True, I remember a similar clause in an Oracle EULA I read a few years ago. But that does not mean we should simply accept this crap. It merely means Oracle deserves some bashing too;-)
And finally, I take such clauses as a sign that the software is actually inferior, at least in some scenarios. Why else would they need that clause?
There is indeed an attempt to make EULAs contractually enforceable, the so called Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA). Wikipedia's article on the subject, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCITA, does however claim the UCITA "has only been passed in two states as of 2004 -- Virginia and Maryland". If you live in one of those, you might be out of luck. In other jurisdictions, EULAs are probably unenforcable. Wikipedia has another article that covers the US situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkwrap_license. In Germany, a few years ago Microsoft failed to enforce the EULA that disallowed separate sales of OEM software. The court ruled that an equivalent of the First-sale doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_first_sal e applied. The EULA that said otherwise was obviously disregarded.
Some people (on/. IIRC) have theorized that this is the reason for the "business launch" in November:
By launching now, Microsoft can give those companies that bought Software Assurance until end of 2006 the Vista licenses they expected, without losing face by extending those Software Assurance contracts for free until Vista is really ready. Now I don't think that said companies will use Vista immediately. They might set up some test PCs, but the rest of the licenses will go into storage and be pulled out when the worst bugs are fixed.
Microsoft might do something like that for its own games. Read "This game may only be used on Windows". After the silliness about Vista and virtualization, I would not be surprised. But they can make that decision only for their own games. I doubt that companies like Valve, ID or Blizzard would adopt that clause. So a DirectX 10 capable WINE would still be attractive, even assuming people care about the EULA.
In Germany there is a tax on displacement, with a multiplier depending on the pollution class of the vehicle. For cars using gasoline, this tax is a rather small part of the car's TCO (unless you are driving a really old stinker that does not even meet level 2 of the EU environmental standards). For a diesel it is more expensive BTW. But there is no legislation that would limit you to a maximum displacement, sometimes you see even not-so-wealthy persons with an old US gas guzzler that has lots of displacement.
The price of liability insurance (mandatory) is tied to the likelihood of accidents with a particular model. Since the sort of drivers that likes to speed also prefers cars with lots of horsepower, those models are more often involved in accidents and tend to be more expensive in insurance. This is the closest we have to a "tax on horsepower".
But the biggest incentive to buy economic cars is indeed the cost of gasoline (and to be really efficient, it would have to be even higher).
In the discussion on Newlaunches.com, the Newlaunches team itself gave a link to http://www.jp.playstation.com/support/qa-591.html. They claim it means "The PS3 will have a peak power consumption of 380 watts".
Sorry for claiming earlier that they did not back up their results (but I still think they could have put the link right in the article).
Well, I believe in argumentation rather than swear words. And the fanatics must have missed this little side-thread, because we don't have anyone acting insulted over the Nazi comparison yet;-) Usually my post would be at either +5, Insightful or at -1, Troll, depending on which faction of zealots is stronger at the moment.
The problem, fundamentally, is that there will be situations in which there won't be enough evidence in the context of the conventional criminal justice system to make an arrest and/or prosecute for a crime BEFORE a plot has been executed. For some, this is seen as just a part of the "cost of doing business" as a free nation, and perhaps a certain level of, e.g., possible terror attacks should be accepted.
I agree with that observation, and I consider myself one of those people who see it as "cost of doing business". Because I don't trust most politicians to stay honest when they can abuse their power to silence political opponents. More about that below...
Some people, myself included, believe that we should do everything possible to stop these kinds of -attacks BEFORE they happen, and not deal with them afterward, or in the criminal courts system. I do understand that making the determination of whether someone falls into this category depends on the judgment of some or many people. However, I consider the common sensical threshold for determining someone is actually legitimately planning to execute a terror plot against the United States to be fairly high, and I trust the skills of politicians and government appointees, for the most part, to fulfill their civic duties regardless of political stripe, and that includes discerning whether someone/something constitutes a national security threat to the United States.
Here we disagree. I distrust the skills, but even more the good intentions of government. Germany was considered a civilized nation too, before the Nazis came into power. On the way from democracy to dictatorship, an important step was the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act that allowed the Nazi government to enact laws on its own, even against the letter of the constitution. Note that the Enabling Act was also claimed "to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Empire".
