I always do. Trolls don't like it (it smells too much like a real conversation), but it works well for those of us who like to actually discuss things.;-)
Anyway, I do agree with your point, but it seems unlikely, which is why I think this is mainly for PR due to the nature of the tech. My point was that if they could enforce their IP they might not have gone this way.
It really depends on how valuable the technology is to you. If I implement a gaming library in AJAX, I'm going to be pretty peeved if someone rips me off. Peeved enough that I will probably sue for lost revenue. On the other hand, if someone rips off my cool looking button control, I'll probably just let it go. (Not worth it.)
Now if a competitor develops their own clean-room gaming library, then we have market competition and there's not a whole lot I can say about it. Unless, that is, they happen to step on a few patents I've filed for various techniques. Then I can probably extract a revenue from them even though they're a competitor.
A good way to not-release-the-source is some sort of binary distribution that cannot be trivially decompiled.
No such thing exists anymore. Even complex C/C++ programs can be decomplied quite easily. It's just that people feel more exposed with JavaScript because the code is distributed in source form. Try a packer/obfuscator like this one instead. The code can still be extracted by someone smart enough, but it does put a barrier in their way.
I for one welcome the new script (overlords), but I can't help myself (oh, and I tried) but point out that because of the nature of the technology (client side jscript) then there isn't actually a good way *not* to release the source code for re-use, at least for the Beer part.
Yes there is: It's called copyrights and patents. You can easily have your ass handed to you on a courtroom plate if you try to rip off someone else's JavaScript. Make sure you have permission before you start stealing code from others. If you're unsure, do your own implementation. You may still be liable for patents, though.
Jesus, breadcrumbs are a total waste of screen space. Why the hell do clients ask for them?
Poorly implemented breadcrumbs are a waste of screen space. Well implemented breadcrumbs are an invaluable navigation tool. They help users track where they are in a given subsection, and help give the user a feel for the overall tree structure of the site. They also improve navigation by allowing the user to reach any level above the current one quickly and easily.
For example, say I'm shopping for a new laptop. I might find myself in the following section:
Store >> Computers >> Laptops >> Bell Demented X
From this point (looking at a laptop) I can navigate back to look at other models, hop up to computers and perhaps look at a desktop instead, or go to the main store and look for deals and other products.
Breadcrumbs are especially useful if I land directly on a page. Say, for example, that someone told me that Company Bell had a good deal on a specific laptop and sent me to the Bell Demented X webpage. If I want to compare with other models, those breadcrumbs help me navigate to other laptops without going through the front page and the entire heirarchy.
Indeed. Most of the posters obviously didn't do much investigation, or are not that familiar with AJAX development. This is the same stuff you've been able to get elsewhere for a LONG time. The Blueshoes and ActiveWidget collections are a lot more useful, albeit not entirely free.
To be honest, I'm consistently frustrated by the status of OSS code with regard to the DHTML components necessary to support open source RIA technology.
It's because the market is still young. For right now there's money to be made in DHTML controls. As long as that's true, programmers aren't going to be giving stuff away. (Hell, I've got my stash of super-secret components, and I'm willing to bet that you do too.) Once components become more commonplace, OSS libraries will begin appearing.
I seriously doubt that there are any real patents or other strings attached. I think this is more of a publicity and goodwill stunt more than anything else. As far as I can tell, there are no sophisticated components here, just the basic stuff that most AJAX developers already have in their toolkits.
The list of components is:
* Calendar * Slider * TreeView
That's a pretty small list, and all are components that are fairly common in AJAX circles.
The core utilities portion of the library is just Yahoo's convenience methods that help abstract away browser differences. Nice if you don't have wrappers like these already, but not very useful if you do. Many AJAX programmers will probably choose to stick with their own libraries.
A few things that come to mind that are missing from this library are:
* A text editor components * DataGrid/Spreadsheet component * Scrolling viewports * Feature-rich DHTML replacements for buttons, lists, radio buttons, and other common controls. * Application layout engine
I'm pretty sure that Yahoo! has these types of components, but isn't going to share as long as there is more value in keeping them secret.
All in all, it's a nice gesture by Yahoo!. Just don't expect a complete library.:-)
Sure, the skills are different. But simpler games can be made for this platform. Think games like pacman.
