Python tends to force, particularly for shorter programs, much more readable code to a third party. It conversely requires you to perhaps be a lot more verbose in some ways, but not verbose enough in others. In longer programs, sometimes you have to maybe look a little carefully to understand the implicit type of a variable, and the whitespace code grouping can cause problems on multi-developer projects (one person uses spaces, another tabs, tabstops don't line up and suddenly one spaced line looks like it is in the same level as a tabbed lines). So I can understand ways python *can* become hard to maintain/read, but my experience is that Perl code has a much stronger tendency to go unintelligible. The indentation, while possible to mess up without affecting program behavior, can be and often is not carefully tended to. Not helping perl's image is the fact that people teaching perl/posting on forums seem to constantly be in an obfuscated perl contest. Perl enthusiasts seem to believe they only have worth if they write unreadable code.
I say this as a person who has moved from Python to Perl due to various reasons. Perl I had a basic understanding of, but the various posts of code snippets on forums for specific tasks had always made me nervous about perl and glad for python. Now that some issues in the python world forced me to perl, I've found perl *can* be a great and straightforward language, so long as the developers are not *trying* to show off how cool their perl skills are.
syncing every few seconds isn't the good 'fix'. Using mount -o sync on obviously transient mounts would be the 'fix' to the problem described. If you sync ever so often, there *still* is no good way to track it/indicate it, while the fs being mounted with sync means the file write operation itself can be tracked more accurately.
Of course, the line to draw at what is 'obviously' transient may be hard, but I think 4GB and under and USB connected is a good rule of thumb today of transient sticks vs. persistantly attached usb storage. When you get into the realm of 'guessing' the intent of the user implicitly, things get hairy.
The default mount options where you cp, say, an iso file, and it returns in a couple of seconds. Then, you type umount, and the real wait begins.
One could make the argument that for certain capacities (say, 2G or smaller), sync as a default mount option might be a reasonable thing, seeing as how typical usage in that scenario is a couple of files written, then yank (i.e. umount process doesn't give a nice progress bar, but a mass file copy operation could), but in any event...
Toyota is not without the evident desire to be redundant for the sake of multiple brands. Sticking to the Toyota umbrella, you have at least Scion, Toyota, and Lexus. Scions clone Toyota low end, and Lexus clones high end (and a bit more, but the overlap is significant). Then you consider things at scale, and you have things like the bizarre Toyota Matrix/Pontiac Vibe thing going on, where you essentially have the exact same car with different exterior styling, but differently branded. That's ignoring the set of *other* Scion/Toyota hatchback/compact wagon things.
I don't understand why so many car companies persist and even expand to soooo many different brands, rather than focusing on one name and one coherent lineup. Then again, it is America where consumers tend to develop stupid brand loyalty despite all meaning behind the brand evaporating, as well as pretentious people who will buy a Lexus but would be loathe to own a mere Toyota.
Under linux, that's dictated by/etc/localtime. So, Linux isn't different from Windows in that respect.
There are applications which independently track the time zone, but they piss me off because they don't concur and I don't feel like selecting my time zone per application.
Whether it's a an MBR record or an executable file stored on a filesystem the firmware may understand, the concepts are the same. Any sane operating system will allow you to modify boot files (after all, how else do you upgrade early-execution code). Whether it's an MBR or a more sophisticate piece of firmware, the principle is the same. The question is whether users have been trained to always be administrator, or if they've been trained the more disciplined way where uncommon (at least should be)/privileged operations can only be executed at significant obious pain.
Under linux even, a number of distributions have on occasion ventured down the very dangerous/wrong approach of skipping user accounts and going all root for the sake of convenience. However, the mainstream usage of linux (and OSX) is thankfully non-root users, and as such any *serious* applications accomodate that usage pattern (with the bonus of being sanely multi-user.
Meanwhile, Windows heritage has been less optimal. The consumer oriented MS platforms right up until XP didn't have a meaningful non-administrator concept, as well as much of a multi-user concept. As a consequence, many application developers did bad things that would break (i.e. using registry entries that are machine specific rather than user specific, or even writing things like saved documents/games to the application Program Files directory. Win9x even provided relevant spots that would evolve to something meaningful, but without significant meaning, many third parties ignored it, especially after Win3.x training. XP was the first definitive wake up call to a WIDE variety of developers. Even so, the majority of users ended up being administrative users to make up for the gap (as well as having no easy automatic privilege escalation). Hell, even a customized preload I saw sets up one user, renaming the administrator user (and in fact, calls an un-renamed administrator account a security risk... indeed).
