Uh, no. Apple is just secretive. They never confirmed nor denied any third-party support in the first place because they were probably toying with a public SDK to get ready in time for WWDC. Hardly an "embarrassing climbdown" at all.
By the way, Apple's control over their mass-market devices is what makes them so stable and appealing.
How in the hell is legally protecting your rights by suing infringers who are distributing your copyrighted materials, and offering them a settlement to avoid court cases, an example of "Mafia tactics" or "protection money?"
Give me a fucking break. This is just another yawn-worthy RIAA-scapegoating article to make the pirates who post here feel all good about it--once again shoving the artists out of the equation. You know, the artists. The folks you're making sure don't get paid for the work. The actual human beings whose material you're spreading around so others won't pay for it.
I wonder if any of you would take a programming job where your boss would decide to not pay you for code you wrote and claim it wasn't theft because he's not actually taking physical property from you?
I know I risk downmods for saying this, but fuck this ridiculous mindset that claims the RIAA is always evil simply because it's suing infringers. If infringing material hadn't been found from their IPs, they wouldn't be getting sued. Because the RIAA doesn't have magic powers, it can't automatically know who is an elderly grandma or the computer of a deceased person, so those stories you hear about "OMG THE RIAA IS SUING ELDERLY PEOPLE OR DEAD PEOPLE" is more bogus propaganda bullshit to make people feel less guilty about piracy. It's human nature. You scapegoat them so you feel like you're fighting a bad guy, rather than feeling like a bad guy for not paying an artist somewhere in the world.
Life for MS means having paid fanboys submit stories to Slashdot with inaccurate headlines and summaries. The "flawed survey" (thanks for telling me what to think about it!) didn't say XP was more secure than Vista. It merely found little benefit in Vista over XP.
Yeah, it opens apps much faster because you're opening 1998-era apps with a reduced featureset in a version of Windows designed to assume that you're always the root user. Windows 98 is a hack on top of MS-DOS. Hacks are typically faster at the expense of functionality, safety, or other benefits.
There have been usability studies like this in the past that drew interesting conclusions. For instance, Windows (and Linux) users are slower at accessing menus because they have to stop their mouse and pinpoint the hit zone, while Mac users are used to slamming the cursor to the top of the screen and hitting the global menubar every time.
I've been troubled for years on how generational improvements in computation equipment don't seem to result in improved USER experience.
Yeah, fuck multitasking, scalable fonts, gigantic 32-bit widescreen displays, hardware accelerated textures, resolution independence, convenience services like spellchecking, firewalls, the processor-intensive audio and visual codecs we use everyday in music players and web browsers, and so on. We should go back to 8-bit 640x480 displays because the Windows 3.1 pulldown menu seemed faster. Also, video the size of a postage stamp was really cool!
I don't know - computing just doesn't seem very exciting anymore. Help.
It's all in your mind. Wake up and admire what you've got.
(recent examples such as the Macbooks, which I also own, are having nasty hardware and QC issues)
Oh please, not any more than the Mac Plus did. Stop romanticizing the past as if it was error-free:
From Wikipedia: The lack of fan could cause the life of a Macintosh Plus to end early for some users. As the power supply would heat up, solder joints inside it would fracture causing a bright vertical power line to run down the center of the screen.
From the debut of the Macintosh 128K through the Macintosh Plus, various third-party cooling add-ons were available to help increase airflow through the unit (including the fanless Mac Chimney which cooled by convection). Apple finally reorganized the Compact Macintosh case to accommodate a fan with the release of the Macintosh SE. Another popular remedy was to create more vents so that more air could escape.
You must have looked wrong. Nintendo is outselling Sony and Microsoft worldwide. Nintendo also has the advantage of catering to both non-casual AND hardcore. Metroid Prime 3 is due out in August, and I can't wait.
Beside that, your argument is moronic. I want to be able to solve a quest in different ways.
Then you'd better stop playing Oblivion since it offers no multiple ways to solve its ultra-linear quests. It's hilarious to me that you leverage Final Fantasy as an insult when Oblivion is just as railroaded and braindead. It is not an RPG. Classes don't matter, and level scaling makes progression pointless. It's a safe, crippled sandbox for XBox 360 players to feel "next-gen" without feeling the challenge of having to locate NPCs or locations by themselves without the Magic McCompass telling them where to point and run.