1. Pacman was larger than 4K.
2. If you think that fitting a full game in so little space is easy, then I invite you to try your hand at the Java 4K Contest. We'll see how you do. (Here's a hint: It's not easy. It takes an exceptional understanding of computer technology.)
Your next argument is dumb.
No sir, your argument is dumb. I never claimed it was a small market, but I did claim that only a percentage of the (rather large) market is interested, and that those interested are only looking to fill in time gaps. Pay attention next time.
One popular view of the cellphone gaming industry is that it's the place where they exile people who couldn't cut it in the console and PC game industry.
Ouch, that's harsh. Did anyone ever consider that the skills necessary for phone programming are just different than the skills required for PC and console game programming? I mean, the latter categories have gobs of memory and CPU to play with. The former has to fit as much as possible in anywhere from 4 to 64 kilobytes. The gaming market hasn't seen requirements that harsh since Atari was king. (Even the NES regularly went beyond those limits.)
The other popular point of view is that with the huge volume of handsets everywhere, it's a market primed to explode.
Uhh, no. That view doesn't fly either.
Let me explain the market:
- Millions (billions?) of people have handsets. - A large percentage of those have "downtime" that they want to fill with something interesting. (e.g. The bus, train, long car trips, etc.) - To fill that downtime, a percentage of those people turn to quick games that they can play for a few minutes.
And that, my friends, is the market in a nutshell. The part that handheld game makers seem to keep missing is that players don't want immersive, long lasting gaming. They want to pull out Pacman, Solitare, Space Invaders, or some other quick game to pass the time. The moment that niche of time is completed, the game gets turned off. Thus the following information has been percolating to the market:
- "Classic" games sell best. - Price points must be low because players don't want to spend much money to fill a little time. - Consumers don't buy new handsets just for the games. They buy games for the handsets.
Or in other words, phone gaming is the ultimate in "Casual" gaming. (Please read up on what casual gaming is before you reply that you're a casual gamer. Thank you.) Anyone who bets their company on the idea that phone players want more than a casual gaming experience is bound to lose. Period, end of story.
Read your article. Tying is an antitrust complaint. If Intel can no longer be argued to be a monopoly, then they are free from many forms of antitrust complaints, including tying. In fact, product tying is a common strategy that small companies can use in order to gain leverage against competitors. (Such as video game console vendors tying game software with their hardware.) That's why it's important to prove that a company is in the position of being a monopoly.
IAANAL, but it may still be possible to argue the case in court, but without the key monopoly position, it can be hard to prove that a company should be punished for such a move. (Especially since such moves can hurt a company's competitive position in the market rather than help.)
BTW, according to Ars Technica, AMD now sells 21.4% of all desktop and laptop CPUs worldwide. AMD's mobile chip sales have rising to 15.1 percent of the market.
AMD's Opertron architecture finally managed to cream Intel at just the right transitional period. AMD is now leading development rather than following. I find that to be a rather shocking turn of events, especially on Intel's own property. (x86)
Whatever the merits of AMD's existing anti-trust complaints, there is no freaking way this isn't an anti-trust violation.
Yes, there is one way. I had the exact same thought as you did, right up until I realized something: Intel no longer has a monopoly in the processor market.
The conclusion that then follows is: There is no more anti-trust. Just competition.
From a consumer perspective, the store is misusing its position (being one of the few stores with a limited stock of the product) to force you to pay higher costs that you don't want to pay to get extra products you don't want just so you can have the core product that you DID want. This is different than just charging a higher price due to limited availability.
From the store's perspective, this is bad because it probably drove a lot of customers into the arms of competitors. Which means that customers they might have counted on to come back to purchase games and accessories will now turn to online stores or other retailers for their needs.
THAT is what's so wrong.
Oh, and it can attract the attention of the Federal Trade Commission for anti-consumer practices.
To be clear, I was referring to legal action to shut down the competitors. (Completely within their rights.) Right now Apple and Realnetworks are playing a game of tag that Apple doesn't have to play.
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but I do know that nuclear fusion doesn't create fallout like nuclear fission does.
