that when 'DFI LanParty' (I think that's their stupid name) started up, they took most of the Abit board designers. Hence last few years the Abit boards were very average, despite still being sold at a premium.
Let start at the top.
"* appear to have been produced primarily for the purpose of sexual arousal, and include an act that:"
'Appears' - appears to who? Not a straight 'produced primarily for the purpose of sexual arousal' - if it were there'd be a heated argument along the lines of "you made it for sexual arousal", "no I didn't - prove it". How do you even defend yourself from 'appears'? Even if you could categorically prove it wasn't (somehow) it wouldn't matter - as it 'appeared to' to the prosecution. You've just been arrested for 'appears' - please tell me how you're going to convince the prosecution, that wants a prosecution, that it 'doesn't appear'? (begging doesn't count)
"(a) appears to be likely to kill the subject, "
Oooh lets look at this one. Killing subject, that would be bad. Yes I agree. Likely to kill.. well what are we talking here. Balance of probabilities? What % death would 'likely' be reached at. Would a video of Russian Roulette be OK, until after the third click therefore bringing the scene total to 'likely death', or maybe it'd all be OK until the 5th shot was unfired.. Not that it really matters and I notice 'Appears' at the front again. Hey - this doesn't even have to be real, it just has to 'appear' - no idea why I was getting all hung up on reality when appearance is all that matters.
How about I film myself, throttling myself whilst cracking one off? Reading the above somebody could start watching, decide I 'Appeared likely to kill the subject' and then pop around to arrest the healthy happy me.
"(b) appears to be likely to result in serious injury to the subject's anus, breasts or genitals,"
Personally if I want to film myself hammering nails through my scrotum, I personally don't see why I can't and then share video with other consenting adults. Just kidding, I don't actually have to do it, I just have to 'appear' to again... Oh and before I leave this point, what's the fascination with anus,breasts and genitals? I'm allowed porn where I'm punching somebody in the face, but not the breasts? Are male beasts included? (If Ridley Scott got the horn when filming gladiator, he is in so much trouble). And one last thing.. 'Serious Injury' - we talking amputation, or a bruise (sorry, an act which may occur likely to cause a bruise)? Oh Oh and before I leave this paragraph, would dismemberment or a slightly more extreme death mutilation be counted? I mean I'm pretty sure suicide bombers mutilate pretty much everything on the list, but nobody seems to focus on precise body parts in that situation.
"(c) involves a sexual act on a human corpse, or (d) involves a sexual act on an animal."
I'm lumping these together as they're just standard necrophilia/bestiality is 'bad' bollocks (and I'm reasonably sure they were illegal previously as well) - still does no harm to add them here and make the list look somewhat less cobbled together. In fact I'm quite sure they started with the first 3 points and had to add these at the end to stifle the guffaws (although personally if I were pitching this, I'd have closed on the necrophilia). Bestiality surely isn't too bad? I mean I'm not rushing off to the fields every weekend myself, but the fact that somebody else wants to screw a cow doesn't upset me that much. I mean placing myself in the animals point of view I'd prefer to be fucked than killed and eaten. I mean what's the worst that can happen a hoof in the knackers...actually now I think about it, rule b by itself would probably outlaw the larger animals.
Time for a summing up (if you made it this far). More I think about this, the more I get annoyed.
Not quite sure where I stand politically/socially. erm.. Libertarian, Do No Harm, pro choice, anti-death penalty, Welfare state, federation of countries - well you get the idea. I have no issue with certain things being declared illegal. I have no issue with a block/warning being assigned to certain URLs - IF there was a list, publically available stating what was blocked and why.
My main g
You're right. I'd never thought about it before - first time I'd ever realized there was something sitting between my page requests and the rest of the internet.
I'd love to get my hands on their complete block list - just intersting to see if there are any patterns in what gets selected for blocking and when.
that's it. You can go to their web page, report something you believe is illegal and if they agree it could be illegal it gets added to the list.
ISPs can then choose to use that list for blocking. Pretty much exactly the same as the open-relay blacklists. Somebody reports an issue. Somebody adds it to the list. Other people can choose whether they use the list as a filter.
IWF would surely want all ISPs to join - as otherwise the alternative is the government in charge of the big UK Internet Off switch.
As for censorship, I agree with you mainly. I'm not trying to argue what should be censored, but if there's a legal definition, I'd expect IWF to follow it. If I find the fact that I can sit down with a pencil, draw a picture, upload it and 'become' a padophile quite utterly retarded, then I agree, but it's the law I want changed.
Taking it to the other extreme. Imagine you find an image you find offensive (use your imagination). If it came through your letter box you'd report it to the police. If it comes through your internet, then what are you currently supposed to do? I don't think there's a right solution I can think of, but should be something.
If you wanted to get cynical over this, that's not the best approach to take.
IWF is organization set up by ISPs. I believe their remit is to flag and block anything possibly illegal, allowing the legal/illegal argument to then be made (and any action taken). Their REAL purpose is to keep governments off the backs of ISPs - we're regulating ourselves, so you can leave us alone.
Now.
New bit of law just rolling out (Jan '09) outlaws 'extreme porn' in the UK. Complete and utter knee-jerk, poorly thought out crap we've come to expect from my government - for example, a clear definition of 'extreme' might have been thought be some to be a pre-requisite to such a law. We've now got some wooly f'in mess where a sizable chunk of the internet could be considered 'extreme'.
So who's going to be involved in this stupid law - IWF. Poor fuckers, don't envy them at all.
Anyway.. if you were in the IWF's position of having to prevent people downloading 'extreme' material with the following options:
1) Arrest everybody who looks at anything vaquely offensive.
