I'm more concerned that FSF shouldn't be certifying hardware at all - as its name suggests.
Certify Coreboot, or a version of Linux, or some software but getting into hardware is a dangerous game precisely because you don't make the hardware (and thus it's almost impossible to guarantee that this device doesn't have some kind of blob somewhere in its hardware).
But if you are going to do it, and do it for random devices that are almost impossible to certify blob-free down to hardware (maybe you don't load them specifically, but that doesn't mean there isn't some buggy on board firmware somewhere that you have no control over) and get submitted to you, down to publicising them like this, then at least get involved in the hardware side, not recycling defunct laptops that may have all manner of invisible software, not unlike just about every commercial x86-based PC.
I don't see the point in this. You want to get away from commercialised products, essentially, and show how wonderful your code is and the freedom you get, but then you're limited to pathetic systems. It basically comes down to a balance that NOBODY wants - you can either browse websites that are out there today, cheaply, or you can have a computer based on Open Source code, or some variation in between.
If the FSF really want to do something useful, they should start with something smaller. The RPi, for instance, still has a shedload of closed-source crap but because it boots from SD-card (so no "BIOS" to worry about at all), it can actually be open-source AND useful if you want to help it be so.
And then once you have that, you can make a "Free" tablet. It's not that hard, it's the RPi, essentially, with a large built-in display (and given that the display and the 3D processing are the largest parts of the non-open devices of the RPi and other similar ARM chips, this is a good place to start from an established base).
Once you have a tablet, you are into real "usable" computers that can be audited. And laptops / netbooks are only a step away, as the recent trend for Windows laptops which are basically tablets with keyboards attached has shown. And then you can move towards laptops.
The technology is there, but only running on some ancient piece of crap makes it look awful.
Wake up, FSF. Put up a Kickstarter for a truly "open" ARM-based (because ARM will let you see if their chips are doing anything dodgy) tablet/cometputer and see what happens. And then you don't start from some brain-dead Windows-based commercial monstrosity with pathetic ACPI tables that you have to Coreboot to make it work properly.
If you want to show off open-source, do it using its strengths - the fact that you can build from the ground up on even the cheapest of hardware, chop and change between hardware modules at will, etc. - and stop pumping out refurbished crap and expecting people to buy it / use it just BECAUSE it's open.
When I do, the local council and even local supermarkets have recycling boxes for them. Pretty standard fare in the UK, as far as I can see. For instance:
says that traditional incandescents cannot be recycled at all, but gives a ton of places near me that offer CFL recycling.
And you only get mercury poisoning if you smash them, not if you handle them like any other bulb (I've never smashed an incandescent, never smashed a CFL, so it's not an issue).
Dunno where you've all been shopping, but all the CFL's I've bought (since about a year after they first appeared in mainstream shops, the ones before that were crap, but we're going back - what? A decade?) turn on instantly, light up the room, and don't fail any more/less than filament bulbs.
They fit in the same sockets and if you check properly, you can get the same bulb shapes too. About the only "weird" thing I've noticed is that some of them "glow" faintly for a few seconds after power-off (most noticeable in bedroom lights, for instance, which tend to plunge you into absolute darkness that you can't miss - because you're looking up - when they go off).
The CFL's are in the pound-shop stock, even at IKEA still. Can't believe they are subsidised much given that they are that cheap Europe-wide and online too. IKEA now has LED bulbs for a pound or two each, in a dozen styles and shapes (never used high-power LED's, so can't comment). Dimmable, some of them, just read the box first or search on Amazon. Just about everything you want.
If you're illuminating rooms, attics, cupboards, interiors of houses, they are absolutely fine. Outside lights are either incandescents (and are therefore used for general illumination, not safety like a light to show that someone is in, hence CFL's are appropriate) or halogen-style floodlights for safety anyway.
Guess what? I put two cheap £2 bulbs into my rear garden lamps and they light up to ten feet away adequately in pitch-black for the whole width of my house. You can go to the bottom of a 30 foot garden by them and not trip over anyway, and yet with them off I can photograph Jupiter and Saturn through a telescope on a clear night with no moon without any special preparations.
And, you know what?, I've paid more than £2 for incandescents a LOT in the past. They haven't been as cheap as people claim they were for a LONG time and that has more to do with inflation than the technology being phased out.
Again, people whining just because you take something away. I bet you could have found a million people who thought a candle "gave off better light" than these new-fangled incandescent bulbs that came along, if you were around a hundred years ago too.
In fact, I've been in my current house for 18 months. The ONLY bulbs I've changed in that time? The stupid 20W halogen G9 / G4 mini-bulbs that there are 12 of in my living room in two light fittings (and with 12 they are barely equivalent to 6 CFL's doing the same job). We have to replace those bloody light fittings soon as they are too expensive to run and just blow *all* the time.
Everything else are CFL bulbs that *I* personally bought as cheap as possible and put into my new house, or CFL's in things that we have brought with us from our previous house (4 years there, only CFL's bought when brand-new, again the only things I changed in that house were 12V "low voltage" halogens). I think there's a pound-shop mains-powered LED thing in the shed, but that's quite new.
