We have to depend on our justice system to take some of that power back from Microsoft and return it into the available pool for everybody else to draw from in order to adjust the situation in a way that corrects for effects of misdeeds done in the past.
Right... and who was it who came to Microsoft's defence when the EU found them guilty of being a monopoly, and wanted to fine them/make them pull WMP out of Windows? Oh that's right; the US Department of Justice.
Somehow, I don't think you can count on the justice system to do anything more than slap them on the wrists and say "Bad, naughty Microsoft!".
Kilngon? Oh I remember; that's that race of sentient pottery kilns that were discovered and subsequently destroyed in Star Trek TOS ep 73: Kirk Gets His Shirt Off Yet Again
Perhaps, but this is an ActionScript programmer. If he had the requisite skills to munge the C preprocessor to produce poetry in code (that love letters one being my favourite), then he wouldn't be programming in ActionScript!
What's the point of this ridiculous rant? Simple. Don't let this happen wherever you live. Please. I might move there some day, just so I can continue in my chosen profession.
The only problem with this, being an Australian, is that the US' line is "if you don't conform to our laws, we'll screw you over even worse than we already do, and you can forget about any kind of military protection. Now get down on your hands and knees..." Fact is, we really have no choice in the matter.
Oh well, time to move to New Zealand--one of the few countries that still has the guts to give the US the finger.
Why must it be innovative? Why must every game made create a new genre, or push the medium forward? What's wrong with having a game that gives us nothing new (except for that whole lighting thing that hasn't been done like this before), and is simply an absolute blast to play?
I guess as a gamer, I should be ashamed for enjoying a game that isn't revolutionary.
Today, the final shread of faith that I had left in my government has finally disappeared. I am now sorry to be Australian.
I "know" why they're doing this. The same reason they got into politics in the first place. Power. Money. Fame. Although perhaps the wholesale "if you don't cave in, you can forget about trade and any kind of military protection in the future" line from the US government helped seal the deal.
What I do not understand is how these people sleep at night, knowing they have sold out every last Australian they supposedly represent. Do they lie in bed next to their loved ones and think "today I signed away my people's freedoms to foreign companies; what a great leader I am"? Or are they just so profoundly stupid that they can't see the plague they are about to unleash on us?
To the Liberals and Labor: you make me ashamed to even be the same nationality as you. If I ever hear you utter the word "freedom" again, I will be sick.
I'm going to cry in the corner now. You can rest easy knowing that you've betrayed us all.
Perhaps, but id actually coded both the demo and the full version. I think the parent was referring to open sourcing a product, letting others polish it to a shine for you, then rebrand it.
Quickly my brothers, let us rise up to these class-brained oo heathens, and mightilly smite them with our spaghetti code and sluggish interpreted code! GOSUB VICTORY
However, at the risk of being modded off topic, this whole thing smacks of "Hey, remember us? We were really big.. uh... well, a while ago. And we have this Java thing, and it's like... cool. Here, stick this on your forehead and you'll be cool, too!"
Please Sun, how about you tidy up that mess of letters and numbers so normal people can work out what in the hell is going on.
I think last time I checked, it was some new otherwise unheard-of studio in the middle east or russia or somewhere. Originally, they planned it to be one of those trippy soul-searching type games, with their own advanced 3D engine developed entirely in house (except for the physics engine, of course), but then they decided that FPSes sell better, so they stuck a rocket launcher in it and set it during the apocalypse. You have to kill demons to get into Heaven and... hey... wait a minute...
Don't get me wrong; I've been doing PHP coding for a while. But the fact of the matter is that the more I code in PHP, the more I dislike it.
Granted, the new OOP features in PHP5 are a good thing; hell, they should've been in there a LONG time ago. And exception support has me jumping for joy.
But where for the love of all that is holy is support for namespaces? I mean, sure PHP has a ton of really handy extensions, but I am getting so sick to death with typing underscores that I'll be happy man if the world suddenly decided that underscores were bad and removed them from all character sets (oh, and keyboards) entirely.
