I don't think it's so much a question of can it infringe patents as does it infringe patents, does it matter and should we change anything because of it.
Incidentally, I suspect the answers are "almost certainly", "not in practise for most people" and "yes, we should ban software patents, they stifle creativity and raise the barrier to entry into markets".
The problem stated is that of determining what the current version is.
Unfortunately I can't read Swedish so I can't comment on your link but here's a recent example of the problem from the UK.
This section of the controversial Digital Economy Act adds new text to this section of the Communications Act 2003. As far as I am aware, there is nowhere I can find a copy of the Communications Act after the changes from later legislation have been applied. This means that to ensure I am compliant with the law, I need to be aware of the original Communications Act and every subsequent act which changes it.
I realise that this isn't the same as an office environment but at the MS X48 event (teams of four people make a game over a couple of days) we were sat with four people on a round table. We were constantly running around the table to get between stuff we were talking about together and stuff we were looking at on our own PCs. Talking to people over the top of monitors is fine but as soon as you want to point at something on your screen, a round table gets in the way.
I suspect that while a round, clear table is probably better for brainstorming, having table arrangements where everyone sits back to back would be better for people working on computers but regularly working together on small parts. Any piece of information you need to share is then just a push and a swivel on an office chair away from anyone else.
Anecdotally, I help run the video gaming society at my university and we found that people get up and talk to each other more when we arrange tables so that there's plenty of room between them and no-one has their back to the wall.
What do you take me for, some kind of trash monkey who is happy to take games out of bins? Pff.
Ahem.
Back in the real world, there are some people who will only buy from the bargain bin because they play a lot of games and don't have a lot of money and are happy enough to wait or seek out a bargain.
I'd argue though that there's still a large proportion of people buying games who have no idea how to tell the good stuff from the crap. Kids will buy anything that has their favourite cartoon character on it, parents will either ask the store assistant, buy what their kids have asked for or just pick something at random they think looks nice. I strongly suspect there's a reasonably large pool of irregular gamers who enjoy playing once in a while and who mostly buy yearly sports titles or big budget games which are very popular and never drop in price anyway (Halo, Gears, Modern Warfare, Mario, Zelda, etc.).
2) When you start programming, it's hard. After a while things start to click, you understand how to use a loop to iterate through a list, you get how function calls work, why you should avoid side-effects and how powerful recursion can be in the right circumstances. Until you get to that point you feel surrounded by people who are talking gibberish and seem to be able to pull solutions out of the air (because they've been introduced to programming before).
3) On top of this you're having to use new tools which you've never seen before. Whether it's a unix shell or an MS Visual IDE it's a very complex piece of software with many options you don't understand the meaning of. If at any point you deviate from the tutorial you've been given then all hope is lost and you're stuck and confused with a very powerful tool that you have no clue how to use.
4) Half the class has done it all before. Basic programming is something that many students will have tried in their own time because they like it. They've already put in the hours with online tutorials or books and have learned how to break down a conceptual solution into something that's realisable with the tools their programming language gives them. Teachers rush through all this basic material in a bored voice without giving enough examples or explaining things in a way that someone who has no clue about programming can understand.
It's no wonder that students without any programming background who are finding the "introductory" courses hard are tempted to cheat. (Not that cheating will help them in the least. The skills required to do well in introductory programming are vital to most of the rest of the course.)
If people see a game for $60 and a similar game for $70 they assume the $70 one is better. (and they're only going to buy one and it's only a $10 difference, I mean really they'd be stupid not to buy the $70 game, right?)
A free market does not serve consumers if consumers do not make an informed choice.
The whole point of that article is that the chip and pin terminal was cracked. I.e. something which is outside of the user's control.
The GP's suggestion avoids this type of vulnerability because the user doesn't have to trust the retailer's terminal at all. One of the key elements in the attack reported in your argument was the use of a cracked chip & pin terminal which showed the £20 restaurant bill while actually charging the customer for the £2000 jeweller's invoice.
