It looks really cool, but I just refuse. I pay for proprietary games even though it hurts me to do it- but they're just games after all, and I don't worry too much about it the way I worry about operating systems, etc. But the problem with this game is that it depends on Blizzard in every way- the game could go away or change in a very bad way any day, and there would be absolutely nothing I could do about it. No alternate server, no informal group games, not even single player. Nothing. In contrast, my Diablo II disks would work exactly the same tomorrow if Blizzard went out of business or were sold to Microsoft.
If they let people run unofficial servers and then charged a fee to play on their server because it's the best, fine- I could still find a server if something I don't like happens. Instead, they are insisting on controlling everything forever as a way of getting people to cough up more money- the money I can handle, really. The control, I can't. Shame too because their games are top notch, even when they're slowed down a little by wine emulation.
Their battle.net servers for Diablo II and Warcraft III are great, and I use them all the time- but I can still play the game over the internet without them and I don't want to change that.
It occurs to me that since this will be an FPGA, game developers could write their own custom video drivers to manage what they're doing in their game.
The card may not be the fastest out there, but in a lot of cases you can probably get really good performance by essentially rewiring the card specifically for your game, then restoring it when you're done.
You're missing the point. Bill G's minions are like priests of some secret sect who won't let you into the secret chamber where the sacred texts lie. Linus is the best merchant in the bazaar, so people "buy" from him. Bill G is the grand inquisitor and the sacred texts are updated at his whim, albeit with the input of his secret priests.
The presence of a multitude of competitors building on the same code keeps Linus honest and forces him to get by on his merit rather than on his appointment as Archbishop of Linux.
I have actually had a local Guitar Center refuse to sell me something unless I let them put my name in the database (I was paying cash, the item was $10). They're not always so stupid about it, but they are *always* extremely pushy. I left that day without buying what I wanted.
What part of "we should change copyright law" don't you understand? I'm not saying that software buyers are willing to do this now, because as you point out the copyright system gives them little incentive to do so. I'm saying *all* software should be this way through a change in copyright law that eliminates monopolies on the copying of released works of software.
There's a free rider problem sure, but firms will weigh the free rider problem against their actual need for the software. If you need software that does something, you'll pay for it even if your competitors would also get it. If your competitor needs it too, then some sort of alliance to share development costs can probably be developed.
Even if all software was free, firms would still need software and would pay money for custom development.
If I have developers in-house it might make more sense to use them, or to use any reasonable resource that costs less than you do.
It's called capitalism buddy. If you can't compete then get out of the way.
Duh, you get people to commission the creation of the project in advance. If all software is free after it's purchased, then people will find it perfectly normal to pay for the creation of this sort of software. You could design a spec for the software and begin accepting bids, then begin work when the bids exceed your anticipated development costs by a sufficient margin. Motivated buyers will make sure your costs are covered. You only get the money if you finish the software, but you're guaranteed a profit when you do.
Obviously your firm will be the first one people call when enhancements to the software are desired since your programmers will be intimately familiar with it, so there will be future business to exploit. In fact, many programmers will probably "give away the razor and charge for the blades" by creating software frameworks then charging reasonable fees for custom enhancements as users desire them. This all works without a copyright monopoly, and properly rewards work rather than after-the-fact ownership.
I'm talking about a world where copyright gives you attribution and first release rights, but no monopoly on copying. People would organize their software purchases very differently in such a world. Of course I care about development costs- I just think you should consider them as up-front costs rather than trying to cover them on the back end by exploiting a harmful information monopoly system.
I'm not saying your business will do better if you GPL everything without changes in copyright law- in fact I'm saying that copyright is like crack- lots of short term gain, lots of long-term misery for everyone involved. We should change copyright law so that attribution and privacy are protected, but reproduction is not prohibited.
So charge a lot for the first copy. Simple as that. You can even GPL it, just don't release the first copy until you get paid.
