Experimental is also where KDE 4 has been living all this time. It'll be good to have experimental back to be something I rarely get a package from, rather than half my GUI systems:)
To be perfectly honest, I'm against biodegradable products in areas that demand environmental resistance. I'd hate to have a biodegradable roof, for example.
Not to bee too pedantic here, but your roof IS biodegradable. The roofs of most modern houses are made of wood. It's the nice non-biodegradable shingles which keep you dry.
Around here, we use mostly ceramic, slate or concrete roofs. My roof is a mix of ceramic and asbestos... damn good roof, but unfortunately not legal to lay on anymore. In any case, not exactly bio-degradable (but except for the asbestos, it doesn't really cause any harm, either)
However I read further, and see that it is actually going to be developed for platform games and ported to the PC. Ported! That means a couple of things. Controls will suck, as going from controllers to keyboard mouse never works. This also effects what types of things you can do in game as some things are just too hard to do with a controller. Also the graphics will suck. They will be designed with a TV and a console video card in mind, and likely upscaled for the PC. Which means blurry and blocky and distorted graphics.
Well, the fact is that the profits are much higher in the consoles. Or so my friends in the business tells me. And no surprise, since the prices per game is much higher, allegedly due to lesser risk of piracy^Wcopyright infrigement.
In case you were looking for answers rather than abuse: I have used both. For me git does what svn does, plus the following in order of most important first.
Locals checkins, that is, you can check in even if offline (on the train, net down, whatever) and you can commit without the rest of the developers getting it. The latter is nice if, say, you have to write an email first to tell the other developers first.
If you want to checkout your code on some meaty machine to test, without pushing the commit to the central server just yet
Have a full tree locally, which means that history dependent operations works offline and fast
Local branches - the advantages is quite obvious
Of course, this is for me, and all points might be irrelevant for you.
What should change about copyright law to avoid the copyright infringement and still allow the using of 20+millions of mullah to develop a game?
The problem here isn't copyright law, it's economics.
Nonsense. If piracy were not a problem, this would be quite feasible... indeed, it *is* feasible for platforms where piracy is not so widespread, like consoles.
It is a struggle to see any reason why the genre of a [single-player, standalone, not online] game should have the slightest bearing on how easy it is to 'protect' from piracy. It's like arguing that engine immobilisers are only useful for four-door sedans, and won't work on sports cars or SUVs.
Well, listen and you might learn something. Graphical adventures are for different reasons not very suited to consoles (lack of mouse, crappy screens, low disk capacities and more). Nor are they realistically protectable by making them an online affair (yet, anyway). Also it is somewhat of a niche genre, so it takes less to move the total game from a net if modest earning to a net loss. Clear now? Merry Christmas then.
Again, the evidence doesn't bear it out. Look at music. Despite the claims of rampant piracy, there is an even greater diversity of niche music than ever before. Similarly with games - independent developers are thriving like they never have before, thanks to internet distribution. There is more variety in games today than there's ever been before. Your argument appears to be based on nothing but nostalgia.
Au contraire, the evidence bears it out very clearly. Most of the veteran software houses are giving up the PC platform or at least relegating it to 2nd place. I have played quite a few games from independent software houses, and I know for a fact that they are barely breaking even --- in the best of cases, except if they either have some way to prevent piracy (online component) *or* develop for a very small budget (like flash games and the like).
Music is neither here nor there, the price for developing music is plummeting, while the price for developing high-quality games are not.
To follow your lead, it seems your argument is based on nothing but self-delusion and wishful thinking:p
I would love it if abandonware games were GPLed, but as the law stands, there pretty much is a fat chance of that happening, right now it still rests on the consumers trust of the company to live up to its promises while going through its death throes.
If this was something consumers wanted, say because it's on a server as opposed to on CDs, this could easily be done. Of course, if there is no real demand, that will not happen.
I doubt we will be able to have internet everywhere, affordable, and in a platform that can handle games soon.
You can get it in my country (DK) right now, at affordable if not quite cheap, prizes right now, I'm guessing you are American (from your posting time, don't kill me if I'm wrong), and I hear US is a bit behind with that sort of thing, but no doubt it will happen there, too.
And still we rely on the trust of who ever is hosting it allowing us to enjoy it years down the road. I don't even trust Valve/Steam, since I thought that Interplay would be around forever just a couple years ago. All things are temporary, no matter how solvent they are today.
