it would fulfill a lot of the mentally ill paranoid delusions about the government trying to spy on them and track their every movement, etc.
Well, I spent a week in Toronto once. There were seemingly a lot of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks every night. I'm not sure there is a better social service than making sure they have wireless Internet.
I must admit: I am rooting for Nintendo nowadays too. I was never a huge fan of Nintendo (although I enjoyed the original Metroid and Mario Brothers games). But I've jumped on their bandwagon.
In fact, this past Christmas, I could've bought an Xbox 360 but instead I asked my wife for a Game Cube and Metroid Prime 2. I've been playing it since, am 90% through the game and I *love* it. And it only cost $120 (GC plus MP2) and came with another game. We have a few games for it that we all enjoy, bought Animal Crossing even though it's old now, and both my 8 yr old and 14 yr old love it. The GC is a great little console. It's the first console I've ever allowed on my primary TV. Our original PS2, PS1, Sega Genesis, etc. have all been relegated to the small TV in the den. But the GC gets front and center on the big TV in the great room and it shines there.
My gut tells me the Revolution will be a great console. I trust my gut.
I didn't RTFA so I'm gonna make some assumptions and a SWAG. First, the assumptions:
The binary you're referencing is Skype's
They released it "encrypted"
The reverse engineering effort succesfully circumvented the encryption
Now, the SWAG: many companies release packed and/or encrypted binaries to befuddle reverse engineering techniques. It is genuinely useless, because people who are good at reverse engineering know the counter-measures to render it useless. Perhaps people who are a little less skilled at reverse engineering executables would by stymied, but I've yet to hear of a case where encrypting a binary actually prevented it from being cracked. For every 1000 people the tactic keeps from being able to do it, there are another 10 or more for whom it's no more than a speed bump.
It would be pretty stupid to lump UNIX and Linux sales together, given that Linux is not UNIX. As far as I can tell, not a single Linux distribution is certified against the Single UNIX Specification, which any Operating System must be in order to be UNIX.
They share similarities to be sure, but they are not the same and should not be lumped together any more than Windows and Linux should be lumped together.
Hey, I don't mean to sound ridiculous. I came across too harshly there. I did say many as in: not all soldiers/leaders. I'm quite certain there are also many soldiers and leaders in the U.S. military that cannot sleep at night because of the horror of taking so many innocent lives. Perhaps many is too strong in regards to the military...maybe I should've just said some feel that way.
I am far more inclined to believe more soldiers on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan right now are traumatized by the murder of innocents than not. But I know some military people who sincerely do not believe any Iraqis are innocent...except perhaps children. To some degree, I think it may be a coping mechanism, because the (admittedly few) military folks I know are not generally that jaded.
I am mostly convinced that terrorists, on the other hand, sincerely believe the civilians they murder are not innocent. Oh, and I have zero faith in U.S. military leadership.
Note that I am not defending terroris(m|ts)...but, in an effort to better understand, I think I should point out that most terrorists do not actually target people they believe are innocent. They merely believe differently about innocence.
In the eyes of a person willing to strap a bomb on their body and self-detonate in a shopping mall, none of the people they maim or kill are innocent. In the eyes of many U.S. soldiers and leaders, few (if any) of the civilians they've killed are innocent.
As with many cultural divides, the problem is one of perspectives. But perspective makes neither one the truth.
Second, these images of Muhammad are as offensive to muslims as it would be to christians to depict the Virgin Mary getting fucked by a pig with the caption "Technically, she's still a virgin."
Yes, I distinctly remember the riots, kidnappings, burnings of embassies by "thousands of protesters", death threats agains all non-Catholics, and other mass hysteria that followed the airing of this episode of South Park.
Oh, and remember how all of those people who started the Fuck the Skull of Jesus stuff were murdered?!
Who can I talk to, and where can I go to work with someone to get my website developed and off the ground?
My guess is what you mean to ask is this: Who will do the work for me for "royalties" or a portion of the profits my grand scheme will generate? I can't afford to pay somebody up front.
