I guess what they're going for is convincing tech managers that their programmers will be sufficiently more
productive with their stuff to make up for the license costs
It worked here, we've all got visual studio.net and it's a nice editor, though it would be very nice to be able to turn some of that crap off after a while (I spend about as much time as I'd save backspacing over the helpfully inserted wrong data type, property, method of whatever)
The worst thing about.net is the help that is included is still horrible. I dropped a few hundred $ on books for VB6, which we then dropped for (Gee whiz golly).net, so I'm not in a hurry to drop $ on books again so soon after getting burned. Useful examples are rare in the help so I end up at sites like this.
During class even the instructor said he didn't think.net has a very easy future, with Java so well established (however never rule out the neophyte managers who buy into the bleeding edge because 'nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft')
I doubt that would fly. Since the EULA is a Licensing Agreement, I don't think that people can just implicitly agree
to it without some sort of acknowledgement.
I think there are (at least) two issues here:
What the customer agrees to.
What the customer knows about.
Having a EULA in a visible location allows the customer to view it and determine, ahead of time, if the terms are acceptable. This could discourage the practices of sneaking in bits like 'and Megatroll shall be granted exclusive rights to everything on the installed computer, overriding and prior claim of copyright or patent, further Megatroll shall be granted the right to inspect installed hardware at any occasion of their convenience.'
You can imagine how long it would take for Best Buy to rethink a policy that meant any customer,
making a routine purchase, can tie up a register for 5 or 10 minutes:)
I nipped off to Fry's last week to purchase a 128MB CF card for my camera, Fry's requires the customer to sign (whether you read or not) a form of acknoweldgement that you understand memory, disk drives, etc. have special return conditions. i.e. you open it you keep it, unless it can be demonstrated that it has a manufacturing defect.
Sure, these busnesses would need a waiting room, with a pot of coffee, for people to reveiw EULA's before buying software.
As for me, I as fsck 'em, I'll do what I want with the software, modify at my own risk, and such. There are unreasonable terms in some EULA's, which wouldn't hold up in any court, but I generally ignore the whole thing. I'm not a pirate, nor am I out to screw up a product and make a bad name for a company. If Microsoft or the BSA feels they have to come into my home and check my computer and make sure I'm doing everything 'right' they can guess again.
I just finished Rw/R and liked it. It did feel like one of those stories which should never have a sequel, but you know the publisher and book agent will twist an arm out of a socket to get one or three.
BTW, this article is a Dupe from Jan. 16, 2001 Perhaps it just doesn't have much priority on the rendering farm. I think it'll make for a very dull movie, though the graphics will make for some extraordinary eye candy.
It's that old concept of 'ownership' usually decided by one of the following factors:
Posession
Recognition by some body which normally charges a fee for recognising things.
Having sufficient means to wrest it from the posesssion of another. Means being, but not limited to: Guns, Lawyers, control over the body which normally charges a fee for recognising things.
We have come to accept that ICANN holds the reigns to such things (as bodies which charge fees etc.) by virtue of being the first (or sufficiently influential enough) to claim that they do in the vacuum of power preceding them. It's all pretty absurd and anyone is perfectly open to creating their own network and fashion of assigning domain names within such a network which are in complete contradiction.
Attempting to seize parliament.uk would amount to putting a foot in a large bucket of water and sticking your tongue in a light socket. If the body (etc.) wishes to fail to recognise Parliament's ownership of the domain, it would seem they beg for Parliament to stop recognising their control over anything. Best to just let them have it and go hassle Harry Potter fans.
Marble madness was just insane. I remember trying to get a feel for the trackball, but never quite getting it well enough. Talk about staying on the bubble.. This is one of those games which was ported to the Amiga and a great job done at that.
I still have a Wico trackball for just such occasions. I'd like to see if I can get it to work on the PC. It uses optics and has the Atari connector, which worked with C64 and Amiga just fine. I suppose someone has a converter and driver and I could find it with minimal difficulty, if only there was some reason to hook it up to the PC presently. I suppose, now that I have a system of decent ability, I should look into MAME.
