As for DRM ending fair use: why do you say that? There are ways to get "fair use" clips from purchased video without breaking the DRM; video screencaps comes immediately to mind (an approach that is awkward for converting an entire 30-minute show or 90-minute movie but quite reasonable for a 40-second clip).
Having to jump through hoops to enjoy my fair use rights is hardly a fair replacement. And good luck pulling off screencaps in the future when your operating system, video player, video card, and monitor are all conspiring through HDCP and similar technologies to keep you as far from that stream as possible. You'll be reduced to pointing a video camera at your screen.
The goal is to convince most people that DRM isn't really a big problem. "See you can add music from iTunes to your family movies in iMovie! Isn't that swell?" It's easy, as the number of people who need more access are pretty small. Once most people have bought into it, mainstream media will cease to be available in non-DRMed form. Most people won't notice as the common case will work. But the guy trying to assemble small clips from a variety of sources to show, say, trends in violence in movies, is out of luck. Fair Use will cease to exist for all practical purposes, replaced with What the Publishers Allows.
In fact, DRM doesn't do anything at all if you don't try to do something wrong like copy iTunes music to someone else's account.
Or extract small excerpts in the original quality for critical purposes. Or listen to the music on my MP3 player without further degradation of quality. Or watch an iTunes video on my Linux laptop. Few people want such functionality, but those examples are legal*, ethical, and prohibited by the DRM in iTunes.
You're buying into the DRM proponent's mindset. "Well, it doesn't get in my way, so clearly it's okay." Content providers pushing DRM want that idea to become popular. Once a sizable majority believe DRM is okay, non-DRM versions of things will no longer be available. The subset of people who need or want the rights that DRM blocks will be out of luck. You're agreeing to trade someone else's existing freedoms in exchange for nothing, or at best a promise to keep generating more content**. That's a pretty bad deal for society as a whole. Maybe it's a good deal for you, since you're trading off someone else's freedom.
* Legal excepting the presence of DRM and the DMCA, which is of course the point of this discussion.
** Those DRM-proponents who claim the market for creative works will dry up if there is no DRM show just how little faith they actually have in the free market. People want original content and are willing to pay for it. Creators want money and can created original content. Something will be worked out. The real people screaming for DRM are publishers who are afraid that they'll be cut out as unnecessary middlemen.
I don't know about Python, but Perl and more recent versions of PHP are not interpreted. They are compiled to opcodes and then the opcodes are executed.
Have you ever considered how those opcodes are executed? I assure you that in the common case the generated opcodes are not native instructions for your CPU.
If by interpreted you mean, "parsing each line of code as it's needed" and by not interpreted you mean "on startup compiling the code to an intermediate representation that is more efficient", I suppose it is true that Perl, Python, and PHP are not interpreted. But I'd be shocked if that wasn't true for Ruby as well.
Let's take as a given the claim that OpenOffice is 10 years behind Microsoft Office. So what?
Maybe OpenOffice isn't ready for people build applications inside of Microsoft Office. Maybe it's not ready for those people who actually use the more powerful features in MS Office. But the majority of MS Office users barely scratch the capabilities of it. The majority are using the subset of the features that were present in 1995! Legions of office employees don't spend the time to learn how to use an office suite to its full extent. Microsoft is handing them a tank when they need a bicycle. These people would be just as well served with OpenOffice.
"It would seem that Telltale games is releasing games in an 'episodic' format, which conveniently makes them more money. I can only assume the same will apply to their Sam and Max game, which can surely only be a bad thing."
Which conveniently makes them money more quickly. They're making adventure games, a genre mainstream gaming has labelled as dead. They're lucky to have gotten what investment money they did. Up to this point they lacked the funding to do an entire game in one shot. Episodic releases means they could create part of a game, sell it, making some money, and use that money to make more of the game.
I'm not fond of it, but given the sad state of the adventure gaming market it seems shortsighted to begrudge their business model. While I'd prefer to buy a complete game at once, if this gets me more and better adventure games that's hardly "only a bad thing."
I don't really see your point. That's much better value than you get at the cinema (and the game is replayable), so what's the big deal?
That's a false comparision. Half-Life 2 Episode 1 isn't up against movies. It's up against other video games who can potentially offer a better dollars per fun-hour ratio. $5 per hour is pretty expensive for video games. Suggesting that it's all okay by comparing it to movies is as silly as suggesting that both movies (about $4/hour locally) and video games are grossly overpriced because I assuming a moderately regular play schedule I can enjoy myself for about $0.37/hour (Assuming a $90 investment, 2 year lifespan, playing about 30 times a year for 4 hours a game).
The reality is that different forms of entertainment are not interchangable. I've happily paid $125 for 3 hours of entertainment; that doesn't mean I'm willing to pay $400 for a game I expect to play for ten hours.
Even assuming we can compare such forms of entertainment, it's hardly a clear win. The proposed Half-Life pricing is roughly $5/hour. Locally I pay around $4/hour for first run movies. If I'm willing to catch a matinee, I can pay about $3/hour. Budget theatres after a few months: $1/hour. Rental: $1/hour, assuming one other person watches it with me. When I purchase a first person shooter, I'm hoping for about 15 hours of gameplay in exchange for $50; roughly $3.50/hour. At $5/hour Half-Life Episode 1 is expensive. However, if it's as good or better than HL2, I'm willing to consider it.
