1) Like other people said, Apple said they're locking their OS to only run on Apple hardware. So this isn't really a surprise.
2) It also won't be a surprise when somebody hacks it and gets Apple's OS to work on other Intel hardware.
My issue with this is: Apple seems to always be focused on having a high-quality user experience. Part of the reason they can do that is that they can target specific sets of hardware (much like how console games increase user-friendliness by targetting a single main configuration).
If you run an Apple OS on different hardware, you have to do some work to get it to work. And you obviously don't expect everything to work 100% perfectly. That's all Apple has to do, they don't really need to DRM things. They just have to make it clear that you'll have a degraded user experience if you run it on other hardware, and they warned you, and that quality issues you may see aren't their fault. If you want to experiment, use the Mach kernel or Linux directly. If you want a nice user experience, use official Apple hardware.
Spelling/grammar is not an issue. There are many smart people in the world who can't write English at all.
1. There's value in brevity. If you can get your points across with a minimum of words, you save your reader time.
2. There's value in distilling your thoughts into two or three bullet points. People don't want to work hard to try to figure out what you're saying. People are more likely to read and understrand your viewpoint if you do a little work to make it short and coherent first.
3. You claim to be intelligent. If so, great. You write like you're from the PR department or fromt upper management, like you need to hype up your writing to make it more impressive. If you you have good ideas, express them clearly, and people will recognize that. They'll recognize that a lot better if you don't have a bunch of hyper formatting.
4. Write less. People don't want to respond to your logical points if a) they have to comb through your first post to make sure they didn't misunderstand it, and b) if you're going to respond with many more pages that they will have to take a lot more of their personal time to try to completely understand.
Yeah, which is why I said that Opera is no slouch on features.
There's still a philosophical difference. Firefox is designed to be endlessly enhanceable by end users. Firefox has shrunk a little bit, but still a large portion of its stock functionality is implemented in javascript (so that its functionality is more easily morphed by add-on user code).
Opera is designed to be a small, solid, fast implementation of most things you need, but it's not inherently designed to be able to morph into an operating system or a kitchen sink. Opera is fundamentally slower moving, because it's implemented in C/assembly, but once Opera catches up with Firefox, its new features are more streamlined.
(no, I'm not confusing Gecko and Firefox. You can bolt a kitchen sink on top of Firefox, so it's a browser + sink)
If they're problems that are related the she-bang (#!/usr/bin/perl), then user-friendliness problems are in teh kernel itself. The #! thing is a hack inside the kernel itself, and as such, does very minimal parsing. So, it doesn't search the path for the perl or python interpretters (unless you use/usr/bin/env, which is also not ideal for a couple reasons).
I don't know. Maybe a better solution would be to create a variable like $SHELL, but call it $SHEBANG. When a script starts with #!$SHEBANG, the kernel wouldn't parse ANYTHING else on that line (eg. have the same behavior across Linux, Solaris,...), and the $SHEBANG program would be some universally available program that would do the parsing of that line, and search the path, etc. I don't know.
Look, the difference between Opera and Mozilla is pretty simple. Ready?
Opera = Vi. Mozilla = Emacs. Got it?
Opera = small download, very small memory footprint, a lot of attention paid to making it fast.
Mozilla = as intelligently designed as Opera, but with a different philosophy. Make it flexible as hell by adding a powerful extension language (emacs gets lisp, mozilla gets javascript). Everybody adds interpretted code to it, and eventually it becomes a mail reader, web browser, operating system, and kitchen sink...
So it's really different strokes for different folks. You like minimalism, and have a growing collection of 80's-era hardware? Use Opera. You like lots of features, and maybe enjoy hacking bits of your favorate app-becomes-OS? Use Mozilla.
(yes, I'm aware that vim can now emulate emacs lisp code, which is definitely a perversion of its original principles. And Opera's no slouch on features. Nevertheless, there's still a difference in original philosophies... Opera won't implement anything that's not light and fast. And Mozilla actively WANTS to have a third of its default functionality implemented in javascript)
over the past 30 years (coincidentally since the inception of leap seconds) the rotation of the earth's crust has accelerated. This acceleration is apparently due to changes of fluid circulation in the outer core of the earth. Historical investigations of earth rotation indicate that such accelerations are not unprecedented, and it should not be possible for the acceleration to continue for very many more years.
