I'm sorry, but as far as I understand it, Debian suffers, or starts to suffer, from Ubuntu's popularity...
Shouldn't being friendly to new people be one of your top priorities then ?
I think Debian certainly could try to deal with people's questions better, but what I was saying is it's not really fair to expect any forum/chat to be the appropriate spot for questions.
Now, in terms of Debian in relation to Ubuntu, I haven't personally delved too fair into the Ubuntu community, but from what I can tell it's popular not because (or just because) of this type of support, but it has much more to do with the fact that it's got a Debian distribution that's both up to date and stable.
More often then not, if I ask a question in a Debian forum, IRC channel or here on Slashdot, somebody will basically tell me to shut up and live with it.
I don't remember having too much trouble getting help on IRC with Debian. I think, however, you have to keep in mind whatever forum you are talking in. If you ask a question like 'Why is x.org NOT in Debian-unstable', something that has surely been discussed to death, unless it's a channel that's explitly friendly to new users you probably won't get a very nice response. Keep in mind that many of these channels/forums are not always targetted to end-users, and all have certain expectations, such as, for example, searching for the answer to your questions before asking it. Often times, the channels are more of a meeting area either for developers or people with similar interests (Debian), and may not want to act as free tech-support.
I suggest looking at http://www.debianhelp.org/ if you are interested in forums that tend to be more friendly to questions.
If no one had ever gone to jail before for commiting murder would it still be a crime??
Murder is clearly immoral. Spam, although incredibly annoying, has some arguements (which I don't agree with for it). Either way, I think making spam illegal in many cases is approriate.
The punishment has to start somewhere. As stated in many other situations, ignorance of the law is no excuse. He was responsible for knowing the laws and how they pertained to his actions. The Can Spam act went into effect in 2003, had he met its regulations he would have not been found guilty under this Virginia law. He had 2 years to clean up his act, and did not.
But, he's not from Virginia, yet he's being required to follow their laws. Email addresses don't come with a marker saying what state they are going to, so it's not fair to try to require him to avoid one specific state. Unfortunately the article doesn't provide much details into exactly what he did beyond basic spamming (fraud?) so I don't know how the Can Spam act applies for him.
I'm sorry but I just don't buy the whole "But it only went into effect 2 weeks ago" argument. There is no 14 day legal grace period on anything. If your city lowers its speedlimit from 35 to 25, and the day later you go through at 37, you better expect a ticket.
While ignorance of the law isn't an excuse, you must admit that it's impossible for anyone to know what every law requires of them. Laws are not just what's passed by the legislature, but also includes precidence in court, rulings against laws due to constitutionality, enforcement by police, prosecution, etc. Being a major spammer he probably did know of the law, but I doubt he figured that him, being outside the state, would be required to follow it. And with no previous examples of the laws enforcement, he likely had no idea what kind of punishment to expect from breaking this law.
All this doesn't get to my main point, which is that 9 years is unnecessarily draconian for fighting spam. This is a white collar crime. Most of these types would likely be scared off from it with *any* jail sentence. If this isn't enough for some spammers, make the punishment go up for second/third/more offences. Unlike something like murder, if some spammer doesn't learn their lesson the first time, the cost isn't so great (just more annoyance). There are crimes that require large sentences, but this isn't one of them.
I actually agree with you, as unpopular as it might be.. Send him for 1 year. That's plenty of deterrent. Do we really want people thinking, "well, i could get rich spamming but the punishment is pretty high, guess I'll just deal crack?!"
This sounds a lot more reasonable. Almost no one has gotten in trouble for sending spam before, and then all the sudden this guy gets hit with by an out of state law and gets sentenced to 9 years. Too many people have this notion that once someone is found guilty of a crime, they are monsters that deserve no sympathy. 9 years is a long time to take from someone, and such a punishment should be reserved for more serious crimes. In terms of the deterent effect, well, most spammers went in thinking there was going to be no punishment. The vast majority of them will scamper away from this 'industry' if they realize they could go to jail for any amount of time. Sure, if you give the death penalty for spam, there will be a lot less spam, but having any sort of criminal punishment will go a long way. There is no need to be draconian.
Umm how so? It's 1 windows update.. or a little up2date on your redhat/fedora box.
The OS itself is not the only place you'll find DST specific code. It especially gets hairy when you consider systems that have to schedule things taking into account multiple time zones. For the home user it probably will be a small issue, but for businesses it will be a pain to deal with.
