Every time an older version of a living project is forked because somebody claims that the old code is "better" for some reason which nobody can quite explain, a kitten dies. Gnome 3 has resulted in the deaths of thousands of kittens already, so before you:
- Fork an old project (users)
- Completely change the direction of the project (maintainers)
Ask yourself if you want to be responsible for the death of a/several kitten(s). If the answer is no, then DON'T DO IT.
Of course, if you think that you can get FF4+ feature parity using the FF 3.x/Gecko 1.x codebase WITHOUT increasing memory usage, then be my guest - kill a kitten. I dare you.
(I'm not talking to parent here, who I assume was being sarcastic, but rather to anybody who thinks forking is a good idea)
Steve Jobs might not be around any more to enforce some of Apple's stricter policies, but that doesn't mean the company is letting it all hang loose.
Because that's the job of a CEO. To take charge of policing their company's third party developer community.
The fact that most CEOs don't get their hands dirty with the day-to-day work of the company is the reason that Microsoft hasn't imploded after years of being headed up by an overweight chimpanzee.
Why is 4:3 such a useful aspect ratio? Just curious because I tend to prefer wide-screen monitors that I can flip on their sides or use in landscape orientation depending on what you're doing, and it seems to me that the monitor market is going that way. I'd have thought that square-ish monitors tend to be less comfortable given that humans have a greater horizontal than vertical field of vision (I feel a bit boxed in when using 4:3 CRTs, but that may just be the low resolution).
This makes me ashamed to be Canadian. It makes us look like a bunch of morons who are afraid of the wireless ghosts of non-ionizing radiation.
No, it makes the Ontario English Catholic Teacher's Association look like a bunch of morons who are afraid of the wireless ghosts of non-ionizing radiation. Don't feel too bad, every country has people who push for insane laws to assuage their equally insane fears and suspicions (usually under the pretense of "protecting the children").
An *attempted* hijacking, but I'd say this is the specific incident the new law is trying to address. I predict a dramatic decrease in the number of skyjackings by armed Communists in Australia over the next fifty-two years or so with this new technology.
"He deliberately force-landed the plane by diving down in a steep manner until the Ground Proximity Warning System gave off a signal 'sink rate, whoop, whoop, pull up'."
He said Komar ignored 15 GPWS warnings as well as his co-pilot's warning and brought the plane into the sharp dive, causing it to drop suddenly by 1,600 feet per minute compared with a normal 1,000 feet per minute and to overshoot the runway.
The plane's front wheel snapped off, causing the aircraft to bounce three times before skidding on the runway, crossing an airport fence and a public road and hitting a dyke before bursting into flames, the prosecutor said.
A few years ago, a friend claimed that a member of the flight crew aboard GA-200 actually said "Stupid American" or something along those lines in an attempt to shut up the GPWS (which wouldn't particularly surprise me knowing Garuda). I'd dearly love to hear the CVR recordings for that flight if anyone knows where I can get them, I'd like to see whether that rumour is fact or fiction.
For one thing, might that be part of why among freeware Tetris clones, clones released as free software (such as M-x tetris) have historically been least likely to draw nastygrams from The Tetris Company? For another, iOS itself has the same ethical problem as any other platform without the ability to install self-signed software, and cloning an iOS-exclusive game frees its mechanics from being tied to that platform.
A valid point, but you contradict yourself. If there already exist two implementations of (roughly) the same game which both run on different platforms (presumably one of which is a Zynga target platform), Zynga aren't "freeing" anything.
As an aside, I was interested in the Tetris IP arrangements so I searched around and found this Quora question. Can you guess who wrote the first (and current top rated) answer?
Seth Sivak, PM / Designer @ Zynga Boston
Oh the irony. But I digress.
But how is that practical? After some point, all the possible mechanics within a genre have been tried. Everything is just a different combination of the same elements, and one might end up combining them the same way someone else did. The last genre launch I know of was a decade and a half ago with Parappa the Rapper.
