This is a sad day for gaming in general. To drop support of a viable platform for monetary reasons is ir purely a financial move on GameSpy's part.
I, too, long for the old days when companies didn't have to think about their costs or profits. When they did whatever would make slashdot users happy. Whatever happened to those days?
It isn't illegal. Legality has to do with the keeping or breaking of laws. Agreeing with Google to host ads for them is not a law, it's merely a contract. In general, there are no legal consequences for breaking a contract. The breaching party may be liable for damages, but in this case I doubt Google would do anything but stop paying you and remove you from their ad hosting program.
Dec 28 to Dec 24? Advent travels backward through time this year? That will be a great trick. Maybe we'll be able to track it using Time::Travel or Time::Warp.
I am pretty sure that Perl is hard to remember because of the "many ways" aspect
I suspect that the main reason C passes your memory test while Perl does not is that you use C much more frequently than Perl. Use leads to familiarity. The fact that there are many programmers (myself included) who can remember Perl syntax, and more readily than C, supports this claim.
Another point is that Perl has a large number of built-in functions, including your pained split. That you may have to look up the exact order of arguments is no more telling than the fact that you may have to look up the order of arguments to C stdlib functions that you don't use often. Again, use leads to familiarity.
With MythTV, though, one button press takes you to the end of all five (or however many) commercials, instead of the end of just one. So it goes like this:
Tivo user: * Commercial starts. * Press skip. * Press skip. * Press skip. * Press skip. * Press skip. * Realize that last one went a bit too far, so you have to back up a bit. * Press rewind. * Continue watching show.
Even if you get it just right and don't have to rewind at all, you're still going through quite a few more steps for every commercial break.
And that's assuming the MythTV user doesn't just set auto-skip. If they do, it would be more like this:
* Continue watching show (because it skips just before the commercial starts).
Actually, if you believe in the whole software license mumbo-jumbo, you're both wrong. As licenses are contracts, authors can legally define any terms that are valid for a normal contract. Although not the case here, he *could* have terms in the for-profit license that exclude using it on or with competing software. Heck, he could put terms that say you have to send him a pig every time you do a code checkout. If you don't agree to the terms, you don't get a license, and you can't use the software. That's it. If you want to use it, you have to agree to the terms. You have no other recourse. You don't have automatic rights to use anything ever produced simply because it exists.
I agree with everything you said (or at least I don't disagree with it), except for the yo-yo dieting effect. Accepting your previous arguments, I would agree that it is a partial explanation. I think a much larger part, however, is that "dieting" doesn't work. Here's what many people do when dieting:
- Notice undesirable weight - Change diet to counteract weight gain - Over time, lose some goal-amount of weight - Resume previous diet, now that weight is down - Regain all of lost weight, due to going back to the exact eating habits that caused it in the first place
This society needs to forget about "diets". Diets do not help you permanently lose weight. You can't change eating habits temporarily and expect to lose weight permanently.
Actually there's no real liability. Software doesn't have the same kinds of liability guarantees that manufactured products usually do. In fact, most licenses state it very clearly (usually in all caps).
For a commercial company producing tax software (like the one I work for), the only real liability is losing credibility with your customers. There aren't any penalties to the company if we (or even the user) find a bug that would cause miscalculations, except that if there are lots, people won't buy your software anymore.
Mostly the reason you won't see Free tax prep software is not because of the liability (because there isn't any), but because of the effort required for updates, as you pointed out. It really is a huge pain in the ass updating for the new year's law changes. Too much of a pain, I would wager, for someone to consider it worthwhile to do for free.
With such a low barrier for entry (the price of the game), and the ease of becoming good (just invest a lot of time)
Do you realize that you've just described nearly every game ever invented? You can become good at any game by "just" investing a lot of time: it's called practicing. If you think becoming good at a video game is any easier just because you don't move around much, you must be playing against some pretty lousy opponents.
I think you've hit on what really qualifies for something as "a sport," as opposed to something done "for sport" which is where it originates. Doing something for the sport of it is just having fun. That's how all "sports" began: some fun game that people enjoyed playing together. Soon other people started gathering around, not waiting to play, they were too lazy for that, but just to watch those that liked to play anyway. It was entertaining.
