more development time seems almost universally to lead to a better product.
Yeah, Daikatana benefitted greatly from the extra time that went into it, and Duke Nukem Forever is sure to be a high quality production because of all the extra time it's had, too.
Sadly, dramatic mid-project changes or indefinite schedules are seldom a good sign....
Obviously the problem isn't an inherently insecure over-trusted client, it's the proliferation of powerful, uncontrolled language weapons like Python that makes copywrite theft like this possible! As long as they have free access to such tools, people like DVDJon will just keep making more and more dangerous programs. What we need are ways to limit access to tools like this, and ways to prevent programs written in these rogue languages from running at all!
Yes, you laugh at such silly ideas (as well you should), but I can almost guarantee you there are entertainment execs thinking those exact thoughts at this very moment.
Is it just me, or has there been a big increase in advertising from companies pushing anti-piracy measures lately? I noticed that in this month's edition of Game Developer magazine there were at least three ads from different companies (including Macrovision) promoting their "solutions." One of them even featured a USB drive key, like the old dongles. Ye gad! Let's not go that route!
I wonder if it's because they're trying to get an early foot in the door of the next console generation.
My attitude is that my energy is much better spent building a compelling product than it is building increasingly elaborate (and ultimately useless) anti-copying measures. In my experience, if you make it just difficult enough that the honest people realize they're violating the licensing agreement, most of them will be willing to pay anyway. The dishonest ones won't care regardless.
I'll second the math suggestion if you want to do tech stuff.
I got my BS in math and my MS in CS. Interestingly, I think I did more hands-on computer work in my upper level math courses than in my CS courses, and more applied math in my CS courses than in my math courses.
Note that many of the great minds in computer science (Turing, Knuth, Kay, etc.) got their starts in mathematics.
I don't care what it's shaped like, or how I have to sit to use it (provided it's comfortable and ergonomic), but I want a keyboard designed specifically for programming.
Think about some of the characters most often needed for programming in common languages: ( ) { } & * $ % @
They're all shift characters on qwerty keyboards, while characters I use relatively less frequently (like digits and most letters) are immediately available without any special combinations.
I guess the obvious problem would be the need for new layouts when using C or Lisp or Python or whatever, but it's still nice to dream about a keyboard designed for programmers in 2005 instead of secretaries in 1873.
It's not clear from text of the agreement that I've seen published so far exactly what the scope is. From Gamespot:
"Take-Two will have exclusive rights among third-party publishers to develop and market simulation, arcade and manager-style baseball video games on the current and next-generation PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, personal computer and hand-held video game systems."
"Manager-style" and "personal computer" could easily be construed as also applying to fantasy baseball leagues, which are a pretty significant business. If that's the case, this wouldn't just affect EA, but an entire ecosystem of fantasy league services, websites, and applications.
It may be rank heresy, but regardless of the OS, ease of installation is not a factor for probably 90% of the population. For most normal people, any OS install process is too hard.
Repeat after me: Average users don't care what OS they run.
Take my wife and my mother. Both of them are fairly astute computer users who understand the need for firewalls and antivirus, and they generally avoid unsafe behavior (and, thus, most malware).
Like nearly everyone else, they don't want to use Linux. They don't want to use Mac OS, either. They don't even want to use Windows! They want to use a word processor, email, the web, and other assundry applications, not an OS.
Neither of them wants to expend an ounce of energy installing or configuring an OS, regardless of how easy (or even geekily fun) it may be, because they don't want to have to think about their OS at all. If Windows gets screwed up on their machines, they'd both rather buy a new system than mess with fixing it. It's not that they don't understand the unnecessity of that, or that they don't care about the inherent waste, it's that doing that would require them to think about and become somewhat expert in things (like operating systems) that distract from their main computer uses.
And I propose that they're typical of most of the population.
So make the installation of any OS as dog simple and non-technical as you want -- it won't matter. Unless it comes from the store pre-configured on the machine, most people will never ever give a moment's thought to installing it.
By "free-as-in-speech" I simply meant that access to amateur communication isn't directly controlled by any governments or groups. Certainly there's regulation, but access is relatively open and cheap. For example, the transportation and commercial shipping industries, along with the military, have their own off-grid communication networks, but the barrier to entry is so high as to make those non-free.
This would be one of the times when BPL would probably be either out or turned off.
The problem isn't interference at the time of a disaster (which, as you pointed out, would likely disappear), the problem is interference with preparation, drills, and tests.
Not to mention the deterrent effect that constant interference would have on amateurs beforehand. It may look like we're just "playing radio," but those are the activities that keep people interested and active in between disasters.
how about using said car batteries and other forms of power to power the damned cell sites
The problem with that idea is that in lots of areas the connections between the cell sites and the main phone network is via landline. Contrary to popular belief, the cell network is auxiliary to the landline network, not independent of it.
To my knowledge, amateur radio provides the only free-as-in-speech global communication network that can operate completely independent of any grid. You can even run computer networks on it, unlike the cell system.
