After realising how much I missed it, I bought Populous second hand a few months ago. What makes it so good is that it has everything a good real-time strategy game should, and nothing more. If only someone were to remake it on modern hardware, with photo-realistic castles and fluid water, but no changes whatsoever to the gameplay, I'd buy it in an instant.
Pure pacifism pisses me off...It's like Veganism...Sounds good on paper, but is unworkable in reality.
As someone who's been a vegan for several years now (as well as boycotting various companies, for example Coca-Cola who had union leaders killed), I don't think it's unworkable in reality.
If it came down to starvation for you and your child vs eating Bambi, Bambi'd be on a stick.
Yes, I concede that. Similarly, if I found myself next to a lion for some reason, and only one of us were going to survive, whoever it was wouldn't feel too guilty about killing the other one.
However, we have society and technology now. I can spend my whole life without ever having to choose between killing an animal or dying. Even most non-vegans don't kill animals directly, they essentially pay other people to do it for them. So when the choice is between, say, a can of lentil soup or a can of chicken soup, it becomes much more practical to go for the most ethical option.
So I would conclude that in this period in time, in a developed country, it is possible to pursue idealism such as pacifism or veganism with at least some success. I'm all in favour of anyone trying to ensure their hard work isn't used to kill anyone.
Imagine how much a marketing company would pay for that info from AOL with the personal details for each user included (i.e. Age, Sex, location etc.)
I would have thought that knowing what a person is interested in, therefore likely to buy, is more useful than knowing their demographic, therefore what they are supposedly likely to buy. The age of someone will tell you if they theoretically prefer cola or wine, for example, but if they regularly search for wine related topics, knowing their age becomes irrelevant. Although I can see the advantage of knowing the name and contact details of the individual when you're trying to sell things to them.
I thought this was the whole advantage to advertising to people based on what they search for: you know what they are actually interested in buying, rather than theoretically interested in buying.
Every iteration [Microsoft] get more stuff right, and their operating system becomes better.
Let's see... they bought QuDOS, the Quick and Dirty Operating System, and renamed it MS-DOS, the Microsoft Disk Operating System, and managed to get it shipped with every new IBM computer. When the clones arrived, their MS-DOS was put on the clones. Then they ripped off MacOS and called it Windows. After version 3 came out, it was sort of something people wanted to use. Since then, they've bought Spyglass and renamed it Internet Explorer, then claimed it was a part of the operating system, and continued to rip off various features of Mac OS (the trash can became the recycle bin in Windows 95, and these days various things OS X has had for a while are creeping their way into Vista). So besides buying other people's software, ripping off other people's software, and locking people into various non-free formats, what exactly has Microsoft done right for their operating system to become better with each iteration? If you mean better as in better for Microsoft, then I guess you're right. If you mean better as in better for the end user, I think you should look into the future of the operating system, such as trusted computing.
Are you kidding? This is the company that people have to pay royalties to every time someone sings Happy Birthday to You in public! (I'm not kidding. Check the songs listed in the credits at the end of a film which has anyone singing this song.)
(Paraphrasing slightly): The new discs would not play on normal CD players, and thus these discs will not sell.
That's not the reason they won't sell. You can't play CDs in a tape player or record player, but they eventually took off enough to replace both those formats. The reason these won't sell is that CDs are good enough. There's no reason to replace your entire record collection again with something that may sound slightly better (then again, if it's a lossy format, it may actually sound worse in some ways).
This format isn't significantly better than CDs, is in some way worse, isn't as convenient as CDs (which you can copy for fair use), and isn't anywhere near as convenient as downloaded music. It's completely redundant.
OK, so no one's buying SACDs or DVD-As. Bearing in mind that DVD-As can store sound in an uncompressed or losslessly compressed format, and DVD videos store it in a lossy format, why would someone who hasn't bought a DVD-A buy music on a DVD video, without as much video footage as a DVD video showing a concert recording?
Warner Brothers should just face it: two formats are already trying to outdo CDs, and both are failing. This one will also fail. Most people don't want a better sounding format - CDs are adequate. If anything, MP3 sharing as proven that what people want is convenience, the kind you can't get from a physical disc.
Personally, I'll stick to true CDs. They have no "digital restriction management" as RMS fondly calls it, and you can still sell them second hand.
It's also free, an important distinction.:) It doesn't matter if it's free as in zero-cost, as long as it's free as in the-freedom-to-copy-it-to-your-friends.
Hard disks today, don't help me enjoy the quiet times of yesterday with the C64, the constant idle spin noise, plus the fans to cool the system. Sure the drive isn't the primary noise factor (besides seek times) but it's an added ambient noise that I don't enjoy - my C64 was great for quiet.
