After all, his upgrade version of XP is going to leave him short on everything he bashed linux about. His media files, excell files, etc are not going to play until he downloads or buys more apps.
Why not? Why can't he just use the software he was using in his previous version of Windows? That's kind of the point of an upgrade, you know -- the OS gets newer, but you keep all your old files and applications.
The end result is a pretty distopian vision of the future. You walk around in this world where you are free to conjure anything you want out of thin air, but you are prevented from using the things you see around you as a base for your creations by absentee content owners.
Really? The game watches what you're creating, and if it's too similar to something somebody else has already created, you get banned?
Or is it rather that you can't take that other person's hard work, tweak it slightly, and call it your own? That if you want something that looks the same, you have to (gasp!) learn to create objects well yourself and build your own version?
Sorry, I don't see the problem. Second Life doesn't prevent you from copying what you see, and DRM doesn't prevent you from quoting a book or singing along to a song. If you want to attack an obnoxious law, attack the modern excesses of patents, where you can literally be sued for infringment over something that you have thought of, designed, and built entirely by yourself without reference to anyone else's work, simply because someone else had previously thought of and patented something similar. That's bad, and stifles creativity. Copyright doesn't.
They're really reaching out to Java and PHP users -- who I suppose are somewhat easy targets, considering how terrible web programming can be in those languages
And they're doing so from a position of strength and knowledge. Why, they even use PHP for the official Ruby on Rails site! Presumably to make sure they really know how their product stacks up against the competition.
Not a big surprise for a country that doesn't respect intellectual property.
The People's Republic of China respects intellectual property more than many nations, though admittedly it is not as paranoid about it as the USA. The PRC is a member of WIPO, and has strict IP laws. Nor is there any discrimination against foreign IP: Chinese courts regularly rule in favour of US companies whose copyrights and patents are being infringed on by Chinese companies.
How was this insightful at all? It's meaningless and doesn't stand up to the simplest analysis. Fewer people die from murder than car accidents (in the U.S.), are you saying that murder should be legal?
Way to attack a straw man. Where did he say that terrorism should be legal? Nowhere. Merely that people should worry more about traffic safety than about terrorism. As they should, if it is their personal safety (or that of their children) that concerns them.
Are you claiming that it would be unreasonable to spend more money on traffic safety than on catching murderers or terrorists? If so, how do you come to that conclusion? Surely we should prioritise the measures that will save more lives?
Dismissing the issues is oversimplifying. Attacking the motives of people is unproductive and condescending.
I have a serious concern that Father Christmas may be a member of an international pedophile ring. I demand action be taken to stop him entering any more children's bedrooms. Don't dismiss this issue, that would be oversimplifying. And don't you dare suggest that I'm crazy, or joking, or trolling. That would be unproductive and condescending. You said so yourself.
So it took months to crack the machine. Big deal. Where are the figures on how many people tried and failed? Where is the information on how sophisticated their attacks were - were they actually skilled hackers, or script kiddies, or even just interested passers-by?
The simple fact of the matter is that without those figures the whole thing is meaningless, and even with them, that kind of competition would be worthless, and tell you absolutely nothing about the actual security of a system. They're PR exercises, nothing more.
I thought Apple only sued people who tried to share news about their forthcoming products?
Uh-oh...
iMal®. Be owned. With style.
Confusing security dialogs. Expensive anti-virus subscriptions. Intrusive firewalls. Some operating systems make losing all your data difficult, and something as simple as having your identity stolen can take months.
iMal® just infects.
No hassle. No decisions. Simply fail to update OS X®, and sit back while iMal® installs itself on your Mac®. Because there's no anti-virus software to choose from, you can be assured that your zombie computer will be sending spam sooner than any PC ever has - and up to 4 times faster. And it's Universal. iMal® just works, whether you're using the latest MacBook Pro or an older G5 system.*
iMal®. Simply infectious.
No purchase is required. iMal® will install itself automatically before the next security patch is released. And it will share itself with all your friends, without you having to lift a finger. It's like a virus. But shiny.
* iMal® requires security features only present in the latest OS X® 10.4 Tiger®. Users of older systems will have to upgrade in order to be taken advantage of by this product.
You can thank me when I've actually taken one. I've been a Windows user for going on 15 years now, and I still haven't ever been hacked, rooted, afflicted with spyware, or even infected by a single virus of any sort.
Take 2: Will there be any games by companies other than Nintendo, Sega, or Hudson?
