Do these games not have a license that states that the game media contains additional data that is inaccessible to the user without the purchase of an additional Xbox Live license, or some such clause?
Apart from the alleged activation vs. download issue, I would think it reasonable for someone to assume that anything on the purchased media was for the use of the user who licensed the media, unless stated otherwise. Like the earlier french fry analogy, the fast food franchise would have to disclose that there were additional fries in the pouch but that you didn't have a right to eat those fries in the hidden compartment without paying for them.
I expect full access to the data in my possession. That Microsoft charged an extra fee for them to access something already in their possession and not being up front about it appears to be the sticking point. It makes them feel like they were deceived into paying twice for the same product (the additional maps). Whether they were charged twice or not, it is the impression that they were that matters.(*)
Compare the Furby where additional features were unlocked with the presence of multiple Furbys. That was disclosed up front.
But that was also a functional requirement for the feature: you couldn't have one Furby carrying on a conversation with another that wasn't there. So unless there's a reason why these maps are useless without being online, there's no functional requirement to be online to use them, so they should be freely enableable independent of Xbox Live.
(*) Does this sound like a DMCA-related problem? It's a bit like not being able to legally access the data on a DVD other than via a licensed player. One would find out quickly if one were to publicize how to unlock these levels without paying for Xbox Live whether Microsoft would think it is a DMCA violation.
Firefighters?! Where did they come in? Are there even any games that involve the killing of firefighters?
Grand Theft Auto 3 (likely Vice City as well) has firefighters showing up to put out fires you start on cars and people (Molotov cocktails and flamethrowers to name two methods). You can then pull them from the truck, kill them, and take the firetruck.
Then you can go on firefighter missions yourself putting out burning cars.
But there are also parked firetrucks you can steal to do those missions without pulling firemen from a truck. And unlike parked police cars, I have yet to see a firetruck in the game that was locked.
Then again, perhaps Snopes should do something to their pages so that they finish loading in finite time. Those damned remote-sourced Javascripts in the body of the pages never load, and too much of the web now requires Javascript to work for me to disable it! Client-side CSS does nothing to prevent them from trying to load.
So, 4 simultaneous DV streams, plus a little regular network traffic, is "an awful lot"?
Just because you're working in one DV application doesn't mean you don't have others bandwidth-using applications running. I could be saving a new rendering of an existing file while simultaneously encoding another into MPEG-2, while a third is in the process of being burned to a DVD, all on the same workstation, all on network mounted volumes.
And while all that is going on, I might want to browse the web for graphics to import into Photoshop for creating the interactive menus for the next DVD to be burned.
It is ECMAscript now. Invented by Netscape, it was first called Livescript, then Netscape got permission from Sun to call it Javascript (associating it with the popularity of Java), and now the standardized version is called ECMAscript.
Unfortunately I don't know the canonical capitalizations of Livescript or Javascript (and I'm not sure Netscape does either).
An animation would play once, then hang or crash the browser.
If only GIF support were this bad in major browsers! We could get rid of that accursed animated GIF altogether.
GIF support was this bad. Maybe you weren't on the net when Netscape 2.0 debuted, but that was when animated GIF support was first introduced (the files still bear the mark in their application control block) along with frames. The combination of animated GIFs and frames was often fatal to the browser, causing major memory leaks and crashes. (And you didn't have the kind of control available today to prevent another site from framing yours.) Before animated GIFs, you had to keep the connection open and use the server-push method to animate images on a browser.
Netscape toughed it out then to make animated GIFs work (and, alas, frames per their design). There just isn't that impetus to make it work again for MNG.
I've got GIFs from a defunct website that were sitting on a hard drive that developed errors throughout the drive because I put it on a bus that can't handle both master and slave drives. (I was attempting to make a backup and instead corrupted the original and backup drives.) Now I have a bunch of GIF files with errors in pairs of bytes randomly distributed in the file.
Now that the patent on GIF's compression is about to expire, I can work off of open source algorithms now legally distributable without royalties, attach my error fixing routines to the error detection code, progressively display the images, and fix the errors as they are encountered. And return my code to the public.
(I would have gone to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to get error-free copies, but they don't have the images for the site available. I only managed to get what I could by browsing image directories, and AFAIK I have the only "surviving" copies.)