Because if you could afford to just pay someone, you could just search google or open a phone book as a number of others have suggested. Personally, I don't do contingency work anymore because the pay is lousy. But if you've got money to spend, I'm sure we could get your website developed and off the ground in a jiffy.
Why couldn't it be done such that one controller in one hand could get you through the game, (making certain features automatic or supplemented by the console/game) but still configurable such that you could take over the automatic functions by using a second controller in your other hand? Speaking of the Metroid series, one controller could easily be assigned movement and fire, with automatic aiming turned on...or two controllers could be used with one assigned to weapons control and the other to movement.
It seems to me those new controllers are designed (waiting and ready) for games to take advantage of one player using one controller in each hand.
You assume that all Christians must be good people just by virtue of being Christians. Therefore, being Christian is virtuous.
I assume that all Christians are not good people. I assume that all Christians accept they are quite flawed and unworthy of God's love and mercy and only thanks to Christ are Christians saved. Without Christ, Christians are a pretty sad lot. I believe that I personally am sinful and justly deserving of God's eternal wrath...but I am thankful that God is willing to forgive me anyway.
Let's see...where else to take this topic...
Okay, there was the Old Testament. This was the Law. No man (but Christ) can come to God under the Law. We are too sinful to maintain it. Certainly, there is much to be learned from studying the Old Testament, atrocities and all.
Then came Jesus, given to the world to bear the cost of our sins so that we may inherit the kingdom of Heaven. Jesus alone was the only human who could meet the requirements of the Law and come into Heaven thusly. He alone was perfect and without sin. His New Testament is that nobody comes to God but through Him. He alone bore the burden of our sins.
I am frustrated by people spouting all the "look at all the bad things that happened in the Old Testament" nonsense. Yes, look at it. There were a lot of atrocities. What's the point of the Old Testament even existing? To show what happens when we try to live according to the Law, our sinfulness, our disconnect from God. The New Testament is what Christians follow and must believe if they are in fact Christians. If one believes the Old Testament, devoid of the New Testament, I would posit that one is roughly following Judaism, not Christianity. Christ's teachings are that the Law is important, but it was the Old way...but the way we cannot follow. He brings the New way to God. He says, "follow me" and His teachings are peace, love, forgiveness, helping those less fortunate than ourselves, etc. Jesus did not spend much time among the religious leaders of His time...He spent it with the poor, the sick, the needy, the weak. His message is most definitely one of tolerance, peace, and forgiveness. And the message of the New Testament is *very much* tied up in showing the fulfillment of prophecy in the Old Testament while rendering the Law moot. Major churches teach Christianity this way...but sinful people (Christians and all) have been getting it wrong since the beginning (which is why things like the Reformation, etc. happened. Martin Luther in his day was called a heretic by the Catholic church...but he was a driving force behind early Protestantism.
Now, does that mean my interpretation or anyone else's is proven any more valid? Of course not. I believe my way, others believe differently. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is the lead up to the story of the Good Samaritan. The key bit that I think many people overlook is when Christ answers the question "What must one do to inherit eternal life?" with "What is written in the Law? How readest thou?" (KJV)
There is a great deal of interpretation involved in the Bible, for certain. But the *majority* of Christians I know understand it the way I've laid it out here. I don't think they're very "progressive" personally. I just think they're too busy trying to be good Christians themselves to go around hating fags, etc.
No doubt, Pat Robertson would call me a heathen and say we are not very Christian. I humbly disagree.
I'm too lazy to research this, so I'll ask you folks fully expecting more ridicule than meaningful responses in the hopes that at least one meaningful response will point me in the right direction...
Are there any MMOGs that one can enjoy 30 minutes at a time, not needing dedicated groups to all be online at the same time, not requiring monthly subscriptions (okay, I'd maybe pay $5/month for such a distraction but no more), that are not just hack/slash, hunt/gather, boring, repetitive, do this same crap over and over just so I can level up, FPS/RPG games?