Fallout is caused by one of two events:
1. Excess nuclear materials not consumed in the reaction are left behind.
2. The neutron radiation from the event interacted with nearby materials (such as the dirt on the ground) to create new radioactive materials.
Nuclear fusion is "clean" in that there are no radioactive materials left over from the reaction. However, it does produce an incredibly strong neutron flux which can easily create radioactive fallout in nearby materials.
Given how destructive neutron radiation is, I'm somewhat surprised that they'd be talking about strapping a reasonably strong source to someone's person.
Apple has been a monopoly far longer than Microsoft or IBM ever were.
1. Apple has NOT been a monopoly for anywhere near as long as IBM. IBM was producing the majority of business computers before Steve Jobs was even out of diapers.
2. Having a monopoly on your own products is not an actionable offense. Having a monopoly on the market is what places you at risk of being charged with abusing your position.
3. Note that having a monopoly on the market is not illegal as long as you can show that you're not actively discouraging competitors. (In Intel's case, the DOJ was happy with them providing all the specs to their chips so that compatible versions could be created and anyone could program them. That's why I can ask Intel for FREE developers manuals, and have them arrive in the mail within a few weeks.)
We can separate "games" into two categories. The fun stuff that people actually like playing can continue to be called "games". The adult oriented, artistic works of sound and video that are supposed to be admired for the sake of it can then be called "garbage". Sound like a plan?:-P
I'm just outright amazed at the gall of some people. A lawsuit claiming anti-trust violations? What antitrust violations? Vertical integration alone is not sufficient to claim anti-trust. You actually have to show that Apple is actively locking competitors out of the market, something they simply aren't doing. Apple's player plays the standard industry formats including MP3 and AAC. The fact that they don't support a competitor's format (Microsoft Windows Media) is not unfair to the market.
In addition (correct me if I'm wrong here), Apple has made absolutely no move against those who have cracked the FairPlay DRM, such as the move that RealNetworks made a short while back. Apple has protected against non-iTunes programs accessing their online store, but usually with minimal fuss and argument.
It technically isn't legal since these developers don't have developer licenses but since they don't sell their homebrew apps, they usually aren't targeted.
What's illegal about developing for the XBox 360? There's no law that says, "you must obtain a license to produce software for a game console."
There is a law that makes it illegal to circumvent protection mechanisms (DMCA), but the standard "reverse engineering for compatibility" loophole was left intact. (Albeit not as strong as it once was.) AFAIK, no one has challenged a console maker in court over reverse engineering for compatibility, making it a legal issue that's still up in the air.
And before anyone brings up Nintendo v. Atari (Tengen), allow me to remind you that Atari never finished reverse engineering the lockout chip. Instead they obtained the patent information under false pretenses, and then attempted to get away with reproducing Nintendo's IP.
Soon we might be able to run our own home brewed games and show our favourite Xvid movies.
Which is to say that piracy of 360 downloadable games will soon flourish.
Are there really any examples of "homebrew" games for modern systems? Being as complex as they are to program, I don't really see why anyone would bother homebrewing a game on the 360 when they can produce the exact same software for the PC. (Much quicker and easier, too.)
I could see the possibility of turning the 360 into a PVR, but doesn't it seem like purchasing or building a dedicated PVR for less $$$ would make more sense? Do you really want to spend $400 just to hack it into a machine that you could have had for $150-$200?
I'm all for the school of thought that says, "It's my hardware, I want to do with it what I want." But sometimes it's okay to say, "this is cool, even thought I don't really have a real use for it yet.":-)
I'm tired of people always blaming the sender. To be offened you have to choose to be offended, irritated, upset, whatever the hell the receivers problem is.
Humor or not, you do have a point. In formal communications it has always been considered important to maintain the best of manners and to always give the sender the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, a fairly harmless letter exchange can quickly turn into a long slew of misunderstandings.
Once the Internet came along, senders and receivers alike began to believe that a formal tone was unnecessary to the otherwise informal communications. The result was that users began deciding the tone of the message by how new the sender was to the forum. If he was new, then his tone was automatically assumed hostile and his content full of stupidities. If he was old, then the tone was automatically seen as friendly and smart. This led to the situation of new forum members being forced to walk on eggshells until they were accepted by their peers.
