...but I won't play this game and help the army's recruiting methods succeed. I'd rather encourage my friends to play games that aren't made by organizations bent on killing people.:)
That's just me, though...you may like killing people for a living.
Supporting legal music downloading is the dumbest thing the RIAA ever did. Why, you ask?
The RIAA currenly has a monopoly on physical distribution. No pirate could every touch them when it comes to their ability to crank out physical CD's. However, once they get the downloading in to the mainstream, (and I mean making it totally replace cds) they will have changed the market so that they are totally obsolete. The RIAA cannot survive in an online world...they are too big, too slow, and too hated.
Let's face it, when it comes to the internet, Geeks have a thousand times more resources for distributing information than the RIAA ever will. What's to stop new bands from using services like itunes to be promoted alongside RIAA bands, and then selling their own music over the net?
Anyways, here's to the RIAA! Thanks for helping to make a world where you are irrelevant!
You totally missed the point. The reason our music sucks is because nobody competes with the RIAA. I basically said that if there were no RIAA it would stimulate competition resulting in better music.
Now, this kind of stuff might be useful for...um...hard-core video editing...and really, really huge servers, but that's about it. The truth of the matter is that your everyday user just has no need to handle numbers of that size or data of those quantities. There are very few situations where 32-bit processors are actually a problem.
This is all based on the erroneous assumption that we somehow NEED the RIAA to get good music. They'd love to have everyone believe that they're the only thing that keeps the good music coming, when in reality they're just an organization devoted to cashing in on people. They have this profit-centric approach to art so perfected that they don't even need artistic talent anymore...they can just suck the blood out of one fad after another.
The RIAA wants to think of musicians like bacteria in a petri dish, that needs to be protected and coddled...I say give me the virulent strain, the one that's had to contend with antibiotics, the elements, and the human immune system.
Only in a brutal, difficult music industry, devoid of fat cats with big wallets, will the truly great artists end up on top.
This is why Object-Oriented Programming is so important. When you think of your program in terms of a series of independent objects that are orchestrated to perform a task, you don't need to discard code that isn't being changed.
In my experience, I have seen very few projects that truly use OOP to its maximum power. Just the other day, I was leafing through the GAIM source, and let me tell you, it wasn't pretty. I personally haven't spent any time studying the code mentioned in the articles, but I'd be willing to bet that most failed rewrites come from code that is not modular.
If you start writing your program with any idea in your head, it might work out, and it might not...the only way to be really sure that your work is going to be of some benefit down the line is to assume that whatever you're writing will need to be replaced, and make that process as painless as possible.
IMO, portability, reusability, and time-effective maintenence are all dependent on OOP.
Think of it this way. You can't put 10 poems in order, publish the book, thereby gaining ownership of the poems, and then sue someone whenever you see the poem reprinted somewhere else. That's all that decision means. This, however, is different.
Imagine, if you will, that you're sitting in a classroom, and it's time to hand in your term papers....you then notice that the kid sitting next to you has EXACTLY the same title page and table of contents from the term paper you turned in last year...wouldn't it be worth checking to see if there are any other similarities?
...is just the world's most expensive filter...from what I understand, it just sits at someone's ISP and collects all of their traffic. Aside from the fact that it can rape thousands of people's privacy at once, it's really nothing to be impressed with...when you're trying to get a specific person's data traditional hacking techniques are still the way to go.
They have the effect of imposing natural selection on our P2P networks. Those that have vulnerable infrastructure will fall, and ones that do not will prosper. Sure, they are accomplishing their goal in the shortest of short terms, but they're creating the motivation and inspiration for unstoppable, anonymous pirate networks. It may look like the music industry is getting healthier, but they're just encouraging the creation of a bigger, badder bug.
vgmix. Only trouble is the guys who run that site are a real bunch of assholes....some clown named Jake (virt) and his girlfriend. There are some good tunes there, but the admins are the ideal pimply-faced nerds who have nothing better to do than go on lock posts and send you nasty PMs whenever you don't agree with them. They also had the exceptionally retarded idea of making the entire web site into a MMORPG, so they'll prohibit you from doing certain things on the site if you haven't "gained enough levels."
Go, leech his bandwith for some occasionally cool tunes, but when it comes to the freaks that inhabit that site, stay far, far away.
If you don't believe me, just check out this picture. And if it's at all believable, he's one of the more normal ones...Yowzer. Tights...
It's certainly preferable to work for a company whose morals you agree with...but it's just as valuable to have good people in bad places. You can do a thousand times more good being a moral, respectable person in the SCO ranks than you can by quitting. As long as you are true to yourself and some concept of morality...as long as you're not the one trying to screw honest developers out of their work, I'd rather have someone like you working for SCO than someone who totally agrees with Darl. Working for a bad company doesn't make you bad...it's only when you become like them.