2) Allow everybody to look at everything and get government regulation applied (How's that going Australia?).
Just sort of suggesting that our collectively national focus even being very slightly brought to this issue, can do nothing but improve the current situation.
why stop here. I've got book after book on my shelf where fictional characters are killed! More to the point if you really want to draw attention to the 'wtf' currently underway, possibly we should direct our law enforcement officers to your national art gallery. Undoubtedly plenty of naked underage flesh on display there (in fact just has to appear underaged, so not even that much of a stretch) - hey, who's to say you're not aroused by cherubs anyway?
O |= |~O-- |_,|`"`|_
Do hope none of you think my stick-people look a bit on the young side - hate to have my front door kicked down and be put on 'a list'
but possibly not in an 'optimal way'.
Looking back at it all I think there are two strands that need to be given. A basic understanding of the syntax (not the language per-se) - so some boolean, if/else/loop guff - just cover the concepts (they're not hard to grasp). Basically allow somebody to write down logic in a vaguely programatical manner. If you want to stretch them, then OO is fine - but that's not how the brain works out of the box. Start with a flow diagram on the whiteboard (ifs) then a few loopy arrows (loops).
Next step is to make them feel they've made something useful. I'd just give them a Apache/PHP pre-config and let them rip with PHP. They can write some HTML and then just slot some PHP in the middle of it. Now if they know nothing about HTML, then maybe start elsewhere - but I'd assume the key is to start with what they can already do, and then get to the simplest way they can improve upon that as soon as possible.
Quite a lot of stuff requires more free time than one person can provide.
Somebody has an idea about something they'd like and they start coding away. Once it's in a reasonable shape they might add it to somewhere like sourceforge.
Quite often they're happy with what they've done and it's just a nice way to distribute it and share it. Sometimes they do it as a way of pulling in other contributors. Maybe somebody with expertise they're missing, somebody with a bright idea for a new direction or simply somebody else to share the vision and help out with the implementation.
Randomly browsing SF projects you can see examples of all of the above - and an awful lot of still-born project that were offered up to the world and rejected. In fact that's one of the things in OSS that is so overlooked. There's an awful lot of crushed dreams to be seen if you go down the search rankings. Stuff that a commercial company would have canned gets made with blood sweat and undoubtledly tears - and then just withers..
Thinking through that though, maybe it's not as bad as it sounds. People can autopsy and salvage whatever they find and fold it into their own OSS - but still a little sad.
If I had to summarize OSS code is like a child. It's been nurtured and cared for by somebody - but eventually it's let go of and offered up to the world.
Stuff that always strikes me is weird is stuff like OpenOffice. I mean how f'in soul destroying and 'non-fun' is it trying to clone Office and make your clone 'suck as little as possible in comparison'
OSS doesn't exist to make the world a better place.
OSS developers don't subsist on mere air.
Development seems to exist on two fronts. Individuals that want to make something cool as a hobby and people who do it as their paymaster has deemed it ultimately financially rewarding for the company to do so.
If it's your code, you don't owe the world anything - so it's just a simple decision of deciding what you want to do with it. Sounds like this was a hobby project so
Either:
You kill your hobby to enable you to make a living off it - and you can always get another hobby.
You keep your hobby and carry on getting paid in whatever way you are at the moment.
I thinkt he above two points boil down into how much you enjoy your hobby, how much you hate your real job and those both relate pretty directly to how much money's being offered.
Personally I'd just take the money - but the very fact you're posting here (and surely anticipating the response) marks you as a lazy masochist who can't be arsed with self-flagilation.
ISPs currently (at least to in the UK) have been racing to the bottom of the market.
Price is what is currently selling. Nobody cares about email servers, nntp retention (if it's even offered) etc etc - people are buying whatever's cheapest. Your ISP is a utility - in fact they care even less. Your water rate might be fixed, but your gas and electricity charge you on the basis of how much you use. Your ISP is generally accepted to provide 'internet' for a fixes price. A small sub-set of the market might care about the headline transfer rate, but it's an even smaller subset that care about the small print.
Basically we are so so so much the minority on these issues for even noticing they exist. More to the point we are the 'hogging consumers' - I can guarantee that you all download more than my mum.
The small print is going to get noticed soon, and it won't be my us - it'll be the people who signed up to netflix beacause of a mail-shot. It'll be the people that wonder why that 360 demo takes longer than it's supposed to.
So how will the market respond? Well there'll be new 'premium' packages that don't throttle for us - but 90% of punter would be happy if say a dozen sites were excluded from their caps based upon their popularity/kickbacks to the ISP.
Take Netflix or Amazon unboxed. Most end users have currently not heard of either of them - but in 5 years time they'll be watching media-less films on their TV. How will they decide which? Well their ISP will tell them.
The WiFi router most ISPS now offer pre-configged will have an HDMI socket on the back and a remote control. It will provide you movies from and the download due to peering will run at full whack.
Even if you're a 'low kbps' subscriber, your ADSL line will suddenly hum at 24Mb to get that movie onto your TV and that charge onto your bill asap. Market will then move subtlely - you'll be offered a slightly higher charge for, I dunno, 1 free film download a week. Then there'll be the premium unlimited rentals model - in summary your ISP will become your Cable TV provider.
I like Windows Mobile. It's open and it's easily the most 'powerful' OS you can get on your phone.
My main issue with it, is whilst under the hood it's wonderfully complete (all manner of fancy stuff you can fiddle with and ability to shove on any app that's popped into anybody's mind) - the actual GUI layer ontop of it all is utterly shite.
