CCP do tolerate most scams in their game, and they expicitly warn people against being too trusting. Even if the perpetrator is known, the GMs will usually not refund your money - it's just tough luck;-) I think they might make an exception if the scamming was done by exploiting bugs in the game mechanics. But if it is simply misplaced trust, you get no compensation at all.
I don't think any company can spin out enough unique quests to keep the server happy. So the quests have to be either computer generated or generated by players.
Again, EVE Online has some of it, but it is limited.
1) You can always get a quest from a NPC agent, but these are rather repetitive. A few dozen missions that are repeated over and over. Maybe one could come up with a more intelligent mission generation system?
2) Players can put out contracts that can be viewed as quests for other players. A good idea but these are limited in scope. Of interest as quests are at the moment only - transport contracts (bring item from A to B) - item exchange (bring me item X and get Y in return) where X or Y can simply be money. Unfortunately, item exchange is somewhat redundant because most of it could also be handled by the (BTW superb) ingame trade system.
Here I have a few ideas: - Escort mission: if player A gets player B safely to location X he gets Y as reward. Needs some work to prevent abuse (player B could call his pirate buddies and say "attack at location Z, it's worthwhile").
- Building missions: Player A puts out a reward for turning a pile of raw materials into goods. Player B shows up with his tools, does the job and gets a reward. This is of course possible today, but again it requires that Player B is trustworthy. An escrow system like in the transport contracts could help there.
While the wikipedia article also links to research that suggests it is less dangerous than methylmercury, I think the FDA was right in requesting that Thiomersal is removed from vaccines as a precaution.
Even if it does not cause Autism, it is known to cause other problems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)#Safety So I'd really like to avoid exposure unless it's inevitable. Shorter shelf life in vaccines does not qualify as "inevitable".
Of course Cutts' theory can be applied to Google itself.
Note it is not a reliable indicator of criminal activity, as there is quite a leap from cheating a search engine to mugging old ladies on the street. But it shows a certain tendency to break the rules and promoting one'Äs own goal at the expense of others.
So I would not be overly surprised to read about Google executives being caught with some outright illegal actions.
Sooner or later, upgraded models will leak to Akabar & friends through one of the following: -Black market -The USA temporarily allying with a bunch of mujahedin that fight an enemy of the US (remember how they delivered Stinger missiles to Afghanistan in order to hurt the Russians?) -Collapse of a nation state that had such weapons for its armed forces, the weapons being looted by who-knows-who.
And then they went with a BSD-based OS. Which is another Unix-like open source system. Without intending to start a flamewar between BSD and Linux fans, I guess the main reason for using BSD was that Apple could legally make it more or less closed source.
If OS X was GPLed and all sources available, I'm sure it would be hacked by now to run on most x86 PCs.
In summary, I love Linux, but I do believe that the article/summary have a point and that Apple's significant resources in (1) spending money on proprietary drivers and (2) developing software that is in some cases superior is cutting into Linux.
Interesting post, and I guess you are right about the user-friendliness of Apple helping the macs. But I'd like to point out that
1) The article says that the Linux marketshare has risen from 0.29% to 0.63%. That is an increase, so Apple is not killing Linux. It may be true that Apple slows down the adoption of Linux.
2) The numbers above may be too low. The german computer magazine publisher Heise (http://www.heise.de/) lists the marketshares among the users of its website for September 2007 as follows, based on the OS reported by the users' browsers:
Windows XP 61,1 % Linux 13,6 % Mac OS 6,6 % Windows 2000 7,5 % Windows Vista 4,7 % Windows 98 0,7 % other/unknown 5,8 %
These numbers are probably skewed toward Linux, thanks to the geeky readership on Heise.de. I guess the real numbers are somewhere between those from the Slashdot article and those from Heise.
3) The driver situation is promising to improve, mostly thanks to AMD/ATI. I hope they follow through with a fully 3D open source driver (and otherwise survive their currently somewhat weak market position).
In other words, if they violated GPL it was probably intentional.
And stupid to boot. As another poster wrote, it is likely to be about a modified IP stack for their internet-oriented products. There is still BSD, whose license allows that copying into closed source products. IIRC you have to give credit somewhere in the documentation, but that is a small price for legally getting free code.
Assuming better technology (as in your point 7), one should also allow for better photovoltaic and related technologies in the comparison.
