+1. They're basically giving away their old stuff they don't care about anymore. And why should they care? There's no way they can make any more money out of those games, and they do have the cash cow tightly under control.
Other things I *loved* about Blizzard back in the days: all that was needed on Windows for their games to work was to have the game's folder. You could copy it from one machine to another etc. No crazy Windows registry non-sense. One folder.
That "back in the days" was yesterday for me. World of Warcraft is exactly this.
so they can make a clean break from Windows to Gnome
I don't really think that's possible right now. Win7 set a pretty high standard for usability, and the independent-packages model can't seem to keep up with them. For example, how do you set up a laptop with Linux to remember the external screens it was connected to, their resolutions and main screen status? It's automatic on 7, and the initial setup is literally 3-4 mouse clicks.
Linux may be fine for servers, but Xorg needs to die before I touch it again.
High taxes, mostly falling on peasants, to sustain Matthias' lavish lifestyle and the Black Army (cumulated with the fact that the latter went on marauding across the Kingdom after being disbanded upon Matthias's death) could imply that he was not very popular with his contemporaries. But the fact that he was elected king in a small anti-Habsburg popular revolution, that he kept the barons in check, persistent rumours about him sounding public opinion by mingling among commoners incognito, and harsh period known witnessed by Hungary later ensured that Matthias' reign is considered one of the most glorious chapters of Hungarian history. Songs and tales refer to him as Matthias the Just (Mátyás, az igazságos in Hungarian), a ruler of justice and great wisdom, and he is arguably the most popular hero of Hungarian folklore.
He was a cheerful man, nicknamed "Vladislaus Bene" because to almost any request he answered, "Bene" (Latin for "(It's) well"). During his reign (1490-1516), the Hungarian royal power declined in favour of the Hungarian magnates, who used their power to curtail the peasants' freedom.[2] His reign in Hungary was largely stable, although Hungary was under consistent border pressure from the Ottoman Empire and went through the revolt of György Dózsa.
Mathias was not a nice guy. He wasn't elected (being the son of a warlord rising in power), increased taxes, ran the country on his own, suppressed the nobility and called his troops "the Black Army". Incidentally, he also knew how to run a country, and how to protect it.
On the other hand, Vladislas was elected, was a truly benevolent king, you couldn't have asked for a more likable guy, really. He also caused the fall of the Hungarian Kingdom by giving his power away, then not having the power to assemble a real army when needed. The result of his actions? After he died in the Battle of Mohács, Hungary ceased to exist as an independent entity for 400 years.
would make music and movie production a near impossible profit in China
If you don't like the conditions in China, you have three options:
1. Convince the Chinese government to do something (good luck, considering the average wage and cultural attitude towards foreign intellectual property) 2. Become the new Chinese government 3. Live with it
Whining on the internet is not one of them.
Dear Americans, there is this wonderful thing called "the rest of the world", and we do some things differently. There is no God Given Right To Profit In Other Countries. If your business model can't handle that, don't sell there.
But there's a difference of scale. You probably don't care if some random guy walking down the street sees your traffic. You don't expect that same guy being there all day, every day, and record everything, now do you? There's a difference between looking out the window and seeing the neighbor naked, and pointing a camera at their house. While the obvious solution is to close the shades, there's still a fucking camera pointed at your house.
Absolutely true. It took me more than a month at ~8 hours a day. Granted, the new dungeon system made it pretty fun, but it was still along the lines of "Yay, 24 xp! Only 32,542,163 to go..."
If FOSS is ever going to become the norm, you have to interact with non-free components for the time being. C# interop for Thunderbird and OOo, anyone?
Yes, it is possible with a C++ library, and wrapping it in C#. Or so I'm told, installing Office was way faster.
How about "make it usable enough so users don't need documentation"?
Hint: how do you make Xorg play nice with laptops getting repeatedly connected to different size screens/projectors? I did RTFM, for several hours. Meanwhile, Win7 takes 3 mouse clicks the first time, then remembers your settings.
I want to stay on Linux, I really do. But I also need to Get Shit Done.
Look at Firefox, it didn't get to be popular by being a clone of IE, but by being better.
No, it got popular by all the zealotry advertising it. It never was "better" than Opera, for example, but it did provide something you can point to while annoying the neighbor.
After all, if you tried that with Linux, the first response was invariably "does it have Excel?" or "can I play games?".
Slashdot Mirror
Oh. It's alright then.
That'll take a sizable chunk out of our $13+ trillion deficit!
Meh. According to the RIAA, my hard drive is valued over $500 million, but I still have to work for a living.
Btw, anyone wanna buy a hard drive?
No, just the bad words.
It is very specific in it's target and implementation trigger.
You forgot one thing: there's always an "imminent cyberattack", for the same reasons we still have spam.
Basically this gives the president the power to declare computing martial law whenever he feels like it.
So there was a Paradise, but then the Universe crashed when the Fruit was a null pointer, and God is running the backup recovery ever since?
Man, that explains everything!
The whole point of /dev/null is that it's writable, but not readable.
Depends on who pronounces it.
