That's the real reason behind these "virtual console" efforts: to make even legitimate uses of emulators by people who own the original machines and games a crime...
If all it takes to turn your "legimitate use" into a crime is Nintendo offering a legal alternative, then you're outside the bounds of legal protection anyway.
Finding ROMs that match the same version of a console game you own is hard, and copying it over is less than simple -- in fact, if you can copy an old ROM, then you're smart enough to go find a job as a programmer.
$10 for a copy of an old game I fondly remember, or lost and never got around to beating, is well worth it. Especially since it's going to be something that will "just work", without mucking around with my PC or a custom keyboard layout.
No. It hasn't. It has often been carried along as an interest of the same people; the magazine F&SF (Fantasy and Science Fiction) is a textbook example of how marketing both to the same audience works just fine, but that doesn't make one the child of the other.
Bold 1: "Science Fiction" is a genre. Genre is nothing more than a marketing term -- which shelf a bookseller puts the book on. There are Romance, Horror, and "Literary" novels that would fit right in with our SciFi/Fantasy books, they just wouldn't sell as well (and vice versa.)
Bold 2: Fantasy is a subgenre of Science Fiction because Science Fiction was a recognized genre first -- at least in part because people were writing good SciFi before good Fantasy. Remember Frankenstein? Journey to the Center of the Earth? Both Sci-fi written in a time when there was no good Fantasy to be found.
At the time, of course, Hawaii was simply an American territory, like Puerto Rico...
Go ahead, bomb our military base on Puerto Rico, see how we react.
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
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· Score: 4, Informative
There's nothing you can't do in a shell that a gui provides extra ability for, when you've been well trained or decided to -learn- how to use a text mode interface well.
Moving multiple arbitrarily named and arbitrarily chosen files from one folder to the next (or other similar action).
Altering the arrangement of a screen.
Anything having to do with graphic design.
Oh, and:
For a simple example, look at a spreadsheet in its most basic form. Tab goes to the next column over, return goes to the next row down. Entire usage of the software can be made in a text screen, and FAR quicker than entering a number, moving to the mouse, moving the mouse to the next cell, clicking, then moving back to the keyboard, when instead you can enter a number, hit return, enter a number, hit return, etc.
A mouse is not fundamental to a GUI, and a good GUI allows for the same keyboard-driven arrangement that your "text screen" spreadsheet does. In fact, using a GUI lets you do things that you can't easily do with a keyboard alone--such as pick a few arbitrary cells to perform a quick calculation on.
the cheapest way of being able to prove a copyright is copy the files to a sd card (or mini cd) and put it and a piece of paper with the md5 sum or sha hash in an envelope and then mail it to yourself (the trick is that tampering with the envelope is a FELONY and has a verifiable date stamp).
The post office is not a notary, and once you have an envelope the USPS doesn't care what you do with it -- throw on extra postage, mail a blank envelope, and then slide your SD card into it, and you've commited no crime. (trying to use said postmark as a false copyright, OTOH, is--but it's not mail fraud). By and large, you cannot count on self-mailed envelopes to add anything more than simple recordkeeping does to your claim.
The cheapest way to gain support for your own records of copyright is to find a real person and show them your work. Anybody legally competent should do; heck, even children might qualify. If you really, really want to use the USPS to establish a date, mail the letter to someone you've hired to pick up your envelope, record the date of mailing, and hold onto it until they need to produce it. But even then, it's the aid of someone else and not the USPS that will support your claim.
A poorly informed opinion based on a soundbite is worse than no opinion at all. That's my opinion.
You're wrong. Soundbytes, or their period equivalent, are the lifeblood of democracy. Remember "taxation without representation"? "divided we fall"? "Remember the Alamo"? "Hell no, we won't go"?
If your argument cannot be distilled into a five-word phrase, you don't really have an argument.
I'm pretty sure that, publish or not, J.R.R. Tolkien isn't going to care one way or the other.
And as for "usual standard" -- Chis Tolkien is going to be able to match or exceed his father's writing in every technical way. Being able to write full time and not having to create the mythology will do that.
Tell that to the Ford company. They were practically the founders of the American Middle class by virtue of over-paying their workers.
Ford is suffering because they bet on the wrong horse, not because UAW was successful. And if Ford hasn't paid their workers enough to buy Ford cars (and no one else did, either), our economy would be in a worse shape now than it is. And we'd probably have never had the manufacturing base to win both world wars.
Decentralized franchises or small-to-medium-scale companies are more attrictive for me as the basis of the middle class worker.
Franchises and small companies suck, by and large, if you're not exactly what the company wants. Not just your skill-set and work-ethic, but your entire lifestyle had better match what the owner dreams his workers should be, or else your job is in jeopardy.
