The problem is that the courts seldom make those decisions. The threat of expensive legal action is used by these patent holders to basically extort money from companies. Out of fear the companies settle with the patent holder, and they are free again to swing away with their questionable patent simply because they have the financial clout to do so.
Fallout 2 had a terrible, terrible bug that prevented folks from progressing past a certain point. Worse yet, the patch didn't work with your save games, so all of your progress was history if you applied it (but you had to).
The same kinds of problems (times ten) happened with Arcanuum, which had a lot of Fallout developers on the team. Great games, but their lack of bugs is not something I could praise with a straight face.
The more focused a channel's content is, the more predictable the audience generally is. If you know who is watching, you can sell advertising to companies that want to target that audience.
It's the same reason a million speciality magazines exist.
The reason the Spot was interesting at all when it began was that it was not labelled for what it was (a corporate sham), and at the time, it seemed amazing that anyone would post anything of a intimate nature on the web.
I remember a friend mocking me at the time for thinking anyone would post such stuff for real. But now, with a million blogs/webcams where people post insanely personal information/images for no financial gain, I feel somewhat vindicated...
I used DDD a few times to buy some cheap boxsets, and it was slow but no problems. Then, last XMas season, the had a big promotion and it flooded their site with orders. My order - lost in the ether. My two emails to customer service - lost in the ether - no response whatsoever.
When that happens with an e-business, that's not a good sign.
Depending on what your viewpoint is, any interpretation of the Constitution and our laws that is not literal to the word of the text could be perceived as judicial activism.
As long as laws are written that are vague, interpretations of their meaning will be made by judges, for better and for worse. The solution is to write better laws that address the specifics.
Well put. Some of these guys can't get jobs, housing, etc. because of this stuff. Tell me how making their lives a living hell after prison makes them less likely to re-offend.
What it comes down to, though, is $$$. We don't want to foot the bill to keep these guys in prison, but we want to feel some false sense of security after we let them go.
To counter that, I had an order where a CD was left out. I emailed them, and they sent it the next day, no questions asked. I got it the day after that.
I've ordered dozens of CD's from them and have had nothing but good experiences. But even if you don't choose to order from them, it's a great place to discover new artists you'll like. With two minutes samples of each song on an album and links to artist web sites that most often have complete songs, you get a much better taste than you do with a 30 second clip.
"They say you should make eye contact with a woman you're interested in. Well, there's a fine line between eye contact and the piercing stare of a psychopath."
The sad thing is that the Slashdot folks would be rude enough to post a direct link to an image-heavy posting on a message board. HTF has occasional load problems on an ordinary day - now I know I won't be able to go there until the damn story here leaves the front page.
And for the record, I really dislike story submissions that try to get in the 'first post' by commenting on the story themselves...
The problem is that global variables made coding PHP easier, which was one of the big selling points of the language. They've finally set register_globals to off by default now, but the damage is done. So many PHP apps require it to be on that it can be a major pain in the ass to fix.
Unfortunately, from what I understand, iDVD doesn't let you create and access chapter points either (it can break up a video into several 'chapters' but they don't play seemlessly).
$349 is not terribly expensive by DVD recorder standards. But having recently bought a recorder, one thing I'd really caution folks about is buying one to create video dvd's without really researching it. Most software that comes with burners is complete crap. MyDVD, which came with my Pioneer and is also bundled with the Sony, is a good example of this. It is incredibly limited in terms of adding basic functionality like chapters or even customized menu design. So if you don't want to create something that looks like 'Bobby's first DVD', you are quickly looking at software packages that cost more than the recorder itself (and they still don't have a lot of the functionality you'd expect at that price). Add to that the fact that you need heinous amounts of hard drive space and CPU to work on this stuff, the total price tag quickly jumps way beyond the initial investment.
I heard Zeldman speak at a conference, and he was quite aware that in many situations it wasn't possible to code to standards (if you had to worry about layout in older browsers, etc.) He knows that the job ultimately dictates what choices you have to make.
I think he feels his role is to try to push folks towards something better than what we're used to working with. When you're leading the charge like that, you don't emphasize everything you *can't* do yet.
Personally, while I'm not going to ditch stuff like table-based layout for quite a while, smaller changes like moving to CSS for fonts can offer a substantial benefit in the short term.
I hate to be picky here, but what was on GameDev.net was a press release from Garage Games, not an actual story. So while we go there expecting an unbiased piece about 'game engine marketing models compared', what we get is what Garage Games was spinning.
I got a zippy new Dell at work, and I decided to multi-boot between Win2k and Linux. Both are pretty simple, but the problem I had was with driver support. With Redhat 7.3, X had a problem with either my video card or LCD, and that wouldn't work at all. With Mandrake 8.2, X started fine, but it had issues with the USB mouse and the built-in Ethernet.
My point? Well, if I had a driver issue with Win2k (which I didn't, of course, because that's what Dell supports), I could just go to the manufacturer website and dl the driver and away we go. Or use Windows Update and have a pretty good shot at finding something there.
