Ouch. About 5:00PM pacific time, I entered http://www.linuxgamepublishing.com/http://www.linu xgamepublishing.com/ into my browser. It is still trying to load, almost 40 minutes later. I might have been interested in persuing their games for linux, but by tomorrow, i will have forgotten them. Too bad.
The only people who are permitted to 'punish' me are my parents and a judge. No one else (and my parent's ability is somewhat diluted now). If our new Blu-ray overlords would like to punish me, they can speak to a judge. If they choose to take action against me without doing so, they can be sure I will speak to a judge about punishing THEM.
Companies can't just invent laws, yet. I'm sure they'd like to, but they can't.
Would a repair procedure performed by a mom-and-pop repair shop (read: not owned by Sony or whomever) count as a 'punishable' offense?
Google creating a second Internet would be counter-productive to what they do. However, this could be used to expand their web accelerator. If subscribers could access a reasonably up-to-date copy of resources on the original Internet, via Google's servers, both to accelerate and to filter malicious content, it could represent a huge change in surfing. I would sign up.
That's all fine, but then what if they want to play games on their PC? You're gonna need microsoft for that - no-one else seems to have cracked games and drivers on their systems.
GNU Gaming Zone? heck, I'm pretty sure Yahoo games is cross-platform. With development, I'm sure web-based games can be done as well as the current crop. Obviously not with the current technology, but it could eventually go that way. There's already a Firefox extension that lets you play different kinds of Solitaire, within the browser (that got my mom to switch from IE:)
The tools to build the tools are there. I bet the AI in a game I played, via some kind of remote graphical session, on a massive server cluster would be better than what my puny Celeron can dream up. Imagine a big scary zombie that can go though, simulate, and select the optimal strategy to use against you, from a pre-programmed selection of 500k+ possible scenerios, fast enough to kick your ass with whatever the best one is.
...it might make Microsoft's offerings less relevant. if most tasks people need to do can be done with online office apps at (say) OpenOffice.org, and other online apps from Google and other companies, that could make standalone applications irrelevant if their browser-based replacements are sufficiently compelling.
Once you can do everything you need to do on your PC without Microsoft, the same way you would with Microsoft (eg, in Safari or Firefox rather than IE, but the same links and buttons), it's much easier to convince people to try out something new, like a mac or a linux desktop.
OK, the feds say we have to have a backdoor in our cable modems and such. Fine. But what kind of back door? Who can get in? What can they do? What prevents other people (ie, not the FBI, say, an evil script kiddie) from using the same back door, once it's been exploited?
Ok, so we have to secure the back door. How? Who decides what is secure enough? It obviously can't be completely secure, cuz the Feds have to be able to get in. Yet it must be secure from everyone BUT the Feds.
This assumes overwhelming arrogance on the basis of the regulators. They are basically saying no one is better at securing than they are. I hope this passes, and when it is cracked, and worms are flying everywhere, my home network (well before the firewall *I* built) gets compromised along with everyone else's network, we can all blame it on the Feds and say we told you so.
Sigh. I understand how Willy Wonka must have felt when he said (very quietly) "No, don't do that."
I was skimming the main page, and I (thought I) saw:
"UK: SF Writers dominate Hugos"
Implying (in my mind) that the United Kingdom was somehow upset that the Hugo Awards were biased towards science fiction writers, as opposed to other writers in other genres. Knowing what a Hugo is, made this seem massively funny.
Then I RTFA, and realized it wasn't near that funny.
Your argument is rather like saying since the city cannot ban people from driving down a street for no good reason, then it necessarily follows that these same people must be allowed unfettered access to the private residences on that street.
You know, that actually works, if you extend it to the situation as it actually was. Say, you own one of these houses on a street, and you are involved in a dispute with the city about something, and people were meeting at your house to discuss what to do about the dispute. The city then chooses to close the road your house (that you own, and bought from someone other than the city) is on, disallowing access to everyone, unless they use alternate routes not everyone has access to (helicopter, etc). While doing so, the city also blocks the 7-11 up the street, the hair salon on the corner, and all your neighbours from accessing their houses. A week later, they re-open the road, with a court order that you don't talk about doing anything bad in your house, which still has nothing to do with the losses of customers the 7-11 had (everyone who didn't own a helicopter).
