1. End users making their own changes but still complaining about error that may or may not be a result of their unauthorized modifications
2. Afraid that other competitors will 'leverage' your investment in development using legal or illegal means.
3. They don't want anyone to know that they 'leveraged' your investment in development to further their own product using legal or illegal means.
4. They didn't bother to patent anything and they're relying on being hidden to keep their trade secrets safe.
5. They license another developer's code which has the exact same limitation, and instead of negotiating with the upstream dev for source distribution rights or reimplementing the needed functionality themselves, they just choose to do nothing.
Anyways, many development environments/frameworks allow for source distribution because customers want to know why an obscure function 3 stack steps into your API routine is throwing ugly errors at you. With clear-and-open source, a developer could use a debugger and realize that they screwed something up before having to contact support with an obvious (to the original dev) problem.
Outside development libraries/frameworks and free products, a full source dump of any given product is pretty rare, at least from my experience.
Its better than the Image viewer that I once played with. It created all metadata and image thumbnails into a purely memory database.
It then stored the database to disk as a large set of insert statements instead of using some sort of disk based storage container. Needless to say, said application ran like a frigging slug. With larger sets of thumbnails, it'd simply run out of memory and die horribly.
Autism, like many other diseases/illnesses can be miss-diagnosed so back in ye olden days, a poor autistic child could've been thrown in an asylum, abandoned, or even snuffed out by those unwilling to care for them.
Plus, since autism isn't an inherently genetic trait, there's no 100% accurate test for the illness. You just have observed behaviour of the participant as a sign of illness, so some people who have it will never be diagnosed whereas some who don't have it will be labelled as such if they happen to exhibit similar symptoms. This is much akin to the use of over-diagnosing signs of ADD.
Plus, if an earlier poster was accurate in their correlation that age is a contributing factor, that could also explain a dramatic rise in Autism, since by in large, people are having children at a later age in most western industrial countries.
1. The AC was a satire. In fact, I remember reading those exact lines at least once before. Its actually quite funny, so props to the original troll for making something really nice to read.
2. ntfs-3g should be all you need to handle read/writes in Linux these days. I think its nested on top of fuse, so you'll probably need it as well. (Side note, glad Linus finally caved on allowing fuse into his kernel releases)
3. WinFS is a meta-layer on top of NTFS, so not in itself a disk file-system.
So if a vengeful Slashdot editor decided to write plain lies about you, there'd be no problem, right? Even better, what about NYT on-line, or WSJ on-line, or yahoo, or MSN... where do you draw the line between reputable source of researched news and heaping pile of bullshit?
I guess you could claim yourself non-reputable if you had a disclaimer that the work was satire, but beyond that, every news source has the ability to be totally wrong, and quite frankly every public web page can be considered a published work.
Which seems particularly relevant to the case in hand (Assuming this law is still on the books).
What I really wanted to look up was the laws on impersonation. If they do 'catch' you posting on-line as someone else, you could be busted for impersonation as well. From what I found, anyone using another person's identity while committing a crime or eliciting benefit from the name could be liable for impersonation. Your Bob Dylan reference as funny as it is could put you in hot water; Unless of course that is your real name =)
I don't know what other games you're playing on your -laptop-, but generally a laptop's Video processor is a heaping pile of bullocks unless you're paying for the super duper premium chips; in which case, they double as base board heaters.
Steam is a great distribution system, but if you're not charging in the native currency rates (Canada in my case) then forget about it. I'd rather pay 30% less and buy it at full retail price. It's sad, because I really do like the system for the games I do have for it.
I'll suggest Team Fortress 2 for two simple reasons:
1. The learning curve to be 'competent' with at least one of the many rolls to choose from is low
2. VAC makes sure that -generally- speaking cheating is kept very low. There's maybe 1 in 30 play sessions where I'm like: "That player is just -too- good"
3. From my experience there are plenty of fellow newbs playing TF2 so one more wouldn't hurt. Who knows, you could play enough and become a newb+1 some day, yay.....
I'm usually a back burning pyro and rank within the top 3 pretty much every game. I do well in the game because:
1. good reflexes (strafing a target while he / she is trying to land a shot on me), ducking to avoiding a Heavy's full brunt, or jumping to avoid (lessen) soldier / demo splatter. Playing online FPS games, will eventually teach someone to get these techniques right. Shake it up a little and who knows how well you'll do.
2. Good strategy in knowing when and where to ambush my foes. This usually involves knowing the map fairly well, so it won't be something easily learned. If you want to work on this, play out the levels just by yourself to get a handle on where everything connects, and possible strategies to apply at each contention point.