That's a good point, the C64 and other 8-bit microcomputers were completely silent. Still, my Mac Mini's only about 20-odd decibels, and roughly the same size too, so things aren't necessarily much worse these days.
The article said Kryder of Seagate and Healy of Hitachi assure us that new disk-drive features like built-in encryption will protect copyright holders and someone asked What the fuck is this, some new trusted computing drm scheme I never heard of?
It does indeed sound like trusted computing. According to Wikipedia:
Sealed storage protects private information by allowing it to be encrypted using a key derived from the software and hardware being used. This means the data can be read only by the same combination of software and hardware.
Trusted Computing would allow companies to create an almost unbreakable DRM system. An example is downloading a music file. Remote attestation could be used so that the music file would refuse to play except on a specific music player that enforces the record company's rules. Sealed storage would prevent the user from opening the file with another player or another computer. The music would be played in curtained memory, which would prevent the user from making an unrestricted copy of the file while it's playing, and secure I/O would prevent capturing what is being sent to the sound system.
I have no idea how you're supposed to back up such data, or even trust your computer to do what you tell it to do.
I recall my C64 as a boy, sure it had that weird "computer high pitch whine" to it but when the 1541-II wasn't reading data that baby was pretty damn quiet, I miss those days and hard disks don't help.
The lack of noise from a hard drive spinning is what you miss? Personally, I miss the OS loading in less than five seconds, and the computer expecting you to type in a computer program instead of letting you run other people's by default. I would have quite enjoyed a hard drive for a computer with 64K of memory, it would have taken a while to fill it up...
The government basically has to create a state of perpetual fear, stir up hatred of the enemy, torture people, have an ongoing war, control information, and basically convince you to willingly see things that are false.
In terms of the American government making their whole country's citizens paranoid that even their neighbours could be some kind of enemy against their ideology, wasn't this achieved in the fifties using the buzzword "communist" a long time before it was done using the buzzword "terrorist?"
Will these official lyrics come in encrypted, DRM'ed text files
That's a pretty good question, actually. From what I understand, the FairPlay DRM used in the iTunes Music Store (to use a popular example) only encrypts the AAC audio stream of the M4A wrapper file. Seeing as this wrapper also includes the album cover art and (as far as I know) the lyric to the song in question, and I'm pretty sure FairPlay doesn't encrypt either of these, it should be trivially easy to extract the copyrighted artwork and lyric without even circumnavigating DRM.
Which presumably is legal for the fair use purpose of singing along to the song, but probably illegal for you to e-mail the lyric to a friend to tell them how good the song is so they also buy a copy.
The best part is that this content will be made available by subscription.
Best for who, exactly? Presumably the movie companies, not the customers. This way you get to keep on giving money for the subscription, and when you finally decide to stop, you have no products to show for it.
I for one will consider downloading albums and films legally just as soon as a method of selling them second hand legitimately appears. Until then, I'll stick to tangible formats which still give me that right.
The director of the National Gang Crime Research Center has stated "In order to understand any subculture, be it al-Qaida, witches, devil worshippers or gangs, you have to be able to know their own language."
I almost dread to ask, but what is the director of such an organisation doing prying into the private lives of practicing Pagans and Wiccans? I can't believe how misunderstood this religion is. If you substituted any other typically nonviolent religious group, such as Christians or Jews, I'm sure they wouldn't be lumped in with gangs quite so quickly.
At one point, the author states that it's a surprise to most people that the web was created for the purpose of publishing as well as reading content. Such a fact is hardly a surprise to the average Slashdot reader, and certainly not to the masses currently posting on MySpace, YouTube, LiveJournal, and other MixedCaps websites which encourage self-publishing.
I for one was surprised when I read about it in Tim Berners-Lee's book Weaving the Web. What surprised me was that HTTP used GET and PUT commands just like FTP, and that the idea was you would download a page, maybe make a few corrections, and then upload it again. No web site I know of implements this. All the writable ones use complex Perl or PHP code based on POST form submissions. The only web browser I've ever seen that supports uploading web pages via HTTP's PUT command is the W3C's own Amaya.
It makes you think how different the web could have been, if it was used for sharing information rather than buying products. Even the person who invented it couldn't predict what it would evolve into.
They seem to be acting much like a heroine addict, in that they're moving from one crime to the next, getting bigger and bigger fines but no matter how much you fine the company it is still pathologically anti-competitive... Is it a rule that all big companies go the way of AT&T eventually?