This is a ridiculous scenario, of course, yet it's exactly what happened. Good analogy there, parent.
No, the real money is in OEM licensing to large volume hardware manufacturers. If Apple sold OS X for generic Intels, everyone would be able to undercut them on hardware prices, so forget about that business. And the walk-in market isn't nearly big enough to sustain them. So unless they could secure a number of OEM deals with the Dells and HPs of the world, they'd be bankrupt within the year. And Microsoft has historically done everything in their power to prevent even insignificant companies like Be from getting their OS shipping pre-installed from the OEM. You'd better believe they'd pull out all the stops to keep Apple out of that market.
All depends on your point of view. If Apple develops some killer app for Mac OS only (iFlicks would be my guess, if it was sufficiently compelling, perhaps incorporated PVR functionality like XP Media Centre, or maybe something else we haven't even thought of), and enough people come yanging to Dell wanting Mac OS preinstalled on their new Dell, Dell would certainly explore the option of licensing Mac OS. Enough people asked for Red Hat on Dell servers, and now it's an option. I doubt anti-trust officials would look kindly on Microsoft punishing a major OEM for shipping another OS, anyways.
But, my point is, if there's a killer app that customers want enough, they'll buy Mac. If I was really devious, I would think of this as a long term plan for Apple to get out of the hardware business, sticking to iPods, iMoviewatcherthingies, maybe some Mac Minis, Mac OS for generic hardware, and media delivery. Given the general animosity towards Microsoft in a lot of places, their own monopoly position restraining them, and Apple's already considerable desktop OS experience (longer than Microsoft's), they could be a serious competitor in ten to fifteen years.
Now that a workaround has been found to make it useless, will they remove it now? I installed it on my parent's laptop (OEM, with a legitimate, paid-for XP install), only to have it hang 45 minutes into the installation, leaving them with no access to any updates now (it seems to have broken both the version of windows update they had, and the new one it was trying to install). Way to go Microsoft!
I especially liked the part about how this 'new Windows Update' would make my update experience faster and more reliable'...i'm sure my pirated but secured windows box would be much faster than the average user who paid $300 to an OEM for his now-spyware-ridden, virus-bearing, spam-spewing zombie box. How exactly is the pirated software slower? Benchmarks? (and could we trust them?)
This isn't a freedom of speech issue. When the speech of one group endangers another innocent group or person's safety in society, freedom of speech is justly limited
Google for bomb recipes. Find anything?
Should we ban Google? Should Google filter searches for bombs?
However, according to your logic, Telus should filter such information from their subscribers (wikipedia would be the first to go).
I hope not. I was carded by an over-enthusiatic new cashier at the grocery store today (I'm almost 30, with a 4 inch beard and grey hair). The store manager, whom I knew personally, scolded her, and I got my smokes. But if this is like this in video game stores, what then? What kind of ID is good enough? What about fake ID? They've been trying to stop kids from buying smokes for years, and they still can if they try hard enough. And those of us who ARE old enough sometimes can't.
We have a pretty strong set of laws here regarding freedoms, like speech. I phoned my Member of Parliament's office already this morning regarding this issue, which I see as one of unlawful repression of free speech. I will be speaking with my provincial representative later today (lucky for me, I'm a party member) to see what she thinks about this action. If Telus gets shit on for violating the rights of this individual to free speech (they didn't block the website due to technical limitation or due to content that violated a law, they did so because they didn't like what it said), then I am all for it. Our government isn't at all afraid of companies like Telus....after all, we used to own them. And they have to follow the law like everyone else.
I urge all Canadians who read this to contact your respective members of provincial and federal government to express your displeasure at this action. If enough of us bitch in this time of minority governments and looming early elections, we might see this kind of action made explicitly illegal awful fast.
Often a new user doesn't know enough to give specifics, they have to be pried out of him.