God, no. If developers make more games like Oblivion, then RPGs are truly doomed. Look at these uninformed quotes from the article:
"For instance," Urquhart explained in an interview to be published on CVG shortly, "it used to be fine to make an RPG that was just wandering around and hacking things up with the player having very little effect on the world around them. Why play that game now if you could just play a MMO?"
Um, no. Good RPGs allowed you to have an effect in the world.
"For example, in Mask of the Betrayer, we can make the world react more to your personal decisions than any MMO could hope to. We can let you impact your companions and the game's NPCs - and the entire story outcome - in ways that MMOs cannot."
Oblivion barely qualifies as an RPG. The skills and armor sets were drastically reduced from Morrowind, and the combat was morphed into a Quake-like first-person twitchfest rather than a stat-based combat system. Classes don't matter, because you can do anything anyway. You can be the Arena Champion as a level 1 warrior, and then join the Mage's Guild and work your way to the top without ever actually using magic. The world and most of its quests (especially the main quest) are totally bland and meaningless.
It's endemic of the "next-gen" hype that leads to budgets spent on crap like SpeedTree and FaceGen rather than making the fucking game.
So, uhh, what was your point again? GP was saying that if the US fell off the face of the Earth tomorrow, the rest of the world would go chugging right along since the bulk of imports come from China and other developing nations.
God, I love anti-American Slashdotters. In your zeal to bash the U.S. (remember, it makes you intellectual and witty!), you conveniently leave out that if the U.S. disappeared, there wouldn't be anybody to buy the damn imports. Bye-bye, economies.
As for global warming, there is so much contradictory evidence that it's a joke whenever someone claims a consensus (the opposite of science, by the way). We'll look back on this silly politically-driven hysteria the same way we look back on the "global cooling" fears of the 1970s. Nobody can explain the medieval warming period, nobody can explain the correlation with solar cycles, nobody can explain the warming in the rest of the solar system, etc. etc. etc. The media cherry-picks what it wants people to hear, because it makes for a better ratings-driven storyline if we're destroying the planet through the evils of our own successes.
One of these days, mankind is going to wake up and stop loathing itself just to feel smart. That is, if liberals lose their stranglehold on the media (perhaps George Soros will have to die first).
Translation: "I'm about to use the logical fallacy called 'appeal to authority'"
Translation: You don't want to acknowledge any contradictory study because it violates your religion--environmentalism. Many environmentalists simply want everyone to feel guilty for their own successful existence. Notice that they never criticize the smaller, poorer countries that are polluting. It's always the advanced, successful nations.
Nobody here will actually read the article and find out why the U.S. opposes the draft. The summary makes it seem like the U.S. opposes it simply because it tries to counter global warming. Uh, no.
Practice what you preach. They "broke the law?" No, they did no such thing. They allegedly "infringed on a copyright." They are two separate things for a reason. copyright infringement != theft. That's why people aren't locked up for it. They're sued.
Uh, you don't explain how they're separate things simply because you believe it's not theft (even though it 100% is, just like stolen GPL code is always called "stolen").
And mind you, many of these words may be buzzwords
Excellent, we already agree.
but at their heart, can you honestly say this is not intimidation?
Yes. Protecting your own rights isn't intimidation.
How many people who have NOT downloaded anything illegally have been sued? How many laws (note, LAWS) has the RIAA tried to bend/break in order to GET information on people?
Since you're making the implication, it's up to you to tell me. As for breaking laws, copyright infringement absolutely is breaking the law. That's why the FBI shuts down piracy rings, but because they can't go after every individual infringer, that is left up to the copyright holder.
And one last bit that gets said over and over again: When you pay for that System of a Down CD, 95% of that money (number made up off top of my head, point is, vast majority) goes to... the RIAA/its affiliates. Bands make money off of tours, merchandise, etc.
Ah, the ol' "They don't get paid much anyway" routine. Pirating music because you don't like the contract the artist willingly signed is like fucking a woman to give her virginity. The truth is that it's hardly 95%, and there is usually a recoup cost for recording and marketing followed by a percentage on future sales.
Artists don't make the majority of income on their expensive tours. Tours cost money and require a bunch of employees, equipment, and advertising to keep running. Tours are advertising to support the album and are scheduled based on the sales of an album in a given region. For example, Metallica's old Black Album tour schedule changed often when they wanted to push sales of the album in a given European country.
