Consider using "distributed" source control in a centralized way. Nobody says you have to use the distributed features just because they're available to you.
The problem here is that all the smart guys in open source thinking about source control are out trying to solve the "distributed" problem; none of them have brain cycles to spare for centralized SCM, which is a shame, because it means that no centralized open source SCM has reasonable merge support.:-(
You may also find that the large changing binary files may not be a big deal for git. git's compression mechanism is (basically) to make a big enormous tar of all versions of the file and compress the whole thing at once. zlib can compress anything that's similar, even binary files, even without considering anything semantic about the files in question. Similar images, similar movies, etc. all compress nicely.
I know I'm not answering your question, but you may be asking the wrong question. Subversion 1.5 "has" merge support, but you still can't do safe bi-directional merges. (Wherein you make a feature branch "foo", merge from trunk to foo, foo to trunk, trunk to foo, foo to trunk, etc.)
Also, you can't safely merge from branch to branch (merging from "foo" to your production "2.x" branch, without passing through trunk).
Unfortunately, if you want real merges in an open source project, you're stuck with the distributed source control systems like git, mercurial, darcs, etc. even if you don't need distributed features.
But you may come to like distributed source control (many people do)... they have tools like "ticgit" that you may like better than some of the other svn-based tools out there.
I've never know invalid HTML to crash IE. I don't think I've ever know IE to take any notice of the code at all. From what I've seen, it downloads the page, strips the code, and then throws whatever is left at the screen...
Hate to break it to you buddy, but Verizon doesn't have a network that's compatible with 3G phones. Until Verizon modernizes their network, GSM phones aren't an option no matter who the provider of the phone is or what their restrictions are.
Verizon has a CDMA network, not a GSM network; they've had 3G EV-DO for ages now. (I, however, enjoy breaking it to you, because you're not my "buddy.")
"Users Know Advertisers Watch Them, and Hate It"... just not enough to do anything about it.
It turns out that users like free/cheap stuff a lot more than they hate advertising or "behavioral targeting." People clicking on ads is a big part of the reason why we don't have to pay anything for Slashdot.
1) All too frequently I see people mis-using the forms, especially by checking boxes that make no sense.
You call out "the police wouldn't put up with it" as a good example. Normally that box is checked together with "vigilante" approaches; the police won't just let you get away with vigilantism because you're going after "criminals." In this case, however, I think the police seriously wouldn't put up with a second Internet, if only because the quality would be so terrible, and because police in foreign governments are frequently highly corrupt, paid off by organized crime to look the other way. Are they really going to put up with a second Internet, this time more transparent?
2) Does this really further the discussion? Yes and no, mostly yes. Certainly the person who is the victim of these form responses usually just looks stupid, and that's frequently the whole purpose of the form. On/. in particular, you don't really expect the original poster (Dempsey, in this case) to read the form response (or any response!).
However, I think that these forms (the spam form in particular) do promote the discussion by encouraging people to really think about the problem. It's hard, if not impossible, to come up with a solution that nobody has usefully thought of before! If you think you've got a good new idea, you should at least do the minimum of research to see if it's been tried before and/or whether there's something obviously wrong with it.
approach to fighting international "cybercrime." Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from nation to nation.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) legitimate Internet uses would be affected (x) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) it will protect us for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) users of the Internet will not put up with it (x) microsoft will not put up with it (x) the police will not put up with it (x) requires too much cooperation from criminals (x) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) laws expressly prohibiting it (x) lack of centrally controlling authority for the Internet (x) open relays in foreign countries ( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) asshats (x) jurisdictional problems ( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) huge existing software investment in the Internet (x) willingness of users to install os patches received by email (x) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes ( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) extreme profitability of international crime (x) joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) technically illiterate politicians ( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with criminals (x) dishonesty on the part of criminals themselves ( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable (x) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) blacklists suck (x) whitelists suck ( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored ( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (x) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) sending email should be free (x) why should we have to trust you and your servers? (x) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome (x) i don't want the government reading my email ( ) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
( ) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work. (x) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
All of the US cellular providers charge not just per message sent, but per message received. Using an SMS e-mail gateway may save you sending fees, but it won't save you on the receiving cost.