OSX made a clean break with OSX (relegating "classic" applications to a relatively severe sandbox"), Linux never had such an unclean history to overcome. So while OSX implementing clean privilege escalation, and Linux has been working on facilities that lend itself well to that (i.e. DBus). Windows XP did not make a clean break, and Vista didn't etiher, but Vista's UAC is an attempt at giving users a facility to do privilege escalation. It's annoying because of bad programs and bad habits. But non-admin default usage + UAC is the only way they have of maintaining a sane featureset without being considered so vulnerable.
It also doesn't help that so many Windows users see "click here for free smilies" and think it's a good idea to do so.
In Wii, the more precise movements (i.e. the movement tracking appropriate to aiming) are based on the ir camera functions to gauge relative position to a fixed reference point (screen) being targeted. The accelerometers alone probably wouldn't be utilized to the same effect. Accelerometers to track the pitch and roll of your head may help in aiming, but the left-to-right movements could be tricky. At least with tilting forward and backward you have gravity as a reference point, rotating the direction of looking gives no absolute reference point, so it could easily get messed up, I'd think. And if trying to do aiming and such, you'd need to track your hand movement in a way that is very cognizant of distance and position relative to the head.
In other words, immersive gaming needs a good reference (or set of reference points) to calibrate the relative accelerometer data. Maybe an array of IR emitters strategicly placed around the play area emitting unique data to complement accelerometer data...
But I was told that there is another device that you can put around the player to block outside lights. I've got just the device right here: Duct Tape. It truly can fix anything.
Once a player is revoked for future titles, doesn't that mean they must intentionally break existing players? So far, since they've compromised keys of programs running on general purpose PCs, they've felt justified because, *relatively* speaking, customers getting a patch from the vendor isn't too difficult (but still, why should those customers suffer for the sake of the studios they gave money to already?). What happens when someone compromises a player's security, and that player is a widely used set top box without any network capabilities?
I know that (perhaps the real reason for companies to leave HD-DVD behind) blu ray has this BD+ scheme which isn't yet demonstrated to be compromised in a general sense. Of course, nothing quite assures me like a Sony-backed standard talking about executable code being installed by a player from the disc, just so you couldn't possibly skip executing it. Sony has never abused such capability before, after all. I know, they *say* BD+ scheme shouldn't change anything persistently and a player *should* roll-back on disk eject to pre-disk state, but who knows.
I wish that studios would recognize that for the illegal scene, they will certainly lose the DRM struggle. All it takes in that arena is for a handful of people to be willing to invest time and effort to break the protection and make a single drm-free copy in order for it to mean absolutely nothing to illegal distribution. They may not even elect to break the disk protection, instead having setups where they break any other part of the digital chain and laboriously copy it over. Meanwhile, for customers that wish to abide by the law, DRM provides no end of extreme headache. Want to make a private copy for backup purposes (i.e. you have young children and you want them to not manipulate the original), whoops, sorry. Want to copy it to hard drive for performance above and beyond any possible disc changer, that won't be valid either. Want to merely play it back on your system and don't run Vista, well, the studios don't like that, so no. Some arbitrary cracker a thousand miles away just *happened* to crack the protection in a way such that the studios will blacklist your playback methods, congratulations, they may make your player useless just to spite the cracker. Want to move it to a portable player that requires some transcoding, no, not allowed. And the studios answer to limitations is essentially they *might* allow common-sense private moving/modification, but only if devices doing this call home and beg for permission first. It's an insane world.
Their are plenty of licenses that people are asked to agree to all sorts of terms unrelated to copyright.
i.e., you are legally permitted to obtain a copy of the software because the license grants that right, so long as you agree to the terms. Should you violate them, then you did not obtain the software with the intent of following the license, so in effect you had no right to use the software in the first place.
Qt makes interesting use of GPL, once they started dual licensing. Back in the day, KDE's status was worrisome as Qt license upon which it depended was not free. Qt knew the success of KDE would be critical to their products commercial success, and that they had to make provisions to allow the free software community to use it with impunity, while encouraging commercial vendors to continue on how they have been. They release dual license GPL and Qt, such that if you are ok with GPL, feel free to use it with impunity, but if you want a more commercial license, you can, but it will cost you. One of the major reasons commercial software vendors back Gnome is that fitting into that merely requires the LGPL, and thus they don't have to reciprocate commercially or with contributions.
Of course, LGPL for commonly used libraries is a requirement when having to deal with a platform of diverse licensing (including BSD and others).
Though I haven't experienced it first hand, is the DRM on the HD formats really any more effective than DRM on DVD? In case you have forgotten, DVD features CSS. While useless as it was defeated, it's still there. From what I hear, the HD formats haven't had more success in protected their keys in general, and though they now revoke them, I wonder what happens when keys from a moderately popular network-disconnected HD format set top box are compromised. So far the keys I hear compromised are desktop software, and they've required users to 'upgrade' to the new key to play back future content. Would they damn a whole set of legitimate customers and kill their reputation for the sake of a losing battle?
