I'm not bitching. I think that the auto-updater is implemented the right way and good to have. I merely show how, in theory, Firefox can take half a minute to start up if there's been a slew of updated addons.
Undoubtedly. However, there is a difference between "I really should pay for this but I won't", "who cares if I give them money?" and "another sale $COMPANY won't make. Hell yeah!".
Also, respect can play a large role in whether I pirate something from a company or not. For example, I won't pirate Blizzard software thanks to them being so nice to their paying customers. (Yes, I know about bnetd.) On the other hand, even though I could legally get Windows XP for free through MSDNAA I'm not bothering - talking to the department's admin to sign me up is too much work and I quite literally don't care whether my Windows is legal or not (WGA hassles and "fuck you, Microsoft" balancing each other out).
But what measure to apply to random companies I don't strongly like or dislike? There, the decision is influenced by my opinion on IP in general. Being that IP is currently being abused and constantly expanded that influence is likely to go towards pirating - as a sign that I do not respect current IP law. It's a form of civil disobedience. I know I'm not the next Mahatma Gandhi but the fact remains that I don't really feel compelled to obey a law I don't respect.
That's what I mean. A law can offend people so much that they make a point of breaking it. Even if they do it in private, it's still happening. Softer IP laws probably wouldn't offend people quite as much as the current "whatever a corporation owns it owns forever" model.
Well, if you add in the time it takes the auto-updater to download and install five extensions you might approach thirty seconds between "clicked the icon" and "ready to use". Firefox 1.0 didn't have that delay... because it didn't have an auto-updater, if I remember correctly.
Not just colors. Work with a netbook and you'll learn to value minimized themes with tiny buttons and the ability to cram two toolbars in next to the menu bar. Netbooks put vertical real estate at a premium and anything that helps me reduce the browser chrome's vertical footprint dramatically improves the browser's usefulness (from "useless" to "almost decent").
Likewise, OSes that natively support theming (ur a UXTheme-hacked Windows) are a very good thing because every vertical pixel I can shave off the window decoration and widgets can mean the difference between a working app and one where the important buttons are offscreen. Interface customizability is very important right now.
The problem with Wikipedia is that it's impossible to tell beforehand whether an article will be deemed noteworthy or not. A list of minor Transformers characters or episode guides for various TV shows are okay, whereas random other articles are not deemed okay. There's no discernible objective measure. How do I tell whether my article about a website with 10.000 hits/day is more or less relevant than the list of fictional locations in The Simpsons? Wikipedia will exclude one article for only pertaining to the interests of a small crowd and then happily allow another of similarly narrow interest. How many people does a certain topic need to affect before it becomes notable? It apparently depends on how many Wikipedia higher-ups are interested in the topic.
One big gripe with Wikipedia is that notability is an opaque, subjective measure. That makes submitting articles a crapshoot.
Actually, there is a better alternative to copyright. It's called copyright. The problem with current IP laws is that once something is protected, it's protected forever (yes, theoretically there are limits but as lone as the Walt Disney Corporation can afford to buy reps they are going to be expanded indefinitely). We get a weird situation where, for example, much of Disney's money comes from derivative works (the brothers Grimm are a common source of material), yet others can very rarely use them as a source of material.
I agree that Pirates of the Caribbean should enjoy protection. However, what about Steamboat Willie?
Not everyone who opposes copyright as currently practiced opposes it in its entirety. Some merely think that the "limited monopoly" should mean that you get a fair chance at making money off your work, not that it should be locked down in perpetuity.
In fact, I believe that excessively long copyright stifles creativity - the incentive to create is outweighed by the restrictions on what you can create without getting ruined by a copyright lawsuit. (This is compounded by copyright lawsuits having become Serious Business in the last years. I'd be very careful about releasing material for profit - if someone decides my work is too similar to his and wins the lawsuit I might very well lose a six-digit amount of money, which I simply can't afford.)
To make an analogy to the "dwarves on the shoulders of giants" analogy: If copyright keeps getting extended we essentially get a world of giants you can't stand on unless you can pay big bucks for licenses. That would mean that any kind of disseminated creativity would only be possible for rich individuals and big corporations. I'm absolutely positive that copyright should not have that effect.
