I agree with you. The nice way that the fields match up is troubling. Perhaps the person who wrote this bit for Harmony copied Sun's class header and then wrote the code -- but that is still a copyright violation. Perhaps Apache can track down who wrote it for an opinion/explanation? I'm hoping that Oracle is just being obtuse.
Bullshit. I have 240 hours of play in TF2 over the past 3 years, and I have several hats. I've even gotten duplicates and crafted them together to make other hats.
TF2 already is like the Blizzard system. In WoW you can pay to re-spec, so it does allow you pay to make yourself stronger. Valve killed idle dropping in the fall 2009 update, which included the Cheater's Lament. You must now play in order to get drops. I had every single game changing item after about 80 hours of play. It's not an onerous task, if you enjoy the game and play it off and on. Personally, I am not planning on buying any of the cosmetic items -- and this doesn't penalize me in the slightest. With TF2 you can also download amazing mods if cool cosmetic changes are what you are after. You don't have to pay Valve anything.
It's interesting that you should say that you want the 2007 version of TF2 because there's always the XBox 360 version. Microsoft hasn't allowed Valve to do free updates, and so there it sits in all its 2007 glory. Valve has a perfect case/control experiment here. On the PC side, they've added items, grinding and now microtransactions. On the 360, the "pure" version is there in front of a much larger audience. Guess which one gets played, and which one doesn't.
Agreed. Any time-travel story will dredge up these problems -- but I simply hate the Harry Potter / T2 / Voyager deus-ex-machina "plot" devices that use it as a giant magic marker to fix everything. The more interesting time travel stories (like T1) will turn the tool back on itself and deprive the user of its supposed power to change history.
Yes, but the "moral" of the first movie was that no matter how hard you try to change the past, you will not alter the course of time's river. The second film's statement was exactly the opposite. I've seen both films multiple times... have you?
Terminator 2 was the HORRIBLE one, from a science fiction point of view. It was filled with time travel nonsense that led to either an infinite universe theory, or an infinitely changeable universe theory -- either of which leaves the viewer with an unsatisfying conclusion (hello Star Trek: Voyager). "No fate but what we make" -- or that you can travel back in time to change it, while somehow retaining the memories of the now-extinct timeline -- implies that the entire plot could be undone by some other schmuck traveling back to make sure that the T1000 was successful or that the camera is following one of an infinite set of universes in which the T1000 was successful (ho-hum). It had no meaning. Fortunately they produced the third film to fix it (and the fourth one was even better than 2).
The first film was brilliant; in the act of attempting to kill Sarah Conner, Sky Net ironically ensured that he would exist. It may not have had a pregnant CGI budget, but the story was much more thought provoking.
Avatar was eye candy, just like T2 -- the story was Dances with Fern Gully.
The big difference in the US is that RIM, et. all are allowed to use encryption. The NSA has to break strong encryption if they want to record all conversations. I use PGP, ssh, https and other forms of encryption all the time because of it. All of my company's site-to-site data goes over AES/SHA tunnels, and I'm not in jail. In many ways the Internet is a "public place" in legal-speak, and you shouldn't expect any kind of privacy from anyone; perhaps least of all from the NSA.
Whether or not a wireless provider is a monopoly has nothing to do with network neutrality It simply states that data packets all must be treated the same for an entity that sells data connectivity to consumers. It's like mandating that water can only contain so much arsenic, or that airplanes must fly in certain corridors. Monopolies are irrelevant to the idea.
BEFORE the fact. Warrants are supposed to be issued by judges, not police, and while under oath. These warrants the police are issuing without involving the courts are unconstitutional.
While I agree with your sentiment, the supreme court has held the executive privileges in the constitution to supersede the 4th amendment protections when national security is at stake. Given that, we should still demand a review after the fact; or a FISA-like court system to expedite warrants. Our police force can only do what congress allows them to. The Patriot Act was a horrible piece of legislation.
Unfortunately, there's no way to know with these "gag orders" in place. Even if some piece of information is needed for national security reasons, it should be subject to speedy judicial review after the fact -- otherwise, there is no mechanism to identify abuse.
However it must be noted that these monopolies are, in no small part, a product of regulation by the FCC and far less a product of the free market.
