I'm one of those who tried to switch to Linux. Even though Win98 is blazing fast on my machine, Xubuntu (light-weight Ubuntu with XFCE) has been as sluggish as Win95 on my other computer, a 486-66MHz. I really appreciated how helpfull the Ubuntu forum members were, but after a while they all determined that XFCE would not run any faster on my computer than it did, and so I switched back to Win98SE.
"Nor does the AP bother to mention how software piracy helped boost certain aspects of the industry in China by decreasing the cost of inputs."
And nor does AP bother to state that the US itself explicitly encouraged the pirating of foreign works in its 1790 Copyright Act:
[N]othing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or
vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart,
book, or books, written, printed, or published by any person not a citizen of the
United States, in foreign parts or places without the jurisdiction of the United
States.
Only in 1891 the US started protecting foreign works under the Chase Act. It serves to remember that the US justified pirating foreign works as being economically beneficial for the country. Even the Chase Act wasn't too friendly to foreign authors: it did protect their rights, but the Manufacturing Clause prevented their publishers from publishing their works in the US. This clause was removed only in 1986. It took the US 101 years to join the Berne Convention.
Or is it the other way round? Anyway, there's nothing wrong with the developers. As you indicated, they must have some seriously pissed-off investors. They realize that they wouldn't find anybody to fund them ever again, so they have no choice than to go on with developing DNF. That way, they at least have a very small chance of striking even; if they scrapped the project, they wouldn't find any new investors.
The beads are not silly; they are the marketer's dream! Imagine the recurring revenue the phone operators get from selling more of the beads for people who gave them all away. A phone company could also lock customers in, with using a proprietary format for these beads. It could also serve as a differentiator for companies. I wish I could come up with something like those beads, patent the idea and then develop it further for a large wireless company.
Bethesda has indeed fooled me twice. I purchased both Daggerfall and Morrowind right after their release, and it took several long months to have each game patched enough to be fully enjoyable. Sorry, but unless you are brand new to the Elder Scrolls series, I have no sympathy for you if you purchased Oblivion soon after its release, a few months after it's been truly completed.
When has the paper backup proved useful? I can't imagine running even a small/medium business and being able to retrieve useful information after a disaster. And then what do you do? Rekey it into a brand new system?
That's why I mentioned that we also keep electronic copies, for convenience, but ultimatelly paper copies are the primary backup. It works very well even in database-driven environment, as long as you don't update fields in a database, but add new rows. And that's exactly what we're doing at work, and what I'm doing at home: in order to document past actions, you don't change them; instead you create an adjustment. As such, all you have to do is to print out the new rows.
I personally do so at home primarily with Quicken, and with various articles I've written or e-mails I've gotten. Keeping track of them is fairly simple; I have a sheet taped to each box that lists its contents, and where I can write whatever I added to the boxes. Libraries have been doing something similar, but on a much greater scale for ages, and it worked just fine even without a computer.
My backup copy is paper. Granted, it gets a little awkward when I move, as I currently have six large file boxes of that stuff, but I know that as long as I keep it reasonably safe from humidity/mice it'll outlive all my computer media and file format changes.
At work we do the same, only to a larger extent. We've got an on-site and off-site storage, and each piece of information is printed in two copies to be stored at each. All that in addition to your usual Veritas tape and CD-RW backups, which we do for convenience of restoring lost data, but which we don't trust enough to eliminate paper copies.
Just to add to your list, with which I fully agree, the wonderful case of Betamax. Sony does have the tendency to deliver truly innovative pieces of technology, but due to their licensing strategy, which you already described, this technology usually goes down the drain. Sony Betamax is a perfect example of that.
Sony's philosophy of overpricing takes a toll with other items as well. For example, I find their computers vastly overpriced, thanks to their short lifespan. Unless you are producing a truly superior product, you shouldn't charge premium prices.
On the other hand, I'd like to mention one Sony product I fell in love with. A long time ago, I got one of their early Sony Clie PDAs. This was at a time before Sony realized they had a gem on their hands. The retail price of the Clie was $99; I guess they were selling it only as a platform for their memory sticks. I'm still using it on a daily basis, and I got a replacement unit, just in case.
Um... the fact that this is coming from a university suggests to ME that it might be highly impractical, but of some academic interest.
I fully agree. Having spent the last two years working in a business incubator associated with a major research university, I found the following life cycle of new technologies to be true in 95% of cases:
1. Invent something, file an invention disclosure with the university and ask for patenting the idea.
2. File for all grants you can get.
3. Once you run out of grants, declare your intention to commercialize the technology.
4. Secure some start-up funding, primarily in the form of SBIR/STTR grants and angel funding.
5. Once funding is received, declare that the technology is not yet ready and go back to the lab to write more papers on your technology.