Any tips on how to request to be on the list of layoffs (to get the severance)?
Ask your manager nicely. I'm serious!
I was at Plumtree when BEA acquired us (now it's the "Business Interaction Division" making the ALUI products) and a number of people said to their managers "BEA isn't the place for me" and walked away pretty happy.
The joke was always that BEA stands for "Built Entirely on Acquisitions"... they seemed to know how to handle themselves when acquiring. Here's hoping they'll handle themselves gracefully as they're being acquired.
I am so "deluded." 2E and 3E have dozens modifiers available to every roll, especially when magic is involved. The magic systems for both games are incredibly complex; as I said, they take up half the rule book. And yet 3E's rules are still more balanced than 2E's ridiculousness; you can point and laugh at 3E's complexities, but for every one of 3E's, I can counter with a dozen 2E weirdnesses and flat-out broken rules.
For example, you bring up ethereal ACs. 2E has several published rules about this that contradict each other. Simple as pie, don't you think?
As for saves: again, every roll has modifiers available in D&D. This is why girls don't want to play with us. 3E is still simpler than 2E on that count. 2E had modifiers available for all 5 of the rolls. Did they stack or didn't they? Save vs spell? Paralyzation? Death magic? "Is that mind-affecting?"
You bring up mind control rolls. Played a wizard against a 2E Psionic lately?
2E's "nothing at all" is not the rule. Check your wilderness survival guide. (You do have a copy, don't you?)
I bought the Player's Handbook from the third edition, read the first thirty pages and went "bleh".
Oops! Maybe you should have looked at the book before you bought it. Or just downloaded the D20 SRD online for free!
Please mod parent down to +4 so we don't have to waste a valuable slot on this uninformed question. You freely admit that you've never read the book.
FYI, 3E is not without its flaws (it's still D&D) but it is way simpler than what came before. Getting rid of THAC0 alone is a huge help, and that's before you consider simplified saving throws (or do you want to remember your saves for PPD, PP, RSW, BW and Spells separately?), attacks of opportunity, etc.
80% of my players only own the PHB, and non-spellcasters don't even need to read the second half of the book, which is all spells. That's better than GURPS, which puts all of its character creation rules in the Characters book and all of the rules for playing the game in the Campaigns book (including the combat rules)!
Mouse movements and keystroke latency are OK for consumer grade encryption keys (though, note that they are normally just a seed for a pseudo-randomizer) you can't really use them on headless servers, which is where most of the important (i.e. high financial value) encryption takes place.
What I'm curious about is what they would do if you went to them and said "I have a game, I would like you to sell it, we've been doing advertising and it should sell quite a bit, we can't afford to pay you for placement but we'll sell the actual copies to you for $15 less so you can actually make a profit on it". Would they give some of that front-and-center space over to it in the hopes of selling more, or would they just relegate it to the back shelves because it's not paying the bucks?
No; consider the question you're asking. Right now, EB/GS get paid for product placement. That money is 100% certain to materialize regardless of the quality of the game. If Sony pays big bucks to get excellent placement for Lair, and then Lair tanks, EB/GS still get paid for giving it lots of shelf space.
What you're asking is: Could I get product placement ("some of that front-and-center space") by giving EB/GS a larger cut of the revenue of the game? Revenues are risky; if your game is a flop, EB/GS will get a large cut of peanuts! So you're asking EB/GS to accept more risk in exchange for (potentially) greater reward.
If your game is a guaranteed success (not a guaranteed "hit," necessarily, but enough to pay for its costs and then some), then you can certainly afford to pay EB/GS for regular product placement, if only by getting investors to fund your advertising budget (which is where product placement is normally charged). If you have reason to believe that the game will sell well, that's exactly what you should do.
If you don't have reason to believe that the game will sell, then neither does EB/GS. In that case, they would get a larger payout only if your game sells more than expected; ideally, your expectations are spot on, so unexpected successes are supposed to be unlikely. That deal is not in their favor.