This could potentially go on for quite a while. I'll save you some trouble by revealing the exclusive knowledge that there will not be any games by any companies apart from the companies by which there are games.
The point is that in the real world, it's the delta, not the multiplier.
In theory. Sadly, it's not that simple. In practice, as the delta gets smaller, the multiplier gets more important, not less. Look at how things are advertised: cars will be "save £2000", not "10% off". But bread is "10% off", not "save 7p".
because much of Windows has been rewritten, it is going to be a pita to adapt existing software. No frigging kidding. Doesn't this happen with every major update?
No, it doesn't. Microsoft's track-record for backwards compatibility is among the best in the industry. Sorry, but while their software has many flaws, there are some things they do very well, and not breaking things in upgrades is one of them.
Compare the upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows XP with the comparable upgrade from OS 9 to OS X. You can run practically any bit of Windows 98 software in Windows XP. You can't run any OS 9 software in OS X without buying a separate copy of OS 9 and using emulation, and people on Mactels can't run any OS 9 software in OS X period.
I find it amusing that nobody ever complains about this, but if they find one single piece of Windows 98 software that doesn't work properly in XP, it's all OMG MICROSOFT IS TEH SUXOR!!!!!11. Can you say "double standards"?
You got my point, it's far more accurate to recognize 10 different symbols than it is to recognize 34, or more when we have accents.
Not necessarily. Trying to write a phonologically complex language like English is bad enough when the number of symbols is half the number of sounds, as currently; if the number were 1/5th, as you suggest, then words would have to be much longer, and reading would become more difficult for humans.
English already has to use more than one letter to represent many sounds: "ch", "sh", "th". With only 10 letters, it would be necessary to have a lot more combinations like that. This is not simplicity.
And most teenagers today are used to input information with 0 to 9 already, think SMS.
When I type a text message on my phone, I type "how are you", not "4466691277733199966688".
The input method is irrelevant; the question is how the data is represented. And it's represented with letters, not numbers.
Personally, I'm still waiting for accurate speech control.
That's only possible with perfect AI. I expect you'll be waiting for the rest of your life...
A picture from the manual cannot constitute infringment because the picture alone is not causing damages to Apple in any way.
Nowhere in copyright law does it state that a copy has to cause harm to be infringing. That's like saying that I can trespass on anyone's property as much as I like as long as I don't break anything or get in their way. Sorry, but it just doesn't work that way. Trespass is trespass, and copyright infringment is copyright infringement, and both are illegal whether anyone is hurt or not. The only difference it makes is that plaintiff will get even more damages if they can prove that the infringement has hurt them.
In this particular case, the fair use defence might well apply. But it would take a court to decide that. The fact that you think something should be fair doesn't necessarily make it so.
The original term of US copyrights was 14 years, despite the tremendous cost of publishing at the time. The goal is to spread information and culture, not to make sure a bunch of greedheads have money. As the cost of that spread declines, the time required to recoup costs diminishes and vanishes.
Diminishes, perhaps. But it will never vanish, because you have to take into account the cost of production as well as the cost of distribution. Music and movies and books do not spring into existence fully formed: somebody needs to sit down and expend a considerable amount of time and effort -- and hence money -- creating them.
Limited copyright is essential as a means of enabling them to recoup that. The GP's point is that as the cost of copying diminishes, it becomes easier and easier for society to say "I like that song, but I can copy it for free, so I don't have to pay you for it." And at that point, the incentive to write another great song is gone... and society is the poorer.
Therefore, as the cost of copying diminishes, it becomes necessary either to enforce copyright law more strictly, or to find another means of compensating artists for their work. Right now, however, copyright is the best means we've found to compensate artists. It's not perfect, any more than capitalism and democracy are perfect; it's just that all the other systems anyone's ever proposed are even worse. If you have a better idea, of course, do pray share it with us.
The spirit of America is that you are free to do what you want but no one owes you a living.
Nobody owes you one, sure. But if society doesn't allow you to make a living doing something, you aren't going to do it. So you could say that society owes it to itself to provide artists with a living...
You say recently, and I'm in no way suggesting you're incorrect, but I'll have to take your word for it, given than Slashdot doesn't put the year on its webpages. Is there a reason for this, or is it just an oversight?
Razorback2 Servers Seized Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Feb 22, '06 12:11 PM
If you want the year displayed, all you have to do is configure your preferences to display it. Go to Preferences -> Homepage -> Date/Time Format and select one of the options that includes the information you want. Problem solved.
