According to the article, "vrow" is a Dutch woman. Can anyone confirm that? Dictionary.com doesn't know the word, but does know "vrouw" (which is also the proper Dutch word for "woman").
Why am I modded "Interesting"? This was supposed to be funny! CSS and transparency, are far from fully implemented!
Nonetheless, the SVG bit is important. Allow me to restate the question in a less sarcastic/funny way:
I am currently one of the developers on an existing online application that uses a combination of SVG and javascript for an important piece of functionality. Currently, our users using Internet Explorer can use this functionality thanks to the Adobe SVG plugin for IE that comes bundled with Acrobat Reader. However, Adobe has recently announced the end of life of this product and has also announced that not all of its features will work on Vista. Will Microsoft take steps to ensure that SVG remain usable for users of IE? If so, can you provide us with concrete data on what these steps will be?
For those who prefer java, here's an open source version, initially developed by IBM. Pretty cool stuff. Had fun with it as a machine learning project in university.
>> Another big advantage is the fact that java identifiers (variable/procedure/class/etc. names) actually make sense.
> ???
Let's take a look at some of the functions in stdio.h: "fputs", "getw", "scanf", "tmpnam", "ungetc". To a programmer who's unexperienced in C/C++, these names don't give the slightest clue as to what these functions are good for. They're unpronouncable, hard to remember, and syntax completion won't do you any good unless it also shows a short description of what these functions actually do.
>> Sure, it's verbose, but syntax completion and a decent resolution on your monitor practically negate that problem. The added clarity more than makes up for it.
>No. They don't. "Syntax completion" helps me write code, not read it. Verbosity != Clarity Here is the dictionary meaning of Verbose Verbosity: long-winded: using or containing too many words
Let's not be pedantic over definitions please. You know what I meant with "verbose", which is that identifiers are descriptive and thus tend to be long. That helps when reading code, but is a pain when writing it, unless you have syntax completion.
>Java is verbose because it lacks features that ought to be there in modern languages in the first place to properly express the logic at the appropriate level of abstraction. And that is by design. It was intentionally created for the least common denominator - initially for web monkeys (applet rage) and later for cheap commodity coders for the the enterprise (J2EE craze). Of course, I am not belittling Java coders. Smart people do work with Java. And there are other reasons for it than the language - more jobs, critical mass advantage etc.
That is just utter nonsense. Java wasn't designed for the least common denominator, it was designed to be clean.
>Java was released in 1995. Is Java better than C++? Maybe. Depends on how you look at it. But Java was a step backwards in every way compared to any serious language released from around that time onwards.
That is just an opinion. And one that you don't even provide arguments in favor of, at that.
>> Disclaimer: YMMV, and yes, I do know that you can use verbose identifiers in C/C++. That doesn't help much if nobody else does so.
>I think you are confusing language features vs language culture. Language culture has more to do with it's application. Business logic obviously will be written quite differently than bit twiddling.
I would call the standard libraries an important feature (positive or negative) of any language.
Another big advantage is the fact that java identifiers (variable/procedure/class/etc. names) actually make sense. Sure, it's verbose, but syntax completion and a decent resolution on your monitor practically negate that problem. The added clarity more than makes up for it.
Disclaimer: YMMV, and yes, I do know that you can use verbose identifiers in C/C++. That doesn't help much if nobody else does so.
As I understand it, the offer was not for full rights, but "merely" a license for distribution and further development.
This difference may not sound important, but it is. If the full rights were sold, then the original developer could no longer license others, and could no longer enfore the GPL on the code. (Only the copyright holder can do so.)
What made you hate the article so much? Because I can't really see why you think it's so terrible. It's not great by any means, but it's not horrible either. It seems to me like you're just trolling, with a little bit of karma whoring thrown in.
Not the O.P. and I didn't even RTFA, but going by the descriptions given by the O.P., it seems like according to these categories, if you play mainstream games you're either playing out of boredom, or you want to be challenged.
That seems completely off to me. About half the gamers I know who have a job, who are serious students, or who otherwise don't have a lot of spare time play games to relax. Where do they fit in?
Speaking for myself, I'm certainly not bored. I've got more stuff to do than I have time for. When I play games, I do so to have a good time and relax. I want to have to put some effort into the thing, but I certainly don't want to be challenged. In what category would that put me?
I know plenty of teens that still "tidy" their rooms and speak respectfully to elders, myself included.
