Between the PS4 and Xbone, both of which can stream and upload to twitch, that's probably at least a million content producers out there. And that doesn't include all the content producers twitch had to band for non-gaming-related content.
What will likely happen is a lot of that migrates to YouTube - so all those PS4 sex shows that were on twitch will just be on YouTube instead (since the PS4 doesn't, at least I don't think, support YouTube yet for content producers. You can watch YouTube videos, but you can't record with the PS4 and upload to YouTube. Though maybe the last update solved that).
And gamers will seek gamer content - if you're on the PS4 or Xbone, switching to YouTube to figure out how to defeat that boss is par for the course. In other words, there's a guaranteed audience looking for guaranteed content.
Hell, I'd like to watch twitch, but the 30 second beer commercials every 30 seconds got tiresome fast. (Especially for crap mass-produced American beer, and I don't drink, so it was wasted advertising money).
Which is why all the music I buy these days is so heavily encumbered with DRM. Despite the shrill protests of the public, the only way to get the content was to accept DRM on my music files.
Oh wait, no, I don't.
[...]
Firefox had an opportunity to be an Apple here; they could have helped redirect the market into a new direction. Instead they caved into prophetic bullshit about declining marketshare and now all its users suffer for their shortsightedness. Mozilla could have said to big media, "this is a shit idea" and rather than sacrifice that huge potential audience the media conglomerates would have found a more favorable alternative.
Apple had a near-monopoly on digital music sales. They had the clout to force the music industry to accept their terms. In fact, that clout was what got the music industry to give DRM-free music to Amazon. iTunes was so big, Apple was calling the shots and making demands - the music industry has long hated 99 cent songs (they wanted variable pricing) and Apple's grip on keeping things that way. And the music industry couldn't simply withdraw their music - the alternative to iTunes and its money was... piracy.
When Apple saw what Amazon was given, they made the same demands (in exchange for variable pricing - 79/99/129 cents). Hence Steve Jobs' essay on DRM and music.
But Apple had the music industry in its palm. And when Amazon was given DRM-free rights, Apple had the leverage they need to demand the same. In fact, the fact that iTunes music was locked to iPod made it all the sweeter - because it meant no OTHER music store could succeed, so the music industry was forced to allow DRM-free music so another music store could get their music loaded on the #1 player - the iPod,
It was a close call - because I suspect the music industry was hoping the DoJ would declare Apple a monopoly and thus be forced to open other DRM systems onto the iPod. Instead, they caved first.
The movie industry saw what happened to the music industry, which is why they're spreading their content around. Netflix is for DVD releases, a month later. Hulu gets up to date TV. Amazon, iTunes, etc., well, they get to rent and sell new releases. No one company will "have it all" so they won't be big enough to start making demands like Apple did. When you can get your TV from Amazon, iTunes or Hulu (with the first two offering it for sale, the latter for free streaming), movies from Amazon, Google Play and iTunes, then later on Netflix...
Sorry, but Firefox adding DRM, in whatever manner they are, is still a shift in the browser industry going forward. There isn't a mainstream browser, that I see, committed to FOSS philosophies out there anymore. I just heard about Pale Moon, but let's face it folks. Firefox, Chrome and IE are mainstream. The others are side projects. Safari, well, doesn't exist on Linux does it. Even I.E. can be shoe-horned on Linux if needed.
Point is, moving forward, there is no longer a major browser that hasn't caved to big media, and DRM. That is, in itself, a continuation of a disturbing trend we're seeing across the Internet, and computing in general. If you don't think this isn't part of that, you haven't been paying attention.
And Mozilla could be the also-ran, where the mainstream browsers are now just IE, Safari and Chrome.
All it would take is users wondering why their Netflix or Hulu doesn't work. They Google it, and see the solution would be to install Chrome, or use the browser built into their OS - IE on Windows, Safari on OS X.
Of course, Mozilla could have influenced the W3C to reject the proposal, thus rendering the web to be a app-distirbution mechanism where you'll need to Netflix app, the Hulu app, etc., to watch Netflix or Hulu on all platforms, including PC. Click "Watch" on Netflix, or YouTube and it lauches the app where you watch it, like how it works with iTunes or Steam.
Google demonstrated all that is really needed are text-only ads.That's the correct ad model, IMHO. No distracting flash, no vectors for malware, and they only take a small amount of screen space. Everything else is Doing It Wrong. Again, just my opinion, but as it turns out I'm always right:P
Given Google has a marketshare of approximately 98% of the online advertising space, that means we should be seeing text ads everywhere, right?
No, Google didn't demonstrate it. They simply cashed in on the novelty of text ads to buy up the ad networks and make more money because that's what people were paying money for. In fact, Google themselves probably is responsible for all the malware laced ads - given they own the ad networks that serve up the crap. Sure, Google wants to separate themselves away by keeping the original name rather than re-tagging them as Google (e.g., DoubleClick, a Google owned company, or AdMob, another Google owned company).
In fact, I rarely see Google ads these days - the advertising space seems to be like it was before Google Ads. Either Google isn't that good at advertising anymore, or Google realizes that Google Ads just don't rake in the money anymore - keyword targeted ads, and all their Google-owned ad networks are bringing in the real money. It's like Google Ads doesn't exist anymore.
Perhaps Google needs to screen their customers better to stop the plague of malware laced ads. They're the ones in the end serving it up, after all.
If Firefox did not support DRM directly, the content providers would offer a custom (closed source) tool that did."
So?
It's not their/job/ to do that. It's their job to make a F/OSS browser. It's in their fucking "Mozilla Manifesto"
DRM isn't Free. They have failed. And to somehow justify it by saying "someone else will do it anyway" is schoolyard "logic"/ rationalization.
The problem is - do you want Firefox to die?
The problem is the other browsers - IE, Safari, Chrome, will support this. If Firefox continued to not support it, users will migrate. Especially as most people already have IE or Safari already installed and running, and everyone keeps telling the to try Chrome (Google keeps pushing it).
End result users will switch. And they might not come back - Firefox will just be known as the "browser where nothing works".
The other problem is app-ification. "There's an app for that" - and even on the PC there are apps for Netflix and others. And the web will pretty much be an app distribution mechanism with websites asking you to install their app. For an example of this, iTunes Preview - it's just a web page that leads you to the iTunes app.
So those are the two outcomes - one where the web is turned into a "get the app" space, or Firefox becomes completely irrelevant, used by a minority who just want to be strange, while the rest of the world just uses other browser to get their stuff done.
Got important conversations to have with people? Sensitive information to convey? Do it in person. The Internet isn't safe anymore, hasn't been for a while now, and it's just likely to get worse.
The internet was NEVER safe. You could NEVER count on perfect secrecy - in fact, everything sent or received had to pass through someone else's hands.
