Actually in the USA since IIRC 1976 changes to copyright that copyrights are automatically granted by simple creation. Yes that's fucked up, but that is what happens when industry lawyers write the laws. As I remember it there was a few works that the studios forgot to extend copyrights on and they fell into PD, hence the law change.
Ya wanna blow a GPL advocate's mind exomondo? Point out their arguments are EXACTLY like the *.A.A. think about it, both talk about how the content/code is "stolen"(no its not, copying isn't stealing as/. says often) unless they are "paid (in cash for one, code for another) and all that don't think they are right MUST be "one of them" (see exploiters, corporations, or dirty filthy pirates) and must be attacked.
I've just always found it quite fascinating that you can take any long winded anti BSD argument, change a few words and almost have a word for word *.A.A rant because both views are so one sided and myopic.
See I just have to LMAO at this one, as you DO realize you are using MPAA logic, yes? The BSD code doesn't "disappear" and it isn't "stolen" and in fact any company that tries to do that for anything more than a one off product will be fucked anyway as their changes will end up farther and farther away from base until they spend more money porting than they would if they just gave the code back.
I just think its hilarious that you could change a couple of words around (user for content creator, code for content) on any rant against BSD and have a perfect MPAA letter, since the arguments are pretty much interchangeable.
But what is to keep them from simply making a BS account for that stuff, hmmm? You can't say it'll be tracked back to them because frankly if the employer is monitoring their net access at work then they are already fucked whether they make an account or not, as the logs will be right there for the employer to see.
I mean you can register and list yourself as a 23 year old Swedish Gymnast, that don't make you one you know. Personally i don't trust any AC that says "He's the employee of company X" anymore than an AC that says he's part of a three letter agency. if he can't even waste 3 whole fucking minutes to stuff some bullshit into a reg form why in the hell should we trust their word on shit? I mean would it really kill him to label himself as John Q Fuckwad from BFE? Its not like he couldn't make up a bullshit Google mail account if a site needs one, hell there are a ton of sites that let you crank out throwaway email addresses, so what's the excuse?
Except that now the $130 food processor does NOT "last a few more years" it just has a better brand name and/or a few more features but dies just as quickly. Hell between the crap soldier and the making every damned thing out of plastic that $1000 laptop doesn't last a damned bit longer than the $450 as the fans are just as crappy, the heatsinks just as thin, again they complete on brand or feature NOT on durability.
You see it as "people buy on price therefor crap" but frankly I see just the opposite "everything crap therefor buy on price" because everyone I know that bought the more expensive TV, laptop, stereo, cell phone, etc? Frankly it didn't last a damned bit longer than the cheap crap sitting next to it, so why pay more?
Hell you can't even change browser defaults because "web designers" have gone suck fucking heavy with JavaScript that most sites will be completely unusable without it.
I used to try to get my customers to use NoScript but now its strictly ABP, why? Because it only takes a half a dozen "reload the page a dozen damned times trying to figure which of the 40 third party scripts loads the fucking content" easter egg hunts for people to become sick of it. Hell its gotten to the point i just sandbox the browser rather than mess with NoScript because i get sick of playing "Where's the content" 3 or 4 times for every. single. page. that I go to.
So if you want to bitch at somebody about the mess? Blame the website designers, a good 99% of whom has gone so damned heavy with third party scripts being loaded from everywhere that most of the time you can't even get the fricking content AT ALL without a ton of JavaScript loaded. And lets face it, its only gonna get worse with all the "HTML V5 Web 3.0 Apps in the cloud" crap coming down the line. To get most of that stuff to even function you have to load a half a dozen scripts from all over the place, what a mess.
The "problem" is that the FOSS community is split right down the middle. On the one hand you have those that want things to "just work" and to have a true "third way" instead of only Windows and OSX, and then you have the "free as in freedom above all!" types that frankly don't give a shit how big a royal PITA the OS or software is as long as they get the source, your RMS faction.
Personally I predict that unless steam or somebody high up, say Canonical, simply forks things away from the devs you simply won't have Steam functional for very long because there are too many "source above all!" types in the kernel team. look up the ONLY major argument you get from a member of the kernel team about hardware ABIs and you'll see its a religious argument, with him going so far as to say "I hope everyone who uses binary blobs have their drivers break often!" which if that isn't religious dogma I don't know what is.
In the end as one of the Red hat devs points out the current system is completely broken and will only get worse because the current Linux philosophy simply doesn't scale, why? Because a handful of devs simply can't provide QA or QC for tens of billions of lines of code, tens of thousands of drivers, and thousands of programs in the repos, that's why. That is why you get half baked software in the repos, drivers that work in foo but not in foo+1, its not because the devs want to break shit its that there is no way in hell to test everything before release.
I just hope things like Steam on Linux will bring about real conversation and change, because I too would like a third way but at least for me and my customers Linux just isn't there yet. But if things don't change I have a feeling Valve is gonna find they need a huge dev team just to keep Steam running, much less add any new features, because it is simply too easy for someone upstream to make a change and break everything downstream.
Except plenty of other OEMs like Asus and Acer manned up and didn't try to screw their customers while Apple swept it under the rug. And ATI discrete mobiles were just as nice at the time, in fact they had less heat issues than Nvidia, yet again Apple? No choice, it was that or...well just that. Sure you could get Intel on the bottom o' the line but Intel is a bad joke when it comes to IGPs.
In the end Apple is NO different than any other OEM....except for the branding. There is a reason why they make every Apple store into this white walled counterculture thing, with posters of guys like Lennon on the walls, because its all part of the brand image. There is a reason why the classic Apple stereotype is a latte sipper at Starbucks with an iPad, its because the average Apple user makes $100K+ a year and just like their car or their clothes Apple is part of that "upwardly mobile" lifestyle identity. Its just not cool to be seen with an HP or Dell notebook, while that Apple symbol is. Kinda ironic so many had a shitfit over the "I Have Money!" iPhone app when all they were doing is targeting what has always been a part of the Apple brand, showing you are somehow "better" than those around you.
