Re:Party in HS may have led to failure in HS not U
on
The Law as a Parent
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· Score: 1
Which is why of course everyone ELSE also became a failure in high school...oh wait...they didn't
Were you stoned the day they taught the phrase "may have" in school?;-) No one said partying inevitably leads to failure in school. See longer response to the other followup.
Re:Party in HS may have led to failure in HS not U
on
The Law as a Parent
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· Score: 1
I guess I should have put the "may" in "... they may have..." in bold. Partying does not necessarily lead to failure. I partied heavily in HS and College, held part time jobs, and eventually earned a Masters. My point is that the folks who have a predisposition to take something to a self destructive excess are probably not going to ease into it. Starting in HS is probably not going to help them.
Party in HS may have led to failure in HS not Univ
on
The Law as a Parent
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· Score: 1
When they graduated, and went to a university, the lack of parental supervision gave way to the partying that they avoided in high school. Low a behold they ended up doing poorly in higher education, one even lost an academic scollorship. The point is, had these people partied in high school, they would have learned to control these desires.
That is naive, had they partied in high school they may have merely become failures at an earlier age. At least they were adults when they became failuires and had already graduated high school. I don't know about your HS but at mine there was no shortage of former A students who turned into "academic losers" when they started heavy partying in JHS or HS.
How? More likely parent will be invovled ...
on
The Law as a Parent
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How does passing laws to restrict the sale of violent games and put tight restrictions on the industry's labeling systems help parents raise their children?
It makes it more likely that a child will not be buying that game without a parent present and the labeling will help the parent be better informed. How could you not see this? Or does the fact that it is not a 100% effective solution somehow make it not worth trying in your view?
When I was a kid I ran out of glue when building a model airplane. I tagged along when my mom went shopping and I went to the toy department and tried to buy some glue. The clerk said that some kids are sniffing glue so they stopped selling it to kids as young as me. I found my mom and brought her back to the toy department and she told the clerk it was OK. She thought that it was a very responsible thing for the store to do and she thought it was very helpful. You doubt that some of today's parents won't have similar opinions?
As someone who was a teenager when Al Gore and Tipper were on a similar crusade with respect to music I find all this hysteria greatly overblown.
Continuing a thread from a different response...
Blackthorne is still available, a playable demo is also available. The original developer was what we now call Blizzard Entertainment. They ported their early console work to GameBot Advanced recnently.
You missed the real point of the followups, that the game is still available today on GameBoy Advanced. Blizzard being the current publisher. Blizzard even offers a playable demo.
Just to be clear the integrators and builders are the same outfit and they would probably not make such an assumption. They would fear mistakes where higher end CPUs were erroneously sold as lower end CPUs. A lower end CPU seeming to be where a higher end CPU should be would set off warning bells. These guys operate on razor thin margins and have to be very careful with their inventory.
But of course it's a lot better of a strategy if you can rebrand them more completely
Just to be clear the string is burned into the electronics of the CPU, see the CPUID instructions. You can't really change that. You would have to have a BIOS that is participating in the fraud. However Windows and various utilities also display this CPUID string so a complete fraud would be very difficult.
If you have an AMD 1300+ and upgrade to what you think is a 2600+ (but is really a 2200+) would you really notice?
Sure. Intel and AMD embed brand strings in the CPU that indicate speed or performance rating. When the machine starts up and BIOS displays this string it would say 2200+ rather than 2600+.
You completely misrepresent things. The countermeasures are not elaborate or half assed. Intel has already been down this road. Fixed clock multipliers, having BIOS vendors display the embedded brand string that includes the performance index, etc. Overclocking on AMD is endangered by large scale counterfeiting.
Relabling is counterfeiting, just like pasting the corners from $10 bills on a $1. It doesn't really matter that you are starting from legitimately produced materials.
In 10 years no one will remember any but the best video game, and even then only with nostalgia. But in 10 years you'll still have a young daughter who may or may not have her head screwed on right
First the story sounds apocryphal so there is not much to say there. However I will point out that Starcraft is not only going to be remembered at its ten year anniversary but it is on track to still being **played** at that time. It has gone far beyond the nostalgic rememberance point. You point is good in general but misapplied to Starcraft, again, I'm only commenting on the game part. The importance of a child is a given and shouldn't even need to be pointed out.
For what reason are Athlon 64 processors not "stable"?