And I've also come to the conclusion that the standard PHP api can't quite make up it's mind whether it's supposed to be emulating C, or maybe some other language. Some array functions are prefixed by array_. Some aren't. Some have their arguments in the reverse order that almost all the others do. It's a mess.
PHP is a nice language, good for beginners. But it's complete lack of namespaces, half-arsed support for functional constructs (damn I hate having to write callback functions out seperately when they're one liners!), and schizophrenic api are slowly pushing me towards more well thought-out languages like Python.
Sure, Python's "thou shalt indent" system annoys me a lot of the time, but other then that it's just a clean, logical language. Unfortunetly, support for it on web hosts seems to be all but non-existant.
Seriously, if the PHP devs really want to bring PHP up a few notches, they need namespaces, and to standardize the API naming conventions. I shouldn't have to constantly open up the PHP manual to work out whether the array sorting function has array_ out the front or not.
Still, it's a nice set of improvements, so credit where credit is due. Kudos to the PHP team.
When Microsoft released PocketPC, they knew that the handwriting recognition wouldn't work well for all users right out of the box, but they didn't particularily care, so they shipped it with Solitaire.
Funny, you'd think they'd index more pages on their own site then just the main one. And what about all the anti-Microsoft stuff that's all over the net?
... because I happen to have three Hotmail accounts. One is a spam bucket (so no points for guessing it's perpetually buried in penis enlargement offers), I have another that I use more cautiously that only gets a few spam messages every week (and that's without turning on the spam filters), and a private one that has gotten (in total) ZERO spam messages.
Hotmail isn't the problem, as usual, it's the people using it that wouldn't know about online privacy if you beat it into them with a sledgehammer.
Also, I really don't care about the 2MB storage limit. I use Hotmail Popper with Thunderbird and never have to see any Hotmail ads:)
That's, uh... a lot of stuff to have. Does he happen to live in, oh I don't know, some kind of warehouse? Or maybe he has one of those nifty pockets of hyperspace the Magratheans had.
The main concern I have, however, are those "Only 250 sets on Earth!" comments. Yes, how unique it is on this planet is all well and good, but what about other planets!? I don't want to shell out $100K for something that's as common as dirt on Europa or even Jupiter.
As an aside, I find the "To place a bid of US $15,000.00 or more, you'll need to provide a valid credit card" line amusing. "Also, a small fee applies if the name on the credit card is different to your own, but only for amounts less than $1,000.00."
Us filthy stinking consumers get to buy all our music all over again for easilly twice the price, giving the poor, suffering music industry a much needed (and obviously deserved) infusion of cash.
In the case of SACD, we even get the added benefits of digital rights managements, which we freeloading, undeserving maggots so justly deserve for our years of support of the music industry.
And, to top it all off, the majority of us who aren't audiophiles (lucky buggers) will experience absolutely no improvement in quality whatsoever! Wow!
Some may be tempted to point out these are only benefits for the music industry, and you'd be right. After all, we're just their customers; why should we benefit?
Honestly, tho, this is ridiculous. With the popularity of the iPod and iTunes (disclaimer: I neither have an iPod, nor use iTunes so I'm not being baised), why do they even bother with these new physical formats? People have demonstrated over and over again that they'd rather sit down at their computer, find the song they want, and click "Download". Sometimes, there's even the word "Buy" associated with it.
But shame on me, this is the music industry afterall... a body that wouldn't know what the market wants even after we try beating into their skulls with a giant cartoon mallet.
One must wonder why they chose a pen. I don't think I've ever owned a pen that picked stuff up and let me carry it across the room... I usually use my hands for that (pick and drop gloves ala Minority Report?)
The problem is, of course, how would this work with a desktop machine? Or something that isn't a tablet device?