1) Aside from the new solar plant in TFA, there is a company named Nanosolar that claims to have a new, very cost-efficient technology for producing photovoltaic cells. The cost per kWh is supposed to be lower than when producing from coal. http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/12/23/2919/8613. While that news still lacks independent confirmation, it is less "science fiction" than assuming we can mine the rest of the solar system.
2) Batteries have greatly improved over the last years. In some places, large-capacity batteries are already used to buffer the grid: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19584/. Assume a further improvement of those technologies and you have a way to bridge phases of low production;-)
I think you understand it correctly, and the WTO sees this as a subtle way of discriminating against foreign casinos.
Because it is relatively easy for a US citizen to drive to the next city with a physical casino, but flying to Antigua for that purpose is a lot more expensive. Online casinos don't have that problem even if they are overseas. In other words, the US have banned that kind of casino gambling that can easily be offered by foreign competitors. Enter the WTO...
The front wheels on this one are really wide, so I guess it will not roll easily. The downside is that will also need wide thoroughfares, almost like a truck. Driving this baby into a standard size garage might fail;-)
In the case of Win2K, I guess its "honest" cost-cutting by some hardware vendors. According to the last Valve hardware survey I took part in, Windows 2000 gamers are only a few percent of the Steam population these days. If some companies think at this point they don't need Windows 2000 drivers anymore, I'm not surprised.
Microsoft's intervention is not necessary to make this happen.
Personally, I'm expecting that my next new computer (a few years from now) might not work with Windows 2000 anymore. Time to get more familiar with Linux...
the learning curve to go from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 is *WORSE* than switching to OpenOffice, a point we have made very clear to our bosses where I work with regards to our recent switch to OpenOffice.
ahh, but is the return on time spent learning openoffice actually better? vim is a bitch to learn, but once you know you way around it, it'll save you dozens of hours compared to nano (or notepad.exe for the windows folk). did you recommend your work switch to openoffice because it was better in the long term, or because you hate Microsoft?
In the long term, ODF as file format alone should be worth it. Microsoft's binary formats were poorly documented (if at all), and OOXML needs a lot more work to become a reasonably usable standard. Maybe it will get there by the time Microsoft builds Office 2010, but I'd rather not rely on that...
Just anecdotal experience but the Windows 2000 and 2003 boxes I've administered have been rock solid other than the occasional box which was running a flaky application.
That matches my experience (and Windows 2000 handles flaky applications much better that Windows 9x), but I'd still like a bit more resilience in these cases. Currently, the main culprit for crashes on my Windows 2000 machine is Teamspeak: it tends to crash on disconnect and take the OS down as well:-(
Though I prefer Linux, I would not like to see a mon-culture OS take over the desktop. Real competition based upon quality trumps a market strangle hold even if it were exercised by a product line I preferred.
Unfortunately, we have yet to fully get there. While both Apple/MacOS and Linux seem to gain some ground recently, their market shares on the desktop are still too small to get them the full attention of hardware and software vendors. Once each of them has 10-20% market share, I think the supply of applications and drivers will reach a point where the playing field is reasonably level. At that point, Microsoft will have to produce something better than Vista (good for Microsoft users) or be displaced (much rejoicing among Linux fanbois;-)
I think this is a leftover from the days of Windows 3.x and 9x, which were NOT properly designed as professional, multitasking operating systems.
Among other things, everybody was administrator. Which led to somewhat unhealthy design habits on the part of application developers, who often took the easy path of just dropping DLLs and such into the system directory. Including some of Microsoft's own developers, but I digress...;-)
Today, it seems that Microsoft has recognized the problem and tries to contain it. But the need to stay compatible to old applications still leads to weird workarounds and designs in Windows. On systems that were designed with multiuser support from the beginning (Unix/Linux just to give one example), point 1 and 4 of your list are implemented and it makes a big difference.
We use it at my place of work and I find it a lot easier to understand than InnoSetup. Plus it is free to download. One major limitation is that it does not support Windows Installer, instead you get a "classic" setup.exe. Link: http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php
Although I think it's nice of them to say that they're not blaming Windows for their own mistake, I do honestly think that Windows should protect such vital files at all cost - including against Administrator level process (e.g. a prompt "you dumbass - are you sure?" will do).
