"Korea's remedy goes beyond what is necessary or appropriate to protect consumers, as it requires the removal of products that consumers may prefer," J. Bruce McDonald, deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department's antitrust division, said in a statement.
Ummm, Bruce, could I see you in my office for a minute? Great.
Bruce, I appreciate your enthusiam. I really do. It's really great. But, you know, there is a lot of work to do in the office. Stuff related to US antitrust law. It'd be really great if you could spend more time worrying about enforcing our laws and judgements, and less worrying about Korea. 'Cuz, umm, that's what the taxpayers are kinda paying ya for. We on the same page here? Great. Well, back to it then.
Strange, strange arguments. So if I slap a big "Beta!" logo on MassiveCopyrightInfringement.com ("Get the latest movies for free!") it will all be cool and no one can sue me? I think not. Beta doesn't mean, "academic exercise" or "research." It means a product well on its way to production, but not finalized.
I'll point out that "screen scraping" typically means reading the output of a program in a way that wasn't intended. Google's super complex screen scraping technique involves calling up the remote web server, making a query, and getting easy to parse HTML back. You know, kinda like your web browser does. It's hardly screen scraping.
Indeed, perhaps more importantly, how is this different from any other web search engine? They download web pages, they index them. Instead of just tossing the results into the main Google engine, they try to be a bit smarter about indexing them, noticing patterns and grouping similar concepts. Google News is just a specially tuned web search engine. Are you suggesting that Google shouldn't be allowed to tune their search engine to return more useful results?
A title and short excerpts from a work are pretty safe, Fair Use wise. Not perfectly safe, but generally so. Google is in zero danger.
If I walked down the street telling everyone how much my professor sucked monkey balls, and one of the people I told happened to be the dean, I would be amazed if I didn't get suspended or expelled.
If you got suspended I'd be surprised the dean had so much free time on his hands that he could track you down and start up the bothersome process of suspending you. Doesn't the school have better things to do than police student bitching? Legal or not, the school is being a thin-skinned crybaby. Shocking news: students at universities across the US complain about classmates and professors on their blogs all the time. Many are far more offensive than the blog in question. Many give the names of professors, unlike teh blog in question. Know how most universities deal with it? They ignore it and go do something more productive with their time. Suspending the student was cowardly. It may be legal, but it was unethical. Marquette deserves public shaming for being thin skinned wankers, being cowards, and wasting student tuition on this.
They're quick to defend the rights of an artist who has created something that some people find objectionable...provided that it's not a Christian nativity scene on someone's front lawn that non-Christians find objectionable. The ACLU is strangely silent when that happens.
Oh is it? "September 20, 2005: ACLU of New Jersey joins lawsuit supporting second-grader's right to sing "Awesome God" at a talent show." "December 22, 2004: ACLU of New Jersey successfully defends right of religious expression by jurors." "November 9, 2004: ACLU of Nevada defends a Mormon student who was suspended after wearing a T-shirt with a religious message to school." "August 11, 2004: ACLU of Nebraska defends church facing eviction by the city of Lincoln." "February 21, 2003: ACLU of Massachusetts defends students punished for distributing candy canes with religious messages." "July 11, 2002: ACLU supports right of Iowa students to distribute Christian literature at school." April 17, 2002: In a victory for the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the ACLU of Virginia, a federal judge strikes down a provision of the Virginia Constitution that bans religious organizations from incorporating." "January 18, 2002: ACLU defends Christian church's right to run "anti-Santa" ads in Boston subways."
Wow, that ACLU sure does turn a blind eye to protecting religion.
I'm quite sure that if a city specifically shut down a nativity scene on private property that the ACLU would be all over it. (Assuming, of course, that the situation was biased. If the city shut down everything on everyone's lawns, navity scenes and garden gnomes alike, it would be stupid, but legal and fair.)
One of my civil rights as a law-abiding citizen is my right to own a gun. Why do we have the NRA? Because the ACLU doesn't defend this right; we need another organization to pick up the slack.
Why do we have an EFF? The ACLU already spends lots of effort fighting for the exact same causes that the EFF does. Ultimately because some peopl prefer to focus in particular areas more than the ACLU does. I suspect the NRA would exist even if the ACLU did defend gun rights.
On that particular issue, well, yes, the ACLU has a different interpretation of the second amendment. I don't actually agree with their assessment, but they're hardly hostile to gun ownership Unless you found the organization, I doubt you'll find an organization that you entirely agree with. I chose to accept that and support several organizations that work in areas I care about.
You're missing the exact point the professor was trying to make. The goal was to understand Pol Pot's position, not to endorse it. It's much easier to fight ones enemies if you understand them. It's easier to notice that a country is heading down a road to death camps if you understand the (faulty) logic that led there. The next real world facism probably won't look like WWII Germany or Italy. But the reasoning that leads there will likely be the same.