In many ways a framework's restrictions (often in the form of implicit assumptions) and how the framework treat you when you decide to break a restriction is more important than the feature set provided.
If you're building a project of any significant complexity, you're eventually going to bump into a wall in your framework. You want to do something one way, but the framework doesn't. Some frameworks will totally block you from rolling your own solution; the framework can't cope with code not strongly tied into the framework. Some frameworks will let you roll your old solutions, but yank most or all of the tools you've been leveraging in the framework. From experience, using a powerful framework's Model-View-Controller system, then having to reimplement significant portions from scratch because the framework can't cope with the user interface you want to provide is a nightmare.
Do not confuse yourself, all the OpenSource applications that are worth something are product of some kind of closed source (for profit) application whose corporation saw more value in it as PR stunt than as software product.
"All" is a strong word. Sure, there is Eclipse. Which many people use to develop C and C++, typically using Stallman's baby gcc. There is MySQL, but who is MySQL's biggest free competitor? The equally open Postgress, born as a research project. Out curiousity, where is the corporation that created the very effective GIMP? Maybe the GIMP isn't ready to replace Photoshop for many professionals, but for the millions of people tweaking their family photos or making simple web pages it's more powerful than tools like Photoshop Elements. Like Apple's browser, Safari? Built on top of KHTML, the core KDE's Konqueror. Need a freely available multi-protocol instant messenger client? GAIM is quite popular, even in Windows. Need a printing system powerful enough that Apple adopted it as their standard? How about CUPS?
That some useful applications came from corporations doesn't mean all did.
So, the transition would take a lot of time - and losing maybe two years of forward progress on this would most likely kill MySQL, market-wise.
Part of the reason MySQL succeeded in the first place is that for huge numbers of small or mid-level users, databases are a solved problem. Sure, faster is better, but any modern database is Good Enough. MySQL lagged in significant functionality befind Postgres for years, but MySQL was Good Enough (and happened to be easier to set up that Postgres) so people deployed it. Maybe its not Enterprise worthy, but if it's good enough to drive Slashdot, it's good enough for lots and lots of real world uses. MySQL's advancement may be delayed, it may not break into larger scale projects quite as quickly, but it's hardly going to kill MySQL. The only thing that might kill MySQL is if more powerful databases become and easy to deploy. Even then, MySQL's mindshare so powerful, I doubt it. Why experiment with someone new that promises features you've never noticed were missing when you can keep using what is known to work. This same mindset allowed Internet Explorer to coast for years and even now Firefox faces an uphill battle.
Repeating cliche arguments against swearing doesn't make them true.
People do not swear to try and simplify language. People swear to indicate extreme emotions. People swear to provide emphasis. In some cases certain swear words have gained traction replacing other, similarly simple words. I assure you that "Fucker" isn't replacing, "a terribly rude person who was clearly raised incorrectly." If people want to simplify language, they can do so without resorting to swear words. Sure, heavy use of "fucker" doesn't make you look terribly intelligent, but neither does other overuses of words. A few obvious examples include the "valley girl" use of "like" or the west coast use of "dude."
You're picking the easy and obvious target. Unfortunately it's the wrong target. If you're really so concerned about the simplification of the English language you've got a much harder task than worrying about some obscenities. Those people who frequently swear have much more fundamental issues than their particular selection of words.
Children don't become addicted to swear words because obscenities are easier. Children use swear words because they're taboo. If anything, but being so upset about it you're making it more appealing for children and those with childlike mindsets.
"Do you really need a bleeding-edge gaming machine to run Linux ?"
I don't understand what your point is. I don't have a bleeding-edge gaming machine. I have a very powerful desktop workstation that I run Linux on. It just happens that the key difference between "powerful workstion" and "powerful gaming machine" is a good video card. Even a cheap, mainstream video card would turn it into a solid, if unexceptional gaming machine. I've already made up my mind to run Linux on that machine; that I could use Cedega to run games on it as well is a bonus. I can't be the only person in this situation, otherwise Transgaming would have gone out of business years ago.
As for the rest of your post about why people don't develop for Linux, agreed, but it seems massively off topic. The entire point of Cedega is to not wait for game developers to support Linux. Many people criticize Transgaming suggesting that it's hurting the chances of developers natively supporting Linux.
Re:The ass-backwards solution
on
Cedega 5.1 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
"I hate to yank everyone back to reality here, but if you can't get your favorite Windoze games to run with Cedega, and you REALLY want to play those games, why not dedicate a true gaming PC running XP and not munge your clean Linux system with all this patchy crap ? Yes it costs money, but Cedega costs money, and games cost money. You have to pay to play. Either that or invest in an Xbox/Playstation."
So with Cedega, for $60 per year, I can use my existing Linux PC which is well decked out with lots of RAM, a fast CPU, and a nice video card. As an added bonus I'm supporting WINE development.
