Silly. There are thousands of possible reasons why someone might want to work with graphical images of banknotes other than counterfeiting. Blocking all those legal uses to prevent one illegal use is a violation of our rights.
The only reason that these rpgs weren't on consoles in the past has been storage. Consoles prior to this generation didn't have enough storage to handle the content without having to switch a multitude of discs, something the average player does not want to do.
Size of famous PC RPG "Morrowind": 1 CD. Size of famous PC RPG "Neverwinter Nights": 3 CDs. Size of famous console RPG "Final Fantasy 7": 3 CDs. Size of famous console RPG "Final Fantasy 8": 4 CDs.
No, all that mailing list posting says is that in Germany you can't force someone who previously violated the GPL to release all the source code for the application they included GPL'd code in.
Guess what? You can't do that in America, either. That goes for everywhere in the world, because that isn't what the GPL is meant to do.
However, as that very post you linked to says, in Germany, you CAN stop the violator from continuing to distribute the product while it contains your GPL'd code, and you can claim damages for the copyright violation. Again, this is the same as everywhere in the world, and it's what the GPL is meant to do.
Look up that article that was posted here and on Groklaw a while back about how the GPL is a license not a contract... it should clear up this misunderstanding.
I don't think you need to be concerned. "Miserable failure" currently gives Dubya first, Jimmy Carter second, Michael Moore third and Hillary Clinton fourth - you must hate at least one of those people, surely?
The fact still is that you need a special japanese windows version to write japanese in it
Well, damn! There I was thinking I'd been writing Japanese in a standard English version of Windows 2000 for all these years! Heck, my applications have even been displaying menus and dialog boxes in Japanese. I guess it must just be a Microsoft proprietary Japanese-compatible language I'm using, instead of the real thing...
therefore Java 1.4.2 is objectively as fast or faster than all other contenders. This has always been theoritically possible, and now it is true in practice.
So Java supporters keep saying, and I'd like to believe it. And yet time after time people release benchmarks, like the ones linked in this article, which say different. If Java runs "objectively as fast or faster than all other contenders", where are the figures that prove this? Can you provide a benchmark that shows it, or maybe some source code in C and Java that shows the latter running faster?
An intelligent and knowledgable post, with one nit I'd like to pick:
However, it is quite difficult for someone using a phonetic system to learn an ideographic one.
Believe it or not, this is not true.
Readers of ideographic systems and readers of so-called "phonetic" systems like English actually read in the same way - first they try to match the abstract shape of a word, then they break it down into segments and try to match the sequence of segments, and they only become aware of the individual components if that fails.
For example, if you see the word "Slashdot", you probably recognise that as a single entity. If you don't know what Slashdot is, you're likely to see it as "Slash" and "dot", those being two entities you do recognise. A kid might say "Suh-ler-ah-suh-huh duh-oh-tuh" as they read it, but I doubt you do.
Likewise, a Chinese reader seeing a common ideographic compound will recognise it as a block. They will recognise a rarer compound as a sequence of familiar characters. Only when faced with a rare character will they actually notice the component parts of that character, and then they'll have to go and look it up - just like you, faced with an English word you don't know, will have to look that up.
The two systems are, in short, of comparable complexity. You only think Chinese is difficult because you think of the characters as ideographs rather than words.
Uh, not true. Example: Stonehenge. I'm pretty sure the ancient Britons who built it were white, and I've also met people who believe aliens must have helped build it.
I do wonder sometimes if there was a proofreader for that book and, if so, how many years of rehabilitation he required.
Finnegans wake? Proofreading? The story I remember is that Joyce sent the book off to be retyped with the hope of adding errors that he hadn't thought of himself.
Isn't there something fundamentally wrong with the idea of product placement being "appropriate"?
No. When used properly, "real" products can make a game seem more real.
The problem I see is not product placement per se, but rather that the product placement deals all seem to be exclusive. It annoys me when I go into a virtual world where (for example) the only soft drink you can find is Coke. Give me a virtual world with competing Pepsi and Coke adverts... that would be "appropriate" in my book.
Agree to both the GPL license (for the player) and the proprietary real license
Eh? Why did you have to agree to the GPL?
I really do not understand why so much free software uses the GPL as a click-through license. It specifically states, in the GPL text, that "You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it", and that the GPL only applies to the act of distribution - it has nothing to do with your use of the software!
