The Half-Life and Portal series are only impressive if you're impressed by FPS. For those of us who consider FPS to be the most overdone, boring game genre ever, this is highly unimpressive.
The only 3D games I've ever had any interest in were the Zelda series and Dragon Quest VIII. Down with the first-person perspective.
Only in theory. Practically speaking, the political parties in the US have all of the votes locked up (in part due to agreements to not participate in debates with other parties due to the 1996 upset.). And both parties are basically the same.
Party labels are just words. Anyone can call themselves a Democrat or a Republican, no matter what their actual political positions are. If you're waiting until the general election, it's too late. The way to get your views taken seriously is to participate in the primaries. Ron Paul has gotten more publicity this year than ever before by running in the Republican presidential primary. If he had skipped out and run as the Libertarian candidate instead, it's likely he would have gotten nowhere near the amount of public attention he actually did.
Teaching methodology has changed enormously just in the last fifty years.
No doubt. But has the actual education of average students in these subjects gotten better, or worse? (I say "average" students because the best students will always find a way to learn almost no matter what, and the worst students will find a way NOT to learn no matter what.)
I've had the luxury of comparing 19th century textbooks to present onesâ"it's not something you'd want to be stuck with; they're more like reference texts with a few questions (or even a separate question book) if you're lucky.
Why is that a bad thing? Sounds to me like this would mostly be a problem for the laziest teachers who basically delegate their entire job to the textbook. The textbook is supposed to be a reference, not the entire class.
But if you avoid such thinking at all cost, and you are the American and European industries in the face of Japanese competition in the eighties, that kept banging on about their quality, while the Japanese sold their cheap products by the million. That's the way of the dinosaur.
The problem with that analogy is that American and European products in the 1980s weren't superior to Japanese products. If anything, they were often worse; look at the junk the Big Three were cranking out regularly back then, compared to Honda and Toyota. American cars were not just more expensive, but inferior, which meant that once the residual brand loyalty of an older generation wore off, the auto companies were screwed.
In contrast, no one really thinks Indian and Eastern European programmers are better than Americans; they're just cheaper.
In logic, ad hominem is arguments of the form "X says Y" and "X has flaws" and then concluding "Y is false". Bad characteristics of a person are not transferred to things they say, which is why ad hominem is a fallacy. Otherwise you could make anything false just by finding a sufficiently odious person to say it, which is obviously not right.
That may be true in a Platonic world of pure logic. In the real world, though, limited time and imperfect knowledge means that most of us have to use heuristics to determine what should be trusted and what should not. And past trustworthiness is one of the most important of these heuristics. If someone has told a thousand lies, it's logically possible that their 1,001th statement is nonetheless the truth, but it's not the way to bet. Philosophers can call this a logical fallacy if they want; the rest of us have to live in the real world, and call it common sense.
What happens far more often is that some stuff gets outsourced, and GPL'd code gets inadvertently introduced. Yes, it happens [theregister.co.uk], and every time it does, it makes lawyers more paranoid.
Seems to me that this is an argument against outsourcing, not open source.
It will be interesting to see how your version of the legal status of a software licence stacks up against what I've spent a substantial amount of time and money talking to actual lawyers about, over a few years now and in relation to quite a few different projects, before putting forward my "uninformed speculations".
Sorry, but you're a random anonymous poster. Without your real name or any real information about you, why should we believe that you've talked to any lawyers? Talk is cheap on the Internet.
I was going to write a fake headline for this, making fun of the idea that of course a next generation product will meet or exceed a current product. That's how technology works, for chrissake. Then I realized that was the real headline. Doesn't this story belong in the "Duh" section of slashdot?
So Slashdot shouldn't post any articles on new and more advanced products? Does that mean when Intel comes out with the Haswell, or AMD with the Trinity, Slashdot shouldn't have articles on those either? After all, "of course" as next generation products they will be better than the current generation. (Well, hopefully - the Bulldozer was inferior to Llano and even Phenom II in some ways.)
If say in a police interrogation you admit to doing the crime a jury will still convict you even if there is absolute proof that you didn't do it. Human nature says if you admitted to it then you did it
The actual evidence, on the other hand, indicates that it is remarkably easy for the police to get people to confess to things they didn't do. Much of what we think of as "common sense" or "human nature" is complete BS.
