If a company wants to re-create the universe and there is a market to buy such a
thing then that company deserves to be given a legal monopoly for their efforts for
a time to regain their investments and profit if possible.
Okay, you could fairly argue that, in isolation... But if two companies do the
same, the one that finishes five minutes later than the other can go pound sand?
I'll bite...you see, with the US & China tied as #1 for most internet users
Which means... What, exactly?
You can get on the internet without Windows - In fact, South Korea REQUIRES
government computers to run open source software (ie, Linux), with the business and
academic communities resultingly all-but-forced to do the same if they want to
get anything done.
So, I repeat my original point - The South Korean market means very little to Microsoft
at the moment. While you could argue that Microsoft currently has a lot of room for
growth there, at the same time it counts as one of those MS-hostile places for which
MS came up with "Starter Edition" in a sad attempt to increase market penetration for
no real short-term gain.
Would MS prefer to have the option of selling in South Korea open to them?
Sure... Burning bridges very rarely helps make money. But will MS grant
more concessions to SK (or any at all) than they did to the EU? No way in Hell.
As an aside, Microsoft already has a totally unbundled OS available - XP Embedded.
Depending on your build options, you can produce something very similar to XP Pro, or
something so stripped down as to "unbundle" even those nasty anticompetitive drivers
Microsoft uses to "favor" to various hardware vendors (the bastards, making my NIC
work right out of the box, without needing a CD or a download or compiling a module!
How dare they?). And IIRC, the per-device license comes out to less than XP
pro (but more than XP home for OEMs?), and explicitly allows (by necessity) for
redistribution. But then, source code doesn't count as opening their formats, and
removing WMP doesn't count as removing WMP, so I don't know why any governments would
consider that option...
It seems fundamentally unjust that a number of scientists could spend
several years working on something but the one that finishes a few weeks
earlier takes the entire reward.
Heh... You two do realize we have exactly such a system
already in place, though not exactly a guarantee that the
winner can rest on their laurels...
We even argue about it frequently here on Slashdot - The US
patent system.
So, to the GP, I would point out the above; And to you, well,
I suppose I more than agree with you - Not only does
the US patent system not reward those who create great new
ideas, it punishes everyone else who comes up with the
same idea (even if the first never chooses to do anything
beyond the pure "concept" stage), and favors those who already
have deep pockets and a legal staff over the little guy with a
great idea.
Not to mention that it perverts truly great undertakings into
nothing more than a legal-WMD mill. "Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy...
What can I say... You got a fine product there, Mr Balsillie.
Reeeeally profitable. But, you stepped on into the wrong
playground here. Y'see, my boss, real sensitive-like guy,
and it looks like you borrowed one of his toys without asking.
Now, I hate to see Mr Campana cry, y'know? So I'll make
you a little offer. You can say yes. I don't recommend you
say no - The last guy what said 'no', well, somehow he found
himself swimming with the Armani-suited sharks, if ya know
what I mean..."
I wonder if South Korea will be as soft and in-effectual as the EU. Me thinks not.
I wonder if Microsoft considers South Korea a "real" country, or just some
some pathetic 2nd-world country, only on the map because of the antics of
its neighbors to the north, trying to flex muscles it doesn't have.
"Unbundle messenger... Uh-huh... Suuuuuuure we will. Tell ya
what... Go home and pretend we never had this little chat, and we won't
'stratify' our market to make all Microsoft products cost a few million
dollars each in your backwater little former US landmine disposal yard".
It would hurt Microsoft a lot to pull out of the EU. Pulling
out of South Korea, though? Somehow that doesn't strike me as one
of their cash-cow sales regions.
Somehow, Professor Utonium in a bathrobe with a sword, acting all serious and silent
just never did it for me.
But aside from that, I'll agree with what others have said - I don't know if
screwing with a sequel to something Henson made seems like such a good idea,
but I'll give it a shot just because they have Tartakovsky directing it.
Source code is a result of implementing a specification. Formats are
defined by specifications, not by proprietary source code.
Still in the wonderful rose-tinted world of academia, eh?
I used to think that as well. In the "real" world, you consider
yourself truly blessed to have the vaguest skeleton of a
spec to code to, and if you have a slow week a few months after
finishing the first released implemenation, you flesh out that
skeleton with what you did.
In over ten years of professional coding, I've had the joy of working
to a basically-complete (if not 100% accurate) functional specification
exactly twice.
I actually liked the original NES contoller. Simple and to the point, and
it fit in your hand in a way that made everything within thumb's reach. Compare
that to most modern controllers where you either need to hold it awkwardly, or
rotate your hands up and inward to reach the center-ish buttons.
Granted, it needed to lack corners, so it wouldn't take out an eye when
you threw it across the room... But then, I suppose that modification would
look vaguely like - the SNES's pad! So Kudos on that one, Nintendo.
As for the worst... I'd have to give that to the NES Advantage, for
"most directly trying to prevent the players from reproducing". Anyone
who owned one will "fondly" remember the first time they used it on a warm
summer day, sitting on the floor in shorts (or just underwear) with the controller
on their lap... And then... ZAP! Yup... The damned things would
actually zap you through the solid-metal base which apparently
Nintendo not only didn't think to connect to ground, but actually made
it hot relative to ground. (And no, I didn't just have a defective
one, I know of at least three others than my own that had this "feature").
