No, not really. I've played games written on open source platforms, and they almost always suck.
Matter of taste, really. Yours suck;)
And music... I've scoured the open source libraries looking for something half way decent. Seriously, I know the tools can do better, it's just that the authors are those kind of people who think "Animusic" is good stuff.
Gee, 90% of the music available for free out there sucks, how shocking. Have you browsed the RIAA's catalogue lately? yeah, Sturgeon's Law and all that. For what is worth, however, I love Wesnoth's music and if I weren't so lazy I'd rip the tracks from the game itself and make my very own OST disk. The classical influences may not be for everyone (specially not the average idiot that thinks "Metal background music" is cruise control for cool, see also: Youtube), but it is good stuff.
The GIMP? Sure, it does a passable job. But the insistence of the open source community on such a name really is hampering it's implementation.
Not really, it isn't. Not only is it very much a dead word in the English language (a Google search found two instances of non-GIMP 'gimp' in the first 10 pages of results, last time I counted), it has no clear analogue in any other language so any potentially "offensive" reference is lost on anybody who doesn't have English as their first language (ie, the overwhelming majority of the world's population).
Open Office works (as long as I don't call it Open Office dot Org... then people look at me like I'm an idiot. For good reason: that's a really horrible name for an office application. Sounds unprofessional and leads people to believe that it's just hacked together by some teenagers in their free time, when in reality it is the work of many paid professional developers that makes it functional.)
Blame the OpenOffice guys then. Or Trademark law, IIRC the OpenOffice product had long been dead when the OOo guys wanted to put out their OSS fork of StarOffice (at least I had never heard of it before then).
Linux? Have distributions include support for fonts that aren't completely ugly and you may start getting somewhere. Seriously, it's painful to work with the included fonts... and don't say "Well, just install package XYZ" because I shouldn't have to do that just to browse the web or read a document without getting a headache.
Again matter of opinion. Me and my friends, we'd much rather have Linux's default font system than Windows', Microsoft should *really* pony up the cash and get some real fonts instead of the cheap knockoffs they've always had. In fact, the beauty of the fonts in my Ubuntu system were a big factor in getting one of my friends to switch to Linux, as he said it was far more comfortable to read PDFs there than in his WinXP system.
The true reason that so many people pirate Photoshop is that most people are idiots and think if Photoshop can do it, it must be the best at it, and if Photoshop can't do it, nothing else should be able to.
For anyone knowledgeable in the myriad of areas Photoshop aims to serve there's far better options out there, some even by Adobe itself. The GIMP may not be in a single one of them (the GUI went from 'unusual' to 'shit' these past couple versions), but they do exist but try and convince Joe Pirate of that.
The same way that it helps normal power users who want to use their ATI and Intel cards on 64-bit OSes when Linux's customer base shrinks to nothing because the "normal people" migrate to Windows due to their refusal to ship closed-source drivers with the kernel.
Taking a stand will always alienate some people, but surrendering will similarly always hurt your chances of success. The key is in knowing when to do which one, and I (along with the Mozilla guys and a good portion of the F/OSS community) believe it's time for the former. You don't? fork Firefox and add h.264 support yourself, or just move to IE if that's what you want.
Just look at FPS, once dominated by PC, now its a console-first, PC-later kind of genre. RTS are slowly getting there to, see Command&Conquer and a bunch of other EA RTS. CRPG, same thing, Fable, Mass Effect, Oblivion, Fallout 3, DeusEx2, Bioshock, etc.
Not really, no. Modern Warfare is one of the few exceptions, but games like Left 4 Dead are made for the PC first *then* consoles, and others like Killing Floor aren't even ported in the first place. RTSs, it's VEEEERY slow, the few that are for consoles suck monumentally, and it'll be a cold day in hell before a game of the scale of Empire: Total War hits the PS360. CRPGs, you must have a *very* different definition of the genre that I do, because to me Fable and Mass Effect fall under modern rather than classic, and neither Deus Ex nor Bioshock are even RPGs to begin with.
Playing the same game for 10 years is not what I call hardcore, I prefer to call those crazy people;) Anyway, thats kind of the friggin point, if you hang on to some decade old games for so long, that is a clear indication of a lack of other good games on the market and not a sign for how great the PC gaming market is.