While the law discussed here is not as far-reaching, the similarities are obvious: -The government is provided with powers that seriously diminish civil rights -It is claimed to be necessary to defend the country against some evil -The checks and balances that would usually prevent abuse are reduced or eliminated. In this case, the court system where the state attorney has to bring proof is circumvented.
For the sake of your fellow countrymen and the rest of the world, I hope that I'm wrong and you'll never have to eat you words. But if I read the intentions of the republicans correctly, you may be in for a rude awakening.
They're doing everything they can to convince Americans to leave, and their willing accomplices in the media are glad to oblige, because they don't like George Bush.
Well we can't leave again. There's no choice but to make them blink first.
To me, this reads like he wants to stick it out at any price, and generalizes those media that publish information in favour of withdrawing as "willing accomplices". Read, as criminals who help the terrorists.
I do understand this as an attempt to trick the American public with rhetoric.
Only on a DRM'ed hardware platform that insists on manufacturer signed binaries. A frequently cited example is the TiVo, and there it is a problem because you don't have other vendors for compatible hardware. With an OS for a PC, you could use the source code to create your own your distribution without DRM.
There are some improvements I don't want to miss anymore.
DOOM 1 was a milestone in 3D gaming, but compared to Duke Nukem the resolution of only 320x200 pixels sucked. So did the fact that you could not look up or down. Which was necessary due to some shortcuts ID software took in programming, so the game could run on a 80386 with acceptable framerate.
Then HalfLife 1 set the bar even higher. While I found the difference not as profound as from DOOM 1 to Duke Nukem, "equivalent to HalfLife 1" is what I now expect as minimum from a game's graphics cababilities.
Of course, everybody has a different opinion of what is "good enough". But for most purposes, the technology of the year 2000 allows a reasonable quality level (and by the way, the regular DVD became available in the late 1990s which is close enough).
While you are right about the legal situation, it seems a bit unfair (and very stupid) to me if Universal first encourages people to do their advertising for them and then goes after them for selling fan articles. Especially at a point where they seem to have given up on marketing Serenity themselves.
As others have mentioned, Universal might have a hard time to find similar fan support for any of their future products. Personally, I would refuse to do viral advertising for anything which is from a big company and NOT released under GPL, Creative Commons or a similar free license.
Other distros, in particular SuSE
on
Will Red Hat Survive?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Novell's distro (AKA SuSE, free version at http://www.opensuse.org/) is not exactly an unknown also-ran distro. They had several years of experience before being acquired by Novell. Now SuSE is often, and to some extent justly, accused of being overly eager to look like Windows. But I still consider it a distro that can be recommended to Linux newbies. It is easy to install and get started with, and from there you can work your way up to more "hardcore" distributions.
The whole SP thing is a throwback to the bad old days of 28.8k modems and CDs by post. Now we can add the fixes as they come along so why bother with a monolithic chunk of code that must be a testing nightmare for MS as well as corporate end users?
Because you can read the SP from a CD and have the fixes installed before you connect the computer to the internet at all. In the past, there have been some security holes that could be exploited as soon as your PC is on the net, making it a race between the malware and the patches which gets to your PC first. Loading the SP from a CD removes this problem.
Sorry for the late answer, but according to the German IT-newsticker at www.heise.de Sony did indeed use copyright arguments. Unfortunately they gave not many details. Unauthorized publishing of the PSP manual was mentioned, but that is the only in-depth information.
Currently, vendors have the right to limit distribution to a certain region. It is time to change copyright law in that regard and strengthen the rights of the end users.
AFAIK that has already happened within the EU, at least car makers have already be fined for trying to prevent re-imports from other EU states. Not that it will help the brits much in this case: Since they are the only large english-speaking country in the EU, buying from France or Germany won't help them to get cheaper english versions of their games.
Let me take a page out of the "hate bush" manual and turn it around... Just how many people should we allow to die in the US from military attacks on civilian targets before we do something about it? Also, what do you call knee jerk reactions? Gathering intelligence from overseas phone calls, bank records, etc?
I don't mind striking back, but it has to stay somewhat in proportion. Assuming Bush was right about Osama being supported by the Taliban, what is the appropriate response for 3000 dead in the WTC? Invading the country and toppling their government?
