I remember doing all of that as well.:-) My first "machine language" program was a series of DATA statements painstakenly copied from the pages of Compute! magazine. It wasn't until later that I understood what was actually going on. My dad bought an Apple//c and then I had to learn about bank switching to access all of its memory. Fun times.
I don't think this rises to the level of an attack on our sovereignty any more than our use of sattelite imaging and other espionage would be a declaration of war on China. If Congress disagrees, then they should declare war on China for these attacks. I personally know at least four people in "cyber security" for our government. Trust me, they aren't just sitting around doing nothing; they are actively engaged in both defensive and offensive systems engineering. If war comes of all this, then so be it -- but I don't think we should jump the shark with inflammatory labels.
If it's a war, then the Constitution requires Congress to declare it. We have wars on poverty, drugs, terrorism; why do we need to further dilute what it means to be at war? I find Schmidt's comments refreshing; perhaps we could have a rational discussion about security without needlessly ratcheting up the fear machine. Traditionally wars had beginnings and endings -- that is to say, they had structure (not to be quaint). When we're eternally at war with concepts, it numbs the sentiment.
Think about an HTML file. It can contain embedded objects and/or alternative tags, or newer tags, all of which your browser may or may not work with. Containers are important because they provide the meta information that players need to orchestrate the various streams embedded in them. Some containers were built for instant streaming in mind (FLV). Some were simple data partitions (AVI). Some are jack-of-all-trades that do everything (MKV). Some are so simple that the user has to provide information about the video in order to interpret them (raw YUV). Some containers are horrible at seeking to key frames (WMV). Some easily get out of sync audio (AVI). Ideally, we should be using Matroska for everything -- but we don't live in an ideal world.
Indeed. Considering the game's $60 price tag, and the fact that you cannot trade it in at Gamespot, and this ridiculous DRM... it'll be a wonder if any PC user buys this game. I may end up picking it up for $20 some point down the road, or just renting it for $5 and playing it on the PS3. Good job Ubisoft, I guess you win. Now you can go crunch numbers and come to the wrong conclusion that PC games "don't sell well".
I found it disturbing that they logged every packet on your Live account for the lifetime of the account (glad I don't use it); but the rest of it is pretty run-of-the-mill.
Adobe also charges for mobile/embedded/redistributed Flash runtimes. Apple would have to pay Adobe for the privilege of allowing them selling more CS dev tools. It's messed up from both sides.
Additionally, Adobe charges a per-device fee for mobile versions of Flash. it is even illegal to re-distribute their x86 Flash plugin without such a license. So Apple would be paying Adobe for the opportunity to collect more money from selling their CS suite.
Once he had that fully established, he played with it a bit in no more than a couple of stories, because he was too good an author to not do so. But even then, there was never a robot 'menace', or robots running around murdering people.
Except for that whole part about irradiating Earth to kill the homeworld, eh? The "zeroth law" allowed Giskard and Daneel to destroy a whole planet, and to set in motion the Foundation.
I tried to create an account, and was able to get past the account creation form. It was fairly detailed... It wanted my street address, the company I worked for, and some sort of "national ID", which I assume is Iran's equivalent of a social security number; but then once I successfully submitted that, I was greeted with another screen telling me to send post to some address at "Argentina Square Blvd." in Tehran. I am to include my signature, as well as that of the highest "administrative unit" in my work. It's draconian by western standards -- and would easily allow them to track people with email; all for "our own good", I'm sure....
It's because Google recently moved gmail to HTTPS. It was an option before, but now its mandatory. Someone's email snooper device stopped working in Iran's ministry of snooping^H^H^H^H^H^H truth, and they threw a fit. Then their prophet-dude probably received a revelation that the country needs it's own "Islamic" email system to be rid of the heathens... etc., etc.
Look at the number of formats and sources available between the two. The PS3, the 360, my Pioneer DVD player, and numerous other devices will play many of: plain-old MPEG-2, MPEG4/2, H.26x, WMV, sorensen and others. They typically accept Quicktime, AVI and other envelopes. Additionally, with those devices you can often browse network shares, the Internet or use various streaming servers open-source or not. They attempt to play what consumers want to play.
The AppleTV is tied to iTunes, and can only play very specific MPEG4 in Quicktime envelopes.