I could convert my box into a dual boot box, but then I'll have to pay for Windows ($268, respent every few years as new Windows releases come out), I have to put up with the nuisance of rebooting, and any services my PC provides are unavailable while in Windows.
I could, as you suggest, purchase a dedicated gaming PC. For something roughly equivalent to my Linux PC, I'd be looking at about $700 (respent every few years either in upgrades or replacements), assuming I'll reused the monitor from my Linux PC. And I'll need to find space for the extra machine.
I could buy an XBox or Playstation (I'd hardly call a piece of commodity electronics an "investment"), but I've been having problems getting World of Warcraft, Civ 4, City of Heroes, and Warcraft III running on either platform.
For some people Cedega is a very reasonable option. Encouraging people to spend money unnecessarily is stupid. Many people can be perfectly happy with Cedega and end up saving money. Personally it isn't for me (I play too many games, so I suffer with the dual boot option), but I'm not sneering at people who make that choice. You're not yanking people back to reality, you're ignoring reality.
Depends on the user. The GIMP probably isn't ready for most people doing graphic design, art book layout, and the like. However, the vast majority of Photoshop users barely touch its power. You've got people tweaking their family photos in Photoshop. They've never calibrated their monitor and printer. They aren't aware of the existance of the more suitable Photoshop Elements, and even if they were why would they buy it? They didn't pay for Photoshop, they're happily using their copyright infringing copy. They got Photoshop by borrowing the discs from work get having it installed by their geek friend. You've got people doing online work who will never need CMYK. You've got small town newspapers who've also never done calibration and rely on their reporters to prepare images for final output. (On the last one, I know such a reporter. She didn't like the GIMPs interface, but once she tried GIMPShop, she was perfectly happy. It does everything that Photoshop did for her.)
I suspect that for the majority of Photoshop users that the GIMP is a suitable replacement. It shouldn't even bug Adobe since most of those users didn't pay for Photoshop in the first place.
You're not fairly depicting the situation. Let's take a look at the source in question. Sadly the SVN server seems to be crushed at the moment, but this is representative. The filename is "gncmod-tax-us.c". The header reads "module definition/initialization for us tax info" Conclusion: this isn't a module intended for general consumption, but is US specific.
So, what's German tax information doing in there? Let's look a little further into the file where this exact same technique is repeated in another function...
This is a very simple hack that loads the (new, special) German
tax definition file in a German locale, or (default) loads the
previous US tax file. */
A clear answer: this is a hack not really intended for general consumption. I'm guessing someone is experimenting with integrating the German data, but it isn't quite ready yet. LOCALE_SPECIFIC_TAX may be a "this is under development and will hopefully eventually work, but not now" setting. Little unused hackery and experiments live in most mainstream code, commented or #ifdefed out. It's fairly common in proprietary software because the end user has little to no chance of learning that they're there.
It looks like this little hack is present, if no enabled, in the trunk of their repository. That's not good and it should probably be removed (or marked more clearly so it doesn't accidentally ship). But it's hardly a Major Problem.
I am not thrilled about this but given the wedding of the browser rendering component and the rest of the user experience ("OS"), i can't say i am surprised.
While not surprising, it's still crap.
The core flaw is that under Windows you can't delete a file that is in use. The accepted solution is to set up a little script to run on reboot that deletes the file and replaces it with the new version. That's sad and stupid.
The Unix solution allowing you to delete an in use file solves the problem. It has its own weaknesses (as long as any process holds a file open, it chews up disk space), but at least you can upgrade even low level libraries (which is all the IE libraries are) without a reboot.
On the flip side, the arguments against used games are equally sound, particularly from a developer standpoint.
No, no they're not. "Capitalism is hard" is not a sound argument.
Somehow the print publishing industry has managed to survive libraries and used book stores. The music industry managed to survive used record and CD stores. The movie industry has managed to survive video rental stores selling their old stock. The automotive industry has managed to survive used car sales.
Stop whining and start figuring out how you're going to compete.
I bought a mini just before they were discontinued, but my other friends have bought the 20 gig, 40 gig, and nano versions of the ipod. None of their purchases came with rubberized earbuds that form a seal in the ear, all of them are regular bud types with the slip-on foam covers. So what are these earbuds you're talking about? Are they even sold by Apple? Made by Apple?
He might be talking about these earbud headphones. They don't come with foam covers. The grey part you can see at the end is rubber or a similar material. (The grey rubber part is also replacable; the set comes with three different sizes.) I don't know if they form a "seal" when used, but they're pretty snug. While not the earbuds that come with the iPod, they're Apple products and specifically sold as being for iPods.
That said, I agree it's a silly case and have no worries about it. It'll be thrown out reasonably promptly.
Google was slow and frequently unavailable in China. Google wanted to set up shop in China to provide a better service for the Chinese people. To do so, they had to accept Chinese laws. The only other option Google has was to not go into China at all. If doing business with China is so horrible, instead of picking on Google let's take some serious steps and block all business with China. Otherwise you're just posturing. China has a repressive regime that suppresses free speech. Any business we do with China supports that regime. Unless you think that perhaps a little captalism is good for China, sowing the seeds of freedom, in which case Google's behavior is identical.