3. Pretty much -the- way for your team to win, you must adapt to your teams needs. Often you'll be short of one class or another (medics / engineers usually), which will cause a quick victory for your foes, or a slow and frustrating attack map loss for you.
Some tips for peeps:
1. Medics are target #1 for me (Pyro) if you're standing still expect to die. Your mission may be to keep someone alive, but mission #1 should be keeping yourself alive. Jump around and keep moving even if the person you're healing isn't
2. Engineers should avoid placing sentry turrets where out-of-range enemies can hit it with impunity. Maps like goldrush were designed to make this technique hard, so you're also forced to babysit your sentry as well.
3. Pyros that use the default flame thrower can use the right click button to blow an enemy weapon back at them, or even more importantly, you can blow an Uber charged attacker away from the sentry turret they're most likely aiming for. This can be a real team saver in a lopsided defensive situation.
I and many many many other people enjoy watching body parts flying in several different directions in Fallout 3 but that doesn't make me a psychopath, or that I'll attempt to re-create the scene in real life.
There's a good reason why -most- non-puzzle games fall into the violent in one way or another category. That's also why most movies are framed with large components of violence and/or sex. We respond to it, but it doesn't mean we'll outwardly act upon our stimulus, which is really what video game conservatives are afraid of.
Then again, it all comes down to public opinion/perception. If it didn't, alcohol & tobacco would have been made illegal long ago. Considering that alcohol makes people more aggressive, and tobacco has too many possible health consequences to mention.
I took several Comp Sci courses in High School 10 years+ ago that explained enough about computer use. Since computers have only increased in use since then, I'd imagine the amount of use they get in classwork can only increase.
If you don't have computer training out of high school beyond 'insert magic disc' its because you chose avoid the box like the plague.
More importantly, it isn't required that all computers users become tech savy. That's what IT people exist for. They make technology bearable for the masses.
Norton Corporate was actually pretty good when I was deploying AV solutions for my work. I don't know how their 'consumer' editions are, but the corporate edition rocked in roll-out simplicity, user edit lockouts (if you're anal enough to enforce it), and yes, if you don't want things like scan on read, you can choose to only scan on write if you like.
>>Have 8 GB of RAM? It'll use the unallocated memory to cache programs.
>Which is wonderful, because I love having my hard drive in constant use, driving down battery life. Especially to cache things I'm not actually using, especially when it'll just be replaced with stuff I AM using!
Actually, you're both wrong about the caching: 1. This is not in the least a new technology as it has existed since NT4 or even earlier perhaps. 2. Unless it has some fancy new pre-cog caching algorithm, it won't touch the hard-drive unless the files requested have been requested 3. The kernel's memory manager prefers application data over the file cache, so if the 'free' memory runs out, it'll steal the memory from the file cache before attempting to swap out.
Sad dude, I use Win2k to this day, and enabling hard-drives over 120gb (if I recall correctly) all you have to do is run a simple registry update and viola, large hard-drive support.
Almost all benefits and caveats of OS support exist within 2k and XP equally. The main differences between the two (were backward compat that nobody uses anymore), a slightly more stable USB driver stack, bluetooth stack, and a more abstract user framebuffer that allows for native RDP, etc.. on a workstation (only did that with servers in 2k).
The big differences are all the aesthetic ones like the new start bar, the annoying task focusses sidebar in explorer, the stupid resource rich search tool and display themes, all of which I can safely live without.
I doubt they actually did what they claimed. I went through the game a second time and capped out faster, but it still took no sooner than 20 hours to get it. Even with the XP perks, you're only levelling up at max 50% faster than you were normally.
Mind you, I was actually playing the game and not just level grinding (Is it even possible to grind in this game?).
I'm not debating the silliness of the LCD/CRT comparison, but if an 'average' television bought today consumes twice the electricity than the 'average' television in the 80's, then you are consuming more power per capita. The problem is the result of people buying larger panel TV's than they would have even considered 10 years ago.
Although poorly put by the article, the end result is the same. The average TV of today consumes more energy than the average TV's from 10, 20 years ago.
"What an utter waste of time. More impact would be realized if they required datacenters to be located further north, requiring less demanding cooling systems."
Larger data centre providers are already building new global data centres in interesting areas for just this reason. This isn't governmentally driven, but certainly economically motivated based on cost.
Are you comparing on static images or when you're actually 'using' the TV?