Indeed. But then, the other day, I wanted to play a 10 year old game (Severance: Blade of darkness) --- and I couldn't. It doesn't work with any version of windows that I can currently install on any machine, nor in wine, due to DRM. So you method is no garantee, either.
As for your sig, Agnosticism would be the absence of knowledge, not decisiveness.
MY sig is a joke, which, due to the restrictions that slashdot has on signature length, has been shortened so far down that not everyone gets it. Sorry about that. Though I'll gladly debate agnosticim, I think that would not be on topic this time around.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
Yeah right, people and companies aren't going to develop new games or innovate because of piracy. Just like nobody makes any new music anymore because of piracy. Sorry, this argument just doesn't make sense logically or economically. People still rake in money writing games and music, and aside from the money, there are always creative types who create because they are internally driven to, not because of a profit motive.
Strawman. I said certain types of games, championed by monkey island in this case, are no longer getting developed, because the upfront cost ($10â?) does not, on average, repaid by sales. An investor will not throw money away, as you wouldn't. And yes, this argument makes sense economically (more piracy leads to less sales leads to poorer payback). You could argue that this is not what happens; but studies very much indicate that this is so, Logically, it trivially makes sense, but I suspect you don't know what that word means (I don't blame you, I am a mathematician)
As for the idealist, then yes, that happens, and still do. But the result is not gorgeous, fun games, because enthusiasm does not pay rent, and one man can only do so much. Perhaps open source can step in and help here, I don't know, but right now this doesn't appear to be happening.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
Citation needed. (I never played it myself, but maybe it just sucked?)
Not enough to prevent 3 sequels, and a host of similar games. Then, in the late 90's, they disappeared. What came unto the scene in the late 90's? Online piracy, and a sharp rise to piracy, too. It might be a coincidence, but I think not.
Also, this assumes that every person who pirates a game/song would have bought it otherwise.
No it doesn't. It assumes that a significant part of the revenue is lost because people chose the free route.
The vast majority of pirates would never have paid for it to start with, so the company isn't actually making any less money than they would without piracy.
Citation needed. This is obviously fantasy. Of course, if the materials was not available for free, some more of it would have been bought.
It's the same argument we heard the RIAA made back in the 80's; it was "OMFG people are going to stop buying cassettes because now they can just record the music from the radio! We're gonna go bankrupt & all music on the planet will cease to exist!". And despite everybody & their dogs making 'mix tapes' and recording music from the radio, album sales soared to all-time record highs.
Flawed analogy. The tapes were of a poor quality and bothersome to make. That's what kept the copying at bay. And the advertising and general economic growth did the rest.
So no, people pirating the music don't hurt the bottom line. The only piracy that impacts sales to any extent is actually called "counterfeiting" i.e. when someone produces & sells hard-copy CD's, etc.
The only up is that online games are having a ball, since cracking those are harder. My hope is that someday it will be feasible to simply host the game on some server and deliver all the content over the net, so that we can get rid of the arrrrggghh pirates.
This is actually done quite frequently. Many online games, especially mmorpg's, do exactly this. The ones who still make you buy a copy from the retail outlet are just trying to gouge you for even more cash. They base their business on revenue from subscriptions, the copies of the game discs themselves are just more gravy for the profit coffers.
As an example, last time I checked you could download WoW for free direct from Blizzard, and they certainly aren't suffering.
So you are saying that these games are doing well because they are free of piracy? That seems to contradict what you wrote earlier.
It's getting late, so only a few points. Adventure games peaked in about 1999 in my opinion; which is incidentally where piracy was lowest. I also know from people inside the business that piracy is a major obstacle in publishing on the PC market; so much that most prefer not to or delay the PC release. Thus, I added 2+2+2, but clearly flagged it as something which I am convinced of, but not something I can prove. Fair?
As for the online part being draconian: The points you have about abandoned games could easily be addressed: these days, letting the code be GPL'ed or similar when the publisher no longer wants to support it seems the obvious solution, and one you see often in my world (linux gamer). The offline bit is not quite irrelevant yet, but will soon be as we will have internet everywhere. And even so, I suspect it is that, or intrusive copyright protection schemes that screws with your computer. I prefer the online bit, thank you very much.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
And how does that make you feel knowing that the publisher spends more time thinking about people that aren't their customers, than you? Shouldn't they just be worried about making their customer happy? I mean, they still turn a profit when they publish, and Stardock managed to get quite a bit of a following with Sins of a Solar Empire without resulting to DRM.
