As the parts are mostly "off the shelf" nowadays, it really isn't possible in any way I can think of. Even the "one box" macs of today still use an ATI or Nvidia card and the respective video drivers, displaying to an off-the-shelf-but-placed-in-a-fancy-box CRT or LCD. As pretty much all modern monitors simply stop displaying once they're fed a signal out of range, it really isn't an issue.
Plus, writing a virus and distributing a virus is a different thing altogether. The successful Windows viruses and worms are self propagating. A virus isn't as much of a virus if you need to email it to another person, ask them to click on it, and then have them type in their admin passwords to run it. There's plenty of scripts that will corrupt system files or cause a system to flip out once they're fed an administrator password on pretty much every operating system. But is sending an email around asking people to go into their / directory and typing sudo rm -rf a virus? I don't really think so...
It runs old OS9 applications in an emulation layer. That layer starts up as an application by choice, meaning that you either turn it on once your computer is on, or when an old application triggers it. So you would have to manually install the virus yourself.
At that point, it would do its virus things inside that emulation layer, probably corrupting some aspect of the environment. When you close the environment (just like any other application), the virus's activity would cease. The fix would be simply "reinstall the environment."
So if you needed to use the "Classic" environment for an old application, and you for whatever reason decided to install the virus or place a disk with a virus on it in your computer and run it in the Classic environment, yes, you could give yourself that virus. But that's hardly that much different than the numerous "Proof that you can intentionally break your system" scripts and applications that are around for every operating system.
In my experience, all of the old viruses that Macs got were Macro viruses from old versions of Word. They have no way of propagating without writing to new documents, but the newer versions of word are pretty innoculated against Macro viruses IIRC.
The short answer to "What happens" is "not much if anything."
It's not so much that they're virus proof. It's that there are no viruses currently.
Could that change in the future? Perhaps. However, the system is built in a way that programs aren't as interconnected in the guts, so a potential virus has a LOT more work cut out for it to make it problematic. It's not like Windows where the IE engine is used in both Outlook, the web browser, and the file browser, and also gives applications low-level access to thigns it shouldn't. OS X handles permissions very well, and even admins aren't "root." To change things, they need to authenticate.
So even a malicious virus would require people to type in their password in multiple dialog prompts, which even novices understand tends to only happen when you change important things on OS X.
But as the port issue and unneeded services issue doesn't really exist on OS X to nearly the same degree as on Windows, even XP, it really is going to take a lot more than just a scare article to cause viruses to sprout up.
I agree to a point. For instance, I've got a 40 gig. It's got 31 gigs of music on it. A lot of that I don't listen to, but sometimes I'm out and about and, dammit, there's that one song you just want to hear a little bit from, and it's nice to have it sitting there. So I have pretty much my entire music library on my iPod. That's why I own one.
That being said, though, I can totally see the point of someone who owns a full-capacity iPod picking up something super-small like the Shuffle or the Nano for the times where they just want a little music without the weight or size of a full iPod. I ride my bike to work pretty regularly now that the temps here have dropped, and if I want to listen to music I need to put my iPod in my bag and keep my bag on my back. Now, I take my bag to work anyway, as it usually contains a thermos and some pens and my lunch. But I could also strap a supersmall and light Nano to my arm, strap the thermos to the 'tray' on the back of the bike, and not worry about the bag -- and have immediate access to the iPod.
My "main" playlist that contains all songs I've rated between 4-5 stars is currently 3.6 gigs. It's the playlist I listen to the most, and the one that I tend to gravitate towards when I just want some music to listen to. As I'm sure you realize, that's right at the bigger Nano's specs. In other words, I could have my full iPod that I fall back on when I'm not sure, and a baby iPod that's for travel or commuting where I want to skip around a bit but want to stay within my favorite songs.
So I'm totally with you on the size thing, and I think I'll always have an iPod that can hold all of my songs. But having something that's really, really small for the times where I just want to take my "favorites" playlist around? That's mighty tempting.
But so what? Cash never had ANY notion of "proving" who it belonged to, and it's been with us for a long, long time.
That's my thinking, too. Sure, if you keep all of your assets in cash, or are super-secure, it only takes a misplaced wallet or a break-in and you're just as screwed as anyone.