I could be optimistic and say that one day in the future we'll all be walking around with regular ball-point (or some other fancy new kind of ink-delivery mechanism) pens with some flash memory and WiFi/Bluetooth/whateverthehellwe'reusing in them, allowing us to walk up to train station timetables and snip off the bits we need, or go to information kiosks and pick up the location of the computer store...
...but then it seems like even something supposedly as simple as drag & drop still isn't even consistent. Maybe instead of inventing new metaphors, we could concentrate on making the best use out of the ones we already have. If you want to take a look at something that uses drag & drop effectively, take a look at Rox. It's editor allows you to both open and save files by dragging and dropping them. Cute, if not rather isolated...
...there isn't really any such thing as "independant countries"; the truth is that we're all obviously incapable of making our own laws, and making our own decisions as to what's legally, socially and morally right. All countries should be begging the US to strongarm them, er, I mean help them to make changes to their laws. After all, the US is the perfect model to base a country on, putting it's most important members (corporations) first, leaving the little guy to fend for himself. We can only hope that in coming years this planet of ours will cease to be known as "Earth" with all of it's different and unique cultures, and come to be known as "America - Planet of Legally Encumbered Thought and Filty Rich Lawyers".
But seriously, I'm rather miffed at the whole superiority stance the US seems to have in regards to other countries, including Australia.
The most insulting part is slipping this into a "Free Trade" agreement... just what the h*ll did we get out of this, anyway? We already lag behind the US in terms of the concept of Free Use (it's illegal to, say, tape an episode off the TV to watch later over here). I remember reading part of the FTA, and it said the aim of the IP section was to bring the IP laws of Australia and the US together. But instead of getting this, we're just being shafted with all the nasty horrible laws that would make big US businesses the most money.
Do we have the words "51st state" plastered somewhere we can't see? (John Howard walks past with arm around cardboard cutout of George Bush)
Slashdot Mirror
Right... and who was it who came to Microsoft's defence when the EU found them guilty of being a monopoly, and wanted to fine them/make them pull WMP out of Windows? Oh that's right; the US Department of Justice.
Somehow, I don't think you can count on the justice system to do anything more than slap them on the wrists and say "Bad, naughty Microsoft!".
No, no, no! You're not allowed to use the site itself! Here's a better mirror for slashdot if Coral gets slashdotted...
SlashdotKilngon? Oh I remember; that's that race of sentient pottery kilns that were discovered and subsequently destroyed in Star Trek TOS ep 73: Kirk Gets His Shirt Off Yet Again
Perhaps, but this is an ActionScript programmer. If he had the requisite skills to munge the C preprocessor to produce poetry in code (that love letters one being my favourite), then he wouldn't be programming in ActionScript!
...he'd be programming in Perl :P
The only problem with this, being an Australian, is that the US' line is "if you don't conform to our laws, we'll screw you over even worse than we already do, and you can forget about any kind of military protection. Now get down on your hands and knees..." Fact is, we really have no choice in the matter.
Oh well, time to move to New Zealand--one of the few countries that still has the guts to give the US the finger.
Why must it be innovative? Why must every game made create a new genre, or push the medium forward? What's wrong with having a game that gives us nothing new (except for that whole lighting thing that hasn't been done like this before), and is simply an absolute blast to play?
I guess as a gamer, I should be ashamed for enjoying a game that isn't revolutionary.
Today, the final shread of faith that I had left in my government has finally disappeared. I am now sorry to be Australian.
I "know" why they're doing this. The same reason they got into politics in the first place. Power. Money. Fame. Although perhaps the wholesale "if you don't cave in, you can forget about trade and any kind of military protection in the future" line from the US government helped seal the deal.
What I do not understand is how these people sleep at night, knowing they have sold out every last Australian they supposedly represent. Do they lie in bed next to their loved ones and think "today I signed away my people's freedoms to foreign companies; what a great leader I am"? Or are they just so profoundly stupid that they can't see the plague they are about to unleash on us?
To the Liberals and Labor: you make me ashamed to even be the same nationality as you. If I ever hear you utter the word "freedom" again, I will be sick.