Great link! For those who don't want to click through to the Google Help link:
How do actions sync in IMAP? Your IMAP client will show all of your default Gmail views under a special [Gmail] folder hierarchy. Here's a guide to how other actions in your IMAP client will appear in your Gmail account.
Action on mobile device/client (e.g. iPhone/Outlook): Result in Gmail on the web
Open a message: Mark a message as read Flag a message: Apply a star to the message Move a message to a folder: Apply a label to the message Move a message to a folder within a folder*: Apply a label showing folder hierarchy ('MainFolder/SubFolder')* Create a folder: Create a label Move a message to [Gmail]/Spam: Report a message as spam Move a message to [Gmail]/Trash: Move a message to Trash Send a message: Store message in Sent Mail Delete a message: Remove label from the message, or delete the message permanently if the message is already in the Spam or Trash label
*IMAP translates labels with a forward slash (/) into a folder hierarchy like you see in your computer's file system. If you have a label such as 'Family/Friends,' you may want to reconsider your naming schemes because your IMAP client will display it as a folder named 'Family' with a subfolder named 'Friends.'
Can anyone point to one or more big cases where the DMCA helped and the person/people wronged would have been without recourse before the DMCA that aren't abuses?
It's important in cases like these to differentiate between the DMCA's take-down/"safe harbor" rules and the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision.
The take-down rules probably ARE a reasonable balance between copyright holders and ordinary joes; certainly that's YouTube's position. Under the DMCA take-down rules, YouTube can't be sued for hosting illegal material, but rather the copyright holder (e.g. Viacom) has to send take-down letters specifying exact material to be removed. Users get notified that their material is taken down, and are allowed to send counterclaims to defend themselves./. posted a story about this working earlier this week: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/13/2028206.
It's not at all clear what would have happened in that case without the DMCA; the DMCA came into existence partly to make it clear/formal what should happen when people violate copyright online. In a material sense, I don't think YouTube could exist unless the DMCA existed, in the sense that I don't think they'd have big investors (e.g. Google) willing to risk their money without the DMCA's safe harbor provisions. (Without the DMCA, YouTube could argue in court that they ought to be treated as a safe harbor, but they'd be on considerably shakier grounds.)
The anti-circumvention provision is the one that totally sucks. That's the provision that says that you aren't allowed to develop and distribute tools to circumvent DRM. (It's also the one that impacts researchers the most.) The point of that provision is simply to discourage people from developing and distributing DRM cracks. Since it's supposed to act as a disincentive, you wouldn't expect to find a big public "example" of it working; you'd expect fewer cracks to be developed and for those cracks to be criminally penalized when they are made available.
private Label l;
private Window w;
private boolean running;
private Runnable toFront;
private int clicks;
private String messages[] = { /* 56*/ "Scary, uh?", "So you want me to go away...", "You know I don't have to, but...", "I'll be nice, just click me one more time:)"
};
}
This post has too few characters per line. I agree that setAlwaysOnTop is clearly the worst offender here. I don't think it's a good idea to restrict the size of applets to "significantly less than screen size"; there are useful full-window-sized applets. Breaking the browser chrome is the real problem here; the applet when enlarged should be a really large object *within* the web page, not beyond its boundary. Note that the LiveConnect "pure JS" version is much more easily closed (at least in FF2.0) than the compiled Java class, partly because the LiveConnect version doesn't use setAlwaysOnTop. Still too few? What more can I possibly say? Let's run "fortune," shall we? "At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer."
Several highly moderated folks have said this is a bad idea. But it's not a bad idea to check for biometric data like faces, fingerprints, etc. It's a bad idea to use those instead of passwords, rather than in addition to passwords.
I think it was Bruce Schneier who grouped authentication mechanisms into three kinds: something you have (like a physical key or device), something you are (like your retinal pattern) and something you know (like a password). You can great security by combining these mechanisms; requiring both a PIN and a facial recognition scheme. If you use all three, you can even conveniently replace keys when they get lost (so long as the user knows his password and passes biometrics) or replace passwords when they're forgotten (so long as the user has her physical object and passes biometrics).