HTC have made a decent stab at pasting over the most obvious cracks in the 'experience', but it's still just a skin and eventually you get dumped into the vile default UI. The 5->6 upgrade was pretty rubbish. 6->6.1 whilst a lovely upgrade was mainly just a load of deep bugfixes that whilst welcomed, shouldn't have been there in the first place.
In an ideal world WM7 would be the core of WM6 with a real Apple-tastic workover of the UI. If it takes longer than they thought, then it takes longer. I just really don't want them to rush out some half baked release.
I had an HTC Tytn which needed recalibration at least once a week (known 'issue'). Replaced it with an HTC Polaris and not had to be calibrated since I got it 6 months ago.
To be fair to the original, the fact that my IPod touch doesn't even have a recalibration option makes me feel a lot more comfortable.
They took up a lot of shelf space and it was annoying me. SO I bought a NAS box and ripped all the decent ones onto it. The physical DVDs then got moved to ebay or the loft.
Now whenever I want to watch a film I just click it from any of my PCs on desks, under my TV, on my old XBMC'd xbox etc. If I'm going on a plane I just have a browse of what I fancy and then drag it onto my ipod.
Basically I have my films - and a load of devices I can play any of them on. I'm happy.
I am quite tempted by BR. HD does look a lot better, but I'll be damned if I'm going to start filling my shelves again or rebuy the missing pixels from my favourite films.
Next point is that when DVD came out the picture on my TV was better than anything I'd seen before. If I wanted that picture, or anything like it, I had to buy a DVD player and DVDS. PC attached to my TV cost $500ish and has HDMI/TOS outputs and is a PC to boot. It'll happily crunch through 1080p x264 video. It does it for me every day. So why would I be tempted to spend pretty much the same again on a decent BR/PS3 player and then buy all those locked down BR disks to give me pretty much the same effect?
In addition my cable operator lets me stream HD on demand to my PVR. *browse menu* *watches animals running about planet earth in 1080*
To summarize I see BR units on demo cycle in shops and I go "Oh yes, isn't that pretty - but I can already do that on my TV." With that realization the urge to throw money over the counter is massively reduced.
although I'm not saying the interface it 'nice'.
For some reason I got it in my head a while back that I'd replace my HTC Polaris with an iPhone - I then decided I'd wait for the 3G version and picked up a touch to replace my dead ipod.
Now the touch has good points - screen is lovely, safari is best mobile browser.. but the music stuff was taken a step back - and I'd f'in sick of how it's shacked to iTunes. I listen to podcasts and like them when I'm abroad. Why can't I just sych my podcasts over the any old wifi? Why can't I plug the ipod into my work laptop, without it attempting to nuke all my music?
WiMo whilst ugly as sin and chunky doesn't every try to prevent me doing stuff - now it might not do everything smoothly - but you at least feel it's trying.
Best thing iphone's done is at least open the market again for smartphones - normal people actually buy them. Like the rest I'm just looking forward to WM7 or Android.
I'm in the UK and like Direct Debit and try to shove as much as I can onto it. 30th I get paid, 1st all my bills get automatically slurrped out of my bank account.
Personally I only do it for the boring payments like utilities, council (local) tax etc, but it's handy for the other stuff. For example my credit cards get the automatic minimum - if I've not already made a payment that month. Normally I'd pay in full when the bill comes, but if I forget, the bill goes AWOL it means I don't get a penalty payment.
Now as everybody has mentioned, things can occasionally go wrong - but the point with direct debit is that you can reverse the payment with your bank, no questions asked. If you think too much has been taken "Reverse that" and you get your money back (and can then argue with the company that's just had the money snatched back from them).
I never went with 3DFX. I had a *thinks* matrox thingie - the m3d or summat. Had the PowerVR chip in it.. then I think it was a Riva TNT.. and then.. I think I went onto an intel chip from that i710 or something..
I think my previous card crapped out and I needed a cheap replacement, so got a hideously cheap OEM version of it - and then found it was faster than the more expensive card I had before..
Anyway, not sure about the order of the cards, but the point I wish to make is at one time intel did make a decent discrete graphics card - before they decided to leave the market to nVidia and ATI.
They did it once before and no reason to think they can't do it again.
they've got another proprietary memory stick standard in them, an entire division trying to foist ATRAC on me in some other guise and get SonicStage back onto my PC.
to traffic problems like bittorrent. If the ISP created some sortof 'blind' caching service (bit like nntp) - then they would provide downloads to the end user faster as it's over their network (user happy) - and less packets are requested from off the ISP network (ISP happy).
To pull this analogy into the real world - the current situation is like a local library that has to order every book in from a central office. By stocking a small selection of popular books locally, your local library can easily satisfy the vasy majority of their clients - and still has the option of giving the minority access to everything they might possibly require.
In fact surely this would be a massive selling point for an ISP - surely not that hard to cache say 50% of the content your average customer downloads.
If the BBC have produced something and want to sell it to another market - the value is decreased if a significant chunk of the people who wanted to watch it in that other market have already done so.
I think it's even more complex than that as there are commercial arms within the BBC in charge of flogging the content. One part wants to move heaven and earth to get as much content out in as many ways as possible - the other half wants you to buy it on DVD.
and now you mention it, I do have a copy of the O'Reilly bookshelf somewhere.
Maybe electronic books are considered to be 'software' and therefore treated as such? I'd never really though of it before - might possibly explain the reluctance of publishers to go electronic.
As for the O'Reilly thing - I swear I never used it Mr O'Reilly and much prefer buying your books with their pretty covers.
When I had my first PocketPC and was honeymoon happy with it, I did buy a legit e-book. Never got passed the first chapter and decided I hated reading on that little screen (I think it was the screen thing, but maybe I just like paper books).
I don't want my cc details buried into a game.