The old adage of "never put online what you don't want the world to know" has always been true. And the "world" refers to anyone - your parents, your boss, the authorities, the government, your friends, and everyone else.
By refunding the purchase in the non-standard currency used for payment? Because even when I pay by credit card now, I am always paying using the same currency as the item is priced.
With Bitcoin, there is a conversion involved in the payment. If the item is returned but bitcoins have halved in value, will I get twice as many bitcoins back as I paid (i.e. new conversion at latest rate - most likely outcome, but I still got to launder my bitcoins into more bitcoins)? If Bitcoins have doubled in value, will I get back the same number I paid and make money on the return (i.e. reuse old rate; ripe for abuse as a way to hedge on the exchange rate for 30 days)? Or will the return be processed as cash (i.e. easy way to launder bitcoins into cash)?
Generally speaking, that's generally the case - there's a "buy" and "sell" price and they can differ.
E.g., let's say the last BTC to USD conversion was 1 BTC to USD$500. A currency converter might "buy" BTC at $450, and sell at $550. So if you buy a $450 item and pay 1 BTC, then return it, you'll get back $450/550 or approximately 0.81818182 BTC back.
Sometimes the company may cheat and limit you to refunding what it got from you - e.g., let's say it's now $250 USD for 1 BTC, and you return the item. The company may cheat and give you back your 1 BTC (and pocket the $450 the merchant returned back).
Currency conversions are horrendously messy , and generally payment processors are geared towards screwing you over. The merchant doesn't see any of this since as far as they're concerned, they refunded you in full.
Why not do both at the same time? Power draw. A microwave can take over half the available load on a standard household circuit. Most are wired for 15 amps before the breaker starts tripping. Heating elements are just as power-hungry, which is why you typically see electric stoves on a dedicated 240V, 20A circuit. I would guess most houses do not have the wiring to support this.
Modern houses to modern code actually specify 20A per circuit to the kitchen, with each plug being on their own circuit.
Why? Because there's always going to be the problem of the kettle and the toaster going at the same time, so if they're on different plugs it means one doesn't trip the other. It also means you can have a 20A microwave plug.
And if you're doing intelligent power draw, you can power the magnetron during the time when the heating element is off...
OCZ always struggles with reliability, and buying their Lambo performance hardware always seems like a recipe for lost data. The fact that they're pushing MLC flash chips to the limit is not reassuring.
Except you're assigning blame in the wrong place.
It is not MLC flash that's the problem. It's OCZ.
The problem with OCZ is they don't put data reliability first - they put speed first. So they compromised reliability for speed. One famous example is where the SandForce controller could run in two modes - a safe-but-slower mode where you don't need external power caps, and a fast-but-unsafe mode where you need power caps so it can dump the tables to flash on power off.
What did OCZ do? They did the fast mode without power caps. So remove power suddenly and the FTL tables get corrupted, losing your data. It's fast, though, and cheap (since you don't pay $$$ for caps), but boy is it a ticking time bomb.
Considering SATA-III limits are hit (or why every SSD is now the same speed), there's no need for performance - using that extra speed for safety is far better.
(It's also why we have PCIe SSDs, because SATA-III is now too slow, and it didn't take long for SSDs, once the standard was reached, to hit the max).
V2V sounds good, but I wonder about people who will hack it. For example, making a fake "traffic is gridlocked here" alert might make one's commute a lot better, or triggering a car to panic stop because it thinks another is doing the same can cause actual harm.
Security isn't something that can be strapped on anymore. It has to be "baked in", in multiple layers, and thoroughly tested as well as every other feature. I hope the makers of V2V technology has this in mind that is being deployed.
The problem is that security is pretty much worthless. First of all, if every car can transmit data, then every other card needs to be able to decipher it. So what security can you implement? Use encryption? Well then every car has to be able to encrypt and decrypt it, at which point it's useless because everyone has the key to encrypt and key to decrypt. At this point, you're doing no better than unencrypted messages.
If you sign every image, then every other car needs to be able to verify that signature, which means either every car needs to have a way to have those certificates acquired, or it doesn't verify the message, in which case well, it's pointless.
And if that's the case, well, even someone with a transmitter can intercept the messages as well.
MIPS may (or may not be) "open source", however it is not free to implement. Implement the latest MIPS ISA without a license agreement from MIPS and you'll be sued to smithereens. You won't be sued if you implement OpenRISC though.
Or to be clearer, MIPS owns several patents on instructions in the ISA. Though I think some of them were worked around another way since the patent covers implementation.
But many other architectures are patented as well - x86 is covered by many patents (most owned between AMD and Intel and cross-licensed), which probably explains why a good chunk of embedded x86 only do the i486 ISA. (Excepting companies like Via who license the patents).
I really don't want to end the browser session and then restore everything when I return two work.
If restarting Firefox and reloading all the same pages again is enough to significantly drop the memory-consumption, that implies Firefix is leaking memory.
Actually, Firefox does another optimization on reload that speeds things up - it doesn't restore the entire session. Close Firefox with 10 tabs open and when you restore it, Firefox only reloads the last tab visible. The others merely are placeholders with page content cached on disk. Click them and Firefox takes a moment to reload the cache and render the page.
This can be dramatic on some webpages that cause Firefox to consume gobs of memory - as long as the page is cached, it doesn't take any. But once Firefox loads it from cache, it starts gobbling memory.
especially once USB gets its shit together and provides enough power to run HDDs without an extra power supply.
It already does... for 2.5" drives.
No it doesn't. At least not spinning rust - those things easily require 2+A to start up. On USB alone, that would prevent them from even starting, nevermind running.
The only reason we "get away" with it is due to cost reasons - each USB port is limited to 500mA, but often they're all ganged together to one big overcurrent switch. E.g., if you have 8 USB ports, you have a 4A overcurrent switch controlling power to all of them.
Since the vast majority of users do NOT use all 4A simultaneously, a USB hard drive can easily spike its current draw without doing anything bad.
But problems arise in more mobile situations - devices with less USB ports suddenly it can matter if they have all sorts of things plugged in - mouse, a thumbdrive, etc. and suddenly plugging in their hard drive kicks everything off the bus as the overcurrent switch cuts power.
Or you may also see it with heavily loaded chains where certain actions suddenly lose USB completely because every drive decides it needs to start simultaneously, fail as they trip the switch, etc.
Right now a lot of stuff only works because the USB implementers were lazy and cheap. But if you have devices with limited USB ports, you run into issues quick.
Heck, even some thumbdrives can't start up on 500mA. Don't ask me why.
Problem is that there is barely any use case for doing that. I can think of a few specialized applications where an external PCI chassis makes sense but not nearly enough to justify Thunderbolt. USB covers 90%+ of the use cases of thunderbolt and other existing technologies cover the rest. Thunderbolt may be a bit more elegant than some but Firewire was more elegant than USB and we all know how that turned out. A low end "good enough" technology will beat a high end expensive technology in the long run almost every time.