Also, the assumption that the CEO's are getting hookers and blow is not universally true. If you produced one of the top 3 games of the year, sure, people are getting rich. If your outside the top 10 though, the development costs are eating enough of the profit that its a crap shoot on whether or not your broke even.
In fact, it sounds like the court would very much like to decrease the amount, but notes that 'nevertheless, the court is powerless to deviate from the DMCA's statutory minimum.'
The court should have ruled that a $3.6 million award would violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against "excessive fines," and that this portion of the DMCA was therefore unconstitutional as applied to this particular case. (It's not that unusual for courts to decide that while a law is constitutional "on its face," it is unconstitutional "as applied."
A few weeks ago, two GIMP hackers got together to do some general hacking, and inadvertedly ported the core graphics code to GEGL. They work around the mismatch between GEGL buffers and GIMP tiles by implementing a storage backend for GEGL using the legacy GIMP tiles; to their surprise things Just Worked (tm), and their code branch will become the 2.9 development series once 2.8 is released.
GIMP may not be the most unprofessionally run software development effort in history, but it's got to be pretty close. Its existence is a bane because it lets Open Source Software fans claim that they have a photo editing package to compete with Photoshop, when what they actually have is a nearly unusable, unfixable pile of crap that needs to be thrown out completely (including the offending coders) and a new effort started from scratch. OSS would be better off if GIMP didn't exist at all; at least then there could be an honest evaluation of what work still needs to be done.
Does it force a stupid command prompt window to appear at all times, like the 2.7.x betas did? Does it still have an obscene graphic as the splash screen, like the 2.7.x betas did?
3. Lights that need to be bright and/or that need to light up right away -- Incandescents. Yes, I still have incandescents in my bathroom and on my porch. Both locations need light that is brighter than LEDs can put out, and the light needs to come on immediately which CFLs are poor at doing. If I used either LEDs or CFLs in those spots there would be times when I would be stumbling around in dim light in a dangerous area.
I haven't yet had an opportunity to use LED household light bulbs, but this sounds strange to me. In every other situation, LEDs light up immediately. In fact, their cycle time is quicker than incandescents: this has been a problem when attempting to use LEDs as a replacement on pinball machines, which initially used incandescent miniature #44 and #555 lights. Because the lamps are controlled by a matrix, they are not actually on constantly, and this means that added circuitry has to be added to the LEDs, such as capacitors to add persistence.
In my experience CFLs last no longer than incandescents. Why should I believe that these claims about LEDs are not also lies?
LEDs are a long-established technology; the only new thing is that they are now made bright enough, and in colors close enough to pure white, to be suitable for general room illumination.
Do you have any 20+ year old electronic equipment? Do the LEDs in that equipment still light up? (Probably.) Everyone has seen a NES console that won't boot because of a dirty/worn cartridge connector, but how many have you ever seen where that stupid red power light won't blink?
As a power user, what I want from my iDevice is simple. Give me a standard, file-explorer-style interface with nested folders. A Windows Explorer shell extension would be great. I do want access to the file metadata. I don't need access to the music or movie stores; I'll rip my own purchased content, thank you. Let me copy files to and from the device manually. No cutesy "sync" features that seem to always either mass-delete files on the device or else spam my hard drive with tons of junk.
Buying apps from the App Store shouldn't require iTunes or a PC at all. You should be able to do it from the iPhone or iPad itself.
iTunes for the PC is an open sore. It's the one major flaw in an otherwise excellent user experience for iDevices.
And Final Cut Pro X was released to huge fanfare and immediate loving acceptance by a huge, grateful customer base... Wasn't it?
Oh, wait... Apples done the whole "write the new one from scratch" and it didn't go down all that well, at least twice.
Their mistake wasn't rewriting Final Cut Pro from scratch. It was: (1) releasing the new version before it was ready for prime time, AND (2) immediately obsoleting the old version and removing it from availability (though they soon had to backpedal on that). Had they done more research on their core user base for FCP, they could have avoided both of these errors.
