The fact that it hasent had a major upgrade in 6 years now actually makes it a pretty fast OS which modern software supports.
New software doesn't *need* to be slower than old software. That's mostly a problem of developers rushing to add new performance-robbing features rather than refining current code and optimizing the old features for performance.
It sounds like a minor point, but I'm just saying that it isn't being 6 years old that makes it faster. Microsoft could have spent the past 6 years increasing performance. They've just chosen not to.
the casino doesn't give you your money back if a machine jams, so it shouldn't work the other way.
I think this is a great point. I don't see any reason why the law should automatically fall on the casino's side. They make their money by fixing these games so that you can't win. That's their business. Someone messed up and the game ended up fixed the other way. It'd be one thing if the customers had hacked the game, but they just played it. In my mind, whether the customers knew something was up isn't really the point-- if the customers all noticed that a dealer was doing his job wrong, not shuffling properly, or paying out more than he's supposed to, I don't see why it should fall on the customers to be legally responsible for correcting the situation. They should be able to take advantage of the casino in the same way that casinos take advantage of their customers.
If the casino wants to recoup their losses, they should try suing whoever programmed the machine incorrectly.
I usually don't bother responding to ACs, but just to make sure there's no misunderstanding, I am not claiming that the IT workers are better now than they were then. I'm not claiming that proper computing principles had not been discovered in 1994. However, I am claiming that people in general have more familiarity and more realistic expectations of what computers can and will do. Among these "people in general" are managers and other office workers who might have been involved in planning "IT projects".
AFAIK, it's very rare for anyone to be sued for copyright violations without distributing. If you're not sharing your music library on P2P networks, but simply have a bunch of MP3s on your harddrive, you won't get sued. Even downloading won't really get you sued. It's being part of the source people are downloading from (for example, being part of a torrent) that gets people in trouble.
Of course, the exception to this is if you're actually representing a company. If your company is pirating media and software and using those in your operation, you might get sued because you have enough money to be worth going after. Of course, if you have that much money, you should be able to afford to operate legally. Find a way to license the codecs legally.
Personally I use Ubuntu and Gentoo at home, but wouldn't choose these for the company servers.
I haven't used Gentoo for a while, but I'm not sure why you wouldn't choose Ubuntu or Debian. Personally, I find each of them to be very stable and easy to manage. If it's an issue of support, you can get professional support from Canonical for Ubuntu.
What your saying is true-- businesses aren't going to get confused by 300 choices. There are a few major players, and anyone looking to use Linux will find out who they are pretty quickly. Often, there will be someone who is pushing for Linux adoption, and there's a good chance that person already have a preferred distro.
You make it sound like a such a bad thing. I don't necessarily think it's just about "lowering the bar", but instead an issue of having realistic expectations. In 1994, having a dedicated IT department was still relatively new for many companies. To put it in perspective, people were still using Windows 3.1. The Internet wasn't even a blip on the pop-culture radar, and (IIRC) Netscape was just being released around that time. Most people understood practically nothing about computers and networks. In a lot of colleges, CS was still a relatively new major, and many colleges didn't even offer IT-specific majors yet. For a long time, the "computer experts" came out of other majors relating to math, engineering, and science.
So it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that the managers of IT projects in many companies had practically no idea of what they were doing. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they had silly expectations about how things would work or what their new systems would allow. After 13 extra years of seeing the reality of computing and being frustrated by computers, one would think their expectations would be lowered somewhat.
LEXX was pretty bullshit and juvenile. It's like it was made for retarded 13 year-olds. Constant adolescent sex jokes, space ships shaped like genitalia, etc. It shouldn't be considered to be part of the same genre at Farscape, Dr. Who, or BSG.
Really, I think there's an untapped market segment there; not just for Farscape, but for certain kinds of TV shows in general. I think it might eventually be a successful business model to plan your show around only having a few episodes on television, solely as marketing for the DVD release of the full season.
