You must be aware that your definition of "life" is clearly different from the Wii's target demographic. You played 115h of FFXII; as you remarked in another post, you finished FFXII in a month.
Having a "life" is a subjective thing; if you feel that your October was spent in a way that you find fulfilling, awesome. I wish I could do that!
The most important advantage we're hoping to get out of OpenAjax is JavaScript namespacing. Prototype, Dojo and others will all too happily clobber each other's functions and objects, rendering them useless when used together. A consistent naming standard is one of the most immediate tangible benefits of the alliance.
The magic happens on Slide 35, where he argues against the "myth" that commoditization will destroy all profits in the open source software market. (This is related to the more general argument that OSS vendors are trading on nothing but fad in a bubble, that will eventually burst once people figure out that this stuff is available for Free and that there is no barrier to entry in this market.)
Specifically, he claims that the open source software marketplace is unlike a generic commodity marketplace and more like the proprietary enterprise software marketplace... but half of the six points on that slide (4, 5 and 6) amount to nothing more than the argument that, if the OSS market were a commodity market, firms wouldn't be making any money, would they? A circular argument if I ever heard one.
His only substantive point is the first bullet on that slide, where he notes that in a generic commodity marketplace, there are "no switching costs to buy from a different producer," but in the OSS marketplace, "customers are loyal to incumbent distribution vendors."
On Slide 39, he explains this behavior: the OSS market "exhibits aspects of a branded consumer luxury good," much like the consumer market for "perfume" or "mineral water," even though "they can't pass a blind taste test half the time."
That's reassuring. For a minute, I thought this whole OSS market was a fad built on hype. But now that I know that people are buying Red Hat like a fashion accessory, now I get it. Where do I sign up to invest?
P.S. The OSS community/software has nothing to lose from a growing/bursting OSS market bubble and everything to gain. The end result will be better software for you and me... and smarting investors.
Uh, I'm going to guess that list is incomplete. If that list is correct, there will be no CompUSA stores in all of Southern California; specifically, no stores in the greater Los Angeles area. There are currently more than a dozen CompUSA stores in Los Angeles.
(That list shows only 8 CA locations, none of which are further south than Santa Barbara.)
I also have a PS3. I haven't gotten a game for it yet, because none of them look interesting. [...] Since I'm interested in playing games, not watching photorealistic cut scenes, playing movies, or otherwise doing things which are not "playing games", the Wii is by far the best of the current options.
This is so outlandish I fear you must be some sort of troll (and if so, congratulations, you got me).
What sort of idiot would spend $600 on a console and never use it? Did you even open the box? I could understand not buying any games if you wanted to use it to watch Bluray movies with it or something, but since you apparently have no intention of doing either, I have to assume that either you're a moron, or you're so rich that you can afford to just throw away $600. (Or both... I can't rule that out!)
apt-get could help me download and install my purchased proprietary DVD player if there were a US-legal Linux DVD player available to acquire using apt-get. But there isn't one. You can get one from Linspire using CNR, or you can switch distros to TurboLinux FUJI and get one that way. As far as I know, those are your options for US-legal DVD players on Linux.
As a smaller but not insignificant point, using apt-get I can't use the same GUI tool to purchase the software and install it like I can with CNR. (Think iTunes, which can both purchase and play music.)
apt-get won't let you purchase, download, and install a US-legal DVD player, legal MP3 player, legal Windows Media Player, and so on. Linspire has paid royalties to the owners of these technologies so you can legally use CNR to install this proprietary software on Linux. You can also use it to purchase/download/install other Crossover/Cedega/Win32 software like World of Warcraft, Quicken, etc.
Sure, you can use EasyUbuntu and get a lot of that stuff illegally for free, but because CNR is legal, it's actually feasible to sell a consumer desktop with, say, Ubuntu + CNR pre-installed. You can't sell EasyUbuntu in the United States (or most EU countries) without expecting a serious lawsuit.
Weaknesses? Absolutely. You can't download songs directly onto it from the iTunes store, you have to export them from a computer. And even though it's got WiFi and Bluetooth on it, you can't sync iPhone with a computer wirelessly. And there should be games on it. And you're required to use it as a phone--you can't use it without signing up for cellular service. Boo.
Wiicade is well worth the price of admission. They have a collection of Wii-oriented Flash games you can play using the Wiimote. Tactical Assassin is the best.
approach to fighting spam. 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 state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it (x) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP (x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers 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 ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) 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 ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) 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:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) 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!
As I've remarked before, the really exciting thing about the inclusion of Opera in the Wii is that it includes Flash support. That means that you can use the Wiimote to play mouse-only Flash games.
Opera is already installed on every Wii (it's used to power the Wii Shop Channel), but to access other websites you have to use DNS redirection hacks... On Friday you'll be able to use it freely. Meanwhile, wiicade.com is a website dedicated to developing/promoting Flash games explicitly designed to be played on the Wii.
Is this just the same thing as STUN (Simple Traversal of UDP through NATs)? The technique described in the article sounds simpler than STUN, but similar in concept. (SIP uses STUN, right?)