I don't actually think there's really a need for DRM at all.
Example I've always liked is books. High Street is full of shops selling them, Amazon built an entire business physically posting them - yet nobody bothers to copy them (well OK, not in 'the western world'). No reason it couldn't be scanned to a text file (cut the spine and shove it through a $99 OCR sheetfeeder and you'd be done in no time. That txt file could easily be sent to anybody on the planet as an email attachment, could be read on practically any computer/phone/PDA etc etc - yet nobody does it.
Guess there are a few frontrunners in 'reasons why':
People like books, they like picking them up, they like holding them, they like reading them - Now I personally feel that ties more to the 'contact with the maker' thing. Somebody wrote this book, their name is on the cover and now I'm reading their words. I'm guessing if books were uncredited and just had a serial number (or some other whim of mine), then people wouldn't quite feel the same about them. This is something that surely needs to be encouraged in the 'games' world (or for that matter any software).
Books are cheap. Well OK the textbooks I had to buy when I was my poorest, were the most expensive.. but by and large they're cheap for the time and pleasure you get out of them.
Libraries - never quite understood how they and the sale of books managed to co-exist. I mean you can walk into your library and walk out with the book you want to read. Bit more fiddly/time consuming than purchase - but definitely a lot cheaper... Do you think there are people that use libraries buy less books than those who don't? Are these the people that can't/won't buy books - would they all resort to piracy if libraries vanished - or just go illiterate.. oh questions questions.
Anyway, where was I going on this one.. I'm full stream ramble now..
Oh right - that's where I was. Audible. I love audible. I pay them £15 a month and I get two big audiobooks to shove on my ipod. I listen to them as I walk to and from work every day and I've probably got more books through my head in the last 2 years than the previous 10 (well OK, 5). Now maybe I'd pay a bit more for three books (occasionally I run out and may be forced to 'borrow' one from elsewhere). 4 books a month? 5.. No I mean I simply don't have the time to listen to them all. I mean with 5 maybe I'd quit playing something I hated but.. they'd just stack up and up. Back to games. I could pirate 5 game DVDs each night. I could pirate their games faster than they can make them. Now when I did pirate, that's what I would have done. I'd be downloading everything I could possibly get my hands on. I'd be archiving it on DVD, NAS, etc etc - it was more about the collecting - I physically couldn't have played all these games. I would however leap from game to game, play 5 mins, get bored and then onto the next one. Occasionally I'd hit a gem; The orginal PC GTA, Total Anihilation (both of which I rushed out and bought), Einhander, Puzzle Fighter etc anyway, point is the best bit of messed up world of piracy was you did get to love stuff nobody else had heard of. So...
How about a subscription based model to games - either:
Pay £x for a new game of your choice from Steam each month (plus 50% off if you pick up a second).
Or Pay £30 a month and play any game you fancy on steam. I mean you just go hog-wild and play whatever takes your fancy. Now revenue sharing from this might be a bit strange - split up by hours you spent on each game? number of times you loaded it up? Review scores? Player review scores? Who knows - but it'd make the world a lot more interesting.
I mean something similar is already happening with MMOs - DVD is given away free with months online trial. They're hoping to get you hooked and get those monthly fees. New Battlefield game is going to be microtransaction based. How's about £1 extra on your WoW sub, for £5 credit in Battlefield?
A
Not really for any specific reason, but here are some of them:
I earn money now. As a student buying that game was taking food/alcohol money.
I don't have less free time. I have to be more selective. I play less games and the cost to purchase is the least of my worries. In fact it probably saves me cash as if I was out doing something else, I'd undoubtedly be spending more money.
I like on-line a lot. I bought Battlefield 2 for the magic code that let me go online - and I've not chipped my 360 for the same reason.
Cracking stuff makes me feel guilty. I mean yes there's all the arguments about how paying for the game gives you a more restricted copy - but Oh I dunno. If it's a good game somebody has poured their heart and soul into it, and I don't want to make them sad.
Steam - I like steam. I go there, I buy a game (after playing a demo maybe) and there it is to play a few minutes later. I can't be arsed fiddling with CDs, I usally lose/scratch them. If I'd put my thinking cap on and designed my own online distribution system - it'd look like Steam.
I'm not involved in the scene. Getting a pre-Jap release of Metal Gear Solid through the post, complete with japanese stamps on the jiffy bag - that's exciting. Clicking on a torrent link or browsing usenet.. not really a challenge. Strange point this one, but I liked the days when stuff had to be posted, or tracked down to an obscure hidden FTP dir. Too easy now.
How to stop piracy? Well that's a tricky one as I think everybody has their own reasons. If you genuinely can't afford the game - then nothing's going to stop that person pirating it (and if there's been no sale to lose - who cares?). If anything it keeps somebody in the market for future releases and hey they might turn into me and start buying them when they can.
Possibly the other thing is to make the makers of games more important. If you've been reading the blog of somebody who is making something - or eagerly tracking the return of Sam and Max - then you're going to feel more inclined to show support and buy it.
When some movie-tie-in appears on 9 formats the day of the films release from 'somewhere' - well I'm not feeling a great emotional attachment to the producers.
Final bit is that I think game makers are starting to be nice to us and understand what we want. We don't have it too bad. Compare what's happening with online distribution of music and movies..
weirdest international experience I had was 2 weeks in Atlanta Georgia. Flown in for 'critical problem' but than dicked around for 2 days before I got to meet 'the important person' (who then sortof mentioned an hour in the problem had been solved)
Still I did managed to pick up 2 invites from co-workers to churches on the Sunday - seemingly my non-existant soul was of a greater concern to the average American corporate drone.
