No, you're not alone. It really sucks when applications, very specifically games, refuse to run on older versions of Windows. many of us have a lot of time and energy invested in those programs. Microsoft is not selling to people unwilling to pay them well, and they're requiring better hardware as a cheap way out of optimizing their code for speed.
This is to say nothing of how so many companies love using your boot-time to copy things into memory so that their load time appears fast. I'm looking right at Adobe, here. Microsoft is doing those companies a favor by requiring hardware good enough that their somewhat evil deceptions of speed are forgivable.
On the other hand, the learning curve for various linux distributions has changed in the last few years. Get yourself another hard drive, nothing fancy, even 20 gigs would be way more than enough. An old 8gig drive, even a 4gig, is sufficient. Swap out the hard drive, and install Debian. Instructions for getting the installation data are here, and instructions for installation are here.
There's only three tricky steps. First, you have to partition the drive correctly. For simplicity, make around 5% of the drive the swap space. Second, during the install process, you have to tell it what network card you have. This means loading the module for the right card. Generally, you can just try each module, and if it autodetects correctly and the name isn't obviously the wrong card, you're good. Third, when you are asked for packages to install, pick the simple method and choose the x-windows install. You will need to know what graphics card you have for this.
If all of that works, congratulations, you have one of the most powerful OSes on your machine now. Use 'aptitude' to pick more packages to install. For someone familiar with Windows, KDE might be a good idea. OpenOffice.org is a good alternative to MS Office.
The beauty of this is, if you screw up, fine. You've got some old harddrive screwed up. You didn't have to back up, and you didn't lose anything, because your windows installation is ready and waiting on your first hard drive. It was not even connected to the computer, so there's no chance of hurting it.
Of course, I'm paranoid, so I would say that you should make backups regularly as a matter of course.
I wouldn't throw all that Windows stuff out, as some of it can be useful, and the games are fun, of course. On the other hand, I dual boot, and I only use the Windows side for games. One of these days, I'm going to see if Guild Wars will work with WINE.
I wish we could get to other planets. Currently I'm following Richard Branson's funding for commercial space flight. But if you want to make the best use of your hardware, and not get screwed by software companies demanding more from you, try Debian. Now to find a spare hard drive to demonstrate for some friends...
I never speak lightly. And I'm not a troll. And I never said that I was a Christian.
Obviously, however, I've been instructed incorrectly. Enlighten me. Tell me about how Jesus never had sex and how virginity is a wonderful thing. Tell me how I can save myself. I'm sure my life would be better if someone could just tell me how to live it. Tell me how your life is better, how you know yourself better, from all of your years as a Christian.
You seemed so worked up about all the bad Christians out there. Now that I see that you have a much clearer path than me, why don't you tell me about it? Are you proud? Are you worried for my soul? What about yours? If you could make me a good Christian, would you?
Not at all. It would increase the value of trusted stolen ID information. In the end, it would just make thieves use more sophisticated social networks, etc. They'd get around it, and would be willing to pay more for real data, since the work that went into collecting it and verifying it was greater.
To sum up, it's still supply and demand, and you're talking about diluting the supply. That means that, for those who can get at the 'good stuff', it's worth more.
On the other hand, if the FBI and the credit card companies were to engage in honey-net operations, then we're talking.
On a related note, I just got a note from my credit card company saying that I could make a temporary credit card number for online purchases. Seems like things are looking up, if only a bit.
You are offtopic, and what's more, wrong
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DECnet Isn't Dead
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· Score: 2, Informative
I have no problem with creimer's view, because he is doing what he wants to do. You, however, have insulted me as well as the intelligence and dedication of many people.
Get you unfounded dogma off of public places. Or, put your money where your mouth is, and prove what you just said.
I'll bet you $100 (no kidding) that you can't defend your position with passages (not just quotes) from the Bible. And, for an even easier bet for you, I'll bet you $1 and let you defend your statement with any Christian references you want to use, even modern works. Bear in mind, I'll use my own references to rebut. You won't even win $1, my Christian friend, because you can't.
And while we're on the way offtopic subject of ignoring rules, at what point did you decide that the rules in the Old Testament didn't apply to Christians? Did you read it between the lines?
Or maybe you should spend your time thinking for yourself, instead of blindly following rules set down by people almost a thousand years ago. You're certainly not following the path of the original Christian church, but instead agreeing with the statements made during the Middle Ages, for two reasons.
First of all, you're not going to find anything about a prophet or Christ demanding virginity. Virginity was not an issue so much until the Middle Ages, for various reasons. Why don't you read some history? It could help your outlook on life.
Second of all, what you will find, if you check the original Hebrew and Greek, is that Jesus, an unmarried man, had sex, as did at least one of his disciples. Was it okay for them, but not you? Were times different then?
He doesn't want to be your leader, and he's not going to be. So he doesn't care if he flashes money around, because he doesn't care about you as a follower. He also does mention that most businesses fail.
Games don't need to be 'girly' to appeal to girls/women, nor do they need stylized versions of men or women which are appealing to women. They need to be NOT OFFENSIVE TO WOMEN. There are subtle, pervasive aspects to games that men may not notice, but turn women off immediately.