(That said, it's one thing to do censoring as required by the government. It's an entirely different thing to rat out someone critizing the Chinese government, as Yahoo stands accused of.)
It may be a brilliant piece of technology, but they really need to reconsider their marketing materials. They suggest that basic touch typing has an average speed of 50 WPM, while their expensive keyboard replacement offers "up to" 50 WPM. As someone who types in the area of 80 WPM, that's not sounding like a compelling replacement for a laptop or desktop keyboard.
I wouldn't buy it to actually *press* the keys. I'd be more interested in programming the displays to show something useful.
The preorder price is $100. For that you get 3 96x96 screens. 27,648 pixels at about $0.0036 per pixel. Have you instead considered a cheap 15" LCD monitor? You can get a 1024x768 display for $160. 786,432 pixels at about $0.0002 per pixel. Even buying a cheap PCI video card to drive it doesn't drive the cost per pixel up much. That seems like a better deal.
The mini-Optimus is cute, but just doesn't seem terribly useful for any but the most specialized of applications (maybe buttons on a soda machine or similar application).
The full Optimus keyboard is an interesting idea because it extends something I already have on my desk. Adding a little crappy monitor doesn't seem like much of a win when for a little bit more I can add a full blown second monitor.
Good point. Come to think of it, the Constitution is silent on exactly what a free "press" or free "speech" is. Can the government pass laws requiring you to show ID or otherwise identify yourself when posting on the internet or making a phone call? After all, you'll still be free to speak in person or print physical newsletters.
Christ, there are valid reasons to criticize Google (the China thing is pretty bad), but you're verging on making crap up.
"removing content, from Google News sources": Google's always had a policy of not indexing things people don't want indexed. That's not evil, that's polite. Agence France Presse is shooting itself in the foot by not being indexed by Google News, but hey, that's their point.
"Google Print caving in to publishers legal threats": Did you read the article. This is temporary. Google is continuing to fight for the right to index books in the courts. Having to wait until the court case is finished is annoying, but is hardly Google actively being evil.
"DMCA complaints": Google's just obeying the law. The law is bad. To try and show that the law is bad, Google is working with Chilling Effects to document the cases, specifically provides links to the takedown notices with contain the links in question. Maybe it would better if Google were to break the law, but I'm hard pressed to call someone attempting to protest a bad law to the extent possible "evil." At worst they've simply failed to be as good as they could be.
The government is going to win this case. It's a business, not a real person, all the arguments Google can make against the government holding the information the government could make against Google themselves holding it.
What are you talking about? Google, as a company, is legally free to collect and keep whatever data it likes. Google didn't force other companies to hand over data; they collected it themselves from users who voluntarily visited Google. The government is also free to collect the data it likes (within the limitations of the fourth amendment). But the government has no particular grounds to force Google to cough up Google's collection of information. Google is not charged with any crime. The government isn't seeking the information in regards to a specific crime. Those are reasons for a supeona. Fishing expeditions hoping to find something to justify a law that the Supreme Court is already pretty ticked at is hardly grounds for search and seizure.
If they would have been smart and just never recorded searches in the first place (which they do on the Google Search Appliance) then this wouldn't have been a big deal.
Records of search results (at very least in the form of standard webserver log files) are a useful and powerful tool for optimizing your web service and debugging problems. Sometimes it's useful to be able to compare what people are search for from, say, a year ago to today's results. I would expect any major online service to keep at least a year's logs, and the government's request was for data within that year.
I'm also betting Google's Search Appliance does keep all sorts of interesting logs. Of course, those log probably aren't shipped off to Google, which is appropriate since the data would proprietary to the company which paid for the appliance.
IMHO, their response should not have been "No, we will not give you that information." it should have been, "No, we do not record that information." I've been using Yahoo's streamlined search at http://search.yahoo.com/ now for the last two months, but this alone would be enough to make me switch if I hadn't already. I loathe MSN's search, but I've found Yahoo's to be nice enough that I just never enable cookies.
You know that your dear friend Yahoo (and MSN) when confronted with identical subpeonas from the government turned over the information without any challenge, right? Google has flaws, maybe even serious ones, but they're certainly trying harder than their competitors.
I think Internet searching at the same place that you hold an active email account is probably the worst thing you could possibly do for privacy right now. And it doesn't matter who it is.
What a strange thing to obsess over as the worst thing for ones privacy. First, while disassociating your email from your searches will make you slightly harder to track down, any search engine still has your IP address and when you contacted. If there was a serious legal case, that information could be used to contact your ISP and track you down. Add in some cookies and other data mining techniques and your gain is pretty minimal. And is Google knowing what searches you're making really that much worse than, say, your credit card company knowing everything you purchase on your credit card?
So you're saying they should just _lie_ to the Chinese government? Or perhaps shirk off and do a poor job of doing what they said they could do? Neither of those gets them out of the hypocrisy hole.