Our economy needs to change a little to accomodate such a system, but the current system is intolerably bad. Everyone who says it's impossible to make a living without copyright suffers from a serious deficit of imagination.
People don't expect to get stuff for free, they just don't expect to pay endlessly for stuff that's free to reproduce.
I was dismayed when ATI stopped releasing information to the DRI developers. I bought a number of Radeon 9200's expressly because they were the last card that could run opengl applications reasonably well with all free software drivers.
I like free software drivers. They create the possibility that talented driver programmers will do interesting things that aren't on the big video card copmanies' radar, adn they keep the vidcard manufacturers honest. Free software is sometimes the rearguard of innovation, it's true; but if the rearguard never shows up, the frontline never moves.
There's Rio Music Manager (rmm), and Rio Music Manager Lite(rmml). Both come with the player, but only rmml is on-board on the device itself.
I've never used rmm since I don't use Windows. However, rmml works just fine on my linux boxes once I install java, and it's actually included on the rio device- whenever you connect the rio up to an ethernet network it runs a little webserver and you can download the java program. However, you can't do firmware upgrades with this software, and it doesn't have the world's best or fastest interface. It seems to want to download the entire song database from the rio each time you start it up and it doesn't remember your layout preferences.
I did find that the java client was able to download all my files back off of my Rio though, which was great when I had a hard drive crash on my desktop machine and lost a couple gigs of oggs- I pulled them back off my Rio.
I wish there was a good command line client so I could automate the process of grabbing mp3s from randirhodesarchives.com and uploading them to my player for my long morning commute. There are a few projects underway to do this, but nothing mature last time I checked.
All in all though, it works pretty well, and the ability to use oggs and flac on my player is very nice indeed.
I've had some minor battery issues with my Karma (sometimes it thinks it's charged when it's almost empty and I have to unplug and replug it a few times), but overall I'm pretty happy.
Bottom line on the software: it's not very pretty and can't handle firmware, but it's fully functional for transferring songs onto/off of the Rio.
"Please help encourage this company to stop wasting taxpayer's money and encourage innovation instead of preventing it."
This is like asking corporations to pay their fair share of taxes without passing a law that requires it. If there's one lesson in the success of capitalism as an economic system, it's that people are basically greedy and that what's not forbidden will be done and genrally accepted, even if it's not right.
We need to curtail patents, not shame individual piecemeal patent holders. Get in touch with your legislators or spred the word through publicity stunts that patents are bad, but this sort of rear guard action helps no one.
That's really impressive. I have one question though- how many megapixels is real life? 20? 30? If it's 20 and someone builds a 40 megapixel camera, will we call it a 2x-reality zoom camera? Will it expose the spirit world?
The sitting there was obviously important to most of the people who saw the film, even if it wasn't to you- you even admit that it's important to all the people you've discussed it with.
Those 7 minutes could have been the time it took for an order to shoot down the plane that hit the Pentagon. He should have said goodbye quickly and politely to the kids and then gotten on the phone to assess the situation and delegate responsibilities. That's what leaders do. He didn't stay cool- he stayed paralyzed. But we couldn't even have this discussion if people didn't see the footage.
20 Year story? If it's historical context you want, don't you think we ought to go back to 1948? Although I admit, Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam in the early 80's and our outfitting of Iraq with chemical weapons for their war against Iran isn't a bad place to start, all told.
The footage is the footage. Context must be added, but the footage is an important part of that story. F9/11 showed a lot of footage that the mainstream media didn't think was an important part of that story- to get a more complete picture it's important to see it through multiple filters. Moore's is a very good one.
Did you see the film? Did you see Bush sitting there in the classroom? Did you hear him say that he's not really thinking about Osama?
The implications are obvious from the facts presented. There's no comparing the footage to what happened- the footage *is* what happened. The footage is the footage.
I drew my own conclusions, and I encourage you to do the same. Seeing this movie doesn't turn you into a communist zombie the way some conservatives seem to think it does. You're a grown up, see the film, do research and decide for yourself.