I've also heard that what Skype does is somehow better than STUN, though it's hard to see how. Can anybody confirm/deny/explain that?
Hmm, thought I'd hit submit, but the post disappeared.
Aaanyway. Nintendo has done you one better by providing Flash support in the Opera browser included in every Wii. That means that you can play games developed in Flash on your Wii using the Wiimote.
Opera is already installed on every Wii (it's used to power the Wii Shop Channel), but to access other websites you have to use DNS redirection hacks... Once Opera is properly "released" you'll be able to use it freely. Meanwhile, wiicade.com is a website dedicated to developing/promoting Flash games explicitly designed to be played on the Wii.
Lots of people have already given you some great advice, especially downloading small-to-medium sized OSS projects (and then later a larger one) and examining their source.
I would explicitly add that you should watch how those programs behave under a debugger, to see what they're really doing at runtime. In my experience, even relatively terrifying programs can become comprehensible in a very short amount of time using this technique.
If this is a move against VMWare, the joke's on Microsoft. You can convert VirtualPC images to VMWare images using the VMWare Virtual Machine Importer, which is a free download.
So don't upgrade major versions. [...] Something breaking between 1.x and 2.x is expected.
You and I have come to expect that, because we're used to it. But that's not the way it has to be; Microsoft has billions of dollars and enormous market share because they don't break backwards compatibility, even with major releases. (If they did, nobody would upgrade, just as you say.)
I'm assuming (for this discussion) that you actually want to run Linux/OSX in the first place. [After all, you could just use that Windows license and run Windows (e.g. in dual boot); for running Windows applications, that works pretty well!:-)]
With that said, if you are going to run Linux, the biggest advantages of CrossOver/Wine are:
1) 3D Gaming: Xen/VMWare don't support 3D graphics hardware. (The latest version of VMWare has an unsupported switch you can turn on, but it doesn't work too well.) If you want to use your fancy 3D graphics card in your Windows games under Linux, you'll need CrossOver or Wine or something like it.
2) Performance: CrossOver doesn't emulate or virtualize anything... as a native implementation of the Win32 API, it performs at native speeds. (In some cases, it actually performs faster than real Windows.) This is especially important for gaming, but other applications can also benefit.
3) No boot times (I guess this is just another aspect of performance)
4) You don't have to waste time transferring files from your VM to your real box; one filesystem means the files are right there on your hard drive.
That's the gist of it. Crossover lists out their key differentiators in a much longer table that basically says the same thing.
I see the thread. It seems like you're suggesting that someone who thinks he has fair use rights has no idea what he's talking about. (That seemed to be the gist of your point about metaphysical rights to produce additional copies.)
Does this guy (or any of us!) have any fair use rights (including the right to produce private additional copies) at all, in your view?
Slashdot Mirror
You must be aware that your definition of "life" is clearly different from the Wii's target demographic. You played 115h of FFXII; as you remarked in another post, you finished FFXII in a month.
Having a "life" is a subjective thing; if you feel that your October was spent in a way that you find fulfilling, awesome. I wish I could do that!
PDF doesn't always cut it as one often uses animations.
Sadly, and disturbingly, PDF files can do animations.
Link?
So what's "GTS"?
Hopefully, that means no one will be foolish enough to pay to use it.
The most important advantage we're hoping to get out of OpenAjax is JavaScript namespacing. Prototype, Dojo and others will all too happily clobber each other's functions and objects, rendering them useless when used together. A consistent naming standard is one of the most immediate tangible benefits of the alliance.
The magic happens on Slide 35, where he argues against the "myth" that commoditization will destroy all profits in the open source software market. (This is related to the more general argument that OSS vendors are trading on nothing but fad in a bubble, that will eventually burst once people figure out that this stuff is available for Free and that there is no barrier to entry in this market.)
Specifically, he claims that the open source software marketplace is unlike a generic commodity marketplace and more like the proprietary enterprise software marketplace... but half of the six points on that slide (4, 5 and 6) amount to nothing more than the argument that, if the OSS market were a commodity market, firms wouldn't be making any money, would they? A circular argument if I ever heard one.
His only substantive point is the first bullet on that slide, where he notes that in a generic commodity marketplace, there are "no switching costs to buy from a different producer," but in the OSS marketplace, "customers are loyal to incumbent distribution vendors."
On Slide 39, he explains this behavior: the OSS market "exhibits aspects of a branded consumer luxury good," much like the consumer market for "perfume" or "mineral water," even though "they can't pass a blind taste test half the time."
That's reassuring. For a minute, I thought this whole OSS market was a fad built on hype. But now that I know that people are buying Red Hat like a fashion accessory, now I get it. Where do I sign up to invest?
P.S. The OSS community/software has nothing to lose from a growing/bursting OSS market bubble and everything to gain. The end result will be better software for you and me... and smarting investors.
The FCC won't release cell carrier reliability data, remember?
Uh, I'm going to guess that list is incomplete. If that list is correct, there will be no CompUSA stores in all of Southern California; specifically, no stores in the greater Los Angeles area. There are currently more than a dozen CompUSA stores in Los Angeles.
