I don't believe that this is the real reason Microsoft is changing the branding. If they thought it was valuable enough to keep, they would fight for it. But among tech-savvy users, Metro has become a punchline and a negative brand, just like Vista. I smell another Mojave coming up.
Is anyone ACTUALLY under the delusion that these people didn't actually download the material in question?
According to Wikipedia, Elegant Angel Productions (the plaintiff in this case) is "one of the early pioneers of Gonzo pornography". I think it's quite likely that the thirtyish mother shown in the Tucson news report did not download this file. She's hardly in the prime demographic for this sort of stuff. It seems much more probable that her Wi-Fi was open to the public and was used by someone else.
Phan told the station that a lawyer for an adult movie outfit called Elegant Angel Productions sent her a letter accusing her of illegally downloading one of its productions. The on-air reporter said the movie has a title "we can't repeat on TV." It appears that the movie company hired a security firm to find IP addresses associated with pirated content via BitTorrent.
I'm wondering if something might have gotten mangled in translation here. Is the official claim against her for downloading the material, or for uploading it? With BitTorrent, this gets a bit fuzzy because both are done simultaneously in normal use. I'm thinking that whoever performed this access (whether it was indeed Ms. Phan or someone else) thought they were downloading the media, but probably didn't realize that the BitTorrent client was simultaneously uploading it to other users, making them vulnerable to an allegation of distributing copyrighted material. Has anyone ever been sued for pure downloading of copyrighted material? Is this a tort and/or crime under the Copyright Act? Would the copyright holder have to prove that the person knew the material was unauthorized, or is this a strict liability offense?
The insurance industry had a problem with cost-of-defense complaints: crappy auto accidents that weren't worth more than a few grand in damages. But they banded together and fought every single one of them (paying just the actual damages & medical, and fighting almost every "pain & suffering" claim).
Not doubting you, but is this a universal thing? About two years ago, my father was in a car crash, and the experience he went through was different. The incident happened when he was supposedly looking at the wrong traffic light (at this location, there are 2 parallel traffic light intersections less than 50 feet apart) and T-boned another car. My father was shaken, but unhurt. The other driver broke a finger in the crash. In addition, both cars were totaled. The insurance company paid out just under $100,000 to the other driver, which fortunately slid in right below the coverage limit on the policy. Still a lot for injuries that minor – I remember commenting that I'd gladly suffer a broken finger for a hundred grand. It can't possibly have cost that much in medical costs, and I'm pretty sure there was a major "pain and suffering" component. This was a small insurance company, so maybe they weren't in on the collaborative deal?
Yes because one gaming company decides it doesn't like windows and makes a Linux port. It must mean that it is an industry change.
It's a shot across Microsoft's bow. Valve is saying: "You may think we have no choice but to go along with whatever crap you decide to put out next, but the truth is that you're only there because of legacy compatibility, and if you try to junk that by chasing Apple's tail, we'll work on moving away from you."
DirectX has the advantage of other features built in. OpenGL is just graphics. DirectX also does audio and manages controller input.
I thought that DirectSound and DirectInput were both deprecated a couple years ago. I know that as of Vista, DirectSound was emulated in software and no longer lets you take over the sound output completely (you need WASAPI for that).
The de facto standard for smartphones and tablets seems to be OpenGL ES 2.0. Why can this not be a de facto standard for desktop and console gaming as well? I'm sure there's something I am overlooking (3D stuff isn't really my forte), but what features are there which OpenGL ES 2.0 doesn't support that gamers really need?
I think it might be a good idea to standardize on something for a few years, and stop indefinitely chasing the upgrade treadmill. Working within specific hardware limitations, and figuring out how to get the highest quality experience out of that limited hardware, often results in the best games. Nintendo seldom, if ever, had cutting-edge console hardware, but they have the best video game software library of any company ever.
Silly question from someone who doesn't keep up with cutting-edge 3D stuff: is there any reason for the industry not to standardize on OpenGL ES 2.0? That already seems to be the de facto standard on portable devices. What features does it lack that make it unsuitable for desktop and console gaming?
Yesterday an update to Knight Capital Group's algorithmic trading software caused massive volume buys and sells, resulting in large price swings on the New York Stock Exchange. As a result, the NYSE canceled some of the trades...
So if I were to write an auto-trading script using the eTrade API, and as a result of a bug it made bizarre trades and I lost a lot of money, would the NYSE agree to cancel those trades? Didn't think so. Why should the big boys get a second bite at the apple? If you write an algorithm to do trading, then from the POV of the stock markets, that algorithm is you. (Just like the way user permissions work in Unix/Windows.)
