The new say() built-in is actually pretty nice and is borrowed from other languages. It's specially nice if you consider it can accept an array argument and print each of its elements in a single line. So:
print "$_\n" for @array;
Turns into just:
say @array;
Which is *a lot* better. You might argue (with some success) that "say" is a stupid name. But it's a short word e better than, say, "println", in my opinion.
Also, threading has been stable in Perl for some years now. The implementation isn't lightweight, though, so current Perl threads are only suitable when a regular fork() would do it. That's why it's mostly not used. In fact, under Windows, fork() is emulated using threads.
If this is true in India, then Brazil is a lot better than India.
Government employees don't have spectacular paychecks but they're above average. And you can get married whenever you want without bribing anyone. You also can't get a permanent government job by bribing people and stuff like that.
Bribing happens in Brazil mostly when you did something against the law and you're trying to evade being punished for it.
I think this is the truth behind all this histery coming from governments directed at internet companies which try to make information freely available (or available in a less-restrictive way).
I somehow think that this situation is analogous to other governments trying coerce Google into providing their user's personal details or removing content that is legal under US law, despite being illegal in other countries (e.g. hate speech).
Governments are losing their power and they're not liking it. This time Google decided they could drop them a cookie or something, you know, just to show some good faith. I'd prefer if they didn't blur anything, though - would make me respect Google a little bit more (but I don't think this will make them automatically evil or anything like that).
Piracy; everyone is Brazil can afford PS2 games. Sony waits for component prices to go down to where they make a profit on every console sold, and start selling the console in Brazil. They don't bother to advertise, so sell a single console at $2 profit. The buyer pirates all the games he can, but finds he can't get a pirate copy of "King of the mushroom people" so buys a legit copy giving Sony $2 profit. Total Brazillian revenue = $4.
That's exactly what happened. And now, with PS3, Sony seems to be selling them here in Brazil since launch, but with a catch: they're freaking expensive. At launch, you could buy a PS3 on regular stores (not in some online auction dealer) for about R$6000, which translates to ~US$2700. Some weeks later, they dropped the price to R$4000 (~US$1800).
The only justification for them to do this is that they know games will be pirated but don't won't to lose all revenue or mind share. The situation when PS2 launched was insane. Each original game costed around R$300 (if memory serves right, at the time, this meant ~US$120; today, it's more like ~US$140) but the brazilian minimum wage was R$250 which is pretty ridiculous. A game (it wasn't even the console) actually costed more than a lot of people would earn a month.
The same goes for everything around here. They insist on selling DVDs and music CDs for ~R$40-50 (US$18-22), the same they charge in other ticher countries such as the US. You can buy a near-perfect pirated replicate (with cover art and stuff like that) for R$3-5, i.e., less than one tent of the price. And then, they start blaming P2P and piracy in general for the fact that their revenue is drowning.
They should just get that, if their business model is not appropriate in the US, where people have a lot more money to spend, in developing countries, where money is scarce, it's almost a joke.
But the media cartels will still probably need another 5 years to get it.
And the funny thing is: if they ever end up developing a really hard to break DRM or copy protection scheme it won't really succeed in most of the world. Technology in emerging economies (such as Brazil, Russia, India and China) only gets widespread usage when their copy protection is broken.
As a brazilian gamer I used to track down PlayStation 2 adoption around here. PS2 only got mainstream after pirated games were available. But that doesn't mean Sony lost revenue. It didn't. If the copy protection had never been broken, PS2 would've never succeeded around here.
In the end, DRM only hurts those that try to play by the rules (well, at least until they get tired if being abused and get their [pirated] goodies for free).
The thing is, no one really buys iPods from Apple around here. Here on MercadoLivre (brazilian eBay's subsidiary) you can get one for R$410 (approx. US$186).
Apple stuff here in Brazil is absurdly expensive but it's not only because of import taxes (since they're "only" 60%). You can actually legally import an iPod, paying all the taxes (which are higher when you're importing as a person instead of as a company) and still *pay less* the Apple Brasil price tag. It's stupid.
Google has already been threatened before here in Brazil regarding Orkut communities focused on hate speech (which is illegal here in Brazil). Google didn't really gave a damn and didn't provide any personal information regarding those individuals.
Brazilian judges have this problem regarding the difference between Google Inc. (US company) and Google Brasil S.A. (a Brazilian company). As much as the brazilian offices wanted to comply with the court order, they didn't have the power to.
In the end, if Google moved out of Brazil it really would be a Brazilian loss, Google would just set up its Latin American office in Argentina or Chile and keep printing money while Brazil would suck a little bit more.
From the same link you provided about the ICOM PCR1500: "Incredible coverage is yours with reception from 10 kHz to 3300 MHz (less cellular and minor gaps)."