If you don't like them, don't buy from then, and don't pirate. If you pirate, you are saying that you actually do want their product (though you prefer it (nearly) free). Actions speak louder than words
The only up is that online games are having a ball, since cracking those are harder. My hope is that someday it will be feasible to simply host the game on some server and deliver all the content over the net, so that we can get rid of the arrrrggghh pirates.
And when some jackass decides to DDoS your content/directory servers to grief a couple hundred thousand people, I'll laugh because you rent your games and have no control by design. I'll do the same when your content provider decides the ROI on supporting an old game isn't enough to justify the hosting expenses.
When DDoS, I get a refund for the lapsed. Sure it might mean I have to do something else for a day, but I will survive, the same is true for a blackout for everyone. If the server gets discontinued, I will move to another game. Since it is online, subscription-based content, I have lost nothing. In all likelyhood, I have moved on long since.
Anyway, this is the only growth area on the PC game market, primarily because of piracy. Yes, I would prefer a world without DRM, piracy and so forth, but I do not see a way to get there. I do support almost every independent linuxgame out there, (at least every second), but it is not enough, apparently due to piracy (yes, linux is just as much hit by this as windows).
As a legal user of P2P, and as a PC gamer (linux only, though), I really hate all the copyright infringements going on.
If copyright law were a more reasonable reflection of reality, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much copyright infringement going on.
What should change about copyright law to avoid the copyright infringement and still allow the using of 20+millions of mullah to develop a game? I am all for shortening the period of copyright, but that really doesn't matter for games. A 12-year copyright (shortest suggestion I have seen) wouldn't really make a difference for computer games just yet.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
And you'd be wrong.
It seems a lot of people have misunderstood me here. I did not mean the monkey island (original game) remake or something like that; I meant another good, funny and stunning graphical adventure. They have gotten very rare, and I fear it is because such games are almost impossible to properly protect from copyright infringement. At least, that is what my contacts in the game industry tells me, and I have no reason to doubt them.
Your post is nonsense form beginning to the end. You first paragraph has nothing to do with the matter at hand, nor has your second statement, as I have not implied anything of the kind.
i.e: If you want to reply, please address at least one point raised.
Soon sending a song through the web will bring larger fines than experimenting with nuclear weapons at home.
If was only one song, rather than 1/3 - 1/2 of the traffic on the internet, I would see your point. As a legal user of P2P, and as a PC gamer (linux only, though), I really hate all the copyright infringements going on. I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
The only up is that online games are having a ball, since cracking those are harder. My hope is that someday it will be feasible to simply host the game on some server and deliver all the content over the net, so that we can get rid of the arrrrggghh pirates.
Then there are the folks who would rather avoid spending money on a license for a high performance db like Oracle and insist on getting cheaper, less capable ones, just to avoid the capital cost.
You mean a database that can actually distinguish an empty string from null?
The only thing I've noticed you get form Oracle over pg is a bigger invoice. But I'm sure you willl tell me that it doesn't scale or other such vapour:P
To my knowledge, there isn't a single car sold by dealerships that gets over 35, aside from a few gutless hybrids.
A front-wheel-drive hybrid with a fair amount of torque would be a great seller here.
You probably know better than I, I am not much of a car person. Nominally, it does 26km per liter (of diesel), in practice it is above 20. Google translated that for me to the 52 mpg number, but I have no feel for the old imperial units:)
It is not a special car, just a Citrium (spelling?) C3 or something like that.
I am not much of a driving man myself, but according to Google our car does 52 mpg at the least. Isn't 26 mpg rather poor? I haven't noticed any problems with snow or groceries in that car, either:) Of course, if I lived in Norway or another snow country I would get myself one of those sets of chains that do snow so well.
JIT is a marketing word. The real term could be something like "caching interpreter".. it is simply an interpreter that caches the resulting code. Meaning that if you managed to write a program that has every line executed once, it would be just like an interpreter in effect.
Personally I like to call JIT for "slightly too late", since "just in time" in my world would imply the code is compiled when you need it, not a bit later.
For example, I would love to get parallel computations figure out my 'optimal' tax returns. Have my GPS calculate optimal routes - the routes I get now are pretty crappy etc.