Tynes's bigger point isn't that deep down all gamers want to run death camps. His point is that in games we tend to be as efficient and ruthless as possible. Games don't reward doing things for the right reasons. Games encourage gaming the system. We change our game play to optimize for what the game rewards. That sort of thinking, combined with some faulty input data or logic can lead to facism.
Re:Free Punch Card
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Why We Fight
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· Score: 1, Insightful
but, if you had to wonder if the person still had their free punch card, you might not be so quick to be an asshole.
I'm reminded of the occasional defense of concealed weapons: you're alot more polite. What?! You're really suggesting that I should watch my mouth because I might get punched? Hell, to a certain extent being able to be an asshole is part of being an American. "It's a free country" has never strictly been legally true, but for a long time it was a true representation of being an American. It has it's down sides (assholes), but I like the upsides (other people don't get to meddle in my life). There are plenty of reasons to be polite, but fear of injury seems like a bad one.
Your punching plan in tempting (oh, so many people who deserve a good punch in the face), but doomed to failing. The reality is that lots of shortsighted people will punch someone early in the year for no good reason. First guy to suggest that the Iraq war as a [good|bad] idea? Pow! Right in the kisser! People will be afraid of stating reasonably held opinions because some unreasonable person might take a swing at them. You might cut down on assholes to a certain extent, but you're going to silence a lot more innocent people.
Ultimately we don't craft laws for the 90% of good people. We craft them for the bad 10%. We have to assume that the bad 10% will be pushing the law to its limits. I'm not prepared to hand that 10% the ability to punch me just because I have a [pro|anti] abortion bumper sticker.
To an extent, I agree. There are many people foolishly declaring Aperture worthless. Indeed, even with its weaknesses, it seems like pretty compelling software to me.
I will suggest you keep in mind that someone for whom a product isn't intended might still be able to make rational and useful critiques of it. Sure, most are just clueless, but not everyone is. As a wise man said, "It's not for you." I think Ars's review was reasonable. The author enumerated the strengths and weaknesses he perceived and provided evidence. Apple included image editing capabilities and hyped them (specifically the nondestructive capabilities). Given the problems with it, it's a pretty big hit on Aperture's value. I don't think it's fair to say that the Ars review is "about as insightful as a Blind Spot review of Solaris 10." (Actually, I'm a bit fuzzy on the exact meaning of that, but I'm reasonably sure it's intended as a smear.)
As for defense of non-commercial software, well, one gets a little slack for being free. It's not hypocritical in the slightest. Software needs to justify its cost in both cash and time. For free Aperture would be an amazing deal. For $50, a great deal. At the list price of $500, it's a bad deal for me, and a questionable deal for professional photographers (thus the value of reviews to get a sense of how much value you get). At $100,000 it would be a terrible deal for everyone and reviewers could justifiable mock it. Reviews of software (or any product) can and should change as the price tag does.
It's for proofing hundreds of frames in a relatively short period of time. Of course most of us (the reviewer included), don't routinely shoot 500 or 1000 frames in a day, and then need to get the best 10 to an editor two hours later.
The manual says to not put it on carpets? Microsoft's designers were actually that stupid? This isn't like "keep the radiator topped off" on your car. This is like "don't park on grass" in your car owners manual. While not lawsuit-worthy, it does suggest a shoddy product. "Don't put your console on the carpet" suggests the designers have no idea how people use consoles in the real world.
Remember, in each of those situations the company in question is going out on a limb for you.
Just like when I (hypothetically) bought an X-Box. I paid to be able to use my X-Box today, not at some hypothetical future date.
Now, assuming the failure rate is reasonably low (we'll see), the general correct solution is you take it back to the store, you get an apology, and a new device. Ideally the store should give you a little something for your wasted time ("Here's a $5 gift certificate"), but that's a nicity, not a requirement. Now in a more specific case, if the store can't give me a working product, there is a problem. That the store doesn't have any more in store isn't my product. They already have my money, I want a working product. My suggestion would be assurances that things will be corrected ASAP ("We'll bump you ahead of people who are on the waiting list since you've been waiting longer") and a significant "little something". A free game seems about right. If the failure rate is low enough, the store will only have to pay out a handful of times; more than justified in keeping your customers happy. If the failure rate is high, someone should be calling the manufacturer screaming at them about the crap they unloaded on you. In this particular case, it's in Microsoft's interests to minimize this news story, so offering to cover the little somethings for stores would be a good investment.
I don't know why the changeover to CSS didn't include a little modification to the story submission script that automatically updates all story links to use Coral Cache.
The reason you don't know is that you haven't read the FAQs. In particular, "Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off." It goes on from there.
Well gosh, some guy says it's all above board, so it must be okay. 'Cuz he wouldn't lie; that would be wrong.
The reporter is a gullable idiot.
