"I could be arrested in this country for the fact that I sympathise with people who carry out suicide bombings."
Yes, you could be, perhaps, in some alternative reality.
But in the real world, no, you couldn't. There is no law in the UK that would cover arresting someone for sympathising with suicide bombings, there is however a law against encouraging others to commit suicide bombings which is presumably what you're thinking of.
In the UK we're certainly not free, but that doesn't mean that Americans are particularly free either. I've encounted a couple of events in the US and with friends in the US lately where people have run afoul of city ordinance laws.
A friend in Virginia wanted to get rid of the grass in his garden in the US and fill his garden with native plants from that region, but couldn't because it would breach city ordinance laws. There was a similar case in California where a couple wanted to do away with their grass and plant xerophytic plants to save on water consumption, but also ended up breaching city ordinance laws.
It's not just that though- look at the guy who was naked in his house and got arrested for indecent exposure following a complaint by a woman and her daughter even though the only reason they saw him was because they were trespassing on his land to start with.
At least here in the UK you can get rid of grass in your garden and plant something else, at least your garden is your garden, and your home is your home.
Labour has a lot to answer for in raping British civil liberties, but it's foolish to imagine you're anymore free in the US. The difference is of course, there are a bunch of people in America who like to consistently remind the world of how free people in America are compared to the rest of the world, even though they're clearly not.
"How do you keep an employee from taking that training you just paid for and leaving for what the employee sees as greener pastures? How do you get a return on the huge investment you just dumped into that employee?"
Treating them well, rather than treating them like shit is generally how most successful companies do it.
If you think withholding training is going to stop smart career oriented people leaving, then you're wrong. They'll just become resentful that the company gives them nothing and leave anyway. The only ones who will hang around are the ones who know they can't do better anywhere else because they're already paid more than they're worth anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I also believe in continuing education as an employee responsibility, but then, I also go where the money is. I've always said the one thing that'll keep me at a company is a company that treats me well and offers good career progression, if they offer me training, and pay me more as I gain in ability and offer them more I have every reason to stay. Otherwise I'll keep hopping from company to company, gaining more money as I do.
You can't give staff training and look at it as an isolated thing, you have to recognise you're not just giving them training, but investing in them, making them better, and with that, you must recognise they're also worth more and pay them what they're worth- do that and in return you'll get loyalty and you'll have a full team of extremely skilled staff, making your company more money overall too.
You see, it'll cost you more in the long run, to end up with crap staff staying, and good staff leaving regardless, and having to keep recruiting to replace them, keep having to pay those recruitment costs, keep losing many productive hours inducting and training the new staff in your systems. At the end of the day, it's cheaper, and more beneficial long term to invest in staff, but many companies just look at the short term, and sure they get by, but they never see decent growth like the top companies do as a result.
One thing no one seems to have brought up in response to this article so far regarding the length of the eruption is that it's not simply the fact the volcano is erupting, and it's not simply the fact that it's erupting in a location where ash is carried by the jet stream.
The issue is the strength of the eruptions. The initial eruptions were of course quite powerful, and these were forcing up sizeable chunks of silica and such into the air which really were quite dangerous, however as the eruption continues and becomes less violent, the particles being blown into the air are becoming much more fine.
So the talk amongst many of how this could last for months or years, completely and utterly misses the point. No one's disputing the eruption could go on a long time, what is in dispute is the violence of the eruption, if it erupts for 2 years but the continued eruption is so small that it doesn't blast much up to a level beyond which it just comes straight back down into iceland then it becomes a non-issue. Even if it keeps blasting particles up into the air to a height where they're a problem, then if those particles become much more fine then airlines can fly through it without issue- this seems to be what the airlines are contesting now, not that there wasn't a danger, but that the ash and particles being blown up now are fine enough to be a non-issue.
There are also requests of course to be able to fly below 20,000 ft, below the ash cloud- this may be a bit more troublesome in terms of fuel for transatlantic flights, but it should at least get air travel going in Europe again.
They wanted the PS3 classified as a computer rather than an entertainment device, but their bid largely failed. When it did fail, support for OtherOS became pointless, they never implemented it for the user, they implemented it for their own attempt to avoid paying tax where it was due.