Yes I think so, but that should be enough. If you turn it into a worldwide "War On Terror", you will step on a lot of people's toes who really had nothing to do with September 11th, and create a lot of new terrorists in the process. Thus I was (despite some doubts) in favor of taking out the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. But the invasion of Iraq is an unmitigated disaster.
Oh, I'm sure WOW will take long to fade to the point where it has to close down because subscriptions don't pay for maintenance anymore. Some time after 2010, I guess. But the numbers of players will shrink. And unless Blizz wants to shrink with them and become a minor player in the market, they better think about a replacement for WOW now.
Yes it is standard practice and might actually be the most lucrative way for Blizzard. But that does not mean everyone has to accept it.
To extend your analogy, if I had paid for buying XP plus a monthly fee for usage, I might also get the idea that upgrades should be included in the price.
And there are companies that work differently: -Arena Net's Guild Wars costs money to buy but no monthly subscriptions -EVE Online costs only a monthly subscription, updates are included (OK, it is a bit more expensive per month)
Sure, as long as the players will pay for it. From an economic point of view, Blizzard would be crazy not to milk WOW for as much money as possible. And economic points of view are important to corporations;-)
Of course (and half off topic), it would be smart to use some of that money and invest in something new, because at some point people will get tired of WOW.
Is anyone even selling 2GB DDR2-800 DIMMs yet? Unlikely. The usually well sorted shop at alternate.de lists only one non-registered 2 GByte DDR2 module: The MDT DIMM 2 GB DDR2-533. As the name says, it is only DDR2-533
4x4 is AMD's short-term approach to put something together that can compete with a Core 2 Duo. Essentially, it is a version of their Opterons aimed at desktop users. Some time in 2007, they plan to release genuine quad cores (4 cores on one chip), hopefully on AM2 too. Then you should be able to upgrade that board.
Most Athlon 64 mainboards support (unbuffered) ECC as well, I have seen consumer boards for less than 100 Euros that do. So the Quad father might support ECC too.
OTOH, you will be limited to a smaller max. amount of RAM. If you follow the links in TFA http://www.hothardware.com/image_popup.cfm?image=b ig_4x4mobo.png&articleid=891&t=a you will see a mainboard with only four memory slots. The biggest unbuffered DDR2 ECC module I can find is the MDT DIMM 2 GB DDR2-533. That makes a maximum of 8GBytes.
For socket 940 or socket F there are plenty of two-processor boards that support 16 Gbyte (four memory slots for each CPU slot).
Sad to say, XP vs. Linux isn't much of a performance competition any more. With a slow enough old box, you'll find they both take forever to boot...;)
Actually it is mostly the fault of the GUIs. Linux in text mode is pretty lean and quick to boot. But so is XP Embedded in a minimal configuration. But as soon as the Windows Explorer or KDE enter the picture, things slow down. Massively.
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True, I remember a similar clause in an Oracle EULA I read a few years ago. But that does not mean we should simply accept this crap. It merely means Oracle deserves some bashing too ;-)
And finally, I take such clauses as a sign that the software is actually inferior, at least in some scenarios. Why else would they need that clause?
There is indeed an attempt to make EULAs contractually enforceable, the so called Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA).l e applied. The EULA that said otherwise was obviously disregarded.
Wikipedia's article on the subject, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCITA, does however claim the UCITA "has only been passed in two states as of 2004 -- Virginia and Maryland". If you live in one of those, you might be out of luck.
In other jurisdictions, EULAs are probably unenforcable. Wikipedia has another article that covers the US situation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkwrap_license.
In Germany, a few years ago Microsoft failed to enforce the EULA that disallowed separate sales of OEM software. The court ruled that an equivalent of the First-sale doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_first_sa
Some people (on /. IIRC) have theorized that this is the reason for the "business launch" in November:
By launching now, Microsoft can give those companies that bought Software Assurance until end of 2006 the Vista licenses they expected, without losing face by extending those Software Assurance contracts for free until Vista is really ready.
Now I don't think that said companies will use Vista immediately. They might set up some test PCs, but the rest of the licenses will go into storage and be pulled out when the worst bugs are fixed.
Microsoft might do something like that for its own games. Read "This game may only be used on Windows". After the silliness about Vista and virtualization, I would not be surprised.