The way things have been going, I've been wondering whether there might be a market for episodic material released directly to DVD, iTunes, and pay-per-view. Maybe I'm alone, but most of the TV I watch these days isn't the channel-surfing kind. I usually only watch a couple of series at a time, record them on my DVR, and then watch them when I have time-- and that's pretty much all the TV I watch. If I could just pay for those series' episodes, get them through iTunes or on-demand or something, and have it for a reasonable price, I might choose that instead of cable TV. I don't even feel like I need to "own" them (like buying a DVD). I usually don't watch the same episodes more than once, and if I could "rent" them, it'd be good enough.
As long as you have files, you'll have some sort of file format. The file formats may become so common and standardized and well-supported that most users don't really know the difference, but there will still be different formats.
I'm not sure it is the *only* tool. Surely there are other things involved, like good communication, cooperation, and sensible design choices. However, none of the other tools for interoperability will work without some kind of standard, and I don't see a possibility where it could be an inappropriate tool. In order to make things interoperate, at some point you have to agree on a way that things will operate. That's your standard.
I'm no expert, but it's a vacuum actually a pretty good heat insulator. That's why it's one of the layers in a thermos (aka vacuum flask). AFAIK, the main reason you freeze in space is because the low pressure causes your fluids to evaporate, which is an endothermic process. Keep the pressure up, and you keep the heat up.
Now you'd also need layers in the suit to prevent radiation both from leaving the suit (and losing heat that way) and from entering the suit (since you'll be outside the protection of the earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere).
I guess I can understand some rare and extreme cases where this could be used in positive ways. There are some people who are unable to function in their daily lives due to irrational fears. However, it seems like this sort of thing could be abused, and that disturbs me a bit. I hope people consider that fear, anxiety, and angst are appropriate responses to many situations. I don't know if it's a good idea to take these things lightly.
I don't think most people think Zunes are completely horrible. I tried one, and it was fine. It's just that the thing has been plagued by bad marketing decisions that give a lot of ammo to make fun of it, and people who dislike Microsoft are making fun of it. Some examples:
after spending years trying to push their "playsforsure" DRM on every piece of media on earth, Microsoft releases an MP3 player that doesn't support it, but has its own special DRM
Microsoft tried to hype the Zune as an iPod killer, perhaps THE iPod killer, and then it fails to live up to the hype and is relatively unsuccessful
they chose to make 1 of their 4 color choices an ugly brown color
they include a feature as useful as WiFi hardware, but only allow it to be used for "squirting", making it somewhat useless
the "squirting" stuff only works if others have Zunes, making it somewhat useless
the "squirting" stuff has a DRM which doesn't allow much use of the music before it stops working, making it somewhat useless
the "squirting" is called "squirting"
pairing the term "squirt" with an ugly brown color tends to conjure the idea of diarrhea.
I mean, really, MS made it an easy target for ridicule. Meanwhile people have a lot of reason to resent Microsoft. Why wouldn't you expect people to ridicule the Zune?
That's a thoughtful post, but the idea in it all that I like best is this: Don't make up your mind so easily.
Unless you're stubbornly sticking to a single path, going through college will probably change your view of where you'd like to be in 10 years. And then after you get out of college, setting out in the real world may change that view again. Working for 10 years on a given career path might make you want to change paths, or even change careers altogether. Things change more often than young people imagine. The life expectancy is more than 80 years these days, and you have no idea what mutations your life will undergo in that amount of time. Certainly, whatever path you pick for the time being, it'd be best to work your ass off and try to excel. You should work at it as though it might be your permanent path, but it may not be.
I've taken a bit of a strange path myself. I've been fixing computers for money since I was 10 and holding down IT jobs since I was 16. I started out a Computer Science major, hated it, and switched over to being a Philosophy major (of all things) with a minor in Literature. After college, I had a brief stint as a professional writer of sorts, hated it, and went back to fixing computers. In the years since, I've worked my way up from being a helpdesk tech to being an executive.
Honestly, I don't think the most important thing you learn in college is the subject matter of your particular major. The *most* important thing is learning how to work and to think in some way that works for you. You have to learn to juggle a lot of work, how to deal with people, and how to communicate your ideas. You learn how to make friends and how to cope with unexpected situations.