Hah. My sister got me a complete NeXT cube at a real auction for only $25, sole bidder.
You can also pick up old Apple II-series computers at your local small Apple dealer for less (and no shipping). I've rescued two platinum//e models, a//c, and a dead IIgs (to use as parts if my original starts to die). Even picked up an old Mac Plus just to run AppleShare and try booting a IIgs over an AppleTalk network.
No, that's not correct for AppleSoft BASIC. RND takes a seed value as a parameter and returns a floating point number from 0.0 to 1.0. Some changes:
20 X = RND(1) * 1000 30 Y = RND(1) * 80 60 PRINT "*"; DEL 80
The last two changes avoid running into the garbage collection routines for dealing with strings.
I think you also need a:
15 TEXT : PRINT CHR$(4); "PR#3"
to disable any graphics mode and activate 80 column mode, if a card to enable it is installed or part of the firmware. Assuming you have DOS or ProDOS loaded, otherwise:
15 TEXT : PR# 3
Nice that you didn't even need a disk operating system to program, though saving to cassette tape was difficult (the IIgs didn't even have a cassette output port).
Uninitialized variables weren't a problem in AppleSoft BASIC. And the LET statement was generally useless.
Granted the ability to stop some crimes before they happen would be of incredible benefit to society as whole.
It's like doing unto others before they do unto you. Soon, even attempted attempted murder will become a crime.
Then, since a neighborhood is considered a high crime area, the whole neighborhood will be placed under neighborhood arrest. The imprisoned area will become larger and larger until you'll need the assistance of one Snake Plissken to get out.
If RTML is instructions fed to a remote telescope in the form of markup, then why wouldn't HTML be called Web Browser Markup Language (WBML)?
It may be conventional usage of XML-derived markup languages, but it seems antithetical to the idea of a markup language. I'll explain why:
Markup languages don't use action verbs for their tags; they use nouns. "This is a table containing these table rows containing this tabular data." A browser knows what a table is and renders it according to its own rules (even if that rendering is as text separated by tabs and newlines).
A language that tells its renderer to "point this way", "film from this time to that time", and "track this path" is not marking up data, it is instructing a device to do things. (Even HTML's EM tag is saying "this word has emphasis", not "emphasize this word".) If this is what RTML is, it isn't a markup language.
Otherwise it's like telling a computer, "The zone immediately below us, in a square of fifty surface spacials," and expecting it to know you want it destroyed completely. The sentence was not a command. The response, "Clarify your instructions," is practically equivalent to an annoyed, "Yeah, what about it?"
When your tags become verbs, what you have ceases to be a markup language and becomes an instructional language. It may look like a markup language, borrowing from the syntax rules of a markup language, but it is an instructional language. IMO, it would be improper to call it a markup language.
Unless what it is marking up is a programming or other instructional language, one so designed that it needs a markup language to be laid upon it to ease the task of interpretation. This would be like overlaying an XML schema on top of C to make blindingly obvious what is what in a C program (structures, functions, statements, parameters, etc.). But one would not call such a CML a programming language, and the CML would not be controlling anything, merely making it easier for the compiler (or interpreter).
IMO, either the report is incorrect, or RTML isn't really a markup language but instead an XML crutch upon which a programming language is built.
How do you use a markup language to control a telescope? Markup languages are used to add meta data to describe a document. If anything it should be used to describe the remote telescope. It doesn't control the telescope directly; that's the function of the backend, comparable to the CGI used with HTML to accept forms data to make the server do things like take credit card orders. Without that, the HTML controls squat about what it describes.
Either it is a markup language or it controls the telescope. It cannot be both.
And if it is a markup language, I should be able to have an RTML browser that renders the Hubble at the simplicity of a circa 1960 child's hobby telescope with a tripod and sliding eyepiece.
There's something ripe here, and it's not the RIAA's case.
They should have to wait until there such a service is launched before suing, just like those who fear being sued under the DMCA seeking affirmation of legality beforehand have been rebuffed by the courts.
Then why do people need to write the rest of my address on the envelope?
Apart from it making the mail carrier's job a little easier not having to memorize the numbers for every home on his route, they don't. The rest of the address is redundant.
Though ZIP+6 is even more accurate, and also in use.