6. Repeat and rinse.
I've seen some really ground-breaking technologies in action. One was proven to decrease the level of emissions by 95%. Another promised to replace current heat sinks with a new design that would eliminate computer fans. Yet another has been around since the 1950s; the lead researcher has invented when he was a grad student. Unfortunately, most researchers at the school I was working at were aware of the fact that in the long term having a technology to work on for another decade or more was more lucrative than starting a company and ending with a miniscule ownership share after venture financing.
I've been recently hired by a company to rework their user manuals. Up to this point, they have been written by the same people who developed the technology, and they were largely ignored by the company's first customers, also serving as beta testers. Recently, however, support calls started to multiply, as new customers had problems understanding the manuals. I found them beyond horrible, and I already started working on completely rewriting them. Here are some of the mistakes I observed over and over again:
* Sentence length. Engineers tend to write very long and convoluted sentences. Please make them stop, and teach them how to alternate between shorter and longer sentences. Also tell them that six or seven lines without a period is torture for the average reader.
* Subject descriptors. After the fourth or fifth noun in a sentence, nobody will know what "it" refers to.
* "if" and "then". These may work well in software programming, but the next time I count five "then"s in a short paragraph I'll shoot the writer. Engineers have the bad habit of overusing cause-and-effect structure in centences.
* Conjunctions. From what I've seen, using "and" after each word, instead of commas, seems to be pretty common.
* Redundancy. Some engineers think that they'll make it easier for the reader if they repeat the same information three times in a single paragraph. First, they put it into introduction, then they include it somewhere in parentheses, and finally they add the same information to the end of the paragraph.
* Definitions. More often, and just as frustrating as with redundancy, engineers forget to clearly define terms. If they do, they put it into glossary or parentheses behind a word. I personally prefer to ease the reader into a term, by starting with common words and slowly building up the definition on top of them.
* Parentheses. This is yet another favorite element of engineers. It allows them to make sentences much longer without triggering the long sentence alert in Word.
* Dashes. Engineers love to use dashes, sometimes without regard whether they replace periods, conjunctions or semicolons with them.
* Workarounds. This is more a mindset than writing, but if you can change this you'll do the mankind a great service. Engineers have problem to think like their readers. That is, if they are concerned with it at all. As a result, I've seen many instances where the engineer has no problems confessing that a feature doesn't work, and instead describing a complex ten-step workaround in the manual. I believe that writers should strive for simplicity; if something gets too complex you should flag it and challenge the writer's underlying mindset, not writing.
I hope this helps a little, but not too much. If you manage to teach engineers how to write, I may be out of job.
My primary computer is a Pentium 133 with 32MB of RAM. I run Win95, WordPerfect Suite 7, Eudora 3 and Opera 7 (registered). The main reason why I stick with it is my familiarity with the interface: having used it for so long, I can do my work on it in sleep.
Now, to be entirely honest, I do have a newer computer as well. It's a laptop with a 1.6GHz processor, 512MB of RAM and WindowsXP. The first thing I did was to customize WinXP to look as much as Win95 as possible; otherwise I wasn't even able to find the Accessories tab in the Start Panel. And don't get me started on Windows Explorer; it took me two days to find it and place a shortcut on the desktop. Even after all the customization, I work on it much more slowly than on my other computer. It's got the newest Office and a whole bunch of other programs, but I still haven't gotten used to it. I only do work on it in the office; at home I use it for playing games. When it comes to doing serious work, check my personal e-mail or read news on-line, I always go back to my old PC.
Vista technically would run on a 1995 Pentium Processor, but who would want to run any OS on such an old processor, even if Vista's legacy compatibility goes back that far.
Maybe some of us don't see a reason to upgrade to a more modern computer. Don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining about Vista hardware requirements; I don't have a reason to upgrade to Vista, either. You should be aware, though, that there are those of us who have had the same computers for so long that a simple RAM stick won't do, and purchasing an entire new computer and configuring it to my needs would require too much time and work, just to have something I don't really need.
Then you're obviously a very young Slovakian who doesn't remember when the Communists used the ID card to keep Slovaks in line. What's the equivilant to "Your papers please" in Slovak, and are they still asking it?