Even with subject matters as technical as computer science and information technology, the direct applicability of what you've been taught in classes will be limited. In real life situations, real life experience will serve you well. In my years of working in IT, looking at formal education and certifications never seemed to be a good sign of whether that person would be able to fix problems or to keep things running well. Surprisingly, I've found my philosophy studies have helped me get jobs and helped me do well in the industry.
I'm weary of giving advice and I'm certainly not advising that people take up philosophy as a means to getting a computer job. I guess I'm just saying that your life probably won't take a straight line, and you'll just have to find your own path. There is no "right answer".
um... ok, well I never said anything about "willy nilly". But, so... then you agree then that there's no reason why a copyright holder can't use a modified (non-verbatim copy) version of the GPL as your license?
I think he's right that there's a problem when you *equate* morality with legality. They aren't the same. Most people agree that laws should be moral, but the problem comes more when you try to make all immorality illegal. Immorality, too often, finds itself in the realm of thought and speech. Immorality too often exists in the intention and motivation rather than the action. People who are willing to accept laws that govern thoughts, speech, intentions, and motivations are people who are willing to accept totalitarian states.
Now, I don't really understand what that has to do with the GPL3, and I'm making no claim that "Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality" is applicable to the debate. However, I don't think the statement itself is wrong.
But the fact of the matter is, other people have spent all this time assisting him because of the morality of the license. If they just wanted open-code efficiency, they would have went with the tried and true BSD license.
That's not necessarily true. A decent portion of Linux (especially the kernel) has come from some kind of corporate sponsorship. Sometimes companies donate existing code, sometimes they donate funds to projects, and sometimes they hire programmers to work on portions of the projects they want. A lot of companies might prefer the GPL to BSD precisely because they don't want competitors to be able to take their code, make improvements, and keep the improvement to themselves.
In case I'm not being clear, imagine there was no Linux, but Redhat and Novell were still writing operating systems. Redhat is just starting out and really wants to make use of the FOSS community, and so they want to release some of their work to under an open-source license. If they pick a BSD license, Novell then has the legal right to take all of Redhat's hard work, put it into SuSE, and without doing any work on their own, start at the same level as Redhat. Then, Redhat had to pay for development, while Novell didn't. From there, Novell can write their own improvements, sell the result, and never share the improved code with Redhat. With the same amount of investment, Novell would be able to create a superior product by riding off of Redhat's work.
Alternatively, Redhat could choose the GPL. In that case, Novell is still allowed to make use of Redhat's code, but once they do, Redhat is also allowed to make use of SuSE's code. Besides possibly gaining more developer support, it also diminishes the ability of other companies to completely screw Redhat over.
Maybe that's a bad example because it's so theoretical, but I think I have a good point in there somewhere. I think part of the reason the GPL is so successful really is because of its efficiency at forcing people to cooperate and to be generous, and not because of its morality. Companies like Redhat, Novell, Sun, and IBM have made substantially donations of code, workforce, and money, and I don't believe that these donations were driven by morality.
The GPL is not free for non-verbatim redistribution.
I don't see why not. You can't take something released under the GPL and pick-and-choose which parts you want to redistribute under, but if you're the original copyright holder, I don't see why you wouldn't be permitted to use an altered form of the GPL for distributing your old code. When you're the original copyright holder, you can license your IP however you please. Or am I wrong?
I don't think anything you can do in a solo game is "cheating."
Well, I don't think there's any reason for anyone to get angry with you for cheating in a solo game. Cheating, in that case, doesn't have any negative ramifications for anyone else, so cheat all you like. Still, I'd call it "cheating" and I don't see that there are any real grounds to claim I'm wrong. But if you don't want to think of it as cheating, let's not quibble over a word.
I'll gladly look online for secrets or a walkthrough to get me past that point. I think that's probably typical. And yes, I do consider it a weakness of the game if I have to do that too much.
That's all I'm really saying. If an average or good player will still get stuck at some point in the game where they're unable to progress for more than a few days of trying, and the only way to get past being "stuck" is to do something outside of normal gameplay (cheat codes or walkthroughs), then there's a problem with the construction of the game.