A good use case is a thunderbolt docking station. You can get USB ones, but they're chintzy and barely work. But thunderbolt ones that provide a pile of ports that are real, legit ports (e.g., a real serial port using native 16550A drivers, real parallel ports suitable for bit-banging), external graphics ports that are suitable for running huge displays (USB display sucks), real Ethernet networking (USB3.0 required for GigE), etc. Plus piles of USB3.0 ports for all those USB peripherals that remain at your desk.
While you're out and mobile, your PC has limited connectivity (WiFi/BT/WWAN), uses onboard graphics, etc., which are great for a light and mobile laptop. But you then go to your desk, plug in a single cable (Thunderbolt will soon support device charging, both ways) and your thin and light becomes an ultra powerful workstation with external high end GPU (multiple monitors, too, since the internal GPU can drive displays through Thunderbolt), networking, etc.
Anyone who's tried a USB docking station junks it within the first week as they're quire useless and your displays lag to hell and back. (If you're lucky, you can do YouTube in QVGA mode)
Rich man donating large sums of cash to education system shocked to find systems flaws are of great complexity and cannot be solved by simply shitting large sums of money into education.
Or proof that no matter how much money to funnel into the education system, it will always be "underfunded".
After all, how often have you heard the refrain that "the ZZZ government has chronically underfunded education and our children are falling behind! We promise to spend $YYY more dollars to fully fund education".
Or "years of cutbacks to education",... (where "cutbacks" are defined as "increases to education spending")
All this shows it's just a sponge that'll suck up any extra money given to it. And blame for it goes all around - teachers, administrators, politicians, unions, etc. No one is exactly blameless.
This was a privilege-escalation exploit, which means you already need an account on the computer to do anything.
Any account would do. Even say, "nobody".
All you need is the ability to run an arbitrary binary, which a buggy CGI script is more than adequate. Basically, if you have a bit of shellcode, that's sufficient. Once you have that going, then you can easily exploit your way to more priviledges.
That said, for the time being we now have a good way to root our Android phones.
It's too little, too late. Sony has probably won this generation already. The Xbox One isn't a failure, but it is going to be relegated to second place.
Is that a bad thing?
The good thing is the Xbone is viable. Because if it was just Sony, things would be even worse than it is. (Think PS3 launch - extra cost, etc. etc. that's something only done by someone cocky enough to "win").
And hey, the Xbox360 won last time, and Microsoft got cocky.
But second is still good, and it means neither can really screw you over - you can bet had the PS3 been the killer and the Xbox360 the has-been, all of Microsoft's announcements (always on DRM, no used games, etc) would come straight from Sony, instead.
Instead, the PS3 was In the position the Xbone is in now - viable, but not in first. Sony took a bitchslap then, Microsoft is now.
And that's a GOOD thing.
Though, I don't get this whole emphasis on "no used game sales" thing. I mean, you can't really re-sell Steam games. Nor sell those "digital download" games you bought. And given how both Sony and Microsoft are pushing digital downloads, well, it seems we're giving up used game sales anyways since every game is now available as a day-1 download.
Now, the interesting thing is - in Canada, this could make the Xbone cheaper than the PS4. The PS4 went UP in price to $450, while the Xbone stayed at $500. So if it's now $400 for the Xbone... (Sony's hurting for money - selling the PS4 at CAD$400 was costing them way too much money).
They've reversed on almost every bad decision at this point. If they can just get around to reversing on backwards compatibility, I won't have any more reasons not to buy one. Don't do it Microsoft. I've been so productive lately.
Sorry, they're considering that as an option, too.
It's a lot harder though, and it'll probably be like the Xbox360 in terms of compatibility because the architectures are completely different (PowerPC vs. x86, and Apple has shown PowerPC emulation on x86 is slow). Granted, the Xbone has more powerful hardware than a Core 2 Duo, but there are fundamental limits on how fast you can emulate it.
There are obviously huge numbers of poor and destitute that have no access to luxuries like mobile phones. Wealthier people are walking around with multiple mobile subscriptions. Either by work/personal accounts, or accounts for tablets and modems, or whatever. So I wonder how far past 100% they will be able to go? 150%? 200 even? It's a good time to be Samsung. Also hard to believe that HTC and Nokia are in so much trouble. Even a small part of 7 billion is a lot of business.
Actually, the poor and destitute are getting cellphones too - it's one of the most transformative technologies that's hit Africa. It's allowed farmers and others to send and receive money (Africa was one of the first to have a payment service that works using SMS that's slowly spreading to Europe), keep in touch, and all that.
In fact, part of the whole "providing light and electricity" is to power phone chargers.
Then there are people in Europe and Asia who have 2 or 3 cellphones, as one person I know put it, "work phone, play phone, wife phone".
It's more of a quirk that in North America, we're quite reluctant to carry more than one phone. Everyone else I've seen has no problem with 2 or more phones at the same time.
Saturation would put this around 200% of population or so.
NVIDIA definitely write their own OSX drivers. I'm pretty sure AMD/ATI and Intel write their own OSX drivers too but these days GPU drivers are usually delivered with operating system updates (in a similar way that you can get driver updates through Windows update). Given how squeezing out GPU hardware documentation for Linux has been tough I don't think NVIDIA/AMD would be keen to help someone else write drivers that unlocked full functionality...
I would say NVidia HELPED write the drivers.
And Apple is a closed source OS company - NVidia, AMD, etc., will have no problems executing NDAs with Apple to prevent disclosure of documentation and other things since none of the patented stuff will leave Cupertino in source code form. And a lot of licensed stuff has that - you may not release the source to it - it can only leave in linked binary form.
Well, that doesn't work TOO well on Linux - because you end up with binary blobs that don't go over so well. So documentation is a lot harder to share since there's stuff in it under NDA that cannot be revealed, and Linux being open-source well, code is a form of documentation.
Apple's not that big - they don't have huge marketshare and all that. You're not going to dedicate a lot of resources helping Apple write drivers for their own OS which has its own idiosyncracies and all that.
At best, most drivers are modular - you have the OpenGL parts that are fairly platform independent that need to talk to hardware which can be done by Apple writing the necessary glue logic between the driver and the ickiness that is I/O Kit.
Then again, Nvidia has a lot more resources to dedicate to driver writing. AMD doesn't, and Intel really only does software (badly) to sell chips.
and you have no company to make a data confidentiality agreement with
Why can't you execute a data confidentiality agreement directly with the main developer as an individual contractor?
And what if the developer says no? There may be many reasons for it - including legal obligations elsewhere (day job, say) that may prevent said developer from "commercializing" their work or even accepting money for the task.
Or even a non-compete, if you happen to be with a competitor of whom the developer works for (you probably won't realize this until it's too late).