Medium and large businesses are better places for the skilled worker who doesn't want to run his own business. All that size brings a box big enough to be flexible and find a productive niche, provided the management isn't so hidebound it wants to run everything as if it were still a small business. Plus, it brings the likeihood of having competent management way up: I'd rather work for a suit at IBM, where my boss's boss has to report to someone, than a local software firm, where my boss's boss might fire me and give my job to his nephew.
Is it your, and your company's, responsibility to try and make poor people's lives happier? What about the responsibility to the owners, shareholders, to make money? Business is not a charity, if you want to do charity then volunteer or support government programs that do this kind of work.
Busiensses have a responsiblity to be good corporate citizens. In a long term view, this almost always results in tangible and intangible gains far higher than the slight cost of the modest ineffeciencty this introduces. Employees who feel that they can trust management to be compassionate towards them will return the favor, and customers who get that same sense from the employees will utilize the company more often.
So, yes, it is a company's job to try and make poor people's lives happier. Because in doing so, the poor people will work harder for the company and give more of their business to the same company. There is a limit to it, but not doing so at all is just bad business.
I get to choose between TWO people, neither of whom represent me.
1: There are no national offices up for election this year. Your vote is for your representative in the house, which is limited to just your congressional district (avg less than 10,000 people), and maybe a Senator which is limited just to your state. You probably also have school board members, judges, state legislators, governor, mayor, and dog catcher up for election, too.
2: Join a party. If you can't find one that you prefer over the other, you're listening to too much press and too little policy. The only election I'm undecided on and care about is my Congresscritter, and I have my choice of two folks in the primary, and two again in the general.
3: Yep, Washington had it right. Parties suck. But parties are a necessary consruct of any sizable democracy--and when you get right down to it, it's better to have them out in the open than mysteriously in back corners.
First of all, the UI changes, IE7, simple network changes, start menu, explorer changes, new dialogs, USB caching, search, WPF, backup utils, audio changes, and speech recognition are next to useless, and are certainly not worth paying for.
No, not really. I've never paid for a windows license, but I'm willing to pay to have most of those above in my home PC.
Let me put it another way: if Vista isn't worth it to you, then no OS ever will be worth it to you.
You seem to think that an act can only invoke a single emotional state.
This actor's death certainly invokes somber reflection on the mortality of us all, encourages sympahty for his family, and causes sadness to thsoe who knew him or his work, but -- given the nature of it -- it's also funny.
Imagine if one of the actors from a Jackass TV show died in one of their stunts. Sad, tradgic, et al -- and, again, funny.
Frontpage, once you convince it to stop the WYSIWTG crap, has three tools that will make fixing a non-technical user's webpage easy. (Never, ever, let a non-technical user use Frontpage without supervision. It's worse than Word.)
"Site Management", where you can let Frontpage check for dead files, orphan files, broken links, and do mass re-names of all HTML-based links. (No script correction here, but non-techies don't do that.)
Regular Expresions (or a workable subset thereof)
VBA, to invoke things like "optimize HTML" and "standardize name"
I'd be shocked if there aren't better tools out there -- but by and large either they don't do as much, or they cost a significant chunk of change.
(Hey, you, with the laughing -- point me to a app that can do #1 with compatible replacements for #2 and #3, and, er, you'll get good karma for being so mean and laughing.)
I should hope so. You're almost always required to buy it, for a considerable sum.
In N.Y., at least, you should remember to buy a policy for yourself, too. If you just buy the insurance for the bank, and there's a problem that invalidates the title, the insurance company will pay off your loan to the bank -- and then come after you for the cash.
The false "NPOV" perspective that an author has to take when writing a wiki is the same problem faced when you're reading a paper written by a committee
Spoken like someone who has either been burned by Wikipedia or upset that their school paper didn't want to carry their Liberatrian / Green Party rant.
Not all wikis strive for, or should strive for, a neutral point of view. The good ones tend to present information in an otherwise unbiased view, true, but that's not necessarily NPOV. Its more akin to how you would write any document intended for general consumption -- you don't go off on tangents that have no bearing to the subject at hand.
Everything just works usability? What makes you say that?
The start-menu-search, the increase in each of those wizard-bits that showed up first in XP, and, if you've got Aero Glass, the preview of each running program. Oh, and the new Sleep/suspend hybrid.
There are others, but as I don't have Vista installed at the moment, I can't list them off for you.
I wonder how old your hardware is -- I installed it on a new PC, and, aside from no OpenGL (ATI's fault) and no DVD playing (Licensing problem), I had zero problems. Not one crash, not one Windows bug.