Well, my definition of "crazy people" is precisely throwing out good hardware the moment a better one comes out, and refusing to play anything at less than 1920x1024, 16xFSAA and 16xAF. And if they migrate to consoles, well, who cares? scientists will ensure the GPU market continues along just fine even without the idiots. And no, there'll always be people that become obsessed with a game in lieu of newer alternatives, people don't play the original NES Mario because there were no 2D platformers for later platforms, or there were only bad ones, people play it because due to its inmense popularity it got considered as the 'standard' that everybody could relate to, so competency at those games translated into a bit more 'geek cred' than mastering, dunno, Yoshi's Island.
I meant the Nintendo style of colorful fun, PopCap is doing more the Solitar2.0 style of game and even they have started doing console ports.
So, colorful but 3D? yeah, kinda dead outside of Winnie Pooh and such 'educative' titles on the PC, but it isn't really alive in consoles either... you have Nintendo, and you have the odd decent-ish movie tie in, but that's it. The Sonic and Jak series went both Darker And Edgier last gen, Spyro is deader than dead, and so on.
As I see it, the PC gaming marked is basically Valve and Blizzard, most other developers already went to the consoles.
As I see it, the entirety of the strategy market and nearly all the sims (flight, racing, etc) and indie crowd is on PCs, the only ones that have moved towards consoles exclusively are a few big-name publishers, whom we didn't really care about last gen.
Sure, the average person couldn't even name the studios behind GalCiv 2 or iRacing, but we've pretty much established elsewhere that the average person is a complete moron anyways.
Combine those two and frankly, I simply don't want to upgrade my graphics card every year just to play the latest and greatest games.
Then don't. The upside of so many console ports is that, once you build a system with better specs than the current console, it'll *always* be a system with better specs than that console: if your computer could run Assassin's Creed (2007) just fine, chances are it'll run FEAR 2 (2009) and MW2 (2009) just as well.
PC hardware doesn't "rot", hardware requirements only go up when graphics go up, and the fact that they haven't is one of the key parts of TFA.
Sure there's plenty of PC exclusives for which you can't really be sure, but strategy games and adventure games have never been particularly demanding on the hardware and even the few that are (SupComm1, Total War series) are still equivalent to the average PS360 port.
First off, how could PC exclusives have "almost died out" when they have entire *genres* for them? strategy games, both of the real-time and the turn-based variety, are practically all PC-exclusive (and the ones that aren't, suck: I'm looking at ya SupComm2) and they're a fairly significant market by themselves.
And secondly, my definition of "hardcore gamer" is and always has been those who play games obsessively, and as far as I can see neither the Starcraft nor the Counter-Strike community has been affected much by console gaming. They've even got the WoW and, arguably, TF2 communities in recent years to keep them company.
Plus, other than the shitty port of DA:O I'm not aware of any console CRPG, I don't know of any console flight sim, and for "colorful fun" games there's quite obviously PopCap so... yeah, I don't think you got many things right in your post, sorry.
DirectX 10 became a "Vista exclusive", despite the fact that unofficial ports made it work on Windows XP without much muss or fuss.
Or much "work" either. Read up beyond the headlines and you'd see all the problems these unofficial DX10 "ports" had, "working" is giving them far too much credit.
DX10 was a Vista-exclusive because it relied on *big* architectural changes in the kernel and other low-level parts of the OS, and porting all those to WinXP was deemed far too invasive and error-prone, plus in the end you'd basically end up with another Vista.
Yeah, ME2's control scheme was such an attrocity, after the excellent and *clearly* PC-oriented interface of ME1 we expected better.
What *fucking* game did you play instead of the real ME1? don't get me wrong, I liked the game too but the fact that it was nothing but a port of an X360 game was clear as day so the fact that ME2 is *also* a mere port should've surprised nobody.
The thing is, the 95%/5% argument also works for the feature X itself. If feature X works in 95% of user scenarios and only triggers the obscure bug 5% of the time, why would you disable the entire thing? just ship it as is and send a "thanks for reporting a bug to us, we're very sorry it happened to you" note to whoever is affected alongside the SP1.
"Normal people" are irrelevant here, writing a script to transcode a video from one format to another is trivial. What matters are "normal webmasters", y'know, those that'll go broke trying to pay MPEG-LA's exorbitant fees and close down their websites as result, or will simply refuse to host any sort of video at all and, as such, the entire 'online video' market will be relegated to already-established multinationals, essentially turning it into something as "interactive" and "diverse" as regular TV.