Chess is a sport? I've heard that Contract Bridge has been suggested as an Olympic sport. Hmm. Is it too much to hope for computer games as an Olympic sport?:-)
Commentator: "Jones moves his elf into Manlobbi's shop, the little dog picks up a spear, the tension is incredible, will the little dog drop it in the doorway, has Jones trained the dog eith enough tripe rations?"
John Madden: "I know what a dog would do for tripe rations, and I've tried them myself, they're really good with some fries and ketchup... etc."
An earlier post this morning indicated the demise of Atari (Midway West) games unit. Yet here a computer specifically designed to play a strategy game hold even.
It'll be a sad day when...
June 11, 2012 ARMONK, NY IBM Corporation officially pulled the plug on its computer games divition.
Re:Technology gives - and technology takes away
on
Instant Concert CDs?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
the only problem with what you are saying is that recording the shows has to be ok'd by the artists. most artists don't allow recordings of their concerts.
I've always assumed that's because they'd prefer to sell you their old albums or the booklets full of promotional pictures. That's the old business model.
a lot of the reason for that has to do with their management and the RIAA. i don't think artists or the RIAA would ever allow a complete third party to record their shows and sell them without getting all or most of the money.
Largely due to restrictive contracts. Again, the old business model. A new artist who doesn't allow that language into a contract has complete freedom to sell recorded performances. I've seen many a bar band sell their own studio recordings. Assuming they recorded a particularly good live show and offered it for sale, nothing prevents them from doing so.
and i don't think clear channel would be overly willing to give all or most of the money away, unless we start to see a major increase in concert tickets.
Tickets have nothing to do with it. If Clear Channel wedges this door open wide enough, those artists who have the clout, are independent, or otherwise are unfettered, this will be the direction music goes. And you can bet the RIAA is paying attention to this, as it is far more damaging to the fat cats than small independent recordings.
Don't fall into the trap of believing the old business model is going to survive no matter what. It has to change because consumers expect more, and when consumers and artists are given the avenue you bet the power of the RIAA will errode fast.
Re:Technology gives - and technology takes away
on
Instant Concert CDs?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Is it too surprising, then, if technology might take it away again ?
I don't see how the technology would take it away. On the contrary, this is a serious threat to the goons who make up the RIAA, as it does two good things:
Artists get paid for their work, directly, bypassing the RIAA hands. Particularly a good thing for bands who don't want to sign bloodsucking contracts and already have established a following.
Fans get live recordings of the show they went to. Man, how many times have I attended a show and thought, "Gosh, I sure liked they way they played x, but their 'live' mixed album in the store isn't anywhere like that. I would pay $$ to get this show on CD)
The only way I could see this being any kind of victory for the RIAA goons is if artists sign a contract which requires their concert proceeds go from the promoter to the RIAA goons and what few cents are left come back to them.
As always, advice to musicians, get your own lawyer to explain terms of a contract to you before signing.
Making this a link rather than trying to get fr1st p0st helps.
I spent much of my first meager paychecks at Aladdin's Castle in Saginaw, MI, playing Crystal Castles and Gauntlet. There was some later version of Asteroids which i really liked, and wouldn't mind sharing my apartment with one of the full-sized arcade machines. And probably most favorite was Tempest, which I have for the PC. There's a knob for sale which I believe works with it. Best game ever with the sound cranked way up!
It's a nice thought that state governments have the backbone that Washington DC lacks. Of course, these state assemblies are likely to have more people from close to where you live, so you can go over to their house and give them a piece of your mind, whereas US Reps. and Sens. usually hide behind a local office. I've raised a stink in DC before, I won't take credit for it by even mentioning it, but after my pointed comments in the house lunch room there was enough silence to hear E. F. Hutton blink. Unfortunately I now live about as far away, in the lower 48 as is possible, from that hive of scum and villainy. That and they probably have a picture of me pinned up somewhere with the word 'troublemaker' in bold letters beneath it.