The game wasn't a sport yet, still just a game, but now with spectators. Of course this didn't last long once some industrious business man noticed that people would probably get hungry and would pay for something to eat while they watched. And hey, since you're buying food, how about a hat of some sort, or a small, unusable version of a piece of equipment with someone's name scribbled on it. And hey, since you're already buying that stuff, why not just pay to be able to see the game at all. After all, those players work hard at having fun and they'd like some compensation too. At this point the game becomes a "sport": people pay just to watch the game, players play the game full time, many of them probably don't even like to play, and businessmen get rich.
This is what qualifies something as a sport. Think about it: do you think of croquet as a sport? The activity itself is rather similar to golf, but it isn't a sport while golf is. Why is that? Because there are no professional croquet players with millions of fans, nationally televised events, and advertisers beating down the door. It's just a "game," definitely not a "sport." Much like video games are just "games" right now. But just wait until the money starts rolling in. Then video games will be sports just like croquet, er, football.
I refuse to even consider ANY language that is whitespace sensitive
I guess you don't do much programming then. Maybe in APL; although I've never used it, the examples I've seen seem to be able to do without whitespace. Any other language needs whitespace somewhere. Ever try to declare a variable in C without whitespace?
Please explain how you are accurately updating $SECONDS once each second (especially while wget is running), as well as how you stop the wget process if it exceeds the 30 minute time limit. Thank you.
If my company had it's own internal IM that didn't require public servers out of our control, it may be feasible
Your company could run its own internal Jabber server. There are lots of clients for the employees, one of which would probably be suitable for or adaptable to the company's environment.
The problem you're having is with different meanings of the word "accept". Accepting the license, in this case, means to abide by its terms. It does not mean to believe in the validity of the license. If SCO has abided by the terms of the GPL with regard to nmap, meaning they made the source available and did not prevent others from making the source available, they have "accepted" it, and the author has no recourse. Whether or not they publicly decry the GPL has no bearing on whether they abide by its terms. If you publicly speak out against a law punishing murder, that does not mean you can be arrested for murder. Even though you've spoken against it, you have still abided by the law's terms: not to murder anyone. So even if SCO says they do not agree with the GPL, they have not necessary violated its terms and may continue distributing software under it.
The point people are trying to make is not that because they have violated the Linux license, they have automatically violated licenses for all GPL software.
The point is that SCO has basically come out and said that the GPL itself is not valid. Hence, they do not accept the GPL. Hence, they do not accept nmap's license. And since they do not accept the license of nmap, the author (and copyright holder) of nmap has terminated their right to distribute it.
This is OT and IANAL, but you haven't stolen from him. You haven't taken something of his. Instead, you've denied giving him something owed. You've broken a contract with him. A contract that stated you would pay him for his labor. A contract that you agreed to when he gave you the estimate, and you said "Go ahead and fix it."
What are you smoking? Are you saying that a two state system (binary) really has four states?
state 1 and !state 1 state 2 and !state 2
No, that isn't how it is. There is state 1 and state 2. That's it. "state 2" implies "!state 1". In a three state system, "state 2" would imply "!state 1 && !state 3".
When someone says "3 state system", it doesn't mean there *really* are 6 states, and they're just a dumbass. It means you're a dumbass because there really are just 3 states.
Yes, it's standards compliant, but the new Opera7 is a huge memory hog and the UI is slow and glitchy. I liked version 6 a lot, but after getting fed up with 7, I switched to Mozilla and am much happier. Plus, Fire(bird/fox) has a much better extension architecture that allows you to do almost anything in terms of look and behavior.
Okay, how about this one. When I was in fourth grade or so, I read a book about this guy (a king maybe?) who had a magic sword that attracted strands of magic, that he could then pull on to make stuff happen. That's as much as I remember from the story, except that I have the impression that the guy was rather annoyed at having to drag this magic sword around all the time and the strands would sometimes get in his way. What's the title?
Defragging is bottle necked by disk speed, not processor speed. Reading and rewriting thousands or hundreds of thousands of bytes to rearrange everything takes much longer than what the processor has to do to figure out where things go. Rebooting is mostly bottle necked by the disk too, because everything has to be loaded off of it to boot. So yes, unless you're running weather simulations or something, you probably do have a lot of superfluous processor power going to waste.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a sad day for gaming in general. To drop support of a viable platform for monetary reasons is ir purely a financial move on GameSpy's part.
I, too, long for the old days when companies didn't have to think about their costs or profits. When they did whatever would make slashdot users happy. Whatever happened to those days?