At least with a credit card, you're protected if someone steals your info and makes charges. Even if they open up new accounts using your credit rating, you can get it removed (most people who run into trouble with it are those who don't keep track of their credit information, so when they try to get a major loan, the bad info comes up and they need to rush to get it removed. If you have the time (less than 6 months, as that's the max time allowed for a company to rebuke your claim) it's relatively easy, despite the hoops and hassle).
With cash, you get none of that. If it's gone, it's gone. If your life savings of bills catches fire, you're screwed. If your credit cards burn up or are stolen... you just get a new one, with no real damage done to your actual finances.
Not to mention how difficult it is to use cash for anything but immediate, local purchases.
That was part of the big deal with Adobe doing the whole "creative suite" thing -- they had finally brought the overall UI of their programs together so that they were rather interchangeable.
Obviously there were differences enough respective to each program -- the tools for Illustrator are quite different from the tools for GoLive, for example. But the palettes and use of each program was exceedingly similar, after years of being just different enough to be annoying.
Still, Paint Shop Pro uses an interface very similar to Photoshop, and I'm relatively certain that it's how it holds on to its relatively small marketshare. It's an alternative that's similar enough so people can use it as either a "home alternative" or a "stepping stone" if they're already familiar with Photoshop.
While naysayers will say that just because Photoshop is popular isn't reason enough to start using a similar interface, there are a lot of things that Photoshop just does right. Putting tools that are semantically similar yet different enough that they won't be used simultaneously on different tabs of one window keeps them visible without getting in the way or "losing" them. And all the tabs can be pulled off if you need to use them a lot. All of the windows recognize one another, and if you start moving them around they'll auto-align with one another and so on. Similar tools are grouped together and are easily accessible.
It's not a perfect interface, but it's one that's easy to pick up on right away and create or edit materials. It's had a long history of user testing, and it shows. An interface should be easy to use for a beginner -- it shouldn't require its userbase to "just spend time getting used to it."
Similar to how someone familiar with Office can pick up Open Office with relative ease, so should it be true of most similar applications -- good user interface design will ultimately end up with some similarities, but should be obvious and usable enough for most beginners.
Incidentally, this is what I've been doing. It's common knowledge that the theaters make nearly all of their money from food sales, so if the theater is crappy, I simply don't buy anything.
Conversely, if I really like a theater and wish them well, I'll make a point of buying some popcorn or a soda. I see it as a "tip" of sorts.
So the crappy suburban theater with kids running around and that ship in pre-popped popcorn in giant plastic bags? Yeah, I use my student discount even though I'm not a student and I only use it for the occasional movie that isn't playing at the local. The local city theater that has smaller screens and less cushy chairs but has a wonderful audience, attentive and smiling staff (not sullen teens), and a good selection of movies -- both big name and limited release? Yeah, I buy a soda and popcorn every time, even if we just ate dinner.
I've heard that too (no pun intended). I don't have an audio setup at home for ultra-hi-fi, but numerous reports I've read say that the surround mix is "airy" or flat in some way. Almost like the "surround option" on cheapy all-in-one systems.
So at least HD video has a much more tangible advantage over HD audio -- it's just bumping up the quality, and not requiring a remixing of the source. But that's still the only real advantage it's offering over DVD.
I totally agree that people are more keen to visual differences than audible differences, but I'm skeptical of the statements that say that film's resolution is significantly higher than even 1080i format video. Film puts a significant amount of grain into a recording, which, while not a bad thing, does reduce the overall clarity of an image IMO. For example, those grainy "artistic" shots aren't going to look any better at 1080i compared to 480p -- they're still going to be grainy. "Pi" isn't going to look any better.
I have HDTV and some HD channels at home, and it is pretty neat to see individual pores on people's faces on PBS. But I compare it to a DVD and I don't notice it nearly as much compared to regular TV (which is awful after seeing HD).
So yes, it is all about capturing the hearts and minds. That still doesn't bring the price down. I think most people are comfortable spending under $1000USD on a TV. How much does your demo setup cost, to consumers? At some point, it's cheaper to just go see it on film in the movie theater if you're that concerned with quality.
(and, as another layer of skeptibility on my part, at the smaller screen sizes that most consumers watch TV on, the increased resolution will be that much less noticeable. Blowing a DVD up to a 9' screen may not look as good as a 1080i show, but on a 30" screen?)