Re:Better Idea: Dancing with the Hollywood Squares
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The Fall of 38 Studios
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And you'd think the sports nuts would eat that shit up wouldn't you? I mean you get to play left field for the Padres or second base for the Rangers and play out the season and try to make a run for the Series? I mean its not like HS baseball, even right field is a damned hard job in the majors and every player can make winning or losing plays so it would require some real team work to get your team up the rankings. Hell you wouldn't even need your whole team online as it'd have your stats for the various positions and other teams could offer you a slot to fill out their roster, so you could raise your stats when your friends weren't playing. Seems like a baseball nut's ultimate fantasy baseball to me.
But to make a WoW style elves and dragons MMO is just suicide! Its like competing with FB, the only way someone is gonna take that over is if FB royally fucks it up, same with WoW. Too many people play it because "that is where all my friends are" and the MMOs are such a time sink most people only play 2 at most, with many sticking to a single one. It just doesn't make any damned sense.
Those type of game frankly ruin the fun for me. While I'm all for having a little strategy in MP those type of games are strictly "If you sink X number of hours you slaughter, if not you're fucked". Its like TF2, My oldest wins sniper competitions on that thing all the time but God knows how many hours he's sunk into it. I watched him play one time and I had to die laughing because some old Vietnam Vet was on the chat going "Will someone take out that Goddamned VC sniper already?" and I actually had to explain to him what a VC was, although looking at his camo outfit I have to admit...he did dress like a classic VC.
To me a good MP should be "easy to play, hard to master" where noobs aren't instakilled in 3 seconds so the community grows and people are actually friendly when they play. The last MP I really sank any time into was the MechWarriors series (Man am I dating myself with THAT reference!) because if one got some friends around you could actually use WWII battle strategies. We used to rack up crazy numbers using the Pacific War's "big blue blanket" in that me and another guy would be in the center with ultraheavies as your battleships, the mediums would be the destroyers covering our flank and sides, and the cruisers would be farther out and lure the "hot dog" shadowcat players into the kill zone. When we used to run into another group it was like The Battle Of Midway with all the rounds flying in massive waves at each other, now THAT was a battle!
Meh, its a shame your ex seals don't play TF2, I'm sure my oldest would like the challenge. So far he's gone up against Army and Marines and bagged 'em both, he's a deadly little sucker, never see him coming..
Make NO mistake folks, The Koch Bros, Goldman Sachs, they don't give a rat's ass about you, the environment, they don't give a shit about anything but having MOAR MONIES because to the ultra greedy like them there is no such thing as "enough" evar. They could build most devices to last a solid decade now, yet the majority of our items are designed for the dump, why? We could be building nuclear plants and molten salt solar to replace all those coal belching power plants but we're not, why? Because they haven't figured out how to make MOAR MONIES off of those, that's why.
Isn't it funny how those like Rev Al Gore never ever say a damned word about putting tarrifs on China or removing their most favored nation status even though we can now pick up the toxic clouds of pollution coming from China on our west coast? If they REALLY cared about the environment why wouldn't they be for tariffs instead of beating the 'free trade" drum?, Why? Because they make massive profits off the poisoning of China, duh!
If you truly wanted to end global warming here is how you would do it, massive taxes on any country that pollutes, replacing coal with nuclear and molten salt along with reprocessing of nuclear fuel and thorium small city powering reactors to lower losses along the lines, stop blowing money starting shit in the middle east and third world and use those funds for a massive upgrade of our infrastructure, with electric high speed trains between major cities and finally a "people's car" that runs on diesel or bio-diesel and gets a minimum of 50 MPG and costs less than $15k. Then add subsidies for the poor so those that can't afford $15k can get enough for their old gas guzzlers to replace them.
Tada! You've just made massive inroads on ending global warming! Congrats! But the big money interests couldn't gouge the living fuck out of everyone with a system like that, in fact prices would probably go down thanks to not constantly blowing fuel hauling everything everywhere, so that just won't happen. Instead we'll end up with something like "crap and trade" where people at the top will own a shell corp they buy "carbon credits" from so it costs them nothing while raping your wallet. The current scams those like Rev Al have set up is like you moving money from your left pocket to your right, calling it "wealth redistribution" and getting a tax break for doing so!
Never underestimate the parasites, they will always find a way to rip you off while enriching themselves. All TFA means is someone found a great scam which they can either fleece the government or you directly while making more profits than your average drug kingpin.
While I see no point in making everyone use real name accounts I don't see any reason why every site should allow ACs unless they just wants lots of trolls and flames. I mean once in a while we'll see an insightful AC comment but for every one of those we'll see a dozen "nigger faggot shill" comments that just derail conversations.
Now as for whether your real name matters? It depends on who you're asking. If its some nosy Nellie in HR or some potential employer? Then yes they would have a field day finding every stupid thing you have ever said on the net. if its the courts or the cops? Sheeeit, Google done got you by the balls friend, its really not hard to find out everything you've done between Google and the ISP, not to mention I'm sure they have that nifty software that looks for common phrases that people use in their everyday speech. Its been proven time and again whether speaking or typing we tend to fall into patterns which is easy enough to pick up with software or even by a person if they've read enough of your writings.
So while I'm 100% for free speech and think nobody should be forced to make real name accounts (although if they are too lazy to make up any account at all i don't see why they should be allowed to get in on the conversation) but more importantly maybe this will wake up John and Jane Public and make them realize that privacy on the net is an illusion. You'd be surprised how many people truly believe the net is like some magic black hole, where once it goes into the cloud its completely untraceable and they can be as big an asshole as they want and it can NEVER come back to bite them in the ass. Hell look at how many still haven't realized the shit they post on FB can come back to bite them in the ass. The public needs to be smacked with a big old cluebat in this area and if fighting to keep from having to use our real names is what it takes? Well then maybe some good will come from the fight.
But something like the Steam sales can actually get people to playing the MP again if it exists. For an example I've been racking up some kills in Bioshock II MP and that was pretty lonely before the Steam sale, but since it was put on sale for 75% off there are plenty of fresh splicers for me to do my aerodash into a shotgun blast or rocket to the face bit.
If they are honest though and say "MP is dead" upfront so I can get that choice? Not a problem but I think that frankly they should at least release the server code when they are gonna walk away so we can host our own. Sadly more likely they just won't tell us the MP is dead until we've already paid and tried to use it. This is the only industry I know of where they can sell you something that doesn't work and you can't even get your money back, what a rip.