It sucks for the user though, because when the user sees a feature, they assume it's their for their own good and for their own use, not merely for Sony's use to try and fiddle the tax system.
That said, it's not the first time either- look at backwards compatibility support, that got cut pretty quickly too. It just seems to be in Sony's nature to promise all sorts of things, and then cut them later when they feel the cost of maintaining them is outweighed by the profits they bring in. At least in the case of backwards compat. they followed the rule of law though. In this case they're clearly in breach of European consumer laws.
In the UK you can leave school at 16, by 17 you can be deployed to Afghanistan shooting people dead if you joined the Army.
I don't see how it's child labour, it just seems to be poor working conditions for young employees, but I suspect it's the same for all employees and so the real issue is the poor working conditions.
The child labour spin in this case sounds like sensationalism. In Apple's case previously some workers were found to be 15 and so I can kind of buy the argument there by western standards, even though it's really quite borderline, but even that's a stretch. 16 and 17 though? That's not child labour.
If 16/17 year olds are to be reclassified as children, then er, the UK fully allows child labour too due to the fact that 16 and 17 year olds can leave school and work full time.
You don't need a federal judge to declare something a monopoly, monopolies are not in themselves illegal. Many componies have monopolies in their respective markets and with their respective products- perhaps some strong examples in Apple's case are the personal media player market, and the online media distribution market. It'd be hard to argue with the percentage Apple holds that it does not hold a monopoly in these areas.
But here's the key, monopolies only become a problem when a company leverages that in an illegal manner to stifle competition in other markets. It's questionable now whether Apple is in fact doing this, and that's the fundamental problem, and that is where your judge comes in- not the declaration of monopoly status, but the declaration of the legality of actions in relation to that monopoly.
So the GP is right and you are wrong, Apple certainly is a monopoly. The real question is whether they're are guilty of any illegality in light of their monopoly status, and that's not something anyone here on Slashdot can answer. It's something for the courts.
Your post is amusing, because your theory that Microsoft couldn't handle a processor shift is a perfect demonstration of how wrong you are.
Why? Because Microsoft have been handling processor shifts for decades, and have been doing it so well, people like you haven't even realised.
From 16 to 32 bit, 32 bit to 64 bit, the introduction of SIMD technologies, the likes of dealing with Xeons, Pentium Pros, Core architecture, Itanium, their development tools like.NET and Visual Studio that allow you to develop once and build seamlessly for ARM, PPC handhelds/phones. Hell, I can even write a game myself in XNA and it'll run on my x86 desktop, my x64 desktop, my PPC XBox 360 and an ARM based Zune HD.
Congratulations in demonstrating you clearly have no idea what you are on about, and in the process, using your own ignorance as evidence of how transparently, rapidly, and effectively that Microsoft do in fact manage major processor shifts.
To be fair, Gears of War was from day one always said to be a trilogy- something it also notes in TFA.
Epic have had a clear plan for the franchise all along in this respect, so I suspect the franchise was developed with the overall storyline for it developed the same time they were developing Gears of War 1. I don't mind this so much, because if they feel the story they wanted to pull off was too much for a single game, then it's really their best option.
I know what you mean though in general- Call of Duty is perhaps the most obvious example. It's not as if the MW branch has anything whatsoever to do with the WW2 games, and even the WW2 games in the series were completely disjoint. Despite this, the success of MW demonstrated that going against the previously established does often end up producing things people want more than they wanted the previously established.
It's just a shame as you say, there isn't more will to make the jump the MW team did. Innovation nowadays seems to come almost entirely from indies.
"It's going to take them a year to produce 6 hours of content."
That's 6 years of dynamic, explorable content.
Which isn't too bad when you consider how long it can take Hollywood to produce 2 hours of static content.
"If you're game cant survive 3 years without one sequel, let alone two it wasn't that good."
Who said it can't survive? Thousands of people still play the original. This is not about being unable to survive, it's about providing sequels for one of the top 5 best selling franchises of this console generation because a) a lot of people enjoy it, and want more, and b) it means more money for them.
What kind of company doesn't try and make more money when there's a massive demand for their product? Certainly not one that's produced a game that can't survive at least.
You really just proved my point, because you demonstrated that the FPS' you like are all playable in a Rambo fashion.
