And, indeed, it was suicide. You've been modded "offtopic"; the parent comment, which is equally offtopic, was modded "insightful". Groupthink at its finest.
Fact is, Vista is better than XP in many ways. And I say this as a Linux user whose second computer is a Mac. It's only the hardcore XP fanboys who think otherwise, and most of them only like XP because they've never used anything better, and mistake "different" for "worse".
Or they could stick to the analog media that is near failure proof.
If you seriously believe that, then all I can say is that you've been remarkably lucky. I've seen VHS tapes, only about 10 years old, where the soundtrack was so distorted that it was nearly impossible to make out.
Requiring the disc to play the game is annoying, especially on PCs.
For you, perhaps. I don't really notice it. I'm generally only playing one game at any one time, and games are the only thing my drive gets used for these days, so the disc just stays in there until I want to play something else.
If you want "annoying", go back to the days when games were played from 5.25" floppies, and you'd have like 8 discs for each game, and every 10 minutes or so everything would come to a halt and a little box would pop up saying "Now insert disc 5". That was annoying.
Not being able to back up said disc is offensively annoying.
Really? I can't think of one single occasion in my entire life where I've ever broken any of the numerous game CDs I own, or scratched them significantly, or had any other reason to wish I'd got a backup. Except on a couple of occasions when I lent a game to someone and they never got round to giving it back, but then it would be illegal for me to use a backup anyway, and heck, it's not like it'd cost a fortune to buy another copy if I really wanted to play something.
How, exactly, would you determine sales lost to copyright infringement?
You can't do it "exactly". You can get a reasonable idea in this case by comparing sales figures and piracy figures to the figures for comparable games, from comparable franchises, with comparable review ratings, that were infected with DRM, and see whether this one had a better or a worse ratio of sales to illegal downloads.
Now, yes, of course that isn't what they're going to do: they're going to claim this is proof that DRM is necessary if even a single copy is pirated, because they're going to be getting a big discount from the DRM-mongers on their next title if they do that. But let's not jump from the sad fact that statistics are normally misused to the incorrect assumption that statistics are never useful.
Piracy is a form of theft, copyright infringement is not. Giving it the title of "piracy" indicates that it holds the same weight or is similar to stealing. It isn't.
You're about 400 years late with this argument. It is called piracy, period. Nobody thinks that implies boarding a ship at sea. Stick with the explanations as to why it's different from theft, where you actually have a strong argument and a hope in hell of convincing people.
That was COPA, which tried to prevent children from accessing porn. This is about COPPA, which is the completely pointless act that makes it a requirement for children under 13 to lie about their age regularly.
Full screen video is only despised because it was used to create some of the worst games of all time -- the so-called "interactive movies", that weren't remotely interactive and sucked as movies too.
Where it was used appropriately -- such as for briefings in games like C&C and the Thief series -- it was actually pretty good, and remained a powerful tool for many years, until in-engine cutscenes got good enough to take over.
C&C also had the best exploit ever -- the AI didn't know how to destroy sandbags, so you could just build a line of sandbags to the enemy base, extend it to a wall around said base, and then get on with building your Mighty Army of Doom while the enemy sat around wondering how it was ever going to get a harvester out with all those sandbags in the way.
Of course, those of us who played it that way also had big problems on the baseless missions, where we were forced to play fair and generally got slaughtered in consequence.:)
But note that [GIMP] does do CMYK seps, which is really all you need.
"All you need" is not the issue. Having proper CMYK editing makes life easier, while GIMP's incredibly primitive separation support makes life harder. I mean, theoretically, "all you need" is a hex editor, and then you can edit your pictures by typing in hex values...
Of course, the whole CMYK thing is a bit of a red herring, because most people -- even many professionals -- don't need CMYK at all. But GIMP has other, deeper failings, like its terrible layer support. Seriously guys, I would like to be able to apply the same effect to multiple layers at once. I would like to be able to group layers, too. These are basic things that make life a hell of a lot easier, and GIMP can't do them, which is one reason why I run a commercial photo editor under VirtualBox instead of using GIMP.
Indeed it does, but does OpenSolaris include Xsun? I thought it only included the Xorg server, which is exactly the same on OpenSolaris as it is on GNU/Linux or any other platform.