Quite possibly. The documentary The Corporation pointed out how such corporations, while legally people in some respects, would be more like psychopaths than any other kind of people, as they do whatever they can get away with on their quest for more profit, showing a complete disregard for morals and the law.
If it's cheaper to break the law and pay a fine than it is to obey the law and profit less, they'll break it.
If you replace the software with guns, you will begin to understand the position of those who want the right to bear arms (modifications have been made).
I think the main difference is that guns are used pretty much exclusively to intimidate or kill animals, be they human or otherwise. Perl and various other languages and utilities, on the other hand, can be used for various good purposes, neutral ones, and evil ones.
The only way around having HTML in your PHP source code that I can think of is to create a class for making pages, with methods such as adding an HTML element and writing the page. The main advantages are that you can write new HTTP headers whenever you want without worrying that HTML was already output because you can write the class to only output at the very last moment, and you can rewrite the class to conform to new versions of X/HTML as they come out if you're cunning enough when you write it. But really, these are advantages of OOP with PHP5 just as much as they're advantages of taking HTML out of the main higher level source.
Why in the world wouldn't Coke want everybody to see that last commercial with the polar bears and penguins? What good can it possibly serve?
Yeah, I agree. There's no reason I can think of why people shouldn't be allowed to copy, distribute and view adverts anywhere, except for ripping off the advert, as you pointed out, and also placing it out of context (remember one of those polar bear adverts being in the middle of Natural Born Killers? According to IMDB, the board of directors were furious when they found out what it was being used in).
Odds are the broadcast flag will only be present on content and not advertisements, so all we have to do is look for the broadcast flag, then record, and when the broadcast flag is not present, stop recording:)
I could be wrong, so it would be nice if someone could verify or prove wrong my claim here, but I'm pretty sure I downloaded a trailer from Apple's site the other day which said it was illegal to copy it. I'm pretty sure it was referring to the actual trailer itself, rather than the film it represented. Which is both scary and silly. Why would anyone want to stop people copying what's essentially an advert? But then again, that's what pop videos are too. Can't you buy those at the iTunes Music Store?
Or, more specifically, why Scott Fahlman first made an ASCII smiley on 19 September 1982, when people didn't realise the joke he'd made about a lift being out of commission after someone contaminated it with mercury in a scientific experiment gone awry actually was a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
After realising how much I missed it, I bought Populous second hand a few months ago. What makes it so good is that it has everything a good real-time strategy game should, and nothing more. If only someone were to remake it on modern hardware, with photo-realistic castles and fluid water, but no changes whatsoever to the gameplay, I'd buy it in an instant.
Pure pacifism pisses me off...It's like Veganism...Sounds good on paper, but is unworkable in reality.
As someone who's been a vegan for several years now (as well as boycotting various companies, for example Coca-Cola who had union leaders killed), I don't think it's unworkable in reality.
If it came down to starvation for you and your child vs eating Bambi, Bambi'd be on a stick.
Yes, I concede that. Similarly, if I found myself next to a lion for some reason, and only one of us were going to survive, whoever it was wouldn't feel too guilty about killing the other one.
However, we have society and technology now. I can spend my whole life without ever having to choose between killing an animal or dying. Even most non-vegans don't kill animals directly, they essentially pay other people to do it for them. So when the choice is between, say, a can of lentil soup or a can of chicken soup, it becomes much more practical to go for the most ethical option.
So I would conclude that in this period in time, in a developed country, it is possible to pursue idealism such as pacifism or veganism with at least some success. I'm all in favour of anyone trying to ensure their hard work isn't used to kill anyone.
Storing every single search performed by every person in the world across a whole epoch could pretty much give you the pulse of the world.
What, like Google Zeitgeist?
Imagine how much a marketing company would pay for that info from AOL with the personal details for each user included (i.e. Age, Sex, location etc.)
I would have thought that knowing what a person is interested in, therefore likely to buy, is more useful than knowing their demographic, therefore what they are supposedly likely to buy. The age of someone will tell you if they theoretically prefer cola or wine, for example, but if they regularly search for wine related topics, knowing their age becomes irrelevant. Although I can see the advantage of knowing the name and contact details of the individual when you're trying to sell things to them.
I thought this was the whole advantage to advertising to people based on what they search for: you know what they are actually interested in buying, rather than theoretically interested in buying.
Every iteration [Microsoft] get more stuff right, and their operating system becomes better.