I disagree on this one. If I want to mess with my boot.ini or similar files as administrator, the operating system should not get in my way. This is not limited to Windows by the way, the default settings of certain other systems are also overly restrictive. But Ubuntu at least offers a howto on how to restore a classic root account on its website;-)
Considering the history of other projects, especially XFree/X.Org, the answer is "Ogg is controllable as long as people are not seriously dissatisfied". Because creating and maintaining a fork ist extra work, it is unlikely to happen as long as people are mostly happy. But do something really annoying, and you can expect a fork that might even displace the original product.
So there would be something like "a bit proprietary";-)
Nokia calls OGG proprietary and talks about a "percption of OGG being free" (slightly paraphrased by me to fit this sentence), but completely fails to address how a codec that is released under GPL can be proprietary.
I also noted that they drop terms like "proprietary" in passing rather that making them a bullet point. Reads like an attempt to get them past the readers attention;-)
Sure, CCP could have chosen another filename for its game. Like "EveConfig.ini" for instance.
This said, it is good to know about the problem in advance. I'll simply make a copy of boot.ini, and if necessary copy it back using my Linux installation;-) It might even be possible to hack the client with a hex editor, changing "boot.ini" to "buut.ini" and fix the problem this way.
Good point about software that needs a particular version of IE, but there are more reasons:
-Standardization in large user groups. If you are an IT department that supports a few thousand users, you probably want the same (tested in advance) set of applications on all PCs so you can cut down on the complexity of your support issues.
-Regulatory requirements in safety critical applications: If you do stuff like medical devices, the above becomes mandatory because you have to show a validation of the software configuration you send out. Each software upgrade will trigger a new round of tests and cause costs. Of course, one might argue against using a general purpose OS on these at all, especially Windows;-)
Most of the stuff you mentioned is indeed on my "do not buy" list, because I don't want to support DRM. In particular those things that only work in DRM'ed mode. Vista falls in this category by product activation.
For the rest, I go by the rule that I don't pay extra for the DRM features, so the item has to compete on the basis of its performance vs. price in non-DRM mode. As an example, lets take the iPod (AFAIK it can play MP3, so it has a non-DRM mode): -The ability to play iTunes songs (with DRM) does not count as an advantage to me -that means it competes on price/performance in playing MP3 against all the cheap MP3 players out there. -which leaves the design as a possible advantage, but I think it is overrated.
Result: The iPod will lose against a cheaper SanDisk Sansa (or similar device;-)
Slashdot Mirror
CCP do tolerate most scams in their game, and they expicitly warn people against being too trusting. Even if the perpetrator is known, the GMs will usually not refund your money - it's just tough luck ;-)
I think they might make an exception if the scamming was done by exploiting bugs in the game mechanics. But if it is simply misplaced trust, you get no compensation at all.
Even so, the economy in EVE is still working.
I don't think any company can spin out enough unique quests to keep the server happy. So the quests have to be either computer generated or generated by players.
;-)
Again, EVE Online has some of it, but it is limited.
1) You can always get a quest from a NPC agent, but these are rather repetitive. A few dozen missions that are repeated over and over. Maybe one could come up with a more intelligent mission generation system?
2) Players can put out contracts that can be viewed as quests for other players. A good idea but these are limited in scope. Of interest as quests are at the moment only
- transport contracts (bring item from A to B)
- item exchange (bring me item X and get Y in return) where X or Y can simply be money. Unfortunately, item exchange is somewhat redundant because most of it could also be handled by the (BTW superb) ingame trade system.
Here I have a few ideas:
- Escort mission: if player A gets player B safely to location X he gets Y as reward. Needs some work to prevent abuse (player B could call his pirate buddies and say "attack at location Z, it's worthwhile").
- Building missions: Player A puts out a reward for turning a pile of raw materials into goods. Player B shows up with his tools, does the job and gets a reward. This is of course possible today, but again it requires that Player B is trustworthy. An escrow system like in the transport contracts could help there.
Feel free to come up with more
Thiomersal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal) is also an organomercury compound and thus in the suspect category.
While the wikipedia article also links to research that suggests it is less dangerous than methylmercury, I think the FDA was right in requesting that Thiomersal is removed from vaccines as a precaution.
