two future installments of Unreal Tournament [previous versions published by Atari] on PC and upcoming next generation consoles."
Does this mean there'll not be a Mac version, or does it just mean Midway (like Atari) will not be doing the Mac port directly, instead it being ported/sold through MacSoft?
If they're ruling out a Mac version, does this have implications for the Linux version too? (ie have they lost interest in portability or have they just removed the Mac)
It would be a shame if the first is true, and definitely unfortunate if the latter too. The UT series is one of the consistantly good ports on the Mac.
If you (as a voter) are unwilling or unable to understand the issues, and can't even take enough interest to know who is running in the major offices of an election, you should not vote.
No. Absolutely wrong. Elections are never directly about issues, they're about putting faith in people to represent you. That's why they're elections, not referenda. And if the issue is about people unwilling to understand the difference between one party or another.
I'd also add in that if you (in the general) are receiving federal handouts you should not be able to vote.
Why? If you're in receipt of benefits, are you some how not subject to the law? Just because one party benefits from a system of government (or perhaps they don't, perhaps they're more likely to gain employment if the government policy changed to something they'd prefer), it doesn't somehow suddenly make them non-persons, the entirety of the legal system still applies to them and the laws passed by government still apply.
Government should always be what is needed, not what can I get out of it.
And the two are mutually exclusive how? Are you proposing, say, a Kazaa user should only support candidates who support stricter copyright laws or employees of the entertainment industry should only support candidates like Richard Stallman? That's insane.
You obviously are not happy with your tax money being used to help the desperate. That's a reasonable position to take (if one I disagree with), but it's one thing to suggest that, quite another to insist on the disenfranchisement of those whose legal behaviour you disagree with. That way, my friend, leads to fascism.
Not to mention something along the lines of "Vote for Bush and get a free Taco! Just bring your reciept at any of our chain of restaurants and..."
Doubtless the usual bunch of rednecks will protest that this is perfectly ok, after all, if someone is so stupid they're willing to base their vote on an such an offer, that's up to them, but the effect of this ultimately is on me and you and those of us who taking voting seriously. Sometimes laws need to be made not to protect people from their own stupidity, but to protect the rest of us from group stupidity.
We want everyone, regardless of what we think about them, to vote: no law has moral legitimacy if it is passed by a body where the people subject to that law had no say in its make-up. To achieve this, we need to protect the integrity of the decision making process. The US has been very lax in this for decades, with absurdly poor voter turn-outs and with many people - ironically too idiotic to understand the concept of representative democracy - keen on putting up as many roadblocks to voting as possible to limit the practice, in general, to only those they see as "appropriate". This isn't right, but improved turn-outs also have to come with sane controls that ensure that voting is easy, that voters are as informed as they can be, and that voters are - by and large - affected as little as possible by illegitimate influences.
Yes, under current law. If hardware contains software, and the manufacturer sees fit to place a license on the software, and there's no way to get around the software, then you have to agree to the license to use the hardware.
I don't believe this is true.
A century or so ago there was a test case where publishers started to sell books with "licenses" that had to be agreed to to read the book. The Supreme Court overturned those licenses arguing that a buyer had the right to avoid terms and conditions added after the item was sold.
I don't actually believe any EULAs where you're required to agree to the license after buying the software are actually valid, at least not in the US. (Note that if you have to agree to an EULA before obtaining the goods, there's no ambiguity, the EULA probably is valid.)
I remember the Dell story too. No lawyers were consulted, and many of the comments made by Dell's support staff suggested they considered the EULAs to be invalid too. Indeed, a lawyer would almost certainly have said the EULA in that case was void anyway, not because of the above precedent, but because the guy was being told to agree to a license Dell refused to give him a copy of.
I don't blame the guy for being hesitant though. These are the kind of scumbag tactics many businesses are employing these days, using the fear of potential legal action (legal action that may ultimately fail but that nobody wants to experience because of the costs and risk involved) to encourage consumer activity that helps the business.
It sucks. There should be stronger laws against this kind of activity.
A current consumer blank, as I understand it, is read only (that is, cannot be burnt) in certain critical areas (those dealing with CSS keys and whatnot.) So you couldn't do a direct bit-to-bit copy.
This is only the case right now because in order to produce blanks (and recorders) you have to license the various patents that cover DVD media. Once those patents expire, the consumer electronics manufacturers will have a little more leeway.
An access control measure. Not a copy control measure. The DMCA is quite explicit about that.