Of course, as long as I've got Nintendo in the spotlight, I think the
Power Pad needs a place of honor - For coming so close to greatness,
but missing so badly. They could have had the DDR
craze all their own a full 15 years earlier, except for one teensy
flaw - a giant mat that people use most of their body weight to press
the buttons still wouldn't register about half the events - Meaning
your feet would hurt from stomping on it so hard after only a few minutes.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft won't want the evidence that
the EU commission holds to come out in public...
Microsoft already rolled over and explosed its soft pink belly,
while the EU just kept on attacking.
The EU complained about WMP, Microsoft gave them "XP N"; The EU
responded by whining that, surprise surprise, no one wanted it so
Microsoft hadn't satisfied their conditions.
The EU complained that Microsoft needed to allow interoperability
with its formats, Microsoft offered to make source code available
(their WSPP program); The EU responded by whining that source code
takes work to figure out, so Microsoft didn't go far enough
to promote interoperability.
And let's not forget the endless threats of fines and the legal
one-sidedness of the entire issue ("Aww, you need another week
to find those 250,000 pages spread across 80 facilities on four
continents? Tough").
So, what should Microsoft do? If someone seems intent
on still kicking you once you go down, you have nothing to lose
by fighting back, even fighting "dirty".
I certainly don't count as a Microsoft fanboy or apologist, in general,
but as regards their battle with the EU, it just looks like the EU
won't accept anything short of Microsoft writing their
compentition's software for them (and even then, if people
still chose the "official" Microsoft product, I don't think the
EU would let it drop).
I currently buy a lot of music - at least a hundred
bucks a month, almost all on indie and used material (I did
the "boycott all RIAA music" for a while, but it didn't work
and only made me suffer - So now I just limit myself
to buying methods that circumvent the RIAA's pockets but still
get me what I want).
I will not, ever, buy from iTunes as long as they use DRM.
the vast majority of my digital music library, I legally
own; But I will turn to piracy before I'll accept
DRM'd content. Aside from that, I consider iTunes a really
great idea... Quick, convenient, better granularity (ie,
you can buy one song without getting the rest of an album
of crap), and a decent selection. But DRM makes it less
than worthless to me. It says "please, sir, may I have another"
as I hand them my money for the privilege of having them insult
my integrity.
So, have I, and people like me, "hurt" Apple over their
use of DRM? Well, I haven't cost them anything, but
I also haven't "switched" where I dispose of a considerable
chunk of my discretionary income.
And FanBoys, spare me the lecture on how not-really-restricting
you consider Apple's DRM. I don't care. They have
DRM, telling me in essence "We do not trust you, we consider
you a thief, but we'll take your money anyway". I do not, and
will not, accept that from any company.
The argument that source code is uncopyrightable, with some
extensions could be applied to almost all, say, fiction stories
since no one's written a truly new story in like five thousand
years.
Or, conversely, that if you take a published blob of source
code, rearrange the order of a few functions and change the
variable names, then *poof*, Pyramus and Thisbe magically
turns into the "different" story Romeo and Juliet.
No matter how you approach it, patenting and/or copyrighting
software flies in the face of sanity. Software, as the
implementation of a mathematical algorithm, expresses nothing
less than universal truths. You simply can't have a monopoly
on those.
Whether or not it counts as deceptive depends on how they
presented the pre-rendered content...
IFF they showed people supposedly playing the game,
and that gameplay apparently used more advanced
rendering than the real game does, then I would call it
deceptive.
If, however, the commercial just showed nicely rendered
scenes thematically consistant with the game, then I would
have to say they have not deceived anyone.
Taken to the logical limit, this ban would suggest that
a game also cannot use humans acting in the genre of the
game (football players, soldiers, even furries) - And
within a generation or two of game consoles, live action
will look confusingly plausible as part of the gameplay.
As the alternative, virtually all ads would turn into
something like the pharmaceutical ads we have today - Jolly
candylike worlds with everyone happy and thin and not depressed
and not pregnant and not suffering from allergies and capable of
maintaining erections, while saying nothing at all about
the product.
As another way of approaching this, an ad showing only pre-rendered
content that does exist in the game strikes me as no
different than a movie trailer for a comedy that only shows
the funniest scenes, even though the rest of the movie might
suck.
Video games have very much turned into interactive movies (if
only animation-like movies). We really need to get over
this obsession with treating the two ideas as substantially
different.
as the telcos lose their traditional phone customers to VoIP, a normal phone
line will just get more and more expensive.
+5 insightful!
I've heard you can still do better in some parts of the country, but in the
NorthEastern US, basic land-line phone service (by which I mean the default
"no frills but not crippled" service) will run you $35 to $60 per month, after fees
and taxes and BS. Unlimited nationwide LD will run at least $70.
For comparison, my broadband costs me $45 and my nationwide 800-minute (? 1200?
something like that - I took the lowest number of minutes they offered and never
even get near half of it) cell service for two phones costs only $80 per month.
So yeah, POTS service has reached the end of its useful life. As a consequence of
that, dialup internet access will start to cost more than broadband.
Now, as for AOL charging so much... The VAST majority of people still on dialup
either: A) have no choice; B) care far more about cost than speed; or C) don't
use the internet enough to justify paying more for broadband.
AOL's move might get some folks in group C to switch to broadband, but A and B
and at least half of C will just go to a cheaper dialup ISP like NetZero. Granted,
as I mentioned (and you already predicted), dialup might realistically cost
more than broadband in the near future; but for now, AOL has AIMed the
gun at their foot a tad prematurely.