Actually, this might be part of why piracy is not only getting more widespread but also more accepted lately: There's a distinct us-vs.-them mentality going on with the average people on one side and the big companies on the other. Not paying for products turns from criminal frugality into a political statement. (Note that I don't mean for this to explain why people do it; I try to explain why people feel good about doing it.)
So, in essence, I'd advocate shorter copyright for two reasons: It's better at increasing creativity and it might help get people to respect copyright again.
That's the exact reason why EULA are deemed unenforcable in Germany - you don't get to read them until after the purchase so you couldn't make an informed decision on whether to buy the product or not. However, as (AFAIK) shrink-wrap EULAs are deemed enforcable in the United States, printing the waiver on the ticket might actually work.
Actually, this is part of a bigger shift in the C++ development community. From now on, a new C++ core edition will be released each year, with names in the format "C++ ". C++ 2010 (or C10 for short) will also contain a major overhaul of the C++ rules, intended to make it so that user's guesses about how the language works will most likely be correct. Here are some of them:
- The long and short keywords are now #defined as static. This fixes issues with respect to variables using these keywords going out of scope before all functions using them have resolved. It also keeps them from being used more than once for the same variable.
- Some of the terminology is changed. "to declare" is replaced with "to put on the battlefield"; "to free" is replaced with "to send to the exile" (or "to exile" for short). This is to make the language less confusing for new users. Also, functions are no longer "called" but "evoked", bringing back some terminology from the early days of the franchise.
- Local variables will no longer be exiled when a block ends. This mechanic has frustrated many new users (as almost nobody can tell without looking it up where a block begins or ends) and thus the developers have removed it. They are aware that this breaks some peoples' coding styles but really think it improves the language.
- Local variables no longer use the stack. The developers felt that putting local variables on the stack could create unintuitive situations and thus moved them to the heap.
All in all C10 will be the best version of C++ ever. Prerelease events will be held shortly.
Actually, look on the various devices you use. There's probably a Foxconn chip or two on them. Foxconn stuff shows up just about everywhere. Besides, what would you recommend for MP3 players besides Creative? I don't want to give them any money due to some of their business activities.
In fact, a "4 kilobytes of memory" restriction would be fairly pointless on modern systems as that would mean that even without using any RAM the demo could never run on a resolution bigger than 72x54x8 (VRAM is memory too, you know?) - assuming that the GPU natively does eight-bit graphics, otherwise you get about 36x27x16. Adding in actual RAM requirements, OS process overhead etc. and we end with demos that give you about... 12x9x16. If you're lucky.
"4 kilobytes of storage" is hard enough to pull off and actually allows for resolutions greater than QCGA.
Virus scanners occasionally scream about legit demos. Small demos use clever techniques to shrink their storage footprint. Viruses do the same thing. The scanner detects a packed exe and sounds the alarm. It's true that the demo exhibits viruslike behavior - but that behavior is simply unpacking itself.
But it doesn't have to be pushed over the wire or the optical disk, which becomes important as Xbox 360 games begin to run up against the 7 GB/disc limit and PC games begin to run up against monthly download caps.
And, of course, one can make the content procedural but cache the generated content on disk once it's generated. That way you don't even get the long loading times every time, yet still save bandwidth. If generation time is significantly shorter than download time (not unlikely as generating 300 MiB of data takes only a few minutes vs. hours through what most people have as broadband) people might even see significantly shorter update times.
If only. All this thing does is give all creatures protection from Earthquake, which makes it somewhat pointless. They should've worked on a generic protection from red.
I think that's implied. I mean, who still burns non-rewritable CDs/DVDs? The regular ones have only downsides, except for a very slight price difference.
Please not. Not after what they did with BioShock. SS3 would be similar: No skill system, no inventory management, no weapon degradation, hacking replaced by a not very challenging minigame. Thanks but no. System Shock 2 was a first-person horror survival roleplaying game. BioShock was a first person shooter. We already have enough of those.
Actually, Safari 4.0.2's User agents is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/530.19.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.2 Safari/530.19
So it does at first say it's Mozilla 5.0 before mentioning it's Safari at the very end.