Erm, nevermind. I see it's already out, and they are already charging about $10 per month, and also offer a way to pay one time fees to open up parts of the game.
A Lifetime Account to play Puzzle Pirates to infinity and beyond...
Funny, nearly all my games included this without having to win a contest. I'm a little curious as to how the plan to charge for this, as it doesn't strike me as the type of thing people would willing shell out money month after month for.
The current proposal is a joke, really, it is expected to save 00.05% of U.S. daily oil usage for two months a year. We need to concentrate on changes that would actually, you know, make a difference.
The cost in updating computers to deal with an update to DST will likely cost more than any savings in oil usage.
Not strictly true. The GPL gives rights, and if you don't accept the terms, you don't get the rights.
The GPL licence gives you the right to copy the program to other people. The user doesn't need the GPL, unless they want to do something that would by default break copyright.
So, by your reasoning, the GPL should be published on such boxes (which would be No Bad Thing). a big "Pure GPL (any version)" / "Pure GPL (v2)" / "OSI Certified Open Source Software" label on the box would preclude you from having to read the small-print.
In terms of EULAs, I essentially said they should be replaced with specific restrictions you could place on the product. They would not have to be spelt out in full, since their full meaning would be codified in law. A possible restriction might be something like "Can be installed on up to 5 computers at once, but only one may be in use at a time".
The message about the GPL on the box would not be needed by law (though if the GPL itself requires it, that's another thing). Someone else used the GPL to give you the software, but by having the software, you have the right to use it. You'd only need to use the GPL if you wanted to further distribute it, or modify it and distribute the changes. To quote from the GPL from section 0:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
Perhaps I'm not being clear as to what I mean by EULA. By EULA, I mean an end-user license which you are theoritically required to have accept simply to use the product in question, even though you'd think by paying for it you'd implicitly get that right. I'm arguing EULAs should not be allowed for normal (non site-licensed) boxed software, or normal downloaded software, especially when you really don't know what the license has till after purchase, the process for a private individual to actually read and understand it is too onerous, and acceptance-by-clicking doesn't imply nearly as much as a signature.
Nobody needs to read a GPL license more than once; why can't we have standard comercial agreements? What we need is a standard set of EULAs for different types of software with coded variations ("basic closed source EULA with XXX clause").
I was thinking nearly the same thing. What I would like to see is instead of licence agreements, basically provide them with some flexibility in terms of what they can mandate by copyright law. So, for example, a company could say you are only allowed to have the program installed on one computer at a time, or alternatively, only have one user at a time but many computers. Now, instead of this joke of 'licensing' software that you purchased at the store, you would actually own it like you do so many other copyrighted goods. The types of restrictions allowed would be fixed, not allowing clauses that try to do disallow things like publishing benchmarks or reverse engineering.
The restrictions would be placed on the box, and what they mean exactly would be codified in law. Click-through and other non-signed EULAs would be banned outright, and signed EULAs can be allowed but with some restrictions.
Note that this wouldn't affect the GPL. The GPL is not an EULA, but a licence that provides additional rights above and beyond fair use.
Mediacom still is around, but now charging fair prices. This municipal effort INCREASED COMPETITION, breaking the monopoly the phone and cable companies enjoyed for so many years.
This is a big problem with how capitalism has been going. When there is competition it's a win, but when there is little competition we end up with oliopolies and monopolies, and they will charge as much as they can get away with to maximize their profit. I'd argue that having a single company control a business is much worse than having the government control it, as at least theoritically the government can provide the service at a fair price, whereas without competition the business will not.
I do have some qualms about government going into business's that are handled by the private sector, besides the big brother issue. The main issue is that the if the government wants to allow there to continue to be a private market, they have to ensure they don't charge less than what it costs to provide the service. In the case the parent post provides, it appears they have not run out the competition, which is a good thing. What I'd like to see is for industries such as this where the government wants to do something about unfair prices, the government help setup co-ops that would be self-sufficient after x number of years. As long as there is a rule of (at minimum) self-sufficiency, private enterprise should still be able to thrive.
It's gotta feel damn good to actually pull your product because too many people want it. Seriously, this problem has gotta be the "best" problem Blizzard could have had with this game.
Though this is on the client-side, it can be quite handy to use something besides the normal command-line CVS interface.
For Windows developers, TortoiseCVS is highly recommended (as well as it's subversion equivalent, TortoiseSVN). For Java users, Eclipse has built in CVS support, which also works quite well.
The customer wants something perfect, that works perfectly, with zero maintenance costs and that he can have for free. There you go, that's all you need to know on what any customer really really wants.
