But when a random number generator decides whether you get the really valueable weapon you can sell for $50 or some piece of crap loot, or a couple gold pieces, that IS gambling.
No, Sony is running a commodity exchange with this, not "selling software".
The commodity is control of items on game servers. If the NASDAQ or NYSE unilaterally delisted a stock or did some other action that killed its value that didn't follow they'd be facing so many lawsuits so fast they'd drill a mile into the earth's crust, they'd be spinning so fast.
Students who have a GPA of lower than 2.6 must find education somewhere else (vocational schools, private schools, etc.)
The problem is, the number of jobs that vocational training actually gets you these days are dwindling at an extremely fast rate here, and in many other "western" countries. Yeah, it'd be easy enough to push low ability/performing students into a vocational system, but the vocational system doesn't train them for anything like the modern world, so you're not exactly making them any more useful to society in any way by forcing them into the vocational "system". They'll be even more unemployable, and even more likely to turn to criminal/underground methods of putting food on their tables than they already are, because they'll be officially labled "No Hopers".
And as far as private schools go, just about anyone who can afford to send their children to a private school already does (save in extremely wealthy areas). Most of the people who don't send their children to private schools won't be able to afford it if their children are forced to leave the public system.
And as far as emulating the Soviet system of education, yes, it produced a very high quality cream off the top, undoubtably, but looking at the rest of society in most of the post-Soviet countries, I don't think shitting that many kids out of the system without a real place to put them did anything but encourage the rampant corruption and organized crime that are crippling those countries today. Some of the former republics made it out OK. Most have not. I'd think long and hard before emulating anything in such a system.
If the radio drama, or the books is what you consider the ultimate perfect expression of the Hitchhiker's series, why in the world are you even considering watching the movie in the first place?
If you're so high strung that someone retelling a story you like in a manner you don't like drives you to this much insanity, you're really losing it. Do you actually think all the movie tie-in merchandise is going to be rewritten to conform to the book? No! When people go to Barnes & Noble, or Borders, or Amazon when they want the movie tie-in book, they're going to get the actual original book, and wonder of wonders, they're going to actually read what you like! Or buy a copy of the radio play and hear in their car on their way to work, or rip it to their iPod.
Jeepers creepers people, get your heads out of your asses.
Excuse me, if slashdot is so goddamned useless because of the dupes, why the hell are you still using it?
You and all those like you who constantly whine and bitch and moan about all the dupes making your life hell are just plain pathetic. I don't believe a word of any of it. Bitching for bitching's sake, and if I cared at all about the moderation system (I don't and have opted out of moderating) I'd save all the mod points I ever recieved on modding down you whiners.
Good fucking Christ, people get a fucking life. It's people like you, with nothing useful to contribute to a discussion other than the fact that someone already brought this topic up before that make slashdot more and more usless, not duplicate articles.
Let me qualify the subject line with the fact that I'm a great fan of the Shadowrun universe. I'm hoping and praying that Microsoft gets off it's rear and lets someone produce a Shadowun MMORPG, because it would certainly have my gaming dollars.
That said, the Shadowrun 3rd edition rules are the most convoluted and obscure RPG rules I've ever had to work with. That's not to say that they're worse than earlier versions of the Shadowrun rules. The first and second editions are even worse, and can be broken in so many ways (as a bored game store owner friend of mine went into hideous detail about one night). However, unless you know the relevant rulebooks inside and out, you are going to have a devil of a time finding the relevant rules. FASA has a horrible reputation for piss poor editing in its books. In some of the older FASA releases, page references are wildly wrong, or completely nonexistant (one popular and hard to find book has all page references as "Page: xx") or even mentioning rules that just plain don't exist.