I used iTunes before I got an iPod and I don't value the program because of how it syncs with the device. I'd be happier with simple USB mass storage (which would also allow me to easily get documents on there). iTunes just happens to be exactly what I want from an MP3 player (well, except for the lack of format extensibility).
You, sir, are a crackpot. What's with PNGs of barcodes? Or QR Codes? Those represent non-image data in an image, yet are somehow okay? (And yes, I've seen QR Codes on websites). You could easily have a QR code point to a goatse mirror and host that, yet people keep trusting PNG to not randomly perform malicious actions against them.
As for the usefulness: Yes, in the case of the torrent scenario it's somewhat limited. However, other people have released implementations that turn random files into PNGs, which allows one to share small files through an image hoster like Photobucket instead of a file hoster like Rapidshare. File hosters usually employ all manners of nag screens while image hosters don't. Of course there's abuse potential but there's abuse potential everywhere.
How would this damage PNG's reputation? The file is a valid image; there's no executable code anywhere. You can extract a fancy pseudo-URI from it with the proper tools but without those there's just no way these images can cause any trouble that random "regular" PNGs wouldn't.
This is akin to ASCCI armoring content for upload to newsgroups. That allowed you to disseminate random binary data, yet it didn't ruin ASCII's reputation. This PNG wrapping is a way to allow people to share torrent files without having to host and link them or modify the board configuration to allow.torrent attachments to posts. Nothing more, nothing less.
Remember that Freud came up with the idea that humans only act to fulfill two desires, sex (eros) and destruction (thanatos). For example, eating a hot dog makes one content because the nourishment means we can more likely procreate (eros) and because we destroy the hot dog (thanatos). That theory tells us a lot about what went on in his head...
However, the theory has been definitely disproven through the continued success of Slashdot - while it's certainly destructive to one's free time, nobody has yet to discover how annihiliating one's chance to get some caters to the eros.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not bitching. I think that the auto-updater is implemented the right way and good to have. I merely show how, in theory, Firefox can take half a minute to start up if there's been a slew of updated addons.
Undoubtedly. However, there is a difference between "I really should pay for this but I won't", "who cares if I give them money?" and "another sale $COMPANY won't make. Hell yeah!".
Also, respect can play a large role in whether I pirate something from a company or not. For example, I won't pirate Blizzard software thanks to them being so nice to their paying customers. (Yes, I know about bnetd.) On the other hand, even though I could legally get Windows XP for free through MSDNAA I'm not bothering - talking to the department's admin to sign me up is too much work and I quite literally don't care whether my Windows is legal or not (WGA hassles and "fuck you, Microsoft" balancing each other out).
But what measure to apply to random companies I don't strongly like or dislike? There, the decision is influenced by my opinion on IP in general. Being that IP is currently being abused and constantly expanded that influence is likely to go towards pirating - as a sign that I do not respect current IP law. It's a form of civil disobedience. I know I'm not the next Mahatma Gandhi but the fact remains that I don't really feel compelled to obey a law I don't respect.
That's what I mean. A law can offend people so much that they make a point of breaking it. Even if they do it in private, it's still happening. Softer IP laws probably wouldn't offend people quite as much as the current "whatever a corporation owns it owns forever" model.
Well, if you add in the time it takes the auto-updater to download and install five extensions you might approach thirty seconds between "clicked the icon" and "ready to use". Firefox 1.0 didn't have that delay... because it didn't have an auto-updater, if I remember correctly.
Not just colors. Work with a netbook and you'll learn to value minimized themes with tiny buttons and the ability to cram two toolbars in next to the menu bar. Netbooks put vertical real estate at a premium and anything that helps me reduce the browser chrome's vertical footprint dramatically improves the browser's usefulness (from "useless" to "almost decent").
Likewise, OSes that natively support theming (ur a UXTheme-hacked Windows) are a very good thing because every vertical pixel I can shave off the window decoration and widgets can mean the difference between a working app and one where the important buttons are offscreen. Interface customizability is very important right now.