That is beside the point. Said point being that getting a 7 year old to behave is much easier than getting a teen to do the same.
What, you mean one of those "better kind of parent" people? Not everyone is utterly incompetent and defeatist when it comes to parenting.
You assume a lot. Not every kid is the same and not everyone grows up in the same environment. And that's not even going into the fact that it is not unusual for teens to go through rebellious phases. Also, the AC in #15742752 has a good point.
Actually, there is no way to proof there is an encryption scheme that cannot be cracked.
There isn't? Proof it!;-)
Seriously, there are ways. The reason most encryption schemes can at least be brute forced is that for any given ciphertext, there are very few possble sensible (non-garbage) plaintexts. So, if you try all possible keys and look at all the resulting plaintexts, the one that is sensible will almost certainly be the original plaintext.
With OTP this won't work as there is a simple proof that for any given ciphertext, every single message of the same lenght is a possible plaintext. So if you have a ciphertext of 1k characters and you try every possible key, you'll end up with every possible text of 1k characters. This includes bits of Shakespeare, Britney Spears porn, texts describing who killed JFK (at least one of which will be amazingly be true:-) ), quotes from the Bible, excerpts from the linux code and much, much more. There's no way of knowing what was the original message.
Oh, and since you'll end up with 256^1000 messages of 1k length, you'll need a bigger harddisk;-)
I fact, that is pretty much the only attack that will work against a correct implementation of OTP, an encryption scheme that actually is unbreakable (though rather unpractical for most applications).
The article also doesn't tell the whole story. Half the adds have the black woman grabbing the white woman. It's also obviously about color in general, not color of skin. Both women are entirely dressed in their respective colors. (Cue remarks about how black and/or white aren't colors.)
Really, while the adds are perhaps not as wisely chosen as they could have been (assuming all the media attention doesn't work to Sony's advantage), the issue is being blown entirely out of proportion by overly pc-people.
I wish people would realise that seeing racial issues where there are none is is almost as undesirable as direct racism itself. Take a lesson from South Park.
That's a nice idea, but it's not what the dictionary says.
Really, I understand that "American" is easier to roll of the tongue than "U-S-ian" or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that that word no more specifically describes people from the US than "European" specifically describes people from the EU.
... as I was under the impression that, EU citizen or not, you couldn't just jump to a random university in some other country.
You can, actually. (Assuming you qualify for the education.) As of a few years ago EU law guarantees this. Before that time it was generally still quite easy (again, assuming you qualify), thanks to the international connections most good universities have.
I think funding is a big factor here. There are quite a number of very well funded US universities. Naturally these can afford better facilities and (in no small part due to the aforementioned facilities) have an easier time attracting the smartest people around the globe.
Does this mean that you automatically get a better education at these universities? Maybe, maybe not. Anecdotical evidence among some of my friends who went to the US to finish their master's degree suggests that it's not any better or worse than Dutch universities. (And no, they didn't go to just any university; these are really smart people who went to places like Berkeley.) All of them really appreciated the facilities and the chance to talk to key people in their chosen field though.
"John Arbuthnot Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, RN (January 25, 1841 - July 10, 1920), commonly known as "Jackie" Fisher, was a British admiral known for his efforts at naval reform. He had a huge influence on the Royal Navy in a career spanning more than 60 years, starting in a navy of wooden sailing ships armed with muzzle-loading cannon and ending in one of battlecruisers, submarines and the first aircraft carriers. The argumentative, energetic, reform-minded Fisher is often considered the second most important figure of British naval history, after Lord Nelson."
"The sixth HMS Dreadnought of the British Royal Navy was the first battleship to have a uniform main battery, rather than having a secondary battery of smaller guns. She was also the first large warship to be powered by steam turbines, making her the fastest warship of her size. So advanced was Dreadnought that her name became a generic term for modern battleships, whilst the ships she made obsolete were known as "pre-dreadnoughts". Her introduction helped spark off a major naval arms race as navies around the world rushed to match her, particularly the Germans in the build up to the First World War."
Just because they say it is? I'm not trolling, I really want to know.
You can copyright source code, but not the rules of a protocol. You'd have to use a patent for that. Since the GPL is all about copyright and not patents (yet), what they say is probably nonsense.
The only construction that I can think of that would make the protocol governed by the GPL (though not for the reasons MySQL AB states) is if the protocol requires the transmission of some text that is itself copyrighted under the GPL *. I'm not familiar with the MySQL protocol, so I couldn't say if it does any such thing. I'd bet against MySQL AB on this issue, though.