Yet another pro-piracy argument intended to make pirates feel better about what they do: "Artists don't make any money from record sales anyway."
Pirating an artist's music because you don't think they make enough money makes as much sense as fucking for virginity.
You're just making sure they get NO money at all. You also want to ignore that they willingly signed their contract, and that they will have reduced sales figures which means they risk getting dropped from the label due to lack of sales and inability to recoup the recording and marketing costs that were agreed upon in the contract.
Give artists money? Go to their concerts and buy all the junk there.
Ah, the ol' classic "someone else will pay them for their work" canard.
If they're trying to have schools clamp on filesharing, the pirates will just move on to other networks.
That's the point. At the least, they can make it more difficult for pirates to rip artists off.
I fucking hate this stupid company.
Why do you "fucking hate" a company legally protecting the rights of its represented artists? We go after stolen GPL code violations all the time here on Slashdot. But piracy of music artists, game developers (like John Carmack at id), movie studios, and so on is okey-dokey?
Let's examine the headline and summary for key words intended to scapegoat the RIAA to make pirates feel less guilty about what they do:
"Attacked" "hit list" "intimidation" "tactics of the industry" "attacked"
Now, what's funny is that all those emotional buzzwords ignore that these students were caught illegally ripping artists off. It's not intimidation or attacking if you defend your own intellectual property--WHICH SLASHDOTTERS SAID THEY SHOULD DO BACK IN 2000! Guess what, kiddies. If you don't want to be "attacked" for violating someone else's rights, don't break the law in the first place. You don't have my sympathy just because your university gave you a broadband connection and you made sure System of a Down didn't get paid today.
Yep. It's just as stupid as the argument people make when the government shuts down a piracy ring, and everyone chimes in with "I sure am glad they're going after the real bad guys instead of murderers and rapists." But those posts usually get modded up.
There really is an attack on Christianity here in the States. I'm an agnostic, and even I acknowledge it. Christianity is an openly mocked religion, the butt of countless punchlines on late night TV. However, Islam and other religions are protected and their critics are vilified as bigots. There are universities in this country where you're actually not allowed to display a Christmas tree, but a menorah is allowed.
The reason Jews are the historical focus is because they were the ones who mostly populated the concentration camps, they were the ones the Nazis originally wanted to ship to a different country, and they were the ones who were the primary target of the Final Solution.
Well, then try a Mac where the OpenGL implementation is shipped by Apple, and that's what all developers have to use. Granted, it's a little slower, though that has changed recently with the multithreading update, and Leopard will be using OpenGL 2.1.
Just wait until she wants to hook up a new scanner or printer from Wal-mart. Linux nerds always cite these cases where a machine they already spent the time setting up works great for someone. Yeah, of course--because you spent all the time setting it up for them, and you'll have to keep returning every time they need to do something technical with it. On a Mac, for instance, you just plug the printer in. No driver CD, no popup telling you it's installing drivers. Just plug it into the USB port, and the printer will be there in the list when you go to File->Print.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no. Apple is just secretive. They never confirmed nor denied any third-party support in the first place because they were probably toying with a public SDK to get ready in time for WWDC. Hardly an "embarrassing climbdown" at all.
By the way, Apple's control over their mass-market devices is what makes them so stable and appealing.
How in the hell is legally protecting your rights by suing infringers who are distributing your copyrighted materials, and offering them a settlement to avoid court cases, an example of "Mafia tactics" or "protection money?"
Give me a fucking break. This is just another yawn-worthy RIAA-scapegoating article to make the pirates who post here feel all good about it--once again shoving the artists out of the equation. You know, the artists. The folks you're making sure don't get paid for the work. The actual human beings whose material you're spreading around so others won't pay for it.
I wonder if any of you would take a programming job where your boss would decide to not pay you for code you wrote and claim it wasn't theft because he's not actually taking physical property from you?
I know I risk downmods for saying this, but fuck this ridiculous mindset that claims the RIAA is always evil simply because it's suing infringers. If infringing material hadn't been found from their IPs, they wouldn't be getting sued. Because the RIAA doesn't have magic powers, it can't automatically know who is an elderly grandma or the computer of a deceased person, so those stories you hear about "OMG THE RIAA IS SUING ELDERLY PEOPLE OR DEAD PEOPLE" is more bogus propaganda bullshit to make people feel less guilty about piracy. It's human nature. You scapegoat them so you feel like you're fighting a bad guy, rather than feeling like a bad guy for not paying an artist somewhere in the world.
