It may be a one trick pony, but that's a damn nice trick. WarCraft, StarCraft, and Diablo titles are pretty much guaranteed to be top sellers when they ship.
Worth $800m? Not sure about that. It all depends on the sales and profits. Obviously the other game companies either don't have the cash to do the deal, or don't think it's worth that much to them.
While I overall agree with you, especially with modern C++ compilers, there is some truth to the perception that C++ is a mere extension of C.
The first (partial) implementations of C++ was, if I recall correctly, the AT&T headers that extended a C compiler.
And although C++ does have stronger typing than C, it's not exactly bulletproof. If you define classes for all of your types, then you can enforce strict typing, but for the 'basic' types (shared between C and C++), code that looks correct and compiles without warning could have catastrophic errors (reducing size in an assignment), and the fact that an enumerated type is treated by the compiler as a fancy bag of numbers.
Yes, these (and other) issues can all be avoided with strict discipline, but a common thread of all of the 'modern' language is to eliminate common human errors.
And re: your last example, that's one of the things that mortifies me about C++. All of this typechecking is really just a suggestion. It can be forced off by typecasting, allowing flagrantly illegal operations.
Hmm...I've got a laser printer, and it's about the size of a basketball. I'm pretty sure I could fit quite a few more than 8 basketballs in a small house. Perhaps I could even get several hundred in my small apartment.
I find it odd that you equate a news report that there are no WMD in Iraq, and there are WMD in North Korea with Arnold Swarzenegger waving his weiner around. I mean, if you're a bush-basher, you must admit that the next governor of CA is acting like your favorite president!
If the wording of your credit card said that they would only accept money that you had robbed from a 7-11, then yes, this would be the same case. The fact that you're poor and ignorant, and cannot find a better way to pay your bills than making a trip to the stop and rob is not, however, written into your contract with the credit card company. You got one, by the way.
And yes, there are two options: Get into compliance by releasing the code, or get into compliance by halting the use of the GPL code. The holders of the GPL copyright can get their lawyers involved to force them to do so, or to pay damages for violating the licensing requirements.
I know that there has been ranting and bitching about Linksys, but until some entity takes the responsibility to actually legally force a GPL violator to come into compliance, the GPL will be a toothless, albeit scary, dragon.
Who has the authority (and money) to hire lawyers to enforce the licensing terms of the code? If you want Linksys to stop using Linux the way that they have, you should find them, and be prepared for a very fun legal proceeding that tests whether GPL is enforceable at all. As far as I know, it has *never* been tested.
However, don't expect to get the source code that you want.
I've heard a lot about this, but haven't followed obsessively, so let me see if I have this straight.
Linksys is under fire for linking some proprietary code with the Linux kernel, and now refusing to release that code, in violation of the GPL.
It sounds, however, as though Linksys does not *own* that code in question, but that have, instead, licensed it from another third party. From that, it would sound as though Linksys does not have the authority to 'set it free' so to speak...it ain't theirs to legally do this with.
I understand that this will have little impact on the linux and/. crowd, and IANAL, but I thought that any terms of a contract that would requre illegal behavior were invalid and unenforceable, and would thus render the GPL terms unenforceable in such a situation.
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments
on
The Cult of the NDA
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Most NDAs don't actually prohibit you from discussing things generally, but they prohit you from discussing specifics.
The ones I have people sign prohibit discussing anything they may see, hear, or learn related to the technology/product being discussed.
Doesn't "...gamers are getting older and tastes are becoming more sophisticated" disagree with ""It is imperative that a game machine is easy to use for anyone"? Which is it?
I don't think that this is mutually exclusive at all. It's not as if young people don't play video games. In fact, the aging of the 'first generation' of video gamers has significantly spread the range of ages that games.
I cannot imagine a neo-luddite buying a console for a 3 year old, but my 3 year old likes to play on my GC. He thinks Zelda is great, and runs around talking about 'adventure boy', and that piglet game, well, it's piglet! Add to that the fact that I'm in my mid-30s, and we play these games *together* (I get through the hard parts, he runs around), this is a much bigger spectrum of ages than the 12-18 that one might initially percieve as 'video game ripe'.
Perhaps because it takes an hour to get somewhere in a bus, especially if you need to transfer, when it takes 15 minutes to do the same by car?
I live downtown in a major US city, and have begun driving because although we have fairly complete mass transit, it can take a damn long time to get around on the transit system, especially when the bus that's supposed to run every ten minutes somehow doesn't show up for 30 minutes at a stretch fairly regularly.
Yes, I will get flamed for this, I'm bad, I'm destroying the environment, but I'd rather spend that hour with my family than standing on a corner and sitting next to the people who take the bus!