You'd almost think TW wants an excuse to excise their very expensive but
now worthless vestigial limb...
but for it to be meaningful, I need to evaluate skills first. (There are 20+ levels
for 6 titles)
Congrats, I had planned to just browse this topic, laughing self-debasingly, until you
stumbled across my peeve about job websites...
You don't have "20+ levels for 6 titles". You have A job you need filled. One
level. One title. One job, one job posting. If you really do have all 20 slots
open, submit 20 postings.
Or rather, you should. My peeve? Employers who "fish" the job sites, by posting truly
outrageous (my favorite ever, 5+ years of Java... in 1998!) or just mind-bogglingly vague ("we
want a self-driven team player to actualize the potential of our Information Technology assets")
"job" descriptions. I can only presume they do this just to see if anyone will bite, not with
any real intention of offering respondants a job.
So... When a job site asks who, what, where, when, and how much - ANSWER THEM! Your company
has a name, and you know that name; You know what you need a body to do; You know where
you need that body to do it (and NONE of the companies listing telecommuting positions mean
it - HR uses that as an alias for either "flex-time" or a 4/1 week); You know when you want
the body to show up, and whether you need them for six weeks or permanantly; And perhaps one
of the most obnoxious, jerk-us-all-around omissions nearly every employer makes, you know HOW
MUCH you want to pay for that body. Don't play games, just give -A- number (not even a range).
We may negotiate around that number at the interview, but you DO have a number in mind.
All it takes is a single producer to have a accidental backdoor
HDCP includes key revocation lists. One backdoor will work for all content
predating the discovery of a flaw, but as soon as you try to play
something newer with the compromised device added to its list, you lose
the ability to play content dependant on the compromised device (even
older content - CRLs/KRLs apply retroactively).
That might well make you wonder what happens when someone like Sony or
Toshiba eventually accidentally release a device with a flaw... Would
Hollywood have the balls to make a million TVs go black with one stoke
of their magic red pen?
Though, on re-reading your comment, it occurs to me you may have meant
something different - That once a compromise occurs, you can use it to
transcode all earlier content, making revocation irrelevant?
On that, I would agree with you, with one slight problem - Storage and
playback. Sure, you could keep a few of your favorite movies on your
HDD, but HD movies eat a LOT of bytes. And even then, you could only
play it back on your computer, since any standalone device capable of
playing it would bring you back to the HDCP problem you wanted to get
around in the first place.
transparently offloading illegal.avi,.mpg and.mp3 from the iPod to a specific computer. An
anonymous phone call to the local authorities to take a look at the computer would finish the job.
Assuming you work in the US Windows-oriented world...
1) Where do you work that your IT guys gave you write access to
administrative shares on the domain?
2) Do you realize that files have a concept of "owner", as well as a creation date,
and that when you authenticate against the domain, a DC logs that?
Meaning that even if you could do it, which if you can your network admins
need to "spend more time with their family", you'd leave tracks even an amateur
could follow straight back to you.
Of course, similar ideas apply to the idea of an iPod sniffing around the
network... Do most companies not limit "important" file access to people
who actually have a reason to access those files?
Perhaps even more relevant - Would most people know what to do with
something juicy? Unlike Hollywood's vision, you won't stumble across files
named "fake_duplicate_set_of_books.xls" or "super_secret_corporate_takeover_plans.doc".
"Real" juicy material takes a frickin' degree in accounting to make any use of...
Just columns of account numbers, dates, and dollar amounts.
the best advice to come out of it seemed to be to hire a local teenager to be that slave
Assuming you have a desk-job and a machine not locked down
tighter than a cat's ass...
Take a dozen CDs per day to work. Set your preferred ripping
software to automatically look your CDs up, rip, and eject.
Pop one in, start your program, minimize it, and just replace
discs whenever the tray pops open. Then just dump them all to a
keychain drive (DON'T use it as the intermediate path, copy them
at the end of the day - Some rippers and some encoders write
and flush sample-by-sample, meaning you can burn through your
100k write lifetime after just two or three dozen ripped discs)
at the end of the day.
Anyway... If it takes a total of 30 seconds per disc of human-interactive
time, you need a new ripping program (and I say that as someone who
manually checks that FreeDB/CDDB gave me results to my liking).
I would suggest separating out any classical, multi-artist
compilations, books-on-CD, and some live material (where one song
can span multiple tracks, and vice-versa) to do on your
own time... They can take a few minutes of research to get
the names right. But for standard one-artist-per-disc with one-song-per-track
material (ie, the vast majority of modern music), you shouldn't have
to do anything more than role-play a CD changing robot.
And hey, what more could you ask for than getting paid
for that whopping five minutes per day it takes to rip a
dozen CDs?
I'm in a bind about this. What most people don't know is that
Australia lacks an Adults only game rating
Umm... Okay? So I fail to see the problem (or rather, I fail
to see why your government doesn't just implement the trivially
obvious solution to the problem)... Allow adult-only ratings
to apply to games.
AU already has higher ratings for movies, or so I've inferred from
other comments on this topic. Just extend them to apply to games,
and you have no problem. No more need to outright ban games.
Of course, ratings and bannings all amount to nothing more than
a farce to make puritans feel better about their lack of actual
parenting skills. I read my first Playboy at 8, have never,
at any time in my life, had difficulty obtaining alcohol, saw my
first hardcore porno at (by?) 12, and I won't elaborate on the
banned/illegal materials I've partaken in, but suffice it to
say the WO(s)D has never meant much more to me than a vague
threat to my freedom if I didn't use my head.