The most famous example is CSS, the system used on DVDs. This doesn't prevent copying (someone with equipment dumb enough can make a straight copy of a DVD without breaking CSS, indeed when the patents on DVD expire it's quite possible electronics manufacturers will start producing equipment to do exactly that. What CSS prevents is unauthorized access to the content, so that only licensed players can (legally) play DVDs, which in turn means that the studios can ensure that all legally available players implement certain restrictions, such as region encoding.)
That's not a lie. Indeed, saying "What do you mean your taxes doubled? They only went up 0.3%" would appear to me to be the "lying" with statistics.
To Nokia, this is an issue because their sales were effected by a dramatic percentage. The fact their marketshare didn't change much doesn't change the effect it had on that company.
And I'm glad they didn't. If the previews are to be believed, this is a story about robots going out of control.
Asimov invented the "three laws" specifically to deal with the absurd number of "robots going out of control" books, pointing out that human beings wouldn't be stupid enough to create a unit they can't control, and would want to put something in them, say, a set of laws built into their circuitry that cannot be overridden.
Asimov's "I, Robot" was not about robots going out of control, it was about the limitations robots would have given they'd have to apply these laws to every decision they make. It was, in short, the EXACT OPPOSITE of what this movie, assuming trailers reflect it correctly, is about.
If anyone is able to re-animate Asimov's corpse, they better frickin' program the three laws of robotics into him. Because otherwise the Good Doctor will be Will Smith's worst enemy...
Well, then what interpretation fits? If Apple was being "forthright" and the issue was availability, surely Apple would have said "The availability of the processor is the most critical factor" or even "The lack of availability of the processor is the major hold-up."
This is a deliberately ambiguous statement. The question was asked twice, suggesting to me that reporters covering the event felt it wasn't a straight answer too.
The major issue with some programs today, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office, etc, is that they take 200 years to load. They should last at least that long;-)
The guy you're responding to wasn't responding to the message you think he was. He was responding to an AC that claims Cadillac have been making pick-ups since the 1960s.
You know, they had problems with the supply of G5s last year when they previewed the PowerMac G5 at WWDC, at that point there were no mass-manufactured G5s at all. It wasn't until August/September that PowerMacs started to ship. So it doesn't really explain the lack of a public showing of the new iMac.
I'd also say the quote "The processor is the most critical factor" is deliberately ambiguous. It could mean "There aren't enough of them", it could mean "They run too hot".
...which actually makes the whole thing even wierder, because assuming Apple's claim that they'll ship the iMac G5 by mid-september is true, they're actually being less forthcoming with information, not more.
The PowerMac G5 was announced and shown at WWDC last year, and then the first units shipped at the end of August, beginning of September. Here, on the other hand, we are merely being told of a machine's existance in a similar timeframe away from it being shipped.
What's up with that? What happened that's so bad, Jobs couldn't even demo the machine? Were these G5 shortages so bad Apple couldn't even mock up a prototype machine?
Amusingly, the error message in Firefox's Javascript console for that page is:
Error: undefinedmenusundefined is not defined Source File: http://www.odeon.co.uk/Odeon/js/global.js Line: 36
Undefinedmenusunderfined is not defined. Hmmm....
Re:Why do you need a hosted shell account? Reasons
on
Unix Shell Accounts?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
FWIW, I have a "free shell account" on my machine at home which is permanently connected thanks to DSL. You can get an address from dynip.com (pay) or a miriad of free providers that will track your IP address and give you a hostname permanently pointing at it. Most major DSL providers in the US seem to offer static IPs as an option too.
This, ultimately, is probably the major reason supported, open, free shell accounts have died out. Most people who'd want one have the ability to create what they need. As a result, the bulk of users of the free services have become those who are desperate to use someone else's machine, and you can imagine that a high proportion of those are script kiddies and other undesirables.
So I think the GP was on the money. Of course, you're out of luck if you don't have a DSL connection (or something else you can use to stay on the net permanently.)
Wasn't it as late as ten years ago when the prevailing theory was that we were going to suffer an ice age due to human activity?
If by "ice age" you're refering to that global cooling guff mentioned in the article, no, it wasn't.
The "Global cooling" nonsense lasted about six months in the mid-seventies and wasn't taken terribly seriously by anyone except the media at the time. From the mid-eighties on, the case has been made, repeatedly and strongly, that there is a greenhouse effect that is causing a rise in temperatures.
