It's also responsible for most anti-US sentiment of the "I'm going to grab an AK and use it against you" grade (although the Drone Wars are now taking up a big share of it), giving the US military and MIC a threat to fight against so that it won't look like they have no reason for eating up so much of the US' tax dollars.
I know this, but don't tell me as I am actually European. Shout at your local senator / congressman / president as they can actually do something about it.
I'd be careful about what the election gives Obama a "mandate" to do.
My options were Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. If Barack Obama was slightly better than Mitt, I'd vote for Obama. That does not mean that I approve of everything that Barack Obama does. And it certainly doesn't translate into a mandate for him to execute a particular policy item.
I can understand it if he feels, based on polling and studies, that most people wanted him because of Obamacare, but the fact of his election only translates into electing him President. Just because it was a cornerstone for his campaign doesn't mean that is why he was elected. If we are honest with ourselves, a great deal of support for Obama is based on a whole spectrum of policies, and the very important fact that Obama was neither Bush, nor was he Romney.
There are probably people who hate Obamacare who voted for Obama because they were more afraid of the Republicans in office. That doesn't mean they aren't at least a little afraid of what Obama might do too.
I was not actually thinking about Romney when I posted this. I was thinking about McCain as that is who he was campaigning against when he made the original promise to do something about the cost of healthcare in the US. If the US people really objected to Obamacare that much though they had a second chance to scrap it by voting for Romney.
I take your point though about only having two (pretty awful) choices, but if Obamacare was really as bigger deal as the Republicans think it is then why are they not in office or even get a majority of the vote in either house?
In the corporate world, after every merger or takeover I've seen, non essential employees are shown the door. If we can do without for a day, why not a week, why not a month, let's go for all year. The worst thing will be having to fondle yourself at the airport.
Maybe the US could go for a merger with Europe? Or a takeover by China maybe?
and stop giving billions of your tax dollars to the Israelis... In one fell swoop, your party would ride back in on a massive wave of goodwill as the TSA goons who make life such a misery would have been consigned to the dustbin of history...
The problem with this is that without all the billions of dollars in US aid Israel would not be able to afford to defend itself as they spend all the money on buying weapons from the US. This would also mean that the US defence industry would then suffer as some of the cool stuff they come up with they are currently only allowed to sell to the US or Israel.
The other amazing advantage of giving all this stuff to Israel is that they actually use it, and mostly against Russian tech that the Arabs around them have. That gives the US a great place to field test stuff and see how it holds up without actually having to invade Russia (which could be costly). It also lets them test stuff that the US would get too much crap for deploying in the field (like White Phosphorous as an area effect weapon instead of a smoke screen) safe in the knowledge that the blame falls on someone else.
So in many ways the money the US gives to Israel in aid is actually just part of the US defence research and development budget:)
All the news stories have been about "which political party should we blame."
You want to know who to blame? All of the twits who have been cheering on "their team" while this has been going on, instead of pressuring their representatives to do their job. The members of Congress -- in both major parties -- feel no pressure to actually resolve the situation, because they've managed to trick their supporters in the media into giving them a pass while they wasted time instead of actually trying to come up with a solution that has a chance of working.
The thing is though was the Affordable Healthcare Act that the Republicans hate so much not a cornerstone of Obama's election campaign? In my mind that means that when the US public elected him that gave him a mandate to actually try and enact his election promises, including Obamacare.
The fact that the Republican party disagrees with it should have not mattered since they did not win the presidential election. It just seems a little wrong that the US public elects someone into power then the losing party goes to these extraordinary lengths to block perfectly constitutional laws that the winner always said he was going to enact anyway.
I understand the role of congress and the senate as a check and balance on the power of the president but I think that is not something that should be used against stuff that was in the list of promises made to the american people before the election.
Man, what the hell kind of dream world are you living in. China may not give a crap how many pressure cookers you want to buy, but they sure as fuck care about your political opinions. Especially if you are or ever were Chinese. Ask any Chinese dissident whether they'd prefer the US was spying on them or China, hell ask most US dissidents.
The US spies on you, but for the most part it seems to have done a whole lot of nothing with any of the information that it has gathered, it's also restricted by law in terms of what it can prosecute you for. China is not, and has already hacked services to get the personal information of people who have "wrong" opinions and then arrested those individuals.
My fucking god I'm getting sick of this idea that China and Russia are good guys who don't oppress their people like the evil US does. The US is only bush league evil, China and Russia are major league.
If the US is now setting its bar on freedom on "we're better than China and Russia" that is a pretty poor state of affairs. Countries like France, Germany, Denmark, and other european (apart from UK where I live obviously) countries are a better bar to aim for now it seems.