Engineers are not supposed to be work on the discovery phase "ask customer what he realistically wants" neither on the update phase "tell customer he can't have but that" neither concern himself with the very fine legal and psycological details involving a transaction.
As some have mentioned, I was slightly off in saying it was the engineer's job to ask the customer, however for better or worse, the engineer's job and analyst's job often get mixed together.
Either way, whoever's job it is to be the analyst (whether it be a separate or shared job) has to coordinate with the business side as well as the customer. Both sides have their roles, and if the business people are allowed to overstep their bounds and make technical decisions, there is going to be problems. A good analyst will stand up to the business people, as well as the customer, to make sure they know what's going on. It won't work out if they don't have that power, whether by their own fault or the fault of the business's structure.
I'm sick and tired of hearing marketing, human resources, finance and 99% of the world of "business" come cry me a river when they complain system doesn't work as expected because they didn't know what the customer really wanted. Not even the customer knew what he wanted, they all came to me saying " it must be cheap and basically print me money "
A big part of engineering is figuring out what the user wants. The user can't be trusted to automatically know exactly what it is he wants that's possible to do. If as an engineer you simply take what's initially asked for, you likely won't get far. If something is impossible, you have to explain to your customer that it is, and provide alternatives. Make sure everyone knows exactly what's going on. While marketers, customers, etc. all have their own faults in the process, you can't simply pass the entire buck to them.
As well, the issue of making something easy to use yet secure, as the grandparent post suggested, is not impossible nor impractical.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but why, oh why, does Visual C++ still not have a form editor like Visual Basic or Visual C#? Sure, it has the dialog editor, but does that's not even close to the same thing. This is something Borland supported quite a while ago with Borland C++ Builder, and was fairly nice.
C++ is a popular enough language to justify the cost for Microsoft, however I get the impression that they don't truly care about C++ and would like to replace both it and VB with C#.
One thing I've noticed when using adware detecting programs is that they often by default include things like cookies in there set of warnings, along with things such as search engines built into Windows as well as messages about registry settings to 'fix' IE.
While certainly there are a fair number of people who want to be warned about all this, this isn't generally what they are after, and probably shouldn't be detected by default. While for me personally I can tell the difference between what to worry about and what not to, those that don't and thus perhaps most likely to get adware, will see all these warnings about cookies and think their system is infested with adware. They can just have cleaned off their system, then a few days later check again and find some cookies reappear and get false alarm bells. This both frustrates them, and then eventually us when we have to double check their system to see if it's truly clean.
The article mentions that the government put an 'R' rating on Manhunt. Why? The ESRB ratings, which every video game publisher adheres to, provide strict outlines on what content deserves what rating. It also defines not one, but TWO ratings that kids should not purchase - 'M - Mature (17+)' and 'AO - Adult Only (18+)'. Why not just require that any Mature- or Adult-rated games require ID?
Movies in Ontario are not reviewed by the movie industry, but by the government. Ratings carry the force of law behind them for their enforcement.
Similarly, with games, the ESRB ratings don't need to be followed by retailers, but an 'R' rating will.
The government requiring retailers to follow ratings: A+. The government re-rating games: D-. Hooray Ontario.
If law is going to be behind a rating system, I'd much rather it be controlled by the government. Why? Because what you are suggesting would mean a non-governmental body would have the law behind it in placing restrictions on games. The MPAA does not have this power in the U.S., and the Ontario equivalent shouldn't either.
One thing to note, there is no requirement in Ontario that games be rated (and actually, the requirement on movies has been overturned in court on constitutional basis). They will only be rated after a complaint, so much fewer games will end up going through this.
Also, note that the ESRB ratings necessarily reflect the values of people in Ontario. When you compare movie ratings, you'll notice that the american rating system puts a heavy burden on anything sexual. An interesting example of this is Lost in Translation, which got an R-rating in the states most likely due to a very short lived scene in a strip club, whereas it got a PG rating in Ontario. It's been rumoured that Coppola purposefully included the scene just to get the R-rating, in order to make the movie seem more mature.
Harsh rating for sexuality are starting to show up with the ESRB as well, with games like 'Singles' and an uncensorred version of the new Leisure Suit Larry game getting 'AO' or 'Adults Online' ratings, essentially putting them in the same class as hardcore pornography. This essentially means you will not find these games in most stores, and publishers will refuse to allow the game to forward until it's fixed to get a lower rating.
