Can you play all the games you could on the PC in the 90s? No, you actually can't unless you are still running Windows 95. Go pull out those discs and see if they run. So what do you do if you want to play them? You download some emulator and the binary for the game and you plat it. But nice try. It will be the same way for Diablo 3 in 15 years.
Oh yes I can. I recently played a game from 1993, both on my desktop and on my cell phone.
You can play Blizzard games in offline mode, so not an issue here.
Is it possible to install with only the CD and start playing without ever going online at any time or contacting Blizzard?
There isn't an install restriction either. Hell, once you register it online you can download it anywhere on to any computer. Complain away, but it isn't Blizzard.
Oh, there it is. "Once you register it online". No money for you.
Any restriction you come up with will be patched out either by the developers or hackers. So your "What if....what if...what if...." is just that. You make a mountain out of a molehill.
That misses the point. I repeat: I do not pay for dealing with such bullshit.
It's actually entirely the reverse: looking for a hacked copy is time consuming, and entirely goes against what paying for things is supposed to be like. Looking for hacked copies is what kids that don't have even half the amount required to buy it, and no way of earning more do. Back when I was 12, I obviously had no regular income. Buying a single game would have required me to save every single cent of what my parents gave me, for a month or more. So I pirated, because I did have plenty free time to copy disks, and even copy by hand manuals that were made to be hard to photocopy.
Now that I grew up, the price of a game is easy to afford. My time, on the other hand is much scarcer. Dealing with DRM bullshit easily spoils a weekend, and is the last thing on my mind when I get home. So no, I absolutely will not put up with it. So I'll spend my money on somebody who appreciates their customers more, which usually end up being indie developers who tend to make something more interesting than the FPS of the month, and are in more need of my money as well.
Re:Not sure I'll buy it.
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It's a show of deep disrespect for the customer. When I think somebody is being an asshole, I don't give them money.
There are plenty practical concerns as well.
Install restrictions - What constitutes a computer for me is very fluid, with my current one getting gradually upgraded, with some old pieces being used to make new computers, and so on. As a bare minimum I'd want to play on my desktop and my laptop, that's already 2 installs. The desktop will at some point be upgraded, which I'm sure will be counted as a different computer, that's 3 installs. After that I have to arbitrarily restrict myself from making changes. Screw that, I'm not paying for being limited in what I can do with my own stuff.
Internet connection -- it goes down, there are trains and airplanes where it's not available, and other countries where it may exist but I may not be able to get access to it. I happen to like to travel ocassionally. If it's required, no deal.
The future - I can still play Diablo 1. Will I be able to play Diablo 3 in 2024? If not, I'm not paying, because if I can arbitrarily lose the ability to run it, it's not really a purchase.
The bugs - Quite a lot of DRM went wrong at some point, forcing people to deal with customer supports, download updates. Sometimes DRM refuses to work with some software, crashes the game, incorrectly decides I've done something wrong, or something else of the sort, all in exchange for no benefit to myself. When I pay for something it's supposed to give me some advantage, not problems.
The "relationship" - DRM inevitably requires maintaining a "relationship" with the company. The game contacting their servers every time I try to run it, me calling their customer support when it won't activate, etc. I absolutely hate such dependency. If I have to care if the company is still in business, I won't buy it. Only allowable exception would be things like MMOs where there's no such thing as a single player mode, but I don't play those anyway.
What's wrong with the screenshots?
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They're.png files, but they look like horribly compressed.jpg. Or the game really looks that bad?
A higher resolution wouldn't hurt either. It's been ages since I played anything at 1024x768.
Iberia (spanish airline) uses metal cutlery. They cut off the end of the fork, and probably blunt the knife as well (it's got a crappy serrated edge on it). They seem to have perfected this and made the amazing achievement of creating a metal knife that cuts worse than a plastic one.
That said, if you do manage to stab somebody with one of those, maybe you can give them a nasty infection. The cutlery comes in a sealed plastic packet, but all of it seems to have bits of salad stuck to it.
So, the school introduces this and the headline is: Students may be able to circumvent it using gummy bears. Boo hoo!! As if any other measure may not be circumvented. A simple supervision or CCTV of the scanner would detect any circumvention attempt.
First, to do this you don't need to do something highly obvious like pulling a gummi bear out of your pocket and mashing it against the sensor. You can make a thin strip, and stick it to your finger, then go through all the usual motions.