One enters only the 5-digit zip code into a TiVo. And the accuracy of the zip code is only dependent upon whether you can get your cable company's lineup (or antenna lineup if you dare try) in the zip code you enter.
Unfortunately, people living in small towns with a single zip code and little TiVo penetration are more vulnerable to association to their viewer data, especially if their cable company doesn't provide identical service to multiple communities.
Still, it seems one can effectively opt out of the selling of this information by delaying when you watch your recordings. It was interesting to see that some commercial during the Super Bowl was the most viewed with TiVos before I even had a chance to watch it myself. (And I watch the Super Bowl only for the commercials, skipping all the plays.)
TiVo hiring a data mining firm to associate subscribers to e-mail addresses, where that firm acquired their database partially from WHOIS in violation of the WHOIS license agreement, now that's something to complain loudly about!
And now, in readable form. (Just changed my default to Plain Old Text from HTML Formatted. Sorry, I'm new.)
With TiVo's new networking feature, you must wait several minutes as the show is copied onto the second unit, where it will remain as a duplicate. You lose instant gratification, but gain the freedom to offload recordings from one TiVo to another when the first one's hard drive is getting full.
This isn't entirely accurate. While the ceiling of the bitrate for Best Quality recordings on a TiVo is higher than that of the USB 1.1 ethernet adapter, recordings at other qualities can be watched as they transfer on the receiving TiVo without delays on a clear 100 Mb/s LAN.
And even at Best Quality, my experience has shown that some shows can still be watched as they transfer without delays, depending on how much motion is in them. Series2 hardware running 4.0 (which enables this Home Media Option) apparently do some basic Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding. I had no problems watching the original Night of the Living Dead while it was transferring.
Though TiVo hasn't said that 4.0 enables VBR on Series2, my experience with that transfer and being able to store many more hours of G4's Portal at Best Quality (very low motion for the majority of that show) than my TiVo's capacity reports, indicates that some VBR encoding is going on.
With TiVo's new networking feature, you must wait several minutes as the show is copied onto the second unit, where it will remain as a duplicate. You lose instant gratification, but gain the freedom to offload recordings from one TiVo to another when the first one's hard drive is getting full.
This isn't entirely accurate. While the ceiling of the bitrate for Best Quality recordings on a TiVo is higher than that of the USB 1.1 ethernet adapter, recordings at other qualities can be watched as they transfer on the receiving TiVo without delays on a clear 100 Mb/s LAN.
And even at Best Quality, my experience has shown that some shows can still be watched as they transfer without delays, depending on how much motion is in them. Series2 hardware running 4.0 (which enables this Home Media Option) apparently do some basic Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding. I had no problems watching the original Night of the Living Dead while it was transferring.
Though TiVo hasn't said that 4.0 enables VBR on Series2, my experience with that transfer and being able to store many more hours of G4's Portal at Best Quality (very low motion for the majority of that show) than my TiVo's capacity reports, indicates that some VBR encoding is going on.
You are degrading the quality of the video if you're capturing it through the analog outputs, even if it is a DirecTiVo. There is no loss[*] between what the dish receives and what you burn if you're doing digital extraction using TyStudio, but there is if it's converting it to an S-Video signal and you're digitizing it with a capture card (and then there's the matter of getting an audio capture card that can capture the digital audio output).
[*] That is, no further loss beyond the digitization process that DirecTV puts on the signal themselves. Your digitally extracted copy just has no further loss beyond that already present in the transmitted signal. You want less loss? Get a BUD (Big Ugly Dish), point it at the uplink feeds for the various networks, and figure out how to extract the signal it receives digitally.
I have never even heard Shadowbane, though I've probably walked by the box in CompUSA or Best Buy. Now, my interest is perked, and I'm sure Ubi will plug the hole.
I guess that's only fair, since the hole plugged the software first.
Slashdot Mirror
Do these games not have a license that states that the game media contains additional data that is inaccessible to the user without the purchase of an additional Xbox Live license, or some such clause?
Apart from the alleged activation vs. download issue, I would think it reasonable for someone to assume that anything on the purchased media was for the use of the user who licensed the media, unless stated otherwise. Like the earlier french fry analogy, the fast food franchise would have to disclose that there were additional fries in the pouch but that you didn't have a right to eat those fries in the hidden compartment without paying for them.
