Is the DVD playback crippled? Will it refuse to skip previews and such?
A DVD player that refuses to skip previews and such isn't crippled, it's working exactly as it's designed to.
I'm not saying that forcing you to watch commercials is a good thing, I think it's awful. But let's not act like players are supposed to completely ignore PUOs on DVDs, they're not. Those that do are the ones that aren't working as the specs detail they're supposed to, they just happen to be doing so in a manner that's convenient to you.
In an ideal world, media companies would use PUOs responsibly and not piss off their consumers. In reality, their abuse of PUOs have caused many of us to seek ways around their pig-headedness by using DVD players that ignore elements of the specifications. It's sad, but we need to recognize the situation for what it is, not what we wish it were.
I took the advanced C++ class at my university the first quarter after they made the class transition from Pascal. I had prior work experience as a C++ programmer, so I figured it would be an easy A. Boy, was I wrong!
The professor was like 80 years old. He must have been around before they developed the one in binary and only had zeros. That in itself isn't so bad, except that he didn't bother to even crack the book to teach C++. He'd give examples and try to work problems on the whiteboard in some kind of pseudo language that wasn't Pascal, definitely wasn't C++, and that hopelessly confused the students who didn't have a really good grasp of the language. Oh, it gets better, though.
His TA, the girl who graded our labs, knew even less. We had a lab where we had to implement a complex number class, ho hum. The instructions stated that we had to develop methods to do things like add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. complex numbers, but they didn't explicitly state what we had to call our functions.
Any C++ programmer worth anything would know that the obvious thing to do is to overload the +, -, *, and / operators so that they could accept complex number arguments and return the appropriate result. I spent a few hours working on it, churned out my class, and when I got the lab back, she had failed me!
I asked why she gave me an F, and she explained that I was supposed to implement the functions using names like add, subtract, etc. I told her that that was nowhere in the instructions for the lab, and she admitted that it was okay to use other function names, but operator overloading was a no-no. Of course, I asked why, and her answer—I kid you not—was that because if you overloaded the operators, other programmers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between your class and built-in types. I argued vehemently that that was the point of operator overloading, that it was an extremely common practice in C++, but she wouldn't be convinced.
It was toward the end of the semester, so I took the lab to my professor and explained to him what was going on. I even took a C++ best practices book with me to show what I was talking about and to prove that I'm not some crackpot stupid student trying to eek out a few extra points. The professor proceeded to explain to me that the university had just informed him that they were letting him go after the semester, that they were firing him. (His words exactly, not mine.) He said that if I had a problem with my grade, I needed to take it up with the TA, because he wasn't going to override anything she said.
In all the programming classes I took at the university, that was the only one in which I got a B, and I was absolutely furious. Not so much because of the negligible impact to my GPA, but because it's the only time I've ever gotten a grade that I truly felt like I didn't deserve, and it was all because of an idiot professor who didn't give a damn about anything (gee, I wonder why they fired him) and a TA who didn't know crap about the subject that she was grading us on.
It's too bad, too. All of my other experiences at the university were relatively pleasant, and I'm a life member of the alumni association today. But that one incident still sticks in my mind as the height of stupidity. I wish now that I had had the balls to escalate it to the dean or maybe even higher. I can't help but wonder how many students failed or otherwise did miserably in that class because of him, and I can't help but wonder if any of them gave up computer science because of that bad experience. God, I hope not.
They're still going to count it as another person "using" Vista. I'm guessing they'd be pretty happy. I can see the marketing spin now. "Even a skeptic like Jared found that the Vista user experience was extremely satisfying."
Well, I will admit that CoH/V tends to not appeal to two types of players.
First, those who are all about min/maxxing their characters and power-leveling through to the end. There's really not much point, since the game isn't focused so much on end-game content and pwning other people, though as mentioned, we did get a nice invention system for those level 50's out there to participate in.
Second, the griefers. There are exceptions of course, but most of the folks in CoH/V are generally nice, helpful folks who are thrilled to be part of the community. Griefers generally have a hard time, because the developers have designed it so that there's just not much they can do to disrupt the game for other people, and the community is pretty quick to react and report the people who do.
So yeah, I guess it might be a pointless waste of time to some people, but the general absence of those people in the game and the tendency of those people to quickly leave the game is one of the things that I really like about it. You have your opinion, but from the tone of your post, I think I'm pretty safe in saying that we're pretty happy that you don't like it.