I know full well that RB6 prior to the newer ones and Theif were meant to be about slow speed and tactics, but that's simply not how they played.
The older RB6 games were easily playable in a rambo fashion, and that's the point- you like them because you only like Rambo style games.
L4D is another fine example, you can pretend it's about tactics, but ultimately it's not, it's just a braindead shooter, where the only tactics are not running off ahead of the rest of the group. Completing L4D on hardest difficulty was a push over even with nothing more than a random group that are all too shy to use their headsets.
I get it, I really do- you like fast paced FPS that's fine, but you still seem to have this delusion that all FPS should be fast paced. That's just dumb, not every game should be the same style. If you don't like slower paced games you don't have to play them, but millions do, it's as simple as that. It's not even as if consoles don't have faster paced FPS either- L4D series, CoD series, Halo series all follow this pattern of faster paced gameplay and it works fine- fine enough in fact that far more people play these games on consoles than they do on the PC even.
You mention requiring fine control of shots between fast paced combat, perhaps you should look at people who play Operation Flashpoint on consoles, you need to be able to act fast one minute, whilst switching to pixel perfect sniping the next- so much so that you need to be able to adjust to the pixel your aiming angle so that shots curve down on targets accounting for the range of your target and weapon. All that and again, people play it just fine on consoles.
You see, ultimately there's no difference between a full 360 degree analog thumb stick, and a mouse ball- if you want to move faster, you just up the sensitivity so you get more in game movement for less physical movement. When there's no real difference though it sounds like the issue is simply that you just never got used to using a gamepad. The granularity of units both inputs detect is so small that they can both easily cater to exactly the same levels of sensitivity and movement, the only difference is how fast you can move your thumb, compared to how fast you can move your wrist. It's really just about getting used to the difference in input rather than an inherent disadvantage of the input system.
We had the same arguments from keyboard only folks when mouselook became prominent in the first place- they just didn't want to bother getting used to a new way of controlling, so instead they just sat and whined about that new way telling everyone it was somehow inferior, when really, it simply wasn't.
It's not like we're dealing with the low fidelity analog sticks, or even digital sticks of old, modern analog sticks on the likes of the 360 and PS3 just aren't that gimped.
"It would add about $10 to the total materials cost (if that) and reduce the feeling of being ripped off significantly."
If you feel like you're being ripped off when you buy Apple stuff then you're doing it wrong.
You're supposed to tell yourself it costs more because it's magical and has been blessed by Steve Jobs, hence the extra cost is completely and utterly justified and well worth it.
"I know realism isn't everything (it's only a game) but I think in any FPS there is a certain expectation that sometimes you have to turn around bloody fast, run, shoot vaguely accurately and quickly, and quickly observe your entire surroundings (not all at the same time)."
So in other words, you don't like slower paced FPS' and in your opinion all FPS should be fast paced?
Some of us (quite a lot judging by sales figures of the likes of Gears of War, Rainbow Six etc. that use this style of gameplay) actually like to play games that aren't all about pretending to be Rambo, where using teamwork and cover to flank and so forth actually mean something.
If I want something fast paced, I play MW2 and run round with my knife class and it's fun sometimes, but it'd really really suck if all FPS games had to be this way. There's too little experimentation and differentiation between games nowadays as is, the last thing we need is for every game to be CoD clones, there's too much of that already.
"Such practices are essentially taboo in Windows or Java. But Apple with Cocoa (and ObjC - it is the enabler of the magic) does them quite often."
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure if your example was too simplified and there's more too it, or whether you don't know much about Windows development.
Windows has supported common controls through all it's APIs from the the C based Win32 API, C++ based MFC, to the.NET framework. I'm pretty sure common controls go back before Win32 as well, but I wasn't developing for Windows back that far. If you develop making use of common controls then the OS takes care of how they look and function, you just implement what they do and how the respond to usage. This seems to be exactly the sort of thing you're describing with Cocoa from your example, Is there more to it than that?
I also certainly don't see why these sorts of practices would be seen as taboo. In general application development I've encountered, abstraction layers to ensure your code is futureproof and portalbe have always been seen as a good thing. It's only where abstraction layers would cause performance issues that they might be avoided, but how many types of applications does that cover really? Even most high end AAA games are fine with various abstraction layers to ensure the game stays pretty much the same to the degree it can based on the hardware whether it's being built for XBox, Playstation or Wii, or something else.