The World Wide Web was made for the explicit purpose of allowing anyone and everyone to participate. Requiring payment of MPEG-LA's patents is the most blantant rape of that idea that you could possibly make.
I consider myself a computer scientist (and the fact that I have a BS in both math and comp sci and am halfwayish through a CS PhD program would seem to support that assertion), and I firmly believe that a sufficiently clever algorithm is as much an invention as a sufficiently clever physical invention.
And what makes a sufficiently clever mathematical equation so different from both that it cannot be patented, or even copyrighted?
Frankly, all the arguments in this whole thread have only convinced me that patents of *all* kinds should be abolished, not just software ones.
Sorry, but software is a tangible machine than runs off another tangible machine called the CPU.
Wrong. Look up the concept of Turing Machines for starters.
Software is tangible because it is always stored in a sequence of 1s and 0s on some tangible medium such as a disc.
Wrong. Software can be represented as an equation (by the Church-Turing thesis) and, therefore, can be stored in the same way that any other equation: in paper, in your mind, whatever.
Math does not require a CPU or any other technology to be useful whereas without a CPU, all software is useless.
Again, wrong. Whoever taught you CS should be fired on the spot.
Therefore, software should be patentable, just as electronics hardware is. After all, today's patentable electronics hardware is developed using VHDL (like Pascal/Ada) or Verilog (C). So why should software be discriminated against?
Then hardware shouldn't be patentable, not the other way around. Seems you failed not only your CS courses but Logic as well, huh.
Then hardware shouldn't be patentable either, problem solved.
It's not about effort, it's never been about effort. Mathematicians have a job just as hard, or harder even, than most programmers and engineers yet their inventions are not only unpatentable, but uncopyrightable as well merely because we've deemed them to be far too fundamental to our society to be otherwise. If that thinking takes out hardware patents as well, or even all patents in general, then so be it.
Wouldn't it be about a billion times easier to leave it as 'mega' and just remember that when you are dealing with base 2 methods of storage, it's 1024 (a power of two) rather than 1000 (a power of ten).
And while you're at it, it'd also be a billion times easier to leave "billion" as 10^12 and just use the phrase "thousand millions" for 10^9 instead.
In the case of software, where NOBODY can be reasonably expected to keep track of every single license out there, there is no reason or means of determining whether that something included with the product as a one-time only offer has already been used.
Easy: assume the worst unless specifically noted otherwise. Simple, and so obvious it's what most people did, consciously or otherwise, until some moron went and sued GameStop.
Exactly. NVidia users should really get out of their heads the notion that, if a company offers propietary drivers, they *must* be superior to the open-source ones in some shape or form.
Sometimes, companies do stupid things like sending a terrible piece of software to compete with a superior one that's available with far less strings attached, and that they support as well, just because they can. AMD is one of those companies.
You meant "buy ATI video cards". All the complains about their drivers being buggy, unstable pieces of crap that can't even display a full-screen video without causing a kernel panic? the propietary driver, the open source one runs smooth as a baby's cheek. Granted, 3D acceleration support is kinda outdated if you only follow the stable releases (I believe the last cards they support are the 3x00 series), but support *is* coming and meanwhile, 2D performance is flawless.
Yeah, except C# is as similar to Java as Ruby is to Perl. In other words, not at all for anyone with even the slightest experience with both languages.
Offer only to original guy-who-activates-it only, rather. It's still possible for somebody to play through the entire game without using any sort of DLC, so it's conceivable that somebody could sell it with its DLC code still usable (in fact, many people did it on eBay near release, to 'cash in' the preorder bonus craze).
Just how is it GS's fault that the PUBLISHER THAT PRINTED THE GAME BOX contains false advertising?
It wasn't false advertising, when the original customer bought the game it did come with the free DLC.
Imagine I buy, say, Windows 7 on a store. Then I burn an Ubuntu CD, put it in place of the Win7 disk then put it on eBay. Somebody buys it, and finds my Ubuntu CD: should Microsoft be held liable for false advertising and send the buyer a free copy of Win7?
If Gamespot doesn't want to modify the packaging for whatever reason, they'd better stick a big "as is" sign on their used section or just stop selling used games altogether. Blaming the publisher would get them nowhere.
