iPhones are synced with computers, but sometimes it'd be nice if they weren't. They've got their own internet connection, so why not do all their syncing directly over the net?
The site seems slasdotted, so I can't RTFA, but my first thought is: what about games with draconian DRM that allows you to install it only a limited number of times? Employees playing those games may destroy the usefulness of those games.
Venus is also a great example of the greenhouse effect. Venus is hotter than Mercury, which is much closer to the sun, but has no atmosphere. Venus' atmosphere traps the heat.
A space elevator at ground level is most likely impossible with current technology, and would certainly be unfeasible (the center would have to be very large in order to keep the whole thing together). A space elevator that can be reached by standard aircraft, however, might just be possible, and with stronger material a ground level one might be as well.
What exactly is the fundamental difference between a space elevator at ground level and one that can be reached by standard aircraft? Those last few km really don't matter in comparison to the other 36000 km.
Star Wars also has small communication devices and other plausible technology that didn't exist at the time (how about robots walking on two legs? Asimo walks somewhat similarly to C3PO).
Two things make Star Wars fantasy: The Force, and the structure of the story. Everything else is perfectly fine SF. Star Trek has a less fantasy-oriented story structure, and pretends to be very SFy, but it has plenty of magic: transporters, replicators, psionics. It's given a name and they act like it has a scientific foundation, but those are not really any better than midichorians.
Thing is, C3PO is a main character; doesn't have to be useful. Besides, he's a hell of a story teller.
Which is definitely a use. Mostly he's a translator, which is useless as long as everybody speaks the same language, but he's the only one who can understand R2D2 and Ewoks.
German is of course a Germaic language rather than a Romanic one (like Italian, Spanish and French), but it does have a lot of words that are closer to the Latin version than their French relatives.
I wonder though, is exploiting a bug in a game in this manner concidered as cheating? I didn't hack any files, I didn't enter a cheat code, I just kept repeatedly talking to a character, who appearantly liked giving me xp for nothing.
Exploiting an obvious and avoidable bug counts as cheating in my book.
I once had a user who could crash anything, just by sitting in front of it. I finally bought some extension cables, and placed her workstation fifteen feet away from where she sat: Keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
After that, it worked great. She got one of her co-workers to turn it on every morning...
There are people who are abnormally 'lucky' with computers, too. A lot of them go into IT, I'd suspect.
Unfortunately I seem to be nearly as jinxed as your user. Stuff that works fine for everybody else fails for me. Hardware doesn't quite break, but my new macbook is slow, applications freeze, firefox and netbeans crash all the time (but I'm blaming the mac). At my previous job, people were also perplexed that common stuff just didn't work for me.
Ruby is a language that attempts to simplify something that is already perfectly simple, and in the process of trying it really does not introduce much of anything useful.
Ruby is a language that simplifies something that is bloody hard in Java. Ever heard of AOP? Trivial in Ruby.
In terms of performance, I'd say empirically that NetBeans is worse than Eclipse.
They both freeze on me. But I used Eclipse on Windows, and NetBeans on a Mac, and in OS X, every application that wasn't specifically developed for Mac behaves like badly written bloatware. My guess would be that NetBeans would perform better on Windows or Linux. Then again, my Eclipse was loaded with plugins, whereas my NetBeans has only the most basic Ruby stuff, so I'm comparing apples with oranges.
Everyone always says "After company X goes bankrupt, it'll be worthless." - but really, what are the odds that Stardock/Valve/Microsoft/Blizzard/etc. will go under?
As others have pointed out already, pretty big. No company survives forever, and even big powerhouses (which Stardock is not) can eventually get in trouble.
But the real danger is not these companies going under, the real danger is them switching to even newer technology in the future, and stopping suport for this one. This has happened quite lot in the past (remember the Yahoo and MS music debacle?). And when they're not making money from an old technology anymore, they'll be losing money by supporting that technology, and losing money is bad for business.
These companies have been around for years - they clearly have some smart people leading them.