I used to have one of those. It wasn't an ID card; it was an entire booklet (pink in color; we used to make a lot of jokes about it), and it was handled pretty much like an internal passport. It included employment information (which looked more like a visa), and other stamps. One of the most common abuses of the ID card then was for the military police to check the IDs of all people of enlistment age, to see whether they had a record of them being in the army. If they did, and they were caught not wearing a uniform, they were arrested.
However, that doesn't change my opinion about national ID cards. Having lived in the US for the past 12 years, I learned that I needed either my passport or a driver's license to function normally. And unlike communist Czechoslovakia, where abuses of IDs were state-mandated, I've experienced enough ID-related abuses in the US on the local level. In addition, once communism fell and the country split, and we got issued our new ID cards, the government was really good at not abusing them at all. As such, I really see no difference in having one or not.
...I personally don't see what's the big fuss about. Back in Slovakia, we've got national ID cards (called "Citizen's Card"). We use them only for identification; the same way I use a driver's license in the US. the ID cards have five pieces of information: Your picture, name, address, date of birth, and a unique ID number. This makes it no different from a US driver's license, with the small distinction that with the exception of writing personal checks you don't give out your DL number. Instead, you use the social security number as your identifier.
Of course, I don't dispute that ID cards can be abused, for example by having them carry much more of your personal information. However, that's not the ID card's fault; it's the responsibility of the government to determine which information will be available through an ID card.
Before going back to school to get my master's I worked for four years. I started with roughly 70 hours per week; got down to 50 hours before "retiring" and going back to school. I'm currently spending 10-12 days, 6 days per week at school. As such, I know what you mean by not having too much time, but both at work and then at school I felt that I contributed a lot and my contributions were appreciated, which is reward enough for me to be highly motivated as I enter the workforce again.
I'd understand it if you were a boss ('how dare those workers get 6 weeks off') - but you're not - you're a working dude too. So why do you do it?
I guess it's because of a different attitude to work we have here. For example, I'm starting in my new position in a week. I'll be eligible to one week of vacation per year after six months of work. Between now and the first opportunity to get vacation I'll have three paid holidays. And you know what? I'm so excited about the job that I'm actually starting a week earlier than my job contract tells me to. I'm really looking forward to it, because I believe I'll be appreciated, and that my contribution will have a tangible impact on the company's growth.
Now, I don't know how exactly it is in Europe (which may sound strange, as I still hold an EU passport even though I've been living in the US for 12 years), but recently I've read a news article where a FRench Economics professor is saying: "I was surprised to see that people actually enjoyed working in a company." This is beyond my capacity to understand. By default, I always assume that people enjoy their work, while she seems to be thinking otherwise.
I believe it is this lack of understanding that prompts Americans to mock the French work conditions. I, and most other people I know, simply can't understand why would anybody need six or more weeks of vacation time, on top of a 35-hours work week.
it's allowed for me to tell people where they can download software.
Not exactly. As the MPAA v. 2600 case showed, linking to illegal material can get you in trouble. The only reason why StarForce is able to do so without a legal challenge is because they are based in Russia, where it may be legal. Stardock, based in the US, cannot do the same thing in return.
This is not the first problem with McAfee I've had this year. A few weeks ago, something started eating my system resources, pushing total CPU usage to 100%. Through trial and error I found that it was the McAfee virus scan. I found others with the same problem, which convinced me that for a change, the problem was not with the user. I ended up uninstalling McAfee and switching to AVG. Just in time, as I can see...
Yet another example of east-west differences
on
Japan's Top 100 Games
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This list is yet another good example of east-west differences in gaming. If you look at the list, the biggest group are games that are heavily story-driven, but which don't give the player too much freedom. In fact, I found only one typical Western game on the list, Wizardry, which placed 66th. This doesn't mean that eastern gaming culture is bad; it's just different. However, with the proliferation of Japanese consoles in the US, resulting in larger numbers of Japanese games here, the eastern culture seems to take over the western one in gaming, at least on store shelves. It is no wonder then that whenever a western-style RPG is released (Arx Fatalis, Gothic, Morrowind), it creates a very fierce following of people who are starved for more freedom in their games.
Thanks to DosBox, I am free to play nearly every game I've ever purchased, and so I can simply list games that are currently installed on my computer as those that I truly love:
* Civilization
* Colonizaton
* Heroes of Might and Magic II
* Master of Magic
* Settlers 2
* UFO: Enemy Unknown
* Warlords
Remind me again, what are the companies that "vigorously defend" their IP rights?