My point to all this is that most of the problems that look like they are one-input-one-output aren't really that. It's just that over the last 50 or so years, we've learned to model them as such out of sheer necessity.
Your GPS route is a most likely an A* algorithm, or a variant of it. There is certainly the possibility of using 4-6 cores on that efficiently, but I don't really see how to use 1000 efficiently.
But perhaps, 1000 is not really necessary. If so, we should concentrate on creating good, lock-free data structures such as queues, heaps and vectors, and put them into commonly available libraries.
Well, claiming is not the same as doing. However, looking at the openid.net website, which I suppose is as authoritative as you get, they claim that the deviation from the protocol is temporary, and should be fixed in the near future. So that is great news:)
From the articles, GoogleID (or whatever you want to call it) isn't openid 2.0 either, though close enough that implementation could probably accommodate both. Sort of like all the work-around we have for Microsoft-specific behavior.
Nonsense. I have one of these, and no problem getting on the network. Besides, if rogue phones could trivially kill the network, I am sure that this would already have been exploited by some criminals.
Copyright holder loses money because income is not received from unauthorized copies.
Seems to make sense at first.
Problem with that logic is that it typically implies that every instance of copying equals an instance of lost sales which is clearly and demonstrably not true.
Typically implies? Nonsense, doubly so. There is no such thing as typically implying for a logical argument, nor does many people that pushes such arguments think or claim that every illegal copy is a lost sale. Instead, some fraction of the sales are lost. That is the argument you would have to refute.
Of course, network effects might mean more sales are generated, too, but that is beside the point, really. If you believe in copyright, you would say that giving away copies is a marketing ploy, which should be up to the rightholder, not some random Joe. If you, on the other hand, do not believe in copyright, that should apply to the GPL. Middle grounds exists, too, of course, such as shorter copyrights (my personal favorite).
I am no expert, but I believe that the bible contains two complete lineages from Jesus to Adam. I believe the 6K figure came from this. The two lineages themselves are a bit odd, but it is claimed that one is through Joseph (which didn't fuck Maria, and isn't the father) and the other through Maria (she is not listed, and it would be quite unique for that text to contain any maternal links).
But seriously, this is nitpicking. The truly troubling parts are the ones that seem to condole wholesale slaughter of men, women and even animals. Or killing a child with a knife. Or offering a woman for gang rape. Or preaching to turn away from your family. After reading that, who really cares if the bible is obviously off on a few points?
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Experimental is also where KDE 4 has been living all this time. It'll be good to have experimental back to be something I rarely get a package from, rather than half my GUI systems :)
Not to bee too pedantic here, but your roof IS biodegradable. The roofs of most modern houses are made of wood. It's the nice non-biodegradable shingles which keep you dry.
Around here, we use mostly ceramic, slate or concrete roofs. My roof is a mix of ceramic and asbestos... damn good roof, but unfortunately not legal to lay on anymore. In any case, not exactly bio-degradable (but except for the asbestos, it doesn't really cause any harm, either)
However I read further, and see that it is actually going to be developed for platform games and ported to the PC. Ported! That means a couple of things. Controls will suck, as going from controllers to keyboard mouse never works. This also effects what types of things you can do in game as some things are just too hard to do with a controller. Also the graphics will suck. They will be designed with a TV and a console video card in mind, and likely upscaled for the PC. Which means blurry and blocky and distorted graphics.
Well, the fact is that the profits are much higher in the consoles. Or so my friends in the business tells me. And no surprise, since the prices per game is much higher, allegedly due to lesser risk of piracy^Wcopyright infrigement.
I use it, and I switched from Pidgin. I don't know, Pidgin just seemed clunky for me.
I only use Jabber though --- I had a lot of accounts, but in the end, Jabber was the only one with more than 1 contact/connection.
In case you were looking for answers rather than abuse: I have used both. For me git does what svn does, plus the following in order of most important first.
Of course, this is for me, and all points might be irrelevant for you.
What should change about copyright law to avoid the copyright infringement and still allow the using of 20+millions of mullah to develop a game?
The problem here isn't copyright law, it's economics.
Nonsense. If piracy were not a problem, this would be quite feasible... indeed, it *is* feasible for platforms where piracy is not so widespread, like consoles.
It is a struggle to see any reason why the genre of a [single-player, standalone, not online] game should have the slightest bearing on how easy it is to 'protect' from piracy. It's like arguing that engine immobilisers are only useful for four-door sedans, and won't work on sports cars or SUVs.