Linux can operate just fine without a mouse...in fact, there are console tools that allow you to do just about whatever you need...it's surprisingly pleasant to code in vi, play music with mp3blaster, and browse the web with lynx.
Besides, if you screw something up in windows, you NEED a mouse just to load / remove drivers, change your GUI config, etc. In linux, all of those things can be done from the console.
The trick is, if we allow consumers to decide what they want for themselves, they will find and come to expect GOOD movies, which are much more difficult to make than "Gili". It's easier to ensure that you have a good return on your investment in a movie when you can totally control what it's competing with. Additionally, it's easier to milk each region for what it's worth, rather than having one price.
In short, they don't care about hypothetical sales for "hero." They want kung fu fans to shut up, get out there, and start paying up for whatever they have decided is the kung fu movie for december 2003 is. Stop telling them what you want. The movie / music industries will tell you what you want, and when you can have it.
Anything that you produce would have been impossible without the society that brought you into this world, fed you, cared for you and educated you. You get a monopoly over your own contributions because the government offers that to you as an incentive. If you truly owned an invention it would be yours to pass down to your descendents until the end of time.
Copyright law should give people just enough incentive that they create things, while always being conscious of the fact that works should return to the public domain as quickly as possible. You never truly own anything you create...that's the way it is, and it's always been that way. It is most certainly NOT a matter of semantics...this principle is the only thing that prevents one revolutionary invention (say an AIDS vaccine) from allowing one person to take over the world.
Having played the Icewind Dale series to death, I have to just say that this sucked. I used to hang out on the BIS message boards a lot, and I really got the feel that these guys really put their hearts into making well-crafted stories for the fans to enjoy.
This is really a shame. Good luck to everyone who worked at BIS, and best of luck in the future.
Ign is bloated crapware...I get four or five full-page ads just to check the newest reviews.
Gamespy has this really irritating login thing...they always get listed for mirrors, but you have to login and sign up and all of this crap just to get any file.
Perhaps once the two are combined they'll discard most of the kludge and return to a slim, informative site design.
After writing that, I slapped myself for being so optimistic...
Slashdot Mirror
...but I won't play this game and help the army's recruiting methods succeed. I'd rather encourage my friends to play games that aren't made by organizations bent on killing people. :)
That's just me, though...you may like killing people for a living.
Supporting legal music downloading is the dumbest thing the RIAA ever did. Why, you ask?
The RIAA currenly has a monopoly on physical distribution. No pirate could every touch them when it comes to their ability to crank out physical CD's. However, once they get the downloading in to the mainstream, (and I mean making it totally replace cds) they will have changed the market so that they are totally obsolete. The RIAA cannot survive in an online world...they are too big, too slow, and too hated.
Let's face it, when it comes to the internet, Geeks have a thousand times more resources for distributing information than the RIAA ever will. What's to stop new bands from using services like itunes to be promoted alongside RIAA bands, and then selling their own music over the net?
Anyways, here's to the RIAA! Thanks for helping to make a world where you are irrelevant!
Yeah, like I said, it's good for servers, but where's the end-user application?
You totally missed the point. The reason our music sucks is because nobody competes with the RIAA. I basically said that if there were no RIAA it would stimulate competition resulting in better music.
Now, this kind of stuff might be useful for...um...hard-core video editing...and really, really huge servers, but that's about it. The truth of the matter is that your everyday user just has no need to handle numbers of that size or data of those quantities. There are very few situations where 32-bit processors are actually a problem.
This is all based on the erroneous assumption that we somehow NEED the RIAA to get good music. They'd love to have everyone believe that they're the only thing that keeps the good music coming, when in reality they're just an organization devoted to cashing in on people. They have this profit-centric approach to art so perfected that they don't even need artistic talent anymore...they can just suck the blood out of one fad after another.
The RIAA wants to think of musicians like bacteria in a petri dish, that needs to be protected and coddled...I say give me the virulent strain, the one that's had to contend with antibiotics, the elements, and the human immune system.
Only in a brutal, difficult music industry, devoid of fat cats with big wallets, will the truly great artists end up on top.
Tar, Feathers, and Pitchforks, baby.
This is why Object-Oriented Programming is so important. When you think of your program in terms of a series of independent objects that are orchestrated to perform a task, you don't need to discard code that isn't being changed.
In my experience, I have seen very few projects that truly use OOP to its maximum power. Just the other day, I was leafing through the GAIM source, and let me tell you, it wasn't pretty. I personally haven't spent any time studying the code mentioned in the articles, but I'd be willing to bet that most failed rewrites come from code that is not modular.
If you start writing your program with any idea in your head, it might work out, and it might not...the only way to be really sure that your work is going to be of some benefit down the line is to assume that whatever you're writing will need to be replaced, and make that process as painless as possible.
IMO, portability, reusability, and time-effective maintenence are all dependent on OOP.