Sorry, but I just don't get what shit you people are buying to have these bad experiences with CFL's. Cheap crap out of Ikea, stuff out of Homebase, stuff found on Amazon, stuff bought from pound-stores (or Trago Mills, if you're familiar with Cornish cheapie-shops and their 63p CFL bulbs), I've bought them all. The worst that happens is you get a slow-start brand but it's been a long time since I got lumbered with one.
Honestly, it's a load of bollocks. The only traditional incandescents in my house are in the electricity cupboard and the loft, and that's because I'm too cheap to even put a proper light fitting in there (currently a 50p lampholder plugged directly into the lighting circuit for both), let alone change the bulb, I use it so little. And the area they have to cover? The cupboard would be fully illuminated by a small 1.5v torch bulb, and the attic I actually have to bring table-lamps (with CFL's!) into to see when I'm working in there because the incandesce
So, presumably they don't actually rewrite the message as such, just change the way it's displayed in the web interface (through an intermediate proxy). Rewriting the message would break all those nice email verification systems, no?
So what about those people using IMAP and not GMail's web interface? Presumably, it's business as usual.
Fact is, if I don't want you to be able to know when I've loaded your images, I won't load your images unless I think they are vital. Which is why my mail-client doesn't download any images by default anyway.
I see this as a good thing - Google are protecting users who are dumb enough to use the web interface for email and rely on it, but not touching anyone who would do things properly anyway.
Not if they just asked nVidia. nVidia own that code and if they wanted to make an exception just for Valve, they can do. And given how closely they have been working together lately, and how beneficial it would be, it would be stupid not to.
It would take about ten minutes to make a "unless it's being distributed as part of a SteamOS installation" disclaimer and throw it into a licence agreement (new or old).
Nobody should really question WHAT you did. It's how you did it.
Blanket doing it to everyone, in foreign countries even, interfering with people who are of no interest but yet still collecting far more than just metadata, storing that data indefinitely for no good reason, doing it all without any sort of oversight, controls or court orders, and then acting nonchalant when it's pointed out that, technically, you've broke just about every law going including those designed FOR YOU to stop terrorism - that's what people are complaining about.
Not that you can link Joe to Fred using their phone records.
Hates Steam for DRM. Recommends Origin. Hahahahaha....
And after 8 hours of downloading, downloading patches, downloading more patches and then constantly downloading over 8Gb for one game that I never got installed (freebie with an indie bundle) I gave up. Never seen such a shoddy, bitty interface and download structure (not to mention speed).
I have several big games on Origin that I've redeemed from bundles, etc. and I honestly don't care enough to install it again.
Just about every platform ever made has supplied people with a dev kit which, almost universally, contains some kind of emulator.
How the hell do you write a launch title, for instance, when the console only exists in prototype versions?
They are expensive, complex, powerful, and - many of them - are just PC-based emulation environments with some custom hardware to interface with controllers, cartridges, etc.
There's nothing new in emulating anything. People were doing it back in the days of PC-based NES development kits. Almost certainly, the devkits for the new consoles are out there now, PC-based, very hard to get hold of, very expensive, and very well protected so you can't just pirate them and give everyone a free console.
But the way the world of console gaming is heading (SteamBox etc.), it may not matter for much longer anyway.
There is nothing more to "emulation" than pretending to be another type of machine. And if you made the machine, the only advantage you have is that you know what the hardware is supposed to do. If you didn't make the machine, it's the REVERSE-ENGINEERING that's complex and difficult and takes years, not the emulation.
I don't see how giving either side of a transaction the ability to back out really fixes anything.
All that will happen is that fraud will shift to ordering products/services, and then withholding the Bitcoin that is "in escrow". Seller gets screwed and buyer gets free stuff.
There is no way to have a mutual, simultaneous exchange of goods/services/payment that doesn't allow fraud on at least one side. If there was, we'd have been using it decades ago.
All the Bitcoin "contract" does is introduce a trusted intermediary, for the most part, or limit goods exchange to those that can be sent via the Bitcoin blockchain. That doesn't solve any problem we can't already solve with such a trusted intermediary. (And who's going to be a trusted intermediary that the seller will adhere blindly to their opinion, and who would need to be able to prove reasonably that you DID or DID NOT receive the product that was sent? Answer: Nobody.)
And most of the Bitcoin exchanges that went under, it was either fraud on the part of the exchange (who presumably would require a trusted intermediary - but who, except another exchange?) or outright stupidity/negligence in their storing of their own bitcoin wallets and associated security.
Bitcoin solves a few problems and helps a lot of others. But it's far from being usable in any kind of fraud prevention like you suggest.
Don't be stupid. Don't trade with people likely to scam you. Don't expect to ever go through your life and not get scammed. If we could stop scamming just with a protocol, we'd have done it back in the dark ages.
My rule for SSD hasn't changed since their invention.
Give me an SSD within the same power-of-ten size as a hard drive for the same cost and we'll talk.
Seriously. Give me a 1Tb SSD for the cost of the cheapest XTb hard drive and I'll buy it. But if hard drives get to 10Tb in that time, guess what happens? You then have to give me a 10Tb drive for the same price.
I thought that 1Tb SSD's would be with us already. The technology is out there, it just needs scaling up. We can buy them but they are STUPID prices, sometimes more than buying, say, 10x100Gb SSD's that ALL use the same chips and boards as the 1Tb SSD.