Allowing mulligans and do-overs when well-connected firms make mistakes is only going to reinforce the perception that Wall Street is a casino rigged in favor of the rich.
Almost as bad as not allowing a smoking gun into a murder trial because of an illegal search and seizure... even if it proves guilt. Both circumstances suppress the truth. So why is one bad and not the other.
Because a murder trial features the full might of the State aligned against one defendant. Because of this, the Constitution and the legal process give criminal defendants additional procedural rights to help to level the playing field. The State is far more powerful than the defendant, so the State must play by the rules, dotting all the 'i's and crossing every 't'. Allowing the State to take shortcuts while prosecuting people is a serious threat to individual freedom. In contrast, a civil case simply involves two private parties, and the stakes at hand are financial; they don't involve jail or execution. The burden of proof is lower in a civil case, and it's reasonable for the rules of evidence to be somewhat more relaxed as well. I can see there being some of the same concerns as with criminal prosecutions if the trial involved a large corporation suing an individual (as in the McLibel case), but when you've got two large corporations going at it, there's no due process reason why you can't just have 'em strap on the boxing gloves and go at it.
The problem is figuring out how to craft a law demanding that. What does it mean to be "relevant" to a bill's stated purpose? For that matter, how does one define the "stated purpose" of a bill?
But the same thing applies to many parts of the existing Constitution. What constitutes a "reasonable search"? What kind of punishments are "cruel and unusual"? And so forth. The answer, in practice, is that the federal courts decide these things. If there was a Constitutional amendment barring irrelevant additions to bills, the deterrent to Congress would presumably be that the addendum could be thrown out by the courts and therefore there would be no point in trying to pass it. Even if the benefit of the doubt was given to the legislature in corner cases, the most blatant abuses like the ones mentioned in this article might be avoided.
You get what you pay for. Who would trust this craptastic bargain basement shit anyway? When something is being sold for a much lower price then competing products, there is a reason for it.
That's not always the case; sometimes certain companies really do offer better price/performance ratio than others. One example I've seen is in the area of woodworking tools. Companies like Delta and Powermatic used to make stationary power tools in the USA; these were built like tanks, priced high but great quality. Then in the mid-1990s they got greedy and started outsourcing production to Taiwan and mainland China, but the prices remained the same. Today even the company names are owned by multinational conglomerates, but they still price as if they were doing things the old way. (There is one exception: Delta's top-end table saw is made in America.) Sometime after this happened, a new company called Grizzly started in the power tool business. They also produced their tools in Taiwan/China, but unlike the legacy players, they passed the cost savings on to customers. (It also helped that they sell exclusively online, rather than through dealers.) From everything I've heard and seen, Grizzly tools really do offer better price/performance than the traditional brands. They generally get good ratings and good recommendations on boards and forums. (And the CEO actually participates in at least one woodworking forum and sometimes personally intervenes if customers are having problems.) Many of the designs are copied from existing designs (the power tool field is far less patent-encumbered than IT, and many designs haven't changed in decades anyway). And the quality seems to be on par with what the other companies are putting out from the same or similar factories.
Chinese business culture values interpersonal over institutional relationships, and business decisions are often oriented towards short-term profit. There is also a lack of transparency and oversight, which has been linked to a high degree of corruption.
Right, because stuff like that would never happen in the United States...
What's to stop Oracle from taking the Homer Simpson solution? ("When you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in everyday and do a half-ass job.") In other words, the judge can order them to port their software to Itanic, but can the judge really order them to do a good job of it? How would this even be measured? Is the judge really going to be acting as a de facto project manager, holding Oracle in contempt of court if there are too many bugs? (Imagine how much they'd have to pay people to work on that project.)
you no longer hit start to stop your computer for one
The launch menu button hasn't been labeled "Start" since Windows XP. Sure, most of us still call it the Start Menu out of habit, and the icon used to bring it up is officially known as the "Start Orb", but your talking points are 6 years out of date.
The only problems Linux on Desktop have are: a) no big OEM support (Dell, Hp, Asus,) b) no commercial games.
Oh, please. There are lots more problems than that. For anyone experienced in Windows, there are a million different little things that make transition painful as hell. Linux still can't render fonts that don't look butt-ugly. No Linux desktop looks or works exactly like Windows Explorer. Driver support is iffy for a wide range of hardware (and the Linux team's idiotic insistence on shoving all the drivers in the kernel source instead of providing a consistent binary interface means this will probably never be fixed). Perhaps most importantly, most productivity software is not available for Linux. MS Office is not available on Linux (and please don't tell me that Open/LibreOffice is good enough as a substitute; until it works and acts like MS Office with 100% document compatibility, it just isn't). Photoshop is not available on Linux (and please don't tell me that GIMP is good enough as a substitute, or it will take me a full five minutes to stop laughing out loud). Name any major software package that people use in their day-to-day work and the odds are very great that it won't be available on Linux.