While I don't think overt lieing to China is a reasonable option, I would maintain that it would not be hypocritical in light of their "Do no evil" motto. Sometimes it's more moral to lie than not. "Are you aware of any runaway slaves hiding in the area?" "Are you aware of any Jews hiding in the area?" "Are you aware of any Tutsis hiding in this area?" I'll agree that enslaving or killing people is far worse than denying them free speech or access to a free press, but my point is that it's possible to lie and being doing the moral thing. Lieing to authorities to preserve access to free speech would seem like "Do no evil" to me. Of course, I'm not banking on Google doing that.
I'm sorry I don't see what is wrong with obeying the laws of a country in which you do business.
You're seriously suggesting that there are no laws so fundamentally immoral that to obey them would be evil? Prior to the US Civil War, one was legally obligated to turn in runaway slaves. I would suggest that following that law was more wrong than breaking the law. In Nazi Germany it was illegal to conceal Jews. Again, I'd suggest that obeying that law would be wrong. Ratting out your fellow filmmakers as "communists", even if you have no evidence they would ever hard America, was once the law of the land. I would suggest that those who refused to testify before McCarthy's Unamerican Activities Commision at the cost of their own careers were often more more than those who ratted out men guilty of nothing more than being interested other economic and political models.
Laws are not morality. Sometimes it's more moral to break the law. Sometimes it more moral to hold yourself to a higher standard than the law.
Freedom of speech is not the same thing as torture; I think it is indeed up to a country to decide for itself what level of speech can be tolerated (even in the US, there are a lot of things you can't say).
We're not talking about "Fire!"-in-a-theater. We're talking oppression of political speech. It's illegal to say that you should have freedom of speech. The citizens of China hardly decided for themselves that they like the level of freedom they have; it was imposed on them. Indeed, the powers in control of China restrict freedom of speech and freedom of the press specifically to keep people from knowing what life can be like with more freedoms.
Google is accepting this top-down order, helping to conceal information that many of the Chinese populous would like access to. By doing so Google is helping the bad guys, giving them more legitimacy. Maybe it's the right thing to do; maybe giving people access to more information, albet filtered, is better than totally cutting them off. However, one could make the case that if all of the major search engines refused to filter that it would provide incentive for China to open up or lose out on valuable tools in this information age (I'm not holding my breath, but it's possible.) It's hardly an obvious choice.
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Having to jump through hoops to enjoy my fair use rights is hardly a fair replacement. And good luck pulling off screencaps in the future when your operating system, video player, video card, and monitor are all conspiring through HDCP and similar technologies to keep you as far from that stream as possible. You'll be reduced to pointing a video camera at your screen.
The goal is to convince most people that DRM isn't really a big problem. "See you can add music from iTunes to your family movies in iMovie! Isn't that swell?" It's easy, as the number of people who need more access are pretty small. Once most people have bought into it, mainstream media will cease to be available in non-DRMed form. Most people won't notice as the common case will work. But the guy trying to assemble small clips from a variety of sources to show, say, trends in violence in movies, is out of luck. Fair Use will cease to exist for all practical purposes, replaced with What the Publishers Allows.
Or extract small excerpts in the original quality for critical purposes. Or listen to the music on my MP3 player without further degradation of quality. Or watch an iTunes video on my Linux laptop. Few people want such functionality, but those examples are legal*, ethical, and prohibited by the DRM in iTunes.
You're buying into the DRM proponent's mindset. "Well, it doesn't get in my way, so clearly it's okay." Content providers pushing DRM want that idea to become popular. Once a sizable majority believe DRM is okay, non-DRM versions of things will no longer be available. The subset of people who need or want the rights that DRM blocks will be out of luck. You're agreeing to trade someone else's existing freedoms in exchange for nothing, or at best a promise to keep generating more content**. That's a pretty bad deal for society as a whole. Maybe it's a good deal for you, since you're trading off someone else's freedom.
* Legal excepting the presence of DRM and the DMCA, which is of course the point of this discussion.
** Those DRM-proponents who claim the market for creative works will dry up if there is no DRM show just how little faith they actually have in the free market. People want original content and are willing to pay for it. Creators want money and can created original content. Something will be worked out. The real people screaming for DRM are publishers who are afraid that they'll be cut out as unnecessary middlemen.
Have you ever considered how those opcodes are executed? I assure you that in the common case the generated opcodes are not native instructions for your CPU.
If by interpreted you mean, "parsing each line of code as it's needed" and by not interpreted you mean "on startup compiling the code to an intermediate representation that is more efficient", I suppose it is true that Perl, Python, and PHP are not interpreted. But I'd be shocked if that wasn't true for Ruby as well.
Maybe OpenOffice isn't ready for people build applications inside of Microsoft Office. Maybe it's not ready for those people who actually use the more powerful features in MS Office. But the majority of MS Office users barely scratch the capabilities of it. The majority are using the subset of the features that were present in 1995! Legions of office employees don't spend the time to learn how to use an office suite to its full extent. Microsoft is handing them a tank when they need a bicycle. These people would be just as well served with OpenOffice.
OpenOffice is ready for most users today.
Which conveniently makes them money more quickly. They're making adventure games, a genre mainstream gaming has labelled as dead. They're lucky to have gotten what investment money they did. Up to this point they lacked the funding to do an entire game in one shot. Episodic releases means they could create part of a game, sell it, making some money, and use that money to make more of the game.