Well, listen and you might learn something. Graphical adventures are for different reasons not very suited to consoles (lack of mouse, crappy screens, low disk capacities and more). Nor are they realistically protectable by making them an online affair (yet, anyway). Also it is somewhat of a niche genre, so it takes less to move the total game from a net if modest earning to a net loss. Clear now? Merry Christmas then.
Again, the evidence doesn't bear it out. Look at music. Despite the claims of rampant piracy, there is an even greater diversity of niche music than ever before. Similarly with games - independent developers are thriving like they never have before, thanks to internet distribution. There is more variety in games today than there's ever been before. Your argument appears to be based on nothing but nostalgia.
Au contraire, the evidence bears it out very clearly. Most of the veteran software houses are giving up the PC platform or at least relegating it to 2nd place. I have played quite a few games from independent software houses, and I know for a fact that they are barely breaking even --- in the best of cases, except if they either have some way to prevent piracy (online component) *or* develop for a very small budget (like flash games and the like).
Music is neither here nor there, the price for developing music is plummeting, while the price for developing high-quality games are not.
To follow your lead, it seems your argument is based on nothing but self-delusion and wishful thinking :p
I would love it if abandonware games were GPLed, but as the law stands, there pretty much is a fat chance of that happening, right now it still rests on the consumers trust of the company to live up to its promises while going through its death throes.
If this was something consumers wanted, say because it's on a server as opposed to on CDs, this could easily be done. Of course, if there is no real demand, that will not happen.
I doubt we will be able to have internet everywhere, affordable, and in a platform that can handle games soon.
You can get it in my country (DK) right now, at affordable if not quite cheap, prizes right now, I'm guessing you are American (from your posting time, don't kill me if I'm wrong), and I hear US is a bit behind with that sort of thing, but no doubt it will happen there, too.
And still we rely on the trust of who ever is hosting it allowing us to enjoy it years down the road. I don't even trust Valve/Steam, since I thought that Interplay would be around forever just a couple years ago. All things are temporary, no matter how solvent they are today.
Indeed. But then, the other day, I wanted to play a 10 year old game (Severance: Blade of darkness) --- and I couldn't. It doesn't work with any version of windows that I can currently install on any machine, nor in wine, due to DRM. So you method is no garantee, either.
As for your sig, Agnosticism would be the absence of knowledge, not decisiveness.
MY sig is a joke, which, due to the restrictions that slashdot has on signature length, has been shortened so far down that not everyone gets it. Sorry about that. Though I'll gladly debate agnosticim, I think that would not be on topic this time around.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
Yeah right, people and companies aren't going to develop new games or innovate because of piracy. Just like nobody makes any new music anymore because of piracy. Sorry, this argument just doesn't make sense logically or economically. People still rake in money writing games and music, and aside from the money, there are always creative types who create because they are internally driven to, not because of a profit motive.
Strawman. I said certain types of games, championed by monkey island in this case, are no longer getting developed, because the upfront cost ($10â?) does not, on average, repaid by sales. An investor will not throw money away, as you wouldn't. And yes, this argument makes sense economically (more piracy leads to less sales leads to poorer payback). You could argue that this is not what happens; but studies very much indicate that this is so, Logically, it trivially makes sense, but I suspect you don't know what that word means (I don't blame you, I am a mathematician)
As for the idealist, then yes, that happens, and still do. But the result is not gorgeous, fun games, because enthusiasm does not pay rent, and one man can only do so much. Perhaps open source can step in and help here, I don't know, but right now this doesn't appear to be happening.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
Citation needed. (I never played it myself, but maybe it just sucked?)
Not enough to prevent 3 sequels, and a host of similar games. Then, in the late 90's, they disappeared. What came unto the scene in the late 90's? Online piracy, and a sharp rise to piracy, too. It might be a coincidence, but I think not.
Also, this assumes that every person who pirates a game/song would have bought it otherwise.
No it doesn't. It assumes that a significant part of the revenue is lost because people chose the free route.
The vast majority of pirates would never have paid for it to start with, so the company isn't actually making any less money than they would without piracy.
Citation needed. This is obviously fantasy. Of course, if the materials was not available for free, some more of it would have been bought.
It's the same argument we heard the RIAA made back in the 80's; it was "OMFG people are going to stop buying cassettes because now they can just record the music from the radio! We're gonna go bankrupt & all music on the planet will cease to exist!". And despite everybody & their dogs making 'mix tapes' and recording music from the radio, album sales soared to all-time record highs.