Let's say Addison Wesley publishes a text book on Modern Evolution and it runs you a steep $90 here in the United States. Unsurprisingly, as the gatekeepers of that copyright, some of us actually shell that out. Well, universities in India are going to want access to this same material but there's a problem and I think you know what it is. That much money means a lot more in India than it does in the United States. So we have publishers wanting to sell textbooks in India to college students but the most anybody can really afford is $9. What's worse, if they don't release a version at that price, they're just going to bootleg it anyway. So the solution is to engage in, as you put it, "price discrimination" or as I might call it distribution values based on localized income since they want to make these materials available but they want to also make a profit in first world countries.
You've explained why this is a dilemma for publishers. What you haven't explained is why anyone outside the publishing industry should give a crap about their business model.
You do not have a right to make a profit in business. Just because someone is doing something that makes it harder for your business to be profitable doesn't mean that it is, or should be, illegal. And rest assured that if the shoe was on the other foot, the publishing companies would have no compunction about eating someone else's financial lunch.
You do understand that there are distribution channels and contracts that prevent someone in, say New Delhi, from noticing that their Addison Wesley book on Modern Evolution sells exceptionally well in the states so they are just going to set up an online store, right?
So what? These contracts are not binding on third parties. Under long-established law (the doctrine of first sale) if you buy a book, you are free to sell or lend it to whoever you want. Copyright law prevents the creation of unauthorized copies; it isn't intended to enforce a publisher's specific international business model.
Even after Jobs's death, rolling boulders downhill at Google just for the lulz would be precisely Ellison's style. He has nothing to lose and potentially a lot to gain.
If true, then it is a breach of fiduciary duty towards Oracle's shareholders. Publicly traded companies aren't supposed to do things "for the lulz."
This assumes a rather large company. Many organizations have one sysadmin who handles security issues as part of their job duties, or just a handful of "IT guys" who more or less handle everything. The library I work for has about 100-150 employees total; the notion of a separate "IT security team" and "IT sysadmin team" is ridiculous for an organization of this size. Our IT department is 6 people total.
A large part of the blame for this rests on Sun/Oracle's idiotic decision to install the browser plugin by default when the Java runtime is installed.
Most users don't need Java at all. Of those who do, a majority of them don't need it in the browser. And of those who do need it in the browser, they only need it for a small handful of websites, not any and every site on the entire WWW. What should happen is that Java installs by default for desktop applications only with no browser plugin. If the browser plugin IS enabled, then by default it should work only on explicitly whitelisted sites or domains, not everywhere. Of course, there should be methods for system administrators to roll out custom whitelist configurations to users in bulk. But apparently no one at Oracle has heard of the principle of least privilege, so we get crap like this every couple of months.
If you have Java, please reevaluate whether or not you really need it. If you do need it, but only for desktop apps (and/or development) and not for browser based apps, then remove the browser plugin. There are virtually no legitimate public websites that use Java, but a lot of malware that exploits the plugin for evil purposes.
Java is not going away and neither is flash nor pdfs.
One of these things is not like the others.
PDFs and Flash objects are an integral part of modern Web browsing. Java is not. If you tried browsing with no Flash plugin or PDF viewer, you'd quickly run across a bunch of sites where you got a severely degraded experience and/or couldn't view the content. But I haven't had a Java plugin installed on my PC for years, and guess how many sites I've run across that need one? Zero. Not a single one. The only reason you need Java in your browser is if you are using one of the poorly-written business sites that still requires it. In that case, it should at least be possible to whitelist Java to only those specific sites. Or you could use IE+Java for only work related websites, and Firefox Portable or Chrome for all your other web browsing.
If you're a home user, there is no reason to ever install Java at all. It's nothing but a needless security risk.
Then I look at the Republican party and really see TWO separate groups. One group is the God believers. The other is the Business believers. There's actually not much overlap. They just happen to be together as part of the same political party in part because decades ago the Democrats ousted the God believers with it's position on abortion.
This is actually not true. Non-Catholic fundamentalists didn't give a damn about abortion until the IRS began denying tax breaks to segregated "Christian" schools in the mid-1970s. Then the racist fundamentalists needed a wedge issue which let them hold a posture of moral superiority, and they chose abortion. See this article for some more details on the actual sordid history of the modern "Religious Right."
Slashdot Mirror
The Half-Life and Portal series are only impressive if you're impressed by FPS. For those of us who consider FPS to be the most overdone, boring game genre ever, this is highly unimpressive.