Further research revealed that while some people had actually paid for XP, they found repeated product activation to be such a painful experience, that it was easier to just download the ilicit version and be done with it.
I guess people could come up with conspiracy theories for this... that Microsoft WANTED people to crack it as fast as possible so they could whine about it to senators or something.
Does anybody know if Herr Gates is scheduled to meet any important people soon?
I don't think so. If Microsoft blocks out even a single other vendor, they are very likely to find themselves in court. If they block out a whole swath of other vendors, they will find themselves in court AND on many newspapers.
(as a semi-related note... I bet it wouldn't be illegal for the Intel Macs to block out everything but OSX... but only because Apple isn't in a monopoly position, and doesn't have a chance to change the majortiy of computer suppliers to have Apple lock-in. On the other hand, Microsoft does have the potential to encourage everyone to move to MS-locked hardware, which is why MS would be jumped on in an instant if they tried something like that
Note that both of these situatios are hypothetical... Apple has clearly said they won't lock others out... but it was a choice they recently made, and I don't think it was strictly because of of legal reasons. Also, from the presentations that MS has given on NGSCB, it looks like they honestly are intending to keep hardware as open as it's always been. eg. standards they've written definitely point in that direction. But not every employee in a company is in sync, and MS can always change their minds, so I suppose it's still possible that they try some funny stuff.
Embrace -- pretend you warm up to a standard because you actually like it
Extend -- Make some Microsoft-specific tweaks to the standard, and encourage others to use them. Make sure those tweaks lock-in users into your software. Bundle it with your OS and Office Suite to give your tweaks an edge. If it's too easy for others interoperate with your modified version of the standard, keep modifying it until others lose relevance, and you have 90% of the market share.
Yeah, but look at Japan now! They have a slice of the pie now, whereas before, they didn't! Look at where we are now, with Toyotas and Kawasakis and PSPs. If China follows Japan's footsteps and gains a slice of the pie, we will all be doomed!
I'm one of the people who think that the flight missions are pointless when all we do is go to the space station and have no real objectives (I'm more for the rovers) but watching the successful liftoff was breathtaking.
I know it's an area that people have differing opinions, but it seems that there are two very valid goals for the space program, no?
learning more about physics on an astronomical scale (eg. how galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets form... learn more about the birth of the universe)
using space transportation and habitats on other planets as a way to safeguard the continued existance of human beings when future Extinction-level events occur. There's lots of evidence that extinction level events have happened in the past, and there's no doubt that semi-serious ones will occur in the future. Even recent recorded history has seen years when summer didn't occur. And right now, it's an even bet whether nature will hurt humans most, of if it will be humans who create their own extinction-level event.
And PSP UMD disks were never intended to illegitmate things like porn. And PSP was never intended to play MAME. People should never misappropriate things, they should only do things that are strictly in accordance with the original author's world view.
the users were exchanging US dollars for the rights to use virtual goods, characters and coin within the game
The players don't OWN the items, they only have a license to use it. Since Sony still owns the items, and the license the players purchase probably has all kinds of lawerly caveats, there's probably not as much legal ground for lawsuits as you think.
you buy gold. dupe bug is found. virtual market collapses. not our fault, you can't sue us.
you buy weapon. find out weapon is cheaper from in-game auction house. caveat emptor, you can't sue us.
we realize you're just a bunch of whiney kids, but please, please... try to act like grown-ups. and don't sue us.
if you really feel strongly about it, and must sue us, you must first go through arbitration phase. Arbitrator will be Dorfunk located in the Nahor Highlands. Beware, the path is long and fraught with claws and large teeth.
I second that. Here (similar here) is an example of GUI scripting within it. If it's good enough to write a bot in for games, it will almost certainly do anything you want it to on the apps side.
Why does it matter that it's official content, as long as you can't access it? There could be nipples hiding in many other games, encrypted with 1024 RSA encryption, and it would take a hacker thousands of years to write a patch that would allow you to see that nipple, but the publishers are still to be condemned? That's stupid. It was clearly and effectively locked up, and users have to go to some trouble to unlock it.
What's the difference from the standpoint of the user? Either way, the only way to access the naughty bits is to download an external tool, point it at your game directory, and run it. They're the EXACT SAME scenario from the user standpoint. It doesn't matter how "fully rended, unmodified form" the nudity is, because the end-user simply can't access it without running an outside tool.