I think it's a shame that updates to existing subscription games always get left out of these lists.
I play City of Heroes/Villains myself, and this year saw three HUGE updates to the game. In Issue 9, we had a new villain zone released, as well as a new invention system that provides a ton of end-game stuff to do, and an in-game auction house. In Issue 10, we got a major world event and a new hero/villain cooperative zone. In Issue 11 (just released a couple of weeks ago), we have another zone, Ouroboros, that allows heros and villains to complete "flashback" mission for even more end-game action, two new power sets, and a ton of new costume options. And those are just the main features, there have been lots of other little tweaks and new surprises.
The game is a LOT better today than it was when it was released around three and half years ago, and it was really a lot of fun back then. The best part of it is that unlike most other games, all of those expansions were released for no addition cost to the regular subscription fee, and the developers under the new NCsoft banner are busy working as I write this on the next expansion, Issue 12, probably to be released around the end of March or so.
Sorry if I sound like an ad, but they've really done a bang-up job on the game. Don't get me wrong, I love Halo 3 and playing with the Wii, but those tend to be merely diversions from the game I've been going back to for years now. It may not be the uber-hyped behemoth that other "Games of the Year" are, but personally, I'd rather stick with one that's been consistently interesting and good year after year.
Maybe it will make the list of "Games of the Decade."
But without the other features, the thing seems pretty much like an array of hard drives to me, ho-hum. One of the things that would set it apart is the built-in extra functionality. If I just wanted hard drives, I'd go out and just buy hard drives and probably save myself some cash in the process. If I want the built-in extra functionality... Well, I'd still go out and just buy hard drives, because I don't want it deliberately crippling and denying me the legitimate use of those capabilities because of some imagined illegal behavior that I haven't and wouldn't engage in.
It would be a little like buying a GPS unit with built-in maps. The catch is, though, that because someone might rob a bank on Main Street, no streets beginning with the letter M will be shown on the maps.
Seriously. There's no way in hell I would buy this thing. The last thing in the world I need is my hard drive deciding what files are and aren't okay to store. Are they on drugs, or what?
I would argue that a Windows machine missing its boot.ini file is actually more useful as a result. At least then, there's a chance that the user will finally install Linux.;-)
...Or maybe it's because Microsoft has been a strong backer of the format since the very beginning, and doesn't want it to end up like all of Sony's other consumer device formats. (Betamax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, SACD, UMD...)
Strike that word "other." I'm well aware that HD-DVD isn't a Sony format. What I said and what I was thinking when I typed that (Sony's consumer device formats other than the competing Blu-ray...) obviously wasn't quite in sync.
...Or maybe it's because Microsoft has been a strong backer of the format since the very beginning, and doesn't want it to end up like all of Sony's other consumer device formats. (Betamax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, SACD, UMD...)
...Or maybe it's because HD-DVD is the format that its cash cow video game console system supports, whereas they have nothing to do with Blu-ray.
Of course, I could just be grasping at straws.
At any rate, I do think he is right in that neither format will be the choice for obtaining and playing hi-def content, online distribution ultimately will win.
He invents patents, he doesn't patent inventions. Pure patent troll.
I think he means, "We are a company that invents and [a company that] receives patents..."
I do agree that he's a pure patent troll, though. He sits around and patents ideas without doing anything to develop them. Then, he waits for someone else to come up with the same idea. He watches as they develop it, market it, sell it, and become successful with it. After he sees that such an idea is a success, he pounces and extorts money from the people who actually made it a reality. If they don't pay up, he takes them to court and sues for millions.
Either way, he gets very rich for doing nothing. I'm sorry, but having an idea is not work, and people shouldn't be rewarded for it unless someone specifically agrees to pay them to do so. Take a second to ponder this: If everyone just sat around on their asses coming up with ideas and patenting them, and no one actually did anything, how far would we go with that? The answer is, of course, nowhere; we'd still be in the dark ages.
I'm so tired of reading stories like this. The guy who is suing actually thinks he's not a patent troll. I read an article about this guy where he denies he's a patent troll. Here's an excerpt:
This sounds suspiciously like a patent troll treading down the litigation track. Yet, Klausner says: "I'd be as happy as a pig in mud if I never have to go to court again." That would be pretty tough to achieve in an increasingly litigious sector. Klausner puts some of the blame for this trend on the defendants. "The infringers are becoming more litigious. There are lots of theories as to why. On the whole everyone is becoming more litigious."