Any yet, somehow, I turned out a (reasonably) normal, healthy
adult, with a college education, decent job, and meaningful
long-term relationship with my significant other (who happens
to have the opposite gender from me, but I wouldn't consider
that a qualification to "healthy" or "normal"). Why? Because
my parents focused on actually raising me as a decent and thinking
person, rather than a sheep adhering to an arbitrary set of
meaningless rules.
The problem with sheep - They don't do so well once they leave
the nice safe pasture.
Sorry guys, but I think the age of "my music" or "owning music"
is dead, and currently in the process of being burried. This is
just the latest shovel of dirt.
Last shovel of dirt, yes - But on the RIAA, not on our right to
own our culture.
Slashdotters (and all people) need to keep in mind the difference
between a major country's legal systems saying "fair use does not
include a right to backups" and the RIAA spewing yet another round
of customer-repelling male cow feces. The former means a lot of
people turn into criminals overnight by the wave of the magic
wand-of-exclusive-law. The latter means... Nothing at all.
You code media players to detect the watermark (which would have to
be in a standardized format) and refuse to play anything that does not
contain the watermark. Conversely, ripping programs will not rip anything
containing the watermark, making it harder to copy the source.
Which accomplishes what, exactly, when the first weak link
in your chain of trust decides to convert it to MP3 and share with
the world?
Who needs an analog hole, when we have have perfectly good
digital ones?
True, but is it a trend on the rise? If so, maybe they can nip it in the bud.
Hate to have to inject the voice of reason into this, but...
Why?
These people kill themselves for a reason.
They live in a place where they have no value as an individual,
where society expects them to work themselves literally to death,
and "urban sprawl" has gone the way of wall-to-wall carpeting.
I'd probaby want to escape that, too!
It really disturbs me that, at the same time our
population keeps rising on an exponential curve, we still
cling to archaic notions of the "sacredness" of every life.
Sacred? No. Worthless. Japanese society has just caught
on to that idea realtively earlier than the rest of us.
Perhaps it has something to do with their stereotypical
obsession with honor and accepting suicide as an honorable
way out of any problem, but they have the right idea. How do
you deal with overpopulation? Encourage death.
Did you really expect some company to spend $18 in postage when you send them $14.99?
If someone wants to play a sucker's game, I won't refuse their money (or services, in
this case).
However... I simply expected them not to lie. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Up to 15 movies per month, 3-at-a-time, for $17.99" does NOT mean
the same as "unlimited movies per month, 3-at-a-time, for $17.99".
See the difference?
Had they simply advertised the former rather than the latter, we would
never have had this discussion, and I would remain a happy customer
(rather than grudgingly accepting they still have the best game in town).
Is that what you really want?
If they need to raise their rates to stay in business, I don't have a problem
with that. If they need to increase the stratification of their service plans
to stay in business, I don't have a problem with that. If they need to charge
a per-disc fee, or make me pay return postage, or outright cap all accounts at X
movies per month, I don't even have a problem with those.
I don't have a problem with any arrangement they offer as long as, when
I fork over my $17.99 per month, I know EXACTLY what I have paid for. If that
means paying too much for too little, I may chose to cancel my account. But
I would do so without holding it against them, just as a personal financial
decision.
As an aside, I don't actually use Blockbuster as my basis of comparison for
what I consider acceptible from Netflix... I use Movie Gallery's $1 for 1-day
Wednesdays as my "good deal" threshhold. Netflix has actually crept a bit
above that (I actually pay more like $1.15 per movie via Netflix, on average),
but their far superior selection makes up for the difference. Not to mention,
if I time my Netflix returns correctly, I can get a new batch on Thursday or
Friday and have them for the weekend, while Wednesday always happens
on Wednesday.
Ah! One poster complains about Gateway not doing anything innovative, the
next complains about them being innovative. Something's not right here.
Well, back in the ooooooold days, they had a truly wonderful
product - No, not their PCs... their keyboards that natively supported
keyboard macros.
AFAIK, you simply can't get a product like that anymore. Sure, you have
a million and one models that support "internet/multimedia hotkeys"
(whicht, in my experience, never seem to work quite right unless you use
MSIE, Outlook Express (not even real Outlook), and WMP), and some
that claim to support macros (with "Free Windows-only software included!"), but none that truly let you map any chord to any combination
of keystrokes, interpreted natively by the keyboard before the PC ever
sees it.
But aside from that - Just another PC manufacturer. And they don't
even offer that keyboard anymore (which commands a hell of a premium
on EBay, incidentally).
People like you who spout ideas like this are truly sickening.
Yeah yeah, save it for someone that cares.
No, making it illegal to discriminate based on race, creed, or
national origin does not completely abolish discrimination
I think you have COMPLETELY missed my point.
A) I won't rent to a white christian male.
B) I won't rent to a white christian male, and say as much.
These have the SAME FRICKIN' OUTCOME, with the exception that
"B" saves any white christian males the trouble of wasting their
time.
Not sayin' either of those seems "right", but I really
have absolutely no patience for "feel-good" laws. If a law
doesn't DO something, it shouldn't exist.
Put another way, you can't outlaw thought-crime until we
have the technology to accurately read minds. And once we
do have that tech (realistically within the next 50 years),
do we really want to start down that particular
slippery slope?
Besides, why are you so upset about anti discrimination laws if
you yourself aren't going to discriminate? Which type of discrimination
were you planning?