2006, for me, since I've been using a Solaris desktop daily since then. A real one, with a SPARC inside and all. It's not as bad as you might think. I even switched from Gnome to Xfce at home once I discovered how much better CDE's 2D desktop-oriented design is compared to the inefficient 1D task-bar-oriented design that Gnome and KDE inexplicably copy from Windows.
(Shame that Sun's deprecated CDE and chosen Gnome to replace it. Restricting main menu access to a corner of the screen, and minimised windows to a line along the edge of the screen, just seems silly once you've experienced the alternative.)
Python isn't a very good language for quick-and-dirty scripting, and it's often not installed at all by default. It's a pretty good general-purpose programming language, but that's a different matter entirely. Perl, in comparison, is ubiquitous on pretty much all Unix-like platforms, and is well adapted for things like one-off one-liners.
More relevantly to this thread, Perl is a better language for FP than Python is. Perl has full support for anonymous closures (Python's lambdas are very weak by comparison), and Perl has proper predictable lexical scoping (Python's scoping rules are rather strange). This all reflects the different design goals of the languages. Python is built on the principle that there should be only one way to achieve any goal -- and in practice that's usually objects. Perl is built on the principle that the programmer should have loads of options to choose from -- and hence it supports several programming paradigms equally well.
How can anyone seriously consider a language that is MISSING almost all of the modern features needed to express your programming intents?
That's one of the things that makes it a good introductory language.
There's a reason why people who started computing in the 1980s are way ahead of people who started computing in the 1990s -- and it's because we all had a BASIC interpreter pop up as soon as we switched our computers on, while the 1990s generation's computers booted into a vastly less powerful DOS shell, and too many of them were sucked into Doom before they ever discovered the joys of qbasic.
Dropping people in at the deep end with classes and objects is crazy, when they don't even grok what a variable is yet. Nobody's suggesting making BASIC the basis of the entire course, but it's a reasonable place to start for the first week or two, while people are still getting their heads round what programming is actually about. Then move onto Scheme to teach them about abstractions. Save "real world" languages like Python and Java until they know something about what's going on underneath all that sugary syntax.
Apple went down the drain more from the clones. Look, Apple's whole thing is about the entire consumer experience from store to computer hardware to boot.
So are you saying the clones had a better customer experience? Because it looks to me as though if a company can be damaged by clones, then the reason for that is that most of the people who use its products just want the product itself, and don't give a damn about the "consumer experience" or the trendy white stores.
No, that's merely an interface to an existing LISP interpreter. You haven't written the interpreter unless you implemented read, eval, print, and loop yourself -- and all the other basic functions that are necessary to write an actual program in LISP.
And it requires the patience of a deity to use it.
(I say this as someone who was forced to use vi this morning due to an unfortunate NFS outage rendering all other editors inaccessible. And I mean vi, not vim. Lord, that was painful...)
Simple. It's Christian morality gone off the deep end.
Which is odd, since "You Shall Not Murder" is one of the fundamental laws Christians are supposed to believe God thought important enough to write down in person, while I don't recall anything in the Bible about drawings of fictional people having sex. So you'd think Christians might go after violence first. But apparently not; it's fine for kids to play at murdering each other, as long as they don't see a nipple before their 21st birthday...
In real thoughtcrime, the crime would be to have the thought. Here, the crime is to possess an image which the judge believes might prompt the thought. The difference is that there is still something in the real world (in this case, the cartoon) that is being presented as evidence that a crime took place; in a thoughtcrime situation, the prosecutor could secure a conviction just by saying something like "we know this person thinks evil things because he looks too happy during the Two Minutes' Thinking Of The Children Only Not Like That You Sick Pervert".
Yes, all this is true. (Except for the bit about Vista requiring less resources, but nobody has ever claimed that. XP also required more resources than Windows 98.)
Most XP users would be better off upgrading to a better OS such as Vista, OS X, or Ubuntu.
In general, all commercial media organisations end up reporting pretty much the same stories; there are differences in the angles they take, and the spin they put on the reporting, but if you compare contents for a week or so you'll find that they're pretty similar.
That is what people call "the media".
Like it or not, these media organisations influence people's lives in a way that ice cream manufacture does not. When all the papers have front-page headlines screaming about allegations that a certain vaccine causes autism, the uptake of that vaccine does fall. This is a fact. Therefore, if those allegations are proven false, why do those newspapers not have a duty to report that as well? If people are trusting you -- however inadvisedly! -- to provide them with information they will use to make medical decisions, then surely you have a responsibility to provide that information as fully as you can, or else to make it clear that the information you are selling should not be used for that purpose.