Actually, System Shock's environment is basically 2.5D - the levels are flat and tile-based (no rooms above rooms, and IIRC all the walls are either 45 or 90 degree angles). Bridges are simulated by using 3D floating objects and allowing multiple height positions for each tile -- exactly the same technique as was used in games like Dark Forces, Duke3D, and even ROTT.
Which isn't to say that the level design isn't pure genius. It fooled a lot of people. Easily one of the greatest games of all time.
If you compare the absolute numbers of exploits Apple trails a factor 1000 by Microsoft. It will take some time until Apple reaches par with Windows (if ever), even if all malware programmers dropped their Windows work ans started concentrating on OSX instead.
What does Windows have to do with this? Nobody questions the fact that Apple is more secure that Windows. However, being better than the worst does not automatically make you good. Cuba is freer than North Korea, but that doesn't mean I'd want to live there.
The simple fact of the matter is that it potentially only takes one virus to steal and/or wipe all your personal data. And if that happens, you really don't care how many other viruses there are out there for your platform. All you care about is the one that got you.
So there is an argument to be made that it is worth having anti-virus software if the potential for a virus is sufficiently high. In practice, given that many people run Windows for years and never see a single virus, trojan, or worm, it does seem fair to say that the threat to Mac users is minuscule. But the argument remains valid. You have to evaluate the threat for yourself; you can't take McAfee's word for it that you'd be better off with AV software, but nor can you believe any random fanboy who asserts that OS X is immune and shall never, NEVER be hacked.
Then they'll market it as a feature, saying that Vista comes with as much as adware pre-installed as XP users needed six months to accumulate.
Some things are funny because they're true. Unfortunately, this is something that's unfunny because it's true.
We all know that if they had a checkbox in the install program that said "Click here to have exclusive special offers delivered to your desktop!", an awful lot of people would click there...
To-date, Microsoft's search results on Linux are way biased toward switching to them.
This is demonstrably false. To test it, I entered "linux" into search.msn.com and into google.com.
MSN's first page of results: linux.org, linux.com, kernel.org, Wikipedia's Linux article, Gentoo, IBM's Linux portal, Debian, Red Hat. Google's first page of results: linux.org, Debian, linux.org.uk, kernel.org, Ubuntu, Mandrake, linux.com, Gentoo, Red Hat, Linux Format.
Pretty similar stuff. The fun is in the sponsored links.
MSN's sponsored link at the very top of the search results: Linux webhosting from webhosting.net. Google's sponsored link at the very top of the search results: www.microsoft.com/getthefacts.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's "trivial", then why do people bother giving it a fancy name like Carmack's Reverse?
After all, his upgrade version of XP is going to leave him short on everything he bashed linux about. His media files, excell files, etc are not going to play until he downloads or buys more apps.
Why not? Why can't he just use the software he was using in his previous version of Windows? That's kind of the point of an upgrade, you know -- the OS gets newer, but you keep all your old files and applications.
The end result is a pretty distopian vision of the future. You walk around in this world where you are free to conjure anything you want out of thin air, but you are prevented from using the things you see around you as a base for your creations by absentee content owners.
Really? The game watches what you're creating, and if it's too similar to something somebody else has already created, you get banned?
Or is it rather that you can't take that other person's hard work, tweak it slightly, and call it your own? That if you want something that looks the same, you have to (gasp!) learn to create objects well yourself and build your own version?
Sorry, I don't see the problem. Second Life doesn't prevent you from copying what you see, and DRM doesn't prevent you from quoting a book or singing along to a song. If you want to attack an obnoxious law, attack the modern excesses of patents, where you can literally be sued for infringment over something that you have thought of, designed, and built entirely by yourself without reference to anyone else's work, simply because someone else had previously thought of and patented something similar. That's bad, and stifles creativity. Copyright doesn't.
They're really reaching out to Java and PHP users -- who I suppose are somewhat easy targets, considering how terrible web programming can be in those languages
And they're doing so from a position of strength and knowledge. Why, they even use PHP for the official Ruby on Rails site! Presumably to make sure they really know how their product stacks up against the competition.
Not a big surprise for a country that doesn't respect intellectual property.
The People's Republic of China respects intellectual property more than many nations, though admittedly it is not as paranoid about it as the USA. The PRC is a member of WIPO, and has strict IP laws. Nor is there any discrimination against foreign IP: Chinese courts regularly rule in favour of US companies whose copyrights and patents are being infringed on by Chinese companies.
You may be thinking of Taiwan.