I do agree that the state of music does tend to give higher quality recordings less of a chance to shine and more of a chance of having an ultra-flat frequency response. One of my friends always complains about compression nowadays, as it seems like the only way to find an album that isn't overcompressed is to wait for an artist to become established, release an overcompressed album, develop a following, break ties with its original label, and follow up on an indie. That indie release will not be overcompressed.;D
But you're definitely right in the fact that many of the features of these newer formats would need to be explicitly mixed for. It could be done, but it would be a separate process. You can't just mix for good stereo imaging with the standard "vocals in the middle" process -- engineers need to actually place things in the surround sound mix appropriately, and for a small market. There really isn't much incentive for a market so driven by radio to invest in these newer formats, and, yeah, you end up with stuff that's really not suited for SACD or DVD-A coming out on the format.
Most of the people I've spoken to who really enjoy their new-format audio setups are big fans of classical music, and to them the cost and difficulty of maintaining such a setup is worthwhile. Oh, and live music, which, to me at least, is somewhat unsurprising with the advantages that surround sound hi-def audio provides.
If you invent something, and someone else then patents it, you can argue that it was simply prior art and not pay anything.
Sure, you won't be able to patent your own thing, but that's how patents work. First to file doesn't make it a race -- it means that a company has to invent it and then can file.
As I understand it, since our system is "first to invent" you can get a patent on most anything, and then try to invent the thing in question. If someone else invents it first, they can file a conflicting patent. This should hopefully prevent one company filing stuff "just in case" and then perhaps inventing it sometime in the future.
Ultimately it depends on whether the content providers are happy with the open DRM specifications, rather than simply if it's available. If they're not restrictive enough or don't allow them to set up specifics related to the track or sale method (subscription-based stores vs. buy "forever" stores), then it won't matter how open it is.
It also makes me wonder if all of these DRM methods won't clutter up the online music usefulness in the future. If every player not only needs to support 10 different formats, but then 10 different DRM methods on top of those formats, that's a lot more work and effort towards creating any media player, soft- or hardware.
Ultimately, the restrictions on something like, say, Apple's iTunes are not very restrictive. You can still burn multiple copies to disc, and if you really want to share your music, you can just re-rip it. What, it's not super-high quality? It's a rip for free on the internet. I've never had any complaints against original music downloaded from the iTMS, and if someone downloading music "illegally" is complaining about the sound quality, that sounds more like their problem, not mine (or Apple's).
The way I see it, it's a difficult draw to get new people into gaming on Windows, let alone other operating systems. The focus is on multiplayer, with sometimes expensive video card requirements for an optimum experience.
Will that attract people who prefer to play consoles? Will the focus on multiplayer FPS and MMORPGs really draw in new blood?
I think it's going to be a hard sell. If mac gaming would essentially pull from the exact same market, then I think they're in for trouble. If mac gaming will pull from people who own a mac, want to play games, but have no way of playing them, and are looking to play those specific genres of games, then there might be something.
But, heck, most gamers eat through games and are done with them in less than 2 weeks, and then lament about the lack of fresh games for 2 months until the next one hits. Is that going to attract ports? Or are macs simply going to get the occasional big game ported a year later, the very rare game released on both platforms simultaneously, or focus on less graphically intensive, shareware/freeware indie projects that don't focus just on FPS and MMORPG?
Personally, I'd be happy if it stays in the realm of indie projects for cheap by people who want to actually develop fun gameplay.
I do also wonder if the highly modular nature of the x86 market helps the "get a new video card every year" mentality that subsequently helps drive games that, while not exactly pushing better gameplay or newer stories, at least pushes the graphics.
Most people are happy working on a mac without ever really getting into its guts. That's a far cry from the "rebuild a PC every year" crowd who pushes for hardware advancements, sometimes simply because they feel like upgrading. I should know; I was in the same boat until I bought a G5 last year. Sure, sometimes I get the itch to put more RAM in my computer, but I'm at a point where it's overkill. For me to seriously upgrade, I would need to buy a new machine. I can't continuously graft new parts to the thing (well, I can kind of get new video cards), and that's even more true for the majority of machines from Apple.
Since Apple controls the majority of the hardware, if they don't push for the latest and greatest games through their hardware support, then it doesn't surprise me that game developers don't pursue it either.
