In all seriousness, it does exist. For the sort of audience WotC was going for, the people are already on RPG.net, ENWorld.org, or BoardGameGeek.com. Gleemax was a set of mediocre forums and some blogs without any decent way to browse through them. Of course it failed to attract the people that were busy discussing games elsewhere already.
On the Mac at least, they wouldn't rather use Java. Apple used to maintain a Java version of the Cocoa API but wound up deprecating it because so few people were using it.
It's because in Magic, the cards are the product, and selling them is where the profit lies. Additionally, Magic is a game in the competitive sense, and maintaining a balanced environment is key to overall player interest in the product. Wizards doesn't trust third parties to maintain that balance, because escalating power level is a good way to increase short-term sales while damaging the long-term viability of the product. Also, much of what drives the appeal of new Magic sets is novel mechanics. Letting other companies chew up potential design space would eat into what Wizards itself could then sell.
In RPGs, by contrast, core books outsell supplements, even from the first party publisher, by an order of magnitude, yet the amount of work to produce a book is roughly the same for both. Supplements make the core books more attractive to potential players, yet are much less profitable to produce. So, in a stroke of generosity, WotC enables other companies to tie into their product, thereby increasing the salability and appeal of the D&D brand without having to invest in supplements no one will buy.
Yes, if the game is sufficiently original. Magic: the Gathering (US Patent #5,662,332) and Icehouse (US Patent #4,936,585) have such protections, for the novel concepts of trading card games and tapping, and real-time turnless, boardless play, respectively. Most games do not contain patentable mechanics, and games can't be copyrighted, only their specific expression (i.e. the rules as written). You can legally rip off a game completely as long as you rename it, rewrite the rules from scratch, and redo the graphic design. The only defensible part of most games is the trademark of the name and distinctive components and trade dress surrounding the overall appearance of the game.
In the Scrabulous case, it certainly seems like a reasonable argument that the name could confuse people into thinking it is an official Scrabble product. If they change the name, however, they're likely safe from a legal standpoint, at least going forward, though there might still be past damages. However, Hasbro is bigger and has more lawyers than they do, which matters a lot in actual practice.
Actually, it's called 850 MHz, but uses 824 - 849 for the downlink and 869 - 894 for the uplink, so 884 is within the range you expect a US GSM phone handset to emit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_ranges
What Leopard also did was add file system support for hard links to directories, so that backups from different points in time could be easily presented as complete volume images without any need for a special backup file format, yet still share storage for unchanged files.
Ack! Mac users suffer that? My condolences to them...
Suffer? Us Mac users still aren't sure how the abomination that is MDI actually occurred to anyone, much less actually got implemented. Windows simply do not belong inside other windows.
I don't see the need for it, but if it could potentially help them sell another million copies of a "GOTY" edition then I'm sure someone up in management is howling for it.
In particular, multiplayer reduces second-hand sales of console versions. If you play the game once and beat it, then you can sell it, allowing someone else who wanted it to play it without paying the publisher money. On the other hand, if you want to fire it up every now and then for an online match, then you need to keep it, so that other guy has to buy a new copy instead.
So, what they're really saying is that the appendix is the Ark where the good bacteria hide out when you have to fire the intestinal Halo system to wipe out the flood of cholera.
it's a pretty useless practice. I've been in stores where it is about 10-12 feet from register to exit, they see you paying at the register, they see you walk directly from the register to the exit, and then they still want to see your receipt.
It's not to prevent shoplifting. It's to prevent theft with employee collusion. If you and the cashier were accomplices, you could grab a $500 product and a $5 product, get in the right line, only get the the $5 one rung up, and walk off with the $500 one perfectly calmly in plain sight. It sounds dumb, but I've heard that's the real reason they go through the whole receipt bullshit. The employees are basically informing on each other.
Google is not a "no bit shall fail" environment. They have entire machines fail every day, and just replace them. If a search fails, run it on an other machine. Lost a couple of pages from the search database? Googlebot will find them again... Not so with financial data.