With Linux, it's a much more elaborate and vague search for help when you *do* run into a installation roadblock. That's not a rip on Linux - it does amazingly well in terms of hardware support all things considered. But for the latest and greatest hardware, installation can be a real drag.
The first is the idea that the Internet is somehow outside or above the real world and its national boundaries. If I phone someone in Nigeria and suggest a money-laundering fraud then it is obvious to all that I am breaking the law in two countries, not in 'phonespace'. Nobody has ever suggested that the content of the telephone network -all those voice calls -should be somehow privileged and treated as outside the normal world.
Why, then, do we act as if our interactions with screen, mouse and keyboard are different? If I send an email suggesting that I am in possession of $50m and will hand it over in return for your bank details, why can't it just be that I also am breaking the law in two countries, not in some mythical 'cyberspace' with its own legal system?
Losing the idea of 'cyberspace' simplifies things greatly.
The problem is that when two countries' sets of laws don't agree that something is a crime, or the question of which country has jurisdiction is unclear. When we speak of cyberspace in terms of law, I think it defines that murky area where things are not so clearly defined as they are in the physical world.
MS released their first version of TiVo and it was called Ultimate TV. No one was overly impressed with it and it didn't sell very well at all.
That doesn't mean they won't keep banging on it. The early versions of both Windows and IE weren't too hot either, but they did pretty well in the long run. MS knows this is a critical market, and they have both time and money on their side.
Well, from my experience, the problem isn't with playing MS's codecs - it's authoring with them. Free tools like VirtualDub and even commercial tools like Premiere prevent you from editing an ASF because MS doesn't want you to (VirtualDub had that feature but removed it because of legal pressure from MS).
Re:Probably worth a read.... Statements are true.
on
Built For Use
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The sad part is that too often the person making the decisions has a fast computer on a fast connection with the latest version of IE, and they think this is how everyone's experience is. So web designers can not only get away with this crap, but too often their clients will be *begging* for it...
A bigger LCD is great, but it will most probably add a lot of $$$ to the price, and the current iMacs aren't cheap as it is for what you get hardware-wise. And the iMac has been about being Apple's entry-level, low-cost computer. Now it's more likely to become like the G4 cube - too expensive for the low-end buyer and too low powered and non-expandable for the high-end power user.
No matter how big you are you just cannot indefinately lose hundreds of dollars on consoles.
Six months is hardly an eternity, and you're talking about a company that has more cash to spend than any other. I personally think the Xbox's long-term prospects will be decided during the next holiday season. If the games are there and the online portion shows promising results, the MS will keep pouring cash into it. They *really* want into this market.
Slashdot Mirror
the USPTO must defer that decision to the courts.
The problem is that the courts seldom make those decisions. The threat of expensive legal action is used by these patent holders to basically extort money from companies. Out of fear the companies settle with the patent holder, and they are free again to swing away with their questionable patent simply because they have the financial clout to do so.
I've watched every movie done on MST3K, and they all bow down in terror to Orgy of the Dead.
Fallout 2 had a terrible, terrible bug that prevented folks from progressing past a certain point. Worse yet, the patch didn't work with your save games, so all of your progress was history if you applied it (but you had to).
The same kinds of problems (times ten) happened with Arcanuum, which had a lot of Fallout developers on the team. Great games, but their lack of bugs is not something I could praise with a straight face.
The more focused a channel's content is, the more predictable the audience generally is. If you know who is watching, you can sell advertising to companies that want to target that audience.
It's the same reason a million speciality magazines exist.
The reason the Spot was interesting at all when it began was that it was not labelled for what it was (a corporate sham), and at the time, it seemed amazing that anyone would post anything of a intimate nature on the web.
I remember a friend mocking me at the time for thinking anyone would post such stuff for real. But now, with a million blogs/webcams where people post insanely personal information/images for no financial gain, I feel somewhat vindicated...
I used DDD a few times to buy some cheap boxsets, and it was slow but no problems. Then, last XMas season, the had a big promotion and it flooded their site with orders. My order - lost in the ether. My two emails to customer service - lost in the ether - no response whatsoever.
When that happens with an e-business, that's not a good sign.
Depending on what your viewpoint is, any interpretation of the Constitution and our laws that is not literal to the word of the text could be perceived as judicial activism.
As long as laws are written that are vague, interpretations of their meaning will be made by judges, for better and for worse. The solution is to write better laws that address the specifics.
Well put. Some of these guys can't get jobs, housing, etc. because of this stuff. Tell me how making their lives a living hell after prison makes them less likely to re-offend.
What it comes down to, though, is $$$. We don't want to foot the bill to keep these guys in prison, but we want to feel some false sense of security after we let them go.
To counter that, I had an order where a CD was left out. I emailed them, and they sent it the next day, no questions asked. I got it the day after that.
I've ordered dozens of CD's from them and have had nothing but good experiences. But even if you don't choose to order from them, it's a great place to discover new artists you'll like. With two minutes samples of each song on an album and links to artist web sites that most often have complete songs, you get a much better taste than you do with a 30 second clip.
"They say you should make eye contact with a woman you're interested in. Well, there's a fine line between eye contact and the piercing stare of a psychopath."