Also, the real thing about USRP is that all its processing is done in software. This is important from a "freedom" point of view because hardware can be regulated extremely easily by governments. But this situation is not quite true for software (DeCSS anyone?).
In fact, I think they'd never be able to outlaw the USRP motherboard itself but some of the daughterboards could be. But that's the whole point of it: the daughterboards could be home-made if necessary - they're simple enough and just need to capture the radio signals (since the processing is done in software).
Where's Ultima Online? Where's Quake?
on
Time-Tested Gaming
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Ultima Online is still played *a lot*. There are hundreds of free shards around the globe and the official paid servers are still also online (I doubt they're still profitable, though).
Then, there's also Quake (yes, the first one). It's still played around the world. Quake mods such as Team Fortress (which paved the way to full modification mods as we see today) and some simpler mods such as Total Destruction are still played and there many active communities for these games.
Although America's reality is a bit different, these facts are completely true in another countries such as here in Brazil, for example, and maybe in many other developing countries. This is the positive side of not being able to have the latest graphics card or whatever: people don't focus that much on graphics. They worry about fun. That's why UO is specially popular: people can make their own world and play with their friends, with a server hosted on their own machine. Almost any PC can run Ultima Online without problems (I used to play it on a K6-350 with 32MB RAM).
The culture is really different. The most commercially succesful game here in Brazil currently is Ragnarök, a crappy online RPG. It has terrible mixed 2d/3d graphics and people are still paying to play it. Because everyone can play it. It's not like Half-Life 2 where maybe 10% of the computers can even run it at a barely playable level.
I *definately* want one of those!
I've always dreamed about having my own personal HUD. I've always drooled at that old Augmented Reality Quake thingy.
If anyone can possibly make a good and fair DRM system, it's Google.
I don't know if they'll end up screwing this one up and end up just playing along the content providers game but there's a chance that a new breed of fair DRM will emerge from Google.
I think that the DRM concept isn't necessarily the problem. The problem lies in its current implementations.
Well, at least, most of them.
It comes to me that a very nicely implemented sorta DRM system is Valve's Steam. It actually adds value, IMHO. I don't know its innards but it seems to provide some kind of developer platform which abstracts content loading, so that it can be downloaded on demand. A direct consequence of this is that I don't ever need to worry about losing the game disks of a Steam powered game. I can always download them again. I find this pretty neat.
Just look at Japanese stuff like QRIO and Asimo.
Hell, even the new reincarnations of the old Aibo are impressive.
"Broadband addiction" (whatever that means) is nothing compared to this.
Soon you'll probably have people stating that in Japan robots are getting addicted to humans beings which they see as some sort of organic gadgets. And I'm not just trying to be fun.
For the same reason that your post and mine will probably get bad karma: because slashsot is all about the "funny" comments.
Unfortunately, people here usually can't realize when a joke stops being fun. Hell, I know people that think there are jokes that never stop being fun. That's just how the world works.
So, go ahead, mod this as offtopic (or simply ignore it) but, you know it's true.
Actually, as some other people cited in other comments, the prices aren't really discounted developing countries.
I'll paste the price of various editions of Windows XP here in Brazil:
WINDOWS XP HOME EDITION OEM.............R$ 294.00 WINDOWS XP PROFESSIONAL EDITION OEM.....R$ 462.00 WINDOWS XP STARTER EDITION OEM..........R$ 126.00
US$ 1 = R$ 2.15
So, you've got XP Home for 136 dollars, XP Pro for 214 dollars and XP Starter Edition for 58 dollars.
The initial salary for an average person which just got out of a BS in Computer Science is something between R$1600 and R$2000 (US$745-930) for 40 hours a week.
So, we get no discount and people earn much less, especially if you consider that IT workers actually have pretty decent earnings for the country's standards, e.g., a telemarketing girl which I know has a monthly salary of R$180 for working 20 hours a week. That means less than 85 dollars a month.
As you might have predicted, almost no one here owns a legitimate Windows copy, except business and people who buy branded PCs (which are expensive as hell).
You can find dvd-ram drives for your computer. Most of these will also READ cd's (r and rw) as well as dvd-rom and dvd+/- r/rw's. Someone even makes a combo drive that handles WRITING dvd-ram AND dvd+/- r/rw disks! That drive isn't as fast as the dvd-ram-less units though.
You should check LG GSA-4163B. I've got one.
It can record at pretty decent speeds:
So while it's not the fastest CD-R burner around (but what's the real difference between, 52x and 40x, in practive?) it's pretty damn fast at recording DVDs.
It's fast AND cheap. And if you read some reviews, you'll notice that it's also pretty good.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually a bit hungry right now and these batteries here on my desk are not being able to keep me well fed.
Oh wait, I just realized what's wrong! Humans can't be fed using electricity... bummer!