Hey, thanks! I remember playing this game in high school but had completely forgotten the name. We always just called it "tank wars," which is, of course, numerous other games. Oh man, we had so much fun playing this on fridays!
No pun intended, although feel free to interpret it that way.
When I was a kid, my parents bought the family an Atari XE. A "console" system that was physically a keyboard and ran BASIC. You could type in a program from the command line and it would run. At the time, I was 4 or 5 I think, and I would just type stuff verbatim from the book. But it was an awful lot of fun. When the book has you do stuff that essentially just results in a flashing screen or a moving blob, sure, that's boring to adults or teens, but kids get a kick out of stuff like that. Or at least, I did.
When I was a teenager, I first got introduced to more creative programming with Pascal. It's a very easy language to learn, and you can do some fun stuff with it. After learning some basics, I had made a cheesy "dungeon" style game. I kept adding on to it as I learned more and it really became pretty neat.
So that's what I'd say. Sure, absorbing media from the internet is fun, but learning about what you can make computers do is probably more valuable. Having a basic understanding of computer guts teaches you things like saving time through batch processing or writing basic little scripts, but that's all worthwhile both for future jobs or just future fun. Don't jump into C, though -- encourage the easier, more basic languages and give your child some fun example programs, that give a visual output of some sort. Even things like, say, if you compile programs, have your child type in the appropriate things at the command line. Sure, they're just typing back what you tell them, but then having their screen fill with code, and a few minutes later having a program that they can play with is pretty neat. Have them "compile" frozen bubble, for instance;D
Yes, you're right. I keep forgetting that "suing successfully with reasonable cause" and "suing just 'cause" are technically both viable for getting a case accepted and defendents indicted.
Most likely, if the patent goes to court, it will be invalidated, since the court cares about products on the market prior to the patent date. After all, what's stopping any random joe on the street from simply filing patents after seeing something on the shelves? The product was available prior to the patent filing, so Apple wouldn't be liable.
To me, what this more likely means is that anyone can produce products with an ipod-like interface.
While I agree with you from a business POV, the copyright office is a government organization that should try its absolute hardest to be compatible and useful for as many people as possible.
I know it's a poor analogy, but imagine if some other portion of the government rolled out a new plan that only affected Caucasians, with support for "minorities" coming soon thereafter. There'd be, rightly so, a lot of angry people.
Now, in no way do I think that the government would seriously push something like that based on race, but I think that's also why it's stupid for them to focus on only appeasing approximately 85-90% of internet users. They should delay the release of the site until it works at least reasonably well in all major browsers. After all, Mac users don't even have a supported IE out (the 5.2 is laughable compared to even the 5.0 IE) and while Linux may not be very strong in the home yet, it's much more popular for businesses and administration. The likelyhood of a secretary working for a tech company and being set up on a Linux box, who also is tasked with submitting stuff to the copyright office, is probably fairly strong. A small portion, sure, but still a portion. And the government, of all organizations, should be representative of small portions. After all, they're supposed to protect us from the "tyranny of the majority" and all that.
Isn't this already true for advertising? I don't watch much TV, but the times that I do I always see ads for "Eat our chips, they're not greasy like those other guys," "Our laundry detergent works better than the leading brand!" and "why shop at those other guys?"
They're all vague references to other companies that most people have an idea about, but are not mentioned. I've never seen a car commercial that says "Buy [our brand], because it's just better than a Ford," or a fast food commercial that says "why eat McDonalds when there's Wendys?"
It seems like these laws are already in place, probably to protect companies from competitors that could engage in either negative advertising or use their established brand to piggy-back.
To answer your initial question, though, I'd imagine that Google will now reject ads that fall under this criteria. If they accept them and continue to list them, that's Google's problem -- they're the ones who lost the lawsuit, not individual advertisers.
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Plus, writing a virus and distributing a virus is a different thing altogether. The successful Windows viruses and worms are self propagating. A virus isn't as much of a virus if you need to email it to another person, ask them to click on it, and then have them type in their admin passwords to run it. There's plenty of scripts that will corrupt system files or cause a system to flip out once they're fed an administrator password on pretty much every operating system. But is sending an email around asking people to go into their / directory and typing sudo rm -rf a virus? I don't really think so...