I ran a Shadowrun campaign for, I believe about a year, approximately a year ago. Page references were just wrong on more than one occasion. Rule sections were unclear. Whole categories of (at least in my game) often happening situations were completely untouched upon, or mentioned only in passing. I'm not averse to house rules, but i like to at least try to see what the game system's rule for a situation is, and see if it made sense. There were so many normal types of situations that even the advanced rulebooks (like Matrix, etc) didn't even mention. I had to develop house rules for all kinds of normal situations. My play group spent hours flipping through sourcebooks trying to find something, ANYTHING that made sense.
I wish the FanPro people well on this. I'll probably pick up the 4th edition rules to support people making stuff for the Shadowrun universe, but any further purchases, and whether I bother running a Shadowrun campaign ever again I've got a lot of doubt about.
I'm not necessarily talking about giving your money to the current GNOME devs to do it (though it's an option...if it works for political donations, why can't it work for Open source software project donations...support them to get what you want out of it).
I'm talking about hiring outside coders to extend the GNOME functionality in the way you want. Get some people, set up a simple website to solicit donations to the project, determine someone who will hire the coder, get the contract set up, and find the right coder to write the code you want.
There are a lot of unemployed or underemployed coders out there. If there are a significant amount of people who need/want a feature that the Gnome dev team refuses to implement, pool your resources and hire a developer to write an extension to Gnome. You can submit the patch, your group and the less underemployed coder get the credit, and you get the feature you want. Even if the Gnome team doesn't accept it, nothing stops you from using it and distributing it.
Developers that are getting paid to work on GNOME are beholden to those that pay them. Yeah, they're working on an Open Source project, but by taking money for their time, the people paying them get to direct their coding. Unpaid developers are beholden to themselves and themselves alone. That's the way it should be. If you don't like it, you need to literally put your money where your mouth is. As has been said many times before, free software only costs nothing if the time spent developing it is worth nothing.
I'm sure they're going to use it against other antivirus companies as well, but I'd bet money this was put in the works a while ago to protect Symantecs extremely lucrative virus protection business against being wiped away by Microsoft, who has been making noises about releasing its own virus software for a while now.
I wouldn't be surprised if Symantec refuses to allow Microsoft to obtain a license to the patent no matter how much money Micrsoft offers. One might hope tactics like this would convince businesses that software patents are a bad idea, but what they are more likely going to do is make businesses do more of the same so they can have simmilar dominance over this or that market segment.
Hell, this is even a really good reason to outsource software development to foreign coders. They aren't encumbered by software patents, and if you're only using the generated code internally, it's a lot harder to prove patent violations.
This isn't the obnoxious advertising clause. At worst it's the "slightly growing file size after each person adds something" clause, as it doesn't require the copyright notice to be displayed in any particular place, just included.
No, I can't. All the more reason to not ascribe pure motives by default to anyone, especially "persons" built from legal constructs and run by committee like corporations.
History may forgive me if my best friend, whom I've known for years, who's family I know well, etc, takes advantage of my trust and screws me over. However, trusting a corporation you know comparatively nothing about will get you nothing but people laughing at you (including me) for being so naive. The "corporation" has been proven untrustworthy since the days of the East India Company.
Since when have devotees of one particular fighting game, never mind the creator of one, done anything but heap derision on the heads of all those witless enough that they don't bow in the presence of My Fighting Game X?
Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat. Tekken vs. Virtua Fighter (before DoA happened) Street Fighter vs. KoF...dreckcetera, dreckcetera.
The guy who created competing fighting game franchise, Dead or Alive thinks Tekken is for sissies. Well blow me down!
Me, I don't care for DoA, and have been playing Tekken 5 all weekend, but this is just stupid fanboyism. Itagaki can say whatever damn fool thing he feels like, for all I care. Any Tekken fanboys getting up in arms about him are just giving him and his game more press.
If governments bothered to see the long term benefit of spending money on research of all kinds (like the US government did during the "space race") then it could easily offset the loss of privately funded research.
Guns, Tax breaks, and pork barrel projects are generally a lot easier to get passed, unfortunately.
