So you mean Windows users are people who work, are logical consumers, or aren't technical? Sounds like a pretty significant share of the market to me. Yup, at least 90%. If I were advertising for any kind of consumer product, I'd definitely want to reach these users.
there is nothing logical about buying a product with 75% shorter shelf-life and 300% more expensive upkeep (than mac) for only 30% less money.
Sorry, but price is not the only factor in a purchase, otherwise i'd buy a little tyco remote-control car and ride it to work, after all it's a car and its SOO much cheaper than a toyota.
SURPRISE, yet another national govenrment considers unhindered, truly private free speech to be a national security risk, from france to the good-ol' US of A every government is probing their constitutions and public opinion with microscopic probes looking for the loopholes and excuses which will make their abolition appear justified.
I think this is a case of over-thought and improper focus.
rather than demanding inordinate precision out of the computer components, the abstraction layers over them should have greater flexibility and be able to account for occasional abberations.
there's a reason everyone with a brain bigger than a chimp is taught to write error handlers into their code.
Actually, it's already been fixed as of 2.6.31-rc3. Interestingly enough, the code by itself was fine until gcc tries to re-assign the pointer value upon compiling. Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols had a decent write-up about it in Computerworld.
And another mountain out of a molehill allowing microsoft astroturfers to troll a flame-war out of a non-event.
So, you've got a copy of bnetd working with Starcraft 2?
Will you have one within the first couple weeks of the game being released?
Probably not, in which case everything I said is true. Eventually there will be one that can do that, and the game companies know it. Their goal is to block piracy in the early period where they can get the most sales and make the most money. The goal isn't to block piracy 3 months from release (that'd be a bonus if they actually did it).
this is bunk.
pirates and people who simply cannot feasibly handle the latency will not buy the product, and will wait out the hack.
it happened with psobb, among many many other titles.
do keep spewing the party line though, i'm sure whichever lobbyping/pr firm which hired you for your low userid will give you a bonus.
The commentary added to the bottom of the summary is wrong. This has a good chance of success at thwarting piracy.
The goal of anti-piracy measures is never to eliminate 100% of piracy until the end of time. That's nearly impossible, and they know it. What they really want to do is make it so that either you can't pirate it for the frst little while, or that you don't want to. Having no functional online play whatsoever in the pirated version is a pretty effective way of making the pirated version worse then the retail version. (That's the opposite strategy of stuff like SecuROM, which generally makes the retail version worse then the pirated version.)
LAN functionality is a real problem in that department now, because it's used primarily for pirates to play on Hamachi (and the like) with each other. Remove it from the game entirely, and the pirates no longer have to simply bypass SecuROM or an offline disk check. They have to emulate Battle.net in order to get any multiplayer working.
Will they do that eventually? Absolutely. Will they do that within the first 2 week sales rush? Highly unlikely. If it takes them a couple months before the pirated versions have online play, then by the standard of what the companies are trying to do, it's a successful anti-piracy measure.
As usual, you crooks who rip off games because you want free stuff are just screwing it up for everybody else.
one word: bnetd
just because the court ruled against it doesnt mean it's not still there in underground circles and bit torrent sites, still under development by altruistic white-hats.
If they disable lan play they'll simply install bnetd on an old box and spoof a local server.
So yes, it will fail miserably at its goal and alienate vast swaths of the customer base with high latency satellite service and those behind ever restricted university gateways.
Dormitories in college tend to be amazing places for mass lan parties.
Back in 03 in my last year in a standard dormitory I remember whole floors engaging in multiplayer FPS and RTS games, doors open, taunting, cheering, and having fun.
This move is indeed dumb, especially given the ever tightening noose on college gateways.
If no patch is made to incorporate lan play into the game, it simply will not be used by a heavy portion of the target demographic for lack of feasibility.
News organizations lead blogs, it's true, but they suffer repeated embarrassment as respondants do actual fact checking.
I subscribe to FT, WSJ, NYT, The Economist, National Geographic, Smithsonian and Scientific American.
I would submit that the number of factual errors per million words in each of these is *vastly* lower than what you'd get by having your bullshit community moderated nonsense.
I mean, look at community websites for a minute, then realize that as much as you hate to admit it, traditional fact checkers are more reliable than asking a bunch of opinionated people to express their opinion about a fact, to determine it's truthiness.
Here's to hoping that your blazingly idiotic and idealistic notions never become the norm, because that would be the death of accurate information.
Ok, allow me to amend my previous claim.
Factual errors includes the omission of information or perspectives thus producing a one-sided or outright dogmatic tone in an article.
What I can't live with is the extreme instability of Pulse Audio. It crashes my apps contstantly from broken pipes. OK, people should be checking their pipes.
Everyone wanted to run ted stevens out on a rail, but he could have made laws to protect us from defective tubes!