Unfortunately, it's also possible to draw conclusions from innocent statements that make them seem sinister -that's called politics or spin, just going the other way, and that's what's happening here.
I don't think Moore was trying to mislead. I've seen the film.
Oh he *implies* stuff... by speaking the truth. I see. He makes a bunch of true statements and leaves the viewer to draw conclusions based on... true evidence. What a tricky guy!
The best way to figure out whether or not Moore's truthful depictions "imply" stuff unfairly is to see it for yourself and decide whether or not those implications are warranted.
No it's not tantamount to lying in your biography, it's a harmless error that doesn't change the meaning.
I don't know if you saw the movie but it was much tighter than his other films. He was very careful with his facts and it shows.
More importantly, whatever you think of his editorializing (and there's not really that much of it in this film), there's no disputing the footage of Bush, Cheney, and all the others- most of his material is straight from the horse's mouth.
The difference between Moore and most of the left is that he's not polite; the difference between Moore and the Rush Limbaughs of the world is that Moore is neither a bigot nor a liar. Conservatives can whine all day about the fact that Moore has a point of view, but when you actually see the films for yourself, you see that they're just desperately trying to distract your attention from the damning evidence that Moore presents.
The bottom line... that's what people who don't want accountability always focus on. Not on the numbers that got you to the bottom line. People who want accountability want to know how you GOT that bottom line.
Regarding Kerry and his service, I'll stick with McCain's opinion- Kerry served honorably and no dirty trick is going to change that. There are some sick people out there. He volunteered for combat, I don't particularly care about the shiny objects bestowed upon him after the fact. But tell me, do you think the people who give out medals are that stupid?
Bush's administration lied about certainty and specificity. Bush's State of the Union address identified specific quantities of specific substances, and Rumsfeld announced their location. You don't do those sort of things when you're not sure. All the others were emboldened by the administration's confidence in those findings, and rightly so; you'd expect the executive branch to have the best access to intelligence. When people raised doubts they were told "trust us, we know what we're doing". Well, Fool me once, shame on you, as they say.
And I defy you to come up with any methodology by which you can show that more civilians would be dead if Saddam were still in power than as a result of the war. As a conservative estimate over 11,000 civilians have been killed directly as a result of this war. So far we only know about 5000 or so from Saddam's reign, and it seems that many of these were from the insurgency after the first Gulf War that the US encouraged but failed to support. Furthermore, it's not clear at all that Allawi is going to be any better. You may recall that this is why we didn't take out Saddam the first time- it was judged that Saddam was a known quantity, and humbled at that- it was not clear that we could easily do better. This alone does not show that the war wasn't justified, but it does show that your thinking is very lazy.
As for the bombing strategy, duh you use different tactics in different places and if they aren't useful then you evaluate your chances of success and the cost of the conflict in the specific case. 900+ American soldiers dead and over 10,000 Iraqis dead so Allawi can demonstrate even faster Due Process than Texas under Bush.
Why do you want to talk about Michael Moore so badly? Quit trying to change the subject.
Here's a recap of our discussion of Bush's AWOL:
Me: Bush was AWOL, here's the facts that prove it. You: That site is partisan. Me: That doesn't change the facts it contains. You: MICHAEL MOORE MICHAEL MOORE! Me: WTF?
Can't believe I'm wasting my time on you. In a sense you win- there goes 15 minutes I'll never get back and no one who cares will ever read this.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks really cool, but I just refuse. I pay for proprietary games even though it hurts me to do it- but they're just games after all, and I don't worry too much about it the way I worry about operating systems, etc. But the problem with this game is that it depends on Blizzard in every way- the game could go away or change in a very bad way any day, and there would be absolutely nothing I could do about it. No alternate server, no informal group games, not even single player. Nothing. In contrast, my Diablo II disks would work exactly the same tomorrow if Blizzard went out of business or were sold to Microsoft.