The most prominent feature I noticed in Word 2003 is the "Reading Layout"; it reflows the document into "screens" as opposed to pages, and makes it easy to page through the document just by hitting space. Word and Excel both got side-by-side document comparison (diff). Outlook got "Search Folders" which dynamically update their contents based on search criteria, as well as "Cached" mode, which makes Outlook actually work without locking up when your connection to Exchange goes wonky. Worth paying for? Probably not, but I didn't pay for them, and they certainly made my life better.
As for Office 2007, someone else already mentioned Outlook 2007's To-Do list for flagged items. All of the products can now save as PDF. The Word font/style changer does this handy live-preview thing so you can see exactly what your document will look like before you select a font/style. Excel now goes up to 1M rows [a dangerous feature if I ever heard one;-)]. And then there's that Ribbon thing. I've used it, and I can find obscure features way more easily... YMMV. I do know that MS kept having focus groups with Office users, asking users what new features they wanted... people kept asking for features that Office already had. Frankly, I learned a lot about Office 2003 just playing around with Office 2007.
Anyway, I think you knew there had to be new features, and I'm not saying these make Office 2003/2007 worth paying for, but there are definitely new features in there of non-zero value.
Second: that the search box does not show Google results even when MS search is turned off. (It reverts to an XP-like slow search instead.)
No shit. I would expect MS results if I'm using MS's search program. If I wanted to use GDS I would use Google's program.
Internet Explorer 7 already supports using Google as the search engine for its search box; it's not so weird to think that regular Explorer would allow you to swap in other search engines as well. More to the point, it's not too much to expect for MS to make it an option.
I actually read TFA. Microsoft is cheerfully threatening the spirit of Free Software: individuals freely contributing code to a shared project.
However, Microsoft's point here is that they're happy to make patent licensing agreements (like the Novell deal) with open source software vendors. Remember, MS has stated publicly that they're happy to make the Novell deal with Red Hat, Canonical, etc.
If you're MS, and your goal is to make more Novell deals, then it makes perfect sense to make noise about your patents.
Unfortunately, DTDs aren't just for validation... they're also the only good way to define "entities" (e.g. "&foo;") in XML. This comes up a lot when trying to put HTML in XML feeds, because HTML has a lot of entities that aren't in the XML spec. Specifically, you may notice that you can't type " " in ordinary XML.
It's trivial to define " " yourself in a DTD, (<!ENTITY nbsp "&#a0;">) and many of the standard DTDs out there do define it, but by the XML 1.0 standard it's got to be defined somewhere or else the XML won't parse.
When you read LotR it's a tale full of magic and conflict and excitement.
Wrong. When you read LotR, magic is a very rare thing. Only 6 wizards have it, and even then, they use it sparingly.
I think you have confused Middle Earth with the tale LotR, a rookie mistake for a Tolkien geek. The story has lots of magic in it. There may only be a handful of "wizards," but you meet Gandalf, Saruman, Galadriel, Bombadil and Radagast in Fellowship alone. LotR is a high magic narrative set in a low magic world... that makes it all the more important when the main characters are showered in magic bling.
As the grandparent post observed, this creates a problem for an MMO, much the same as the problem SWG had: Jedis are supposed to be rare, but everybody wants to play a Jedi. Similarly, in Middle Earth, magic is supposed to be rare and exciting, but everybody wants magic loot and a wizard in their party. They want that because that's what the story is like: they want to be in LotR, not Middle Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider using "distributed" source control in a centralized way. Nobody says you have to use the distributed features just because they're available to you.
The problem here is that all the smart guys in open source thinking about source control are out trying to solve the "distributed" problem; none of them have brain cycles to spare for centralized SCM, which is a shame, because it means that no centralized open source SCM has reasonable merge support. :-(
You may also find that the large changing binary files may not be a big deal for git. git's compression mechanism is (basically) to make a big enormous tar of all versions of the file and compress the whole thing at once. zlib can compress anything that's similar, even binary files, even without considering anything semantic about the files in question. Similar images, similar movies, etc. all compress nicely.