I realize that it's probably due to older, underpowered hardware
they're not lead are they?
BAM.. yeah.. i just did that..*cheesy music and stage hook NOW*
hen we'll have nothing left but crowdsourced news. Which is OK in a riot or a protest, but otherwise does not come with the depth of research from a good, non-lazy journalist that does his or her homework
you mean repeating verbatim various corporate press releases and giving more coverage to dogmatic wackos than factual dissection?
That's what's passing for main stream media now so far as complex issues are concerned.
If this is a swiftian joke, it's cute, otherwise, move along, nothing to see here..
Although there is no clock or time stamp on the footage, the source claims the report was given at 4:57pm EST, 23 minutes before Building 7 collapsed at 5:20pm. While the exact time of the report cannot be confirmed at present
News organizations lead blogs, it's true, but they suffer repeated embarrassment as respondants do actual fact checking.
Maybe the lesson here is they should hold their tongues and do real investigations into the issues they cover and offer balanced analysis rather than regurgitate press releases or empty ideological sound bytes.
Blogs would lose relevance quickly if the news sources themselves provided this analysis along with truly open, community moderated, meta-moderated, and meta-meta-moderated response columns to help add any unmentioned perspectives, updates, or corrections.
If traditional outlets don't take the time to properly research and compose their stories and don't offer true opportunities for community feedback they will always run second string to the likes of slashdot, reddit, and the daily show.
That's what the "participating in government" part of my comment was about. It takes letter writing and peaceful agitation to keep a government honest and accountable. Politicians are going to interpret low voter turnout as a sign that they're doing a bad job. They'll likely take it as a sign that they're doing an OK job and that people are just apathetic.
In the US there are two major parties, moderate centerist corporate sellouts and ultra-fascist corporate sellouts.
Most others can't even get on the ballot.
They know damn well they can ignore your letters, most responses are form letters telling you why you, the constituent being represented, are wrong and need to be "set right" by the elected official.
so are you saying I should, as a liberal, be voting ultra-fascist instead of centerist? Exactly what do you suggest that will actually make a difference?
If you want a true offroad vehicle you get a military surplus HMMV,
That would be Gentoo then. It's like a HMMV but with more functionality and a nasty habit of going a bit strange. Personally, I wouldn't run anything else.
so long as it burns gas at a rate of 10 gallons per mile im game *thumbsup*
Whatever happened to the considerable R&D projects to replace the shuttle with a new model?
your average laptop has considerably more computing power than the first shuttles had, and while the electronics have been updated, the engineering behind the overall superstructure, propulsion, etc are equally dated.
When last I heard, the proposals being considered represented a potential 30% cost reduction, and they were looking for better.
What happened to those?
Building those would create jobs across the board across the entire income and skill spread of the american populace, and it would dramatically reduce the risk of mortality for those we send into space for research and save us money in the future which we will need to balance out the tremendous spending currently underway*
*(yes.. yes.. feel free to giggle or outright guffaw at this last point, but there is still a very slim chance we'll have some fiscally responsible politician elected some time)
Its funny how that when you take statisitics out of context or only looking at a small subset of the factors involved in a statistical analysis that you can prove just about anything.
Sadly you like to ignore the fact that a lot more people use Windows than Linux, so naturally Windows stories are going to be more popular.
Its not anti-Linux. Its pro-howTheWorldActuallyWorksIfYouAren'tWearingYourFanboyBlinders.
Why do you think Apple gets more press for its OS than Linux, but less than MS does for Windows?
Why do you think anything iPod outranks any other music player these days?
It must be beautiful to be able to ignore all the other evidence screaming at you in order to keep your inner fanboy happy.
IMHO, FreeBSD is a far more useful OS than Linux. Must be a conspiracy from slashdot since Linux stories get a lot of news here but FreeBSD doesn't.
Of course its more likely that most everyone here prefers Linux, but I'm going to ignore that and scream about your evil anti-FreeBSD conspiracy !@$!@%!@%!@%!@
and yet another example of what GGP is pointing out.
Slashdot Mirror
So you mean Windows users are people who work, are logical consumers, or aren't technical? Sounds like a pretty significant share of the market to me. Yup, at least 90%. If I were advertising for any kind of consumer product, I'd definitely want to reach these users.
there is nothing logical about buying a product with 75% shorter shelf-life and 300% more expensive upkeep (than mac) for only 30% less money.
Sorry, but price is not the only factor in a purchase, otherwise i'd buy a little tyco remote-control car and ride it to work, after all it's a car and its SOO much cheaper than a toyota.
The susceptibility of users is one possibility, of course, but so are
1) better product (see the comments regarding Cashback ads)
2) better placement
3) better advertising clients (ever seen an interesting google ad but hesitated to click because of the shady domain?)
the other possibility could be "parent post is a paid microsoft astroturfer"
This is the new incarnation of formulaic news.