As much as DRM *should* bother people, on physical media in particular it doesn't seem to register with moth people.
No, I'd say it's predominantly the pricing, which was exacerbated by the ambiguous market situation. Buying *one* player was probably already too much money for the benefit, but to be safe they would have had to buy two players. Now with one factor, it's less bad, but HD playback devices I don't think have come down enough for the mass market to decide it worth it to replace their DVD players.
In a market full of DRM, you get both. They'll still be copying (because DRM is fundamentally a flawed concept) and lawsuits to 'close the holes'. I find the lawsuits ludicrous, but I'd rather have just them withouth the DRM. At least if they relent to the overwhelming pressures and provide a more fair system by which individual songs may be acquired legally, I would be happy to participate in the market significantly once again (of course, I currently abstain from acquiring music rather than illegally acquire music, as I think abstaining is the correct message to send).
The question becomes, though, could they cause great legal grief if they discover you have digital copies of a song on some media of yours, and you cannot readily prove how you acquired them? I would think it not possible/reasonable to even try a case unless they have evidence of you providing or acquiring it, but the way those lawyers have been, who knows what they'll try. And the sad fact is they can legally intimidate people into settlements who could defend themselves, but they lack those means.
Firefox may decide in that case it just somehow modeled that aspect of its universe wrong or incompletely, and that 1,216 MB of mystery memory that doesn't make sense is merely 'dark memory' that must certainly exist, but simply can't be dealt with like the rest of the memory can be.
Such an inconsistency to us would be so potentially complex our advanced physicists would be hard pressed to be sure it simply can't be at all possible rather than our understanding not be quite right about what is really possible.
Just because the boxes happen to be x86 now doesn't mean OSX is any more accessible than the PPC days.
To companies considering migrating from Linux to OSX or even Windows to OSX, you have to ask yourself one simple question, are you prepared to sacrifice your hardware vendor flexibility? If running Linux, you are not strongly locked into any hardware or software vendor. With MS, you have software vendor lockin, but are at least spared hardware lockin. With OSX, you are locked into software and hardware. If Apple does anything you don't like, you're stuck. IBM/AIX is that way, HP/HP-UX is that way, and Solaris is *mostly* that way (though Sun has been changing that picture), so it's not exactly an uncommon scenario and to an extent, not unreasonable, but being unaware of that circumstance ahead of time could leave you in great pain if things do not continue to align with your strategy. In fact, I'm reasonably confident that a large part of Microsoft's success in the NT4 days despite being technically uninteresting compared to a lot of established players in the space was the hardware indepedence. Of the serious contenders of the day (free x86 *nixes didn't have the commercial backing yet, leaving commercial Unixes as the vast bulk of the competition), only NT and Netware were hardware vendor independent. That's a very significant situation.
His point was not trying to say Turing model does not represent computation as we know it, but that *if* we were a simulation, our models of computation could merely be a subset of the system's running the universe. Possibilities may be intrinsically impossible for us to contemplate as dictated by the simulation.
So, while he claims it to be testable, it's really hard to disprove, really. If you found an aspect of reality that couldn't possibly mesh with our models of computation, it could be interpreted to disprove, or you could say the higher-order system is able to do information processing in ways that are either by unintended limitation or explicit design not conceivably possible to us.
Let's say a sentient copy of firefox decides 'hey, maybe I'm just a program, since everything I see is HTML, and I know how I could put it together'. Then that copy sees a page with flash content 'oh, there's something about my reality that I don't understand how it could be constructed from HTML, therefore my universe isn't a program' But the reality is a program even if firefox doesn't have the mechanism to understand that it is.
*Technically* speaking, I can't think of any legitimate non-DRM afflicted digital video sources. The movie download services are all encumbered as far as I know. You buy any digital media format (HD-DVD, Blue Ray, DVD) and they are all technically DRM-encumbered (DVD counts as encumbered, despite it's pathetically weak methodologies. Even in the analog realm, many VHS tapes that were released used Macrovision to block fair use rights.
Somewhere along the way,the consumer lost and rather than standing their ground and refusing the technology that denies them their fair-use rights, they've accepted whatever hacks around the system and kept buying. Macrovision on VHS was met with filters you could buy at any electronics store. DeCSS made people consider the DVD protection issue moot. I've not yet touched the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray situation, but I hear many stories about those schemes being defeated. And for download services, Fu4wm for example is used for that.
It's a really sad state of affairs, every single DRM scheme ever put forth has been handily defeated, but you don't see, for example, the movie studios making claims that DVD is a useless format because it has no technically meaningful DRM. You'd think that would be noticed as evidence that DRM is unnecessary hassle in a market of mostly fair consumers...