Even if it does not cause Autism, it is known to cause other problems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)#Safety
So I'd really like to avoid exposure unless it's inevitable. Shorter shelf life in vaccines does not qualify as "inevitable".
Of course Cutts' theory can be applied to Google itself.
Note it is not a reliable indicator of criminal activity, as there is quite a leap from cheating a search engine to mugging old ladies on the street. But it shows a certain tendency to break the rules and promoting one'Äs own goal at the expense of others.
So I would not be overly surprised to read about Google executives being caught with some outright illegal actions.
Sooner or later, upgraded models will leak to Akabar & friends through one of the following:
-Black market
-The USA temporarily allying with a bunch of mujahedin that fight an enemy of the US (remember how they delivered Stinger missiles to Afghanistan in order to hurt the Russians?)
-Collapse of a nation state that had such weapons for its armed forces, the weapons being looted by who-knows-who.
It's only a matter of time...
And then they went with a BSD-based OS. Which is another Unix-like open source system. Without intending to start a flamewar between BSD and Linux fans, I guess the main reason for using BSD was that Apple could legally make it more or less closed source.
If OS X was GPLed and all sources available, I'm sure it would be hacked by now to run on most x86 PCs.
Interesting post, and I guess you are right about the user-friendliness of Apple helping the macs. But I'd like to point out that
1) The article says that the Linux marketshare has risen from 0.29% to 0.63%. That is an increase, so Apple is not killing Linux. It may be true that Apple slows down the adoption of Linux.
2) The numbers above may be too low. The german computer magazine publisher Heise (http://www.heise.de/) lists the marketshares among the users of its website for September 2007 as follows, based on the OS reported by the users' browsers:
Windows XP 61,1 %
Linux 13,6 %
Mac OS 6,6 %
Windows 2000 7,5 %
Windows Vista 4,7 %
Windows 98 0,7 %
other/unknown 5,8 %
These numbers are probably skewed toward Linux, thanks to the geeky readership on Heise.de. I guess the real numbers are somewhere between those from the Slashdot article and those from Heise.
3) The driver situation is promising to improve, mostly thanks to AMD/ATI. I hope they follow through with a fully 3D open source driver (and otherwise survive their currently somewhat weak market position).
And stupid to boot. As another poster wrote, it is likely to be about a modified IP stack for their internet-oriented products.
There is still BSD, whose license allows that copying into closed source products. IIRC you have to give credit somewhere in the documentation, but that is a small price for legally getting free code.
At the distances involved here, the preferred method would be High-voltage direct current (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current).
That implies rectifying at the source and inverting at the end anyway, and the output may have a different frequency from the input.
Assuming better technology (as in your point 7), one should also allow for better photovoltaic and related technologies in the comparison.
;-)
1) Aside from the new solar plant in TFA, there is a company named Nanosolar that claims to have a new, very cost-efficient technology for producing photovoltaic cells. The cost per kWh is supposed to be lower than when producing from coal. http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/12/23/2919/8613.
While that news still lacks independent confirmation, it is less "science fiction" than assuming we can mine the rest of the solar system.
2) Batteries have greatly improved over the last years. In some places, large-capacity batteries are already used to buffer the grid: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19584/. Assume a further improvement of those technologies and you have a way to bridge phases of low production
3) According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_grid#Bulk_power_transmission), long range power transmission is already feasible at reasonable cost.
I think you understand it correctly, and the WTO sees this as a subtle way of discriminating against foreign casinos.
Because it is relatively easy for a US citizen to drive to the next city with a physical casino, but flying to Antigua for that purpose is a lot more expensive. Online casinos don't have that problem even if they are overseas.
In other words, the US have banned that kind of casino gambling that can easily be offered by foreign competitors. Enter the WTO...
The front wheels on this one are really wide, so I guess it will not roll easily. The downside is that will also need wide thoroughfares, almost like a truck. Driving this baby into a standard size garage might fail ;-)
In the case of Win2K, I guess its "honest" cost-cutting by some hardware vendors. According to the last Valve hardware survey I took part in, Windows 2000 gamers are only a few percent of the Steam population these days. If some companies think at this point they don't need Windows 2000 drivers anymore, I'm not surprised.
Microsoft's intervention is not necessary to make this happen.
Personally, I'm expecting that my next new computer (a few years from now) might not work with Windows 2000 anymore. Time to get more familiar with Linux...