How was this insightful at all? It's meaningless and doesn't stand up to the simplest analysis. Fewer people die from murder than car accidents (in the U.S.), are you saying that murder should be legal?
Way to attack a straw man. Where did he say that terrorism should be legal? Nowhere. Merely that people should worry more about traffic safety than about terrorism. As they should, if it is their personal safety (or that of their children) that concerns them.
Are you claiming that it would be unreasonable to spend more money on traffic safety than on catching murderers or terrorists? If so, how do you come to that conclusion? Surely we should prioritise the measures that will save more lives?
Dismissing the issues is oversimplifying. Attacking the motives of people is unproductive and condescending.
I have a serious concern that Father Christmas may be a member of an international pedophile ring. I demand action be taken to stop him entering any more children's bedrooms. Don't dismiss this issue, that would be oversimplifying. And don't you dare suggest that I'm crazy, or joking, or trolling. That would be unproductive and condescending. You said so yourself.
So it took months to crack the machine. Big deal. Where are the figures on how many people tried and failed? Where is the information on how sophisticated their attacks were - were they actually skilled hackers, or script kiddies, or even just interested passers-by?
The simple fact of the matter is that without those figures the whole thing is meaningless, and even with them, that kind of competition would be worthless, and tell you absolutely nothing about the actual security of a system. They're PR exercises, nothing more.
Uh-oh...
Hey man, thanks for taking one for the team.
You can thank me when I've actually taken one. I've been a Windows user for going on 15 years now, and I still haven't ever been hacked, rooted, afflicted with spyware, or even infected by a single virus of any sort.
I wonder what I'm doing wrong...
Mr. Spock (I don't know that he held a doctorate in anything, but he was described as a scientist)
Predictable? Me?
Take 2: Will there be any games by companies other than Nintendo, Sega, or Hudson?
This could potentially go on for quite a while. I'll save you some trouble by revealing the exclusive knowledge that there will not be any games by any companies apart from the companies by which there are games.
The point is that in the real world, it's the delta, not the multiplier.
In theory. Sadly, it's not that simple. In practice, as the delta gets smaller, the multiplier gets more important, not less. Look at how things are advertised: cars will be "save £2000", not "10% off". But bread is "10% off", not "save 7p".
Then sony comes in and does it better than any of their competitors (go ahead argue all you want).
Ahh, good old "proof by assertion". You must be the terror of your high-school debating society.
because much of Windows has been rewritten, it is going to be a pita to adapt existing software. No frigging kidding. Doesn't this happen with every major update?
No, it doesn't. Microsoft's track-record for backwards compatibility is among the best in the industry. Sorry, but while their software has many flaws, there are some things they do very well, and not breaking things in upgrades is one of them.
Compare the upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows XP with the comparable upgrade from OS 9 to OS X. You can run practically any bit of Windows 98 software in Windows XP. You can't run any OS 9 software in OS X without buying a separate copy of OS 9 and using emulation, and people on Mactels can't run any OS 9 software in OS X period.
I find it amusing that nobody ever complains about this, but if they find one single piece of Windows 98 software that doesn't work properly in XP, it's all OMG MICROSOFT IS TEH SUXOR!!!!!11. Can you say "double standards"?
Bah, everyone knows Jesus spoke 17th-century English.
You got my point, it's far more accurate to recognize 10 different symbols than it is to recognize 34, or more when we have accents.
Not necessarily. Trying to write a phonologically complex language like English is bad enough when the number of symbols is half the number of sounds, as currently; if the number were 1/5th, as you suggest, then words would have to be much longer, and reading would become more difficult for humans.
English already has to use more than one letter to represent many sounds: "ch", "sh", "th". With only 10 letters, it would be necessary to have a lot more combinations like that. This is not simplicity.
And most teenagers today are used to input information with 0 to 9 already, think SMS.
When I type a text message on my phone, I type "how are you", not "4466691277733199966688".
The input method is irrelevant; the question is how the data is represented. And it's represented with letters, not numbers.
Personally, I'm still waiting for accurate speech control.
That's only possible with perfect AI. I expect you'll be waiting for the rest of your life...
A picture from the manual cannot constitute infringment because the picture alone is not causing damages to Apple in any way.
Nowhere in copyright law does it state that a copy has to cause harm to be infringing. That's like saying that I can trespass on anyone's property as much as I like as long as I don't break anything or get in their way. Sorry, but it just doesn't work that way. Trespass is trespass, and copyright infringment is copyright infringement, and both are illegal whether anyone is hurt or not. The only difference it makes is that plaintiff will get even more damages if they can prove that the infringement has hurt them.
