Try being a Paladin. Only Holy Paladins are even close to being viable in Arena, and you'll never see any in the top twenty when the cash prizes are on offer.
The upcoming expansion is going to change this, apparently, but Paladins have been waiting a *long* time for any sign of change.
Once Mac reaches market share tipping point, which I think is inevitable given their better marketing atm, I can't wait to see the mac get taken alive by the vultures. The lure of Free Smileys and Limewire isn't limited to Windows. The reason it hasn't crossed over is market share and cost/gain. Once that market share is reached, and it's more lucrative to entice suckers that aren't any smarter for paying a premium...
You're spot on there. We all know that the system design of OS X is precisely the same as Windows, and that the sort of easy hacks that affect Windows will always affect Macs. Security can only ever be through obscurity, never through design.
Just because google is the darling of the day doesn't mean it will stay that way.
True, but I'm pretty sure they have to commit some crime before being taken to court by the government. Being a monopoly player isn't a crime in and of itself, nor should it be. Having the potential to commit a crime is utterly irrelevant in law, unless some action is taken toward realising that potential (even planning may be enough).
I'll wait until I hear some specifics before I make any judgements on this one.
This thread reads like a Scientology website. Xenu says, Google good! Now together everybody, fill in the blank Google ----
No, what you're seeing is not groupthink in action but people who are yet to hear of any actual crimes. Until we hear of specific criminal activities, Google are indeed good.
When Microsoft trumpet the LSE's uptime in their advertising (plenty of links today on that) are they really trumpeting something they have no control over? Your post seems to indicate that this is your opinion.
We've only got two responses here.
A) Microsoft have no control over the final product, and their ads are just lies (marketing should at least have a kernel of truth). They should be more honest and change their claims to "Our platform was used to develop the software that gives the LSE such great uptime." Or perhaps drop the whole uptime thing anyway, since there's not a damn thing they have to do with it.
B) Microsoft have control over the final product, and jcr's post is reasonable.
Either way, it's not a good story for Microsoft.
To the lay-person, taking the plaudits for success means also taking the brickbats for failure. Microsoft were happy to claim success, so it's fair to tar them with the failure.
Curses! My throw-away line pitched for cheap laughs has been taken seriously and refuted!
I was thinking of viral populations mutating in response to drugs. Now, this is from memory, so you'll need a massive grain of salt, but I recall reading about AIDS in this respect - the drugs cause populations to reduce or die off, leaving more drug-resistant versions free to breed and mutate. Soon enough the drugs lose effectiveness, and the viruses develop resistance to them (sounds like evolving defenses to me and you had a better description). These may not be innovations as such, but they sound like mutations to me and the survivors are certainly better suited to their environment than the ones that died off.
On top of that, your comment reminded me of my father's argument against evolution, which was "If apes came down from the trees millions of years ago to evolve, why aren't they still doing it today?" My answer then was "They still are, just very slowly."
The timescales involved for real species seperation are too large for us to observe (particularly with larger plants and animals), but there's no reason the processes we can observe in fossil records have stopped.
Thanks for the response. I have to be more careful throwing out one-liners around here!
I'm pretty sure WoW doesn't stress the network. My wife and I have played when our ISP had throttled the connection back from 6144kbps to 128kbps and the difference was minor.
WoW is not a bandwidth hog, more a constant quiet hum on the lines.
Until we have a computer model that can start from 20 years ago and predict today correctly, we won't know enough to say that we understand what's happening.
People have been working on weather simulation models for decades now and are still a long way from starting *last week* and getting *today* exactly right. This is a very hard problem with many, many variables, some of which we don't even know about.
It's true that we can't show definitive proof linking human actions to climate change, but there's a strong likelihood that we will *never* have that sort of proof, or that if we do, it'll come many years from today, possibly too late to make the changes we must make.
Given a potential threat, a likely cause and a looming deadline, it seems reasonable to try to mitigate against it as much as is reasonable.