For example, for a large number of women, an ad or box art for a game which features scantily clad models is a big red warning light that says, "This game is for the guys, because we're treating women as objects." An even larger warning sign is when a women is doing something suggestive, or standing in a particularly revealing pose. This warns women away because we use these signals for many other situations as well. Further, such objectification is quite offensive to many women, even if it not for men.
Another example, again in the advertising, is when an attempt is made to appeal to bravado or bloodlust. Many men are conditioned to respond positively, and many women are conditioned to respond negatively. Usually, however, such things are not pivotal aspects of the game unless it is derivative or just plain bad, so the game was played by less women than it would actually have appealled to. Again, this is a signalling device present in the advertisements.
Anyway, this is mostly an issue because the advertising and tone decisions for games are often made by men, specifically men who haven't learned about women's impressions. When that changes, these problems will dissappear and you'll never have to read another story about how there aren't any women gamers.
RIAA / MPAA doesn't care about people using BitTorrent to share linux distributions and the like, so they don't care about that "genie".
I think that they have to care about other uses of P2P software, since any legitimately-used p2p app that doesn't scan and report files could be used to distribute copyrighted works. If bittorrent is 'allowed' to exist, meaning they don't sue for its closure somehow, then they'll never 'stop all the downloading'. Any system will potentially allow illegal distribution, and they know it.
It may be that these organizations will only back down from their stance when a court orders it, as with video tape recorders, cassette tape recorders, and CD burners. In fact, looking at that list, I think it would be a safe bet that a court's decision will be required. But that is not an easy thing to predict.
Here's a different question: Why aren't they already using Bittorrent to distribute old movies with previews attached? Because they couldn't count ad views. If they could count ad views, and be sure of it, then they could make money on it. They can't do that, maybe not yet, maybe never, and thus they view it (rightly) as competition, and (wrongly) try to kill it.
So if you really want the MPAA/RIAA and such to leave Bittorrent alone, then they have to get their ad revenue or previews somehow, and they have to be able to count them. Sickeningly enough, the web-enabled stuff in the WMA format was probably a way to do that, since each viewing of the movie's previews could potentially report home. I would not trust that particular solution, but if some solution was possible, then we can be safe from vicious legal threats.
Oh, I suppose I should point out why I think the RIAA/MPAA is right to view free viewing of old movies as competition. They currently spend so much on movies that at least one out of every few needs to be a blockbuster, and the same goes for expensively-promoted music groups. The movie and music industry are depending on marketing rather than quality to sell their media, because marketing is cheaper. A person with more options is less affected by marketing. Therefore, all options are competition, at least indirectly. If that competition cuts into the marketing power these companies hold, it becomes major competition. The fight here isn't so much about copyright infringement as it is about marketing power.
Well, I suppose now we've hit the crux of the matter: How well did he research his options ahead of time? As a fellow computer scientist, I've been giving him the benefit of the doubt. You are, however, quite correct about his statement. It does threaten legal action, and perhaps he really was silly enough to threaten this without already having it ready. Again, I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, but I guess that second nod to his forethought is not correct.
I think you are somewhat mistaken about his attempts to bring the matter to the attention of his superiors. In his letter, he discusses his conversations with management, etc., and how he got no reaction from them. That was actually my reason for stating that his company had no internal reporting mechanisms. Again, I've been giving him the benefit of the doubt: since he tried _something_, I figured he tried the best thing he knew to do.
Of course, I could be wrong. He could have done all of this so hastily that he skipped over the anonymous reporting channels that his company provides for just such isses. And I wouldn't know.
Since I don't know, I'll just end this here, and wait for the trial. If he was so hasty that he ignored perfectly good channels, then I've been over-estimating him. I don't think I have, but you've provided a counter-example so now I'll just wait.
No, that's not how it's supposed to work. As an employee, loyal to the company, you are supposed to have internal recourse available to bring illegal activity to the attention of your seniors, and all the way up the chain if you direct supervisor won't listen. You are not supposed to have to go to the police, since a company should be capable of cleaning up its own act. Going to the police means that the normal channels of reporting issues have failed.
Everything I wrote there is how it works in ethical companies, meaning companies whose executives have laid out specific plans for remaining on the right side of the law. I don't care if you think that "most companies aren't like that". What that would mean is that "most companies deserve liquidation". If you can't at least have a plan for handling your own breaches of the law, and avoiding them in the future, then the company is not run in an ethical manner. Go ask someone with an MBA what kind of ethics class they had to take to get it. A company that doesn't have a plan for reporting issues about itself is derelict in its duties. All claims of impropriety leveled at such companies, including Chip's, have extra weight once they reach court.
Yeah, it'll be a while before they reach court.
If his complaints are true, then I sure as hell don't want to have anything to do with those companies. See? That's the reason that (ethical) companies need internal reporting mechanisms. If the CEO of an ethical company got wind of this behavior through internal channels, then they could correct it before I ever heard of it, and they wouldn't lose me as a customer, distributor, or business partner. That's what internal channels are for: protecting the company from itself.