This is my problem exactly. My Gentoo desktop had so many different things that happened, that my small-picture understanding couldn't tie them together into a coherent question (xrdb hanging both CPUs on startx, inability to access bash in Konsole or xterm after killing xrdb via ssh, in which bash works fine, ability to use bash in X after su'ing to root, X refusing to release control of the screen and keyboard to the console after the X server is stopped, inability to use sound as non-root, except via remote ssh...how does one make a question out of that?)
if I had someone to help me when it breaks. I've dallied with Debian and now Gentoo, but each of them has ended up broken (due directly to my own ignorance) to the point where fixing it to make it usable was beyond my knowledge. I'm not a stupid person. I know how to google, and I know that the best answer to a question is a source of information, rather than a set of instructions, but it's not always easy to know what to ask or how to get the responses you need, and even if you do, often you're ignored anyways. I'd love to see a distro step up to address this, maybe with some kind of voluntary mentor/buddy system, where an experienced user 'adopts' a newbie and offers periodic, light email or chat help when needed, till the new user gets sufficiently knowledgeable to fix things herself (at which time, said user could become a mentor for a newer user if they so choose, perpetuating things). This is what keeps me on Windows, and a bit of my soul dies every time I turn the thing on, but I can fix it if it breaks (which, of course, it does).
Google probably has no real incentive to create or market an OS for us desktop users, but with the mad clustering they have going, I'd bet their customizations and tweaks to their server farm would make for a great distro for large clusters. There's more market for an OS than a desktop....
I fail to see why this is a surprise. The real benefit will be Longhorn N, or whatever the heck they call it. Right now, inertia will create the alternative, but now's the time to start dreaming up a 'killer' feature for a media player. When everyone (in Europe) has to make a choice with their new OS, then the door is wide open for something superior to succeed in the market. I think (maybe I'm wrong), but I sorta thought this was the point of doing this, was to re-create a market for media player software, after Microsoft used illegal activities to destroy it.
Slashdot Mirror
I choose neither. I'll stick to my PC games, and one of my old-but-still-fun consoles when I want to play that kind of game.
Ouch. About 5:00PM pacific time, I entered http://www.linuxgamepublishing.com/http://www.linu xgamepublishing.com/ into my browser. It is still trying to load, almost 40 minutes later. I might have been interested in persuing their games for linux, but by tomorrow, i will have forgotten them. Too bad.
Do you want to pay an extra $130 ($100 cost of drive plus 30% profit margin) on your new PS3 for a DRM-laden drive that can 'punish' you? No thanks.
The only people who are permitted to 'punish' me are my parents and a judge. No one else (and my parent's ability is somewhat diluted now). If our new Blu-ray overlords would like to punish me, they can speak to a judge. If they choose to take action against me without doing so, they can be sure I will speak to a judge about punishing THEM.
Companies can't just invent laws, yet. I'm sure they'd like to, but they can't.
Would a repair procedure performed by a mom-and-pop repair shop (read: not owned by Sony or whomever) count as a 'punishable' offense?
Unfortunately, due to the Slashdot effect, no one can see the picture as it changes. Ergo, no one can win.
Good way to stress-test their web-servers, though.
They'd love this story. Big company stealing from the poor hurricane victims. It's comedically evil, except it's real.
Google creating a second Internet would be counter-productive to what they do. However, this could be used to expand their web accelerator. If subscribers could access a reasonably up-to-date copy of resources on the original Internet, via Google's servers, both to accelerate and to filter malicious content, it could represent a huge change in surfing. I would sign up.
Wow. Deep Blue versus CS kiddies....
Chess. Pshaw.
That's all fine, but then what if they want to play games on their PC? You're gonna need microsoft for that - no-one else seems to have cracked games and drivers on their systems.
:)
GNU Gaming Zone? heck, I'm pretty sure Yahoo games is cross-platform. With development, I'm sure web-based games can be done as well as the current crop. Obviously not with the current technology, but it could eventually go that way. There's already a Firefox extension that lets you play different kinds of Solitaire, within the browser (that got my mom to switch from IE
The tools to build the tools are there. I bet the AI in a game I played, via some kind of remote graphical session, on a massive server cluster would be better than what my puny Celeron can dream up. Imagine a big scary zombie that can go though, simulate, and select the optimal strategy to use against you, from a pre-programmed selection of 500k+ possible scenerios, fast enough to kick your ass with whatever the best one is.