I was hoping for this Christmas but that's not going to happen either. If you want to wait until next year, guess what, the requirements go up again.
Stop pissing about with HDD technologies and just start selling SSD's of sensible prices en masse. Every time I hear the word "platters" now it pisses me off. I was hoping to be rid of them by now, not handing them more crutches.
Sorry, but you describe a useful function. Whether it's relevant any more or not is neither here nor there. If I invent a way to make a clockwork mechanism work more efficiently, that's still an invention, still patentable. And, as Trevor Bayliss shows, still something that should be protected by patents even if it's "old hat".
The real crux of the matter is whether FAT is "obvious to one skilled in the art" which is a much, much, much more relevant and important test of patentability. Fact is, it pretty much is. If you're a filesystem designer and you're handed FAT and told to make it store long file names, FAT LFN's are pretty much one of a million ways to do them - and not even a particularly effective or perfect one.
Lacking such "inventiveness", and being just something that anyone with half a brain could come up with, AND being in a jurisdiction where software patents shouldn't be allowed by the EU courts anyway, that's what means it should be invalidated. By the same token, BTW, Trevor Bayliss would also fail. What he did wasn't invention, just quite a smart combination of two existing technologies. But at least it was a physical invention and not a way to get Linux-based vendors (e.g. TomTom) to pay Microsoft money for Windows-only inventions.
If you can't cross-compile a game to a Linux binary, then you're not really programming properly. Game authoring tools are for apps, and if your app-maker can't make apps for Android, iPad, etc. just as easily as having a plugin, then you've most likely exhausted its capabilities long ago.
Any sort of big-name title, the worry is more about the underlying engine, e.g. DirectX vs OpenGL, etc. than anything to do with just pressing a button and out pops a binary.
If you can manage to write a Windows game and then a Mac port or an Android app of it, then chances are you can target any platform you like as easily as anything. If you didn't, the problem isn't lack of tools to do so.
Likely to be pushed out of sight by the Elite:Dangerous kick starter that was successful earlier this year, which has David Braben working on it.
As yet, it's all pretty pictures and talk, but they got £2m just from the kickstarter. Star Citizen, in comparison, is something I'd never heard of until you linked it - and seems to have been running for longer.
(P.S. $2.5m stretch goals to add "an additional flyable ship"?)
Not that I'm knocking either - hell, I probably want both - but it's going to be a struggle and neither are going to be ready for YEARS.
I found out about a search engine (back in the days when the best you had was a "web directory" that some guy hand-maintained) because my brother was talking to the guys who were writing it at the time on open newsgroups. It was unheard of and still just a uni project back then, turned out to be quite huge, and we used it for years until something better came along (which we heard by word-of-mouth from friends, not a banner-ad or shill-piece).
Did the cop know or reasonably suspect that a theft was being committed? Yes.
Is he required to know exactly the local electricity rates, the rate of the consumption of the car, the time it was plugged it down to the nearest second, the cable losses, and the discount that the school gets on electricity supply before he can make an arrest? No.
And if you read the article, he didn't - he made a report, the arrest came when the facts came to light.
If a kid runs out of a shop chased by security with an armful of things, the cop doesn't need to itemise what he has and whether it reaches a certain figure. You arrest, then you investigate, which is the purpose of the arrest, and then if necessary you "escalate" the arrest to a formal charge.
Being arrested means NOTHING except detaining you on reasonable suspicion of a crime until it can be ascertained whether a crime has been committed or not.
Fact is, he didn't arrest him, that came later when they checked facts. And he can arrest him because he has more than a reasonable suspicion that he took something (a product or service) that didn't belong to him, without permission, and with the intention to permanently deprive the owner of it. MORE THAN reasonable. In that he could see him doing it first-hand and query him about it and get an admission ("Yeah, but it's only 5c!" is basically an admission that you did it if you have anywhere near a half-decent lawyer on the other side).
What part of this confuses you? He was arrested, after much consultation, for a crime he admits doing, that a policeman caught him doing, which the school did not give permission for him to do, petty though it is.
You know what? I bet if he'd asked the school and even said "Here's ten cents for the school charity, can I just plug in my car outside for a minute so I can get home?" they'd have told the police that it was authorised and there'd be no issue.
Do you have a warning sign on your external electrical sockets at home (e.g. in the garden?)
Do you have a warning sign on your garden sprinklers?
Do you have a warning sign on the bulb in your porch?
No. It's not yours, don't take it. Ask first, and 99.9% of the time if it's reasonable it'll be a Yes. And if it's ever a No, then you really DON'T want to have been doing it to that person's house anyway as they'd probably have you arrested if you were caught no matter what (i.e. they said No for a reason, or they said No because they never want you to do that and they'd kick up a fuss if they ever found our you did).
I put a padlock on things FOR ME. To stop deliberate theft that would inconvenience me. Just because something doesn't have a sign or a lock does NOT mean you can just walk up and use/take it (take, for example, someone putting a "Help Yourself" sign on my car, and then someone takes it - that's still theft!)
And no matter what the case, if you just asked first, it wouldn't have been a problem.
So, he admits theft. He had intention and permanently deprived a school of something that was theirs and they were required to pay for, and which they had not authorised.
