This affects a lot of people - even if you don't bank with Royal Bank but your employer does then you will be affected. The HR manager where I work sent out a bulletin today that should apply to anyone affected by this situation:
---- All financial institution are on line with this issue, mortgage or automatic debit payments, will be honored, should anyone be charged interest , advise your bank,the Royal Bank will refund the charges.
All financial institution will advance cash based on an employee presenting a pay stub, they will not advance the full amount of the pay stub , they will however provide cash for the weekend. ----
Yes. Let's all "ignore" opposing viewpoints becuause that's the best way to win the debate - not to mention it's a lot more mature. Besides, the average slashdot reader is clueless, uninformed and not capable of critical analysis so we don't want them to see anything that might dissuade them from the "correct" view.
"My gf uses AOL and her inbox is full of this shit daily. I would rather not see SEXUALLY EXPLICIT 100x over and over again as I scroll down the list."
Does your girlfriend know you're reading her email? Let's hope she doesn't read slashdot, you might not have a girlfriend for much longer.:)
Eeehh... so what's your point exactly? They don't allow porn... because porn isn't banned in the US or anywhere else... consequently they're afraid of being boycotted for funding some... thing....
Whatever.
Anyway I seriously doubt they're afraid of boycotts. What large company is, in this day and age? The world has been conquered my friend. The general public doesn't care enough about anything anymore and they don't boycott anything anymore because everyone wants to have their cake and eat it. If boycotts worked then Monsanto would be bankrupt, Tibet would be free, and there would be no ducks with oil-soaked feathers.
The only thing they're afraid of is not attracting investors, and investors want a "sure thing" with little to no risk and nothing that looks like it will attract legal attention. And THAT is why PayPal doesn't fund online-vice and open source projects which could 'potentially' enable said vice.
There really are people who believe this stuff. And forget the pseudo-science, just having a dumb story in the media, ANY media, is enough to convince a lot of people.
As much as I desperately want to believe that most people are fairly intelligent and take this stuff with a large grain of salt (like a salt block) I continually meet people who absolutely stun me with their gullability (stupidity is too mean a word, but perhaps more applicable?).
I have an Uncle who was absolutely convinced that the Mars rover had snapped a picture of a "Martian Cat" with big "martian-looking" eyes and then thought for sure the government was covering it up by removing all the copies of the "World Weekly News" from the stands before anyone else could buy a copy. The obvious fact that the store sold out is perhaps even more depressing though. Who buys that crap? Oh yeah, my Uncle.
You don't maintain your own programs then, do you?
I've had to maintain programs written by developers who, like you apparently, separated out the maintainability aspects from their concept of "well-written" code.
Well written code does not mean written fast - it means the next guy down the line, after you've moved on and forgotten about it, can easily follow the logic and make changes with minimal effort. GOTO's almost never facilitate this. Please trust your peers on this - it's been debated often enough and long enough by those in the know that it's no longer a subject for reasonable debate. In fact, defending the use of GOTO usually shows one of two things: 1) Inexperience -or- 2) Old Age (meaning the behaviour is so ingrained one simply can't comprehend anything different).
Of course, I'm assuming you have the option to not use GOTO. If the language you use has no control structors other than Jumps and Labels, then obviously you have no choice. But I would argue that even if that's the case, you're probably using an old language for one of two reasons: 1) Not experienced with anything else -or- 2) Too old and stubborn to move on to anything else (meaning the behviour is so ingrained that you probably sit alone in the corner pumping out Cobol not even aware that you were laid off months ago and replaced by the Janitor who took a crash course in Javascript).;)
Re:The flagship...