The story is that the XBox violates the HDCP standard to do this; It has to decrypt protected content, in order to display it.
Is this really a violation of the HDCP standard? Then why does my TV do the same thing?
The point you are missing is that you can decode HDCP in order to display it legally, but you cannot then write the unencrypted stream to disk or pass it on unencrypted without telling the HDMI input that such a thing is possible. Providing the XBOX One tells any device attached to the HDMI input whether or not the HDCP path remains secure everything is fine legally.
This means that even if they do ship a program that allowed you to record video from the HDMI input they would just have to tell the other device by turning off HDCP and falling back to unencrypted HDMI, the other device could then refuse to play the content down an unencrypted HDMI connection if it was BluRay or whatever HDCP is supposed to protect. It might well simply turn off HDCP then function perfectly normally though it many cases such is if you are trying to watch an unprotected source like an unencrypted DVD or output from an HDMI camera.
Even if you are watching a protected source thought it could keep HDCP enabled and act as a pass-through device providing it was not allowing you to record the video stream. HDCP allows many devices to do this already such as AV receivers that need to decode the stream in order get at the audio to send it to speakers but then also send the parts of the signal they are not interested in on to the display.
Either way... When the XBox launches, someone's going to take it apart, and then encrypted HDMI can bend over and kiss it's curvy ass goodbye.
It seems that there are quite a few approaches to cracking HDCP already so pulling apart an XBOX One is a waste of time. Of course the value in HDCP though is that it prevents anyone from legally mass marketing a recorder that will circumvent it (Intel will sue you into oblivion), not that it is technologically perfect.
Oh, right... marketing blurb. Right, was supposed to focus on that instead. Sorry slashdot... I forgot you aren't a geek site anymore, just a pile of paid advertisements posing as stories.
Fine, you hate slashdot so much then just stop coming here. Nobody is forcing you to post here, you choose to. Choose to do something else instead that you enjoy.
Well I have not played the PS4 and not many have so who's to say Sony have not considered doing this although in my case if I am playing a game the last thing I want to do is monitor a friends list.
I guess you never play online with people from your friends list then. If you are gaming online it is quite nice to know when your friends come online so you can invite them to join your game.
Another reason this might be useful is while waiting for matchmaking to find you a game. I often have my laptop on the desk next to me so I can sit there browsing the web while waiting for it to find enough players if there are 4 or 5 of us joined on each other trying to get a match of BlackOps2. Sometimes the wait is so long we just give up but on most occasions it only takes a few minutes, having something else to keep you occupied like watching crap on TV would help keep you entertained though.
I'm running 5760x1200 across three monitors on an ATI Flex card using the radeon driver. No problems here. But then again, I don't game, I don't run multiple GPUs in a CrossFire setup, and I don't get near the ATI binary drivers, so it's all good.
3 monitors probably works a treat, have you tried with an even number though?
When I tried running this a few years back it annoyed the crap out of me that alert boxes would always end up centered over all the displays so bang on the boundary of two monitors. What I wanted was two separate displays I could drag windows between but have everything default to appear on the primary monitor like it did under Windows.
Not bothered experimenting with multiple monitors since as it was such an arse last time. Have things improved?
The usa patent system doesn't really use the "non-obvious" test. Non-obvious is supposed to be non-obvious to a qualified practitioner of the field in question. I'm pretty sure I could have implemented one-click if asked.
Just because something is non-obvious does make it hard to implement. Often incredibly simple things are just overlooked because nobody think of them.
Thinking about them from a users perspective however often takes a whole team of usability people watching test users work there way through a system. They might then come up with an incredibly simple technical change that can be implemented in 5 minutes that a technical person simply never would have thought of on their own.
Any web developer worth their salt could have come up with one-click, so why did it not exist before Amazon when e-commerce sites had been around for years?
"OneClick was something new; my recollection is that nobody had done anything quite like it - but not because it was novel or innovative. Nobody had done it before because everybody thought it was a bad idea."
It might have been new but it fails the "non-obvious" test.
Does it? Surely it actually passes the non-obvious test because before Amazon did it everyone thought doing it was a bad idea?
By taking a risk and implementing something that everyone else thought was stupid and proving it could be done safely maybe Amazon has done enough to deserve a patent. I am not 100% sure either way but it is far from as clear cut you make out precisely because e-commerce web sites had been around for years before Amazon but nobody had bothered implementing a system that let you click a single button to buy with no basket process in the middle.
This is not a technology patent, this is a patent on a way of doing things that makes a common system more usable exactly like Apple are so fond of. I do think there is an argument for removing this entire class of patents from the system, but I would also worry that by doing this it would end up being a disincentive for companies to invest in user interface design and research.