It works better than you'd think. ;-)
I know I'm not answering your question, but you may be asking the wrong question. Subversion 1.5 "has" merge support, but you still can't do safe bi-directional merges. (Wherein you make a feature branch "foo", merge from trunk to foo, foo to trunk, trunk to foo, foo to trunk, etc.)
Also, you can't safely merge from branch to branch (merging from "foo" to your production "2.x" branch, without passing through trunk).
Here's the designer of SVN merge support discussing the problem:
http://subversion.tigris.org/servlets/ReadMsg?listName=dev&msgNo=127570
Unfortunately, if you want real merges in an open source project, you're stuck with the distributed source control systems like git, mercurial, darcs, etc. even if you don't need distributed features.
But you may come to like distributed source control (many people do)... they have tools like "ticgit" that you may like better than some of the other svn-based tools out there.
It has been known to happen! http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885932 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811751 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913788 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909363
"Users Know Advertisers Watch Them, and Hate It" ... just not enough to do anything about it.
It turns out that users like free/cheap stuff a lot more than they hate advertising or "behavioral targeting." People clicking on ads is a big part of the reason why we don't have to pay anything for Slashdot.
Don't you just hate that?
Amazon EC2 Open To All
Amazon and Hardware As a Service
Amazon Betas 'Elastic' Grid Computing Service
I agree, on both counts.
/. in particular, you don't really expect the original poster (Dempsey, in this case) to read the form response (or any response!).
1) All too frequently I see people mis-using the forms, especially by checking boxes that make no sense.
You call out "the police wouldn't put up with it" as a good example. Normally that box is checked together with "vigilante" approaches; the police won't just let you get away with vigilantism because you're going after "criminals." In this case, however, I think the police seriously wouldn't put up with a second Internet, if only because the quality would be so terrible, and because police in foreign governments are frequently highly corrupt, paid off by organized crime to look the other way. Are they really going to put up with a second Internet, this time more transparent?
2) Does this really further the discussion? Yes and no, mostly yes. Certainly the person who is the victim of these form responses usually just looks stupid, and that's frequently the whole purpose of the form. On
However, I think that these forms (the spam form in particular) do promote the discussion by encouraging people to really think about the problem. It's hard, if not impossible, to come up with a solution that nobody has usefully thought of before! If you think you've got a good new idea, you should at least do the minimum of research to see if it's been tried before and/or whether there's something obviously wrong with it.
Rhetoric isn't always a bad thing.
so we can re-use our old forms. It's a bit surprising how effective this is.
--
Patrick J. Dempsey, your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting international "cybercrime." Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from nation to nation.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) legitimate Internet uses would be affected
(x) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) it will protect us for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) users of the Internet will not put up with it
(x) microsoft will not put up with it
(x) the police will not put up with it
(x) requires too much cooperation from criminals
(x) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) lack of centrally controlling authority for the Internet
(x) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) asshats
(x) jurisdictional problems
( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) huge existing software investment in the Internet
(x) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
(x) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) extreme profitability of international crime
(x) joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with criminals
(x) dishonesty on the part of criminals themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) blacklists suck
(x) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) sending email should be free
(x) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) i don't want the government reading my email
( ) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
( ) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
(x) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
All of the US cellular providers charge not just per message sent, but per message received. Using an SMS e-mail gateway may save you sending fees, but it won't save you on the receiving cost.
I was at Plumtree when BEA acquired us (now it's the "Business Interaction Division" making the ALUI products) and a number of people said to their managers "BEA isn't the place for me" and walked away pretty happy.
The joke was always that BEA stands for "Built Entirely on Acquisitions"
I am so "deluded." 2E and 3E have dozens modifiers available to every roll, especially when magic is involved. The magic systems for both games are incredibly complex; as I said, they take up half the rule book. And yet 3E's rules are still more balanced than 2E's ridiculousness; you can point and laugh at 3E's complexities, but for every one of 3E's, I can counter with a dozen 2E weirdnesses and flat-out broken rules.