The problem with Wikipedia is that it's impossible to tell beforehand whether an article will be deemed noteworthy or not. A list of minor Transformers characters or episode guides for various TV shows are okay, whereas random other articles are not deemed okay. There's no discernible objective measure. How do I tell whether my article about a website with 10.000 hits/day is more or less relevant than the list of fictional locations in The Simpsons? Wikipedia will exclude one article for only pertaining to the interests of a small crowd and then happily allow another of similarly narrow interest. How many people does a certain topic need to affect before it becomes notable? It apparently depends on how many Wikipedia higher-ups are interested in the topic.
One big gripe with Wikipedia is that notability is an opaque, subjective measure. That makes submitting articles a crapshoot.
Actually, there is a better alternative to copyright. It's called copyright. The problem with current IP laws is that once something is protected, it's protected forever (yes, theoretically there are limits but as lone as the Walt Disney Corporation can afford to buy reps they are going to be expanded indefinitely). We get a weird situation where, for example, much of Disney's money comes from derivative works (the brothers Grimm are a common source of material), yet others can very rarely use them as a source of material.
I agree that Pirates of the Caribbean should enjoy protection. However, what about Steamboat Willie?
Not everyone who opposes copyright as currently practiced opposes it in its entirety. Some merely think that the "limited monopoly" should mean that you get a fair chance at making money off your work, not that it should be locked down in perpetuity.
In fact, I believe that excessively long copyright stifles creativity - the incentive to create is outweighed by the restrictions on what you can create without getting ruined by a copyright lawsuit. (This is compounded by copyright lawsuits having become Serious Business in the last years. I'd be very careful about releasing material for profit - if someone decides my work is too similar to his and wins the lawsuit I might very well lose a six-digit amount of money, which I simply can't afford.)
To make an analogy to the "dwarves on the shoulders of giants" analogy: If copyright keeps getting extended we essentially get a world of giants you can't stand on unless you can pay big bucks for licenses. That would mean that any kind of disseminated creativity would only be possible for rich individuals and big corporations. I'm absolutely positive that copyright should not have that effect.
Actually, this might be part of why piracy is not only getting more widespread but also more accepted lately: There's a distinct us-vs.-them mentality going on with the average people on one side and the big companies on the other. Not paying for products turns from criminal frugality into a political statement. (Note that I don't mean for this to explain why people do it; I try to explain why people feel good about doing it.)
So, in essence, I'd advocate shorter copyright for two reasons: It's better at increasing creativity and it might help get people to respect copyright again.
That's the exact reason why EULA are deemed unenforcable in Germany - you don't get to read them until after the purchase so you couldn't make an informed decision on whether to buy the product or not. However, as (AFAIK) shrink-wrap EULAs are deemed enforcable in the United States, printing the waiver on the ticket might actually work.
"Nuclear weapons strive to celebrate our individuality, creativity and free spirit" - Rob Oppenheimer
"Gravity strives to celebrate our individuality, creativity and free spirit" - Zack Newton
"Slashdot strives to celebrate our individuality, creativity and free spirit" - Mandy Taco
"Our individuality, creativity and free spirit strive to celebrate our individuality, creativity and free spirit" - J-Dog_666
Actually, this is part of a bigger shift in the C++ development community. From now on, a new C++ core edition will be released each year, with names in the format "C++ ". C++ 2010 (or C10 for short) will also contain a major overhaul of the C++ rules, intended to make it so that user's guesses about how the language works will most likely be correct. Here are some of them:
- The long and short keywords are now #defined as static. This fixes issues with respect to variables using these keywords going out of scope before all functions using them have resolved. It also keeps them from being used more than once for the same variable.
- Some of the terminology is changed. "to declare" is replaced with "to put on the battlefield"; "to free" is replaced with "to send to the exile" (or "to exile" for short). This is to make the language less confusing for new users. Also, functions are no longer "called" but "evoked", bringing back some terminology from the early days of the franchise.
- Local variables will no longer be exiled when a block ends. This mechanic has frustrated many new users (as almost nobody can tell without looking it up where a block begins or ends) and thus the developers have removed it. They are aware that this breaks some peoples' coding styles but really think it improves the language.
- Local variables no longer use the stack. The developers felt that putting local variables on the stack could create unintuitive situations and thus moved them to the heap.
All in all C10 will be the best version of C++ ever. Prerelease events will be held shortly.