Second, sure, with enough work it could be detected. But the point of this is to avoid work in the first place. You might as well ditch the scanner and go back to having teachers do the check.
last, maybe you have the budget to be running as many servers and to be hogging as much energy as you want, but what about all the mobile phone users connected to your site? is it acceptable that every single little AJAX interaction now has to go through the encryption/decryption straw on their 400 mhz oldschool mobile phone?
Sure, why not? I tested mine, it can do aes-128 at 8MB/s. That may not seem like terribly fast, but it's faster than the ideal case for 3G (with the real world rate being considerably lower)
My laptop (nothing especially impressive, chosen for battery time and not power) can do it at 90MB/s. My desktop does it at 250MB/s, and isn't terribly new either (Phenom II 940).
what about places where, for various reasons, encryption is controlled or restricted? are we going to tell them no, unless you have full end to end encryption, you cant use the web?
Yes? Because those places either have no access to anything modern anyway, or nobody cares about what the law says. Encryption is so common that many games like WoW use it.
the hubris of "just throw more end to end encryption" at it is bullshit, rotten wrong incorrect bullshit. what we need is a cookie solution not susceptible to man in the middle attacks. anything else is irresponsible overkill, and ignorant to the real problem and diverse requirements and use cases of the web. authentication does not have to be tied to end to end encryption, at least thats my mangled crippled understanding of Kerberos.
Why? You provide no good justification for it. The fact is that currently encryption is fast even on limited devices on cell phones, and on modern hardware doing full disk encryption amounts to a rounding error. Encryption is also easy to implement in hardware, where it gets even better performance.
I don't understand why would it be "hubris" anyway. The way I see it, everything remotely possible should be encrypted, all the time. There's no good reason for random third parties to be looking at my packets anyway.
Frankly, once I know a company bans entire accounts for doing something that affects only myself, and that Blizzard is well known for wide, sweeping bans, and that all their games are tied to one account, any thoughts of buying anything from Blizzard disappear from my head.
No one has demonstrated without a doubt that it means the end of civilization.
I've never, ever heard of anybody say it would. Please link to any place where you've heard it.
What is there is a potential for things getting seriously unpleasant. There was an earthquake in Haiti recently for instance. That's the kind of "unpleasant" I'm thinking of, only in multiple places at once. Will the human race survive? Sure. Do I want to be there when it happens? Hell, no.
We will adapt, migrate and flourish, because that is human nature.
Oh, there's been a lot of flourishing in New Orleans lately? You mean that they quickly fixed everything in a couple of months and since then it's been awesome? And of course I'm sure you don't mind at all the amount of tax money that it took to fix it, as well as the loss the economy took from having all those people stop what they were doing and get to rebuilding.
There's a big difference between having to adapt quickly and having to adapt over centuries.
Let's say the sea level rises. If it rises a few meters in 50 years, you may see your house on the beach get flooded. If it rises in 5000 years, there's likely to be a point where one of your descendants decides that the sea came uncomfortably close a few years back, and moves somewhere else.
An army isn't so much protection against war as protection against getting invaded, and forcing others to do your bidding.
Pads and a helmet indeed are so that you can take greater risks. It's technically possible to sit on a box containing an engine and ride on it at 80 MPH. Nobody does it because that's too dangerous. A car on the other hand protects you enough that the tradeoff is worth it. If we could be safe enough at 300 MPH (as we are in an airplane or bullet train for instance), we'd travel at that speed as well. If it was safe enough to do on the road, then we'd do it on the road.
I mean, do countries wait until it's clear there's going to be a war before they start training an army and making weapons? The US also has the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, just in case. It's generally a good thing to plan ahead.
When the scores are tallied, Suzette ties with Rollo Carpenter's Cleverbot for 2nd-3rd. Yet, it turns out, the 3rd round judge got the human subject from hell. Poetic justice! The human was all over the place -- confusing, vague. The judge voted irritated/angry/bored Suzette as human. Instant win since no other program swayed the judges.
So, if I understood correctly, the judge talks to two people. A bot, and a human. It seems that in this case, the judge is not deciding on a per-case basis, but talks to everybody then figures out who's the bot by choosing the one that did the worst. So the judge getting to talk to a joker, troll or complete idiot can make even a crappy bot win the test.
