Yes, monopolies are overall not good, but not everything bad they do is *caused* by them being a monopoly.
Being a monopoly means they don't have to care about offending or annoying their customers. So they don't take the minimal amount of care that would have been needed to have prevented problems like this. They can wait until someone makes a fuss, secure knowing that no matter how long it takes them to fix it (or ignore it) that they won't lose any customers, because there is nowhere for them to go.
Interesting. Another thing I've noticed about English text from Asian countries is that it's often stretched or squished to fit a space. To me text with the wrong aspect ratio always looks weird and amateurish. Is it common practice to stretch and squish Asian characters, or is that something that's only done with English?
When the printer or layout person doesn't read English, they just make it fit. The customer often doesn't care either, it's just boilerplate to them.
What I find interesting about printed chinese english is that it is often printed in the same typeface. Look at many of the inspection tags, instructions, or 'made in china' tags that you have on products laying about; chances are that they are all in an identical old-fashioned serif typeface. Can anyone tell us the story behind this generic 'english' typeface that I run into so often?
Chinese fonts have thousands of characters. They also include all the standard European ones. Unfortunately, whatever the Chinese looks like, they all seem to have copied the same crappy old spindly English letters, probably from some Windows 2.0 font. Sometimes I work with Chinese text and I always change the font for the English words to get something more presentable.
Pepsi's "Come Alive With the Pepsi Generation" translated into "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From the Grave" in Chinese.
The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as "Kekoukela", meaning "Bite the Wax Tadpole"
Y'know, this might be an interesting idea...
Imagine if the passphrase to your key was the contents of a large binary on your system.
Well, now you've published that idea, it would take them a couple of minutes at most to check all the binaries on any machine. Why not just use your wife's name + her birthday? They'd NEVER think of that.
I keep forgetting that slashdot doesn't understand the idea of newline characters and so needs fecking HTML code to work.
Change your default format from "HTML formatted" to "Plain old text". You can still use bold, italic, etc tags, but newlines are translated into P codes.
The "geek factor" doesn't equate to lots of revenue and they know it. For most people, once is enough. No matter what.
Who else but geeks would download a cam of a movie to watch on their PC anyway? The quality is crap, it's only to satisfy your curiosity. Does Joe Sixpack really download cam rips? Maybe I'm behind the curve.
Nice way to let someone else make your opinion for you. Especially people whose opinions have a habit of sucking. Have fun seeing the next overhyped action sequel or Ben Stiller movie
If you're going to read movie reviews at all, you will soon find how to translate between what a particular reviewer thinks and what you will make of it. With one local newspaper reviewer I could be sure I would hate everything he praised and vice versa. Others I could be more in tune with. With online reviews you can just bookmark the reviewers you trust.
Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research Inc., a San Francisco company that develops anti-piracy technology, said that unlike with music, one viewing of a film -- even in blurry, camcorded form -- often is enough.
"With rare exception, once you've seen the movie you're unlikely to watch it a second time," Kocher said.
What bullshit. For a start, this guy "develops anti-piracy technology". Why the hell the journalists don't question HOW HE KNOWS THIS? Or is he just pulling it out his ass?
Especially for a "geek" movie -- say a comic book superhero, Star Trek, etc, -- the geeks WILL certainly download blurry camcorder videos. Then, if it's not crap, they'll all troop down to the cineplex to watch it on the big screen. Then, they'll buy the DVD. Then, they'll buy the Director's Cut..... The studios whine about how the "bad buzz" went around with Hulk. "If not for those meddling kids it would have been a hit". That movie was DOA. "Dark Knight" has wonderful buzz. It wouldn't matter if you could download it the day it was out, it'd still have broken records.
I don't understand why it would be so hard to accept that people decide what the fuck they want to do with their product, if this is how Apple want to sell it let them. If you don't like it don't buy it.
I don't understand why it would be so hard to accept that people decide what the fuck they want to do with their product, if this is what customers want to do with their product, let them.
I do not understand this mentality of people who use email as a 'to do list' or 'archive of information'. It excels at neither of these.
It excels as a list of messages documenting a relationship. Contract negotiations, pricing, etc, etc. Business relationships can span decades. There is constant turnover of people. You need an authoritative file of who said what to who. It used to be a paper file, now if you're doing most of your business by email that's what you need to keep. And the original email mailboxes are a lot easier to search than whatever documents, wikis, whatever different people may have stored copies in.
It's a fair question, and one I've certainly struggled with. Ultimately, you have to come up with a balancing of the possibilities. On one hand is the possibility that an email over 180 days exonerates you and on the other is an email over 180 days old that sends your executives to prison.
And what about when the executives deny responsibility for various dubious practices and blame some junior staffer who was just following their (now deleted) orders?
Unless the staffer was paranoid enough to risk breaking rules to make his own backup (which might be hard to verify, anyway), he's the one (unjustly) screwed.