Uh, that's why the proposals work by translating international characters into ASCII. It may not look as pretty, but you WILL be able to enter any international characters using a standard US keyboard connected to a 7-bit ASCII terminal.
Moreover, there's nothing stopping Norwegians with US partners setting up ASCII mail aliases. That way other Norwegians can use their real name in their email address, while Americans still just type something that looks like their real name.
If you're German, surely you can see how nice it would be to be able to have proper German spellings in DNS? Sure, with the neuer Rechtschreibung you don't have to worry about double s so much, but don't you ever pine for the option of an umlaut?
Instead of http://www.google.com/ one would just write ``Google'' (or maybe ``google''?), dropping the http://www which is fairly redundant when using a webbrowser (yes, I know that ``www'' indicates the hostname, but who cares what the hostname is, I just want the site), and the TLD which is basically meaningless.
Um, bad example, since Google makes use of the TLD. Google.com is generic searching, but google.co.uk has an option to restrict searches to UK sites, google.co.jp has a Japanese interface and an option to restrict searches to Japanese sites, and so on.
It's much more convenient than asking users to select a country from a drop-down list when restricting their search.
As for droppping "http:", my web browser supports numerous other protocols - I use "about:", "file:", and "ftp:" all the time - so it's not redundant. And my browser adds it as a default if I leave it off anyway. "//" is obviously required, as it indicates a network address (dunno about you, but I occasionally use my web browser to read local HTML files too).
You can make a case for losing the "www" convention, though.
Unfortunately this is not the case: the GPL FAQ gives, as an example of an explanation accompanying a GPL'd library FOO,
"Linking FOO statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on FOO. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination." (emphasis mine)
If Qt's license does not include an exemption clause for linking non-GPL but free software, then you can't do it.
SUN and MS would love to have SCO keep going: they benefit the most from SCO's legal diaherra.
MS, yes, but how do Sun benefit from SCO attacking Linux? We are talking about the same Sun who are currently trying to sell their new "Java Desktop" product, right? You know, the one that's a Linux distribution?
I don't get excited about "Google alternatives". Google satisfies my searching needs as it is.
You know, people said the same about Yahoo. And Webcrawler. And AltaVista. Remember those?
Google is the best now, and has been for a while, but it's just the latest in a succession of Amazing New Search Engines that have all genuinely represented Something Better. Why assume that what we have now is the best we'll ever have?
Maybe in a year or so you'll write "I don't get excited about 'Vivisimo alternatives'", and someone will reply with "Remember Google?"...
Slippery slope arguments are tiring and boring, but that doesn't make them any less valid.
On the contrary - the "slippery slope" is a recognised form of false argument. If the argument was valid, then America would still be a British colony, and by now you'd be laboring under 150% taxes - since the "slippery slope" that was started with the Stamp Act would obviously have continued, and of course nobody would ever have said "this far and no further" and actually overthrown the government that was trying to take things further than the people would bear.
Ratings are good. You're saying that parents should be the ones responsible for what their children play? You're quite right. Hey, guess what - that's what ratings are for! And arranging stuff on the shelves according to its rating is just a way of making it easier for parents to choose games that fit what they want their children to see.
Well, imagine a society where instead of just all the "good" videogames being segregated to a single "special" location, that it was a society where all the "good" books were segregated to a single "special" location and the government kept records of who wanted to read the "good" books.
Want to know where the mistake in your argument is? It's right there in the above paragraph. We're talking about a society where the "good" videogames are in a "special" location. I don't see anything there about "the government keeping records of who wants to play the 'good' videogames".
By the way, in case you hadn't noticed, our society already segregates books. Or did you think the "adult" section in your local bookstore was full of Thomas the Tank Engine?
Slashdot Mirror
Why (i|u)? [iu] saves a whole byte!
And your regexp *still* doesn't match BSD.
It might be better to make the dock lockable by right-clicking on it.
What is this "right-clicking" of which you speak?
Silly. There are thousands of possible reasons why someone might want to work with graphical images of banknotes other than counterfeiting. Blocking all those legal uses to prevent one illegal use is a violation of our rights.
The only reason that these rpgs weren't on consoles in the past has been storage. Consoles prior to this generation didn't have enough storage to handle the content without having to switch a multitude of discs, something the average player does not want to do.