I admit to myself purchasing DVDs on occasion (I can find *no* venue to get unencumbered video, so I have to settle for ineffective DRM, but have found after the fact that some of my titles had no attempt at CSS), but beyond that, I've been avoiding the situation of DRM media because I don't want to deal with it. I've been looking to buy unencumbered music, but so far the selection of tracks I recognize isn't there. I'm relegated to CD purchases (making sure to keep track of the boneheaded efforts on that front to avoid supporting it with my money).
Since 2008 will be based on the Vista core, you'll need a dedicated person to sit at the console to address the "Someone is trying to access your website, cancel or alaw?" dialogs.
increase the allowed number of users to googolplex + 1 That would constitute a decrease *and* be less than the Microsoft offering. You clearly meant infinity*2.
Seriously, to what extent was Netcraft's status gamed by microsoft ala that situation where Microsoft got their platform as the return for ungodly numbers of parked domains vs. how much of reflects an actual legitimate uptake of their platform in the face of Apache? I haven't seen any technical/logistic reason for them to be suddenly gaining ground (maybe this move would have some impact), so I was wondering if it is really happening and if so why.
consumer-friendly companion to the ThinkPads What's so consumer-unfriendly about thinkpads?
Well, judging from the specs of the IdeaPads, evidently high resolution and a trackpoint must be consumer-unfriendly, and low res and touchpad only are consumer friendly....
I think I'll stick with the ThinkPad line, thanks anyway...
I see that historically the non-thinkpad Lenovo's are cheaper, and I guess that's what they mean, but I don't see anything to distinguish them from every other cheaper laptop in existence.
Ok, so, where is a single RTS designed for a console specifically for mouse input?
Same for FPS, name one that is designed explicitly for mouse and console.
I particularly wonder for on-line gameplay, if they would worry that allowing some people to use the mouse would make the games horribly unbalanced since the 'typical' experience is intended to be couch play, which doesn't lend itself well to mousing in general. Already where games exist on consoles and computers concurrently, effort is made to keep the populations separate as trying to ensure a semblance of balance is extremely difficult.
Sure, technically, the PS3, Xbox360, and Wii *can* interact using USB and bluetooth and therefore many device options are opened up, but development studios will embrace the 'blessed' interface (gamepad or wiimote depending on platform). If I *had* to play any RTS or FPS on a console, it would be the Wii-mote with the IR pointer, though it's not nearly as easy to manipulate and do fine motions as a mouse. I am aware of how rather weak the Wii processor/GPU is, but the controls are key. Of course, Wii's online strategy has been pathetic (for the sake of 'please, think of the children!'), taking away a *lot* of the potential for fun online gaming of any genre so far...
But, when all is said and done, the PC remains far and away the platform for good gaming in particular genres, specifically due to the developer's vision of how a PC gamer would be seated and utilizing the system vs. a console gamer. Many other genres (platformers, most rpgs, vehicle operation) are most often better on a console.
If MS wants to continue their business the way they always have, the xbox and xbox360 may have been part product, and part proof-of-concept to try to sell a sort of gaming-system platform, ala the Windows OS for desktop.
If Toshiba and others decided to make consumer electronics devices that happened to be 'xbox 360' compliant, or whatever the platform specification of the time happens to be, MS may decide to maintain merely the core platform specification, client software stack, and the server infrastructure of xbox live, without producing many units of their hardware implementation of the platform they dictate.
Of course, they run the *high* risk of doing so of defeating the whole point of consoles, that every console is the same hardware with the same features so game developers don't have to worry about the complexity of the user having a varying amount of central processor/graphics horsepower/memory/different optical drives. If HD-DVD got integrated and supported as a platform for games to be published on, that would walk the 360 down the path of the computer in terms of having to read 'requirements' on the box before purchase, and licensing could lead to a mess if they aren't careful on all the various components.
'LAN gaming' makes sense with handhelds and computer systems, which have displays and interfaces designed with per-person monitors. But when your targeted output device is a TV (which tends to be shared and larger), things get tricky. For many Wii games, the possibility of smaller dedicated displays is worked against by the style of the controller (with some exceptions, the general point of the Wii is to wave the controller around like a madman with plenty of space between the player, other players, and the screen).
Sure, you could have console LAN parties with more conventional joystick interaction, but Wii isn't focused on that. For other consoles, LAN party is fine but everyone has to bring their own copy. It doesn't buy anything special networking wise, just socially, since the LAN party in that case is just a special case of online play where everyone happens to access from the same place.
The console experience has been focused on shared displays for all gamers, and if you want to play a first-person shooter or something similar where a dedicated screen is essentially mandatory, you're still better off with a PC (which also has a much better interface than a joystick for shooters and RTS, though the Wii gets closer than other consoles to having a decent interface).