In the GP's method the transaction details would be displayed on the card itself. The card will create an authorisation for the given transaction and display that transaction to the user. To conduct a similar attack you would have to somehow induce my card to display one transaction and generate an authorisation for a different one. This means you have to somehow crack my card, while it is still in my possession, in the very short period of time while it interfaces with your system. This is in contrast with the system in the article where a chip&pin terminal was carefully dismantled and cracked so that it could then be used to scam the cardholder.
My Dad once took my mouse away. At the time I was enjoying learning to use Linux so I happily sat at a terminal and learned to use links, screen, moc, irssi and a few other things.
Let's go over your contribution to this discussion:
And this attitude is exactly why people will play LoL over HoN.
I disagree that the attitudes of the userbase will drive players from one game to another in huge numbers. As evidence I present the relative player numbers for CS and TF2.
It may be true for some people but it certainly isn't a general rule.
I never said it did. Your attitude seems to echo exactly why I don't play. Your taking the amount of players as the quality of the game.
Where did I say that? I was merely refuting the idea that an elitist userbase will drive players away in huge numbers.
WoW has much more players than CS:S online, but I still rate WoW as a pile of dog shit because of elitist attitudes.
The more you struggle to justify the reason the play a game the more you reinforce mine (and many other's) stances toward games taken over by elitists.
I don't play CS because it isn't fun unless everyone is of a comparable skill level and I don't play WoW because I don't like MMOs. I do play TF2 although not as much as I used to.
To be honest I find your attitude of slamming a game due to its community quite odd. In any skill based team game the success of the whole team depends on each member of the team playing their part. These types of games also tend to attract very competitive players who take the game seriously. Unless you're prepared to take the time to learn the game and be good at it, any attempt to have players of vastly different skill levels playing together will end in frustration. If you want to learn to play well then you need to practise lots and either read up on strategies or find a group of people who is willing to teach you. If you're not interested in playing competitively (as I'm not) then I suggest you seek out a community of like minded people who are happy to simply chat while playing and not care whether they win or lose.
That isn't to say that a lot of public games won't be full of foul-mouthed teens with a small amount of skill and a desire to pwn someone and then gloat about it. They're not people you need to listen to, if they were really any good they'd be playing in a competitive clan rather than sitting around dominating pub servers. These are the people that the mute or ignore feature was designed for.
It's quite a step from being able to identify yourself securely over the internet and being forced to do so under all circumstances.
For some website to require you to divulge your identity for the privilege of posting is something I would find acceptable, it's their forum after all. For the government to mandate that every website was to do this would be both stupid and unenforceable.
Team fortress had pretty good lag compensation as I remember (to the point where people who were not lagging would complain that they died after they had got into cover).
Even when we go to download only games there will still be a market for big budget titles. No amount of $1.99 iPhone games can, for me, challenge the fun of playing Call of Duty online. You can argue that downloaded games will be cheaper and the price of games will fall but the fact remains that this year's best selling game was also one if its most expensive.
As a counterpoint to the rest of your post, may I point out that in the most recent iPhone games chart the top selling game costs $9.99 and five out of the top ten games were published by EA (none of which cost more than $6.99).
With IWnet you have a choice between private game (i.e. you provide everyone who is playing) and pickup match and if you all join from the same lobby, you get put on the same team. A private match wasn't an option, there were only five people who had the game.
It's not that they were trying to stack the teams (we're not actually that good anyway!) but IWnet gives you no other choice.
Gone are the days when we could all just jump on a dedicated server and balance the teams. Gone too are server rules like "No team stacking".
The same thing that everyone who moved from XP to 7 gained.
Windows 7 is nicer to use in almost every respect. The new taskbar (which is the best use of desktop compositing I've seen), the improved Alt-Tab window and the searchable start menu are the things that jump to mind most readily.