Slashdot Mirror
If a company wants to re-create the universe and there is a market to buy such a thing then that company deserves to be given a legal monopoly for their efforts for a time to regain their investments and profit if possible.
Okay, you could fairly argue that, in isolation... But if two companies do the same, the one that finishes five minutes later than the other can go pound sand?
I'll bite...you see, with the US & China tied as #1 for most internet users
Which means... What, exactly?
You can get on the internet without Windows - In fact, South Korea REQUIRES government computers to run open source software (ie, Linux), with the business and academic communities resultingly all-but-forced to do the same if they want to get anything done.
So, I repeat my original point - The South Korean market means very little to Microsoft at the moment. While you could argue that Microsoft currently has a lot of room for growth there, at the same time it counts as one of those MS-hostile places for which MS came up with "Starter Edition" in a sad attempt to increase market penetration for no real short-term gain.
Would MS prefer to have the option of selling in South Korea open to them? Sure... Burning bridges very rarely helps make money. But will MS grant more concessions to SK (or any at all) than they did to the EU? No way in Hell.
As an aside, Microsoft already has a totally unbundled OS available - XP Embedded. Depending on your build options, you can produce something very similar to XP Pro, or something so stripped down as to "unbundle" even those nasty anticompetitive drivers Microsoft uses to "favor" to various hardware vendors (the bastards, making my NIC work right out of the box, without needing a CD or a download or compiling a module! How dare they?). And IIRC, the per-device license comes out to less than XP pro (but more than XP home for OEMs?), and explicitly allows (by necessity) for redistribution. But then, source code doesn't count as opening their formats, and removing WMP doesn't count as removing WMP, so I don't know why any governments would consider that option...
It seems fundamentally unjust that a number of scientists could spend several years working on something but the one that finishes a few weeks earlier takes the entire reward.
Heh... You two do realize we have exactly such a system already in place, though not exactly a guarantee that the winner can rest on their laurels...
We even argue about it frequently here on Slashdot - The US patent system.
So, to the GP, I would point out the above; And to you, well, I suppose I more than agree with you - Not only does the US patent system not reward those who create great new ideas, it punishes everyone else who comes up with the same idea (even if the first never chooses to do anything beyond the pure "concept" stage), and favors those who already have deep pockets and a legal staff over the little guy with a great idea.
Not to mention that it perverts truly great undertakings into nothing more than a legal-WMD mill. "Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy... What can I say... You got a fine product there, Mr Balsillie. Reeeeally profitable. But, you stepped on into the wrong playground here. Y'see, my boss, real sensitive-like guy, and it looks like you borrowed one of his toys without asking. Now, I hate to see Mr Campana cry, y'know? So I'll make you a little offer. You can say yes. I don't recommend you say no - The last guy what said 'no', well, somehow he found himself swimming with the Armani-suited sharks, if ya know what I mean..."
I wonder if South Korea will be as soft and in-effectual as the EU. Me thinks not.
I wonder if Microsoft considers South Korea a "real" country, or just some some pathetic 2nd-world country, only on the map because of the antics of its neighbors to the north, trying to flex muscles it doesn't have.
"Unbundle messenger... Uh-huh... Suuuuuuure we will. Tell ya what... Go home and pretend we never had this little chat, and we won't 'stratify' our market to make all Microsoft products cost a few million dollars each in your backwater little former US landmine disposal yard".
It would hurt Microsoft a lot to pull out of the EU. Pulling out of South Korea, though? Somehow that doesn't strike me as one of their cash-cow sales regions.
Also, I must agree with my sibling post in that you have to watch Samurai Jack.
Oddly enough, I've liked everything he's done except Samurai Jack.
Somehow, Professor Utonium in a bathrobe with a sword, acting all serious and silent just never did it for me.
But aside from that, I'll agree with what others have said - I don't know if screwing with a sequel to something Henson made seems like such a good idea, but I'll give it a shot just because they have Tartakovsky directing it.
Source code is a result of implementing a specification. Formats are defined by specifications, not by proprietary source code.
Still in the wonderful rose-tinted world of academia, eh?
I used to think that as well. In the "real" world, you consider yourself truly blessed to have the vaguest skeleton of a spec to code to, and if you have a slow week a few months after finishing the first released implemenation, you flesh out that skeleton with what you did.
In over ten years of professional coding, I've had the joy of working to a basically-complete (if not 100% accurate) functional specification exactly twice.
Atari 2600 and NES.
I actually liked the original NES contoller. Simple and to the point, and it fit in your hand in a way that made everything within thumb's reach. Compare that to most modern controllers where you either need to hold it awkwardly, or rotate your hands up and inward to reach the center-ish buttons.
Granted, it needed to lack corners, so it wouldn't take out an eye when you threw it across the room... But then, I suppose that modification would look vaguely like - the SNES's pad! So Kudos on that one, Nintendo.
As for the worst... I'd have to give that to the NES Advantage, for "most directly trying to prevent the players from reproducing". Anyone who owned one will "fondly" remember the first time they used it on a warm summer day, sitting on the floor in shorts (or just underwear) with the controller on their lap... And then... ZAP! Yup... The damned things would actually zap you through the solid-metal base which apparently Nintendo not only didn't think to connect to ground, but actually made it hot relative to ground. (And no, I didn't just have a defective one, I know of at least three others than my own that had this "feature").