In the long term, ODF as file format alone should be worth it. Microsoft's binary formats were poorly documented (if at all), and OOXML needs a lot more work to become a reasonably usable standard. Maybe it will get there by the time Microsoft builds Office 2010, but I'd rather not rely on that...
That matches my experience (and Windows 2000 handles flaky applications much better that Windows 9x), but I'd still like a bit more resilience in these cases.
Currently, the main culprit for crashes on my Windows 2000 machine is Teamspeak:
it tends to crash on disconnect and take the OS down as well
Unfortunately, we have yet to fully get there. While both Apple/MacOS and Linux seem to gain some ground recently, their market shares on the desktop are still too small to get them the full attention of hardware and software vendors.
Once each of them has 10-20% market share, I think the supply of applications and drivers will reach a point where the playing field is reasonably level. At that point, Microsoft will have to produce something better than Vista (good for Microsoft users) or be displaced (much rejoicing among Linux fanbois
I think this is a leftover from the days of Windows 3.x and 9x, which were NOT properly designed as professional, multitasking operating systems.
;-)
Among other things, everybody was administrator. Which led to somewhat unhealthy design habits on the part of application developers, who often took the easy path of just dropping DLLs and such into the system directory. Including some of Microsoft's own developers, but I digress...
Today, it seems that Microsoft has recognized the problem and tries to contain it. But the need to stay compatible to old applications still leads to weird workarounds and designs in Windows.
On systems that were designed with multiuser support from the beginning (Unix/Linux just to give one example), point 1 and 4 of your list are implemented and it makes a big difference.
We use it at my place of work and I find it a lot easier to understand than InnoSetup. Plus it is free to download. One major limitation is that it does not support Windows Installer, instead you get a "classic" setup.exe.
Link: http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php
I disagree on this one. If I want to mess with my boot.ini or similar files as administrator, the operating system should not get in my way.
This is not limited to Windows by the way, the default settings of certain other systems are also overly restrictive. But Ubuntu at least offers a howto on how to restore a classic root account on its website
I think your definition is a good one.
;-)
Considering the history of other projects, especially XFree/X.Org, the answer is "Ogg is controllable as long as people are not seriously dissatisfied".
Because creating and maintaining a fork ist extra work, it is unlikely to happen as long as people are mostly happy. But do something really annoying, and you can expect a fork that might even displace the original product.
So there would be something like "a bit proprietary"
Nokia calls OGG proprietary and talks about a "percption of OGG being free" (slightly paraphrased by me to fit this sentence), but completely fails to address how a codec that is released under GPL can be proprietary.
;-)
I also noted that they drop terms like "proprietary" in passing rather that making them a bullet point. Reads like an attempt to get them past the readers attention
Sure, CCP could have chosen another filename for its game. Like "EveConfig.ini" for instance.
;-)
This said, it is good to know about the problem in advance. I'll simply make a copy of boot.ini, and if necessary copy it back using my Linux installation
It might even be possible to hack the client with a hex editor, changing "boot.ini" to "buut.ini" and fix the problem this way.
Good point about software that needs a particular version of IE, but there are more reasons:
;-)
-Standardization in large user groups. If you are an IT department that supports a few thousand users, you probably want the same (tested in advance) set of applications on all PCs so you can cut down on the complexity of your support issues.
-Regulatory requirements in safety critical applications:
If you do stuff like medical devices, the above becomes mandatory because you have to show a validation of the software configuration you send out. Each software upgrade will trigger a new round of tests and cause costs.
Of course, one might argue against using a general purpose OS on these at all, especially Windows
Most of the stuff you mentioned is indeed on my "do not buy" list, because I don't want to support DRM. In particular those things that only work in DRM'ed mode. Vista falls in this category by product activation.
;-)
For the rest, I go by the rule that I don't pay extra for the DRM features, so the item has to compete on the basis of its performance vs. price in non-DRM mode.
As an example, lets take the iPod (AFAIK it can play MP3, so it has a non-DRM mode):
-The ability to play iTunes songs (with DRM) does not count as an advantage to me
-that means it competes on price/performance in playing MP3 against all the cheap MP3 players out there.
-which leaves the design as a possible advantage, but I think it is overrated.
Result: The iPod will lose against a cheaper SanDisk Sansa (or similar device