Yep, this is mostly true, if you're making a clone of a game you don't need permission providing you don't infringe on their IP.
Infringement of IP might be using the same names of characters, graphically similar enemies and so forth.
Basically, if the original game is story based you're going to struggle to immitate it without infringing on their IP because their IP is so core to the game, but if you're going for a less story focussed game, let's say something like Streetfighter 2, then clone away, just change the characters, change the moves, change the name, and there's really fuck all they can do- you can still do a fighting game that resembles it and recreate the spirit of the original game without copying their IP.
The same goes for a game like, say Desert Strike or the games in that series- it's fine to make a roughly isometric viewpoint based game where you fly around in a helicopter blowing shit up as long as you change the storyline, and use a slightly different helicopter, or give it different weapons.
So really it comes down to how closely the IP is tied into the gameplay, with Tetris there was really little IP other than the name, it's hard for them to claim coloured blocks as their IP and they cannot class the gameplay as their IP hence why as the parent said, you can clone the shit out of tetris and give it a different name. The same would go for games like Asteroids as long as the name and spaceship aren't quite the same. But then as I say, if you take an platformer like Mario or Sonic then you can copy the gameplay- game mechanics such as jumping on heads to kill, the speed characters move, how high they jump, but you can't copy the characters or enemies so by the time you're done you'll be left with a game that might play like Mario or Sonic, but is otherwise completely and utterly different and just another platformer.
So overall the answer to the question is really just how much of the original game you want to clone- if you just want to make a game that feels like the original, but has fresh characters, storyline, name and so forth then fine. If you want to clone the original characters and storyline then you're out of luck.
As an aside, in my younger days, Valve came in heavy handed against a mod team I was in for trying to create a clone of the original Teamfortress for a different engine and told us we were infringing on their IP because we used the word Fortress in the name even though we didn't use the word Team, and we used the same class names. They told us we could carry on if we removed Fortress from the name, and if we changed the class names. I was 17 at the time so wasn't going to argue, but I suspect they had very little case against us anyway, even more so when you take into account the fact the original TF mod was available free with source code and listed as free to use as you want, even though Valve later removed it and claimed that agreement was no longer valid, something I'm not sure they can retroactively take back anyway. So companies will try it on, if you believe you've done nothing wrong seek proper legal advice, they may just be trying to strong arm you when you have absolutely no case to answer at all.
I would say in the face of modern strengthening of IP laws, the laws surrounding computer game development are actually some of the fairest and most liberal, and I'd argue this is why computer games technology move so fast- we'd probably never have had Call of Duty MW games if Valve had been able to use say Counter-Strike to claim rights to modern warfare FPS games for example.
I think you'd be suprised, there seems to be a similar trend in other universities, I think it's because many departments run on shoe string budgets, and GIS was often an expense they couldn't afford.
Now it's available free to them, and cross platform so they can make use of it anywhere from their desktop to their laptop at home to their mobile phone/PDA in the field.
A friend who is a botanist working at a university in Brazil makes heavy use of it along with the rest of his department to map various plant species, and their spread and decline as a tool for helping map the discovery and decline of species, as well as acting as an aid to give clues as to how newly discovered, or previously poorly classified species might be classified or re-classified taxonomically. It helps give clues to where hybridisation may have led to new distinct species and so forth.
It's a tool his department simply didn't have before, but perhaps that's part of it too. Those who are experts in one field, don't necessarily know enough to know tools like this even exist, until companies like Google make them popular and put them in the public eye. When those experts do see these tools they realise how utterly useful they are- remember, not everyone knows enough about computers to know what's out there, or to realise the many ways in which they can assist their day to day work.
Advancement of the tools matters too- phones/pdas with built in GPS and access to these applications, cameras that tag photos with GPS coordinates, cheaper than ever GPS devices and so on all increase the attractiveness and ease of use of these apps where people may previously have found them too difficult or too much hassle to work with over their existing methods too I suppose.
It had built in accelerometers and GPS that fed back to the beings legs so that they could use their brain for other things than menial tasks like travelling to where they want to be.
To be fair, I've never found Barclays in the UK to be too bad to me.