SURPRISE, yet another national govenrment considers unhindered, truly private free speech to be a national security risk, from france to the good-ol' US of A every government is probing their constitutions and public opinion with microscopic probes looking for the loopholes and excuses which will make their abolition appear justified.
For those interested, the very astute original writeup of the referenced slashodt article was taken down, but is still available here on wayback
Software's lifespan is amazingly short from one version to the next, and each version is in and of itself separately copyrighted.
even 5 years is too long given this.
The entire foundation of the pirate party is about removal of restrictions, not imposition of them.
This particular issue is simply not something they were focused on, and thus had not provided a public position.
The suggestion provided sounds like something they would gladly adopt into any reforms they push to assure "public domain" remains public.
I wish I had mod points.
"something may have hit jupiter" and left a black mark...but jupiter inisists she just fell eye-first on the coffee table!
I think this is a case of over-thought and improper focus.
rather than demanding inordinate precision out of the computer components, the abstraction layers over them should have greater flexibility and be able to account for occasional abberations.
there's a reason everyone with a brain bigger than a chimp is taught to write error handlers into their code.
I agree with your other points, and I'm all in favour of improved space exploration, but:
Building those would create jobs across the board across the entire income and skill spread of the american populace
That's just the broken window fallacy. The money that would have been spent on improving the shuttles is still available to create jobs elsewhere.
because the private sector is just JUMPING at the chance to employ people right?
It's not a fallacy when nobody else is willing to do it.
"exclusivity agreements promote competition"
how can anyone ANYWHERE not see the blatant intellectual dishonesty.
Actually, it's already been fixed as of 2.6.31-rc3. Interestingly enough, the code by itself was fine until gcc tries to re-assign the pointer value upon compiling. Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols had a decent write-up about it in Computerworld.
And another mountain out of a molehill allowing microsoft astroturfers to troll a flame-war out of a non-event.
So, you've got a copy of bnetd working with Starcraft 2?
Will you have one within the first couple weeks of the game being released?
Probably not, in which case everything I said is true. Eventually there will be one that can do that, and the game companies know it. Their goal is to block piracy in the early period where they can get the most sales and make the most money. The goal isn't to block piracy 3 months from release (that'd be a bonus if they actually did it).
this is bunk.
pirates and people who simply cannot feasibly handle the latency will not buy the product, and will wait out the hack.
it happened with psobb, among many many other titles.
do keep spewing the party line though, i'm sure whichever lobbyping/pr firm which hired you for your low userid will give you a bonus.
The commentary added to the bottom of the summary is wrong. This has a good chance of success at thwarting piracy.
The goal of anti-piracy measures is never to eliminate 100% of piracy until the end of time. That's nearly impossible, and they know it. What they really want to do is make it so that either you can't pirate it for the frst little while, or that you don't want to. Having no functional online play whatsoever in the pirated version is a pretty effective way of making the pirated version worse then the retail version. (That's the opposite strategy of stuff like SecuROM, which generally makes the retail version worse then the pirated version.)
LAN functionality is a real problem in that department now, because it's used primarily for pirates to play on Hamachi (and the like) with each other. Remove it from the game entirely, and the pirates no longer have to simply bypass SecuROM or an offline disk check. They have to emulate Battle.net in order to get any multiplayer working.
Will they do that eventually? Absolutely. Will they do that within the first 2 week sales rush? Highly unlikely. If it takes them a couple months before the pirated versions have online play, then by the standard of what the companies are trying to do, it's a successful anti-piracy measure.
As usual, you crooks who rip off games because you want free stuff are just screwing it up for everybody else.
one word: bnetd
just because the court ruled against it doesnt mean it's not still there in underground circles and bit torrent sites, still under development by altruistic white-hats.
If they disable lan play they'll simply install bnetd on an old box and spoof a local server.
So yes, it will fail miserably at its goal and alienate vast swaths of the customer base with high latency satellite service and those behind ever restricted university gateways.
Dormitories in college tend to be amazing places for mass lan parties.
Back in 03 in my last year in a standard dormitory I remember whole floors engaging in multiplayer FPS and RTS games, doors open, taunting, cheering, and having fun.
This move is indeed dumb, especially given the ever tightening noose on college gateways.
If no patch is made to incorporate lan play into the game, it simply will not be used by a heavy portion of the target demographic for lack of feasibility.
News organizations lead blogs, it's true, but they suffer repeated embarrassment as respondants do actual fact checking.
I subscribe to FT, WSJ, NYT, The Economist, National Geographic, Smithsonian and Scientific American.
I would submit that the number of factual errors per million words in each of these is *vastly* lower than what you'd get by having your bullshit community moderated nonsense.