At that point, it would do its virus things inside that emulation layer, probably corrupting some aspect of the environment. When you close the environment (just like any other application), the virus's activity would cease. The fix would be simply "reinstall the environment."
So if you needed to use the "Classic" environment for an old application, and you for whatever reason decided to install the virus or place a disk with a virus on it in your computer and run it in the Classic environment, yes, you could give yourself that virus. But that's hardly that much different than the numerous "Proof that you can intentionally break your system" scripts and applications that are around for every operating system.
In my experience, all of the old viruses that Macs got were Macro viruses from old versions of Word. They have no way of propagating without writing to new documents, but the newer versions of word are pretty innoculated against Macro viruses IIRC.
The short answer to "What happens" is "not much if anything."
Could that change in the future? Perhaps. However, the system is built in a way that programs aren't as interconnected in the guts, so a potential virus has a LOT more work cut out for it to make it problematic. It's not like Windows where the IE engine is used in both Outlook, the web browser, and the file browser, and also gives applications low-level access to thigns it shouldn't. OS X handles permissions very well, and even admins aren't "root." To change things, they need to authenticate.
So even a malicious virus would require people to type in their password in multiple dialog prompts, which even novices understand tends to only happen when you change important things on OS X.
But as the port issue and unneeded services issue doesn't really exist on OS X to nearly the same degree as on Windows, even XP, it really is going to take a lot more than just a scare article to cause viruses to sprout up.
That being said, though, I can totally see the point of someone who owns a full-capacity iPod picking up something super-small like the Shuffle or the Nano for the times where they just want a little music without the weight or size of a full iPod. I ride my bike to work pretty regularly now that the temps here have dropped, and if I want to listen to music I need to put my iPod in my bag and keep my bag on my back. Now, I take my bag to work anyway, as it usually contains a thermos and some pens and my lunch. But I could also strap a supersmall and light Nano to my arm, strap the thermos to the 'tray' on the back of the bike, and not worry about the bag -- and have immediate access to the iPod.
My "main" playlist that contains all songs I've rated between 4-5 stars is currently 3.6 gigs. It's the playlist I listen to the most, and the one that I tend to gravitate towards when I just want some music to listen to. As I'm sure you realize, that's right at the bigger Nano's specs. In other words, I could have my full iPod that I fall back on when I'm not sure, and a baby iPod that's for travel or commuting where I want to skip around a bit but want to stay within my favorite songs.
So I'm totally with you on the size thing, and I think I'll always have an iPod that can hold all of my songs. But having something that's really, really small for the times where I just want to take my "favorites" playlist around? That's mighty tempting.
That's my thinking, too. Sure, if you keep all of your assets in cash, or are super-secure, it only takes a misplaced wallet or a break-in and you're just as screwed as anyone.
At least with a credit card, you're protected if someone steals your info and makes charges. Even if they open up new accounts using your credit rating, you can get it removed (most people who run into trouble with it are those who don't keep track of their credit information, so when they try to get a major loan, the bad info comes up and they need to rush to get it removed. If you have the time (less than 6 months, as that's the max time allowed for a company to rebuke your claim) it's relatively easy, despite the hoops and hassle).
With cash, you get none of that. If it's gone, it's gone. If your life savings of bills catches fire, you're screwed. If your credit cards burn up or are stolen... you just get a new one, with no real damage done to your actual finances.
Not to mention how difficult it is to use cash for anything but immediate, local purchases.
That's not the case with XP. I've tested it out -- use the install disc to format to NTFS, then switch over to Linux. It'll ID it correctly as NTFS.
Obviously there were differences enough respective to each program -- the tools for Illustrator are quite different from the tools for GoLive, for example. But the palettes and use of each program was exceedingly similar, after years of being just different enough to be annoying.
Still, Paint Shop Pro uses an interface very similar to Photoshop, and I'm relatively certain that it's how it holds on to its relatively small marketshare. It's an alternative that's similar enough so people can use it as either a "home alternative" or a "stepping stone" if they're already familiar with Photoshop.
While naysayers will say that just because Photoshop is popular isn't reason enough to start using a similar interface, there are a lot of things that Photoshop just does right. Putting tools that are semantically similar yet different enough that they won't be used simultaneously on different tabs of one window keeps them visible without getting in the way or "losing" them. And all the tabs can be pulled off if you need to use them a lot. All of the windows recognize one another, and if you start moving them around they'll auto-align with one another and so on. Similar tools are grouped together and are easily accessible.