To which regulation do you refer? Back when they regulated the telcos for dialup and DSL, we had a lot of competition. When it was deregulated, my set of choices went down to two. Wireless service may be acceptable for small communities, or when latency is not an issue -- but anyone living in a city will experience horrible connectivity with it. Last-mile solutions outside of DSL are almost exclusively limited to two companies. It's an infrastructure problem, much like highways, sewer and water.
The interesting thing is that the more regulated a particular industry is, the more dominated it is by big business.
Really? Our national highway system and municipal roads are so regulated that it makes Ayn Rand blush from her grave -- and yet I personally know two small business that are working on maintenance projects on I-15 here. Perhaps if we converted them into toll roads there would be even more small business involvement?;-)
"It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals." -Bertrand Russell
You said, "you've got to buy a whole lot of games to amortize that" -- so I assumed you were comparing the $300-$500 price tag with a console's price tag.
You forgot to add in all the accessories that you need to purchase with your console. Everything from 802.11 adapters, to extra controllers / nunchucks / classic controllers / kinect / move wands / proprietary memory devices / proprietary hard disks / non-standard hdmi/component cables.. the list goes on and on. Console gaming isn't as cheap as the base price of the machine.
Anyone writing a flash-based video player would opt for the fast path and follow whatever rules are necessary. But thanks to Adobe's laziness, that option isn't available. Flash is just a dinosaur that doesn't want to evolve.
I would take that one step further: Anyone writing a flash-based video player is doing it wrong. We needed flash for web video because there were no universal alternatives, and we will still need it in the very short-term -- but web surfers are savvy enough to install new browsers now, and HTML5 is coming down the tracks full-steam, with or without w3c approval.
VLC uses XVideo under Linux for certain. Flash cannot use XVideo, because it has to mix RGB content over the top of video -- but VLC at least uses that.
The Linux thing might be true. Even if there was one universally implemented GL desktop standard, that's not the same as having a universally implemented hardware decoding API. They're pretty much orthogonal.
Linux has a few competing standards, but complaining about that does not excuse Adobe from implementing one. There are millions of embedded Linux devices that use hardware decoding for video -- going all the way back to MPEG2. You would think Adobe would allocate developer resources for something this important, unless it's not all that important for them, of course. I can't watch fullscreen Flash content on YouTube -- but HTML5 content plays flawlessly. Advantage, HTML5.
Adobe cant't do that, because Flash is not designed to play video. Think about it. Flash mixes MovieClips with vector and timeline content, all with z-axis alpha-blended content. It must transfer video into RGB in order to mix it with the bitmap data from vector sources, bitmap sources and from the font renderer. Flash can use sophisticated codec helpers for some tasks, but it will never be as good as dedicated devices like the iPad, which can only play one video format with specific limitations. This isn't to say that Flash is some kind of failure -- only that it was designed to solve a different problem.
I get even worse performance from the 10.0.45.2 release plugin -- regardless the browser. Perhaps your computer is faster than mine? I can happily stream CNN, but it uses a lot more than 8% of my CPU. Vimeo is much worse -- although if I look at it under Windows, it works just fine. Perhaps you can educate me on how to get Flash working? I would really appreciate it.
Yeah, I have a 12" PowerBook (best laptop ever made!) running Leopard -- and I feel your pain. There's no need to forget Linux though, they probably outnumber PPC mac users by a wide margin.
Yes, I spit coffee at my screen when I read that quote from Adobe. Apparently their Flash engineers haven't tried to go to Vimeo while running Linux. It's mind-numbingly slow on my 2.8ghz P4 system running Ubuntu 10.04 and Chrome 6 (with integrated Flash 10.1). Contrarily, HTML5 YouTube plays content using 20% of my CPU. Adobe engineers even admit that Flash is not designed to be a video player -- so perhaps there is room for both technologies going forward.
It's not all that difficult to free your iPhone. Mine can not only tether, but it also will create an 802.11 access point to share my 3G connection with anyone in range. I also get the added benefit of apt, including pretty much any command-line based utility (ssh, tcpdump, nmap, etc.). I showed my father the roaming 3G access point, and now his phone is jailbroken as well. He did it himself.
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I agree with you. The nice way that the fields match up is troubling. Perhaps the person who wrote this bit for Harmony copied Sun's class header and then wrote the code -- but that is still a copyright violation. Perhaps Apache can track down who wrote it for an opinion/explanation? I'm hoping that Oracle is just being obtuse.