Only pretentious people with more money than sense think that £45 for 8 hours gameplay is better than paying £35 second hand then selling it 8 hours later for £20.
I can't remember the last game I bought that I only got 8 hours gameplay out of. I think it was probably Sam and Max or something decades ago. If I only got 8 hours game play out of something I would probably make a mental note never to buy anything from that publisher / developer again.
The most recent games I have been playing are Crysis2, Skyrim (156 hours) and BlackOps2 (366 hours) and they have all given me longer than 8 hours gameplay.
Crysis 2 might be less than the others (steam does not track it for some reason) but I only bought that on the cheap but I would still hope it is into the 40+ hours. This is a great thing about Steam, as they can be pretty sure that games sold through it are not going to be pirated they can offer amazing deals for older stuff where you can pick up a game for a few quid. I think I paid less than a tenner for Crysis2 a few months back.
Since your quote pounds in your reply though put that 8 hours into perspective, how long would it take you to spend £45 in the pub over here? Or on a meal out? If I was able to survive 8 hours in the pub nowadays without needing a stretcher at the end of it I would probably be down at least a ton.
Granted there are some games that have more limited lifetimes but that is why I generally just avoid that crap and only go for stuff thats actually worth paying for.
I'd rather not have to get my under-13s their own accounts and have to tripple-purchase all the games we all like to play.
I still wouldn't risk trusting my kids not to accidentally download something that helped them get passed a particular level or something that was picked up by VAC or Punkbuster and got my whole account locked out. I guess it depends how much online gaming you do though but for me the idea of picking up a ban would be pretty crap. I am fairly sure they would not get me banned deliberately, but I can see how easily they could do it by accident.
Once my steam account did not say "in good standing" under the VAC section I reckon I would never be able to play online again as people would just kick me from any game that had dedicated servers as soon as I got into my stride (and started owning them).
I'd just be happy if I could run Steam with the/same/ account on two (or more) different computers simultaneously. Not to play the same game, but having the ability to play one game on one PC and a completely different game on another seems like something those geniuses at Valve should have figured out how to do by now.
Unless that's what this update does. They say it allows you to "authorize another device" but that does not necessarily indicate the same account can be used at the same time.
But why?
Your steam account is YOUR account. Why would you want anyone else to use it? They could cheat, get you banned, and you lose access to everything. This is just too much of a risk for most people.
On the other hand, if I want to play one game (say, Halo: ODST) while a friend plays a *different* game, say Halo 3, we can do that. Even though I, and not he, own both games. Steam doesn't let you do that, even with this so-called "Sharing" feature. I didn't want to share access to my account's games list, I wanted to share access to my games, individually. Don't let us both play Foo at the same time if you must, but if I want to play Foo and he wants to play Bar, why the fuck not?
DRM is such incredible bullshit. Steam included.
The price you pay for this is having to keep hold of the disks and care for them like gold dust. You also have to constantly change disks every time you want to play something different. For me that is incredible bullshit when the content is installed on the harddisk anyway. If you forget to put the disk back in its case and it get scratched you either have to write a begging letter to the manufacturer or buy a second copy of something you already own, like wise if you misplace the disk.
I moved house recently and found I have 3 copies of Cyrsis. 2 long since lost disks that had fallen behind the back of my desk an the replacement digital licence on steam that I bought to replace them.
Some people like you might feel that the loss of being able to sell games on second hand or share them with friends is useful, but a great many of us think that is just being stingy. If you want to play something then buy it. If it sucks, you have only spent a few quid and you probably should have read more reviews anyway. The benefit of being able to go back and play old games anytime and not have to keep our houses cluttered up with crappy old disks is an advantage of DRM that outweighs any restrictions.
Just out of interest, why is it good when Valve does this sort of thing with Steam but it was ultimate internet uproar when Microsoft proposed the exact same thing for the XBox One before having to backtrack?
This requires the exact same phoning home that Microsoft originally planned to implement and they were offering this exact same feature as a result of that.
Is there a particular reason as to why it's suddenly now okay other than the fact Valve seems to get a free pass when it introduces ever more intrusive DRM?
Actually it was good when the Xbox One was going to do it to. Only cheapskates try sell or buy second hand games, the rest of us just buy stuff and keep it and for us it is great being able to throw away the disk as soon we use it and then from then on play with no physical media in the drive. That for me is the biggest PITA about buying disk based games on old consoles, having to get up off the couch and change the disk any time you want to play a different game.
