Bear in mind that Counter Strike started life as an Half-Life mod. Now you can go buy it. The main difference between CS and TF2 in this respect is that TF2 seems destined to remain vapourware.
> I have never put petrol in your car! I really wish you would with pump prices being what they are today:)
> As regards driving unlicensed, in the UK you have to be supervised until you pass your test I know. Having passed two driving tests (cars & motorcyles) in the UK (albeit ~20 years ago), and having been a motorcycle instructor for a couple of years (again, almost 20 years ago). But your original clam was "You'll note that you can't drive a car without the license thingy.". And we both know that just isn't the case. You implied that you had to pass a test to obtain such a license - again, untrue (in the UK, to obtain a provisional license - you just have to fill in a form and send a cheque). And we also both know that it is physically possible to drive a car without obtaining a license. (I did so, in fact - legally. I took my first couple of "driving lessons" on a friend's farm). But as I said earlier, driving tests (in the UK and elsewhere) do nothing to ensure that drivers are "safe" (if they did, then there wouldn't be so many accidents and deaths on the roads)
> I suspect in France for example you have to kill your first padestrian before you get a full licence IIRC, the French require you to kill one pedestrian to get a provisional license, you get your full license for killing three in one day. In Paris, I belie the rules are different - anyone found in charge of a motor vehicle and who also possesses any form of driving license is immediatly jailed for life.
> But are there any laws regarding the drinking of hot beverages? Maybe there ought to be. Then we wouldn't have people drinking coffee who were not competent to do so.
> comparing super-heated coffee and the four items listed is a specious argument. I'd don't think one could legitimatly decribe the coffee in question as "super-heated". Since it was still liquid, then it must have been below 100C/212F. Scarcely qualifies as super-heated. You'd have to follow the thread back (I can't be bothered to do so, since/. comes straight from the "cornered rat" school of user-interfaces), but the post (not mine) was in response to an argument about manufacturers making safe products. I've said it before, but will repeat it here. Millions of people buy hot coffee every day - I'm one of them. Almost all of them manage to survive unscathed. I think hot coffee is, generally, a pretty safe product.
> Saving money is not a reason for disfiguring someone for life and causing them untold pain. But (and this is the whole thrust of the argument) Micky D's *DIDN'T* disfigure the woman or cause her pain. They sold her coffee, and there the relationship ended. She didn't slip on a wet floor, she wasn't knocked by a staff memeber, whatever. She was outside the store (I really can't bring myself to use the word "restaurant" when I'm talking about McD) in a car when the spillage happened. Maybe they should have a sign saying "Warning. Coffee can be dangerous. Don't do anything stupid with it", but I'm kind of of the opinion that there are some things which are understood - I wouldn't put a loaded gun in my mouth, and I wouldn't put hot coffee in my lap.
> Call me a right-wing fascist if you must, Ok, if it'll keep you happy. You're a right-wing fascist:)
> few moral scruples would go a long way towards restricting profits in the name of product safety. That's a long leap - from "moral scruples" to cold coffee. Presumably you'd be happier if McDonald's/Burger King/Starbucks/Pret A Manger/Cafe Nero/whoever sold COLD coffee? I tell you three times, I wouldn't. And I suspect that most of the coffee buying public wouldn't. I take it you don't actually DRINK coffee?. And, presumably we should extend this argument to any hot beverage or foodstuffs. I bought some hot doughnuts at Goodwood last weekend, and realised pretty quickly that if I tried to eat them immediatly I'd probably burn my mouth, so I waited (and I didn't put them in my lap). But if you and yours have your way, then it 's bye bye to hot doughnuts, jacket potatoes, fish and chips, curry... - just in case someone doesn't understand that hot things can damage the human body? Then we start sueing the manufacturers of cookers because they allow us to heat our food, kettle manufacturers since they allow us to boil water to scald outselves with. This way lies madness.