*) As an aside, some company used a similar construction for an anti-spam solution, whereby a copyrighted haiku had to be sent in the mail header in order to circumvent the filter. This haiku wasn't licensed to spammers, automatically making them copyright infringers if they included it.
ESA (or anybody else) isn't to blame here. C&C is far from abandonware as you can still buy it in stores as part of the C&C: The First Decade set. It's pretty cheap, even.
Even if a publisher would want to do this...
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Even if a publisher would want to release one of these old games, they may not be able to due to contractual obligations or practical considerations.
For instance they may have to pay royalties to the developer or licence fees for a software component or trademark for every copy distributed (even if for free). This is particularly troublesome if the party to pay is now defunct or if the current owner of the rights is unknown or disputed. The original contracts may even be missing.
If there was serious money involved they could perhaps be compelled to sort such issues out, but since that isn't the case, most publishers really don't want to go through all the hassle.
A damn shame for sure, but that's just the way things are.
I do have it, but I haven't played it yet. Apart from chapter 3 (? The one with the time-travelling, the besieged village and the trial), I found NWN so incredibly disappointing that I didn't feel like going into the expansions.
Have you played BGII or Torment? How do you feel HOtU compares to those?
It's all just semantics, really. Sure, Diablo is nothing like what my friends and I do when we play a pen and paper rpg, but the mainstream doesn't even know about pen and paper rpgs. They just know that those fantasy games where your character gets better stats as you get farther into the game are called rpgs. Being anal about it only makes for awkward communication with non-p&p-rpgers. In the end they'll win anyway. Far more of them than there are of us.
But maybe I'm being too fatalistic.
Anyway, I know plenty of p&p D&Ders whose exploits really are nothing more than a low-tech Diablo, so maybe the game does deserve to be called an rpg:-)
Slashdot Mirror
According to the article, "vrow" is a Dutch woman. Can anyone confirm that? Dictionary.com doesn't know the word, but does know "vrouw" (which is also the proper Dutch word for "woman").
Why am I modded "Interesting"? This was supposed to be funny! CSS and transparency, are far from fully implemented!
Nonetheless, the SVG bit is important. Allow me to restate the question in a less sarcastic/funny way:
I am currently one of the developers on an existing online application that uses a combination of SVG and javascript for an important piece of functionality. Currently, our users using Internet Explorer can use this functionality thanks to the Adobe SVG plugin for IE that comes bundled with Acrobat Reader. However, Adobe has recently announced the end of life of this product and has also announced that not all of its features will work on Vista. Will Microsoft take steps to ensure that SVG remain usable for users of IE? If so, can you provide us with concrete data on what these steps will be?
Yeah, who does that Da Vinci guy think he is?! Get in line with the rest of us!
For those who prefer java, here's an open source version, initially developed by IBM. Pretty cool stuff. Had fun with it as a machine learning project in university.
>> Another big advantage is the fact that java identifiers (variable/procedure/class/etc. names) actually make sense.
> ???
Let's take a look at some of the functions in stdio.h: "fputs", "getw", "scanf", "tmpnam", "ungetc". To a programmer who's unexperienced in C/C++, these names don't give the slightest clue as to what these functions are good for. They're unpronouncable, hard to remember, and syntax completion won't do you any good unless it also shows a short description of what these functions actually do.
>> Sure, it's verbose, but syntax completion and a decent resolution on your monitor practically negate that problem. The added clarity more than makes up for it.
>No. They don't. "Syntax completion" helps me write code, not read it.
Verbosity != Clarity
Here is the dictionary meaning of Verbose
Verbosity: long-winded: using or containing too many words
Let's not be pedantic over definitions please. You know what I meant with "verbose", which is that identifiers are descriptive and thus tend to be long. That helps when reading code, but is a pain when writing it, unless you have syntax completion.
>Java is verbose because it lacks features that ought to be there in modern languages in the first place to properly express the logic at the appropriate level of abstraction. And that is by design. It was intentionally created for the least common denominator - initially for web monkeys (applet rage) and later for cheap commodity coders for the the enterprise (J2EE craze). Of course, I am not belittling Java coders. Smart people do work with Java. And there are other reasons for it than the language - more jobs, critical mass advantage etc.
That is just utter nonsense. Java wasn't designed for the least common denominator, it was designed to be clean.