As others have said, if you're 16 years old and want to see nudity, it's far easier to just google for porn, or talk a real live person who has the jiggly bits that interest you.
The only real difference I can see is that of intent... at one time in the past, somebody who works at Rockstar Games thought about including this content. That's it, that's the biggest problem I can see.
The final game CD does contain textures of nudity, yes. Those nudity textures can't normally be accessed by gamers without using a third party tool that goes in and physically changes a few bytes in files in the game.
So, what does this mean for ESRB games in the future? That no graphics of nudity can exist in the game, no matter how obscured/hidden/encrypted they are? Does ESRB have to scour all binaries now, looking for graphics in every conceivable format?
Furthermore, it wasn't just textures... there were 3D animations included. Take out the textures, and you still a plethora of white shadows humping, possibly with dangly or jiggly bits in the right places. Would Rockstar have gotten in trouble for explicit white shadows, and had to have made sure all traces of these were removed too?
I mean, this is rediculous. The mini-games were solidly hidden, and people who want to unlock it have to download a tool that was specifically crafted for this game by someone else. There's no other way to unlock it. If there's a nipple hidden deep inside a binary, let it be.
It's pretty easy for women to take their shirts off too, you know. That functionality should be a federal offense too.
You just talk like an MBA who has ADD and a raging crack addiction, that's all. I do somewhat disagree with your technical arguments too, but your writing is too grating to carefully read and respond to, so I'll just take exception to your style of writing for now.
Please post as a logged-in person, so I can see if you always talk like that. And if you really do always talk like that, log in so I can put you in my "Foes" list.
And if you're rating the ad for badness, you're also paying attention to it. So all they care about is a button that says "I paid attention to this advertisement". Which is basically the fast-forward button, which Tivo records.
In terms of innovation in interactivity... they've had years to try interactive ads on the web, and apparently the best way to get the user involved in their ad is to ask you to Punch the Monkey. (no thanks)
Slashdot Mirror
2) It also won't be a surprise when somebody hacks it and gets Apple's OS to work on other Intel hardware.
My issue with this is: Apple seems to always be focused on having a high-quality user experience. Part of the reason they can do that is that they can target specific sets of hardware (much like how console games increase user-friendliness by targetting a single main configuration).
If you run an Apple OS on different hardware, you have to do some work to get it to work. And you obviously don't expect everything to work 100% perfectly. That's all Apple has to do, they don't really need to DRM things. They just have to make it clear that you'll have a degraded user experience if you run it on other hardware, and they warned you, and that quality issues you may see aren't their fault. If you want to experiment, use the Mach kernel or Linux directly. If you want a nice user experience, use official Apple hardware.
1. There's value in brevity. If you can get your points across with a minimum of words, you save your reader time.
2. There's value in distilling your thoughts into two or three bullet points. People don't want to work hard to try to figure out what you're saying. People are more likely to read and understrand your viewpoint if you do a little work to make it short and coherent first.
3. You claim to be intelligent. If so, great. You write like you're from the PR department or fromt upper management, like you need to hype up your writing to make it more impressive. If you you have good ideas, express them clearly, and people will recognize that. They'll recognize that a lot better if you don't have a bunch of hyper formatting.
4. Write less. People don't want to respond to your logical points if a) they have to comb through your first post to make sure they didn't misunderstand it, and b) if you're going to respond with many more pages that they will have to take a lot more of their personal time to try to completely understand.
There's still a philosophical difference. Firefox is designed to be endlessly enhanceable by end users. Firefox has shrunk a little bit, but still a large portion of its stock functionality is implemented in javascript (so that its functionality is more easily morphed by add-on user code).
Opera is designed to be a small, solid, fast implementation of most things you need, but it's not inherently designed to be able to morph into an operating system or a kitchen sink. Opera is fundamentally slower moving, because it's implemented in C/assembly, but once Opera catches up with Firefox, its new features are more streamlined.
(no, I'm not confusing Gecko and Firefox. You can bolt a kitchen sink on top of Firefox, so it's a browser + sink)
I don't know. Maybe a better solution would be to create a variable like $SHELL, but call it $SHEBANG. When a script starts with #!$SHEBANG, the kernel wouldn't parse ANYTHING else on that line (eg. have the same behavior across Linux, Solaris, ...), and the $SHEBANG program would be some universally available program that would do the parsing of that line, and search the path, etc. I don't know.