I don't care if it was 5c or $500, he did something he shouldn't have. And the repercussions of his actions may have been greater - I work in schools and I can't leave trailing leads on the ground, I have to be careful not to overload circuits that are sometimes not even capable of providing the local 13A maximum without fusing things (but yet checked regularly and are legal). And he plugged it in and walked off, so there's no telling what might have happened - electrical fire, overloaded the circuit and cut off the alarm or some other important system, etc. and it's possible nobody would have known until he returned to his car.
Sorry, but you just can't do this. Try doing it in someone's house. I have an external socket on my house for powering garden tools - see what happens if you try to plug your car into it for even a microsecond. I guarantee you that it won't be worth your while. I have a lock on mine, but I have little reason to - using it without my express permission is theft whether it has a lock on or not.
You can whine as much as you want - as with anything, if you wouldn't have done it if the policeman was just standing right there watching you do it, there's a reason for that. You knew it was wrong and thought that nobody would mind and you'd just get away with it.
And you know what the biggest bitch of the whole story is? In any school I've ever worked in, if you'd just asked the caretaker / a school representative if you could do it first (like all our PTA and parents do when they want to do something on school premises, even outside of school hours or when they've paid for the hall inside), they'd probably have just said Yes. Hell, they'll put the extension leads out for you and make sure it's safe and using a safe socket and that the leads can't be tripped over if you ask nicely.
It pisses me off that people think that just because "it's only a few cents" (or only "a couple of mph", or "only for a minute"), that excuses that they knew it was wrong and deliberately chose to do it anyway.
If you wouldn't have done it at a random stranger's house, why would you do it at your children's school without asking?
Make a good product, make a good customer out of your customers, and you don't have to pay people to advertise it.
Probably spent more on Steam than I have on my last few PC's combined. And my first purchase took nearly a year after they shut WON down, and I only created the account to carry on playing CS 1.6 online.
Fact is, make a good enough product and treat your customers well and you don't have to buy ANYONE, they'll give you a positive review and backing all of their own accord.
Though I have to say that their announcements are 10 years too late, I feel that Valve's experience of their investing their system in this minority platform must be paying off. Why would they continue otherwise.
They get a viable console OS platform, for "free", with community support. They get a reputation as being "the" Linux gaming vendor (like transgaming etc. were). They get to bring their games to new platforms and push driver issues through Intel etc. cooperation to get themselves some influence in the industry from multiple angles.
And they are obviously seeing that their investment in Linux and even small things like SDL (which I believe is the backend of much of the Steam client, not to mention the browser components they use) is paying dividends for them.
Good on them, I say. It *is* a niche platform, but they are driving it hard and seeing what it can do for them, rather than just waiting until it has 25% market share before they do anything about it (which is the standard attitude among software and hardware companies). And they are doing lots of things they don't NEED to be doing. They've pretty much held off the Windows marketplace junk, so they don't need that 1% of Linux users jumping on board, nor would they make a huge difference even if they hadn't shielded themselves against the Windows Store.
I have used the Linux Steam client. It's just like Steam, but on Linux. I have played some of my games on Linux (88 supported out of 500+), and they work just like they do on Linux (even though that's much more dependent on the software developer, but the Valve titles are especially nice). Big picture mode was needed once we all started having widescreen TV's with HDMI, and it delivers. The next logical step is to make a box that just plays Steam and goes out on HDMI and if you have that kind of backing and prior success on Linux, why pay for Windows (even if that's only true for the first few revisions of the hardware)?
But they've taken it further - rather than just bash out a cheap PC-clone console, they are redesigning controllers, reprogramming their games around them, looking into the new VR trend, and trying to make it a machine that not just they can build. That's going above-and-beyond, as far as I'm concerned, so they deserve recognition for it, even if they are doing it purely for profit reasons.
The only downside is that people have been saying for 10 years how this should have been started on, and it took too long to get there. But we're there now.
Well done, Valve. Looking forward to buying a Steam console next Christmas when all these XBox and PS crap that I've never touched are just memories.
"I was only driving without insurance for a minute." "I was only over the speed limit for a minute." "I was only throwing bricks through people's windows for a minute." "I was only obstructing the police officer for a minute". "I only tweeted the name of the guy, that the courts ordered to be kept secret until after the trial, for a minute."
Are all valid excuses to get off?
No. He did it. He admits it. And with DDoS, it's perfectly possible to have several million people "only do it for a minute" and still take any site you can point to down through sheer overwhelming of traffic.
The size of his fine - that's up to his legal team to prove the damages caused by his actions were less than he is being required to pay and that it's disproportionate. You can argue that in appeal if you want.
But, fact is, you did it. You meant to do it. You verifiably did it. You admit you did it. And it was illegal to do it. Argue over your punishment but the headline just has me saying "Er, yes, and?"
Slashdot Mirror
I'm more concerned that FSF shouldn't be certifying hardware at all - as its name suggests.
Certify Coreboot, or a version of Linux, or some software but getting into hardware is a dangerous game precisely because you don't make the hardware (and thus it's almost impossible to guarantee that this device doesn't have some kind of blob somewhere in its hardware).