In this particular case, the fair use defence might well apply. But it would take a court to decide that. The fact that you think something should be fair doesn't necessarily make it so.
(Standard IANAL disclaimer goes here.)
The original term of US copyrights was 14 years, despite the tremendous cost of publishing at the time. The goal is to spread information and culture, not to make sure a bunch of greedheads have money. As the cost of that spread declines, the time required to recoup costs diminishes and vanishes.
Diminishes, perhaps. But it will never vanish, because you have to take into account the cost of production as well as the cost of distribution. Music and movies and books do not spring into existence fully formed: somebody needs to sit down and expend a considerable amount of time and effort -- and hence money -- creating them.
Limited copyright is essential as a means of enabling them to recoup that. The GP's point is that as the cost of copying diminishes, it becomes easier and easier for society to say "I like that song, but I can copy it for free, so I don't have to pay you for it." And at that point, the incentive to write another great song is gone... and society is the poorer.
Therefore, as the cost of copying diminishes, it becomes necessary either to enforce copyright law more strictly, or to find another means of compensating artists for their work. Right now, however, copyright is the best means we've found to compensate artists. It's not perfect, any more than capitalism and democracy are perfect; it's just that all the other systems anyone's ever proposed are even worse. If you have a better idea, of course, do pray share it with us.
The spirit of America is that you are free to do what you want but no one owes you a living.
Nobody owes you one, sure. But if society doesn't allow you to make a living doing something, you aren't going to do it. So you could say that society owes it to itself to provide artists with a living...
If you want the year displayed, all you have to do is configure your preferences to display it. Go to Preferences -> Homepage -> Date/Time Format and select one of the options that includes the information you want. Problem solved.
A good way to find out:: Give the guy a polygraph before he's extradited!
Unfortunately he's British, and on this side of the pond we have never fallen for the "lie detector" snake oil.
Actually, System Shock's environment is basically 2.5D - the levels are flat and tile-based (no rooms above rooms, and IIRC all the walls are either 45 or 90 degree angles). Bridges are simulated by using 3D floating objects and allowing multiple height positions for each tile -- exactly the same technique as was used in games like Dark Forces, Duke3D, and even ROTT.
Which isn't to say that the level design isn't pure genius. It fooled a lot of people. Easily one of the greatest games of all time.
sed can't edit files in place? You could have fooled me. What does the -i switch do, then?
If you compare the absolute numbers of exploits Apple trails a factor 1000 by Microsoft. It will take some time until Apple reaches par with Windows (if ever), even if all malware programmers dropped their Windows work ans started concentrating on OSX instead.
What does Windows have to do with this? Nobody questions the fact that Apple is more secure that Windows. However, being better than the worst does not automatically make you good. Cuba is freer than North Korea, but that doesn't mean I'd want to live there.
The simple fact of the matter is that it potentially only takes one virus to steal and/or wipe all your personal data. And if that happens, you really don't care how many other viruses there are out there for your platform. All you care about is the one that got you.
So there is an argument to be made that it is worth having anti-virus software if the potential for a virus is sufficiently high. In practice, given that many people run Windows for years and never see a single virus, trojan, or worm, it does seem fair to say that the threat to Mac users is minuscule. But the argument remains valid. You have to evaluate the threat for yourself; you can't take McAfee's word for it that you'd be better off with AV software, but nor can you believe any random fanboy who asserts that OS X is immune and shall never, NEVER be hacked.
Then they'll market it as a feature, saying that Vista comes with as much as adware pre-installed as XP users needed six months to accumulate.
Some things are funny because they're true. Unfortunately, this is something that's unfunny because it's true.
We all know that if they had a checkbox in the install program that said "Click here to have exclusive special offers delivered to your desktop!", an awful lot of people would click there...
To-date, Microsoft's search results on Linux are way biased toward switching to them.
This is demonstrably false. To test it, I entered "linux" into search.msn.com and into google.com.
MSN's first page of results: linux.org, linux.com, kernel.org, Wikipedia's Linux article, Gentoo, IBM's Linux portal, Debian, Red Hat.
Google's first page of results: linux.org, Debian, linux.org.uk, kernel.org, Ubuntu, Mandrake, linux.com, Gentoo, Red Hat, Linux Format.
Pretty similar stuff. The fun is in the sponsored links.
MSN's sponsored link at the very top of the search results: Linux webhosting from webhosting.net.
Google's sponsored link at the very top of the search results: www.microsoft.com/getthefacts.