Of course, occasionally even a good player gets stuck on something stupid. There's some obvious next step that falls into a particular gamer's blind spot, and he/she can't figure out the right thing to do. That's not really the fault of the game designers. Still, I'd say that if there are particular parts of your game that frustrate most players for a long time, then that it a sign of poor game design.
Personally, I think the perfect difficulty for a game is that it always feels like a challenge, but somehow never prevents you from progressing. You should never just get "stuck" on some part of a game with no idea on how to move on for weeks at a time, the only way to continue is to cheat in some way. (And yes, in my mind, looking up info in a game guide is "cheating")
That was my first thought, too. You're talking about a nation with a budget of, what, a couple trillion dollars a year? If they're implying that keeping our future nationwide wireless internet access open will cost a couple billion, I'd say that's the most worthwhile couple billion dollars our government could spend.
Hell, I bet lots of aspects of our economic and social freedom "costs" us billions of dollars every year. I, for one, wouldn't choose to sell that freedom for a mere couple billion dollars.
I didn't RTFA, but where in those numbers are the people who rip DVDs but don't share the resulting movies? Or did they just assume that everyone with DVD copying/ripping software were using it for copyright infringement?
I rip DVDs sometimes using a nice little program called Handbrake. I guess it's illegal to crack the encryption, but I don't let others copy my movies. I use Handbrake so that I can put my movies on my laptop, mostly for when I travel. That way, I can have several movies with me without needing to carry around physical DVDs. Handbrake also allows you to encode files for specific devices, like the iPod and the AppleTV, which I believe should also be considered a fair use of the copyrighted material. It's format shifting, not infringement.
After all, why go to all the trouble of pushing Vista or its (likely even less popular) successors on an uninterested public, when you can just bill them monthly?
I really hate hearing the marketing on these things, too. They try to paint the whole thing as actually being cost-effective, because paying monthly charges will keep you from having to pay upgrade fees (like Microsoft's SA on volume licensing). Of course, that assumes that the sum of your monthly fees is less than buying a license outright. Plus, if they lock you in to their own solutions and get to charge you monthly, then they'll have no incentive to actually improve their products. They won't have to release a new, better version and then sell you on the upgrade. They won't need to worry about competition because they'll make sure you're locked in. They'll be able to just sit on their asses and let the money roll in.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that it hasent had a major upgrade in 6 years now actually makes it a pretty fast OS which modern software supports.
New software doesn't *need* to be slower than old software. That's mostly a problem of developers rushing to add new performance-robbing features rather than refining current code and optimizing the old features for performance.
It sounds like a minor point, but I'm just saying that it isn't being 6 years old that makes it faster. Microsoft could have spent the past 6 years increasing performance. They've just chosen not to.
the casino doesn't give you your money back if a machine jams, so it shouldn't work the other way.
I think this is a great point. I don't see any reason why the law should automatically fall on the casino's side. They make their money by fixing these games so that you can't win. That's their business. Someone messed up and the game ended up fixed the other way. It'd be one thing if the customers had hacked the game, but they just played it. In my mind, whether the customers knew something was up isn't really the point-- if the customers all noticed that a dealer was doing his job wrong, not shuffling properly, or paying out more than he's supposed to, I don't see why it should fall on the customers to be legally responsible for correcting the situation. They should be able to take advantage of the casino in the same way that casinos take advantage of their customers.
If the casino wants to recoup their losses, they should try suing whoever programmed the machine incorrectly.
I usually don't bother responding to ACs, but just to make sure there's no misunderstanding, I am not claiming that the IT workers are better now than they were then. I'm not claiming that proper computing principles had not been discovered in 1994. However, I am claiming that people in general have more familiarity and more realistic expectations of what computers can and will do. Among these "people in general" are managers and other office workers who might have been involved in planning "IT projects".
AFAIK, it's very rare for anyone to be sued for copyright violations without distributing. If you're not sharing your music library on P2P networks, but simply have a bunch of MP3s on your harddrive, you won't get sued. Even downloading won't really get you sued. It's being part of the source people are downloading from (for example, being part of a torrent) that gets people in trouble.