To claim that Zynga were just "throwing shit at the wall" and managed to create a 1:1 copy of Tiny Tower strains credulity. I know getting past the "threshold of originality" is practical because so many game developers manage to do it year after year. As hardware and user interfaces evolve (think touchscreens and accelerometers), there are more and more opportunities for companies to put forward unique and original experiences tailored for new devices. I highly doubt that the pool of available original game ideas is even finite, let alone close to exhausted.
To compare operating systems with games based on the criteria of originality completely misses a key difference between games and operating systems. When it comes to OSes, most users absolutely *detest* change. They can, and *will* simply ignore your product in order to stick with what they feel comfortable with. Take a couple of Microsoft examples: Vista and the ribbon UI. Both of these were widely panned by users, to the point that many people threatened to do away with using Windows altogether. But they stuck with it. Why? Microsoft certainly didn't keep their customers because of a lack of worthy commercial and non-commercial competitors, and they didn't keep their customers by immediately caving in to user demands (even if they wanted to do so, their distribution mechanisms and release cycles were far too rigid to undo their UI changes at the click of a button). Microsoft kept their customers because they had a platform, and on that platform they and others had built applications which Windows users had become attached to. Sure, everyone could have switched to something other than Windows, but that would have taken time and had a steep learning curve. The real winner there was Windows 7, because it had the shallowest learning curve available and virtually zero cost of migration for most business-critical Windows apps (which are usually more expensive than the OS itself). The lesson is that if you want people to jump ship to your OS, you need to make it as easy as possible for them. This is why (IMO) GNU would have failed if it modelled itself on anything other than the dominant (or near-dominant) OS at the time.
Games are different; your average gamer doesn't care whether or not they'll have to upgrade to QuickBooks 2012 if they buy a copy of your new game. They just want something interesting that they haven't played to death yet. In addition, moderately steep learning curves for games are often valued (think StarCraft 2) as they reward players who put effort into learning the ropes. Zynga aren't going to sell their new game to any of tho
But which is the key element that gets GNU off the hook? Is it giving credit to the UNIX heritage, or is it distribution of the result under a free software license?
A bit of each, really. Also the fact that several UNIX clones existed at the time, and that GNU was created as a response to a perceived ethical problem rather than a financial one.
A problem with giving credit to the author of the older work is that unless it's done very carefully, giving credit can introduce trademark problems if there's any way for an end user to interpret it as implying an endorsement of the clone by the older work's author or publisher.
The name "GNU's not UNIX" may well have been a very tongue-in-cheek response to this dilemna, but I can't say I know for sure. Zynga obviously knew that they were going to come up against this obstacle if they made a Tiny Tower clone, and rather than deciding to license the IP off Nimblebit (purchase the company, even) or simply make a different game, they opted to shamelessly rip off the game mechanics and give nothing back to Nimblebit (no attribution, no money, nothing). My qualm is that Zynga had the financial resources to go ahead with any of those alternatives, but instead went the blatant rip-off route.
Ugh. That comparison is wrong on so many levels. Let me demonstrate:
GNU: Project members like the UNIX philosophy put forward (and built on) by the UNIX operating system, but dislike the fact that users are not free to use/modify their programs and are instead bound by overly restrictive licenses. They decide to write a UNIX-style operating system (taking inspiration from the *many* UNIX-style operating systems around at the time), but make it "Free as in Freedom" for the betterment of computer users everywhere. They don't have the resources of the big companies like AT&T/Bell, but through sheer persistence and determination they finally create the GNU operating system (paying homage to its UNIX heritage with the reverse-acronym GNU's Not UNIX). True to their original vision, they circulate it for free and start what could best be termed a "F/OSS revolution".
Zynga: Realise that their income stream from years of cloning games like "Farm Town" is beginning to dry up. As they have done in the past, they simply take a successful game (from a company small enough that it does not have the resources to take legal action, of course) and make a clone with a slightly improved user interface and the sort of graphics that only a 7,000 person company can produce. They sell their blatantly plagiarised game and refuse to acknowledge the original game in any way, shape or form.
