No, I haven't. It didn't even occur to me as something that would be a likely solution.... what would Valve do, give me a *special* patch for special customers?
Or maybe they'd learn about and fix the bug that's biting you in the ass? You're the architect of your own misery, buddy; help is there for the asking, but you're too busy nailing yourself to a cross to consider that Valve maybe isn't out to fuck you over.
I tried it. I forgot to try the "preview" button, which would have reminded me that the enter button means shit to slashdot, and I needed to re-mark it up.
I'm an anti-copyright advocate who sees more power in releasing my information for free to the ether of the Internet. Not only do I not copyright my blog posts, e-books and music, I openly request others to copy it and even put their own name on it. I've realized that once I put something into easily copied form, it will be copied. It might be partially used, fully mimiced, or completely turned upside down, yet I've also found that the more I am copied, the more people tend to find out that I am the original author.
For me as a writer, I love to know that people are reading me and replying to me -- that is my "profit" in the short term -- reader input. I tend to make up my own words that I write with, in order to see who might be copying me fully. I then look at what people say about their "writings", too. One such word I created was unanimocracy, but I've invented a few other phrases that are easily searched, too.
I believe the best way to "fix" plagiarism isn't to make it more illegal or immoral, but to work on a free market and open system where content creators can submit their creations to be cataloged as "the first." Let others copy it, but Google or another toolbar can easily flag a new creation as "very similar to another." Imagine if the Google toolbar had a "% of originality" for every site you visit (or every paragraph to highlight with your mouse). This could work for lyrics, guitar tabs, writings, opinion, news articles, etc.
Plagiarism is "OK" is some circles -- do a Google News search and see how many big named media outlets just regurgitate each others' news. Boring. Bloggers do the same thing, but many put a unique spin on the original writer's ideas.
I love when people plagiarize me. In the long run it builds my credibility even if they don't reference me as the original writer. I'd rather find free market solutions (such as the one I outlined above) rather than find penalties for the copying. If someone discovers that the person they respect didn't write the content on their own, the market fixes this by making the reader not read the plagiariser anymore. Easy solution.
In the long run, trying to protect your creative works will be a losing process. I use my previous creations to gain new customers who appreciate the information that I don't share. That is the product/service I sell, and I use my years of writing to show a history of original opinion and beliefs. Anything I write for public consumption is merely a marketing tool to get people to hire me for real face-time -- I could care less if someone else found a better way to make money with my thoughts. Most of my thoughts are based on a lifetime of reading and thinking about what others say.
My blog network forum is based completely on the comments of others -- I even pay my readers who give me the best comments. Their input on my writings is what gives me MORE information to sell at a higher price to those willing to pay for my knowledge. Why should I stop others from using my works to create new opinions that I can learn from?
Yeah, this is just stupid. OS X has the capability to encrypt the user's home folder, but that doesn't make it any more "anti-linux" than this makes Vista.
Yeah, why would trust a guy that admits and critizes Microsoft problems when they exist, that admits that most of the things in vista are inspired in mac os x, and that owns a mac and likes mac os x?
Because he's a shill. A fanboy. I don't trust him to tell the truth for the same reason I don't trust RMS, or any other frothing at the mouth zealot. Because no matter what happens, no matter what the details of the situation are, his response is always going to be coloured by his agenda, and his advice always intended to further that agenda regardless of whether or not it represents the best or most logical course of action.
Just look at the Vista article. This is terrible, that's garbage, it's a huge disappointment. Rating: 5/5!
super-human Microsoft shill. Why would you trust him at all?
The notable thing here is that, despite having his lips surgically grafted to Microsoft's ass, he actually dared to voice any complaint at all about an MS product.
I mean, think about it. Microsoft's address is "One Microsoft Way"
I'm not kidding. That's their address. A bit pretentious don't you think? But Apple names their's "infinite loop" A programming joke. How cool is that?
Pretentious? It's the clearest statement of their philosophy that they've ever made. Unless someone happens to have a video of Ballmer screaming "Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"?