Size of famous PC RPG "Morrowind": 1 CD.
Size of famous PC RPG "Neverwinter Nights": 3 CDs.
Size of famous console RPG "Final Fantasy 7": 3 CDs.
Size of famous console RPG "Final Fantasy 8": 4 CDs.
No, all that mailing list posting says is that in Germany you can't force someone who previously violated the GPL to release all the source code for the application they included GPL'd code in.
Guess what? You can't do that in America, either. That goes for everywhere in the world, because that isn't what the GPL is meant to do.
However, as that very post you linked to says, in Germany, you CAN stop the violator from continuing to distribute the product while it contains your GPL'd code, and you can claim damages for the copyright violation. Again, this is the same as everywhere in the world, and it's what the GPL is meant to do.
Look up that article that was posted here and on Groklaw a while back about how the GPL is a license not a contract... it should clear up this misunderstanding.
I don't think you need to be concerned. "Miserable failure" currently gives Dubya first, Jimmy Carter second, Michael Moore third and Hillary Clinton fourth - you must hate at least one of those people, surely?
The fact still is that you need a special japanese windows version to write japanese in it
Well, damn! There I was thinking I'd been writing Japanese in a standard English version of Windows 2000 for all these years! Heck, my applications have even been displaying menus and dialog boxes in Japanese. I guess it must just be a Microsoft proprietary Japanese-compatible language I'm using, instead of the real thing...
Microsoft dumps a vat of tar to keep their's together.
No, Microsoft would never use tar. They use a proprietary file format called CAB.
therefore Java 1.4.2 is objectively as fast or faster than all other contenders. This has always been theoritically possible, and now it is true in practice.
So Java supporters keep saying, and I'd like to believe it. And yet time after time people release benchmarks, like the ones linked in this article, which say different. If Java runs "objectively as fast or faster than all other contenders", where are the figures that prove this? Can you provide a benchmark that shows it, or maybe some source code in C and Java that shows the latter running faster?
C/C++ is largely English in terms of character set and keywords used.
Which is why Perl is the way forward!
An intelligent and knowledgable post, with one nit I'd like to pick:
However, it is quite difficult for someone using a phonetic system to learn an ideographic one.
Believe it or not, this is not true.
Readers of ideographic systems and readers of so-called "phonetic" systems like English actually read in the same way - first they try to match the abstract shape of a word, then they break it down into segments and try to match the sequence of segments, and they only become aware of the individual components if that fails.
For example, if you see the word "Slashdot", you probably recognise that as a single entity. If you don't know what Slashdot is, you're likely to see it as "Slash" and "dot", those being two entities you do recognise. A kid might say "Suh-ler-ah-suh-huh duh-oh-tuh" as they read it, but I doubt you do.
Likewise, a Chinese reader seeing a common ideographic compound will recognise it as a block. They will recognise a rarer compound as a sequence of familiar characters. Only when faced with a rare character will they actually notice the component parts of that character, and then they'll have to go and look it up - just like you, faced with an English word you don't know, will have to look that up.
The two systems are, in short, of comparable complexity. You only think Chinese is difficult because you think of the characters as ideographs rather than words.
Uh, not true. Example: Stonehenge. I'm pretty sure the ancient Britons who built it were white, and I've also met people who believe aliens must have helped build it.
I do wonder sometimes if there was a proofreader for that book and, if so, how many years of rehabilitation he required.
Finnegans wake? Proofreading? The story I remember is that Joyce sent the book off to be retyped with the hope of adding errors that he hadn't thought of himself.
Can you name any other development languages that only run on ONE OS, boys and girls? Neither can I.
AppleScript?
Isn't there something fundamentally wrong with the idea of product placement being "appropriate"?
No. When used properly, "real" products can make a game seem more real.
The problem I see is not product placement per se, but rather that the product placement deals all seem to be exclusive. It annoys me when I go into a virtual world where (for example) the only soft drink you can find is Coke. Give me a virtual world with competing Pepsi and Coke adverts... that would be "appropriate" in my book.
SCO Countdown.
Agree to both the GPL license (for the player) and the proprietary real license
Eh? Why did you have to agree to the GPL?
I really do not understand why so much free software uses the GPL as a click-through license. It specifically states, in the GPL text, that "You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it", and that the GPL only applies to the act of distribution - it has nothing to do with your use of the software!