Let's see... they bought QuDOS, the Quick and Dirty Operating System, and renamed it MS-DOS, the Microsoft Disk Operating System, and managed to get it shipped with every new IBM computer. When the clones arrived, their MS-DOS was put on the clones. Then they ripped off MacOS and called it Windows. After version 3 came out, it was sort of something people wanted to use. Since then, they've bought Spyglass and renamed it Internet Explorer, then claimed it was a part of the operating system, and continued to rip off various features of Mac OS (the trash can became the recycle bin in Windows 95, and these days various things OS X has had for a while are creeping their way into Vista). So besides buying other people's software, ripping off other people's software, and locking people into various non-free formats, what exactly has Microsoft done right for their operating system to become better with each iteration? If you mean better as in better for Microsoft, then I guess you're right. If you mean better as in better for the end user, I think you should look into the future of the operating system, such as trusted computing.
Microsoft doesn't care about impressing Linux users, they care about releasing something that A LOT of normal users can install and forget about.
No, they care about money and power. It's an important distinction.
It might be a good idea to short their stock.
Are you kidding? This is the company that people have to pay royalties to every time someone sings Happy Birthday to You in public! (I'm not kidding. Check the songs listed in the credits at the end of a film which has anyone singing this song.)
(Paraphrasing slightly): The new discs would not play on normal CD players, and thus these discs will not sell.
That's not the reason they won't sell. You can't play CDs in a tape player or record player, but they eventually took off enough to replace both those formats. The reason these won't sell is that CDs are good enough. There's no reason to replace your entire record collection again with something that may sound slightly better (then again, if it's a lossy format, it may actually sound worse in some ways).
This format isn't significantly better than CDs, is in some way worse, isn't as convenient as CDs (which you can copy for fair use), and isn't anywhere near as convenient as downloaded music. It's completely redundant.
OK, so no one's buying SACDs or DVD-As. Bearing in mind that DVD-As can store sound in an uncompressed or losslessly compressed format, and DVD videos store it in a lossy format, why would someone who hasn't bought a DVD-A buy music on a DVD video, without as much video footage as a DVD video showing a concert recording?
Warner Brothers should just face it: two formats are already trying to outdo CDs, and both are failing. This one will also fail. Most people don't want a better sounding format - CDs are adequate. If anything, MP3 sharing as proven that what people want is convenience, the kind you can't get from a physical disc.
Personally, I'll stick to true CDs. They have no "digital restriction management" as RMS fondly calls it, and you can still sell them second hand.
Linux is free, and ad-free.
It's also free, an important distinction. :) It doesn't matter if it's free as in zero-cost, as long as it's free as in the-freedom-to-copy-it-to-your-friends.
Hard disks today, don't help me enjoy the quiet times of yesterday with the C64, the constant idle spin noise, plus the fans to cool the system. Sure the drive isn't the primary noise factor (besides seek times) but it's an added ambient noise that I don't enjoy - my C64 was great for quiet.
That's a good point, the C64 and other 8-bit microcomputers were completely silent. Still, my Mac Mini's only about 20-odd decibels, and roughly the same size too, so things aren't necessarily much worse these days.
The article said Kryder of Seagate and Healy of Hitachi assure us that new disk-drive features like built-in encryption will protect copyright holders and someone asked What the fuck is this, some new trusted computing drm scheme I never heard of?
It does indeed sound like trusted computing. According to Wikipedia:
I have no idea how you're supposed to back up such data, or even trust your computer to do what you tell it to do.
I recall my C64 as a boy, sure it had that weird "computer high pitch whine" to it but when the 1541-II wasn't reading data that baby was pretty damn quiet, I miss those days and hard disks don't help.
The lack of noise from a hard drive spinning is what you miss? Personally, I miss the OS loading in less than five seconds, and the computer expecting you to type in a computer program instead of letting you run other people's by default. I would have quite enjoyed a hard drive for a computer with 64K of memory, it would have taken a while to fill it up...
The government basically has to create a state of perpetual fear, stir up hatred of the enemy, torture people, have an ongoing war, control information, and basically convince you to willingly see things that are false.
In terms of the American government making their whole country's citizens paranoid that even their neighbours could be some kind of enemy against their ideology, wasn't this achieved in the fifties using the buzzword "communist" a long time before it was done using the buzzword "terrorist?"
Will these official lyrics come in encrypted, DRM'ed text files
That's a pretty good question, actually. From what I understand, the FairPlay DRM used in the iTunes Music Store (to use a popular example) only encrypts the AAC audio stream of the M4A wrapper file. Seeing as this wrapper also includes the album cover art and (as far as I know) the lyric to the song in question, and I'm pretty sure FairPlay doesn't encrypt either of these, it should be trivially easy to extract the copyrighted artwork and lyric without even circumnavigating DRM.