Flawed analogy. The tapes were of a poor quality and bothersome to make. That's what kept the copying at bay. And the advertising and general economic growth did the rest.
So no, people pirating the music don't hurt the bottom line. The only piracy that impacts sales to any extent is actually called "counterfeiting" i.e. when someone produces & sells hard-copy CD's, etc.
You live in a fantasy if you believe that. Just the other day was an article disproving that right here on slashdot.
The only up is that online games are having a ball, since cracking those are harder. My hope is that someday it will be feasible to simply host the game on some server and deliver all the content over the net, so that we can get rid of the arrrrggghh pirates.
This is actually done quite frequently. Many online games, especially mmorpg's, do exactly this. The ones who still make you buy a copy from the retail outlet are just trying to gouge you for even more cash. They base their business on revenue from subscriptions, the copies of the game discs themselves are just more gravy for the profit coffers. As an example, last time I checked you could download WoW for free direct from Blizzard, and they certainly aren't suffering.
So you are saying that these games are doing well because they are free of piracy? That seems to contradict what you wrote earlier.
It's getting late, so only a few points. Adventure games peaked in about 1999 in my opinion; which is incidentally where piracy was lowest. I also know from people inside the business that piracy is a major obstacle in publishing on the PC market; so much that most prefer not to or delay the PC release. Thus, I added 2+2+2, but clearly flagged it as something which I am convinced of, but not something I can prove. Fair?
As for the online part being draconian: The points you have about abandoned games could easily be addressed: these days, letting the code be GPL'ed or similar when the publisher no longer wants to support it seems the obvious solution, and one you see often in my world (linux gamer). The offline bit is not quite irrelevant yet, but will soon be as we will have internet everywhere. And even so, I suspect it is that, or intrusive copyright protection schemes that screws with your computer. I prefer the online bit, thank you very much.
And how does that make you feel knowing that the publisher spends more time thinking about people that aren't their customers, than you? Shouldn't they just be worried about making their customer happy? I mean, they still turn a profit when they publish, and Stardock managed to get quite a bit of a following with Sins of a Solar Empire without resulting to DRM.
If you don't like them, don't buy from then, and don't pirate. If you pirate, you are saying that you actually do want their product (though you prefer it (nearly) free). Actions speak louder than words
And when some jackass decides to DDoS your content/directory servers to grief a couple hundred thousand people, I'll laugh because you rent your games and have no control by design. I'll do the same when your content provider decides the ROI on supporting an old game isn't enough to justify the hosting expenses.
When DDoS, I get a refund for the lapsed. Sure it might mean I have to do something else for a day, but I will survive, the same is true for a blackout for everyone. If the server gets discontinued, I will move to another game. Since it is online, subscription-based content, I have lost nothing. In all likelyhood, I have moved on long since.
Anyway, this is the only growth area on the PC game market, primarily because of piracy. Yes, I would prefer a world without DRM, piracy and so forth, but I do not see a way to get there. I do support almost every independent linuxgame out there, (at least every second), but it is not enough, apparently due to piracy (yes, linux is just as much hit by this as windows).
As a legal user of P2P, and as a PC gamer (linux only, though), I really hate all the copyright infringements going on.
If copyright law were a more reasonable reflection of reality, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much copyright infringement going on.
What should change about copyright law to avoid the copyright infringement and still allow the using of 20+millions of mullah to develop a game? I am all for shortening the period of copyright, but that really doesn't matter for games. A 12-year copyright (shortest suggestion I have seen) wouldn't really make a difference for computer games just yet.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
And you'd be wrong.
It seems a lot of people have misunderstood me here. I did not mean the monkey island (original game) remake or something like that; I meant another good, funny and stunning graphical adventure. They have gotten very rare, and I fear it is because such games are almost impossible to properly protect from copyright infringement. At least, that is what my contacts in the game industry tells me, and I have no reason to doubt them.
Your post is nonsense form beginning to the end. You first paragraph has nothing to do with the matter at hand, nor has your second statement, as I have not implied anything of the kind.
i.e: If you want to reply, please address at least one point raised.
Soon sending a song through the web will bring larger fines than experimenting with nuclear weapons at home.