Um... /dev/null is a standard Unix thing, not just Linux. Heck, even my Cygwin box (or GNU/Windows as RMS would doubtless call it) has a /dev/null.
Uh, that's why the proposals work by translating international characters into ASCII. It may not look as pretty, but you WILL be able to enter any international characters using a standard US keyboard connected to a 7-bit ASCII terminal.
Moreover, there's nothing stopping Norwegians with US partners setting up ASCII mail aliases. That way other Norwegians can use their real name in their email address, while Americans still just type something that looks like their real name.
If you're German, surely you can see how nice it would be to be able to have proper German spellings in DNS? Sure, with the neuer Rechtschreibung you don't have to worry about double s so much, but don't you ever pine for the option of an umlaut?
Instead of http://www.google.com/ one would just write ``Google'' (or maybe ``google''?), dropping the http://www which is fairly redundant when using a webbrowser (yes, I know that ``www'' indicates the hostname, but who cares what the hostname is, I just want the site), and the TLD which is basically meaningless.
Um, bad example, since Google makes use of the TLD. Google.com is generic searching, but google.co.uk has an option to restrict searches to UK sites, google.co.jp has a Japanese interface and an option to restrict searches to Japanese sites, and so on.
It's much more convenient than asking users to select a country from a drop-down list when restricting their search.
As for droppping "http:", my web browser supports numerous other protocols - I use "about:", "file:", and "ftp:" all the time - so it's not redundant. And my browser adds it as a default if I leave it off anyway. "//" is obviously required, as it indicates a network address (dunno about you, but I occasionally use my web browser to read local HTML files too).
You can make a case for losing the "www" convention, though.
Unfortunately this is not the case: the GPL FAQ gives, as an example of an explanation accompanying a GPL'd library FOO,
"Linking FOO statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on FOO. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination." (emphasis mine)
If Qt's license does not include an exemption clause for linking non-GPL but free software, then you can't do it.
SUN and MS would love to have SCO keep going: they benefit the most from SCO's legal diaherra.
MS, yes, but how do Sun benefit from SCO attacking Linux? We are talking about the same Sun who are currently trying to sell their new "Java Desktop" product, right? You know, the one that's a Linux distribution?
I don't get excited about "Google alternatives". Google satisfies my searching needs as it is.
You know, people said the same about Yahoo. And Webcrawler. And AltaVista. Remember those?
Google is the best now, and has been for a while, but it's just the latest in a succession of Amazing New Search Engines that have all genuinely represented Something Better. Why assume that what we have now is the best we'll ever have?
Maybe in a year or so you'll write "I don't get excited about 'Vivisimo alternatives'", and someone will reply with "Remember Google?"...
What I've noticed is that people expect to pay these guys to come around and fix something.... Even if it's relatively close family.
:-/
For some reason my time seems to be worth less than theirs
Bill them, then. Don't try to argue them into agreeing to pay you first, just fix their problem and then hand them the bill as a fait accompli.
Either they'll pay up, or they'll stop badgering you to fix their PCs. You win either way, right?
Slippery slope arguments are tiring and boring, but that doesn't make them any less valid.
On the contrary - the "slippery slope" is a recognised form of false argument. If the argument was valid, then America would still be a British colony, and by now you'd be laboring under 150% taxes - since the "slippery slope" that was started with the Stamp Act would obviously have continued, and of course nobody would ever have said "this far and no further" and actually overthrown the government that was trying to take things further than the people would bear.
Ratings are good. You're saying that parents should be the ones responsible for what their children play? You're quite right. Hey, guess what - that's what ratings are for! And arranging stuff on the shelves according to its rating is just a way of making it easier for parents to choose games that fit what they want their children to see.
Well, imagine a society where instead of just all the "good" videogames being segregated to a single "special" location, that it was a society where all the "good" books were segregated to a single "special" location and the government kept records of who wanted to read the "good" books.
Want to know where the mistake in your argument is? It's right there in the above paragraph. We're talking about a society where the "good" videogames are in a "special" location. I don't see anything there about "the government keeping records of who wants to play the 'good' videogames".
By the way, in case you hadn't noticed, our society already segregates books. Or did you think the "adult" section in your local bookstore was full of Thomas the Tank Engine?