I use ABP, Firebug, Vimperator, NoScript, HTTPS-Everywhere and Ghostery. I see no reason why ABP, HTTPS-Everywhere and Ghostery should not merge into a single extension (Ghostery and HTTPS-Everywhere are both privacy related, and if you're going to have two extensions like ABP and Ghostery that simply block tracking DOM elements they may as well be merged into one), and why the NoScript and Firebug features aren't already integrated into the browser (as they are with Webkit/Webkit DOM inspector and Chromium's easy "click-to-run-this-plugin" feature). With that many extensions (*all* being developed by different people), FF will almost certainly leak memory like a sieve.
Only bad programmers complain about programming languages. A good programmer can program in any programming language he wants...
It's a good thing all schoolchildren are Good Programmers then. Hell, why are we even teaching them this! They can program in any language they want!
A few lesson's experience in one language makes not a Good Programmer. Not having a portable, flexible language makes it extremely difficult for kids to hack on cool pet projects like web apps and games without investing a significant amount of time learning a new language for doing each task.
This is what happens when any country is run by insert religion here. We see it in Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, etc. These countries really are better off under dictators rather than leading themselves, compare Saudi Arabia to Somalia. We will see a lot more of this in the "Arab Spring" countries. I expect to be modded down by the PC crowd with their "all belief systems are equal" and "a Theocracy can be just as good as secular democracy (as long as it isn't Christian)" comments but they are just ignoring what actually happens whenever insert religious group here get into power. Surprise surprise they follow the teaching of insert religion here - from a demented warlord with a taste for little girls.
Bonus points: come up with five religions that could make the above quote factually correct.
The source is on their Google Code page. It seems a bit sill that they don't provide a link to it on the front page of their website. Also, I have a feeling that the word "library" refers to a standalone Dart source file rather than a body of code which you link against and call from your own application. From the spec overview:
Dart programs are organized in a modular fashion into units called libraries. Libraries are units of encapsulation and may be mutually recursive.
Is this a programming language with an existing shell script interpreter style implementation, too?
An interpreted language bundled with a REPL? I'm not sure if Dart has a REPL, but it would be pretty trivial to implement. Fortunately the Dart specification *does* support shebangs (so #!/usr/bin/dart), check out the relevant section here (they call it a script tag). Here's an excerpt:
A library may optionally begin with a script tag, which can be used to identify the interpreter of the script to whatever computing environment the script is embedded in. A script tag begins with the characters #! and ends at the end of the line. Any characters after #! are ignored by the Dart implementation.
Just remember drones can be jammed, intercepted, or hacked.
Claims Iranian state television...
It is a whole lot harder to hack mark one eyeballs remotely.
In Australia, high power laser pointers are banned for exactly this reason. If humans can be blinded by an off-the-shelf laser, how well are they going to fare against bullets?
But this *is* distinct from current technologies. TFA says that the navy want the helicopter to land automatically as close as possible to the soldier. Given that it will probably be landing under heavy fire and in difficult terrain, this is no small feat. It's not an app to "fly a helicopter", it's an app to tell a helicopter to fly itself, and the latter part is what's so exciting.
Why? Manufacturing them overseas lowers the price and makes them more accessible to students. IIRC the Raspberry Pi Foundation's stated goal is to teach children programming, not to bolster a failing industry at the expense of educators and hobbyists.
Cars are only dangerous when you're bad at driving. Ever wondered why only a small fraction of drivers are involved in fatal or near-fatal car crashes each year? It's because the rest have above average driving skill. Ask them yourself if you don't believe me.
At NASA spending rates, $500k would get you three or four "artist's impression" drawings of an American-flag covered spaceship which looks suspiciously like the USS Enterprise. $500k is chicken feed for a government agency like DARPA.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time an older version of a living project is forked because somebody claims that the old code is "better" for some reason which nobody can quite explain, a kitten dies. Gnome 3 has resulted in the deaths of thousands of kittens already, so before you:
Ask yourself if you want to be responsible for the death of a/several kitten(s). If the answer is no, then DON'T DO IT.
