How is a copyright term of 14 years going to cause anyone to reduce their investments in game companies? Do you believe anyone seriously expects a video game to continue selling after 14 YEARS?
That's not unreasonable at all.
There's also another point here: if old games were automatically released into public domain after 14 years, some customers might not want to pay for new stuff at all, because there would be so much old games to play for free.
Shortening copyright to 14 years for digital works would fix a lot of this.
Wait, you have to consider all sides of that. Would that "fix" also cause smaller investments being made in game companies and their products? What is more important: cool, big, polished games from the original companies, or the permission for a hobbyist to make a Mario clone?
I once scooted through the source code of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and it also seemed to have some kind of intermediate "mini-language" for shaders. It wasn't a language really, but it allowed artists to execute various effects with different parameters (like "winterfog 22 3.0 3.0 1"), which were then converted to real shaders on the fly. What is also surprising that I would have expected such an old game using fixed functionality instead of shaders.
Not to digress, but of late (last ten years), I have noticed the quality of Linux is not near the BSDs. Not knocking any programmers out there, but in general BSD tends to be better developed than Linux. Linux seems to be chaotic and many things seem like afterthoughts or ill-conceived notions and some are broken, yet ship anyway. I've not noticed this in the BSDs. The Free and OpenBSD boxes I've worked on and with have, short of HW failures, been almost perfect.
I still find Windows Update to be one of the most flaky components of Windows. There's a too high chance of updates failing to install, and the Windows Update dialog in Control Panel can be stuck displaying 0% while the backend is making progress just fine. Also they removed the "New updates are available" system tray icon, which I find disappointing. Also you have to keep automatic updates turned on so that the Windows Defender malware definitions are kept up to date.
Some nerds have now sold them this idea, but when it eventually comes to deployment, everyone will realize "Oh my god the desktop is buggy, and LibreOffice constantly screws up the formatting of documents. We can't actually use something like this." After that, there will just be the ugly flag symbol and a spinning pearls animation when people start their computers.
We really should be preserving old computers in HDL in a form as loyal as possible to the original. Then we could always reimplement them in FPGA and make "real" hardware cheaply enough until the sun burns out.
Hard drives require a lot precision machining and assembly. Chip fabrication and PCB assembly scales much better, and is much cheaper. It's the same pick-and-place followed by oven reflow that/everything/ else uses.
Geeze, why is this so hard! This was a clear crash over mainland Europe. We could quickly locate the destroyed plane and acquire the flight recorders, the whole show. Why is it still so clunky to piece together what actually happened? Shouldn't we have more data captured, for example video streams from the cabin and cockpit? It's so annoying when it's 2015 and Facebook knows what kind of socks you will be wearing today, but we have to play Sherlock Holmes with a commercial airliner crash.
I don't see what could go wrong. Once the fix has been done, they only have one step left, which is just a standard procedure of pushing a crystal in a cart into a beam.
About fifteen years ago I was starting to struggle with sciatic nerve pain due to years spent driving a car with a heavy racing clutch in traffic, and a lack of exercise.
Wow, nice to hear someone in a similar situation. I also have sciatic pain (thankly no slipped discs or serious stuff like that) due to too much sitting on my ass. However it's now getting better thanks to increased exercise.
I surely have walked and bicycled aplenty, but my abs and back muscles are garbage.
That is what I love about cooking: it allows me to change components to my liking and compile my own meal. Contrast that to a Dorito chip which is a bloated monolithic blob.
Just put a quick summary in the beginning.:) There's so much information surrounding us these days that it's hard to judge whether reading all of your text is worth it.
Web pages have always been a bit unreliable technology. Who doesn't occasionally meet a page that is almost loaded, but hangs there waiting for one element to be downloaded? At I meet a few times a week a page that gets "stuck". Then you refresh the page and it's fine. Why does this problem still exist? Can't the browser at least quickly try reloading that element?
Imagine if desktop GUI apps were like that. That some GUI element would just randomly not show up. That would be unacceptable.
Why is it released for "non commercial use", why does it matter to Pixar if it gets used in "perrsonal projects that do not generate commercial profits"? Does it stop RenderMan working for Pixar if a human or a commercial entity makes money from using it?
It requires a big team of senior engineers in mathematics and computer science to create and support something like RenderMan, so it's not unreasonable that they ask money for it.
The idea is probably that hobbyists (many of whom wouldn't have enough spare money to buy it anyway) can get familiar with the software, and then Pixar can sell the software to commercial use where the actual bucks are made. For a fully commercial tool I see this being a pretty nice deal.
Even then the real license costs just $495 per seat, which is cheap. You can easily recoup that investment.
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Yes, last time when you looked in 1998.
Now you only have to do Control Panel -> Uninstall a program -> Turn Windows features on or off -> [ ] Internet Explorer.
It asks to reboot, and at the same time IE is nuked from the orbit.
There is no proof that IE would be needed for any kind of operating system functionality anymore.
What is this rubbish? Didn't we have these talks a long time ago already?
- Office 2007 and Office 2010 support ODF 1.1
- Office 2013 also supports ODF 1.2
Go open your Microsoft Office, and the option to save in OpenDocument is right there in the Save As dialog.
Whether anyone actually uses it, is the real question.