What Valve are saying now means though that I can let my missus play portal on her computer without me having to give her access to mine where she can see my Pr0n. Actually I don't care about her having access to my PC as she does anyway but I do not want to have to boot her off my PC (she is home on maternity leave all day from this week) when I get home from work and need to work off some stress. This will let me set her up a separate steam account, grant her access to my library then she can play the old games I am done with on her crappy old laptop.
I know that if steam were more open I could sell them second hand but I have always worried what would happen if a licence key I used to own was used for cheating after I sold it so would never risk it.
I have a mirrored set of SSD's on all my important machines, and RAID 6 for bulk storage.
Unlike Linus, I can't afford to lose work.
It's worth reading his post to find out he hasn't actually lost any kernel work. He just was finding it too painful to retrieve the pull requests sent to him from his email archive so just asked people to resend them.
This is another perk of being the boss, if something is difficult (and exceedingly boring) you can just ask an underling to do it for you. In this case he is relying on the fact that most people are probably impatiently waiting for their pull request to appear in the latest development version of the kernel with baited breath so they are probably quite happy to resend it.
After having been through a major recovery process recently you will be amazed at how much work this entails even when you have backups. Him asking for help is no bad thing.
Makes me wonder what would happen to Linux development if Torvalds was to get hit by a bus, or be incapacitated in some way. Is kernel development that reliant on one person that a single laptop breaking brings everything to a halt?
Actually the result would probably be pretty much the same in the short term. Greg Kroah Hartman or someone would send an email out letting everyone know the terrible news and asking everyone who has sent a patch to Linus for merging to resend it to him as it was problematic to get it out of Linus's email archive. Things would stop for a day or however long it took him to receive all the patches and check that each one had been merged.
Then in a day or so everything would be back to normal and Greg would start insulting people for minor transgressions:)
gcc being gpl v3 does not effect the output of the complier only code linked to or borrowed from it
So? This is about them including the compiler in the base system. Or are you suggesting they include a completely different complier as part of the base install to the one they actually use internally to build the system?
I'm deeply disappointed that this issue was decided over philosophical instead of technical merits. If Clang was superior to GCC in the majority of benchmarks, then I would support this decision. But that’s not the case, GCC is still leading in most benchmarks and can be an order of magnitude faster when the popular OpenMP library is used.[1] Sadly, BSD users are the losers here.
So what would you prefer? That BSD threw out their entire licensing policy and adopted the GPL3? Or that they stuck with an old version of GCC that was licensed under the just about permissible to them GPL2 but that got no updates.
Maybe they could have forked GCC then tried to maintain a version that was licensed under GPL2 and backported GPL3 GCC fixes into their fork but that strikes me as being a legal nightmare to be honest.
It would have been more useful it phoronix compared LLVM/Clang 3.3 to GCC 4.2.1 and you posted that as that is the only thing the BSD community could use instead.
This decision was forced by the GCC adopting the GPL3 but was probably always going to happen sooner or later. The BSD community and the FSF have VERY different ideas of what constitutes "free" software with the FSF actually wanting their code to be less free in order to make sure that if you use it you have to let other people see how you use it and keep any derivatives free.
Not technically. But companies generally try and file bullshit extensions to something they already created in such a way that they are in effect extending the life of a previous patent for very little added.
The company who owned the patents in question has probably just done this as a one off with the aim of winning support for genetically modified food.
So? I don't see that as a bad aim. Each should be on their own merits instead of getting a frankenstein label. The GM fear is driving us towards vunerable monocultures so is probably worse than whatever the anti-GM people want to prevent. Anti-GM killed such promising things as growing long lasting vaccines that can be administered orally in bananas. No needles, not even refridgeration required, and it was killed off not long before human trails were due to start. If a GM company want to fight luddites with some PR from free food I don't see anything wrong with that. We let coca-cola get PR so why not these guys with far more noble aims?
I only have a problem with it because if it works it will be the only time it happens as the public will have been won over. The next person with lofty aims who tries to do the same thing as this guy has done with Golden Rice will find out that the company no longer needs to win the public over so they will be told to pay market rates for the use of the patents or sod off and let the children die of vitamin A deficiency.
If companies want to be able to get patents on genetically modifying bits of the food chain then they should start by lobbying government to change patent law such that the humanitarian non profit licence covering these patents applies to all patents on modified food going forward as well. Letting them just do it as a one off is too short term when the gains these companies stand to make from these patents in future are so huge.
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It's also responsible for most anti-US sentiment of the "I'm going to grab an AK and use it against you" grade (although the Drone Wars are now taking up a big share of it), giving the US military and MIC a threat to fight against so that it won't look like they have no reason for eating up so much of the US' tax dollars.
I know this, but don't tell me as I am actually European. Shout at your local senator / congressman / president as they can actually do something about it.