How long a company has existed doesn't mean a thing for how long it will continue to exist. But if it wants to continue to exist, those smart people will have to keep their eye on the bottom line: they need to make money. They will stop support for GOO or whatever other DRM scheme as soon as they stop making profit on it.
The only way I'd trust something like this is if patches that remove the DRM are already is escrow, to be released when the server goes down.
The ability to "steal" content unfortunately is a necessary part of it being accessable and usable.
Just when I'm out of mod points...
But yes, that's exactly it: if it's not usable after theft, it's probably also not usable after something else went wrong.
As far as I understand, GOO does require online activation, which means that after Stardock goed bankrupt, you probably won't be able to install it on a new machine anymore. And if you are able to install it on new machines without requiring Stardock's permission, that pretty much means you can "steal" it.
The Yugo sold quite a lot of cars, and according to the wikipedia article you link to, they're still being sold. Not in the US, but the Tata Nano isn't aimed at the US either. Lots of stuff isn't. Just because something won't succeed in the US, that doesn't automatically make it a failure.
Slashdot Mirror
iPhones are synced with computers, but sometimes it'd be nice if they weren't. They've got their own internet connection, so why not do all their syncing directly over the net?
The site seems slasdotted, so I can't RTFA, but my first thought is: what about games with draconian DRM that allows you to install it only a limited number of times? Employees playing those games may destroy the usefulness of those games.
Venus is also a great example of the greenhouse effect. Venus is hotter than Mercury, which is much closer to the sun, but has no atmosphere. Venus' atmosphere traps the heat.
I prefer Terran.
It's Solomani for me.
But if we did want a name for people from Tellus, wouldn't Tellosian be better? It at least fits grammatically.
I'm still waiting for the SF story that calls stuff from Venus "Venerial" rather than "Venusian".
A space elevator at ground level is most likely impossible with current technology, and would certainly be unfeasible (the center would have to be very large in order to keep the whole thing together). A space elevator that can be reached by standard aircraft, however, might just be possible, and with stronger material a ground level one might be as well.
What exactly is the fundamental difference between a space elevator at ground level and one that can be reached by standard aircraft? Those last few km really don't matter in comparison to the other 36000 km.
Star Wars also has small communication devices and other plausible technology that didn't exist at the time (how about robots walking on two legs? Asimo walks somewhat similarly to C3PO).
Two things make Star Wars fantasy: The Force, and the structure of the story. Everything else is perfectly fine SF. Star Trek has a less fantasy-oriented story structure, and pretends to be very SFy, but it has plenty of magic: transporters, replicators, psionics. It's given a name and they act like it has a scientific foundation, but those are not really any better than midichorians.
Thing is, C3PO is a main character; doesn't have to be useful. Besides, he's a hell of a story teller.
Which is definitely a use. Mostly he's a translator, which is useless as long as everybody speaks the same language, but he's the only one who can understand R2D2 and Ewoks.
Since when is German based on Latin?
German is of course a Germaic language rather than a Romanic one (like Italian, Spanish and French), but it does have a lot of words that are closer to the Latin version than their French relatives.
Inequalities are a fact of life in a free society. It sucks, but it's better than the alternative.
Which alternative exactly? There are several.
Personally I prefer a society where freedom is distributed equally over one where freedom is only for those who can afford it.
A society where the poor are unable to protect themselves against injustice is not really a free society at all.
In Soviet Russia the people at the top of the food chain also had a lot of freedom. Freedom for a minority doesn't make it a free society.
Google notes that...over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.
and how does Google know that?
They're Google. Knowing stuff is their business.
I wonder though, is exploiting a bug in a game in this manner concidered as cheating? I didn't hack any files, I didn't enter a cheat code, I just kept repeatedly talking to a character, who appearantly liked giving me xp for nothing.
Exploiting an obvious and avoidable bug counts as cheating in my book.
I once had a user who could crash anything, just by sitting in front of it. I finally bought some extension cables, and placed her workstation fifteen feet away from where she sat: Keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
After that, it worked great. She got one of her co-workers to turn it on every morning...