The only 3D games I've ever had any interest in were the Zelda series and Dragon Quest VIII. Down with the first-person perspective.
Only in theory. Practically speaking, the political parties in the US have all of the votes locked up (in part due to agreements to not participate in debates with other parties due to the 1996 upset.). And both parties are basically the same.
Party labels are just words. Anyone can call themselves a Democrat or a Republican, no matter what their actual political positions are. If you're waiting until the general election, it's too late. The way to get your views taken seriously is to participate in the primaries. Ron Paul has gotten more publicity this year than ever before by running in the Republican presidential primary. If he had skipped out and run as the Libertarian candidate instead, it's likely he would have gotten nowhere near the amount of public attention he actually did.
Teaching methodology has changed enormously just in the last fifty years.
No doubt. But has the actual education of average students in these subjects gotten better, or worse? (I say "average" students because the best students will always find a way to learn almost no matter what, and the worst students will find a way NOT to learn no matter what.)
I've had the luxury of comparing 19th century textbooks to present onesâ"it's not something you'd want to be stuck with; they're more like reference texts with a few questions (or even a separate question book) if you're lucky.
Why is that a bad thing? Sounds to me like this would mostly be a problem for the laziest teachers who basically delegate their entire job to the textbook. The textbook is supposed to be a reference, not the entire class.
But if you avoid such thinking at all cost, and you are the American and European industries in the face of Japanese competition in the eighties, that kept banging on about their quality, while the Japanese sold their cheap products by the million. That's the way of the dinosaur.
The problem with that analogy is that American and European products in the 1980s weren't superior to Japanese products. If anything, they were often worse; look at the junk the Big Three were cranking out regularly back then, compared to Honda and Toyota. American cars were not just more expensive, but inferior, which meant that once the residual brand loyalty of an older generation wore off, the auto companies were screwed.
In contrast, no one really thinks Indian and Eastern European programmers are better than Americans; they're just cheaper.
In logic, ad hominem is arguments of the form "X says Y" and "X has flaws" and then concluding "Y is false". Bad characteristics of a person are not transferred to things they say, which is why ad hominem is a fallacy. Otherwise you could make anything false just by finding a sufficiently odious person to say it, which is obviously not right.
That may be true in a Platonic world of pure logic. In the real world, though, limited time and imperfect knowledge means that most of us have to use heuristics to determine what should be trusted and what should not. And past trustworthiness is one of the most important of these heuristics. If someone has told a thousand lies, it's logically possible that their 1,001th statement is nonetheless the truth, but it's not the way to bet. Philosophers can call this a logical fallacy if they want; the rest of us have to live in the real world, and call it common sense.
What happens far more often is that some stuff gets outsourced, and GPL'd code gets inadvertently introduced. Yes, it happens [theregister.co.uk], and every time it does, it makes lawyers more paranoid.
Seems to me that this is an argument against outsourcing, not open source.
It will be interesting to see how your version of the legal status of a software licence stacks up against what I've spent a substantial amount of time and money talking to actual lawyers about, over a few years now and in relation to quite a few different projects, before putting forward my "uninformed speculations".
Sorry, but you're a random anonymous poster. Without your real name or any real information about you, why should we believe that you've talked to any lawyers? Talk is cheap on the Internet.
I was going to write a fake headline for this, making fun of the idea that of course a next generation product will meet or exceed a current product. That's how technology works, for chrissake. Then I realized that was the real headline. Doesn't this story belong in the "Duh" section of slashdot?
So Slashdot shouldn't post any articles on new and more advanced products? Does that mean when Intel comes out with the Haswell, or AMD with the Trinity, Slashdot shouldn't have articles on those either? After all, "of course" as next generation products they will be better than the current generation. (Well, hopefully - the Bulldozer was inferior to Llano and even Phenom II in some ways.)
If say in a police interrogation you admit to doing the crime a jury will still convict you even if there is absolute proof that you didn't do it. Human nature says if you admitted to it then you did it
The actual evidence, on the other hand, indicates that it is remarkably easy for the police to get people to confess to things they didn't do. Much of what we think of as "common sense" or "human nature" is complete BS.