At which point you've got a broken piece of software and are scrambling to find something to help you fix it. Meanwhile, your company is losing money from loss of access to that software.
And without a repro, and bad data to test with, the need for the fix is not obvious.
If a patch is made with the intent to correct misbehavior, this implies that a cause of the misbehavior has been found. And once a cause is found, it shouldn't be too hard to generate fictitious data that likewise trigger the misbehavior.
Again, you run in to the issue of what if the goals conflict? What if the reason for the broken behaviour is by design?
Really, the best solution is to not contract with individual developers (face it - there are way too many of them), but with a services company like Red Hat, IBM, or many other Linux support companies where if you do have a problem, they can support you directly rather than trying to get back to the original developer. And if the patch is something the developer rejects, that company can still support you.
Of course, if you've priced Red Hat, you realize they aren't cheap, either. And that's intentional because it is a lot of work. Which I don't have a problem with because when your company experiences a problem with any software, having someone to call up is VERY worth it. Doesn't matter that instead of being able to call a developer directly, you call Red Hat instead and they'll support you. Confidentiality and all.
People who make sense don't get cookies -- people who say the same garbage as come out of corporate think tanks get promoted. The Egyptian empire existed for a couple thousand years without debt. America has had about 4 economic crashes.
You do realize that according to some, debt predates money. As in, in the barter economy, I give you a goat now, and I expect you to repay me in loaves of bread.
But the current form of debt and money has been around to before the Roman empire, which has lasted a pretty damn long time.
The problem is you're applying micro-economics to macro-economics, and that doesn't work. It's why we have both micro and macro economics - both work similarly, but differently.
It's also why tying a fiscal supply to a limited good (e.g., gold) is futile because history has shown economic crashes when said limited good happened to be scarcer.
Debt, when carefully used, is a very powerful economic tool. Businesses regularly engage in debt because to not do so can cripple a company if it needed immediate liquid cash. It's why this last fiscal collapse was called a "liquidity crisis" - when a company needed liquidity, it couldn't get it and ended up going out of business because it couldn't get the necsssary cashflow. (Basically, a company ties up its liquid money making investments - people, equipment, stock, etc, and when it comes due to needing liquid cash, it often borrows against these assets (which aren't liquid) for a short term loan. But when no one wants to make the loan, the company is forced to liquidate, which means giving up future growth to make today's rent).
Even today economists have generally agreed that one of the major causes of the Great Depression was the lack of spending making the whole situation far worse than it had to be and it was only through war debt spending (i.e., WWII) that really got the country out of it.
The really big problem these days is inadequate fiscal education, coupled with way-to-easy credit. Things like risk vs. return, cashflow, budgeting, investments (all kinds - stocks, bonds, forex, etc), taxes, and even basic economic theory are not being taught today. Stuff that used to get taught during courses in Home Economics - practical day to day skills required in running a household. This lack of knowledge is really what's causing problems,
Simplistic reasoning - Credit cards are bad. But they aren't, really - they're a GREAT way to build up a credit rating, as long as you have impulse control, avoid instant gratification (both can be taught and learned, but aren't), and are great as a revolving account for spending, provided it actually revolves and you don't carry a balance. The problem is, it's way too misused because things like impulse control and delayed gratification aren't taught and learned.
The article seems to mention Windows/Linux (or Linux/Window). What about OpenGL/GLES drivers on other platforms, such as Mac OS X, Android, iOS, ?
OS X and iOS well, the drivers I believe work, but can be slow. The reason is, well, Apple pretty much wrote the drivers for AMD, nVidia, Intel and Imagination Technologies. There probably was a lot of cooperation with the respective companies, but Apple pretty much wrote it themselves as the others do not have the time, money or resources to write drivers for Apple.
Android is much like Linux and Windows. The driver quality depends a lot on the OEM. Most just blindly use the drivers as is and maybe tweak stuff if it doesn't compile, but that's it. Just take the code base and plop it in. You'll find OpenGL extensions that claim to be supported, but aren't, things that work wonky if you don't do it the right way, and features that are supposed to be supported, but so untested that they don't work.
Android's further complicated because there are multiple vendors - AMD (as a derived part in Qualcomm SoCs), nVidia, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Broadcom (VideoCore, same as RPi), etc. Drivers from each are pretty sketchy because most are developed to the point of "it seems to work" and shipped as early releases, while later revisions fix bugs and such. But a year later, a new one comes out and more beta drivers.
It can be a challenge if you want to code to the bleeding edge. Apple has a slight edge here as iOS exclusively uses Imagination Technologies and Apple's drivers are fairly consistent - if there's a bug, well, everyone ends up knowing about it and coding around it. When you're only worrying about effectively one platform, it's a bit easier.
the German company had the strategy to explicitly manage the obligations from open source. effectively the rules were: Apache style, bsd style licenses and LGPL where white listed GPL 3 was blacklisted GPL needed special consideration (so kind of blacklisted)
A company I worked for had the exact same policy. Though it was a bit more formalized in that if you want to use a not-previously-approved piece of software (commercial or open-source), the license and justification must be sent to Legal in order to vet it. And for open-source, they had the same criteria - except GPL (all) was blacklisted and you needed a Really Good Reason(tm) to have it considered.
And they needed to know if it was a tool for inhouse use or to go to customers, as well.
Considering that those licenses all cover distribution I don't see the difference for an in company product. Especially since the difference between GPL and GPL 3 deals with preventing locked bootloaders. Now if you're doing embedded development or selling software, it's a completely different story. I don't agree with it, but I can see why companies want complete control of their products.
The problem is that "distribution" may occur inadvertently. It's generally considered that if the software is used on premises by employees, it's not distribution. But it gets murkier if there are external contractors involved - if the contractors work onsite, then no, it's not really distribution. But what if the contractor then works offsite? Or if you agree to take on more contractors, and they exclusively work off-site? That could be considered distribution to those people since the software has no gone offsite to other people.
And I believe a case was decided, or the FSF has decided that yes, that is distribution and triggers the GPL.
And it makes sense - let's say they hire you to solve an issue they have, and then they send you the build tools they use so you can build the code base. Oops, that IS distribution since they sent you the tools. It's just like they sent you the tools in a regular way, you're not an employee and it's no longer on site, so it's distributed to you and you have a right to the source per the GPL.
And then there's the whole compatibility issue - GPLv2 is NOT compatible with GPLv3. Some GPLv2 code is marked as "upgradable" (i.e., GPLv2 or later, or GPLv2+) so it can turn into GPLv3 code. But GPLv2-only code cannot be mixed with GPLv3. And in a somewhat mixed and large code base, this could happen quite inadvertently. Especially if someone is upgrading from one version to another, and the old was GPLv2, while the new is GPLv3.
Companies are paranoid these days, and legal obligations can be inadvertently created so they're wanting to be extremely careful.
