While Discovery Channel is paying these families, I really don't feel encouraged to have a lot of children. In fact, because of those shows I'm becoming more supportive of forced sterilization. Starting with the Duggars...
Not entirely, but it becomes much more expensive to start up a new project. Getting rid of ACES only to start over from scratch doesn't seem like a wise business decision. Still, I don't think Flight is a true reboot of MSFS- it may just be a simpler game wrapped around a simple flight engine (like Pilotwings), dumbed down for a wider (and more attention-deficit) audience.
I wouldn't be surprised to see if Microsoft does the same with Age of Empires- AOE and AOK, (and to some extent, III) were all fairly complex as far as tech trees and counter strategies, especially compared to more mainstream RTSes like C&C and Starcraft.
Coincidently, Microsoft "lost" the Ensemble team who did the original AOE games in a similar way it "lost" the ACES team, yet similarities end there. MS is contracting the former Ensemble devs (under Robot Entertainment) to do AOE Online, but it appears Flight is being done in-house.
You notice when Microsoft is trying to reach out to a large audience and advertise one of their own products, they don't force Silverlight down our throats?
Patents are a monopolistic privileges granted by the government, as they require government assistance to enforce. Most prominent anarcho-capitalists (ie- the ones who oppose any regulation) are strongly opposed to the idea of patents, and many oppose all forms of intellectual property- though the philosophy that one can "own" ideas is largely independent of the economic spectrum.
ROTT did not have diagonal walls- the wall placement was still orthogonal, just like Wolfenstein. The floors and ceilings were fixed throughout the level, but the ceiling height could differ from one level or the next, or be nonexistent. The illusion of stairs was brought by sprites (gravitational anomaly disks?) that changed perspective depending on their vertical relationship to the player.
Heretic, OTOH, used the Doom engine and added y-shearing for looking up and down- it wasn't perspective-correct, but it did the job.
I don't believe there was much of an incremental steps between Wolfenstein and Doom, but there were some incremental steps between Doom and Quake. The Build engine, used by Duke Nukem 3D and other games (Shadow Warrior, Blood, Redneck Rampage, etc) allowed slanted floors, horizontal wall movement, and rooms-above-rooms.
I agree, a 22 would have been better. First time I shot a 30.06 was when I was 17, and weighed 130 lbs. And it still felt like it had ripped off my shoulder- not to mention the scope left a permanent scar above my eyebrow. 13 year holds should not be shooting higher caliber weapons than they can physically handle, even if it's to prove a point.
I'm surprised AT&T hasn't caught on with you yet- I had originally done the same with my Nexus One. I was on the $10 Medianet plan with AT&T, until they either got ahold of IMEI numbers for the N1 or figured out that my data usage (about a gig/month) must have come from a smartphone. In April, I received an email from AT&T telling me that "for my convenience" they switched me to the correct smartphone plan. Now I'm stuck paying ~$100/month for the cheapest voice plan plus unlimited data and texts and not much else.
Read the ToS more carefully, Steam calls it a purchase, but treats it much more like a license. People can and do lose entire accounts worth of games when somebody hacks in.
Not a problem- ask nicely and Valve will restore your account.
And even if you get the games back, if the person got you banned then they won't undo it.
You're referring to a VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) ban, which will ban you from VAC-enabled servers. That doesn't keep you from playing the game- you'll be able to play on non-VAC servers. However, Valve's policy is strict for a reason- anyone who has been caught cheating could claim their account has been hacked and then anyone could continue playing on VAC servers.
Multiplayer is a completely different animal when dealing with software licensing. You're never guaranteed that the "official" servers will stay up indefinitely, and if the game lacks support for dedicated servers (ahem, MW2), then you're completely out of the online at some point in the future. Needless to say, VAC-bans are the least of my worries.
It's a fair tradeoff, and the ToS is reasonable enough to me that I've made most of my game purchases through Steam. Plus, their DRM is breakable if Valve ever goes away, so just make sure you make backups of your games, use a strong password, and be wary of phishing pages and keyloggers (a good general rule anyway), and you shouldn't have anything to worry about.