Riiiight, it's Apple's fault he has to sue them. He had an idea, and as far as I can tell, never saw, met, or discussed it with anyone at Apple. They happened to have a similar idea and acted on it, and now they have to pay. Dearly. Some more wisdom from him:
Klausner denies that his company is a patent troll, as he defines the term: "Just change the 'n' in inventor to 's'. These investors start up a fund and put patents in a portfolio. They see them as oil wells. I am an inventor. The value I bring to the universe is my ideas. I'm not a marketer or a manufacturer or a distributor. We are a company that invents and receives patents - my own - and licenses them."
I'm sorry, but I just don't see having an idea as meriting hundreds of millions of dollars. Acting on an idea, now that's worth something.
I have lots of ideas, too. I don't patent most of them, because I don't plan on acting on them, and I don't feel like I deserve hundreds of millions of dollars if someone else does. Even if there were something I feel like would make the world a better place, it's likely I wouldn't pursue it because I know I'd get sued into oblivion for just about anything I might do.
I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how patents spur innovation. Every time I read articles like this, patents are being used to hinder it.
They're starting with this statement, tomorrow they may pass a bill to effectively censor the internet.
In that case, then let's all get worked up about it tomorrow. I don't like the idea of creating a movement and protesting stuff that may happen. Right now, they just want to study it and help in education efforts against it, and that's fine with me. Like I said, if you don't think the tax dollars are worth it, that's one thing, and I can respect that opinion. But to present it as if the bill itself is an attempt to censor the Internet is just plain incorrect.
I just read the bill (linky, it's not that long), and the Internet is mentioned only once:
The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.
That's it, nothing else. The bill's purpose is to establish a committee to study violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism, and to assist federal officials in training and education efforts to prevent such things.
If you disagree with spending tax dollars to do that, then I don't have a problem with that. If the committee comes up with some outlandish plan to regulate the Internet as a result of their research, then I agree we need to get worked up about it. But the bill does not say that the Internet is a "terrorist threat," and it sure as hell does not define the Internet as a "terrorist tool that Congress needs to develop and implement methods to combat."
As pointed out in a later post, the OLPC project in Nigeria is basically charity.
If they continue having problems like this, simply don't send any to them. Let LANCOR explain to the Nigerian government and people how their greed and abuse of patent law is screwing up the education of Nigeria's children and putting them at a serious disadvantage to the country's neighbors.
In YouTube's defense, I've never heard of stage6 before. Rest assured, if it gets as popular as YouTube, they will get "crazy" on the copyright stuff. (Unless, of course, they're hosted out of country in some location where copyright stuff isn't an issue, but then, there are other issues to deal with at that point.)
Also, the reason videos on YouTube are kind of crappy is because that's the resolution it's always supported. I mean, why upload a 100MB file at a decent native resolution if it's just going to re-encode it at a lower resolution? If they do go to a higher resolution, I think it's safe to say that uploaders will account for it and send in videos at a better resolution. There just was never a need to before.
Dude, employees coming to congress and saying this is happening is not equivalent to some nut bag who believes in space aliens giving him an anal probe.
When did I say it was?
I'm referring to things such as the practice of extraordinary rendition, torture by waterboarding, silently monitoring all Internet traffic, etc. Stuff that the administration in charge keeps waving their hand at us and telling us, "There's nothing to worry about."
There's an unprecedented level of government secrecy in the U.S. now, secrecy about stuff that has little or nothing to do with national security. Well, secrecy except when it comes to disclosing the names of CIA personnel who happen to be involved with your political enemies. That's what makes me so nervous, it's secrecy for political reasons, not secrecy for security reasons.
It's kind of ironic that all of this is done in the name of protecting me from terrorists. I'm more afraid of my own government today than I've ever been of terrorists. And frankly, I feel that the government that has spent so much time, money, and effort, breaking laws whenever convenient, to protect me from terrorism has made us more vulnerable than ever.
Before we in the U.S. get to patting ourselves on the back for not being this bad, consider the story just two posts down that discusses how this is probably already being done here with no one's knowledge or consent. I say "probably" because no one really knows. No laws passed, no protests staged (hard to protest something you don't even know about), just government silently doing whatever it wants after slapping a "national security" label on it.
It's not right in Germany, and it's not right here. The difference is that at least in Germany, this type of gross invasion of privacy happened on the public record and they can react and do something about it now.