But is the online aspect a significant reason people bought the game? Is that what it was marketed as? It usually is.
Yes, but a lot of people have moved on.
I mean, when Microsoft shut down Xbox Live for the original Xbox, you know how many people used it still? Only about 1000. And most were playing Halo 2. (And this is when Xbox Live was regularly running 200K+ people continually).
In the end, the number of people playing the older games really dwindles. And like Halo 2 was the popular one - the other games on the top 10 list were getting only between 15-100 players.
And heck, most of those players were on Xbox360s at that point, so it wasn't because they refused to buy a new console.
because class action lawsuits are supposedly much cheaper per person than one person... a one person lawsuit would just get totally overpowered by a corporation until he was destitute and couldnt afford to continue the lawsuit.
Because a class action helps solve the "steal from many" problem.
What's worse for society - someone that steals $1M from someone else? Or something that steals $1 from 1M people? The outcome is the same, yet there is willingness to pursue the former and ignore the latter.
Think of it this way - your phone bill goes up $5 per month. Over say, 5M subscribers, that's $25M more revenue per month, or a whopping $300M per year. Well, slightly less... see...
And you know what? 99.99% of the people won't do a single thing - the cost to write in and complain is more than $5. For those that do the effort, well, just cut them a $5 cheque, or more likely a $5 credit off next month's bill. At which point they'll continue the $5 charge, repeating again.
Oh, but you can't cancel, because you're in a contract. And some abusive ones really allow for "reasonable increase in costs".
And now the CEO gets a new yacht and a big fat bonus. Next year they'll ding everyone $2 more.
The class-action was formed for this abuse - because in the end, most people cannot be bothered to claim back what really amounts to a couple hundred bucks in the end by going to court, and it's easy to buy off those that do by writing them a cheque for the refund after making it as difficult as possible.
The most important thing to do during your freshman year is networking.
Sorry, but the closed off anti-social geek is NOT the ideal state. You need to be knocking on doors, getting to know people. Make lots of friends during the studies, keep in touch with them. And get to know people outside your class - the TA, the profs, etc.
You need to get out there, because that's the best way to find out about opportunities. Cold-calling works to an extent, but if you can get that friend-of-a-friend-is-looking-for-something, even better.
If you're bogged down with studies, networking is cheap, quick and effective. Then about midway through the semester before the summer break, start asking around for a summer job. It doesn't matter what - research, assistant, coffeeboy, whatever. Just use those contacts to see what people have out there. Doesn't need to be relevant to your studies because there are many transferable skills. Especially for a freshman year - you don't know anything so take on an entry level technical job.
Again, the goal is not the task at hand (but please do it well to impress), but to get yourself out there and with people to network. When you meet the prof from "industry" or who started their own company from the research that interests you, pursue them! Especially if you can pull a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend link or better.
Yes, summer breaks are supposed to be for relaxation and stuff, but do exploit them as the ability to do some work. Earn some pocket change to help make your sophomore year just that bit easier, and more importantly, get in front of people. Impress them with work ethic and soft skills (because that's all you have) and get them wanting you the next summer.
And if you hear of interesting research, find out more.
If you get enough people wanting you, finding a job is not something you need you need to worry about. The easiest job interview is one that goes "well, we liked what you did for us before, do you have any questions and when can you start?"
One of the biggest secrets in the world is if someone wants you badly, it doesn't matter about "hiring freeze" or "no-poaching" or other agreements. There are always ways around them and if you're that desired, they'll find ways to make you a job offer.
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Twitch picked up a lot of users recently though.
Between the PS4 and Xbone, both of which can stream and upload to twitch, that's probably at least a million content producers out there. And that doesn't include all the content producers twitch had to band for non-gaming-related content.
What will likely happen is a lot of that migrates to YouTube - so all those PS4 sex shows that were on twitch will just be on YouTube instead (since the PS4 doesn't, at least I don't think, support YouTube yet for content producers. You can watch YouTube videos, but you can't record with the PS4 and upload to YouTube. Though maybe the last update solved that).
And gamers will seek gamer content - if you're on the PS4 or Xbone, switching to YouTube to figure out how to defeat that boss is par for the course. In other words, there's a guaranteed audience looking for guaranteed content.
Hell, I'd like to watch twitch, but the 30 second beer commercials every 30 seconds got tiresome fast. (Especially for crap mass-produced American beer, and I don't drink, so it was wasted advertising money).
Apple had a near-monopoly on digital music sales. They had the clout to force the music industry to accept their terms. In fact, that clout was what got the music industry to give DRM-free music to Amazon. iTunes was so big, Apple was calling the shots and making demands - the music industry has long hated 99 cent songs (they wanted variable pricing) and Apple's grip on keeping things that way. And the music industry couldn't simply withdraw their music - the alternative to iTunes and its money was... piracy.
When Apple saw what Amazon was given, they made the same demands (in exchange for variable pricing - 79/99/129 cents). Hence Steve Jobs' essay on DRM and music.
But Apple had the music industry in its palm. And when Amazon was given DRM-free rights, Apple had the leverage they need to demand the same. In fact, the fact that iTunes music was locked to iPod made it all the sweeter - because it meant no OTHER music store could succeed, so the music industry was forced to allow DRM-free music so another music store could get their music loaded on the #1 player - the iPod,
It was a close call - because I suspect the music industry was hoping the DoJ would declare Apple a monopoly and thus be forced to open other DRM systems onto the iPod. Instead, they caved first.
The movie industry saw what happened to the music industry, which is why they're spreading their content around. Netflix is for DVD releases, a month later. Hulu gets up to date TV. Amazon, iTunes, etc., well, they get to rent and sell new releases. No one company will "have it all" so they won't be big enough to start making demands like Apple did. When you can get your TV from Amazon, iTunes or Hulu (with the first two offering it for sale, the latter for free streaming), movies from Amazon, Google Play and iTunes, then later on Netflix...
And Mozilla could be the also-ran, where the mainstream browsers are now just IE, Safari and Chrome.
All it would take is users wondering why their Netflix or Hulu doesn't work. They Google it, and see the solution would be to install Chrome, or use the browser built into their OS - IE on Windows, Safari on OS X.
Of course, Mozilla could have influenced the W3C to reject the proposal, thus rendering the web to be a app-distirbution mechanism where you'll need to Netflix app, the Hulu app, etc., to watch Netflix or Hulu on all platforms, including PC. Click "Watch" on Netflix, or YouTube and it lauches the app where you watch it, like how it works with iTunes or Steam.
Given Google has a marketshare of approximately 98% of the online advertising space, that means we should be seeing text ads everywhere, right?