I expect full access to the data in my possession. That Microsoft charged an extra fee for them to access something already in their possession and not being up front about it appears to be the sticking point. It makes them feel like they were deceived into paying twice for the same product (the additional maps). Whether they were charged twice or not, it is the impression that they were that matters.(*)
Compare the Furby where additional features were unlocked with the presence of multiple Furbys. That was disclosed up front.
But that was also a functional requirement for the feature: you couldn't have one Furby carrying on a conversation with another that wasn't there. So unless there's a reason why these maps are useless without being online, there's no functional requirement to be online to use them, so they should be freely enableable independent of Xbox Live.
(*) Does this sound like a DMCA-related problem? It's a bit like not being able to legally access the data on a DVD other than via a licensed player. One would find out quickly if one were to publicize how to unlock these levels without paying for Xbox Live whether Microsoft would think it is a DMCA violation.
ever notice on your bill how your account number is your phone number?
Well, they need all 10 of those digits. What do you expect them to do: bill everyone according to only the 9 digits of their social security number?
Firefighters?! Where did they come in? Are there even any games that involve the killing of firefighters?
Grand Theft Auto 3 (likely Vice City as well) has firefighters showing up to put out fires you start on cars and people (Molotov cocktails and flamethrowers to name two methods). You can then pull them from the truck, kill them, and take the firetruck.
Then you can go on firefighter missions yourself putting out burning cars.
But there are also parked firetrucks you can steal to do those missions without pulling firemen from a truck. And unlike parked police cars, I have yet to see a firetruck in the game that was locked.
Then perhaps the write up on Snopes should be updated.
Then again, perhaps Snopes should do something to their pages so that they finish loading in finite time. Those damned remote-sourced Javascripts in the body of the pages never load, and too much of the web now requires Javascript to work for me to disable it! Client-side CSS does nothing to prevent them from trying to load.
So, 4 simultaneous DV streams, plus a little regular network traffic, is "an awful lot"?
Just because you're working in one DV application doesn't mean you don't have others bandwidth-using applications running. I could be saving a new rendering of an existing file while simultaneously encoding another into MPEG-2, while a third is in the process of being burned to a DVD, all on the same workstation, all on network mounted volumes.
And while all that is going on, I might want to browse the web for graphics to import into Photoshop for creating the interactive menus for the next DVD to be burned.
the 'old timers' from the era of the original Jargon File still congregate in the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.computers.
So, comp.society.folklore (moderated) is still dead?
Actually, I'm generally curious about the state of moderation on Usenet these days. Are the moderated children of rec.humor the only ones to survive?
It is ECMAscript now. Invented by Netscape, it was first called Livescript, then Netscape got permission from Sun to call it Javascript (associating it with the popularity of Java), and now the standardized version is called ECMAscript.
Unfortunately I don't know the canonical capitalizations of Livescript or Javascript (and I'm not sure Netscape does either).
An animation would play once, then hang or crash the browser.
If only GIF support were this bad in major browsers! We could get rid of that accursed animated GIF altogether.
GIF support was this bad. Maybe you weren't on the net when Netscape 2.0 debuted, but that was when animated GIF support was first introduced (the files still bear the mark in their application control block) along with frames. The combination of animated GIFs and frames was often fatal to the browser, causing major memory leaks and crashes. (And you didn't have the kind of control available today to prevent another site from framing yours.) Before animated GIFs, you had to keep the connection open and use the server-push method to animate images on a browser.
Netscape toughed it out then to make animated GIFs work (and, alas, frames per their design). There just isn't that impetus to make it work again for MNG.
I've got GIFs from a defunct website that were sitting on a hard drive that developed errors throughout the drive because I put it on a bus that can't handle both master and slave drives. (I was attempting to make a backup and instead corrupted the original and backup drives.) Now I have a bunch of GIF files with errors in pairs of bytes randomly distributed in the file.
Now that the patent on GIF's compression is about to expire, I can work off of open source algorithms now legally distributable without royalties, attach my error fixing routines to the error detection code, progressively display the images, and fix the errors as they are encountered. And return my code to the public.
(I would have gone to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to get error-free copies, but they don't have the images for the site available. I only managed to get what I could by browsing image directories, and AFAIK I have the only "surviving" copies.)