I'm going to cry in the corner now. You can rest easy knowing that you've betrayed us all.
Perhaps, but id actually coded both the demo and the full version. I think the parent was referring to open sourcing a product, letting others polish it to a shine for you, then rebrand it.
...OGG already supports... hey, wait a sec...
Oh God! OGG only supports 255 channels! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!!! ARRRGGHHHH!!!!!
I justify the above comment based solely on the following points:
I just wanted to say it before someone else did ^_^
Just goes to proove:
Just when you think you know what's going on, reality throws you a curve moose.
Curses! He hath found us out!
Quickly my brothers, let us rise up to these class-brained oo heathens, and mightilly smite them with our spaghetti code and sluggish interpreted code! GOSUB VICTORY
However, at the risk of being modded off topic, this whole thing smacks of "Hey, remember us? We were really big.. uh... well, a while ago. And we have this Java thing, and it's like... cool. Here, stick this on your forehead and you'll be cool, too!"
Please Sun, how about you tidy up that mess of letters and numbers so normal people can work out what in the hell is going on.
RETURN
I think last time I checked, it was some new otherwise unheard-of studio in the middle east or russia or somewhere. Originally, they planned it to be one of those trippy soul-searching type games, with their own advanced 3D engine developed entirely in house (except for the physics engine, of course), but then they decided that FPSes sell better, so they stuck a rocket launcher in it and set it during the apocalypse. You have to kill demons to get into Heaven and... hey... wait a minute...
...but for some reason I'm rather disinterested.
Don't get me wrong; I've been doing PHP coding for a while. But the fact of the matter is that the more I code in PHP, the more I dislike it.
Granted, the new OOP features in PHP5 are a good thing; hell, they should've been in there a LONG time ago. And exception support has me jumping for joy.
But where for the love of all that is holy is support for namespaces? I mean, sure PHP has a ton of really handy extensions, but I am getting so sick to death with typing underscores that I'll be happy man if the world suddenly decided that underscores were bad and removed them from all character sets (oh, and keyboards) entirely.
And I've also come to the conclusion that the standard PHP api can't quite make up it's mind whether it's supposed to be emulating C, or maybe some other language. Some array functions are prefixed by array_. Some aren't. Some have their arguments in the reverse order that almost all the others do. It's a mess.
PHP is a nice language, good for beginners. But it's complete lack of namespaces, half-arsed support for functional constructs (damn I hate having to write callback functions out seperately when they're one liners!), and schizophrenic api are slowly pushing me towards more well thought-out languages like Python.
Sure, Python's "thou shalt indent" system annoys me a lot of the time, but other then that it's just a clean, logical language. Unfortunetly, support for it on web hosts seems to be all but non-existant.
Seriously, if the PHP devs really want to bring PHP up a few notches, they need namespaces, and to standardize the API naming conventions. I shouldn't have to constantly open up the PHP manual to work out whether the array sorting function has array_ out the front or not.
Still, it's a nice set of improvements, so credit where credit is due. Kudos to the PHP team.
When Microsoft released PocketPC, they knew that the handwriting recognition wouldn't work well for all users right out of the box, but they didn't particularily care, so they shipped it with Solitaire.
They also shipped Windows with Solitaire...
...since this search returns only one result.
Funny, you'd think they'd index more pages on their own site then just the main one. And what about all the anti-Microsoft stuff that's all over the net?
Just found it somewhat odd...
... because I happen to have three Hotmail accounts. One is a spam bucket (so no points for guessing it's perpetually buried in penis enlargement offers), I have another that I use more cautiously that only gets a few spam messages every week (and that's without turning on the spam filters), and a private one that has gotten (in total) ZERO spam messages.
Hotmail isn't the problem, as usual, it's the people using it that wouldn't know about online privacy if you beat it into them with a sledgehammer.
Also, I really don't care about the 2MB storage limit. I use Hotmail Popper with Thunderbird and never have to see any Hotmail ads :)
That's, uh... a lot of stuff to have. Does he happen to live in, oh I don't know, some kind of warehouse? Or maybe he has one of those nifty pockets of hyperspace the Magratheans had.