+1. They're basically giving away their old stuff they don't care about anymore. And why should they care? There's no way they can make any more money out of those games, and they do have the cash cow tightly under control.
It's as "do no evil" as you can get.
Other things I *loved* about Blizzard back in the days: all that was needed on Windows for their games to work was to have the game's folder. You could copy it from one machine to another etc. No crazy Windows registry non-sense. One folder.
That "back in the days" was yesterday for me. World of Warcraft is exactly this.
Next!
I cast Write Ticket (Rank 1).
so they can make a clean break from Windows to Gnome
I don't really think that's possible right now. Win7 set a pretty high standard for usability, and the independent-packages model can't seem to keep up with them. For example, how do you set up a laptop with Linux to remember the external screens it was connected to, their resolutions and main screen status? It's automatic on 7, and the initial setup is literally 3-4 mouse clicks.
Linux may be fine for servers, but Xorg needs to die before I touch it again.
The number of benevolent kings and dictators are extremely small.
"Benevolent" is a truly misleading factor, and should probably ignored when choosing someone to run a country.
For example: Mathias I
High taxes, mostly falling on peasants, to sustain Matthias' lavish lifestyle and the Black Army (cumulated with the fact that the latter went on marauding across the Kingdom after being disbanded upon Matthias's death) could imply that he was not very popular with his contemporaries. But the fact that he was elected king in a small anti-Habsburg popular revolution, that he kept the barons in check, persistent rumours about him sounding public opinion by mingling among commoners incognito, and harsh period known witnessed by Hungary later ensured that Matthias' reign is considered one of the most glorious chapters of Hungarian history. Songs and tales refer to him as Matthias the Just (Mátyás, az igazságos in Hungarian), a ruler of justice and great wisdom, and he is arguably the most popular hero of Hungarian folklore.
Compare to his successor, Vladislas II:
He was a cheerful man, nicknamed "Vladislaus Bene" because to almost any request he answered, "Bene" (Latin for "(It's) well"). During his reign (1490-1516), the Hungarian royal power declined in favour of the Hungarian magnates, who used their power to curtail the peasants' freedom.[2] His reign in Hungary was largely stable, although Hungary was under consistent border pressure from the Ottoman Empire and went through the revolt of György Dózsa.
Mathias was not a nice guy. He wasn't elected (being the son of a warlord rising in power), increased taxes, ran the country on his own, suppressed the nobility and called his troops "the Black Army". Incidentally, he also knew how to run a country, and how to protect it.
On the other hand, Vladislas was elected, was a truly benevolent king, you couldn't have asked for a more likable guy, really. He also caused the fall of the Hungarian Kingdom by giving his power away, then not having the power to assemble a real army when needed. The result of his actions? After he died in the Battle of Mohács, Hungary ceased to exist as an independent entity for 400 years.
It's too late. There's already large sections of your genome that have been patented by various companies.
Mom has prior art.
would make music and movie production a near impossible profit in China
If you don't like the conditions in China, you have three options:
1. Convince the Chinese government to do something (good luck, considering the average wage and cultural attitude towards foreign intellectual property)
2. Become the new Chinese government
3. Live with it
Whining on the internet is not one of them.
Dear Americans, there is this wonderful thing called "the rest of the world", and we do some things differently. There is no God Given Right To Profit In Other Countries. If your business model can't handle that, don't sell there.
Decriminalizing something like copyright law does not automagically make it ok to do no matter what.
One problem though: there's nothing to decriminalize about it, at least not in Sweden.
Just make sure the judge you get is not a board member of a copyright lobby group.
If there were some magic bullet
Eliminate users?
But there's a difference of scale. You probably don't care if some random guy walking down the street sees your traffic. You don't expect that same guy being there all day, every day, and record everything, now do you? There's a difference between looking out the window and seeing the neighbor naked, and pointing a camera at their house. While the obvious solution is to close the shades, there's still a fucking camera pointed at your house.
Guess what Google does.
The most abundant energy source in history! You, sir, deserve a Nobel Prize.
Absolutely true. It took me more than a month at ~8 hours a day. Granted, the new dungeon system made it pretty fun, but it was still along the lines of "Yay, 24 xp! Only 32,542,163 to go..."
but seriously, what CPU's are made without some type of hardware-assisted virtualization support?
Umm.. most of them?
If FOSS is ever going to become the norm, you have to interact with non-free components for the time being. C# interop for Thunderbird and OOo, anyone?
Yes, it is possible with a C++ library, and wrapping it in C#. Or so I'm told, installing Office was way faster.
How about "make it usable enough so users don't need documentation"?
Hint: how do you make Xorg play nice with laptops getting repeatedly connected to different size screens/projectors? I did RTFM, for several hours. Meanwhile, Win7 takes 3 mouse clicks the first time, then remembers your settings.
I want to stay on Linux, I really do. But I also need to Get Shit Done.
Look at Firefox, it didn't get to be popular by being a clone of IE, but by being better.
No, it got popular by all the zealotry advertising it. It never was "better" than Opera, for example, but it did provide something you can point to while annoying the neighbor.
After all, if you tried that with Linux, the first response was invariably "does it have Excel?" or "can I play games?".
Even roaches have kids.