>Java was released in 1995. Is Java better than C++? Maybe. Depends on how you look at it. But Java was a step backwards in every way compared to any serious language released from around that time onwards.
That is just an opinion. And one that you don't even provide arguments in favor of, at that.
>> Disclaimer: YMMV, and yes, I do know that you can use verbose identifiers in C/C++. That doesn't help much if nobody else does so.
>I think you are confusing language features vs language culture. Language culture has more to do with it's application. Business logic obviously will be written quite differently than bit twiddling.
I would call the standard libraries an important feature (positive or negative) of any language.
Another big advantage is the fact that java identifiers (variable/procedure/class/etc. names) actually make sense. Sure, it's verbose, but syntax completion and a decent resolution on your monitor practically negate that problem. The added clarity more than makes up for it.
Disclaimer: YMMV, and yes, I do know that you can use verbose identifiers in C/C++. That doesn't help much if nobody else does so.
As I understand it, the offer was not for full rights, but "merely" a license for distribution and further development.
This difference may not sound important, but it is. If the full rights were sold, then the original developer could no longer license others, and could no longer enfore the GPL on the code. (Only the copyright holder can do so.)
It's still cheap though.
What made you hate the article so much? Because I can't really see why you think it's so terrible. It's not great by any means, but it's not horrible either. It seems to me like you're just trolling, with a little bit of karma whoring thrown in.
Not the O.P. and I didn't even RTFA, but going by the descriptions given by the O.P., it seems like according to these categories, if you play mainstream games you're either playing out of boredom, or you want to be challenged.
That seems completely off to me. About half the gamers I know who have a job, who are serious students, or who otherwise don't have a lot of spare time play games to relax. Where do they fit in?
Speaking for myself, I'm certainly not bored. I've got more stuff to do than I have time for. When I play games, I do so to have a good time and relax. I want to have to put some effort into the thing, but I certainly don't want to be challenged. In what category would that put me?
Actually, the British Crime Survey reported the 22% increase. The official figures show an 8% increase.
m
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5195910.st
CNET is confusing different statistics.
This BBC link is more informative. The official figures are up 8%, but the British Crime Survey suggests it's actually 22%.
I know plenty of teens that still "tidy" their rooms and speak respectfully to elders, myself included.
That is beside the point. Said point being that getting a 7 year old to behave is much easier than getting a teen to do the same.
What, you mean one of those "better kind of parent" people? Not everyone is utterly incompetent and defeatist when it comes to parenting.
You assume a lot. Not every kid is the same and not everyone grows up in the same environment. And that's not even going into the fact that it is not unusual for teens to go through rebellious phases. Also, the AC in #15742752 has a good point.
but I manage to get him to tidy his room (and even other rooms in the house) and to speak respectfully to his elders.
Wait till he's a teen and see what's left of that.
And please consider for a moment how bragging about how your kid is better than someone else's makes you sound. Don't be one of those people.
Yes, and hence you'll have no way of knowing which one is the original one. That's pretty much my point.
Actually, there is no way to proof there is an encryption scheme that cannot be cracked.
;-)
:-) ), quotes from the Bible, excerpts from the linux code and much, much more. There's no way of knowing what was the original message.
;-)
There isn't? Proof it!
Seriously, there are ways. The reason most encryption schemes can at least be brute forced is that for any given ciphertext, there are very few possble sensible (non-garbage) plaintexts. So, if you try all possible keys and look at all the resulting plaintexts, the one that is sensible will almost certainly be the original plaintext.
With OTP this won't work as there is a simple proof that for any given ciphertext, every single message of the same lenght is a possible plaintext. So if you have a ciphertext of 1k characters and you try every possible key, you'll end up with every possible text of 1k characters. This includes bits of Shakespeare, Britney Spears porn, texts describing who killed JFK (at least one of which will be amazingly be true
Oh, and since you'll end up with 256^1000 messages of 1k length, you'll need a bigger harddisk
I fact, that is pretty much the only attack that will work against a correct implementation of OTP, an encryption scheme that actually is unbreakable (though rather unpractical for most applications).
The article also doesn't tell the whole story. Half the adds have the black woman grabbing the white woman. It's also obviously about color in general, not color of skin. Both women are entirely dressed in their respective colors. (Cue remarks about how black and/or white aren't colors.)
Really, while the adds are perhaps not as wisely chosen as they could have been (assuming all the media attention doesn't work to Sony's advantage), the issue is being blown entirely out of proportion by overly pc-people.