Re:Better Idea: Dancing with the Hollywood Squares
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The Fall of 38 Studios
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I just don't get why he didn't make what he knew. I mean I personally don't care for sports but I bet a baseball game where every player is a real person and you have teams and leagues and work your way towards the World Series would probably sell, a hell of a lot more than yet another WoW ripoff.
I mean how damned many more MMOs filled with elves and dragons and crap do we really need anyway?
Actually last time I went into Gamestop (a couple of months ago when my nephew wanted to go there as part of his BDay) they were seriously big into gift cards for things like Steam, WoW, and just about every other MMO and game seller you can name. Made it easy for a kid like him to get some extra goodies on his favorite Korean MMO without having to worry about having a CC or trying to get his parents to use theirs which they sure as hell wouldn't on some funky overseas MMO.
But I got to agree about the Steam sales, its great to not only load up on the new stuff but to get the old games you may have missed. I personally got the HL 1 collection (lost my HL 1 disc ages ago and never got around to Blue Shift or Opposing force) for like $5, my oldest got him some TF classic for $2, not to mention the newer games like Bulletstorm, Saints Row 3 (we all got that one, its a hoot in co-op) as well as some indies like Trine 2 and both boys got the dungeon defenders series which they are playing the hell out of.
I just have to wonder how many publishers other than Valve will let you keep playing old games? i mean I fired up HL 1 DM and TF Classic and was blasting in full servers within seconds, but you look at a company like EA and they won't let you run your own servers and pull the plug after like a year and a half for many games. Who is gonna want to buy older games if half the game is broken?
Oh Good Lord, drank a little heavy on the iKoolaid did you? I mean did you even read what you wrote? You sound like a fricking press release! Seriously do you work for Apple? Because if not you should really apply, since all you did was spout flowery BS for half a dozen lines without saying anything other than PR crap.
Apple sells because its FASHION, okay? Do you think Air Jordans sell crazy money because it" derives from the people inside Nike really being into building great projects"? fuck no, its a status symbol, that is why people will kill you for a pair of Air Jordans. Guess what else people will kill you for? An iPhone or an iPad, wonder why that is? Couldn't be because its fashionable to have those things, would it?
Face it friend, having last year's iPad is about as cool as wearing last year's Jordans, aka lame. People buy them for the same reason they buy Prada, Gucci, and Starbucks, its because of the brand. Steve Jobs spent his whole life building and nurturing that image, and the fact that so many such as yourself act like its a magical hippie factory in Cupertino just shows what a master showman Steve Jobs really was.
I bet you're the same type that was sitting there telling everyone how Altivec made X86 a bad joke, right up until Steve switched to X86 and then you sang Intel's praises. There is a reason why they call it "The Cult Of Mac" you know, and if you look in the mirror you'll see a member! Of course all those Appleites that got bit by bumpgate just weren't true believers, why they didn't have Steve in their heart! Now please go buy yourself another highly overpriced X86 laptop, or another walled garden and tell yourself how wonderful that sandbox you're allowed to play in is, you know you'll feel better about yourself when you do.
Let me ask you a question...what difference do you REALLY see in an SSD? I ask this because for one to be large enough to actually install my games to (the things faster access would be good for) it'd cost crazy money and since I almost never boot the OS...what's the point?
I mean you mention Win 7 which I use as well and it has the excellent Readyboost and Supercaching so with 8Gb of RAM and an 8Gb flash I have all my small I/Os already on solid state and all of my basic programs fit into the Supercache so no gains there, and I can't honestly think of anything OTHER than games I'd really give a crap about loading faster. The problem of course is my Steam folder is already over 100Gb and my regular games folder adds another 60Gb or so, so obviously games on the SSD would be right out.
So is having JUST the OS on the SSD really worth the hassle? You've got higher failure rates, less space, and without being able to put your games on them what are you gonna speed up other than boot? MS Office?
Won't happen until you can get the ISPs to quit overselling the living hell out of their networks and then slapping nasty caps just to make sure you don't use what you pay for!
Don't you just love when irony is so moist and delicious? On the one hand you have a set of greedy publishing bastards that want to take away first sale, but to do so they have to get around the greedy ISP bastards that want to oversell and cap the shit out of their networks.
Kinda sad when there isn't anyone to actually root for, Gamestop charging crazy prices while giving jack shit for trade ins, the ISPs capping your asses, or the media corps wanting to take away first sale and nickel and dime you with DLC so that a $60 game actually costs $130 just to get what you would have gotten before in the box...wow what a carnival of sucktitude!
Oh c'mon now, didn't John "Make you his bitch" with Daikatana? I know that I certainly felt like crying like a little bitch when those damned AI sidekicks got hung on a wall or walked out right into the fire and caused me to redo the level!
Old John was just so far ahead of his time you failed to appreciate him. Bad AI, uninspired level design, hell he beat EA to the punch by over a decade!
I had to do that trick once as well and I'm glad to say it worked. Man you want to talk about a tense as hell experience, there I was with a gal just crying her eyes out because that drive was the ONLY source of a couple of hundred pics and little video and audio clips of her dead mother.
But I did just as you described, vacu-sealed the drive and let it come back to room temp before opening the bag and it worked just long enough to get that data off. Luckily that one close call was enough for her so I was able to set her up a backup routine using a combination of DVDs plus Cloud plus USB HDDs that are rotated out weekly between her home and that of her sister. that way everything she has is backed up thrice on 3 different mediums at 3 different locations just to be safe.
Please folks, i don't care if its flash sticks, get your friends and family to back up the important stuff, okay? Make digital copies of all pictures and documents and store them in multiple locations. I had a customer come home from a 3 day business trip to a smoldering pile where his house once was so I know how important they can be. Thankfully he had listened to me and all it took was retrieving his backup drive from his brother's house and he had all his records and pictures back in a few hours but he could have lost everything, all the photos of his family, all his childhood videos, the whole thing just gone.
So backup backup backup folks, and make sure everyone you know does the same. Hell you can get a 32Gb flash stick for less than $20 off of Newegg and that will hold most people's precious stuff right there and fit into your pocket or a safety deposit box. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, as I've seen time and time again here at the shop.
Okay, no bullshit. Apple is about iMONEY and that is why everyone and their dog and their dog's rubber bone is developing for it, okay? Look up that interview with the head of Epic where he says their iOS game has made them more profits than anything they've ever put out. Like it or not folks Apple locking the living shit out of their systems have made it easier for devs to sell their wares, while Android being open means pirates run rampant.