Calling for absolute proof in science is a delaying tactic, although many don't realise this. Science works by disproving theories, until whatever remains is the best fit for all the data we can observe. Currently the human-caused climate change model is looking pretty good, although it's far from perfect.
The GPL does not impose any restrictions at all on what you can do with your copy of the software.
the main thing that the GPL does is allow you to make and distribute further copies of the work... provided you follow certain rules. Which includes, as you point out, not selling it as your own work sans source code.
The GPL definitely limits what you can do with your software, and you've outlined this at the end of your post.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing (I see it as a nett good thing) but we have to remember that all licences come with limitations and whether they are licences to use or licences to distribute, the limitations are real.
The licence you agree to when you install Windows or OS X is restrictive, but so is the licence you agree to when you install Linux. It's just that we value the Linux licence more as it seems less limiting to us.
Bubble... dispellable. Blessing of Protection... doesn't protect from magic. Buffs... dispellable by just about every class it seems. Hunters can dispel?!? Two stuns that seem to be resisted an *awful* lot. No specific interrupts (the stuns help, but once you've blown them, that's it, you're toast). Warlocks and Warriors cause fear in the zealous Paladins, and we run away like scared little girls.
In PvP, my Paladin is a great target, soaking up damage and keeping the enemy busy while other players step in to kill them. If a good healer can keep me going, I can keep the attention of the enemy players focused on the big guy in shiny plate with the massive hammer. They forget about the guys in leather who vanished just before I ran forward.
Without a good healer, I've got maybe three seconds to live.
WotLK Paladins look to be different. I hope so.
Sorry, pet peeve there. I don't want to be OP, I just want better balance against classes like Warlocks and Rogues (who I just cannot touch 1:1).
This is not so relevant, but a 10x10 pixel image might have a tiny performance hit compared to a 8x8 or 16x16 image. Software and hardware deals fine with non-power-of-two image dimensions, but never as fast as the alternative.
Me: A.) It's not Linux, so it won't "just work" no matter what you do...
Linux. It Just Works. (Your experience may vary.)
Me: No, that's not how Microsoft works. You pay them, and you get to use the software on that computer. They still own it - you don't...
That's not an artefact of proprietary software, it's basic copyright. I can download Ubuntu, but I do not own Ubuntu. I have a single copy, or as many duplicates as I want. I can't just do what I like with it though (eg change the branding and sell it as my own work sans source code) - there are rules for redistribution and all that. Nearly all software has some rules you must follow. F/OSS is not above this.
And you can move Windows to other PCs. I've done it. It might require a call to the Windows Activation team, but it's not hard. You can't have it on two at the same time though, but you can shift it.
I'm not a Windows user, except in the office. I'm a fan of Linux, even though I've never managed to really get it working right. I don't think you should misinform people about what proprietary software is or isn't though - only honest, accurate information is worth using to change people's minds about F/OSS.
You're right, I threw an off-the-cuff response out there to the specific claim by the parent poster that Apple can run on $2B. That poster seemed to go down the software-only path, but let's step back and look at the numbers.
I quoted $7.5B, and that's only the three months to Jun-08. Let's pull the data out.
$3.6B in Mac hardware $1.7B in iPod hardware $0.8B in music products & services (iTunes store) $0.4B in iPhone products and services $0.4B in peripherals $0.5B in software sales
That's $3.6B at risk. I threw $5B out there, but I included stuff I shouldn't have. Still, we have $3.6B on the table as being at risk. Sure, there might be no change but there is a chance that the entire amount will drop from the revenue.
The point is that we cannot know what will happen to that revenue.
Go to any large business and try to make a business case to put just under half their revenue at risk. You'll need absolutely rock-solid data, a business case so clear and bulletproof that there can be no room for doubt.
We certainly don't have that here. We don't even have agreement on the basics.