Also, the assumption that the CEO's are getting hookers and blow is not universally true. If you produced one of the top 3 games of the year, sure, people are getting rich. If your outside the top 10 though, the development costs are eating enough of the profit that its a crap shoot on whether or not your broke even.
The CEOs are always getting hookers and blow.
Risk is for the little people.
In fact, it sounds like the court would very much like to decrease the amount, but notes that 'nevertheless, the court is powerless to deviate from the DMCA's statutory minimum.'
The court should have ruled that a $3.6 million award would violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against "excessive fines," and that this portion of the DMCA was therefore unconstitutional as applied to this particular case. (It's not that unusual for courts to decide that while a law is constitutional "on its face," it is unconstitutional "as applied."
Mao or Napoleon are what you get from a revolution.
Napoleon wasn't actually that bad a ruler.
A few weeks ago, two GIMP hackers got together to do some general hacking, and inadvertedly ported the core graphics code to GEGL. They work around the mismatch between GEGL buffers and GIMP tiles by implementing a storage backend for GEGL using the legacy GIMP tiles; to their surprise things Just Worked (tm), and their code branch will become the 2.9 development series once 2.8 is released.
GIMP may not be the most unprofessionally run software development effort in history, but it's got to be pretty close. Its existence is a bane because it lets Open Source Software fans claim that they have a photo editing package to compete with Photoshop, when what they actually have is a nearly unusable, unfixable pile of crap that needs to be thrown out completely (including the offending coders) and a new effort started from scratch. OSS would be better off if GIMP didn't exist at all; at least then there could be an honest evaluation of what work still needs to be done.
Have you tried RC1?
Does it force a stupid command prompt window to appear at all times, like the 2.7.x betas did? Does it still have an obscene graphic as the splash screen, like the 2.7.x betas did?
3. Lights that need to be bright and/or that need to light up right away -- Incandescents. Yes, I still have incandescents in my bathroom and on my porch. Both locations need light that is brighter than LEDs can put out, and the light needs to come on immediately which CFLs are poor at doing. If I used either LEDs or CFLs in those spots there would be times when I would be stumbling around in dim light in a dangerous area.
I haven't yet had an opportunity to use LED household light bulbs, but this sounds strange to me. In every other situation, LEDs light up immediately. In fact, their cycle time is quicker than incandescents: this has been a problem when attempting to use LEDs as a replacement on pinball machines, which initially used incandescent miniature #44 and #555 lights. Because the lamps are controlled by a matrix, they are not actually on constantly, and this means that added circuitry has to be added to the LEDs, such as capacitors to add persistence.
In my experience CFLs last no longer than incandescents. Why should I believe that these claims about LEDs are not also lies?
LEDs are a long-established technology; the only new thing is that they are now made bright enough, and in colors close enough to pure white, to be suitable for general room illumination.
Do you have any 20+ year old electronic equipment? Do the LEDs in that equipment still light up? (Probably.) Everyone has seen a NES console that won't boot because of a dirty/worn cartridge connector, but how many have you ever seen where that stupid red power light won't blink?
As a power user, what I want from my iDevice is simple. Give me a standard, file-explorer-style interface with nested folders. A Windows Explorer shell extension would be great. I do want access to the file metadata. I don't need access to the music or movie stores; I'll rip my own purchased content, thank you. Let me copy files to and from the device manually. No cutesy "sync" features that seem to always either mass-delete files on the device or else spam my hard drive with tons of junk.
Buying apps from the App Store shouldn't require iTunes or a PC at all. You should be able to do it from the iPhone or iPad itself.
iTunes for the PC is an open sore. It's the one major flaw in an otherwise excellent user experience for iDevices.
And Final Cut Pro X was released to huge fanfare and immediate loving acceptance by a huge, grateful customer base... Wasn't it? Oh, wait... Apples done the whole "write the new one from scratch" and it didn't go down all that well, at least twice.
Their mistake wasn't rewriting Final Cut Pro from scratch. It was: (1) releasing the new version before it was ready for prime time, AND (2) immediately obsoleting the old version and removing it from availability (though they soon had to backpedal on that). Had they done more research on their core user base for FCP, they could have avoided both of these errors.