Okay, so last year's Madden is now $10, after it has raked in $300 million in revenues. And next year, this year's Madden will do the same.
The thing is, typical shrink-wrap games require *no* after-sales support, other than the current PC misbehavior of releasing beta quality products and patching later (not an option on consoles). Zero, Nada...Even crappy EQ support costs money, and keeping the servers up costs money, too. And even if you don't like the incremental content, it comes from somewhere.
I'm not saying that EQ isn't profitable, or that the purveyors of MMO games should be recognized as saints or anything, but making a product that people want and charging what people will pay doesn't make them some sort of omnipresent evil conspiracy. Hell, Tivo costs about the same, and it's just a fancy VCR! Is EQ worth more to you than the monthly charge for your Tivo?
That said, most people won't pay the $15/month *required* to make online games viable (no profit, no product), even though we'll pay $100 a month for Digital TV and High-Speed Internet access. That money buys you a lot of variety for the whole family, but EQ buys you exactly one thing...EQ.
And yes, most software companies would like to sell software by subscription, especially when they have a captive customer base, or the customer wants to buy the 'future', rather than the 'present' product. I subscribe to virus protection software, and I know that I'll always be up-to-date, and the company is motivated to stay that way. And it's cheaper for me that way, so everybody wins!
For instance, when I was working at Sony (Electonics) in 2000, it was a widely discussed phenomenon concerning the $3.5 million in pure *profit* that Sony raked in per *month* from Everquest. This was after server fees, support fees, and everyone involved had gotten thier paychecks, and if you recall in 2000 EQ cost $9.95 a month.
IIRC, Everquest has ~400,000 subscribers, which would mean that they brought in about $3.5m in revenue per month, before paying for support people, developers, paying for bandwidth (lots), electricity et al.
The money that EQ brings in a year is significantly smaller than a 'smash hit' like Vice City, Madden Football, or the like, and the profit margins are nowhere near as high.
This article has an interesting read on the online market.
Uh, not to respond to your nit-picking with facts, but the Prius costs $21000 and the Camry costs $20,000-$26,000
And, well, I'd say that it's an easy bet that any of the electric cars out there will get far over 100 mpg. Put a gallon of gas in a can in the trunk, drive it around forever without ever opening it.
Just like their membership in the WTO and their status as Most Favored Nation by the US forces them to not commit heinous human rights violations, and to actively enforce intellectual property rights?
This should not be a surprise to anybody. In fact, half of the population is dumber than average.
First off, Star Trek is a TV show, not reality. Probably not even close to what reality will be.
Correct. Their fashion sense is rather disturbingly blunted. I cannot believe in a future dominated by skin-tight spandex jumpsuits. The horror of it is even worse than that of one dominated by robots.
The only place I see 'auger' is in this thread, and the useless replies, including my own. The synopsis and reg article both have the spelling 'augur'.
I think I saw him doing a little sidewalk show at Fisherman's Wharf a couple weeks ago. I thought "this is odd, there's a guy showing people he can solve the cube in under 30 seconds...", and just walked past.
Little did I know I was passing by my chance to meet a world champion. I just hope he doesn't let it go to his head and end up screwed up like Mike Tyson or Todd Marinovich.
Well, I installed OpenOffice, and the first, second, and third impression I had of it compared to MS Office were all "this is a piece of crap".
Mac Users, you're not missing out on much, so don't be too concerned. If you really weren't willing to pay for quality, you wouldn't have bought a Mac in the first place, right?
Would it be a good idea to have consumer pc boxes equipped with cheap builtin hardware firewall/nat?
It could, of course, be turned off by corporate IT folk who don't want to have it, or by the intrepid home user who knows what they are doing, but for the unwashed masses, would just 'be there'.
Anyway, would this provide any actual protection? And could it pass the UI test for the standard user?
Third, Asians refers to a wide variety of people. Orientals refers to people or objects specifically from East Asia, such as Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Thailanders and Vietnamese.
Actually, this is incorrect...
In the era when 'Oriental' was coined, it was everything east of Europe. The famous Orient Express rail line went to where? The Orient, of course, aka Turkey. And not all of the 'Orient Express' trains even went as far as Turkey. Some stopped in Sofia, Belgrade. wikipedia
Oriental Rugs typically come from the region previously known as Persia. Mine was made in India, others are made in Pakistan. You can pick them up in North Africa, too.
Slashdot Mirror
It may be a one trick pony, but that's a damn nice trick. WarCraft, StarCraft, and Diablo titles are pretty much guaranteed to be top sellers when they ship.