I'd like nothing less than each spammer must seek my personal permission before being allowed to solicit me. And nothing as much a lie as the disclaimer I see in much spam 'you get this email because you visited one of our sites and asked to be added to our mailing list.'
"heck, I didn't even know there was such a site as Malda's House of rare and exotic used keyboards..."
Why not, GUI is ok for desktops, but I seems to me I'd prefer a CLI version for servers (and I don't mean piddly NT servers)
Whenever I get a new computer, I expect a Command Line Interface (or shell as some are wont to call it) I must be old school, but I don't feel I'm totally in control if I have layers of GUI-fication and de-GUI-fication between me and processes.
Though that's probably not their reasoning, it's probably more of a spite thing, or keeping a finger in the pie, anyway.
and there's
no worry about having to find it later.
Except for those brief moments when having a black box would serve the purpose of having one, i.e. it's breaking up and the last seconds are lost, but onboard tracking instruments may tell something lost in the telemetry. That and the brief usual blackout period of re-entry.
This morning there was some interesting bit on the BBC, from a NASA spokesman, about high altitude space thunderclouds, also called sprites, which may have discharged on the shuttle.
it's like saying camels are brown, and therefore it's dry in the desert...
It's like... that's what MSDN is there for and it does it badly. That was the point, not how wonderful Google or USENET are. A helpsite with broken links, incomplete information, etc. can't beat the user community (which they seem to be at odds with anyway, I think M$ loves suits, who buy the stuff and loath the programmers who try to do anything useful with it.)
"Well, that's the problem, you're trying to use it, you are supposed to use it, you're just supposed to buy it!"
Well... american comics have had soft pr0n for decades, buxom babes/buff dudes, all in skit-tight uniforms. I switched to the 'funny animal' comics, like Usagi Yojimbo some time back, because 'hero' comics were getting to soap-opera.
Manga, like euro comics, do a better job of just trying to tell a story. It probably also is attractive in the sense of Monty Python (in relation to american audiences) of being slightly arcane (due to cultural differences), which triggers some little thing in the mind which release the 'hey that's cool' hormone which makes us feel good about something. Also, having CmdrTaco toss Anime stuff (I'm looking right at an Animefu banner ad as I type. Coincidence?) in front of/. readers establishes a sense of community.
Personally, I've tried it, but it's just not my thing. The stories are too preposterous for me (unlike a wandering rabbit ronin, which makes perfect sense!)
MSDN has an annoyingly high number of broken links, too. It's like the option of last resort when looking for assistance on Visual Studio.Net, best results seem to come from punching in a few keywords in Google and picking through what comes up, that or hit USENET groups.
It is reasonable to assume that someone who isn't smart enough to manage his own money
would mismanage company money. I never understood bad credit. Why would someone
think he can spend more money he has and get away with it? If you can't afford something,
don't buy it. Geeze.
Dag! There you go. Badmouthing the President of Unitey States! You're a terrorist, ain't ya? Everyone knows terrorists got lots of money! That's how they attrack attention to theyselves, payin they bills on time and blowin' stuff up.
Except, of course, for that little court ruling that it isn't legal to force such tax compliance in the first place which created the "loophole."
I wasn't aware it was a loophole, IIRC, that was by design. Closing it is merely changing the law, which has met with resistance, but probably finding more sympathy in state capitols as they struggle with budgets.
"Tax free internet is like a third rail, you don't want to touch that!"
"Oh? Tell a state they'll lose programs and services, and employees will face layoffs if there's no money, see which is a bigger third rail!"
don't take the job. This time though, don't take it because you'll be forever
marked by your superiors as "that troublesome guy who wouldn't go along with our policy".
i.e. most likely to cause a flap over personal background checks, drug testing, conviction records, security checks and the cavity search during the annual holiday party.