Of course, we in the U.S. can do something about it too, but most people won't get worked up over what government might be doing without it being proven true, and our government is mercilessly exploiting that fact right now by keeping everything secret and implying that anyone who thinks otherwise is some kind of kooky conspiracy theorist (while they spy on them to make sure they don't get too far out of line).
I wonder how many others have decided to do the same.
Me.
The rootkit was the straw that broke the camel's back, though. I bought a Sony home theater system around five years ago. The DVD changer in it broke, so I sent it in for warranty repair. It took months for them to fix it and get it back to me, and when they finally did, it was still broken. They obviously hadn't checked to make sure it was working before sending it back. So I returned it again, and they fixed it that time. Just before the warranty expired, the DVD changer broke yet again, so I send it back again. They fixed it and sent it back after another month or so. Then around a year later, one of the speaker ports screwed up, causing the center channel to emit a constant high-pitched whistle. I wasn't about to pay to get something fixed that would probably break again soon anyway, so I cut my losses and threw the thing away.
Then, of course, there was the whole PS3 debacle. Sony was so nauseatingly arrogant about the whole thing, acting as if paying $600 for a gaming console that was a thinly veiled attempt at foisting their Blu-ray format on everyone would be a privilege. They didn't take any competition seriously, from a console gaming or a next-gen HD format point of view, and they got their clocks cleaned. That was extremely satisfying to watch. The reason I hate Blu-ray isn't because of its technical merits or lack thereof, it's because of how it was pushed on the public.
From what I hear, Sony used to be a really kick-ass company. Maybe someday they will be again after they learn some humility and what their place in the food chain is (i.e. under the wants and needs of its customers). But for now, they've just done too much wrong and lost my respect.
read the Cedega forums because there are 100 people who do experience glitches for every 1 person who experiences none.
That's because they are for the most part support forums. I mean, take a look at any software's forum, and you'll get the same ratio.
there was some sort of reason that emmert gave such as that it relied upon directX or some other MS technology and thats why it COULDN'T port. It's not that they won't... it's that they CAN'T
I'd like to see some sort of documentation on that. I mean, other than graphics, what is DirectX used for? Sound? That is generally a heck of a lot easier to port than video. (And all in-game sounds are in OGG format, in case anyone's remotely interested.) Networking? As far as I can tell, CoH/V doesn't use any of DirectX's specialized networking services, but relies on plain ol' Windows networking. What else is there?
It's more stuff like the launcher/updater application that depends on Windows. The launcher's data window actually is an embedded IE control. Stupid stuff like that. Stuff that they could port if they wanted to, but just haven't taken the time to, probably because they don't feel there's a huge demand for it. Like I said, I'm trying to change that perception and convince them that it is worthwhile.
As for Jack, I've never hated him or anything, but if he did say that, it wouldn't be the first time I've disagreed with him on something. (He once dissed the though of user-generated content, which I think would have a HUGE positive impact on the game.) Hopefully the new development team will rethink things.
In the meantime, though, I highly encourage playing it on Cedega, it is a worthwhile experience. About the only bad thing about it is that some of the community-developed utilities (*ahem* HeroStats) don't work on Cedega/Linux.
You're right, that was my main problem. The developers harped on the concept of risk versus reward for a long time, and a small element of the player base (such as the poster I replied to) hated it. They only want the reward, not the risk.
As the poster himself pointed out:
the system was changed to what we were told was "How the devs originally wanted it"
The developers weren't clueless, they knew from the outset that it was an issue. However, I understand that they wanted to get the game out even if it wasn't 100% perfect, especially since it was something they could fix later.
I think they underestimated the capacity of people to min/max like that though, and it only got raised way up on the radar after some data mining showed what was going on and after people on the forums copped attitudes about how important tanks were and how everyone else were basically spectators.
When they changed it so that no player was invulnerable and restored some balance to the game, there was a huge outcry about it. There were some people, like the poster I replied to, who just didn't want to play a game that they weren't guaranteed to win every time. Don't be fooled, though. These players wouldn't have stuck around much longer even if the developers gave them everything they wanted. A lot of people were just your normal contingent of DOOOOOM!-sayers, and years later, they're still around crying "DOOOOOM!"--and still enjoying the game. Some people were frustrated because they had invested a lot of time into figuring out the exact equations to min/max their characters, and they had to basically start over in their calculations.