The way this works is that companies specializing in rebates bid to offer rebates. The bid is how much the retailer (say, Best Buy) will pay them. It's a portion of the rebate value. So a rebate company might offer to fulfill a $40 rebate on a video card in exchange for $20 per video card sold. Best Buy gets to claim a $40 discount on the video card, but only pays $20 per card. The rebate company gets $20 per video card. All they have to do is ensure that less than half of eligible buyers claim the rebate and they make money. That's were things get messy. If they misjudge the rebate claim rate (or are just evil and want more money) they have incentive to be hardasses and find minor nits to refuse rebates on. "Oh, you gave your zip code, but not your zip+4. The form said 'Zip+4'. No rebate for you." The even more evil ones will resort to outright tricky. "Ooops, a bunch of mail fell in the garbage." How can you prove you mailed it to them. They can claim you failed to send necessary UPC codes. Again, can you prove you did? Sure, many rebate houses are honest and won't play such games, but not all do. And the sleezy rebate houses can underbid the honest ones.
"But if rebates go away, he says, the savings won't all go toward lower prices. 'Retailers will keep some of that.'" Congratulations Captain Obvious. Fine. I'd rather get $10 off at the register than $20 off after six months and filling out forms and watching to make sure they don't 'lose' my submission.
An easy way to find and brand porn sites? The.pro,.areo, and.museum TLDs weren't created because people are so offended by professionals, airplanes, and museums that they want to filter them.
What's wrong with/etc/init.d/* startup scripts? Speed and lack of dependencies for starters.
*eh*
Yeah, something with dependencies (which allows parallel startups, which increases speed) would be nice. It's a bit unfortunate that my machine takes a minute to get through starting up the various services instead of 10 seconds. Yet somehow I struggle on. The worst you can charge System V init scripts with is being annoyingly slow. For something you do relatively infrequently, it just hardly seems worthy of being labelled a "big problem" like the person I was originally responding to did. It's a nuisance.
You'll notice I said, "mainstream stuff". I said that for a reason. Terminals and Emacs (and my preference Vim) are hardly mainstream. They're weird and Joe Random User probably shouldn't use them. For that subset of us who need to use a terminal, we'll have to live with right clicking and selecting Copy or Paste. I'll admit a little bit of jealously for Apple's Option key. Copy and Paste is Option-C/V and works just fine in their terminal application, just like every other Mac OS X app. As for Emacs and Vim; sadly their days are numbered. Us diehard fans will keep using it, but for a new developer I can't honestly recommend them. Yes, Vim is very powerful. But was it really worth the time it took me to learn it? Probably at the time, because there wasn't really much better. But now various graphical editors are getting complete enough to satisfy even me.
Select then replace isn't broken. I use it all the time. Select the text I want to copy. Ctrl+C. Select the text I want to replace. Ctrl+V. Pretty much just like Mac OS X and Windows. The existance of the kinda weird selection buffer doesn't harm the more common copy buffer. A point can be made for retiring the selection buffer because it confuses the average person, but it's hardly breaking functionality.
...throw out all the old garbage (X windows, the many start up daemons, unix copy/paste, gtk)
What's wrong with X-Windows? The old "It's too slow"? Because locally it's working all in memory, no network, and nice and zippy. What's wrong with the start up daemons? There are lots of them, but you can tweak and tune them. The typical daemons started on a system configured for "workstation" or "desktop" tends to be similar to the number of processes I end up running in Windows XP or Mac OS X. Or is it the method daemons start up with? I find it no more or less confusing the mess that is the combination of Windows services and startup programs. Mac OS X has something similar; it may not be rc scripts, but they're launching stuff like Samba and CUPS just like my Linux box does. Unix copy/paste? What's wrong with it? I copy stuff to and fro quite happily. Or are you whining about the "select is copy, middle click is paste"? Because while you were apparently sleeping, the mainstream stuff all started supporting Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. Select-paste still works, but if you don't like you don't have to use it. GTK? Ummm, right.
The reality is that you don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about.
Comments can be a refuge of lazy programmers, too.
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How to Write Comments
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· Score: 1
People use the 'code should be self documenting' excuse because they are lazy and don't want to take the time to actually write documentation.
Code should be self documenting because humans are bad at maintaining redundant things. Code and comments tend to diverge. You either spend time being very careful to update both the code and comments, or you spend time discovering that the comments are out of date.
Keep in mind that "code should be self documenting" is a rule of thumb, not an absolute law. Commenting something that is cryptic by its very nature is a good idea. Documenting the interface to a function is helpful. "Code should be self documenting" isn't lashing out against documentation and comments as a whole, it's lashing out against people who write clumsy, confusing code and slap some comments on as a fix. It's lashing out against people who comment on the "how" while completely glossing over the "why". Unfortunately proper commenting balanced with self-documenting code is frequently glossed over in course. Assignments require comments, but students are really graded on quantity, not quality.