GOA (used to run European Dark Age of Camelot) continued to bill me after I'd cancelled my subscription. I spent weeks trying to get hold of them and to get them to refund me and they did. Only they billed me again after that, so I contact the bank and asked them to reverse the charge and block any future charges, and even though it was a debit card, which I was told they will not do that for, they did.
I was also double charged by a hotel (Delta) and Airline (Air Canada) in the past, and in both cases the bank was happy to refund the overdraw charges these incurred.
I've even been victim of card fraud, where an online retailer had their database hacked and obviously didn't store card details in an encrypted form such that my details were used in Italy to buy 350 euros worth of Italian mobile phone credit. It was a ball ache, but at least there was no real hassle in getting the money back other than filling in the forms for a fraudulent transaction report they were quite helpful about it all, even allowing me a temporary overdraw limit with no charges incurred for using it so that I wasn't out of money for the 10 day period they investigated it and returned the money over.
Don't get me wrong, it should still be handled better, I personally have no interest in the ability to get negative on my debit card account so frankly I'd rather they bank had just refused the second charging requests altogether because I didn't have money in my account for the second charge in both cases, but I recognise that's how they make their money to offer these accounts free in the UK- by taking advantage of stupid people who really do spend more than they have. I also don't think it was sensible that they allowed use of my card from Italy, when I'd used it around the same time in the UK either - I can't be in two places at once for crying out loud, so there's certainly a lot they could do.
The point is though, in the cases where things like this did happen to me through no fault of my own, Barclays have always been fair in resolving the issue for me.
I can't really comment on other banks, I know my parents had problems with Natwest though when my grandmother became ill, such that although my grandmother had given permission and filled in all the forms to allow my parents to manage her account on their behalf, Natwest still refused access and blocked my grandmother out too claiming she was mentally unfit to access her own money, and that she was also mentally unfit to allow my parents to manage it for her! Luckily in their case the FSA intervened and sorted Natwest out for them though because they were actually breaking their legal obligations, so certainly it's not always a pretty picture.
"PR has problems too, since you don;t have your "own" MP, local issues tend to get less attention."
So what? My MP has demonstrated he has no interest anyway. He disagrees with me on most things and votes that way, he's pro-ID card, pro-DEB, anti-equal rights and so forth. I couldn't give a toss if I didn't have a local representative because they only serve the minority of the country (33% of the population under the current government) that voted them in.
You might as well have national MPs you can contact that are at least interested in your issues and will hence bring them up and vote the way you would like, than local MPs that aren't interested and vote against your interests.
I'd rather have a vote, than no vote at all and hence get lumped with a representative who doesn't represent me whatsoever.
You don't even have to do PR in a centralised manner, you can still make it so that MPs pulled in through proportional vote must be distributed sensibly across regions (i.e. in proportion to population) meaning you still have representatives from the Midlands, Yorkshire, and so forth- it doesn't really need to be subdivided less than that in most the country, Yorkshire's issues for example are pretty uniform across it, but importantly people in Yorkshire could always then almost certainly at least find an MP who is interested in each of their issues.
The point is, even though PR isn't perfect, it's a damn sight more fair for everyone- at least everyone's on an equal footing in terms of vote and representation then. This is how it works in Europe, where countries have representatives allocated in proportion to their population. It doesn't mean people in each country don't have representatives who share their interests which they can contact though. You can still get in touch with the euro MP who best suits your needs in your region, rather than be left with a choice of only one who doesn't represent you at all.
I'll be impressed when I see it happen here! I'm not originally from here, but the mentality in these villages near where I live now stinks, they're all still voting Labour because they think they're still rebelling against Thatcher which is, well, madness. That was all so long ago, it's irrelevant now and even then they could vote Lib Dem, Greens or whatever to make the same point but they don't.
This constituency has been held by Labour without skipping a single election since 1918, so it's not just that I guess, it seems like it's just kind of brainwashed into them to vote Labour from birth.
The problem is, Labour have a majority of around 14,000 here.
Even if my entire village voted for the next closest candidate, it still wouldn't matter, because he has the mining villages for life.
I do vote still, but I feel it's pointless, because my vote is no different to having no vote whatsoever.