Look at GameSpy. Their overall scores are out of five stars, with the possibility of half stars in the score. The overall score that a game can get is severely restricted, and as long as it's decent, it's almost guaranteed to get seven stars or higher - a score that most of us would consider to be "good."
I think in many ways it's good to limit it in this manner. There is a significant amount of error in all these ratings, and they are trying to give a quantitative score from qualititive opinions. If one site gives Halo 2 a 9.5, and Half-Life 2 a 9.6, does that mean Half-Life 2 is than Halo 2? I think the scale gamespy has is very reasonable, and it gave both games 5 stars. There is no way numbers could tell you which of these games you'll like more, but they do reflect that they are both excellent games. If you want to know which one is better and for what reasons, you are just going to have to go read the review.
While we won't know yet, a big issue with all this is how compatible the licences will be with each other. While there is a fair amount of software that says it's compatible with GPL 2 or greater, much is specifically locked to a specific version.
For this type of software, will we be able to use it in software that's under GPL 3? GPL 2 won't allow for additional restrictions, nor will it allow being mixed with other software that isn't under GPL 2.
As far as I can see, the only way that GPL 3 can allow compatibility if you are able to 'downgrade' to GPL 2. If that option is available, that may make it difficult if not impossible to achieve the goals that the FSF has in mind.
Another possibility is to try to get the original authors to rerelease their software under the new licence. This may be possible in cases where a central authority has the redistribution rights to do this (such as the FSF has with much of their software), but a lot of GPL'd software isn't quite so careful. Many patches may have been included into a piece of software not by giving full redistribution rights but instead under licence of GPL 2, in which case those authors technically need to be contacted to allow for their use in GPL 3 software.
Another possibility is that it could split the set of GPL software in two: one under GPL 2, and another under GPL 3. I have a feeling this won't happen, but it wouldn't be great. People of like minds who want to share their software would not be able to simply because of licensing issues that may be too hard to resolve at this point.
Anyway, I'm sure Moglen and RMS are taking this into account while they work on the licence. I hope it's put together in an open manner, so that all these kinds of issues are addressed.
Odd. On my system, all I have to do is log out of my DSL, or not log in when I start up. Steam happily (if somewhat slowly) starts in offline mode and off I go. I heard all these horror stories about people having to physically unplug their network cable but I'm not sure why you'd have to do that. Are they all on isolated LANs?
Well, many Internet connections are by default always on, and don't go through something like PPPoE. The slowness of it on your end is because you probably have the network card enabled even if you aren't logged in. When the game detects any network connection, it seems to keep trying till it times out, instead of just instantly allowing offline mode.
No one has to actually physically unplug their Internet cable, at least if they are using Win 2K/XP. Just go into the control panel/network, right click on the internet connection and disable it. This may help you as well if you are finding it slow to get into offline mode.
That's not really true at all. I try to fix rhythmic bugs (or periodic spikes) first, because they are:
1) Easy to identify (with the proper performance monitoring tools)
2) Very distracting to players
and
3) Does tend to cause motion sickness, even in people otherwise unaffected by video games.
They are also the most likely performance problems to require system rewrites, because they are generally indicative of something that you are doing wrong from time to time.
Well, from playing Half-Life 2, they aren't much worse than those seen in similar games. It may have just been difficult to deal with. It sounds like perhaps some sort of preloading strategy might have helped, but there are many factors involved that can complicate that. The game's engine is tuned for probably 90% of the game, but then has trouble with a few of the more open areas. I think that perhaps some perfectionists are making a bigger deal of it then it really is... it's not like every 5 or 10 seconds you run into this freeze, it's more like ever 10 minutes or so, as far as I could see, though I imagine systems with lower amounts of ram/video ram will run into it more.
Steam allows automatic patching, so once a bug is found and fixed, it can be applied immediately; no more having to search for patches.
It seems you have no choice as to whether you want a patch or not. It's all automatic. Now, there are advantages to this, but it also means that if your game was previously working and then they somehow introduce a bug into the game, you can't avoid it.
You can install the games on as many computers as you want; you just can't play them on more than one computer at a time.
Well... I've got a few computers at my home and I've been able to play it on multiple computers without forcing offline mode. One thing that appeared to work before, but might not now, is the ability to play counter-strike:source in this manner. I'm not sure if this is because of a Steam update or some difference in how I was playing.
Steam allows for a delivery system that I think most people (those who have high-speed internet connections, anyway) would agree is much more convenient than having to buy CDs from a store and then having to make sure that you don't lose or damage the CDs.