...and the fact the EFF realizes the company is simply enforcing their rights to the patent under law.
Why would the EFF care that they're "simply enforcing their rights"? A major part of the EFF's work is to fight things that may be technically legal, but are morally bankrupt. In some cases they can be fought in the courts by challenging the legality or interpretation of the law. In this particular case a major public standard is built on this patent. It was believed that there were no costs involved with implementing it; the patent was not known about. A decade went by without anyone complaining that it was infringing. Suddenly the owner can pop up and announce that he can shut down a standard used across the world by just about anyone with a computer? Forgent is hardly "simply" enforcing their rights. They are knowingly attempting to blackmail major industries with a submarine patent. They're scum, they're abusing the law, and it would be appropriate for the EFF to be involved. There are many reasons the EFF might not be involved, including the imminent expiration you mentioned. But skipping this case because Forgent is technically within the letter of the law is not a reason.
Way to get press coverage for implementing an idea from the 70s. The big fight over creator owned comics happened years ago. While many mainstream comics remain owned by the publishers and not the creators, there are many comic properties owned by their creators now. There are publishers founded on the idea. David Sim's Cerebus is perhaps the most famous; he was one of the early people to make a big ruckus over the importance of creator owned comics.
I think text adventures/interactive fiction (IF) has an edge because it self selects for a smarter, more literate demographic. You even note, the homebrew RPG community is less likely to draw the twelve-year-olds. And despite the claims of the article, programming in the two most popular development languages (TADS and Inform) is non-trivial. It's simple enough that most adults could learn it, it's complex enough to drive off even more dabblers. So while there is some utter crap, it's a lower percentage of the whole.
(Of course, 90% of everything is crap. Be it RPGs, text adventures, novels, music, blogs, and the like. I'm willing to trade more crap being generated in exchange for more good stuff being generated. The system will find ways of filtering the crap. In the case of IF the IFComp works pretty well. Word of mouth has succesfully lead me to a number of very small, non-local bands. I suspect the homebrew RPG community has working filtering mechanisms.)
I'm less convinced that the IF community has a "retrogaming" focus. Traditional sprite based RPGs have been replaced with shiny 3D RPGs. Everything you can do in a sprite based RPG can be done in a 3D-engine. In the case of IF, there isn't anything that's obviously better. Graphic adventures can't yet capture the flexibility of a text adventure. They'll never capture the particular feeling of the written word any more than movies replaced novels.
(Indeed, so an extent I wonder how many of the RPG Maker fans are really interested in the retrogaming aspect compared to how many use it because it's what they have? Little sprites are easy, big sprites are harder, 3d models and animation are harder yet. As the tools make things easier I'd expect 3D to be the default for future would be game creators, perhaps thanks to Super Ultra RPG Maker 3D.)
Maybe I misunderstand but as I understand it MD5s are normally used in a checksum manner to sign or provide a fingerprint of a document. If you have an original document and compute it's MD5 then it can match some certified MD5 check sum. If someone were to generate a fake document they coul dnot design it to match the MD5 fingerprint. They could create some bit of gibberish that did match it but not a document that was useful as a forgery.
Most document formats have lots of "dead space", parts you can pretty much modify at will without changing what the user actually sees. Comments in HTML or PostScript. Old junk data in Word documents. Executables can have just about anything you like added if you know your stuff. The MD5 attacks currently available only 128 "dead space" bytes to generate a collision. So far from being a gibberish document, one can generate almost any document you want. This page has a simple example with PostScript files. Both files have the same MD5 hash, but one is a relatively harmless letter of recommendation while the other is a grant of security clearance. Get your boss to sign your letter of recommendation digitally, swap in the security clearance file, and pass it on. This is a Big Deal and a Major Problem.
But what has "worked" for me lately is buying CDs and vinyl second hand.
Increased value in the secondary market increases value in the primary market. Keeping in mind that my buying second-hand, you're increasing the market for second-hand CDs. An increase in the value of that market makes the first-sale CDs more valuable; if I don't like it (or I'm unscrupulous and rip it first), I can sell it for more money. End result (if enough people do this): Sony can charge slightly more for their CDs.
I'm not saying what you're doing is without value. Not all of the value you paid makes it way to the primary market. But it's not quite as effective as you might hope.
If you're interesting in text adventures, or have fond memories of them but haven't played in a while, check out some of the new stuff. Most modern games have better parsers than the old games, better even than Infocoms. And many eschew the old "learn by dying" style so popular in the eighties. As the article suggests, the Interactive Fiction Competition is a great place to start. As a general rule the top few positions are great games. The Interactive Fiction Archive is full of great stuff, but not well organized for browsing. I prefer Baf's Guide which indexes the Archive. Finally, if you're into Lovecraftian horror, I strongly recommend Anchorhead. Anchorhead is the only horror text adventure I've ever found to be creepy. It's got solid, well integrated puzzles and a compelling story.