I could really enjoy a multiplayer cooperative puzzle solving game that didn't require every member of a group to be online at the same time. Imagine some of those simple puzzles they put in newspapers (crosswords, soduko, cryptoquotes, etc.) of massive size where a group of six or so friends could get online together and work cooperatively towards solving it, or any one of you could get back on at your liesure and put 30 minutes into solving a tiny part of it. Imagine massive puzzles of various types that are aggregates of smaller puzzles and as each smaller piece is solved, the larger puzzle inches closer towards the final solution.
Anyway, that'd maybe interest me in MMOGs. Otherwise, I can play FPS/RPG/RTS stuff on my GameCube and PS2 that's just as entertaining as EQ, et. al. (to me) without it costing me $10-15/month per game.
It's too bad the most prominent professed US Christians aren't at all like Christ.
I submit that professing oneself as a Christian and actually being a Christian are not one and the same. Perhaps your observation of how "like Christ" a person's views and behaviors are is a good indicator of whether they truly are a Christian or whether they merely claim to be.
My guess is Microsoft flat out cannot comply. I believe they DO NOT POSSESS documentation in the form of a full specification. Their only documentation IS THE CODE. The EU said, "Provide documentation of your APIs." Microsoft said, "Here's 15,000 pages of docs." Then the EU said, "That documentation is incomplete and horrible and just plain crappy...and that's putting it nicely. Try again." So Microsoft said, "F*** YOU! That documentation was all put together by reviewing our code. Our code is our only documentation. You want fully documented APIs...fine. Here it is, you figure it out."
Of course, in order to look at Microsoft's source, you'll probably have to sign away your first born and you might as well give up the idea of ever writing any open source implementaton of anything you figure out from looking at that code or you'll be getting a call from Microsoft's lawyers asking you if you'd like to play a nice game of global thermonuclear war.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you PLEASE fix the headline?! Microsoft most definitely DID NOT JOIN the OpenDocument Alliance. ODA is the group who is trying to push for ODF adoption. Microsoft can join if they want, but they don't want.
They joined the INCITS/V1 Technical Committee. They're not even remotely the same thing and don't even look remotely similar (ODA vs INCITS). Way to go on the asinine headline Zonk.
Methinks maumedia doth protest too much.
Am I the only person who thinks Iwata is being quoted out of context? Perhaps he's saying they have other reasons for attempting a global launch and couldn't give two shits about what Microsoft and Sony are trying to do. It's like saying, "I don't think it's necessary to post comments on slashdot simply because others are doing this." Maybe I think it's necessary to post comments on slashdot because every post contains a link to my web site and I'm trying to bump up my page rank on google. But you could quote me as saying, "killmenow doesn't think posting on slashdot is necessary..." and add your stupid bit of guesswork that perhaps I'll stop.
Perhaps...
Get Oracle to buy you. Because, you know, as Larry Ellison says, "Open source becomes successful when major industrial corporations invest heavily in that open source project."
I think for Microsoft, truly the third time is the charm. And the cool thing about my prediction is that it's as well reasoned as those put forth by this article's author and I just pulled it out of my ass.
I know. I actually spoke to some local Toronto(ans? ites?) and they said the same thing. In fact, I even watched a van with blankets and food stop by to check on several of them a couple times. I was told that's basically what the social services people do for them. They won't stay at the shelters so there's really little more they can do except just check on them, make sure they have food and blankets, etc. It's a fair bit more than what we do for them here in my little city.
I wouldn't be surprised. And in an ironic sort of way, it would fulfill a lot of the mentally ill paranoid delusions about the government trying to spy on them and track their every movement, etc.
Well, I spent a week in Toronto once. There were seemingly a lot of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks every night. I'm not sure there is a better social service than making sure they have wireless Internet.
I must admit: I am rooting for Nintendo nowadays too. I was never a huge fan of Nintendo (although I enjoyed the original Metroid and Mario Brothers games). But I've jumped on their bandwagon.