Anyway, it's obvious from this that Chip's company doesn't have good internal reporting mechanisms. And that necessarily gives that company a strike against them to begin with. Or it should. We'll have to wait and see if it really does.
A previous post some years ago on this subject also mentioned a nightly ritual for the IT department of some company: walking through the staff areas and checking for modem connections people might have added.
Is that always true for civil law? There's a law in Texas about leaving spare tires out for three days after it rains. (That's how long it takes mosquitos to spawn in the standing water in the tires.) This is definitely a law concerning something you may not have known that you were doing, so I'm not sure civil crimes require intent.
Also, isn't 'involuntary manslaughter' a crime? Killing someone with your car while driving drunk is often given this charge. Certainly you didn't intend to kill them, or anyone. But you're still responsible for your actions, and so it's a crime.
As far as I know, a judge sees the two situations identically. Both are breaches of the law, and both are committed unintentionally. "ignorance of the law" is also about personally responsibility. When you are unaware that there is a chance to accidentally break the law, and it happens, the judge and/or jury are lenient. When it happens again, you should have known better. Maybe they'll treat you leniently again, maybe not. That's the reasoning that I expect from lawyers.
It seems like people are kind of paranoid about this sort of thing. Go talk to a judge sometime, and ask them how they would handle the case. We have laws, and they're not designed to kill us. They're enforced by a big bunch of people, and most of them that I've met personally didn't want to hurt anybody.
"ignorance..." means that if you don't know an action is illegal you are still liable to be prosecuted, not that you can be prosecuted for something you didn't know you were doing at all.
I would say that that's exactly what ignorance of the law is about. Citizenship and full rights in a country also entails full responsibility for your actions, even those committed accidentally. Also, there isn't much difference between doing something accidentally and doing something that you didn't know you were doing. The law in the US is very forgiving for such acts, but prosecutes them nonetheless, with written warnings or lighter sentences.
I can see the distinction between accidentally doing something illegal and unknowingly doing something that you (had you known) would have known was illegal. However, both of those sound like ignorance to me, were they to be considered in the eyes of a judge. Both of those also sound like situations where said judge would tend to be lenient.
The concept behind "ignorance of the law is no excuse", as far as my schooling went, was that you have the responsibility to ensure that you didn't disobey the law in the country or region in which you had chosen to live. The fact that lots of people don't make or have much of a choice on that subject, nor are they lawyers, as I am not, is the reason that both situations I described are AFAIK treated leniently the first time.
And people are prosecuted all the time for things they did unknowingly. I saw a man speak to a judge about a speeding ticket he had gotten while his speedometer was broken. He hadn't known. The judge agreed to let him off, given that he brought a written statement from the mechanic who fixed the car that the speedometer was off by the given amount. The man was prosecuted, i.e. brought to court, and let off by the judge. If this doesn't have anything to do with "ignorance of the law", then you should have read more clearly when I said I Am Not A Lawyer.
The point is that accidental OR unknowing breaches of the law are generally forgiven or treated leniently. What I was trying to say to the (now great-grandparent) is that the situation they were describing wouldn't get people in much trouble, as far as I knew.
IANAL. That being said, the mantra I always heard was, "Ignorance of the law does not make you innocent." That might also be just a scare tactic, but it makes some sense to me. To continue the tangent, I think that enforcing laws (with at least a written warning) on first offenses committed accidentally is appropriate.
That being said, let's say you accidentally leave a file online, people download it, and you get sued. Sure you should be able to claim ignorance, and the judge lets you off with a warning. But the next time, after that first offense, I would expect a judge to assume that you did it on purpose. You were probably instructed by the court to better secure your website after the first incident.
MPAA and RIAA are American organizations, and have been the most aggressive pursuants of music downloaders. This ruling will (hopefully) affect the majority of their legal actions, i.e. those in the US. So, no it's not/. becoming US-centric, it's a US-based pair of organizations affected by the contents of the article.
You're forgetting MMOs. They work much better on a PC, where people have already worked out their own internet access rather than paying Sony or Microsoft for more access (XBox Live!, for instance).
Also, you are forgetting the controllers. Consoles have wonderfully ergonomic controllers (or at least the Cube does), and PCs have 101 buttons. Some games require 101 buttons.
Also, joysticks. No one buys a joystick for a console. So MechWarrior and flight games will always have a place on the PC.
Also, who gives a crap about High Def? That's right, people with a lot of money. I bet they have plenty of money for keeping up with PC graphics card costs, too. So your points about High Definition TV fall flat.
You're also getting confused about how long it takes to develop games. It takes that much work no matter whether you're developing for a console or a PC. Check Halo 2's production cost sometime.
Oh, and A-List titles are still on the PC just as much on the consoles. The only thing is, you've never heard of them. Why? Because they aren't advertised the same way. I understand that that is somewhat of a contradiction in terms. Let me put it this way: PC games don't need as much advertising up front because they are easier to try for free. Partly, this is because it is easier to crack and illegally distribute the full versions of PC games, and partially it is because it is easier to get your hands on demo versions of PC games. Thus, PC games can ride on their merits more often than console games can. That means that you haven't heard about great PC games because they are already selling well without having to buy huge ads.