Usually its the user. Someone will upgrade a system by replacing the motherboard but that old power supply is not Athlon rated. Or they will buy brand new crappy parts. Or they will have a rats nest of ribbon cables block airflow through the case. Or they will overclock and think because the systems seems to be running fine everything is OK, being totally oblivious to the fact that not all overclocking induced errors are obvious - some are as subtle as an instruction giving the wrong answer. The build-your-own folks who buy high quality parts after doing their homework, who properly route cables to permit airflow, and who avoid risky behaviors like overclocking are not heard from as often as the former.
Someone else posted "you get what you pay for", well yes and no. You get back the effort that went in, now you could pay for someone else's effort, or you could invest your own time. Either works.
The company did patent it, Mr. Russell was an employee not some independent inventor working out of his garage:
"Battelle recognized Russell's creativity and gave him time and a laboratory to develop his ideas, including a far-out system that would use a laser to read digitized music.
In hindsight, Battelle let Russell's patents go for a song. It licensed them to a venture capitalist who formed a public company in 1980 to market the technology.
That company ran out of money in 1985, and the patents went to a startup in Toronto, which hired Russell.
It sued Sony, Philips and music publishers for licensing fees and royalties on CD technology, but Russell was let go before settlements were reached, and he never got a share."
Case 2: Inventor creates well-deserved patent which leads to multi-billion dollars of business for many companies and does not receive a cent of royalties, due to bad/greedy decisions by corporate management.
Opinion: Well-deserved patents good - companies greedy/stupid.
Where is this logical inconsistency again?
Well we could begin with the fact that you completely misrepresent the starting conditions. Did you read the article? He did not develop the technology on his own, this was not a garage inventor. He was an employee doing research on company time on company equipment. The company, Battelle, owned his work and they got just as "screwed" as he did. Your "bad/greedy" characterization is naive. Good ideas are not enough, you need the resources to turn the ideas into products, and some good luck. A more realistic characterization was that the idea was too far ahead of its time.
Apple is not our friend. You might like their fancy computers and software, but never forget that they are a proprietary hardware and software company.
Since when is "friend" defined as non-commercial? Also are you incapable of having friends that do not share your religion? Most of us are not that narrow minded.
Apple promotes Unix on the consumer desktop. Apple increases the acceptance of FreeBSD by using it for portions, Darwin, of their operating system. Although they do not have to, BSD license, they are "good citizens" and make their changes available to the public. Apple has open sourced it's formerly proprietary file system code. They provide a free development environment with their systems. They actively work with Terra Soft to make a version of Linux, Yellow Dog, available for Apple hardware.
The fact that they do not open source all their code, their GUI in particular, does not make them an enemy. The fact that they do not support some people's pet music formats does not make them an enemy. The fact that their mission is not to promote all things open source does not make them an enemy. They seem happy to coexist, and to work with open source when appropriate.
Now watch the Apple zealots mod this down for being anti-Apple
Actually there is no shortage of legitimate reasons to mod you down.
Evil hands with just use yesterdays "or later" ...
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Revising the GPL
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· Score: 1
If it appears that the FSF will fall into evil hands, then I would expect many OSS developers to hurry up and release a new version with "version X alone" style licensing
So what, the evil hands will just get the previous day's source with the "or later" style.
You missed the point. Users are able to redistribute the software and the user is *free* to specify a more recent GPL if the original author left in the "or later" text. Essentially forking the project. That seems to be the users right, if you don't like that and if you chose the GPL, too bad. In the worst case scenario(*) described where a future GPL is BSD'ish, the fork would seem to be BSD and commercially exploitable without sharing changes.
(*) A previous poster's worst case, not mine, I have nothing against the BSD license.
Hey, Blizzard - you're a freaking company. Here's an amazing idea: use a freaking web server and download the patches that way. Your downloader obviously doesn't work.
Dude, get a clue, they have an http download for folks who really have problems, are blocked at school, etc. I'm not posting the link because I don't want to slashdot it but go to their support. The rest of you reading along, most of you don't have problem with the bittorrent code, you are just impatient. It starts out slow and takes a while to ramp up, it ends up being faster than http so just relax a little and be patient. Of course I expect this advice to ignored and you Mr AC are screwed because these folks are now going to overload the http download, Good luck.