But they can make that decision only for their own games. I doubt that companies like Valve, ID or Blizzard would adopt that clause. So a DirectX 10 capable WINE would still be attractive, even assuming people care about the EULA.
In Germany there is a tax on displacement, with a multiplier depending on the pollution class of the vehicle.
For cars using gasoline, this tax is a rather small part of the car's TCO (unless you are driving a really old stinker that does not even meet level 2 of the EU environmental standards). For a diesel it is more expensive BTW.
But there is no legislation that would limit you to a maximum displacement, sometimes you see even not-so-wealthy persons with an old US gas guzzler that has lots of displacement.
The price of liability insurance (mandatory) is tied to the likelihood of accidents with a particular model. Since the sort of drivers that likes to speed also prefers cars with lots of horsepower, those models are more often involved in accidents and tend to be more expensive in insurance. This is the closest we have to a "tax on horsepower".
But the biggest incentive to buy economic cars is indeed the cost of gasoline (and to be really efficient, it would have to be even higher).
In the discussion on Newlaunches.com, the Newlaunches team itself gave a link to http://www.jp.playstation.com/support/qa-591.html. They claim it means "The PS3 will have a peak power consumption of 380 watts".
Sorry for claiming earlier that they did not back up their results (but I still think they could have put the link right in the article).
If you follow the link in TFA, you will be redirected once more and end up at http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/sony_playstati on_3_further_details.php. That article simply claims the 380 watt power consumption, without offering further sources.
;-)
One poster there immediately replied "Absolutely wrong. It has a 380 watt power supply. That's no indication it actually draws that much!".
So take all of it with a shovel of salt
Well, I believe in argumentation rather than swear words. And the fanatics must have missed this little side-thread, because we don't have anyone acting insulted over the Nazi comparison yet ;-)
Usually my post would be at either +5, Insightful or at -1, Troll, depending on which faction of zealots is stronger at the moment.
I agree with that observation, and I consider myself one of those people who see it as "cost of doing business". Because I don't trust most politicians to stay honest when they can abuse their power to silence political opponents. More about that below...
Here we disagree. I distrust the skills, but even more the good intentions of government.
Germany was considered a civilized nation too, before the Nazis came into power. On the way from democracy to dictatorship, an important step was the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act that allowed the Nazi government to enact laws on its own, even against the letter of the constitution. Note that the Enabling Act was also claimed "to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Empire".
While the law discussed here is not as far-reaching, the similarities are obvious:
-The government is provided with powers that seriously diminish civil rights
-It is claimed to be necessary to defend the country against some evil
-The checks and balances that would usually prevent abuse are reduced or eliminated. In this case, the court system where the state attorney has to bring proof is circumvented.
For the sake of your fellow countrymen and the rest of the world, I hope that I'm wrong and you'll never have to eat you words. But if I read the intentions of the republicans correctly, you may be in for a rude awakening.
To me, this reads like he wants to stick it out at any price, and generalizes those media that publish information in favour of withdrawing as "willing accomplices". Read, as criminals who help the terrorists.
I do understand this as an attempt to trick the American public with rhetoric.
Only on a DRM'ed hardware platform that insists on manufacturer signed binaries. A frequently cited example is the TiVo, and there it is a problem because you don't have other vendors for compatible hardware.
With an OS for a PC, you could use the source code to create your own your distribution without DRM.
There are some improvements I don't want to miss anymore.
DOOM 1 was a milestone in 3D gaming, but compared to Duke Nukem the resolution of only 320x200 pixels sucked. So did the fact that you could not look up or down. Which was necessary due to some shortcuts ID software took in programming, so the game could run on a 80386 with acceptable framerate.
Then HalfLife 1 set the bar even higher. While I found the difference not as profound as from DOOM 1 to Duke Nukem, "equivalent to HalfLife 1" is what I now expect as minimum from a game's graphics cababilities.
Of course, everybody has a different opinion of what is "good enough". But for most purposes, the technology of the year 2000 allows a reasonable quality level (and by the way, the regular DVD became available in the late 1990s which is close enough).
While you are right about the legal situation, it seems a bit unfair (and very stupid) to me if Universal first encourages people to do their advertising for them and then goes after them for selling fan articles. Especially at a point where they seem to have given up on marketing Serenity themselves.