It's nice, as long as Steam is freely available. There are several risks with Steam, including whether Steams stays online, and whether Valve changes the rules on Steam, perhaps charging a fee for redownloading games. Hell, just recently people were having trouble just playing single player due to issues with their servers. While I don't think Half-Life 2 will disappear just because Steam might at some point, it would be a pain to deal with.
And the most important of all (that so many people seem to overlook or forget): After activation, you do not have to be connected to internet to play the Steam-based games; just start Steam in off-line mode.
You can't just start in off-line mode... I wish that were an option but it's not. To get it into off-line mode, you must not be connected to the internet, which may involve disabling your network card. I've heard that people with LANs not connected to the Internet have extra trouble since Steam has to timeout before it will allow you to play in off-line mode.
I certainly understand why Valve is doing this, and Steam is a bit more flexible than I thought it might turn out to be. However, we are to a large extent at their mercy on this. They can change the rules after the fact, and certain things you could do before in the game may not work. I have enough trust in Valve that nothing too serious on this front would happen, though it wouldn't be their first time. While not officially allowed as far as I understand, Half-Life 1 allowed you to play on multiple computers online, but after several years that rule was changed. Steam is an interesting experiment in this type of business model, but all these types of systems carry with them the varying rules that can change after purchase.
It's not a problem that happens all the time, only when entering a new area. Given that the main game is single player, I don't think it really detracts from the game any more than the loading times. It's really a minor flaw that most companies would never even come back to fix. I guess it keeps things from being 'flawless', but there is so much going for this game that something small like this is not something to get excited over.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't being friendly to new people be one of your top priorities then ?
I think Debian certainly could try to deal with people's questions better, but what I was saying is it's not really fair to expect any forum/chat to be the appropriate spot for questions.
Now, in terms of Debian in relation to Ubuntu, I haven't personally delved too fair into the Ubuntu community, but from what I can tell it's popular not because (or just because) of this type of support, but it has much more to do with the fact that it's got a Debian distribution that's both up to date and stable.
I don't remember having too much trouble getting help on IRC with Debian. I think, however, you have to keep in mind whatever forum you are talking in. If you ask a question like 'Why is x.org NOT in Debian-unstable', something that has surely been discussed to death, unless it's a channel that's explitly friendly to new users you probably won't get a very nice response. Keep in mind that many of these channels/forums are not always targetted to end-users, and all have certain expectations, such as, for example, searching for the answer to your questions before asking it. Often times, the channels are more of a meeting area either for developers or people with similar interests (Debian), and may not want to act as free tech-support.
I suggest looking at http://www.debianhelp.org/ if you are interested in forums that tend to be more friendly to questions.
Murder is clearly immoral. Spam, although incredibly annoying, has some arguements (which I don't agree with for it). Either way, I think making spam illegal in many cases is approriate.
The punishment has to start somewhere. As stated in many other situations, ignorance of the law is no excuse. He was responsible for knowing the laws and how they pertained to his actions. The Can Spam act went into effect in 2003, had he met its regulations he would have not been found guilty under this Virginia law. He had 2 years to clean up his act, and did not.
But, he's not from Virginia, yet he's being required to follow their laws. Email addresses don't come with a marker saying what state they are going to, so it's not fair to try to require him to avoid one specific state. Unfortunately the article doesn't provide much details into exactly what he did beyond basic spamming (fraud?) so I don't know how the Can Spam act applies for him.
I'm sorry but I just don't buy the whole "But it only went into effect 2 weeks ago" argument. There is no 14 day legal grace period on anything. If your city lowers its speedlimit from 35 to 25, and the day later you go through at 37, you better expect a ticket.
While ignorance of the law isn't an excuse, you must admit that it's impossible for anyone to know what every law requires of them. Laws are not just what's passed by the legislature, but also includes precidence in court, rulings against laws due to constitutionality, enforcement by police, prosecution, etc. Being a major spammer he probably did know of the law, but I doubt he figured that him, being outside the state, would be required to follow it. And with no previous examples of the laws enforcement, he likely had no idea what kind of punishment to expect from breaking this law.
All this doesn't get to my main point, which is that 9 years is unnecessarily draconian for fighting spam. This is a white collar crime. Most of these types would likely be scared off from it with *any* jail sentence. If this isn't enough for some spammers, make the punishment go up for second/third/more offences. Unlike something like murder, if some spammer doesn't learn their lesson the first time, the cost isn't so great (just more annoyance). There are crimes that require large sentences, but this isn't one of them.