No, Google didn't demonstrate it. They simply cashed in on the novelty of text ads to buy up the ad networks and make more money because that's what people were paying money for. In fact, Google themselves probably is responsible for all the malware laced ads - given they own the ad networks that serve up the crap. Sure, Google wants to separate themselves away by keeping the original name rather than re-tagging them as Google (e.g., DoubleClick, a Google owned company, or AdMob, another Google owned company).
In fact, I rarely see Google ads these days - the advertising space seems to be like it was before Google Ads. Either Google isn't that good at advertising anymore, or Google realizes that Google Ads just don't rake in the money anymore - keyword targeted ads, and all their Google-owned ad networks are bringing in the real money. It's like Google Ads doesn't exist anymore.
Perhaps Google needs to screen their customers better to stop the plague of malware laced ads. They're the ones in the end serving it up, after all.
The problem is - do you want Firefox to die?
The problem is the other browsers - IE, Safari, Chrome, will support this. If Firefox continued to not support it, users will migrate. Especially as most people already have IE or Safari already installed and running, and everyone keeps telling the to try Chrome (Google keeps pushing it).
End result users will switch. And they might not come back - Firefox will just be known as the "browser where nothing works".
The other problem is app-ification. "There's an app for that" - and even on the PC there are apps for Netflix and others. And the web will pretty much be an app distribution mechanism with websites asking you to install their app. For an example of this, iTunes Preview - it's just a web page that leads you to the iTunes app.
So those are the two outcomes - one where the web is turned into a "get the app" space, or Firefox becomes completely irrelevant, used by a minority who just want to be strange, while the rest of the world just uses other browser to get their stuff done.
The internet was NEVER safe. You could NEVER count on perfect secrecy - in fact, everything sent or received had to pass through someone else's hands.
The old adage of "never put online what you don't want the world to know" has always been true. And the "world" refers to anyone - your parents, your boss, the authorities, the government, your friends, and everyone else.
Generally speaking, that's generally the case - there's a "buy" and "sell" price and they can differ.
E.g., let's say the last BTC to USD conversion was 1 BTC to USD$500. A currency converter might "buy" BTC at $450, and sell at $550. So if you buy a $450 item and pay 1 BTC, then return it, you'll get back $450/550 or approximately 0.81818182 BTC back.
Sometimes the company may cheat and limit you to refunding what it got from you - e.g., let's say it's now $250 USD for 1 BTC, and you return the item. The company may cheat and give you back your 1 BTC (and pocket the $450 the merchant returned back).
Currency conversions are horrendously messy , and generally payment processors are geared towards screwing you over. The merchant doesn't see any of this since as far as they're concerned, they refunded you in full.
Modern houses to modern code actually specify 20A per circuit to the kitchen, with each plug being on their own circuit.
Why? Because there's always going to be the problem of the kettle and the toaster going at the same time, so if they're on different plugs it means one doesn't trip the other. It also means you can have a 20A microwave plug.
And if you're doing intelligent power draw, you can power the magnetron during the time when the heating element is off...
Except you're assigning blame in the wrong place.
It is not MLC flash that's the problem. It's OCZ.
The problem with OCZ is they don't put data reliability first - they put speed first. So they compromised reliability for speed. One famous example is where the SandForce controller could run in two modes - a safe-but-slower mode where you don't need external power caps, and a fast-but-unsafe mode where you need power caps so it can dump the tables to flash on power off.
What did OCZ do? They did the fast mode without power caps. So remove power suddenly and the FTL tables get corrupted, losing your data. It's fast, though, and cheap (since you don't pay $$$ for caps), but boy is it a ticking time bomb.
Considering SATA-III limits are hit (or why every SSD is now the same speed), there's no need for performance - using that extra speed for safety is far better.
(It's also why we have PCIe SSDs, because SATA-III is now too slow, and it didn't take long for SSDs, once the standard was reached, to hit the max).
The problem is that security is pretty much worthless. First of all, if every car can transmit data, then every other card needs to be able to decipher it. So what security can you implement? Use encryption? Well then every car has to be able to encrypt and decrypt it, at which point it's useless because everyone has the key to encrypt and key to decrypt. At this point, you're doing no better than unencrypted messages.
If you sign every image, then every other car needs to be able to verify that signature, which means either every car needs to have a way to have those certificates acquired, or it doesn't verify the message, in which case well, it's pointless.
And if that's the case, well, even someone with a transmitter can intercept the messages as well.
Or to be clearer, MIPS owns several patents on instructions in the ISA. Though I think some of them were worked around another way since the patent covers implementation.
But many other architectures are patented as well - x86 is covered by many patents (most owned between AMD and Intel and cross-licensed), which probably explains why a good chunk of embedded x86 only do the i486 ISA. (Excepting companies like Via who license the patents).
Actually, Firefox does another optimization on reload that speeds things up - it doesn't restore the entire session. Close Firefox with 10 tabs open and when you restore it, Firefox only reloads the last tab visible. The others merely are placeholders with page content cached on disk. Click them and Firefox takes a moment to reload the cache and render the page.
This can be dramatic on some webpages that cause Firefox to consume gobs of memory - as long as the page is cached, it doesn't take any. But once Firefox loads it from cache, it starts gobbling memory.
No it doesn't. At least not spinning rust - those things easily require 2+A to start up. On USB alone, that would prevent them from even starting, nevermind running.
The only reason we "get away" with it is due to cost reasons - each USB port is limited to 500mA, but often they're all ganged together to one big overcurrent switch. E.g., if you have 8 USB ports, you have a 4A overcurrent switch controlling power to all of them.
Since the vast majority of users do NOT use all 4A simultaneously, a USB hard drive can easily spike its current draw without doing anything bad.
But problems arise in more mobile situations - devices with less USB ports suddenly it can matter if they have all sorts of things plugged in - mouse, a thumbdrive, etc. and suddenly plugging in their hard drive kicks everything off the bus as the overcurrent switch cuts power.
Or you may also see it with heavily loaded chains where certain actions suddenly lose USB completely because every drive decides it needs to start simultaneously, fail as they trip the switch, etc.
Right now a lot of stuff only works because the USB implementers were lazy and cheap. But if you have devices with limited USB ports, you run into issues quick.
Heck, even some thumbdrives can't start up on 500mA. Don't ask me why.
A good use case is a thunderbolt docking station. You can get USB ones, but they're chintzy and barely work. But thunderbolt ones that provide a pile of ports that are real, legit ports (e.g., a real serial port using native 16550A drivers, real parallel ports suitable for bit-banging), external graphics ports that are suitable for running huge displays (USB display sucks), real Ethernet networking (USB3.0 required for GigE), etc. Plus piles of USB3.0 ports for all those USB peripherals that remain at your desk.
While you're out and mobile, your PC has limited connectivity (WiFi/BT/WWAN), uses onboard graphics, etc., which are great for a light and mobile laptop. But you then go to your desk, plug in a single cable (Thunderbolt will soon support device charging, both ways) and your thin and light becomes an ultra powerful workstation with external high end GPU (multiple monitors, too, since the internal GPU can drive displays through Thunderbolt), networking, etc.