Running XP-64 here for work (not by choice- some legacy support needed for projects in Visual Studio 2003, which doesn't work on Vista/7). I've been using it for 3 years.
The desktop/taskbar will occasionally freeze for no reason. That's my only major annoyance.
The driver situation is better than it used to be. Nvidia's drivers have come a long way- up until last year, I couldn't enable antialiasing while multiple monitors were in use (now I can). Coworkers using SLI still have issues, but then again, even 32-bit drivers aren't perfect at SLI. I no longer get blue screen crashes when hot-swapping USB-drives.
Still doesn't hold a candle to Win7-64 though- it seems more stable than 32-bit XP, at least on the 2 systems that have been upgraded from XP to 7 at my home.
I'm sure they're aware of that, however, it gets tedious when you have hundreds of friends and you're trying to figure out who knows who on your friends list- and even then, I'd be wrong for some cases (many friends happen to know each other, even though I've met them from completely separate channels).
Google is proposing that the social networking software should automatically detect these subgroups.
Dry ice in a soda bottle can be dangerous (especially if you point the cap at someone), but certainly not an act of terrorism.
It's funny how this story gets brought up right before the July 4 weekend- I can't buy any of the fireworks that I used to play with as a kid. I set off dry ice bombs at my high school with no police action resulted (this was before Columbine). I remember going out into the wilderness with a.22 rifle and hunting by myself at the age of 10. Had this been recent, my parents would be in the same boat as the mom in TFA.
We're depriving our youth of the dangers and the excitement resulting from a combination of intelligence, curiosity, and access to a lot of cool chemicals and explosive materials. Now that Darwin has been defanged, we're a nation of pussies.
So you're claiming that sexual preference is a choice? While simply "being gay" can be hidden easier than "being black" (in most cases), both are traits that people can't really change.
In college, every math professor who were Chinese (about 1/4 of my math dept) I had would say "ploblem". It became so much a joke that I would even write "ploblem" instead of "problem" in my notes and homework... it was always the little things like that kept me awake in complex analysis.
The Apple UI patents where tested almost the day they where issued (see MS vs Apple over UI for windows and the resulting cross-licensing)
Say what?! The Apple vs. Microsoft case was about "look-and-feel" copyright, not patents. And the end result was that Apple had their asses handed to them after the court noted that Apple's GUI wasn't original itself, and borrowed heavily from Xerox.
The "cross-licensing" occurred before they ever went to court. The only reason why Apple sued was because Microsoft decided that they no longer needed to license Apple's tech for Windows 2.0 (they had paid Apple fees for Windows 1.0).
I actually have issues of Infoworld I kept since the 80s that followed the case very closely.
I must be old...
And I agree that most hardware and all software (and design patents) are bunk. Unfortunately, the courts and USPTO can't seem to make up their minds (1981, 1996, 1998, etc). The Supreme Court needs to be especially careful when they make a ruling on Bilski, as it may invalidate more than just business method patents. Here's hoping they don't avoid the issue.
The difference is, IMHO, Nokia's hardware patents stand up to scrutiny. UI and software, on the other hand, have not yet been court tested, and there's even a small possibility that software or UI patents may be invalidated by a surprise Bilski decision in the Supreme Court.
It stands to reason that Nokia's portfolio is more valuable.
Neither you or I really know exactly what deals Nokia or Apple had in mind going into the talks- but one thing's for certain: Apple walked. The same way they walked from talks with Cisco over licensing their registered trademark for "iPhone", and then used it anyway without approval (fortunately, Apple learned its lesson by the time it used Fujitsu's iPad trademark). Who else chooses to walk from a legal agreement just so they can spend millions on legal fees over the fallout?
I might be extrapolating, but here are my two observations:
1. Apple doesn't seem to be a very agreeable company in negotiations. They're the prima donna of the tech industry, and everyone knows it.