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The only way the d8 could possible hurt you more than the d4 is if it was standing end-to-end along the longest axis which isn't very likely. Any other position it's still inherently unstable and will probably rock when you stand on it so that you step on a long dull 'edge' rather an a pointy corner. The stable little d4 just naturally falls anywhere with a pointy corner aiming straight up. It hasn't got anywhere to go but into your foot no matter how flat the corners are. What's even more readily apparent however, is my need for a life. Mine has sucked ever since my friends grew up and stopped playing D&D. Now all I do is spend my days waiting to argue with people about dice on slashdot. *sigh*
On the flip side you don't want movies rendered stupid because they were too afraid to stray from the original storyline. The story should be altered as appropriate to fit the media. What makes a good comic/game/novel, doesn't always makes a good movie. For example. imagine what spider-man would have been like if he rambled on philosophically during the fighting sequences in the movie as much as he does in many of the comics. Or better yet, imagine the confusion the average non-Tolkien reading movie-goer would have felt trying to sit through the enigma that is Tom Bombadil had it not been mercifully excluded. Having said that, I do so hate it when, as you say, the movie deviates so much from the original storyline as to share name only. But this happens even within the same media. Who here truly considers the new Battlestar Galactica an honest remake of the original? A good director, like PJ, can take the elements from the original media that are crucial to the spirit of the story and craft it in such a way that the new product keeps the spirit even if many of the details are changed or missing.
Why is this "belittling" spiel modded as insightful? Why? What is insightful about saying "it could always get worse". Would it be insightful to say "Hey, dude, you should be greatful you only have siphilus, cause, man at least you don't have Aids".
The only thing worse than cliche advice like that is the attitude that anyone should just suck it all up because at they don't have it half as bad as someone else. Does it make the problem go away? No. Does it offer strategies on how to deal with the problem? No. All if is, if anything, is an excuse for someone, with grand notions of their own self-importance, to belittle someone else.
Here's another reality check: You getting shot at is the risk you take when you join the Army and given Americas glorious record of imposing themselves willy nilly on anyone smaller than them you can hardly say it was a risk you weren't aware of - so don't you dare come galloping in on your high horse like some brave mighty warlord and talk down to the rest of us about the meaninglessness of our problems because "hey, at least we don't have to risk getting blown".
Now if I can only get her to quit forwarding me those retarded chain letters we'll be all set.
When she's not looking, install a mail filter on *her* outbound port. Have it automatically reply with a generic canned acknowledgement from you: "Ha ha. thanks ma. How's dad?", and everyone else in the recpientlist: "Stop sending me this crap!".
I'm assuming you're talking about PLCs and SCADA systems - which are typically custom designed for the job/client. There's a big difference between that and the backdoors in those kinds of systems that apparently your customer knew about, and this Cisco bulletin. This is much larger in scale with a large well-known company and a large staff (potential spilly-talkers) and affects perhaps thousands of customers who did not know they had backdoors. Consequently the security implications are much more severe. If I have access to the custom built PLC in , say, a sewer pumping station - whoopdeedoo.. sure I can cause damage but my ability to cause damage is likely limited to that particular system and the information is probably damned hard to come by (I would hope). Plus I thinks it's safe to say I'd be a lot easier to catch since there's probably only a very limited hand full of people who ever had access to it in the first place.
This is the ultimate in inconsiderate selfishness. The name you give a child is the name that child is going to be stuck with, at least until they're old enough to change it to something sensible. Children are not 'possessions' or baubles that hang around as a display of your status or in this case you 'geekiness'. Consequently the name you give a child is something very serious and deserving of every bit of consideration you can give it and more. With more idiots like this naming their children in the same way they would name a pet or even a car, I would not be surprised to see more lawsuits in the future by offspring pissed off at their parents for the lifetime of humiliation heaped upon them by these inconsiderate jerkwads who don't deserve the title of 'parent'. You don't think it'll happen? There's already cases of young men suing their parents over being circumcised - a very common practice until recently. A child's name is NOT a joke. Grow the hell up!
To put it into perspective. "Prince Michael" might not be old enough to care right now, but once he's a young adult, do you think he's really going to appreciate the amount of consideration is self-obsessed ass-wipe of a father gave his name?