This sounds a lot more reasonable. Almost no one has gotten in trouble for sending spam before, and then all the sudden this guy gets hit with by an out of state law and gets sentenced to 9 years. Too many people have this notion that once someone is found guilty of a crime, they are monsters that deserve no sympathy. 9 years is a long time to take from someone, and such a punishment should be reserved for more serious crimes. In terms of the deterent effect, well, most spammers went in thinking there was going to be no punishment. The vast majority of them will scamper away from this 'industry' if they realize they could go to jail for any amount of time. Sure, if you give the death penalty for spam, there will be a lot less spam, but having any sort of criminal punishment will go a long way. There is no need to be draconian.
The OS itself is not the only place you'll find DST specific code. It especially gets hairy when you consider systems that have to schedule things taking into account multiple time zones. For the home user it probably will be a small issue, but for businesses it will be a pain to deal with.
Erm, nevermind. I see it's already out, and they are already charging about $10 per month, and also offer a way to pay one time fees to open up parts of the game.
Funny, nearly all my games included this without having to win a contest. I'm a little curious as to how the plan to charge for this, as it doesn't strike me as the type of thing people would willing shell out money month after month for.
The cost in updating computers to deal with an update to DST will likely cost more than any savings in oil usage.
The GPL licence gives you the right to copy the program to other people. The user doesn't need the GPL, unless they want to do something that would by default break copyright.
So, by your reasoning, the GPL should be published on such boxes (which would be No Bad Thing). a big "Pure GPL (any version)" / "Pure GPL (v2)" / "OSI Certified Open Source Software" label on the box would preclude you from having to read the small-print.
In terms of EULAs, I essentially said they should be replaced with specific restrictions you could place on the product. They would not have to be spelt out in full, since their full meaning would be codified in law. A possible restriction might be something like "Can be installed on up to 5 computers at once, but only one may be in use at a time".
The message about the GPL on the box would not be needed by law (though if the GPL itself requires it, that's another thing). Someone else used the GPL to give you the software, but by having the software, you have the right to use it. You'd only need to use the GPL if you wanted to further distribute it, or modify it and distribute the changes. To quote from the GPL from section 0:
Perhaps I'm not being clear as to what I mean by EULA. By EULA, I mean an end-user license which you are theoritically required to have accept simply to use the product in question, even though you'd think by paying for it you'd implicitly get that right. I'm arguing EULAs should not be allowed for normal (non site-licensed) boxed software, or normal downloaded software, especially when you really don't know what the license has till after purchase, the process for a private individual to actually read and understand it is too onerous, and acceptance-by-clicking doesn't imply nearly as much as a signature.
I was thinking nearly the same thing. What I would like to see is instead of licence agreements, basically provide them with some flexibility in terms of what they can mandate by copyright law. So, for example, a company could say you are only allowed to have the program installed on one computer at a time, or alternatively, only have one user at a time but many computers. Now, instead of this joke of 'licensing' software that you purchased at the store, you would actually own it like you do so many other copyrighted goods. The types of restrictions allowed would be fixed, not allowing clauses that try to do disallow things like publishing benchmarks or reverse engineering.
The restrictions would be placed on the box, and what they mean exactly would be codified in law. Click-through and other non-signed EULAs would be banned outright, and signed EULAs can be allowed but with some restrictions.
Note that this wouldn't affect the GPL. The GPL is not an EULA, but a licence that provides additional rights above and beyond fair use.
This is a big problem with how capitalism has been going. When there is competition it's a win, but when there is little competition we end up with oliopolies and monopolies, and they will charge as much as they can get away with to maximize their profit. I'd argue that having a single company control a business is much worse than having the government control it, as at least theoritically the government can provide the service at a fair price, whereas without competition the business will not.
I do have some qualms about government going into business's that are handled by the private sector, besides the big brother issue. The main issue is that the if the government wants to allow there to continue to be a private market, they have to ensure they don't charge less than what it costs to provide the service. In the case the parent post provides, it appears they have not run out the competition, which is a good thing. What I'd like to see is for industries such as this where the government wants to do something about unfair prices, the government help setup co-ops that would be self-sufficient after x number of years. As long as there is a rule of (at minimum) self-sufficiency, private enterprise should still be able to thrive.
It was a catastrophic success!
For Windows developers, TortoiseCVS is highly recommended (as well as it's subversion equivalent, TortoiseSVN). For Java users, Eclipse has built in CVS support, which also works quite well.