Perhaps Apple's ala-carte plan would have been more successful if they had coupled it with the ideal that gave us Rip. Mix. Burn. The iPod supports MP3 and allows consumers to directly use their content from external sources (ogg notwithstanding). This, in addition to their preferred format. If AppleTV had allowed importing of existing content without re-encoding, and (legalities aside) made it easy to import DVDs into a library -- and THEN offered the ala-cart iTunes episodes, I wonder what would have happened.
I won't hold my breath on the SCOTUS doing anything pro-consumer right now.;-)
People prefer paying for Netflix over AppleTV, clearly, but attributing this to "openness," when all of your counterexamples involve proprietary videogame consoles, proprietary or patented/licenesed media formats, proprietary client software, and streaming non-saveable movies, is a bit rich.
I was using the term "open" in contrast with "fucking locked down" as per the gp, not open in a FSF sense. And, yes, those proprietary systems are all much more open than AppleTV was, which consumers saw. It's all a matter of degree. If the Google device is more open, in a non-pedant-FSF-way, then consumers may well pay attention to it.
This seems like a highly speculative conclusion, given that MythTV hasn't exactly taken over my TV credenza just yet. Are you sure AppleTV hasn't failed on account of the fact that people prefer to pay for cable/ DVR over paying for shows episode-by-episode?
Sure, that's one reason -- but another is that AppleTV can't do what a PS3 or 360 can do (among other set-top boxes and blueray players). Apple was trying to herd users to their store in the same way the iPad is attempting for books. They placed artificial restrictions on the formats and distribution channels for AppleTV (no Netflix, no Hulu, etc.). My Mac Mini can do all of that just fine, and is a much better Apple TV than AppleTV is.
Consumers have picked better alternatives that are more convenient, which in that instance means that it must play a variety of formats and be able to read media from a variety of sources (Internet, USB, home network, etc.). They wanted something more open. They aren't mindless Apple-buying zombies, although some of those do exist (and they probably bought the AppleTV).
What nerds don't get is that most people don't care about "user's freedom." They're happy to buy a controlled but stable device that lets them browse the web.
AppleTV failed because it wasn't open; it can only play content from the iTunes store, or painstakingly transcoded files. People would rather use devices that are convenient, which implies a certain amount of give and take with the user's needs (see XBox 360 and the PS3). People will want to listen to Pandora while using other applications, and if the iPhone/iPad OS4 still has a single-tasking mentality, it will be fundamentally broken, just like AppleTV is. Ditto with receiving instant messages while playing a game or browsing the web; OS3 can only do that on the 3G network. The iPhone was enough of a revolution for people to see past these faults (heck, I own one); but when the competition starts in earnest Apple will need to adjust.
My point was that sometimes, cloud services are better than "owning" physical media. My 2-disc set of KOTOR did not work, but Steam did. The $5 was well spent.
I recently installed Knights of the Old Republic on my Windows 7 box and could not, for the life of me, get it to work properly. I tried various patches from dead websites after applying the most "recent" patch from Bioware. After giving up on that, I ponied up $5 for the Steam version, which installed and works flawlessly (it has a newer version number than any of my attempts). Chalk one up for the cloud version being better than actually owning the discs.
By your logic, those minijack-to-FM transmitters should also be illegal, but they're not. The FCC allows people to broadcast as long as they restrict it to a certain power level that won't interfere with others.
Apple and the FSF also want Flash to die. Perhaps the enemy of our enemy really is our friend in this case. The motivations behind each organization may be different (or the same), but the end result is a win for open standards.
and not realizing that the whole c# thing is just another trojan horse, as is.NET
So should the authors of Wine, Samba and OpenOffice go work for Microsoft as well? They're all _obviously_ trojan horses... right? I mean, _nothing_ good comes from Microsoft. Ever. All of their engineers are pure evil incarnate, right?
Why? Have you tried writing a dbus-aware program in C, and then in C#? There is a world of difference, in favor of the C# version. This irrational fear of all-things-Microsoft is out of control. There are good engineers at Microsoft, and some of them are even free software proponents.
Regardless all that, Mono is a GPL language, free in every sense. Linux dbus has nothing to do with "dotNet". We shouldn't exclude good software because of our irrational prejudices.
I love Slashdot. Where else can the cultural merits of the Star Wars Holiday Special be compared to transcendental truth and the entire hope of a species?
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I remember doing all of that as well. :-) My first "machine language" program was a series of DATA statements painstakenly copied from the pages of Compute! magazine. It wasn't until later that I understood what was actually going on. My dad bought an Apple //c and then I had to learn about bank switching to access all of its memory. Fun times.