If they let people run unofficial servers and then charged a fee to play on their server because it's the best, fine- I could still find a server if something I don't like happens. Instead, they are insisting on controlling everything forever as a way of getting people to cough up more money- the money I can handle, really. The control, I can't. Shame too because their games are top notch, even when they're slowed down a little by wine emulation.
Their battle.net servers for Diablo II and Warcraft III are great, and I use them all the time- but I can still play the game over the internet without them and I don't want to change that.
In your world it seems that all laws are equally good, and all crimes equally bad. Not so.
It occurs to me that since this will be an FPGA, game developers could write their own custom video drivers to manage what they're doing in their game.
The card may not be the fastest out there, but in a lot of cases you can probably get really good performance by essentially rewiring the card specifically for your game, then restoring it when you're done.
You're missing the point. Bill G's minions are like priests of some secret sect who won't let you into the secret chamber where the sacred texts lie. Linus is the best merchant in the bazaar, so people "buy" from him. Bill G is the grand inquisitor and the sacred texts are updated at his whim, albeit with the input of his secret priests.
The presence of a multitude of competitors building on the same code keeps Linus honest and forces him to get by on his merit rather than on his appointment as Archbishop of Linux.
"Yeah, there's a human side to business, and if you think your company is evil, then quit."
If you see Hitler coming to power and it scares you, don't lobby for a better government- move to Poland! Fucking whiner.
I have actually had a local Guitar Center refuse to sell me something unless I let them put my name in the database (I was paying cash, the item was $10). They're not always so stupid about it, but they are *always* extremely pushy. I left that day without buying what I wanted.
Why on earth would anyone go along with this?
What part of "we should change copyright law" don't you understand? I'm not saying that software buyers are willing to do this now, because as you point out the copyright system gives them little incentive to do so. I'm saying *all* software should be this way through a change in copyright law that eliminates monopolies on the copying of released works of software.
There's a free rider problem sure, but firms will weigh the free rider problem against their actual need for the software. If you need software that does something, you'll pay for it even if your competitors would also get it. If your competitor needs it too, then some sort of alliance to share development costs can probably be developed.
Even if all software was free, firms would still need software and would pay money for custom development.
If I have developers in-house it might make more sense to use them, or to use any reasonable resource that costs less than you do.
It's called capitalism buddy. If you can't compete then get out of the way.
Duh, you get people to commission the creation of the project in advance. If all software is free after it's purchased, then people will find it perfectly normal to pay for the creation of this sort of software. You could design a spec for the software and begin accepting bids, then begin work when the bids exceed your anticipated development costs by a sufficient margin. Motivated buyers will make sure your costs are covered. You only get the money if you finish the software, but you're guaranteed a profit when you do.
Obviously your firm will be the first one people call when enhancements to the software are desired since your programmers will be intimately familiar with it, so there will be future business to exploit. In fact, many programmers will probably "give away the razor and charge for the blades" by creating software frameworks then charging reasonable fees for custom enhancements as users desire them. This all works without a copyright monopoly, and properly rewards work rather than after-the-fact ownership.
I'm talking about a world where copyright gives you attribution and first release rights, but no monopoly on copying. People would organize their software purchases very differently in such a world. Of course I care about development costs- I just think you should consider them as up-front costs rather than trying to cover them on the back end by exploiting a harmful information monopoly system.
I'm not saying your business will do better if you GPL everything without changes in copyright law- in fact I'm saying that copyright is like crack- lots of short term gain, lots of long-term misery for everyone involved. We should change copyright law so that attribution and privacy are protected, but reproduction is not prohibited.
Like I said,a serious deficit of imagination.
So charge a lot for the first copy. Simple as that. You can even GPL it, just don't release the first copy until you get paid.
Our economy needs to change a little to accomodate such a system, but the current system is intolerably bad. Everyone who says it's impossible to make a living without copyright suffers from a serious deficit of imagination.
People don't expect to get stuff for free, they just don't expect to pay endlessly for stuff that's free to reproduce.