What amazes me is how often I'll see people club each other to get some bulky cheap thing on eBay, which common sense states the shipping cost should be the limiting factor on. e.g.
$2.00 for Coffee mug + $5.00 shipping.
(hint: always figure postage into your final bid amount, if it's a rare Webvan mug for a combined total $7.00, and you'd happily pay $10.00 go for it.)
I frequent many of my LxS (x = bike, computer, etc.) because of their advantage of
Buy-it-Now-and-Have-it-Now technology and I-Can-Take-it-Back-For-Exchange-or-Refund technology, which, as opportunity cost, beat whatever discount I'd get from Pay-Now-Get-it-Later-and-Get-Screwed-on-Returns technology.
Internet retailers who have a physical presence in California have charged me sales tax, last year. It's not like there's any secret, you get to see your total before submitting payment. A few sites are forthright, displaying the tax policy on their home page.
It's just a leveling of the playing field. At some point I expect mandatory for all businesses, including those without a physical presence, which could be difficult for the Mom & Pop, HOWEVER(!) that doesn't prevent some sharpie from starting up a business to track it for them, if you get my drift.
Slashdot Mirror
It worked here, we've all got visual studio .net and it's a nice editor, though it would be very nice to be able to turn some of that crap off after a while (I spend about as much time as I'd save backspacing over the helpfully inserted wrong data type, property, method of whatever)
The worst thing about .net is the help that is included is still horrible. I dropped a few hundred $ on books for VB6, which we then dropped for (Gee whiz golly) .net, so I'm not in a hurry to drop $ on books again so soon after getting burned. Useful examples are rare in the help so I end up at sites like this.
During class even the instructor said he didn't think .net has a very easy future, with Java so well established (however never rule out the neophyte managers who buy into the bleeding edge because 'nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft')
Now there's a motto for Slashdot editors...
I think there are (at least) two issues here:
What the customer agrees to.
What the customer knows about.
Having a EULA in a visible location allows the customer to view it and determine, ahead of time, if the terms are acceptable. This could discourage the practices of sneaking in bits like 'and Megatroll shall be granted exclusive rights to everything on the installed computer, overriding and prior claim of copyright or patent, further Megatroll shall be granted the right to inspect installed hardware at any occasion of their convenience.'
I nipped off to Fry's last week to purchase a 128MB CF card for my camera, Fry's requires the customer to sign (whether you read or not) a form of acknoweldgement that you understand memory, disk drives, etc. have special return conditions. i.e. you open it you keep it, unless it can be demonstrated that it has a manufacturing defect.
Sure, these busnesses would need a waiting room, with a pot of coffee, for people to reveiw EULA's before buying software.
As for me, I as fsck 'em, I'll do what I want with the software, modify at my own risk, and such. There are unreasonable terms in some EULA's, which wouldn't hold up in any court, but I generally ignore the whole thing. I'm not a pirate, nor am I out to screw up a product and make a bad name for a company. If Microsoft or the BSA feels they have to come into my home and check my computer and make sure I'm doing everything 'right' they can guess again.
Do any companies, which do not sell exclusively downloads?
BTW, this article is a Dupe from Jan. 16, 2001 Perhaps it just doesn't have much priority on the rendering farm. I think it'll make for a very dull movie, though the graphics will make for some extraordinary eye candy.
It's that old concept of 'ownership' usually decided by one of the following factors:
Posession
Recognition by some body which normally charges a fee for recognising things.
Having sufficient means to wrest it from the posesssion of another. Means being, but not limited to: Guns, Lawyers, control over the body which normally charges a fee for recognising things.
We have come to accept that ICANN holds the reigns to such things (as bodies which charge fees etc.) by virtue of being the first (or sufficiently influential enough) to claim that they do in the vacuum of power preceding them. It's all pretty absurd and anyone is perfectly open to creating their own network and fashion of assigning domain names within such a network which are in complete contradiction.