In fact, this past Christmas, I could've bought an Xbox 360 but instead I asked my wife for a Game Cube and Metroid Prime 2. I've been playing it since, am 90% through the game and I *love* it. And it only cost $120 (GC plus MP2) and came with another game. We have a few games for it that we all enjoy, bought Animal Crossing even though it's old now, and both my 8 yr old and 14 yr old love it. The GC is a great little console. It's the first console I've ever allowed on my primary TV. Our original PS2, PS1, Sega Genesis, etc. have all been relegated to the small TV in the den. But the GC gets front and center on the big TV in the great room and it shines there.
My gut tells me the Revolution will be a great console. I trust my gut.
- The binary you're referencing is Skype's
- They released it "encrypted"
- The reverse engineering effort succesfully circumvented the encryption
Now, the SWAG: many companies release packed and/or encrypted binaries to befuddle reverse engineering techniques. It is genuinely useless, because people who are good at reverse engineering know the counter-measures to render it useless. Perhaps people who are a little less skilled at reverse engineering executables would by stymied, but I've yet to hear of a case where encrypting a binary actually prevented it from being cracked. For every 1000 people the tactic keeps from being able to do it, there are another 10 or more for whom it's no more than a speed bump.It would be pretty stupid to lump UNIX and Linux sales together, given that Linux is not UNIX. As far as I can tell, not a single Linux distribution is certified against the Single UNIX Specification, which any Operating System must be in order to be UNIX.
They share similarities to be sure, but they are not the same and should not be lumped together any more than Windows and Linux should be lumped together.
Hey, I don't mean to sound ridiculous. I came across too harshly there. I did say many as in: not all soldiers/leaders. I'm quite certain there are also many soldiers and leaders in the U.S. military that cannot sleep at night because of the horror of taking so many innocent lives. Perhaps many is too strong in regards to the military...maybe I should've just said some feel that way.
I am far more inclined to believe more soldiers on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan right now are traumatized by the murder of innocents than not. But I know some military people who sincerely do not believe any Iraqis are innocent...except perhaps children. To some degree, I think it may be a coping mechanism, because the (admittedly few) military folks I know are not generally that jaded.
I am mostly convinced that terrorists, on the other hand, sincerely believe the civilians they murder are not innocent. Oh, and I have zero faith in U.S. military leadership.
In the eyes of a person willing to strap a bomb on their body and self-detonate in a shopping mall, none of the people they maim or kill are innocent. In the eyes of many U.S. soldiers and leaders, few (if any) of the civilians they've killed are innocent.
As with many cultural divides, the problem is one of perspectives. But perspective makes neither one the truth.
Oh, and remember how all of those people who started the Fuck the Skull of Jesus stuff were murdered?!
Riot on, brother.
Because if you could afford to just pay someone, you could just search google or open a phone book as a number of others have suggested. Personally, I don't do contingency work anymore because the pay is lousy. But if you've got money to spend, I'm sure we could get your website developed and off the ground in a jiffy.
Why couldn't it be done such that one controller in one hand could get you through the game, (making certain features automatic or supplemented by the console/game) but still configurable such that you could take over the automatic functions by using a second controller in your other hand? Speaking of the Metroid series, one controller could easily be assigned movement and fire, with automatic aiming turned on...or two controllers could be used with one assigned to weapons control and the other to movement.
It seems to me those new controllers are designed (waiting and ready) for games to take advantage of one player using one controller in each hand.
Let's see...where else to take this topic...
Okay, there was the Old Testament. This was the Law. No man (but Christ) can come to God under the Law. We are too sinful to maintain it. Certainly, there is much to be learned from studying the Old Testament, atrocities and all.
Then came Jesus, given to the world to bear the cost of our sins so that we may inherit the kingdom of Heaven. Jesus alone was the only human who could meet the requirements of the Law and come into Heaven thusly. He alone was perfect and without sin. His New Testament is that nobody comes to God but through Him. He alone bore the burden of our sins.
