The reason we hate it is because we don't use the address bar as a search engine.
We like it to autocomplete the url that we're typing so disabling it completely is a step backwards but the new behaviour seems dumb.
Example: I've typed in web, am I more likely to be looking for "xkcd - A *web*comic of..." or "GameFAQs... Video games *web* site..", perhaps I want "Lets turn this fucking *web*site yellow" or "Rapidshare: 1-Click *Web*hosting" or maybe, just maybe, I've started typing in webmail.bath.ac.uk like I do reasonably often (but probably not as much as I visit xkcd or GameFAQs).
I admit, web is a very generic word so this is quite an extreme example but I find that when typing in urls into the address bar, the awesome bar is a lot worse at bringing up the rest of the address you're typing.
Side note: I really like the idea of an integrated search for bookmarks and history, it is more useful than I would have thought but it already exists in the history panel (which I have appear in my sidebar). If they wanted to draw attention to it, would it have killed them to integrate it into the search box and make the search box itself more of a central feature? I mean, when I want to search, I use the search bar or hit my google bookmark on the toolbar, I don't type what I'm looking for in the address bar.
The C code is written to be as clear as possible and to show what's going on. A much more convoluted example could be written in C. (A simple example which would give something comparable to the C++ code would be to have a C library which implements dynamically resizing arrays and have it return the size as an unsigned int).
It gives the expected result that C should give. Most people probably already know this...
All this shows is that C++ requires a similar level of intimate knowledge of it's standard libraries as C does. (Which is true and not a good thing but somehow it doesn't seem to hurt C much.)
A good compiler will warn you when you have a signed/unsigned mismatch.
The same good compiler would warn you of the mistake in the original C++ code as well as the return type of Vector::size and accumulate is known at compile time.
I realise that's a joke, but it brings back painful memories of MSN messenger and WMP when they both got the glossy look with rounded corners and no window decoration.
No, you're not the only one, I had an discussion the other day with someone about why he loves it and I hate it.
It basically comes down to this: I don't use my address bar to search, I use it to type addresses and so I only want it to auto complete addresses. When I do want to search I open history and search there.
I realise that some people do use the address bar to search and so I can see why they would think the awesome bar is a great idea but I wish they'd left me some way to turn it off.
With electronic, you now have to pay for the support of that electronic component.
You have to pay to support whatever system you use, irrespective of whether or not it involves electronic components.
If you had a system where people had to fill out forms, you'd need to provide support for people who didn't understand the forms and you'd also have to have people to check that submitted forms were correctly filled in.
On the other hand, Epic, id et. al (who can afford to buy these things) can test out new ideas which make use of all this power so that their games can use it by the time it becomes affordable (probably in about two years time).
Updates whenever the hell it feels like. I don't care if there's a fix for a small bug I haven't encountered when I want to play my game now. Yes I will download it at some point, but when I'm trying to start the game it's not the best time.
Slow. Why the hell does steam take so long to load anyway. This is exacerbated by the horrible quality of virgin media's adsl service in the evenings which sometimes cause steam to take five minutes to start (for most of that it doesn't even appear to do anything but complains if I try to start it again).
Requires an internet connection. Yes I could enable offline mode but since I usually use it for playing online games it wouldn't be what I want most of the time.
Having said that, I love steam, the friends system is awesome and it works excellently for online games. I just wish it was less inconvenient for offline games.
To actually answer your question: No, it wouldn't. Admittedly my first action after buying a game is to crack it so I don't have to put the CD in but if I crack wasn't available I would probably shut up and live with it. Incidentally, I haven't cracked CoD4 because the multi-player doesn't need the disc. I find this to be a nice compromise.
Piracy is easier than getting the game legitimately
Only if you know where to find the pirated copy. Pirates don't advertise in prominent places and don't have a high street presence. Additionally, many online forums ban discussion about warez and there are many sites promising free software which actually install viruses.
I'm well aware where I can find copies of games and cracks for games my friends own but if you don't, and you don't know who to ask, then you're going to find it difficult.
Following this though, copy protection only makes sense in two cases:
To prevent me from making a copy for my friend, or letting him install off the same disc. Whether this is a good idea or not is debatable. This is the usual base case for games and is usually accomplished by requiring the cd (annoying but most people are used to it).
For multiplayer games. This is where copy protection comes into its own. It's reasonably easy to give everyone a unique key and prevent two people from playing online simultaneously with the same key. Since playing with your friends is one of the big draws of online games, people sharing keys isn't a problem.
I'm not sure about Blu-Ray discs but for DVDs the keys needed for the decryption process is stored in an area on the disc which is not writable on DVD-Rs.
Disclaimer: I can't remember exactly where I read this and may have remembered incorrectly.
I was securing a wireless network for a friend's mother the other day (I set it up securely when I installed it originally too, not sure who changed it).