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Python tends to force, particularly for shorter programs, much more readable code to a third party. It conversely requires you to perhaps be a lot more verbose in some ways, but not verbose enough in others. In longer programs, sometimes you have to maybe look a little carefully to understand the implicit type of a variable, and the whitespace code grouping can cause problems on multi-developer projects (one person uses spaces, another tabs, tabstops don't line up and suddenly one spaced line looks like it is in the same level as a tabbed lines). So I can understand ways python *can* become hard to maintain/read, but my experience is that Perl code has a much stronger tendency to go unintelligible. The indentation, while possible to mess up without affecting program behavior, can be and often is not carefully tended to. Not helping perl's image is the fact that people teaching perl/posting on forums seem to constantly be in an obfuscated perl contest. Perl enthusiasts seem to believe they only have worth if they write unreadable code.
I say this as a person who has moved from Python to Perl due to various reasons. Perl I had a basic understanding of, but the various posts of code snippets on forums for specific tasks had always made me nervous about perl and glad for python. Now that some issues in the python world forced me to perl, I've found perl *can* be a great and straightforward language, so long as the developers are not *trying* to show off how cool their perl skills are.
syncing every few seconds isn't the good 'fix'. Using mount -o sync on obviously transient mounts would be the 'fix' to the problem described. If you sync ever so often, there *still* is no good way to track it/indicate it, while the fs being mounted with sync means the file write operation itself can be tracked more accurately.
Of course, the line to draw at what is 'obviously' transient may be hard, but I think 4GB and under and USB connected is a good rule of thumb today of transient sticks vs. persistantly attached usb storage. When you get into the realm of 'guessing' the intent of the user implicitly, things get hairy.
The default mount options where you cp, say, an iso file, and it returns in a couple of seconds. Then, you type umount, and the real wait begins.
One could make the argument that for certain capacities (say, 2G or smaller), sync as a default mount option might be a reasonable thing, seeing as how typical usage in that scenario is a couple of files written, then yank (i.e. umount process doesn't give a nice progress bar, but a mass file copy operation could), but in any event...
Toyota is not without the evident desire to be redundant for the sake of multiple brands. Sticking to the Toyota umbrella, you have at least Scion, Toyota, and Lexus. Scions clone Toyota low end, and Lexus clones high end (and a bit more, but the overlap is significant). Then you consider things at scale, and you have things like the bizarre Toyota Matrix/Pontiac Vibe thing going on, where you essentially have the exact same car with different exterior styling, but differently branded. That's ignoring the set of *other* Scion/Toyota hatchback/compact wagon things.
I don't understand why so many car companies persist and even expand to soooo many different brands, rather than focusing on one name and one coherent lineup. Then again, it is America where consumers tend to develop stupid brand loyalty despite all meaning behind the brand evaporating, as well as pretentious people who will buy a Lexus but would be loathe to own a mere Toyota.
Under linux, that's dictated by /etc/localtime. So, Linux isn't different from Windows in that respect.
There are applications which independently track the time zone, but they piss me off because they don't concur and I don't feel like selecting my time zone per application.
Whether it's a an MBR record or an executable file stored on a filesystem the firmware may understand, the concepts are the same. Any sane operating system will allow you to modify boot files (after all, how else do you upgrade early-execution code). Whether it's an MBR or a more sophisticate piece of firmware, the principle is the same. The question is whether users have been trained to always be administrator, or if they've been trained the more disciplined way where uncommon (at least should be)/privileged operations can only be executed at significant obious pain.
Under linux even, a number of distributions have on occasion ventured down the very dangerous/wrong approach of skipping user accounts and going all root for the sake of convenience. However, the mainstream usage of linux (and OSX) is thankfully non-root users, and as such any *serious* applications accomodate that usage pattern (with the bonus of being sanely multi-user.
Meanwhile, Windows heritage has been less optimal. The consumer oriented MS platforms right up until XP didn't have a meaningful non-administrator concept, as well as much of a multi-user concept. As a consequence, many application developers did bad things that would break (i.e. using registry entries that are machine specific rather than user specific, or even writing things like saved documents/games to the application Program Files directory. Win9x even provided relevant spots that would evolve to something meaningful, but without significant meaning, many third parties ignored it, especially after Win3.x training. XP was the first definitive wake up call to a WIDE variety of developers. Even so, the majority of users ended up being administrative users to make up for the gap (as well as having no easy automatic privilege escalation). Hell, even a customized preload I saw sets up one user, renaming the administrator user (and in fact, calls an un-renamed administrator account a security risk... indeed).