Questions about the viability of the patent aside, this guy had it issued, and Sony violated it. The same company that has no problems suing thousands of its customers has no problem doing the same to an inventor, only on a much larger scale, and for 25 years without problems. Just to be clear: I don't condone either piracy and IP theft, but of the two categories, Sony has been the bigger thief. In fact, the company can be described as the 800 pound gorilla among IP thiefs.
I shopped at Target today. As usual, I spent my time at the checkout chatting with the cashier. She didn't look at her scanner once, nor did she look what she was ringing up. All that because we had a fun little talk.
Now I did so because that's the kind of person I am - always friendly and talkative. However, there are plenty of social engineers who could sweettalk a cashier into not scanning a product at all, or at least do what I did, in which case she wouldn't notice.
As a customer, though at the end of the day I prefer friendly cashiers to those who check everything and treat you like a criminal. I guess Target could suffer more losses from employing such people than allowing a few criminals to steal their merchandise.
Slashdot Mirror
As they say here in the south: "If it ain't broken, don't fix it"
I'm one of those who tried to switch to Linux. Even though Win98 is blazing fast on my machine, Xubuntu (light-weight Ubuntu with XFCE) has been as sluggish as Win95 on my other computer, a 486-66MHz. I really appreciated how helpfull the Ubuntu forum members were, but after a while they all determined that XFCE would not run any faster on my computer than it did, and so I switched back to Win98SE.
And nor does AP bother to state that the US itself explicitly encouraged the pirating of foreign works in its 1790 Copyright Act:
Only in 1891 the US started protecting foreign works under the Chase Act. It serves to remember that the US justified pirating foreign works as being economically beneficial for the country. Even the Chase Act wasn't too friendly to foreign authors: it did protect their rights, but the Manufacturing Clause prevented their publishers from publishing their works in the US. This clause was removed only in 1986. It took the US 101 years to join the Berne Convention.
Or is it the other way round? Anyway, there's nothing wrong with the developers. As you indicated, they must have some seriously pissed-off investors. They realize that they wouldn't find anybody to fund them ever again, so they have no choice than to go on with developing DNF. That way, they at least have a very small chance of striking even; if they scrapped the project, they wouldn't find any new investors.
The beads are not silly; they are the marketer's dream! Imagine the recurring revenue the phone operators get from selling more of the beads for people who gave them all away. A phone company could also lock customers in, with using a proprietary format for these beads. It could also serve as a differentiator for companies. I wish I could come up with something like those beads, patent the idea and then develop it further for a large wireless company.
I do, for my office work. With AVG and an older version of ZoneAlarm, I see no reason to upgrade.
Bethesda has indeed fooled me twice. I purchased both Daggerfall and Morrowind right after their release, and it took several long months to have each game patched enough to be fully enjoyable. Sorry, but unless you are brand new to the Elder Scrolls series, I have no sympathy for you if you purchased Oblivion soon after its release, a few months after it's been truly completed.
That's why I mentioned that we also keep electronic copies, for convenience, but ultimatelly paper copies are the primary backup. It works very well even in database-driven environment, as long as you don't update fields in a database, but add new rows. And that's exactly what we're doing at work, and what I'm doing at home: in order to document past actions, you don't change them; instead you create an adjustment. As such, all you have to do is to print out the new rows.
I personally do so at home primarily with Quicken, and with various articles I've written or e-mails I've gotten. Keeping track of them is fairly simple; I have a sheet taped to each box that lists its contents, and where I can write whatever I added to the boxes. Libraries have been doing something similar, but on a much greater scale for ages, and it worked just fine even without a computer.
At work we do the same, only to a larger extent. We've got an on-site and off-site storage, and each piece of information is printed in two copies to be stored at each. All that in addition to your usual Veritas tape and CD-RW backups, which we do for convenience of restoring lost data, but which we don't trust enough to eliminate paper copies.
Either that, or the definition of "hate speech" has been changing over time.
Sony's philosophy of overpricing takes a toll with other items as well. For example, I find their computers vastly overpriced, thanks to their short lifespan. Unless you are producing a truly superior product, you shouldn't charge premium prices.
On the other hand, I'd like to mention one Sony product I fell in love with. A long time ago, I got one of their early Sony Clie PDAs. This was at a time before Sony realized they had a gem on their hands. The retail price of the Clie was $99; I guess they were selling it only as a platform for their memory sticks. I'm still using it on a daily basis, and I got a replacement unit, just in case.