But in spite of the huge outcry, most people really didn't care that much about the change. Honestly, it didn't affect the majority of players much at all. And there were some, like me, who said, "Wow, that's actually a really good idea. Yes, our characters aren't gods any more, but in the long run, it will make the game more fun."
I won't lie, as you can see, some people really did leave. But since Enhancement Diversification rolled out, City of Heroes has steadily increased its subscriber base ever since, and frankly, I say good riddance to the people who would destroy the game's longetivity just so that they could keep their "I Win" button.
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A DVD player that refuses to skip previews and such isn't crippled, it's working exactly as it's designed to.
I'm not saying that forcing you to watch commercials is a good thing, I think it's awful. But let's not act like players are supposed to completely ignore PUOs on DVDs, they're not. Those that do are the ones that aren't working as the specs detail they're supposed to, they just happen to be doing so in a manner that's convenient to you.
In an ideal world, media companies would use PUOs responsibly and not piss off their consumers. In reality, their abuse of PUOs have caused many of us to seek ways around their pig-headedness by using DVD players that ignore elements of the specifications. It's sad, but we need to recognize the situation for what it is, not what we wish it were.
I took the advanced C++ class at my university the first quarter after they made the class transition from Pascal. I had prior work experience as a C++ programmer, so I figured it would be an easy A. Boy, was I wrong!
The professor was like 80 years old. He must have been around before they developed the one in binary and only had zeros. That in itself isn't so bad, except that he didn't bother to even crack the book to teach C++. He'd give examples and try to work problems on the whiteboard in some kind of pseudo language that wasn't Pascal, definitely wasn't C++, and that hopelessly confused the students who didn't have a really good grasp of the language. Oh, it gets better, though.
His TA, the girl who graded our labs, knew even less. We had a lab where we had to implement a complex number class, ho hum. The instructions stated that we had to develop methods to do things like add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. complex numbers, but they didn't explicitly state what we had to call our functions.
Any C++ programmer worth anything would know that the obvious thing to do is to overload the +, -, *, and / operators so that they could accept complex number arguments and return the appropriate result. I spent a few hours working on it, churned out my class, and when I got the lab back, she had failed me!
I asked why she gave me an F, and she explained that I was supposed to implement the functions using names like add, subtract, etc. I told her that that was nowhere in the instructions for the lab, and she admitted that it was okay to use other function names, but operator overloading was a no-no. Of course, I asked why, and her answer—I kid you not—was that because if you overloaded the operators, other programmers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between your class and built-in types. I argued vehemently that that was the point of operator overloading, that it was an extremely common practice in C++, but she wouldn't be convinced.
It was toward the end of the semester, so I took the lab to my professor and explained to him what was going on. I even took a C++ best practices book with me to show what I was talking about and to prove that I'm not some crackpot stupid student trying to eek out a few extra points. The professor proceeded to explain to me that the university had just informed him that they were letting him go after the semester, that they were firing him. (His words exactly, not mine.) He said that if I had a problem with my grade, I needed to take it up with the TA, because he wasn't going to override anything she said.
In all the programming classes I took at the university, that was the only one in which I got a B, and I was absolutely furious. Not so much because of the negligible impact to my GPA, but because it's the only time I've ever gotten a grade that I truly felt like I didn't deserve, and it was all because of an idiot professor who didn't give a damn about anything (gee, I wonder why they fired him) and a TA who didn't know crap about the subject that she was grading us on.
It's too bad, too. All of my other experiences at the university were relatively pleasant, and I'm a life member of the alumni association today. But that one incident still sticks in my mind as the height of stupidity. I wish now that I had had the balls to escalate it to the dean or maybe even higher. I can't help but wonder how many students failed or otherwise did miserably in that class because of him, and I can't help but wonder if any of them gave up computer science because of that bad experience. God, I hope not.
They're still going to count it as another person "using" Vista. I'm guessing they'd be pretty happy. I can see the marketing spin now. "Even a skeptic like Jared found that the Vista user experience was extremely satisfying."
Well, I will admit that CoH/V tends to not appeal to two types of players.
First, those who are all about min/maxxing their characters and power-leveling through to the end. There's really not much point, since the game isn't focused so much on end-game content and pwning other people, though as mentioned, we did get a nice invention system for those level 50's out there to participate in.
Second, the griefers. There are exceptions of course, but most of the folks in CoH/V are generally nice, helpful folks who are thrilled to be part of the community. Griefers generally have a hard time, because the developers have designed it so that there's just not much they can do to disrupt the game for other people, and the community is pretty quick to react and report the people who do.