Insofar as people are predicting "ice ages" today as a result of global warming, this is describing a potential scenario where some parts of the Earth that are warm today may (not will, may) become cooler, even with an average rise in temperature over the Earth as a whole, because of potential weather system changes. Several spots on the Earth are far warmer than they would otherwise be because weather systems transfer heat to them. One example is Britain which shares a lattitude with frost-covered areas of Canada and Moscow, but suffers relatively little snow or sub-zero temperatures. Britain gets a sizable amount of heat from the Gulf Stream, a supply of heated water from the Gulf of Mexico. Were the Gulf Stream to change direction, and head further South, Britain would cool down.
That's a lot of ifs, potentials, and maybes. It's certainly an alarmist picture to paint London becoming another Moscow if you don't get rid of your SUV. However, what is beyond dispute are the following:
There is such a thing as a greenhouse effect. This can be seen on a planetary scale in some of our neighbouring planets, such as Venus
Current studies show the Earth is heating up
Human beings are pumping an enormous amount of CO2 in the air and destroying natural CO2 sinks
CO2 is a greenhouse gas
Whether you want to make the links is up to you. To prove that human beings are responsible for global warming takes a tremendous effort. To prove the Earth is heating up, however, has been done time and time again.
The DGA decided that the name got so much exposure from the film Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, An (1997) that it was no longer an effective alias; the film Supernova (2000/I) was the first "post-Smithee" film.
I don't care what the article says, ARM isn't a monopoly and this is another case of people mis-using the term.
ARM isn't a monopoly because ARM doesn't have such dominance that it could control the market if it wanted to. To give a comparison: If Microsoft insisted that every computer in 2005 should support the Apple Desktop Bus instead of USB or PS/2 Keyboard/Mice, and ceased selling operating systems that support the older standards, virtually every commodity PC manufacturer in the world would have to comply and produce machines with ADB ports.
To not do so would put that manufacturer at a massive disadvantage. Even if someone wanted to make Linux machines, they'd be dealing with such a small market they'd be economically at a massive disadvantage if they didn't buy commodity ADB motherboards intended for Windows machines, and tried to manufacture their own.
ARM, by comparison, cannot do this. ARM's core market is embedded processors. If it "took sides" in the 3G cellphone wars, and blessed either UMTS or CDMA2000, refusing to allow its designs to be used with "the other" network standard, customers would just eschew ARM for MIPS, SH-3, or whatever.
ARM isn't a monopoly. It merely has a high market share. There is a difference. There is nothing locking people into ARM designs, they're just very good.
Nobody runs as "admin". They run as their own account, but by default the account set up initially has administrator privileges. The operating system does not encourage the creation of further accounts at that point, indeed by default the system will boot into the account without the user ever entering a username and password.
This is by design. It's supposed to be user friendly. It's supposed to "just work". Unless a user is already familiar with the OS X security system and wants to set up multiple accounts, THEY'LL NEVER SET UP A NON-ADMIN ACCOUNT.
The director of my company's US division collared me at lunch and told me rather proudly that he'd just installed Firefox and he loves it. While it'd be unfair to describe him as hostile to FOSS, he certainly avoids it in part, I believe, because of the overly heavy and often inappropriate, advocacy he sees. For that reason, he actually asked me not to tell anyone (well, I assume he meant at anyone at work...)
If he's using it, and admitting to liking it, I honestly can believe it's going mainstream.
I assume you've never used a Mac, or if you have you have only ever installed a handful of apps that happen to include system extensions.
You do not need an admin account to install programs globally. You just drag them to your hard disk to a directory that's accessable globally (say,/Applications.) You will not be prompted for your password. You might want to prove this for yourself. Go to a Mac. Download Firebird. Double click on the.dmg to open it. Drag the Firebird icon to/Applications. That's it, you're done. Did you enter a password?
The only time you're prompted for a password is if you're installing a system extension (or an application that includes a system extension.)
Now, some would argue this is ok because nothing that isn't a system extension will open automatically. I personally disagree, after all, if I always run Safari, and some malware works by removing Safari.app and replacing it with an identical program called Safari.app that invokes the "real" Safari.app after making sure its little daemon is running, then what's the difference?
OS X has potential holes. They're not being exploited at the moment, but right now the wrong thing to do is to pretend they do not exist and allow people to be kept off guard.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're ruling out a Mac version, does this have implications for the Linux version too? (ie have they lost interest in portability or have they just removed the Mac)
It would be a shame if the first is true, and definitely unfortunate if the latter too. The UT series is one of the consistantly good ports on the Mac.
You obviously are not happy with your tax money being used to help the desperate. That's a reasonable position to take (if one I disagree with), but it's one thing to suggest that, quite another to insist on the disenfranchisement of those whose legal behaviour you disagree with. That way, my friend, leads to fascism.