First, Microsoft can inform you of what operating systems it is guaranteed to run on. It cannot legally enforce this, directly or indirectly, without violating anti-trust laws regarding product bundling.
Microsoft is not enforcing what operating systems Microsoft Office will run on. It is enforcing what operating systems it will provide an automatic update service to. Microsoft is not forced to allow anyone to use a service, otherwise AOL would be sued every time they tried to stop third party AIM clients from accessing the AIM service. As yet, Microsoft has not stopped WINE users from installing downloaded updaters. When that happens, you might have a point.
See "Intentional Interference With Prospective Economic Advantage" for more information.
Informative, but I don't see anything that damns Microsoft outright. Microsoft might argue that companies selling software intended to allow people to use licensed software intended to be used on Windows without needing to buy Windows as "intentional interference with prospective economic advantage" as well.
What Microsoft is basically doing is refusing to offer support for their software running on any system they don't advertise the product working with. This is the same reason that if I call up Apple for support getting my iPod working under Linux, they're going to hang up the phone on me.
Microsoft isn't obliged to allow their automated update tools to function under WINE. They aren't even obliged to allow seperately downloaded updaters to work under WINE. The software you're updating is advertised to run on Windows only and you're not running it on Windows. Microsoft isn't breaking any rules, and whining about it just wastes oxygen
Either work on getting around the block, buy a copy of Windows, or work on switching over to one of the free software suites. Donate some money to the Open Office, KOffice, or AbiWord projects. I'm sure they can use all the cash they get, and it will help them add more and more useless features to the software so the pointy-haired types will be more impressed with them.
Those people attacking Mr. Gorman are certainly stripped of any reasonable credibility by their name-calling. However, Mr. Gorman's credibility on the topic is just as damaged by his use of the exact same tactics to strike back at his detractors.
I do not disagree with his assessments of Google and the "blogosphere" as being not very useful to dedicated researchers. For the sake of reference, I avoid web logs for the same reasons I avoid online discussion forums...they are a waste of my time. Yes, Slashdot is a waste of my time, but everyone can use a good vice or two.
I do disagree with him failing to take his own advice, and contributing to the "polluting" the databases of the publicly available search engines with the same kind of drivel he accuses the blogosphere of joyfully producing. Your command of the English language, your reading list, and your personal research habits do make your "article" any less worthless.
In a subscription service YOU WILL NEVER GET TO KEEP THE SONGS.
It depends on the subscription. Audible.com has a subscription plan where you get two audio books per month for $20/month. Your choice of book, and I haven't found a book no matter how long that counted as more than a single selection.
I've cancelled my subscription a couple times and went for long periods without it and I've always been able to download the audiobooks I recieved on the subscription plan as many times as I felt like. Their software allows CD burning (even through iTunes), and I've ripped the CDs it creates to MP3 just fine.
Admittedly it's a fairly special case as the subscription in effect gives those subscribed to it a ridiculous discount on specifically purchased books, but it is a subscription nonetheless.
If you consider that any song that is ripped from original media instead of being downloaded from the iTunes store is a potential loss of revenue for Apple, then you can see how Steve would be against the idea.
If that was the way they viewed it, why on god's green earth would Apple include CD-Ripping software in iTunes?
I heard that the Beverly offices were only a QA center and no software actually got developed there? I know someone who's father worked there about a year ago and that's what he implied.
Not sure I'd call a QA location a "studio" per se. Unless they mean studio in the sense of studio apartment.
So it's just been an administrative shell for a year? Makes sense to close it down if nothing at all happens there.
Slashdot Mirror
But when a random number generator decides whether you get the really valueable weapon you can sell for $50 or some piece of crap loot, or a couple gold pieces, that IS gambling.
You're playing the equivalent of craps.
No, Sony is running a commodity exchange with this, not "selling software".
The commodity is control of items on game servers. If the NASDAQ or NYSE unilaterally delisted a stock or did some other action that killed its value that didn't follow they'd be facing so many lawsuits so fast they'd drill a mile into the earth's crust, they'd be spinning so fast.