But if you are going to do it, and do it for random devices that are almost impossible to certify blob-free down to hardware (maybe you don't load them specifically, but that doesn't mean there isn't some buggy on board firmware somewhere that you have no control over) and get submitted to you, down to publicising them like this, then at least get involved in the hardware side, not recycling defunct laptops that may have all manner of invisible software, not unlike just about every commercial x86-based PC.
I don't see the point in this. You want to get away from commercialised products, essentially, and show how wonderful your code is and the freedom you get, but then you're limited to pathetic systems. It basically comes down to a balance that NOBODY wants - you can either browse websites that are out there today, cheaply, or you can have a computer based on Open Source code, or some variation in between.
If the FSF really want to do something useful, they should start with something smaller. The RPi, for instance, still has a shedload of closed-source crap but because it boots from SD-card (so no "BIOS" to worry about at all), it can actually be open-source AND useful if you want to help it be so.
And then once you have that, you can make a "Free" tablet. It's not that hard, it's the RPi, essentially, with a large built-in display (and given that the display and the 3D processing are the largest parts of the non-open devices of the RPi and other similar ARM chips, this is a good place to start from an established base).
Once you have a tablet, you are into real "usable" computers that can be audited. And laptops / netbooks are only a step away, as the recent trend for Windows laptops which are basically tablets with keyboards attached has shown. And then you can move towards laptops.
The technology is there, but only running on some ancient piece of crap makes it look awful.
Wake up, FSF. Put up a Kickstarter for a truly "open" ARM-based (because ARM will let you see if their chips are doing anything dodgy) tablet/cometputer and see what happens. And then you don't start from some brain-dead Windows-based commercial monstrosity with pathetic ACPI tables that you have to Coreboot to make it work properly.
If you want to show off open-source, do it using its strengths - the fact that you can build from the ground up on even the cheapest of hardware, chop and change between hardware modules at will, etc. - and stop pumping out refurbished crap and expecting people to buy it / use it just BECAUSE it's open.
Haven't needed to do so in 4 years.
When I do, the local council and even local supermarkets have recycling boxes for them. Pretty standard fare in the UK, as far as I can see. For instance:
http://www.recyclenow.com/what_can_i_do_today/can_it_be_recycled/miscellaneous/light_bulbs.html
says that traditional incandescents cannot be recycled at all, but gives a ton of places near me that offer CFL recycling.
And you only get mercury poisoning if you smash them, not if you handle them like any other bulb (I've never smashed an incandescent, never smashed a CFL, so it's not an issue).
Dunno where you've all been shopping, but all the CFL's I've bought (since about a year after they first appeared in mainstream shops, the ones before that were crap, but we're going back - what? A decade?) turn on instantly, light up the room, and don't fail any more/less than filament bulbs.
They fit in the same sockets and if you check properly, you can get the same bulb shapes too. About the only "weird" thing I've noticed is that some of them "glow" faintly for a few seconds after power-off (most noticeable in bedroom lights, for instance, which tend to plunge you into absolute darkness that you can't miss - because you're looking up - when they go off).
The CFL's are in the pound-shop stock, even at IKEA still. Can't believe they are subsidised much given that they are that cheap Europe-wide and online too. IKEA now has LED bulbs for a pound or two each, in a dozen styles and shapes (never used high-power LED's, so can't comment). Dimmable, some of them, just read the box first or search on Amazon. Just about everything you want.
If you're illuminating rooms, attics, cupboards, interiors of houses, they are absolutely fine. Outside lights are either incandescents (and are therefore used for general illumination, not safety like a light to show that someone is in, hence CFL's are appropriate) or halogen-style floodlights for safety anyway.
Guess what? I put two cheap £2 bulbs into my rear garden lamps and they light up to ten feet away adequately in pitch-black for the whole width of my house. You can go to the bottom of a 30 foot garden by them and not trip over anyway, and yet with them off I can photograph Jupiter and Saturn through a telescope on a clear night with no moon without any special preparations.
And, you know what?, I've paid more than £2 for incandescents a LOT in the past. They haven't been as cheap as people claim they were for a LONG time and that has more to do with inflation than the technology being phased out.
Again, people whining just because you take something away. I bet you could have found a million people who thought a candle "gave off better light" than these new-fangled incandescent bulbs that came along, if you were around a hundred years ago too.
In fact, I've been in my current house for 18 months. The ONLY bulbs I've changed in that time? The stupid 20W halogen G9 / G4 mini-bulbs that there are 12 of in my living room in two light fittings (and with 12 they are barely equivalent to 6 CFL's doing the same job). We have to replace those bloody light fittings soon as they are too expensive to run and just blow *all* the time.
Everything else are CFL bulbs that *I* personally bought as cheap as possible and put into my new house, or CFL's in things that we have brought with us from our previous house (4 years there, only CFL's bought when brand-new, again the only things I changed in that house were 12V "low voltage" halogens). I think there's a pound-shop mains-powered LED thing in the shed, but that's quite new.
Sorry, but I just don't get what shit you people are buying to have these bad experiences with CFL's. Cheap crap out of Ikea, stuff out of Homebase, stuff found on Amazon, stuff bought from pound-stores (or Trago Mills, if you're familiar with Cornish cheapie-shops and their 63p CFL bulbs), I've bought them all. The worst that happens is you get a slow-start brand but it's been a long time since I got lumbered with one.