Of course, as long as I've got Nintendo in the spotlight, I think the Power Pad needs a place of honor - For coming so close to greatness, but missing so badly. They could have had the DDR craze all their own a full 15 years earlier, except for one teensy flaw - a giant mat that people use most of their body weight to press the buttons still wouldn't register about half the events - Meaning your feet would hurt from stomping on it so hard after only a few minutes.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft won't want the evidence that the EU commission holds to come out in public...
Microsoft already rolled over and explosed its soft pink belly, while the EU just kept on attacking.
The EU complained about WMP, Microsoft gave them "XP N"; The EU responded by whining that, surprise surprise, no one wanted it so Microsoft hadn't satisfied their conditions.
The EU complained that Microsoft needed to allow interoperability with its formats, Microsoft offered to make source code available (their WSPP program); The EU responded by whining that source code takes work to figure out, so Microsoft didn't go far enough to promote interoperability.
And let's not forget the endless threats of fines and the legal one-sidedness of the entire issue ("Aww, you need another week to find those 250,000 pages spread across 80 facilities on four continents? Tough").
So, what should Microsoft do? If someone seems intent on still kicking you once you go down, you have nothing to lose by fighting back, even fighting "dirty".
I certainly don't count as a Microsoft fanboy or apologist, in general, but as regards their battle with the EU, it just looks like the EU won't accept anything short of Microsoft writing their compentition's software for them (and even then, if people still chose the "official" Microsoft product, I don't think the EU would let it drop).
Hasn't hurt iTunes.
Sure it has. They've just done well regardless.
I currently buy a lot of music - at least a hundred bucks a month, almost all on indie and used material (I did the "boycott all RIAA music" for a while, but it didn't work and only made me suffer - So now I just limit myself to buying methods that circumvent the RIAA's pockets but still get me what I want).
I will not, ever, buy from iTunes as long as they use DRM. the vast majority of my digital music library, I legally own; But I will turn to piracy before I'll accept DRM'd content. Aside from that, I consider iTunes a really great idea... Quick, convenient, better granularity (ie, you can buy one song without getting the rest of an album of crap), and a decent selection. But DRM makes it less than worthless to me. It says "please, sir, may I have another" as I hand them my money for the privilege of having them insult my integrity.
So, have I, and people like me, "hurt" Apple over their use of DRM? Well, I haven't cost them anything, but I also haven't "switched" where I dispose of a considerable chunk of my discretionary income.
And FanBoys, spare me the lecture on how not-really-restricting you consider Apple's DRM. I don't care. They have DRM, telling me in essence "We do not trust you, we consider you a thief, but we'll take your money anyway". I do not, and will not, accept that from any company.
Yeah, cause, you know, they could let you know you won, and *then* ask for your personal information!
Yeah, cause, you know, not everyone manages to punch the monkey...
The argument that source code is uncopyrightable, with some extensions could be applied to almost all, say, fiction stories since no one's written a truly new story in like five thousand years.
Or, conversely, that if you take a published blob of source code, rearrange the order of a few functions and change the variable names, then *poof*, Pyramus and Thisbe magically turns into the "different" story Romeo and Juliet.
No matter how you approach it, patenting and/or copyrighting software flies in the face of sanity. Software, as the implementation of a mathematical algorithm, expresses nothing less than universal truths. You simply can't have a monopoly on those.
Is it deceptive?
Whether or not it counts as deceptive depends on how they presented the pre-rendered content...
IFF they showed people supposedly playing the game, and that gameplay apparently used more advanced rendering than the real game does, then I would call it deceptive.
If, however, the commercial just showed nicely rendered scenes thematically consistant with the game, then I would have to say they have not deceived anyone.
Taken to the logical limit, this ban would suggest that a game also cannot use humans acting in the genre of the game (football players, soldiers, even furries) - And within a generation or two of game consoles, live action will look confusingly plausible as part of the gameplay.
As the alternative, virtually all ads would turn into something like the pharmaceutical ads we have today - Jolly candylike worlds with everyone happy and thin and not depressed and not pregnant and not suffering from allergies and capable of maintaining erections, while saying nothing at all about the product.
As another way of approaching this, an ad showing only pre-rendered content that does exist in the game strikes me as no different than a movie trailer for a comedy that only shows the funniest scenes, even though the rest of the movie might suck.
Video games have very much turned into interactive movies (if only animation-like movies). We really need to get over this obsession with treating the two ideas as substantially different.
as the telcos lose their traditional phone customers to VoIP, a normal phone line will just get more and more expensive.
+5 insightful!
I've heard you can still do better in some parts of the country, but in the NorthEastern US, basic land-line phone service (by which I mean the default "no frills but not crippled" service) will run you $35 to $60 per month, after fees and taxes and BS. Unlimited nationwide LD will run at least $70.
For comparison, my broadband costs me $45 and my nationwide 800-minute (? 1200? something like that - I took the lowest number of minutes they offered and never even get near half of it) cell service for two phones costs only $80 per month.
So yeah, POTS service has reached the end of its useful life. As a consequence of that, dialup internet access will start to cost more than broadband.
Now, as for AOL charging so much... The VAST majority of people still on dialup either: A) have no choice; B) care far more about cost than speed; or C) don't use the internet enough to justify paying more for broadband.
AOL's move might get some folks in group C to switch to broadband, but A and B and at least half of C will just go to a cheaper dialup ISP like NetZero. Granted, as I mentioned (and you already predicted), dialup might realistically cost more than broadband in the near future; but for now, AOL has AIMed the gun at their foot a tad prematurely.