The post loads perfectly. The post finishes loading. The post displays perfectly in its entirety. I start reading it. Then, after 15 seconds, it disappears and is replaced with a message saying "Your request took too long to complete. This is typically just a temporary error due to high network traffic or heavy usage of Blogger."
Thanks, Google. I love an application that claims there's an error when nothing's wrong, and displays the message in such a way that I can't even read the article that was displaying perfectly until you replaced it with your error message. Says a lot for the quality of Blogger.
The American people, as a whole, are happy to spend more money on fighting al-Qaeda.
The American people, as a whole, are not happy spending more money on fighting organised crime.
The American government, as a representative democracy, spends money roughly where the people want it spent, i.e. on terrorism.
If you think the government is doing the wrong thing, then it is your duty as a citizen to stand up in public and explain why. If you make a persuasive argument, then other people will support your cause, and eventually you will have sufficient backing that the government will take note of your movement and adjust its actions to suit the new desires of the American people. Look at the history of the civil rights movement for examples of this working in practice -- and note that Martin Luther King did not become a household name by posting anonymously on Slashdot.
Anyone wanna bet that Obama won't do a damn thing about these obvious attempts to spy on American citizens?
I find your paranoia (and that of many other Slashdotters) interesting. Why are so many Americans so certain that everything their government does is an attempt to oppress them? NSA's mission is foreign intelligence. That means that most of what they do is about spying on people who are not American citizens. Believe it or not, the world out here is really quite big. Did you know that there are actually more non-Americans than Americans on the Internet? There's plenty of non-American data for NSA to mine, if data mining is what they want to do.
You are not the centre of the universe. You are not the only thing your government cares about. You are not being spied on with satellite mind-control rays. Get over yourselves and drop the conspiracy crap, please.
Or, you know, go and collect loads of guns and hole yourself up in a log cabin in the mountains while you wait for the Rapture. They can't eavesdrop on your communications if you're only communicating with the Lord!
(Oh noes! I have disagreed with teh groupthink! Negative mods coming in 3... 2... 1...)
As far as I'm concerned, having advertising rammed down your throats in a game that retails for $60 is adequate grounds for piracy.
No, it's adequate grounds for not playing that game.
If the games have ads in, they will know how many people play them. If lots of people play them, they will make more games with ads in. If fewer people play them, they will abandon the idea.
After all they're still going to make money off of you.
That's all the more reason not to play the games! If they make money out of pirates, then an ad-infested game might end up being more profitable than one that respects its players. Then everyone would start putting ads in their games. Is that really the outcome you want?
Slashdot Mirror
And, indeed, it was suicide. You've been modded "offtopic"; the parent comment, which is equally offtopic, was modded "insightful". Groupthink at its finest.
Fact is, Vista is better than XP in many ways. And I say this as a Linux user whose second computer is a Mac. It's only the hardcore XP fanboys who think otherwise, and most of them only like XP because they've never used anything better, and mistake "different" for "worse".
If you seriously believe that, then all I can say is that you've been remarkably lucky. I've seen VHS tapes, only about 10 years old, where the soundtrack was so distorted that it was nearly impossible to make out.
For you, perhaps. I don't really notice it. I'm generally only playing one game at any one time, and games are the only thing my drive gets used for these days, so the disc just stays in there until I want to play something else.
If you want "annoying", go back to the days when games were played from 5.25" floppies, and you'd have like 8 discs for each game, and every 10 minutes or so everything would come to a halt and a little box would pop up saying "Now insert disc 5". That was annoying.
Really? I can't think of one single occasion in my entire life where I've ever broken any of the numerous game CDs I own, or scratched them significantly, or had any other reason to wish I'd got a backup. Except on a couple of occasions when I lent a game to someone and they never got round to giving it back, but then it would be illegal for me to use a backup anyway, and heck, it's not like it'd cost a fortune to buy another copy if I really wanted to play something.
You can't do it "exactly". You can get a reasonable idea in this case by comparing sales figures and piracy figures to the figures for comparable games, from comparable franchises, with comparable review ratings, that were infected with DRM, and see whether this one had a better or a worse ratio of sales to illegal downloads.