Actually, look on the various devices you use. There's probably a Foxconn chip or two on them. Foxconn stuff shows up just about everywhere. Besides, what would you recommend for MP3 players besides Creative? I don't want to give them any money due to some of their business activities.
At the top there's a navigation bar reading "Checkout | Browse | Changes". Clicking on "Browse" will take you here: http://code.google.com/p/virtualagc/source/browse/
In fact, a "4 kilobytes of memory" restriction would be fairly pointless on modern systems as that would mean that even without using any RAM the demo could never run on a resolution bigger than 72x54x8 (VRAM is memory too, you know?) - assuming that the GPU natively does eight-bit graphics, otherwise you get about 36x27x16. Adding in actual RAM requirements, OS process overhead etc. and we end with demos that give you about... 12x9x16. If you're lucky.
"4 kilobytes of storage" is hard enough to pull off and actually allows for resolutions greater than QCGA.
Virus scanners occasionally scream about legit demos. Small demos use clever techniques to shrink their storage footprint. Viruses do the same thing. The scanner detects a packed exe and sounds the alarm. It's true that the demo exhibits viruslike behavior - but that behavior is simply unpacking itself.
And, of course, one can make the content procedural but cache the generated content on disk once it's generated. That way you don't even get the long loading times every time, yet still save bandwidth. If generation time is significantly shorter than download time (not unlikely as generating 300 MiB of data takes only a few minutes vs. hours through what most people have as broadband) people might even see significantly shorter update times.
Just tell them to use headphones when working on their Mac. Problem solved.
If only. All this thing does is give all creatures protection from Earthquake, which makes it somewhat pointless. They should've worked on a generic protection from red.
Shouldn't Switzerland get to decide? After all, they made the Web.
I think that's implied. I mean, who still burns non-rewritable CDs/DVDs? The regular ones have only downsides, except for a very slight price difference.
Please not. Not after what they did with BioShock. SS3 would be similar: No skill system, no inventory management, no weapon degradation, hacking replaced by a not very challenging minigame. Thanks but no. System Shock 2 was a first-person horror survival roleplaying game. BioShock was a first person shooter. We already have enough of those.
Actually, Safari 4.0.2's User agents is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/530.19.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.2 Safari/530.19
So it does at first say it's Mozilla 5.0 before mentioning it's Safari at the very end.
I used iTunes before I got an iPod and I don't value the program because of how it syncs with the device. I'd be happier with simple USB mass storage (which would also allow me to easily get documents on there). iTunes just happens to be exactly what I want from an MP3 player (well, except for the lack of format extensibility).
You, sir, are a crackpot. What's with PNGs of barcodes? Or QR Codes? Those represent non-image data in an image, yet are somehow okay? (And yes, I've seen QR Codes on websites). You could easily have a QR code point to a goatse mirror and host that, yet people keep trusting PNG to not randomly perform malicious actions against them.
As for the usefulness: Yes, in the case of the torrent scenario it's somewhat limited. However, other people have released implementations that turn random files into PNGs, which allows one to share small files through an image hoster like Photobucket instead of a file hoster like Rapidshare. File hosters usually employ all manners of nag screens while image hosters don't. Of course there's abuse potential but there's abuse potential everywhere.
How would this damage PNG's reputation? The file is a valid image; there's no executable code anywhere. You can extract a fancy pseudo-URI from it with the proper tools but without those there's just no way these images can cause any trouble that random "regular" PNGs wouldn't.
.torrent attachments to posts. Nothing more, nothing less.
This is akin to ASCCI armoring content for upload to newsgroups. That allowed you to disseminate random binary data, yet it didn't ruin ASCII's reputation. This PNG wrapping is a way to allow people to share torrent files without having to host and link them or modify the board configuration to allow
If this gains traction I expect BT clients to support these images directly.
Remember that Freud came up with the idea that humans only act to fulfill two desires, sex (eros) and destruction (thanatos). For example, eating a hot dog makes one content because the nourishment means we can more likely procreate (eros) and because we destroy the hot dog (thanatos). That theory tells us a lot about what went on in his head...
However, the theory has been definitely disproven through the continued success of Slashdot - while it's certainly destructive to one's free time, nobody has yet to discover how annihiliating one's chance to get some caters to the eros.