Worth $800m? Not sure about that. It all depends on the sales and profits. Obviously the other game companies either don't have the cash to do the deal, or don't think it's worth that much to them.
While I overall agree with you, especially with modern C++ compilers, there is some truth to the perception that C++ is a mere extension of C.
The first (partial) implementations of C++ was, if I recall correctly, the AT&T headers that extended a C compiler.
And although C++ does have stronger typing than C, it's not exactly bulletproof. If you define classes for all of your types, then you can enforce strict typing, but for the 'basic' types (shared between C and C++), code that looks correct and compiles without warning could have catastrophic errors (reducing size in an assignment), and the fact that an enumerated type is treated by the compiler as a fancy bag of numbers.
Yes, these (and other) issues can all be avoided with strict discipline, but a common thread of all of the 'modern' language is to eliminate common human errors.
And re: your last example, that's one of the things that mortifies me about C++. All of this typechecking is really just a suggestion. It can be forced off by typecasting, allowing flagrantly illegal operations.
Hmm...I've got a laser printer, and it's about the size of a basketball.
I'm pretty sure I could fit quite a few more than 8 basketballs in a small house. Perhaps I could even get several hundred in my small apartment.
I find it odd that you equate a news report that there are no WMD in Iraq, and there are WMD in North Korea with Arnold Swarzenegger waving his weiner around.
I mean, if you're a bush-basher, you must admit that the next governor of CA is acting like your favorite president!
But in the vein of the orgiastic frenzy, they'll all be busy with the little boys.
Perhaps, but these aren't used videogame cartridges. From what I saw, they were the real-deal arcade ROMs, not the home console ROMs.
If the wording of your credit card said that they would only accept money that you had robbed from a 7-11, then yes, this would be the same case. The fact that you're poor and ignorant, and cannot find a better way to pay your bills than making a trip to the stop and rob is not, however, written into your contract with the credit card company. You got one, by the way.
And yes, there are two options: Get into compliance by releasing the code, or get into compliance by halting the use of the GPL code. The holders of the GPL copyright can get their lawyers involved to force them to do so, or to pay damages for violating the licensing requirements.
I know that there has been ranting and bitching about Linksys, but until some entity takes the responsibility to actually legally force a GPL violator to come into compliance, the GPL will be a toothless, albeit scary, dragon.
Who has the authority (and money) to hire lawyers to enforce the licensing terms of the code? If you want Linksys to stop using Linux the way that they have, you should find them, and be prepared for a very fun legal proceeding that tests whether GPL is enforceable at all. As far as I know, it has *never* been tested.
However, don't expect to get the source code that you want.
I've heard a lot about this, but haven't followed obsessively, so let me see if I have this straight.
/. crowd, and IANAL, but I thought that any terms of a contract that would requre illegal behavior were invalid and unenforceable, and would thus render the GPL terms unenforceable in such a situation.
Linksys is under fire for linking some proprietary code with the Linux kernel, and now refusing to release that code, in violation of the GPL.
It sounds, however, as though Linksys does not *own* that code in question, but that have, instead, licensed it from another third party. From that, it would sound as though Linksys does not have the authority to 'set it free' so to speak...it ain't theirs to legally do this with.
I understand that this will have little impact on the linux and
Most NDAs don't actually prohibit you from discussing things generally, but they prohit you from discussing specifics.
The ones I have people sign prohibit discussing anything they may see, hear, or learn related to the technology/product being discussed.
Doesn't "...gamers are getting older and tastes are becoming more sophisticated" disagree with ""It is imperative that a game machine is easy to use for anyone"? Which is it?
I don't think that this is mutually exclusive at all. It's not as if young people don't play video games. In fact, the aging of the 'first generation' of video gamers has significantly spread the range of ages that games.
I cannot imagine a neo-luddite buying a console for a 3 year old, but my 3 year old likes to play on my GC. He thinks Zelda is great, and runs around talking about 'adventure boy', and that piglet game, well, it's piglet! Add to that the fact that I'm in my mid-30s, and we play these games *together* (I get through the hard parts, he runs around), this is a much bigger spectrum of ages than the 12-18 that one might initially percieve as 'video game ripe'.
Perhaps because it takes an hour to get somewhere in a bus, especially if you need to transfer, when it takes 15 minutes to do the same by car?
I live downtown in a major US city, and have begun driving because although we have fairly complete mass transit, it can take a damn long time to get around on the transit system, especially when the bus that's supposed to run every ten minutes somehow doesn't show up for 30 minutes at a stretch fairly regularly.
Yes, I will get flamed for this, I'm bad, I'm destroying the environment, but I'd rather spend that hour with my family than standing on a corner and sitting next to the people who take the bus!