I'm very pro-EU because as the EU is based on PR, despite the fact my vote in the European elections is diluted amongst a few hundred thousand people that's still a vote that actually has some value.
It's sad that I can affect UK policy slightly through European elections, but not in the slightest through our very own national elections. The Conservative, UKIP and BNP's position on Europe seems quite laughable to me in this respect, because they talk of removing power from Brussels back to the UK, but ironically, this would actually give me LESS of a say in my own country. How fucked up is that, that I have to rely on Brussels for any say whatsoever in my own country? and how sad is it that the nationalist ideology behind bringing power back from Brussels actually just means more power for politicians, and less for citizens stuck in areas where they don't support the winning candidate (safe seats) - i.e. the majority of the population, 67% last election in fact.
Slashdot Mirror
"I could be arrested in this country for the fact that I sympathise with people who carry out suicide bombings."
Yes, you could be, perhaps, in some alternative reality.
But in the real world, no, you couldn't. There is no law in the UK that would cover arresting someone for sympathising with suicide bombings, there is however a law against encouraging others to commit suicide bombings which is presumably what you're thinking of.
In the UK we're certainly not free, but that doesn't mean that Americans are particularly free either. I've encounted a couple of events in the US and with friends in the US lately where people have run afoul of city ordinance laws.
A friend in Virginia wanted to get rid of the grass in his garden in the US and fill his garden with native plants from that region, but couldn't because it would breach city ordinance laws. There was a similar case in California where a couple wanted to do away with their grass and plant xerophytic plants to save on water consumption, but also ended up breaching city ordinance laws.
It's not just that though- look at the guy who was naked in his house and got arrested for indecent exposure following a complaint by a woman and her daughter even though the only reason they saw him was because they were trespassing on his land to start with.
At least here in the UK you can get rid of grass in your garden and plant something else, at least your garden is your garden, and your home is your home.
Labour has a lot to answer for in raping British civil liberties, but it's foolish to imagine you're anymore free in the US. The difference is of course, there are a bunch of people in America who like to consistently remind the world of how free people in America are compared to the rest of the world, even though they're clearly not.
"How do you keep an employee from taking that training you just paid for and leaving for what the employee sees as greener pastures? How do you get a return on the huge investment you just dumped into that employee?"
Treating them well, rather than treating them like shit is generally how most successful companies do it.
If you think withholding training is going to stop smart career oriented people leaving, then you're wrong. They'll just become resentful that the company gives them nothing and leave anyway. The only ones who will hang around are the ones who know they can't do better anywhere else because they're already paid more than they're worth anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I also believe in continuing education as an employee responsibility, but then, I also go where the money is. I've always said the one thing that'll keep me at a company is a company that treats me well and offers good career progression, if they offer me training, and pay me more as I gain in ability and offer them more I have every reason to stay. Otherwise I'll keep hopping from company to company, gaining more money as I do.
You can't give staff training and look at it as an isolated thing, you have to recognise you're not just giving them training, but investing in them, making them better, and with that, you must recognise they're also worth more and pay them what they're worth- do that and in return you'll get loyalty and you'll have a full team of extremely skilled staff, making your company more money overall too.
You see, it'll cost you more in the long run, to end up with crap staff staying, and good staff leaving regardless, and having to keep recruiting to replace them, keep having to pay those recruitment costs, keep losing many productive hours inducting and training the new staff in your systems. At the end of the day, it's cheaper, and more beneficial long term to invest in staff, but many companies just look at the short term, and sure they get by, but they never see decent growth like the top companies do as a result.
One thing no one seems to have brought up in response to this article so far regarding the length of the eruption is that it's not simply the fact the volcano is erupting, and it's not simply the fact that it's erupting in a location where ash is carried by the jet stream.
The issue is the strength of the eruptions. The initial eruptions were of course quite powerful, and these were forcing up sizeable chunks of silica and such into the air which really were quite dangerous, however as the eruption continues and becomes less violent, the particles being blown into the air are becoming much more fine.
So the talk amongst many of how this could last for months or years, completely and utterly misses the point. No one's disputing the eruption could go on a long time, what is in dispute is the violence of the eruption, if it erupts for 2 years but the continued eruption is so small that it doesn't blast much up to a level beyond which it just comes straight back down into iceland then it becomes a non-issue. Even if it keeps blasting particles up into the air to a height where they're a problem, then if those particles become much more fine then airlines can fly through it without issue- this seems to be what the airlines are contesting now, not that there wasn't a danger, but that the ash and particles being blown up now are fine enough to be a non-issue.