Think of it this way. You can't put 10 poems in order, publish the book, thereby gaining ownership of the poems, and then sue someone whenever you see the poem reprinted somewhere else. That's all that decision means. This, however, is different.
Imagine, if you will, that you're sitting in a classroom, and it's time to hand in your term papers....you then notice that the kid sitting next to you has EXACTLY the same title page and table of contents from the term paper you turned in last year...wouldn't it be worth checking to see if there are any other similarities?
...is just the world's most expensive filter...from what I understand, it just sits at someone's ISP and collects all of their traffic. Aside from the fact that it can rape thousands of people's privacy at once, it's really nothing to be impressed with...when you're trying to get a specific person's data traditional hacking techniques are still the way to go.
They have the effect of imposing natural selection on our P2P networks. Those that have vulnerable infrastructure will fall, and ones that do not will prosper. Sure, they are accomplishing their goal in the shortest of short terms, but they're creating the motivation and inspiration for unstoppable, anonymous pirate networks. It may look like the music industry is getting healthier, but they're just encouraging the creation of a bigger, badder bug.
What's wrong with our cakes as they are?
vgmix. Only trouble is the guys who run that site are a real bunch of assholes....some clown named Jake (virt) and his girlfriend. There are some good tunes there, but the admins are the ideal pimply-faced nerds who have nothing better to do than go on lock posts and send you nasty PMs whenever you don't agree with them. They also had the exceptionally retarded idea of making the entire web site into a MMORPG, so they'll prohibit you from doing certain things on the site if you haven't "gained enough levels." Go, leech his bandwith for some occasionally cool tunes, but when it comes to the freaks that inhabit that site, stay far, far away. If you don't believe me, just check out this picture. And if it's at all believable, he's one of the more normal ones...Yowzer. Tights...
...further proof that no matter how pedantic you are, there's always someone just itching to one-up you on Slashdot...
It's certainly preferable to work for a company whose morals you agree with...but it's just as valuable to have good people in bad places. You can do a thousand times more good being a moral, respectable person in the SCO ranks than you can by quitting. As long as you are true to yourself and some concept of morality...as long as you're not the one trying to screw honest developers out of their work, I'd rather have someone like you working for SCO than someone who totally agrees with Darl. Working for a bad company doesn't make you bad...it's only when you become like them.
Linux can operate just fine without a mouse...in fact, there are console tools that allow you to do just about whatever you need...it's surprisingly pleasant to code in vi, play music with mp3blaster, and browse the web with lynx. Besides, if you screw something up in windows, you NEED a mouse just to load / remove drivers, change your GUI config, etc. In linux, all of those things can be done from the console.
Saying the iPod doesn't benefit from iTunes is like saying the KKK doesn't benefit from the NRA.
The trick is, if we allow consumers to decide what they want for themselves, they will find and come to expect GOOD movies, which are much more difficult to make than "Gili". It's easier to ensure that you have a good return on your investment in a movie when you can totally control what it's competing with. Additionally, it's easier to milk each region for what it's worth, rather than having one price.
In short, they don't care about hypothetical sales for "hero." They want kung fu fans to shut up, get out there, and start paying up for whatever they have decided is the kung fu movie for december 2003 is. Stop telling them what you want. The movie / music industries will tell you what you want, and when you can have it.
Why don't we SYN flood their FTP server? If their claims are correct, it should go offline, right?
What are you going to do, put it in your pocket? How do you stealthily steal a cruise missile? Wouldn't people notice it poking out of your trunk?
If all he uses is the web, why don't you put linux on there. Just do a barebones install, give him fluxbox and firebird and be done with it.
Anything that you produce would have been impossible without the society that brought you into this world, fed you, cared for you and educated you. You get a monopoly over your own contributions because the government offers that to you as an incentive. If you truly owned an invention it would be yours to pass down to your descendents until the end of time.
Copyright law should give people just enough incentive that they create things, while always being conscious of the fact that works should return to the public domain as quickly as possible. You never truly own anything you create...that's the way it is, and it's always been that way. It is most certainly NOT a matter of semantics...this principle is the only thing that prevents one revolutionary invention (say an AIDS vaccine) from allowing one person to take over the world.
Having played the Icewind Dale series to death, I have to just say that this sucked. I used to hang out on the BIS message boards a lot, and I really got the feel that these guys really put their hearts into making well-crafted stories for the fans to enjoy. This is really a shame. Good luck to everyone who worked at BIS, and best of luck in the future.
Ign is bloated crapware...I get four or five full-page ads just to check the newest reviews. Gamespy has this really irritating login thing...they always get listed for mirrors, but you have to login and sign up and all of this crap just to get any file. Perhaps once the two are combined they'll discard most of the kludge and return to a slim, informative site design. After writing that, I slapped myself for being so optimistic...
The guy's a filmmaker giving the equivalent of a giant thank-you card, not a civil servant.