As for $200 a pop -- I doubt it. Maybe if you're running pirated versions and need to buy whole new licenses, or if you have some despirate need to have the Professional version. But I'd be shocked if a two-machine license of Vista Home Premium is over $200 total. (Assume $150 upgrade box price + $50 license-only purchase.)
I got news for you, those stainless steel chain-maille butchers gloves go for $180.00; a wallet isn't going to be less because it'll take about the same amount of chain-maille plus the leather internals,
Why would you want a chain mail(*) wallet? It doesn't have to flex that way, and the mail won't give you some kind of special resistance to RF. With the right setup of chicken wire, you could probably do the same thing, for about $20.
(*: Like "breastplate", "chain mail" is a perfectly valid English word. It's not like, oh, "gorget" )
Pretty pictures make great games, but why would I want that for an OS? Especially if my hardware needs to be upgraded before I can play. No thanks!
3 reasons you want to upgrade from XP to Vista:
1: OSX-esqe "everything-just-works" jump in usability. 2: DVD/CD as a backup destination. 3: Run-as-user security finally works.
If you use Windows at home, or support Windows for friends and faimly, you want them using Vista ASAP, just for those three reasons. There are a few other things under the hood going on, but those three are what will drive home users to upgrade, and what will convince businesses that can afford it to upgrade as well.
The next 2-3 years are going to be good for Microsoft, similar to the last 5 years for Apple.
The problem is that the laws of thermodynamics say that if you had to put energy into the system there will be a net loss of energy over the life of the process
Which means exactly two things.
1: Any "free energy" device is dependent on a system outside of its physical construction, just like hydropower or solar power is dependent on an outside source.
2: If (1) isn't the case with this, and the claim is valid, then we need to revise either the laws of theormodynamics or how we apply them. They weren't written by God, they just happen to be the best description of that aspect of physics that we have.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the real reason behind these "virtual console" efforts: to make even legitimate uses of emulators by people who own the original machines and games a crime...
If all it takes to turn your "legimitate use" into a crime is Nintendo offering a legal alternative, then you're outside the bounds of legal protection anyway.
Finding ROMs that match the same version of a console game you own is hard, and copying it over is less than simple -- in fact, if you can copy an old ROM, then you're smart enough to go find a job as a programmer.
$10 for a copy of an old game I fondly remember, or lost and never got around to beating, is well worth it. Especially since it's going to be something that will "just work", without mucking around with my PC or a custom keyboard layout.
No. It hasn't. It has often been carried along as an interest of the same people; the magazine F&SF (Fantasy and Science Fiction) is a textbook example of how marketing both to the same audience works just fine, but that doesn't make one the child of the other.
Bold 1: "Science Fiction" is a genre. Genre is nothing more than a marketing term -- which shelf a bookseller puts the book on. There are Romance, Horror, and "Literary" novels that would fit right in with our SciFi/Fantasy books, they just wouldn't sell as well (and vice versa.)
Bold 2: Fantasy is a subgenre of Science Fiction because Science Fiction was a recognized genre first -- at least in part because people were writing good SciFi before good Fantasy. Remember Frankenstein? Journey to the Center of the Earth? Both Sci-fi written in a time when there was no good Fantasy to be found.
I would say science fiction is more a subgenre of fantasy, "fantasy" being a setting which is "fantastic"
"Genre" is nothing more than a marketing label -- which is why you see Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchet under "scifi/fantasy" instead of "comedy".
but it isn't science fiction, it is fantasy
sorry, Fantasy is (and always has been) a subgenre of Science Fiction. Think of it as 'novels for nerds'.
At the time, of course, Hawaii was simply an American territory, like Puerto Rico...
Go ahead, bomb our military base on Puerto Rico, see how we react.
There's nothing you can't do in a shell that a gui provides extra ability for, when you've been well trained or decided to -learn- how to use a text mode interface well.
Moving multiple arbitrarily named and arbitrarily chosen files from one folder to the next (or other similar action).
Altering the arrangement of a screen.
Anything having to do with graphic design.
Oh, and:
For a simple example, look at a spreadsheet in its most basic form. Tab goes to the next column over, return goes to the next row down. Entire usage of the software can be made in a text screen, and FAR quicker than entering a number, moving to the mouse, moving the mouse to the next cell, clicking, then moving back to the keyboard, when instead you can enter a number, hit return, enter a number, hit return, etc.