The problem is that content creators think that their works are somehow "special" and unlike physical objects
Here's some news for ya: they are. That's why perpetual copyright is idiotic, why software patents are an attrocity, and why the Open Source community is ruled by He Who Is Competent rather than He Who Has Money.
The recent DLC wave ain't a good business model for the gaming market, but treating them as physical objects is far worse and even less grounded in reality, so if you want the DLC gone, better think of something else.
I'm a big Mono supporter so it's not that I'm trying to justify myself, but 'freedom' does not and *should* not mean 'freedom from criticism'. They should be free to complain about our use of Mono just as much as Stallman is free to complain about people using NVidia drivers or, dunno, I to complain about people mindlessly wasting time posting shock pictures from 4chan. As long as people are free to take heed of the complains or ignore them altogether (and we all are), then our freedom is still intact.
You mean, if instead of Microsoft the patent holder were Apple, Nokia et al, and instead of an optional part of a software development stack it were a standard covering the entirety of the world wide web? Why, they'd be just as emotional, except it'd be about how not *everybody* welcomes them with open arms.
I know, I know, lots of people post to Slashdot and all that, but why the hell do Mono stories get so many "hurr patents bad hurr" guys while anything concerning h.264 is nothing but an endless stream of "suck it Firefox, h.264 is here to stay so throw MPEG-LA a big, fat check and STFU"?
So? Mono *is* a great development platform and that's, for me, a good enough reason to use it. Doesn't mean I'll stop using Ruby, Python and Java or that I'll stop learning Lisp and Perl either, only that, in addition to those, I'll also use Mono because it freaking rocks.
Seriously, you wanna bitch about patents, go and do so against the h.264 zealots. MPEG-LA has shown both its patent portfolio as well as its intent to use them offensively, Microsoft has done neither and, in any case, the Mono team will throw anything that could theoretically be patented by Microsoft into an external project and keep the core as patent-free as anything else in Linux-land soon, if they haven't already, I haven't checked in a while.
And before you ask, yes C# is very useful without the potentially-patented stuff, there's bindings for a plethora of popular F/OSS apps and libraries out there, all of excellent quality as far as I've seen.
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No, not really. I've played games written on open source platforms, and they almost always suck.
Matter of taste, really. Yours suck ;)
And music... I've scoured the open source libraries looking for something half way decent. Seriously, I know the tools can do better, it's just that the authors are those kind of people who think "Animusic" is good stuff.
Gee, 90% of the music available for free out there sucks, how shocking. Have you browsed the RIAA's catalogue lately? yeah, Sturgeon's Law and all that. For what is worth, however, I love Wesnoth's music and if I weren't so lazy I'd rip the tracks from the game itself and make my very own OST disk. The classical influences may not be for everyone (specially not the average idiot that thinks "Metal background music" is cruise control for cool, see also: Youtube), but it is good stuff.
The GIMP? Sure, it does a passable job. But the insistence of the open source community on such a name really is hampering it's implementation.
Not really, it isn't. Not only is it very much a dead word in the English language (a Google search found two instances of non-GIMP 'gimp' in the first 10 pages of results, last time I counted), it has no clear analogue in any other language so any potentially "offensive" reference is lost on anybody who doesn't have English as their first language (ie, the overwhelming majority of the world's population).
Open Office works (as long as I don't call it Open Office dot Org... then people look at me like I'm an idiot. For good reason: that's a really horrible name for an office application. Sounds unprofessional and leads people to believe that it's just hacked together by some teenagers in their free time, when in reality it is the work of many paid professional developers that makes it functional.)
Blame the OpenOffice guys then. Or Trademark law, IIRC the OpenOffice product had long been dead when the OOo guys wanted to put out their OSS fork of StarOffice (at least I had never heard of it before then).
Linux? Have distributions include support for fonts that aren't completely ugly and you may start getting somewhere. Seriously, it's painful to work with the included fonts... and don't say "Well, just install package XYZ" because I shouldn't have to do that just to browse the web or read a document without getting a headache.
Again matter of opinion. Me and my friends, we'd much rather have Linux's default font system than Windows', Microsoft should *really* pony up the cash and get some real fonts instead of the cheap knockoffs they've always had. In fact, the beauty of the fonts in my Ubuntu system were a big factor in getting one of my friends to switch to Linux, as he said it was far more comfortable to read PDFs there than in his WinXP system.