At last look, they're sitting on something like 36 billion in cash reservces. That's a large amount of money - too large to fit into my brain so let's compare that to something reasonable.
Let's say you have 36 dollars in your pocket. This fine takes away 62 cents. You still have $35.38 cents. Assuming that the money isn't just sitting in a locked safe but is invested in T-bills, bonds, stocks, etc... they'll make that back in interest/dividends whatever in the time it takes them to write the cheque to the EU.
A cash fine means nothing to MS - Any meaningful punishment has to take the form of limitations imposed upon their business practices itself - above and beyond requiring them to merely comply with law.
Forget the super extended version trilogy - wait until after the Hobbit is released and get the super duper extended quadrilogy. (which will still be obsoleted if/when PJ tackles the Silmarilion).
But wouldn't the best protection be no protection in this case. My fear isn't that a MS AVS is going to put McCaffee and Symantec out of business, my real fear is that it will be the creation of yet another Windows based Monoculture.
One company with the vast majority of the AVS business might not create enough competition to combat viruses. For example, would they jump to fight off viruses that only infect non-MS (ie competitor) applications? Or would they leave it to the competitor to fix. It "should" be two pronged, but I doubt that it would be. Would certain competitor applications inexplicably set off virus alarms? So what if they turn around later and say they goofed - in the meantime that competitor application has been removed from thousands of desktops by paranoid moms who didn't know any better.
With a monoculture under Microsofts control, what alternative would we have if McCaffee and Symantic et al in the meantime all went under?
It seems almost twilight-zonish the reponses to this article today - a LOT of people defending MicroSofts right to include this software rather than bashing them over it. I don't think they're necessarily wrong, but c'mon - MicroSoft has not exactly earned anyone's "trust". If things were different and MS hadn't pulled the crap they did in the past I might not feel the way I do now - but the fact is I simply do not trust this company.
So why is no protection better than this MS protection? Precisely because with no protection at least the 'greater public' is not at the mercy of a Monoculture that does NOT have the consumer's best interests at heart. (Not saying that other AVS company's do - but at least they're busy beating each other over the heads fighting for the consumer's hearts and minds).
But this all might be moot anyway. Another poster seems sure that MS isn't providing their own AVS, simply the ability to integrate existing ones more tightly into the OS.
On the flip side, maybe the same companies will try to mitigate their losses by porting their software to Linux. Ok yeah, I know... Linux doesn't suffer from viruses, etc to anywhere near the same extent and even then they would be different viruses to boot. But as it gains popularity its only a matter of time and the free ones that come with the distributions uh... well.. nevermind.
Part of the 'answer' is in the article itself. As the artical states, the times have changed. When the comanche was first initiated it was to counter soviet threats. Well... the Soviet Union is no longer a threat. And modern threats have other less expensive solutions. So I don't think this is an example of a stupid decision at all. What's stupid would have been to continue pumping money into a project that has no purpose whether it was ready for production or not.
I'm too lazy to look, but this isn't the first time slashdot has covered some yahoo with a grudge blasting Sun over not releasing Java to the public domain or whatever.
I consider myself a "Java Developer" by profession. I switched years ago and have avoided C++ ever since. I love Java because it ISN'T C++. And I can't help but feel that Sun's control over Java is what has kept it from degenerating into a mess like C++.
As another poster has mentioned, everything you want to know about Java's internals and source code is there for anyone who wants to look.
About the only thing you can't do is break standard's compliance and still claim to be Java and thank god for that. If Java was not under Sun's control then there would have been no recourse against MicroSoft for pulling that stunt.
How many companies have been taken to task for claiming to have a C, C++, Pascal, Fortran, Cobol - you name it compiler that wasn't standards compliant? When's the last time you wrote a non-trivial program using VisualC++ that compiled and ran out of the box on Linux EVEN with strict standards compliance turned on? Yeah, a lot of it's library issues and not language itself, but with Java everyone has access to the same rich library, and with few exception, most third party libraries are fully cross-platform as well (at least if they claim %100 pure Java).
