Well, they could apply for a PI license, for starters. One of the central points is that they did stuff that counts as a private investigation while not having the license that permits them to do so.
The only thing that would have saved the Big-3 would have been to fire everyone over 40 and start again.
Careful, that doesn't always work. They did that at the moderately well-running shipping company my dad worked for. The result: Within two years they went from 100 trucks and several mills to five trucks (and no, the economy wasn't at fault; they failed during a boom). Essentially they booted everyone with experience and replaced them with a bunch of much cheaper engineers straight out of school. Yeah, that worked out well.
"Old" doesn't always mean "out of touch". Competence and experience are not inversely coupled.
As for missiling something - that's fairly ordinary gaming parlance. I mean, you can also shotgun someone and anyone playing D&D has probably seen someone get fireballed. In StarCraft you can even get zerged even though a Zerg is not even a weapon per se (for the uninitiated, it's one of the playable races), it's just that most Zerg players use the strategy of spamming (yet another verbing) small units until victory.
It's not quite standard English yet but I expect the next big change in the English language to be a trend towards verbing. Then again I'm not a linguist/anglicist and know jack squat about the topic.
Most of the time when someone uses the term "paradigm" to describe future change thereof, they're wrong. Paradigms have a tendency to resist change... I don't expect GWave to replace all forms of online communication any more than Jabber has replaced ICQ, MSN and AIM. It will supplement them, of course, but a replacement is extremely unlikely.
It's not about the attention span. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about Web 2.x and cloud computing so when someone tells me that Google came up with this wonderfully amazing and amazingly wonderful new... thing that's going to change everything but in order to understand what it actually is I have to watch an eighty minute keynote - well, my first reaction is to say no. They either talk too much or their product is too complicated. I just have better things to do than spend nearly one and a half hours getting talked to about a web app that, based on the description everyone gives me, sounds like EMACS' big brother wrapped around XMPP.
I'll wait a couple months until real-world use has shown what it actually can and can't. If I'm particularly curious I might even read the Wikipedia article in a week or two. Much more time-efficient.
Hey, at least I was pedantic for the sake of filling that particular niche of/. culture and not because I find the distinction particularly important - although I would've found a completely solid-state design interesting as long as it's more gaming-friendly than Apple's. It sounds far-fetched but then again the PSP, the NDS and the Pandora also would sound far-fetched if you told someone from 2003 about them. In fact, if there's one thing I'm actually liking about in the current gaming industry it's the trend towards devices that make you wonder however they came up with that.
Regarding Apple's devices; as unsuited as the iPod touch is for gaming, the only TV ad I've ever seen for it (in Germany) only talks about how many games there are available for it. The iPhone is sold on applications (oh, and you can also call people with it); the iPod touch is sold on games and only that. They don't even mention how many songs you can put on there or even that it plays music at all - although the latter is already implied by the name "iPod". So yes, Apple appears to actually want the iPod touch to be seen as a console. Probably sells better that way.
Wrong. It still has buttons. And no, that's not obvious; a new generational step (as evidenced by the absence of a UMD drive) can involve the replacement of all controls - and Apple has shown that you can indeed sell a device without any buttons to people who want a handheld console.
Unlike Microsoft who takes all responsibility from any malfunction in its softw--Oh that's right the EULA crowd never does.
To quote the GNU General Public License, Version 3 (emphasis mine):
15. Disclaimer of Warranty.
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
16. Limitation of Liability. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MODIFIES AND/OR CONVEYS THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
BSD contains similar language. Face it: Most of F/OSS, including the Linux kernel, explicitly denies any responsibility for the software working properly - or even for the software not overwriting your root partition with random data. Virtually all end-user software is distributed on a "maybe this will possibly work" basis.
There's an easier fix: Just query whether the filesystem you want to write to is mounted synchronously and refuse to write to it if it isn't. That way such syncing issues can be programmer-time-efficiently avoided.
Actually, you might want to define the column width in terms of points or em and not pixels. The reason for that is that someone with a high-resolution display might override your font sizes and use bigger fonts for readability; thus a 400px column is going to be effectively narrower for them. It also fits the general (often ignored) best practice of assuming as little as possible about the visitor: You don't know how wide their font is but an 80 em wide column will always be able to contain exactly 80 'm's.