Students who have a GPA of lower than 2.6 must find education somewhere else (vocational schools, private schools, etc.)
The problem is, the number of jobs that vocational training actually gets you these days are dwindling at an extremely fast rate here, and in many other "western" countries. Yeah, it'd be easy enough to push low ability/performing students into a vocational system, but the vocational system doesn't train them for anything like the modern world, so you're not exactly making them any more useful to society in any way by forcing them into the vocational "system". They'll be even more unemployable, and even more likely to turn to criminal/underground methods of putting food on their tables than they already are, because they'll be officially labled "No Hopers".
And as far as private schools go, just about anyone who can afford to send their children to a private school already does (save in extremely wealthy areas). Most of the people who don't send their children to private schools won't be able to afford it if their children are forced to leave the public system.
And as far as emulating the Soviet system of education, yes, it produced a very high quality cream off the top, undoubtably, but looking at the rest of society in most of the post-Soviet countries, I don't think shitting that many kids out of the system without a real place to put them did anything but encourage the rampant corruption and organized crime that are crippling those countries today. Some of the former republics made it out OK. Most have not. I'd think long and hard before emulating anything in such a system.
If the radio drama, or the books is what you consider the ultimate perfect expression of the Hitchhiker's series, why in the world are you even considering watching the movie in the first place?
If you're so high strung that someone retelling a story you like in a manner you don't like drives you to this much insanity, you're really losing it. Do you actually think all the movie tie-in merchandise is going to be rewritten to conform to the book? No! When people go to Barnes & Noble, or Borders, or Amazon when they want the movie tie-in book, they're going to get the actual original book, and wonder of wonders, they're going to actually read what you like! Or buy a copy of the radio play and hear in their car on their way to work, or rip it to their iPod.
Jeepers creepers people, get your heads out of your asses.
Excuse me, if slashdot is so goddamned useless because of the dupes, why the hell are you still using it?
You and all those like you who constantly whine and bitch and moan about all the dupes making your life hell are just plain pathetic. I don't believe a word of any of it. Bitching for bitching's sake, and if I cared at all about the moderation system (I don't and have opted out of moderating) I'd save all the mod points I ever recieved on modding down you whiners.
Good fucking Christ, people get a fucking life. It's people like you, with nothing useful to contribute to a discussion other than the fact that someone already brought this topic up before that make slashdot more and more usless, not duplicate articles.
I would rather have a distribution that contains the software I want to use, and much of that software is part of the GNOME project.
I'll take the software I use over software I don't want to use.
The dead and buried Application Service Provider industry called from beyond the grave. They want their idea back.
Let me qualify the subject line with the fact that I'm a great fan of the Shadowrun universe. I'm hoping and praying that Microsoft gets off it's rear and lets someone produce a Shadowun MMORPG, because it would certainly have my gaming dollars.
That said, the Shadowrun 3rd edition rules are the most convoluted and obscure RPG rules I've ever had to work with. That's not to say that they're worse than earlier versions of the Shadowrun rules. The first and second editions are even worse, and can be broken in so many ways (as a bored game store owner friend of mine went into hideous detail about one night). However, unless you know the relevant rulebooks inside and out, you are going to have a devil of a time finding the relevant rules. FASA has a horrible reputation for piss poor editing in its books. In some of the older FASA releases, page references are wildly wrong, or completely nonexistant (one popular and hard to find book has all page references as "Page: xx") or even mentioning rules that just plain don't exist.
I ran a Shadowrun campaign for, I believe about a year, approximately a year ago. Page references were just wrong on more than one occasion. Rule sections were unclear. Whole categories of (at least in my game) often happening situations were completely untouched upon, or mentioned only in passing. I'm not averse to house rules, but i like to at least try to see what the game system's rule for a situation is, and see if it made sense. There were so many normal types of situations that even the advanced rulebooks (like Matrix, etc) didn't even mention. I had to develop house rules for all kinds of normal situations. My play group spent hours flipping through sourcebooks trying to find something, ANYTHING that made sense.