Doubtless the usual bunch of rednecks will protest that this is perfectly ok, after all, if someone is so stupid they're willing to base their vote on an such an offer, that's up to them, but the effect of this ultimately is on me and you and those of us who taking voting seriously. Sometimes laws need to be made not to protect people from their own stupidity, but to protect the rest of us from group stupidity.
We want everyone, regardless of what we think about them, to vote: no law has moral legitimacy if it is passed by a body where the people subject to that law had no say in its make-up. To achieve this, we need to protect the integrity of the decision making process. The US has been very lax in this for decades, with absurdly poor voter turn-outs and with many people - ironically too idiotic to understand the concept of representative democracy - keen on putting up as many roadblocks to voting as possible to limit the practice, in general, to only those they see as "appropriate". This isn't right, but improved turn-outs also have to come with sane controls that ensure that voting is easy, that voters are as informed as they can be, and that voters are - by and large - affected as little as possible by illegitimate influences.
A century or so ago there was a test case where publishers started to sell books with "licenses" that had to be agreed to to read the book. The Supreme Court overturned those licenses arguing that a buyer had the right to avoid terms and conditions added after the item was sold.
I don't actually believe any EULAs where you're required to agree to the license after buying the software are actually valid, at least not in the US. (Note that if you have to agree to an EULA before obtaining the goods, there's no ambiguity, the EULA probably is valid.)
I remember the Dell story too. No lawyers were consulted, and many of the comments made by Dell's support staff suggested they considered the EULAs to be invalid too. Indeed, a lawyer would almost certainly have said the EULA in that case was void anyway, not because of the above precedent, but because the guy was being told to agree to a license Dell refused to give him a copy of.
I don't blame the guy for being hesitant though. These are the kind of scumbag tactics many businesses are employing these days, using the fear of potential legal action (legal action that may ultimately fail but that nobody wants to experience because of the costs and risk involved) to encourage consumer activity that helps the business.
It sucks. There should be stronger laws against this kind of activity.
This is only the case right now because in order to produce blanks (and recorders) you have to license the various patents that cover DVD media. Once those patents expire, the consumer electronics manufacturers will have a little more leeway.
The most famous example is CSS, the system used on DVDs. This doesn't prevent copying (someone with equipment dumb enough can make a straight copy of a DVD without breaking CSS, indeed when the patents on DVD expire it's quite possible electronics manufacturers will start producing equipment to do exactly that. What CSS prevents is unauthorized access to the content, so that only licensed players can (legally) play DVDs, which in turn means that the studios can ensure that all legally available players implement certain restrictions, such as region encoding.)
To Nokia, this is an issue because their sales were effected by a dramatic percentage. The fact their marketshare didn't change much doesn't change the effect it had on that company.
Asimov invented the "three laws" specifically to deal with the absurd number of "robots going out of control" books, pointing out that human beings wouldn't be stupid enough to create a unit they can't control, and would want to put something in them, say, a set of laws built into their circuitry that cannot be overridden.
Asimov's "I, Robot" was not about robots going out of control, it was about the limitations robots would have given they'd have to apply these laws to every decision they make. It was, in short, the EXACT OPPOSITE of what this movie, assuming trailers reflect it correctly, is about.
If anyone is able to re-animate Asimov's corpse, they better frickin' program the three laws of robotics into him. Because otherwise the Good Doctor will be Will Smith's worst enemy...
I think you should stop now before you dig yourself into an even deeper hole ;-)
This is a deliberately ambiguous statement. The question was asked twice, suggesting to me that reporters covering the event felt it wasn't a straight answer too.
The major issue with some programs today, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office, etc, is that they take 200 years to load. They should last at least that long ;-)
The guy you're responding to wasn't responding to the message you think he was. He was responding to an AC that claims Cadillac have been making pick-ups since the 1960s.
I'd also say the quote "The processor is the most critical factor" is deliberately ambiguous. It could mean "There aren't enough of them", it could mean "They run too hot".
He certainly does get taken care of. There's a rather odd arrangement where they bought him a private jet and lease it back from him.. He gets about a million dollars a year from the arrangement.
The PowerMac G5 was announced and shown at WWDC last year, and then the first units shipped at the end of August, beginning of September. Here, on the other hand, we are merely being told of a machine's existance in a similar timeframe away from it being shipped.
What's up with that? What happened that's so bad, Jobs couldn't even demo the machine? Were these G5 shortages so bad Apple couldn't even mock up a prototype machine?
This doesn't make any sense to me.