It isn't illegal. Legality has to do with the keeping or breaking of laws. Agreeing with Google to host ads for them is not a law, it's merely a contract. In general, there are no legal consequences for breaking a contract. The breaching party may be liable for damages, but in this case I doubt Google would do anything but stop paying you and remove you from their ad hosting program.
this year it started on the 28 of December
Dec 28 to Dec 24? Advent travels backward through time this year? That will be a great trick. Maybe we'll be able to track it using Time::Travel or Time::Warp.
I am pretty sure that Perl is hard to remember because of the "many ways" aspect
I suspect that the main reason C passes your memory test while Perl does not is that you use C much more frequently than Perl. Use leads to familiarity. The fact that there are many programmers (myself included) who can remember Perl syntax, and more readily than C, supports this claim.
Another point is that Perl has a large number of built-in functions, including your pained split. That you may have to look up the exact order of arguments is no more telling than the fact that you may have to look up the order of arguments to C stdlib functions that you don't use often. Again, use leads to familiarity.
No, not even then.
With MythTV, though, one button press takes you to the end of all five (or however many) commercials, instead of the end of just one. So it goes like this:
MythTV user:
* Commercial starts.
* Press skip.
* Continue watching show.
Tivo user:
* Commercial starts.
* Press skip.
* Press skip.
* Press skip.
* Press skip.
* Press skip.
* Realize that last one went a bit too far, so you have to back up a bit.
* Press rewind.
* Continue watching show.
Even if you get it just right and don't have to rewind at all, you're still going through quite a few more steps for every commercial break.
And that's assuming the MythTV user doesn't just set auto-skip. If they do, it would be more like this:
* Continue watching show (because it skips just before the commercial starts).
Backspace or Rewind
Actually, if you believe in the whole software license mumbo-jumbo, you're both wrong. As licenses are contracts, authors can legally define any terms that are valid for a normal contract. Although not the case here, he *could* have terms in the for-profit license that exclude using it on or with competing software. Heck, he could put terms that say you have to send him a pig every time you do a code checkout. If you don't agree to the terms, you don't get a license, and you can't use the software. That's it. If you want to use it, you have to agree to the terms. You have no other recourse. You don't have automatic rights to use anything ever produced simply because it exists.
I agree with everything you said (or at least I don't disagree with it), except for the yo-yo dieting effect. Accepting your previous arguments, I would agree that it is a partial explanation. I think a much larger part, however, is that "dieting" doesn't work. Here's what many people do when dieting:
- Notice undesirable weight
- Change diet to counteract weight gain
- Over time, lose some goal-amount of weight
- Resume previous diet, now that weight is down
- Regain all of lost weight, due to going back to the exact eating habits that caused it in the first place
This society needs to forget about "diets". Diets do not help you permanently lose weight. You can't change eating habits temporarily and expect to lose weight permanently.
Actually there's no real liability. Software doesn't have the same kinds of liability guarantees that manufactured products usually do. In fact, most licenses state it very clearly (usually in all caps).
For a commercial company producing tax software (like the one I work for), the only real liability is losing credibility with your customers. There aren't any penalties to the company if we (or even the user) find a bug that would cause miscalculations, except that if there are lots, people won't buy your software anymore.
Mostly the reason you won't see Free tax prep software is not because of the liability (because there isn't any), but because of the effort required for updates, as you pointed out. It really is a huge pain in the ass updating for the new year's law changes. Too much of a pain, I would wager, for someone to consider it worthwhile to do for free.
The reason this post seems almost like a good post is that it's a subtle troll.
It shows up in most of the Perl 6 stories.
With such a low barrier for entry (the price of the game), and the ease of becoming good (just invest a lot of time)
Do you realize that you've just described nearly every game ever invented? You can become good at any game by "just" investing a lot of time: it's called practicing. If you think becoming good at a video game is any easier just because you don't move around much, you must be playing against some pretty lousy opponents.
I think you've hit on what really qualifies for something as "a sport," as opposed to something done "for sport" which is where it originates. Doing something for the sport of it is just having fun. That's how all "sports" began: some fun game that people enjoyed playing together. Soon other people started gathering around, not waiting to play, they were too lazy for that, but just to watch those that liked to play anyway. It was entertaining.