Thank god for Java and thank god for Sun's control over it. The JSR is enough openess we need.
Can't disagree with you more if I tried. What you are basically saying is "Hey you, you hobby programmer! Stop doing that thing that you're doing because you're having fun and do something else that you might not enjoy as much but is at least not done yet by somebody else. And do it quick dammit if you wanna beat MS someday. Whaddya mean you don't give a rat's a**?"
There's a lot of duplicated effort because Linux is very much still a hobby OS for many people. To tell them to get organized and contribute to existing projects is like asking someone to not build a Lego Tie-fighter because a million other people have already done it.
I could not care less if Linux isn't on everyone's desktop. I use Linux for the things I use it for and will continue to use it for those things whether Bill Gates becomes dictator-for-life of the Universe or not.
Besides, one of the biggest problems with MS isn't that Windows sucks, its the "monoculture" of Windows Software and hence that fact that there's no alternative to it sucking. Would a Linux momoculture be any better in the long run?
Seriously, you and all the posters who replied to you and complain about this same thing are completely missing the point. NWN is not a traditional single-player cRPG. Comparing it to Baldur's Gate is like comparing elephants to orangutans. They're simply not the same thing. Do you bi8ch about your tax software because you can't use it to write a letter to grandma? NO! Complaining that NWN isn't as good as BG is almost the same thing.
Right from the outset BioWare made it well known to anyone who cared to listen that NWN was about bringing PnP D&D to the computer. Hence the total hackibility of the game. I remember a talk they gave at the University of Alberta back when BG1 was still on the shelves: NWN was going to the game that brought traditional D&D to the computer: Nothing more nothing less.
The campaigns that are included are there just to get you up and going - the real juice is playing online, on a server with a "Dungeon Master" guiding your adventure. If you like the single player experience better, then there are other games, though you really don't need to look further than NWN Vault for some great single player modules.
But NWN has never hyped has the ultimate single player game and wasn't intended to be anything like Baldur's Gate. Everything about NWN is designed with the module creator and DM's in minde: For example, the terrain graphics aren't nearly as pretty as BG2, but that's because the average DM isn't going to be a graphics artists, hence the simpler tile based system. Somebody complained about the dialogs not being as in depth as BG2: again - simpler system so that the real creators (you and I) aren't intimidated from using the toolset (although the dialogs CAN be very involved if you put your mind to it)
The idiot who replied to you saying he will never play another BioWare game because NWN wasn't the single player experience he wanted is really a bonehead indeed. BioWare is one the few (only?) software companies out there that seems to genuinely care about the quality of their games. And how many game companies do you know make the investment they did into supporting Linux. The only reason they didn't do it sooner was because of the hastles from their licensers. You want to boycott somebody, boycott Bethesda: Now THERE is a company that could learn a thing or to about quality.
One of NWN goal's is to put content creation in the hands of the players. Granted, you have to be a pretty hard-core fan to spend time creating content rather than playing but then NWN is more directed to trying to capture as much of the feel and flexibility of PnP D&D as possible. This includes the ability to mod the hell out of it. Try doing that with BG. I'm not sure why you think that doesn't go far enough. NWN and Morrowind have spoiled me - I now hesitate to buy any PC game that does not have built in modding capability. Lack of story-line? Whatever - I can create my own and that's the whole point of NWN. If this isn't your cup of tea, then well... sorry, you didn't like it. But I would strongly encourage you to see the game for what it is meant to be rather than compare it to something it wasn't intended to be, and head over to NWN Vaults to try some of the userland mods created by strong story tellers with Waaaaaaay too much time on their hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you try suing?
This affects a lot of people - even if you don't bank with Royal Bank but your employer does then you will be affected. The HR manager where I work sent out a bulletin today that should apply to anyone affected by this situation:
----
All financial institution are on line with this issue, mortgage or automatic debit payments, will be honored, should anyone be charged interest , advise your bank,the Royal Bank will refund the charges.