So yeah, I guess it might be a pointless waste of time to some people, but the general absence of those people in the game and the tendency of those people to quickly leave the game is one of the things that I really like about it. You have your opinion, but from the tone of your post, I think I'm pretty safe in saying that we're pretty happy that you don't like it.
I think it's a shame that updates to existing subscription games always get left out of these lists.
I play City of Heroes/Villains myself, and this year saw three HUGE updates to the game. In Issue 9, we had a new villain zone released, as well as a new invention system that provides a ton of end-game stuff to do, and an in-game auction house. In Issue 10, we got a major world event and a new hero/villain cooperative zone. In Issue 11 (just released a couple of weeks ago), we have another zone, Ouroboros, that allows heros and villains to complete "flashback" mission for even more end-game action, two new power sets, and a ton of new costume options. And those are just the main features, there have been lots of other little tweaks and new surprises.
The game is a LOT better today than it was when it was released around three and half years ago, and it was really a lot of fun back then. The best part of it is that unlike most other games, all of those expansions were released for no addition cost to the regular subscription fee, and the developers under the new NCsoft banner are busy working as I write this on the next expansion, Issue 12, probably to be released around the end of March or so.
Sorry if I sound like an ad, but they've really done a bang-up job on the game. Don't get me wrong, I love Halo 3 and playing with the Wii, but those tend to be merely diversions from the game I've been going back to for years now. It may not be the uber-hyped behemoth that other "Games of the Year" are, but personally, I'd rather stick with one that's been consistently interesting and good year after year.
Maybe it will make the list of "Games of the Decade."
But without the other features, the thing seems pretty much like an array of hard drives to me, ho-hum. One of the things that would set it apart is the built-in extra functionality. If I just wanted hard drives, I'd go out and just buy hard drives and probably save myself some cash in the process. If I want the built-in extra functionality... Well, I'd still go out and just buy hard drives, because I don't want it deliberately crippling and denying me the legitimate use of those capabilities because of some imagined illegal behavior that I haven't and wouldn't engage in.
It would be a little like buying a GPS unit with built-in maps. The catch is, though, that because someone might rob a bank on Main Street, no streets beginning with the letter M will be shown on the maps.
No thank you.
Seriously. There's no way in hell I would buy this thing. The last thing in the world I need is my hard drive deciding what files are and aren't okay to store. Are they on drugs, or what?
Here is a complete list of file types it cripples the functionality for.
The funniest part is the "What it holds" section at the bottom:
I would argue that a Windows machine missing its boot.ini file is actually more useful as a result. At least then, there's a chance that the user will finally install Linux. ;-)
Strike that word "other." I'm well aware that HD-DVD isn't a Sony format. What I said and what I was thinking when I typed that (Sony's consumer device formats other than the competing Blu-ray...) obviously wasn't quite in sync.
...Or maybe it's because Microsoft has been a strong backer of the format since the very beginning, and doesn't want it to end up like all of Sony's other consumer device formats. (Betamax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, SACD, UMD...)
...Or maybe it's because HD-DVD is the format that its cash cow video game console system supports, whereas they have nothing to do with Blu-ray.
Of course, I could just be grasping at straws.
At any rate, I do think he is right in that neither format will be the choice for obtaining and playing hi-def content, online distribution ultimately will win.
I think he means, "We are a company that invents and [a company that] receives patents..."
I do agree that he's a pure patent troll, though. He sits around and patents ideas without doing anything to develop them. Then, he waits for someone else to come up with the same idea. He watches as they develop it, market it, sell it, and become successful with it. After he sees that such an idea is a success, he pounces and extorts money from the people who actually made it a reality. If they don't pay up, he takes them to court and sues for millions.
Either way, he gets very rich for doing nothing. I'm sorry, but having an idea is not work, and people shouldn't be rewarded for it unless someone specifically agrees to pay them to do so. Take a second to ponder this: If everyone just sat around on their asses coming up with ideas and patenting them, and no one actually did anything, how far would we go with that? The answer is, of course, nowhere; we'd still be in the dark ages.
