After it hit the App store, one of the original developers of XPilot told us he feels adamantly that we're betraying the spirit of the GPL by charging for it.
Uhm, no. The "spirit" of the GPL is that anyone can sell GPLed software as long as they continue to give the source code away.
I'd try to figure out a nice way to tell the original developer to:
Fuck off
Use a difference license if he doesn't want his software sold by other parties.
It is their money they are spending to do all of this, and the notion of creating a network that lets all this cool factor happen just to have someone else duplicate it, or worse duplicate it badly and sell at a lower price point is NOT a winning business model, in fact it is a model for going out of business.
I see two solutions: Either carriers are forced to sell all their phones at fair market value and unlocked so they can be taken to other networks; OR, carriers are legally barred from selling and investing in phones.
Either way, everything that the carriers are saying is complete BS when compared to how the cell phone industry in Europe works.
Well, your problem is that image quality is subjective. Can computers make good subjective judgements? Not really.
Let's say you count the number of pixels that are different? Well, what if JPEG usually slightly alters the brightness? You could weight the difference, but what if JPEG sometimes moves an edge by a pixel?
I think if you study a bit about how JPEG works, you might find that you can computationally determine how much information that is lost; but that does not mean that your computed number in any way is related to what a human will say the image quality is.
If we're getting rid of Net Neutrality, I suggest that we also get rid of Electricity Neutrality. Because things like cable modems and routers increase the load on the electric system, cable companies should have to pay extra money for all the electricity that they consume.
Is it PC-Compatible? You can probably download floppy images of DOS 3.3 and use rawrite to make bootable disks. All you'll need to do is find a "modern" PC that has a traditional floppy controller, and a 5.25" drive. Chances are, the physical interfaces are the same, so you can use the 5.25" drives from the Epson in your "modern" PC.
I used this technique 10 years ago when I had access to some ancient TRS-80s in high school. I hopped onto the internet with my speedy 28.8K modem, downloaded some floppy images of games, and used rawrite to make the disks.
A little bit of Googling brings up some clues, but if you get stuck, there's always FreeDOS.
I love basic Microsoft mice: Simple, wired, two buttons, and a scroll wheel. No drivers, extra buttons, or other weird stuff. I even use them with my Macintosh.
For example, while the water in some games may not look as good as in Crysis, I can still tell it's water. What are your opinions on the current direction of game graphics?
I prefer cartoony and abstract graphics, but I'm not a hardcore gamer. I play games to escape, so they don't need to mimic real life.
So, with regard to water: It doesn't have to look like real water, but it should look COOL and/or FUN. You can define what COOL and/or FUN is, but I should enjoy looking at it and it should have some artistic merit.
Heck, for all I care, you could make a fun 2-D platform game using scans of crayon or marker drawings, as long as they are interesting and fun to look at. On the other hand, realistic but robotic / cold graphics are an immediate turn-off to me.
Get a larger monitor and push it further back on your desk. It's better for your eyes, because they work harder when focusing on objects that are closer. I run my 24" Apple monitor at a high resolution, (higher then 1680x1050,) and keep it at least four feet from my eyes.
The current Apple 24" monitor can do 1920x1200: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB382LL/A?fnode=MTY1NDA5OQ&mco=NDE4NDE5Nw If you're at least 27 years old, it's really worth going to a larger monitor and pushing it as far away as possible. 27 is the age that eyestrain starts the monitor is inches away from your face.
Java had generics first, but C# actually has real generics (and not compile-time crap that can be broken).
Yeah, that's what it is. The Java compiler can infer something about generics so you don't have to type as many class names, but the system is more fragile then C#.
Yeah, in C# the main method begins with a capital M. In Java, it's lowercase. That pretty much sums up the differences. Oh, and in C#, you don't have checked exceptions.
C# introduces features that are in C++, but not in Java: Operator Overloading, delegates (function pointers), and indexers. C# also brings in multicast events, query syntax, and properties. When I learned Java in college, multicast events in Java were much more painful. C# can also confuse noobs because the syntax is a bit richer; whereas in Java there's more of a reliance on design patterns.
Java copied C#'s foreach syntax. I'm not sure who got to generics first; although the differences are significant if you like generic programming.
It's like the differences between French, Italian, and Spanish. If you speak one of those languages, you care about the differences.
Needless to say, I recently started a project in Java, but quickly switched to C# because this particular project makes use of operator overloading, which Java does not support. Unfortunately, in my case, Mono + MonoDevelop is behind Open Java + Eclipse.
I'm sorry but this so called new technology is a farce. 30% improvement in efficiency over 5% efficiency is still just 8% overall. At $5 apiece, which is way more then a CFL, which goes around $2.5 to $3.3 apiece, and it's 75% efficiency, I'm going for CFL.