Honestly, it's a load of bollocks. The only traditional incandescents in my house are in the electricity cupboard and the loft, and that's because I'm too cheap to even put a proper light fitting in there (currently a 50p lampholder plugged directly into the lighting circuit for both), let alone change the bulb, I use it so little. And the area they have to cover? The cupboard would be fully illuminated by a small 1.5v torch bulb, and the attic I actually have to bring table-lamps (with CFL's!) into to see when I'm working in there because the incandesce
So, presumably they don't actually rewrite the message as such, just change the way it's displayed in the web interface (through an intermediate proxy). Rewriting the message would break all those nice email verification systems, no?
So what about those people using IMAP and not GMail's web interface? Presumably, it's business as usual.
Fact is, if I don't want you to be able to know when I've loaded your images, I won't load your images unless I think they are vital. Which is why my mail-client doesn't download any images by default anyway.
I see this as a good thing - Google are protecting users who are dumb enough to use the web interface for email and rely on it, but not touching anyone who would do things properly anyway.
We have no idea what a random person working for a contractor with access to our top-secret systems managed to steal before he went on the run...
but we have to know your shoe-size, what toilet-paper you use, and what kind of porn turns you on.
A well-prioritised spying agency, there.
The other poster covered everything but also:
Not if they just asked nVidia. nVidia own that code and if they wanted to make an exception just for Valve, they can do. And given how closely they have been working together lately, and how beneficial it would be, it would be stupid not to.
It would take about ten minutes to make a "unless it's being distributed as part of a SteamOS installation" disclaimer and throw it into a licence agreement (new or old).
Nobody should really question WHAT you did. It's how you did it.
Blanket doing it to everyone, in foreign countries even, interfering with people who are of no interest but yet still collecting far more than just metadata, storing that data indefinitely for no good reason, doing it all without any sort of oversight, controls or court orders, and then acting nonchalant when it's pointed out that, technically, you've broke just about every law going including those designed FOR YOU to stop terrorism - that's what people are complaining about.
Not that you can link Joe to Fred using their phone records.
"Can an email server hold more than 1000 accounts?"
Hahahahahahahhahahahaaha.
Oh, you Microsoft jokers...
Hates Steam for DRM. Recommends Origin. Hahahahaha....
And after 8 hours of downloading, downloading patches, downloading more patches and then constantly downloading over 8Gb for one game that I never got installed (freebie with an indie bundle) I gave up. Never seen such a shoddy, bitty interface and download structure (not to mention speed).
I have several big games on Origin that I've redeemed from bundles, etc. and I honestly don't care enough to install it again.
Just about every platform ever made has supplied people with a dev kit which, almost universally, contains some kind of emulator.
How the hell do you write a launch title, for instance, when the console only exists in prototype versions?
They are expensive, complex, powerful, and - many of them - are just PC-based emulation environments with some custom hardware to interface with controllers, cartridges, etc.
There's nothing new in emulating anything. People were doing it back in the days of PC-based NES development kits. Almost certainly, the devkits for the new consoles are out there now, PC-based, very hard to get hold of, very expensive, and very well protected so you can't just pirate them and give everyone a free console.
But the way the world of console gaming is heading (SteamBox etc.), it may not matter for much longer anyway.
There is nothing more to "emulation" than pretending to be another type of machine. And if you made the machine, the only advantage you have is that you know what the hardware is supposed to do. If you didn't make the machine, it's the REVERSE-ENGINEERING that's complex and difficult and takes years, not the emulation.
I don't see how giving either side of a transaction the ability to back out really fixes anything.
All that will happen is that fraud will shift to ordering products/services, and then withholding the Bitcoin that is "in escrow". Seller gets screwed and buyer gets free stuff.
There is no way to have a mutual, simultaneous exchange of goods/services/payment that doesn't allow fraud on at least one side. If there was, we'd have been using it decades ago.
All the Bitcoin "contract" does is introduce a trusted intermediary, for the most part, or limit goods exchange to those that can be sent via the Bitcoin blockchain. That doesn't solve any problem we can't already solve with such a trusted intermediary. (And who's going to be a trusted intermediary that the seller will adhere blindly to their opinion, and who would need to be able to prove reasonably that you DID or DID NOT receive the product that was sent? Answer: Nobody.)
And most of the Bitcoin exchanges that went under, it was either fraud on the part of the exchange (who presumably would require a trusted intermediary - but who, except another exchange?) or outright stupidity/negligence in their storing of their own bitcoin wallets and associated security.
Bitcoin solves a few problems and helps a lot of others. But it's far from being usable in any kind of fraud prevention like you suggest.
Don't be stupid. Don't trade with people likely to scam you. Don't expect to ever go through your life and not get scammed. If we could stop scamming just with a protocol, we'd have done it back in the dark ages.
My rule for SSD hasn't changed since their invention.
Give me an SSD within the same power-of-ten size as a hard drive for the same cost and we'll talk.
Seriously. Give me a 1Tb SSD for the cost of the cheapest XTb hard drive and I'll buy it. But if hard drives get to 10Tb in that time, guess what happens? You then have to give me a 10Tb drive for the same price.