The market for PC games is big enough for that. For proof of all this, go to http://www.ddo.com/ and check out the 'Alpha' status. There are thousands of hardcore fans rabidly waiting for a game you've never heard of. They will advertise a bit to catch the mainstream, but since they're already assured by release time that they'll make back their production cost, they don't care the same way Microsoft did about Halo 2. Microsoft was so worried about Halo 2 that they paid for an different entire game (http://www.ilovebees.com/ in order to advertise it. PC game makers don't have to do that.
"Too bad"? I don't know about that. There aren't international laws covering all internet usage, and police only exist to enforce laws. We have one example of actual internet enforcement, and that's China. Doesn't look like a very good example for ensuring freedom of expression. I prefer the current hazy legal status, where the only thing people can agree on is child pron.
Yeah, but I just got paid for working in a language I didn't know until I took the job. Twice. So shove off. Come back when you've written your own monad and programmed in an assembly language in the same day.
For ethics reasons, I can't just put it online. It was a project for class, and I'm sure my professor is still assigning it. However, I'm also sure that if you look up my professor and ask him if anyone ever wrote a Pascal compiler in Haskell, he will happily tell you about me. It's really his decision whether or not to release it. I consider it a simple programming exercise, really. It was just something I did for class. Mind you, we didn't implement all of the language. I think we left out enumerated types and subtypes, and some other stuff. I'm pretty sure we did Arrays, but I can't remember. It's been a really long time.
I don't really consider it a big deal to write a compiler for the very first version of Pascal. It's not that tricky, especially when you're taking a Compilers class at the time with a good professor. It was a little interesting getting the circular type references handled in the right way, but after that everything pretty much fell into place. If you absolutely need a working compiler for Pascal in Haskell, I'll try and finish it.
Oh, and of COURSE there wasn't any optimisation. I'm no compiler writer.
That's all it needs. My code is ten times shorter, so I'll worry about a development tool when Notepad can't hold my entire Pascal compiler in one file.
Actually, I'm just playing around. There isn't a major development tool for Haskell, just like there isn't one for Python. On the other hand, Haskell's type system goes a long way towards making big projects manageable, even without a dev toolkit. I suppose I'll need something serious once we write something big, but since code really is ten times shorter in Haskell than in C++, that's not going to happen for a long time.
I really thought that Japan's television networks were nationalized as the BBC is, and that they paid for production costs of shows with national funding. I could be wrong, though. Also, there is cheap anime and there is expensive anime. The difference is usually how much tweening their is in the animations, since that requires much more labor. Also the quality of the art in general affects the speed of production and therefore the amount of upfront cash needed to finance it. Even the cheap anime takes a dedicated (paid) staff working for several months.
I would argue that the industry actually created sheerly through creativity was manga, japanese comic books, since their production schedules are not so rigid (for small-scale mangas), and they require much less labor overall. Also, anime has to be made all in one go per season, whereas a single manga issue is all that it takes to get sales.
I submit that the fact that most anime was originally manga is strong evidence that manga is really the creative force you are talking about. I'm not saying you're not right. I think it's really cool that such a thing could have happened. Japan really needed the boost, too. Manga and anime sales mean a big chunk of change moving constantly in their economy.
Now if only those of us in the US could pull this off. I think that we generally can't, since the networks are all part of big conglomerates now. Manga sales in Japan prove that there is legitimate demand for that manga and its stories, and that is the proof which studios and networks need to be willing to produce a show. At the moment, we here in the US don't really have that option, since the distributors of television are national across a big nation and can't pick up a show unless it is certain to be watched be a sizable portion of their whole audience. That, in turn, means that a show's story must be much more well known to be picked up and produced in the US than it needs to be in most other places.
Actually, I have implemented a compiler from scratch. It compiled Pascal (original), and I wrote it in Haskell. Worked beautifully, too, and so fast. Spat out code that run on the linux machine I was using. People sometimes talk about functional languages being slow, but Haskell is as fast as C++ when both are well written, if not faster.
I do like subrange types. Now that you mention them, I kind of miss them in Haskell. I'm not sure if you're saying that Delphi would make a good industrial or educational language. I guess it would be both, as long as the basics of imperative programming (i.e. variables, values, parameter passing, functions) could be learned without getting into the OO part. That's what was(is) wrong with teaching using Java.
Delphi's wondeful threads don't hurt Java's thread capabilities. Both of them together look askance at C++'s threads.
I totally agree that a Real Programmer should learn a fair amount of languages, especially those in different categories. I guess I'll have to learn Prolog now.
If you really get into Haskell, you don't leave it. Kind of like LISP, I guess. There were a few 'closet' LISP-lover professors at UT. They assigned projects in C++, but what they really wanted to talk about was LISP, and one of them accepted projects in either language.
Using Haskell over most other languages makes sense, once you understand 'foldr', the 'folding' function. I do not write 'for' loops in Haskell, or 'while' loops or any other kind of loop. In Haskell, three levels of 'loops' can be written in 120 characters over two lines and be well-styled code.