I'm not fond of it, but given the sad state of the adventure gaming market it seems shortsighted to begrudge their business model. While I'd prefer to buy a complete game at once, if this gets me more and better adventure games that's hardly "only a bad thing."
That's a false comparision. Half-Life 2 Episode 1 isn't up against movies. It's up against other video games who can potentially offer a better dollars per fun-hour ratio. $5 per hour is pretty expensive for video games. Suggesting that it's all okay by comparing it to movies is as silly as suggesting that both movies (about $4/hour locally) and video games are grossly overpriced because I assuming a moderately regular play schedule I can enjoy myself for about $0.37/hour (Assuming a $90 investment, 2 year lifespan, playing about 30 times a year for 4 hours a game).
The reality is that different forms of entertainment are not interchangable. I've happily paid $125 for 3 hours of entertainment; that doesn't mean I'm willing to pay $400 for a game I expect to play for ten hours.
Even assuming we can compare such forms of entertainment, it's hardly a clear win. The proposed Half-Life pricing is roughly $5/hour. Locally I pay around $4/hour for first run movies. If I'm willing to catch a matinee, I can pay about $3/hour. Budget theatres after a few months: $1/hour. Rental: $1/hour, assuming one other person watches it with me. When I purchase a first person shooter, I'm hoping for about 15 hours of gameplay in exchange for $50; roughly $3.50/hour. At $5/hour Half-Life Episode 1 is expensive. However, if it's as good or better than HL2, I'm willing to consider it.
In many ways a framework's restrictions (often in the form of implicit assumptions) and how the framework treat you when you decide to break a restriction is more important than the feature set provided. If you're building a project of any significant complexity, you're eventually going to bump into a wall in your framework. You want to do something one way, but the framework doesn't. Some frameworks will totally block you from rolling your own solution; the framework can't cope with code not strongly tied into the framework. Some frameworks will let you roll your old solutions, but yank most or all of the tools you've been leveraging in the framework. From experience, using a powerful framework's Model-View-Controller system, then having to reimplement significant portions from scratch because the framework can't cope with the user interface you want to provide is a nightmare.
"All" is a strong word. Sure, there is Eclipse. Which many people use to develop C and C++, typically using Stallman's baby gcc. There is MySQL, but who is MySQL's biggest free competitor? The equally open Postgress, born as a research project. Out curiousity, where is the corporation that created the very effective GIMP? Maybe the GIMP isn't ready to replace Photoshop for many professionals, but for the millions of people tweaking their family photos or making simple web pages it's more powerful than tools like Photoshop Elements. Like Apple's browser, Safari? Built on top of KHTML, the core KDE's Konqueror. Need a freely available multi-protocol instant messenger client? GAIM is quite popular, even in Windows. Need a printing system powerful enough that Apple adopted it as their standard? How about CUPS?
That some useful applications came from corporations doesn't mean all did.
Part of the reason MySQL succeeded in the first place is that for huge numbers of small or mid-level users, databases are a solved problem. Sure, faster is better, but any modern database is Good Enough. MySQL lagged in significant functionality befind Postgres for years, but MySQL was Good Enough (and happened to be easier to set up that Postgres) so people deployed it. Maybe its not Enterprise worthy, but if it's good enough to drive Slashdot, it's good enough for lots and lots of real world uses. MySQL's advancement may be delayed, it may not break into larger scale projects quite as quickly, but it's hardly going to kill MySQL. The only thing that might kill MySQL is if more powerful databases become and easy to deploy. Even then, MySQL's mindshare so powerful, I doubt it. Why experiment with someone new that promises features you've never noticed were missing when you can keep using what is known to work. This same mindset allowed Internet Explorer to coast for years and even now Firefox faces an uphill battle.
People do not swear to try and simplify language. People swear to indicate extreme emotions. People swear to provide emphasis. In some cases certain swear words have gained traction replacing other, similarly simple words. I assure you that "Fucker" isn't replacing, "a terribly rude person who was clearly raised incorrectly." If people want to simplify language, they can do so without resorting to swear words. Sure, heavy use of "fucker" doesn't make you look terribly intelligent, but neither does other overuses of words. A few obvious examples include the "valley girl" use of "like" or the west coast use of "dude."
You're picking the easy and obvious target. Unfortunately it's the wrong target. If you're really so concerned about the simplification of the English language you've got a much harder task than worrying about some obscenities. Those people who frequently swear have much more fundamental issues than their particular selection of words.
Children don't become addicted to swear words because obscenities are easier. Children use swear words because they're taboo. If anything, but being so upset about it you're making it more appealing for children and those with childlike mindsets.
I don't understand what your point is. I don't have a bleeding-edge gaming machine. I have a very powerful desktop workstation that I run Linux on. It just happens that the key difference between "powerful workstion" and "powerful gaming machine" is a good video card. Even a cheap, mainstream video card would turn it into a solid, if unexceptional gaming machine. I've already made up my mind to run Linux on that machine; that I could use Cedega to run games on it as well is a bonus. I can't be the only person in this situation, otherwise Transgaming would have gone out of business years ago.