(That list shows only 8 CA locations, none of which are further south than Santa Barbara.)
This is so outlandish I fear you must be some sort of troll (and if so, congratulations, you got me).
What sort of idiot would spend $600 on a console and never use it? Did you even open the box? I could understand not buying any games if you wanted to use it to watch Bluray movies with it or something, but since you apparently have no intention of doing either, I have to assume that either you're a moron, or you're so rich that you can afford to just throw away $600. (Or both... I can't rule that out!)
apt-get could help me download and install my purchased proprietary DVD player if there were a US-legal Linux DVD player available to acquire using apt-get. But there isn't one. You can get one from Linspire using CNR, or you can switch distros to TurboLinux FUJI and get one that way. As far as I know, those are your options for US-legal DVD players on Linux.
As a smaller but not insignificant point, using apt-get I can't use the same GUI tool to purchase the software and install it like I can with CNR. (Think iTunes, which can both purchase and play music.)
apt-get won't let you purchase, download, and install a US-legal DVD player, legal MP3 player, legal Windows Media Player, and so on. Linspire has paid royalties to the owners of these technologies so you can legally use CNR to install this proprietary software on Linux. You can also use it to purchase/download/install other Crossover/Cedega/Win32 software like World of Warcraft, Quicken, etc.
Sure, you can use EasyUbuntu and get a lot of that stuff illegally for free, but because CNR is legal, it's actually feasible to sell a consumer desktop with, say, Ubuntu + CNR pre-installed. You can't sell EasyUbuntu in the United States (or most EU countries) without expecting a serious lawsuit.
Well, more than "works with a mouse", they require only a mouse, and are formatted specifically to fit the Wii's screen dimensions.
Wiicade is well worth the price of admission. They have a collection of Wii-oriented Flash games you can play using the Wiimote. Tactical Assassin is the best.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. 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 state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers 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
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) 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
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) 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:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) 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!
As I've remarked before, the really exciting thing about the inclusion of Opera in the Wii is that it includes Flash support. That means that you can use the Wiimote to play mouse-only Flash games.
Opera is already installed on every Wii (it's used to power the Wii Shop Channel), but to access other websites you have to use DNS redirection hacks... On Friday you'll be able to use it freely. Meanwhile, wiicade.com is a website dedicated to developing/promoting Flash games explicitly designed to be played on the Wii.
Is this just the same thing as STUN (Simple Traversal of UDP through NATs)? The technique described in the article sounds simpler than STUN, but similar in concept. (SIP uses STUN, right?)
I've also heard that what Skype does is somehow better than STUN, though it's hard to see how. Can anybody confirm/deny/explain that?
Hmm, thought I'd hit submit, but the post disappeared.
Aaanyway. Nintendo has done you one better by providing Flash support in the Opera browser included in every Wii. That means that you can play games developed in Flash on your Wii using the Wiimote.
Opera is already installed on every Wii (it's used to power the Wii Shop Channel), but to access other websites you have to use DNS redirection hacks... Once Opera is properly "released" you'll be able to use it freely. Meanwhile, wiicade.com is a website dedicated to developing/promoting Flash games explicitly designed to be played on the Wii.
Lots of people have already given you some great advice, especially downloading small-to-medium sized OSS projects (and then later a larger one) and examining their source.
I would explicitly add that you should watch how those programs behave under a debugger, to see what they're really doing at runtime. In my experience, even relatively terrifying programs can become comprehensible in a very short amount of time using this technique.
If this is a move against VMWare, the joke's on Microsoft. You can convert VirtualPC images to VMWare images using the VMWare Virtual Machine Importer, which is a free download.
I'm assuming (for this discussion) that you actually want to run Linux/OSX in the first place. [After all, you could just use that Windows license and run Windows (e.g. in dual boot); for running Windows applications, that works pretty well! :-)]
With that said, if you are going to run Linux, the biggest advantages of CrossOver/Wine are:
1) 3D Gaming: Xen/VMWare don't support 3D graphics hardware. (The latest version of VMWare has an unsupported switch you can turn on, but it doesn't work too well.) If you want to use your fancy 3D graphics card in your Windows games under Linux, you'll need CrossOver or Wine or something like it.
2) Performance: CrossOver doesn't emulate or virtualize anything... as a native implementation of the Win32 API, it performs at native speeds. (In some cases, it actually performs faster than real Windows.) This is especially important for gaming, but other applications can also benefit.
3) No boot times (I guess this is just another aspect of performance)
4) You don't have to waste time transferring files from your VM to your real box; one filesystem means the files are right there on your hard drive.
That's the gist of it. Crossover lists out their key differentiators in a much longer table that basically says the same thing.
I see the thread. It seems like you're suggesting that someone who thinks he has fair use rights has no idea what he's talking about. (That seemed to be the gist of your point about metaphysical rights to produce additional copies.)
Does this guy (or any of us!) have any fair use rights (including the right to produce private additional copies) at all, in your view?