I have recently bought a Sony 120hz Bravia and a BluRay player. Comparing movies from DVD and BluRay are subtly different, but not enough to elicit a different physical or emotional response to whatever I'm watching.
There will be the odd scene that the higher definition will really help fill you (mostly in distant pan shots that have minute details), but for the most part, the affect it non-existent.
I say this about the resolution, but I'd assume that most consumers are even less conscious of the difference in colour replication.
Hell here's a story for you. My friend's a TelCo/Internet/TV installer for a local TelCo and one of the most painful parts of his job is helping customers setup their TV's after the TV signal has been configured. Why is this so painful? It's because most HDTV (16:9 screen) customers he's dealt with prefer stretched 4:3 to 'get rid of the black bars'.
This can't really work for monster homes and places that use a lot of internal heating. Imagine living in the mountains where there isn't pipe gas to your home. You can either drive in your gas, or use electricity to heat your home.
The amount of electricity would be painfully large that the system would simply fall over. The same could be said about the very complicated setup of shared living units like condos that share a large portion of 'communal' power draw.
Maybe geographical tiered taxation and mandatory power consumption numbers are reasonable solutions for putting the onus on consumer to fix their power consumption requirements, but even then there will be a large amount of wiggle room to catch all the exceptional cases of over-charge for need and undercharge when electricity is being wasted.
PS: I've seen the same line repeated several times here: The 'same' TV will end up costing more money for consumers in California. Where does this come from? Is this just anti-government rhetoric or are there studies that say government influence on products cause price inflation?
Nice thoughts, but when you start linking in dependencies, shared resources, etc.. you're in for a world of hurt. I'd say the complexity of setting up a packaging and partitioning system like this would be along the lines of what SELinux does for security.
The only advantage that I could see from this is that we may need yet-another-packaging-system to help organize installations, so we may be able to convince every Linux provider to use the same packaging format / layout.
Slashdot Mirror
> important to keep the source code super secret
The reason will most likely be listed below:
1. End users making their own changes but still complaining about error that may or may not be a result of their unauthorized modifications
2. Afraid that other competitors will 'leverage' your investment in development using legal or illegal means.
3. They don't want anyone to know that they 'leveraged' your investment in development to further their own product using legal or illegal means.
4. They didn't bother to patent anything and they're relying on being hidden to keep their trade secrets safe.
5. They license another developer's code which has the exact same limitation, and instead of negotiating with the upstream dev for source distribution rights or reimplementing the needed functionality themselves, they just choose to do nothing.
Anyways, many development environments/frameworks allow for source distribution because customers want to know why an obscure function 3 stack steps into your API routine is throwing ugly errors at you. With clear-and-open source, a developer could use a debugger and realize that they screwed something up before having to contact support with an obvious (to the original dev) problem.
Outside development libraries/frameworks and free products, a full source dump of any given product is pretty rare, at least from my experience.
Its better than the Image viewer that I once played with. It created all metadata and image thumbnails into a purely memory database.
It then stored the database to disk as a large set of insert statements instead of using some sort of disk based storage container. Needless to say, said application ran like a frigging slug. With larger sets of thumbnails, it'd simply run out of memory and die horribly.
Autism, like many other diseases/illnesses can be miss-diagnosed so back in ye olden days, a poor autistic child could've been thrown in an asylum, abandoned, or even snuffed out by those unwilling to care for them.
Plus, since autism isn't an inherently genetic trait, there's no 100% accurate test for the illness. You just have observed behaviour of the participant as a sign of illness, so some people who have it will never be diagnosed whereas some who don't have it will be labelled as such if they happen to exhibit similar symptoms. This is much akin to the use of over-diagnosing signs of ADD.
Plus, if an earlier poster was accurate in their correlation that age is a contributing factor, that could also explain a dramatic rise in Autism, since by in large, people are having children at a later age in most western industrial countries.
1. The AC was a satire. In fact, I remember reading those exact lines at least once before. Its actually quite funny, so props to the original troll for making something really nice to read.
2. ntfs-3g should be all you need to handle read/writes in Linux these days. I think its nested on top of fuse, so you'll probably need it as well. (Side note, glad Linus finally caved on allowing fuse into his kernel releases)
3. WinFS is a meta-layer on top of NTFS, so not in itself a disk file-system.
So if a vengeful Slashdot editor decided to write plain lies about you, there'd be no problem, right? Even better, what about NYT on-line, or WSJ on-line, or yahoo, or MSN... where do you draw the line between reputable source of researched news and heaping pile of bullshit?