Anyone who's tried a USB docking station junks it within the first week as they're quire useless and your displays lag to hell and back. (If you're lucky, you can do YouTube in QVGA mode)
Or proof that no matter how much money to funnel into the education system, it will always be "underfunded".
After all, how often have you heard the refrain that "the ZZZ government has chronically underfunded education and our children are falling behind! We promise to spend $YYY more dollars to fully fund education".
Or "years of cutbacks to education", ... (where "cutbacks" are defined as "increases to education spending")
All this shows it's just a sponge that'll suck up any extra money given to it. And blame for it goes all around - teachers, administrators, politicians, unions, etc. No one is exactly blameless.
Any account would do. Even say, "nobody".
All you need is the ability to run an arbitrary binary, which a buggy CGI script is more than adequate. Basically, if you have a bit of shellcode, that's sufficient. Once you have that going, then you can easily exploit your way to more priviledges.
That said, for the time being we now have a good way to root our Android phones.
Is that a bad thing?
The good thing is the Xbone is viable. Because if it was just Sony, things would be even worse than it is. (Think PS3 launch - extra cost, etc. etc. that's something only done by someone cocky enough to "win").
And hey, the Xbox360 won last time, and Microsoft got cocky.
But second is still good, and it means neither can really screw you over - you can bet had the PS3 been the killer and the Xbox360 the has-been, all of Microsoft's announcements (always on DRM, no used games, etc) would come straight from Sony, instead.
Instead, the PS3 was In the position the Xbone is in now - viable, but not in first. Sony took a bitchslap then, Microsoft is now.
And that's a GOOD thing.
Though, I don't get this whole emphasis on "no used game sales" thing. I mean, you can't really re-sell Steam games. Nor sell those "digital download" games you bought. And given how both Sony and Microsoft are pushing digital downloads, well, it seems we're giving up used game sales anyways since every game is now available as a day-1 download.
Now, the interesting thing is - in Canada, this could make the Xbone cheaper than the PS4. The PS4 went UP in price to $450, while the Xbone stayed at $500. So if it's now $400 for the Xbone... (Sony's hurting for money - selling the PS4 at CAD$400 was costing them way too much money).
Sorry, they're considering that as an option, too.
It's a lot harder though, and it'll probably be like the Xbox360 in terms of compatibility because the architectures are completely different (PowerPC vs. x86, and Apple has shown PowerPC emulation on x86 is slow). Granted, the Xbone has more powerful hardware than a Core 2 Duo, but there are fundamental limits on how fast you can emulate it.
The PS3 did it by embedding a PS2 into it.
Actually, the poor and destitute are getting cellphones too - it's one of the most transformative technologies that's hit Africa. It's allowed farmers and others to send and receive money (Africa was one of the first to have a payment service that works using SMS that's slowly spreading to Europe), keep in touch, and all that.
In fact, part of the whole "providing light and electricity" is to power phone chargers.
Then there are people in Europe and Asia who have 2 or 3 cellphones, as one person I know put it, "work phone, play phone, wife phone".
It's more of a quirk that in North America, we're quite reluctant to carry more than one phone. Everyone else I've seen has no problem with 2 or more phones at the same time.
Saturation would put this around 200% of population or so.
I would say NVidia HELPED write the drivers.
And Apple is a closed source OS company - NVidia, AMD, etc., will have no problems executing NDAs with Apple to prevent disclosure of documentation and other things since none of the patented stuff will leave Cupertino in source code form. And a lot of licensed stuff has that - you may not release the source to it - it can only leave in linked binary form.
Well, that doesn't work TOO well on Linux - because you end up with binary blobs that don't go over so well. So documentation is a lot harder to share since there's stuff in it under NDA that cannot be revealed, and Linux being open-source well, code is a form of documentation.
Apple's not that big - they don't have huge marketshare and all that. You're not going to dedicate a lot of resources helping Apple write drivers for their own OS which has its own idiosyncracies and all that.
At best, most drivers are modular - you have the OpenGL parts that are fairly platform independent that need to talk to hardware which can be done by Apple writing the necessary glue logic between the driver and the ickiness that is I/O Kit.
Then again, Nvidia has a lot more resources to dedicate to driver writing. AMD doesn't, and Intel really only does software (badly) to sell chips.
And what if the developer says no? There may be many reasons for it - including legal obligations elsewhere (day job, say) that may prevent said developer from "commercializing" their work or even accepting money for the task.
Or even a non-compete, if you happen to be with a competitor of whom the developer works for (you probably won't realize this until it's too late).
At which point you've got a broken piece of software and are scrambling to find something to help you fix it. Meanwhile, your company is losing money from loss of access to that software.
Again, you run in to the issue of what if the goals conflict? What if the reason for the broken behaviour is by design?
Really, the best solution is to not contract with individual developers (face it - there are way too many of them), but with a services company like Red Hat, IBM, or many other Linux support companies where if you do have a problem, they can support you directly rather than trying to get back to the original developer. And if the patch is something the developer rejects, that company can still support you.
Of course, if you've priced Red Hat, you realize they aren't cheap, either. And that's intentional because it is a lot of work. Which I don't have a problem with because when your company experiences a problem with any software, having someone to call up is VERY worth it. Doesn't matter that instead of being able to call a developer directly, you call Red Hat instead and they'll support you. Confidentiality and all.
You do realize that according to some, debt predates money. As in, in the barter economy, I give you a goat now, and I expect you to repay me in loaves of bread.
But the current form of debt and money has been around to before the Roman empire, which has lasted a pretty damn long time.
The problem is you're applying micro-economics to macro-economics, and that doesn't work. It's why we have both micro and macro economics - both work similarly, but differently.
It's also why tying a fiscal supply to a limited good (e.g., gold) is futile because history has shown economic crashes when said limited good happened to be scarcer.
Debt, when carefully used, is a very powerful economic tool. Businesses regularly engage in debt because to not do so can cripple a company if it needed immediate liquid cash. It's why this last fiscal collapse was called a "liquidity crisis" - when a company needed liquidity, it couldn't get it and ended up going out of business because it couldn't get the necsssary cashflow. (Basically, a company ties up its liquid money making investments - people, equipment, stock, etc, and when it comes due to needing liquid cash, it often borrows against these assets (which aren't liquid) for a short term loan. But when no one wants to make the loan, the company is forced to liquidate, which means giving up future growth to make today's rent).
Even today economists have generally agreed that one of the major causes of the Great Depression was the lack of spending making the whole situation far worse than it had to be and it was only through war debt spending (i.e., WWII) that really got the country out of it.
