That only brings me to a webpage with a bigger version of the same ad or the companies webpage. In the days of the Internet I would expect it to bring me straight to Amazon where I can buy the product or to a price search engine that gives me the place with the lowest price. Or at least some place where I can get actual information on the product, reviews and such, a webforum, something, not just more marketing bullshit, I already clicked the ad, so don't bother me with even more of it, provide me with the info to actually give you money, easily. Also generally speaking most product webpages are complete junk, they simply don't provide the info I want about a product, they are vague and imprecise and not really helpful at all, a lot of products of our daily lives don't even have proper webpages, foot items for example rarely have any useful info about them. I don't just mean nutritional info, I want some history on the evolution of the product over the years, how it differs in different reasons and whatever. Product webpages should drown me in information like Wikipedia does, not just be the web version of a magazine ad.
For the same reason infomercials don't show you the price in minute one: the brand name might turn some people off. They want to show you the attributes to make you want the product, and then they tell you what product has those attributes.
That might have been true for TV, but on Youtube where I can skip ads after 5sec? What's the point of having an ad whose end I never see and thus never find out what the product is for?
ads that are actually well-produced entertainment would probably result in viewers being distracted by the production
Very true, but that is what I am complaining about. I can't remember what most ads are for because the ad has absolutely no relation to the actual product. You have 30sec of ad and then 2sec at the end where they actually show the product. It's like companies purposefully try to hide their product. At least give me a company logo in the corner so that I know what the ad is about or better yet make an actual informative video, not just some exercise in 30sec storytelling.
There might be some fall of of effectivness, but in general I don't think anybody really cares, given how bad ads on the Internet are. Not only are they still almost completely untargeted, they are also incredible repetitious, boring and not even made for the Internet. If Youtube for example shows me a video, why not tell me the name of the product at the start of the video? I am going to skip it in 5sec anyway, so you could just tell me now and reenforce that logo into my brain or I won't see it. Also why are there so few ads? Youtube seems to run the same five ads in a loop, every few month they might update one, but if I open three tabs, I get to see the same video three times. What's the point of that? Also why are they not interactive? Why can't I comment on them? Why can't I click a "I do not care about this product" button to get rid of them? Why can't I click a "I want to see more"?
Maybe there is some reason for ads sucking so much, maybe that's what makes them stick in my mind. I don't know. But the general feel I get from Internet ads is that nobody really cares about making them intersting, it's just colorful garbage dumped all over the Internet and it makes no real use of the possibilities that the Internet would provide.
It's completely irrelevant if it's x86 or PowerPC or whatever, as a PS4 will still not be able to run PC games just as your PC won't be able to run PS4 games. And if you hope for hackers to solve that, well they haven't even managed to get Xbox1 emulation up and running properly and that was x86 as well. PS2, Gamecube and even Wii emulation are pretty solid these days, even so those where completely different architectures. There is a ton of complexity when it comes to emulating games and the processors instruction set is really the least of your problems.
Serious question, am I the only one that sees the end coming for these big name Consoles?
Not unless they have serious competition. Steambox might provide that, but nobody knows when that will be out and what games it will run. It's also not clear if Steambox would get the developer support it needs with EA and Ubisoft trying to build up their own services with Origin and UPlay. So till Steambox it out, the big consoles are still the only way to get to get high end gaming experience that is user friendly and works on your TV.
As for Ouya and friends, I don't think any serious gamer would like a sudden downgrade of his graphics back to Xbox1 level. Those Android based things get more powerful each year, but it will take a while till they can be considered serious competition.
gives you some measure of control in regards to what people find if they search for you.
Only when you are into search-engine-optimization, otherwise you can write insightful stuff for years, but some silly blog post that got popular for one reason or another might bobble up to the top of the search results. All the stuff you do online isn't really properly reflected by the search results people get when they input your name, only a small seemingly random portion is.