Of course, if you think that you can get FF4+ feature parity using the FF 3.x/Gecko 1.x codebase WITHOUT increasing memory usage, then be my guest - kill a kitten. I dare you.
(I'm not talking to parent here, who I assume was being sarcastic, but rather to anybody who thinks forking is a good idea)
Steve Jobs might not be around any more to enforce some of Apple's stricter policies, but that doesn't mean the company is letting it all hang loose.
Because that's the job of a CEO. To take charge of policing their company's third party developer community.
The fact that most CEOs don't get their hands dirty with the day-to-day work of the company is the reason that Microsoft hasn't imploded after years of being headed up by an overweight chimpanzee.
Why is 4:3 such a useful aspect ratio? Just curious because I tend to prefer wide-screen monitors that I can flip on their sides or use in landscape orientation depending on what you're doing, and it seems to me that the monitor market is going that way. I'd have thought that square-ish monitors tend to be less comfortable given that humans have a greater horizontal than vertical field of vision (I feel a bit boxed in when using 4:3 CRTs, but that may just be the low resolution).
You have to show everyone that these people are wrong, why they are wrong, and why it is a bad thing to allow such wrongness to win.
Obligatory XKCD
This makes me ashamed to be Canadian. It makes us look like a bunch of morons who are afraid of the wireless ghosts of non-ionizing radiation.
No, it makes the Ontario English Catholic Teacher's Association look like a bunch of morons who are afraid of the wireless ghosts of non-ionizing radiation. Don't feel too bad, every country has people who push for insane laws to assuage their equally insane fears and suspicions (usually under the pretense of "protecting the children").
Or a word processor that won't barf when you are editing a 10,000 page document.
I would suggest that you are "doing it wrong" if you have a 10, 000 page document in a word processor ;)
You've got some good points, though. The lack of a decent CAD suite in particular is a major pain.
The same EU that almost banned cordless phones and Wi-Fi in schools because of unsafe radiation?
TAA Flight 408
An *attempted* hijacking, but I'd say this is the specific incident the new law is trying to address. I predict a dramatic decrease in the number of skyjackings by armed Communists in Australia over the next fifty-two years or so with this new technology.
"He deliberately force-landed the plane by diving down in a steep manner until the Ground Proximity Warning System gave off a signal 'sink rate, whoop, whoop, pull up'."
He said Komar ignored 15 GPWS warnings as well as his co-pilot's warning and brought the plane into the sharp dive, causing it to drop suddenly by 1,600 feet per minute compared with a normal 1,000 feet per minute and to overshoot the runway.
The plane's front wheel snapped off, causing the aircraft to bounce three times before skidding on the runway, crossing an airport fence and a public road and hitting a dyke before bursting into flames, the prosecutor said.
Source.
A few years ago, a friend claimed that a member of the flight crew aboard GA-200 actually said "Stupid American" or something along those lines in an attempt to shut up the GPWS (which wouldn't particularly surprise me knowing Garuda). I'd dearly love to hear the CVR recordings for that flight if anyone knows where I can get them, I'd like to see whether that rumour is fact or fiction.
A jihad upon the enemies of football!
For one thing, might that be part of why among freeware Tetris clones, clones released as free software (such as M-x tetris) have historically been least likely to draw nastygrams from The Tetris Company? For another, iOS itself has the same ethical problem as any other platform without the ability to install self-signed software, and cloning an iOS-exclusive game frees its mechanics from being tied to that platform.
A valid point, but you contradict yourself. If there already exist two implementations of (roughly) the same game which both run on different platforms (presumably one of which is a Zynga target platform), Zynga aren't "freeing" anything.
As an aside, I was interested in the Tetris IP arrangements so I searched around and found this Quora question. Can you guess who wrote the first (and current top rated) answer?
Seth Sivak, PM / Designer @ Zynga Boston
Oh the irony. But I digress.
But how is that practical? After some point, all the possible mechanics within a genre have been tried. Everything is just a different combination of the same elements, and one might end up combining them the same way someone else did. The last genre launch I know of was a decade and a half ago with Parappa the Rapper.