Okay, so last year's Madden is now $10, after it has raked in $300 million in revenues. And next year, this year's Madden will do the same.
The thing is, typical shrink-wrap games require *no* after-sales support, other than the current PC misbehavior of releasing beta quality products and patching later (not an option on consoles). Zero, Nada...Even crappy EQ support costs money, and keeping the servers up costs money, too. And even if you don't like the incremental content, it comes from somewhere.
I'm not saying that EQ isn't profitable, or that the purveyors of MMO games should be recognized as saints or anything, but making a product that people want and charging what people will pay doesn't make them some sort of omnipresent evil conspiracy. Hell, Tivo costs about the same, and it's just a fancy VCR! Is EQ worth more to you than the monthly charge for your Tivo?
That said, most people won't pay the $15/month *required* to make online games viable (no profit, no product), even though we'll pay $100 a month for Digital TV and High-Speed Internet access. That money buys you a lot of variety for the whole family, but EQ buys you exactly one thing...EQ.
And yes, most software companies would like to sell software by subscription, especially when they have a captive customer base, or the customer wants to buy the 'future', rather than the 'present' product. I subscribe to virus protection software, and I know that I'll always be up-to-date, and the company is motivated to stay that way. And it's cheaper for me that way, so everybody wins!
For instance, when I was working at Sony (Electonics) in 2000, it was a widely discussed phenomenon concerning the $3.5 million in pure *profit* that Sony raked in per *month* from Everquest. This was after server fees, support fees, and everyone involved had gotten thier paychecks, and if you recall in 2000 EQ cost $9.95 a month.
IIRC, Everquest has ~400,000 subscribers, which would mean that they brought in about $3.5m in revenue per month, before paying for support people, developers, paying for bandwidth (lots), electricity et al.
The money that EQ brings in a year is significantly smaller than a 'smash hit' like Vice City, Madden Football, or the like, and the profit margins are nowhere near as high.
This article has an interesting read on the online market.
Uh, not to respond to your nit-picking with facts, but the Prius costs $21000 and the Camry costs $20,000-$26,000
And, well, I'd say that it's an easy bet that any of the electric cars out there will get far over 100 mpg. Put a gallon of gas in a can in the trunk, drive it around forever without ever opening it.
Just like their membership in the WTO and their status as Most Favored Nation by the US forces them to not commit heinous human rights violations, and to actively enforce intellectual property rights?
The fact is, a great many people are stupid.
This should not be a surprise to anybody. In fact, half of the population is dumber than average.
First off, Star Trek is a TV show, not reality. Probably not even close to what reality will be.
Correct. Their fashion sense is rather disturbingly blunted. I cannot believe in a future dominated by skin-tight spandex jumpsuits. The horror of it is even worse than that of one dominated by robots.
The only place I see 'auger' is in this thread, and the useless replies, including my own. The synopsis and reg article both have the spelling 'augur'.
I think I saw him doing a little sidewalk show at Fisherman's Wharf a couple weeks ago. I thought "this is odd, there's a guy showing people he can solve the cube in under 30 seconds...", and just walked past.
Little did I know I was passing by my chance to meet a world champion. I just hope he doesn't let it go to his head and end up screwed up like Mike Tyson or Todd Marinovich.
I hope they don't tax the penis enlargement pills I bought through email...
The Incredible Hulk: Not Real
Also Not Real:
The Tooth Fairy
Santa Claus
Porn
The New York Times
Subject says it all
Well, I installed OpenOffice, and the first, second, and third impression I had of it compared to MS Office were all "this is a piece of crap".
Mac Users, you're not missing out on much, so don't be too concerned. If you really weren't willing to pay for quality, you wouldn't have bought a Mac in the first place, right?
Would it be a good idea to have consumer pc boxes equipped with cheap builtin hardware firewall/nat?
It could, of course, be turned off by corporate IT folk who don't want to have it, or by the intrepid home user who knows what they are doing, but for the unwashed masses, would just 'be there'.
Anyway, would this provide any actual protection? And could it pass the UI test for the standard user?
Third, Asians refers to a wide variety of people. Orientals refers to people or objects specifically from East Asia, such as Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Thailanders and Vietnamese.
Actually, this is incorrect...
In the era when 'Oriental' was coined, it was everything east of Europe. The famous Orient Express rail line went to where? The Orient, of course, aka Turkey. And not all of the 'Orient Express' trains even went as far as Turkey. Some stopped in Sofia, Belgrade. wikipedia
Oriental Rugs typically come from the region previously known as Persia. Mine was made in India, others are made in Pakistan. You can pick them up in North Africa, too.
Oriental in Wikipedia
Perhaps they can use these