The sad thing is that the Slashdot folks would be rude enough to post a direct link to an image-heavy posting on a message board. HTF has occasional load problems on an ordinary day - now I know I won't be able to go there until the damn story here leaves the front page.
And for the record, I really dislike story submissions that try to get in the 'first post' by commenting on the story themselves...
The problem is that global variables made coding PHP easier, which was one of the big selling points of the language. They've finally set register_globals to off by default now, but the damage is done. So many PHP apps require it to be on that it can be a major pain in the ass to fix.
Unfortunately, from what I understand, iDVD doesn't let you create and access chapter points either (it can break up a video into several 'chapters' but they don't play seemlessly).
$349 is not terribly expensive by DVD recorder standards. But having recently bought a recorder, one thing I'd really caution folks about is buying one to create video dvd's without really researching it. Most software that comes with burners is complete crap. MyDVD, which came with my Pioneer and is also bundled with the Sony, is a good example of this. It is incredibly limited in terms of adding basic functionality like chapters or even customized menu design. So if you don't want to create something that looks like 'Bobby's first DVD', you are quickly looking at software packages that cost more than the recorder itself (and they still don't have a lot of the functionality you'd expect at that price). Add to that the fact that you need heinous amounts of hard drive space and CPU to work on this stuff, the total price tag quickly jumps way beyond the initial investment.
I heard Zeldman speak at a conference, and he was quite aware that in many situations it wasn't possible to code to standards (if you had to worry about layout in older browsers, etc.) He knows that the job ultimately dictates what choices you have to make.
I think he feels his role is to try to push folks towards something better than what we're used to working with. When you're leading the charge like that, you don't emphasize everything you *can't* do yet.
Personally, while I'm not going to ditch stuff like table-based layout for quite a while, smaller changes like moving to CSS for fonts can offer a substantial benefit in the short term.
I hate to be picky here, but what was on GameDev.net was a press release from Garage Games, not an actual story. So while we go there expecting an unbiased piece about 'game engine marketing models compared', what we get is what Garage Games was spinning.
I got a zippy new Dell at work, and I decided to multi-boot between Win2k and Linux. Both are pretty simple, but the problem I had was with driver support. With Redhat 7.3, X had a problem with either my video card or LCD, and that wouldn't work at all. With Mandrake 8.2, X started fine, but it had issues with the USB mouse and the built-in Ethernet.
My point? Well, if I had a driver issue with Win2k (which I didn't, of course, because that's what Dell supports), I could just go to the manufacturer website and dl the driver and away we go. Or use Windows Update and have a pretty good shot at finding something there.
With Linux, it's a much more elaborate and vague search for help when you *do* run into a installation roadblock. That's not a rip on Linux - it does amazingly well in terms of hardware support all things considered. But for the latest and greatest hardware, installation can be a real drag.
The first is the idea that the Internet is somehow outside or above the real world and its national boundaries. If I phone someone in Nigeria and suggest a money-laundering fraud then it is obvious to all that I am breaking the law in two countries, not in 'phonespace'. Nobody has ever suggested that the content of the telephone network -all those voice calls -should be somehow privileged and treated as outside the normal world.
Why, then, do we act as if our interactions with screen, mouse and keyboard are different? If I send an email suggesting that I am in possession of $50m and will hand it over in return for your bank details, why can't it just be that I also am breaking the law in two countries, not in some mythical 'cyberspace' with its own legal system?
Losing the idea of 'cyberspace' simplifies things greatly.
The problem is that when two countries' sets of laws don't agree that something is a crime, or the question of which country has jurisdiction is unclear. When we speak of cyberspace in terms of law, I think it defines that murky area where things are not so clearly defined as they are in the physical world.
That doesn't mean they won't keep banging on it. The early versions of both Windows and IE weren't too hot either, but they did pretty well in the long run. MS knows this is a critical market, and they have both time and money on their side.
Well, from my experience, the problem isn't with playing MS's codecs - it's authoring with them. Free tools like VirtualDub and even commercial tools like Premiere prevent you from editing an ASF because MS doesn't want you to (VirtualDub had that feature but removed it because of legal pressure from MS).
The sad part is that too often the person making the decisions has a fast computer on a fast connection with the latest version of IE, and they think this is how everyone's experience is. So web designers can not only get away with this crap, but too often their clients will be *begging* for it...
Driver support is a *huge* issue, and it's why I've stuck with Soundblasters since my tragic Monster Sound purchase a few years back.
At least with a Soundblaster I can be reasonably sure that there will be drivers in both Windows and Linux for some time to come.
A bigger LCD is great, but it will most probably add a lot of $$$ to the price, and the current iMacs aren't cheap as it is for what you get hardware-wise. And the iMac has been about being Apple's entry-level, low-cost computer. Now it's more likely to become like the G4 cube - too expensive for the low-end buyer and too low powered and non-expandable for the high-end power user.
Six months is hardly an eternity, and you're talking about a company that has more cash to spend than any other. I personally think the Xbox's long-term prospects will be decided during the next holiday season. If the games are there and the online portion shows promising results, the MS will keep pouring cash into it. They *really* want into this market.
The Windows version doesn't have this.