You'd almost think TW wants an excuse to excise their very expensive but now worthless vestigial limb...
but for it to be meaningful, I need to evaluate skills first. (There are 20+ levels for 6 titles)
Congrats, I had planned to just browse this topic, laughing self-debasingly, until you stumbled across my peeve about job websites...
You don't have "20+ levels for 6 titles". You have A job you need filled. One level. One title. One job, one job posting. If you really do have all 20 slots open, submit 20 postings.
Or rather, you should. My peeve? Employers who "fish" the job sites, by posting truly outrageous (my favorite ever, 5+ years of Java... in 1998!) or just mind-bogglingly vague ("we want a self-driven team player to actualize the potential of our Information Technology assets") "job" descriptions. I can only presume they do this just to see if anyone will bite, not with any real intention of offering respondants a job.
So... When a job site asks who, what, where, when, and how much - ANSWER THEM! Your company has a name, and you know that name; You know what you need a body to do; You know where you need that body to do it (and NONE of the companies listing telecommuting positions mean it - HR uses that as an alias for either "flex-time" or a 4/1 week); You know when you want the body to show up, and whether you need them for six weeks or permanantly; And perhaps one of the most obnoxious, jerk-us-all-around omissions nearly every employer makes, you know HOW MUCH you want to pay for that body. Don't play games, just give -A- number (not even a range). We may negotiate around that number at the interview, but you DO have a number in mind.
All it takes is a single producer to have a accidental backdoor
HDCP includes key revocation lists. One backdoor will work for all content predating the discovery of a flaw, but as soon as you try to play something newer with the compromised device added to its list, you lose the ability to play content dependant on the compromised device (even older content - CRLs/KRLs apply retroactively).
That might well make you wonder what happens when someone like Sony or Toshiba eventually accidentally release a device with a flaw... Would Hollywood have the balls to make a million TVs go black with one stoke of their magic red pen?
Though, on re-reading your comment, it occurs to me you may have meant something different - That once a compromise occurs, you can use it to transcode all earlier content, making revocation irrelevant? On that, I would agree with you, with one slight problem - Storage and playback. Sure, you could keep a few of your favorite movies on your HDD, but HD movies eat a LOT of bytes. And even then, you could only play it back on your computer, since any standalone device capable of playing it would bring you back to the HDCP problem you wanted to get around in the first place.
transparently offloading illegal .avi, .mpg and .mp3 from the iPod to a specific computer. An
anonymous phone call to the local authorities to take a look at the computer would finish the job.
Assuming you work in the US Windows-oriented world...
1) Where do you work that your IT guys gave you write access to administrative shares on the domain?
2) Do you realize that files have a concept of "owner", as well as a creation date, and that when you authenticate against the domain, a DC logs that?
Meaning that even if you could do it, which if you can your network admins need to "spend more time with their family", you'd leave tracks even an amateur could follow straight back to you.
Of course, similar ideas apply to the idea of an iPod sniffing around the network... Do most companies not limit "important" file access to people who actually have a reason to access those files?
Perhaps even more relevant - Would most people know what to do with something juicy? Unlike Hollywood's vision, you won't stumble across files named "fake_duplicate_set_of_books.xls" or "super_secret_corporate_takeover_plans.doc". "Real" juicy material takes a frickin' degree in accounting to make any use of... Just columns of account numbers, dates, and dollar amounts.
the best advice to come out of it seemed to be to hire a local teenager to be that slave
Assuming you have a desk-job and a machine not locked down tighter than a cat's ass...
Take a dozen CDs per day to work. Set your preferred ripping software to automatically look your CDs up, rip, and eject. Pop one in, start your program, minimize it, and just replace discs whenever the tray pops open. Then just dump them all to a keychain drive (DON'T use it as the intermediate path, copy them at the end of the day - Some rippers and some encoders write and flush sample-by-sample, meaning you can burn through your 100k write lifetime after just two or three dozen ripped discs) at the end of the day.
Anyway... If it takes a total of 30 seconds per disc of human-interactive time, you need a new ripping program (and I say that as someone who manually checks that FreeDB/CDDB gave me results to my liking).
I would suggest separating out any classical, multi-artist compilations, books-on-CD, and some live material (where one song can span multiple tracks, and vice-versa) to do on your own time... They can take a few minutes of research to get the names right. But for standard one-artist-per-disc with one-song-per-track material (ie, the vast majority of modern music), you shouldn't have to do anything more than role-play a CD changing robot.
And hey, what more could you ask for than getting paid for that whopping five minutes per day it takes to rip a dozen CDs?
I'm in a bind about this. What most people don't know is that Australia lacks an Adults only game rating
Umm... Okay? So I fail to see the problem (or rather, I fail to see why your government doesn't just implement the trivially obvious solution to the problem)... Allow adult-only ratings to apply to games.
AU already has higher ratings for movies, or so I've inferred from other comments on this topic. Just extend them to apply to games, and you have no problem. No more need to outright ban games.
Of course, ratings and bannings all amount to nothing more than a farce to make puritans feel better about their lack of actual parenting skills. I read my first Playboy at 8, have never, at any time in my life, had difficulty obtaining alcohol, saw my first hardcore porno at (by?) 12, and I won't elaborate on the banned/illegal materials I've partaken in, but suffice it to say the WO(s)D has never meant much more to me than a vague threat to my freedom if I didn't use my head.