> But it is nice to know I have morals, scruples and the ability to empathise and make the RIGHT decisions. I empathise with the woman - I have personal experience of third degree burns. But that doesn't change the fact that I still can't see any way of genuinly holding McDonalds responsible (but then again, I'm not an American lawyer). The ONLY way I can see a justification for this is the fulfillment of the American dream - hurt yourself, find somebody rich to sue and get your millions. And the reason for the high settlement in this (and other similar cases) is that American juries are full of everyday Americans hoping that when their chance comes they'll get a huge settlement. And the best way they can see of ensuring that is to increase the "expected" damages by hypig up whatever-case-they're-sitting on.
(Since this is now WAY off-topic, I've turned off my +1 and will leave it at that. Pleasure debating with you:)
> Yes, you'd know it's "hot", but would you know exactly how? You wouldn't need to know EXACTLY how hot, just "is it likly to be hot enough to hurt". If you're not sure, then I'd suggest you would err on the side of caution. Not doing so would, IMHO, be either reckless or stupid. It must be nice to live in a society where you can get the courts to force some huge corporation to pay you millions for being stupid.
> But while there isn't a great range of consequence implied by "getting your head blown off", such is not the case with "a burn". So let me get this straight - you're saying that if you drink coffee that you expect to hurt a little, you can sue the vendor if it hurts a lot? But if you expected it hurt a lot, you can't?
> I highly doubt that when you envision what would happen if you spilled your coffee mug on yourself, you are envisioning 3rd degree burns. I prefer to envison NOT spilling coffee on myself, and therefore am careful to avoid doing so.
> Are you familiar with 3rd degree burns? As a matter of fact, I am. You wouldn't ask that question if you knew me - I have had personal experience (no, not from coffee). But please feel free to carry on making your invalid assumptions about me. Since this conversation has now drifted even further off-topic than it was before, I've removed my +1 and will go and do something more interesting. You carry on defending the rights of dumb people to sue others for their dumbness. It's your insurance premiums that are being affected, not mine.
Might be nice as a "off-the-shelf" solution (if you have a rack), but - as you say - probably cost-prohibitive. A Linux box would be a much cheaper option for a "homebuilt traffic-shapping appliance".
I'd take a wild guess that he's running some sort of P2P client (e.g. KaZaA, Direct Connect, Gnutella etc.) They can soak up a lot of upstream bandwidth (so I've heard:-)
The 70k (or whatever) upstream limit is based on actual bits transmitted across the network - including protocol bits. Since the 1M/sec downstream traffic has a certain amount of handshaking back to the source of the data, that handshaking has to travel back as part of the 70k upstream. If the handshakes don't get, then the downstream can slow or resend (net effect is a slowdown of actual throughput). Does that make sense? I know what I mean, but I don't think I'm communicating it very well:-(
> 400 kbit down stream is not bad at all. Unless you're paying for 1.5Mbit (which it sounds like he is), in which case it sucks. 400k isn't bad, but it's only about a quarter of 1.5M. That's a BIG difference if you're transferring a large file (e.g. a movie), and is even more apparent if you're trying to (e.g.) stream video.
LRP's project might be of some use. Yes, it means getting a cheap box to run Linux, but then you can use all of that real neat networking software that's available for Linux boxes but isn't available for Windoze boxes.
Re:Lots of PalmOs devices have jog wheels.
on
New Palm Pictures?
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· Score: 2
> As far as I know, all of Sony's devices have had it, Sony devices (such as my S300E) DO have a jog wheel, but it's nothing like the one in the picture. On the Sony devices, it's located in the top left side of the device (which a friend has pointed out makes it useless for left-handed people), whereas the one in the picture is in the centre of the lower panel (i.e. where most curent Palm devices have the up/down scroll buttons)
> If you fail to protect your patent, knowing that infringement has occurred, you lose your rights to the patent. s/patent/trademark/g; They're different.
> 1. Patent law makes you enforce your patents. If you don't, you lose them No, that's trademarks. > And Patents don't last that long anyway I believe it's 20 years. But that's from memory, and this isn't really my field of expertise.