Life for MS means having paid fanboys submit stories to Slashdot with inaccurate headlines and summaries. The "flawed survey" (thanks for telling me what to think about it!) didn't say XP was more secure than Vista. It merely found little benefit in Vista over XP.
Yeah, it opens apps much faster because you're opening 1998-era apps with a reduced featureset in a version of Windows designed to assume that you're always the root user. Windows 98 is a hack on top of MS-DOS. Hacks are typically faster at the expense of functionality, safety, or other benefits.
There have been usability studies like this in the past that drew interesting conclusions. For instance, Windows (and Linux) users are slower at accessing menus because they have to stop their mouse and pinpoint the hit zone, while Mac users are used to slamming the cursor to the top of the screen and hitting the global menubar every time.
Yeah, fuck multitasking, scalable fonts, gigantic 32-bit widescreen displays, hardware accelerated textures, resolution independence, convenience services like spellchecking, firewalls, the processor-intensive audio and visual codecs we use everyday in music players and web browsers, and so on. We should go back to 8-bit 640x480 displays because the Windows 3.1 pulldown menu seemed faster. Also, video the size of a postage stamp was really cool!
It's all in your mind. Wake up and admire what you've got.
Oh please, not any more than the Mac Plus did. Stop romanticizing the past as if it was error-free:
From Wikipedia:
The lack of fan could cause the life of a Macintosh Plus to end early for some users. As the power supply would heat up, solder joints inside it would fracture causing a bright vertical power line to run down the center of the screen.
From the debut of the Macintosh 128K through the Macintosh Plus, various third-party cooling add-ons were available to help increase airflow through the unit (including the fanless Mac Chimney which cooled by convection). Apple finally reorganized the Compact Macintosh case to accommodate a fan with the release of the Macintosh SE. Another popular remedy was to create more vents so that more air could escape.
Ha, if only cut-and-paste in Linux really was as simple as you just made it out to be.
What matters is what Microsoft actually ships, not vaporware lab projects it hypes in MSDN marketing brochures to get Windows trolls excited.
How is a new GUI and password dialog on top of the same old code a fundamental rewrite?
You must have looked wrong. Nintendo is outselling Sony and Microsoft worldwide. Nintendo also has the advantage of catering to both non-casual AND hardcore. Metroid Prime 3 is due out in August, and I can't wait.
Then you'd better stop playing Oblivion since it offers no multiple ways to solve its ultra-linear quests. It's hilarious to me that you leverage Final Fantasy as an insult when Oblivion is just as railroaded and braindead. It is not an RPG. Classes don't matter, and level scaling makes progression pointless. It's a safe, crippled sandbox for XBox 360 players to feel "next-gen" without feeling the challenge of having to locate NPCs or locations by themselves without the Magic McCompass telling them where to point and run.
Um, no. Good RPGs allowed you to have an effect in the world.
Yeah, welcome to 20 fucking years ago!
Oblivion barely qualifies as an RPG. The skills and armor sets were drastically reduced from Morrowind, and the combat was morphed into a Quake-like first-person twitchfest rather than a stat-based combat system. Classes don't matter, because you can do anything anyway. You can be the Arena Champion as a level 1 warrior, and then join the Mage's Guild and work your way to the top without ever actually using magic. The world and most of its quests (especially the main quest) are totally bland and meaningless.
It's endemic of the "next-gen" hype that leads to budgets spent on crap like SpeedTree and FaceGen rather than making the fucking game.
God, I love anti-American Slashdotters. In your zeal to bash the U.S. (remember, it makes you intellectual and witty!), you conveniently leave out that if the U.S. disappeared, there wouldn't be anybody to buy the damn imports. Bye-bye, economies.
As for global warming, there is so much contradictory evidence that it's a joke whenever someone claims a consensus (the opposite of science, by the way). We'll look back on this silly politically-driven hysteria the same way we look back on the "global cooling" fears of the 1970s. Nobody can explain the medieval warming period, nobody can explain the correlation with solar cycles, nobody can explain the warming in the rest of the solar system, etc. etc. etc. The media cherry-picks what it wants people to hear, because it makes for a better ratings-driven storyline if we're destroying the planet through the evils of our own successes.