The true reason that so many people pirate Photoshop is that most people are idiots and think if Photoshop can do it, it must be the best at it, and if Photoshop can't do it, nothing else should be able to.
For anyone knowledgeable in the myriad of areas Photoshop aims to serve there's far better options out there, some even by Adobe itself. The GIMP may not be in a single one of them (the GUI went from 'unusual' to 'shit' these past couple versions), but they do exist but try and convince Joe Pirate of that.
The same way that it helps normal power users who want to use their ATI and Intel cards on 64-bit OSes when Linux's customer base shrinks to nothing because the "normal people" migrate to Windows due to their refusal to ship closed-source drivers with the kernel.
Taking a stand will always alienate some people, but surrendering will similarly always hurt your chances of success. The key is in knowing when to do which one, and I (along with the Mozilla guys and a good portion of the F/OSS community) believe it's time for the former. You don't? fork Firefox and add h.264 support yourself, or just move to IE if that's what you want.
Just look at FPS, once dominated by PC, now its a console-first, PC-later kind of genre. RTS are slowly getting there to, see Command&Conquer and a bunch of other EA RTS. CRPG, same thing, Fable, Mass Effect, Oblivion, Fallout 3, DeusEx2, Bioshock, etc.
Not really, no. Modern Warfare is one of the few exceptions, but games like Left 4 Dead are made for the PC first *then* consoles, and others like Killing Floor aren't even ported in the first place. RTSs, it's VEEEERY slow, the few that are for consoles suck monumentally, and it'll be a cold day in hell before a game of the scale of Empire: Total War hits the PS360. CRPGs, you must have a *very* different definition of the genre that I do, because to me Fable and Mass Effect fall under modern rather than classic, and neither Deus Ex nor Bioshock are even RPGs to begin with.
Playing the same game for 10 years is not what I call hardcore, I prefer to call those crazy people ;) Anyway, thats kind of the friggin point, if you hang on to some decade old games for so long, that is a clear indication of a lack of other good games on the market and not a sign for how great the PC gaming market is.
Well, my definition of "crazy people" is precisely throwing out good hardware the moment a better one comes out, and refusing to play anything at less than 1920x1024, 16xFSAA and 16xAF. And if they migrate to consoles, well, who cares? scientists will ensure the GPU market continues along just fine even without the idiots. And no, there'll always be people that become obsessed with a game in lieu of newer alternatives, people don't play the original NES Mario because there were no 2D platformers for later platforms, or there were only bad ones, people play it because due to its inmense popularity it got considered as the 'standard' that everybody could relate to, so competency at those games translated into a bit more 'geek cred' than mastering, dunno, Yoshi's Island.
I meant the Nintendo style of colorful fun, PopCap is doing more the Solitar2.0 style of game and even they have started doing console ports.
So, colorful but 3D? yeah, kinda dead outside of Winnie Pooh and such 'educative' titles on the PC, but it isn't really alive in consoles either... you have Nintendo, and you have the odd decent-ish movie tie in, but that's it. The Sonic and Jak series went both Darker And Edgier last gen, Spyro is deader than dead, and so on.
As I see it, the PC gaming marked is basically Valve and Blizzard, most other developers already went to the consoles.
As I see it, the entirety of the strategy market and nearly all the sims (flight, racing, etc) and indie crowd is on PCs, the only ones that have moved towards consoles exclusively are a few big-name publishers, whom we didn't really care about last gen.
Sure, the average person couldn't even name the studios behind GalCiv 2 or iRacing, but we've pretty much established elsewhere that the average person is a complete moron anyways.
Combine those two and frankly, I simply don't want to upgrade my graphics card every year just to play the latest and greatest games.
Then don't. The upside of so many console ports is that, once you build a system with better specs than the current console, it'll *always* be a system with better specs than that console: if your computer could run Assassin's Creed (2007) just fine, chances are it'll run FEAR 2 (2009) and MW2 (2009) just as well.
PC hardware doesn't "rot", hardware requirements only go up when graphics go up, and the fact that they haven't is one of the key parts of TFA.
Sure there's plenty of PC exclusives for which you can't really be sure, but strategy games and adventure games have never been particularly demanding on the hardware and even the few that are (SupComm1, Total War series) are still equivalent to the average PS360 port.