The beautiful thing is, GHC (the major compiler for Haskell) is so good, that it turns the nice flowery list manipulations into tight assembly language loops directly, at least on four or five of the big architectures. That's x86 *NIX, x86 Win*, Sparc, a Mac arch or two, I think. I could be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
This is to say nothing of how so many companies love using your boot-time to copy things into memory so that their load time appears fast. I'm looking right at Adobe, here. Microsoft is doing those companies a favor by requiring hardware good enough that their somewhat evil deceptions of speed are forgivable.
On the other hand, the learning curve for various linux distributions has changed in the last few years. Get yourself another hard drive, nothing fancy, even 20 gigs would be way more than enough. An old 8gig drive, even a 4gig, is sufficient. Swap out the hard drive, and install Debian. Instructions for getting the installation data are here, and instructions for installation are here.
There's only three tricky steps. First, you have to partition the drive correctly. For simplicity, make around 5% of the drive the swap space. Second, during the install process, you have to tell it what network card you have. This means loading the module for the right card. Generally, you can just try each module, and if it autodetects correctly and the name isn't obviously the wrong card, you're good. Third, when you are asked for packages to install, pick the simple method and choose the x-windows install. You will need to know what graphics card you have for this.
If all of that works, congratulations, you have one of the most powerful OSes on your machine now. Use 'aptitude' to pick more packages to install. For someone familiar with Windows, KDE might be a good idea. OpenOffice.org is a good alternative to MS Office.
The beauty of this is, if you screw up, fine. You've got some old harddrive screwed up. You didn't have to back up, and you didn't lose anything, because your windows installation is ready and waiting on your first hard drive. It was not even connected to the computer, so there's no chance of hurting it.
Of course, I'm paranoid, so I would say that you should make backups regularly as a matter of course.
I wouldn't throw all that Windows stuff out, as some of it can be useful, and the games are fun, of course. On the other hand, I dual boot, and I only use the Windows side for games. One of these days, I'm going to see if Guild Wars will work with WINE.
I wish we could get to other planets. Currently I'm following Richard Branson's funding for commercial space flight. But if you want to make the best use of your hardware, and not get screwed by software companies demanding more from you, try Debian. Now to find a spare hard drive to demonstrate for some friends...
I never speak lightly. And I'm not a troll. And I never said that I was a Christian.
Obviously, however, I've been instructed incorrectly. Enlighten me. Tell me about how Jesus never had sex and how virginity is a wonderful thing. Tell me how I can save myself. I'm sure my life would be better if someone could just tell me how to live it. Tell me how your life is better, how you know yourself better, from all of your years as a Christian.
You seemed so worked up about all the bad Christians out there. Now that I see that you have a much clearer path than me, why don't you tell me about it? Are you proud? Are you worried for my soul? What about yours? If you could make me a good Christian, would you?
Not at all. It would increase the value of trusted stolen ID information. In the end, it would just make thieves use more sophisticated social networks, etc. They'd get around it, and would be willing to pay more for real data, since the work that went into collecting it and verifying it was greater.
To sum up, it's still supply and demand, and you're talking about diluting the supply. That means that, for those who can get at the 'good stuff', it's worth more.
On the other hand, if the FBI and the credit card companies were to engage in honey-net operations, then we're talking.
On a related note, I just got a note from my credit card company saying that I could make a temporary credit card number for online purchases. Seems like things are looking up, if only a bit.
I have no problem with creimer's view, because he is doing what he wants to do. You, however, have insulted me as well as the intelligence and dedication of many people.
Get you unfounded dogma off of public places. Or, put your money where your mouth is, and prove what you just said.
I'll bet you $100 (no kidding) that you can't defend your position with passages (not just quotes) from the Bible. And, for an even easier bet for you, I'll bet you $1 and let you defend your statement with any Christian references you want to use, even modern works. Bear in mind, I'll use my own references to rebut. You won't even win $1, my Christian friend, because you can't.
And while we're on the way offtopic subject of ignoring rules, at what point did you decide that the rules in the Old Testament didn't apply to Christians? Did you read it between the lines?
Or maybe you should spend your time thinking for yourself, instead of blindly following rules set down by people almost a thousand years ago. You're certainly not following the path of the original Christian church, but instead agreeing with the statements made during the Middle Ages, for two reasons.
First of all, you're not going to find anything about a prophet or Christ demanding virginity. Virginity was not an issue so much until the Middle Ages, for various reasons. Why don't you read some history? It could help your outlook on life.
Second of all, what you will find, if you check the original Hebrew and Greek, is that Jesus, an unmarried man, had sex, as did at least one of his disciples. Was it okay for them, but not you? Were times different then?
He doesn't want to be your leader, and he's not going to be. So he doesn't care if he flashes money around, because he doesn't care about you as a follower. He also does mention that most businesses fail.
Games don't need to be 'girly' to appeal to girls/women, nor do they need stylized versions of men or women which are appealing to women. They need to be NOT OFFENSIVE TO WOMEN. There are subtle, pervasive aspects to games that men may not notice, but turn women off immediately.