It's not a perfect interface, but it's one that's easy to pick up on right away and create or edit materials. It's had a long history of user testing, and it shows. An interface should be easy to use for a beginner -- it shouldn't require its userbase to "just spend time getting used to it." Similar to how someone familiar with Office can pick up Open Office with relative ease, so should it be true of most similar applications -- good user interface design will ultimately end up with some similarities, but should be obvious and usable enough for most beginners.
Conversely, if I really like a theater and wish them well, I'll make a point of buying some popcorn or a soda. I see it as a "tip" of sorts.
So the crappy suburban theater with kids running around and that ship in pre-popped popcorn in giant plastic bags? Yeah, I use my student discount even though I'm not a student and I only use it for the occasional movie that isn't playing at the local. The local city theater that has smaller screens and less cushy chairs but has a wonderful audience, attentive and smiling staff (not sullen teens), and a good selection of movies -- both big name and limited release? Yeah, I buy a soda and popcorn every time, even if we just ate dinner.
Kudos to you, good sir :D
So at least HD video has a much more tangible advantage over HD audio -- it's just bumping up the quality, and not requiring a remixing of the source. But that's still the only real advantage it's offering over DVD.
I have HDTV and some HD channels at home, and it is pretty neat to see individual pores on people's faces on PBS. But I compare it to a DVD and I don't notice it nearly as much compared to regular TV (which is awful after seeing HD).
So yes, it is all about capturing the hearts and minds. That still doesn't bring the price down. I think most people are comfortable spending under $1000USD on a TV. How much does your demo setup cost, to consumers? At some point, it's cheaper to just go see it on film in the movie theater if you're that concerned with quality.
(and, as another layer of skeptibility on my part, at the smaller screen sizes that most consumers watch TV on, the increased resolution will be that much less noticeable. Blowing a DVD up to a 9' screen may not look as good as a 1080i show, but on a 30" screen?)
But you're definitely right in the fact that many of the features of these newer formats would need to be explicitly mixed for. It could be done, but it would be a separate process. You can't just mix for good stereo imaging with the standard "vocals in the middle" process -- engineers need to actually place things in the surround sound mix appropriately, and for a small market. There really isn't much incentive for a market so driven by radio to invest in these newer formats, and, yeah, you end up with stuff that's really not suited for SACD or DVD-A coming out on the format.
Most of the people I've spoken to who really enjoy their new-format audio setups are big fans of classical music, and to them the cost and difficulty of maintaining such a setup is worthwhile. Oh, and live music, which, to me at least, is somewhat unsurprising with the advantages that surround sound hi-def audio provides.
Well, you could, if one existed.
Sure, you won't be able to patent your own thing, but that's how patents work. First to file doesn't make it a race -- it means that a company has to invent it and then can file.
As I understand it, since our system is "first to invent" you can get a patent on most anything, and then try to invent the thing in question. If someone else invents it first, they can file a conflicting patent. This should hopefully prevent one company filing stuff "just in case" and then perhaps inventing it sometime in the future.
It also makes me wonder if all of these DRM methods won't clutter up the online music usefulness in the future. If every player not only needs to support 10 different formats, but then 10 different DRM methods on top of those formats, that's a lot more work and effort towards creating any media player, soft- or hardware.
Ultimately, the restrictions on something like, say, Apple's iTunes are not very restrictive. You can still burn multiple copies to disc, and if you really want to share your music, you can just re-rip it. What, it's not super-high quality? It's a rip for free on the internet. I've never had any complaints against original music downloaded from the iTMS, and if someone downloading music "illegally" is complaining about the sound quality, that sounds more like their problem, not mine (or Apple's).
Will that attract people who prefer to play consoles? Will the focus on multiplayer FPS and MMORPGs really draw in new blood?
I think it's going to be a hard sell. If mac gaming would essentially pull from the exact same market, then I think they're in for trouble. If mac gaming will pull from people who own a mac, want to play games, but have no way of playing them, and are looking to play those specific genres of games, then there might be something.