Even with a spectacular launch where over 250,000 units were sold in just the first day, and had a record 100,000 playing on the afternoon of the launch, they seem to be commited to improving and growing the game, and that is very good to see
I'm confused, why would a spectacularly successful launch not lead to improvements and growth? I mean in general. With Blizzard specifically it should be even less surprising given that they have a history of supporting games for many years after release and that is without a monthly fee. Starcraft, a six year old game, was patched this year.
You're missing something: the world has countries other than the USA, and it's not the job of other countries' governments to enrich companies in the USA.
I have missed nothing. You are restating my opening comment: "The German decision may be viewed as a jobs program, or possibly seeding a domestic software industry."
Here in the USA, the government is indeed corrupt and does everything it can to give handouts to the rich and doesn't bother saving money or supporting local industries. However, not all countries' governments are this way, nor should they be. Luckily for the Germans, the German government appears to have domestic interests at heart and doesn't freely send their money overseas.
That is naive. Government corruption and waste is not USA-specific. There is no shortage of it in Europe. Also, the USA protects and promotes its companies as well as a means to protect jobs, tax revenue, etc. It has no need to promote OSS because the dominant companies are US based. In areas where the US is not dominant there have been similar activities. Things are far more similar on both sides of the Atlantic than you suggest.
The problem is that governments are not really interested is saving money or OSS. In reality it is "local" politics. The German decision may be viewed as a jobs program, or possibly seeding a domestic software industry.
It is not government's role to take down high profit companies, and it is not only the company shareholders that would be in trouble, it is the employees who would be in trouble. The executives and such have their golden parachutes, the little guys get screwed. Things are far more complicatd than you suggest.
The original Mac had a one-button mouse, but Steve Jobs' NeXT hardware (Cube and Slab) had a two-button mouse. I find it extremely unlikely that Steve is the only one at Apple who opposes a two-button mosue, since he allowed them at NeXT.
That would be naive. The Next systems were Unix workstations, Macs are consumer systems that must be easily operated by small children.
I'm not directing this at you, I'm directing this at the "community" at large. Your post just reminded me of this other problem.
**We** should be contributing to various organizations. As I said in the other post, less "free beer", consider it tipping the waitress/bartender. I guess this is the other OSS shortcoming, too many people expect others (government, companies) to pay. Few people donate their own time or money (buy CDs from org rather than download ISO, etc.) but they have lots of suggestions on how others should spend money or time.
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Which is why of course everyone ELSE also became a failure in high school...oh wait...they didn't
;-) No one said partying inevitably leads to failure in school. See longer response to the other followup.
Were you stoned the day they taught the phrase "may have" in school?
I guess I should have put the "may" in "... they may have ..." in bold. Partying does not necessarily lead to failure. I partied heavily in HS and College, held part time jobs, and eventually earned a Masters. My point is that the folks who have a predisposition to take something to a self destructive excess are probably not going to ease into it. Starting in HS is probably not going to help them.
When they graduated, and went to a university, the lack of parental supervision gave way to the partying that they avoided in high school. Low a behold they ended up doing poorly in higher education, one even lost an academic scollorship. The point is, had these people partied in high school, they would have learned to control these desires.
That is naive, had they partied in high school they may have merely become failures at an earlier age. At least they were adults when they became failuires and had already graduated high school. I don't know about your HS but at mine there was no shortage of former A students who turned into "academic losers" when they started heavy partying in JHS or HS.
How does passing laws to restrict the sale of violent games and put tight restrictions on the industry's labeling systems help parents raise their children?
It makes it more likely that a child will not be buying that game without a parent present and the labeling will help the parent be better informed. How could you not see this? Or does the fact that it is not a 100% effective solution somehow make it not worth trying in your view?
When I was a kid I ran out of glue when building a model airplane. I tagged along when my mom went shopping and I went to the toy department and tried to buy some glue. The clerk said that some kids are sniffing glue so they stopped selling it to kids as young as me. I found my mom and brought her back to the toy department and she told the clerk it was OK. She thought that it was a very responsible thing for the store to do and she thought it was very helpful. You doubt that some of today's parents won't have similar opinions?
As someone who was a teenager when Al Gore and Tipper were on a similar crusade with respect to music I find all this hysteria greatly overblown.
Continuing a thread from a different response ...