To be honest, I haven't seen any laptops that will support more than even 2 gigs of RAM. Yeah, most have two SO-DIMM slots, and 2 Gig SO-DIMMs are getting cheaper, but from what I've seen most on-board memory controllers seem to max out at 2 Gigs.
You've got a good point, though, and maybe there are a few laptop mobos out there that can take more than 2 Gigs, I just haven't seen any.
Intel started a mobile CPU revolution with the Pentium M, so it's a little disappointing to hear that its latest successor doesn't improve further.
Wha?? Did you even glance at the article?
The Core Solo uses the same power as the Pentium-M to deliver more performance. The Core Duo uses slightly more power than the Pentium-M to deliver a lot more performance. Ergo, the performance per watt figures in both cases are better than the Pentium-M's.
In what sense, exactly, does the Core (Yonah) series not continue making improvements on its predecessors?
Further, since the software operates on byte-streams, it can compress anything: email, databases, archives, mp3's, encrypted data or whatever weird data format your favorite program uses.
It can compress anything!1111 Even already compressed mp3s and encrypted data, both of which have a high degree of data entropy, and are essentially uncompressible!
The PSP, several iRiver models, a bunch of those no-name flash-based systems, among others.
All of which is irrelevant; even if the iPod were the only portable audio player using the AAC standard, it wouldn't be proprietary. Non-proprietary isn't synonymous with popular, however much Microsoft would like you to believe otherwise.
The tags have been at the mercy of bias and trolls since the beta started. Every article even remotely critical of Microsoft has been consistently tagged as "fud", for one thing.
This search turns up three ads at the top before any actual search results. So what's the problem with Ask doing this, exactly?
If you run the same search on ask.com, you get three ads at the top, like google...and five more at the bottom between the last search result and the "next page(s)" button row.
I like the new layout, but the extra ads are a bit egregious, and the separation of the last non-paid result from the page controls irritates the shit out of me. It gives that same "real results squeezed between a sea of ads" feeling that turned me off pretty much all of the non-Google engines.
Seriously, how many copies of a library does that leave you having installed?
Generally? One.
Remember, this isn't a Linux distro, where the user has all the choices in the world except the one that matters most: the choice to have all of their apps look and behave in a consistent manner. 99.99999% of all apps targeting OS X link against the standard system Carbon or Cocoa frameworks. The odd app might have a really large third party library linked in and included in the app bundle, but that tends to be the exception rather than the rule, as the bundled libraries tend to be of the small, utility type that only run a few K. How bloated is it? Not very at all.
Now compare that with the situation on your average Linux distro: Instead of one version of one or two frameworks, every third app is written against a different toolkit. Want GIMP? Install GTK. KDevelop? Need QT too. Your text editor links against the athena toolkit, your system management utilities against Tk, your games against SDL, your audio editor against WxWidgets, your file manager against GNOME, something else against FLTK, FOX, Lesstif, Xaw...your shared libraries folder reads like an explosion at the acronym factory. Repeat ad naseum for your XML parsing libraries, your regex libraries, your sound libraries, etc, etc.
And it doesn't end there. Binary compatibility between library releases is the exception rather than the rule. Every third GTK app requires that a different point revision of the GTK libraries be installed. XMMS requires that you install libraries that are several major revisions out of date. You've got 6 different versions of three different XML parsing libraries installed, 2 regex engines, 3 copies of your JPEG, PNG, etc libraries, 3 or 4 different audio libraries with a couple different versions installed. Multiple versions of multiple libraries; an endless proliferation of crap that all does the same job with only the most miniscule of differences. All for the sake of an illusion of "choice" foisted on the end user by a fractious developer base with a raging case of Not Invented Here Syndrome and a belief that their convenience is more important than a consistent experience for the end user.
So - you install a version of the gimp - you get a copy of gtk, install eog - you get a copy of gtk, install.... well I think you get my point.
ZOMG that will eat up tens of megabytes of precious space!!!11eleventyone.