Now do I like this? No, I do not. I don't like it anymore than how Windows gets console ports because too many gamers get all their games from TPB, but pretending that ain't reality isn't gonna change it. I personally switch everyone I can over to Steam so they can get cheap games without piracy and maybe something similar will work on Android, who knows.
But I do know that right now one can't blame devs for going with Apple anymore than you can blame 'em for going with the consoles because like it or not apple's walled gardens make it just enough of a PITA that John Average is more likely to buy that game than snatch it, just as he's more likely to buy that console game. The problem with "free as in freedom" is that too many prefer "free as in beer" and if its easy peasy to pirate then they will, as we've seen time and time again. Hell wasn't it on this very site not 3 weeks ago they were talking about Android games being made F2P because everyone was just pirating the shit out of them anyway?
In the end if you want to make money you go Apple, simple as that. I hope this changes, i hope we find a way to have our freedom while not screwing over those making the software, but so far its been an either or kinda deal and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Well I'd also argue why waste money when we already have something that works, and works well?
The F1 was well built, its tested, its a sunk cost. Sure it'll cost money to put them back in production but I bet it'll be a hell of a lot less than all the work that goes into a brand new design and most importantly we KNOW it works.
So personally I'm 100% for this as well. The F1 was a damned good design and if we can save costs and get our space program back on track with the F1 back on the pad I say lets do this.
It all depends on HOW the drive has died. if you just flip the switch and nothing happens? Good chance its a dead board and if you swap it out you've got a shot just like you found out.
But if on the other hand you fire it up and its hot as hell and makes a grinding or clicking noise? yeah...you're screwed. I've managed to save some files from a head crash by chilling the drive and then grabbing data as fast as I possibly can but its tricky as hell and every second its doing more damage.
Finally there if the big "Boy are YOU fucked!" which is of course SSDs. i have yet to hear of anyone bringing one of those back to life, when the controller goes on one of those you're just boned. The bitch with those is you get ZERO warning, just flip the switch and bye bye. That is why i tell my customers to go with HDDs or hybrids until they get the bugs worked out or backup backup backup, which frankly they should be doing anyway but few do.
So it all comes down to 1.-what you are trying to get back, the smaller the better. pics and docs are a hell of a lot easier to do a quick snatch on than video, 2.-What kind of damage you are looking at, failed controller, head crash, burning motor, and 3.-How much data you need to get back, the shorter the better. You don't know what "fun" is until you try to save 4Gb+ of pictures and clips of somebody's dead mother when they have NO backup. Its a hell of a lot easier to grab 40Mb than it is 4000Mb when the drive is dying.
Our Navy was LARGE, but frankly it wasn't very good. We had built these massive battleships before the depression and that was the bulk of our fleet in 1941. Sure we had Enterprise and a half a dozen others, mostly built to max out our tonnage of the treaty, but when compared to Japan our navy was a bit of a joke.
The reason Japan went after them was two fold, 1.-FDR had done everything he could to insult Japan, going so far as to make the Japanese ambassador wait for nearly two weeks in the lobby just to tell him to piss off (Read the book by Herbert Hoover who was part of the negotiations, its free online and its scary how much FDR didn't give a shit about what the people wanted when it came to WWII) and 2.-They needed the oil in the Dutch East Indies and it didn't matter how slow and old the WWI era battleships were if they could light up the oil fields with shore bombardment.
Now as far as the Army was concerned there was a serious split at that time between those that believed in Mitchell's idea of "The bombers will win" aka the bomber mafia and those that believed the bombers should support the ground troops. If you'll look at the dates you'll see we didn't really start getting serious about ground troops until the B-17s started dropping like flies over Europe. We could have easily moved the men with Liberty ships, we were cranking those things out like hotcakes, but the military at the time honestly didn't think we'd need 'em. they thought that the massive waves of bombers would pound the Axis and they would fly the white flag and it'd be over.
My late grandfather fought over in EU during WWII and before he died I had the honor of talking to him about what it was truly like, and he talked quite often about how shocked they were at the way the Germans fought. He said even when it was beyond obvious they had no chance in hell they kept fighting, sometimes down to the last man, and that many of our troops coming over frankly thought the war would be over before they got to the front. Nobody believed they could withstand such huge numbers of B-17s and B-24s and possibly fight back.
In either case it doesn't change the fact that the wind down at the end of WWII changed everything, before that we often went a decade or more between conflicts and after? We haven't even gone 5 years without the CIA starting something or the military getting involved in a "police action" somewhere, why? No money for peace time and the MIC shells out constantly for lobbyists and promotes the chickenhawks that's why. what we are seeing in Dotcom is just how corrupt its all gotten, you have the DoJ saying they'll do whatever they want to the man whether the law allows it or not. Where is the press? where is the POTUS? Where is congress? All too busy counting their checks to care.
Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read and just proves what I've been saying for years, which is if you bet everything on how "the street' treats your stock you ARE gonna die because frankly the street don't care if you burn down the buildings as long as it gives them short term gains.
A perfect example was Danforth at WH, he sold the business right out from under the company and closed what he couldn't sell. Did Wall street punish him for destroying the company? Hell no, the stock went through the roof!
If you want to see why America is crumbling you only have to go look at Wall street, the ever growing desire for ever shorter term gains has turned business from one of investment and growth into one of quick flips and bailing. Another perfect example, Circuit City. the last CEO fired every worker that was actually selling well (and thus getting paid more) and shuttered every business that didn't hit a metric and then when the stock jumped he cashed out and walked away as what was left of the business crumbled. Great for him, great for the street, lousy for CC and business in general.
The fact that Ballmer obviously cares so much about America's obsession with stock price just shows what a shitty CEO he is, as that frankly shouldn't ever enter into his business decisions. He should be looking at what is best for MSFT in a down economy, what he can do to make sure MSFT is ready when things pick up, and he should be investing in new tech now to see them through the next decade with new ideas. Instead he merely apes what has worked for others by cooking up or buying half baked clones (Zune, Kin, Sidekick, WinPhone, Win 8) and hopes if he slings enough money at the problem it'll magically fix itself. Its a recipe for massive failure but Ballmer has enough cash and stock frankly it won't hurt him a bit, he'll still walk away a billionaire.