If we're talking about real, demonstrable gains, the move from 2000 -> XP was far more questionable.
I will happily admit that I can only comment on this from the user's perspective, I don't know what changes were made between Windows Server 2000 -> 2003 -> 2008.
I saw MW2 played at a LAN at uni a couple of weeks ago and I have to say I was unimpressed.
The lobby and matchmaking service is pretty nice, allowing you to form a party and then look for games where you can play on the same team, a pity it doesn't work so well in practise. You're stuck with the problem that a large proportion of people leave as soon as they see several people bearing the same tag join the game meaning that you have to go through the matchmaking process several times. Then there's the more technical problem of the game sometimes leaving some players behind when the lobby joins or leaves a game.
When you actually get into a game, there's a small chance that the dynamically chosen "best" host will be terrible and have huge lag spikes. (This while we're all connected through the university JANET connection.) Eventually the game decides to migrate the host, everything stops, a new host is chosen and then the game continues. Then the host quits because his team is losing and we go the the "Choosing a new host" screen again, and again.
This must be some definition of "works really well" that I was previously unaware of.
No, dipshit, they're anonymously aggregating data about filesharing to give to Universal as part of a deal they made.
This sort of thing is probably valuable to them since it's likely to be more accurate and complete than the stuff gathered by MediaSentry and their ilk.
Do you really think they believe the ludicrous numbers they've been putting out? Wouldn't they want to know the truth themselves, even if they keep it hidden?
Important passwords should be long, random and not written down.
For each password, make up a set of cryptic crossword clues, preferably making obscure references to things from several different aspects of your life.
Additionally, make them really evil cryptic crossword clues that don't quite give you enough information (but enough to jog your memory).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's so much a question of can it infringe patents as does it infringe patents, does it matter and should we change anything because of it.
Incidentally, I suspect the answers are "almost certainly", "not in practise for most people" and "yes, we should ban software patents, they stifle creativity and raise the barrier to entry into markets".
This isn't about open source, there exist completely open source decoders and encoders for h264.
This is about patents and the costs and consequences of licensing them.
The problem stated is that of determining what the current version is.
Unfortunately I can't read Swedish so I can't comment on your link but here's a recent example of the problem from the UK.
This section of the controversial Digital Economy Act adds new text to this section of the Communications Act 2003. As far as I am aware, there is nowhere I can find a copy of the Communications Act after the changes from later legislation have been applied. This means that to ensure I am compliant with the law, I need to be aware of the original Communications Act and every subsequent act which changes it.
I realise that this isn't the same as an office environment but at the MS X48 event (teams of four people make a game over a couple of days) we were sat with four people on a round table. We were constantly running around the table to get between stuff we were talking about together and stuff we were looking at on our own PCs. Talking to people over the top of monitors is fine but as soon as you want to point at something on your screen, a round table gets in the way.
I suspect that while a round, clear table is probably better for brainstorming, having table arrangements where everyone sits back to back would be better for people working on computers but regularly working together on small parts. Any piece of information you need to share is then just a push and a swivel on an office chair away from anyone else.
Anecdotally, I help run the video gaming society at my university and we found that people get up and talk to each other more when we arrange tables so that there's plenty of room between them and no-one has their back to the wall.
The bargain bin? Are you crazy?
Only really terrible games end up in there!
What do you take me for, some kind of trash monkey who is happy to take games out of bins? Pff.
Ahem.
Back in the real world, there are some people who will only buy from the bargain bin because they play a lot of games and don't have a lot of money and are happy enough to wait or seek out a bargain.
I'd argue though that there's still a large proportion of people buying games who have no idea how to tell the good stuff from the crap. Kids will buy anything that has their favourite cartoon character on it, parents will either ask the store assistant, buy what their kids have asked for or just pick something at random they think looks nice. I strongly suspect there's a reasonably large pool of irregular gamers who enjoy playing once in a while and who mostly buy yearly sports titles or big budget games which are very popular and never drop in price anyway (Halo, Gears, Modern Warfare, Mario, Zelda, etc.).