CFLs suck in dimmers. These won't, and IMO, well worth the extra bucks so my "mood lighting" doesn't create a strobe effect in the bedroom or when I'm tryint to watch a movie.
I live in Edmonton Alberta, Canada where 8 months of winter is fairly common. Here our old incandescent bulbs have 100% efficiency because the heat generated does not go to waste:-)
Only if you use electric heat, which is typically more expensive then gas or oil. If you're using electric heat, (or heating your home with light bulbs,) the inefficiencies come from issues in the power grid, and issues at the power plant.
Uhm, I thought that was the point of Adam & Eve? Is the symbolism of the "tree of knowledge" and "realizing that we're naked" so obscure that it goes over most peoples' heads?
I still used a walkman when I was in college in 1999-2003. MP3 players were either too expensive or could only hold 45 minutes of music. I had a few portable CD players, but they skipped too much in order for me to take them skiing; so I spent $25 on a tiny walkman and used about 10-15 tapes that I had left over from high school.
Seriously, these things were made for the '80s! Back then, you needed your friends to help you put on your pants because they were so tight! If you ate too much during the day, you would need the paramedics to cut you out of your pants at night! You could clip a brick of lead to your belt loop and your pants would remain firmly in place.
Apparently the "skinny hipster" trend hasn't hit your hometown yet. I think its a conspiracy between the fashion industry and the health industry to get us fat guys to loose weight.
What's funny is when you see a teenage couple walking down the street, dressed exactly the same, except that the guy's pants are tighter then the girl's!
Uhm, isn't this libel? The newspaper claimed that the post was a letter to the editor, which it was not. I don't think copyright is the best venue to use to recover damages; because libel laws are meant for these situations.
I agree absolutely. The real reason the HD disk formats have struggled is because DVD is "good enough" for most people. DVD replaced VHS because of better picture and sound, but also because it offered the convenience of no rewinding, more stuff on one disk, the ability to skip to different chapters, etc and it's more robust than tapes. Blu-ray (or HD-DVD) doesn't offer anything above slightly better picture (assuming you have a decent, and expensive TV with a decent sound system).
So this week I downloaded a 7 gig, 1080p version of 2001; and then I performed an A-B comparison to my 480p version on DVD. The visual difference was phenomenal on my 46" LCD, but I'm just not sure if I'll get a BluRay player any time soon. I run my TV via computer; and BluRay on computer is a big world of hurt. It's a lot easier to just download off of BitTorrent when I know that those files will work!
That, and I've already bought 2001 twice. The first pressing was letterboxed onto DVD, so it looked like shit when I finally got a widescreen TV. Do I need to buy the same movie three times? WTF!
But if you're out of prison, and just plain poor, it's your own damn fault. You need to get a better job or invent something cool so you earn enough money to pay for your own healthcare.
...Or just go to prison! In colder climates, some homeless people will commit a crime in full view of the police just so they can go to prison for the winter.
But... their bottom line *could* benefit if they add value to the physical items they sell (eg. if their CD comes with an official t-shirt, sew-on patch, etc).
Ugh. I already have so much crap that I get rid of every year. I stopped buying CDs because I didn't need any more crap taking up space.
We all know that artists used to only make a small percentage of their CD sales. Most of the price of the CD was keeping up the distribution network: The record store took their cut to keep the lights on and their employees' noses coked; and the RIAA took their cut to keep their noses coked.
Seriously, though; don't try to get me to buy more useless crap.
You might consider VMware view. Each person has a thin client on their desk which controls a VM on a centralized cluster. You can centrally manage everyones' VMs and control things like updates and anti-virus.
This is stupid. People like yourself are obviously not going to pay no matter what because there is a free alternative. Please just stop trying to justify yourself and just say, "I like free stuff, and since I can get it, I'm not paying!" At least it would be honest instead of hiding behind a thinly veiled curtain of "complaints."
The real problem is that the recording industry thinks that they are "charging what the market will bear." The "market" is tired of waiting decades for prices that it "will bear."
I'm laughing so hard at the "40 year life expectancy" that I'm about to fall out of my chair.
It depends on wear and weather. There's a 3-4 mile stretch of I80 that I drive over when I go skiing that's very beat up. The reason why it's so beat up is because when the road is slippery due to snow, they make all of the vehicles put on chains. The chains then destroy the road.
The right lane, where trucks drive, has dents from the truck wheels that are about 6 inches deep.
On the other hand, another poster commented that there are roads in LA where the pavement lasted 50 years! LA's weather is quite gentle.
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After it hit the App store, one of the original developers of XPilot told us he feels adamantly that we're betraying the spirit of the GPL by charging for it.