Here are the examples Oracle is using:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/oracle-says-google-directly-copied-java-code-heres-the-line-by-line-comparison/41025&usg=AFQjCNF1GNdD5_oXwawU7akdBGHETrf57w
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.scribd.com/doc/40316099/orclgoogcode&usg=AFQjCNFFdZkReVLuVJIS7Xshk1X997VTIA
And a link to the original Sun implementation:
http://www.docjar.com/html/api/sun/security/provider/certpath/PolicyNodeImpl.java.html
We don't know all the facts... but it smells funny.
Bullshit. I have 240 hours of play in TF2 over the past 3 years, and I have several hats. I've even gotten duplicates and crafted them together to make other hats.
TF2 already is like the Blizzard system. In WoW you can pay to re-spec, so it does allow you pay to make yourself stronger. Valve killed idle dropping in the fall 2009 update, which included the Cheater's Lament. You must now play in order to get drops. I had every single game changing item after about 80 hours of play. It's not an onerous task, if you enjoy the game and play it off and on. Personally, I am not planning on buying any of the cosmetic items -- and this doesn't penalize me in the slightest. With TF2 you can also download amazing mods if cool cosmetic changes are what you are after. You don't have to pay Valve anything.
It's interesting that you should say that you want the 2007 version of TF2 because there's always the XBox 360 version. Microsoft hasn't allowed Valve to do free updates, and so there it sits in all its 2007 glory. Valve has a perfect case/control experiment here. On the PC side, they've added items, grinding and now microtransactions. On the 360, the "pure" version is there in front of a much larger audience. Guess which one gets played, and which one doesn't.
Agreed. Any time-travel story will dredge up these problems -- but I simply hate the Harry Potter / T2 / Voyager deus-ex-machina "plot" devices that use it as a giant magic marker to fix everything. The more interesting time travel stories (like T1) will turn the tool back on itself and deprive the user of its supposed power to change history.
And I wish they hadn't canceled the TV show.
Yes, but the "moral" of the first movie was that no matter how hard you try to change the past, you will not alter the course of time's river. The second film's statement was exactly the opposite. I've seen both films multiple times... have you?
Terminator 2 was the HORRIBLE one, from a science fiction point of view. It was filled with time travel nonsense that led to either an infinite universe theory, or an infinitely changeable universe theory -- either of which leaves the viewer with an unsatisfying conclusion (hello Star Trek: Voyager). "No fate but what we make" -- or that you can travel back in time to change it, while somehow retaining the memories of the now-extinct timeline -- implies that the entire plot could be undone by some other schmuck traveling back to make sure that the T1000 was successful or that the camera is following one of an infinite set of universes in which the T1000 was successful (ho-hum). It had no meaning. Fortunately they produced the third film to fix it (and the fourth one was even better than 2).
The first film was brilliant; in the act of attempting to kill Sarah Conner, Sky Net ironically ensured that he would exist. It may not have had a pregnant CGI budget, but the story was much more thought provoking.
Avatar was eye candy, just like T2 -- the story was Dances with Fern Gully.
The big difference in the US is that RIM, et. all are allowed to use encryption. The NSA has to break strong encryption if they want to record all conversations. I use PGP, ssh, https and other forms of encryption all the time because of it. All of my company's site-to-site data goes over AES/SHA tunnels, and I'm not in jail. In many ways the Internet is a "public place" in legal-speak, and you shouldn't expect any kind of privacy from anyone; perhaps least of all from the NSA.
Whether or not a wireless provider is a monopoly has nothing to do with network neutrality It simply states that data packets all must be treated the same for an entity that sells data connectivity to consumers. It's like mandating that water can only contain so much arsenic, or that airplanes must fly in certain corridors. Monopolies are irrelevant to the idea.
BEFORE the fact. Warrants are supposed to be issued by judges, not police, and while under oath. These warrants the police are issuing without involving the courts are unconstitutional.
While I agree with your sentiment, the supreme court has held the executive privileges in the constitution to supersede the 4th amendment protections when national security is at stake. Given that, we should still demand a review after the fact; or a FISA-like court system to expedite warrants. Our police force can only do what congress allows them to. The Patriot Act was a horrible piece of legislation.
Unfortunately, there's no way to know with these "gag orders" in place. Even if some piece of information is needed for national security reasons, it should be subject to speedy judicial review after the fact -- otherwise, there is no mechanism to identify abuse.