Depends on how far and where you have spread. A lot of stuff I have written over the years on forums is gone, as either the forums are gone completely or the data was lost of a redesign or crash. Of course decade old Usenet stuff from me is still around and so are some mailing list archives. The biggest issue with the Internet isn't that you can't delete stuff from it, you can and most stuff will just disappear by itself, the tricky part is that you don't have any control over which part will disappear and which won't. Sometimes things will turn into a meme or enter some place that gets mirrored a lot and then they will become nearly impossible to get rid of, but other times when you look for old stuff all you find is that the server had a robots.txt and things never made it to archive.org or anywhere else.
It is now a smear campaign to point out someone is a cheater and a liar?
She got her doctor title 30 years ago, not last week. You might not call it a smear campaign, as it is based on truth, but I find it always rather iffy when something that somebody has done 30 years ago counts more then all that which he has done since then. It's not like it was noticed that she cheated because of incompetence at the job, but just because it's currently a trend to dig through old doctor thesis of politicians in Germany.
Does anybody know why they left away the start/select button? Those seems rather fundamental to a whole lot of modern game designs and not having them will probably be a rather big annoyance. Do they have anything planed for the GUI that will address this issue?
No need to download and install a game, it's ready to be run in seconds. It's also platform independent, so you can play the same games wherever you have a screen and an Internet connection.
Isn't all iTunes music DRM-free now? Meaning you actually can resell it without any problem from Apple. Their EULA might still forbid it, I don't know, but if that's void, they can't prevent you from doing it. On the flip side the number of people that might buy DRM-free music from an unauthorized reseller might be rather small, as most people would probably feel like that's indistinguishable from piracy, it's just bits after all and with DRM-free nobody can keep track of who truly own the license.
And the license is not transferable if you read the fine print. But who reads the EULA?
I think the main issue here is that they don't print the full EULA on boxed copies of software. And thus as you can't read the EULA at the time of the purchase, it's void. Things might be different with online sales where the EULA has to be agreed up on a purchase, we will find out more about that when this lawsuit is over.
As far as I understand it, it's not so much that software licenses have to be allowed to resold, but that they way companies tried to prevent it is not sufficient under current law. Specifically in the case of Steam as far as I understand the issue was this: User buys boxed copy of game that requires Steam, Steam changes month/years later their TOS and requires the user to accept it, if users refuses he gets locked out of his Steam account. That's however illegal, Steam can't take away a users access to his games, especially not with TOS changes that didn't even exist when the user bought the game.
I don't think there is anything in the law that actually forces licenses to be resealable if the buyer had the information that it can't be resold when he bought it. So if Steam changes their TOS to something like "Steam is a rental service that gives you access to games for the next 10 years" it might be ok for Steams to continue to exist without allowing resales, but they can't apply that change retroactively to past sales, especially not of boxed copies.
Use a US billing address credit card. Steam will be cheaper than your local store
That's a TOS violation and might get your account blocked.
You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence, whether to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content, to purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography, or for any other purpose. If you do this, we may terminate your access to your Account.
The "per infringement" thing could end up really bad when people are sharing their whole music collection. I mean three songs seems rather tiny amount for the average act of piracy, most would probably at least share the whole album, if not the whole bands history.
Microsoft has already won by having ExtFAT part of the SDXC spec, so every big SD card comes with it. The only thing the Open Source world can do is damage control by implementing it and thus staying useful.
The idea of rolling releases is by itself a good one, as there is really no point in trying to get thousands of packages, that are in large part completely independed of each other, "stable" at the same time ("stable" mostly meaning we won't ship the fixes upstream provides). However far to often new packages also break stuff, be it just little things or Unity and Gnome3 comming along and wreaking your whole desktop environment. So could we please get proper support for downgrades or the installation of multiple versions per package first? If stuff breaks and I could just go back to the older version in a single click I wouldn't mind if stuff breaks. But right now I have to search for the.deb via arcane means, twiddle with raw dpkg and in the end might completely wreak the dependency tree as a result (try install old Gnome2 on modern Ubuntu, not easy). As long as upgrades are a one way street, rolling releases really sound like a bad idea if you want a stable system.