I fully agree. Having spent the last two years working in a business incubator associated with a major research university, I found the following life cycle of new technologies to be true in 95% of cases:
1. Invent something, file an invention disclosure with the university and ask for patenting the idea.
2. File for all grants you can get.
3. Once you run out of grants, declare your intention to commercialize the technology.
4. Secure some start-up funding, primarily in the form of SBIR/STTR grants and angel funding.
5. Once funding is received, declare that the technology is not yet ready and go back to the lab to write more papers on your technology.
6. Repeat and rinse.
I've seen some really ground-breaking technologies in action. One was proven to decrease the level of emissions by 95%. Another promised to replace current heat sinks with a new design that would eliminate computer fans. Yet another has been around since the 1950s; the lead researcher has invented when he was a grad student. Unfortunately, most researchers at the school I was working at were aware of the fact that in the long term having a technology to work on for another decade or more was more lucrative than starting a company and ending with a miniscule ownership share after venture financing.
I've been recently hired by a company to rework their user manuals. Up to this point, they have been written by the same people who developed the technology, and they were largely ignored by the company's first customers, also serving as beta testers. Recently, however, support calls started to multiply, as new customers had problems understanding the manuals. I found them beyond horrible, and I already started working on completely rewriting them. Here are some of the mistakes I observed over and over again:
* Sentence length. Engineers tend to write very long and convoluted sentences. Please make them stop, and teach them how to alternate between shorter and longer sentences. Also tell them that six or seven lines without a period is torture for the average reader.
* Subject descriptors. After the fourth or fifth noun in a sentence, nobody will know what "it" refers to.
* "if" and "then". These may work well in software programming, but the next time I count five "then"s in a short paragraph I'll shoot the writer. Engineers have the bad habit of overusing cause-and-effect structure in centences.
* Conjunctions. From what I've seen, using "and" after each word, instead of commas, seems to be pretty common.
* Redundancy. Some engineers think that they'll make it easier for the reader if they repeat the same information three times in a single paragraph. First, they put it into introduction, then they include it somewhere in parentheses, and finally they add the same information to the end of the paragraph.
* Definitions. More often, and just as frustrating as with redundancy, engineers forget to clearly define terms. If they do, they put it into glossary or parentheses behind a word. I personally prefer to ease the reader into a term, by starting with common words and slowly building up the definition on top of them.
* Parentheses. This is yet another favorite element of engineers. It allows them to make sentences much longer without triggering the long sentence alert in Word.
* Dashes. Engineers love to use dashes, sometimes without regard whether they replace periods, conjunctions or semicolons with them.
* Workarounds. This is more a mindset than writing, but if you can change this you'll do the mankind a great service. Engineers have problem to think like their readers. That is, if they are concerned with it at all. As a result, I've seen many instances where the engineer has no problems confessing that a feature doesn't work, and instead describing a complex ten-step workaround in the manual. I believe that writers should strive for simplicity; if something gets too complex you should flag it and challenge the writer's underlying mindset, not writing.
I hope this helps a little, but not too much. If you manage to teach engineers how to write, I may be out of job.
Now, to be entirely honest, I do have a newer computer as well. It's a laptop with a 1.6GHz processor, 512MB of RAM and WindowsXP. The first thing I did was to customize WinXP to look as much as Win95 as possible; otherwise I wasn't even able to find the Accessories tab in the Start Panel. And don't get me started on Windows Explorer; it took me two days to find it and place a shortcut on the desktop. Even after all the customization, I work on it much more slowly than on my other computer. It's got the newest Office and a whole bunch of other programs, but I still haven't gotten used to it. I only do work on it in the office; at home I use it for playing games. When it comes to doing serious work, check my personal e-mail or read news on-line, I always go back to my old PC.
Maybe some of us don't see a reason to upgrade to a more modern computer. Don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining about Vista hardware requirements; I don't have a reason to upgrade to Vista, either. You should be aware, though, that there are those of us who have had the same computers for so long that a simple RAM stick won't do, and purchasing an entire new computer and configuring it to my needs would require too much time and work, just to have something I don't really need.
I used to have one of those. It wasn't an ID card; it was an entire booklet (pink in color; we used to make a lot of jokes about it), and it was handled pretty much like an internal passport. It included employment information (which looked more like a visa), and other stamps. One of the most common abuses of the ID card then was for the military police to check the IDs of all people of enlistment age, to see whether they had a record of them being in the army. If they did, and they were caught not wearing a uniform, they were arrested.
However, that doesn't change my opinion about national ID cards. Having lived in the US for the past 12 years, I learned that I needed either my passport or a driver's license to function normally. And unlike communist Czechoslovakia, where abuses of IDs were state-mandated, I've experienced enough ID-related abuses in the US on the local level. In addition, once communism fell and the country split, and we got issued our new ID cards, the government was really good at not abusing them at all. As such, I really see no difference in having one or not.