2. They take a hypocritical stance when violating IP of other companies.
Other things to consider: Apple has already proven themselves to be quite the patent troll, and even intends on attacking free software soon.
Sorry, but this pattern of behavior is hard to justify.
I really don't think Nokia wants to make an iPhone knockoff. Rather, they wanted protection from the legal threats that Apple had been making over Nokia's touchscreen smartphones.
Non-discrimination aside, wouldn't you want competitor, who continually threatens you and others with litigation, to back down as a condition of licensing terms? I think that's reasonable.
No, it was Apple who picked a fight with Nokia. Nokia simply called their bluff.
Apple and Nokia were in talks for a while- from what I've been told (by insiders), Nokia wanted the same licensing fees plus a cross-licensing agreement that it had done with nearly every other GSM smartphone manufacturer before, but Apple overvalued their patent portfolio (which admittedly is mostly software and UI/window dressing patents). Apple walked out of the talks, and then Nokia sued.
Legally, Apple doesn't have much to stand on in the Nokia vs. Apple suit, so they thought they could swing some of their weight around and attack smaller companies to build up some credibility for their own IP.
At first, they threatened Palm, but suing them would be like trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip- not to mention that Palm has quite a hefty IP portfolio themselves, so the battle would be costly and drag on for years. So instead they went after a foreign target that was having lots of newfound success in the smartphone market. They may have attempted to associate HTC with the slew of KiRF-device (blatant knockoffs- ie, Meizu M8) manufacturers from China and Taiwan. It would also have the benefit (for Apple) of taking some of the wind out of Android's sails. Win-win, according to Apple's legal team.
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While Discovery Channel is paying these families, I really don't feel encouraged to have a lot of children. In fact, because of those shows I'm becoming more supportive of forced sterilization. Starting with the Duggars...
I think this being the Discovery Channel has a lot to do with it. It's interesting to me anyway.
No pricing nor benchmarks. The article is purely a discussion about the architecture.
Not entirely, but it becomes much more expensive to start up a new project. Getting rid of ACES only to start over from scratch doesn't seem like a wise business decision. Still, I don't think Flight is a true reboot of MSFS- it may just be a simpler game wrapped around a simple flight engine (like Pilotwings), dumbed down for a wider (and more attention-deficit) audience.
I wouldn't be surprised to see if Microsoft does the same with Age of Empires- AOE and AOK, (and to some extent, III) were all fairly complex as far as tech trees and counter strategies, especially compared to more mainstream RTSes like C&C and Starcraft.
Coincidently, Microsoft "lost" the Ensemble team who did the original AOE games in a similar way it "lost" the ACES team, yet similarities end there. MS is contracting the former Ensemble devs (under Robot Entertainment) to do AOE Online, but it appears Flight is being done in-house.
You notice when Microsoft is trying to reach out to a large audience and advertise one of their own products, they don't force Silverlight down our throats?
Patents are a monopolistic privileges granted by the government, as they require government assistance to enforce. Most prominent anarcho-capitalists (ie- the ones who oppose any regulation) are strongly opposed to the idea of patents, and many oppose all forms of intellectual property- though the philosophy that one can "own" ideas is largely independent of the economic spectrum.
ROTT actually came after Doom.
ROTT did not have diagonal walls- the wall placement was still orthogonal, just like Wolfenstein. The floors and ceilings were fixed throughout the level, but the ceiling height could differ from one level or the next, or be nonexistent. The illusion of stairs was brought by sprites (gravitational anomaly disks?) that changed perspective depending on their vertical relationship to the player.
Heretic, OTOH, used the Doom engine and added y-shearing for looking up and down- it wasn't perspective-correct, but it did the job.
I don't believe there was much of an incremental steps between Wolfenstein and Doom, but there were some incremental steps between Doom and Quake. The Build engine, used by Duke Nukem 3D and other games (Shadow Warrior, Blood, Redneck Rampage, etc) allowed slanted floors, horizontal wall movement, and rooms-above-rooms.
The only way to believe in a magic flying jew that is his own father is to deny logic, science, and any kind of common sense.