Oh well, I guess I'll just stick to non-shitty apps that don't forego the benefits of looking and working like every other program on my machine in order to saddle me with the "benefits" of a non-standard GUI toolkit that doesn't work the way everything else on my system does and looks worse too.
Re:Maybe Lionhead Studios Just Isn't Doing Well?
on
Molyneux Rumour Control
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Black & White 2 just came out too far after the original Black & White...
No, the problem with Black & White 2 was that it was a sequel to Black & White, an incredibly over-hyped game, like Fable, that didn't come anywhere near living up to Molyneux's hyperbole, and had extremely shit game-play besides. That thing left such a bad taste in so many people's mouths that I'm amazed they even considered making a sequel to it.
They don't sell the same volume as a Dan Brown or JK Rowling novel.
Neither do 99.999% of books, and yet most cost the same or less than those two's novels.
Market forces do factor in, of course, but there demonstrably is price gouging at work too. K&R has been around forever, is quite small, and is one of the best selling tech books of all time, and it costs more today then when it came out. If Rowling's books were priced like tech books, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone would now be selling for $60.
Game programmers haven't yet managed to create complex enough engines to demand physics engines.
It's hard to decipher what it is you're trying to say here, but if you're claiming that game physics haven't become sophisticated enough that they've given up scratching together some simple calculations and turned to third-party, dedicated, professional physics engines, you're dead wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time these things get to the owner, is there any room left on them for installing real software?
Dell's ridiculous amount of pre-installed crap is taking the concept of bloat to all new levels.
No, I haven't. It didn't even occur to me as something that would be a likely solution.... what would Valve do, give me a *special* patch for special customers?
Or maybe they'd learn about and fix the bug that's biting you in the ass? You're the architect of your own misery, buddy; help is there for the asking, but you're too busy nailing yourself to a cross to consider that Valve maybe isn't out to fuck you over.
I tried it. I forgot to try the "preview" button, which would have reminded me that the enter button means shit to slashdot, and I needed to re-mark it up.
I'm an anti-copyright advocate who sees more power in releasing my information for free to the ether of the Internet. Not only do I not copyright my blog posts, e-books and music, I openly request others to copy it and even put their own name on it. I've realized that once I put something into easily copied form, it will be copied. It might be partially used, fully mimiced, or completely turned upside down, yet I've also found that the more I am copied, the more people tend to find out that I am the original author. For me as a writer, I love to know that people are reading me and replying to me -- that is my "profit" in the short term -- reader input. I tend to make up my own words that I write with, in order to see who might be copying me fully. I then look at what people say about their "writings", too. One such word I created was unanimocracy, but I've invented a few other phrases that are easily searched, too. I believe the best way to "fix" plagiarism isn't to make it more illegal or immoral, but to work on a free market and open system where content creators can submit their creations to be cataloged as "the first." Let others copy it, but Google or another toolbar can easily flag a new creation as "very similar to another." Imagine if the Google toolbar had a "% of originality" for every site you visit (or every paragraph to highlight with your mouse). This could work for lyrics, guitar tabs, writings, opinion, news articles, etc. Plagiarism is "OK" is some circles -- do a Google News search and see how many big named media outlets just regurgitate each others' news. Boring. Bloggers do the same thing, but many put a unique spin on the original writer's ideas. I love when people plagiarize me. In the long run it builds my credibility even if they don't reference me as the original writer. I'd rather find free market solutions (such as the one I outlined above) rather than find penalties for the copying. If someone discovers that the person they respect didn't write the content on their own, the market fixes this by making the reader not read the plagiariser anymore. Easy solution. In the long run, trying to protect your creative works will be a losing process. I use my previous creations to gain new customers who appreciate the information that I don't share. That is the product/service I sell, and I use my years of writing to show a history of original opinion and beliefs. Anything I write for public consumption is merely a marketing tool to get people to hire me for real face-time -- I could care less if someone else found a better way to make money with my thoughts. Most of my thoughts are based on a lifetime of reading and thinking about what others say. My blog network forum is based completely on the comments of others -- I even pay my readers who give me the best comments. Their input on my writings is what gives me MORE information to sell at a higher price to those willing to pay for my knowledge. Why should I stop others from using my works to create new opinions that I can learn from?