To claim that Zynga were just "throwing shit at the wall" and managed to create a 1:1 copy of Tiny Tower strains credulity. I know getting past the "threshold of originality" is practical because so many game developers manage to do it year after year. As hardware and user interfaces evolve (think touchscreens and accelerometers), there are more and more opportunities for companies to put forward unique and original experiences tailored for new devices. I highly doubt that the pool of available original game ideas is even finite, let alone close to exhausted.
To compare operating systems with games based on the criteria of originality completely misses a key difference between games and operating systems. When it comes to OSes, most users absolutely *detest* change. They can, and *will* simply ignore your product in order to stick with what they feel comfortable with. Take a couple of Microsoft examples: Vista and the ribbon UI. Both of these were widely panned by users, to the point that many people threatened to do away with using Windows altogether. But they stuck with it. Why? Microsoft certainly didn't keep their customers because of a lack of worthy commercial and non-commercial competitors, and they didn't keep their customers by immediately caving in to user demands (even if they wanted to do so, their distribution mechanisms and release cycles were far too rigid to undo their UI changes at the click of a button). Microsoft kept their customers because they had a platform, and on that platform they and others had built applications which Windows users had become attached to. Sure, everyone could have switched to something other than Windows, but that would have taken time and had a steep learning curve. The real winner there was Windows 7, because it had the shallowest learning curve available and virtually zero cost of migration for most business-critical Windows apps (which are usually more expensive than the OS itself). The lesson is that if you want people to jump ship to your OS, you need to make it as easy as possible for them. This is why (IMO) GNU would have failed if it modelled itself on anything other than the dominant (or near-dominant) OS at the time.
Games are different; your average gamer doesn't care whether or not they'll have to upgrade to QuickBooks 2012 if they buy a copy of your new game. They just want something interesting that they haven't played to death yet. In addition, moderately steep learning curves for games are often valued (think StarCraft 2) as they reward players who put effort into learning the ropes. Zynga aren't going to sell their new game to any of tho
But which is the key element that gets GNU off the hook? Is it giving credit to the UNIX heritage, or is it distribution of the result under a free software license?
A bit of each, really. Also the fact that several UNIX clones existed at the time, and that GNU was created as a response to a perceived ethical problem rather than a financial one.
A problem with giving credit to the author of the older work is that unless it's done very carefully, giving credit can introduce trademark problems if there's any way for an end user to interpret it as implying an endorsement of the clone by the older work's author or publisher.
The name "GNU's not UNIX" may well have been a very tongue-in-cheek response to this dilemna, but I can't say I know for sure. Zynga obviously knew that they were going to come up against this obstacle if they made a Tiny Tower clone, and rather than deciding to license the IP off Nimblebit (purchase the company, even) or simply make a different game, they opted to shamelessly rip off the game mechanics and give nothing back to Nimblebit (no attribution, no money, nothing). My qualm is that Zynga had the financial resources to go ahead with any of those alternatives, but instead went the blatant rip-off route.
Ugh. That comparison is wrong on so many levels. Let me demonstrate:
GNU: Project members like the UNIX philosophy put forward (and built on) by the UNIX operating system, but dislike the fact that users are not free to use/modify their programs and are instead bound by overly restrictive licenses. They decide to write a UNIX-style operating system (taking inspiration from the *many* UNIX-style operating systems around at the time), but make it "Free as in Freedom" for the betterment of computer users everywhere. They don't have the resources of the big companies like AT&T/Bell, but through sheer persistence and determination they finally create the GNU operating system (paying homage to its UNIX heritage with the reverse-acronym GNU's Not UNIX). True to their original vision, they circulate it for free and start what could best be termed a "F/OSS revolution".
Zynga: Realise that their income stream from years of cloning games like "Farm Town" is beginning to dry up. As they have done in the past, they simply take a successful game (from a company small enough that it does not have the resources to take legal action, of course) and make a clone with a slightly improved user interface and the sort of graphics that only a 7,000 person company can produce. They sell their blatantly plagiarised game and refuse to acknowledge the original game in any way, shape or form.