I thought that 1Tb SSD's would be with us already. The technology is out there, it just needs scaling up. We can buy them but they are STUPID prices, sometimes more than buying, say, 10x100Gb SSD's that ALL use the same chips and boards as the 1Tb SSD.
I was hoping for this Christmas but that's not going to happen either. If you want to wait until next year, guess what, the requirements go up again.
Stop pissing about with HDD technologies and just start selling SSD's of sensible prices en masse. Every time I hear the word "platters" now it pisses me off. I was hoping to be rid of them by now, not handing them more crutches.
Sorry, but you describe a useful function. Whether it's relevant any more or not is neither here nor there. If I invent a way to make a clockwork mechanism work more efficiently, that's still an invention, still patentable. And, as Trevor Bayliss shows, still something that should be protected by patents even if it's "old hat".
The real crux of the matter is whether FAT is "obvious to one skilled in the art" which is a much, much, much more relevant and important test of patentability. Fact is, it pretty much is. If you're a filesystem designer and you're handed FAT and told to make it store long file names, FAT LFN's are pretty much one of a million ways to do them - and not even a particularly effective or perfect one.
Lacking such "inventiveness", and being just something that anyone with half a brain could come up with, AND being in a jurisdiction where software patents shouldn't be allowed by the EU courts anyway, that's what means it should be invalidated. By the same token, BTW, Trevor Bayliss would also fail. What he did wasn't invention, just quite a smart combination of two existing technologies. But at least it was a physical invention and not a way to get Linux-based vendors (e.g. TomTom) to pay Microsoft money for Windows-only inventions.
Or Opera.
I just get a page of junk.
Direct Android compatibility.
(Potentially)
What smartphone / tablet type has the greatest marketshare again?
If you can't cross-compile a game to a Linux binary, then you're not really programming properly. Game authoring tools are for apps, and if your app-maker can't make apps for Android, iPad, etc. just as easily as having a plugin, then you've most likely exhausted its capabilities long ago.
Any sort of big-name title, the worry is more about the underlying engine, e.g. DirectX vs OpenGL, etc. than anything to do with just pressing a button and out pops a binary.
If you can manage to write a Windows game and then a Mac port or an Android app of it, then chances are you can target any platform you like as easily as anything. If you didn't, the problem isn't lack of tools to do so.
Likely to be pushed out of sight by the Elite:Dangerous kick starter that was successful earlier this year, which has David Braben working on it.
As yet, it's all pretty pictures and talk, but they got £2m just from the kickstarter. Star Citizen, in comparison, is something I'd never heard of until you linked it - and seems to have been running for longer.
(P.S. $2.5m stretch goals to add "an additional flyable ship"?)
Not that I'm knocking either - hell, I probably want both - but it's going to be a struggle and neither are going to be ready for YEARS.
I found out about a search engine (back in the days when the best you had was a "web directory" that some guy hand-maintained) because my brother was talking to the guys who were writing it at the time on open newsgroups. It was unheard of and still just a uni project back then, turned out to be quite huge, and we used it for years until something better came along (which we heard by word-of-mouth from friends, not a banner-ad or shill-piece).
It's true what you say.
Don't hyperbolise.
Did the cop know or reasonably suspect that a theft was being committed? Yes.
Is he required to know exactly the local electricity rates, the rate of the consumption of the car, the time it was plugged it down to the nearest second, the cable losses, and the discount that the school gets on electricity supply before he can make an arrest? No.
And if you read the article, he didn't - he made a report, the arrest came when the facts came to light.
If a kid runs out of a shop chased by security with an armful of things, the cop doesn't need to itemise what he has and whether it reaches a certain figure. You arrest, then you investigate, which is the purpose of the arrest, and then if necessary you "escalate" the arrest to a formal charge.
Being arrested means NOTHING except detaining you on reasonable suspicion of a crime until it can be ascertained whether a crime has been committed or not.
Fact is, he didn't arrest him, that came later when they checked facts. And he can arrest him because he has more than a reasonable suspicion that he took something (a product or service) that didn't belong to him, without permission, and with the intention to permanently deprive the owner of it. MORE THAN reasonable. In that he could see him doing it first-hand and query him about it and get an admission ("Yeah, but it's only 5c!" is basically an admission that you did it if you have anywhere near a half-decent lawyer on the other side).
What part of this confuses you? He was arrested, after much consultation, for a crime he admits doing, that a policeman caught him doing, which the school did not give permission for him to do, petty though it is.
You know what? I bet if he'd asked the school and even said "Here's ten cents for the school charity, can I just plug in my car outside for a minute so I can get home?" they'd have told the police that it was authorised and there'd be no issue.
Do you have a warning sign on your external electrical sockets at home (e.g. in the garden?)
Do you have a warning sign on your garden sprinklers?
Do you have a warning sign on the bulb in your porch?
No. It's not yours, don't take it. Ask first, and 99.9% of the time if it's reasonable it'll be a Yes. And if it's ever a No, then you really DON'T want to have been doing it to that person's house anyway as they'd probably have you arrested if you were caught no matter what (i.e. they said No for a reason, or they said No because they never want you to do that and they'd kick up a fuss if they ever found our you did).