Text adventures are great. To dismiss them as obsolete because we have graphics now is as foolish as dismissing novels because we have movies. I'm a big fan of graphic adventures (and just about any other type of game), but I still appreciate text adventures. There is a level of interactivity in modern text adventures that graphic games haven't yet achieved. The extremely low development costs mean that lots of interesting and quirky stuff gets made.
The WSJ article oversimplifies a few important things. The IF competition is supposed to be limited to games that take two hours. The idea is to get more people writing games under the idea that a two hour game is much easier to make than a twenty hour game. But people still regularly release longer games. Anchorhead, mentioned above, too me about 30 hours.
It's also not fair to say that "just" 174 people voted. Judging is time consuming; you're expected to play to the conclusion (or for two hours, whichever comes first) at least 5 games. And while there is lots of good stuff, there is a lot of junk. So being a proper judge takes a healthy chunk of time and a willingness to suffer some bad games. It's far easier to just wait until the competition ends, then download the top rated ones. While text adventures are a niche market, I expect we're talking thousands of people who play the competition games. It's just that only a small subset vote.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm, Bruce, could I see you in my office for a minute? Great.
Bruce, I appreciate your enthusiam. I really do. It's really great. But, you know, there is a lot of work to do in the office. Stuff related to US antitrust law. It'd be really great if you could spend more time worrying about enforcing our laws and judgements, and less worrying about Korea. 'Cuz, umm, that's what the taxpayers are kinda paying ya for. We on the same page here? Great. Well, back to it then.
Strange, strange arguments. So if I slap a big "Beta!" logo on MassiveCopyrightInfringement.com ("Get the latest movies for free!") it will all be cool and no one can sue me? I think not. Beta doesn't mean, "academic exercise" or "research." It means a product well on its way to production, but not finalized.
I'll point out that "screen scraping" typically means reading the output of a program in a way that wasn't intended. Google's super complex screen scraping technique involves calling up the remote web server, making a query, and getting easy to parse HTML back. You know, kinda like your web browser does. It's hardly screen scraping.
Indeed, perhaps more importantly, how is this different from any other web search engine? They download web pages, they index them. Instead of just tossing the results into the main Google engine, they try to be a bit smarter about indexing them, noticing patterns and grouping similar concepts. Google News is just a specially tuned web search engine. Are you suggesting that Google shouldn't be allowed to tune their search engine to return more useful results?
A title and short excerpts from a work are pretty safe, Fair Use wise. Not perfectly safe, but generally so. Google is in zero danger.
If you got suspended I'd be surprised the dean had so much free time on his hands that he could track you down and start up the bothersome process of suspending you. Doesn't the school have better things to do than police student bitching? Legal or not, the school is being a thin-skinned crybaby. Shocking news: students at universities across the US complain about classmates and professors on their blogs all the time. Many are far more offensive than the blog in question. Many give the names of professors, unlike teh blog in question. Know how most universities deal with it? They ignore it and go do something more productive with their time. Suspending the student was cowardly. It may be legal, but it was unethical. Marquette deserves public shaming for being thin skinned wankers, being cowards, and wasting student tuition on this.
Oh is it? "September 20, 2005: ACLU of New Jersey joins lawsuit supporting second-grader's right to sing "Awesome God" at a talent show." "December 22, 2004: ACLU of New Jersey successfully defends right of religious expression by jurors." "November 9, 2004: ACLU of Nevada defends a Mormon student who was suspended after wearing a T-shirt with a religious message to school." "August 11, 2004: ACLU of Nebraska defends church facing eviction by the city of Lincoln." "February 21, 2003: ACLU of Massachusetts defends students punished for distributing candy canes with religious messages." "July 11, 2002: ACLU supports right of Iowa students to distribute Christian literature at school." April 17, 2002: In a victory for the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the ACLU of Virginia, a federal judge strikes down a provision of the Virginia Constitution that bans religious organizations from incorporating." "January 18, 2002: ACLU defends Christian church's right to run "anti-Santa" ads in Boston subways."
Wow, that ACLU sure does turn a blind eye to protecting religion.
I'm quite sure that if a city specifically shut down a nativity scene on private property that the ACLU would be all over it. (Assuming, of course, that the situation was biased. If the city shut down everything on everyone's lawns, navity scenes and garden gnomes alike, it would be stupid, but legal and fair.)
Why do we have an EFF? The ACLU already spends lots of effort fighting for the exact same causes that the EFF does. Ultimately because some peopl prefer to focus in particular areas more than the ACLU does. I suspect the NRA would exist even if the ACLU did defend gun rights.