How exactly is that confusing in GTA4? Focus only matters when you are close to objects, when you however look at something that is 5-10 meter away, everything else beyond that threshold will be in focus as well. In a third person game like GTA4 that essentially means everything should always be in focus, as you are never really up close to anything unless you make some camera acrobatics and force the camera into a wall.
There is Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation, if that however will ever be able to give detailed enough feedback and be easy enough to use in a consumer device is another question. Till then we can always take ginger pills to cure the motion sickness.
How are we supposed to secure a free state if the tyrant can wirelessly disable our arms?
Good old unarmed non-violent protest is the only way you can properly secure a democracy, everything else will just get you labeled as terrorist and locked up long before your little revolution movement can get any traction.
What worries me about gun control is the idea that the government wants to control ownership of a piece of metal that anybody can fabricate in a day in their home and to which there are lots of lethal alternatives.
Except that most guns aren't manufactured in people homes and most people neither have the tools nor the knowledge to build a gun. Also this is nothing special to guns, you can build bombs a lot easier then guns, yet those are already outlawed and nobody complains.
Where are we going to stop?
At guns.
What's going to happen with 3D printers?
The same as with 2D printers. Just because you have one, doesn't mean you are allowed to print money with it. Scanners will even refuse to scan money thanks to some simple pattern printed on bills.
Problem is that our superior transportation is a piece of metal, not a faster horse. When it comes to meat it's not just about building a better tool, but about being better at building biology then nature itself. I don't doubt that we can do it, but I have some doubt about it being cheaper then a real chicken or cow.
Slashdot Mirror
That's called clicking the ad.
That only brings me to a webpage with a bigger version of the same ad or the companies webpage. In the days of the Internet I would expect it to bring me straight to Amazon where I can buy the product or to a price search engine that gives me the place with the lowest price. Or at least some place where I can get actual information on the product, reviews and such, a webforum, something, not just more marketing bullshit, I already clicked the ad, so don't bother me with even more of it, provide me with the info to actually give you money, easily. Also generally speaking most product webpages are complete junk, they simply don't provide the info I want about a product, they are vague and imprecise and not really helpful at all, a lot of products of our daily lives don't even have proper webpages, foot items for example rarely have any useful info about them. I don't just mean nutritional info, I want some history on the evolution of the product over the years, how it differs in different reasons and whatever. Product webpages should drown me in information like Wikipedia does, not just be the web version of a magazine ad.
For the same reason infomercials don't show you the price in minute one: the brand name might turn some people off. They want to show you the attributes to make you want the product, and then they tell you what product has those attributes.
That might have been true for TV, but on Youtube where I can skip ads after 5sec? What's the point of having an ad whose end I never see and thus never find out what the product is for?
ads that are actually well-produced entertainment would probably result in viewers being distracted by the production
Very true, but that is what I am complaining about. I can't remember what most ads are for because the ad has absolutely no relation to the actual product. You have 30sec of ad and then 2sec at the end where they actually show the product. It's like companies purposefully try to hide their product. At least give me a company logo in the corner so that I know what the ad is about or better yet make an actual informative video, not just some exercise in 30sec storytelling.
There might be some fall of of effectivness, but in general I don't think anybody really cares, given how bad ads on the Internet are. Not only are they still almost completely untargeted, they are also incredible repetitious, boring and not even made for the Internet. If Youtube for example shows me a video, why not tell me the name of the product at the start of the video? I am going to skip it in 5sec anyway, so you could just tell me now and reenforce that logo into my brain or I won't see it. Also why are there so few ads? Youtube seems to run the same five ads in a loop, every few month they might update one, but if I open three tabs, I get to see the same video three times. What's the point of that? Also why are they not interactive? Why can't I comment on them? Why can't I click a "I do not care about this product" button to get rid of them? Why can't I click a "I want to see more"?