I'm so tired of reading stories like this. The guy who is suing actually thinks he's not a patent troll. I read an article about this guy where he denies he's a patent troll. Here's an excerpt:
Riiiight, it's Apple's fault he has to sue them. He had an idea, and as far as I can tell, never saw, met, or discussed it with anyone at Apple. They happened to have a similar idea and acted on it, and now they have to pay. Dearly. Some more wisdom from him:
I'm sorry, but I just don't see having an idea as meriting hundreds of millions of dollars. Acting on an idea, now that's worth something.
I have lots of ideas, too. I don't patent most of them, because I don't plan on acting on them, and I don't feel like I deserve hundreds of millions of dollars if someone else does. Even if there were something I feel like would make the world a better place, it's likely I wouldn't pursue it because I know I'd get sued into oblivion for just about anything I might do.
I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how patents spur innovation. Every time I read articles like this, patents are being used to hinder it.
Oh make no mistake, there are plenty of good reasons to trash Congress and government. This just happens to not be one of them.
If people cry over everything, even imagined made-up things, then no one will take them seriously when they cry over the real problems.
In that case, then let's all get worked up about it tomorrow. I don't like the idea of creating a movement and protesting stuff that may happen. Right now, they just want to study it and help in education efforts against it, and that's fine with me. Like I said, if you don't think the tax dollars are worth it, that's one thing, and I can respect that opinion. But to present it as if the bill itself is an attempt to censor the Internet is just plain incorrect.
Holy crap, that title and summary is misleading.
I just read the bill (linky, it's not that long), and the Internet is mentioned only once:
That's it, nothing else. The bill's purpose is to establish a committee to study violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism, and to assist federal officials in training and education efforts to prevent such things.
If you disagree with spending tax dollars to do that, then I don't have a problem with that. If the committee comes up with some outlandish plan to regulate the Internet as a result of their research, then I agree we need to get worked up about it. But the bill does not say that the Internet is a "terrorist threat," and it sure as hell does not define the Internet as a "terrorist tool that Congress needs to develop and implement methods to combat."
As pointed out in a later post, the OLPC project in Nigeria is basically charity.
If they continue having problems like this, simply don't send any to them. Let LANCOR explain to the Nigerian government and people how their greed and abuse of patent law is screwing up the education of Nigeria's children and putting them at a serious disadvantage to the country's neighbors.
For the record, this is much funnier than it's been given credit for so far...
Quite the opposite. The people who make Skittles candy are suing for patent infringement.
In YouTube's defense, I've never heard of stage6 before. Rest assured, if it gets as popular as YouTube, they will get "crazy" on the copyright stuff. (Unless, of course, they're hosted out of country in some location where copyright stuff isn't an issue, but then, there are other issues to deal with at that point.)
Also, the reason videos on YouTube are kind of crappy is because that's the resolution it's always supported. I mean, why upload a 100MB file at a decent native resolution if it's just going to re-encode it at a lower resolution? If they do go to a higher resolution, I think it's safe to say that uploaders will account for it and send in videos at a better resolution. There just was never a need to before.
I think this is excellent news.
Ah, you're right, it does make more sense now. I was wondering how you got aliens out of my post.
Nice reply.
Heh, Bushbots. I'll have to remember that one.
When did I say it was?
I'm referring to things such as the practice of extraordinary rendition, torture by waterboarding, silently monitoring all Internet traffic, etc. Stuff that the administration in charge keeps waving their hand at us and telling us, "There's nothing to worry about."
There's an unprecedented level of government secrecy in the U.S. now, secrecy about stuff that has little or nothing to do with national security. Well, secrecy except when it comes to disclosing the names of CIA personnel who happen to be involved with your political enemies. That's what makes me so nervous, it's secrecy for political reasons, not secrecy for security reasons.
It's kind of ironic that all of this is done in the name of protecting me from terrorists. I'm more afraid of my own government today than I've ever been of terrorists. And frankly, I feel that the government that has spent so much time, money, and effort, breaking laws whenever convenient, to protect me from terrorism has made us more vulnerable than ever.
Before we in the U.S. get to patting ourselves on the back for not being this bad, consider the story just two posts down that discusses how this is probably already being done here with no one's knowledge or consent. I say "probably" because no one really knows. No laws passed, no protests staged (hard to protest something you don't even know about), just government silently doing whatever it wants after slapping a "national security" label on it.
It's not right in Germany, and it's not right here. The difference is that at least in Germany, this type of gross invasion of privacy happened on the public record and they can react and do something about it now.