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Actually in the USA since IIRC 1976 changes to copyright that copyrights are automatically granted by simple creation. Yes that's fucked up, but that is what happens when industry lawyers write the laws. As I remember it there was a few works that the studios forgot to extend copyrights on and they fell into PD, hence the law change.
Ya wanna blow a GPL advocate's mind exomondo? Point out their arguments are EXACTLY like the *.A.A. think about it, both talk about how the content/code is "stolen"(no its not, copying isn't stealing as /. says often) unless they are "paid (in cash for one, code for another) and all that don't think they are right MUST be "one of them" (see exploiters, corporations, or dirty filthy pirates) and must be attacked.
I've just always found it quite fascinating that you can take any long winded anti BSD argument, change a few words and almost have a word for word *.A.A rant because both views are so one sided and myopic.
See I just have to LMAO at this one, as you DO realize you are using MPAA logic, yes? The BSD code doesn't "disappear" and it isn't "stolen" and in fact any company that tries to do that for anything more than a one off product will be fucked anyway as their changes will end up farther and farther away from base until they spend more money porting than they would if they just gave the code back.
I just think its hilarious that you could change a couple of words around (user for content creator, code for content) on any rant against BSD and have a perfect MPAA letter, since the arguments are pretty much interchangeable.
But what is to keep them from simply making a BS account for that stuff, hmmm? You can't say it'll be tracked back to them because frankly if the employer is monitoring their net access at work then they are already fucked whether they make an account or not, as the logs will be right there for the employer to see.
I mean you can register and list yourself as a 23 year old Swedish Gymnast, that don't make you one you know. Personally i don't trust any AC that says "He's the employee of company X" anymore than an AC that says he's part of a three letter agency. if he can't even waste 3 whole fucking minutes to stuff some bullshit into a reg form why in the hell should we trust their word on shit? I mean would it really kill him to label himself as John Q Fuckwad from BFE? Its not like he couldn't make up a bullshit Google mail account if a site needs one, hell there are a ton of sites that let you crank out throwaway email addresses, so what's the excuse?
Except that now the $130 food processor does NOT "last a few more years" it just has a better brand name and/or a few more features but dies just as quickly. Hell between the crap soldier and the making every damned thing out of plastic that $1000 laptop doesn't last a damned bit longer than the $450 as the fans are just as crappy, the heatsinks just as thin, again they complete on brand or feature NOT on durability.
You see it as "people buy on price therefor crap" but frankly I see just the opposite "everything crap therefor buy on price" because everyone I know that bought the more expensive TV, laptop, stereo, cell phone, etc? Frankly it didn't last a damned bit longer than the cheap crap sitting next to it, so why pay more?
Hell you can't even change browser defaults because "web designers" have gone suck fucking heavy with JavaScript that most sites will be completely unusable without it.
I used to try to get my customers to use NoScript but now its strictly ABP, why? Because it only takes a half a dozen "reload the page a dozen damned times trying to figure which of the 40 third party scripts loads the fucking content" easter egg hunts for people to become sick of it. Hell its gotten to the point i just sandbox the browser rather than mess with NoScript because i get sick of playing "Where's the content" 3 or 4 times for every. single. page. that I go to.
So if you want to bitch at somebody about the mess? Blame the website designers, a good 99% of whom has gone so damned heavy with third party scripts being loaded from everywhere that most of the time you can't even get the fricking content AT ALL without a ton of JavaScript loaded. And lets face it, its only gonna get worse with all the "HTML V5 Web 3.0 Apps in the cloud" crap coming down the line. To get most of that stuff to even function you have to load a half a dozen scripts from all over the place, what a mess.
The "problem" is that the FOSS community is split right down the middle. On the one hand you have those that want things to "just work" and to have a true "third way" instead of only Windows and OSX, and then you have the "free as in freedom above all!" types that frankly don't give a shit how big a royal PITA the OS or software is as long as they get the source, your RMS faction.
Personally I predict that unless steam or somebody high up, say Canonical, simply forks things away from the devs you simply won't have Steam functional for very long because there are too many "source above all!" types in the kernel team. look up the ONLY major argument you get from a member of the kernel team about hardware ABIs and you'll see its a religious argument, with him going so far as to say "I hope everyone who uses binary blobs have their drivers break often!" which if that isn't religious dogma I don't know what is.
In the end as one of the Red hat devs points out the current system is completely broken and will only get worse because the current Linux philosophy simply doesn't scale, why? Because a handful of devs simply can't provide QA or QC for tens of billions of lines of code, tens of thousands of drivers, and thousands of programs in the repos, that's why. That is why you get half baked software in the repos, drivers that work in foo but not in foo+1, its not because the devs want to break shit its that there is no way in hell to test everything before release.
I just hope things like Steam on Linux will bring about real conversation and change, because I too would like a third way but at least for me and my customers Linux just isn't there yet. But if things don't change I have a feeling Valve is gonna find they need a huge dev team just to keep Steam running, much less add any new features, because it is simply too easy for someone upstream to make a change and break everything downstream.
Except plenty of other OEMs like Asus and Acer manned up and didn't try to screw their customers while Apple swept it under the rug. And ATI discrete mobiles were just as nice at the time, in fact they had less heat issues than Nvidia, yet again Apple? No choice, it was that or...well just that. Sure you could get Intel on the bottom o' the line but Intel is a bad joke when it comes to IGPs.
In the end Apple is NO different than any other OEM....except for the branding. There is a reason why they make every Apple store into this white walled counterculture thing, with posters of guys like Lennon on the walls, because its all part of the brand image. There is a reason why the classic Apple stereotype is a latte sipper at Starbucks with an iPad, its because the average Apple user makes $100K+ a year and just like their car or their clothes Apple is part of that "upwardly mobile" lifestyle identity. Its just not cool to be seen with an HP or Dell notebook, while that Apple symbol is. Kinda ironic so many had a shitfit over the "I Have Money!" iPhone app when all they were doing is targeting what has always been a part of the Apple brand, showing you are somehow "better" than those around you.