If open source is serious about taking over the desktop, it will stop chasing the chimera of Linux and let that be reserved for servers and embedded systems, where it works quite well. ReactOS would be a far better platform for taking over the end-user desktop, if it ever got any real level of support from large organizations with resources to donate.
Those figures are misleading, games sales do not print the same picture, not event [sic] close.
Indeed – the games sales figures are far more lopsided in favor of the Wii over the Xbox 360 than the console sales figures. The best-selling Xbox 360 game, Kinect Adventures, sold 18 million copies. The Wii has seven games that sold more than that, with Wii Sports at 79.6 million copies blowing everything else away.
Watts is supported by the "Heartland Institute", a shadowy sockpuppet that represents dirty-energy companies, tobacco companies, and other assorted malefactors. (The Institute refuses to give details on its funding.)
I don't think this is your typical criticism for bloat. Just managing an annual mountain of tax laws and applying them correctly would easily go over thousands of lines.
Shouldn't business logic be separate from code? Why can't these rules be kept in databases rather than hard-coded?
Yeah right. Like they can't afford to hire some Objective-C programmers.
As I said before, pretty disgusting for a company who owes its very EXISTENCE to Apple.
It's absurd to say that they owe their very existence to Apple. Does everyone who develops software for Windows "owe their very existence" to Microsoft?
If they thought they could make a profit by porting their software to OSX, they probably would have done it. But large companies generally don't act for purely sentimental reasons.
I don't understand what it is that people are being prevented from doing. If you want the widest possible audience for your DIY game and want to make a few bucks, go for iOS; $99 isn't that big a barrier to entry. If you don't want to pay the $99 and/or want to do one of the specific things with your game that Apple says you can't, write for Android. Or just code for a standard PC operating system. There is nothing special about modern consoles; they're basically just restricted and usually outdated computers. You can hook any modern PC up to your TV through the HDMI port.
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I don't believe that this is the real reason Microsoft is changing the branding. If they thought it was valuable enough to keep, they would fight for it. But among tech-savvy users, Metro has become a punchline and a negative brand, just like Vista. I smell another Mojave coming up.
Is anyone ACTUALLY under the delusion that these people didn't actually download the material in question?
According to Wikipedia, Elegant Angel Productions (the plaintiff in this case) is "one of the early pioneers of Gonzo pornography". I think it's quite likely that the thirtyish mother shown in the Tucson news report did not download this file. She's hardly in the prime demographic for this sort of stuff. It seems much more probable that her Wi-Fi was open to the public and was used by someone else.
From the original article:
I'm wondering if something might have gotten mangled in translation here. Is the official claim against her for downloading the material, or for uploading it? With BitTorrent, this gets a bit fuzzy because both are done simultaneously in normal use. I'm thinking that whoever performed this access (whether it was indeed Ms. Phan or someone else) thought they were downloading the media, but probably didn't realize that the BitTorrent client was simultaneously uploading it to other users, making them vulnerable to an allegation of distributing copyrighted material. Has anyone ever been sued for pure downloading of copyrighted material? Is this a tort and/or crime under the Copyright Act? Would the copyright holder have to prove that the person knew the material was unauthorized, or is this a strict liability offense?
The insurance industry had a problem with cost-of-defense complaints: crappy auto accidents that weren't worth more than a few grand in damages. But they banded together and fought every single one of them (paying just the actual damages & medical, and fighting almost every "pain & suffering" claim).
Not doubting you, but is this a universal thing? About two years ago, my father was in a car crash, and the experience he went through was different. The incident happened when he was supposedly looking at the wrong traffic light (at this location, there are 2 parallel traffic light intersections less than 50 feet apart) and T-boned another car. My father was shaken, but unhurt. The other driver broke a finger in the crash. In addition, both cars were totaled. The insurance company paid out just under $100,000 to the other driver, which fortunately slid in right below the coverage limit on the policy. Still a lot for injuries that minor – I remember commenting that I'd gladly suffer a broken finger for a hundred grand. It can't possibly have cost that much in medical costs, and I'm pretty sure there was a major "pain and suffering" component. This was a small insurance company, so maybe they weren't in on the collaborative deal?
Yes because one gaming company decides it doesn't like windows and makes a Linux port. It must mean that it is an industry change.
It's a shot across Microsoft's bow. Valve is saying: "You may think we have no choice but to go along with whatever crap you decide to put out next, but the truth is that you're only there because of legacy compatibility, and if you try to junk that by chasing Apple's tail, we'll work on moving away from you."