For example, you bring up ethereal ACs. 2E has several published rules about this that contradict each other. Simple as pie, don't you think?
As for saves: again, every roll has modifiers available in D&D. This is why girls don't want to play with us. 3E is still simpler than 2E on that count. 2E had modifiers available for all 5 of the rolls. Did they stack or didn't they? Save vs spell? Paralyzation? Death magic? "Is that mind-affecting?"
You bring up mind control rolls. Played a wizard against a 2E Psionic lately?
2E's "nothing at all" is not the rule. Check your wilderness survival guide. (You do have a copy, don't you?)
Please mod parent down to +4 so we don't have to waste a valuable slot on this uninformed question. You freely admit that you've never read the book.
FYI, 3E is not without its flaws (it's still D&D) but it is way simpler than what came before. Getting rid of THAC0 alone is a huge help, and that's before you consider simplified saving throws (or do you want to remember your saves for PPD, PP, RSW, BW and Spells separately?), attacks of opportunity, etc.
80% of my players only own the PHB, and non-spellcasters don't even need to read the second half of the book, which is all spells. That's better than GURPS, which puts all of its character creation rules in the Characters book and all of the rules for playing the game in the Campaigns book (including the combat rules)!
-Dan
http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/five_in_five/010807/index.shtml
Mouse movements and keystroke latency are OK for consumer grade encryption keys (though, note that they are normally just a seed for a pseudo-randomizer) you can't really use them on headless servers, which is where most of the important (i.e. high financial value) encryption takes place.
What you're asking is: Could I get product placement ("some of that front-and-center space") by giving EB/GS a larger cut of the revenue of the game? Revenues are risky; if your game is a flop, EB/GS will get a large cut of peanuts! So you're asking EB/GS to accept more risk in exchange for (potentially) greater reward.
If your game is a guaranteed success (not a guaranteed "hit," necessarily, but enough to pay for its costs and then some), then you can certainly afford to pay EB/GS for regular product placement, if only by getting investors to fund your advertising budget (which is where product placement is normally charged). If you have reason to believe that the game will sell well, that's exactly what you should do.
If you don't have reason to believe that the game will sell, then neither does EB/GS. In that case, they would get a larger payout only if your game sells more than expected; ideally, your expectations are spot on, so unexpected successes are supposed to be unlikely. That deal is not in their favor.
Great link! For those who don't want to click through to the Google Help link:
How do actions sync in IMAP?
Your IMAP client will show all of your default Gmail views under a special [Gmail] folder hierarchy. Here's a guide to how other actions in your IMAP client will appear in your Gmail account.
Action on mobile device/client (e.g. iPhone/Outlook): Result in Gmail on the web
Open a message: Mark a message as read
Flag a message: Apply a star to the message
Move a message to a folder: Apply a label to the message
Move a message to a folder within a folder*: Apply a label showing folder hierarchy ('MainFolder/SubFolder')*
Create a folder: Create a label
Move a message to [Gmail]/Spam: Report a message as spam
Move a message to [Gmail]/Trash: Move a message to Trash
Send a message: Store message in Sent Mail
Delete a message: Remove label from the message, or delete the message permanently if the message is already in the Spam or Trash label
*IMAP translates labels with a forward slash (/) into a folder hierarchy like you see in your computer's file system. If you have a label such as 'Family/Friends,' you may want to reconsider your naming schemes because your IMAP client will display it as a folder named 'Family' with a subfolder named 'Friends.'
Like the game says: What if you could live your life over again?
;-)
If you make it all the way to the end of this game and you don't feel anything, you're not really a human being.
(Full disclaimer: I ported AE to the web from the Commodore 64.)
It's important in cases like these to differentiate between the DMCA's take-down/"safe harbor" rules and the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision.
The take-down rules probably ARE a reasonable balance between copyright holders and ordinary joes; certainly that's YouTube's position. Under the DMCA take-down rules, YouTube can't be sued for hosting illegal material, but rather the copyright holder (e.g. Viacom) has to send take-down letters specifying exact material to be removed. Users get notified that their material is taken down, and are allowed to send counterclaims to defend themselves.