---
As an example of of how important the tone is to a conversation, consider this real life situation: People who run into each other on a campus (such as college or work) regularly engage in a simple greeting exchange like this:
"How are you today?" "Fine, thank you!"
Such greeting are ingrained into us as the way things are. But what if someone changes the message but uses the same tone? A story that was related to me was of a college student who amused herself with this exchange:
"How are you today?" "Fine! To hell with you?"
Since she used the exact same tone as someone replying politely, very few individuals caught on to her rather rude retort. (Which, of course, produced no end of amusement for both her and her friends.)
---
Thankfully, there is one popular location on the Internet where formalized communication is still expected. (No, it's Slashdot.) If you have ever visited Wikipedia, you'll find that they encourage people to allows assume the best in their exchanges, and be careful about taking offense. If a communications breakdown occurs, then volunteers provide mediation to help to the two parties come to a better understanding of what each other is trying to say. In this way, miscommunications are usually kept from starting outright flamewars. Without these procedures, Wikipedia would have long ago devolved into nothing more than massive editing wars.
That's because you don't remember Gateway before they went mega-commerical. Many of us remember Gateway as being the mail-order company that always built PCs to the highest specifications of technology and quality. When everyone else was shipping 2x CDRom drives, Gateway was shipping 4x. When everyone was shipping 4 megs of RAM, Gateway was shipping 16. When everyone else had non-existant technical support, Gateway had excellent service that got your problem taken care of right away.
THAT is the Gateway I remember. The Gateway of today is nothing more than some other megacorp abusing the namesake of a company who knew how to build computers.
Do you have anything that isn't a websurvey? Otherwise mine is at least a real study done within the last year as opposed to "proving" that the users of a specific website really like JBoss. I'd be happy to entertain anything better if you've got it.
Posting web surveys as evidence is always trolling. Period, end of story.
Slashdot Mirror
fair point (am I allowed to do that here?).
;-)
I always do. Trolls don't like it (it smells too much like a real conversation), but it works well for those of us who like to actually discuss things.
Anyway, I do agree with your point, but it seems unlikely, which is why I think this is mainly for PR due to the nature of the tech. My point was that if they could enforce their IP they might not have gone this way.
It really depends on how valuable the technology is to you. If I implement a gaming library in AJAX, I'm going to be pretty peeved if someone rips me off. Peeved enough that I will probably sue for lost revenue. On the other hand, if someone rips off my cool looking button control, I'll probably just let it go. (Not worth it.)
Now if a competitor develops their own clean-room gaming library, then we have market competition and there's not a whole lot I can say about it. Unless, that is, they happen to step on a few patents I've filed for various techniques. Then I can probably extract a revenue from them even though they're a competitor.
A good way to not-release-the-source is some sort of binary distribution that cannot be trivially decompiled.
No such thing exists anymore. Even complex C/C++ programs can be decomplied quite easily. It's just that people feel more exposed with JavaScript because the code is distributed in source form. Try a packer/obfuscator like this one instead. The code can still be extracted by someone smart enough, but it does put a barrier in their way.
Same advice applies.
:)
This is about the ygPos,ygAnim and ygDom libraries which are invaluable to most people (at least me).
This is what I love about doing DHTML/AJAX. People are so easily impressed.
Like I said, if you don't have it in your library already, it's a nice thing to have. If you do, then it's probably so much noise.
I for one welcome the new script (overlords), but I can't help myself (oh, and I tried) but point out that because of the nature of the technology (client side jscript) then there isn't actually a good way *not* to release the source code for re-use, at least for the Beer part.
Yes there is: It's called copyrights and patents. You can easily have your ass handed to you on a courtroom plate if you try to rip off someone else's JavaScript. Make sure you have permission before you start stealing code from others. If you're unsure, do your own implementation. You may still be liable for patents, though.
Poorly implemented breadcrumbs are a waste of screen space. Well implemented breadcrumbs are an invaluable navigation tool. They help users track where they are in a given subsection, and help give the user a feel for the overall tree structure of the site. They also improve navigation by allowing the user to reach any level above the current one quickly and easily.