DirectX has the advantage of other features built in. OpenGL is just graphics. DirectX also does audio and manages controller input.
I thought that DirectSound and DirectInput were both deprecated a couple years ago. I know that as of Vista, DirectSound was emulated in software and no longer lets you take over the sound output completely (you need WASAPI for that).
The de facto standard for smartphones and tablets seems to be OpenGL ES 2.0. Why can this not be a de facto standard for desktop and console gaming as well? I'm sure there's something I am overlooking (3D stuff isn't really my forte), but what features are there which OpenGL ES 2.0 doesn't support that gamers really need?
I think it might be a good idea to standardize on something for a few years, and stop indefinitely chasing the upgrade treadmill. Working within specific hardware limitations, and figuring out how to get the highest quality experience out of that limited hardware, often results in the best games. Nintendo seldom, if ever, had cutting-edge console hardware, but they have the best video game software library of any company ever.
Silly question from someone who doesn't keep up with cutting-edge 3D stuff: is there any reason for the industry not to standardize on OpenGL ES 2.0? That already seems to be the de facto standard on portable devices. What features does it lack that make it unsuitable for desktop and console gaming?
Yesterday an update to Knight Capital Group's algorithmic trading software caused massive volume buys and sells, resulting in large price swings on the New York Stock Exchange. As a result, the NYSE canceled some of the trades...
So if I were to write an auto-trading script using the eTrade API, and as a result of a bug it made bizarre trades and I lost a lot of money, would the NYSE agree to cancel those trades? Didn't think so. Why should the big boys get a second bite at the apple? If you write an algorithm to do trading, then from the POV of the stock markets, that algorithm is you. (Just like the way user permissions work in Unix/Windows.)
Allowing mulligans and do-overs when well-connected firms make mistakes is only going to reinforce the perception that Wall Street is a casino rigged in favor of the rich.
Almost as bad as not allowing a smoking gun into a murder trial because of an illegal search and seizure... even if it proves guilt. Both circumstances suppress the truth. So why is one bad and not the other.
Because a murder trial features the full might of the State aligned against one defendant. Because of this, the Constitution and the legal process give criminal defendants additional procedural rights to help to level the playing field. The State is far more powerful than the defendant, so the State must play by the rules, dotting all the 'i's and crossing every 't'. Allowing the State to take shortcuts while prosecuting people is a serious threat to individual freedom. In contrast, a civil case simply involves two private parties, and the stakes at hand are financial; they don't involve jail or execution. The burden of proof is lower in a civil case, and it's reasonable for the rules of evidence to be somewhat more relaxed as well. I can see there being some of the same concerns as with criminal prosecutions if the trial involved a large corporation suing an individual (as in the McLibel case), but when you've got two large corporations going at it, there's no due process reason why you can't just have 'em strap on the boxing gloves and go at it.
The problem is figuring out how to craft a law demanding that. What does it mean to be "relevant" to a bill's stated purpose? For that matter, how does one define the "stated purpose" of a bill?
But the same thing applies to many parts of the existing Constitution. What constitutes a "reasonable search"? What kind of punishments are "cruel and unusual"? And so forth. The answer, in practice, is that the federal courts decide these things. If there was a Constitutional amendment barring irrelevant additions to bills, the deterrent to Congress would presumably be that the addendum could be thrown out by the courts and therefore there would be no point in trying to pass it. Even if the benefit of the doubt was given to the legislature in corner cases, the most blatant abuses like the ones mentioned in this article might be avoided.
You'd be lucky to get through a resolution expressing condolences to the Colorado shooting victims.
Indeed; the NRA would never allow that.
You get what you pay for. Who would trust this craptastic bargain basement shit anyway? When something is being sold for a much lower price then competing products, there is a reason for it.
That's not always the case; sometimes certain companies really do offer better price/performance ratio than others. One example I've seen is in the area of woodworking tools. Companies like Delta and Powermatic used to make stationary power tools in the USA; these were built like tanks, priced high but great quality. Then in the mid-1990s they got greedy and started outsourcing production to Taiwan and mainland China, but the prices remained the same. Today even the company names are owned by multinational conglomerates, but they still price as if they were doing things the old way. (There is one exception: Delta's top-end table saw is made in America.) Sometime after this happened, a new company called Grizzly started in the power tool business. They also produced their tools in Taiwan/China, but unlike the legacy players, they passed the cost savings on to customers. (It also helped that they sell exclusively online, rather than through dealers.) From everything I've heard and seen, Grizzly tools really do offer better price/performance than the traditional brands. They generally get good ratings and good recommendations on boards and forums. (And the CEO actually participates in at least one woodworking forum and sometimes personally intervenes if customers are having problems.) Many of the designs are copied from existing designs (the power tool field is far less patent-encumbered than IT, and many designs haven't changed in decades anyway). And the quality seems to be on par with what the other companies are putting out from the same or similar factories.