On that particular issue, well, yes, the ACLU has a different interpretation of the second amendment. I don't actually agree with their assessment, but they're hardly hostile to gun ownership Unless you found the organization, I doubt you'll find an organization that you entirely agree with. I chose to accept that and support several organizations that work in areas I care about.
You're missing the exact point the professor was trying to make. The goal was to understand Pol Pot's position, not to endorse it. It's much easier to fight ones enemies if you understand them. It's easier to notice that a country is heading down a road to death camps if you understand the (faulty) logic that led there. The next real world facism probably won't look like WWII Germany or Italy. But the reasoning that leads there will likely be the same.
Tynes's bigger point isn't that deep down all gamers want to run death camps. His point is that in games we tend to be as efficient and ruthless as possible. Games don't reward doing things for the right reasons. Games encourage gaming the system. We change our game play to optimize for what the game rewards. That sort of thinking, combined with some faulty input data or logic can lead to facism.
I'm reminded of the occasional defense of concealed weapons: you're alot more polite. What?! You're really suggesting that I should watch my mouth because I might get punched? Hell, to a certain extent being able to be an asshole is part of being an American. "It's a free country" has never strictly been legally true, but for a long time it was a true representation of being an American. It has it's down sides (assholes), but I like the upsides (other people don't get to meddle in my life). There are plenty of reasons to be polite, but fear of injury seems like a bad one.
Your punching plan in tempting (oh, so many people who deserve a good punch in the face), but doomed to failing. The reality is that lots of shortsighted people will punch someone early in the year for no good reason. First guy to suggest that the Iraq war as a [good|bad] idea? Pow! Right in the kisser! People will be afraid of stating reasonably held opinions because some unreasonable person might take a swing at them. You might cut down on assholes to a certain extent, but you're going to silence a lot more innocent people.
Ultimately we don't craft laws for the 90% of good people. We craft them for the bad 10%. We have to assume that the bad 10% will be pushing the law to its limits. I'm not prepared to hand that 10% the ability to punch me just because I have a [pro|anti] abortion bumper sticker.
To an extent, I agree. There are many people foolishly declaring Aperture worthless. Indeed, even with its weaknesses, it seems like pretty compelling software to me.
I will suggest you keep in mind that someone for whom a product isn't intended might still be able to make rational and useful critiques of it. Sure, most are just clueless, but not everyone is. As a wise man said, "It's not for you." I think Ars's review was reasonable. The author enumerated the strengths and weaknesses he perceived and provided evidence. Apple included image editing capabilities and hyped them (specifically the nondestructive capabilities). Given the problems with it, it's a pretty big hit on Aperture's value. I don't think it's fair to say that the Ars review is "about as insightful as a Blind Spot review of Solaris 10." (Actually, I'm a bit fuzzy on the exact meaning of that, but I'm reasonably sure it's intended as a smear.)
As for defense of non-commercial software, well, one gets a little slack for being free. It's not hypocritical in the slightest. Software needs to justify its cost in both cash and time. For free Aperture would be an amazing deal. For $50, a great deal. At the list price of $500, it's a bad deal for me, and a questionable deal for professional photographers (thus the value of reviews to get a sense of how much value you get). At $100,000 it would be a terrible deal for everyone and reviewers could justifiable mock it. Reviews of software (or any product) can and should change as the price tag does.
If that's what it's for, it's got some serious problems. "Hmm, I should probably tag these 500 images with 'Swimsuit Shoot: Cindy' so I can easily find them later." *clicky*clicky*. "Two and half hours to retag them? I better call my editor for an extension." When you discover that you picked the wrong images because the thumbnails were wrong, and sent your editor damaged images because he wants 8-bit TIFFS and Aperture isn't good at the conversion, well, maybe Aperture isn't up to snuff. The reviewer managed to ferret out these problems.
The manual says to not put it on carpets? Microsoft's designers were actually that stupid? This isn't like "keep the radiator topped off" on your car. This is like "don't park on grass" in your car owners manual. While not lawsuit-worthy, it does suggest a shoddy product. "Don't put your console on the carpet" suggests the designers have no idea how people use consoles in the real world.
Just like when I (hypothetically) bought an X-Box. I paid to be able to use my X-Box today, not at some hypothetical future date.
Now, assuming the failure rate is reasonably low (we'll see), the general correct solution is you take it back to the store, you get an apology, and a new device. Ideally the store should give you a little something for your wasted time ("Here's a $5 gift certificate"), but that's a nicity, not a requirement. Now in a more specific case, if the store can't give me a working product, there is a problem. That the store doesn't have any more in store isn't my product. They already have my money, I want a working product. My suggestion would be assurances that things will be corrected ASAP ("We'll bump you ahead of people who are on the waiting list since you've been waiting longer") and a significant "little something". A free game seems about right. If the failure rate is low enough, the store will only have to pay out a handful of times; more than justified in keeping your customers happy. If the failure rate is high, someone should be calling the manufacturer screaming at them about the crap they unloaded on you. In this particular case, it's in Microsoft's interests to minimize this news story, so offering to cover the little somethings for stores would be a good investment.