For example, for a large number of women, an ad or box art for a game which features scantily clad models is a big red warning light that says, "This game is for the guys, because we're treating women as objects." An even larger warning sign is when a women is doing something suggestive, or standing in a particularly revealing pose. This warns women away because we use these signals for many other situations as well. Further, such objectification is quite offensive to many women, even if it not for men.
Another example, again in the advertising, is when an attempt is made to appeal to bravado or bloodlust. Many men are conditioned to respond positively, and many women are conditioned to respond negatively. Usually, however, such things are not pivotal aspects of the game unless it is derivative or just plain bad, so the game was played by less women than it would actually have appealled to. Again, this is a signalling device present in the advertisements.
Anyway, this is mostly an issue because the advertising and tone decisions for games are often made by men, specifically men who haven't learned about women's impressions. When that changes, these problems will dissappear and you'll never have to read another story about how there aren't any women gamers.
And that makes you feel...?
You didn't mention why you cared. What's it to you that a Nintendo console is released later than those close to it?
Quote:
>When a program is uninstalled, the OS would ensure all traces of the registry entry are deleted (this is easy because of #2)
But how to deal with poorly written applications that don't tell the OS everything they do ?
You use Debian.
I think that they have to care about other uses of P2P software, since any legitimately-used p2p app that doesn't scan and report files could be used to distribute copyrighted works. If bittorrent is 'allowed' to exist, meaning they don't sue for its closure somehow, then they'll never 'stop all the downloading'. Any system will potentially allow illegal distribution, and they know it.
It may be that these organizations will only back down from their stance when a court orders it, as with video tape recorders, cassette tape recorders, and CD burners. In fact, looking at that list, I think it would be a safe bet that a court's decision will be required. But that is not an easy thing to predict.
Here's a different question: Why aren't they already using Bittorrent to distribute old movies with previews attached? Because they couldn't count ad views. If they could count ad views, and be sure of it, then they could make money on it. They can't do that, maybe not yet, maybe never, and thus they view it (rightly) as competition, and (wrongly) try to kill it.
So if you really want the MPAA/RIAA and such to leave Bittorrent alone, then they have to get their ad revenue or previews somehow, and they have to be able to count them. Sickeningly enough, the web-enabled stuff in the WMA format was probably a way to do that, since each viewing of the movie's previews could potentially report home. I would not trust that particular solution, but if some solution was possible, then we can be safe from vicious legal threats.
Oh, I suppose I should point out why I think the RIAA/MPAA is right to view free viewing of old movies as competition. They currently spend so much on movies that at least one out of every few needs to be a blockbuster, and the same goes for expensively-promoted music groups. The movie and music industry are depending on marketing rather than quality to sell their media, because marketing is cheaper. A person with more options is less affected by marketing. Therefore, all options are competition, at least indirectly. If that competition cuts into the marketing power these companies hold, it becomes major competition. The fight here isn't so much about copyright infringement as it is about marketing power.
Well, I suppose now we've hit the crux of the matter: How well did he research his options ahead of time? As a fellow computer scientist, I've been giving him the benefit of the doubt. You are, however, quite correct about his statement. It does threaten legal action, and perhaps he really was silly enough to threaten this without already having it ready. Again, I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, but I guess that second nod to his forethought is not correct.
I think you are somewhat mistaken about his attempts to bring the matter to the attention of his superiors. In his letter, he discusses his conversations with management, etc., and how he got no reaction from them. That was actually my reason for stating that his company had no internal reporting mechanisms. Again, I've been giving him the benefit of the doubt: since he tried _something_, I figured he tried the best thing he knew to do.
Of course, I could be wrong. He could have done all of this so hastily that he skipped over the anonymous reporting channels that his company provides for just such isses. And I wouldn't know.
Since I don't know, I'll just end this here, and wait for the trial. If he was so hasty that he ignored perfectly good channels, then I've been over-estimating him. I don't think I have, but you've provided a counter-example so now I'll just wait.
No, that's not how it's supposed to work. As an employee, loyal to the company, you are supposed to have internal recourse available to bring illegal activity to the attention of your seniors, and all the way up the chain if you direct supervisor won't listen. You are not supposed to have to go to the police, since a company should be capable of cleaning up its own act. Going to the police means that the normal channels of reporting issues have failed.
Everything I wrote there is how it works in ethical companies, meaning companies whose executives have laid out specific plans for remaining on the right side of the law. I don't care if you think that "most companies aren't like that". What that would mean is that "most companies deserve liquidation". If you can't at least have a plan for handling your own breaches of the law, and avoiding them in the future, then the company is not run in an ethical manner. Go ask someone with an MBA what kind of ethics class they had to take to get it. A company that doesn't have a plan for reporting issues about itself is derelict in its duties. All claims of impropriety leveled at such companies, including Chip's, have extra weight once they reach court.
Yeah, it'll be a while before they reach court.
If his complaints are true, then I sure as hell don't want to have anything to do with those companies. See? That's the reason that (ethical) companies need internal reporting mechanisms. If the CEO of an ethical company got wind of this behavior through internal channels, then they could correct it before I ever heard of it, and they wouldn't lose me as a customer, distributor, or business partner. That's what internal channels are for: protecting the company from itself.