I mean, look at community websites for a minute, then realize that as much as you hate to admit it, traditional fact checkers are more reliable than asking a bunch of opinionated people to express their opinion about a fact, to determine it's truthiness.
Here's to hoping that your blazingly idiotic and idealistic notions never become the norm, because that would be the death of accurate information.
Ok, allow me to amend my previous claim.
Factual errors includes the omission of information or perspectives thus producing a one-sided or outright dogmatic tone in an article.
Heaviest example: music downloading.
What I can't live with is the extreme instability of Pulse Audio. It crashes my apps contstantly from broken pipes. OK, people should be checking their pipes.
Everyone wanted to run ted stevens out on a rail, but he could have made laws to protect us from defective tubes!
I realize that it's probably due to older, underpowered hardware
they're not lead are they?
BAM.. yeah.. i just did that..*cheesy music and stage hook NOW*
hen we'll have nothing left but crowdsourced news. Which is OK in a riot or a protest, but otherwise does not come with the depth of research from a good, non-lazy journalist that does his or her homework
you mean repeating verbatim various corporate press releases and giving more coverage to dogmatic wackos than factual dissection?
That's what's passing for main stream media now so far as complex issues are concerned.
Traditional news sometime can even lead the reality.
If this is a swiftian joke, it's cute, otherwise, move along, nothing to see here..
News organizations lead blogs, it's true, but they suffer repeated embarrassment as respondants do actual fact checking.
Maybe the lesson here is they should hold their tongues and do real investigations into the issues they cover and offer balanced analysis rather than regurgitate press releases or empty ideological sound bytes.
Blogs would lose relevance quickly if the news sources themselves provided this analysis along with truly open, community moderated, meta-moderated, and meta-meta-moderated response columns to help add any unmentioned perspectives, updates, or corrections.
If traditional outlets don't take the time to properly research and compose their stories and don't offer true opportunities for community feedback they will always run second string to the likes of slashdot, reddit, and the daily show.
That's what the "participating in government" part of my comment was about. It takes letter writing and peaceful agitation to keep a government honest and accountable. Politicians are going to interpret low voter turnout as a sign that they're doing a bad job. They'll likely take it as a sign that they're doing an OK job and that people are just apathetic.
In the US there are two major parties, moderate centerist corporate sellouts and ultra-fascist corporate sellouts.
Most others can't even get on the ballot.
They know damn well they can ignore your letters, most responses are form letters telling you why you, the constituent being represented, are wrong and need to be "set right" by the elected official.
so are you saying I should, as a liberal, be voting ultra-fascist instead of centerist? Exactly what do you suggest that will actually make a difference?
If you want a true offroad vehicle you get a military surplus HMMV,
That would be Gentoo then. It's like a HMMV but with more functionality and a nasty habit of going a bit strange. Personally, I wouldn't run anything else.
so long as it burns gas at a rate of 10 gallons per mile im game *thumbsup*
Whatever happened to the considerable R&D projects to replace the shuttle with a new model?
your average laptop has considerably more computing power than the first shuttles had, and while the electronics have been updated, the engineering behind the overall superstructure, propulsion, etc are equally dated.
When last I heard, the proposals being considered represented a potential 30% cost reduction, and they were looking for better.
What happened to those?
Building those would create jobs across the board across the entire income and skill spread of the american populace, and it would dramatically reduce the risk of mortality for those we send into space for research and save us money in the future which we will need to balance out the tremendous spending currently underway*
*(yes.. yes.. feel free to giggle or outright guffaw at this last point, but there is still a very slim chance we'll have some fiscally responsible politician elected some time)
.. WHOOSH!!!
honestly, laugh.. it has a bit of bite, but it's meant to be humorous!
Its funny how that when you take statisitics out of context or only looking at a small subset of the factors involved in a statistical analysis that you can prove just about anything.
Sadly you like to ignore the fact that a lot more people use Windows than Linux, so naturally Windows stories are going to be more popular.
Its not anti-Linux. Its pro-howTheWorldActuallyWorksIfYouAren'tWearingYourFanboyBlinders.
Why do you think Apple gets more press for its OS than Linux, but less than MS does for Windows?
Why do you think anything iPod outranks any other music player these days?
It must be beautiful to be able to ignore all the other evidence screaming at you in order to keep your inner fanboy happy.
IMHO, FreeBSD is a far more useful OS than Linux. Must be a conspiracy from slashdot since Linux stories get a lot of news here but FreeBSD doesn't.
Of course its more likely that most everyone here prefers Linux, but I'm going to ignore that and scream about your evil anti-FreeBSD conspiracy
!@$!@%!@%!@%!@
and yet another example of what GGP is pointing out.
Do keep up the good work for your employer.