All financial institution will advance cash based on an employee presenting a pay stub, they will not advance the full amount of the pay stub , they will however provide cash for the weekend.
----
Yes. Let's all "ignore" opposing viewpoints becuause that's the best way to win the debate - not to mention it's a lot more mature. Besides, the average slashdot reader is clueless, uninformed and not capable of critical analysis so we don't want them to see anything that might dissuade them from the "correct" view.
"My gf uses AOL and her inbox is full of this shit daily. I would rather not see SEXUALLY EXPLICIT 100x over and over again as I scroll down the list."
:)
Does your girlfriend know you're reading her email? Let's hope she doesn't read slashdot, you might not have a girlfriend for much longer.
Eeehh... so what's your point exactly? They don't allow porn... because porn isn't banned in the US or anywhere else... consequently they're afraid of being boycotted for funding some... thing....
Whatever.
Anyway I seriously doubt they're afraid of boycotts. What large company is, in this day and age? The world has been conquered my friend. The general public doesn't care enough about anything anymore and they don't boycott anything anymore because everyone wants to have their cake and eat it. If boycotts worked then Monsanto would be bankrupt, Tibet would be free, and there would be no ducks with oil-soaked feathers.
The only thing they're afraid of is not attracting investors, and investors want a "sure thing" with little to no risk and nothing that looks like it will attract legal attention. And THAT is why PayPal doesn't fund online-vice and open source projects which could 'potentially' enable said vice.
No, our tax dollars go to torturing and murdering Somalis instead. Guns. Stress. Poor leadership. Shit happens.
But, it is damned cold here though. Supposed to snow tonight, goddammit!
There really are people who believe this stuff. And forget the pseudo-science, just having a dumb story in the media, ANY media, is enough to convince a lot of people.
As much as I desperately want to believe that most people are fairly intelligent and take this stuff with a large grain of salt (like a salt block) I continually meet people who absolutely stun me with their gullability (stupidity is too mean a word, but perhaps more applicable?).
I have an Uncle who was absolutely convinced that the Mars rover had snapped a picture of a "Martian Cat" with big "martian-looking" eyes and then thought for sure the government was covering it up by removing all the copies of the "World Weekly News" from the stands before anyone else could buy a copy. The obvious fact that the store sold out is perhaps even more depressing though. Who buys that crap? Oh yeah, my Uncle.
You don't maintain your own programs then, do you?
;)
I've had to maintain programs written by developers who, like you apparently, separated out the maintainability aspects from their concept of "well-written" code.
Well written code does not mean written fast - it means the next guy down the line, after you've moved on and forgotten about it, can easily follow the logic and make changes with minimal effort. GOTO's almost never facilitate this. Please trust your peers on this - it's been debated often enough and long enough by those in the know that it's no longer a subject for reasonable debate. In fact, defending the use of GOTO usually shows one of two things:
1) Inexperience -or-
2) Old Age (meaning the behaviour is so ingrained one simply can't comprehend anything different).
Of course, I'm assuming you have the option to not use GOTO. If the language you use has no control structors other than Jumps and Labels, then obviously you have no choice. But I would argue that even if that's the case, you're probably using an old language for one of two reasons:
1) Not experienced with anything else -or-
2) Too old and stubborn to move on to anything else (meaning the behviour is so ingrained that you probably sit alone in the corner pumping out Cobol not even aware that you were laid off months ago and replaced by the Janitor who took a crash course in Javascript).
The only way the d8 could possible hurt you more than the d4 is if it was standing end-to-end along the longest axis which isn't very likely. Any other position it's still inherently unstable and will probably rock when you stand on it so that you step on a long dull 'edge' rather an a pointy corner. The stable little d4 just naturally falls anywhere with a pointy corner aiming straight up. It hasn't got anywhere to go but into your foot no matter how flat the corners are. What's even more readily apparent however, is my need for a life. Mine has sucked ever since my friends grew up and stopped playing D&D. Now all I do is spend my days waiting to argue with people about dice on slashdot. *sigh*
Forget Zelda man... what about the Pac-Man cartoons?