Engineers are not supposed to be work on the discovery phase "ask customer what he realistically wants" neither on the update phase "tell customer he can't have but that" neither concern himself with the very fine legal and psycological details involving a transaction.
As some have mentioned, I was slightly off in saying it was the engineer's job to ask the customer, however for better or worse, the engineer's job and analyst's job often get mixed together.
Either way, whoever's job it is to be the analyst (whether it be a separate or shared job) has to coordinate with the business side as well as the customer. Both sides have their roles, and if the business people are allowed to overstep their bounds and make technical decisions, there is going to be problems. A good analyst will stand up to the business people, as well as the customer, to make sure they know what's going on. It won't work out if they don't have that power, whether by their own fault or the fault of the business's structure.
I'm sick and tired of hearing marketing, human resources, finance and 99% of the world of "business" come cry me a river when they complain system doesn't work as expected because they didn't know what the customer really wanted. Not even the customer knew what he wanted, they all came to me saying " it must be cheap and basically print me money "
A big part of engineering is figuring out what the user wants. The user can't be trusted to automatically know exactly what it is he wants that's possible to do. If as an engineer you simply take what's initially asked for, you likely won't get far. If something is impossible, you have to explain to your customer that it is, and provide alternatives. Make sure everyone knows exactly what's going on. While marketers, customers, etc. all have their own faults in the process, you can't simply pass the entire buck to them.
As well, the issue of making something easy to use yet secure, as the grandparent post suggested, is not impossible nor impractical.
C++ is a popular enough language to justify the cost for Microsoft, however I get the impression that they don't truly care about C++ and would like to replace both it and VB with C#.
Horray for progress.
While certainly there are a fair number of people who want to be warned about all this, this isn't generally what they are after, and probably shouldn't be detected by default. While for me personally I can tell the difference between what to worry about and what not to, those that don't and thus perhaps most likely to get adware, will see all these warnings about cookies and think their system is infested with adware. They can just have cleaned off their system, then a few days later check again and find some cookies reappear and get false alarm bells. This both frustrates them, and then eventually us when we have to double check their system to see if it's truly clean.
Movies in Ontario are not reviewed by the movie industry, but by the government. Ratings carry the force of law behind them for their enforcement.
Similarly, with games, the ESRB ratings don't need to be followed by retailers, but an 'R' rating will.
The government requiring retailers to follow ratings: A+. The government re-rating games: D-. Hooray Ontario.
If law is going to be behind a rating system, I'd much rather it be controlled by the government. Why? Because what you are suggesting would mean a non-governmental body would have the law behind it in placing restrictions on games. The MPAA does not have this power in the U.S., and the Ontario equivalent shouldn't either.
One thing to note, there is no requirement in Ontario that games be rated (and actually, the requirement on movies has been overturned in court on constitutional basis). They will only be rated after a complaint, so much fewer games will end up going through this.
Also, note that the ESRB ratings necessarily reflect the values of people in Ontario. When you compare movie ratings, you'll notice that the american rating system puts a heavy burden on anything sexual. An interesting example of this is Lost in Translation, which got an R-rating in the states most likely due to a very short lived scene in a strip club, whereas it got a PG rating in Ontario. It's been rumoured that Coppola purposefully included the scene just to get the R-rating, in order to make the movie seem more mature.
Harsh rating for sexuality are starting to show up with the ESRB as well, with games like 'Singles' and an uncensorred version of the new Leisure Suit Larry game getting 'AO' or 'Adults Online' ratings, essentially putting them in the same class as hardcore pornography. This essentially means you will not find these games in most stores, and publishers will refuse to allow the game to forward until it's fixed to get a lower rating.
I think in many ways it's good to limit it in this manner. There is a significant amount of error in all these ratings, and they are trying to give a quantitative score from qualititive opinions. If one site gives Halo 2 a 9.5, and Half-Life 2 a 9.6, does that mean Half-Life 2 is than Halo 2? I think the scale gamespy has is very reasonable, and it gave both games 5 stars. There is no way numbers could tell you which of these games you'll like more, but they do reflect that they are both excellent games. If you want to know which one is better and for what reasons, you are just going to have to go read the review.
For this type of software, will we be able to use it in software that's under GPL 3? GPL 2 won't allow for additional restrictions, nor will it allow being mixed with other software that isn't under GPL 2.
As far as I can see, the only way that GPL 3 can allow compatibility if you are able to 'downgrade' to GPL 2. If that option is available, that may make it difficult if not impossible to achieve the goals that the FSF has in mind.