To your disclosure - I don't like the idea of Psystar selling modified versions of OS X. If they were selling a PC with a boxed copy of OS X and didn't do the installation, they couldn't be touched by any law in the land. Selling pre-installed machines with hacked software is another matter entirely.
Surely if the whole point is that a Mac is commodity hardware, then Apple are competing against Dell, HP, etc and cannot be considered a monopoly.
Or if Macs are not commodity hardware, then we can talk about the smaller, specific market of Macs versus the larger market of PCs. Even then I'd argue that Apple still competes against Dell, HP, etc, and again Apple hold no monopoly.
In addition to that, see my previous post for my thoughts on the "reasonable substitute" point. It's a red herring.
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Mages? Ha! You've got it easy!
Try being a Paladin. Only Holy Paladins are even close to being viable in Arena, and you'll never see any in the top twenty when the cash prizes are on offer.
The upcoming expansion is going to change this, apparently, but Paladins have been waiting a *long* time for any sign of change.
If anything, many of the Alliance racials needed to be toned down.
Yes, diplomacy is pretty damn powerful in battlegrounds.
"Can't we just talk about this?"
As hard as I try, negotiating a settlement over Tower Point (in Alterac Valley) just never seems to work.
Once Mac reaches market share tipping point, which I think is inevitable given their better marketing atm, I can't wait to see the mac get taken alive by the vultures. The lure of Free Smileys and Limewire isn't limited to Windows. The reason it hasn't crossed over is market share and cost/gain. Once that market share is reached, and it's more lucrative to entice suckers that aren't any smarter for paying a premium...
You're spot on there. We all know that the system design of OS X is precisely the same as Windows, and that the sort of easy hacks that affect Windows will always affect Macs. Security can only ever be through obscurity, never through design.
Obvious stuff, really.
Same for Linux.
Too true.
Just because google is the darling of the day doesn't mean it will stay that way.
True, but I'm pretty sure they have to commit some crime before being taken to court by the government. Being a monopoly player isn't a crime in and of itself, nor should it be. Having the potential to commit a crime is utterly irrelevant in law, unless some action is taken toward realising that potential (even planning may be enough).
I'll wait until I hear some specifics before I make any judgements on this one.
This thread reads like a Scientology website. Xenu says, Google good! Now together everybody, fill in the blank Google ----
No, what you're seeing is not groupthink in action but people who are yet to hear of any actual crimes. Until we hear of specific criminal activities, Google are indeed good.
Innocent until proven guilty, remember?
Their support *is* fantastic! That is absolutely true.
Unfortunately it's "fantastic" in the old sense of the word.
Just because I'm curious...
When Microsoft trumpet the LSE's uptime in their advertising (plenty of links today on that) are they really trumpeting something they have no control over? Your post seems to indicate that this is your opinion.
We've only got two responses here.
A) Microsoft have no control over the final product, and their ads are just lies (marketing should at least have a kernel of truth). They should be more honest and change their claims to "Our platform was used to develop the software that gives the LSE such great uptime." Or perhaps drop the whole uptime thing anyway, since there's not a damn thing they have to do with it.
B) Microsoft have control over the final product, and jcr's post is reasonable.
Either way, it's not a good story for Microsoft.
To the lay-person, taking the plaudits for success means also taking the brickbats for failure. Microsoft were happy to claim success, so it's fair to tar them with the failure.
Curses! My throw-away line pitched for cheap laughs has been taken seriously and refuted!
I was thinking of viral populations mutating in response to drugs. Now, this is from memory, so you'll need a massive grain of salt, but I recall reading about AIDS in this respect - the drugs cause populations to reduce or die off, leaving more drug-resistant versions free to breed and mutate. Soon enough the drugs lose effectiveness, and the viruses develop resistance to them (sounds like evolving defenses to me and you had a better description). These may not be innovations as such, but they sound like mutations to me and the survivors are certainly better suited to their environment than the ones that died off.