Attempting to seize parliament.uk would amount to putting a foot in a large bucket of water and sticking your tongue in a light socket. If the body (etc.) wishes to fail to recognise Parliament's ownership of the domain, it would seem they beg for Parliament to stop recognising their control over anything. Best to just let them have it and go hassle Harry Potter fans.
Marble madness was just insane. I remember trying to get a feel for the trackball, but never quite getting it well enough. Talk about staying on the bubble.. This is one of those games which was ported to the Amiga and a great job done at that.
I still have a Wico trackball for just such occasions. I'd like to see if I can get it to work on the PC. It uses optics and has the Atari connector, which worked with C64 and Amiga just fine. I suppose someone has a converter and driver and I could find it with minimal difficulty, if only there was some reason to hook it up to the PC presently. I suppose, now that I have a system of decent ability, I should look into MAME.
Chess is a sport? I've heard that Contract Bridge has been suggested as an Olympic sport. Hmm. Is it too much to hope for computer games as an Olympic sport? :-)
Commentator: "Jones moves his elf into Manlobbi's shop, the little dog picks up a spear, the tension is incredible, will the little dog drop it in the doorway, has Jones trained the dog eith enough tripe rations?"
John Madden: "I know what a dog would do for tripe rations, and I've tried them myself, they're really good with some fries and ketchup... etc."
It'll be a sad day when ...
I've always assumed that's because they'd prefer to sell you their old albums or the booklets full of promotional pictures. That's the old business model.
a lot of the reason for that has to do with their management and the RIAA. i don't think artists or the RIAA would ever allow a complete third party to record their shows and sell them without getting all or most of the money.
Largely due to restrictive contracts. Again, the old business model. A new artist who doesn't allow that language into a contract has complete freedom to sell recorded performances. I've seen many a bar band sell their own studio recordings. Assuming they recorded a particularly good live show and offered it for sale, nothing prevents them from doing so.
and i don't think clear channel would be overly willing to give all or most of the money away, unless we start to see a major increase in concert tickets.
Tickets have nothing to do with it. If Clear Channel wedges this door open wide enough, those artists who have the clout, are independent, or otherwise are unfettered, this will be the direction music goes. And you can bet the RIAA is paying attention to this, as it is far more damaging to the fat cats than small independent recordings.
Don't fall into the trap of believing the old business model is going to survive no matter what. It has to change because consumers expect more, and when consumers and artists are given the avenue you bet the power of the RIAA will errode fast.
I don't see how the technology would take it away. On the contrary, this is a serious threat to the goons who make up the RIAA, as it does two good things:
Artists get paid for their work, directly, bypassing the RIAA hands. Particularly a good thing for bands who don't want to sign bloodsucking contracts and already have established a following.
Fans get live recordings of the show they went to. Man, how many times have I attended a show and thought, "Gosh, I sure liked they way they played x, but their 'live' mixed album in the store isn't anywhere like that. I would pay $$ to get this show on CD)
The only way I could see this being any kind of victory for the RIAA goons is if artists sign a contract which requires their concert proceeds go from the promoter to the RIAA goons and what few cents are left come back to them.
As always, advice to musicians, get your own lawyer to explain terms of a contract to you before signing.
I spent much of my first meager paychecks at Aladdin's Castle in Saginaw, MI, playing Crystal Castles and Gauntlet. There was some later version of Asteroids which i really liked, and wouldn't mind sharing my apartment with one of the full-sized arcade machines. And probably most favorite was Tempest, which I have for the PC. There's a knob for sale which I believe works with it. Best game ever with the sound cranked way up!
I'd like nothing less than each spammer must seek my personal permission before being allowed to solicit me. And nothing as much a lie as the disclaimer I see in much spam 'you get this email because you visited one of our sites and asked to be added to our mailing list.'