A mouse is not fundamental to a GUI, and a good GUI allows for the same keyboard-driven arrangement that your "text screen" spreadsheet does. In fact, using a GUI lets you do things that you can't easily do with a keyboard alone--such as pick a few arbitrary cells to perform a quick calculation on.
the cheapest way of being able to prove a copyright is copy the files to a sd card (or mini cd) and put it and a piece of paper with the md5 sum or sha hash in an envelope and then mail it to yourself (the trick is that tampering with the envelope is a FELONY and has a verifiable date stamp).
The post office is not a notary, and once you have an envelope the USPS doesn't care what you do with it -- throw on extra postage, mail a blank envelope, and then slide your SD card into it, and you've commited no crime. (trying to use said postmark as a false copyright, OTOH, is--but it's not mail fraud). By and large, you cannot count on self-mailed envelopes to add anything more than simple recordkeeping does to your claim.
The cheapest way to gain support for your own records of copyright is to find a real person and show them your work. Anybody legally competent should do; heck, even children might qualify. If you really, really want to use the USPS to establish a date, mail the letter to someone you've hired to pick up your envelope, record the date of mailing, and hold onto it until they need to produce it. But even then, it's the aid of someone else and not the USPS that will support your claim.
Nice way of getting people to forget that XP already does everything they need, and locking them into having to buy an upgrade at retail prices.
XP does "everything" anyone needs in the same way that Linux does.
And MS does a pretty thorough job in telling you "don't install this on anything you can't lose."
A poorly informed opinion based on a soundbite is worse than no opinion at all.
That's my opinion.
You're wrong. Soundbytes, or their period equivalent, are the lifeblood of democracy. Remember "taxation without representation"? "divided we fall"? "Remember the Alamo"? "Hell no, we won't go"?
If your argument cannot be distilled into a five-word phrase, you don't really have an argument.
I'm pretty sure that, publish or not, J.R.R. Tolkien isn't going to care one way or the other.
And as for "usual standard" -- Chis Tolkien is going to be able to match or exceed his father's writing in every technical way. Being able to write full time and not having to create the mythology will do that.
Tell that to the Ford company. They were practically the founders of the American Middle class by virtue of over-paying their workers.
Ford is suffering because they bet on the wrong horse, not because UAW was successful. And if Ford hasn't paid their workers enough to buy Ford cars (and no one else did, either), our economy would be in a worse shape now than it is. And we'd probably have never had the manufacturing base to win both world wars.
Decentralized franchises or small-to-medium-scale companies are more attrictive for me as the basis of the middle class worker.
Franchises and small companies suck, by and large, if you're not exactly what the company wants. Not just your skill-set and work-ethic, but your entire lifestyle had better match what the owner dreams his workers should be, or else your job is in jeopardy.
Medium and large businesses are better places for the skilled worker who doesn't want to run his own business. All that size brings a box big enough to be flexible and find a productive niche, provided the management isn't so hidebound it wants to run everything as if it were still a small business. Plus, it brings the likeihood of having competent management way up: I'd rather work for a suit at IBM, where my boss's boss has to report to someone, than a local software firm, where my boss's boss might fire me and give my job to his nephew.
Is it your, and your company's, responsibility to try and make poor people's lives happier? What about the responsibility to the owners, shareholders, to make money? Business is not a charity, if you want to do charity then volunteer or support government programs that do this kind of work.
Busiensses have a responsiblity to be good corporate citizens. In a long term view, this almost always results in tangible and intangible gains far higher than the slight cost of the modest ineffeciencty this introduces. Employees who feel that they can trust management to be compassionate towards them will return the favor, and customers who get that same sense from the employees will utilize the company more often.
So, yes, it is a company's job to try and make poor people's lives happier. Because in doing so, the poor people will work harder for the company and give more of their business to the same company. There is a limit to it, but not doing so at all is just bad business.
Why can't I just install a trash plasma zapper under the sink and skip the expensive middle-man?
If you can make one that small, and get a profitable charge, and convince your local fire marshal you won't burn your house down, sure.
Provided you produce clean enough power, you'll even get paid by the electric company for your extra.
I get to choose between TWO people, neither of whom represent me.
1: There are no national offices up for election this year. Your vote is for your representative in the house, which is limited to just your congressional district (avg less than 10,000 people), and maybe a Senator which is limited just to your state. You probably also have school board members, judges, state legislators, governor, mayor, and dog catcher up for election, too.
2: Join a party. If you can't find one that you prefer over the other, you're listening to too much press and too little policy. The only election I'm undecided on and care about is my Congresscritter, and I have my choice of two folks in the primary, and two again in the general.
3: Yep, Washington had it right. Parties suck. But parties are a necessary consruct of any sizable democracy--and when you get right down to it, it's better to have them out in the open than mysteriously in back corners.