One of these days, mankind is going to wake up and stop loathing itself just to feel smart. That is, if liberals lose their stranglehold on the media (perhaps George Soros will have to die first).
Translation: You don't want to acknowledge any contradictory study because it violates your religion--environmentalism. Many environmentalists simply want everyone to feel guilty for their own successful existence. Notice that they never criticize the smaller, poorer countries that are polluting. It's always the advanced, successful nations.
Nobody here will actually read the article and find out why the U.S. opposes the draft. The summary makes it seem like the U.S. opposes it simply because it tries to counter global warming. Uh, no.
Uh, you don't explain how they're separate things simply because you believe it's not theft (even though it 100% is, just like stolen GPL code is always called "stolen").
Excellent, we already agree.
Yes. Protecting your own rights isn't intimidation.
Since you're making the implication, it's up to you to tell me. As for breaking laws, copyright infringement absolutely is breaking the law. That's why the FBI shuts down piracy rings, but because they can't go after every individual infringer, that is left up to the copyright holder.
Ah, the ol' "They don't get paid much anyway" routine. Pirating music because you don't like the contract the artist willingly signed is like fucking a woman to give her virginity. The truth is that it's hardly 95%, and there is usually a recoup cost for recording and marketing followed by a percentage on future sales.
Artists don't make the majority of income on their expensive tours. Tours cost money and require a bunch of employees, equipment, and advertising to keep running. Tours are advertising to support the album and are scheduled based on the sales of an album in a given region. For example, Metallica's old Black Album tour schedule changed often when they wanted to push sales of the album in a given European country.
Pirating an artist's music because you don't think they make enough money makes as much sense as fucking for virginity.
You're just making sure they get NO money at all. You also want to ignore that they willingly signed their contract, and that they will have reduced sales figures which means they risk getting dropped from the label due to lack of sales and inability to recoup the recording and marketing costs that were agreed upon in the contract.
Ah, the ol' classic "someone else will pay them for their work" canard.
That's the point. At the least, they can make it more difficult for pirates to rip artists off.
Why do you "fucking hate" a company legally protecting the rights of its represented artists? We go after stolen GPL code violations all the time here on Slashdot. But piracy of music artists, game developers (like John Carmack at id), movie studios, and so on is okey-dokey?
Let's examine the headline and summary for key words intended to scapegoat the RIAA to make pirates feel less guilty about what they do:
"Attacked"
"hit list"
"intimidation"
"tactics of the industry"
"attacked"
Now, what's funny is that all those emotional buzzwords ignore that these students were caught illegally ripping artists off. It's not intimidation or attacking if you defend your own intellectual property--WHICH SLASHDOTTERS SAID THEY SHOULD DO BACK IN 2000! Guess what, kiddies. If you don't want to be "attacked" for violating someone else's rights, don't break the law in the first place. You don't have my sympathy just because your university gave you a broadband connection and you made sure System of a Down didn't get paid today.
Yep. It's just as stupid as the argument people make when the government shuts down a piracy ring, and everyone chimes in with "I sure am glad they're going after the real bad guys instead of murderers and rapists." But those posts usually get modded up.
There really is an attack on Christianity here in the States. I'm an agnostic, and even I acknowledge it. Christianity is an openly mocked religion, the butt of countless punchlines on late night TV. However, Islam and other religions are protected and their critics are vilified as bigots. There are universities in this country where you're actually not allowed to display a Christmas tree, but a menorah is allowed.
The reason Jews are the historical focus is because they were the ones who mostly populated the concentration camps, they were the ones the Nazis originally wanted to ship to a different country, and they were the ones who were the primary target of the Final Solution.
Well, then try a Mac where the OpenGL implementation is shipped by Apple, and that's what all developers have to use. Granted, it's a little slower, though that has changed recently with the multithreading update, and Leopard will be using OpenGL 2.1.
Just wait until she wants to hook up a new scanner or printer from Wal-mart. Linux nerds always cite these cases where a machine they already spent the time setting up works great for someone. Yeah, of course--because you spent all the time setting it up for them, and you'll have to keep returning every time they need to do something technical with it. On a Mac, for instance, you just plug the printer in. No driver CD, no popup telling you it's installing drivers. Just plug it into the USB port, and the printer will be there in the list when you go to File->Print.