I'd be careful about what the election gives Obama a "mandate" to do.
My options were Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. If Barack Obama was slightly better than Mitt, I'd vote for Obama. That does not mean that I approve of everything that Barack Obama does. And it certainly doesn't translate into a mandate for him to execute a particular policy item.
I can understand it if he feels, based on polling and studies, that most people wanted him because of Obamacare, but the fact of his election only translates into electing him President. Just because it was a cornerstone for his campaign doesn't mean that is why he was elected. If we are honest with ourselves, a great deal of support for Obama is based on a whole spectrum of policies, and the very important fact that Obama was neither Bush, nor was he Romney.
There are probably people who hate Obamacare who voted for Obama because they were more afraid of the Republicans in office. That doesn't mean they aren't at least a little afraid of what Obama might do too.
I was not actually thinking about Romney when I posted this. I was thinking about McCain as that is who he was campaigning against when he made the original promise to do something about the cost of healthcare in the US. If the US people really objected to Obamacare that much though they had a second chance to scrap it by voting for Romney.
I take your point though about only having two (pretty awful) choices, but if Obamacare was really as bigger deal as the Republicans think it is then why are they not in office or even get a majority of the vote in either house?
In the corporate world, after every merger or takeover I've seen, non essential employees are shown the door. If we can do without for a day, why not a week, why not a month, let's go for all year. The worst thing will be having to fondle yourself at the airport.
Maybe the US could go for a merger with Europe? Or a takeover by China maybe?
and stop giving billions of your tax dollars to the Israelis... In one fell swoop, your party would ride back in on a massive wave of goodwill as the TSA goons who make life such a misery would have been consigned to the dustbin of history...
The problem with this is that without all the billions of dollars in US aid Israel would not be able to afford to defend itself as they spend all the money on buying weapons from the US. This would also mean that the US defence industry would then suffer as some of the cool stuff they come up with they are currently only allowed to sell to the US or Israel.
The other amazing advantage of giving all this stuff to Israel is that they actually use it, and mostly against Russian tech that the Arabs around them have. That gives the US a great place to field test stuff and see how it holds up without actually having to invade Russia (which could be costly). It also lets them test stuff that the US would get too much crap for deploying in the field (like White Phosphorous as an area effect weapon instead of a smoke screen) safe in the knowledge that the blame falls on someone else.
So in many ways the money the US gives to Israel in aid is actually just part of the US defence research and development budget :)
All the news stories have been about "which political party should we blame."
You want to know who to blame? All of the twits who have been cheering on "their team" while this has been going on, instead of pressuring their representatives to do their job. The members of Congress -- in both major parties -- feel no pressure to actually resolve the situation, because they've managed to trick their supporters in the media into giving them a pass while they wasted time instead of actually trying to come up with a solution that has a chance of working.
The thing is though was the Affordable Healthcare Act that the Republicans hate so much not a cornerstone of Obama's election campaign? In my mind that means that when the US public elected him that gave him a mandate to actually try and enact his election promises, including Obamacare.
The fact that the Republican party disagrees with it should have not mattered since they did not win the presidential election. It just seems a little wrong that the US public elects someone into power then the losing party goes to these extraordinary lengths to block perfectly constitutional laws that the winner always said he was going to enact anyway.
I understand the role of congress and the senate as a check and balance on the power of the president but I think that is not something that should be used against stuff that was in the list of promises made to the american people before the election.
Man, what the hell kind of dream world are you living in. China may not give a crap how many pressure cookers you want to buy, but they sure as fuck care about your political opinions. Especially if you are or ever were Chinese. Ask any Chinese dissident whether they'd prefer the US was spying on them or China, hell ask most US dissidents.
The US spies on you, but for the most part it seems to have done a whole lot of nothing with any of the information that it has gathered, it's also restricted by law in terms of what it can prosecute you for. China is not, and has already hacked services to get the personal information of people who have "wrong" opinions and then arrested those individuals.
My fucking god I'm getting sick of this idea that China and Russia are good guys who don't oppress their people like the evil US does. The US is only bush league evil, China and Russia are major league.
If the US is now setting its bar on freedom on "we're better than China and Russia" that is a pretty poor state of affairs. Countries like France, Germany, Denmark, and other european (apart from UK where I live obviously) countries are a better bar to aim for now it seems.
Let us never confuse creating value with capturing value; somehow we have to get them better aligned.
Do we?
Because you know, I was under the impression that not everybody measured value and success by the fatness of one's wallet.
Maybe not everybody, but most people probably do unfortunately.
The story is that the XBox violates the HDCP standard to do this; It has to decrypt protected content, in order to display it.
Is this really a violation of the HDCP standard? Then why does my TV do the same thing?