She didn't want anyone using her network because "They could be looking at any number of things I wouldn't approve of."
Or even more likely, the kernel update comes out including all the new driver modules compiled for it.
Let us take the situation that some driver distributed as part of the kernel is broken in a way that makes it break catastrophically when used in the new kernel. This assumes that no-one used the driver in testing before the kernel was released. If it gets released as part of a large distro, then no-one on the testing team for that distro used the driver either. Hence, the driver is probably not very widely used. For the few people it does impact, the quick workaround is the select the older kernel from the bootloader menu and everything works as it did before the update.
Third party drivers usually have to be re-installed after a kernel update anyway. In the best case you reinstall the driver and it works. In the worst case you have to go back to the old kernel until the driver is fixed.
I suspect your usage enjoyment depends a lot on the hardware.
I had the misfortune to use an HTC smartphone with WM6 on a development project last year and it was dire. Slow, unresponsive, unclear (all I was trying to do was enable wifi, I said enable, it said ok and I look and wifi is still disabled) One of my most painful memories involving technology was watching it change from portrait to landscape when you opened the mini keyboard.
It was a great disappointment, the phone looks awesome (nice size, nice screen, slide-out qwerty keyboard) until you turn it on.
They were foolish and didn't shell out for the high-capacity battery? My laptop would only last for four hours when it was new (now it's down to 50 minutes, I can justify getting a larger battery (I'm a student -> I'm poor))
Yes, but that doesn't matter. The passengers can start "boarding" in the concourse before the plane is ready to receive them leading to shorter turnaround times.
Considering the seating area on rails suggestion, you could also have lots of doors into the seating area since they wouldn't have to be external airtight doors.
It's a nice idea. Probably cheaper and more practical would be the row gates they have for roller coasters (at least at alton towers).
When waiting to board, the passengers for each row line up behind a small gate. While you wouldn't get the same efficiency as you get on a roller coaster because you can't let all rows board at once, it would make it trivially easy to make most people board roughly in order and it would allow people to have those "oh please can I swap seats" conversations before getting on the plane.
Because if I'm some inventor, and I come up with e.g. a top for baby beakers that really doesn't spill when it gets thrown across the floor, get an agreement with a supermarket to fund the manufacture and start producing and selling the things then without patent protection it will be a couple of months before every plastic utensil maker with products marketed at babies is also making them and because they've got a better manufacturing setup and can afford to invest more money in the product than I can, theirs are better and cheaper than mine and I can't sell any more.
The net result being that I say screw this inventing stuff business, it doesn't pay and the supermarket never funds an individual with a brilliant idea ever again because they didn't make their investment back.
The patent process makes sense, it just doesn't work for software because ideas are cheap and easy, there's very little cost of entry to produce a product and changes happen much faster. There's no need for patent protection for ideas in software, it still economically a good idea to innovate without them.
My course had an interesting way around the "Magic" problem. The first half of the first semester could be done entirely in BlueJ, an IDE which lets you define your classes and functions in a diagrammatic way, similar to how inheritance diagrams are drawn. Once they'd taught us the basics for conditionals, loops, methods, classes and inheritance they taught us what the imports and stuff that BlueJ hid away did and how to use them. We were also taught how to use stuff from the Java API and given a few pointers to the more useful classes. When it came to doing the coursework, it had to be done outside BlueJ, be compiled with javac and run correctly on the unix servers*. If you wanted to read around and never touch BlueJ from the start then that was fine too.
That first semester got people to think about solving problems using the tools available. In the second semester we got taught basic data structures, how arrays work, what a linked list is and how to build GUIs. About half way through the semester, they let us use eclipse instead of emacs or our text editor of choice. We also had a module on C so by the end of that we all knew what pointers were, how you use them and what happens when you get them wrong.
Using Java first got people to think like programmers, to get better at solving problems and to learn OO ideas. After we had got to the point where we could actually write something, they filled in all the lower level details that are important to know.
*The coursework itself was not particularly well thought through (IMO). It was four questions, an RPN calculator with very strict rules on what should happen on an integer overflow and a few other details, an infix calculator, a compression program and a connect 4 game (with marks for a GUI and AI). Unfortunately, a lot of the people who hadn't done programming before took one look and nearly cried. Had they been better at solving problems, they could have realised that about half the marks should have been achievable by anyone in the class but the questions were complicated enough to confuse a lot of people. The results for the whole module were bi-polar, a big gap between those who 'got' programming and those who didn't. I believe they're changing the course this year to make it cater better for people who haven't programmed before and the start of the course is now in python.
Or combining MySQL and Access and being unsure whether each will produce or expect a US style date or a UK style date or a MySQL style date.
In the end I wrote code to make Access Dates from MySQL Dates and vice-versa.