I am frustrated by people spouting all the "look at all the bad things that happened in the Old Testament" nonsense. Yes, look at it. There were a lot of atrocities. What's the point of the Old Testament even existing? To show what happens when we try to live according to the Law, our sinfulness, our disconnect from God. The New Testament is what Christians follow and must believe if they are in fact Christians. If one believes the Old Testament, devoid of the New Testament, I would posit that one is roughly following Judaism, not Christianity. Christ's teachings are that the Law is important, but it was the Old way...but the way we cannot follow. He brings the New way to God. He says, "follow me" and His teachings are peace, love, forgiveness, helping those less fortunate than ourselves, etc. Jesus did not spend much time among the religious leaders of His time...He spent it with the poor, the sick, the needy, the weak. His message is most definitely one of tolerance, peace, and forgiveness. And the message of the New Testament is *very much* tied up in showing the fulfillment of prophecy in the Old Testament while rendering the Law moot. Major churches teach Christianity this way...but sinful people (Christians and all) have been getting it wrong since the beginning (which is why things like the Reformation, etc. happened. Martin Luther in his day was called a heretic by the Catholic church...but he was a driving force behind early Protestantism.
Now, does that mean my interpretation or anyone else's is proven any more valid? Of course not. I believe my way, others believe differently. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is the lead up to the story of the Good Samaritan. The key bit that I think many people overlook is when Christ answers the question "What must one do to inherit eternal life?" with "What is written in the Law? How readest thou?" (KJV)
There is a great deal of interpretation involved in the Bible, for certain. But the *majority* of Christians I know understand it the way I've laid it out here. I don't think they're very "progressive" personally. I just think they're too busy trying to be good Christians themselves to go around hating fags, etc.
No doubt, Pat Robertson would call me a heathen and say we are not very Christian. I humbly disagree.
War Is Peace
This reminds me of one of my all-time favorite quotes: "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity."
I'm too lazy to research this, so I'll ask you folks fully expecting more ridicule than meaningful responses in the hopes that at least one meaningful response will point me in the right direction...
Are there any MMOGs that one can enjoy 30 minutes at a time, not needing dedicated groups to all be online at the same time, not requiring monthly subscriptions (okay, I'd maybe pay $5/month for such a distraction but no more), that are not just hack/slash, hunt/gather, boring, repetitive, do this same crap over and over just so I can level up, FPS/RPG games?
I could really enjoy a multiplayer cooperative puzzle solving game that didn't require every member of a group to be online at the same time. Imagine some of those simple puzzles they put in newspapers (crosswords, soduko, cryptoquotes, etc.) of massive size where a group of six or so friends could get online together and work cooperatively towards solving it, or any one of you could get back on at your liesure and put 30 minutes into solving a tiny part of it. Imagine massive puzzles of various types that are aggregates of smaller puzzles and as each smaller piece is solved, the larger puzzle inches closer towards the final solution.
Anyway, that'd maybe interest me in MMOGs. Otherwise, I can play FPS/RPG/RTS stuff on my GameCube and PS2 that's just as entertaining as EQ, et. al. (to me) without it costing me $10-15/month per game.
It's too bad the most prominent professed US Christians aren't at all like Christ.
I submit that professing oneself as a Christian and actually being a Christian are not one and the same. Perhaps your observation of how "like Christ" a person's views and behaviors are is a good indicator of whether they truly are a Christian or whether they merely claim to be.
My guess is Microsoft flat out cannot comply. I believe they DO NOT POSSESS documentation in the form of a full specification. Their only documentation IS THE CODE. The EU said, "Provide documentation of your APIs." Microsoft said, "Here's 15,000 pages of docs." Then the EU said, "That documentation is incomplete and horrible and just plain crappy...and that's putting it nicely. Try again." So Microsoft said, "F*** YOU! That documentation was all put together by reviewing our code. Our code is our only documentation. You want fully documented APIs...fine. Here it is, you figure it out."
Of course, in order to look at Microsoft's source, you'll probably have to sign away your first born and you might as well give up the idea of ever writing any open source implementaton of anything you figure out from looking at that code or you'll be getting a call from Microsoft's lawyers asking you if you'd like to play a nice game of global thermonuclear war.