Anyway, it's obvious from this that Chip's company doesn't have good internal reporting mechanisms. And that necessarily gives that company a strike against them to begin with. Or it should. We'll have to wait and see if it really does.
A previous post some years ago on this subject also mentioned a nightly ritual for the IT department of some company: walking through the staff areas and checking for modem connections people might have added.
Just a thought.
Is that always true for civil law? There's a law in Texas about leaving spare tires out for three days after it rains. (That's how long it takes mosquitos to spawn in the standing water in the tires.) This is definitely a law concerning something you may not have known that you were doing, so I'm not sure civil crimes require intent.
Also, isn't 'involuntary manslaughter' a crime? Killing someone with your car while driving drunk is often given this charge. Certainly you didn't intend to kill them, or anyone. But you're still responsible for your actions, and so it's a crime.
It seems like people are kind of paranoid about this sort of thing. Go talk to a judge sometime, and ask them how they would handle the case. We have laws, and they're not designed to kill us. They're enforced by a big bunch of people, and most of them that I've met personally didn't want to hurt anybody.
I would say that that's exactly what ignorance of the law is about. Citizenship and full rights in a country also entails full responsibility for your actions, even those committed accidentally. Also, there isn't much difference between doing something accidentally and doing something that you didn't know you were doing. The law in the US is very forgiving for such acts, but prosecutes them nonetheless, with written warnings or lighter sentences.
I can see the distinction between accidentally doing something illegal and unknowingly doing something that you (had you known) would have known was illegal. However, both of those sound like ignorance to me, were they to be considered in the eyes of a judge. Both of those also sound like situations where said judge would tend to be lenient.
The concept behind "ignorance of the law is no excuse", as far as my schooling went, was that you have the responsibility to ensure that you didn't disobey the law in the country or region in which you had chosen to live. The fact that lots of people don't make or have much of a choice on that subject, nor are they lawyers, as I am not, is the reason that both situations I described are AFAIK treated leniently the first time.
And people are prosecuted all the time for things they did unknowingly. I saw a man speak to a judge about a speeding ticket he had gotten while his speedometer was broken. He hadn't known. The judge agreed to let him off, given that he brought a written statement from the mechanic who fixed the car that the speedometer was off by the given amount. The man was prosecuted, i.e. brought to court, and let off by the judge. If this doesn't have anything to do with "ignorance of the law", then you should have read more clearly when I said I Am Not A Lawyer.
The point is that accidental OR unknowing breaches of the law are generally forgiven or treated leniently. What I was trying to say to the (now great-grandparent) is that the situation they were describing wouldn't get people in much trouble, as far as I knew.
IANAL. That being said, the mantra I always heard was, "Ignorance of the law does not make you innocent." That might also be just a scare tactic, but it makes some sense to me. To continue the tangent, I think that enforcing laws (with at least a written warning) on first offenses committed accidentally is appropriate. That being said, let's say you accidentally leave a file online, people download it, and you get sued. Sure you should be able to claim ignorance, and the judge lets you off with a warning. But the next time, after that first offense, I would expect a judge to assume that you did it on purpose. You were probably instructed by the court to better secure your website after the first incident.
MPAA and RIAA are American organizations, and have been the most aggressive pursuants of music downloaders. This ruling will (hopefully) affect the majority of their legal actions, i.e. those in the US. So, no it's not /. becoming US-centric, it's a US-based pair of organizations affected by the contents of the article.
You're forgetting MMOs. They work much better on a PC, where people have already worked out their own internet access rather than paying Sony or Microsoft for more access (XBox Live!, for instance).
Also, you are forgetting the controllers. Consoles have wonderfully ergonomic controllers (or at least the Cube does), and PCs have 101 buttons. Some games require 101 buttons.
Also, joysticks. No one buys a joystick for a console. So MechWarrior and flight games will always have a place on the PC.
Also, who gives a crap about High Def? That's right, people with a lot of money. I bet they have plenty of money for keeping up with PC graphics card costs, too. So your points about High Definition TV fall flat.
You're also getting confused about how long it takes to develop games. It takes that much work no matter whether you're developing for a console or a PC. Check Halo 2's production cost sometime.
Oh, and A-List titles are still on the PC just as much on the consoles. The only thing is, you've never heard of them. Why? Because they aren't advertised the same way. I understand that that is somewhat of a contradiction in terms. Let me put it this way: PC games don't need as much advertising up front because they are easier to try for free. Partly, this is because it is easier to crack and illegally distribute the full versions of PC games, and partially it is because it is easier to get your hands on demo versions of PC games. Thus, PC games can ride on their merits more often than console games can. That means that you haven't heard about great PC games because they are already selling well without having to buy huge ads.
The market for PC games is big enough for that. For proof of all this, go to http://www.ddo.com/ and check out the 'Alpha' status. There are thousands of hardcore fans rabidly waiting for a game you've never heard of. They will advertise a bit to catch the mainstream, but since they're already assured by release time that they'll make back their production cost, they don't care the same way Microsoft did about Halo 2. Microsoft was so worried about Halo 2 that they paid for an different entire game (http://www.ilovebees.com/ in order to advertise it. PC game makers don't have to do that.