Of course, the exception to this is if you're actually representing a company. If your company is pirating media and software and using those in your operation, you might get sued because you have enough money to be worth going after. Of course, if you have that much money, you should be able to afford to operate legally. Find a way to license the codecs legally.
Personally I use Ubuntu and Gentoo at home, but wouldn't choose these for the company servers.
I haven't used Gentoo for a while, but I'm not sure why you wouldn't choose Ubuntu or Debian. Personally, I find each of them to be very stable and easy to manage. If it's an issue of support, you can get professional support from Canonical for Ubuntu.
What your saying is true-- businesses aren't going to get confused by 300 choices. There are a few major players, and anyone looking to use Linux will find out who they are pretty quickly. Often, there will be someone who is pushing for Linux adoption, and there's a good chance that person already have a preferred distro.
You make it sound like a such a bad thing. I don't necessarily think it's just about "lowering the bar", but instead an issue of having realistic expectations. In 1994, having a dedicated IT department was still relatively new for many companies. To put it in perspective, people were still using Windows 3.1. The Internet wasn't even a blip on the pop-culture radar, and (IIRC) Netscape was just being released around that time. Most people understood practically nothing about computers and networks. In a lot of colleges, CS was still a relatively new major, and many colleges didn't even offer IT-specific majors yet. For a long time, the "computer experts" came out of other majors relating to math, engineering, and science.
So it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that the managers of IT projects in many companies had practically no idea of what they were doing. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they had silly expectations about how things would work or what their new systems would allow. After 13 extra years of seeing the reality of computing and being frustrated by computers, one would think their expectations would be lowered somewhat.
LEXX was pretty bullshit and juvenile. It's like it was made for retarded 13 year-olds. Constant adolescent sex jokes, space ships shaped like genitalia, etc. It shouldn't be considered to be part of the same genre at Farscape, Dr. Who, or BSG.
Really, I think there's an untapped market segment there; not just for Farscape, but for certain kinds of TV shows in general. I think it might eventually be a successful business model to plan your show around only having a few episodes on television, solely as marketing for the DVD release of the full season.
The way things have been going, I've been wondering whether there might be a market for episodic material released directly to DVD, iTunes, and pay-per-view. Maybe I'm alone, but most of the TV I watch these days isn't the channel-surfing kind. I usually only watch a couple of series at a time, record them on my DVR, and then watch them when I have time-- and that's pretty much all the TV I watch. If I could just pay for those series' episodes, get them through iTunes or on-demand or something, and have it for a reasonable price, I might choose that instead of cable TV. I don't even feel like I need to "own" them (like buying a DVD). I usually don't watch the same episodes more than once, and if I could "rent" them, it'd be good enough.
You know, I can almost deal with one of those... except that Farscape was replaced by "Tremors: the series". I mean, really, WTF?
As long as you have files, you'll have some sort of file format. The file formats may become so common and standardized and well-supported that most users don't really know the difference, but there will still be different formats.
I'm not sure it is the *only* tool. Surely there are other things involved, like good communication, cooperation, and sensible design choices. However, none of the other tools for interoperability will work without some kind of standard, and I don't see a possibility where it could be an inappropriate tool. In order to make things interoperate, at some point you have to agree on a way that things will operate. That's your standard.
I'm no expert, but it's a vacuum actually a pretty good heat insulator. That's why it's one of the layers in a thermos (aka vacuum flask). AFAIK, the main reason you freeze in space is because the low pressure causes your fluids to evaporate, which is an endothermic process. Keep the pressure up, and you keep the heat up.
Now you'd also need layers in the suit to prevent radiation both from leaving the suit (and losing heat that way) and from entering the suit (since you'll be outside the protection of the earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere).
I guess I can understand some rare and extreme cases where this could be used in positive ways. There are some people who are unable to function in their daily lives due to irrational fears. However, it seems like this sort of thing could be abused, and that disturbs me a bit. I hope people consider that fear, anxiety, and angst are appropriate responses to many situations. I don't know if it's a good idea to take these things lightly.