Uhm, no. The "spirit" of the GPL is that anyone can sell GPLed software as long as they continue to give the source code away.
I'd try to figure out a nice way to tell the original developer to:
It is their money they are spending to do all of this, and the notion of creating a network that lets all this cool factor happen just to have someone else duplicate it, or worse duplicate it badly and sell at a lower price point is NOT a winning business model, in fact it is a model for going out of business.
I see two solutions: Either carriers are forced to sell all their phones at fair market value and unlocked so they can be taken to other networks; OR, carriers are legally barred from selling and investing in phones.
Either way, everything that the carriers are saying is complete BS when compared to how the cell phone industry in Europe works.
Well, your problem is that image quality is subjective. Can computers make good subjective judgements? Not really.
Let's say you count the number of pixels that are different? Well, what if JPEG usually slightly alters the brightness? You could weight the difference, but what if JPEG sometimes moves an edge by a pixel?
I think if you study a bit about how JPEG works, you might find that you can computationally determine how much information that is lost; but that does not mean that your computed number in any way is related to what a human will say the image quality is.
If we're getting rid of Net Neutrality, I suggest that we also get rid of Electricity Neutrality. Because things like cable modems and routers increase the load on the electric system, cable companies should have to pay extra money for all the electricity that they consume.
Is it PC-Compatible? You can probably download floppy images of DOS 3.3 and use rawrite to make bootable disks. All you'll need to do is find a "modern" PC that has a traditional floppy controller, and a 5.25" drive. Chances are, the physical interfaces are the same, so you can use the 5.25" drives from the Epson in your "modern" PC.
I used this technique 10 years ago when I had access to some ancient TRS-80s in high school. I hopped onto the internet with my speedy 28.8K modem, downloaded some floppy images of games, and used rawrite to make the disks.
A little bit of Googling brings up some clues, but if you get stuck, there's always FreeDOS.
I love basic Microsoft mice: Simple, wired, two buttons, and a scroll wheel. No drivers, extra buttons, or other weird stuff. I even use them with my Macintosh.
For example, while the water in some games may not look as good as in Crysis, I can still tell it's water. What are your opinions on the current direction of game graphics?
I prefer cartoony and abstract graphics, but I'm not a hardcore gamer. I play games to escape, so they don't need to mimic real life.
So, with regard to water: It doesn't have to look like real water, but it should look COOL and/or FUN. You can define what COOL and/or FUN is, but I should enjoy looking at it and it should have some artistic merit.
Heck, for all I care, you could make a fun 2-D platform game using scans of crayon or marker drawings, as long as they are interesting and fun to look at. On the other hand, realistic but robotic / cold graphics are an immediate turn-off to me.
Get a larger monitor and push it further back on your desk. It's better for your eyes, because they work harder when focusing on objects that are closer. I run my 24" Apple monitor at a high resolution, (higher then 1680x1050,) and keep it at least four feet from my eyes.
The current Apple 24" monitor can do 1920x1200: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB382LL/A?fnode=MTY1NDA5OQ&mco=NDE4NDE5Nw If you're at least 27 years old, it's really worth going to a larger monitor and pushing it as far away as possible. 27 is the age that eyestrain starts the monitor is inches away from your face.
Java had generics first, but C# actually has real generics (and not compile-time crap that can be broken).
Yeah, that's what it is. The Java compiler can infer something about generics so you don't have to type as many class names, but the system is more fragile then C#.
Yeah, in C# the main method begins with a capital M. In Java, it's lowercase. That pretty much sums up the differences. Oh, and in C#, you don't have checked exceptions.
C# introduces features that are in C++, but not in Java: Operator Overloading, delegates (function pointers), and indexers. C# also brings in multicast events, query syntax, and properties. When I learned Java in college, multicast events in Java were much more painful. C# can also confuse noobs because the syntax is a bit richer; whereas in Java there's more of a reliance on design patterns.
Java copied C#'s foreach syntax. I'm not sure who got to generics first; although the differences are significant if you like generic programming.
It's like the differences between French, Italian, and Spanish. If you speak one of those languages, you care about the differences.
Needless to say, I recently started a project in Java, but quickly switched to C# because this particular project makes use of operator overloading, which Java does not support. Unfortunately, in my case, Mono + MonoDevelop is behind Open Java + Eclipse.
I'm sorry but this so called new technology is a farce. 30% improvement in efficiency over 5% efficiency is still just 8% overall. At $5 apiece, which is way more then a CFL, which goes around $2.5 to $3.3 apiece, and it's 75% efficiency, I'm going for CFL.
CFLs suck in dimmers. These won't, and IMO, well worth the extra bucks so my "mood lighting" doesn't create a strobe effect in the bedroom or when I'm tryint to watch a movie.