For example, say I'm shopping for a new laptop. I might find myself in the following section:From this point (looking at a laptop) I can navigate back to look at other models, hop up to computers and perhaps look at a desktop instead, or go to the main store and look for deals and other products.
Breadcrumbs are especially useful if I land directly on a page. Say, for example, that someone told me that Company Bell had a good deal on a specific laptop and sent me to the Bell Demented X webpage. If I want to compare with other models, those breadcrumbs help me navigate to other laptops without going through the front page and the entire heirarchy.
"Library", are you kidding me?
Indeed. Most of the posters obviously didn't do much investigation, or are not that familiar with AJAX development. This is the same stuff you've been able to get elsewhere for a LONG time. The Blueshoes and ActiveWidget collections are a lot more useful, albeit not entirely free.
To be honest, I'm consistently frustrated by the status of OSS code with regard to the DHTML components necessary to support open source RIA technology.
It's because the market is still young. For right now there's money to be made in DHTML controls. As long as that's true, programmers aren't going to be giving stuff away. (Hell, I've got my stash of super-secret components, and I'm willing to bet that you do too.) Once components become more commonplace, OSS libraries will begin appearing.
I seriously doubt that there are any real patents or other strings attached. I think this is more of a publicity and goodwill stunt more than anything else. As far as I can tell, there are no sophisticated components here, just the basic stuff that most AJAX developers already have in their toolkits.
:-)
The list of components is:
* Calendar
* Slider
* TreeView
That's a pretty small list, and all are components that are fairly common in AJAX circles.
The core utilities portion of the library is just Yahoo's convenience methods that help abstract away browser differences. Nice if you don't have wrappers like these already, but not very useful if you do. Many AJAX programmers will probably choose to stick with their own libraries.
A few things that come to mind that are missing from this library are:
* A text editor components
* DataGrid/Spreadsheet component
* Scrolling viewports
* Feature-rich DHTML replacements for buttons, lists, radio buttons, and other common controls.
* Application layout engine
I'm pretty sure that Yahoo! has these types of components, but isn't going to share as long as there is more value in keeping them secret.
All in all, it's a nice gesture by Yahoo!. Just don't expect a complete library.
Sure, the skills are different. But simpler games can be made for this platform. Think games like pacman.
1. Pacman was larger than 4K.
2. If you think that fitting a full game in so little space is easy, then I invite you to try your hand at the Java 4K Contest. We'll see how you do. (Here's a hint: It's not easy. It takes an exceptional understanding of computer technology.)
Your next argument is dumb.
No sir, your argument is dumb. I never claimed it was a small market, but I did claim that only a percentage of the (rather large) market is interested, and that those interested are only looking to fill in time gaps. Pay attention next time.
One popular view of the cellphone gaming industry is that it's the place where they exile people who couldn't cut it in the console and PC game industry.
Ouch, that's harsh. Did anyone ever consider that the skills necessary for phone programming are just different than the skills required for PC and console game programming? I mean, the latter categories have gobs of memory and CPU to play with. The former has to fit as much as possible in anywhere from 4 to 64 kilobytes. The gaming market hasn't seen requirements that harsh since Atari was king. (Even the NES regularly went beyond those limits.)
The other popular point of view is that with the huge volume of handsets everywhere, it's a market primed to explode.
Uhh, no. That view doesn't fly either.
Let me explain the market:
- Millions (billions?) of people have handsets.
- A large percentage of those have "downtime" that they want to fill with something interesting. (e.g. The bus, train, long car trips, etc.)
- To fill that downtime, a percentage of those people turn to quick games that they can play for a few minutes.
And that, my friends, is the market in a nutshell. The part that handheld game makers seem to keep missing is that players don't want immersive, long lasting gaming. They want to pull out Pacman, Solitare, Space Invaders, or some other quick game to pass the time. The moment that niche of time is completed, the game gets turned off. Thus the following information has been percolating to the market:
- "Classic" games sell best.
- Price points must be low because players don't want to spend much money to fill a little time.
- Consumers don't buy new handsets just for the games. They buy games for the handsets.
Or in other words, phone gaming is the ultimate in "Casual" gaming. (Please read up on what casual gaming is before you reply that you're a casual gamer. Thank you.) Anyone who bets their company on the idea that phone players want more than a casual gaming experience is bound to lose. Period, end of story.