It's not at all clear what would have happened in that case without the DMCA; the DMCA came into existence partly to make it clear/formal what should happen when people violate copyright online. In a material sense, I don't think YouTube could exist unless the DMCA existed, in the sense that I don't think they'd have big investors (e.g. Google) willing to risk their money without the DMCA's safe harbor provisions. (Without the DMCA, YouTube could argue in court that they ought to be treated as a safe harbor, but they'd be on considerably shakier grounds.)
The anti-circumvention provision is the one that totally sucks. That's the provision that says that you aren't allowed to develop and distribute tools to circumvent DRM. (It's also the one that impacts researchers the most.) The point of that provision is simply to discourage people from developing and distributing DRM cracks. Since it's supposed to act as a disincentive, you wouldn't expect to find a big public "example" of it working; you'd expect fewer cracks to be developed and for those cracks to be criminally penalized when they are made available.
Several highly moderated folks have said this is a bad idea. But it's not a bad idea to check for biometric data like faces, fingerprints, etc. It's a bad idea to use those instead of passwords, rather than in addition to passwords.
I think it was Bruce Schneier who grouped authentication mechanisms into three kinds: something you have (like a physical key or device), something you are (like your retinal pattern) and something you know (like a password). You can great security by combining these mechanisms; requiring both a PIN and a facial recognition scheme. If you use all three, you can even conveniently replace keys when they get lost (so long as the user knows his password and passes biometrics) or replace passwords when they're forgotten (so long as the user has her physical object and passes biometrics).
The most prominent feature I noticed in Word 2003 is the "Reading Layout"; it reflows the document into "screens" as opposed to pages, and makes it easy to page through the document just by hitting space. Word and Excel both got side-by-side document comparison (diff). Outlook got "Search Folders" which dynamically update their contents based on search criteria, as well as "Cached" mode, which makes Outlook actually work without locking up when your connection to Exchange goes wonky. Worth paying for? Probably not, but I didn't pay for them, and they certainly made my life better.
;-)]. And then there's that Ribbon thing. I've used it, and I can find obscure features way more easily... YMMV. I do know that MS kept having focus groups with Office users, asking users what new features they wanted... people kept asking for features that Office already had. Frankly, I learned a lot about Office 2003 just playing around with Office 2007.
As for Office 2007, someone else already mentioned Outlook 2007's To-Do list for flagged items. All of the products can now save as PDF. The Word font/style changer does this handy live-preview thing so you can see exactly what your document will look like before you select a font/style. Excel now goes up to 1M rows [a dangerous feature if I ever heard one
Anyway, I think you knew there had to be new features, and I'm not saying these make Office 2003/2007 worth paying for, but there are definitely new features in there of non-zero value.
I actually read TFA. Microsoft is cheerfully threatening the spirit of Free Software: individuals freely contributing code to a shared project.
However, Microsoft's point here is that they're happy to make patent licensing agreements (like the Novell deal) with open source software vendors. Remember, MS has stated publicly that they're happy to make the Novell deal with Red Hat, Canonical, etc.
If you're MS, and your goal is to make more Novell deals, then it makes perfect sense to make noise about your patents.
Unfortunately, DTDs aren't just for validation... they're also the only good way to define "entities" (e.g. "&foo;") in XML. This comes up a lot when trying to put HTML in XML feeds, because HTML has a lot of entities that aren't in the XML spec. Specifically, you may notice that you can't type " " in ordinary XML.
It's trivial to define " " yourself in a DTD, (<!ENTITY nbsp "&#a0;">) and many of the standard DTDs out there do define it, but by the XML 1.0 standard it's got to be defined somewhere or else the XML won't parse.
As the grandparent post observed, this creates a problem for an MMO, much the same as the problem SWG had: Jedis are supposed to be rare, but everybody wants to play a Jedi. Similarly, in Middle Earth, magic is supposed to be rare and exciting, but everybody wants magic loot and a wizard in their party. They want that because that's what the story is like: they want to be in LotR, not Middle Earth.