...I personally don't see what's the big fuss about. Back in Slovakia, we've got national ID cards (called "Citizen's Card"). We use them only for identification; the same way I use a driver's license in the US. the ID cards have five pieces of information: Your picture, name, address, date of birth, and a unique ID number. This makes it no different from a US driver's license, with the small distinction that with the exception of writing personal checks you don't give out your DL number. Instead, you use the social security number as your identifier.
Of course, I don't dispute that ID cards can be abused, for example by having them carry much more of your personal information. However, that's not the ID card's fault; it's the responsibility of the government to determine which information will be available through an ID card.
Before going back to school to get my master's I worked for four years. I started with roughly 70 hours per week; got down to 50 hours before "retiring" and going back to school. I'm currently spending 10-12 days, 6 days per week at school. As such, I know what you mean by not having too much time, but both at work and then at school I felt that I contributed a lot and my contributions were appreciated, which is reward enough for me to be highly motivated as I enter the workforce again.
I guess it's because of a different attitude to work we have here. For example, I'm starting in my new position in a week. I'll be eligible to one week of vacation per year after six months of work. Between now and the first opportunity to get vacation I'll have three paid holidays. And you know what? I'm so excited about the job that I'm actually starting a week earlier than my job contract tells me to. I'm really looking forward to it, because I believe I'll be appreciated, and that my contribution will have a tangible impact on the company's growth.
Now, I don't know how exactly it is in Europe (which may sound strange, as I still hold an EU passport even though I've been living in the US for 12 years), but recently I've read a news article where a FRench Economics professor is saying: "I was surprised to see that people actually enjoyed working in a company." This is beyond my capacity to understand. By default, I always assume that people enjoy their work, while she seems to be thinking otherwise.
I believe it is this lack of understanding that prompts Americans to mock the French work conditions. I, and most other people I know, simply can't understand why would anybody need six or more weeks of vacation time, on top of a 35-hours work week.
Not exactly. As the MPAA v. 2600 case showed, linking to illegal material can get you in trouble. The only reason why StarForce is able to do so without a legal challenge is because they are based in Russia, where it may be legal. Stardock, based in the US, cannot do the same thing in return.
This is not the first problem with McAfee I've had this year. A few weeks ago, something started eating my system resources, pushing total CPU usage to 100%. Through trial and error I found that it was the McAfee virus scan. I found others with the same problem, which convinced me that for a change, the problem was not with the user. I ended up uninstalling McAfee and switching to AVG. Just in time, as I can see...
This list is yet another good example of east-west differences in gaming. If you look at the list, the biggest group are games that are heavily story-driven, but which don't give the player too much freedom. In fact, I found only one typical Western game on the list, Wizardry, which placed 66th. This doesn't mean that eastern gaming culture is bad; it's just different. However, with the proliferation of Japanese consoles in the US, resulting in larger numbers of Japanese games here, the eastern culture seems to take over the western one in gaming, at least on store shelves. It is no wonder then that whenever a western-style RPG is released (Arx Fatalis, Gothic, Morrowind), it creates a very fierce following of people who are starved for more freedom in their games.
Thanks to DosBox, I am free to play nearly every game I've ever purchased, and so I can simply list games that are currently installed on my computer as those that I truly love: * Civilization * Colonizaton * Heroes of Might and Magic II * Master of Magic * Settlers 2 * UFO: Enemy Unknown * Warlords
Questions about the viability of the patent aside, this guy had it issued, and Sony violated it. The same company that has no problems suing thousands of its customers has no problem doing the same to an inventor, only on a much larger scale, and for 25 years without problems. Just to be clear: I don't condone either piracy and IP theft, but of the two categories, Sony has been the bigger thief. In fact, the company can be described as the 800 pound gorilla among IP thiefs.
I shopped at Target today. As usual, I spent my time at the checkout chatting with the cashier. She didn't look at her scanner once, nor did she look what she was ringing up. All that because we had a fun little talk.
Now I did so because that's the kind of person I am - always friendly and talkative. However, there are plenty of social engineers who could sweettalk a cashier into not scanning a product at all, or at least do what I did, in which case she wouldn't notice.
As a customer, though at the end of the day I prefer friendly cashiers to those who check everything and treat you like a criminal. I guess Target could suffer more losses from employing such people than allowing a few criminals to steal their merchandise.