As for the rest of your post about why people don't develop for Linux, agreed, but it seems massively off topic. The entire point of Cedega is to not wait for game developers to support Linux. Many people criticize Transgaming suggesting that it's hurting the chances of developers natively supporting Linux.
So with Cedega, for $60 per year, I can use my existing Linux PC which is well decked out with lots of RAM, a fast CPU, and a nice video card. As an added bonus I'm supporting WINE development.
I could convert my box into a dual boot box, but then I'll have to pay for Windows ($268, respent every few years as new Windows releases come out), I have to put up with the nuisance of rebooting, and any services my PC provides are unavailable while in Windows.
I could, as you suggest, purchase a dedicated gaming PC. For something roughly equivalent to my Linux PC, I'd be looking at about $700 (respent every few years either in upgrades or replacements), assuming I'll reused the monitor from my Linux PC. And I'll need to find space for the extra machine.
I could buy an XBox or Playstation (I'd hardly call a piece of commodity electronics an "investment"), but I've been having problems getting World of Warcraft, Civ 4, City of Heroes, and Warcraft III running on either platform.
For some people Cedega is a very reasonable option. Encouraging people to spend money unnecessarily is stupid. Many people can be perfectly happy with Cedega and end up saving money. Personally it isn't for me (I play too many games, so I suffer with the dual boot option), but I'm not sneering at people who make that choice. You're not yanking people back to reality, you're ignoring reality.
Depends on the user. The GIMP probably isn't ready for most people doing graphic design, art book layout, and the like. However, the vast majority of Photoshop users barely touch its power. You've got people tweaking their family photos in Photoshop. They've never calibrated their monitor and printer. They aren't aware of the existance of the more suitable Photoshop Elements, and even if they were why would they buy it? They didn't pay for Photoshop, they're happily using their copyright infringing copy. They got Photoshop by borrowing the discs from work get having it installed by their geek friend. You've got people doing online work who will never need CMYK. You've got small town newspapers who've also never done calibration and rely on their reporters to prepare images for final output. (On the last one, I know such a reporter. She didn't like the GIMPs interface, but once she tried GIMPShop, she was perfectly happy. It does everything that Photoshop did for her.)
I suspect that for the majority of Photoshop users that the GIMP is a suitable replacement. It shouldn't even bug Adobe since most of those users didn't pay for Photoshop in the first place.
So, what's German tax information doing in there? Let's look a little further into the file where this exact same technique is repeated in another function... This is a very simple hack that loads the (new, special) German tax definition file in a German locale, or (default) loads the previous US tax file. */
A clear answer: this is a hack not really intended for general consumption. I'm guessing someone is experimenting with integrating the German data, but it isn't quite ready yet. LOCALE_SPECIFIC_TAX may be a "this is under development and will hopefully eventually work, but not now" setting. Little unused hackery and experiments live in most mainstream code, commented or #ifdefed out. It's fairly common in proprietary software because the end user has little to no chance of learning that they're there.
It looks like this little hack is present, if no enabled, in the trunk of their repository. That's not good and it should probably be removed (or marked more clearly so it doesn't accidentally ship). But it's hardly a Major Problem.
While not surprising, it's still crap.
The core flaw is that under Windows you can't delete a file that is in use. The accepted solution is to set up a little script to run on reboot that deletes the file and replaces it with the new version. That's sad and stupid.
The Unix solution allowing you to delete an in use file solves the problem. It has its own weaknesses (as long as any process holds a file open, it chews up disk space), but at least you can upgrade even low level libraries (which is all the IE libraries are) without a reboot.
No, no they're not. "Capitalism is hard" is not a sound argument.
Somehow the print publishing industry has managed to survive libraries and used book stores. The music industry managed to survive used record and CD stores. The movie industry has managed to survive video rental stores selling their old stock. The automotive industry has managed to survive used car sales.
Stop whining and start figuring out how you're going to compete.
He might be talking about these earbud headphones. They don't come with foam covers. The grey part you can see at the end is rubber or a similar material. (The grey rubber part is also replacable; the set comes with three different sizes.) I don't know if they form a "seal" when used, but they're pretty snug. While not the earbuds that come with the iPod, they're Apple products and specifically sold as being for iPods.
That said, I agree it's a silly case and have no worries about it. It'll be thrown out reasonably promptly.
(That said, it's one thing to do censoring as required by the government. It's an entirely different thing to rat out someone critizing the Chinese government, as Yahoo stands accused of.)
It may be a brilliant piece of technology, but they really need to reconsider their marketing materials. They suggest that basic touch typing has an average speed of 50 WPM, while their expensive keyboard replacement offers "up to" 50 WPM. As someone who types in the area of 80 WPM, that's not sounding like a compelling replacement for a laptop or desktop keyboard.
The preorder price is $100. For that you get 3 96x96 screens. 27,648 pixels at about $0.0036 per pixel. Have you instead considered a cheap 15" LCD monitor? You can get a 1024x768 display for $160. 786,432 pixels at about $0.0002 per pixel. Even buying a cheap PCI video card to drive it doesn't drive the cost per pixel up much. That seems like a better deal.