Google does more than search, you know. There's plenty of financial data involved in their ad business, and they keep customer data for GMail, Docs & Spreadsheets, and other web apps. They cant exactly go around losing that all the time.
gmail.com and googlemail.com are the same place. If you get an address on either, you can receive mail on both and check your mail on both. All that happens is that based on which country you're in, you'll get redirected around and wind up with a slightly different logo in the top left. That's it.
Also, we do have some form of ID on Slashdot. Mine's "Sunburnt (890890)". When you read a post and see my ID at the top, you might recall previous posts of mine and think, "Hey, this guy's usually pretty sharp and probably onto something here, I should credit this more than most other posts" or "Hey, this guy's usually a total jackass and is probably lying about everything in this post." On the other hand, if I post anonymously, you can't even look at my comment history to make such a determination. The concept of anonymity can be applied to varying degrees in diverse situations.
What you're getting at is the distinction between anonymity, in which you have no identity, and pseudonymity, in which you have a persistent identity that need not be traceable to your everyday identity, but which still allows you to build up a reputation and be recognized as an individual by others.
New hardware is adopted because it's faster and/or cheaper. These days, the processor is only sometimes the critical component when it comes to speed. Slapping a new processor into an old system doesn't make that much sense, and the development cost of backwards compatibility with old hardware architectures to keep a tiny fraction of the Slashdot crowd happy simply isn't worth it. Computers have become commodities. When they break or get old, you throw them out and get a new one. No amount of whining will change this, because economics is against you.
First off, Nicola Tesla was not insane. Secondly, he *did* do this, many times in fact.
Just because Tesla was a genius doesn't mean he wasn't also insane. He invented a great many useful and wonderful things that are very important to the infrastructure of modern society, and was at times denied credit by jealous and antagonistic rivals, but he had many eccentricities, particularly in his later life, that point to him not having been entirely well in the head. He refused to eat where others could see him, freaked out about other people's hair touching him, and generally seems to have had serious problems maintaining normal interpersonal relationships with other people.
Slashdot Mirror
The gasoline-filled tank is under the seats? Call me old fashioned (and it won't be the first time) but I'll take a pennyfarthing, thank you.
Are you crazy? Why would I buy a GPU now if they're going to be 570 times faster in just a few years? I'd just be wasting my money!
Exactly. 200 dB is just over 31 times more powerful than 185 dB.
In all seriousness, it does exist. For the sort of audience WotC was going for, the people are already on RPG.net, ENWorld.org, or BoardGameGeek.com. Gleemax was a set of mediocre forums and some blogs without any decent way to browse through them. Of course it failed to attract the people that were busy discussing games elsewhere already.
This time for sure, Rocky!
On the Mac at least, they wouldn't rather use Java. Apple used to maintain a Java version of the Cocoa API but wound up deprecating it because so few people were using it.
I'm pretty sure Target counts as affiliate, and Amazon runs their online presence. Dropping them is not even close to a viable option.
It's because in Magic, the cards are the product, and selling them is where the profit lies. Additionally, Magic is a game in the competitive sense, and maintaining a balanced environment is key to overall player interest in the product. Wizards doesn't trust third parties to maintain that balance, because escalating power level is a good way to increase short-term sales while damaging the long-term viability of the product. Also, much of what drives the appeal of new Magic sets is novel mechanics. Letting other companies chew up potential design space would eat into what Wizards itself could then sell.
In RPGs, by contrast, core books outsell supplements, even from the first party publisher, by an order of magnitude, yet the amount of work to produce a book is roughly the same for both. Supplements make the core books more attractive to potential players, yet are much less profitable to produce. So, in a stroke of generosity, WotC enables other companies to tie into their product, thereby increasing the salability and appeal of the D&D brand without having to invest in supplements no one will buy.