...it might make Microsoft's offerings less relevant. if most tasks people need to do can be done with online office apps at (say) OpenOffice.org, and other online apps from Google and other companies, that could make standalone applications irrelevant if their browser-based replacements are sufficiently compelling.
Once you can do everything you need to do on your PC without Microsoft, the same way you would with Microsoft (eg, in Safari or Firefox rather than IE, but the same links and buttons), it's much easier to convince people to try out something new, like a mac or a linux desktop.
That's the threat here.
OK, the feds say we have to have a backdoor in our cable modems and such. Fine. But what kind of back door? Who can get in? What can they do? What prevents other people (ie, not the FBI, say, an evil script kiddie) from using the same back door, once it's been exploited?
Ok, so we have to secure the back door. How? Who decides what is secure enough? It obviously can't be completely secure, cuz the Feds have to be able to get in. Yet it must be secure from everyone BUT the Feds.
This assumes overwhelming arrogance on the basis of the regulators. They are basically saying no one is better at securing than they are. I hope this passes, and when it is cracked, and worms are flying everywhere, my home network (well before the firewall *I* built) gets compromised along with everyone else's network, we can all blame it on the Feds and say we told you so.
Sigh. I understand how Willy Wonka must have felt when he said (very quietly) "No, don't do that."
I was skimming the main page, and I (thought I) saw:
"UK: SF Writers dominate Hugos"
Implying (in my mind) that the United Kingdom was somehow upset that the Hugo Awards were biased towards science fiction writers, as opposed to other writers in other genres. Knowing what a Hugo is, made this seem massively funny.
Then I RTFA, and realized it wasn't near that funny.
Your argument is rather like saying since the city cannot ban people from driving down a street for no good reason, then it necessarily follows that these same people must be allowed unfettered access to the private residences on that street.
You know, that actually works, if you extend it to the situation as it actually was. Say, you own one of these houses on a street, and you are involved in a dispute with the city about something, and people were meeting at your house to discuss what to do about the dispute. The city then chooses to close the road your house (that you own, and bought from someone other than the city) is on, disallowing access to everyone, unless they use alternate routes not everyone has access to (helicopter, etc). While doing so, the city also blocks the 7-11 up the street, the hair salon on the corner, and all your neighbours from accessing their houses. A week later, they re-open the road, with a court order that you don't talk about doing anything bad in your house, which still has nothing to do with the losses of customers the 7-11 had (everyone who didn't own a helicopter).
This is a ridiculous scenario, of course, yet it's exactly what happened. Good analogy there, parent.
No, the real money is in OEM licensing to large volume hardware manufacturers. If Apple sold OS X for generic Intels, everyone would be able to undercut them on hardware prices, so forget about that business. And the walk-in market isn't nearly big enough to sustain them. So unless they could secure a number of OEM deals with the Dells and HPs of the world, they'd be bankrupt within the year. And Microsoft has historically done everything in their power to prevent even insignificant companies like Be from getting their OS shipping pre-installed from the OEM. You'd better believe they'd pull out all the stops to keep Apple out of that market.
All depends on your point of view. If Apple develops some killer app for Mac OS only (iFlicks would be my guess, if it was sufficiently compelling, perhaps incorporated PVR functionality like XP Media Centre, or maybe something else we haven't even thought of), and enough people come yanging to Dell wanting Mac OS preinstalled on their new Dell, Dell would certainly explore the option of licensing Mac OS. Enough people asked for Red Hat on Dell servers, and now it's an option. I doubt anti-trust officials would look kindly on Microsoft punishing a major OEM for shipping another OS, anyways.
But, my point is, if there's a killer app that customers want enough, they'll buy Mac. If I was really devious, I would think of this as a long term plan for Apple to get out of the hardware business, sticking to iPods, iMoviewatcherthingies, maybe some Mac Minis, Mac OS for generic hardware, and media delivery. Given the general animosity towards Microsoft in a lot of places, their own monopoly position restraining them, and Apple's already considerable desktop OS experience (longer than Microsoft's), they could be a serious competitor in ten to fifteen years.
Does this mean Google images will now be a for-pay service, or will Google just go bankrupt?
I would get laid..
Yeah, by Bill Gates.