In general, pixels aren't a particularly good unit for any kind of interface design (unless you design your interface in Photoshop). You usually have other, more flexible alternatives.
Valve, who runs Steam, owns the rights to their content on Steam. So if they go under, they would have the ability to release such a patch without falling afoul of contracts.
But what if another company buys Valve and just kills off Steam? Maybe you see patches for the current top 10 games but they're probably not going to see Half-Life 1 as important enough to warrant an anti-Steam patch.
I presonally still prefer the way Blizzard handles this - you tell them your CD key and the game is registered as yours. You then use your browser to download ISOs from them. You can even download the Mac version of a game you only bought the Windows version of and vice versa. The only DRM is whatever the game comes with.
The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected.
They don't know what DRM is but they know that SecuROM is the broken thing that makes them reinstall Windows and call the customer support hotline about installation limits before they finally have to download a crack to play BioShock.
But the point is that the company asus.co.uk is registered on is neither Asus' German branch, nor does Asus' German branch use 1&1. The question remains why Asus would use a non-LLC that is neither the German branch nor the mother company to register the UK domain via a German registrar not used by the German branch - and why they'd register their domain as "individual" in the UK but "organisation" in Germany. It just seems convoluted and unlikely.
I also don't see why the USA shouldn't keep control of IANA. Europe just rolls its own DNS root and everything's dandy. That way we can even add our own restrictions and you add yours and we won't interfere with each other because we can't resolve anything not in our respective roots anyway.
Okay, so it's a bit of a hassle to have to register with US-IANA, EU-root, Asia-root, Africa-root and a number of smaller root networks. And an internationally reachable domain becomes ten times as expensive. But that's really a small price to pay for everyone getting their cake.
But would a british subsidiary not rather be an LLC? Why is the site registered as a "UK Individual"? And why through a German registrar? It just doesn't quite add up. And no, they didn't use their German branch to register the site; the German branch is "ASUS Computer GmbH" and is directly registered with DENIC as an organisation.
Yup. Scam site. It's registered to "Asustek Computer Inc" (asus.com is registered to "Asus Computer International") via a German 1&1 reseller/brand. It seems someone is trying to damage Asus' reputation.
Slashdot Mirror
It's good they don't thake the Fifth. I don't trust them to give it back.
Well, they could apply for a PI license, for starters. One of the central points is that they did stuff that counts as a private investigation while not having the license that permits them to do so.
Careful, that doesn't always work. They did that at the moderately well-running shipping company my dad worked for. The result: Within two years they went from 100 trucks and several mills to five trucks (and no, the economy wasn't at fault; they failed during a boom). Essentially they booted everyone with experience and replaced them with a bunch of much cheaper engineers straight out of school. Yeah, that worked out well.
"Old" doesn't always mean "out of touch". Competence and experience are not inversely coupled.
As for missiling something - that's fairly ordinary gaming parlance. I mean, you can also shotgun someone and anyone playing D&D has probably seen someone get fireballed. In StarCraft you can even get zerged even though a Zerg is not even a weapon per se (for the uninitiated, it's one of the playable races), it's just that most Zerg players use the strategy of spamming (yet another verbing) small units until victory.
It's not quite standard English yet but I expect the next big change in the English language to be a trend towards verbing. Then again I'm not a linguist/anglicist and know jack squat about the topic.
Black triangle. Scientology is not seen as a religion in Germany, at least not by non-crackpots.
Most of the time when someone uses the term "paradigm" to describe future change thereof, they're wrong. Paradigms have a tendency to resist change... I don't expect GWave to replace all forms of online communication any more than Jabber has replaced ICQ, MSN and AIM. It will supplement them, of course, but a replacement is extremely unlikely.
It's not about the attention span. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about Web 2.x and cloud computing so when someone tells me that Google came up with this wonderfully amazing and amazingly wonderful new... thing that's going to change everything but in order to understand what it actually is I have to watch an eighty minute keynote - well, my first reaction is to say no. They either talk too much or their product is too complicated. I just have better things to do than spend nearly one and a half hours getting talked to about a web app that, based on the description everyone gives me, sounds like EMACS' big brother wrapped around XMPP.
I'll wait a couple months until real-world use has shown what it actually can and can't. If I'm particularly curious I might even read the Wikipedia article in a week or two. Much more time-efficient.