Let's say Addison Wesley publishes a text book on Modern Evolution and it runs you a steep $90 here in the United States. Unsurprisingly, as the gatekeepers of that copyright, some of us actually shell that out. Well, universities in India are going to want access to this same material but there's a problem and I think you know what it is. That much money means a lot more in India than it does in the United States. So we have publishers wanting to sell textbooks in India to college students but the most anybody can really afford is $9. What's worse, if they don't release a version at that price, they're just going to bootleg it anyway. So the solution is to engage in, as you put it, "price discrimination" or as I might call it distribution values based on localized income since they want to make these materials available but they want to also make a profit in first world countries.
You've explained why this is a dilemma for publishers. What you haven't explained is why anyone outside the publishing industry should give a crap about their business model.
You do not have a right to make a profit in business. Just because someone is doing something that makes it harder for your business to be profitable doesn't mean that it is, or should be, illegal. And rest assured that if the shoe was on the other foot, the publishing companies would have no compunction about eating someone else's financial lunch.
You do understand that there are distribution channels and contracts that prevent someone in, say New Delhi, from noticing that their Addison Wesley book on Modern Evolution sells exceptionally well in the states so they are just going to set up an online store, right?
So what? These contracts are not binding on third parties. Under long-established law (the doctrine of first sale) if you buy a book, you are free to sell or lend it to whoever you want. Copyright law prevents the creation of unauthorized copies; it isn't intended to enforce a publisher's specific international business model.
Even after Jobs's death, rolling boulders downhill at Google just for the lulz would be precisely Ellison's style. He has nothing to lose and potentially a lot to gain.
If true, then it is a breach of fiduciary duty towards Oracle's shareholders. Publicly traded companies aren't supposed to do things "for the lulz."
The it security team trumps the it sysadmin team.
This assumes a rather large company. Many organizations have one sysadmin who handles security issues as part of their job duties, or just a handful of "IT guys" who more or less handle everything. The library I work for has about 100-150 employees total; the notion of a separate "IT security team" and "IT sysadmin team" is ridiculous for an organization of this size. Our IT department is 6 people total.
A large part of the blame for this rests on Sun/Oracle's idiotic decision to install the browser plugin by default when the Java runtime is installed.
Most users don't need Java at all. Of those who do, a majority of them don't need it in the browser. And of those who do need it in the browser, they only need it for a small handful of websites, not any and every site on the entire WWW. What should happen is that Java installs by default for desktop applications only with no browser plugin. If the browser plugin IS enabled, then by default it should work only on explicitly whitelisted sites or domains, not everywhere. Of course, there should be methods for system administrators to roll out custom whitelist configurations to users in bulk. But apparently no one at Oracle has heard of the principle of least privilege, so we get crap like this every couple of months.
If you have Java, please reevaluate whether or not you really need it. If you do need it, but only for desktop apps (and/or development) and not for browser based apps, then remove the browser plugin. There are virtually no legitimate public websites that use Java, but a lot of malware that exploits the plugin for evil purposes.
Java is not going away and neither is flash nor pdfs.
One of these things is not like the others.
PDFs and Flash objects are an integral part of modern Web browsing. Java is not. If you tried browsing with no Flash plugin or PDF viewer, you'd quickly run across a bunch of sites where you got a severely degraded experience and/or couldn't view the content. But I haven't had a Java plugin installed on my PC for years, and guess how many sites I've run across that need one? Zero. Not a single one. The only reason you need Java in your browser is if you are using one of the poorly-written business sites that still requires it. In that case, it should at least be possible to whitelist Java to only those specific sites. Or you could use IE+Java for only work related websites, and Firefox Portable or Chrome for all your other web browsing.
If you're a home user, there is no reason to ever install Java at all. It's nothing but a needless security risk.
Then I look at the Republican party and really see TWO separate groups. One group is the God believers. The other is the Business believers. There's actually not much overlap. They just happen to be together as part of the same political party in part because decades ago the Democrats ousted the God believers with it's position on abortion.
This is actually not true. Non-Catholic fundamentalists didn't give a damn about abortion until the IRS began denying tax breaks to segregated "Christian" schools in the mid-1970s. Then the racist fundamentalists needed a wedge issue which let them hold a posture of moral superiority, and they chose abortion. See this article for some more details on the actual sordid history of the modern "Religious Right."