On the flip side you don't want movies rendered stupid because they were too afraid to stray from the original storyline. The story should be altered as appropriate to fit the media. What makes a good comic/game/novel, doesn't always makes a good movie. For example. imagine what spider-man would have been like if he rambled on philosophically during the fighting sequences in the movie as much as he does in many of the comics. Or better yet, imagine the confusion the average non-Tolkien reading movie-goer would have felt trying to sit through the enigma that is Tom Bombadil had it not been mercifully excluded.
Having said that, I do so hate it when, as you say, the movie deviates so much from the original storyline as to share name only. But this happens even within the same media. Who here truly considers the new Battlestar Galactica an honest remake of the original?
A good director, like PJ, can take the elements from the original media that are crucial to the spirit of the story and craft it in such a way that the new product keeps the spirit even if many of the details are changed or missing.
Why is this "belittling" spiel modded as insightful? Why? What is insightful about saying "it could always get worse". Would it be insightful to say "Hey, dude, you should be greatful you only have siphilus, cause, man at least you don't have Aids".
The only thing worse than cliche advice like that is the attitude that anyone should just suck it all up because at they don't have it half as bad as someone else. Does it make the problem go away? No. Does it offer strategies on how to deal with the problem? No. All if is, if anything, is an excuse for someone, with grand notions of their own self-importance, to belittle someone else.
Here's another reality check: You getting shot at is the risk you take when you join the Army and given Americas glorious record of imposing themselves willy nilly on anyone smaller than them you can hardly say it was a risk you weren't aware of - so don't you dare come galloping in on your high horse like some brave mighty warlord and talk down to the rest of us about the meaninglessness of our problems because "hey, at least we don't have to risk getting blown".
Now if I can only get her to quit forwarding me those retarded chain letters we'll be all set.
When she's not looking, install a mail filter on *her* outbound port. Have it automatically reply with a generic canned acknowledgement from you: "Ha ha. thanks ma. How's dad?", and everyone else in the recpientlist: "Stop sending me this crap!".
I'm assuming you're talking about PLCs and SCADA systems - which are typically custom designed for the job/client. There's a big difference between that and the backdoors in those kinds of systems that apparently your customer knew about, and this Cisco bulletin. This is much larger in scale with a large well-known company and a large staff (potential spilly-talkers) and affects perhaps thousands of customers who did not know they had backdoors. Consequently the security implications are much more severe. If I have access to the custom built PLC in , say, a sewer pumping station - whoopdeedoo.. sure I can cause damage but my ability to cause damage is likely limited to that particular system and the information is probably damned hard to come by (I would hope). Plus I thinks it's safe to say I'd be a lot easier to catch since there's probably only a very limited hand full of people who ever had access to it in the first place.
This is the ultimate in inconsiderate selfishness. The name you give a child is the name that child is going to be stuck with, at least until they're old enough to change it to something sensible. Children are not 'possessions' or baubles that hang around as a display of your status or in this case you 'geekiness'. Consequently the name you give a child is something very serious and deserving of every bit of consideration you can give it and more. With more idiots like this naming their children in the same way they would name a pet or even a car, I would not be surprised to see more lawsuits in the future by offspring pissed off at their parents for the lifetime of humiliation heaped upon them by these inconsiderate jerkwads who don't deserve the title of 'parent'. You don't think it'll happen? There's already cases of young men suing their parents over being circumcised - a very common practice until recently. A child's name is NOT a joke. Grow the hell up!
To put it into perspective. "Prince Michael" might not be old enough to care right now, but once he's a young adult, do you think he's really going to appreciate the amount of consideration is self-obsessed ass-wipe of a father gave his name?
In spite of this, Canadian television has yet to produce a domestic hit television series, and virtually all our recording artists flee to the states.