Blackthorne is still available, a playable demo is also available. The original developer was what we now call Blizzard Entertainment. They ported their early console work to GameBot Advanced recnently.
http://www.blizzard.com/blizzclassic/
You missed the real point of the followups, that the game is still available today on GameBoy Advanced. Blizzard being the current publisher. Blizzard even offers a playable demo.
http://www.blizzard.com/blizzclassic/
Just to be clear the integrators and builders are the same outfit and they would probably not make such an assumption. They would fear mistakes where higher end CPUs were erroneously sold as lower end CPUs. A lower end CPU seeming to be where a higher end CPU should be would set off warning bells. These guys operate on razor thin margins and have to be very careful with their inventory.
and how many people would actually notice?
You only need one to alert the system integrator that unknowingly bought the counterfeit chips.
But of course it's a lot better of a strategy if you can rebrand them more completely
Just to be clear the string is burned into the electronics of the CPU, see the CPUID instructions. You can't really change that. You would have to have a BIOS that is participating in the fraud. However Windows and various utilities also display this CPUID string so a complete fraud would be very difficult.
If you have an AMD 1300+ and upgrade to what you think is a 2600+ (but is really a 2200+) would you really notice?
Sure. Intel and AMD embed brand strings in the CPU that indicate speed or performance rating. When the machine starts up and BIOS displays this string it would say 2200+ rather than 2600+.
You completely misrepresent things. The countermeasures are not elaborate or half assed. Intel has already been down this road. Fixed clock multipliers, having BIOS vendors display the embedded brand string that includes the performance index, etc. Overclocking on AMD is endangered by large scale counterfeiting.
Relabling is counterfeiting, just like pasting the corners from $10 bills on a $1. It doesn't really matter that you are starting from legitimately produced materials.
In 10 years no one will remember any but the best video game, and even then only with nostalgia. But in 10 years you'll still have a young daughter who may or may not have her head screwed on right
First the story sounds apocryphal so there is not much to say there. However I will point out that Starcraft is not only going to be remembered at its ten year anniversary but it is on track to still being **played** at that time. It has gone far beyond the nostalgic rememberance point. You point is good in general but misapplied to Starcraft, again, I'm only commenting on the game part. The importance of a child is a given and shouldn't even need to be pointed out.
For what reason are Athlon 64 processors not "stable"?
Usually its the user. Someone will upgrade a system by replacing the motherboard but that old power supply is not Athlon rated. Or they will buy brand new crappy parts. Or they will have a rats nest of ribbon cables block airflow through the case. Or they will overclock and think because the systems seems to be running fine everything is OK, being totally oblivious to the fact that not all overclocking induced errors are obvious - some are as subtle as an instruction giving the wrong answer. The build-your-own folks who buy high quality parts after doing their homework, who properly route cables to permit airflow, and who avoid risky behaviors like overclocking are not heard from as often as the former.
Someone else posted "you get what you pay for", well yes and no. You get back the effort that went in, now you could pay for someone else's effort, or you could invest your own time. Either works.
The company did patent it, Mr. Russell was an employee not some independent inventor working out of his garage:
"Battelle recognized Russell's creativity and gave him time and a laboratory to develop his ideas, including a far-out system that would use a laser to read digitized music. In hindsight, Battelle let Russell's patents go for a song. It licensed them to a venture capitalist who formed a public company in 1980 to market the technology. That company ran out of money in 1985, and the patents went to a startup in Toronto, which hired Russell. It sued Sony, Philips and music publishers for licensing fees and royalties on CD technology, but Russell was let go before settlements were reached, and he never got a share."
Case 2: Inventor creates well-deserved patent which leads to multi-billion dollars of business for many companies and does not receive a cent of royalties, due to bad/greedy decisions by corporate management. Opinion: Well-deserved patents good - companies greedy/stupid. Where is this logical inconsistency again?
Well we could begin with the fact that you completely misrepresent the starting conditions. Did you read the article? He did not develop the technology on his own, this was not a garage inventor. He was an employee doing research on company time on company equipment. The company, Battelle, owned his work and they got just as "screwed" as he did. Your "bad/greedy" characterization is naive. Good ideas are not enough, you need the resources to turn the ideas into products, and some good luck. A more realistic characterization was that the idea was too far ahead of its time.
Apple is not our friend. You might like their fancy computers and software, but never forget that they are a proprietary hardware and software company.
Since when is "friend" defined as non-commercial? Also are you incapable of having friends that do not share your religion? Most of us are not that narrow minded.