It's also worth noting that the Core Duo, over-clocked, was still running at a slower frequency than the FX-60 at stock speeds.
Ergo, it beat the tar out of the Athlon, clock-for-clock.
Game theory is based upon zero-sum outcomes.
There goes any shred of credibility you've been clinging to. Zero-Sum games are but one branch of games studied by Game Theory.
Yeah, this is just stupid. OS X has the capability to encrypt the user's home folder, but that doesn't make it any more "anti-linux" than this makes Vista.
"Vista is a fucking train wreck" 5/5!
"I like Mac OS X a lot" 4/5!
The guy is a shill. If you want to trust a shill, that's your business, but at least admit to yourself that you like having smoke blown up your ass.
Yeah, why would trust a guy that admits and critizes Microsoft problems when they exist, that admits that most of the things in vista are inspired in mac os x, and that owns a mac and likes mac os x?
Because he's a shill. A fanboy. I don't trust him to tell the truth for the same reason I don't trust RMS, or any other frothing at the mouth zealot. Because no matter what happens, no matter what the details of the situation are, his response is always going to be coloured by his agenda, and his advice always intended to further that agenda regardless of whether or not it represents the best or most logical course of action.
Just look at the Vista article. This is terrible, that's garbage, it's a huge disappointment. Rating: 5/5!
super-human Microsoft shill. Why would you trust him at all?
The notable thing here is that, despite having his lips surgically grafted to Microsoft's ass, he actually dared to voice any complaint at all about an MS product.
I mean, think about it. Microsoft's address is "One Microsoft Way"
I'm not kidding. That's their address. A bit pretentious don't you think? But Apple names their's "infinite loop" A programming joke. How cool is that?
Pretentious? It's the clearest statement of their philosophy that they've ever made. Unless someone happens to have a video of Ballmer screaming "Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"?
To be honest, I haven't seen any laptops that will support more than even 2 gigs of RAM. Yeah, most have two SO-DIMM slots, and 2 Gig SO-DIMMs are getting cheaper, but from what I've seen most on-board memory controllers seem to max out at 2 Gigs. You've got a good point, though, and maybe there are a few laptop mobos out there that can take more than 2 Gigs, I just haven't seen any.
So what would you do if you wanted a dual core 64 bit laptop?
Realize that there isn't a laptop on the planet that can make use of a 64 bit address space, and come to my senses?
Intel started a mobile CPU revolution with the Pentium M, so it's a little disappointing to hear that its latest successor doesn't improve further.
Wha?? Did you even glance at the article?
The Core Solo uses the same power as the Pentium-M to deliver more performance. The Core Duo uses slightly more power than the Pentium-M to deliver a lot more performance. Ergo, the performance per watt figures in both cases are better than the Pentium-M's.
In what sense, exactly, does the Core (Yonah) series not continue making improvements on its predecessors?
And look at all the innovative new products that are coming out of Hollywood these days.
Last I checked, the focus group and clueless executive professions weren't unionized.
Further, since the software operates on byte-streams, it can compress anything: email, databases, archives, mp3's, encrypted data or whatever weird data format your favorite program uses.
It can compress anything!1111 Even already compressed mp3s and encrypted data, both of which have a high degree of data entropy, and are essentially uncompressible!
Magical compression for everyone!!
The PSP, several iRiver models, a bunch of those no-name flash-based systems, among others.
All of which is irrelevant; even if the iPod were the only portable audio player using the AAC standard, it wouldn't be proprietary. Non-proprietary isn't synonymous with popular, however much Microsoft would like you to believe otherwise.
Enough of proprietary formats that lock you into one brand of hardware... whether it's called MD, UMD, ATRA or anything else (frankly, even AAC).