Well, it's conceivable that this guy is his own grandfather, so why not?
Neither did Apple. They gave away cases.
I agree, a 22 would have been better. First time I shot a 30.06 was when I was 17, and weighed 130 lbs. And it still felt like it had ripped off my shoulder- not to mention the scope left a permanent scar above my eyebrow. 13 year holds should not be shooting higher caliber weapons than they can physically handle, even if it's to prove a point.
It's Bring search, you plick!
Taiwan != China
Well, at least to the Taiwanese anyway...
The Nexus One had a subsidized option if you went the T-mobile route.
I'm surprised AT&T hasn't caught on with you yet- I had originally done the same with my Nexus One. I was on the $10 Medianet plan with AT&T, until they either got ahold of IMEI numbers for the N1 or figured out that my data usage (about a gig/month) must have come from a smartphone. In April, I received an email from AT&T telling me that "for my convenience" they switched me to the correct smartphone plan. Now I'm stuck paying ~$100/month for the cheapest voice plan plus unlimited data and texts and not much else.
Read the ToS more carefully, Steam calls it a purchase, but treats it much more like a license. People can and do lose entire accounts worth of games when somebody hacks in.
Not a problem- ask nicely and Valve will restore your account.
And even if you get the games back, if the person got you banned then they won't undo it.
You're referring to a VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) ban, which will ban you from VAC-enabled servers. That doesn't keep you from playing the game- you'll be able to play on non-VAC servers. However, Valve's policy is strict for a reason- anyone who has been caught cheating could claim their account has been hacked and then anyone could continue playing on VAC servers.
Multiplayer is a completely different animal when dealing with software licensing. You're never guaranteed that the "official" servers will stay up indefinitely, and if the game lacks support for dedicated servers (ahem, MW2), then you're completely out of the online at some point in the future. Needless to say, VAC-bans are the least of my worries.
It's a fair tradeoff, and the ToS is reasonable enough to me that I've made most of my game purchases through Steam. Plus, their DRM is breakable if Valve ever goes away, so just make sure you make backups of your games, use a strong password, and be wary of phishing pages and keyloggers (a good general rule anyway), and you shouldn't have anything to worry about.
Running XP-64 here for work (not by choice- some legacy support needed for projects in Visual Studio 2003, which doesn't work on Vista/7). I've been using it for 3 years.
The desktop/taskbar will occasionally freeze for no reason. That's my only major annoyance.
The driver situation is better than it used to be. Nvidia's drivers have come a long way- up until last year, I couldn't enable antialiasing while multiple monitors were in use (now I can). Coworkers using SLI still have issues, but then again, even 32-bit drivers aren't perfect at SLI. I no longer get blue screen crashes when hot-swapping USB-drives.
Still doesn't hold a candle to Win7-64 though- it seems more stable than 32-bit XP, at least on the 2 systems that have been upgraded from XP to 7 at my home.
I'm sure they're aware of that, however, it gets tedious when you have hundreds of friends and you're trying to figure out who knows who on your friends list- and even then, I'd be wrong for some cases (many friends happen to know each other, even though I've met them from completely separate channels).
Google is proposing that the social networking software should automatically detect these subgroups.
Dry ice in a soda bottle can be dangerous (especially if you point the cap at someone), but certainly not an act of terrorism.
.22 rifle and hunting by myself at the age of 10. Had this been recent, my parents would be in the same boat as the mom in TFA.
It's funny how this story gets brought up right before the July 4 weekend- I can't buy any of the fireworks that I used to play with as a kid. I set off dry ice bombs at my high school with no police action resulted (this was before Columbine). I remember going out into the wilderness with a
We're depriving our youth of the dangers and the excitement resulting from a combination of intelligence, curiosity, and access to a lot of cool chemicals and explosive materials. Now that Darwin has been defanged, we're a nation of pussies.
I better go dismantle my potato cannon...
So you're claiming that sexual preference is a choice? While simply "being gay" can be hidden easier than "being black" (in most cases), both are traits that people can't really change.