How is a copyright term of 14 years going to cause anyone to reduce their investments in game companies? Do you believe anyone seriously expects a video game to continue selling after 14 YEARS?
That's not unreasonable at all.
There's also another point here: if old games were automatically released into public domain after 14 years, some customers might not want to pay for new stuff at all, because there would be so much old games to play for free.
Shortening copyright to 14 years for digital works would fix a lot of this.
Wait, you have to consider all sides of that. Would that "fix" also cause smaller investments being made in game companies and their products? What is more important: cool, big, polished games from the original companies, or the permission for a hobbyist to make a Mario clone?
I once scooted through the source code of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and it also seemed to have some kind of intermediate "mini-language" for shaders. It wasn't a language really, but it allowed artists to execute various effects with different parameters (like "winterfog 22 3.0 3.0 1"), which were then converted to real shaders on the fly. What is also surprising that I would have expected such an old game using fixed functionality instead of shaders.
Not to digress, but of late (last ten years), I have noticed the quality of Linux is not near the BSDs. Not knocking any programmers out there, but in general BSD tends to be better developed than Linux. Linux seems to be chaotic and many things seem like afterthoughts or ill-conceived notions and some are broken, yet ship anyway. I've not noticed this in the BSDs. The Free and OpenBSD boxes I've worked on and with have, short of HW failures, been almost perfect.
That matches my experience.
Does it work properly?
I still find Windows Update to be one of the most flaky components of Windows. There's a too high chance of updates failing to install, and the Windows Update dialog in Control Panel can be stuck displaying 0% while the backend is making progress just fine. Also they removed the "New updates are available" system tray icon, which I find disappointing. Also you have to keep automatic updates turned on so that the Windows Defender malware definitions are kept up to date.
Fully agree with that list actually.
Some nerds have now sold them this idea, but when it eventually comes to deployment, everyone will realize "Oh my god the desktop is buggy, and LibreOffice constantly screws up the formatting of documents. We can't actually use something like this." After that, there will just be the ugly flag symbol and a spinning pearls animation when people start their computers.
Any counterarguments?
You actually believed HTML5 would be capable of something like that on it's own?
It would be a hard project, but completely doable with WebGL and scripting.
That wasted standby power is probably consumed by the power supply itself.
No modern power supply is so inefficient that it would leak 10W when not loaded.
I see an antique car being far more useful than an antique computer.
We really should be preserving old computers in HDL in a form as loyal as possible to the original. Then we could always reimplement them in FPGA and make "real" hardware cheaply enough until the sun burns out.
It's doable, although these are big efforts.
There is already this Japanese guy who has done it for the SNES.
The car is useful.
Hard drives require a lot precision machining and assembly. Chip fabrication and PCB assembly scales much better, and is much cheaper. It's the same pick-and-place followed by oven reflow that /everything/ else uses.
Good point.
A good consumer drive could take it just fine.
Geeze, why is this so hard! This was a clear crash over mainland Europe. We could quickly locate the destroyed plane and acquire the flight recorders, the whole show. Why is it still so clunky to piece together what actually happened? Shouldn't we have more data captured, for example video streams from the cabin and cockpit? It's so annoying when it's 2015 and Facebook knows what kind of socks you will be wearing today, but we have to play Sherlock Holmes with a commercial airliner crash.
I don't see what could go wrong. Once the fix has been done, they only have one step left, which is just a standard procedure of pushing a crystal in a cart into a beam.
Doesn't a diet like that eventually cause heart and circulatory system problems?
About fifteen years ago I was starting to struggle with sciatic nerve pain due to years spent driving a car with a heavy racing clutch in traffic, and a lack of exercise.
Wow, nice to hear someone in a similar situation. I also have sciatic pain (thankly no slipped discs or serious stuff like that) due to too much sitting on my ass. However it's now getting better thanks to increased exercise.
I surely have walked and bicycled aplenty, but my abs and back muscles are garbage.
That is what I love about cooking: it allows me to change components to my liking and compile my own meal. Contrast that to a Dorito chip which is a bloated monolithic blob.
Just put a quick summary in the beginning. :) There's so much information surrounding us these days that it's hard to judge whether reading all of your text is worth it.
Web pages have always been a bit unreliable technology. Who doesn't occasionally meet a page that is almost loaded, but hangs there waiting for one element to be downloaded? At I meet a few times a week a page that gets "stuck". Then you refresh the page and it's fine. Why does this problem still exist? Can't the browser at least quickly try reloading that element?
Imagine if desktop GUI apps were like that. That some GUI element would just randomly not show up. That would be unacceptable.
Why is it released for "non commercial use", why does it matter to Pixar if it gets used in "perrsonal projects that do not generate commercial profits"? Does it stop RenderMan working for Pixar if a human or a commercial entity makes money from using it?
It requires a big team of senior engineers in mathematics and computer science to create and support something like RenderMan, so it's not unreasonable that they ask money for it.
The idea is probably that hobbyists (many of whom wouldn't have enough spare money to buy it anyway) can get familiar with the software, and then Pixar can sell the software to commercial use where the actual bucks are made. For a fully commercial tool I see this being a pretty nice deal.
Even then the real license costs just $495 per seat, which is cheap. You can easily recoup that investment.