Yeah, nothing says proprietary formats like the ISO standard MPEG-4 audio layer.
The tags have been at the mercy of bias and trolls since the beta started. Every article even remotely critical of Microsoft has been consistently tagged as "fud", for one thing.
This search turns up three ads at the top before any actual search results. So what's the problem with Ask doing this, exactly?
If you run the same search on ask.com, you get three ads at the top, like google...and five more at the bottom between the last search result and the "next page(s)" button row.
I like the new layout, but the extra ads are a bit egregious, and the separation of the last non-paid result from the page controls irritates the shit out of me. It gives that same "real results squeezed between a sea of ads" feeling that turned me off pretty much all of the non-Google engines.
How bloated must that be?
Seriously, how many copies of a library does that leave you having installed?
Generally? One.
Remember, this isn't a Linux distro, where the user has all the choices in the world except the one that matters most: the choice to have all of their apps look and behave in a consistent manner. 99.99999% of all apps targeting OS X link against the standard system Carbon or Cocoa frameworks. The odd app might have a really large third party library linked in and included in the app bundle, but that tends to be the exception rather than the rule, as the bundled libraries tend to be of the small, utility type that only run a few K. How bloated is it? Not very at all.
Now compare that with the situation on your average Linux distro: Instead of one version of one or two frameworks, every third app is written against a different toolkit. Want GIMP? Install GTK. KDevelop? Need QT too. Your text editor links against the athena toolkit, your system management utilities against Tk, your games against SDL, your audio editor against WxWidgets, your file manager against GNOME, something else against FLTK, FOX, Lesstif, Xaw...your shared libraries folder reads like an explosion at the acronym factory. Repeat ad naseum for your XML parsing libraries, your regex libraries, your sound libraries, etc, etc.
And it doesn't end there. Binary compatibility between library releases is the exception rather than the rule. Every third GTK app requires that a different point revision of the GTK libraries be installed. XMMS requires that you install libraries that are several major revisions out of date. You've got 6 different versions of three different XML parsing libraries installed, 2 regex engines, 3 copies of your JPEG, PNG, etc libraries, 3 or 4 different audio libraries with a couple different versions installed. Multiple versions of multiple libraries; an endless proliferation of crap that all does the same job with only the most miniscule of differences. All for the sake of an illusion of "choice" foisted on the end user by a fractious developer base with a raging case of Not Invented Here Syndrome and a belief that their convenience is more important than a consistent experience for the end user.
Now, how bloated must that be?
So - you install a version of the gimp - you get a copy of gtk, install eog - you get a copy of gtk, install.... well I think you get my point.
ZOMG that will eat up tens of megabytes of precious space!!!11eleventyone.
Oh well, I guess I'll just stick to non-shitty apps that don't forego the benefits of looking and working like every other program on my machine in order to saddle me with the "benefits" of a non-standard GUI toolkit that doesn't work the way everything else on my system does and looks worse too.
Black & White 2 just came out too far after the original Black & White...
No, the problem with Black & White 2 was that it was a sequel to Black & White, an incredibly over-hyped game, like Fable, that didn't come anywhere near living up to Molyneux's hyperbole, and had extremely shit game-play besides. That thing left such a bad taste in so many people's mouths that I'm amazed they even considered making a sequel to it.
They don't sell the same volume as a Dan Brown or JK Rowling novel.
Neither do 99.999% of books, and yet most cost the same or less than those two's novels.
Market forces do factor in, of course, but there demonstrably is price gouging at work too. K&R has been around forever, is quite small, and is one of the best selling tech books of all time, and it costs more today then when it came out. If Rowling's books were priced like tech books, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone would now be selling for $60.
Game programmers haven't yet managed to create complex enough engines to demand physics engines.
It's hard to decipher what it is you're trying to say here, but if you're claiming that game physics haven't become sophisticated enough that they've given up scratching together some simple calculations and turned to third-party, dedicated, professional physics engines, you're dead wrong.