> 2. PNG, anyone? What about PNG? It's not a replacement for JPEG. PNG is a lossless image format which does more-or-less everything that GIF does (except for mutli-frame images - "animated GIFs".), and most of it better. What it can't do is compete with a lossy compression mechanism like JPEG in reducing the file sizes of large, photographic, images. JPEG works by "losing" details of the stored image, whilst PNG retains the exact image.
> a file format placed into the public domain by C-Cube Microsystems
> surely placing the algorithm in the public domain is at least prior art that will invalidate this patent?
There's no suggestion there that the algorithm is in the public domain, but the file format is. That's not the same at all. Not being a patent lawyer (or indeed, any kind of lawyer) I haven't read the patent in any detail. But I do know a little about standards and ISO (I sit on an ISO commitee - JCT1/SC22/WG21 for the record). It's not beyond the realms of possibility that an ISO commitee might standardise a technique which has been patented in one or more member nations. (It's pretty unlikely, but it's possible). But it's worth remembering that the 'I' in ISO means International, and a patent filed in the US may not be enforcable in the rest of the world.
> The best example is Kleenex. I'd have said either Hoover (vacuum cleaner) or Aspirin (pain killer). Interestingly, I don't recall hearing anyone using Kleenex as a generic term (but that may because I don't live in the US).
> by the time they get their parking validated It should come as no surprise to find that Micro$oft's Redmond campus is large enough that it has its own parking (hell, it has it's own bus service). It doesn't need validating.
> Any body making public standards should require all participants to provide a license to anybody using that patent for the purpose of implementing that standard free of charge to all. Standards bodies such as the ISO, BSI and (for Europhobes) ANSI actually do this (That's why nuts from manufacturer A fit bolts from manufacturer B). I have personal experience of this, having been involved with the development of ISO/IEC 14882:1992(E) ("Programming Languages - C++"). You don't even need to buy the standards document to implement it (although it certainly helps)
> A few other points Thanks for the additional info - somebody should mod your post +1 Informative, even if this whole thread is now -1 Offtopic:)
> the original lawsuit was only for repaying hospital costs That's as may be, but I'd still consider the suit to be bogus. The spill was out of McDonalds control - it wasn't on their wet floor, it wasn't caused by one of their staff. Sueing someone for serving hot coffee and not ensuring that you don't spill it is just plain dumb.
> it was the jury who decided on the multi-million dollar penalty <cynic>No doubt that it would raise the bar for payouts in this kind of suit in case that they themselves might be able to sue someone someday </cynic>
> One of their claims was that because the woman was really old and would probably be dead in a few years, her body wasn't worth the cost of repairing itMcDonalds ought to sue whatever moron came up with that defence.
> If she had tried to drink the coffee, she would have had 3rd degree burns on her mouth Have you ever put a cup of REALLY hot coffee to your mouth? I promise you, you'll realise it's that hot BEFORE it touches your lips.
> Cars are unsafe, but few people expect their tires to undergo sudden and dramatic self-destruction Perhaps if more people were aware that this can happen, the roads would be safer (and it's not always due to a manufacturing defect).
> If you don't know how long ago the coffee was brewed, or how hot it is maintained in the pot, you have no way of knowing when it is safe to contact with your skin. This is, of course, rubbish, I'm sorry, but it is. You've clearly never had a cup of hot coffee.
> If you don't know how long ago the coffee was brewed, or how hot it is maintained in the pot, you have no way of knowing when it is safe to contact with your skin And if you don't know whether the gun is loaded, you don't put it in your mouth and pull the trigger. If you've just purchased a HOT beverage (coffee, for instance), then it is reasonable to expect it to be HOT - and not unreasonable for the vendor to expect you to realise it's HOT. Therefore, you should take the precautions you would normally take with a HOT beverage.
Slashdot Mirror
> TF2 will be released the day after the first Mars Mission.
I wouldn't bet on it...
You don't need to own Half-Life to play the retail version of CS. (Not that I can understand why anyone who likes FPS games wouldn't own HL...)
Bear in mind that Counter Strike started life as an Half-Life mod. Now you can go buy it. The main difference between CS and TF2 in this respect is that TF2 seems destined to remain vapourware.