The Beachcombers, Man!!! The Beachcombers!!!
Oh, and for you thirty-something canadians in the crowd, just when you thought the Beachcombers was safely dead and forgotten.... *shudder*
At last look, they're sitting on something like 36 billion in cash reservces. That's a large amount of money - too large to fit into my brain so let's compare that to something reasonable.
Let's say you have 36 dollars in your pocket. This fine takes away 62 cents. You still have $35.38 cents. Assuming that the money isn't just sitting in a locked safe but is invested in T-bills, bonds, stocks, etc... they'll make that back in interest/dividends whatever in the time it takes them to write the cheque to the EU.
A cash fine means nothing to MS - Any meaningful punishment has to take the form of limitations imposed upon their business practices itself - above and beyond requiring them to merely comply with law.
Forget the super extended version trilogy - wait until after the Hobbit is released and get the super duper extended quadrilogy. (which will still be obsoleted if/when PJ tackles the Silmarilion).
But wouldn't the best protection be no protection in this case. My fear isn't that a MS AVS is going to put McCaffee and Symantec out of business, my real fear is that it will be the creation of yet another Windows based Monoculture.
One company with the vast majority of the AVS business might not create enough competition to combat viruses. For example, would they jump to fight off viruses that only infect non-MS (ie competitor) applications? Or would they leave it to the competitor to fix. It "should" be two pronged, but I doubt that it would be. Would certain competitor applications inexplicably set off virus alarms? So what if they turn around later and say they goofed - in the meantime that competitor application has been removed from thousands of desktops by paranoid moms who didn't know any better.
With a monoculture under Microsofts control, what alternative would we have if McCaffee and Symantic et al in the meantime all went under?
It seems almost twilight-zonish the reponses to this article today - a LOT of people defending MicroSofts right to include this software rather than bashing them over it. I don't think they're necessarily wrong, but c'mon - MicroSoft has not exactly earned anyone's "trust". If things were different and MS hadn't pulled the crap they did in the past I might not feel the way I do now - but the fact is I simply do not trust this company.
So why is no protection better than this MS protection? Precisely because with no protection at least the 'greater public' is not at the mercy of a Monoculture that does NOT have the consumer's best interests at heart. (Not saying that other AVS company's do - but at least they're busy beating each other over the heads fighting for the consumer's hearts and minds).
But this all might be moot anyway. Another poster seems sure that MS isn't providing their own AVS, simply the ability to integrate existing ones more tightly into the OS.
On the flip side, maybe the same companies will try to mitigate their losses by porting their software to Linux. Ok yeah, I know... Linux doesn't suffer from viruses, etc to anywhere near the same extent and even then they would be different viruses to boot. But as it gains popularity its only a matter of time and the free ones that come with the distributions uh... well.. nevermind.
Part of the 'answer' is in the article itself. As the artical states, the times have changed. When the comanche was first initiated it was to counter soviet threats. Well... the Soviet Union is no longer a threat. And modern threats have other less expensive solutions. So I don't think this is an example of a stupid decision at all. What's stupid would have been to continue pumping money into a project that has no purpose whether it was ready for production or not.
I'm too lazy to look, but this isn't the first time slashdot has covered some yahoo with a grudge blasting Sun over not releasing Java to the public domain or whatever.
I consider myself a "Java Developer" by profession. I switched years ago and have avoided C++ ever since. I love Java because it ISN'T C++.
And I can't help but feel that Sun's control over Java is what has kept it from degenerating into a mess like C++.
As another poster has mentioned, everything you want to know about Java's internals and source code is there for anyone who wants to look.
About the only thing you can't do is break standard's compliance and still claim to be Java and thank god for that. If Java was not under Sun's control then there would have been no recourse against MicroSoft for pulling that stunt.