That seems to be a weak test. I don't think the judge should be able to make an answer based on logic (eg, if I'm completely sure this one is a human, then even if very good the other one must be a bot). There should exist the possibility of everybody the judge talks to being a bot, or everybody being a human, which would force them to judge everybody to talk to individually.
I'm not confusing them, I know perfectly well what's the difference.
It's just that to me it doesn't matter much where it comes from. If it's locked, I don't don't buy it.
On the iPhone, the lock on root comes from Apple, so no matter who sells it, I'm automatically not interested. For other phones, the lock could come from a carrier, in which case I'll only buy it if I can buy it without the lock, by for instance ignoring the carrier and buying from the manufacturer.
And another thing, regarding your first paragraph: Apple does things that annoy you, but they are not immoral, just... annoying. Contrast that with MS.
Eh, that's not exactly it. For me, Apple has long ago reached the point of "I'm sure I don't want to buy their products". The things they do that make me decide not to buy their products are in my view are very unlikely to change. If they were to change, I'd be very unlikely to miss it. Due to this, I don't pay very close attention to them, because one minor reason more or less to dislike them doesn't change anything anyway.
There might well be something that Apple does that I consider unethical. But that just doesn't matter much at this point. If Steve Jobs kicks puppies or whatever, I already don't buy his products, and can't buy less than nothing. So I just have better things to do than to look for things like that.
I disagree with the "superior experience" assessment. For me it's automatically equivalent to "unusable".
I don't own any consoles for the same reason. I like games I can mess with. More than half of my enjoyment of a game comes from mods made by other users, creating mods, or messing with the source if available. I'll grant I'm quite atypical for a gamer though.
I've never understood the big deal--game consoles are locked down too, but you don't see tirades against Nintendo around here.
Well, I don't see a post every time Miyamoto scratches his butt, which helps a lot. Also the same content is largely available on PC. And the lack of the myriad of stories along the lines of "X can be done with an iPhone" when pretty much any phone made in the last decade has the required capabilities.
I don't particularly like Nintendo either, btw. For example I really don't like their litigation against modchips, which ensures I won't buy any of their stuff.
I've seen many comments similar to this one recently and I just don't understand it. Look at how MS funneled money into SCO to attack Linux, how they strong-armed Novell into a "licensing agreement," how they pressured governments into making OOXML a standard, or intentionally selling defective XB360s. Those are things that Apple never stooped to doing, and that's just recent history. Halloween document anyone?
The GP's statement is correct though. Apple does annoying things MS doesn't. But both companies annoy me, and I avoid dealing with them, just for different reasons. Just that Apple doesn't fund SCO, or that MS doesn't control their hardware with an iron fist doesn't make either company automatically awesome in my eyes.
Apple retaining tight control over the Mac platform isn't stooping to anything. It's what they've always done and will continue to do, much to their users' delight. Why should Apple change their business model to appease geeks who won't buy their products anyway?
So that we buy their products, of course.
It doesn't matter what Apple does, people who hate Apple will never buy their products.
That's a mistake. I don't dislike Apple because it's Apple. I dislike Apple because of what Apple currently does. If they change what they do, I might change my mind. It's simple.
I change my mind on companies. Years back, in my mind, "Blizzard" equated with "awesome". These days it equates with "no way I'm paying". It could change back if they started making stuff I'd be willing to buy again.
Why should they change because of disdain from non-customers?
Because this non-customer could be a customer if they made something I like.
Sort of like when android gets completely locked down by a carrier, you end up "rooting" the device to install custom software and enjoy the benefits of your completely free and open software ecosystem, but when apple does it, you have to throw off the chains of tyranny by jailbreaking your locked down piece of crap that nobody would ever want to buy anyway, if it weren't for the power of apple's marketing team and the weak-mindedness of sheeple.
I don't like either case. In the locked down Android case, my annoyance would go for the carrier though, and I'd avoid dealing with that carrier if at all possible. Fortunately here I can (and do) buy unlocked phones. I haven't ever bought a phone from the carrier for this reason.
In the Apple case I don't get to do such a thing, because it's always locked down, no matter who I buy from.