On top of that, your comment reminded me of my father's argument against evolution, which was "If apes came down from the trees millions of years ago to evolve, why aren't they still doing it today?" My answer then was "They still are, just very slowly."
The timescales involved for real species seperation are too large for us to observe (particularly with larger plants and animals), but there's no reason the processes we can observe in fossil records have stopped.
Thanks for the response. I have to be more careful throwing out one-liners around here!
Hey, he didn't steal that oxygen! He just borrowed it. It still exists, although temporarily bonded with carbon.
Apparently, the real power-users also can't connect unless they kill a puppy. Odd that they left that out of the article.
I'm pretty sure WoW doesn't stress the network. My wife and I have played when our ISP had throttled the connection back from 6144kbps to 128kbps and the difference was minor.
WoW is not a bandwidth hog, more a constant quiet hum on the lines.
Evolution is history?
When did it stop?
Someone better tell the viruses, those short generations have them evolving like crazy!
Hey! Stop repeating that 'water vapour' story. Your post here is 25mins after you acknowledged someone else's correction.
Until we have a computer model that can start from 20 years ago and predict today correctly, we won't know enough to say that we understand what's happening.
People have been working on weather simulation models for decades now and are still a long way from starting *last week* and getting *today* exactly right. This is a very hard problem with many, many variables, some of which we don't even know about.
It's true that we can't show definitive proof linking human actions to climate change, but there's a strong likelihood that we will *never* have that sort of proof, or that if we do, it'll come many years from today, possibly too late to make the changes we must make.
Given a potential threat, a likely cause and a looming deadline, it seems reasonable to try to mitigate against it as much as is reasonable.
Calling for absolute proof in science is a delaying tactic, although many don't realise this. Science works by disproving theories, until whatever remains is the best fit for all the data we can observe. Currently the human-caused climate change model is looking pretty good, although it's far from perfect.
Pirating it will make it work on a LAN?
Wow, these clever pirates!
I remember buying it so long ago, but the hype was too much for the game to live up to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco_(computer_game)
Screenshots from the Atari-ST version:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-st/eco/screenshots
Ah, memories...
The GPL does not impose any restrictions at all on what you can do with your copy of the software.
the main thing that the GPL does is allow you to make and distribute further copies of the work ... provided you follow certain rules. Which includes, as you point out, not selling it as your own work sans source code.
The GPL definitely limits what you can do with your software, and you've outlined this at the end of your post.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing (I see it as a nett good thing) but we have to remember that all licences come with limitations and whether they are licences to use or licences to distribute, the limitations are real.
The licence you agree to when you install Windows or OS X is restrictive, but so is the licence you agree to when you install Linux. It's just that we value the Linux licence more as it seems less limiting to us.
Every class is OP! :)
Except Paladins.
Bubble... dispellable.
Blessing of Protection... doesn't protect from magic.
Buffs... dispellable by just about every class it seems. Hunters can dispel?!?
Two stuns that seem to be resisted an *awful* lot.
No specific interrupts (the stuns help, but once you've blown them, that's it, you're toast).
Warlocks and Warriors cause fear in the zealous Paladins, and we run away like scared little girls.
In PvP, my Paladin is a great target, soaking up damage and keeping the enemy busy while other players step in to kill them. If a good healer can keep me going, I can keep the attention of the enemy players focused on the big guy in shiny plate with the massive hammer. They forget about the guys in leather who vanished just before I ran forward.
Without a good healer, I've got maybe three seconds to live.
WotLK Paladins look to be different. I hope so.
Sorry, pet peeve there. I don't want to be OP, I just want better balance against classes like Warlocks and Rogues (who I just cannot touch 1:1).
This is not so relevant, but a 10x10 pixel image might have a tiny performance hit compared to a 8x8 or 16x16 image. Software and hardware deals fine with non-power-of-two image dimensions, but never as fast as the alternative.