Oh, absolutely. But think how many people have been conditioned to think that "computers slow down as they get older." My old P2-400 will run Windows 98 exactly as quickly today as it did six years ago, but to my mom it has "just gotten so old and slow."
Yes, because you're trying to run Word 2003 on it! Here, use WordPerfect 98 instead.
As the demands and expectations of users increase, it's easy for the moment-to-moment productivity costs of spyware to get lost in the increasing system costs of regular software.
It's not really a trade-off between privacy and free software, it's a trade-off between privacy and convenience. Many people have made the value judgment that the time and effort necessary to fight spyware and find non-treacherous alternatives is worth more to them than the privacy they give up.
The cost of the privacy lost is invisible and (apparently) non-intrusive, while the cost of the time and effort is obvious and immediately quantifiable.
Think about how many times you've heard someone say things along these lines: "Can you believe I spent 6 hours cleaning spyware off my system and had to reinstall Windows twice? Then I had to find new software with a privacy policy acceptible to me, and it took hours to download and install it all."
Compare that to how many times you've heard someone say something like: "Wow! I had spyware all over my system. It was tracking my shopping and browsing habits, reporting my computer usage stats to ad agencies, and sending my IP and passwords to a scam company in Russia!"
The cost former is obvious to even the most ignorant users, while the cost of the latter requires much more insight and knowledge.
There are plenty of government programs that are run with impressive efficiency. There are also plenty that hemorrhage money like a gaping chest wound. Government programs, like most other things, are seldom entirely flawless or completely worthless, of course.
Government should in no way be involved where private enterprise can provide the same service
That's absolutely right! There's no reason in the world that governments should provide any services whatsoever that can be provided by private entities.
Please!
Although they are often unfair and inefficient, governments can and do provide some vital services when the private sector is unwilling or unable to do so. During the 30's, millions of people got power and paved roads thanks to the Tennessee Valley Authority and the WPA. Perfect programs? Certainly not, but they filled a need that wasn't being met by private companies.
Most communities are willing to wait for private broadband roll-out, but for those who aren't willing to live on the cabletelco timetable, the threat of municiple broadband was a big stick to spur private companies into action. This law removes that incentive to action.
This would be comparable to the big power companies getting laws passed during the middle of the 20th century outlawing the many rural power co-ops that sprung up to provide service to people who lived too far away from cities to get get electricity otherwise.
If you were relocating a tech company to a small town, would you choose a city that only has relatively slow commercial broadband, or would you choose a city that has a fiber optic network that you, as a local corporate citizen, could have some influence over?
What about newspapers? Sure, you can argue that newspaper ads aren't "intrusive", in a time-dependent way, but would a newspaper or its advertisers welcome a service that made it free or easy to eliminate all ads, and keep the other content, while still keeping the newspaper cost at 50 cents?
We call those things "scissors" where I come from. It is 100% legal to buy a newspaper, take it home, and cut out all the ads before reading it. It is not legal to open a newspaper box, remove all the ads, then put the ad-free papers back in.
Tivo is much more similar to the first example than the second. Tivo is not preventing you from watching all the ads you want, they're just giving you the scissors to use as you like.
Considering that only 51.3% of the voting age population actually bothered to register and show up at the polls in 2000, it could be argued that anything less than 99% of the votes would have failed to be an accurate expression of the opinion of the population. Since Florida came in at 50.6%, 5000 votes more or less would've been pretty statistically insignificant anyway.
Back in my day, whenever we wanted to play football, we had to go out and find 6-21 other people to play with. Then we had to find an air-filled animal skin to use for a ball, and we had to go outdoors to do it! And the only red we saw came not from LEDs, but from dozens of cuts and scratches!
The first exception to come immediately to mind is college dorm rooms. Fast internet connections, plenty of unpatched computers, and a single room that nearly all of your living takes place in. Limit your searches to college IP blocks, and you'd get much better results. Not many wild orgies, but certainly lots of normal day-to-day living stuff.
You wouldn't catch much of interest in my home office now ("Ooo! Look! He's watching the printer!"), but when I bought my webcam back in college I intentionally sought out a model with a manual power switch and lens cover for this very reason.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you!
It should be pointed out that in several of the Susan Calvin stories, it's explicitly stated that the Three Laws everyone refers to are not the actual laws themselves. The actual laws governing robotic behavior are mathematical constructs that are too complex to be easily expressible in human language. The classic Three Laws are just shorthand Cliff's Notes versions of the real ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, dramatic mid-project changes or indefinite schedules are seldom a good sign....
Yes, you laugh at such silly ideas (as well you should), but I can almost guarantee you there are entertainment execs thinking those exact thoughts at this very moment.
I feel ill....
I wonder if it's because they're trying to get an early foot in the door of the next console generation.
My attitude is that my energy is much better spent building a compelling product than it is building increasingly elaborate (and ultimately useless) anti-copying measures. In my experience, if you make it just difficult enough that the honest people realize they're violating the licensing agreement, most of them will be willing to pay anyway. The dishonest ones won't care regardless.