Different is not necessarily better. As a consumer I can buy a Droid phone and in the future buy another driod phone from another compatible manufacturer and still use the same apps. If I buy a Nokia, I am stuck buying Nokias if I want to use the same app. There is also the catch 22 of any new OS; Few apps are written because the install base in not high enough, Install base is low because there are few apps. iOS avoided that issue because they were the first on the block and every developer wanted to get on their band waggon. Android avoided that issue because there are enough people that are dissatisfied with Apple's closed system that an open system has a place. It sounds like MeeGoo will be just another closed system like iOS; one manufacturer, one app store, my way or the highway. MeeGoo will be behind iOS and Android forever causing every app publisher to make the decision whether or not to support a third OS. The answer to that question for many developers is no.
N900 is extremely open actually. You can entirely reformat and repartition it if you wish. You can install Android, Ubuntu or anything else you want on it.
I don't know how will this work out long term, but IMO it has a big advantage is that very little porting required. There isn't as much need to get on the bandwagon because a lot of what can be used on Maemo/Meego is stuff that makes perfect sense on the PC.
My first question is; how many people will be running command line tools on their phone?
Lots. They just won't know it. The NFS tools are commandline tools for instance. If you want to set up a pretty GUI for NFS on the N900 you already have the tools to do the job. All you need is to write a little GUI to use them.
Want your app to do some image processing? You can install and call imagemagick.
Second the code must run on an ARM so must be written for an ARM. Can I easily port my Android or iOS app to MeeGoo? I doubt that very much. Which means that I need to write apps for a third OS. Not a good decision if i can cover 95% of the current market buy supporting iOS and Android.
It must not be written for an ARM. It must compile on ARM, which the vast majority of Linux software does. Ubuntu has an ARM version.
Can I easily port my Android or iOS app to MeeGoo?
For Android, I'm pretty sure it will be possible to run the apps. I don't know much about how Android development works, but I don't see anything stopping the existence of a Dalvik package for Meego, and some sort of compatibility layer. You can use a chroot, VM, whatever approach is needed to get it to work. It's possible to install Android on the N900.
iPhone probably not, but then I'm quite sure that Apple would really hate such a thing.
I see the issue differently: To target Android or iPhone I've got to write for their specific SDK. To target the N900 a lot of the time I can reuse code that runs in any normal Linux distro, and just adjust the UI as needed.
Not supported on N900 certainly, but that makes sense. As far as I can tell, Nokia has no intention of switching away from Maemo on N900, Meego will be used for a future device.
Or you mean Nokia is going to release an Intel based phone?
What Symbian? What I have is a N900, there's no trace of Symbian in it as far as I can tell. What runs on the N900 is a very standard looking Debian based distribution.
Making themselves yet another Android vendor would give little reason for people to prefer their phones over somebody else's.
Also I find Nokia's approach interesting. Their distribution is a very standard looking one, and porting applications to it is extremely trivial. Anything that compiles on ARM will run outright, and only needs fixes to the UI. Lots of command line tools can be used without changes.
In WW2 there was an actual war going on, with allies being attacked. There was plenty justification for various parties joining. With Iraq though, there was no war going on in the beginning. The US went and made one, and all the justifications for it are very flimsy. I'm not opposed to war when it's for good reasons (self defense for instance), but I think that it should be avoided unless really necessary. And in the case of Iraq it wasn't necessary. Iraq didn't pose any danger to the US or its allies.
Second, IMO the US screwed things up horribly from the "liberation" angle. If it's really a liberation the right strategy would have been to bust their asses protecting the population. That would mean small, surgical attacks against only the insurgents, protecting the population at any cost, and demonstrating in every way possible that if you're not an insurgent you don't have anything to worry about. Blowing up a building full of people to get just one guy on the roof should have been completely out of the question. But of course that's a terribly difficult task, and one that would have required an almost inhumanly competent and dedicated army, as well as a population willing to sacrifice its soldiers for some random people who live who knows where.
Problem is, it was supposed to be a liberation, not a war.
When the WMDs didn't pan out, Bush went on and on about the glorious democracy they were going to bring by deposing of the evil tyrant. Well, just look at it. Isn't the guy who was driving his wife to the hospital glad you set things right?
I'll grant you that ignoring a checkpoint in wartime isn't the smartest decision one can make, but chances are under Saddam he would still be alive. And I thought that the whole point of this was making things better.
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Oh yes I can. I recently played a game from 1993, both on my desktop and on my cell phone.
Is it possible to install with only the CD and start playing without ever going online at any time or contacting Blizzard?
Oh, there it is. "Once you register it online". No money for you.