Anyway, I made sure to archive all my email and keep a copy at home. And it did come in useful when I quit and sued the company later, and I was able to produce copies of messages verifying my claims and refuting the company's (fortunately the judge didn't obsess about the provenance of my copies, and the company was too clueless to question them).
. There's a secret trick to wake him up.... Then, in the line which drops down, enter the word typo. Click the Tag button to the right of that.
Works about 10% of the time, in my experience. Most of them don't give a shit. Taco has said many times he thinks it looks more friendly to make mistakes.
If Scrabulous made enough changes in color and style to make their board not a derived work of the Scrabble board artwork, they'd be fine - and most game rip-offs do so. But they didn't, and if they did it would invalidate many specific Scrabble strategies and not be as popular. The spacing and location of the bonus squares is part of what makes Scrabble Scrabble, and if you change the board artwork enough to not infringe, you'd have a game that plays a bit differently.
No, you can have exactly the same gameplay and placement. Just change the artwork.
Though "artwork' is a bit of an exaggeration for a grid of white, pink and blue boxes. I really doubt that would be considered "art" in any copyrightable sense. Though I'm sure the lawyers would try to claim so. If they used slightly different colours and lettering, they should be fine, ultimately, though lawyers could drag it out.
Looking at a screen shot of the game, Hasbro might have trademark the way the tiles look. i.e. a letter with a number in the bottom right hand corner.
You can't trademark a layout of "a letter and a number in a box". (A logo or name, yes.) You can patent it, but it would be hard to uphold such a generic design. In any case, patents expire in normally 17 years, Scrabble is over 60 years old.
You can't copyright a game, but you *can* copyright a game board.
In general, no. Perhaps if it was full of original symbols artwork and design. Scrabble uses a simple grid and generic lettering, a few stars. If Scrabulous had half a brain they could copy it and make minor variations in colour and style that no one would notice, but would make it unique. Given that their version is digital, it can't be a duplicate of the real Scrabble game board anyway.
You can copyright a game. I remember a few years ago, Hasbro sued Kellogg for having a card matching game on their cereal boxes as part of a Finding Nemo promotion, saying it too closely resembled their Memory card game. Wizards of the Coast even has a patent for "games, published in the form of trading cards, in which a player selects a collection of tradeable elements and uses that set to compete with other players", so any collectible card game has to pay them royalties.
You start claiming "You can copyright a game", the you start talking about patents. Do you understand the (vast) difference?
However, I suspect that your suggestion is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and merely offered as a rebuttal to 'HTML'.
Yes. HTML is pretty horrible as far as character sets go too. I live in Hong Kong and often have to manually change the default character encoding to be able to view a page in the intended character set.
My guess is it started as a stupid bar-bet kind of discussion: "how would you get the gold out of the middle of a rock? Heat the stone, and melt the gold!" And Neal replied, "Hey, I bet I can write a story where that's the ending."
That actually was the gimmick in one of the original Mission Impossible TV episodes back in the 1968 ("The Mercenaries"). They drilled a small hole from below, extruded a heating element which melted the vault full of gold (no mention of the nuclear power source it would have needed...) let it run down the hole and cast it into new ingots. Fnally the heater sprayed a fresh coat of paint over the room and they went off in their van as usual... Very different to the Tom Cruise movies.
Sure. If you believe that I have a fifth: ASCII plain text.
90% of business documents oculd be in this format with no loss of information, a 99% reduction in size and ability to use any number of tools to search and organise it.
But the PHBs want to use Comic Sans and paste movies into their memos.
Slashdot Mirror
Being a monopoly means they don't have to care about offending or annoying their customers. So they don't take the minimal amount of care that would have been needed to have prevented problems like this. They can wait until someone makes a fuss, secure knowing that no matter how long it takes them to fix it (or ignore it) that they won't lose any customers, because there is nowhere for them to go.
When the printer or layout person doesn't read English, they just make it fit. The customer often doesn't care either, it's just boilerplate to them.
Richard Feynman was a pretty serious bongo drummer.
Chinese fonts have thousands of characters. They also include all the standard European ones. Unfortunately, whatever the Chinese looks like, they all seem to have copied the same crappy old spindly English letters, probably from some Windows 2.0 font. Sometimes I work with Chinese text and I always change the font for the English words to get something more presentable.
The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as "Kekoukela", meaning "Bite the Wax Tadpole"
Bullshit urban legends. Citations?
Well, now you've published that idea, it would take them a couple of minutes at most to check all the binaries on any machine. Why not just use your wife's name + her birthday? They'd NEVER think of that.
Change your default format from "HTML formatted" to "Plain old text". You can still use bold, italic, etc tags, but newlines are translated into P codes.
Right. And you enter your programs by soldering contacts on the circuit board.