This, ultimately, is probably the major reason supported, open, free shell accounts have died out. Most people who'd want one have the ability to create what they need. As a result, the bulk of users of the free services have become those who are desperate to use someone else's machine, and you can imagine that a high proportion of those are script kiddies and other undesirables.
So I think the GP was on the money. Of course, you're out of luck if you don't have a DSL connection (or something else you can use to stay on the net permanently.)
The "Global cooling" nonsense lasted about six months in the mid-seventies and wasn't taken terribly seriously by anyone except the media at the time. From the mid-eighties on, the case has been made, repeatedly and strongly, that there is a greenhouse effect that is causing a rise in temperatures.
Insofar as people are predicting "ice ages" today as a result of global warming, this is describing a potential scenario where some parts of the Earth that are warm today may (not will, may) become cooler, even with an average rise in temperature over the Earth as a whole, because of potential weather system changes. Several spots on the Earth are far warmer than they would otherwise be because weather systems transfer heat to them. One example is Britain which shares a lattitude with frost-covered areas of Canada and Moscow, but suffers relatively little snow or sub-zero temperatures. Britain gets a sizable amount of heat from the Gulf Stream, a supply of heated water from the Gulf of Mexico. Were the Gulf Stream to change direction, and head further South, Britain would cool down.
That's a lot of ifs, potentials, and maybes. It's certainly an alarmist picture to paint London becoming another Moscow if you don't get rid of your SUV. However, what is beyond dispute are the following:
- There is such a thing as a greenhouse effect. This can be seen on a planetary scale in some of our neighbouring planets, such as Venus
- Current studies show the Earth is heating up
- Human beings are pumping an enormous amount of CO2 in the air and destroying natural CO2 sinks
- CO2 is a greenhouse gas
Whether you want to make the links is up to you. To prove that human beings are responsible for global warming takes a tremendous effort. To prove the Earth is heating up, however, has been done time and time again.What difference does it make? If he was a practicing Christian, would it have been deemed comment-worthy?
ARM isn't a monopoly because ARM doesn't have such dominance that it could control the market if it wanted to. To give a comparison: If Microsoft insisted that every computer in 2005 should support the Apple Desktop Bus instead of USB or PS/2 Keyboard/Mice, and ceased selling operating systems that support the older standards, virtually every commodity PC manufacturer in the world would have to comply and produce machines with ADB ports.
To not do so would put that manufacturer at a massive disadvantage. Even if someone wanted to make Linux machines, they'd be dealing with such a small market they'd be economically at a massive disadvantage if they didn't buy commodity ADB motherboards intended for Windows machines, and tried to manufacture their own.
ARM, by comparison, cannot do this. ARM's core market is embedded processors. If it "took sides" in the 3G cellphone wars, and blessed either UMTS or CDMA2000, refusing to allow its designs to be used with "the other" network standard, customers would just eschew ARM for MIPS, SH-3, or whatever.
ARM isn't a monopoly. It merely has a high market share. There is a difference. There is nothing locking people into ARM designs, they're just very good.
This is by design. It's supposed to be user friendly. It's supposed to "just work". Unless a user is already familiar with the OS X security system and wants to set up multiple accounts, THEY'LL NEVER SET UP A NON-ADMIN ACCOUNT.
That's the problem.
The director of my company's US division collared me at lunch and told me rather proudly that he'd just installed Firefox and he loves it. While it'd be unfair to describe him as hostile to FOSS, he certainly avoids it in part, I believe, because of the overly heavy and often inappropriate, advocacy he sees. For that reason, he actually asked me not to tell anyone (well, I assume he meant at anyone at work...)
If he's using it, and admitting to liking it, I honestly can believe it's going mainstream.
You do not need an admin account to install programs globally. You just drag them to your hard disk to a directory that's accessable globally (say, /Applications.) You will not be prompted for your password. You might want to prove this for yourself. Go to a Mac. Download Firebird. Double click on the .dmg to open it. Drag the Firebird icon to /Applications. That's it, you're done. Did you enter a password?
The only time you're prompted for a password is if you're installing a system extension (or an application that includes a system extension.)
Now, some would argue this is ok because nothing that isn't a system extension will open automatically. I personally disagree, after all, if I always run Safari, and some malware works by removing Safari.app and replacing it with an identical program called Safari.app that invokes the "real" Safari.app after making sure its little daemon is running, then what's the difference?
OS X has potential holes. They're not being exploited at the moment, but right now the wrong thing to do is to pretend they do not exist and allow people to be kept off guard.