I was dismayed when ATI stopped releasing information to the DRI developers. I bought a number of Radeon 9200's expressly because they were the last card that could run opengl applications reasonably well with all free software drivers.
I like free software drivers. They create the possibility that talented driver programmers will do interesting things that aren't on the big video card copmanies' radar, adn they keep the vidcard manufacturers honest. Free software is sometimes the rearguard of innovation, it's true; but if the rearguard never shows up, the frontline never moves.
what the heck is riocopy?
I've got one, and here's the deal.
There's Rio Music Manager (rmm), and Rio Music Manager Lite(rmml). Both come with the player, but only rmml is on-board on the device itself.
I've never used rmm since I don't use Windows. However, rmml works just fine on my linux boxes once I install java, and it's actually included on the rio device- whenever you connect the rio up to an ethernet network it runs a little webserver and you can download the java program. However, you can't do firmware upgrades with this software, and it doesn't have the world's best or fastest interface. It seems to want to download the entire song database from the rio each time you start it up and it doesn't remember your layout preferences.
I did find that the java client was able to download all my files back off of my Rio though, which was great when I had a hard drive crash on my desktop machine and lost a couple gigs of oggs- I pulled them back off my Rio.
I wish there was a good command line client so I could automate the process of grabbing mp3s from randirhodesarchives.com and uploading them to my player for my long morning commute. There are a few projects underway to do this, but nothing mature last time I checked.
All in all though, it works pretty well, and the ability to use oggs and flac on my player is very nice indeed.
I've had some minor battery issues with my Karma (sometimes it thinks it's charged when it's almost empty and I have to unplug and replug it a few times), but overall I'm pretty happy.
Bottom line on the software: it's not very pretty and can't handle firmware, but it's fully functional for transferring songs onto/off of the Rio.
um, executive compensation is not a fixed cost
"Please help encourage this company to stop wasting taxpayer's money and encourage innovation instead of preventing it."
This is like asking corporations to pay their fair share of taxes without passing a law that requires it. If there's one lesson in the success of capitalism as an economic system, it's that people are basically greedy and that what's not forbidden will be done and genrally accepted, even if it's not right.
We need to curtail patents, not shame individual piecemeal patent holders. Get in touch with your legislators or spred the word through publicity stunts that patents are bad, but this sort of rear guard action helps no one.
That's really impressive. I have one question though- how many megapixels is real life? 20? 30? If it's 20 and someone builds a 40 megapixel camera, will we call it a 2x-reality zoom camera? Will it expose the spirit world?
Just wondering.
Ya, let's provoke a nation that is under the leadership of a crazy guy
Don't forget the corner Bush has painted himself into on this subject:
"Do I forget the lessons of September 11th and take the word of a madman, or do I take action to defend our country?
"Faced with that choice, I will defend America every time," he declared.
Just sayin'. He's got some explaining to do regarding his negotiating posture with North Korea, since, you know, they actually *have* WMD.
No, not the same. Moore didn't change the meaning, you did.
The sitting there was obviously important to most of the people who saw the film, even if it wasn't to you- you even admit that it's important to all the people you've discussed it with.
Those 7 minutes could have been the time it took for an order to shoot down the plane that hit the Pentagon. He should have said goodbye quickly and politely to the kids and then gotten on the phone to assess the situation and delegate responsibilities. That's what leaders do. He didn't stay cool- he stayed paralyzed. But we couldn't even have this discussion if people didn't see the footage.
20 Year story? If it's historical context you want, don't you think we ought to go back to 1948? Although I admit, Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam in the early 80's and our outfitting of Iraq with chemical weapons for their war against Iran isn't a bad place to start, all told.
The footage is the footage. Context must be added, but the footage is an important part of that story. F9/11 showed a lot of footage that the mainstream media didn't think was an important part of that story- to get a more complete picture it's important to see it through multiple filters. Moore's is a very good one.
You see, you changed the meaning to the exact opposite of what I said. That sort of error is to be considered harmful.