That misses the point. I repeat: I do not pay for dealing with such bullshit.
It's actually entirely the reverse: looking for a hacked copy is time consuming, and entirely goes against what paying for things is supposed to be like. Looking for hacked copies is what kids that don't have even half the amount required to buy it, and no way of earning more do. Back when I was 12, I obviously had no regular income. Buying a single game would have required me to save every single cent of what my parents gave me, for a month or more. So I pirated, because I did have plenty free time to copy disks, and even copy by hand manuals that were made to be hard to photocopy.
Now that I grew up, the price of a game is easy to afford. My time, on the other hand is much scarcer. Dealing with DRM bullshit easily spoils a weekend, and is the last thing on my mind when I get home. So no, I absolutely will not put up with it. So I'll spend my money on somebody who appreciates their customers more, which usually end up being indie developers who tend to make something more interesting than the FPS of the month, and are in more need of my money as well.
It's a show of deep disrespect for the customer. When I think somebody is being an asshole, I don't give them money.
There are plenty practical concerns as well.
Install restrictions - What constitutes a computer for me is very fluid, with my current one getting gradually upgraded, with some old pieces being used to make new computers, and so on. As a bare minimum I'd want to play on my desktop and my laptop, that's already 2 installs. The desktop will at some point be upgraded, which I'm sure will be counted as a different computer, that's 3 installs. After that I have to arbitrarily restrict myself from making changes. Screw that, I'm not paying for being limited in what I can do with my own stuff.
Internet connection -- it goes down, there are trains and airplanes where it's not available, and other countries where it may exist but I may not be able to get access to it. I happen to like to travel ocassionally. If it's required, no deal.
The future - I can still play Diablo 1. Will I be able to play Diablo 3 in 2024? If not, I'm not paying, because if I can arbitrarily lose the ability to run it, it's not really a purchase.
The bugs - Quite a lot of DRM went wrong at some point, forcing people to deal with customer supports, download updates. Sometimes DRM refuses to work with some software, crashes the game, incorrectly decides I've done something wrong, or something else of the sort, all in exchange for no benefit to myself. When I pay for something it's supposed to give me some advantage, not problems.
The "relationship" - DRM inevitably requires maintaining a "relationship" with the company. The game contacting their servers every time I try to run it, me calling their customer support when it won't activate, etc. I absolutely hate such dependency. If I have to care if the company is still in business, I won't buy it. Only allowable exception would be things like MMOs where there's no such thing as a single player mode, but I don't play those anyway.
They're .png files, but they look like horribly compressed .jpg. Or the game really looks that bad?
A higher resolution wouldn't hurt either. It's been ages since I played anything at 1024x768.
You haven't used airline metal cutlery, I see.
Iberia (spanish airline) uses metal cutlery. They cut off the end of the fork, and probably blunt the knife as well (it's got a crappy serrated edge on it). They seem to have perfected this and made the amazing achievement of creating a metal knife that cuts worse than a plastic one.
That said, if you do manage to stab somebody with one of those, maybe you can give them a nasty infection. The cutlery comes in a sealed plastic packet, but all of it seems to have bits of salad stuck to it.
First, to do this you don't need to do something highly obvious like pulling a gummi bear out of your pocket and mashing it against the sensor. You can make a thin strip, and stick it to your finger, then go through all the usual motions.
Second, sure, with enough work it could be detected. But the point of this is to avoid work in the first place. You might as well ditch the scanner and go back to having teachers do the check.
Sure, why not? I tested mine, it can do aes-128 at 8MB/s. That may not seem like terribly fast, but it's faster than the ideal case for 3G (with the real world rate being considerably lower)
My laptop (nothing especially impressive, chosen for battery time and not power) can do it at 90MB/s. My desktop does it at 250MB/s, and isn't terribly new either (Phenom II 940).
Yes? Because those places either have no access to anything modern anyway, or nobody cares about what the law says. Encryption is so common that many games like WoW use it.
Why? You provide no good justification for it. The fact is that currently encryption is fast even on limited devices on cell phones, and on modern hardware doing full disk encryption amounts to a rounding error. Encryption is also easy to implement in hardware, where it gets even better performance.
I don't understand why would it be "hubris" anyway. The way I see it, everything remotely possible should be encrypted, all the time. There's no good reason for random third parties to be looking at my packets anyway.