The mini-Optimus is cute, but just doesn't seem terribly useful for any but the most specialized of applications (maybe buttons on a soda machine or similar application).
The full Optimus keyboard is an interesting idea because it extends something I already have on my desk. Adding a little crappy monitor doesn't seem like much of a win when for a little bit more I can add a full blown second monitor.
Good point. Come to think of it, the Constitution is silent on exactly what a free "press" or free "speech" is. Can the government pass laws requiring you to show ID or otherwise identify yourself when posting on the internet or making a phone call? After all, you'll still be free to speak in person or print physical newsletters.
" removing content, from Google News sources ": Google's always had a policy of not indexing things people don't want indexed. That's not evil, that's polite. Agence France Presse is shooting itself in the foot by not being indexed by Google News, but hey, that's their point.
" Google Print caving in to publishers legal threats ": Did you read the article. This is temporary. Google is continuing to fight for the right to index books in the courts. Having to wait until the court case is finished is annoying, but is hardly Google actively being evil.
" DMCA complaints ": Google's just obeying the law. The law is bad. To try and show that the law is bad, Google is working with Chilling Effects to document the cases, specifically provides links to the takedown notices with contain the links in question. Maybe it would better if Google were to break the law, but I'm hard pressed to call someone attempting to protest a bad law to the extent possible "evil." At worst they've simply failed to be as good as they could be.
What are you talking about? Google, as a company, is legally free to collect and keep whatever data it likes. Google didn't force other companies to hand over data; they collected it themselves from users who voluntarily visited Google. The government is also free to collect the data it likes (within the limitations of the fourth amendment). But the government has no particular grounds to force Google to cough up Google's collection of information. Google is not charged with any crime. The government isn't seeking the information in regards to a specific crime. Those are reasons for a supeona. Fishing expeditions hoping to find something to justify a law that the Supreme Court is already pretty ticked at is hardly grounds for search and seizure.
Records of search results (at very least in the form of standard webserver log files) are a useful and powerful tool for optimizing your web service and debugging problems. Sometimes it's useful to be able to compare what people are search for from, say, a year ago to today's results. I would expect any major online service to keep at least a year's logs, and the government's request was for data within that year.
I'm also betting Google's Search Appliance does keep all sorts of interesting logs. Of course, those log probably aren't shipped off to Google, which is appropriate since the data would proprietary to the company which paid for the appliance.
You know that your dear friend Yahoo (and MSN) when confronted with identical subpeonas from the government turned over the information without any challenge, right? Google has flaws, maybe even serious ones, but they're certainly trying harder than their competitors.What a strange thing to obsess over as the worst thing for ones privacy. First, while disassociating your email from your searches will make you slightly harder to track down, any search engine still has your IP address and when you contacted. If there was a serious legal case, that information could be used to contact your ISP and track you down. Add in some cookies and other data mining techniques and your gain is pretty minimal. And is Google knowing what searches you're making really that much worse than, say, your credit card company knowing everything you purchase on your credit card?
While I don't think overt lieing to China is a reasonable option, I would maintain that it would not be hypocritical in light of their "Do no evil" motto. Sometimes it's more moral to lie than not. "Are you aware of any runaway slaves hiding in the area?" "Are you aware of any Jews hiding in the area?" "Are you aware of any Tutsis hiding in this area?" I'll agree that enslaving or killing people is far worse than denying them free speech or access to a free press, but my point is that it's possible to lie and being doing the moral thing. Lieing to authorities to preserve access to free speech would seem like "Do no evil" to me. Of course, I'm not banking on Google doing that.
You're seriously suggesting that there are no laws so fundamentally immoral that to obey them would be evil? Prior to the US Civil War, one was legally obligated to turn in runaway slaves. I would suggest that following that law was more wrong than breaking the law. In Nazi Germany it was illegal to conceal Jews. Again, I'd suggest that obeying that law would be wrong. Ratting out your fellow filmmakers as "communists", even if you have no evidence they would ever hard America, was once the law of the land. I would suggest that those who refused to testify before McCarthy's Unamerican Activities Commision at the cost of their own careers were often more more than those who ratted out men guilty of nothing more than being interested other economic and political models.
Laws are not morality. Sometimes it's more moral to break the law. Sometimes it more moral to hold yourself to a higher standard than the law.
We're not talking about "Fire!"-in-a-theater. We're talking oppression of political speech. It's illegal to say that you should have freedom of speech. The citizens of China hardly decided for themselves that they like the level of freedom they have; it was imposed on them. Indeed, the powers in control of China restrict freedom of speech and freedom of the press specifically to keep people from knowing what life can be like with more freedoms.
Google is accepting this top-down order, helping to conceal information that many of the Chinese populous would like access to. By doing so Google is helping the bad guys, giving them more legitimacy. Maybe it's the right thing to do; maybe giving people access to more information, albet filtered, is better than totally cutting them off. However, one could make the case that if all of the major search engines refused to filter that it would provide incentive for China to open up or lose out on valuable tools in this information age (I'm not holding my breath, but it's possible.) It's hardly an obvious choice.