I wish people would realise that seeing racial issues where there are none is is almost as undesirable as direct racism itself. Take a lesson from South Park.
That's a nice idea, but it's not what the dictionary says.
Really, I understand that "American" is easier to roll of the tongue than "U-S-ian" or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that that word no more specifically describes people from the US than "European" specifically describes people from the EU.
... as I was under the impression that, EU citizen or not, you couldn't just jump to a random university in some other country.
You can, actually. (Assuming you qualify for the education.) As of a few years ago EU law guarantees this. Before that time it was generally still quite easy (again, assuming you qualify), thanks to the international connections most good universities have.
I think funding is a big factor here. There are quite a number of very well funded US universities. Naturally these can afford better facilities and (in no small part due to the aforementioned facilities) have an easier time attracting the smartest people around the globe.
Does this mean that you automatically get a better education at these universities? Maybe, maybe not. Anecdotical evidence among some of my friends who went to the US to finish their master's degree suggests that it's not any better or worse than Dutch universities. (And no, they didn't go to just any university; these are really smart people who went to places like Berkeley.) All of them really appreciated the facilities and the chance to talk to key people in their chosen field though.
"John Arbuthnot Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, RN (January 25, 1841 - July 10, 1920), commonly known as "Jackie" Fisher, was a British admiral known for his efforts at naval reform. He had a huge influence on the Royal Navy in a career spanning more than 60 years, starting in a navy of wooden sailing ships armed with muzzle-loading cannon and ending in one of battlecruisers, submarines and the first aircraft carriers. The argumentative, energetic, reform-minded Fisher is often considered the second most important figure of British naval history, after Lord Nelson."
"The sixth HMS Dreadnought of the British Royal Navy was the first battleship to have a uniform main battery, rather than having a secondary battery of smaller guns. She was also the first large warship to be powered by steam turbines, making her the fastest warship of her size. So advanced was Dreadnought that her name became a generic term for modern battleships, whilst the ships she made obsolete were known as "pre-dreadnoughts". Her introduction helped spark off a major naval arms race as navies around the world rushed to match her, particularly the Germans in the build up to the First World War."
Taken from wikipedia.
Just because they say it is? I'm not trolling, I really want to know.
You can copyright source code, but not the rules of a protocol. You'd have to use a patent for that. Since the GPL is all about copyright and not patents (yet), what they say is probably nonsense.
The only construction that I can think of that would make the protocol governed by the GPL (though not for the reasons MySQL AB states) is if the protocol requires the transmission of some text that is itself copyrighted under the GPL *. I'm not familiar with the MySQL protocol, so I couldn't say if it does any such thing. I'd bet against MySQL AB on this issue, though.
*) As an aside, some company used a similar construction for an anti-spam solution, whereby a copyrighted haiku had to be sent in the mail header in order to circumvent the filter. This haiku wasn't licensed to spammers, automatically making them copyright infringers if they included it.
ESA (or anybody else) isn't to blame here. C&C is far from abandonware as you can still buy it in stores as part of the C&C: The First Decade set. It's pretty cheap, even.
Even if a publisher would want to release one of these old games, they may not be able to due to contractual obligations or practical considerations.
For instance they may have to pay royalties to the developer or licence fees for a software component or trademark for every copy distributed (even if for free). This is particularly troublesome if the party to pay is now defunct or if the current owner of the rights is unknown or disputed. The original contracts may even be missing.
If there was serious money involved they could perhaps be compelled to sort such issues out, but since that isn't the case, most publishers really don't want to go through all the hassle.
A damn shame for sure, but that's just the way things are.
I do have it, but I haven't played it yet. Apart from chapter 3 (? The one with the time-travelling, the besieged village and the trial), I found NWN so incredibly disappointing that I didn't feel like going into the expansions.
Have you played BGII or Torment? How do you feel HOtU compares to those?
It's all just semantics, really. Sure, Diablo is nothing like what my friends and I do when we play a pen and paper rpg, but the mainstream doesn't even know about pen and paper rpgs. They just know that those fantasy games where your character gets better stats as you get farther into the game are called rpgs. Being anal about it only makes for awkward communication with non-p&p-rpgers. In the end they'll win anyway. Far more of them than there are of us.
:-)
But maybe I'm being too fatalistic.
Anyway, I know plenty of p&p D&Ders whose exploits really are nothing more than a low-tech Diablo, so maybe the game does deserve to be called an rpg