I live in Edmonton Alberta, Canada where 8 months of winter is fairly common. Here our old incandescent bulbs have 100% efficiency because the heat generated does not go to waste :-)
Only if you use electric heat, which is typically more expensive then gas or oil. If you're using electric heat, (or heating your home with light bulbs,) the inefficiencies come from issues in the power grid, and issues at the power plant.
Uhm, I thought that was the point of Adam & Eve? Is the symbolism of the "tree of knowledge" and "realizing that we're naked" so obscure that it goes over most peoples' heads?
I still used a walkman when I was in college in 1999-2003. MP3 players were either too expensive or could only hold 45 minutes of music. I had a few portable CD players, but they skipped too much in order for me to take them skiing; so I spent $25 on a tiny walkman and used about 10-15 tapes that I had left over from high school.
Seriously, these things were made for the '80s! Back then, you needed your friends to help you put on your pants because they were so tight! If you ate too much during the day, you would need the paramedics to cut you out of your pants at night! You could clip a brick of lead to your belt loop and your pants would remain firmly in place.
Apparently the "skinny hipster" trend hasn't hit your hometown yet. I think its a conspiracy between the fashion industry and the health industry to get us fat guys to loose weight.
What's funny is when you see a teenage couple walking down the street, dressed exactly the same, except that the guy's pants are tighter then the girl's!
Google is about to own a monopoly on all published books. This is a concern of anti-trust lawyers.
Uhm, isn't this libel? The newspaper claimed that the post was a letter to the editor, which it was not. I don't think copyright is the best venue to use to recover damages; because libel laws are meant for these situations.
I agree absolutely. The real reason the HD disk formats have struggled is because DVD is "good enough" for most people. DVD replaced VHS because of better picture and sound, but also because it offered the convenience of no rewinding, more stuff on one disk, the ability to skip to different chapters, etc and it's more robust than tapes. Blu-ray (or HD-DVD) doesn't offer anything above slightly better picture (assuming you have a decent, and expensive TV with a decent sound system).
So this week I downloaded a 7 gig, 1080p version of 2001; and then I performed an A-B comparison to my 480p version on DVD. The visual difference was phenomenal on my 46" LCD, but I'm just not sure if I'll get a BluRay player any time soon. I run my TV via computer; and BluRay on computer is a big world of hurt. It's a lot easier to just download off of BitTorrent when I know that those files will work!
That, and I've already bought 2001 twice. The first pressing was letterboxed onto DVD, so it looked like shit when I finally got a widescreen TV. Do I need to buy the same movie three times? WTF!
But if you're out of prison, and just plain poor, it's your own damn fault. You need to get a better job or invent something cool so you earn enough money to pay for your own healthcare.
...Or just go to prison! In colder climates, some homeless people will commit a crime in full view of the police just so they can go to prison for the winter.
But ... their bottom line *could* benefit if they add value to the physical items they sell (eg. if their CD comes with an official t-shirt, sew-on patch, etc).
Ugh. I already have so much crap that I get rid of every year. I stopped buying CDs because I didn't need any more crap taking up space.
We all know that artists used to only make a small percentage of their CD sales. Most of the price of the CD was keeping up the distribution network: The record store took their cut to keep the lights on and their employees' noses coked; and the RIAA took their cut to keep their noses coked.
Seriously, though; don't try to get me to buy more useless crap.
You're probably not gonna:
But, if that's the life you want, there's nothing wrong with trying! Just don't assume that, because you work hard, you're going to succeed.
What possibly could justify an individual purchasing gold at a 30% markup in small quantities?
It's a "stupid tax," like the lottery. The people who pay it are taxed for being stupid.
You might consider VMware view. Each person has a thin client on their desk which controls a VM on a centralized cluster. You can centrally manage everyones' VMs and control things like updates and anti-virus.
http://www.vmware.com/products/view/
This is stupid. People like yourself are obviously not going to pay no matter what because there is a free alternative. Please just stop trying to justify yourself and just say, "I like free stuff, and since I can get it, I'm not paying!" At least it would be honest instead of hiding behind a thinly veiled curtain of "complaints."
The real problem is that the recording industry thinks that they are "charging what the market will bear." The "market" is tired of waiting decades for prices that it "will bear."
I'm laughing so hard at the "40 year life expectancy" that I'm about to fall out of my chair.
It depends on wear and weather. There's a 3-4 mile stretch of I80 that I drive over when I go skiing that's very beat up. The reason why it's so beat up is because when the road is slippery due to snow, they make all of the vehicles put on chains. The chains then destroy the road.
The right lane, where trucks drive, has dents from the truck wheels that are about 6 inches deep.
On the other hand, another poster commented that there are roads in LA where the pavement lasted 50 years! LA's weather is quite gentle.