I mean, really, MS made it an easy target for ridicule. Meanwhile people have a lot of reason to resent Microsoft. Why wouldn't you expect people to ridicule the Zune?
That's a thoughtful post, but the idea in it all that I like best is this: Don't make up your mind so easily.
Unless you're stubbornly sticking to a single path, going through college will probably change your view of where you'd like to be in 10 years. And then after you get out of college, setting out in the real world may change that view again. Working for 10 years on a given career path might make you want to change paths, or even change careers altogether. Things change more often than young people imagine. The life expectancy is more than 80 years these days, and you have no idea what mutations your life will undergo in that amount of time. Certainly, whatever path you pick for the time being, it'd be best to work your ass off and try to excel. You should work at it as though it might be your permanent path, but it may not be.
I've taken a bit of a strange path myself. I've been fixing computers for money since I was 10 and holding down IT jobs since I was 16. I started out a Computer Science major, hated it, and switched over to being a Philosophy major (of all things) with a minor in Literature. After college, I had a brief stint as a professional writer of sorts, hated it, and went back to fixing computers. In the years since, I've worked my way up from being a helpdesk tech to being an executive.
Honestly, I don't think the most important thing you learn in college is the subject matter of your particular major. The *most* important thing is learning how to work and to think in some way that works for you. You have to learn to juggle a lot of work, how to deal with people, and how to communicate your ideas. You learn how to make friends and how to cope with unexpected situations.
Even with subject matters as technical as computer science and information technology, the direct applicability of what you've been taught in classes will be limited. In real life situations, real life experience will serve you well. In my years of working in IT, looking at formal education and certifications never seemed to be a good sign of whether that person would be able to fix problems or to keep things running well. Surprisingly, I've found my philosophy studies have helped me get jobs and helped me do well in the industry.
I'm weary of giving advice and I'm certainly not advising that people take up philosophy as a means to getting a computer job. I guess I'm just saying that your life probably won't take a straight line, and you'll just have to find your own path. There is no "right answer".
um... ok, well I never said anything about "willy nilly". But, so... then you agree then that there's no reason why a copyright holder can't use a modified (non-verbatim copy) version of the GPL as your license?
You can't just willy nilly make your own derivative GPL.
And what if the FSF gave you permission?
I think he's right that there's a problem when you *equate* morality with legality. They aren't the same. Most people agree that laws should be moral, but the problem comes more when you try to make all immorality illegal. Immorality, too often, finds itself in the realm of thought and speech. Immorality too often exists in the intention and motivation rather than the action. People who are willing to accept laws that govern thoughts, speech, intentions, and motivations are people who are willing to accept totalitarian states.
Now, I don't really understand what that has to do with the GPL3, and I'm making no claim that "Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality" is applicable to the debate. However, I don't think the statement itself is wrong.
But the fact of the matter is, other people have spent all this time assisting him because of the morality of the license. If they just wanted open-code efficiency, they would have went with the tried and true BSD license.
That's not necessarily true. A decent portion of Linux (especially the kernel) has come from some kind of corporate sponsorship. Sometimes companies donate existing code, sometimes they donate funds to projects, and sometimes they hire programmers to work on portions of the projects they want. A lot of companies might prefer the GPL to BSD precisely because they don't want competitors to be able to take their code, make improvements, and keep the improvement to themselves.
In case I'm not being clear, imagine there was no Linux, but Redhat and Novell were still writing operating systems. Redhat is just starting out and really wants to make use of the FOSS community, and so they want to release some of their work to under an open-source license. If they pick a BSD license, Novell then has the legal right to take all of Redhat's hard work, put it into SuSE, and without doing any work on their own, start at the same level as Redhat. Then, Redhat had to pay for development, while Novell didn't. From there, Novell can write their own improvements, sell the result, and never share the improved code with Redhat. With the same amount of investment, Novell would be able to create a superior product by riding off of Redhat's work.