The point you are missing is that you can decode HDCP in order to display it legally, but you cannot then write the unencrypted stream to disk or pass it on unencrypted without telling the HDMI input that such a thing is possible. Providing the XBOX One tells any device attached to the HDMI input whether or not the HDCP path remains secure everything is fine legally.
This means that even if they do ship a program that allowed you to record video from the HDMI input they would just have to tell the other device by turning off HDCP and falling back to unencrypted HDMI, the other device could then refuse to play the content down an unencrypted HDMI connection if it was BluRay or whatever HDCP is supposed to protect. It might well simply turn off HDCP then function perfectly normally though it many cases such is if you are trying to watch an unprotected source like an unencrypted DVD or output from an HDMI camera.
Even if you are watching a protected source thought it could keep HDCP enabled and act as a pass-through device providing it was not allowing you to record the video stream. HDCP allows many devices to do this already such as AV receivers that need to decode the stream in order get at the audio to send it to speakers but then also send the parts of the signal they are not interested in on to the display.
Either way... When the XBox launches, someone's going to take it apart, and then encrypted HDMI can bend over and kiss it's curvy ass goodbye.
Go read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection
It seems that there are quite a few approaches to cracking HDCP already so pulling apart an XBOX One is a waste of time. Of course the value in HDCP though is that it prevents anyone from legally mass marketing a recorder that will circumvent it (Intel will sue you into oblivion), not that it is technologically perfect.
Oh, right... marketing blurb. Right, was supposed to focus on that instead. Sorry slashdot... I forgot you aren't a geek site anymore, just a pile of paid advertisements posing as stories.
Fine, you hate slashdot so much then just stop coming here. Nobody is forcing you to post here, you choose to. Choose to do something else instead that you enjoy.
Well I have not played the PS4 and not many have so who's to say Sony have not considered doing this although in my case if I am playing a game the last thing I want to do is monitor a friends list.
I guess you never play online with people from your friends list then. If you are gaming online it is quite nice to know when your friends come online so you can invite them to join your game.
Another reason this might be useful is while waiting for matchmaking to find you a game. I often have my laptop on the desk next to me so I can sit there browsing the web while waiting for it to find enough players if there are 4 or 5 of us joined on each other trying to get a match of BlackOps2. Sometimes the wait is so long we just give up but on most occasions it only takes a few minutes, having something else to keep you occupied like watching crap on TV would help keep you entertained though.
Who cares if he got asked. I can ask for a lot of things too, but what I actually get is what matters. What did the government get?
Probably a rude explanation about why they know fuck all about how kernel development works :)
I'm running 5760x1200 across three monitors on an ATI Flex card using the radeon driver. No problems here. But then again, I don't game, I don't run multiple GPUs in a CrossFire setup, and I don't get near the ATI binary drivers, so it's all good.
3 monitors probably works a treat, have you tried with an even number though?
When I tried running this a few years back it annoyed the crap out of me that alert boxes would always end up centered over all the displays so bang on the boundary of two monitors. What I wanted was two separate displays I could drag windows between but have everything default to appear on the primary monitor like it did under Windows.
Not bothered experimenting with multiple monitors since as it was such an arse last time. Have things improved?
The usa patent system doesn't really use the "non-obvious" test. Non-obvious is supposed to be non-obvious to a qualified practitioner of the field in question. I'm pretty sure I could have implemented one-click if asked.
Just because something is non-obvious does make it hard to implement. Often incredibly simple things are just overlooked because nobody think of them.
Thinking about them from a users perspective however often takes a whole team of usability people watching test users work there way through a system. They might then come up with an incredibly simple technical change that can be implemented in 5 minutes that a technical person simply never would have thought of on their own.
Any web developer worth their salt could have come up with one-click, so why did it not exist before Amazon when e-commerce sites had been around for years?
"OneClick was something new; my recollection is that nobody had done anything quite like it - but not because it was novel or innovative. Nobody had done it before because everybody thought it was a bad idea."
It might have been new but it fails the "non-obvious" test.
Does it? Surely it actually passes the non-obvious test because before Amazon did it everyone thought doing it was a bad idea?
By taking a risk and implementing something that everyone else thought was stupid and proving it could be done safely maybe Amazon has done enough to deserve a patent. I am not 100% sure either way but it is far from as clear cut you make out precisely because e-commerce web sites had been around for years before Amazon but nobody had bothered implementing a system that let you click a single button to buy with no basket process in the middle.
This is not a technology patent, this is a patent on a way of doing things that makes a common system more usable exactly like Apple are so fond of. I do think there is an argument for removing this entire class of patents from the system, but I would also worry that by doing this it would end up being a disincentive for companies to invest in user interface design and research.