Read your article. Tying is an antitrust complaint. If Intel can no longer be argued to be a monopoly, then they are free from many forms of antitrust complaints, including tying. In fact, product tying is a common strategy that small companies can use in order to gain leverage against competitors. (Such as video game console vendors tying game software with their hardware.) That's why it's important to prove that a company is in the position of being a monopoly.
IAANAL, but it may still be possible to argue the case in court, but without the key monopoly position, it can be hard to prove that a company should be punished for such a move. (Especially since such moves can hurt a company's competitive position in the market rather than help.)
BTW, according to Ars Technica, AMD now sells 21.4% of all desktop and laptop CPUs worldwide. AMD's mobile chip sales have rising to 15.1 percent of the market.
AMD's Opertron architecture finally managed to cream Intel at just the right transitional period. AMD is now leading development rather than following. I find that to be a rather shocking turn of events, especially on Intel's own property. (x86)
Whatever the merits of AMD's existing anti-trust complaints, there is no freaking way this isn't an anti-trust violation.
Yes, there is one way. I had the exact same thought as you did, right up until I realized something: Intel no longer has a monopoly in the processor market.
The conclusion that then follows is: There is no more anti-trust. Just competition.
Scary.
From a consumer perspective, the store is misusing its position (being one of the few stores with a limited stock of the product) to force you to pay higher costs that you don't want to pay to get extra products you don't want just so you can have the core product that you DID want. This is different than just charging a higher price due to limited availability.
From the store's perspective, this is bad because it probably drove a lot of customers into the arms of competitors. Which means that customers they might have counted on to come back to purchase games and accessories will now turn to online stores or other retailers for their needs.
THAT is what's so wrong.
Oh, and it can attract the attention of the Federal Trade Commission for anti-consumer practices.
To be clear, I was referring to legal action to shut down the competitors. (Completely within their rights.) Right now Apple and Realnetworks are playing a game of tag that Apple doesn't have to play.
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but I do know that nuclear fusion doesn't create fallout like nuclear fission does.
Fallout is caused by one of two events:
1. Excess nuclear materials not consumed in the reaction are left behind.
2. The neutron radiation from the event interacted with nearby materials (such as the dirt on the ground) to create new radioactive materials.
Nuclear fusion is "clean" in that there are no radioactive materials left over from the reaction. However, it does produce an incredibly strong neutron flux which can easily create radioactive fallout in nearby materials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout
Given how destructive neutron radiation is, I'm somewhat surprised that they'd be talking about strapping a reasonably strong source to someone's person.
Apple has been a monopoly far longer than Microsoft or IBM ever were.
1. Apple has NOT been a monopoly for anywhere near as long as IBM. IBM was producing the majority of business computers before Steve Jobs was even out of diapers.
2. Having a monopoly on your own products is not an actionable offense. Having a monopoly on the market is what places you at risk of being charged with abusing your position.
3. Note that having a monopoly on the market is not illegal as long as you can show that you're not actively discouraging competitors. (In Intel's case, the DOJ was happy with them providing all the specs to their chips so that compatible versions could be created and anyone could program them. That's why I can ask Intel for FREE developers manuals, and have them arrive in the mail within a few weeks.)
We can separate "games" into two categories. The fun stuff that people actually like playing can continue to be called "games". The adult oriented, artistic works of sound and video that are supposed to be admired for the sake of it can then be called "garbage". Sound like a plan? :-P
(Tongue firmly stapled to my cheek.)
I'm just outright amazed at the gall of some people. A lawsuit claiming anti-trust violations? What antitrust violations? Vertical integration alone is not sufficient to claim anti-trust. You actually have to show that Apple is actively locking competitors out of the market, something they simply aren't doing. Apple's player plays the standard industry formats including MP3 and AAC. The fact that they don't support a competitor's format (Microsoft Windows Media) is not unfair to the market.
In addition (correct me if I'm wrong here), Apple has made absolutely no move against those who have cracked the FairPlay DRM, such as the move that RealNetworks made a short while back. Apple has protected against non-iTunes programs accessing their online store, but usually with minimal fuss and argument.
So in short, what exactly is the case?