I guess you could claim yourself non-reputable if you had a disclaimer that the work was satire, but beyond that, every news source has the ability to be totally wrong, and quite frankly every public web page can be considered a published work.
Just curious and all since you brought it up, but how would court/military/gov secrets/etc.. gag orders work in regards to constitutional law?
Does it simply refer to consequences after the fact, or do these gag order actually put the crime on the -act- of the speech?
Looking into this, I found:
http://news.cnet.com/Create-an-e-annoyance,-go-to-jail/2010-1028_3-6022491.html
Which seems particularly relevant to the case in hand (Assuming this law is still on the books).
What I really wanted to look up was the laws on impersonation. If they do 'catch' you posting on-line as someone else, you could be busted for impersonation as well. From what I found, anyone using another person's identity while committing a crime or eliciting benefit from the name could be liable for impersonation. Your Bob Dylan reference as funny as it is could put you in hot water; Unless of course that is your real name =)
I don't know what other games you're playing on your -laptop-, but generally a laptop's Video processor is a heaping pile of bullocks unless you're paying for the super duper premium chips; in which case, they double as base board heaters.
I hate .NET as much as anyone, but your argument is flawed. There is a LOT more to .NET than just a windowing toolkit.
Don't fall into the trap of comparing apples to oranges, because in the end, it'll end up hurting the cause more than helping.
You better start packing your bags since a large number of Gnome GUI applications are already being written in Python these days.
Steam is a great distribution system, but if you're not charging in the native currency rates (Canada in my case) then forget about it. I'd rather pay 30% less and buy it at full retail price. It's sad, because I really do like the system for the games I do have for it.
I'll suggest Team Fortress 2 for two simple reasons:
1. The learning curve to be 'competent' with at least one of the many rolls to choose from is low
2. VAC makes sure that -generally- speaking cheating is kept very low. There's maybe 1 in 30 play sessions where I'm like: "That player is just -too- good"
3. From my experience there are plenty of fellow newbs playing TF2 so one more wouldn't hurt. Who knows, you could play enough and become a newb+1 some day, yay.....
Don't forget the strategy (and reflexes).
I'm usually a back burning pyro and rank within the top 3 pretty much every game. I do well in the game because:
1. good reflexes (strafing a target while he / she is trying to land a shot on me), ducking to avoiding a Heavy's full brunt, or jumping to avoid (lessen) soldier / demo splatter. Playing online FPS games, will eventually teach someone to get these techniques right. Shake it up a little and who knows how well you'll do.
2. Good strategy in knowing when and where to ambush my foes. This usually involves knowing the map fairly well, so it won't be something easily learned. If you want to work on this, play out the levels just by yourself to get a handle on where everything connects, and possible strategies to apply at each contention point.
3. Pretty much -the- way for your team to win, you must adapt to your teams needs. Often you'll be short of one class or another (medics / engineers usually), which will cause a quick victory for your foes, or a slow and frustrating attack map loss for you.
Some tips for peeps:
1. Medics are target #1 for me (Pyro) if you're standing still expect to die. Your mission may be to keep someone alive, but mission #1 should be keeping yourself alive. Jump around and keep moving even if the person you're healing isn't
2. Engineers should avoid placing sentry turrets where out-of-range enemies can hit it with impunity. Maps like goldrush were designed to make this technique hard, so you're also forced to babysit your sentry as well.
3. Pyros that use the default flame thrower can use the right click button to blow an enemy weapon back at them, or even more importantly, you can blow an Uber charged attacker away from the sentry turret they're most likely aiming for. This can be a real team saver in a lopsided defensive situation.
I and many many many other people enjoy watching body parts flying in several different directions in Fallout 3 but that doesn't make me a psychopath, or that I'll attempt to re-create the scene in real life.
There's a good reason why -most- non-puzzle games fall into the violent in one way or another category. That's also why most movies are framed with large components of violence and/or sex. We respond to it, but it doesn't mean we'll outwardly act upon our stimulus, which is really what video game conservatives are afraid of.
Then again, it all comes down to public opinion/perception. If it didn't, alcohol & tobacco would have been made illegal long ago. Considering that alcohol makes people more aggressive, and tobacco has too many possible health consequences to mention.
I took several Comp Sci courses in High School 10 years+ ago that explained enough about computer use. Since computers have only increased in use since then, I'd imagine the amount of use they get in classwork can only increase.
If you don't have computer training out of high school beyond 'insert magic disc' its because you chose avoid the box like the plague.
More importantly, it isn't required that all computers users become tech savy. That's what IT people exist for. They make technology bearable for the masses.