You mean like this? (which was featured on /. recently)
> I have never put petrol in your car! :)
/. comes straight from the "cornered rat" school of user-interfaces), but the post (not mine) was in response to an argument about manufacturers making safe products.
:)
:)
I really wish you would with pump prices being what they are today
> As regards driving unlicensed, in the UK you have to be supervised until you pass your test
I know. Having passed two driving tests (cars & motorcyles) in the UK (albeit ~20 years ago), and having been a motorcycle instructor for a couple of years (again, almost 20 years ago). But your original clam was "You'll note that you can't drive a car without the license thingy.". And we both know that just isn't the case. You implied that you had to pass a test to obtain such a license - again, untrue (in the UK, to obtain a provisional license - you just have to fill in a form and send a cheque). And we also both know that it is physically possible to drive a car without obtaining a license. (I did so, in fact - legally. I took my first couple of "driving lessons" on a friend's farm). But as I said earlier, driving tests (in the UK and elsewhere) do nothing to ensure that drivers are "safe" (if they did, then there wouldn't be so many accidents and deaths on the roads)
> I suspect in France for example you have to kill your first padestrian before you get a full licence
IIRC, the French require you to kill one pedestrian to get a provisional license, you get your full license for killing three in one day. In Paris, I belie the rules are different - anyone found in charge of a motor vehicle and who also possesses any form of driving license is immediatly jailed for life.
> But are there any laws regarding the drinking of hot beverages?
Maybe there ought to be. Then we wouldn't have people drinking coffee who were not competent to do so.
> comparing super-heated coffee and the four items listed is a specious argument.
I'd don't think one could legitimatly decribe the coffee in question as "super-heated". Since it was still liquid, then it must have been below 100C/212F. Scarcely qualifies as super-heated.
You'd have to follow the thread back (I can't be bothered to do so, since
I've said it before, but will repeat it here. Millions of people buy hot coffee every day - I'm one of them. Almost all of them manage to survive unscathed. I think hot coffee is, generally, a pretty safe product.
> Saving money is not a reason for disfiguring someone for life and causing them untold pain.
But (and this is the whole thrust of the argument) Micky D's *DIDN'T* disfigure the woman or cause her pain. They sold her coffee, and there the relationship ended. She didn't slip on a wet floor, she wasn't knocked by a staff memeber, whatever. She was outside the store (I really can't bring myself to use the word "restaurant" when I'm talking about McD) in a car when the spillage happened. Maybe they should have a sign saying "Warning. Coffee can be dangerous. Don't do anything stupid with it", but I'm kind of of the opinion that there are some things which are understood - I wouldn't put a loaded gun in my mouth, and I wouldn't put hot coffee in my lap.
> Call me a right-wing fascist if you must,
Ok, if it'll keep you happy. You're a right-wing fascist
> few moral scruples would go a long way towards restricting profits in the name of product safety.
That's a long leap - from "moral scruples" to cold coffee.
Presumably you'd be happier if McDonald's/Burger King/Starbucks/Pret A Manger/Cafe Nero/whoever sold COLD coffee? I tell you three times, I wouldn't. And I suspect that most of the coffee buying public wouldn't. I take it you don't actually DRINK coffee?. And, presumably we should extend this argument to any hot beverage or foodstuffs. I bought some hot doughnuts at Goodwood last weekend, and realised pretty quickly that if I tried to eat them immediatly I'd probably burn my mouth, so I waited (and I didn't put them in my lap). But if you and yours have your way, then it 's bye bye to hot doughnuts, jacket potatoes, fish and chips, curry... - just in case someone doesn't understand that hot things can damage the human body? Then we start sueing the manufacturers of cookers because they allow us to heat our food, kettle manufacturers since they allow us to boil water to scald outselves with. This way lies madness.
> But it is nice to know I have morals, scruples and the ability to empathise and make the RIGHT decisions.