Look, the difference between Opera and Mozilla is pretty simple. Ready?
Opera = Vi. Mozilla = Emacs. Got it?
Opera = small download, very small memory footprint, a lot of attention paid to making it fast.
Mozilla = as intelligently designed as Opera, but with a different philosophy. Make it flexible as hell by adding a powerful extension language (emacs gets lisp, mozilla gets javascript). Everybody adds interpretted code to it, and eventually it becomes a mail reader, web browser, operating system, and kitchen sink...
So it's really different strokes for different folks. You like minimalism, and have a growing collection of 80's-era hardware? Use Opera. You like lots of features, and maybe enjoy hacking bits of your favorate app-becomes-OS? Use Mozilla.
Further research revealed that while some people had actually paid for XP, they found repeated product activation to be such a painful experience, that it was easier to just download the ilicit version and be done with it.
Does anybody know if Herr Gates is scheduled to meet any important people soon?
(as a semi-related note... I bet it wouldn't be illegal for the Intel Macs to block out everything but OSX... but only because Apple isn't in a monopoly position, and doesn't have a chance to change the majortiy of computer suppliers to have Apple lock-in. On the other hand, Microsoft does have the potential to encourage everyone to move to MS-locked hardware, which is why MS would be jumped on in an instant if they tried something like that
)Extend -- Make some Microsoft-specific tweaks to the standard, and encourage others to use them. Make sure those tweaks lock-in users into your software. Bundle it with your OS and Office Suite to give your tweaks an edge. If it's too easy for others interoperate with your modified version of the standard, keep modifying it until others lose relevance, and you have 90% of the market share.
That's virtually the same as saying "from the we-know-there's-confusion-in-the-writeup-somewhere -but-we're-too-lazy-to-RTFA dept.", isn't it?
Yeah, but look at Japan now! They have a slice of the pie now, whereas before, they didn't! Look at where we are now, with Toyotas and Kawasakis and PSPs. If China follows Japan's footsteps and gains a slice of the pie, we will all be doomed!
And PSP UMD disks were never intended to illegitmate things like porn. And PSP was never intended to play MAME. People should never misappropriate things, they should only do things that are strictly in accordance with the original author's world view.
I second that. Here (similar here) is an example of GUI scripting within it. If it's good enough to write a bot in for games, it will almost certainly do anything you want it to on the apps side.
Why does it matter that it's official content, as long as you can't access it? There could be nipples hiding in many other games, encrypted with 1024 RSA encryption, and it would take a hacker thousands of years to write a patch that would allow you to see that nipple, but the publishers are still to be condemned? That's stupid. It was clearly and effectively locked up, and users have to go to some trouble to unlock it.
As others have said, if you're 16 years old and want to see nudity, it's far easier to just google for porn, or talk a real live person who has the jiggly bits that interest you.
The only real difference I can see is that of intent... at one time in the past, somebody who works at Rockstar Games thought about including this content. That's it, that's the biggest problem I can see.
So, what does this mean for ESRB games in the future? That no graphics of nudity can exist in the game, no matter how obscured/hidden/encrypted they are? Does ESRB have to scour all binaries now, looking for graphics in every conceivable format?
Furthermore, it wasn't just textures... there were 3D animations included. Take out the textures, and you still a plethora of white shadows humping, possibly with dangly or jiggly bits in the right places. Would Rockstar have gotten in trouble for explicit white shadows, and had to have made sure all traces of these were removed too?
I mean, this is rediculous. The mini-games were solidly hidden, and people who want to unlock it have to download a tool that was specifically crafted for this game by someone else. There's no other way to unlock it. If there's a nipple hidden deep inside a binary, let it be.
It's pretty easy for women to take their shirts off too, you know. That functionality should be a federal offense too.
Shhh, it's supposed to be secret! Don't broadly distribute this third-party modification over the internet, or it will be the end of our fun...
Please post as a logged-in person, so I can see if you always talk like that. And if you really do always talk like that, log in so I can put you in my "Foes" list.
In terms of innovation in interactivity... they've had years to try interactive ads on the web, and apparently the best way to get the user involved in their ad is to ask you to Punch the Monkey. (no thanks)