It technically isn't legal since these developers don't have developer licenses but since they don't sell their homebrew apps, they usually aren't targeted.
What's illegal about developing for the XBox 360? There's no law that says, "you must obtain a license to produce software for a game console."
There is a law that makes it illegal to circumvent protection mechanisms (DMCA), but the standard "reverse engineering for compatibility" loophole was left intact. (Albeit not as strong as it once was.) AFAIK, no one has challenged a console maker in court over reverse engineering for compatibility, making it a legal issue that's still up in the air.
And before anyone brings up Nintendo v. Atari (Tengen), allow me to remind you that Atari never finished reverse engineering the lockout chip. Instead they obtained the patent information under false pretenses, and then attempted to get away with reproducing Nintendo's IP.
Soon we might be able to run our own home brewed games and show our favourite Xvid movies.
:-)
Which is to say that piracy of 360 downloadable games will soon flourish.
Are there really any examples of "homebrew" games for modern systems? Being as complex as they are to program, I don't really see why anyone would bother homebrewing a game on the 360 when they can produce the exact same software for the PC. (Much quicker and easier, too.)
I could see the possibility of turning the 360 into a PVR, but doesn't it seem like purchasing or building a dedicated PVR for less $$$ would make more sense? Do you really want to spend $400 just to hack it into a machine that you could have had for $150-$200?
I'm all for the school of thought that says, "It's my hardware, I want to do with it what I want." But sometimes it's okay to say, "this is cool, even thought I don't really have a real use for it yet."
I feel that it's often easier to understand tone on IRC.
I'm willing to bet that you made that statement with 90% confidence, didn't you?
I'm tired of people always blaming the sender. To be offened you have to choose to be offended, irritated, upset, whatever the hell the receivers problem is.
Humor or not, you do have a point. In formal communications it has always been considered important to maintain the best of manners and to always give the sender the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, a fairly harmless letter exchange can quickly turn into a long slew of misunderstandings.
Once the Internet came along, senders and receivers alike began to believe that a formal tone was unnecessary to the otherwise informal communications. The result was that users began deciding the tone of the message by how new the sender was to the forum. If he was new, then his tone was automatically assumed hostile and his content full of stupidities. If he was old, then the tone was automatically seen as friendly and smart. This led to the situation of new forum members being forced to walk on eggshells until they were accepted by their peers.
---
As an example of of how important the tone is to a conversation, consider this real life situation: People who run into each other on a campus (such as college or work) regularly engage in a simple greeting exchange like this:
"How are you today?"
"Fine, thank you!"
Such greeting are ingrained into us as the way things are. But what if someone changes the message but uses the same tone? A story that was related to me was of a college student who amused herself with this exchange:
"How are you today?"
"Fine! To hell with you?"
Since she used the exact same tone as someone replying politely, very few individuals caught on to her rather rude retort. (Which, of course, produced no end of amusement for both her and her friends.)
---
Thankfully, there is one popular location on the Internet where formalized communication is still expected. (No, it's Slashdot.) If you have ever visited Wikipedia, you'll find that they encourage people to allows assume the best in their exchanges, and be careful about taking offense. If a communications breakdown occurs, then volunteers provide mediation to help to the two parties come to a better understanding of what each other is trying to say. In this way, miscommunications are usually kept from starting outright flamewars. Without these procedures, Wikipedia would have long ago devolved into nothing more than massive editing wars.
But uh. Gateways have always sucked.
That's because you don't remember Gateway before they went mega-commerical. Many of us remember Gateway as being the mail-order company that always built PCs to the highest specifications of technology and quality. When everyone else was shipping 2x CDRom drives, Gateway was shipping 4x. When everyone was shipping 4 megs of RAM, Gateway was shipping 16. When everyone else had non-existant technical support, Gateway had excellent service that got your problem taken care of right away.
THAT is the Gateway I remember. The Gateway of today is nothing more than some other megacorp abusing the namesake of a company who knew how to build computers.
Do you have anything that isn't a websurvey? Otherwise mine is at least a real study done within the last year as opposed to "proving" that the users of a specific website really like JBoss. I'd be happy to entertain anything better if you've got it.
Posting web surveys as evidence is always trolling. Period, end of story.