Frankly, once I know a company bans entire accounts for doing something that affects only myself, and that Blizzard is well known for wide, sweeping bans, and that all their games are tied to one account, any thoughts of buying anything from Blizzard disappear from my head.
Given the quickly growing amount of Android phones, it seems that strategy isn't going to keep working for much longer.
I've never, ever heard of anybody say it would. Please link to any place where you've heard it.
What is there is a potential for things getting seriously unpleasant. There was an earthquake in Haiti recently for instance. That's the kind of "unpleasant" I'm thinking of, only in multiple places at once. Will the human race survive? Sure. Do I want to be there when it happens? Hell, no.
Oh, there's been a lot of flourishing in New Orleans lately? You mean that they quickly fixed everything in a couple of months and since then it's been awesome? And of course I'm sure you don't mind at all the amount of tax money that it took to fix it, as well as the loss the economy took from having all those people stop what they were doing and get to rebuilding.
There's a big difference between having to adapt quickly and having to adapt over centuries.
Let's say the sea level rises. If it rises a few meters in 50 years, you may see your house on the beach get flooded. If it rises in 5000 years, there's likely to be a point where one of your descendants decides that the sea came uncomfortably close a few years back, and moves somewhere else.
But that's kind of what they're there for.
An army isn't so much protection against war as protection against getting invaded, and forcing others to do your bidding.
Pads and a helmet indeed are so that you can take greater risks. It's technically possible to sit on a box containing an engine and ride on it at 80 MPH. Nobody does it because that's too dangerous. A car on the other hand protects you enough that the tradeoff is worth it. If we could be safe enough at 300 MPH (as we are in an airplane or bullet train for instance), we'd travel at that speed as well. If it was safe enough to do on the road, then we'd do it on the road.
Just like with other long term things, no?
I mean, do countries wait until it's clear there's going to be a war before they start training an army and making weapons? The US also has the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, just in case. It's generally a good thing to plan ahead.
So, if I understood correctly, the judge talks to two people. A bot, and a human. It seems that in this case, the judge is not deciding on a per-case basis, but talks to everybody then figures out who's the bot by choosing the one that did the worst. So the judge getting to talk to a joker, troll or complete idiot can make even a crappy bot win the test.
That seems to be a weak test. I don't think the judge should be able to make an answer based on logic (eg, if I'm completely sure this one is a human, then even if very good the other one must be a bot). There should exist the possibility of everybody the judge talks to being a bot, or everybody being a human, which would force them to judge everybody to talk to individually.
I'm not confusing them, I know perfectly well what's the difference.
It's just that to me it doesn't matter much where it comes from. If it's locked, I don't don't buy it.
On the iPhone, the lock on root comes from Apple, so no matter who sells it, I'm automatically not interested. For other phones, the lock could come from a carrier, in which case I'll only buy it if I can buy it without the lock, by for instance ignoring the carrier and buying from the manufacturer.
Eh, that's not exactly it. For me, Apple has long ago reached the point of "I'm sure I don't want to buy their products". The things they do that make me decide not to buy their products are in my view are very unlikely to change. If they were to change, I'd be very unlikely to miss it. Due to this, I don't pay very close attention to them, because one minor reason more or less to dislike them doesn't change anything anyway.
There might well be something that Apple does that I consider unethical. But that just doesn't matter much at this point. If Steve Jobs kicks puppies or whatever, I already don't buy his products, and can't buy less than nothing. So I just have better things to do than to look for things like that.
I disagree with the "superior experience" assessment. For me it's automatically equivalent to "unusable".
I don't own any consoles for the same reason. I like games I can mess with. More than half of my enjoyment of a game comes from mods made by other users, creating mods, or messing with the source if available. I'll grant I'm quite atypical for a gamer though.
Well, I don't see a post every time Miyamoto scratches his butt, which helps a lot. Also the same content is largely available on PC. And the lack of the myriad of stories along the lines of "X can be done with an iPhone" when pretty much any phone made in the last decade has the required capabilities.
I don't particularly like Nintendo either, btw. For example I really don't like their litigation against modchips, which ensures I won't buy any of their stuff.
The GP's statement is correct though. Apple does annoying things MS doesn't. But both companies annoy me, and I avoid dealing with them, just for different reasons. Just that Apple doesn't fund SCO, or that MS doesn't control their hardware with an iron fist doesn't make either company automatically awesome in my eyes.