There are people who are abnormally 'lucky' with computers, too. A lot of them go into IT, I'd suspect.
Unfortunately I seem to be nearly as jinxed as your user. Stuff that works fine for everybody else fails for me. Hardware doesn't quite break, but my new macbook is slow, applications freeze, firefox and netbeans crash all the time (but I'm blaming the mac). At my previous job, people were also perplexed that common stuff just didn't work for me.
This is really annoying for a programmer.
I have never had a harddrive fail. Never. Not on a fresh computer and not on a decade old one.
Can I hire you as admin for our raid-0 disk server?
I can't understand your argument. Ruby wasn't created as a response to Java, it predates it.
True. It's programmers migrating to Ruby that's a response to Java.
Ruby is a language that attempts to simplify something that is already perfectly simple, and in the process of trying it really does not introduce much of anything useful.
Ruby is a language that simplifies something that is bloody hard in Java. Ever heard of AOP? Trivial in Ruby.
In all seriousness, Ruby is probably used less than Python and PHP.
But growing faster.
1. Ask Slashdot
2. ????
3. Profit!
No, Java will be supercesed by COBOL.
Java already is the new COBOL.
In terms of performance, I'd say empirically that NetBeans is worse than Eclipse.
They both freeze on me. But I used Eclipse on Windows, and NetBeans on a Mac, and in OS X, every application that wasn't specifically developed for Mac behaves like badly written bloatware. My guess would be that NetBeans would perform better on Windows or Linux. Then again, my Eclipse was loaded with plugins, whereas my NetBeans has only the most basic Ruby stuff, so I'm comparing apples with oranges.
And I'd say, when it comes to editing source code, I think only ed sucks more than Visual Studio.
An IDE is not just about the editor. When I worked with Visual Studio (ages ago, fortunately), I used a gvim plugin as editor.
No IDE does exactly what you need. The real strength of IDEs is the availlability of plugins that add the functionality you do need.
IBM has made plenty of money with Websphere. What would "owning Java" give them?
They get to call the shots.
Also, they get a lot more Java experts, so maybe they can finally fix some of their own crap.
Everyone always says "After company X goes bankrupt, it'll be worthless." - but really, what are the odds that Stardock/Valve/Microsoft/Blizzard/etc. will go under?
As others have pointed out already, pretty big. No company survives forever, and even big powerhouses (which Stardock is not) can eventually get in trouble.
But the real danger is not these companies going under, the real danger is them switching to even newer technology in the future, and stopping suport for this one. This has happened quite lot in the past (remember the Yahoo and MS music debacle?). And when they're not making money from an old technology anymore, they'll be losing money by supporting that technology, and losing money is bad for business.
These companies have been around for years - they clearly have some smart people leading them.
How long a company has existed doesn't mean a thing for how long it will continue to exist. But if it wants to continue to exist, those smart people will have to keep their eye on the bottom line: they need to make money. They will stop support for GOO or whatever other DRM scheme as soon as they stop making profit on it.
The only way I'd trust something like this is if patches that remove the DRM are already is escrow, to be released when the server goes down.
The ability to "steal" content unfortunately is a necessary part of it being accessable and usable.
Just when I'm out of mod points...
But yes, that's exactly it: if it's not usable after theft, it's probably also not usable after something else went wrong.
As far as I understand, GOO does require online activation, which means that after Stardock goed bankrupt, you probably won't be able to install it on a new machine anymore. And if you are able to install it on new machines without requiring Stardock's permission, that pretty much means you can "steal" it.
That's true. People can afford to drive more recklessly due to all the safety measures in their car.
I once heard a proposal to change that, by replacing the airbag in the steering wheel with a sharp steel spike.
Failed?
The Yugo sold quite a lot of cars, and according to the wikipedia article you link to, they're still being sold. Not in the US, but the Tata Nano isn't aimed at the US either. Lots of stuff isn't. Just because something won't succeed in the US, that doesn't automatically make it a failure.