The really big problem these days is inadequate fiscal education, coupled with way-to-easy credit. Things like risk vs. return, cashflow, budgeting, investments (all kinds - stocks, bonds, forex, etc), taxes, and even basic economic theory are not being taught today. Stuff that used to get taught during courses in Home Economics - practical day to day skills required in running a household. This lack of knowledge is really what's causing problems,
Simplistic reasoning - Credit cards are bad. But they aren't, really - they're a GREAT way to build up a credit rating, as long as you have impulse control, avoid instant gratification (both can be taught and learned, but aren't), and are great as a revolving account for spending, provided it actually revolves and you don't carry a balance. The problem is, it's way too misused because things like impulse control and delayed gratification aren't taught and learned.
OS X and iOS well, the drivers I believe work, but can be slow. The reason is, well, Apple pretty much wrote the drivers for AMD, nVidia, Intel and Imagination Technologies. There probably was a lot of cooperation with the respective companies, but Apple pretty much wrote it themselves as the others do not have the time, money or resources to write drivers for Apple.
Android is much like Linux and Windows. The driver quality depends a lot on the OEM. Most just blindly use the drivers as is and maybe tweak stuff if it doesn't compile, but that's it. Just take the code base and plop it in. You'll find OpenGL extensions that claim to be supported, but aren't, things that work wonky if you don't do it the right way, and features that are supposed to be supported, but so untested that they don't work.
Android's further complicated because there are multiple vendors - AMD (as a derived part in Qualcomm SoCs), nVidia, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Broadcom (VideoCore, same as RPi), etc. Drivers from each are pretty sketchy because most are developed to the point of "it seems to work" and shipped as early releases, while later revisions fix bugs and such. But a year later, a new one comes out and more beta drivers.
It can be a challenge if you want to code to the bleeding edge. Apple has a slight edge here as iOS exclusively uses Imagination Technologies and Apple's drivers are fairly consistent - if there's a bug, well, everyone ends up knowing about it and coding around it. When you're only worrying about effectively one platform, it's a bit easier.
A company I worked for had the exact same policy. Though it was a bit more formalized in that if you want to use a not-previously-approved piece of software (commercial or open-source), the license and justification must be sent to Legal in order to vet it. And for open-source, they had the same criteria - except GPL (all) was blacklisted and you needed a Really Good Reason(tm) to have it considered.
And they needed to know if it was a tool for inhouse use or to go to customers, as well.
The problem is that "distribution" may occur inadvertently. It's generally considered that if the software is used on premises by employees, it's not distribution. But it gets murkier if there are external contractors involved - if the contractors work onsite, then no, it's not really distribution. But what if the contractor then works offsite? Or if you agree to take on more contractors, and they exclusively work off-site? That could be considered distribution to those people since the software has no gone offsite to other people.
And I believe a case was decided, or the FSF has decided that yes, that is distribution and triggers the GPL.
And it makes sense - let's say they hire you to solve an issue they have, and then they send you the build tools they use so you can build the code base. Oops, that IS distribution since they sent you the tools. It's just like they sent you the tools in a regular way, you're not an employee and it's no longer on site, so it's distributed to you and you have a right to the source per the GPL.
And then there's the whole compatibility issue - GPLv2 is NOT compatible with GPLv3. Some GPLv2 code is marked as "upgradable" (i.e., GPLv2 or later, or GPLv2+) so it can turn into GPLv3 code. But GPLv2-only code cannot be mixed with GPLv3. And in a somewhat mixed and large code base, this could happen quite inadvertently. Especially if someone is upgrading from one version to another, and the old was GPLv2, while the new is GPLv3.
Companies are paranoid these days, and legal obligations can be inadvertently created so they're wanting to be extremely careful.
Yes, but a lot of people have moved on.
I mean, when Microsoft shut down Xbox Live for the original Xbox, you know how many people used it still? Only about 1000. And most were playing Halo 2. (And this is when Xbox Live was regularly running 200K+ people continually).
In the end, the number of people playing the older games really dwindles. And like Halo 2 was the popular one - the other games on the top 10 list were getting only between 15-100 players.
And heck, most of those players were on Xbox360s at that point, so it wasn't because they refused to buy a new console.
Because a class action helps solve the "steal from many" problem.
What's worse for society - someone that steals $1M from someone else? Or something that steals $1 from 1M people? The outcome is the same, yet there is willingness to pursue the former and ignore the latter.
Think of it this way - your phone bill goes up $5 per month. Over say, 5M subscribers, that's $25M more revenue per month, or a whopping $300M per year. Well, slightly less... see...
And you know what? 99.99% of the people won't do a single thing - the cost to write in and complain is more than $5. For those that do the effort, well, just cut them a $5 cheque, or more likely a $5 credit off next month's bill. At which point they'll continue the $5 charge, repeating again.
Oh, but you can't cancel, because you're in a contract. And some abusive ones really allow for "reasonable increase in costs".
And now the CEO gets a new yacht and a big fat bonus. Next year they'll ding everyone $2 more.
The class-action was formed for this abuse - because in the end, most people cannot be bothered to claim back what really amounts to a couple hundred bucks in the end by going to court, and it's easy to buy off those that do by writing them a cheque for the refund after making it as difficult as possible.
The most important thing to do during your freshman year is networking.
Sorry, but the closed off anti-social geek is NOT the ideal state. You need to be knocking on doors, getting to know people. Make lots of friends during the studies, keep in touch with them. And get to know people outside your class - the TA, the profs, etc.
You need to get out there, because that's the best way to find out about opportunities. Cold-calling works to an extent, but if you can get that friend-of-a-friend-is-looking-for-something, even better.
If you're bogged down with studies, networking is cheap, quick and effective. Then about midway through the semester before the summer break, start asking around for a summer job. It doesn't matter what - research, assistant, coffeeboy, whatever. Just use those contacts to see what people have out there. Doesn't need to be relevant to your studies because there are many transferable skills. Especially for a freshman year - you don't know anything so take on an entry level technical job.
Again, the goal is not the task at hand (but please do it well to impress), but to get yourself out there and with people to network. When you meet the prof from "industry" or who started their own company from the research that interests you, pursue them! Especially if you can pull a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend link or better.
Yes, summer breaks are supposed to be for relaxation and stuff, but do exploit them as the ability to do some work. Earn some pocket change to help make your sophomore year just that bit easier, and more importantly, get in front of people. Impress them with work ethic and soft skills (because that's all you have) and get them wanting you the next summer.
And if you hear of interesting research, find out more.
If you get enough people wanting you, finding a job is not something you need you need to worry about. The easiest job interview is one that goes "well, we liked what you did for us before, do you have any questions and when can you start?"
One of the biggest secrets in the world is if someone wants you badly, it doesn't matter about "hiring freeze" or "no-poaching" or other agreements. There are always ways around them and if you're that desired, they'll find ways to make you a job offer.