Slashdot Mirror
that when 'DFI LanParty' (I think that's their stupid name) started up, they took most of the Abit board designers. Hence last few years the Abit boards were very average, despite still being sold at a premium.
Let start at the top.
"* appear to have been produced primarily for the purpose of sexual arousal, and include an act that:"
'Appears' - appears to who? Not a straight 'produced primarily for the purpose of sexual arousal' - if it were there'd be a heated argument along the lines of "you made it for sexual arousal", "no I didn't - prove it". How do you even defend yourself from 'appears'? Even if you could categorically prove it wasn't (somehow) it wouldn't matter - as it 'appeared to' to the prosecution. You've just been arrested for 'appears' - please tell me how you're going to convince the prosecution, that wants a prosecution, that it 'doesn't appear'? (begging doesn't count)
"(a) appears to be likely to kill the subject,
" Oooh lets look at this one. Killing subject, that would be bad. Yes I agree. Likely to kill.. well what are we talking here. Balance of probabilities? What % death would 'likely' be reached at. Would a video of Russian Roulette be OK, until after the third click therefore bringing the scene total to 'likely death', or maybe it'd all be OK until the 5th shot was unfired.. Not that it really matters and I notice 'Appears' at the front again. Hey - this doesn't even have to be real, it just has to 'appear' - no idea why I was getting all hung up on reality when appearance is all that matters.
How about I film myself, throttling myself whilst cracking one off? Reading the above somebody could start watching, decide I 'Appeared likely to kill the subject' and then pop around to arrest the healthy happy me.
"(b) appears to be likely to result in serious injury to the subject's anus, breasts or genitals,"
Personally if I want to film myself hammering nails through my scrotum, I personally don't see why I can't and then share video with other consenting adults. Just kidding, I don't actually have to do it, I just have to 'appear' to again... Oh and before I leave this point, what's the fascination with anus,breasts and genitals? I'm allowed porn where I'm punching somebody in the face, but not the breasts? Are male beasts included? (If Ridley Scott got the horn when filming gladiator, he is in so much trouble). And one last thing.. 'Serious Injury' - we talking amputation, or a bruise (sorry, an act which may occur likely to cause a bruise)? Oh Oh and before I leave this paragraph, would dismemberment or a slightly more extreme death mutilation be counted? I mean I'm pretty sure suicide bombers mutilate pretty much everything on the list, but nobody seems to focus on precise body parts in that situation.
"(c) involves a sexual act on a human corpse, or (d) involves a sexual act on an animal."
I'm lumping these together as they're just standard necrophilia/bestiality is 'bad' bollocks (and I'm reasonably sure they were illegal previously as well) - still does no harm to add them here and make the list look somewhat less cobbled together. In fact I'm quite sure they started with the first 3 points and had to add these at the end to stifle the guffaws (although personally if I were pitching this, I'd have closed on the necrophilia). Bestiality surely isn't too bad? I mean I'm not rushing off to the fields every weekend myself, but the fact that somebody else wants to screw a cow doesn't upset me that much. I mean placing myself in the animals point of view I'd prefer to be fucked than killed and eaten. I mean what's the worst that can happen a hoof in the knackers...actually now I think about it, rule b by itself would probably outlaw the larger animals.
Time for a summing up (if you made it this far). More I think about this, the more I get annoyed.
Not quite sure where I stand politically/socially. erm.. Libertarian, Do No Harm, pro choice, anti-death penalty, Welfare state, federation of countries - well you get the idea. I have no issue with certain things being declared illegal. I have no issue with a block/warning being assigned to certain URLs - IF there was a list, publically available stating what was blocked and why.
My main g
You're right. I'd never thought about it before - first time I'd ever realized there was something sitting between my page requests and the rest of the internet.
I'd love to get my hands on their complete block list - just intersting to see if there are any patterns in what gets selected for blocking and when.
that's it. You can go to their web page, report something you believe is illegal and if they agree it could be illegal it gets added to the list.
ISPs can then choose to use that list for blocking. Pretty much exactly the same as the open-relay blacklists. Somebody reports an issue. Somebody adds it to the list. Other people can choose whether they use the list as a filter.
IWF would surely want all ISPs to join - as otherwise the alternative is the government in charge of the big UK Internet Off switch.
As for censorship, I agree with you mainly. I'm not trying to argue what should be censored, but if there's a legal definition, I'd expect IWF to follow it. If I find the fact that I can sit down with a pencil, draw a picture, upload it and 'become' a padophile quite utterly retarded, then I agree, but it's the law I want changed.
Taking it to the other extreme. Imagine you find an image you find offensive (use your imagination). If it came through your letter box you'd report it to the police. If it comes through your internet, then what are you currently supposed to do? I don't think there's a right solution I can think of, but should be something.
If you wanted to get cynical over this, that's not the best approach to take.
IWF is organization set up by ISPs. I believe their remit is to flag and block anything possibly illegal, allowing the legal/illegal argument to then be made (and any action taken). Their REAL purpose is to keep governments off the backs of ISPs - we're regulating ourselves, so you can leave us alone.
Now.
New bit of law just rolling out (Jan '09) outlaws 'extreme porn' in the UK. Complete and utter knee-jerk, poorly thought out crap we've come to expect from my government - for example, a clear definition of 'extreme' might have been thought be some to be a pre-requisite to such a law. We've now got some wooly f'in mess where a sizable chunk of the internet could be considered 'extreme'.
So who's going to be involved in this stupid law - IWF. Poor fuckers, don't envy them at all. Anyway.. if you were in the IWF's position of having to prevent people downloading 'extreme' material with the following options:
1) Arrest everybody who looks at anything vaquely offensive.