First off, how could PC exclusives have "almost died out" when they have entire *genres* for them? strategy games, both of the real-time and the turn-based variety, are practically all PC-exclusive (and the ones that aren't, suck: I'm looking at ya SupComm2) and they're a fairly significant market by themselves.
And secondly, my definition of "hardcore gamer" is and always has been those who play games obsessively, and as far as I can see neither the Starcraft nor the Counter-Strike community has been affected much by console gaming. They've even got the WoW and, arguably, TF2 communities in recent years to keep them company.
Plus, other than the shitty port of DA:O I'm not aware of any console CRPG, I don't know of any console flight sim, and for "colorful fun" games there's quite obviously PopCap so... yeah, I don't think you got many things right in your post, sorry.
DirectX 10 became a "Vista exclusive", despite the fact that unofficial ports made it work on Windows XP without much muss or fuss.
Or much "work" either. Read up beyond the headlines and you'd see all the problems these unofficial DX10 "ports" had, "working" is giving them far too much credit.
DX10 was a Vista-exclusive because it relied on *big* architectural changes in the kernel and other low-level parts of the OS, and porting all those to WinXP was deemed far too invasive and error-prone, plus in the end you'd basically end up with another Vista.
Yeah, ME2's control scheme was such an attrocity, after the excellent and *clearly* PC-oriented interface of ME1 we expected better.
What *fucking* game did you play instead of the real ME1? don't get me wrong, I liked the game too but the fact that it was nothing but a port of an X360 game was clear as day so the fact that ME2 is *also* a mere port should've surprised nobody.
The thing is, the 95%/5% argument also works for the feature X itself. If feature X works in 95% of user scenarios and only triggers the obscure bug 5% of the time, why would you disable the entire thing? just ship it as is and send a "thanks for reporting a bug to us, we're very sorry it happened to you" note to whoever is affected alongside the SP1.
"Normal people" are irrelevant here, writing a script to transcode a video from one format to another is trivial. What matters are "normal webmasters", y'know, those that'll go broke trying to pay MPEG-LA's exorbitant fees and close down their websites as result, or will simply refuse to host any sort of video at all and, as such, the entire 'online video' market will be relegated to already-established multinationals, essentially turning it into something as "interactive" and "diverse" as regular TV.
The World Wide Web was made for the explicit purpose of allowing anyone and everyone to participate. Requiring payment of MPEG-LA's patents is the most blantant rape of that idea that you could possibly make.
I consider myself a computer scientist (and the fact that I have a BS in both math and comp sci and am halfwayish through a CS PhD program would seem to support that assertion), and I firmly believe that a sufficiently clever algorithm is as much an invention as a sufficiently clever physical invention.
And what makes a sufficiently clever mathematical equation so different from both that it cannot be patented, or even copyrighted?
Frankly, all the arguments in this whole thread have only convinced me that patents of *all* kinds should be abolished, not just software ones.
Sorry, but software is a tangible machine than runs off another tangible machine called the CPU.
Wrong. Look up the concept of Turing Machines for starters.
Software is tangible because it is always stored in a sequence of 1s and 0s on some tangible medium such as a disc.
Wrong. Software can be represented as an equation (by the Church-Turing thesis) and, therefore, can be stored in the same way that any other equation: in paper, in your mind, whatever.
Math does not require a CPU or any other technology to be useful whereas without a CPU, all software is useless.
Again, wrong. Whoever taught you CS should be fired on the spot.
Therefore, software should be patentable, just as electronics hardware is. After all, today's patentable electronics hardware is developed using VHDL (like Pascal/Ada) or Verilog (C). So why should software be discriminated against?
Then hardware shouldn't be patentable, not the other way around. Seems you failed not only your CS courses but Logic as well, huh.
Then hardware shouldn't be patentable either, problem solved.
It's not about effort, it's never been about effort. Mathematicians have a job just as hard, or harder even, than most programmers and engineers yet their inventions are not only unpatentable, but uncopyrightable as well merely because we've deemed them to be far too fundamental to our society to be otherwise. If that thinking takes out hardware patents as well, or even all patents in general, then so be it.
Actually, you can: switch SI units to base-2. That also gets us the benefit of being able to count up to 1024 on our hands instead of a puny 10 ;)
Wouldn't it be about a billion times easier to leave it as 'mega' and just remember that when you are dealing with base 2 methods of storage, it's 1024 (a power of two) rather than 1000 (a power of ten).