Another possibility is to try to get the original authors to rerelease their software under the new licence. This may be possible in cases where a central authority has the redistribution rights to do this (such as the FSF has with much of their software), but a lot of GPL'd software isn't quite so careful. Many patches may have been included into a piece of software not by giving full redistribution rights but instead under licence of GPL 2, in which case those authors technically need to be contacted to allow for their use in GPL 3 software.
Another possibility is that it could split the set of GPL software in two: one under GPL 2, and another under GPL 3. I have a feeling this won't happen, but it wouldn't be great. People of like minds who want to share their software would not be able to simply because of licensing issues that may be too hard to resolve at this point.
Anyway, I'm sure Moglen and RMS are taking this into account while they work on the licence. I hope it's put together in an open manner, so that all these kinds of issues are addressed.
Well, many Internet connections are by default always on, and don't go through something like PPPoE. The slowness of it on your end is because you probably have the network card enabled even if you aren't logged in. When the game detects any network connection, it seems to keep trying till it times out, instead of just instantly allowing offline mode.
No one has to actually physically unplug their Internet cable, at least if they are using Win 2K/XP. Just go into the control panel/network, right click on the internet connection and disable it. This may help you as well if you are finding it slow to get into offline mode.
1) Easy to identify (with the proper performance monitoring tools)
2) Very distracting to players and
3) Does tend to cause motion sickness, even in people otherwise unaffected by video games.
They are also the most likely performance problems to require system rewrites, because they are generally indicative of something that you are doing wrong from time to time.
Well, from playing Half-Life 2, they aren't much worse than those seen in similar games. It may have just been difficult to deal with. It sounds like perhaps some sort of preloading strategy might have helped, but there are many factors involved that can complicate that. The game's engine is tuned for probably 90% of the game, but then has trouble with a few of the more open areas. I think that perhaps some perfectionists are making a bigger deal of it then it really is... it's not like every 5 or 10 seconds you run into this freeze, it's more like ever 10 minutes or so, as far as I could see, though I imagine systems with lower amounts of ram/video ram will run into it more.
It seems you have no choice as to whether you want a patch or not. It's all automatic. Now, there are advantages to this, but it also means that if your game was previously working and then they somehow introduce a bug into the game, you can't avoid it.
You can install the games on as many computers as you want; you just can't play them on more than one computer at a time.
Well... I've got a few computers at my home and I've been able to play it on multiple computers without forcing offline mode. One thing that appeared to work before, but might not now, is the ability to play counter-strike:source in this manner. I'm not sure if this is because of a Steam update or some difference in how I was playing.
Steam allows for a delivery system that I think most people (those who have high-speed internet connections, anyway) would agree is much more convenient than having to buy CDs from a store and then having to make sure that you don't lose or damage the CDs.
It's nice, as long as Steam is freely available. There are several risks with Steam, including whether Steams stays online, and whether Valve changes the rules on Steam, perhaps charging a fee for redownloading games. Hell, just recently people were having trouble just playing single player due to issues with their servers. While I don't think Half-Life 2 will disappear just because Steam might at some point, it would be a pain to deal with.
And the most important of all (that so many people seem to overlook or forget): After activation, you do not have to be connected to internet to play the Steam-based games; just start Steam in off-line mode.
You can't just start in off-line mode... I wish that were an option but it's not. To get it into off-line mode, you must not be connected to the internet, which may involve disabling your network card. I've heard that people with LANs not connected to the Internet have extra trouble since Steam has to timeout before it will allow you to play in off-line mode.
I certainly understand why Valve is doing this, and Steam is a bit more flexible than I thought it might turn out to be. However, we are to a large extent at their mercy on this. They can change the rules after the fact, and certain things you could do before in the game may not work. I have enough trust in Valve that nothing too serious on this front would happen, though it wouldn't be their first time. While not officially allowed as far as I understand, Half-Life 1 allowed you to play on multiple computers online, but after several years that rule was changed. Steam is an interesting experiment in this type of business model, but all these types of systems carry with them the varying rules that can change after purchase.
It's not a problem that happens all the time, only when entering a new area. Given that the main game is single player, I don't think it really detracts from the game any more than the loading times. It's really a minor flaw that most companies would never even come back to fix. I guess it keeps things from being 'flawless', but there is so much going for this game that something small like this is not something to get excited over.
A classic. I remembered it more for its hit on the controllers than Halo.