Maybe there is some reason for ads sucking so much, maybe that's what makes them stick in my mind. I don't know. But the general feel I get from Internet ads is that nobody really cares about making them intersting, it's just colorful garbage dumped all over the Internet and it makes no real use of the possibilities that the Internet would provide.
It's completely irrelevant if it's x86 or PowerPC or whatever, as a PS4 will still not be able to run PC games just as your PC won't be able to run PS4 games. And if you hope for hackers to solve that, well they haven't even managed to get Xbox1 emulation up and running properly and that was x86 as well. PS2, Gamecube and even Wii emulation are pretty solid these days, even so those where completely different architectures. There is a ton of complexity when it comes to emulating games and the processors instruction set is really the least of your problems.
Serious question, am I the only one that sees the end coming for these big name Consoles?
Not unless they have serious competition. Steambox might provide that, but nobody knows when that will be out and what games it will run. It's also not clear if Steambox would get the developer support it needs with EA and Ubisoft trying to build up their own services with Origin and UPlay. So till Steambox it out, the big consoles are still the only way to get to get high end gaming experience that is user friendly and works on your TV.
As for Ouya and friends, I don't think any serious gamer would like a sudden downgrade of his graphics back to Xbox1 level. Those Android based things get more powerful each year, but it will take a while till they can be considered serious competition.
The problem here isn't proprietary software, but dependency on a central service and a lack of redundancy.
gives you some measure of control in regards to what people find if they search for you.
Only when you are into search-engine-optimization, otherwise you can write insightful stuff for years, but some silly blog post that got popular for one reason or another might bobble up to the top of the search results. All the stuff you do online isn't really properly reflected by the search results people get when they input your name, only a small seemingly random portion is.
Depends on how far and where you have spread. A lot of stuff I have written over the years on forums is gone, as either the forums are gone completely or the data was lost of a redesign or crash. Of course decade old Usenet stuff from me is still around and so are some mailing list archives. The biggest issue with the Internet isn't that you can't delete stuff from it, you can and most stuff will just disappear by itself, the tricky part is that you don't have any control over which part will disappear and which won't. Sometimes things will turn into a meme or enter some place that gets mirrored a lot and then they will become nearly impossible to get rid of, but other times when you look for old stuff all you find is that the server had a robots.txt and things never made it to archive.org or anywhere else.
It is now a smear campaign to point out someone is a cheater and a liar?
She got her doctor title 30 years ago, not last week. You might not call it a smear campaign, as it is based on truth, but I find it always rather iffy when something that somebody has done 30 years ago counts more then all that which he has done since then. It's not like it was noticed that she cheated because of incompetence at the job, but just because it's currently a trend to dig through old doctor thesis of politicians in Germany.
Does anybody know why they left away the start/select button? Those seems rather fundamental to a whole lot of modern game designs and not having them will probably be a rather big annoyance. Do they have anything planed for the GUI that will address this issue?
No need to download and install a game, it's ready to be run in seconds. It's also platform independent, so you can play the same games wherever you have a screen and an Internet connection.
Isn't all iTunes music DRM-free now? Meaning you actually can resell it without any problem from Apple. Their EULA might still forbid it, I don't know, but if that's void, they can't prevent you from doing it. On the flip side the number of people that might buy DRM-free music from an unauthorized reseller might be rather small, as most people would probably feel like that's indistinguishable from piracy, it's just bits after all and with DRM-free nobody can keep track of who truly own the license.
And the license is not transferable if you read the fine print. But who reads the EULA?
I think the main issue here is that they don't print the full EULA on boxed copies of software. And thus as you can't read the EULA at the time of the purchase, it's void. Things might be different with online sales where the EULA has to be agreed up on a purchase, we will find out more about that when this lawsuit is over.