From the article you linked:
Right, because stuff like that would never happen in the United States...
Thank God.
What's to stop Oracle from taking the Homer Simpson solution? ("When you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in everyday and do a half-ass job.") In other words, the judge can order them to port their software to Itanic, but can the judge really order them to do a good job of it? How would this even be measured? Is the judge really going to be acting as a de facto project manager, holding Oracle in contempt of court if there are too many bugs? (Imagine how much they'd have to pay people to work on that project.)
you no longer hit start to stop your computer for one
The launch menu button hasn't been labeled "Start" since Windows XP. Sure, most of us still call it the Start Menu out of habit, and the icon used to bring it up is officially known as the "Start Orb", but your talking points are 6 years out of date.
Everyone on slashdot is about to become a UI expert.
As Bob Dylan put it, you don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
The only problems Linux on Desktop have are: a) no big OEM support (Dell, Hp, Asus,) b) no commercial games.
Oh, please. There are lots more problems than that. For anyone experienced in Windows, there are a million different little things that make transition painful as hell. Linux still can't render fonts that don't look butt-ugly. No Linux desktop looks or works exactly like Windows Explorer. Driver support is iffy for a wide range of hardware (and the Linux team's idiotic insistence on shoving all the drivers in the kernel source instead of providing a consistent binary interface means this will probably never be fixed). Perhaps most importantly, most productivity software is not available for Linux. MS Office is not available on Linux (and please don't tell me that Open/LibreOffice is good enough as a substitute; until it works and acts like MS Office with 100% document compatibility, it just isn't). Photoshop is not available on Linux (and please don't tell me that GIMP is good enough as a substitute, or it will take me a full five minutes to stop laughing out loud). Name any major software package that people use in their day-to-day work and the odds are very great that it won't be available on Linux.
If open source is serious about taking over the desktop, it will stop chasing the chimera of Linux and let that be reserved for servers and embedded systems, where it works quite well. ReactOS would be a far better platform for taking over the end-user desktop, if it ever got any real level of support from large organizations with resources to donate.
The wii buyers seem to be the least likely to buy games since most are shallow crap.
Right, because there's nothing "shallow" about the 32,768th first-person shooter that is basically a reskinning of the 32,767 that came before...
The truth is that the Wii has the best game library of any console, and a large portion of this consists of first-party Nintendo products. If this weren't the case, the Wii wouldn't have sold, because it's technologically inferior to the other consoles in most respects. The sales figures show that Wii game sales way outpace the Xbox 360 (the top 7 Wii titles all outsell the best-selling 360 title), and absolutely demolish PS3 sales (the best-selling Wii game shipped an order of magnitude more copies than the best-selling PS3 game).
Those figures are misleading, games sales do not print the same picture, not event [sic] close.
Indeed – the games sales figures are far more lopsided in favor of the Wii over the Xbox 360 than the console sales figures. The best-selling Xbox 360 game, Kinect Adventures, sold 18 million copies. The Wii has seven games that sold more than that, with Wii Sports at 79.6 million copies blowing everything else away.
Who is paying him?
Watts is supported by the "Heartland Institute", a shadowy sockpuppet that represents dirty-energy companies, tobacco companies, and other assorted malefactors. (The Institute refuses to give details on its funding.)
I don't think this is your typical criticism for bloat. Just managing an annual mountain of tax laws and applying them correctly would easily go over thousands of lines.
Shouldn't business logic be separate from code? Why can't these rules be kept in databases rather than hard-coded?
Yeah right. Like they can't afford to hire some Objective-C programmers. As I said before, pretty disgusting for a company who owes its very EXISTENCE to Apple.
It's absurd to say that they owe their very existence to Apple. Does everyone who develops software for Windows "owe their very existence" to Microsoft?
If they thought they could make a profit by porting their software to OSX, they probably would have done it. But large companies generally don't act for purely sentimental reasons.
I don't understand what it is that people are being prevented from doing. If you want the widest possible audience for your DIY game and want to make a few bucks, go for iOS; $99 isn't that big a barrier to entry. If you don't want to pay the $99 and/or want to do one of the specific things with your game that Apple says you can't, write for Android. Or just code for a standard PC operating system. There is nothing special about modern consoles; they're basically just restricted and usually outdated computers. You can hook any modern PC up to your TV through the HDMI port.