As others have mentioned, Universal might have a hard time to find similar fan support for any of their future products. Personally, I would refuse to do viral advertising for anything which is from a big company and NOT released under GPL, Creative Commons or a similar free license.
Novell's distro (AKA SuSE, free version at http://www.opensuse.org/) is not exactly an unknown also-ran distro. They had several years of experience before being acquired by Novell.
Now SuSE is often, and to some extent justly, accused of being overly eager to look like Windows. But I still consider it a distro that can be recommended to Linux newbies. It is easy to install and get started with, and from there you can work your way up to more "hardcore" distributions.
Because you can read the SP from a CD and have the fixes installed before you connect the computer to the internet at all.
In the past, there have been some security holes that could be exploited as soon as your PC is on the net, making it a race between the malware and the patches which gets to your PC first. Loading the SP from a CD removes this problem.
Sorry for the late answer, but according to the German IT-newsticker at www.heise.de Sony did indeed use copyright arguments. Unfortunately they gave not many details. Unauthorized publishing of the PSP manual was mentioned, but that is the only in-depth information.
Currently, vendors have the right to limit distribution to a certain region. It is time to change copyright law in that regard and strengthen the rights of the end users.
AFAIK that has already happened within the EU, at least car makers have already be fined for trying to prevent re-imports from other EU states. Not that it will help the brits much in this case:
Since they are the only large english-speaking country in the EU, buying from France or Germany won't help them to get cheaper english versions of their games.
I don't mind striking back, but it has to stay somewhat in proportion. Assuming Bush was right about Osama being supported by the Taliban, what is the appropriate response for 3000 dead in the WTC? Invading the country and toppling their government?
Yes I think so, but that should be enough. If you turn it into a worldwide "War On Terror", you will step on a lot of people's toes who really had nothing to do with September 11th, and create a lot of new terrorists in the process.
Thus I was (despite some doubts) in favor of taking out the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. But the invasion of Iraq is an unmitigated disaster.
Oh, I'm sure WOW will take long to fade to the point where it has to close down because subscriptions don't pay for maintenance anymore. Some time after 2010, I guess.
But the numbers of players will shrink. And unless Blizz wants to shrink with them and become a minor player in the market, they better think about a replacement for WOW now.
Yes it is standard practice and might actually be the most lucrative way for Blizzard. But that does not mean everyone has to accept it.
To extend your analogy, if I had paid for buying XP plus a monthly fee for usage, I might also get the idea that upgrades should be included in the price.
And there are companies that work differently:
-Arena Net's Guild Wars costs money to buy but no monthly subscriptions
-EVE Online costs only a monthly subscription, updates are included (OK, it is a bit more expensive per month)
Sure, as long as the players will pay for it. ;-)
From an economic point of view, Blizzard would be crazy not to milk WOW for as much money as possible. And economic points of view are important to corporations
Of course (and half off topic), it would be smart to use some of that money and invest in something new, because at some point people will get tired of WOW.
Is anyone even selling 2GB DDR2-800 DIMMs yet?
Unlikely. The usually well sorted shop at alternate.de lists only one non-registered 2 GByte DDR2 module:
The MDT DIMM 2 GB DDR2-533. As the name says, it is only DDR2-533
4x4 is AMD's short-term approach to put something together that can compete with a Core 2 Duo. Essentially, it is a version of their Opterons aimed at desktop users.
Some time in 2007, they plan to release genuine quad cores (4 cores on one chip), hopefully on AM2 too. Then you should be able to upgrade that board.
Most Athlon 64 mainboards support (unbuffered) ECC as well, I have seen consumer boards for less than 100 Euros that do. So the Quad father might support ECC too.
b ig_4x4mobo.png&articleid=891&t=a
OTOH, you will be limited to a smaller max. amount of RAM. If you follow the links in TFA
http://www.hothardware.com/image_popup.cfm?image=
you will see a mainboard with only four memory slots. The biggest unbuffered DDR2 ECC module I can find is the MDT DIMM 2 GB DDR2-533. That makes a maximum of 8GBytes.
For socket 940 or socket F there are plenty of two-processor boards that support 16 Gbyte (four memory slots for each CPU slot).
Actually it is mostly the fault of the GUIs. Linux in text mode is pretty lean and quick to boot. But so is XP Embedded in a minimal configuration. But as soon as the Windows Explorer or KDE enter the picture, things slow down. Massively.