Only if you were using BASIC. Once you went to 6502 assembly, you could use all the RAM.
I don't think this rises to the level of an attack on our sovereignty any more than our use of sattelite imaging and other espionage would be a declaration of war on China. If Congress disagrees, then they should declare war on China for these attacks. I personally know at least four people in "cyber security" for our government. Trust me, they aren't just sitting around doing nothing; they are actively engaged in both defensive and offensive systems engineering. If war comes of all this, then so be it -- but I don't think we should jump the shark with inflammatory labels.
If it's a war, then the Constitution requires Congress to declare it. We have wars on poverty, drugs, terrorism; why do we need to further dilute what it means to be at war? I find Schmidt's comments refreshing; perhaps we could have a rational discussion about security without needlessly ratcheting up the fear machine. Traditionally wars had beginnings and endings -- that is to say, they had structure (not to be quaint). When we're eternally at war with concepts, it numbs the sentiment.
Think about an HTML file. It can contain embedded objects and/or alternative tags, or newer tags, all of which your browser may or may not work with. Containers are important because they provide the meta information that players need to orchestrate the various streams embedded in them. Some containers were built for instant streaming in mind (FLV). Some were simple data partitions (AVI). Some are jack-of-all-trades that do everything (MKV). Some are so simple that the user has to provide information about the video in order to interpret them (raw YUV). Some containers are horrible at seeking to key frames (WMV). Some easily get out of sync audio (AVI). Ideally, we should be using Matroska for everything -- but we don't live in an ideal world.
Indeed. Considering the game's $60 price tag, and the fact that you cannot trade it in at Gamespot, and this ridiculous DRM... it'll be a wonder if any PC user buys this game. I may end up picking it up for $20 some point down the road, or just renting it for $5 and playing it on the PS3. Good job Ubisoft, I guess you win. Now you can go crunch numbers and come to the wrong conclusion that PC games "don't sell well".
I found it disturbing that they logged every packet on your Live account for the lifetime of the account (glad I don't use it); but the rest of it is pretty run-of-the-mill.
Adobe also charges for mobile/embedded/redistributed Flash runtimes. Apple would have to pay Adobe for the privilege of allowing them selling more CS dev tools. It's messed up from both sides.
Additionally, Adobe charges a per-device fee for mobile versions of Flash. it is even illegal to re-distribute their x86 Flash plugin without such a license. So Apple would be paying Adobe for the opportunity to collect more money from selling their CS suite.
Google maps breaks your proposition; as you pointed out, it's using drag to scroll.
How would you distinguish between drag and hover in that case? A touchpad has no buttons; it's not a trackpad.
Once he had that fully established, he played with it a bit in no more than a couple of stories, because he was too good an author to not do so. But even then, there was never a robot 'menace', or robots running around murdering people.
Except for that whole part about irradiating Earth to kill the homeworld, eh? The "zeroth law" allowed Giskard and Daneel to destroy a whole planet, and to set in motion the Foundation.
I tried to create an account, and was able to get past the account creation form. It was fairly detailed... It wanted my street address, the company I worked for, and some sort of "national ID", which I assume is Iran's equivalent of a social security number; but then once I successfully submitted that, I was greeted with another screen telling me to send post to some address at "Argentina Square Blvd." in Tehran. I am to include my signature, as well as that of the highest "administrative unit" in my work. It's draconian by western standards -- and would easily allow them to track people with email; all for "our own good", I'm sure....
It's because Google recently moved gmail to HTTPS. It was an option before, but now its mandatory. Someone's email snooper device stopped working in Iran's ministry of snooping^H^H^H^H^H^H truth, and they threw a fit. Then their prophet-dude probably received a revelation that the country needs it's own "Islamic" email system to be rid of the heathens... etc., etc.
Look at the number of formats and sources available between the two. The PS3, the 360, my Pioneer DVD player, and numerous other devices will play many of: plain-old MPEG-2, MPEG4/2, H.26x, WMV, sorensen and others. They typically accept Quicktime, AVI and other envelopes. Additionally, with those devices you can often browse network shares, the Internet or use various streaming servers open-source or not. They attempt to play what consumers want to play.
The AppleTV is tied to iTunes, and can only play very specific MPEG4 in Quicktime envelopes.