And you'd think the sports nuts would eat that shit up wouldn't you? I mean you get to play left field for the Padres or second base for the Rangers and play out the season and try to make a run for the Series? I mean its not like HS baseball, even right field is a damned hard job in the majors and every player can make winning or losing plays so it would require some real team work to get your team up the rankings. Hell you wouldn't even need your whole team online as it'd have your stats for the various positions and other teams could offer you a slot to fill out their roster, so you could raise your stats when your friends weren't playing. Seems like a baseball nut's ultimate fantasy baseball to me.
But to make a WoW style elves and dragons MMO is just suicide! Its like competing with FB, the only way someone is gonna take that over is if FB royally fucks it up, same with WoW. Too many people play it because "that is where all my friends are" and the MMOs are such a time sink most people only play 2 at most, with many sticking to a single one. It just doesn't make any damned sense.
Those type of game frankly ruin the fun for me. While I'm all for having a little strategy in MP those type of games are strictly "If you sink X number of hours you slaughter, if not you're fucked". Its like TF2, My oldest wins sniper competitions on that thing all the time but God knows how many hours he's sunk into it. I watched him play one time and I had to die laughing because some old Vietnam Vet was on the chat going "Will someone take out that Goddamned VC sniper already?" and I actually had to explain to him what a VC was, although looking at his camo outfit I have to admit...he did dress like a classic VC.
To me a good MP should be "easy to play, hard to master" where noobs aren't instakilled in 3 seconds so the community grows and people are actually friendly when they play. The last MP I really sank any time into was the MechWarriors series (Man am I dating myself with THAT reference!) because if one got some friends around you could actually use WWII battle strategies. We used to rack up crazy numbers using the Pacific War's "big blue blanket" in that me and another guy would be in the center with ultraheavies as your battleships, the mediums would be the destroyers covering our flank and sides, and the cruisers would be farther out and lure the "hot dog" shadowcat players into the kill zone. When we used to run into another group it was like The Battle Of Midway with all the rounds flying in massive waves at each other, now THAT was a battle!
Meh, its a shame your ex seals don't play TF2, I'm sure my oldest would like the challenge. So far he's gone up against Army and Marines and bagged 'em both, he's a deadly little sucker, never see him coming..
Nope, I'm sure they've set themselves to cash in using tricks like having the one who came up with credit default swaps write the rules for carbon trading so they can make a royal mint off cap and trade.
Make NO mistake folks, The Koch Bros, Goldman Sachs, they don't give a rat's ass about you, the environment, they don't give a shit about anything but having MOAR MONIES because to the ultra greedy like them there is no such thing as "enough" evar. They could build most devices to last a solid decade now, yet the majority of our items are designed for the dump, why? We could be building nuclear plants and molten salt solar to replace all those coal belching power plants but we're not, why? Because they haven't figured out how to make MOAR MONIES off of those, that's why.
Isn't it funny how those like Rev Al Gore never ever say a damned word about putting tarrifs on China or removing their most favored nation status even though we can now pick up the toxic clouds of pollution coming from China on our west coast? If they REALLY cared about the environment why wouldn't they be for tariffs instead of beating the 'free trade" drum?, Why? Because they make massive profits off the poisoning of China, duh!
If you truly wanted to end global warming here is how you would do it, massive taxes on any country that pollutes, replacing coal with nuclear and molten salt along with reprocessing of nuclear fuel and thorium small city powering reactors to lower losses along the lines, stop blowing money starting shit in the middle east and third world and use those funds for a massive upgrade of our infrastructure, with electric high speed trains between major cities and finally a "people's car" that runs on diesel or bio-diesel and gets a minimum of 50 MPG and costs less than $15k. Then add subsidies for the poor so those that can't afford $15k can get enough for their old gas guzzlers to replace them.
Tada! You've just made massive inroads on ending global warming! Congrats! But the big money interests couldn't gouge the living fuck out of everyone with a system like that, in fact prices would probably go down thanks to not constantly blowing fuel hauling everything everywhere, so that just won't happen. Instead we'll end up with something like "crap and trade" where people at the top will own a shell corp they buy "carbon credits" from so it costs them nothing while raping your wallet. The current scams those like Rev Al have set up is like you moving money from your left pocket to your right, calling it "wealth redistribution" and getting a tax break for doing so!
Never underestimate the parasites, they will always find a way to rip you off while enriching themselves. All TFA means is someone found a great scam which they can either fleece the government or you directly while making more profits than your average drug kingpin.
While I see no point in making everyone use real name accounts I don't see any reason why every site should allow ACs unless they just wants lots of trolls and flames. I mean once in a while we'll see an insightful AC comment but for every one of those we'll see a dozen "nigger faggot shill" comments that just derail conversations.
Now as for whether your real name matters? It depends on who you're asking. If its some nosy Nellie in HR or some potential employer? Then yes they would have a field day finding every stupid thing you have ever said on the net. if its the courts or the cops? Sheeeit, Google done got you by the balls friend, its really not hard to find out everything you've done between Google and the ISP, not to mention I'm sure they have that nifty software that looks for common phrases that people use in their everyday speech. Its been proven time and again whether speaking or typing we tend to fall into patterns which is easy enough to pick up with software or even by a person if they've read enough of your writings.
So while I'm 100% for free speech and think nobody should be forced to make real name accounts (although if they are too lazy to make up any account at all i don't see why they should be allowed to get in on the conversation) but more importantly maybe this will wake up John and Jane Public and make them realize that privacy on the net is an illusion. You'd be surprised how many people truly believe the net is like some magic black hole, where once it goes into the cloud its completely untraceable and they can be as big an asshole as they want and it can NEVER come back to bite them in the ass. Hell look at how many still haven't realized the shit they post on FB can come back to bite them in the ass. The public needs to be smacked with a big old cluebat in this area and if fighting to keep from having to use our real names is what it takes? Well then maybe some good will come from the fight.
But something like the Steam sales can actually get people to playing the MP again if it exists. For an example I've been racking up some kills in Bioshock II MP and that was pretty lonely before the Steam sale, but since it was put on sale for 75% off there are plenty of fresh splicers for me to do my aerodash into a shotgun blast or rocket to the face bit.
If they are honest though and say "MP is dead" upfront so I can get that choice? Not a problem but I think that frankly they should at least release the server code when they are gonna walk away so we can host our own. Sadly more likely they just won't tell us the MP is dead until we've already paid and tried to use it. This is the only industry I know of where they can sell you something that doesn't work and you can't even get your money back, what a rip.