No Fucking Way.
Postscript is a printer language. without some more-friendly front end.
Exactly.
I've hacked Postscript too on occasion. But I would never ever imagine trying to write a laid-out page in it from scratch.
If you try, you'll just end up creating a huge pile of macros and end up with something vaguely like TeX, but much harder to use and more limited.
Who else but geeks would download a cam of a movie to watch on their PC anyway? The quality is crap, it's only to satisfy your curiosity. Does Joe Sixpack really download cam rips? Maybe I'm behind the curve.
If you're going to read movie reviews at all, you will soon find how to translate between what a particular reviewer thinks and what you will make of it. With one local newspaper reviewer I could be sure I would hate everything he praised and vice versa. Others I could be more in tune with. With online reviews you can just bookmark the reviewers you trust.
What bullshit. For a start, this guy "develops anti-piracy technology". Why the hell the journalists don't question HOW HE KNOWS THIS? Or is he just pulling it out his ass?
Especially for a "geek" movie -- say a comic book superhero, Star Trek, etc, -- the geeks WILL certainly download blurry camcorder videos. Then, if it's not crap, they'll all troop down to the cineplex to watch it on the big screen. Then, they'll buy the DVD. Then, they'll buy the Director's Cut..... The studios whine about how the "bad buzz" went around with Hulk. "If not for those meddling kids it would have been a hit". That movie was DOA. "Dark Knight" has wonderful buzz. It wouldn't matter if you could download it the day it was out, it'd still have broken records.
I don't understand why it would be so hard to accept that people decide what the fuck they want to do with their product, if this is what customers want to do with their product, let them.
It excels as a list of messages documenting a relationship. Contract negotiations, pricing, etc, etc. Business relationships can span decades. There is constant turnover of people. You need an authoritative file of who said what to who. It used to be a paper file, now if you're doing most of your business by email that's what you need to keep. And the original email mailboxes are a lot easier to search than whatever documents, wikis, whatever different people may have stored copies in.
And what about when the executives deny responsibility for various dubious practices and blame some junior staffer who was just following their (now deleted) orders?
Unless the staffer was paranoid enough to risk breaking rules to make his own backup (which might be hard to verify, anyway), he's the one (unjustly) screwed.
Anyway, I made sure to archive all my email and keep a copy at home. And it did come in useful when I quit and sued the company later, and I was able to produce copies of messages verifying my claims and refuting the company's (fortunately the judge didn't obsess about the provenance of my copies, and the company was too clueless to question them).
Maybe the NSA has a copy of the fax, but the phone company should only have a record of the sending and receiving numbers, not what was actually sent.
Works about 10% of the time, in my experience. Most of them don't give a shit. Taco has said many times he thinks it looks more friendly to make mistakes.
Anyway, look at http://slashdot.org/tags/typo . Lots of articles tagged "typo" still have obvious errors.
No, you can have exactly the same gameplay and placement. Just change the artwork.
Though "artwork' is a bit of an exaggeration for a grid of white, pink and blue boxes. I really doubt that would be considered "art" in any copyrightable sense. Though I'm sure the lawyers would try to claim so. If they used slightly different colours and lettering, they should be fine, ultimately, though lawyers could drag it out.
You can't trademark a layout of "a letter and a number in a box". (A logo or name, yes.) You can patent it, but it would be hard to uphold such a generic design. In any case, patents expire in normally 17 years, Scrabble is over 60 years old.
In general, no. Perhaps if it was full of original symbols artwork and design. Scrabble uses a simple grid and generic lettering, a few stars. If Scrabulous had half a brain they could copy it and make minor variations in colour and style that no one would notice, but would make it unique. Given that their version is digital, it can't be a duplicate of the real Scrabble game board anyway.
You start claiming "You can copyright a game", the you start talking about patents. Do you understand the (vast) difference?
Or Australian.
Okay then make it Unicode.
However, I suspect that your suggestion is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and merely offered as a rebuttal to 'HTML'.
Yes. HTML is pretty horrible as far as character sets go too. I live in Hong Kong and often have to manually change the default character encoding to be able to view a page in the intended character set.
That actually was the gimmick in one of the original Mission Impossible TV episodes back in the 1968 ("The Mercenaries"). They drilled a small hole from below, extruded a heating element which melted the vault full of gold (no mention of the nuclear power source it would have needed...) let it run down the hole and cast it into new ingots. Fnally the heater sprayed a fresh coat of paint over the room and they went off in their van as usual... Very different to the Tom Cruise movies.
Sure. If you believe that I have a fifth: ASCII plain text.
90% of business documents oculd be in this format with no loss of information, a 99% reduction in size and ability to use any number of tools to search and organise it.
But the PHBs want to use Comic Sans and paste movies into their memos.
"403 Forbidden"
Try http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/movie/watchmen/stills/17