Now that a workaround has been found to make it useless, will they remove it now? I installed it on my parent's laptop (OEM, with a legitimate, paid-for XP install), only to have it hang 45 minutes into the installation, leaving them with no access to any updates now (it seems to have broken both the version of windows update they had, and the new one it was trying to install). Way to go Microsoft!
I especially liked the part about how this 'new Windows Update' would make my update experience faster and more reliable'...i'm sure my pirated but secured windows box would be much faster than the average user who paid $300 to an OEM for his now-spyware-ridden, virus-bearing, spam-spewing zombie box. How exactly is the pirated software slower? Benchmarks? (and could we trust them?)
This isn't a freedom of speech issue.
When the speech of one group endangers another innocent group or person's safety in society, freedom of speech is justly limited
Google for bomb recipes. Find anything?
Should we ban Google? Should Google filter searches for bombs?
However, according to your logic, Telus should filter such information from their subscribers (wikipedia would be the first to go).
I hope not. I was carded by an over-enthusiatic new cashier at the grocery store today (I'm almost 30, with a 4 inch beard and grey hair). The store manager, whom I knew personally, scolded her, and I got my smokes. But if this is like this in video game stores, what then? What kind of ID is good enough? What about fake ID? They've been trying to stop kids from buying smokes for years, and they still can if they try hard enough. And those of us who ARE old enough sometimes can't.
Won't work.
We have a pretty strong set of laws here regarding freedoms, like speech. I phoned my Member of Parliament's office already this morning regarding this issue, which I see as one of unlawful repression of free speech. I will be speaking with my provincial representative later today (lucky for me, I'm a party member) to see what she thinks about this action. If Telus gets shit on for violating the rights of this individual to free speech (they didn't block the website due to technical limitation or due to content that violated a law, they did so because they didn't like what it said), then I am all for it. Our government isn't at all afraid of companies like Telus....after all, we used to own them. And they have to follow the law like everyone else.
I urge all Canadians who read this to contact your respective members of provincial and federal government to express your displeasure at this action. If enough of us bitch in this time of minority governments and looming early elections, we might see this kind of action made explicitly illegal awful fast.
Often a new user doesn't know enough to give specifics, they have to be pried out of him.
This is my problem exactly. My Gentoo desktop had so many different things that happened, that my small-picture understanding couldn't tie them together into a coherent question (xrdb hanging both CPUs on startx, inability to access bash in Konsole or xterm after killing xrdb via ssh, in which bash works fine, ability to use bash in X after su'ing to root, X refusing to release control of the screen and keyboard to the console after the X server is stopped, inability to use sound as non-root, except via remote ssh...how does one make a question out of that?)
if I had someone to help me when it breaks. I've dallied with Debian and now Gentoo, but each of them has ended up broken (due directly to my own ignorance) to the point where fixing it to make it usable was beyond my knowledge. I'm not a stupid person. I know how to google, and I know that the best answer to a question is a source of information, rather than a set of instructions, but it's not always easy to know what to ask or how to get the responses you need, and even if you do, often you're ignored anyways. I'd love to see a distro step up to address this, maybe with some kind of voluntary mentor/buddy system, where an experienced user 'adopts' a newbie and offers periodic, light email or chat help when needed, till the new user gets sufficiently knowledgeable to fix things herself (at which time, said user could become a mentor for a newer user if they so choose, perpetuating things). This is what keeps me on Windows, and a bit of my soul dies every time I turn the thing on, but I can fix it if it breaks (which, of course, it does).
Google probably has no real incentive to create or market an OS for us desktop users, but with the mad clustering they have going, I'd bet their customizations and tweaks to their server farm would make for a great distro for large clusters. There's more market for an OS than a desktop....
I fail to see why this is a surprise. The real benefit will be Longhorn N, or whatever the heck they call it. Right now, inertia will create the alternative, but now's the time to start dreaming up a 'killer' feature for a media player. When everyone (in Europe) has to make a choice with their new OS, then the door is wide open for something superior to succeed in the market. I think (maybe I'm wrong), but I sorta thought this was the point of doing this, was to re-create a market for media player software, after Microsoft used illegal activities to destroy it.
Maybe if they self-destructed every six months on the dot, my users would finally learn to back their shit up!
Of course, they still wouldn't. It'd just be my fault somehow. Sigh.