Norton Corporate was actually pretty good when I was deploying AV solutions for my work. I don't know how their 'consumer' editions are, but the corporate edition rocked in roll-out simplicity, user edit lockouts (if you're anal enough to enforce it), and yes, if you don't want things like scan on read, you can choose to only scan on write if you like.
>>Have 8 GB of RAM? It'll use the unallocated memory to cache programs.
>Which is wonderful, because I love having my hard drive in constant use, driving down battery life. Especially to cache things I'm not actually using, especially when it'll just be replaced with stuff I AM using!
Actually, you're both wrong about the caching:
1. This is not in the least a new technology as it has existed since NT4 or even earlier perhaps.
2. Unless it has some fancy new pre-cog caching algorithm, it won't touch the hard-drive unless the files requested have been requested
3. The kernel's memory manager prefers application data over the file cache, so if the 'free' memory runs out, it'll steal the memory from the file cache before attempting to swap out.
Sad dude, I use Win2k to this day, and enabling hard-drives over 120gb (if I recall correctly) all you have to do is run a simple registry update and viola, large hard-drive support.
Almost all benefits and caveats of OS support exist within 2k and XP equally. The main differences between the two (were backward compat that nobody uses anymore), a slightly more stable USB driver stack, bluetooth stack, and a more abstract user framebuffer that allows for native RDP, etc.. on a workstation (only did that with servers in 2k).
The big differences are all the aesthetic ones like the new start bar, the annoying task focusses sidebar in explorer, the stupid resource rich search tool and display themes, all of which I can safely live without.
I doubt they actually did what they claimed. I went through the game a second time and capped out faster, but it still took no sooner than 20 hours to get it. Even with the XP perks, you're only levelling up at max 50% faster than you were normally.
Mind you, I was actually playing the game and not just level grinding (Is it even possible to grind in this game?).
Maybe its just me not being poor or actually liking cable, but is OTA TV really that pervasive these days?
I'm not debating the silliness of the LCD/CRT comparison, but if an 'average' television bought today consumes twice the electricity than the 'average' television in the 80's, then you are consuming more power per capita. The problem is the result of people buying larger panel TV's than they would have even considered 10 years ago.
Although poorly put by the article, the end result is the same. The average TV of today consumes more energy than the average TV's from 10, 20 years ago.
"What an utter waste of time. More impact would be realized if they required datacenters to be located further north, requiring less demanding cooling systems."
Larger data centre providers are already building new global data centres in interesting areas for just this reason. This isn't governmentally driven, but certainly economically motivated based on cost.
Are you comparing on static images or when you're actually 'using' the TV?
I have recently bought a Sony 120hz Bravia and a BluRay player. Comparing movies from DVD and BluRay are subtly different, but not enough to elicit a different physical or emotional response to whatever I'm watching.
There will be the odd scene that the higher definition will really help fill you (mostly in distant pan shots that have minute details), but for the most part, the affect it non-existent.
I say this about the resolution, but I'd assume that most consumers are even less conscious of the difference in colour replication.
Hell here's a story for you. My friend's a TelCo/Internet/TV installer for a local TelCo and one of the most painful parts of his job is helping customers setup their TV's after the TV signal has been configured. Why is this so painful? It's because most HDTV (16:9 screen) customers he's dealt with prefer stretched 4:3 to 'get rid of the black bars'.
This can't really work for monster homes and places that use a lot of internal heating. Imagine living in the mountains where there isn't pipe gas to your home. You can either drive in your gas, or use electricity to heat your home.
The amount of electricity would be painfully large that the system would simply fall over. The same could be said about the very complicated setup of shared living units like condos that share a large portion of 'communal' power draw.
Maybe geographical tiered taxation and mandatory power consumption numbers are reasonable solutions for putting the onus on consumer to fix their power consumption requirements, but even then there will be a large amount of wiggle room to catch all the exceptional cases of over-charge for need and undercharge when electricity is being wasted.
PS: I've seen the same line repeated several times here: The 'same' TV will end up costing more money for consumers in California. Where does this come from? Is this just anti-government rhetoric or are there studies that say government influence on products cause price inflation?
Nice thoughts, but when you start linking in dependencies, shared resources, etc.. you're in for a world of hurt. I'd say the complexity of setting up a packaging and partitioning system like this would be along the lines of what SELinux does for security.
The only advantage that I could see from this is that we may need yet-another-packaging-system to help organize installations, so we may be able to convince every Linux provider to use the same packaging format / layout.