So that we buy their products, of course.
That's a mistake. I don't dislike Apple because it's Apple. I dislike Apple because of what Apple currently does. If they change what they do, I might change my mind. It's simple.
I change my mind on companies. Years back, in my mind, "Blizzard" equated with "awesome". These days it equates with "no way I'm paying". It could change back if they started making stuff I'd be willing to buy again.
Because this non-customer could be a customer if they made something I like.
I don't like either case. In the locked down Android case, my annoyance would go for the carrier though, and I'd avoid dealing with that carrier if at all possible. Fortunately here I can (and do) buy unlocked phones. I haven't ever bought a phone from the carrier for this reason.
In the Apple case I don't get to do such a thing, because it's always locked down, no matter who I buy from.
N900 is extremely open actually. You can entirely reformat and repartition it if you wish. You can install Android, Ubuntu or anything else you want on it.
I don't know how will this work out long term, but IMO it has a big advantage is that very little porting required. There isn't as much need to get on the bandwagon because a lot of what can be used on Maemo/Meego is stuff that makes perfect sense on the PC.
Lots. They just won't know it. The NFS tools are commandline tools for instance. If you want to set up a pretty GUI for NFS on the N900 you already have the tools to do the job. All you need is to write a little GUI to use them.
Want your app to do some image processing? You can install and call imagemagick.
It must not be written for an ARM. It must compile on ARM, which the vast majority of Linux software does. Ubuntu has an ARM version.
For Android, I'm pretty sure it will be possible to run the apps. I don't know much about how Android development works, but I don't see anything stopping the existence of a Dalvik package for Meego, and some sort of compatibility layer. You can use a chroot, VM, whatever approach is needed to get it to work. It's possible to install Android on the N900.
iPhone probably not, but then I'm quite sure that Apple would really hate such a thing.
I see the issue differently: To target Android or iPhone I've got to write for their specific SDK. To target the N900 a lot of the time I can reuse code that runs in any normal Linux distro, and just adjust the UI as needed.
Not supported on N900 certainly, but that makes sense. As far as I can tell, Nokia has no intention of switching away from Maemo on N900, Meego will be used for a future device.
Or you mean Nokia is going to release an Intel based phone?
What Symbian? What I have is a N900, there's no trace of Symbian in it as far as I can tell. What runs on the N900 is a very standard looking Debian based distribution.
Making themselves yet another Android vendor would give little reason for people to prefer their phones over somebody else's.
Also I find Nokia's approach interesting. Their distribution is a very standard looking one, and porting applications to it is extremely trivial. Anything that compiles on ARM will run outright, and only needs fixes to the UI. Lots of command line tools can be used without changes.
Two things,
First, I don't think it's comparable to WW2.
In WW2 there was an actual war going on, with allies being attacked. There was plenty justification for various parties joining. With Iraq though, there was no war going on in the beginning. The US went and made one, and all the justifications for it are very flimsy. I'm not opposed to war when it's for good reasons (self defense for instance), but I think that it should be avoided unless really necessary. And in the case of Iraq it wasn't necessary. Iraq didn't pose any danger to the US or its allies.
Second, IMO the US screwed things up horribly from the "liberation" angle. If it's really a liberation the right strategy would have been to bust their asses protecting the population. That would mean small, surgical attacks against only the insurgents, protecting the population at any cost, and demonstrating in every way possible that if you're not an insurgent you don't have anything to worry about. Blowing up a building full of people to get just one guy on the roof should have been completely out of the question. But of course that's a terribly difficult task, and one that would have required an almost inhumanly competent and dedicated army, as well as a population willing to sacrifice its soldiers for some random people who live who knows where.
Well, enlighten me then.
And for the record, I don't watch CNN (and don't live in the US either)
Precisely. That's the same way I see the iPad and similar devices.
If I bought it, I own it, therefore any keys to be had must be mine. Anything else is unacceptable.
Problem is, it was supposed to be a liberation, not a war.
When the WMDs didn't pan out, Bush went on and on about the glorious democracy they were going to bring by deposing of the evil tyrant. Well, just look at it. Isn't the guy who was driving his wife to the hospital glad you set things right?
I'll grant you that ignoring a checkpoint in wartime isn't the smartest decision one can make, but chances are under Saddam he would still be alive. And I thought that the whole point of this was making things better.