I wish the FanPro people well on this. I'll probably pick up the 4th edition rules to support people making stuff for the Shadowrun universe, but any further purchases, and whether I bother running a Shadowrun campaign ever again I've got a lot of doubt about.
I'm not necessarily talking about giving your money to the current GNOME devs to do it (though it's an option...if it works for political donations, why can't it work for Open source software project donations...support them to get what you want out of it).
I'm talking about hiring outside coders to extend the GNOME functionality in the way you want. Get some people, set up a simple website to solicit donations to the project, determine someone who will hire the coder, get the contract set up, and find the right coder to write the code you want.
There are a lot of unemployed or underemployed coders out there. If there are a significant amount of people who need/want a feature that the Gnome dev team refuses to implement, pool your resources and hire a developer to write an extension to Gnome. You can submit the patch, your group and the less underemployed coder get the credit, and you get the feature you want. Even if the Gnome team doesn't accept it, nothing stops you from using it and distributing it.
Developers that are getting paid to work on GNOME are beholden to those that pay them. Yeah, they're working on an Open Source project, but by taking money for their time, the people paying them get to direct their coding. Unpaid developers are beholden to themselves and themselves alone. That's the way it should be. If you don't like it, you need to literally put your money where your mouth is. As has been said many times before, free software only costs nothing if the time spent developing it is worth nothing.
That the U.S. isn't as bad as the slashdotters say, and Canada isn't so great?
You're only half right. Canada isn't so great.
I'm not a citizen of a European country. My signature on that document means nothing, no matter how much I agree.
I'm sure they're going to use it against other antivirus companies as well, but I'd bet money this was put in the works a while ago to protect Symantecs extremely lucrative virus protection business against being wiped away by Microsoft, who has been making noises about releasing its own virus software for a while now.
I wouldn't be surprised if Symantec refuses to allow Microsoft to obtain a license to the patent no matter how much money Micrsoft offers. One might hope tactics like this would convince businesses that software patents are a bad idea, but what they are more likely going to do is make businesses do more of the same so they can have simmilar dominance over this or that market segment.
Hell, this is even a really good reason to outsource software development to foreign coders. They aren't encumbered by software patents, and if you're only using the generated code internally, it's a lot harder to prove patent violations.
This isn't the obnoxious advertising clause. At worst it's the "slightly growing file size after each person adds something" clause, as it doesn't require the copyright notice to be displayed in any particular place, just included.
Can you?
No, I can't. All the more reason to not ascribe pure motives by default to anyone, especially "persons" built from legal constructs and run by committee like corporations.
History may forgive me if my best friend, whom I've known for years, who's family I know well, etc, takes advantage of my trust and screws me over. However, trusting a corporation you know comparatively nothing about will get you nothing but people laughing at you (including me) for being so naive. The "corporation" has been proven untrustworthy since the days of the East India Company.
Since when have devotees of one particular fighting game, never mind the creator of one, done anything but heap derision on the heads of all those witless enough that they don't bow in the presence of My Fighting Game X?
...dreckcetera, dreckcetera.
Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat.
Tekken vs. Virtua Fighter (before DoA happened)
Street Fighter vs. KoF
The guy who created competing fighting game franchise, Dead or Alive thinks Tekken is for sissies. Well blow me down!
Me, I don't care for DoA, and have been playing Tekken 5 all weekend, but this is just stupid fanboyism. Itagaki can say whatever damn fool thing he feels like, for all I care. Any Tekken fanboys getting up in arms about him are just giving him and his game more press.
If governments bothered to see the long term benefit of spending money on research of all kinds (like the US government did during the "space race") then it could easily offset the loss of privately funded research.
Guns, Tax breaks, and pork barrel projects are generally a lot easier to get passed, unfortunately.