The new say() built-in is actually pretty nice and is borrowed from other languages. It's specially nice if you consider it can accept an array argument and print each of its elements in a single line. So:
print "$_\n" for @array;
Turns into just:
say @array;
Which is *a lot* better. You might argue (with some success) that "say" is a stupid name. But it's a short word e better than, say, "println", in my opinion.
Also, threading has been stable in Perl for some years now. The implementation isn't lightweight, though, so current Perl threads are only suitable when a regular fork() would do it. That's why it's mostly not used. In fact, under Windows, fork() is emulated using threads.
If this is true in India, then Brazil is a lot better than India.
Government employees don't have spectacular paychecks but they're above average. And you can get married whenever you want without bribing anyone. You also can't get a permanent government job by bribing people and stuff like that.
Bribing happens in Brazil mostly when you did something against the law and you're trying to evade being punished for it.
I think this is the truth behind all this histery coming from governments directed at internet companies which try to make information freely available (or available in a less-restrictive way).
I somehow think that this situation is analogous to other governments trying coerce Google into providing their user's personal details or removing content that is legal under US law, despite being illegal in other countries (e.g. hate speech).
Governments are losing their power and they're not liking it. This time Google decided they could drop them a cookie or something, you know, just to show some good faith. I'd prefer if they didn't blur anything, though - would make me respect Google a little bit more (but I don't think this will make them automatically evil or anything like that).
Piracy; everyone is Brazil can afford PS2 games. Sony waits for component prices to go down to where they make a profit on every console sold, and start selling the console in Brazil. They don't bother to advertise, so sell a single console at $2 profit. The buyer pirates all the games he can, but finds he can't get a pirate copy of "King of the mushroom people" so buys a legit copy giving Sony $2 profit. Total Brazillian revenue = $4.
That's exactly what happened. And now, with PS3, Sony seems to be selling them here in Brazil since launch, but with a catch: they're freaking expensive. At launch, you could buy a PS3 on regular stores (not in some online auction dealer) for about R$6000, which translates to ~US$2700. Some weeks later, they dropped the price to R$4000 (~US$1800).
The only justification for them to do this is that they know games will be pirated but don't won't to lose all revenue or mind share. The situation when PS2 launched was insane. Each original game costed around R$300 (if memory serves right, at the time, this meant ~US$120; today, it's more like ~US$140) but the brazilian minimum wage was R$250 which is pretty ridiculous. A game (it wasn't even the console) actually costed more than a lot of people would earn a month.
The same goes for everything around here. They insist on selling DVDs and music CDs for ~R$40-50 (US$18-22), the same they charge in other ticher countries such as the US. You can buy a near-perfect pirated replicate (with cover art and stuff like that) for R$3-5, i.e., less than one tent of the price. And then, they start blaming P2P and piracy in general for the fact that their revenue is drowning.
They should just get that, if their business model is not appropriate in the US, where people have a lot more money to spend, in developing countries, where money is scarce, it's almost a joke.
But the media cartels will still probably need another 5 years to get it.
And the funny thing is: if they ever end up developing a really hard to break DRM or copy protection scheme it won't really succeed in most of the world. Technology in emerging economies (such as Brazil, Russia, India and China) only gets widespread usage when their copy protection is broken.
As a brazilian gamer I used to track down PlayStation 2 adoption around here. PS2 only got mainstream after pirated games were available. But that doesn't mean Sony lost revenue. It didn't. If the copy protection had never been broken, PS2 would've never succeeded around here.
In the end, DRM only hurts those that try to play by the rules (well, at least until they get tired if being abused and get their [pirated] goodies for free).
The thing is, no one really buys iPods from Apple around here.
Here on MercadoLivre (brazilian eBay's subsidiary) you can get one for R$410 (approx. US$186).
Apple stuff here in Brazil is absurdly expensive but it's not only because of import taxes (since they're "only" 60%). You can actually legally import an iPod, paying all the taxes (which are higher when you're importing as a person instead of as a company) and still *pay less* the Apple Brasil price tag. It's stupid.
Google has already been threatened before here in Brazil regarding Orkut communities focused on hate speech (which is illegal here in Brazil). Google didn't really gave a damn and didn't provide any personal information regarding those individuals.
Brazilian judges have this problem regarding the difference between Google Inc. (US company) and Google Brasil S.A. (a Brazilian company). As much as the brazilian offices wanted to comply with the court order, they didn't have the power to.
In the end, if Google moved out of Brazil it really would be a Brazilian loss, Google would just set up its Latin American office in Argentina or Chile and keep printing money while Brazil would suck a little bit more.
From the same link you provided about the ICOM PCR1500: "Incredible coverage is yours with reception from 10 kHz to 3300 MHz (less cellular and minor gaps)."