However it must be noted that these monopolies are, in no small part, a product of regulation by the FCC and far less a product of the free market.
To which regulation do you refer? Back when they regulated the telcos for dialup and DSL, we had a lot of competition. When it was deregulated, my set of choices went down to two. Wireless service may be acceptable for small communities, or when latency is not an issue -- but anyone living in a city will experience horrible connectivity with it. Last-mile solutions outside of DSL are almost exclusively limited to two companies. It's an infrastructure problem, much like highways, sewer and water.
The interesting thing is that the more regulated a particular industry is, the more dominated it is by big business.
Really? Our national highway system and municipal roads are so regulated that it makes Ayn Rand blush from her grave -- and yet I personally know two small business that are working on maintenance projects on I-15 here. Perhaps if we converted them into toll roads there would be even more small business involvement? ;-)
"It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals." -Bertrand Russell
Gnash doesn't support ActionScript 3. Lightspark does. There has been talk on the Gnash list for a hybrid solution.
You said, "you've got to buy a whole lot of games to amortize that" -- so I assumed you were comparing the $300-$500 price tag with a console's price tag.
You forgot to add in all the accessories that you need to purchase with your console. Everything from 802.11 adapters, to extra controllers / nunchucks / classic controllers / kinect / move wands / proprietary memory devices / proprietary hard disks / non-standard hdmi/component cables .. the list goes on and on. Console gaming isn't as cheap as the base price of the machine.
Anyone writing a flash-based video player would opt for the fast path and follow whatever rules are necessary. But thanks to Adobe's laziness, that option isn't available. Flash is just a dinosaur that doesn't want to evolve.
I would take that one step further: Anyone writing a flash-based video player is doing it wrong. We needed flash for web video because there were no universal alternatives, and we will still need it in the very short-term -- but web surfers are savvy enough to install new browsers now, and HTML5 is coming down the tracks full-steam, with or without w3c approval.
VLC uses XVideo under Linux for certain. Flash cannot use XVideo, because it has to mix RGB content over the top of video -- but VLC at least uses that.
The Linux thing might be true. Even if there was one universally implemented GL desktop standard, that's not the same as having a universally implemented hardware decoding API. They're pretty much orthogonal.
Linux has a few competing standards, but complaining about that does not excuse Adobe from implementing one. There are millions of embedded Linux devices that use hardware decoding for video -- going all the way back to MPEG2. You would think Adobe would allocate developer resources for something this important, unless it's not all that important for them, of course. I can't watch fullscreen Flash content on YouTube -- but HTML5 content plays flawlessly. Advantage, HTML5.
Adobe cant't do that, because Flash is not designed to play video. Think about it. Flash mixes MovieClips with vector and timeline content, all with z-axis alpha-blended content. It must transfer video into RGB in order to mix it with the bitmap data from vector sources, bitmap sources and from the font renderer. Flash can use sophisticated codec helpers for some tasks, but it will never be as good as dedicated devices like the iPad, which can only play one video format with specific limitations. This isn't to say that Flash is some kind of failure -- only that it was designed to solve a different problem.
I get even worse performance from the 10.0.45.2 release plugin -- regardless the browser. Perhaps your computer is faster than mine? I can happily stream CNN, but it uses a lot more than 8% of my CPU. Vimeo is much worse -- although if I look at it under Windows, it works just fine. Perhaps you can educate me on how to get Flash working? I would really appreciate it.
Yeah, I have a 12" PowerBook (best laptop ever made!) running Leopard -- and I feel your pain. There's no need to forget Linux though, they probably outnumber PPC mac users by a wide margin.
Yes, I spit coffee at my screen when I read that quote from Adobe. Apparently their Flash engineers haven't tried to go to Vimeo while running Linux. It's mind-numbingly slow on my 2.8ghz P4 system running Ubuntu 10.04 and Chrome 6 (with integrated Flash 10.1). Contrarily, HTML5 YouTube plays content using 20% of my CPU. Adobe engineers even admit that Flash is not designed to be a video player -- so perhaps there is room for both technologies going forward.
It's not all that difficult to free your iPhone. Mine can not only tether, but it also will create an 802.11 access point to share my 3G connection with anyone in range. I also get the added benefit of apt, including pretty much any command-line based utility (ssh, tcpdump, nmap, etc.). I showed my father the roaming 3G access point, and now his phone is jailbroken as well. He did it himself.