OSX made a clean break with OSX (relegating "classic" applications to a relatively severe sandbox"), Linux never had such an unclean history to overcome. So while OSX implementing clean privilege escalation, and Linux has been working on facilities that lend itself well to that (i.e. DBus). Windows XP did not make a clean break, and Vista didn't etiher, but Vista's UAC is an attempt at giving users a facility to do privilege escalation. It's annoying because of bad programs and bad habits. But non-admin default usage + UAC is the only way they have of maintaining a sane featureset without being considered so vulnerable.
It also doesn't help that so many Windows users see "click here for free smilies" and think it's a good idea to do so.
In Wii, the more precise movements (i.e. the movement tracking appropriate to aiming) are based on the ir camera functions to gauge relative position to a fixed reference point (screen) being targeted. The accelerometers alone probably wouldn't be utilized to the same effect. Accelerometers to track the pitch and roll of your head may help in aiming, but the left-to-right movements could be tricky. At least with tilting forward and backward you have gravity as a reference point, rotating the direction of looking gives no absolute reference point, so it could easily get messed up, I'd think. And if trying to do aiming and such, you'd need to track your hand movement in a way that is very cognizant of distance and position relative to the head.
In other words, immersive gaming needs a good reference (or set of reference points) to calibrate the relative accelerometer data. Maybe an array of IR emitters strategicly placed around the play area emitting unique data to complement accelerometer data...
Once a player is revoked for future titles, doesn't that mean they must intentionally break existing players? So far, since they've compromised keys of programs running on general purpose PCs, they've felt justified because, *relatively* speaking, customers getting a patch from the vendor isn't too difficult (but still, why should those customers suffer for the sake of the studios they gave money to already?). What happens when someone compromises a player's security, and that player is a widely used set top box without any network capabilities?
I know that (perhaps the real reason for companies to leave HD-DVD behind) blu ray has this BD+ scheme which isn't yet demonstrated to be compromised in a general sense. Of course, nothing quite assures me like a Sony-backed standard talking about executable code being installed by a player from the disc, just so you couldn't possibly skip executing it. Sony has never abused such capability before, after all. I know, they *say* BD+ scheme shouldn't change anything persistently and a player *should* roll-back on disk eject to pre-disk state, but who knows.
I wish that studios would recognize that for the illegal scene, they will certainly lose the DRM struggle. All it takes in that arena is for a handful of people to be willing to invest time and effort to break the protection and make a single drm-free copy in order for it to mean absolutely nothing to illegal distribution. They may not even elect to break the disk protection, instead having setups where they break any other part of the digital chain and laboriously copy it over. Meanwhile, for customers that wish to abide by the law, DRM provides no end of extreme headache. Want to make a private copy for backup purposes (i.e. you have young children and you want them to not manipulate the original), whoops, sorry. Want to copy it to hard drive for performance above and beyond any possible disc changer, that won't be valid either. Want to merely play it back on your system and don't run Vista, well, the studios don't like that, so no. Some arbitrary cracker a thousand miles away just *happened* to crack the protection in a way such that the studios will blacklist your playback methods, congratulations, they may make your player useless just to spite the cracker. Want to move it to a portable player that requires some transcoding, no, not allowed. And the studios answer to limitations is essentially they *might* allow common-sense private moving/modification, but only if devices doing this call home and beg for permission first. It's an insane world.
Their are plenty of licenses that people are asked to agree to all sorts of terms unrelated to copyright.
i.e., you are legally permitted to obtain a copy of the software because the license grants that right, so long as you agree to the terms. Should you violate them, then you did not obtain the software with the intent of following the license, so in effect you had no right to use the software in the first place.
Qt makes interesting use of GPL, once they started dual licensing. Back in the day, KDE's status was worrisome as Qt license upon which it depended was not free. Qt knew the success of KDE would be critical to their products commercial success, and that they had to make provisions to allow the free software community to use it with impunity, while encouraging commercial vendors to continue on how they have been. They release dual license GPL and Qt, such that if you are ok with GPL, feel free to use it with impunity, but if you want a more commercial license, you can, but it will cost you. One of the major reasons commercial software vendors back Gnome is that fitting into that merely requires the LGPL, and thus they don't have to reciprocate commercially or with contributions.
Of course, LGPL for commonly used libraries is a requirement when having to deal with a platform of diverse licensing (including BSD and others).
Though I haven't experienced it first hand, is the DRM on the HD formats really any more effective than DRM on DVD? In case you have forgotten, DVD features CSS. While useless as it was defeated, it's still there. From what I hear, the HD formats haven't had more success in protected their keys in general, and though they now revoke them, I wonder what happens when keys from a moderately popular network-disconnected HD format set top box are compromised. So far the keys I hear compromised are desktop software, and they've required users to 'upgrade' to the new key to play back future content. Would they damn a whole set of legitimate customers and kill their reputation for the sake of a losing battle?