I empathise with the woman - I have personal experience of third degree burns. But that doesn't change the fact that I still can't see any way of genuinly holding McDonalds responsible (but then again, I'm not an American lawyer). The ONLY way I can see a justification for this is the fulfillment of the American dream - hurt yourself, find somebody rich to sue and get your millions. And the reason for the high settlement in this (and other similar cases) is that American juries are full of everyday Americans hoping that when their chance comes they'll get a huge settlement. And the best way they can see of ensuring that is to increase the "expected" damages by hypig up whatever-case-they're-sitting on.
(Since this is now WAY off-topic, I've turned off my +1 and will leave it at that. Pleasure debating with you
> Yes, you'd know it's "hot", but would you know exactly how?
You wouldn't need to know EXACTLY how hot, just "is it likly to be hot enough to hurt". If you're not sure, then I'd suggest you would err on the side of caution. Not doing so would, IMHO, be either reckless or stupid.
It must be nice to live in a society where you can get the courts to force some huge corporation to pay you millions for being stupid.
> But while there isn't a great range of consequence implied by "getting your head blown off", such is not the case with "a burn".
So let me get this straight - you're saying that if you drink coffee that you expect to hurt a little, you can sue the vendor if it hurts a lot? But if you expected it hurt a lot, you can't?
> I highly doubt that when you envision what would happen if you spilled your coffee mug on yourself, you are envisioning 3rd degree burns.
I prefer to envison NOT spilling coffee on myself, and therefore am careful to avoid doing so.
> Are you familiar with 3rd degree burns?
As a matter of fact, I am. You wouldn't ask that question if you knew me - I have had personal experience (no, not from coffee). But please feel free to carry on making your invalid assumptions about me. Since this conversation has now drifted even further off-topic than it was before, I've removed my +1 and will go and do something more interesting. You carry on defending the rights of dumb people to sue others for their dumbness. It's your insurance premiums that are being affected, not mine.
Might be nice as a "off-the-shelf" solution (if you have a rack), but - as you say - probably cost-prohibitive. A Linux box would be a much cheaper option for a "homebuilt traffic-shapping appliance".
Much more lucid than my explanation :)
I'd take a wild guess that he's running some sort of P2P client (e.g. KaZaA, Direct Connect, Gnutella etc.) They can soak up a lot of upstream bandwidth (so I've heard :-)
The 70k (or whatever) upstream limit is based on actual bits transmitted across the network - including protocol bits. Since the 1M/sec downstream traffic has a certain amount of handshaking back to the source of the data, that handshaking has to travel back as part of the 70k upstream. If the handshakes don't get, then the downstream can slow or resend (net effect is a slowdown of actual throughput). :-(
Does that make sense? I know what I mean, but I don't think I'm communicating it very well
> 400 kbit down stream is not bad at all.
Unless you're paying for 1.5Mbit (which it sounds like he is), in which case it sucks. 400k isn't bad, but it's only about a quarter of 1.5M. That's a BIG difference if you're transferring a large file (e.g. a movie), and is even more apparent if you're trying to (e.g.) stream video.
LRP's project might be of some use. Yes, it means getting a cheap box to run Linux, but then you can use all of that real neat networking software that's available for Linux boxes but isn't available for Windoze boxes.
> As far as I know, all of Sony's devices have had it,
Sony devices (such as my S300E) DO have a jog wheel, but it's nothing like the one in the picture. On the Sony devices, it's located in the top left side of the device (which a friend has pointed out makes it useless for left-handed people), whereas the one in the picture is in the centre of the lower panel (i.e. where most curent Palm devices have the up/down scroll buttons)
> If you fail to protect your patent, knowing that infringement has occurred, you lose your rights to the patent.
s/patent/trademark/g;
They're different.
> 1. Patent law makes you enforce your patents. If you don't, you lose them
No, that's trademarks.
> And Patents don't last that long anyway
I believe it's 20 years. But that's from memory, and this isn't really my field of expertise.
> 2. PNG, anyone?
What about PNG? It's not a replacement for JPEG. PNG is a lossless image format which does more-or-less everything that GIF does (except for mutli-frame images - "animated GIFs".), and most of it better. What it can't do is compete with a lossy compression mechanism like JPEG in reducing the file sizes of large, photographic, images. JPEG works by "losing" details of the stored image, whilst PNG retains the exact image.