As far as I understand it, it's not so much that software licenses have to be allowed to resold, but that they way companies tried to prevent it is not sufficient under current law. Specifically in the case of Steam as far as I understand the issue was this: User buys boxed copy of game that requires Steam, Steam changes month/years later their TOS and requires the user to accept it, if users refuses he gets locked out of his Steam account. That's however illegal, Steam can't take away a users access to his games, especially not with TOS changes that didn't even exist when the user bought the game.
I don't think there is anything in the law that actually forces licenses to be resealable if the buyer had the information that it can't be resold when he bought it. So if Steam changes their TOS to something like "Steam is a rental service that gives you access to games for the next 10 years" it might be ok for Steams to continue to exist without allowing resales, but they can't apply that change retroactively to past sales, especially not of boxed copies.
Use a US billing address credit card. Steam will be cheaper than your local store
That's a TOS violation and might get your account blocked.
The "per infringement" thing could end up really bad when people are sharing their whole music collection. I mean three songs seems rather tiny amount for the average act of piracy, most would probably at least share the whole album, if not the whole bands history.
Microsoft has already won by having ExtFAT part of the SDXC spec, so every big SD card comes with it. The only thing the Open Source world can do is damage control by implementing it and thus staying useful.
The idea of rolling releases is by itself a good one, as there is really no point in trying to get thousands of packages, that are in large part completely independed of each other, "stable" at the same time ("stable" mostly meaning we won't ship the fixes upstream provides). However far to often new packages also break stuff, be it just little things or Unity and Gnome3 comming along and wreaking your whole desktop environment. So could we please get proper support for downgrades or the installation of multiple versions per package first? If stuff breaks and I could just go back to the older version in a single click I wouldn't mind if stuff breaks. But right now I have to search for the .deb via arcane means, twiddle with raw dpkg and in the end might completely wreak the dependency tree as a result (try install old Gnome2 on modern Ubuntu, not easy). As long as upgrades are a one way street, rolling releases really sound like a bad idea if you want a stable system.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5084022
Mega encrypts files using the hash of the content as encryption key, this allows them to have dedup without knowing how to decrypt the files.
How exactly is that confusing in GTA4? Focus only matters when you are close to objects, when you however look at something that is 5-10 meter away, everything else beyond that threshold will be in focus as well. In a third person game like GTA4 that essentially means everything should always be in focus, as you are never really up close to anything unless you make some camera acrobatics and force the camera into a wall.
There is Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation, if that however will ever be able to give detailed enough feedback and be easy enough to use in a consumer device is another question. Till then we can always take ginger pills to cure the motion sickness.
How are we supposed to secure a free state if the tyrant can wirelessly disable our arms?
Good old unarmed non-violent protest is the only way you can properly secure a democracy, everything else will just get you labeled as terrorist and locked up long before your little revolution movement can get any traction.
What worries me about gun control is the idea that the government wants to control ownership of a piece of metal that anybody can fabricate in a day in their home and to which there are lots of lethal alternatives.
Except that most guns aren't manufactured in people homes and most people neither have the tools nor the knowledge to build a gun. Also this is nothing special to guns, you can build bombs a lot easier then guns, yet those are already outlawed and nobody complains.
Where are we going to stop?
At guns.
What's going to happen with 3D printers?
The same as with 2D printers. Just because you have one, doesn't mean you are allowed to print money with it. Scanners will even refuse to scan money thanks to some simple pattern printed on bills.
Right, blaming a physical object for a _mental_ problem is the "problem".
A mentally ill person without a gun is pretty harmless, one with a gun on the other side not so much.
Problem is that our superior transportation is a piece of metal, not a faster horse. When it comes to meat it's not just about building a better tool, but about being better at building biology then nature itself. I don't doubt that we can do it, but I have some doubt about it being cheaper then a real chicken or cow.