I do realise this, my point was that because UT3 is primarily an online game and can restrict access to it's online services without having to use any traditional copy protection, it would have less of a reason to prevent copying the actual program because without your own cd key, you can't play online. For UT3, this is a big thing, for games with a large single-player component or games without online multiplayer, this problem would be less likely to put off someone considering copying the game instead of buying it.
Personally, I find this to be a happy medium. People who like the game buy it, those who don't like it so much can still borrow a copy to play at a LAN.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason we hate it is because we don't use the address bar as a search engine.
..." or "GameFAQs... Video games *web* site..", perhaps I want "Lets turn this fucking *web*site yellow" or "Rapidshare: 1-Click *Web*hosting" or maybe, just maybe, I've started typing in webmail.bath.ac.uk like I do reasonably often (but probably not as much as I visit xkcd or GameFAQs).
We like it to autocomplete the url that we're typing so disabling it completely is a step backwards but the new behaviour seems dumb.
Example: I've typed in web, am I more likely to be looking for "xkcd - A *web*comic of
I admit, web is a very generic word so this is quite an extreme example but I find that when typing in urls into the address bar, the awesome bar is a lot worse at bringing up the rest of the address you're typing.
Side note: I really like the idea of an integrated search for bookmarks and history, it is more useful than I would have thought but it already exists in the history panel (which I have appear in my sidebar). If they wanted to draw attention to it, would it have killed them to integrate it into the search box and make the search box itself more of a central feature? I mean, when I want to search, I use the search bar or hit my google bookmark on the toolbar, I don't type what I'm looking for in the address bar.
The C code is written to be as clear as possible and to show what's going on. A much more convoluted example could be written in C. (A simple example which would give something comparable to the C++ code would be to have a C library which implements dynamically resizing arrays and have it return the size as an unsigned int).
All this shows is that C++ requires a similar level of intimate knowledge of it's standard libraries as C does. (Which is true and not a good thing but somehow it doesn't seem to hurt C much.)
A good compiler will warn you when you have a signed/unsigned mismatch.The same good compiler would warn you of the mistake in the original C++ code as well as the return type of Vector::size and accumulate is known at compile time.
Very interesting
Because Vector::size() returns an unsigned int, the division is done with unsigned numbers.
The code will give a wrong answer if the total is negative.
C has the same problem:
There is, it's called oldbar and it's linked above.
Unfortunately, it only replaces the look, not the functionality, of the firefox 2 address bar.
I realise that's a joke, but it brings back painful memories of MSN messenger and WMP when they both got the glossy look with rounded corners and no window decoration.
No, you're not the only one, I had an discussion the other day with someone about why he loves it and I hate it.
It basically comes down to this: I don't use my address bar to search, I use it to type addresses and so I only want it to auto complete addresses. When I do want to search I open history and search there.
I realise that some people do use the address bar to search and so I can see why they would think the awesome bar is a great idea but I wish they'd left me some way to turn it off.
I recommend to you the Phoenix Wright series of games.
You have to pay to support whatever system you use, irrespective of whether or not it involves electronic components.
If you had a system where people had to fill out forms, you'd need to provide support for people who didn't understand the forms and you'd also have to have people to check that submitted forms were correctly filled in.
On the other hand, Epic, id et. al (who can afford to buy these things) can test out new ideas which make use of all this power so that their games can use it by the time it becomes affordable (probably in about two years time).
Steam sucks big-time for single player games.
Having said that, I love steam, the friends system is awesome and it works excellently for online games. I just wish it was less inconvenient for offline games.
To actually answer your question: No, it wouldn't. Admittedly my first action after buying a game is to crack it so I don't have to put the CD in but if I crack wasn't available I would probably shut up and live with it. Incidentally, I haven't cracked CoD4 because the multi-player doesn't need the disc. I find this to be a nice compromise.
Only if you know where to find the pirated copy. Pirates don't advertise in prominent places and don't have a high street presence. Additionally, many online forums ban discussion about warez and there are many sites promising free software which actually install viruses.
I'm well aware where I can find copies of games and cracks for games my friends own but if you don't, and you don't know who to ask, then you're going to find it difficult.
Following this though, copy protection only makes sense in two cases:
I'm not sure about Blu-Ray discs but for DVDs the keys needed for the decryption process is stored in an area on the disc which is not writable on DVD-Rs.
Disclaimer: I can't remember exactly where I read this and may have remembered incorrectly.
I was securing a wireless network for a friend's mother the other day (I set it up securely when I installed it originally too, not sure who changed it).
She didn't want anyone using her network because "They could be looking at any number of things I wouldn't approve of."
Or even more likely, the kernel update comes out including all the new driver modules compiled for it.
Let us take the situation that some driver distributed as part of the kernel is broken in a way that makes it break catastrophically when used in the new kernel. This assumes that no-one used the driver in testing before the kernel was released. If it gets released as part of a large distro, then no-one on the testing team for that distro used the driver either. Hence, the driver is probably not very widely used. For the few people it does impact, the quick workaround is the select the older kernel from the bootloader menu and everything works as it did before the update.