> a file format placed into the public domain by C-Cube Microsystems
> surely placing the algorithm in the public domain is at least prior art that will invalidate this patent?
There's no suggestion there that the algorithm is in the public domain, but the file format is. That's not the same at all. Not being a patent lawyer (or indeed, any kind of lawyer) I haven't read the patent in any detail. But I do know a little about standards and ISO (I sit on an ISO commitee - JCT1/SC22/WG21 for the record). It's not beyond the realms of possibility that an ISO commitee might standardise a technique which has been patented in one or more member nations. (It's pretty unlikely, but it's possible). But it's worth remembering that the 'I' in ISO means International, and a patent filed in the US may not be enforcable in the rest of the world.
> How did the other folks in the JPEG group not know about this from the beginning? :)
Too many joints?
> That is not correct :)
That is correct
> The best example is Kleenex.
I'd have said either Hoover (vacuum cleaner) or Aspirin (pain killer). Interestingly, I don't recall hearing anyone using Kleenex as a generic term (but that may because I don't live in the US).
> by the time they get their parking validated
It should come as no surprise to find that Micro$oft's Redmond campus is large enough that it has its own parking (hell, it has it's own bus service). It doesn't need validating.
> Zeosync's web site is gone
Looks like they improved the compression technique then. Now it's infinite-to-nothing...
> Any body making public standards should require all participants to provide a license to anybody using that patent for the purpose of implementing that standard free of charge to all.
Standards bodies such as the ISO, BSI and (for Europhobes) ANSI actually do this (That's why nuts from manufacturer A fit bolts from manufacturer B). I have personal experience of this, having been involved with the development of ISO/IEC 14882:1992(E) ("Programming Languages - C++"). You don't even need to buy the standards document to implement it (although it certainly helps)
RollerBlades is a trademark, not a patent. Patent law and trademark law are different.
> juries aren't often made up of a particularly sensible lot,
:)
Aren't they supposed to be representative of the population? Oh yeah, I see what you mean
> A few other points :)
Thanks for the additional info - somebody should mod your post +1 Informative, even if this whole thread is now -1 Offtopic
> the original lawsuit was only for repaying hospital costs
That's as may be, but I'd still consider the suit to be bogus. The spill was out of McDonalds control - it wasn't on their wet floor, it wasn't caused by one of their staff. Sueing someone for serving hot coffee and not ensuring that you don't spill it is just plain dumb.
> it was the jury who decided on the multi-million dollar penalty
<cynic>No doubt that it would raise the bar for payouts in this kind of suit in case that they themselves might be able to sue someone someday
</cynic>
> One of their claims was that because the woman was really old and would probably be dead in a few years, her body wasn't worth the cost of repairing itMcDonalds ought to sue whatever moron came up with that defence.
> If she had tried to drink the coffee, she would have had 3rd degree burns on her mouth
Have you ever put a cup of REALLY hot coffee to your mouth? I promise you, you'll realise it's that hot BEFORE it touches your lips.
> Cars are unsafe, but few people expect their tires to undergo sudden and dramatic self-destruction
Perhaps if more people were aware that this can happen, the roads would be safer (and it's not always due to a manufacturing defect).
> If you don't know how long ago the coffee was brewed, or how hot it is maintained in the pot, you have no way of knowing when it is safe to contact with your skin.
This is, of course, rubbish, I'm sorry, but it is. You've clearly never had a cup of hot coffee.
> If you don't know how long ago the coffee was brewed, or how hot it is maintained in the pot, you have no way of knowing when it is safe to contact with your skin
And if you don't know whether the gun is loaded, you don't put it in your mouth and pull the trigger.
If you've just purchased a HOT beverage (coffee, for instance), then it is reasonable to expect it to be HOT - and not unreasonable for the vendor to expect you to realise it's HOT. Therefore, you should take the precautions you would normally take with a HOT beverage.