Apple promotes Unix on the consumer desktop. Apple increases the acceptance of FreeBSD by using it for portions, Darwin, of their operating system. Although they do not have to, BSD license, they are "good citizens" and make their changes available to the public. Apple has open sourced it's formerly proprietary file system code. They provide a free development environment with their systems. They actively work with Terra Soft to make a version of Linux, Yellow Dog, available for Apple hardware.
The fact that they do not open source all their code, their GUI in particular, does not make them an enemy. The fact that they do not support some people's pet music formats does not make them an enemy. The fact that their mission is not to promote all things open source does not make them an enemy. They seem happy to coexist, and to work with open source when appropriate.
Now watch the Apple zealots mod this down for being anti-Apple
Actually there is no shortage of legitimate reasons to mod you down.
If it appears that the FSF will fall into evil hands, then I would expect many OSS developers to hurry up and release a new version with "version X alone" style licensing
So what, the evil hands will just get the previous day's source with the "or later" style.
You missed the point. Users are able to redistribute the software and the user is *free* to specify a more recent GPL if the original author left in the "or later" text. Essentially forking the project. That seems to be the users right, if you don't like that and if you chose the GPL, too bad. In the worst case scenario(*) described where a future GPL is BSD'ish, the fork would seem to be BSD and commercially exploitable without sharing changes.
(*) A previous poster's worst case, not mine, I have nothing against the BSD license.
Hey, Blizzard - you're a freaking company. Here's an amazing idea: use a freaking web server and download the patches that way. Your downloader obviously doesn't work.
Dude, get a clue, they have an http download for folks who really have problems, are blocked at school, etc. I'm not posting the link because I don't want to slashdot it but go to their support. The rest of you reading along, most of you don't have problem with the bittorrent code, you are just impatient. It starts out slow and takes a while to ramp up, it ends up being faster than http so just relax a little and be patient. Of course I expect this advice to ignored and you Mr AC are screwed because these folks are now going to overload the http download, Good luck.
Even with a spectacular launch where over 250,000 units were sold in just the first day, and had a record 100,000 playing on the afternoon of the launch, they seem to be commited to improving and growing the game, and that is very good to see
I'm confused, why would a spectacularly successful launch not lead to improvements and growth? I mean in general. With Blizzard specifically it should be even less surprising given that they have a history of supporting games for many years after release and that is without a monthly fee. Starcraft, a six year old game, was patched this year.
You're missing something: the world has countries other than the USA, and it's not the job of other countries' governments to enrich companies in the USA.
I have missed nothing. You are restating my opening comment: "The German decision may be viewed as a jobs program, or possibly seeding a domestic software industry."
Here in the USA, the government is indeed corrupt and does everything it can to give handouts to the rich and doesn't bother saving money or supporting local industries. However, not all countries' governments are this way, nor should they be. Luckily for the Germans, the German government appears to have domestic interests at heart and doesn't freely send their money overseas.
That is naive. Government corruption and waste is not USA-specific. There is no shortage of it in Europe. Also, the USA protects and promotes its companies as well as a means to protect jobs, tax revenue, etc. It has no need to promote OSS because the dominant companies are US based. In areas where the US is not dominant there have been similar activities. Things are far more similar on both sides of the Atlantic than you suggest.
The problem is that governments are not really interested is saving money or OSS. In reality it is "local" politics. The German decision may be viewed as a jobs program, or possibly seeding a domestic software industry.
It is not government's role to take down high profit companies, and it is not only the company shareholders that would be in trouble, it is the employees who would be in trouble. The executives and such have their golden parachutes, the little guys get screwed. Things are far more complicatd than you suggest.
The original Mac had a one-button mouse, but Steve Jobs' NeXT hardware (Cube and Slab) had a two-button mouse. I find it extremely unlikely that Steve is the only one at Apple who opposes a two-button mosue, since he allowed them at NeXT.
That would be naive. The Next systems were Unix workstations, Macs are consumer systems that must be easily operated by small children.
I'm not directing this at you, I'm directing this at the "community" at large. Your post just reminded me of this other problem.
**We** should be contributing to various organizations. As I said in the other post, less "free beer", consider it tipping the waitress/bartender. I guess this is the other OSS shortcoming, too many people expect others (government, companies) to pay. Few people donate their own time or money (buy CDs from org rather than download ISO, etc.) but they have lots of suggestions on how others should spend money or time.