The main concern I have, however, are those "Only 250 sets on Earth!" comments. Yes, how unique it is on this planet is all well and good, but what about other planets!? I don't want to shell out $100K for something that's as common as dirt on Europa or even Jupiter.
As an aside, I find the "To place a bid of US $15,000.00 or more, you'll need to provide a valid credit card" line amusing. "Also, a small fee applies if the name on the credit card is different to your own, but only for amounts less than $1,000.00."
Just think of the advantages.
Some may be tempted to point out these are only benefits for the music industry, and you'd be right. After all, we're just their customers; why should we benefit?
Honestly, tho, this is ridiculous. With the popularity of the iPod and iTunes (disclaimer: I neither have an iPod, nor use iTunes so I'm not being baised), why do they even bother with these new physical formats? People have demonstrated over and over again that they'd rather sit down at their computer, find the song they want, and click "Download". Sometimes, there's even the word "Buy" associated with it.
But shame on me, this is the music industry afterall... a body that wouldn't know what the market wants even after we try beating into their skulls with a giant cartoon mallet.
One must wonder why they chose a pen. I don't think I've ever owned a pen that picked stuff up and let me carry it across the room... I usually use my hands for that (pick and drop gloves ala Minority Report?)
The problem is, of course, how would this work with a desktop machine? Or something that isn't a tablet device?
I could be optimistic and say that one day in the future we'll all be walking around with regular ball-point (or some other fancy new kind of ink-delivery mechanism) pens with some flash memory and WiFi/Bluetooth/whateverthehellwe'reusing in them, allowing us to walk up to train station timetables and snip off the bits we need, or go to information kiosks and pick up the location of the computer store...
...but then it seems like even something supposedly as simple as drag & drop still isn't even consistent. Maybe instead of inventing new metaphors, we could concentrate on making the best use out of the ones we already have. If you want to take a look at something that uses drag & drop effectively, take a look at Rox. It's editor allows you to both open and save files by dragging and dropping them. Cute, if not rather isolated...
Microsoft: the future of warfare...
(click "Launch Missiles")
Clippy: I'm sorry, the feature you requested isn't installed. Please insert the Microsoft Warfare 2003 CD to continue.
(inserts CD)
MSI: I'm sorry, this machine has changed too much since the last install, and you will need to re-activate your copy of Microsoft Warfare.
Reason: hardware removed: S3 Savage
hardware added: USB ICMB Launching Tube
(insert copius swearing in swedish)
Wessels? Since when was Chekov Swedish?
smacks head
Sorry about that. Had an attack of stupid. I'm lucky I got away with only minor bruising...
...there isn't really any such thing as "independant countries"; the truth is that we're all obviously incapable of making our own laws, and making our own decisions as to what's legally, socially and morally right. All countries should be begging the US to strongarm them, er, I mean help them to make changes to their laws. After all, the US is the perfect model to base a country on, putting it's most important members (corporations) first, leaving the little guy to fend for himself. We can only hope that in coming years this planet of ours will cease to be known as "Earth" with all of it's different and unique cultures, and come to be known as "America - Planet of Legally Encumbered Thought and Filty Rich Lawyers".
But seriously, I'm rather miffed at the whole superiority stance the US seems to have in regards to other countries, including Australia.
The most insulting part is slipping this into a "Free Trade" agreement... just what the h*ll did we get out of this, anyway? We already lag behind the US in terms of the concept of Free Use (it's illegal to, say, tape an episode off the TV to watch later over here). I remember reading part of the FTA, and it said the aim of the IP section was to bring the IP laws of Australia and the US together. But instead of getting this, we're just being shafted with all the nasty horrible laws that would make big US businesses the most money.
Do we have the words "51st state" plastered somewhere we can't see? (John Howard walks past with arm around cardboard cutout of George Bush)