I use ABP, Firebug, Vimperator, NoScript, HTTPS-Everywhere and Ghostery. I see no reason why ABP, HTTPS-Everywhere and Ghostery should not merge into a single extension (Ghostery and HTTPS-Everywhere are both privacy related, and if you're going to have two extensions like ABP and Ghostery that simply block tracking DOM elements they may as well be merged into one), and why the NoScript and Firebug features aren't already integrated into the browser (as they are with Webkit/Webkit DOM inspector and Chromium's easy "click-to-run-this-plugin" feature). With that many extensions (*all* being developed by different people), FF will almost certainly leak memory like a sieve.
Only bad programmers complain about programming languages. A good programmer can program in any programming language he wants...
It's a good thing all schoolchildren are Good Programmers then. Hell, why are we even teaching them this! They can program in any language they want!
A few lesson's experience in one language makes not a Good Programmer. Not having a portable, flexible language makes it extremely difficult for kids to hack on cool pet projects like web apps and games without investing a significant amount of time learning a new language for doing each task.
This is what happens when any country is run by insert religion here. We see it in Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, etc. These countries really are better off under dictators rather than leading themselves, compare Saudi Arabia to Somalia. We will see a lot more of this in the "Arab Spring" countries. I expect to be modded down by the PC crowd with their "all belief systems are equal" and "a Theocracy can be just as good as secular democracy (as long as it isn't Christian)" comments but they are just ignoring what actually happens whenever insert religious group here get into power. Surprise surprise they follow the teaching of insert religion here - from a demented warlord with a taste for little girls.
Bonus points: come up with five religions that could make the above quote factually correct.
The source is on their Google Code page. It seems a bit sill that they don't provide a link to it on the front page of their website. Also, I have a feeling that the word "library" refers to a standalone Dart source file rather than a body of code which you link against and call from your own application. From the spec overview:
Dart programs are organized in a modular fashion into units called libraries. Libraries are units of encapsulation and may be mutually recursive.
Is this a programming language with an existing shell script interpreter style implementation, too?
An interpreted language bundled with a REPL? I'm not sure if Dart has a REPL, but it would be pretty trivial to implement. Fortunately the Dart specification *does* support shebangs (so #!/usr/bin/dart), check out the relevant section here (they call it a script tag). Here's an excerpt:
A library may optionally begin with a script tag, which can be used to identify the interpreter of the script to whatever computing environment the script is embedded in. A script tag begins with the characters #! and ends at the end of the line. Any characters after #! are ignored by the Dart implementation.
"File storage" may not be sexy, but "social cloud file storage" is.
That is why I'm not upgrading to Windows 7 - I'm still enjoying the spectacular Vista!
Just remember drones can be jammed, intercepted, or hacked.
Claims Iranian state television...
It is a whole lot harder to hack mark one eyeballs remotely.
In Australia, high power laser pointers are banned for exactly this reason. If humans can be blinded by an off-the-shelf laser, how well are they going to fare against bullets?
But this *is* distinct from current technologies. TFA says that the navy want the helicopter to land automatically as close as possible to the soldier. Given that it will probably be landing under heavy fire and in difficult terrain, this is no small feat. It's not an app to "fly a helicopter", it's an app to tell a helicopter to fly itself, and the latter part is what's so exciting.
Bit annoyed that it's not made in the UK.
Why? Manufacturing them overseas lowers the price and makes them more accessible to students. IIRC the Raspberry Pi Foundation's stated goal is to teach children programming, not to bolster a failing industry at the expense of educators and hobbyists.
Cars are only dangerous when you're bad at driving. Ever wondered why only a small fraction of drivers are involved in fatal or near-fatal car crashes each year? It's because the rest have above average driving skill. Ask them yourself if you don't believe me.
At NASA spending rates, $500k would get you three or four "artist's impression" drawings of an American-flag covered spaceship which looks suspiciously like the USS Enterprise. $500k is chicken feed for a government agency like DARPA.