The game wasn't a sport yet, still just a game, but now with spectators. Of course this didn't last long once some industrious business man noticed that people would probably get hungry and would pay for something to eat while they watched. And hey, since you're buying food, how about a hat of some sort, or a small, unusable version of a piece of equipment with someone's name scribbled on it. And hey, since you're already buying that stuff, why not just pay to be able to see the game at all. After all, those players work hard at having fun and they'd like some compensation too. At this point the game becomes a "sport": people pay just to watch the game, players play the game full time, many of them probably don't even like to play, and businessmen get rich.
This is what qualifies something as a sport. Think about it: do you think of croquet as a sport? The activity itself is rather similar to golf, but it isn't a sport while golf is. Why is that? Because there are no professional croquet players with millions of fans, nationally televised events, and advertisers beating down the door. It's just a "game," definitely not a "sport." Much like video games are just "games" right now. But just wait until the money starts rolling in. Then video games will be sports just like croquet, er, football.
I guess you don't do much programming then. Maybe in APL; although I've never used it, the examples I've seen seem to be able to do without whitespace. Any other language needs whitespace somewhere. Ever try to declare a variable in C without whitespace?How'd that work out for you?
Please explain how you are accurately updating $SECONDS once each second (especially while wget is running), as well as how you stop the wget process if it exceeds the 30 minute time limit. Thank you.
If my company had it's own internal IM that didn't require public servers out of our control, it may be feasible
Your company could run its own internal Jabber server. There are lots of clients for the employees, one of which would probably be suitable for or adaptable to the company's environment.
The problem you're having is with different meanings of the word "accept". Accepting the license, in this case, means to abide by its terms. It does not mean to believe in the validity of the license. If SCO has abided by the terms of the GPL with regard to nmap, meaning they made the source available and did not prevent others from making the source available, they have "accepted" it, and the author has no recourse. Whether or not they publicly decry the GPL has no bearing on whether they abide by its terms. If you publicly speak out against a law punishing murder, that does not mean you can be arrested for murder. Even though you've spoken against it, you have still abided by the law's terms: not to murder anyone. So even if SCO says they do not agree with the GPL, they have not necessary violated its terms and may continue distributing software under it.
The point people are trying to make is not that because they have violated the Linux license, they have automatically violated licenses for all GPL software.
The point is that SCO has basically come out and said that the GPL itself is not valid. Hence, they do not accept the GPL. Hence, they do not accept nmap's license. And since they do not accept the license of nmap, the author (and copyright holder) of nmap has terminated their right to distribute it.
There's not a single MUD out there that isn't heavily derived from one of the original ones.
How about this one?
This is OT and IANAL, but you haven't stolen from him. You haven't taken something of his. Instead, you've denied giving him something owed. You've broken a contract with him. A contract that stated you would pay him for his labor. A contract that you agreed to when he gave you the estimate, and you said "Go ahead and fix it."
What are you smoking? Are you saying that a two state system (binary) really has four states?
state 1 and !state 1
state 2 and !state 2
No, that isn't how it is. There is state 1 and state 2. That's it. "state 2" implies "!state 1". In a three state system, "state 2" would imply "!state 1 && !state 3".
When someone says "3 state system", it doesn't mean there *really* are 6 states, and they're just a dumbass. It means you're a dumbass because there really are just 3 states.
Yes, it's standards compliant, but the new Opera7 is a huge memory hog and the UI is slow and glitchy. I liked version 6 a lot, but after getting fed up with 7, I switched to Mozilla and am much happier. Plus, Fire(bird/fox) has a much better extension architecture that allows you to do almost anything in terms of look and behavior.
Try this link for Lightspeed. Under the Hip Pocket games.
Next.
Okay, how about this one. When I was in fourth grade or so, I read a book about this guy (a king maybe?) who had a magic sword that attracted strands of magic, that he could then pull on to make stuff happen. That's as much as I remember from the story, except that I have the impression that the guy was rather annoyed at having to drag this magic sword around all the time and the strands would sometimes get in his way. What's the title?
Defragging is bottle necked by disk speed, not processor speed. Reading and rewriting thousands or hundreds of thousands of bytes to rearrange everything takes much longer than what the processor has to do to figure out where things go. Rebooting is mostly bottle necked by the disk too, because everything has to be loaded off of it to boot. So yes, unless you're running weather simulations or something, you probably do have a lot of superfluous processor power going to waste.