The real one will be marked "NSA sewage", of course.
The government could use a light drizzle as an excuse to scare people with the threat of scaring people.
Hey, at least I was pedantic for the sake of filling that particular niche of /. culture and not because I find the distinction particularly important - although I would've found a completely solid-state design interesting as long as it's more gaming-friendly than Apple's. It sounds far-fetched but then again the PSP, the NDS and the Pandora also would sound far-fetched if you told someone from 2003 about them. In fact, if there's one thing I'm actually liking about in the current gaming industry it's the trend towards devices that make you wonder however they came up with that.
Regarding Apple's devices; as unsuited as the iPod touch is for gaming, the only TV ad I've ever seen for it (in Germany) only talks about how many games there are available for it. The iPhone is sold on applications (oh, and you can also call people with it); the iPod touch is sold on games and only that. They don't even mention how many songs you can put on there or even that it plays music at all - although the latter is already implied by the name "iPod". So yes, Apple appears to actually want the iPod touch to be seen as a console. Probably sells better that way.
Wrong. It still has buttons. And no, that's not obvious; a new generational step (as evidenced by the absence of a UMD drive) can involve the replacement of all controls - and Apple has shown that you can indeed sell a device without any buttons to people who want a handheld console.
To quote the GNU General Public License, Version 3 (emphasis mine):
15. Disclaimer of Warranty.
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
16. Limitation of Liability.
IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MODIFIES AND/OR CONVEYS THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
BSD contains similar language. Face it: Most of F/OSS, including the Linux kernel, explicitly denies any responsibility for the software working properly - or even for the software not overwriting your root partition with random data. Virtually all end-user software is distributed on a "maybe this will possibly work" basis.
There's an easier fix: Just query whether the filesystem you want to write to is mounted synchronously and refuse to write to it if it isn't. That way such syncing issues can be programmer-time-efficiently avoided.
A clean room isn't that important when you use an 80 mm process.
Actually, you might want to define the column width in terms of points or em and not pixels. The reason for that is that someone with a high-resolution display might override your font sizes and use bigger fonts for readability; thus a 400px column is going to be effectively narrower for them. It also fits the general (often ignored) best practice of assuming as little as possible about the visitor: You don't know how wide their font is but an 80 em wide column will always be able to contain exactly 80 'm's.
In general, pixels aren't a particularly good unit for any kind of interface design (unless you design your interface in Photoshop). You usually have other, more flexible alternatives.
Counterpoint! They also have FarCry. ;)
They don't know what DRM is but they know that SecuROM is the broken thing that makes them reinstall Windows and call the customer support hotline about installation limits before they finally have to download a crack to play BioShock.
Apparently the Tech stylesheet is broken somewhere - changing the subdomain to "yro" makes everything work.
Yeah, but C/ASM/a custom ASIC is still faster for $SPECIFIC_THING so it's slow.
But the point is that the company asus.co.uk is registered on is neither Asus' German branch, nor does Asus' German branch use 1&1. The question remains why Asus would use a non-LLC that is neither the German branch nor the mother company to register the UK domain via a German registrar not used by the German branch - and why they'd register their domain as "individual" in the UK but "organisation" in Germany. It just seems convoluted and unlikely.
I also don't see why the USA shouldn't keep control of IANA. Europe just rolls its own DNS root and everything's dandy. That way we can even add our own restrictions and you add yours and we won't interfere with each other because we can't resolve anything not in our respective roots anyway.
Okay, so it's a bit of a hassle to have to register with US-IANA, EU-root, Asia-root, Africa-root and a number of smaller root networks. And an internationally reachable domain becomes ten times as expensive. But that's really a small price to pay for everyone getting their cake.
But would a british subsidiary not rather be an LLC? Why is the site registered as a "UK Individual"? And why through a German registrar? It just doesn't quite add up. And no, they didn't use their German branch to register the site; the German branch is "ASUS Computer GmbH" and is directly registered with DENIC as an organisation.
Yup. Scam site. It's registered to "Asustek Computer Inc" (asus.com is registered to "Asus Computer International") via a German 1&1 reseller/brand. It seems someone is trying to damage Asus' reputation.
You get upset because the moderators appear to be on crack? You must be new here...