Now, yes, of course that isn't what they're going to do: they're going to claim this is proof that DRM is necessary if even a single copy is pirated, because they're going to be getting a big discount from the DRM-mongers on their next title if they do that. But let's not jump from the sad fact that statistics are normally misused to the incorrect assumption that statistics are never useful.
You're about 400 years late with this argument. It is called piracy, period. Nobody thinks that implies boarding a ship at sea. Stick with the explanations as to why it's different from theft, where you actually have a strong argument and a hope in hell of convincing people.
That was COPA, which tried to prevent children from accessing porn. This is about COPPA, which is the completely pointless act that makes it a requirement for children under 13 to lie about their age regularly.
Full screen video is only despised because it was used to create some of the worst games of all time -- the so-called "interactive movies", that weren't remotely interactive and sucked as movies too.
Where it was used appropriately -- such as for briefings in games like C&C and the Thief series -- it was actually pretty good, and remained a powerful tool for many years, until in-engine cutscenes got good enough to take over.
C&C also had the best exploit ever -- the AI didn't know how to destroy sandbags, so you could just build a line of sandbags to the enemy base, extend it to a wall around said base, and then get on with building your Mighty Army of Doom while the enemy sat around wondering how it was ever going to get a harvester out with all those sandbags in the way.
Of course, those of us who played it that way also had big problems on the baseless missions, where we were forced to play fair and generally got slaughtered in consequence. :)
"All you need" is not the issue. Having proper CMYK editing makes life easier, while GIMP's incredibly primitive separation support makes life harder. I mean, theoretically, "all you need" is a hex editor, and then you can edit your pictures by typing in hex values ...
Of course, the whole CMYK thing is a bit of a red herring, because most people -- even many professionals -- don't need CMYK at all. But GIMP has other, deeper failings, like its terrible layer support. Seriously guys, I would like to be able to apply the same effect to multiple layers at once. I would like to be able to group layers, too. These are basic things that make life a hell of a lot easier, and GIMP can't do them, which is one reason why I run a commercial photo editor under VirtualBox instead of using GIMP.
Indeed it does, but does OpenSolaris include Xsun? I thought it only included the Xorg server, which is exactly the same on OpenSolaris as it is on GNU/Linux or any other platform.
2006, for me, since I've been using a Solaris desktop daily since then. A real one, with a SPARC inside and all. It's not as bad as you might think. I even switched from Gnome to Xfce at home once I discovered how much better CDE's 2D desktop-oriented design is compared to the inefficient 1D task-bar-oriented design that Gnome and KDE inexplicably copy from Windows.
(Shame that Sun's deprecated CDE and chosen Gnome to replace it. Restricting main menu access to a corner of the screen, and minimised windows to a line along the edge of the screen, just seems silly once you've experienced the alternative.)
Python isn't a very good language for quick-and-dirty scripting, and it's often not installed at all by default. It's a pretty good general-purpose programming language, but that's a different matter entirely. Perl, in comparison, is ubiquitous on pretty much all Unix-like platforms, and is well adapted for things like one-off one-liners.
More relevantly to this thread, Perl is a better language for FP than Python is. Perl has full support for anonymous closures (Python's lambdas are very weak by comparison), and Perl has proper predictable lexical scoping (Python's scoping rules are rather strange). This all reflects the different design goals of the languages. Python is built on the principle that there should be only one way to achieve any goal -- and in practice that's usually objects. Perl is built on the principle that the programmer should have loads of options to choose from -- and hence it supports several programming paradigms equally well.
That's one of the things that makes it a good introductory language.
There's a reason why people who started computing in the 1980s are way ahead of people who started computing in the 1990s -- and it's because we all had a BASIC interpreter pop up as soon as we switched our computers on, while the 1990s generation's computers booted into a vastly less powerful DOS shell, and too many of them were sucked into Doom before they ever discovered the joys of qbasic.
Dropping people in at the deep end with classes and objects is crazy, when they don't even grok what a variable is yet. Nobody's suggesting making BASIC the basis of the entire course, but it's a reasonable place to start for the first week or two, while people are still getting their heads round what programming is actually about. Then move onto Scheme to teach them about abstractions. Save "real world" languages like Python and Java until they know something about what's going on underneath all that sugary syntax.
So are you saying the clones had a better customer experience? Because it looks to me as though if a company can be damaged by clones, then the reason for that is that most of the people who use its products just want the product itself, and don't give a damn about the "consumer experience" or the trendy white stores.