Also, the real thing about USRP is that all its processing is done in software. This is important from a "freedom" point of view because hardware can be regulated extremely easily by governments. But this situation is not quite true for software (DeCSS anyone?).
In fact, I think they'd never be able to outlaw the USRP motherboard itself but some of the daughterboards could be. But that's the whole point of it: the daughterboards could be home-made if necessary - they're simple enough and just need to capture the radio signals (since the processing is done in software).
Ultima Online is still played *a lot*. There are hundreds of free shards around the globe and the official paid servers are still also online (I doubt they're still profitable, though).
Then, there's also Quake (yes, the first one). It's still played around the world. Quake mods such as Team Fortress (which paved the way to full modification mods as we see today) and some simpler mods such as Total Destruction are still played and there many active communities for these games.
Although America's reality is a bit different, these facts are completely true in another countries such as here in Brazil, for example, and maybe in many other developing countries. This is the positive side of not being able to have the latest graphics card or whatever: people don't focus that much on graphics. They worry about fun. That's why UO is specially popular: people can make their own world and play with their friends, with a server hosted on their own machine. Almost any PC can run Ultima Online without problems (I used to play it on a K6-350 with 32MB RAM).
The culture is really different. The most commercially succesful game here in Brazil currently is Ragnarök, a crappy online RPG. It has terrible mixed 2d/3d graphics and people are still paying to play it. Because everyone can play it. It's not like Half-Life 2 where maybe 10% of the computers can even run it at a barely playable level.
I *definately* want one of those!
I've always dreamed about having my own personal HUD. I've always drooled at that old Augmented Reality Quake thingy.
If anyone can possibly make a good and fair DRM system, it's Google.
I don't know if they'll end up screwing this one up and end up just playing along the content providers game but there's a chance that a new breed of fair DRM will emerge from Google.
I think that the DRM concept isn't necessarily the problem. The problem lies in its current implementations.
Well, at least, most of them.
It comes to me that a very nicely implemented sorta DRM system is Valve's Steam. It actually adds value, IMHO. I don't know its innards but it seems to provide some kind of developer platform which abstracts content loading, so that it can be downloaded on demand. A direct consequence of this is that I don't ever need to worry about losing the game disks of a Steam powered game. I can always download them again. I find this pretty neat.
Just look at Japanese stuff like QRIO and Asimo.
Hell, even the new reincarnations of the old Aibo are impressive.
"Broadband addiction" (whatever that means) is nothing compared to this.
Soon you'll probably have people stating that in Japan robots are getting addicted to humans beings which they see as some sort of organic gadgets. And I'm not just trying to be fun.
For the same reason that your post and mine will probably get bad karma: because slashsot is all about the "funny" comments.
Unfortunately, people here usually can't realize when a joke stops being fun. Hell, I know people that think there are jokes that never stop being fun. That's just how the world works.
So, go ahead, mod this as offtopic (or simply ignore it) but, you know it's true.
I just hope they've got a suitable replacement...
Actually, as some other people cited in other comments, the prices aren't really discounted developing countries.
I'll paste the price of various editions of Windows XP here in Brazil:
WINDOWS XP HOME EDITION OEM.............R$ 294.00
WINDOWS XP PROFESSIONAL EDITION OEM.....R$ 462.00
WINDOWS XP STARTER EDITION OEM..........R$ 126.00
US$ 1 = R$ 2.15
So, you've got XP Home for 136 dollars, XP Pro for 214 dollars and XP Starter Edition for 58 dollars.
The initial salary for an average person which just got out of a BS in Computer Science is something between R$1600 and R$2000 (US$745-930) for 40 hours a week.
So, we get no discount and people earn much less, especially if you consider that IT workers actually have pretty decent earnings for the country's standards, e.g., a telemarketing girl which I know has a monthly salary of R$180 for working 20 hours a week. That means less than 85 dollars a month.
As you might have predicted, almost no one here owns a legitimate Windows copy, except business and people who buy branded PCs (which are expensive as hell).
You can find dvd-ram drives for your computer. Most of these will also READ cd's (r and rw) as well as dvd-rom and dvd+/- r/rw's. Someone even makes a combo drive that handles WRITING dvd-ram AND dvd+/- r/rw disks! That drive isn't as fast as the dvd-ram-less units though.
;)
You should check LG GSA-4163B. I've got one. It can record at pretty decent speeds:
DVD+R: 16X
DVD+RW: 8X
DVD+R: DL: 4X
DVD-R: 16X
DVD-RW: 6X
DVD-RAM: 5x
CD-R: 40X
CD-RW: 24X
So while it's not the fastest CD-R burner around (but what's the real difference between, 52x and 40x, in practive?) it's pretty damn fast at recording DVDs.
It's fast AND cheap. And if you read some reviews, you'll notice that it's also pretty good.
Communist power supplying!