And while you're at it, it'd also be a billion times easier to leave "billion" as 10^12 and just use the phrase "thousand millions" for 10^9 instead.
In the case of software, where NOBODY can be reasonably expected to keep track of every single license out there, there is no reason or means of determining whether that something included with the product as a one-time only offer has already been used.
Easy: assume the worst unless specifically noted otherwise. Simple, and so obvious it's what most people did, consciously or otherwise, until some moron went and sued GameStop.
Exactly. NVidia users should really get out of their heads the notion that, if a company offers propietary drivers, they *must* be superior to the open-source ones in some shape or form.
Sometimes, companies do stupid things like sending a terrible piece of software to compete with a superior one that's available with far less strings attached, and that they support as well, just because they can. AMD is one of those companies.
You meant "buy ATI video cards". All the complains about their drivers being buggy, unstable pieces of crap that can't even display a full-screen video without causing a kernel panic? the propietary driver, the open source one runs smooth as a baby's cheek. Granted, 3D acceleration support is kinda outdated if you only follow the stable releases (I believe the last cards they support are the 3x00 series), but support *is* coming and meanwhile, 2D performance is flawless.
Yeah, except C# is as similar to Java as Ruby is to Perl. In other words, not at all for anyone with even the slightest experience with both languages.
Offer only to original guy-who-activates-it only, rather. It's still possible for somebody to play through the entire game without using any sort of DLC, so it's conceivable that somebody could sell it with its DLC code still usable (in fact, many people did it on eBay near release, to 'cash in' the preorder bonus craze).
Just how is it GS's fault that the PUBLISHER THAT PRINTED THE GAME BOX contains false advertising?
It wasn't false advertising, when the original customer bought the game it did come with the free DLC.
Imagine I buy, say, Windows 7 on a store. Then I burn an Ubuntu CD, put it in place of the Win7 disk then put it on eBay. Somebody buys it, and finds my Ubuntu CD: should Microsoft be held liable for false advertising and send the buyer a free copy of Win7?
If Gamespot doesn't want to modify the packaging for whatever reason, they'd better stick a big "as is" sign on their used section or just stop selling used games altogether. Blaming the publisher would get them nowhere.
The problem is that content creators think that their works are somehow "special" and unlike physical objects
Here's some news for ya: they are. That's why perpetual copyright is idiotic, why software patents are an attrocity, and why the Open Source community is ruled by He Who Is Competent rather than He Who Has Money.
The recent DLC wave ain't a good business model for the gaming market, but treating them as physical objects is far worse and even less grounded in reality, so if you want the DLC gone, better think of something else.
I'm a big Mono supporter so it's not that I'm trying to justify myself, but 'freedom' does not and *should* not mean 'freedom from criticism'. They should be free to complain about our use of Mono just as much as Stallman is free to complain about people using NVidia drivers or, dunno, I to complain about people mindlessly wasting time posting shock pictures from 4chan. As long as people are free to take heed of the complains or ignore them altogether (and we all are), then our freedom is still intact.
You mean, if instead of Microsoft the patent holder were Apple, Nokia et al, and instead of an optional part of a software development stack it were a standard covering the entirety of the world wide web? Why, they'd be just as emotional, except it'd be about how not *everybody* welcomes them with open arms.
I know, I know, lots of people post to Slashdot and all that, but why the hell do Mono stories get so many "hurr patents bad hurr" guys while anything concerning h.264 is nothing but an endless stream of "suck it Firefox, h.264 is here to stay so throw MPEG-LA a big, fat check and STFU"?
So? Mono *is* a great development platform and that's, for me, a good enough reason to use it. Doesn't mean I'll stop using Ruby, Python and Java or that I'll stop learning Lisp and Perl either, only that, in addition to those, I'll also use Mono because it freaking rocks.
Seriously, you wanna bitch about patents, go and do so against the h.264 zealots. MPEG-LA has shown both its patent portfolio as well as its intent to use them offensively, Microsoft has done neither and, in any case, the Mono team will throw anything that could theoretically be patented by Microsoft into an external project and keep the core as patent-free as anything else in Linux-land soon, if they haven't already, I haven't checked in a while.
And before you ask, yes C# is very useful without the potentially-patented stuff, there's bindings for a plethora of popular F/OSS apps and libraries out there, all of excellent quality as far as I've seen.