Indeed. I read too quickly. The point is the same- the error didn't change the meaning, and was therefore harmless.
Are you kidding me?
Did you see the film? Did you see Bush sitting there in the classroom? Did you hear him say that he's not really thinking about Osama?
The implications are obvious from the facts presented. There's no comparing the footage to what happened- the footage *is* what happened. The footage is the footage.
I drew my own conclusions, and I encourage you to do the same. Seeing this movie doesn't turn you into a communist zombie the way some conservatives seem to think it does. You're a grown up, see the film, do research and decide for yourself.
Unfortunately, it's also possible to draw conclusions from innocent statements that make them seem sinister -that's called politics or spin, just going the other way, and that's what's happening here.
I don't think Moore was trying to mislead. I've seen the film.
Oh he *implies* stuff... by speaking the truth. I see. He makes a bunch of true statements and leaves the viewer to draw conclusions based on... true evidence. What a tricky guy!
The best way to figure out whether or not Moore's truthful depictions "imply" stuff unfairly is to see it for yourself and decide whether or not those implications are warranted.
No it's not tantamount to lying in your biography, it's a harmless error that doesn't change the meaning.
I don't know if you saw the movie but it was much tighter than his other films. He was very careful with his facts and it shows.
More importantly, whatever you think of his editorializing (and there's not really that much of it in this film), there's no disputing the footage of Bush, Cheney, and all the others- most of his material is straight from the horse's mouth.
The difference between Moore and most of the left is that he's not polite; the difference between Moore and the Rush Limbaughs of the world is that Moore is neither a bigot nor a liar. Conservatives can whine all day about the fact that Moore has a point of view, but when you actually see the films for yourself, you see that they're just desperately trying to distract your attention from the damning evidence that Moore presents.
The bottom line... that's what people who don't want accountability always focus on. Not on the numbers that got you to the bottom line. People who want accountability want to know how you GOT that bottom line.
Regarding Kerry and his service, I'll stick with McCain's opinion- Kerry served honorably and no dirty trick is going to change that. There are some sick people out there. He volunteered for combat, I don't particularly care about the shiny objects bestowed upon him after the fact. But tell me, do you think the people who give out medals are that stupid?
Bush's administration lied about certainty and specificity. Bush's State of the Union address identified specific quantities of specific substances, and Rumsfeld announced their location. You don't do those sort of things when you're not sure. All the others were emboldened by the administration's confidence in those findings, and rightly so; you'd expect the executive branch to have the best access to intelligence. When people raised doubts they were told "trust us, we know what we're doing". Well, Fool me once, shame on you, as they say.
And I defy you to come up with any methodology by which you can show that more civilians would be dead if Saddam were still in power than as a result of the war. As a conservative estimate over 11,000 civilians have been killed directly as a result of this war. So far we only know about 5000 or so from Saddam's reign, and it seems that many of these were from the insurgency after the first Gulf War that the US encouraged but failed to support. Furthermore, it's not clear at all that Allawi is going to be any better. You may recall that this is why we didn't take out Saddam the first time- it was judged that Saddam was a known quantity, and humbled at that- it was not clear that we could easily do better. This alone does not show that the war wasn't justified, but it does show that your thinking is very lazy.
As for the bombing strategy, duh you use different tactics in different places and if they aren't useful then you evaluate your chances of success and the cost of the conflict in the specific case. 900+ American soldiers dead and over 10,000 Iraqis dead so Allawi can demonstrate even faster Due Process than Texas under Bush.
Why do you want to talk about Michael Moore so badly? Quit trying to change the subject.
Here's a recap of our discussion of Bush's AWOL:
Me: Bush was AWOL, here's the facts that prove it.
You: That site is partisan.
Me: That doesn't change the facts it contains.
You: MICHAEL MOORE MICHAEL MOORE!
Me: WTF?
Can't believe I'm wasting my time on you. In a sense you win- there goes 15 minutes I'll never get back and no one who cares will ever read this.