I just don't get why he didn't make what he knew. I mean I personally don't care for sports but I bet a baseball game where every player is a real person and you have teams and leagues and work your way towards the World Series would probably sell, a hell of a lot more than yet another WoW ripoff.
I mean how damned many more MMOs filled with elves and dragons and crap do we really need anyway?
Actually last time I went into Gamestop (a couple of months ago when my nephew wanted to go there as part of his BDay) they were seriously big into gift cards for things like Steam, WoW, and just about every other MMO and game seller you can name. Made it easy for a kid like him to get some extra goodies on his favorite Korean MMO without having to worry about having a CC or trying to get his parents to use theirs which they sure as hell wouldn't on some funky overseas MMO.
But I got to agree about the Steam sales, its great to not only load up on the new stuff but to get the old games you may have missed. I personally got the HL 1 collection (lost my HL 1 disc ages ago and never got around to Blue Shift or Opposing force) for like $5, my oldest got him some TF classic for $2, not to mention the newer games like Bulletstorm, Saints Row 3 (we all got that one, its a hoot in co-op) as well as some indies like Trine 2 and both boys got the dungeon defenders series which they are playing the hell out of.
I just have to wonder how many publishers other than Valve will let you keep playing old games? i mean I fired up HL 1 DM and TF Classic and was blasting in full servers within seconds, but you look at a company like EA and they won't let you run your own servers and pull the plug after like a year and a half for many games. Who is gonna want to buy older games if half the game is broken?
Oh Good Lord, drank a little heavy on the iKoolaid did you? I mean did you even read what you wrote? You sound like a fricking press release! Seriously do you work for Apple? Because if not you should really apply, since all you did was spout flowery BS for half a dozen lines without saying anything other than PR crap.
Apple sells because its FASHION, okay? Do you think Air Jordans sell crazy money because it" derives from the people inside Nike really being into building great projects"? fuck no, its a status symbol, that is why people will kill you for a pair of Air Jordans. Guess what else people will kill you for? An iPhone or an iPad, wonder why that is? Couldn't be because its fashionable to have those things, would it?
Face it friend, having last year's iPad is about as cool as wearing last year's Jordans, aka lame. People buy them for the same reason they buy Prada, Gucci, and Starbucks, its because of the brand. Steve Jobs spent his whole life building and nurturing that image, and the fact that so many such as yourself act like its a magical hippie factory in Cupertino just shows what a master showman Steve Jobs really was.
I bet you're the same type that was sitting there telling everyone how Altivec made X86 a bad joke, right up until Steve switched to X86 and then you sang Intel's praises. There is a reason why they call it "The Cult Of Mac" you know, and if you look in the mirror you'll see a member! Of course all those Appleites that got bit by bumpgate just weren't true believers, why they didn't have Steve in their heart! Now please go buy yourself another highly overpriced X86 laptop, or another walled garden and tell yourself how wonderful that sandbox you're allowed to play in is, you know you'll feel better about yourself when you do.
Let me ask you a question...what difference do you REALLY see in an SSD? I ask this because for one to be large enough to actually install my games to (the things faster access would be good for) it'd cost crazy money and since I almost never boot the OS...what's the point?
I mean you mention Win 7 which I use as well and it has the excellent Readyboost and Supercaching so with 8Gb of RAM and an 8Gb flash I have all my small I/Os already on solid state and all of my basic programs fit into the Supercache so no gains there, and I can't honestly think of anything OTHER than games I'd really give a crap about loading faster. The problem of course is my Steam folder is already over 100Gb and my regular games folder adds another 60Gb or so, so obviously games on the SSD would be right out.
So is having JUST the OS on the SSD really worth the hassle? You've got higher failure rates, less space, and without being able to put your games on them what are you gonna speed up other than boot? MS Office?
Won't happen until you can get the ISPs to quit overselling the living hell out of their networks and then slapping nasty caps just to make sure you don't use what you pay for!
Don't you just love when irony is so moist and delicious? On the one hand you have a set of greedy publishing bastards that want to take away first sale, but to do so they have to get around the greedy ISP bastards that want to oversell and cap the shit out of their networks.
Kinda sad when there isn't anyone to actually root for, Gamestop charging crazy prices while giving jack shit for trade ins, the ISPs capping your asses, or the media corps wanting to take away first sale and nickel and dime you with DLC so that a $60 game actually costs $130 just to get what you would have gotten before in the box...wow what a carnival of sucktitude!
Oh c'mon now, didn't John "Make you his bitch" with Daikatana? I know that I certainly felt like crying like a little bitch when those damned AI sidekicks got hung on a wall or walked out right into the fire and caused me to redo the level!
Old John was just so far ahead of his time you failed to appreciate him. Bad AI, uninspired level design, hell he beat EA to the punch by over a decade!
I had to do that trick once as well and I'm glad to say it worked. Man you want to talk about a tense as hell experience, there I was with a gal just crying her eyes out because that drive was the ONLY source of a couple of hundred pics and little video and audio clips of her dead mother.
But I did just as you described, vacu-sealed the drive and let it come back to room temp before opening the bag and it worked just long enough to get that data off. Luckily that one close call was enough for her so I was able to set her up a backup routine using a combination of DVDs plus Cloud plus USB HDDs that are rotated out weekly between her home and that of her sister. that way everything she has is backed up thrice on 3 different mediums at 3 different locations just to be safe.
Please folks, i don't care if its flash sticks, get your friends and family to back up the important stuff, okay? Make digital copies of all pictures and documents and store them in multiple locations. I had a customer come home from a 3 day business trip to a smoldering pile where his house once was so I know how important they can be. Thankfully he had listened to me and all it took was retrieving his backup drive from his brother's house and he had all his records and pictures back in a few hours but he could have lost everything, all the photos of his family, all his childhood videos, the whole thing just gone.
So backup backup backup folks, and make sure everyone you know does the same. Hell you can get a 32Gb flash stick for less than $20 off of Newegg and that will hold most people's precious stuff right there and fit into your pocket or a safety deposit box. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, as I've seen time and time again here at the shop.
Okay, no bullshit. Apple is about iMONEY and that is why everyone and their dog and their dog's rubber bone is developing for it, okay? Look up that interview with the head of Epic where he says their iOS game has made them more profits than anything they've ever put out. Like it or not folks Apple locking the living shit out of their systems have made it easier for devs to sell their wares, while Android being open means pirates run rampant.