The reason you don't know is that you haven't read the FAQs. In particular, "Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off." It goes on from there.
Well gosh, some guy says it's all above board, so it must be okay. 'Cuz he wouldn't lie; that would be wrong.
The reporter is a gullable idiot.
The way this works is that companies specializing in rebates bid to offer rebates. The bid is how much the retailer (say, Best Buy) will pay them. It's a portion of the rebate value. So a rebate company might offer to fulfill a $40 rebate on a video card in exchange for $20 per video card sold. Best Buy gets to claim a $40 discount on the video card, but only pays $20 per card. The rebate company gets $20 per video card. All they have to do is ensure that less than half of eligible buyers claim the rebate and they make money. That's were things get messy. If they misjudge the rebate claim rate (or are just evil and want more money) they have incentive to be hardasses and find minor nits to refuse rebates on. "Oh, you gave your zip code, but not your zip+4. The form said 'Zip+4'. No rebate for you." The even more evil ones will resort to outright tricky. "Ooops, a bunch of mail fell in the garbage." How can you prove you mailed it to them. They can claim you failed to send necessary UPC codes. Again, can you prove you did? Sure, many rebate houses are honest and won't play such games, but not all do. And the sleezy rebate houses can underbid the honest ones.
"But if rebates go away, he says, the savings won't all go toward lower prices. 'Retailers will keep some of that.'" Congratulations Captain Obvious. Fine. I'd rather get $10 off at the register than $20 off after six months and filling out forms and watching to make sure they don't 'lose' my submission.
Rebates are every bit as sinister as you think.
An easy way to find and brand porn sites? The .pro, .areo, and .museum TLDs weren't created because people are so offended by professionals, airplanes, and museums that they want to filter them.
*eh*
Yeah, something with dependencies (which allows parallel startups, which increases speed) would be nice. It's a bit unfortunate that my machine takes a minute to get through starting up the various services instead of 10 seconds. Yet somehow I struggle on. The worst you can charge System V init scripts with is being annoyingly slow. For something you do relatively infrequently, it just hardly seems worthy of being labelled a "big problem" like the person I was originally responding to did. It's a nuisance.
You'll notice I said, "mainstream stuff". I said that for a reason. Terminals and Emacs (and my preference Vim) are hardly mainstream. They're weird and Joe Random User probably shouldn't use them. For that subset of us who need to use a terminal, we'll have to live with right clicking and selecting Copy or Paste. I'll admit a little bit of jealously for Apple's Option key. Copy and Paste is Option-C/V and works just fine in their terminal application, just like every other Mac OS X app. As for Emacs and Vim; sadly their days are numbered. Us diehard fans will keep using it, but for a new developer I can't honestly recommend them. Yes, Vim is very powerful. But was it really worth the time it took me to learn it? Probably at the time, because there wasn't really much better. But now various graphical editors are getting complete enough to satisfy even me.
Select then replace isn't broken. I use it all the time. Select the text I want to copy. Ctrl+C. Select the text I want to replace. Ctrl+V. Pretty much just like Mac OS X and Windows. The existance of the kinda weird selection buffer doesn't harm the more common copy buffer. A point can be made for retiring the selection buffer because it confuses the average person, but it's hardly breaking functionality.
What's wrong with X-Windows? The old "It's too slow"? Because locally it's working all in memory, no network, and nice and zippy. What's wrong with the start up daemons? There are lots of them, but you can tweak and tune them. The typical daemons started on a system configured for "workstation" or "desktop" tends to be similar to the number of processes I end up running in Windows XP or Mac OS X. Or is it the method daemons start up with? I find it no more or less confusing the mess that is the combination of Windows services and startup programs. Mac OS X has something similar; it may not be rc scripts, but they're launching stuff like Samba and CUPS just like my Linux box does. Unix copy/paste? What's wrong with it? I copy stuff to and fro quite happily. Or are you whining about the "select is copy, middle click is paste"? Because while you were apparently sleeping, the mainstream stuff all started supporting Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. Select-paste still works, but if you don't like you don't have to use it. GTK? Ummm, right.
The reality is that you don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about.
Code should be self documenting because humans are bad at maintaining redundant things. Code and comments tend to diverge. You either spend time being very careful to update both the code and comments, or you spend time discovering that the comments are out of date.