Hah. My sister got me a complete NeXT cube at a real auction for only $25, sole bidder.
//e models, a //c, and a dead IIgs (to use as parts if my original starts to die). Even picked up an old Mac Plus just to run AppleShare and try booting a IIgs over an AppleTalk network.
You can also pick up old Apple II-series computers at your local small Apple dealer for less (and no shipping). I've rescued two platinum
I picked up a //c cheaply a couple of years ago. It's monitor is a 5" monochrome. Matching color, apple logo, stand. Still works, too.
Of course, I'd rather have the LCD panel Heywood Floyd had on it when working on the beach in 2010.
No, that's not correct for AppleSoft BASIC. RND takes a seed value as a parameter and returns a floating point number from 0.0 to 1.0. Some changes:
20 X = RND(1) * 1000
30 Y = RND(1) * 80
60 PRINT "*";
DEL 80
The last two changes avoid running into the garbage collection routines for dealing with strings.
I think you also need a:
15 TEXT : PRINT CHR$(4); "PR#3"
to disable any graphics mode and activate 80 column mode, if a card to enable it is installed or part of the firmware. Assuming you have DOS or ProDOS loaded, otherwise:
15 TEXT : PR# 3
Nice that you didn't even need a disk operating system to program, though saving to cassette tape was difficult (the IIgs didn't even have a cassette output port).
Uninitialized variables weren't a problem in AppleSoft BASIC. And the LET statement was generally useless.
Granted the ability to stop some crimes before they happen would be of incredible benefit to society as whole.
It's like doing unto others before they do unto you. Soon, even attempted attempted murder will become a crime.
Then, since a neighborhood is considered a high crime area, the whole neighborhood will be placed under neighborhood arrest. The imprisoned area will become larger and larger until you'll need the assistance of one Snake Plissken to get out.
If RTML is instructions fed to a remote telescope in the form of markup, then why wouldn't HTML be called Web Browser Markup Language (WBML)?
It may be conventional usage of XML-derived markup languages, but it seems antithetical to the idea of a markup language. I'll explain why:
Markup languages don't use action verbs for their tags; they use nouns. "This is a table containing these table rows containing this tabular data." A browser knows what a table is and renders it according to its own rules (even if that rendering is as text separated by tabs and newlines).
A language that tells its renderer to "point this way", "film from this time to that time", and "track this path" is not marking up data, it is instructing a device to do things. (Even HTML's EM tag is saying "this word has emphasis", not "emphasize this word".) If this is what RTML is, it isn't a markup language.
Otherwise it's like telling a computer, "The zone immediately below us, in a square of fifty surface spacials," and expecting it to know you want it destroyed completely. The sentence was not a command. The response, "Clarify your instructions," is practically equivalent to an annoyed, "Yeah, what about it?"
When your tags become verbs, what you have ceases to be a markup language and becomes an instructional language. It may look like a markup language, borrowing from the syntax rules of a markup language, but it is an instructional language. IMO, it would be improper to call it a markup language.
Unless what it is marking up is a programming or other instructional language, one so designed that it needs a markup language to be laid upon it to ease the task of interpretation. This would be like overlaying an XML schema on top of C to make blindingly obvious what is what in a C program (structures, functions, statements, parameters, etc.). But one would not call such a CML a programming language, and the CML would not be controlling anything, merely making it easier for the compiler (or interpreter).
IMO, either the report is incorrect, or RTML isn't really a markup language but instead an XML crutch upon which a programming language is built.
How do you use a markup language to control a telescope? Markup languages are used to add meta data to describe a document. If anything it should be used to describe the remote telescope. It doesn't control the telescope directly; that's the function of the backend, comparable to the CGI used with HTML to accept forms data to make the server do things like take credit card orders. Without that, the HTML controls squat about what it describes.
Either it is a markup language or it controls the telescope. It cannot be both.
And if it is a markup language, I should be able to have an RTML browser that renders the Hubble at the simplicity of a circa 1960 child's hobby telescope with a tripod and sliding eyepiece.
There's something ripe here, and it's not the RIAA's case.
They should have to wait until there such a service is launched before suing, just like those who fear being sued under the DMCA seeking affirmation of legality beforehand have been rebuffed by the courts.
Well, if it is 105 (221 ), then I can think of one device that could use this as an embedded component: coffee makers.