Third party drivers usually have to be re-installed after a kernel update anyway. In the best case you reinstall the driver and it works. In the worst case you have to go back to the old kernel until the driver is fixed.
I suspect your usage enjoyment depends a lot on the hardware.
I had the misfortune to use an HTC smartphone with WM6 on a development project last year and it was dire. Slow, unresponsive, unclear (all I was trying to do was enable wifi, I said enable, it said ok and I look and wifi is still disabled) One of my most painful memories involving technology was watching it change from portrait to landscape when you opened the mini keyboard.
It was a great disappointment, the phone looks awesome (nice size, nice screen, slide-out qwerty keyboard) until you turn it on.
They were foolish and didn't shell out for the high-capacity battery? My laptop would only last for four hours when it was new (now it's down to 50 minutes, I can justify getting a larger battery (I'm a student -> I'm poor))
Yes, but that doesn't matter. The passengers can start "boarding" in the concourse before the plane is ready to receive them leading to shorter turnaround times. Considering the seating area on rails suggestion, you could also have lots of doors into the seating area since they wouldn't have to be external airtight doors.
It's a nice idea. Probably cheaper and more practical would be the row gates they have for roller coasters (at least at alton towers).
When waiting to board, the passengers for each row line up behind a small gate. While you wouldn't get the same efficiency as you get on a roller coaster because you can't let all rows board at once, it would make it trivially easy to make most people board roughly in order and it would allow people to have those "oh please can I swap seats" conversations before getting on the plane.
Because if I'm some inventor, and I come up with e.g. a top for baby beakers that really doesn't spill when it gets thrown across the floor, get an agreement with a supermarket to fund the manufacture and start producing and selling the things then without patent protection it will be a couple of months before every plastic utensil maker with products marketed at babies is also making them and because they've got a better manufacturing setup and can afford to invest more money in the product than I can, theirs are better and cheaper than mine and I can't sell any more.
The net result being that I say screw this inventing stuff business, it doesn't pay and the supermarket never funds an individual with a brilliant idea ever again because they didn't make their investment back.
The patent process makes sense, it just doesn't work for software because ideas are cheap and easy, there's very little cost of entry to produce a product and changes happen much faster. There's no need for patent protection for ideas in software, it still economically a good idea to innovate without them.
Yes, but only if you're also in the London network.
My course had an interesting way around the "Magic" problem. The first half of the first semester could be done entirely in BlueJ, an IDE which lets you define your classes and functions in a diagrammatic way, similar to how inheritance diagrams are drawn. Once they'd taught us the basics for conditionals, loops, methods, classes and inheritance they taught us what the imports and stuff that BlueJ hid away did and how to use them. We were also taught how to use stuff from the Java API and given a few pointers to the more useful classes. When it came to doing the coursework, it had to be done outside BlueJ, be compiled with javac and run correctly on the unix servers*. If you wanted to read around and never touch BlueJ from the start then that was fine too. That first semester got people to think about solving problems using the tools available. In the second semester we got taught basic data structures, how arrays work, what a linked list is and how to build GUIs. About half way through the semester, they let us use eclipse instead of emacs or our text editor of choice. We also had a module on C so by the end of that we all knew what pointers were, how you use them and what happens when you get them wrong. Using Java first got people to think like programmers, to get better at solving problems and to learn OO ideas. After we had got to the point where we could actually write something, they filled in all the lower level details that are important to know. *The coursework itself was not particularly well thought through (IMO). It was four questions, an RPN calculator with very strict rules on what should happen on an integer overflow and a few other details, an infix calculator, a compression program and a connect 4 game (with marks for a GUI and AI). Unfortunately, a lot of the people who hadn't done programming before took one look and nearly cried. Had they been better at solving problems, they could have realised that about half the marks should have been achievable by anyone in the class but the questions were complicated enough to confuse a lot of people. The results for the whole module were bi-polar, a big gap between those who 'got' programming and those who didn't. I believe they're changing the course this year to make it cater better for people who haven't programmed before and the start of the course is now in python.
Or combining MySQL and Access and being unsure whether each will produce or expect a US style date or a UK style date or a MySQL style date. In the end I wrote code to make Access Dates from MySQL Dates and vice-versa.
I do realise this, my point was that because UT3 is primarily an online game and can restrict access to it's online services without having to use any traditional copy protection, it would have less of a reason to prevent copying the actual program because without your own cd key, you can't play online. For UT3, this is a big thing, for games with a large single-player component or games without online multiplayer, this problem would be less likely to put off someone considering copying the game instead of buying it.
Personally, I find this to be a happy medium. People who like the game buy it, those who don't like it so much can still borrow a copy to play at a LAN.