As much as DRM *should* bother people, on physical media in particular it doesn't seem to register with moth people.
No, I'd say it's predominantly the pricing, which was exacerbated by the ambiguous market situation. Buying *one* player was probably already too much money for the benefit, but to be safe they would have had to buy two players. Now with one factor, it's less bad, but HD playback devices I don't think have come down enough for the mass market to decide it worth it to replace their DVD players.
In a market full of DRM, you get both. They'll still be copying (because DRM is fundamentally a flawed concept) and lawsuits to 'close the holes'. I find the lawsuits ludicrous, but I'd rather have just them withouth the DRM. At least if they relent to the overwhelming pressures and provide a more fair system by which individual songs may be acquired legally, I would be happy to participate in the market significantly once again (of course, I currently abstain from acquiring music rather than illegally acquire music, as I think abstaining is the correct message to send).
The question becomes, though, could they cause great legal grief if they discover you have digital copies of a song on some media of yours, and you cannot readily prove how you acquired them? I would think it not possible/reasonable to even try a case unless they have evidence of you providing or acquiring it, but the way those lawyers have been, who knows what they'll try. And the sad fact is they can legally intimidate people into settlements who could defend themselves, but they lack those means.
Seeing as how the Kindle doesn't even have a backlight, it wouldn't help with that.
Firefox may decide in that case it just somehow modeled that aspect of its universe wrong or incompletely, and that 1,216 MB of mystery memory that doesn't make sense is merely 'dark memory' that must certainly exist, but simply can't be dealt with like the rest of the memory can be.
Such an inconsistency to us would be so potentially complex our advanced physicists would be hard pressed to be sure it simply can't be at all possible rather than our understanding not be quite right about what is really possible.
Just because the boxes happen to be x86 now doesn't mean OSX is any more accessible than the PPC days.
To companies considering migrating from Linux to OSX or even Windows to OSX, you have to ask yourself one simple question, are you prepared to sacrifice your hardware vendor flexibility? If running Linux, you are not strongly locked into any hardware or software vendor. With MS, you have software vendor lockin, but are at least spared hardware lockin. With OSX, you are locked into software and hardware. If Apple does anything you don't like, you're stuck. IBM/AIX is that way, HP/HP-UX is that way, and Solaris is *mostly* that way (though Sun has been changing that picture), so it's not exactly an uncommon scenario and to an extent, not unreasonable, but being unaware of that circumstance ahead of time could leave you in great pain if things do not continue to align with your strategy. In fact, I'm reasonably confident that a large part of Microsoft's success in the NT4 days despite being technically uninteresting compared to a lot of established players in the space was the hardware indepedence. Of the serious contenders of the day (free x86 *nixes didn't have the commercial backing yet, leaving commercial Unixes as the vast bulk of the competition), only NT and Netware were hardware vendor independent. That's a very significant situation.
If God hadn't decided to flood ping us we'd be doing better.
His point was not trying to say Turing model does not represent computation as we know it, but that *if* we were a simulation, our models of computation could merely be a subset of the system's running the universe. Possibilities may be intrinsically impossible for us to contemplate as dictated by the simulation.
So, while he claims it to be testable, it's really hard to disprove, really. If you found an aspect of reality that couldn't possibly mesh with our models of computation, it could be interpreted to disprove, or you could say the higher-order system is able to do information processing in ways that are either by unintended limitation or explicit design not conceivably possible to us.
Let's say a sentient copy of firefox decides 'hey, maybe I'm just a program, since everything I see is HTML, and I know how I could put it together'. Then that copy sees a page with flash content 'oh, there's something about my reality that I don't understand how it could be constructed from HTML, therefore my universe isn't a program' But the reality is a program even if firefox doesn't have the mechanism to understand that it is.
*Technically* speaking, I can't think of any legitimate non-DRM afflicted digital video sources. The movie download services are all encumbered as far as I know. You buy any digital media format (HD-DVD, Blue Ray, DVD) and they are all technically DRM-encumbered (DVD counts as encumbered, despite it's pathetically weak methodologies. Even in the analog realm, many VHS tapes that were released used Macrovision to block fair use rights.
Somewhere along the way,the consumer lost and rather than standing their ground and refusing the technology that denies them their fair-use rights, they've accepted whatever hacks around the system and kept buying. Macrovision on VHS was met with filters you could buy at any electronics store. DeCSS made people consider the DVD protection issue moot. I've not yet touched the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray situation, but I hear many stories about those schemes being defeated. And for download services, Fu4wm for example is used for that.
It's a really sad state of affairs, every single DRM scheme ever put forth has been handily defeated, but you don't see, for example, the movie studios making claims that DVD is a useless format because it has no technically meaningful DRM. You'd think that would be noticed as evidence that DRM is unnecessary hassle in a market of mostly fair consumers...