If was only one song, rather than 1/3 - 1/2 of the traffic on the internet, I would see your point. As a legal user of P2P, and as a PC gamer (linux only, though), I really hate all the copyright infringements going on. I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
The only up is that online games are having a ball, since cracking those are harder. My hope is that someday it will be feasible to simply host the game on some server and deliver all the content over the net, so that we can get rid of the arrrrggghh pirates.
End rant :)
Then there are the folks who would rather avoid spending money on a license for a high performance db like Oracle and insist on getting cheaper, less capable ones, just to avoid the capital cost.
You mean a database that can actually distinguish an empty string from null?
The only thing I've noticed you get form Oracle over pg is a bigger invoice. But I'm sure you willl tell me that it doesn't scale or other such vapour :P
52mpg?
To my knowledge, there isn't a single car sold by dealerships that gets over 35, aside from a few gutless hybrids.
A front-wheel-drive hybrid with a fair amount of torque would be a great seller here.
You probably know better than I, I am not much of a car person. Nominally, it does 26km per liter (of diesel), in practice it is above 20. Google translated that for me to the 52 mpg number, but I have no feel for the old imperial units :)
It is not a special car, just a Citrium (spelling?) C3 or something like that.
I am not much of a driving man myself, but according to Google our car does 52 mpg at the least. Isn't 26 mpg rather poor? I haven't noticed any problems with snow or groceries in that car, either :) Of course, if I lived in Norway or another snow country I would get myself one of those sets of chains that do snow so well.
Java is compiled Just-in-time
How is that different than an interpreter?
JIT is a marketing word. The real term could be something like "caching interpreter".. it is simply an interpreter that caches the resulting code. Meaning that if you managed to write a program that has every line executed once, it would be just like an interpreter in effect.
Personally I like to call JIT for "slightly too late", since "just in time" in my world would imply the code is compiled when you need it, not a bit later.
For example, I would love to get parallel computations figure out my 'optimal' tax returns. Have my GPS calculate optimal routes - the routes I get now are pretty crappy etc.
My point to all this is that most of the problems that look like they are one-input-one-output aren't really that. It's just that over the last 50 or so years, we've learned to model them as such out of sheer necessity.
Your GPS route is a most likely an A* algorithm, or a variant of it. There is certainly the possibility of using 4-6 cores on that efficiently, but I don't really see how to use 1000 efficiently.
But perhaps, 1000 is not really necessary. If so, we should concentrate on creating good, lock-free data structures such as queues, heaps and vectors, and put them into commonly available libraries.
Well, claiming is not the same as doing. However, looking at the openid.net website, which I suppose is as authoritative as you get, they claim that the deviation from the protocol is temporary, and should be fixed in the near future. So that is great news :)
From the articles, GoogleID (or whatever you want to call it) isn't openid 2.0 either, though close enough that implementation could probably accommodate both. Sort of like all the work-around we have for Microsoft-specific behavior.
Nonsense. I have one of these, and no problem getting on the network. Besides, if rogue phones could trivially kill the network, I am sure that this would already have been exploited by some criminals.
You're losing sales.
Let's go through the logic of that shall we?
Seems to make sense at first.
Problem with that logic is that it typically implies that every instance of copying equals an instance of lost sales which is clearly and demonstrably not true.
Typically implies? Nonsense, doubly so. There is no such thing as typically implying for a logical argument, nor does many people that pushes such arguments think or claim that every illegal copy is a lost sale. Instead, some fraction of the sales are lost. That is the argument you would have to refute.
Of course, network effects might mean more sales are generated, too, but that is beside the point, really. If you believe in copyright, you would say that giving away copies is a marketing ploy, which should be up to the rightholder, not some random Joe. If you, on the other hand, do not believe in copyright, that should apply to the GPL. Middle grounds exists, too, of course, such as shorter copyrights (my personal favorite).
I am no expert, but I believe that the bible contains two complete lineages from Jesus to Adam. I believe the 6K figure came from this. The two lineages themselves are a bit odd, but it is claimed that one is through Joseph (which didn't fuck Maria, and isn't the father) and the other through Maria (she is not listed, and it would be quite unique for that text to contain any maternal links).
But seriously, this is nitpicking. The truly troubling parts are the ones that seem to condole wholesale slaughter of men, women and even animals. Or killing a child with a knife. Or offering a woman for gang rape. Or preaching to turn away from your family. After reading that, who really cares if the bible is obviously off on a few points?