But of course, if my coffee maker has a 1.3 GHz processor in it, it better make damn fine coffee!
Then why do people need to write the rest of my address on the envelope?
Apart from it making the mail carrier's job a little easier not having to memorize the numbers for every home on his route, they don't. The rest of the address is redundant.
Though ZIP+6 is even more accurate, and also in use.
One enters only the 5-digit zip code into a TiVo. And the accuracy of the zip code is only dependent upon whether you can get your cable company's lineup (or antenna lineup if you dare try) in the zip code you enter.
Unfortunately, people living in small towns with a single zip code and little TiVo penetration are more vulnerable to association to their viewer data, especially if their cable company doesn't provide identical service to multiple communities.
Still, it seems one can effectively opt out of the selling of this information by delaying when you watch your recordings. It was interesting to see that some commercial during the Super Bowl was the most viewed with TiVos before I even had a chance to watch it myself. (And I watch the Super Bowl only for the commercials, skipping all the plays.)
TiVo hiring a data mining firm to associate subscribers to e-mail addresses, where that firm acquired their database partially from WHOIS in violation of the WHOIS license agreement, now that's something to complain loudly about!
And now, in readable form. (Just changed my default to Plain Old Text from HTML Formatted. Sorry, I'm new.)
With TiVo's new networking feature, you must wait several minutes as the show is copied onto the second unit, where it will remain as a duplicate. You lose instant gratification, but gain the freedom to offload recordings from one TiVo to another when the first one's hard drive is getting full.
This isn't entirely accurate. While the ceiling of the bitrate for Best Quality recordings on a TiVo is higher than that of the USB 1.1 ethernet adapter, recordings at other qualities can be watched as they transfer on the receiving TiVo without delays on a clear 100 Mb/s LAN.
And even at Best Quality, my experience has shown that some shows can still be watched as they transfer without delays, depending on how much motion is in them. Series2 hardware running 4.0 (which enables this Home Media Option) apparently do some basic Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding. I had no problems watching the original Night of the Living Dead while it was transferring.
Though TiVo hasn't said that 4.0 enables VBR on Series2, my experience with that transfer and being able to store many more hours of G4's Portal at Best Quality (very low motion for the majority of that show) than my TiVo's capacity reports, indicates that some VBR encoding is going on.
With TiVo's new networking feature, you must wait several minutes as the show is copied onto the second unit, where it will remain as a duplicate. You lose instant gratification, but gain the freedom to offload recordings from one TiVo to another when the first one's hard drive is getting full. This isn't entirely accurate. While the ceiling of the bitrate for Best Quality recordings on a TiVo is higher than that of the USB 1.1 ethernet adapter, recordings at other qualities can be watched as they transfer on the receiving TiVo without delays on a clear 100 Mb/s LAN. And even at Best Quality, my experience has shown that some shows can still be watched as they transfer without delays, depending on how much motion is in them. Series2 hardware running 4.0 (which enables this Home Media Option) apparently do some basic Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding. I had no problems watching the original Night of the Living Dead while it was transferring. Though TiVo hasn't said that 4.0 enables VBR on Series2, my experience with that transfer and being able to store many more hours of G4's Portal at Best Quality (very low motion for the majority of that show) than my TiVo's capacity reports, indicates that some VBR encoding is going on.
You are degrading the quality of the video if you're capturing it through the analog outputs, even if it is a DirecTiVo. There is no loss[*] between what the dish receives and what you burn if you're doing digital extraction using TyStudio, but there is if it's converting it to an S-Video signal and you're digitizing it with a capture card (and then there's the matter of getting an audio capture card that can capture the digital audio output).
[*] That is, no further loss beyond the digitization process that DirecTV puts on the signal themselves. Your digitally extracted copy just has no further loss beyond that already present in the transmitted signal. You want less loss? Get a BUD (Big Ugly Dish), point it at the uplink feeds for the various networks, and figure out how to extract the signal it receives digitally.
I have never even heard Shadowbane, though I've probably walked by the box in CompUSA or Best Buy. Now, my interest is perked, and I'm sure Ubi will plug the hole. I guess that's only fair, since the hole plugged the software first.
What do you want them to do instead? Have Dave from Portal sic The Drifter on them?