I admit to myself purchasing DVDs on occasion (I can find *no* venue to get unencumbered video, so I have to settle for ineffective DRM, but have found after the fact that some of my titles had no attempt at CSS), but beyond that, I've been avoiding the situation of DRM media because I don't want to deal with it. I've been looking to buy unencumbered music, but so far the selection of tracks I recognize isn't there. I'm relegated to CD purchases (making sure to keep track of the boneheaded efforts on that front to avoid supporting it with my money).
3DO is a very good example of exactly what I was talking about, shouldn't have been modded offtopic.
Since 2008 will be based on the Vista core, you'll need a dedicated person to sit at the console to address the "Someone is trying to access your website, cancel or alaw?" dialogs.
Seriously, to what extent was Netcraft's status gamed by microsoft ala that situation where Microsoft got their platform as the return for ungodly numbers of parked domains vs. how much of reflects an actual legitimate uptake of their platform in the face of Apache? I haven't seen any technical/logistic reason for them to be suddenly gaining ground (maybe this move would have some impact), so I was wondering if it is really happening and if so why.
Well, judging from the specs of the IdeaPads, evidently high resolution and a trackpoint must be consumer-unfriendly, and low res and touchpad only are consumer friendly....
I think I'll stick with the ThinkPad line, thanks anyway...
I see that historically the non-thinkpad Lenovo's are cheaper, and I guess that's what they mean, but I don't see anything to distinguish them from every other cheaper laptop in existence.
Ok, so, where is a single RTS designed for a console specifically for mouse input?
Same for FPS, name one that is designed explicitly for mouse and console.
I particularly wonder for on-line gameplay, if they would worry that allowing some people to use the mouse would make the games horribly unbalanced since the 'typical' experience is intended to be couch play, which doesn't lend itself well to mousing in general. Already where games exist on consoles and computers concurrently, effort is made to keep the populations separate as trying to ensure a semblance of balance is extremely difficult.
Sure, technically, the PS3, Xbox360, and Wii *can* interact using USB and bluetooth and therefore many device options are opened up, but development studios will embrace the 'blessed' interface (gamepad or wiimote depending on platform). If I *had* to play any RTS or FPS on a console, it would be the Wii-mote with the IR pointer, though it's not nearly as easy to manipulate and do fine motions as a mouse. I am aware of how rather weak the Wii processor/GPU is, but the controls are key. Of course, Wii's online strategy has been pathetic (for the sake of 'please, think of the children!'), taking away a *lot* of the potential for fun online gaming of any genre so far...
But, when all is said and done, the PC remains far and away the platform for good gaming in particular genres, specifically due to the developer's vision of how a PC gamer would be seated and utilizing the system vs. a console gamer. Many other genres (platformers, most rpgs, vehicle operation) are most often better on a console.
If MS wants to continue their business the way they always have, the xbox and xbox360 may have been part product, and part proof-of-concept to try to sell a sort of gaming-system platform, ala the Windows OS for desktop.
If Toshiba and others decided to make consumer electronics devices that happened to be 'xbox 360' compliant, or whatever the platform specification of the time happens to be, MS may decide to maintain merely the core platform specification, client software stack, and the server infrastructure of xbox live, without producing many units of their hardware implementation of the platform they dictate.
Of course, they run the *high* risk of doing so of defeating the whole point of consoles, that every console is the same hardware with the same features so game developers don't have to worry about the complexity of the user having a varying amount of central processor/graphics horsepower/memory/different optical drives. If HD-DVD got integrated and supported as a platform for games to be published on, that would walk the 360 down the path of the computer in terms of having to read 'requirements' on the box before purchase, and licensing could lead to a mess if they aren't careful on all the various components.
'LAN gaming' makes sense with handhelds and computer systems, which have displays and interfaces designed with per-person monitors. But when your targeted output device is a TV (which tends to be shared and larger), things get tricky. For many Wii games, the possibility of smaller dedicated displays is worked against by the style of the controller (with some exceptions, the general point of the Wii is to wave the controller around like a madman with plenty of space between the player, other players, and the screen).
Sure, you could have console LAN parties with more conventional joystick interaction, but Wii isn't focused on that. For other consoles, LAN party is fine but everyone has to bring their own copy. It doesn't buy anything special networking wise, just socially, since the LAN party in that case is just a special case of online play where everyone happens to access from the same place.
The console experience has been focused on shared displays for all gamers, and if you want to play a first-person shooter or something similar where a dedicated screen is essentially mandatory, you're still better off with a PC (which also has a much better interface than a joystick for shooters and RTS, though the Wii gets closer than other consoles to having a decent interface).