Alternatively, Redhat could choose the GPL. In that case, Novell is still allowed to make use of Redhat's code, but once they do, Redhat is also allowed to make use of SuSE's code. Besides possibly gaining more developer support, it also diminishes the ability of other companies to completely screw Redhat over.
Maybe that's a bad example because it's so theoretical, but I think I have a good point in there somewhere. I think part of the reason the GPL is so successful really is because of its efficiency at forcing people to cooperate and to be generous, and not because of its morality. Companies like Redhat, Novell, Sun, and IBM have made substantially donations of code, workforce, and money, and I don't believe that these donations were driven by morality.
The GPL is not free for non-verbatim redistribution.
I don't see why not. You can't take something released under the GPL and pick-and-choose which parts you want to redistribute under, but if you're the original copyright holder, I don't see why you wouldn't be permitted to use an altered form of the GPL for distributing your old code. When you're the original copyright holder, you can license your IP however you please. Or am I wrong?
I don't think anything you can do in a solo game is "cheating."
Well, I don't think there's any reason for anyone to get angry with you for cheating in a solo game. Cheating, in that case, doesn't have any negative ramifications for anyone else, so cheat all you like. Still, I'd call it "cheating" and I don't see that there are any real grounds to claim I'm wrong. But if you don't want to think of it as cheating, let's not quibble over a word.
I'll gladly look online for secrets or a walkthrough to get me past that point. I think that's probably typical. And yes, I do consider it a weakness of the game if I have to do that too much.
That's all I'm really saying. If an average or good player will still get stuck at some point in the game where they're unable to progress for more than a few days of trying, and the only way to get past being "stuck" is to do something outside of normal gameplay (cheat codes or walkthroughs), then there's a problem with the construction of the game.
Of course, occasionally even a good player gets stuck on something stupid. There's some obvious next step that falls into a particular gamer's blind spot, and he/she can't figure out the right thing to do. That's not really the fault of the game designers. Still, I'd say that if there are particular parts of your game that frustrate most players for a long time, then that it a sign of poor game design.
I agree with this wholeheartedly.
Personally, I think the perfect difficulty for a game is that it always feels like a challenge, but somehow never prevents you from progressing. You should never just get "stuck" on some part of a game with no idea on how to move on for weeks at a time, the only way to continue is to cheat in some way. (And yes, in my mind, looking up info in a game guide is "cheating")
That was my first thought, too. You're talking about a nation with a budget of, what, a couple trillion dollars a year? If they're implying that keeping our future nationwide wireless internet access open will cost a couple billion, I'd say that's the most worthwhile couple billion dollars our government could spend.
Hell, I bet lots of aspects of our economic and social freedom "costs" us billions of dollars every year. I, for one, wouldn't choose to sell that freedom for a mere couple billion dollars.
I didn't RTFA, but where in those numbers are the people who rip DVDs but don't share the resulting movies? Or did they just assume that everyone with DVD copying/ripping software were using it for copyright infringement?
I rip DVDs sometimes using a nice little program called Handbrake. I guess it's illegal to crack the encryption, but I don't let others copy my movies. I use Handbrake so that I can put my movies on my laptop, mostly for when I travel. That way, I can have several movies with me without needing to carry around physical DVDs. Handbrake also allows you to encode files for specific devices, like the iPod and the AppleTV, which I believe should also be considered a fair use of the copyrighted material. It's format shifting, not infringement.
Are those people included in the 1.5%?
After all, why go to all the trouble of pushing Vista or its (likely even less popular) successors on an uninterested public, when you can just bill them monthly?
I really hate hearing the marketing on these things, too. They try to paint the whole thing as actually being cost-effective, because paying monthly charges will keep you from having to pay upgrade fees (like Microsoft's SA on volume licensing). Of course, that assumes that the sum of your monthly fees is less than buying a license outright. Plus, if they lock you in to their own solutions and get to charge you monthly, then they'll have no incentive to actually improve their products. They won't have to release a new, better version and then sell you on the upgrade. They won't need to worry about competition because they'll make sure you're locked in. They'll be able to just sit on their asses and let the money roll in.