2) Allow everybody to look at everything and get government regulation applied (How's that going Australia?).
Just sort of suggesting that our collectively national focus even being very slightly brought to this issue, can do nothing but improve the current situation.
why stop here. I've got book after book on my shelf where fictional characters are killed!
More to the point if you really want to draw attention to the 'wtf' currently underway, possibly we should direct our law enforcement officers to your national art gallery. Undoubtedly plenty of naked underage flesh on display there (in fact just has to appear underaged, so not even that much of a stretch) - hey, who's to say you're not aroused by cherubs anyway?
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Do hope none of you think my stick-people look a bit on the young side - hate to have my front door kicked down and be put on 'a list'
but possibly not in an 'optimal way'.
Looking back at it all I think there are two strands that need to be given. A basic understanding of the syntax (not the language per-se) - so some boolean, if/else/loop guff - just cover the concepts (they're not hard to grasp). Basically allow somebody to write down logic in a vaguely programatical manner. If you want to stretch them, then OO is fine - but that's not how the brain works out of the box. Start with a flow diagram on the whiteboard (ifs) then a few loopy arrows (loops). Next step is to make them feel they've made something useful. I'd just give them a Apache/PHP pre-config and let them rip with PHP. They can write some HTML and then just slot some PHP in the middle of it. Now if they know nothing about HTML, then maybe start elsewhere - but I'd assume the key is to start with what they can already do, and then get to the simplest way they can improve upon that as soon as possible.
Quite a lot of stuff requires more free time than one person can provide.
Somebody has an idea about something they'd like and they start coding away. Once it's in a reasonable shape they might add it to somewhere like sourceforge.
Quite often they're happy with what they've done and it's just a nice way to distribute it and share it. Sometimes they do it as a way of pulling in other contributors. Maybe somebody with expertise they're missing, somebody with a bright idea for a new direction or simply somebody else to share the vision and help out with the implementation.
Randomly browsing SF projects you can see examples of all of the above - and an awful lot of still-born project that were offered up to the world and rejected. In fact that's one of the things in OSS that is so overlooked. There's an awful lot of crushed dreams to be seen if you go down the search rankings. Stuff that a commercial company would have canned gets made with blood sweat and undoubtledly tears - and then just withers..
Thinking through that though, maybe it's not as bad as it sounds. People can autopsy and salvage whatever they find and fold it into their own OSS - but still a little sad.
If I had to summarize OSS code is like a child. It's been nurtured and cared for by somebody - but eventually it's let go of and offered up to the world.
Stuff that always strikes me is weird is stuff like OpenOffice. I mean how f'in soul destroying and 'non-fun' is it trying to clone Office and make your clone 'suck as little as possible in comparison'
OSS doesn't exist to make the world a better place.
OSS developers don't subsist on mere air.
Development seems to exist on two fronts. Individuals that want to make something cool as a hobby and people who do it as their paymaster has deemed it ultimately financially rewarding for the company to do so.
If it's your code, you don't owe the world anything - so it's just a simple decision of deciding what you want to do with it. Sounds like this was a hobby project so
Either:
You kill your hobby to enable you to make a living off it - and you can always get another hobby.
You keep your hobby and carry on getting paid in whatever way you are at the moment.
I thinkt he above two points boil down into how much you enjoy your hobby, how much you hate your real job and those both relate pretty directly to how much money's being offered.
Personally I'd just take the money - but the very fact you're posting here (and surely anticipating the response) marks you as a lazy masochist who can't be arsed with self-flagilation.
ISPs currently (at least to in the UK) have been racing to the bottom of the market.
Price is what is currently selling. Nobody cares about email servers, nntp retention (if it's even offered) etc etc - people are buying whatever's cheapest. Your ISP is a utility - in fact they care even less. Your water rate might be fixed, but your gas and electricity charge you on the basis of how much you use. Your ISP is generally accepted to provide 'internet' for a fixes price. A small sub-set of the market might care about the headline transfer rate, but it's an even smaller subset that care about the small print.
Basically we are so so so much the minority on these issues for even noticing they exist. More to the point we are the 'hogging consumers' - I can guarantee that you all download more than my mum.
The small print is going to get noticed soon, and it won't be my us - it'll be the people who signed up to netflix beacause of a mail-shot. It'll be the people that wonder why that 360 demo takes longer than it's supposed to.
So how will the market respond? Well there'll be new 'premium' packages that don't throttle for us - but 90% of punter would be happy if say a dozen sites were excluded from their caps based upon their popularity/kickbacks to the ISP.
Take Netflix or Amazon unboxed. Most end users have currently not heard of either of them - but in 5 years time they'll be watching media-less films on their TV. How will they decide which? Well their ISP will tell them.
The WiFi router most ISPS now offer pre-configged will have an HDMI socket on the back and a remote control. It will provide you movies from and the download due to peering will run at full whack.
Even if you're a 'low kbps' subscriber, your ADSL line will suddenly hum at 24Mb to get that movie onto your TV and that charge onto your bill asap. Market will then move subtlely - you'll be offered a slightly higher charge for, I dunno, 1 free film download a week. Then there'll be the premium unlimited rentals model - in summary your ISP will become your Cable TV provider.
I like Windows Mobile. It's open and it's easily the most 'powerful' OS you can get on your phone.
My main issue with it, is whilst under the hood it's wonderfully complete (all manner of fancy stuff you can fiddle with and ability to shove on any app that's popped into anybody's mind) - the actual GUI layer ontop of it all is utterly shite.
HTC have made a decent stab at pasting over the most obvious cracks in the 'experience', but it's still just a skin and eventually you get dumped into the vile default UI. The 5->6 upgrade was pretty rubbish. 6->6.1 whilst a lovely upgrade was mainly just a load of deep bugfixes that whilst welcomed, shouldn't have been there in the first place.