1) Cheating is easy. Copy, Paste, Done.
2) When you start programming, it's hard. After a while things start to click, you understand how to use a loop to iterate through a list, you get how function calls work, why you should avoid side-effects and how powerful recursion can be in the right circumstances. Until you get to that point you feel surrounded by people who are talking gibberish and seem to be able to pull solutions out of the air (because they've been introduced to programming before).
3) On top of this you're having to use new tools which you've never seen before. Whether it's a unix shell or an MS Visual IDE it's a very complex piece of software with many options you don't understand the meaning of. If at any point you deviate from the tutorial you've been given then all hope is lost and you're stuck and confused with a very powerful tool that you have no clue how to use.
4) Half the class has done it all before. Basic programming is something that many students will have tried in their own time because they like it. They've already put in the hours with online tutorials or books and have learned how to break down a conceptual solution into something that's realisable with the tools their programming language gives them. Teachers rush through all this basic material in a bored voice without giving enough examples or explaining things in a way that someone who has no clue about programming can understand.
It's no wonder that students without any programming background who are finding the "introductory" courses hard are tempted to cheat. (Not that cheating will help them in the least. The skills required to do well in introductory programming are vital to most of the rest of the course.)
The $70 for a game is down to consumer stupidity.
If people see a game for $60 and a similar game for $70 they assume the $70 one is better. (and they're only going to buy one and it's only a $10 difference, I mean really they'd be stupid not to buy the $70 game, right?)
A free market does not serve consumers if consumers do not make an informed choice.
The whole point of that article is that the chip and pin terminal was cracked. I.e. something which is outside of the user's control.
The GP's suggestion avoids this type of vulnerability because the user doesn't have to trust the retailer's terminal at all. One of the key elements in the attack reported in your argument was the use of a cracked chip & pin terminal which showed the £20 restaurant bill while actually charging the customer for the £2000 jeweller's invoice.
In the GP's method the transaction details would be displayed on the card itself. The card will create an authorisation for the given transaction and display that transaction to the user. To conduct a similar attack you would have to somehow induce my card to display one transaction and generate an authorisation for a different one. This means you have to somehow crack my card, while it is still in my possession, in the very short period of time while it interfaces with your system. This is in contrast with the system in the article where a chip&pin terminal was carefully dismantled and cracked so that it could then be used to scam the cardholder.
My Dad once took my mouse away. At the time I was enjoying learning to use Linux so I happily sat at a terminal and learned to use links, screen, moc, irssi and a few other things.
Next time he took the keyboard :(
With Chip&PIN we can no longer do this, the cashier never touches my card.
Let's go over your contribution to this discussion:
I disagree that the attitudes of the userbase will drive players from one game to another in huge numbers. As evidence I present the relative player numbers for CS and TF2.
It may be true for some people but it certainly isn't a general rule.
Where did I say that? I was merely refuting the idea that an elitist userbase will drive players away in huge numbers.
I don't play CS because it isn't fun unless everyone is of a comparable skill level and I don't play WoW because I don't like MMOs. I do play TF2 although not as much as I used to.
To be honest I find your attitude of slamming a game due to its community quite odd. In any skill based team game the success of the whole team depends on each member of the team playing their part. These types of games also tend to attract very competitive players who take the game seriously. Unless you're prepared to take the time to learn the game and be good at it, any attempt to have players of vastly different skill levels playing together will end in frustration. If you want to learn to play well then you need to practise lots and either read up on strategies or find a group of people who is willing to teach you. If you're not interested in playing competitively (as I'm not) then I suggest you seek out a community of like minded people who are happy to simply chat while playing and not care whether they win or lose.
That isn't to say that a lot of public games won't be full of foul-mouthed teens with a small amount of skill and a desire to pwn someone and then gloat about it. They're not people you need to listen to, if they were really any good they'd be playing in a competitive clan rather than sitting around dominating pub servers. These are the people that the mute or ignore feature was designed for.