I got my BS in math and my MS in CS. Interestingly, I think I did more hands-on computer work in my upper level math courses than in my CS courses, and more applied math in my CS courses than in my math courses.
Note that many of the great minds in computer science (Turing, Knuth, Kay, etc.) got their starts in mathematics.
Think about some of the characters most often needed for programming in common languages: ( ) { } & * $ % @
They're all shift characters on qwerty keyboards, while characters I use relatively less frequently (like digits and most letters) are immediately available without any special combinations.
I guess the obvious problem would be the need for new layouts when using C or Lisp or Python or whatever, but it's still nice to dream about a keyboard designed for programmers in 2005 instead of secretaries in 1873.
Which is pretty much how fantasy leagues work, isn't it?
Repeat after me: Average users don't care what OS they run.
Take my wife and my mother. Both of them are fairly astute computer users who understand the need for firewalls and antivirus, and they generally avoid unsafe behavior (and, thus, most malware).
Like nearly everyone else, they don't want to use Linux. They don't want to use Mac OS, either. They don't even want to use Windows! They want to use a word processor, email, the web, and other assundry applications, not an OS.
Neither of them wants to expend an ounce of energy installing or configuring an OS, regardless of how easy (or even geekily fun) it may be, because they don't want to have to think about their OS at all. If Windows gets screwed up on their machines, they'd both rather buy a new system than mess with fixing it. It's not that they don't understand the unnecessity of that, or that they don't care about the inherent waste, it's that doing that would require them to think about and become somewhat expert in things (like operating systems) that distract from their main computer uses.
And I propose that they're typical of most of the population.
So make the installation of any OS as dog simple and non-technical as you want -- it won't matter. Unless it comes from the store pre-configured on the machine, most people will never ever give a moment's thought to installing it.
But what about Lord British?!
By "free-as-in-speech" I simply meant that access to amateur communication isn't directly controlled by any governments or groups. Certainly there's regulation, but access is relatively open and cheap. For example, the transportation and commercial shipping industries, along with the military, have their own off-grid communication networks, but the barrier to entry is so high as to make those non-free.
Not to mention the deterrent effect that constant interference would have on amateurs beforehand. It may look like we're just "playing radio," but those are the activities that keep people interested and active in between disasters.
And I'm not just saying that because I'm a HAM. :-)
To my knowledge, amateur radio provides the only free-as-in-speech global communication network that can operate completely independent of any grid. You can even run computer networks on it, unlike the cell system.
Yes, because you're trying to run Word 2003 on it! Here, use WordPerfect 98 instead.
As the demands and expectations of users increase, it's easy for the moment-to-moment productivity costs of spyware to get lost in the increasing system costs of regular software.
The cost of the privacy lost is invisible and (apparently) non-intrusive, while the cost of the time and effort is obvious and immediately quantifiable.
Think about how many times you've heard someone say things along these lines: "Can you believe I spent 6 hours cleaning spyware off my system and had to reinstall Windows twice? Then I had to find new software with a privacy policy acceptible to me, and it took hours to download and install it all."
Compare that to how many times you've heard someone say something like: "Wow! I had spyware all over my system. It was tracking my shopping and browsing habits, reporting my computer usage stats to ad agencies, and sending my IP and passwords to a scam company in Russia!"
The cost former is obvious to even the most ignorant users, while the cost of the latter requires much more insight and knowledge.
Often != Always
There are plenty of government programs that are run with impressive efficiency. There are also plenty that hemorrhage money like a gaping chest wound. Government programs, like most other things, are seldom entirely flawless or completely worthless, of course.
Please!
Although they are often unfair and inefficient, governments can and do provide some vital services when the private sector is unwilling or unable to do so. During the 30's, millions of people got power and paved roads thanks to the Tennessee Valley Authority and the WPA. Perfect programs? Certainly not, but they filled a need that wasn't being met by private companies.
Most communities are willing to wait for private broadband roll-out, but for those who aren't willing to live on the cabletelco timetable, the threat of municiple broadband was a big stick to spur private companies into action. This law removes that incentive to action.
This would be comparable to the big power companies getting laws passed during the middle of the 20th century outlawing the many rural power co-ops that sprung up to provide service to people who lived too far away from cities to get get electricity otherwise.
If you were relocating a tech company to a small town, would you choose a city that only has relatively slow commercial broadband, or would you choose a city that has a fiber optic network that you, as a local corporate citizen, could have some influence over?
;-)
Tivo is much more similar to the first example than the second. Tivo is not preventing you from watching all the ads you want, they're just giving you the scissors to use as you like.
Back in my day, whenever we wanted to play football, we had to go out and find 6-21 other people to play with. Then we had to find an air-filled animal skin to use for a ball, and we had to go outdoors to do it! And the only red we saw came not from LEDs, but from dozens of cuts and scratches!
You wouldn't catch much of interest in my home office now ("Ooo! Look! He's watching the printer!"), but when I bought my webcam back in college I intentionally sought out a model with a manual power switch and lens cover for this very reason.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you!
Gee...I hope that's not an omen.
Why yes, I am a dork. How did you guess?