Of course, we in the U.S. can do something about it too, but most people won't get worked up over what government might be doing without it being proven true, and our government is mercilessly exploiting that fact right now by keeping everything secret and implying that anyone who thinks otherwise is some kind of kooky conspiracy theorist (while they spy on them to make sure they don't get too far out of line).
Me.
The rootkit was the straw that broke the camel's back, though. I bought a Sony home theater system around five years ago. The DVD changer in it broke, so I sent it in for warranty repair. It took months for them to fix it and get it back to me, and when they finally did, it was still broken. They obviously hadn't checked to make sure it was working before sending it back. So I returned it again, and they fixed it that time. Just before the warranty expired, the DVD changer broke yet again, so I send it back again. They fixed it and sent it back after another month or so. Then around a year later, one of the speaker ports screwed up, causing the center channel to emit a constant high-pitched whistle. I wasn't about to pay to get something fixed that would probably break again soon anyway, so I cut my losses and threw the thing away.
Then, of course, there was the whole PS3 debacle. Sony was so nauseatingly arrogant about the whole thing, acting as if paying $600 for a gaming console that was a thinly veiled attempt at foisting their Blu-ray format on everyone would be a privilege. They didn't take any competition seriously, from a console gaming or a next-gen HD format point of view, and they got their clocks cleaned. That was extremely satisfying to watch. The reason I hate Blu-ray isn't because of its technical merits or lack thereof, it's because of how it was pushed on the public.
From what I hear, Sony used to be a really kick-ass company. Maybe someday they will be again after they learn some humility and what their place in the food chain is (i.e. under the wants and needs of its customers). But for now, they've just done too much wrong and lost my respect.
That's because they are for the most part support forums. I mean, take a look at any software's forum, and you'll get the same ratio.
I'd like to see some sort of documentation on that. I mean, other than graphics, what is DirectX used for? Sound? That is generally a heck of a lot easier to port than video. (And all in-game sounds are in OGG format, in case anyone's remotely interested.) Networking? As far as I can tell, CoH/V doesn't use any of DirectX's specialized networking services, but relies on plain ol' Windows networking. What else is there?
It's more stuff like the launcher/updater application that depends on Windows. The launcher's data window actually is an embedded IE control. Stupid stuff like that. Stuff that they could port if they wanted to, but just haven't taken the time to, probably because they don't feel there's a huge demand for it. Like I said, I'm trying to change that perception and convince them that it is worthwhile.
As for Jack, I've never hated him or anything, but if he did say that, it wouldn't be the first time I've disagreed with him on something. (He once dissed the though of user-generated content, which I think would have a HUGE positive impact on the game.) Hopefully the new development team will rethink things.
In the meantime, though, I highly encourage playing it on Cedega, it is a worthwhile experience. About the only bad thing about it is that some of the community-developed utilities (*ahem* HeroStats) don't work on Cedega/Linux.
You're right, that was my main problem. The developers harped on the concept of risk versus reward for a long time, and a small element of the player base (such as the poster I replied to) hated it. They only want the reward, not the risk.
As the poster himself pointed out:
The developers weren't clueless, they knew from the outset that it was an issue. However, I understand that they wanted to get the game out even if it wasn't 100% perfect, especially since it was something they could fix later.
I think they underestimated the capacity of people to min/max like that though, and it only got raised way up on the radar after some data mining showed what was going on and after people on the forums copped attitudes about how important tanks were and how everyone else were basically spectators.
When they changed it so that no player was invulnerable and restored some balance to the game, there was a huge outcry about it. There were some people, like the poster I replied to, who just didn't want to play a game that they weren't guaranteed to win every time. Don't be fooled, though. These players wouldn't have stuck around much longer even if the developers gave them everything they wanted. A lot of people were just your normal contingent of DOOOOOM!-sayers, and years later, they're still around crying "DOOOOOM!"--and still enjoying the game. Some people were frustrated because they had invested a lot of time into figuring out the exact equations to min/max their characters, and they had to basically start over in their calculations.
But in spite of the huge outcry, most people really didn't care that much about the change. Honestly, it didn't affect the majority of players much at all. And there were some, like me, who said, "Wow, that's actually a really good idea. Yes, our characters aren't gods any more, but in the long run, it will make the game more fun."
I won't lie, as you can see, some people really did leave. But since Enhancement Diversification rolled out, City of Heroes has steadily increased its subscriber base ever since, and frankly, I say good riddance to the people who would destroy the game's longetivity just so that they could keep their "I Win" button.