But, heck, most gamers eat through games and are done with them in less than 2 weeks, and then lament about the lack of fresh games for 2 months until the next one hits. Is that going to attract ports? Or are macs simply going to get the occasional big game ported a year later, the very rare game released on both platforms simultaneously, or focus on less graphically intensive, shareware/freeware indie projects that don't focus just on FPS and MMORPG?
Personally, I'd be happy if it stays in the realm of indie projects for cheap by people who want to actually develop fun gameplay.
Most people are happy working on a mac without ever really getting into its guts. That's a far cry from the "rebuild a PC every year" crowd who pushes for hardware advancements, sometimes simply because they feel like upgrading. I should know; I was in the same boat until I bought a G5 last year. Sure, sometimes I get the itch to put more RAM in my computer, but I'm at a point where it's overkill. For me to seriously upgrade, I would need to buy a new machine. I can't continuously graft new parts to the thing (well, I can kind of get new video cards), and that's even more true for the majority of machines from Apple.
Since Apple controls the majority of the hardware, if they don't push for the latest and greatest games through their hardware support, then it doesn't surprise me that game developers don't pursue it either.
Hey, thanks! I remember playing this game in high school but had completely forgotten the name. We always just called it "tank wars," which is, of course, numerous other games. Oh man, we had so much fun playing this on fridays!
Yep, which is why I'm posting my opinion, and not offering legal advice.
When I was a kid, my parents bought the family an Atari XE. A "console" system that was physically a keyboard and ran BASIC. You could type in a program from the command line and it would run. At the time, I was 4 or 5 I think, and I would just type stuff verbatim from the book. But it was an awful lot of fun. When the book has you do stuff that essentially just results in a flashing screen or a moving blob, sure, that's boring to adults or teens, but kids get a kick out of stuff like that. Or at least, I did.
When I was a teenager, I first got introduced to more creative programming with Pascal. It's a very easy language to learn, and you can do some fun stuff with it. After learning some basics, I had made a cheesy "dungeon" style game. I kept adding on to it as I learned more and it really became pretty neat.
So that's what I'd say. Sure, absorbing media from the internet is fun, but learning about what you can make computers do is probably more valuable. Having a basic understanding of computer guts teaches you things like saving time through batch processing or writing basic little scripts, but that's all worthwhile both for future jobs or just future fun. Don't jump into C, though -- encourage the easier, more basic languages and give your child some fun example programs, that give a visual output of some sort. Even things like, say, if you compile programs, have your child type in the appropriate things at the command line. Sure, they're just typing back what you tell them, but then having their screen fill with code, and a few minutes later having a program that they can play with is pretty neat. Have them "compile" frozen bubble, for instance ;D
Yes, you're right. I keep forgetting that "suing successfully with reasonable cause" and "suing just 'cause" are technically both viable for getting a case accepted and defendents indicted.
If they're working 30 hours a day, I seriously hope they're billing their lunch!
To me, what this more likely means is that anyone can produce products with an ipod-like interface.
I know it's a poor analogy, but imagine if some other portion of the government rolled out a new plan that only affected Caucasians, with support for "minorities" coming soon thereafter. There'd be, rightly so, a lot of angry people.
Now, in no way do I think that the government would seriously push something like that based on race, but I think that's also why it's stupid for them to focus on only appeasing approximately 85-90% of internet users. They should delay the release of the site until it works at least reasonably well in all major browsers. After all, Mac users don't even have a supported IE out (the 5.2 is laughable compared to even the 5.0 IE) and while Linux may not be very strong in the home yet, it's much more popular for businesses and administration. The likelyhood of a secretary working for a tech company and being set up on a Linux box, who also is tasked with submitting stuff to the copyright office, is probably fairly strong. A small portion, sure, but still a portion. And the government, of all organizations, should be representative of small portions. After all, they're supposed to protect us from the "tyranny of the majority" and all that.
They're all vague references to other companies that most people have an idea about, but are not mentioned. I've never seen a car commercial that says "Buy [our brand], because it's just better than a Ford," or a fast food commercial that says "why eat McDonalds when there's Wendys?"
It seems like these laws are already in place, probably to protect companies from competitors that could engage in either negative advertising or use their established brand to piggy-back.
To answer your initial question, though, I'd imagine that Google will now reject ads that fall under this criteria. If they accept them and continue to list them, that's Google's problem -- they're the ones who lost the lawsuit, not individual advertisers.