First of all, the UI changes, IE7, simple network changes, start menu, explorer changes, new dialogs, USB caching, search, WPF, backup utils, audio changes, and speech recognition are next to useless, and are certainly not worth paying for.
No, not really. I've never paid for a windows license, but I'm willing to pay to have most of those above in my home PC.
Let me put it another way: if Vista isn't worth it to you, then no OS ever will be worth it to you.
Muslims are not terrorists.
But terrorists are muslims. It's simple folly to not concentrate our resources on muslims -- watching mosques, hiring arabic translators, et al.
You seem to think that an act can only invoke a single emotional state.
This actor's death certainly invokes somber reflection on the mortality of us all, encourages sympahty for his family, and causes sadness to thsoe who knew him or his work, but -- given the nature of it -- it's also funny.
Imagine if one of the actors from a Jackass TV show died in one of their stunts. Sad, tradgic, et al -- and, again, funny.
No, really, stop laughing.
Frontpage, once you convince it to stop the WYSIWTG crap, has three tools that will make fixing a non-technical user's webpage easy. (Never, ever, let a non-technical user use Frontpage without supervision. It's worse than Word.)
I'd be shocked if there aren't better tools out there -- but by and large either they don't do as much, or they cost a significant chunk of change.
(Hey, you, with the laughing -- point me to a app that can do #1 with compatible replacements for #2 and #3, and, er, you'll get good karma for being so mean and laughing.)
I should hope so. You're almost always required to buy it, for a considerable sum.
In N.Y., at least, you should remember to buy a policy for yourself, too. If you just buy the insurance for the bank, and there's a problem that invalidates the title, the insurance company will pay off your loan to the bank -- and then come after you for the cash.
The false "NPOV" perspective that an author has to take when writing a wiki is the same problem faced when you're reading a paper written by a committee
Spoken like someone who has either been burned by Wikipedia or upset that their school paper didn't want to carry their Liberatrian / Green Party rant.
Not all wikis strive for, or should strive for, a neutral point of view. The good ones tend to present information in an otherwise unbiased view, true, but that's not necessarily NPOV. Its more akin to how you would write any document intended for general consumption -- you don't go off on tangents that have no bearing to the subject at hand.
Everything just works usability? What makes you say that?
The start-menu-search, the increase in each of those wizard-bits that showed up first in XP, and, if you've got Aero Glass, the preview of each running program. Oh, and the new Sleep/suspend hybrid.
There are others, but as I don't have Vista installed at the moment, I can't list them off for you.
I wonder how old your hardware is -- I installed it on a new PC, and, aside from no OpenGL (ATI's fault) and no DVD playing (Licensing problem), I had zero problems. Not one crash, not one Windows bug.
As for $200 a pop -- I doubt it. Maybe if you're running pirated versions and need to buy whole new licenses, or if you have some despirate need to have the Professional version. But I'd be shocked if a two-machine license of Vista Home Premium is over $200 total. (Assume $150 upgrade box price + $50 license-only purchase.)
I got news for you, those stainless steel chain-maille butchers gloves go for $180.00; a wallet isn't going to be less because it'll take about the same amount of chain-maille plus the leather internals,
Why would you want a chain mail(*) wallet? It doesn't have to flex that way, and the mail won't give you some kind of special resistance to RF. With the right setup of chicken wire, you could probably do the same thing, for about $20.
(*: Like "breastplate", "chain mail" is a perfectly valid English word. It's not like, oh, "gorget" )
Pretty pictures make great games, but why would I want that for an OS? Especially if my hardware needs to be upgraded before I can play. No thanks!
3 reasons you want to upgrade from XP to Vista:
1: OSX-esqe "everything-just-works" jump in usability.
2: DVD/CD as a backup destination.
3: Run-as-user security finally works.
If you use Windows at home, or support Windows for friends and faimly, you want them using Vista ASAP, just for those three reasons. There are a few other things under the hood going on, but those three are what will drive home users to upgrade, and what will convince businesses that can afford it to upgrade as well.
The next 2-3 years are going to be good for Microsoft, similar to the last 5 years for Apple.
What's so hard about putting a miniUSB connector in instead of a card slot?
I don't want yet another thing dongling from my anything. Add a miniUSB as well as a real SD card slot, and I'm golden.
The problem is that the laws of thermodynamics say that if you had to put energy into the system there will be a net loss of energy over the life of the process
Which means exactly two things.
1: Any "free energy" device is dependent on a system outside of its physical construction, just like hydropower or solar power is dependent on an outside source.
2: If (1) isn't the case with this, and the claim is valid, then we need to revise either the laws of theormodynamics or how we apply them. They weren't written by God, they just happen to be the best description of that aspect of physics that we have.