And which of those games currently has over 66000 players online (combining both versions)?
It seems that your stance doesn't extend to the gaming community at large.
It's quite a step from being able to identify yourself securely over the internet and being forced to do so under all circumstances.
For some website to require you to divulge your identity for the privilege of posting is something I would find acceptable, it's their forum after all. For the government to mandate that every website was to do this would be both stupid and unenforceable.
Team fortress had pretty good lag compensation as I remember (to the point where people who were not lagging would complain that they died after they had got into cover).
Supreme Commander did this too.
Even when we go to download only games there will still be a market for big budget titles. No amount of $1.99 iPhone games can, for me, challenge the fun of playing Call of Duty online. You can argue that downloaded games will be cheaper and the price of games will fall but the fact remains that this year's best selling game was also one if its most expensive.
As a counterpoint to the rest of your post, may I point out that in the most recent iPhone games chart the top selling game costs $9.99 and five out of the top ten games were published by EA (none of which cost more than $6.99).
Really?
I wouldn't have recommended it to kids because it's pretty difficult and frustrating.
I thought Mirror's Edge did a pretty good job at making you fail a lot and feel very dead when you did so.
Data, sure, but the summary did at least specify information.
With IWnet you have a choice between private game (i.e. you provide everyone who is playing) and pickup match and if you all join from the same lobby, you get put on the same team. A private match wasn't an option, there were only five people who had the game.
It's not that they were trying to stack the teams (we're not actually that good anyway!) but IWnet gives you no other choice.
Gone are the days when we could all just jump on a dedicated server and balance the teams. Gone too are server rules like "No team stacking".
IWnet really does leave a lot to be desired.
The same thing that everyone who moved from XP to 7 gained.
Windows 7 is nicer to use in almost every respect. The new taskbar (which is the best use of desktop compositing I've seen), the improved Alt-Tab window and the searchable start menu are the things that jump to mind most readily.
If we're talking about real, demonstrable gains, the move from 2000 -> XP was far more questionable.
I will happily admit that I can only comment on this from the user's perspective, I don't know what changes were made between Windows Server 2000 -> 2003 -> 2008.
I saw MW2 played at a LAN at uni a couple of weeks ago and I have to say I was unimpressed.
The lobby and matchmaking service is pretty nice, allowing you to form a party and then look for games where you can play on the same team, a pity it doesn't work so well in practise. You're stuck with the problem that a large proportion of people leave as soon as they see several people bearing the same tag join the game meaning that you have to go through the matchmaking process several times. Then there's the more technical problem of the game sometimes leaving some players behind when the lobby joins or leaves a game.
When you actually get into a game, there's a small chance that the dynamically chosen "best" host will be terrible and have huge lag spikes. (This while we're all connected through the university JANET connection.) Eventually the game decides to migrate the host, everything stops, a new host is chosen and then the game continues. Then the host quits because his team is losing and we go the the "Choosing a new host" screen again, and again.
This must be some definition of "works really well" that I was previously unaware of.
and then Halo 2 came out and showed how much worse it is when everyone has voice chat.
No, dipshit, they're anonymously aggregating data about filesharing to give to Universal as part of a deal they made.
This sort of thing is probably valuable to them since it's likely to be more accurate and complete than the stuff gathered by MediaSentry and their ilk.
Do you really think they believe the ludicrous numbers they've been putting out? Wouldn't they want to know the truth themselves, even if they keep it hidden?
Important passwords should be long, random and not written down.
For each password, make up a set of cryptic crossword clues, preferably making obscure references to things from several different aspects of your life.
Additionally, make them really evil cryptic crossword clues that don't quite give you enough information (but enough to jog your memory).
Sure you do. It happened. Everyone else saw it.
The best you can do is remember it and learn from it.