Yes, if the game is sufficiently original. Magic: the Gathering (US Patent #5,662,332) and Icehouse (US Patent #4,936,585) have such protections, for the novel concepts of trading card games and tapping, and real-time turnless, boardless play, respectively. Most games do not contain patentable mechanics, and games can't be copyrighted, only their specific expression (i.e. the rules as written). You can legally rip off a game completely as long as you rename it, rewrite the rules from scratch, and redo the graphic design. The only defensible part of most games is the trademark of the name and distinctive components and trade dress surrounding the overall appearance of the game.
In the Scrabulous case, it certainly seems like a reasonable argument that the name could confuse people into thinking it is an official Scrabble product. If they change the name, however, they're likely safe from a legal standpoint, at least going forward, though there might still be past damages. However, Hasbro is bigger and has more lawyers than they do, which matters a lot in actual practice.
Actually, it's called 850 MHz, but uses 824 - 849 for the downlink and 869 - 894 for the uplink, so 884 is within the range you expect a US GSM phone handset to emit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_ranges
Imagine being able to download an open-source implementation of said cryptosystem from http://www.truecrypt.org/...
(Seriously, you must be new here. Half the comments on any encryption-and-law-related post are links to TrueCrypt.)
It's a trap!
What Leopard also did was add file system support for hard links to directories, so that backups from different points in time could be easily presented as complete volume images without any need for a special backup file format, yet still share storage for unchanged files.
Suffer? Us Mac users still aren't sure how the abomination that is MDI actually occurred to anyone, much less actually got implemented. Windows simply do not belong inside other windows.
In particular, multiplayer reduces second-hand sales of console versions. If you play the game once and beat it, then you can sell it, allowing someone else who wanted it to play it without paying the publisher money. On the other hand, if you want to fire it up every now and then for an online match, then you need to keep it, so that other guy has to buy a new copy instead.
So, what they're really saying is that the appendix is the Ark where the good bacteria hide out when you have to fire the intestinal Halo system to wipe out the flood of cholera.
At least someone still has some sense and remembers about those quaint old "rights" and "warrants" and "due process".
It's not to prevent shoplifting. It's to prevent theft with employee collusion. If you and the cashier were accomplices, you could grab a $500 product and a $5 product, get in the right line, only get the the $5 one rung up, and walk off with the $500 one perfectly calmly in plain sight. It sounds dumb, but I've heard that's the real reason they go through the whole receipt bullshit. The employees are basically informing on each other.
Google does more than search, you know. There's plenty of financial data involved in their ad business, and they keep customer data for GMail, Docs & Spreadsheets, and other web apps. They cant exactly go around losing that all the time.
gmail.com and googlemail.com are the same place. If you get an address on either, you can receive mail on both and check your mail on both. All that happens is that based on which country you're in, you'll get redirected around and wind up with a slightly different logo in the top left. That's it.
The number given for Sergey Brin's home phone is the Google front desk.
What you're getting at is the distinction between anonymity, in which you have no identity, and pseudonymity, in which you have a persistent identity that need not be traceable to your everyday identity, but which still allows you to build up a reputation and be recognized as an individual by others.
New hardware is adopted because it's faster and/or cheaper. These days, the processor is only sometimes the critical component when it comes to speed. Slapping a new processor into an old system doesn't make that much sense, and the development cost of backwards compatibility with old hardware architectures to keep a tiny fraction of the Slashdot crowd happy simply isn't worth it. Computers have become commodities. When they break or get old, you throw them out and get a new one. No amount of whining will change this, because economics is against you.
Virtual LEGO bricks pose no choking hazards.
Just because Tesla was a genius doesn't mean he wasn't also insane. He invented a great many useful and wonderful things that are very important to the infrastructure of modern society, and was at times denied credit by jealous and antagonistic rivals, but he had many eccentricities, particularly in his later life, that point to him not having been entirely well in the head. He refused to eat where others could see him, freaked out about other people's hair touching him, and generally seems to have had serious problems maintaining normal interpersonal relationships with other people.