"heck, I didn't even know there was such a site as Malda's House of rare and exotic used keyboards..."
Whenever I get a new computer, I expect a Command Line Interface (or shell as some are wont to call it) I must be old school, but I don't feel I'm totally in control if I have layers of GUI-fication and de-GUI-fication between me and processes.
Though that's probably not their reasoning, it's probably more of a spite thing, or keeping a finger in the pie, anyway.
Except for those brief moments when having a black box would serve the purpose of having one, i.e. it's breaking up and the last seconds are lost, but onboard tracking instruments may tell something lost in the telemetry. That and the brief usual blackout period of re-entry.
This morning there was some interesting bit on the BBC, from a NASA spokesman, about high altitude space thunderclouds, also called sprites, which may have discharged on the shuttle.
It's like... that's what MSDN is there for and it does it badly. That was the point, not how wonderful Google or USENET are. A helpsite with broken links, incomplete information, etc. can't beat the user community (which they seem to be at odds with anyway, I think M$ loves suits, who buy the stuff and loath the programmers who try to do anything useful with it.)
"Well, that's the problem, you're trying to use it, you are supposed to use it, you're just supposed to buy it!"
Well... american comics have had soft pr0n for decades, buxom babes/buff dudes, all in skit-tight uniforms. I switched to the 'funny animal' comics, like Usagi Yojimbo some time back, because 'hero' comics were getting to soap-opera.
Manga, like euro comics, do a better job of just trying to tell a story. It probably also is attractive in the sense of Monty Python (in relation to american audiences) of being slightly arcane (due to cultural differences), which triggers some little thing in the mind which release the 'hey that's cool' hormone which makes us feel good about something. Also, having CmdrTaco toss Anime stuff (I'm looking right at an Animefu banner ad as I type. Coincidence?) in front of /. readers establishes a sense of community.
Personally, I've tried it, but it's just not my thing. The stories are too preposterous for me (unlike a wandering rabbit ronin, which makes perfect sense!)
MSDN has an annoyingly high number of broken links, too. It's like the option of last resort when looking for assistance on Visual Studio .Net, best results seem to come from punching in a few keywords in Google and picking through what comes up, that or hit USENET groups.
Dag! There you go. Badmouthing the President of Unitey States! You're a terrorist, ain't ya? Everyone knows terrorists got lots of money! That's how they attrack attention to theyselves, payin they bills on time and blowin' stuff up.
I wasn't aware it was a loophole, IIRC, that was by design. Closing it is merely changing the law, which has met with resistance, but probably finding more sympathy in state capitols as they struggle with budgets.
"Tax free internet is like a third rail, you don't want to touch that!"
"Oh? Tell a state they'll lose programs and services, and employees will face layoffs if there's no money, see which is a bigger third rail!"
i.e. most likely to cause a flap over personal background checks, drug testing, conviction records, security checks and the cavity search during the annual holiday party.
Ah, you must be with Pan IP...
Hold on a sec while I find my bullets...
What amazes me is how often I'll see people club each other to get some bulky cheap thing on eBay, which common sense states the shipping cost should be the limiting factor on. e.g.
$2.00 for Coffee mug + $5.00 shipping.
(hint: always figure postage into your final bid amount, if it's a rare Webvan mug for a combined total $7.00, and you'd happily pay $10.00 go for it.)
I frequent many of my LxS (x = bike, computer, etc.) because of their advantage of Buy-it-Now-and-Have-it-Now technology and I-Can-Take-it-Back-For-Exchange-or-Refund technology, which, as opportunity cost, beat whatever discount I'd get from Pay-Now-Get-it-Later-and-Get-Screwed-on-Returns technology.
It's just a leveling of the playing field. At some point I expect mandatory for all businesses, including those without a physical presence, which could be difficult for the Mom & Pop, HOWEVER(!) that doesn't prevent some sharpie from starting up a business to track it for them, if you get my drift.