I put a padlock on things FOR ME. To stop deliberate theft that would inconvenience me. Just because something doesn't have a sign or a lock does NOT mean you can just walk up and use/take it (take, for example, someone putting a "Help Yourself" sign on my car, and then someone takes it - that's still theft!)
And no matter what the case, if you just asked first, it wouldn't have been a problem.
So, he admits theft. He had intention and permanently deprived a school of something that was theirs and they were required to pay for, and which they had not authorised.
I don't care if it was 5c or $500, he did something he shouldn't have. And the repercussions of his actions may have been greater - I work in schools and I can't leave trailing leads on the ground, I have to be careful not to overload circuits that are sometimes not even capable of providing the local 13A maximum without fusing things (but yet checked regularly and are legal). And he plugged it in and walked off, so there's no telling what might have happened - electrical fire, overloaded the circuit and cut off the alarm or some other important system, etc. and it's possible nobody would have known until he returned to his car.
Sorry, but you just can't do this. Try doing it in someone's house. I have an external socket on my house for powering garden tools - see what happens if you try to plug your car into it for even a microsecond. I guarantee you that it won't be worth your while. I have a lock on mine, but I have little reason to - using it without my express permission is theft whether it has a lock on or not.
You can whine as much as you want - as with anything, if you wouldn't have done it if the policeman was just standing right there watching you do it, there's a reason for that. You knew it was wrong and thought that nobody would mind and you'd just get away with it.
And you know what the biggest bitch of the whole story is? In any school I've ever worked in, if you'd just asked the caretaker / a school representative if you could do it first (like all our PTA and parents do when they want to do something on school premises, even outside of school hours or when they've paid for the hall inside), they'd probably have just said Yes. Hell, they'll put the extension leads out for you and make sure it's safe and using a safe socket and that the leads can't be tripped over if you ask nicely.
It pisses me off that people think that just because "it's only a few cents" (or only "a couple of mph", or "only for a minute"), that excuses that they knew it was wrong and deliberately chose to do it anyway.
If you wouldn't have done it at a random stranger's house, why would you do it at your children's school without asking?
Make a good product, make a good customer out of your customers, and you don't have to pay people to advertise it.
Probably spent more on Steam than I have on my last few PC's combined. And my first purchase took nearly a year after they shut WON down, and I only created the account to carry on playing CS 1.6 online.
Fact is, make a good enough product and treat your customers well and you don't have to buy ANYONE, they'll give you a positive review and backing all of their own accord.
Though I have to say that their announcements are 10 years too late, I feel that Valve's experience of their investing their system in this minority platform must be paying off. Why would they continue otherwise.
They get a viable console OS platform, for "free", with community support. They get a reputation as being "the" Linux gaming vendor (like transgaming etc. were). They get to bring their games to new platforms and push driver issues through Intel etc. cooperation to get themselves some influence in the industry from multiple angles.
And they are obviously seeing that their investment in Linux and even small things like SDL (which I believe is the backend of much of the Steam client, not to mention the browser components they use) is paying dividends for them.
Good on them, I say. It *is* a niche platform, but they are driving it hard and seeing what it can do for them, rather than just waiting until it has 25% market share before they do anything about it (which is the standard attitude among software and hardware companies). And they are doing lots of things they don't NEED to be doing. They've pretty much held off the Windows marketplace junk, so they don't need that 1% of Linux users jumping on board, nor would they make a huge difference even if they hadn't shielded themselves against the Windows Store.
I have used the Linux Steam client. It's just like Steam, but on Linux. I have played some of my games on Linux (88 supported out of 500+), and they work just like they do on Linux (even though that's much more dependent on the software developer, but the Valve titles are especially nice). Big picture mode was needed once we all started having widescreen TV's with HDMI, and it delivers. The next logical step is to make a box that just plays Steam and goes out on HDMI and if you have that kind of backing and prior success on Linux, why pay for Windows (even if that's only true for the first few revisions of the hardware)?
But they've taken it further - rather than just bash out a cheap PC-clone console, they are redesigning controllers, reprogramming their games around them, looking into the new VR trend, and trying to make it a machine that not just they can build. That's going above-and-beyond, as far as I'm concerned, so they deserve recognition for it, even if they are doing it purely for profit reasons.
The only downside is that people have been saying for 10 years how this should have been started on, and it took too long to get there. But we're there now.
Well done, Valve. Looking forward to buying a Steam console next Christmas when all these XBox and PS crap that I've never touched are just memories.
So:
"I was only driving without insurance for a minute."
"I was only over the speed limit for a minute."
"I was only throwing bricks through people's windows for a minute."
"I was only obstructing the police officer for a minute".
"I only tweeted the name of the guy, that the courts ordered to be kept secret until after the trial, for a minute."
Are all valid excuses to get off?
No. He did it. He admits it. And with DDoS, it's perfectly possible to have several million people "only do it for a minute" and still take any site you can point to down through sheer overwhelming of traffic.
The size of his fine - that's up to his legal team to prove the damages caused by his actions were less than he is being required to pay and that it's disproportionate. You can argue that in appeal if you want.
But, fact is, you did it. You meant to do it. You verifiably did it. You admit you did it. And it was illegal to do it. Argue over your punishment but the headline just has me saying "Er, yes, and?"