Only pretentious people with more money than sense think that £45 for 8 hours gameplay is better than paying £35 second hand then selling it 8 hours later for £20.
I can't remember the last game I bought that I only got 8 hours gameplay out of. I think it was probably Sam and Max or something decades ago. If I only got 8 hours game play out of something I would probably make a mental note never to buy anything from that publisher / developer again.
The most recent games I have been playing are Crysis2, Skyrim (156 hours) and BlackOps2 (366 hours) and they have all given me longer than 8 hours gameplay.
Crysis 2 might be less than the others (steam does not track it for some reason) but I only bought that on the cheap but I would still hope it is into the 40+ hours. This is a great thing about Steam, as they can be pretty sure that games sold through it are not going to be pirated they can offer amazing deals for older stuff where you can pick up a game for a few quid. I think I paid less than a tenner for Crysis2 a few months back.
Since your quote pounds in your reply though put that 8 hours into perspective, how long would it take you to spend £45 in the pub over here? Or on a meal out? If I was able to survive 8 hours in the pub nowadays without needing a stretcher at the end of it I would probably be down at least a ton.
Granted there are some games that have more limited lifetimes but that is why I generally just avoid that crap and only go for stuff thats actually worth paying for.
Because I have kids?
I'd rather not have to get my under-13s their own accounts and have to tripple-purchase all the games we all like to play.
I still wouldn't risk trusting my kids not to accidentally download something that helped them get passed a particular level or something that was picked up by VAC or Punkbuster and got my whole account locked out. I guess it depends how much online gaming you do though but for me the idea of picking up a ban would be pretty crap. I am fairly sure they would not get me banned deliberately, but I can see how easily they could do it by accident.
Once my steam account did not say "in good standing" under the VAC section I reckon I would never be able to play online again as people would just kick me from any game that had dedicated servers as soon as I got into my stride (and started owning them).
I'd just be happy if I could run Steam with the /same/ account on two (or more) different computers simultaneously. Not to play the same game, but having the ability to play one game on one PC and a completely different game on another seems like something those geniuses at Valve should have figured out how to do by now.
Unless that's what this update does. They say it allows you to "authorize another device" but that does not necessarily indicate the same account can be used at the same time.
But why?
Your steam account is YOUR account. Why would you want anyone else to use it? They could cheat, get you banned, and you lose access to everything. This is just too much of a risk for most people.
For games that don't offer split-screen, yes.
On the other hand, if I want to play one game (say, Halo: ODST) while a friend plays a *different* game, say Halo 3, we can do that. Even though I, and not he, own both games. Steam doesn't let you do that, even with this so-called "Sharing" feature. I didn't want to share access to my account's games list, I wanted to share access to my games, individually. Don't let us both play Foo at the same time if you must, but if I want to play Foo and he wants to play Bar, why the fuck not?
DRM is such incredible bullshit. Steam included.
The price you pay for this is having to keep hold of the disks and care for them like gold dust. You also have to constantly change disks every time you want to play something different. For me that is incredible bullshit when the content is installed on the harddisk anyway. If you forget to put the disk back in its case and it get scratched you either have to write a begging letter to the manufacturer or buy a second copy of something you already own, like wise if you misplace the disk.
I moved house recently and found I have 3 copies of Cyrsis. 2 long since lost disks that had fallen behind the back of my desk an the replacement digital licence on steam that I bought to replace them.
Some people like you might feel that the loss of being able to sell games on second hand or share them with friends is useful, but a great many of us think that is just being stingy. If you want to play something then buy it. If it sucks, you have only spent a few quid and you probably should have read more reviews anyway. The benefit of being able to go back and play old games anytime and not have to keep our houses cluttered up with crappy old disks is an advantage of DRM that outweighs any restrictions.
Just out of interest, why is it good when Valve does this sort of thing with Steam but it was ultimate internet uproar when Microsoft proposed the exact same thing for the XBox One before having to backtrack?
This requires the exact same phoning home that Microsoft originally planned to implement and they were offering this exact same feature as a result of that.
Is there a particular reason as to why it's suddenly now okay other than the fact Valve seems to get a free pass when it introduces ever more intrusive DRM?
Actually it was good when the Xbox One was going to do it to. Only cheapskates try sell or buy second hand games, the rest of us just buy stuff and keep it and for us it is great being able to throw away the disk as soon we use it and then from then on play with no physical media in the drive. That for me is the biggest PITA about buying disk based games on old consoles, having to get up off the couch and change the disk any time you want to play a different game.