Keep in mind that "code should be self documenting" is a rule of thumb, not an absolute law. Commenting something that is cryptic by its very nature is a good idea. Documenting the interface to a function is helpful. "Code should be self documenting" isn't lashing out against documentation and comments as a whole, it's lashing out against people who write clumsy, confusing code and slap some comments on as a fix. It's lashing out against people who comment on the "how" while completely glossing over the "why". Unfortunately proper commenting balanced with self-documenting code is frequently glossed over in course. Assignments require comments, but students are really graded on quantity, not quality.
Why would the EFF care that they're "simply enforcing their rights"? A major part of the EFF's work is to fight things that may be technically legal, but are morally bankrupt. In some cases they can be fought in the courts by challenging the legality or interpretation of the law. In this particular case a major public standard is built on this patent. It was believed that there were no costs involved with implementing it; the patent was not known about. A decade went by without anyone complaining that it was infringing. Suddenly the owner can pop up and announce that he can shut down a standard used across the world by just about anyone with a computer? Forgent is hardly "simply" enforcing their rights. They are knowingly attempting to blackmail major industries with a submarine patent. They're scum, they're abusing the law, and it would be appropriate for the EFF to be involved. There are many reasons the EFF might not be involved, including the imminent expiration you mentioned. But skipping this case because Forgent is technically within the letter of the law is not a reason.
Way to get press coverage for implementing an idea from the 70s. The big fight over creator owned comics happened years ago. While many mainstream comics remain owned by the publishers and not the creators, there are many comic properties owned by their creators now. There are publishers founded on the idea. David Sim's Cerebus is perhaps the most famous; he was one of the early people to make a big ruckus over the importance of creator owned comics.
(Of course, 90% of everything is crap. Be it RPGs, text adventures, novels, music, blogs, and the like. I'm willing to trade more crap being generated in exchange for more good stuff being generated. The system will find ways of filtering the crap. In the case of IF the IFComp works pretty well. Word of mouth has succesfully lead me to a number of very small, non-local bands. I suspect the homebrew RPG community has working filtering mechanisms.)
I'm less convinced that the IF community has a "retrogaming" focus. Traditional sprite based RPGs have been replaced with shiny 3D RPGs. Everything you can do in a sprite based RPG can be done in a 3D-engine. In the case of IF, there isn't anything that's obviously better. Graphic adventures can't yet capture the flexibility of a text adventure. They'll never capture the particular feeling of the written word any more than movies replaced novels.
(Indeed, so an extent I wonder how many of the RPG Maker fans are really interested in the retrogaming aspect compared to how many use it because it's what they have? Little sprites are easy, big sprites are harder, 3d models and animation are harder yet. As the tools make things easier I'd expect 3D to be the default for future would be game creators, perhaps thanks to Super Ultra RPG Maker 3D.)
Bill Gates is scheduled to give the keynote at the Supercomputing 2005 (or SC05) conference, which is going on right now.
Most document formats have lots of "dead space", parts you can pretty much modify at will without changing what the user actually sees. Comments in HTML or PostScript. Old junk data in Word documents. Executables can have just about anything you like added if you know your stuff. The MD5 attacks currently available only 128 "dead space" bytes to generate a collision. So far from being a gibberish document, one can generate almost any document you want. This page has a simple example with PostScript files. Both files have the same MD5 hash, but one is a relatively harmless letter of recommendation while the other is a grant of security clearance. Get your boss to sign your letter of recommendation digitally, swap in the security clearance file, and pass it on. This is a Big Deal and a Major Problem.
Increased value in the secondary market increases value in the primary market. Keeping in mind that my buying second-hand, you're increasing the market for second-hand CDs. An increase in the value of that market makes the first-sale CDs more valuable; if I don't like it (or I'm unscrupulous and rip it first), I can sell it for more money. End result (if enough people do this): Sony can charge slightly more for their CDs.
I'm not saying what you're doing is without value. Not all of the value you paid makes it way to the primary market. But it's not quite as effective as you might hope.
Text adventures are great. To dismiss them as obsolete because we have graphics now is as foolish as dismissing novels because we have movies. I'm a big fan of graphic adventures (and just about any other type of game), but I still appreciate text adventures. There is a level of interactivity in modern text adventures that graphic games haven't yet achieved. The extremely low development costs mean that lots of interesting and quirky stuff gets made.
The WSJ article oversimplifies a few important things. The IF competition is supposed to be limited to games that take two hours. The idea is to get more people writing games under the idea that a two hour game is much easier to make than a twenty hour game. But people still regularly release longer games. Anchorhead, mentioned above, too me about 30 hours.
It's also not fair to say that "just" 174 people voted. Judging is time consuming; you're expected to play to the conclusion (or for two hours, whichever comes first) at least 5 games. And while there is lots of good stuff, there is a lot of junk. So being a proper judge takes a healthy chunk of time and a willingness to suffer some bad games. It's far easier to just wait until the competition ends, then download the top rated ones. While text adventures are a niche market, I expect we're talking thousands of people who play the competition games. It's just that only a small subset vote.