In an ideal world WM7 would be the core of WM6 with a real Apple-tastic workover of the UI. If it takes longer than they thought, then it takes longer. I just really don't want them to rush out some half baked release.
I had an HTC Tytn which needed recalibration at least once a week (known 'issue'). Replaced it with an HTC Polaris and not had to be calibrated since I got it 6 months ago.
To be fair to the original, the fact that my IPod touch doesn't even have a recalibration option makes me feel a lot more comfortable.
They took up a lot of shelf space and it was annoying me. SO I bought a NAS box and ripped all the decent ones onto it. The physical DVDs then got moved to ebay or the loft.
Now whenever I want to watch a film I just click it from any of my PCs on desks, under my TV, on my old XBMC'd xbox etc. If I'm going on a plane I just have a browse of what I fancy and then drag it onto my ipod.
Basically I have my films - and a load of devices I can play any of them on. I'm happy.
I am quite tempted by BR. HD does look a lot better, but I'll be damned if I'm going to start filling my shelves again or rebuy the missing pixels from my favourite films.
Next point is that when DVD came out the picture on my TV was better than anything I'd seen before. If I wanted that picture, or anything like it, I had to buy a DVD player and DVDS. PC attached to my TV cost $500ish and has HDMI/TOS outputs and is a PC to boot. It'll happily crunch through 1080p x264 video. It does it for me every day. So why would I be tempted to spend pretty much the same again on a decent BR/PS3 player and then buy all those locked down BR disks to give me pretty much the same effect?
In addition my cable operator lets me stream HD on demand to my PVR. *browse menu* *watches animals running about planet earth in 1080*
To summarize I see BR units on demo cycle in shops and I go "Oh yes, isn't that pretty - but I can already do that on my TV." With that realization the urge to throw money over the counter is massively reduced.
although I'm not saying the interface it 'nice'. For some reason I got it in my head a while back that I'd replace my HTC Polaris with an iPhone - I then decided I'd wait for the 3G version and picked up a touch to replace my dead ipod.
Now the touch has good points - screen is lovely, safari is best mobile browser.. but the music stuff was taken a step back - and I'd f'in sick of how it's shacked to iTunes. I listen to podcasts and like them when I'm abroad. Why can't I just sych my podcasts over the any old wifi? Why can't I plug the ipod into my work laptop, without it attempting to nuke all my music?
WiMo whilst ugly as sin and chunky doesn't every try to prevent me doing stuff - now it might not do everything smoothly - but you at least feel it's trying.
Best thing iphone's done is at least open the market again for smartphones - normal people actually buy them. Like the rest I'm just looking forward to WM7 or Android.
I'm in the UK and like Direct Debit and try to shove as much as I can onto it. 30th I get paid, 1st all my bills get automatically slurrped out of my bank account.
Personally I only do it for the boring payments like utilities, council (local) tax etc, but it's handy for the other stuff. For example my credit cards get the automatic minimum - if I've not already made a payment that month. Normally I'd pay in full when the bill comes, but if I forget, the bill goes AWOL it means I don't get a penalty payment.
Now as everybody has mentioned, things can occasionally go wrong - but the point with direct debit is that you can reverse the payment with your bank, no questions asked. If you think too much has been taken "Reverse that" and you get your money back (and can then argue with the company that's just had the money snatched back from them).
I never went with 3DFX. I had a *thinks* matrox thingie - the m3d or summat. Had the PowerVR chip in it.. then I think it was a Riva TNT.. and then.. I think I went onto an intel chip from that i710 or something..
I think my previous card crapped out and I needed a cheap replacement, so got a hideously cheap OEM version of it - and then found it was faster than the more expensive card I had before..
Anyway, not sure about the order of the cards, but the point I wish to make is at one time intel did make a decent discrete graphics card - before they decided to leave the market to nVidia and ATI.
They did it once before and no reason to think they can't do it again.
they've got another proprietary memory stick standard in them, an entire division trying to foist ATRAC on me in some other guise and get SonicStage back onto my PC.
towards Sony is making me feel dirty.
to traffic problems like bittorrent. If the ISP created some sortof 'blind' caching service (bit like nntp) - then they would provide downloads to the end user faster as it's over their network (user happy) - and less packets are requested from off the ISP network (ISP happy).
To pull this analogy into the real world - the current situation is like a local library that has to order every book in from a central office. By stocking a small selection of popular books locally, your local library can easily satisfy the vasy majority of their clients - and still has the option of giving the minority access to everything they might possibly require.
In fact surely this would be a massive selling point for an ISP - surely not that hard to cache say 50% of the content your average customer downloads.
If the BBC have produced something and want to sell it to another market - the value is decreased if a significant chunk of the people who wanted to watch it in that other market have already done so.
I think it's even more complex than that as there are commercial arms within the BBC in charge of flogging the content. One part wants to move heaven and earth to get as much content out in as many ways as possible - the other half wants you to buy it on DVD.
and now you mention it, I do have a copy of the O'Reilly bookshelf somewhere.
Maybe electronic books are considered to be 'software' and therefore treated as such? I'd never really though of it before - might possibly explain the reluctance of publishers to go electronic.
As for the O'Reilly thing - I swear I never used it Mr O'Reilly and much prefer buying your books with their pretty covers.
When I had my first PocketPC and was honeymoon happy with it, I did buy a legit e-book. Never got passed the first chapter and decided I hated reading on that little screen (I think it was the screen thing, but maybe I just like paper books).
think I meant to put this as a reply to the post above.