Perhaps Apple's ala-carte plan would have been more successful if they had coupled it with the ideal that gave us Rip. Mix. Burn. The iPod supports MP3 and allows consumers to directly use their content from external sources (ogg notwithstanding). This, in addition to their preferred format. If AppleTV had allowed importing of existing content without re-encoding, and (legalities aside) made it easy to import DVDs into a library -- and THEN offered the ala-cart iTunes episodes, I wonder what would have happened.
I won't hold my breath on the SCOTUS doing anything pro-consumer right now. ;-)
People prefer paying for Netflix over AppleTV, clearly, but attributing this to "openness," when all of your counterexamples involve proprietary videogame consoles, proprietary or patented/licenesed media formats, proprietary client software, and streaming non-saveable movies, is a bit rich.
I was using the term "open" in contrast with "fucking locked down" as per the gp, not open in a FSF sense. And, yes, those proprietary systems are all much more open than AppleTV was, which consumers saw. It's all a matter of degree. If the Google device is more open, in a non-pedant-FSF-way, then consumers may well pay attention to it.
This seems like a highly speculative conclusion, given that MythTV hasn't exactly taken over my TV credenza just yet. Are you sure AppleTV hasn't failed on account of the fact that people prefer to pay for cable/ DVR over paying for shows episode-by-episode?
Sure, that's one reason -- but another is that AppleTV can't do what a PS3 or 360 can do (among other set-top boxes and blueray players). Apple was trying to herd users to their store in the same way the iPad is attempting for books. They placed artificial restrictions on the formats and distribution channels for AppleTV (no Netflix, no Hulu, etc.). My Mac Mini can do all of that just fine, and is a much better Apple TV than AppleTV is.
Consumers have picked better alternatives that are more convenient, which in that instance means that it must play a variety of formats and be able to read media from a variety of sources (Internet, USB, home network, etc.). They wanted something more open. They aren't mindless Apple-buying zombies, although some of those do exist (and they probably bought the AppleTV).
What nerds don't get is that most people don't care about "user's freedom." They're happy to buy a controlled but stable device that lets them browse the web.
AppleTV failed because it wasn't open; it can only play content from the iTunes store, or painstakingly transcoded files. People would rather use devices that are convenient, which implies a certain amount of give and take with the user's needs (see XBox 360 and the PS3). People will want to listen to Pandora while using other applications, and if the iPhone/iPad OS4 still has a single-tasking mentality, it will be fundamentally broken, just like AppleTV is. Ditto with receiving instant messages while playing a game or browsing the web; OS3 can only do that on the 3G network. The iPhone was enough of a revolution for people to see past these faults (heck, I own one); but when the competition starts in earnest Apple will need to adjust.
People aren't as stupid as you seem to believe.
My point was that sometimes, cloud services are better than "owning" physical media. My 2-disc set of KOTOR did not work, but Steam did. The $5 was well spent.
I recently installed Knights of the Old Republic on my Windows 7 box and could not, for the life of me, get it to work properly. I tried various patches from dead websites after applying the most "recent" patch from Bioware. After giving up on that, I ponied up $5 for the Steam version, which installed and works flawlessly (it has a newer version number than any of my attempts). Chalk one up for the cloud version being better than actually owning the discs.
By your logic, those minijack-to-FM transmitters should also be illegal, but they're not. The FCC allows people to broadcast as long as they restrict it to a certain power level that won't interfere with others.
Why else *would* they join?
Apple and the FSF also want Flash to die. Perhaps the enemy of our enemy really is our friend in this case. The motivations behind each organization may be different (or the same), but the end result is a win for open standards.
and not realizing that the whole c# thing is just another trojan horse, as is .NET
So should the authors of Wine, Samba and OpenOffice go work for Microsoft as well? They're all _obviously_ trojan horses... right? I mean, _nothing_ good comes from Microsoft. Ever. All of their engineers are pure evil incarnate, right?
This is like "arguing" with a Glenn Beck fan....
So get rid of the fucking thing!
Why? Have you tried writing a dbus-aware program in C, and then in C#? There is a world of difference, in favor of the C# version. This irrational fear of all-things-Microsoft is out of control. There are good engineers at Microsoft, and some of them are even free software proponents.
Regardless all that, Mono is a GPL language, free in every sense. Linux dbus has nothing to do with "dotNet". We shouldn't exclude good software because of our irrational prejudices.
I love Slashdot. Where else can the cultural merits of the Star Wars Holiday Special be compared to transcendental truth and the entire hope of a species?