No, that's merely an interface to an existing LISP interpreter. You haven't written the interpreter unless you implemented read, eval, print, and loop yourself -- and all the other basic functions that are necessary to write an actual program in LISP.
And it requires the patience of a deity to use it.
(I say this as someone who was forced to use vi this morning due to an unfortunate NFS outage rendering all other editors inaccessible. And I mean vi, not vim. Lord, that was painful...)
Which is odd, since "You Shall Not Murder" is one of the fundamental laws Christians are supposed to believe God thought important enough to write down in person, while I don't recall anything in the Bible about drawings of fictional people having sex. So you'd think Christians might go after violence first. But apparently not; it's fine for kids to play at murdering each other, as long as they don't see a nipple before their 21st birthday...
In real thoughtcrime, the crime would be to have the thought. Here, the crime is to possess an image which the judge believes might prompt the thought. The difference is that there is still something in the real world (in this case, the cartoon) that is being presented as evidence that a crime took place; in a thoughtcrime situation, the prosecutor could secure a conviction just by saying something like "we know this person thinks evil things because he looks too happy during the Two Minutes' Thinking Of The Children Only Not Like That You Sick Pervert".
Yes, all this is true. (Except for the bit about Vista requiring less resources, but nobody has ever claimed that. XP also required more resources than Windows 98.)
Most XP users would be better off upgrading to a better OS such as Vista, OS X, or Ubuntu.
So, um, what was your point exactly?
Okay, then, the equivalent of automatic transmission.
In general, all commercial media organisations end up reporting pretty much the same stories; there are differences in the angles they take, and the spin they put on the reporting, but if you compare contents for a week or so you'll find that they're pretty similar.
That is what people call "the media".
Like it or not, these media organisations influence people's lives in a way that ice cream manufacture does not. When all the papers have front-page headlines screaming about allegations that a certain vaccine causes autism, the uptake of that vaccine does fall. This is a fact. Therefore, if those allegations are proven false, why do those newspapers not have a duty to report that as well? If people are trusting you -- however inadvisedly! -- to provide them with information they will use to make medical decisions, then surely you have a responsibility to provide that information as fully as you can, or else to make it clear that the information you are selling should not be used for that purpose.
...but Google apparently doesn't want me to.
The post loads perfectly. The post finishes loading. The post displays perfectly in its entirety. I start reading it. Then, after 15 seconds, it disappears and is replaced with a message saying "Your request took too long to complete. This is typically just a temporary error due to high network traffic or heavy usage of Blogger."
Thanks, Google. I love an application that claims there's an error when nothing's wrong, and displays the message in such a way that I can't even read the article that was displaying perfectly until you replaced it with your error message. Says a lot for the quality of Blogger.
This is called "democracy":
If you think the government is doing the wrong thing, then it is your duty as a citizen to stand up in public and explain why. If you make a persuasive argument, then other people will support your cause, and eventually you will have sufficient backing that the government will take note of your movement and adjust its actions to suit the new desires of the American people. Look at the history of the civil rights movement for examples of this working in practice -- and note that Martin Luther King did not become a household name by posting anonymously on Slashdot.
I find your paranoia (and that of many other Slashdotters) interesting. Why are so many Americans so certain that everything their government does is an attempt to oppress them? NSA's mission is foreign intelligence. That means that most of what they do is about spying on people who are not American citizens. Believe it or not, the world out here is really quite big. Did you know that there are actually more non-Americans than Americans on the Internet? There's plenty of non-American data for NSA to mine, if data mining is what they want to do.
You are not the centre of the universe. You are not the only thing your government cares about. You are not being spied on with satellite mind-control rays. Get over yourselves and drop the conspiracy crap, please.
Or, you know, go and collect loads of guns and hole yourself up in a log cabin in the mountains while you wait for the Rapture. They can't eavesdrop on your communications if you're only communicating with the Lord!
(Oh noes! I have disagreed with teh groupthink! Negative mods coming in 3... 2... 1...)
I admire the optimism that lets you assume that Rock Band 3 won't have McDonalds ads.
No, it's adequate grounds for not playing that game.
If the games have ads in, they will know how many people play them. If lots of people play them, they will make more games with ads in. If fewer people play them, they will abandon the idea.
That's all the more reason not to play the games! If they make money out of pirates, then an ad-infested game might end up being more profitable than one that respects its players. Then everyone would start putting ads in their games. Is that really the outcome you want?