So that's *you*!
Tell me, do you install Windows? What do you think of OS X? Or those ads? And could you handle day to day Linux use?
Finally, all those quotes about what you do, or how much you know can be substantiated!
Me: A.) It's not Linux, so it won't "just work" no matter what you do...
Linux. It Just Works.
(Your experience may vary.)
Me: No, that's not how Microsoft works. You pay them, and you get to use the software on that computer. They still own it - you don't...
That's not an artefact of proprietary software, it's basic copyright. I can download Ubuntu, but I do not own Ubuntu. I have a single copy, or as many duplicates as I want. I can't just do what I like with it though (eg change the branding and sell it as my own work sans source code) - there are rules for redistribution and all that. Nearly all software has some rules you must follow. F/OSS is not above this.
And you can move Windows to other PCs. I've done it. It might require a call to the Windows Activation team, but it's not hard. You can't have it on two at the same time though, but you can shift it.
I'm not a Windows user, except in the office. I'm a fan of Linux, even though I've never managed to really get it working right. I don't think you should misinform people about what proprietary software is or isn't though - only honest, accurate information is worth using to change people's minds about F/OSS.
That goes for me too.
(I feel like this is becoming one of those "I am Spartacus!" scenes.)
Um, if the complete share of $3.6B would be at risk, a quite large amount of *OSX sales* would come to the rescue.
No, that's an assumption. You don't bet that sort of money, or even a fraction of it, on a guess.
Remember, $0.5B is of standalone, retail packages of OSX, without the one bundled with new Macs.
Well, that $0.5B includes all Apple software, not just OS X. There's iLife, Aperture, Shake, Motion, that video thing and more.
Additionally, if Macs ales would fall in this scale, Macs weren't competitive in the first place.
That's a good point, but when Apple assumes all the R&D and marketing costs, any clone maker should be able to put out cheaper systems.
I'm looking forward to the case. It's interesting at least.
You're right, I threw an off-the-cuff response out there to the specific claim by the parent poster that Apple can run on $2B. That poster seemed to go down the software-only path, but let's step back and look at the numbers.
I quoted $7.5B, and that's only the three months to Jun-08. Let's pull the data out.
$3.6B in Mac hardware
$1.7B in iPod hardware
$0.8B in music products & services (iTunes store)
$0.4B in iPhone products and services
$0.4B in peripherals
$0.5B in software sales
(from Nasdaq, about halfway down)
That's $3.6B at risk. I threw $5B out there, but I included stuff I shouldn't have. Still, we have $3.6B on the table as being at risk. Sure, there might be no change but there is a chance that the entire amount will drop from the revenue.
The point is that we cannot know what will happen to that revenue.
Go to any large business and try to make a business case to put just under half their revenue at risk. You'll need absolutely rock-solid data, a business case so clear and bulletproof that there can be no room for doubt.
We certainly don't have that here. We don't even have agreement on the basics.
To your disclosure - I don't like the idea of Psystar selling modified versions of OS X. If they were selling a PC with a boxed copy of OS X and didn't do the installation, they couldn't be touched by any law in the land. Selling pre-installed machines with hacked software is another matter entirely.
Surely if the whole point is that a Mac is commodity hardware, then Apple are competing against Dell, HP, etc and cannot be considered a monopoly.
Or if Macs are not commodity hardware, then we can talk about the smaller, specific market of Macs versus the larger market of PCs. Even then I'd argue that Apple still competes against Dell, HP, etc, and again Apple hold no monopoly.
In addition to that, see my previous post for my thoughts on the "reasonable substitute" point. It's a red herring.
Psystar is format-shifting a legally-purchased copy OS X for the convenience of its customers. Nothing more.
No, they're modifying the code slightly in order to make it boot. A Psystar clone does not run the same exact code that any Apple Mac does.
Now we're looking at Psystar selling modified versions of another company's software.
Very different from format shifting.