First, Microsoft can inform you of what operating systems it is guaranteed to run on. It cannot legally enforce this, directly or indirectly, without violating anti-trust laws regarding product bundling.
Microsoft is not enforcing what operating systems Microsoft Office will run on. It is enforcing what operating systems it will provide an automatic update service to. Microsoft is not forced to allow anyone to use a service, otherwise AOL would be sued every time they tried to stop third party AIM clients from accessing the AIM service. As yet, Microsoft has not stopped WINE users from installing downloaded updaters. When that happens, you might have a point.
See "Intentional Interference With Prospective Economic Advantage" for more information.
Informative, but I don't see anything that damns Microsoft outright. Microsoft might argue that companies selling software intended to allow people to use licensed software intended to be used on Windows without needing to buy Windows as "intentional interference with prospective economic advantage" as well.
IANAL, etc.
What Microsoft is basically doing is refusing to offer support for their software running on any system they don't advertise the product working with. This is the same reason that if I call up Apple for support getting my iPod working under Linux, they're going to hang up the phone on me.
Microsoft isn't obliged to allow their automated update tools to function under WINE. They aren't even obliged to allow seperately downloaded updaters to work under WINE. The software you're updating is advertised to run on Windows only and you're not running it on Windows. Microsoft isn't breaking any rules, and whining about it just wastes oxygen
Either work on getting around the block, buy a copy of Windows, or work on switching over to one of the free software suites. Donate some money to the Open Office, KOffice, or AbiWord projects. I'm sure they can use all the cash they get, and it will help them add more and more useless features to the software so the pointy-haired types will be more impressed with them.
...then there aren't any.
Those people attacking Mr. Gorman are certainly stripped of any reasonable credibility by their name-calling. However, Mr. Gorman's credibility on the topic is just as damaged by his use of the exact same tactics to strike back at his detractors.
I do not disagree with his assessments of Google and the "blogosphere" as being not very useful to dedicated researchers. For the sake of reference, I avoid web logs for the same reasons I avoid online discussion forums...they are a waste of my time. Yes, Slashdot is a waste of my time, but everyone can use a good vice or two.
I do disagree with him failing to take his own advice, and contributing to the "polluting" the databases of the publicly available search engines with the same kind of drivel he accuses the blogosphere of joyfully producing. Your command of the English language, your reading list, and your personal research habits do make your "article" any less worthless.
When your game is a national pastime, you make money no matter how old it is.
Notice that the bulk of the changes in this patch are implementing a Korean-character interface.
In a subscription service YOU WILL NEVER GET TO KEEP THE SONGS.
It depends on the subscription. Audible.com has a subscription plan where you get two audio books per month for $20/month. Your choice of book, and I haven't found a book no matter how long that counted as more than a single selection.
I've cancelled my subscription a couple times and went for long periods without it and I've always been able to download the audiobooks I recieved on the subscription plan as many times as I felt like. Their software allows CD burning (even through iTunes), and I've ripped the CDs it creates to MP3 just fine.
Admittedly it's a fairly special case as the subscription in effect gives those subscribed to it a ridiculous discount on specifically purchased books, but it is a subscription nonetheless.
If you consider that any song that is ripped from original media instead of being downloaded from the iTunes store is a potential loss of revenue for Apple, then you can see how Steve would be against the idea.
If that was the way they viewed it, why on god's green earth would Apple include CD-Ripping software in iTunes?
I heard that the Beverly offices were only a QA center and no software actually got developed there? I know someone who's father worked there about a year ago and that's what he implied.
Not sure I'd call a QA location a "studio" per se. Unless they mean studio in the sense of studio apartment.
So it's just been an administrative shell for a year? Makes sense to close it down if nothing at all happens there.
One of my customers just installed it and now whenever she opens "an application" the fans go into overdrive mode.
Not sure what exactly she means by "an application" but this should be something to watch out for for any of you with G5 iMacs.