Chinese have problems with with R sounds.
In college, every math professor who were Chinese (about 1/4 of my math dept) I had would say "ploblem". It became so much a joke that I would even write "ploblem" instead of "problem" in my notes and homework... it was always the little things like that kept me awake in complex analysis.
Now we all know that you are completely full of shit.
Sorry, I didn't realize that my criticisms of Apple's patent trolling had offended you personally.
Does Apple pay you to defend this practice, or do you volunteer?
The Apple UI patents where tested almost the day they where issued (see MS vs Apple over UI for windows and the resulting cross-licensing)
Say what?! The Apple vs. Microsoft case was about "look-and-feel" copyright, not patents. And the end result was that Apple had their asses handed to them after the court noted that Apple's GUI wasn't original itself, and borrowed heavily from Xerox.
The "cross-licensing" occurred before they ever went to court. The only reason why Apple sued was because Microsoft decided that they no longer needed to license Apple's tech for Windows 2.0 (they had paid Apple fees for Windows 1.0).
I actually have issues of Infoworld I kept since the 80s that followed the case very closely.
I must be old...
And I agree that most hardware and all software (and design patents) are bunk. Unfortunately, the courts and USPTO can't seem to make up their minds (1981, 1996, 1998, etc). The Supreme Court needs to be especially careful when they make a ruling on Bilski, as it may invalidate more than just business method patents. Here's hoping they don't avoid the issue.
The difference is, IMHO, Nokia's hardware patents stand up to scrutiny. UI and software, on the other hand, have not yet been court tested, and there's even a small possibility that software or UI patents may be invalidated by a surprise Bilski decision in the Supreme Court.
It stands to reason that Nokia's portfolio is more valuable.
Neither you or I really know exactly what deals Nokia or Apple had in mind going into the talks- but one thing's for certain: Apple walked. The same way they walked from talks with Cisco over licensing their registered trademark for "iPhone", and then used it anyway without approval (fortunately, Apple learned its lesson by the time it used Fujitsu's iPad trademark). Who else chooses to walk from a legal agreement just so they can spend millions on legal fees over the fallout?
I might be extrapolating, but here are my two observations:
1. Apple doesn't seem to be a very agreeable company in negotiations. They're the prima donna of the tech industry, and everyone knows it.
2. They take a hypocritical stance when violating IP of other companies.
Other things to consider: Apple has already proven themselves to be quite the patent troll, and even intends on attacking free software soon.
Sorry, but this pattern of behavior is hard to justify.
I really don't think Nokia wants to make an iPhone knockoff. Rather, they wanted protection from the legal threats that Apple had been making over Nokia's touchscreen smartphones.
Non-discrimination aside, wouldn't you want competitor, who continually threatens you and others with litigation, to back down as a condition of licensing terms? I think that's reasonable.
No, it was Apple who picked a fight with Nokia. Nokia simply called their bluff.
Apple and Nokia were in talks for a while- from what I've been told (by insiders), Nokia wanted the same licensing fees plus a cross-licensing agreement that it had done with nearly every other GSM smartphone manufacturer before, but Apple overvalued their patent portfolio (which admittedly is mostly software and UI/window dressing patents). Apple walked out of the talks, and then Nokia sued.
Legally, Apple doesn't have much to stand on in the Nokia vs. Apple suit, so they thought they could swing some of their weight around and attack smaller companies to build up some credibility for their own IP.
At first, they threatened Palm, but suing them would be like trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip- not to mention that Palm has quite a hefty IP portfolio themselves, so the battle would be costly and drag on for years. So instead they went after a foreign target that was having lots of newfound success in the smartphone market. They may have attempted to associate HTC with the slew of KiRF-device (blatant knockoffs- ie, Meizu M8) manufacturers from China and Taiwan. It would also have the benefit (for Apple) of taking some of the wind out of Android's sails. Win-win, according to Apple's legal team.
That strategy seems to be backfiring.