How many companies have been taken to task for claiming to have a C, C++, Pascal, Fortran, Cobol - you name it compiler that wasn't standards compliant? When's the last time you wrote a non-trivial program using VisualC++ that compiled and ran out of the box on Linux EVEN with strict standards compliance turned on? Yeah, a lot of it's library issues and not language itself, but with Java everyone has access to the same rich library, and with few exception, most third party libraries are fully cross-platform as well (at least if they claim %100 pure Java).
Thank god for Java and thank god for Sun's control over it. The JSR is enough openess we need.
Can't disagree with you more if I tried.
What you are basically saying is "Hey you, you hobby programmer! Stop doing that thing that you're doing because you're having fun and do something else that you might not enjoy as much but is at least not done yet by somebody else. And do it quick dammit if you wanna beat MS someday. Whaddya mean you don't give a rat's a**?"
There's a lot of duplicated effort because Linux is very much still a hobby OS for many people. To tell them to get organized and contribute to existing projects is like asking someone to not build a Lego Tie-fighter because a million other people have already done it.
I could not care less if Linux isn't on everyone's desktop. I use Linux for the things I use it for and will continue to use it for those things whether Bill Gates becomes dictator-for-life of the Universe or not.
Besides, one of the biggest problems with MS isn't that Windows sucks, its the "monoculture" of Windows Software and hence that fact that there's no alternative to it sucking. Would a Linux momoculture be any better in the long run?
But I hear what you're saying.
Seriously, you and all the posters who replied to you and complain about this same thing are completely missing the point. NWN is not a traditional single-player cRPG. Comparing it to Baldur's Gate is like comparing elephants to orangutans. They're simply not the same thing. Do you bi8ch about your tax software because you can't use it to write a letter to grandma? NO! Complaining that NWN isn't as good as BG is almost the same thing.
Right from the outset BioWare made it well known to anyone who cared to listen that NWN was about bringing PnP D&D to the computer. Hence the total hackibility of the game. I remember a talk they gave at the University of Alberta back when BG1 was still on the shelves: NWN was going to the game that brought traditional D&D to the computer: Nothing more nothing less.
The campaigns that are included are there just to get you up and going - the real juice is playing online, on a server with a "Dungeon Master" guiding your adventure. If you like the single player experience better, then there are other games, though you really don't need to look further than NWN Vault for some great single player modules.
But NWN has never hyped has the ultimate single player game and wasn't intended to be anything like Baldur's Gate. Everything about NWN is designed with the module creator and DM's in minde: For example, the terrain graphics aren't nearly as pretty as BG2, but that's because the average DM isn't going to be a graphics artists, hence the simpler tile based system. Somebody complained about the dialogs not being as in depth as BG2: again - simpler system so that the real creators (you and I) aren't intimidated from using the toolset (although the dialogs CAN be very involved if you put your mind to it)
The idiot who replied to you saying he will never play another BioWare game because NWN wasn't the single player experience he wanted is really a bonehead indeed. BioWare is one the few (only?) software companies out there that seems to genuinely care about the quality of their games. And how many game companies do you know make the investment they did into supporting Linux. The only reason they didn't do it sooner was because of the hastles from their licensers. You want to boycott somebody, boycott Bethesda: Now THERE is a company that could learn a thing or to about quality.
One of NWN goal's is to put content creation in the hands of the players. Granted, you have to be a pretty hard-core fan to spend time creating content rather than playing but then NWN is more directed to trying to capture as much of the feel and flexibility of PnP D&D as possible. This includes the ability to mod the hell out of it. Try doing that with BG. I'm not sure why you think that doesn't go far enough. NWN and Morrowind have spoiled me - I now hesitate to buy any PC game that does not have built in modding capability. Lack of story-line? Whatever - I can create my own and that's the whole point of NWN. If this isn't your cup of tea, then well... sorry, you didn't like it. But I would strongly encourage you to see the game for what it is meant to be rather than compare it to something it wasn't intended to be, and head over to NWN Vaults to try some of the userland mods created by strong story tellers with Waaaaaaay too much time on their hands.