"Too bad"? I don't know about that. There aren't international laws covering all internet usage, and police only exist to enforce laws. We have one example of actual internet enforcement, and that's China. Doesn't look like a very good example for ensuring freedom of expression. I prefer the current hazy legal status, where the only thing people can agree on is child pron.
Yeah, but I just got paid for working in a language I didn't know until I took the job. Twice. So shove off. Come back when you've written your own monad and programmed in an assembly language in the same day.
For ethics reasons, I can't just put it online. It was a project for class, and I'm sure my professor is still assigning it. However, I'm also sure that if you look up my professor and ask him if anyone ever wrote a Pascal compiler in Haskell, he will happily tell you about me. It's really his decision whether or not to release it. I consider it a simple programming exercise, really. It was just something I did for class. Mind you, we didn't implement all of the language. I think we left out enumerated types and subtypes, and some other stuff. I'm pretty sure we did Arrays, but I can't remember. It's been a really long time.
Here's his webpage:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~novak/
I don't really consider it a big deal to write a compiler for the very first version of Pascal. It's not that tricky, especially when you're taking a Compilers class at the time with a good professor. It was a little interesting getting the circular type references handled in the right way, but after that everything pretty much fell into place. If you absolutely need a working compiler for Pascal in Haskell, I'll try and finish it.
Oh, and of COURSE there wasn't any optimisation. I'm no compiler writer.
foldr
That's all it needs. My code is ten times shorter, so I'll worry about a development tool when Notepad can't hold my entire Pascal compiler in one file.
Actually, I'm just playing around. There isn't a major development tool for Haskell, just like there isn't one for Python. On the other hand, Haskell's type system goes a long way towards making big projects manageable, even without a dev toolkit. I suppose I'll need something serious once we write something big, but since code really is ten times shorter in Haskell than in C++, that's not going to happen for a long time.
I really thought that Japan's television networks were nationalized as the BBC is, and that they paid for production costs of shows with national funding. I could be wrong, though. Also, there is cheap anime and there is expensive anime. The difference is usually how much tweening their is in the animations, since that requires much more labor. Also the quality of the art in general affects the speed of production and therefore the amount of upfront cash needed to finance it. Even the cheap anime takes a dedicated (paid) staff working for several months.
I would argue that the industry actually created sheerly through creativity was manga, japanese comic books, since their production schedules are not so rigid (for small-scale mangas), and they require much less labor overall. Also, anime has to be made all in one go per season, whereas a single manga issue is all that it takes to get sales.
I submit that the fact that most anime was originally manga is strong evidence that manga is really the creative force you are talking about. I'm not saying you're not right. I think it's really cool that such a thing could have happened. Japan really needed the boost, too. Manga and anime sales mean a big chunk of change moving constantly in their economy.
Now if only those of us in the US could pull this off. I think that we generally can't, since the networks are all part of big conglomerates now. Manga sales in Japan prove that there is legitimate demand for that manga and its stories, and that is the proof which studios and networks need to be willing to produce a show. At the moment, we here in the US don't really have that option, since the distributors of television are national across a big nation and can't pick up a show unless it is certain to be watched be a sizable portion of their whole audience. That, in turn, means that a show's story must be much more well known to be picked up and produced in the US than it needs to be in most other places.
This also explains why most movies are crap.
Actually, I have implemented a compiler from scratch. It compiled Pascal (original), and I wrote it in Haskell. Worked beautifully, too, and so fast. Spat out code that run on the linux machine I was using. People sometimes talk about functional languages being slow, but Haskell is as fast as C++ when both are well written, if not faster.
I do like subrange types. Now that you mention them, I kind of miss them in Haskell. I'm not sure if you're saying that Delphi would make a good industrial or educational language. I guess it would be both, as long as the basics of imperative programming (i.e. variables, values, parameter passing, functions) could be learned without getting into the OO part. That's what was(is) wrong with teaching using Java.
Delphi's wondeful threads don't hurt Java's thread capabilities. Both of them together look askance at C++'s threads.
I totally agree that a Real Programmer should learn a fair amount of languages, especially those in different categories. I guess I'll have to learn Prolog now.
If you really get into Haskell, you don't leave it. Kind of like LISP, I guess. There were a few 'closet' LISP-lover professors at UT. They assigned projects in C++, but what they really wanted to talk about was LISP, and one of them accepted projects in either language.
Using Haskell over most other languages makes sense, once you understand 'foldr', the 'folding' function. I do not write 'for' loops in Haskell, or 'while' loops or any other kind of loop. In Haskell, three levels of 'loops' can be written in 120 characters over two lines and be well-styled code.
The beautiful thing is, GHC (the major compiler for Haskell) is so good, that it turns the nice flowery list manipulations into tight assembly language loops directly, at least on four or five of the big architectures. That's x86 *NIX, x86 Win*, Sparc, a Mac arch or two, I think. I could be wrong.