What Valve are saying now means though that I can let my missus play portal on her computer without me having to give her access to mine where she can see my Pr0n. Actually I don't care about her having access to my PC as she does anyway but I do not want to have to boot her off my PC (she is home on maternity leave all day from this week) when I get home from work and need to work off some stress. This will let me set her up a separate steam account, grant her access to my library then she can play the old games I am done with on her crappy old laptop.
I know that if steam were more open I could sell them second hand but I have always worried what would happen if a licence key I used to own was used for cheating after I sold it so would never risk it.
I have a mirrored set of SSD's on all my important machines, and RAID 6 for bulk storage.
Unlike Linus, I can't afford to lose work.
It's worth reading his post to find out he hasn't actually lost any kernel work. He just was finding it too painful to retrieve the pull requests sent to him from his email archive so just asked people to resend them.
This is another perk of being the boss, if something is difficult (and exceedingly boring) you can just ask an underling to do it for you. In this case he is relying on the fact that most people are probably impatiently waiting for their pull request to appear in the latest development version of the kernel with baited breath so they are probably quite happy to resend it.
After having been through a major recovery process recently you will be amazed at how much work this entails even when you have backups. Him asking for help is no bad thing.
Makes me wonder what would happen to Linux development if Torvalds was to get hit by a bus, or be incapacitated in some way. Is kernel development that reliant on one person that a single laptop breaking brings everything to a halt?
Actually the result would probably be pretty much the same in the short term. Greg Kroah Hartman or someone would send an email out letting everyone know the terrible news and asking everyone who has sent a patch to Linus for merging to resend it to him as it was problematic to get it out of Linus's email archive. Things would stop for a day or however long it took him to receive all the patches and check that each one had been merged.
Then in a day or so everything would be back to normal and Greg would start insulting people for minor transgressions :)
gcc being gpl v3 does not effect the output of the complier only code linked to or borrowed from it
So? This is about them including the compiler in the base system. Or are you suggesting they include a completely different complier as part of the base install to the one they actually use internally to build the system?
I'm deeply disappointed that this issue was decided over philosophical instead of technical merits. If Clang was superior to GCC in the majority of benchmarks, then I would support this decision. But that’s not the case, GCC is still leading in most benchmarks and can be an order of magnitude faster when the popular OpenMP library is used.[1] Sadly, BSD users are the losers here.
[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=llvm_33svn_competes&num=5
So what would you prefer? That BSD threw out their entire licensing policy and adopted the GPL3? Or that they stuck with an old version of GCC that was licensed under the just about permissible to them GPL2 but that got no updates.
Maybe they could have forked GCC then tried to maintain a version that was licensed under GPL2 and backported GPL3 GCC fixes into their fork but that strikes me as being a legal nightmare to be honest.
It would have been more useful it phoronix compared LLVM/Clang 3.3 to GCC 4.2.1 and you posted that as that is the only thing the BSD community could use instead.
This decision was forced by the GCC adopting the GPL3 but was probably always going to happen sooner or later. The BSD community and the FSF have VERY different ideas of what constitutes "free" software with the FSF actually wanting their code to be less free in order to make sure that if you use it you have to let other people see how you use it and keep any derivatives free.
Since there is no way to inspect the random number generator and no way to verify it's operation, it should not be used by default.
Even if it is only used as a way of increasing the entropy of a random number generator not to exclusively provide the result?
You should go and read this:
https://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4191765&cid=44811495
and this:
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c2557a303ab6712bb6e09447df828c557c710ac9
Patents don't last forever.
Not technically. But companies generally try and file bullshit extensions to something they already created in such a way that they are in effect extending the life of a previous patent for very little added.
So? I don't see that as a bad aim. Each should be on their own merits instead of getting a frankenstein label. The GM fear is driving us towards vunerable monocultures so is probably worse than whatever the anti-GM people want to prevent. Anti-GM killed such promising things as growing long lasting vaccines that can be administered orally in bananas. No needles, not even refridgeration required, and it was killed off not long before human trails were due to start. If a GM company want to fight luddites with some PR from free food I don't see anything wrong with that. We let coca-cola get PR so why not these guys with far more noble aims?
I only have a problem with it because if it works it will be the only time it happens as the public will have been won over. The next person with lofty aims who tries to do the same thing as this guy has done with Golden Rice will find out that the company no longer needs to win the public over so they will be told to pay market rates for the use of the patents or sod off and let the children die of vitamin A deficiency.
If companies want to be able to get patents on genetically modifying bits of the food chain then they should start by lobbying government to change patent law such that the humanitarian non profit licence covering these patents applies to all patents on modified food going forward as well. Letting them just do it as a one off is too short term when the gains these companies stand to make from these patents in future are so huge.