Now do I like this? No, I do not. I don't like it anymore than how Windows gets console ports because too many gamers get all their games from TPB, but pretending that ain't reality isn't gonna change it. I personally switch everyone I can over to Steam so they can get cheap games without piracy and maybe something similar will work on Android, who knows.
But I do know that right now one can't blame devs for going with Apple anymore than you can blame 'em for going with the consoles because like it or not apple's walled gardens make it just enough of a PITA that John Average is more likely to buy that game than snatch it, just as he's more likely to buy that console game. The problem with "free as in freedom" is that too many prefer "free as in beer" and if its easy peasy to pirate then they will, as we've seen time and time again. Hell wasn't it on this very site not 3 weeks ago they were talking about Android games being made F2P because everyone was just pirating the shit out of them anyway?
In the end if you want to make money you go Apple, simple as that. I hope this changes, i hope we find a way to have our freedom while not screwing over those making the software, but so far its been an either or kinda deal and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Well I'd also argue why waste money when we already have something that works, and works well?
The F1 was well built, its tested, its a sunk cost. Sure it'll cost money to put them back in production but I bet it'll be a hell of a lot less than all the work that goes into a brand new design and most importantly we KNOW it works.
So personally I'm 100% for this as well. The F1 was a damned good design and if we can save costs and get our space program back on track with the F1 back on the pad I say lets do this.
It all depends on HOW the drive has died. if you just flip the switch and nothing happens? Good chance its a dead board and if you swap it out you've got a shot just like you found out.
But if on the other hand you fire it up and its hot as hell and makes a grinding or clicking noise? yeah...you're screwed. I've managed to save some files from a head crash by chilling the drive and then grabbing data as fast as I possibly can but its tricky as hell and every second its doing more damage.
Finally there if the big "Boy are YOU fucked!" which is of course SSDs. i have yet to hear of anyone bringing one of those back to life, when the controller goes on one of those you're just boned. The bitch with those is you get ZERO warning, just flip the switch and bye bye. That is why i tell my customers to go with HDDs or hybrids until they get the bugs worked out or backup backup backup, which frankly they should be doing anyway but few do.
So it all comes down to 1.-what you are trying to get back, the smaller the better. pics and docs are a hell of a lot easier to do a quick snatch on than video, 2.-What kind of damage you are looking at, failed controller, head crash, burning motor, and 3.-How much data you need to get back, the shorter the better. You don't know what "fun" is until you try to save 4Gb+ of pictures and clips of somebody's dead mother when they have NO backup. Its a hell of a lot easier to grab 40Mb than it is 4000Mb when the drive is dying.
Our Navy was LARGE, but frankly it wasn't very good. We had built these massive battleships before the depression and that was the bulk of our fleet in 1941. Sure we had Enterprise and a half a dozen others, mostly built to max out our tonnage of the treaty, but when compared to Japan our navy was a bit of a joke.
The reason Japan went after them was two fold, 1.-FDR had done everything he could to insult Japan, going so far as to make the Japanese ambassador wait for nearly two weeks in the lobby just to tell him to piss off (Read the book by Herbert Hoover who was part of the negotiations, its free online and its scary how much FDR didn't give a shit about what the people wanted when it came to WWII) and 2.-They needed the oil in the Dutch East Indies and it didn't matter how slow and old the WWI era battleships were if they could light up the oil fields with shore bombardment.
Now as far as the Army was concerned there was a serious split at that time between those that believed in Mitchell's idea of "The bombers will win" aka the bomber mafia and those that believed the bombers should support the ground troops. If you'll look at the dates you'll see we didn't really start getting serious about ground troops until the B-17s started dropping like flies over Europe. We could have easily moved the men with Liberty ships, we were cranking those things out like hotcakes, but the military at the time honestly didn't think we'd need 'em. they thought that the massive waves of bombers would pound the Axis and they would fly the white flag and it'd be over.
My late grandfather fought over in EU during WWII and before he died I had the honor of talking to him about what it was truly like, and he talked quite often about how shocked they were at the way the Germans fought. He said even when it was beyond obvious they had no chance in hell they kept fighting, sometimes down to the last man, and that many of our troops coming over frankly thought the war would be over before they got to the front. Nobody believed they could withstand such huge numbers of B-17s and B-24s and possibly fight back.
In either case it doesn't change the fact that the wind down at the end of WWII changed everything, before that we often went a decade or more between conflicts and after? We haven't even gone 5 years without the CIA starting something or the military getting involved in a "police action" somewhere, why? No money for peace time and the MIC shells out constantly for lobbyists and promotes the chickenhawks that's why. what we are seeing in Dotcom is just how corrupt its all gotten, you have the DoJ saying they'll do whatever they want to the man whether the law allows it or not. Where is the press? where is the POTUS? Where is congress? All too busy counting their checks to care.
Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read and just proves what I've been saying for years, which is if you bet everything on how "the street' treats your stock you ARE gonna die because frankly the street don't care if you burn down the buildings as long as it gives them short term gains.
A perfect example was Danforth at WH, he sold the business right out from under the company and closed what he couldn't sell. Did Wall street punish him for destroying the company? Hell no, the stock went through the roof!
If you want to see why America is crumbling you only have to go look at Wall street, the ever growing desire for ever shorter term gains has turned business from one of investment and growth into one of quick flips and bailing. Another perfect example, Circuit City. the last CEO fired every worker that was actually selling well (and thus getting paid more) and shuttered every business that didn't hit a metric and then when the stock jumped he cashed out and walked away as what was left of the business crumbled. Great for him, great for the street, lousy for CC and business in general.
The fact that Ballmer obviously cares so much about America's obsession with stock price just shows what a shitty CEO he is, as that frankly shouldn't ever enter into his business decisions. He should be looking at what is best for MSFT in a down economy, what he can do to make sure MSFT is ready when things pick up, and he should be investing in new tech now to see them through the next decade with new ideas. Instead he merely apes what has worked for others by cooking up or buying half baked clones (Zune, Kin, Sidekick, WinPhone, Win 8) and hopes if he slings enough money at the problem it'll magically fix itself. Its a recipe for massive failure but Ballmer has enough cash and stock frankly it won't hurt him a bit, he'll still walk away a billionaire.