Any yet, somehow, I turned out a (reasonably) normal, healthy adult, with a college education, decent job, and meaningful long-term relationship with my significant other (who happens to have the opposite gender from me, but I wouldn't consider that a qualification to "healthy" or "normal"). Why? Because my parents focused on actually raising me as a decent and thinking person, rather than a sheep adhering to an arbitrary set of meaningless rules.
The problem with sheep - They don't do so well once they leave the nice safe pasture.
Sorry guys, but I think the age of "my music" or "owning music" is dead, and currently in the process of being burried. This is just the latest shovel of dirt.
Last shovel of dirt, yes - But on the RIAA, not on our right to own our culture.
Slashdotters (and all people) need to keep in mind the difference between a major country's legal systems saying "fair use does not include a right to backups" and the RIAA spewing yet another round of customer-repelling male cow feces. The former means a lot of people turn into criminals overnight by the wave of the magic wand-of-exclusive-law. The latter means... Nothing at all.
I noticed the maximum for not giving up the key is 2 years and or a fine. Depending what may be on some hard drives, that will be the best choice.
So two years later they drag you back into court, and ask for the same key.
Entirely "new" crime to not disclose it, again. So, another two years plus X pounds. Repeat until compliance, irrelevance, or death.
You code media players to detect the watermark (which would have to be in a standardized format) and refuse to play anything that does not contain the watermark. Conversely, ripping programs will not rip anything containing the watermark, making it harder to copy the source.
Which accomplishes what, exactly, when the first weak link in your chain of trust decides to convert it to MP3 and share with the world?
Who needs an analog hole, when we have have perfectly good digital ones?
True, but is it a trend on the rise? If so, maybe they can nip it in the bud.
Hate to have to inject the voice of reason into this, but...
Why?
These people kill themselves for a reason.
They live in a place where they have no value as an individual, where society expects them to work themselves literally to death, and "urban sprawl" has gone the way of wall-to-wall carpeting.
I'd probaby want to escape that, too!
It really disturbs me that, at the same time our population keeps rising on an exponential curve, we still cling to archaic notions of the "sacredness" of every life.
Sacred? No. Worthless. Japanese society has just caught on to that idea realtively earlier than the rest of us. Perhaps it has something to do with their stereotypical obsession with honor and accepting suicide as an honorable way out of any problem, but they have the right idea. How do you deal with overpopulation? Encourage death.
Did you really expect some company to spend $18 in postage when you send them $14.99?
If someone wants to play a sucker's game, I won't refuse their money (or services, in this case).
However... I simply expected them not to lie. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Up to 15 movies per month, 3-at-a-time, for $17.99" does NOT mean the same as "unlimited movies per month, 3-at-a-time, for $17.99".
See the difference?
Had they simply advertised the former rather than the latter, we would never have had this discussion, and I would remain a happy customer (rather than grudgingly accepting they still have the best game in town).
Is that what you really want?
If they need to raise their rates to stay in business, I don't have a problem with that. If they need to increase the stratification of their service plans to stay in business, I don't have a problem with that. If they need to charge a per-disc fee, or make me pay return postage, or outright cap all accounts at X movies per month, I don't even have a problem with those.
I don't have a problem with any arrangement they offer as long as, when I fork over my $17.99 per month, I know EXACTLY what I have paid for. If that means paying too much for too little, I may chose to cancel my account. But I would do so without holding it against them, just as a personal financial decision.
As an aside, I don't actually use Blockbuster as my basis of comparison for what I consider acceptible from Netflix... I use Movie Gallery's $1 for 1-day Wednesdays as my "good deal" threshhold. Netflix has actually crept a bit above that (I actually pay more like $1.15 per movie via Netflix, on average), but their far superior selection makes up for the difference. Not to mention, if I time my Netflix returns correctly, I can get a new batch on Thursday or Friday and have them for the weekend, while Wednesday always happens on Wednesday.
Ah! One poster complains about Gateway not doing anything innovative, the next complains about them being innovative. Something's not right here.
Well, back in the ooooooold days, they had a truly wonderful product - No, not their PCs... their keyboards that natively supported keyboard macros.
AFAIK, you simply can't get a product like that anymore. Sure, you have a million and one models that support "internet/multimedia hotkeys" (whicht, in my experience, never seem to work quite right unless you use MSIE, Outlook Express (not even real Outlook), and WMP), and some that claim to support macros (with "Free Windows-only software included!"), but none that truly let you map any chord to any combination of keystrokes, interpreted natively by the keyboard before the PC ever sees it.
But aside from that - Just another PC manufacturer. And they don't even offer that keyboard anymore (which commands a hell of a premium on EBay, incidentally).
People like you who spout ideas like this are truly sickening.
Yeah yeah, save it for someone that cares.
No, making it illegal to discriminate based on race, creed, or national origin does not completely abolish discrimination
I think you have COMPLETELY missed my point.
A) I won't rent to a white christian male.
B) I won't rent to a white christian male, and say as much.
These have the SAME FRICKIN' OUTCOME, with the exception that "B" saves any white christian males the trouble of wasting their time.
Not sayin' either of those seems "right", but I really have absolutely no patience for "feel-good" laws. If a law doesn't DO something, it shouldn't exist.
Put another way, you can't outlaw thought-crime until we have the technology to accurately read minds. And once we do have that tech (realistically within the next 50 years), do we really want to start down that particular slippery slope?
Besides, why are you so upset about anti discrimination laws if you yourself aren't going to discriminate? Which type of discrimination were you planning?
So, have you stopped beating your wife yet?