I don't want my cc details buried into a game.
I don't actually think there's really a need for DRM at all.
Example I've always liked is books. High Street is full of shops selling them, Amazon built an entire business physically posting them - yet nobody bothers to copy them (well OK, not in 'the western world'). No reason it couldn't be scanned to a text file (cut the spine and shove it through a $99 OCR sheetfeeder and you'd be done in no time. That txt file could easily be sent to anybody on the planet as an email attachment, could be read on practically any computer/phone/PDA etc etc - yet nobody does it.
Guess there are a few frontrunners in 'reasons why':
People like books, they like picking them up, they like holding them, they like reading them - Now I personally feel that ties more to the 'contact with the maker' thing. Somebody wrote this book, their name is on the cover and now I'm reading their words. I'm guessing if books were uncredited and just had a serial number (or some other whim of mine), then people wouldn't quite feel the same about them. This is something that surely needs to be encouraged in the 'games' world (or for that matter any software).
Books are cheap. Well OK the textbooks I had to buy when I was my poorest, were the most expensive.. but by and large they're cheap for the time and pleasure you get out of them.
Libraries - never quite understood how they and the sale of books managed to co-exist. I mean you can walk into your library and walk out with the book you want to read. Bit more fiddly/time consuming than purchase - but definitely a lot cheaper... Do you think there are people that use libraries buy less books than those who don't? Are these the people that can't/won't buy books - would they all resort to piracy if libraries vanished - or just go illiterate.. oh questions questions.
Anyway, where was I going on this one.. I'm full stream ramble now..
Oh right - that's where I was. Audible. I love audible. I pay them £15 a month and I get two big audiobooks to shove on my ipod. I listen to them as I walk to and from work every day and I've probably got more books through my head in the last 2 years than the previous 10 (well OK, 5). Now maybe I'd pay a bit more for three books (occasionally I run out and may be forced to 'borrow' one from elsewhere). 4 books a month? 5.. No I mean I simply don't have the time to listen to them all. I mean with 5 maybe I'd quit playing something I hated but.. they'd just stack up and up. Back to games. I could pirate 5 game DVDs each night. I could pirate their games faster than they can make them. Now when I did pirate, that's what I would have done. I'd be downloading everything I could possibly get my hands on. I'd be archiving it on DVD, NAS, etc etc - it was more about the collecting - I physically couldn't have played all these games. I would however leap from game to game, play 5 mins, get bored and then onto the next one. Occasionally I'd hit a gem; The orginal PC GTA, Total Anihilation (both of which I rushed out and bought), Einhander, Puzzle Fighter etc anyway, point is the best bit of messed up world of piracy was you did get to love stuff nobody else had heard of. So...
How about a subscription based model to games - either:
Pay £x for a new game of your choice from Steam each month (plus 50% off if you pick up a second).
Or Pay £30 a month and play any game you fancy on steam. I mean you just go hog-wild and play whatever takes your fancy. Now revenue sharing from this might be a bit strange - split up by hours you spent on each game? number of times you loaded it up? Review scores? Player review scores? Who knows - but it'd make the world a lot more interesting.
I mean something similar is already happening with MMOs - DVD is given away free with months online trial. They're hoping to get you hooked and get those monthly fees. New Battlefield game is going to be microtransaction based. How's about £1 extra on your WoW sub, for £5 credit in Battlefield?
A
Not really for any specific reason, but here are some of them:
I earn money now. As a student buying that game was taking food/alcohol money.
I don't have less free time. I have to be more selective. I play less games and the cost to purchase is the least of my worries. In fact it probably saves me cash as if I was out doing something else, I'd undoubtedly be spending more money.
I like on-line a lot. I bought Battlefield 2 for the magic code that let me go online - and I've not chipped my 360 for the same reason.
Cracking stuff makes me feel guilty. I mean yes there's all the arguments about how paying for the game gives you a more restricted copy - but Oh I dunno. If it's a good game somebody has poured their heart and soul into it, and I don't want to make them sad.
Steam - I like steam. I go there, I buy a game (after playing a demo maybe) and there it is to play a few minutes later. I can't be arsed fiddling with CDs, I usally lose/scratch them. If I'd put my thinking cap on and designed my own online distribution system - it'd look like Steam.
I'm not involved in the scene. Getting a pre-Jap release of Metal Gear Solid through the post, complete with japanese stamps on the jiffy bag - that's exciting. Clicking on a torrent link or browsing usenet.. not really a challenge. Strange point this one, but I liked the days when stuff had to be posted, or tracked down to an obscure hidden FTP dir. Too easy now.
How to stop piracy? Well that's a tricky one as I think everybody has their own reasons. If you genuinely can't afford the game - then nothing's going to stop that person pirating it (and if there's been no sale to lose - who cares?). If anything it keeps somebody in the market for future releases and hey they might turn into me and start buying them when they can.
Possibly the other thing is to make the makers of games more important. If you've been reading the blog of somebody who is making something - or eagerly tracking the return of Sam and Max - then you're going to feel more inclined to show support and buy it. When some movie-tie-in appears on 9 formats the day of the films release from 'somewhere' - well I'm not feeling a great emotional attachment to the producers.
Final bit is that I think game makers are starting to be nice to us and understand what we want. We don't have it too bad. Compare what's happening with online distribution of music and movies..
weirdest international experience I had was 2 weeks in Atlanta Georgia. Flown in for 'critical problem' but than dicked around for 2 days before I got to meet 'the important person' (who then sortof mentioned an hour in the problem had been solved)
Still I did managed to pick up 2 invites from co-workers to churches on the Sunday - seemingly my non-existant soul was of a greater concern to the average American corporate drone.