Which presumably is legal for the fair use purpose of singing along to the song, but probably illegal for you to e-mail the lyric to a friend to tell them how good the song is so they also buy a copy.
The best part is that this content will be made available by subscription.
Best for who, exactly? Presumably the movie companies, not the customers. This way you get to keep on giving money for the subscription, and when you finally decide to stop, you have no products to show for it.
I for one will consider downloading albums and films legally just as soon as a method of selling them second hand legitimately appears. Until then, I'll stick to tangible formats which still give me that right.
The director of the National Gang Crime Research Center has stated "In order to understand any subculture, be it al-Qaida, witches, devil worshippers or gangs, you have to be able to know their own language."
I almost dread to ask, but what is the director of such an organisation doing prying into the private lives of practicing Pagans and Wiccans? I can't believe how misunderstood this religion is. If you substituted any other typically nonviolent religious group, such as Christians or Jews, I'm sure they wouldn't be lumped in with gangs quite so quickly.
At one point, the author states that it's a surprise to most people that the web was created for the purpose of publishing as well as reading content. Such a fact is hardly a surprise to the average Slashdot reader, and certainly not to the masses currently posting on MySpace, YouTube, LiveJournal, and other MixedCaps websites which encourage self-publishing.
I for one was surprised when I read about it in Tim Berners-Lee's book Weaving the Web. What surprised me was that HTTP used GET and PUT commands just like FTP, and that the idea was you would download a page, maybe make a few corrections, and then upload it again. No web site I know of implements this. All the writable ones use complex Perl or PHP code based on POST form submissions. The only web browser I've ever seen that supports uploading web pages via HTTP's PUT command is the W3C's own Amaya.
It makes you think how different the web could have been, if it was used for sharing information rather than buying products. Even the person who invented it couldn't predict what it would evolve into.
They seem to be acting much like a heroine addict, in that they're moving from one crime to the next, getting bigger and bigger fines but no matter how much you fine the company it is still pathologically anti-competitive... Is it a rule that all big companies go the way of AT&T eventually?
Quite possibly. The documentary The Corporation pointed out how such corporations, while legally people in some respects, would be more like psychopaths than any other kind of people, as they do whatever they can get away with on their quest for more profit, showing a complete disregard for morals and the law.
If it's cheaper to break the law and pay a fine than it is to obey the law and profit less, they'll break it.
Don't forget the simpler Gnoosic, the music section of the Global Network of Dreams.
If you replace the software with guns, you will begin to understand the position of those who want the right to bear arms (modifications have been made).
I think the main difference is that guns are used pretty much exclusively to intimidate or kill animals, be they human or otherwise. Perl and various other languages and utilities, on the other hand, can be used for various good purposes, neutral ones, and evil ones.
The only way around having HTML in your PHP source code that I can think of is to create a class for making pages, with methods such as adding an HTML element and writing the page. The main advantages are that you can write new HTTP headers whenever you want without worrying that HTML was already output because you can write the class to only output at the very last moment, and you can rewrite the class to conform to new versions of X/HTML as they come out if you're cunning enough when you write it. But really, these are advantages of OOP with PHP5 just as much as they're advantages of taking HTML out of the main higher level source.
Why in the world wouldn't Coke want everybody to see that last commercial with the polar bears and penguins? What good can it possibly serve?
Yeah, I agree. There's no reason I can think of why people shouldn't be allowed to copy, distribute and view adverts anywhere, except for ripping off the advert, as you pointed out, and also placing it out of context (remember one of those polar bear adverts being in the middle of Natural Born Killers? According to IMDB, the board of directors were furious when they found out what it was being used in).
Odds are the broadcast flag will only be present on content and not advertisements, so all we have to do is look for the broadcast flag, then record, and when the broadcast flag is not present, stop recording :)
I could be wrong, so it would be nice if someone could verify or prove wrong my claim here, but I'm pretty sure I downloaded a trailer from Apple's site the other day which said it was illegal to copy it. I'm pretty sure it was referring to the actual trailer itself, rather than the film it represented. Which is both scary and silly. Why would anyone want to stop people copying what's essentially an advert? But then again, that's what pop videos are too. Can't you buy those at the iTunes Music Store?
This is why I think people "invented" emoticons :)
Or, more specifically, why Scott Fahlman first made an ASCII smiley on 19 September 1982, when people didn't realise the joke he'd made about a lift being out of commission after someone contaminated it with mercury in a scientific experiment gone awry actually was a joke.