There are also requests of course to be able to fly below 20,000 ft, below the ash cloud- this may be a bit more troublesome in terms of fuel for transatlantic flights, but it should at least get air travel going in Europe again.
It was a tax dodge.
They wanted the PS3 classified as a computer rather than an entertainment device, but their bid largely failed. When it did fail, support for OtherOS became pointless, they never implemented it for the user, they implemented it for their own attempt to avoid paying tax where it was due.
It sucks for the user though, because when the user sees a feature, they assume it's their for their own good and for their own use, not merely for Sony's use to try and fiddle the tax system.
That said, it's not the first time either- look at backwards compatibility support, that got cut pretty quickly too. It just seems to be in Sony's nature to promise all sorts of things, and then cut them later when they feel the cost of maintaining them is outweighed by the profits they bring in. At least in the case of backwards compat. they followed the rule of law though. In this case they're clearly in breach of European consumer laws.
Yeah, I couldn't fathom this either.
In the UK you can leave school at 16, by 17 you can be deployed to Afghanistan shooting people dead if you joined the Army.
I don't see how it's child labour, it just seems to be poor working conditions for young employees, but I suspect it's the same for all employees and so the real issue is the poor working conditions.
The child labour spin in this case sounds like sensationalism. In Apple's case previously some workers were found to be 15 and so I can kind of buy the argument there by western standards, even though it's really quite borderline, but even that's a stretch. 16 and 17 though? That's not child labour.
If 16/17 year olds are to be reclassified as children, then er, the UK fully allows child labour too due to the fact that 16 and 17 year olds can leave school and work full time.
Yeah, if only someone could get that big fat ash cloud out the way it'd be a beautiful clear sky.
Read the post modded up above.
You don't need a federal judge to declare something a monopoly, monopolies are not in themselves illegal. Many componies have monopolies in their respective markets and with their respective products- perhaps some strong examples in Apple's case are the personal media player market, and the online media distribution market. It'd be hard to argue with the percentage Apple holds that it does not hold a monopoly in these areas.
But here's the key, monopolies only become a problem when a company leverages that in an illegal manner to stifle competition in other markets. It's questionable now whether Apple is in fact doing this, and that's the fundamental problem, and that is where your judge comes in- not the declaration of monopoly status, but the declaration of the legality of actions in relation to that monopoly.
So the GP is right and you are wrong, Apple certainly is a monopoly. The real question is whether they're are guilty of any illegality in light of their monopoly status, and that's not something anyone here on Slashdot can answer. It's something for the courts.
Your post is amusing, because your theory that Microsoft couldn't handle a processor shift is a perfect demonstration of how wrong you are.
Why? Because Microsoft have been handling processor shifts for decades, and have been doing it so well, people like you haven't even realised.
From 16 to 32 bit, 32 bit to 64 bit, the introduction of SIMD technologies, the likes of dealing with Xeons, Pentium Pros, Core architecture, Itanium, their development tools like .NET and Visual Studio that allow you to develop once and build seamlessly for ARM, PPC handhelds/phones. Hell, I can even write a game myself in XNA and it'll run on my x86 desktop, my x64 desktop, my PPC XBox 360 and an ARM based Zune HD.
Congratulations in demonstrating you clearly have no idea what you are on about, and in the process, using your own ignorance as evidence of how transparently, rapidly, and effectively that Microsoft do in fact manage major processor shifts.
To be fair, Gears of War was from day one always said to be a trilogy- something it also notes in TFA.
Epic have had a clear plan for the franchise all along in this respect, so I suspect the franchise was developed with the overall storyline for it developed the same time they were developing Gears of War 1. I don't mind this so much, because if they feel the story they wanted to pull off was too much for a single game, then it's really their best option.
I know what you mean though in general- Call of Duty is perhaps the most obvious example. It's not as if the MW branch has anything whatsoever to do with the WW2 games, and even the WW2 games in the series were completely disjoint. Despite this, the success of MW demonstrated that going against the previously established does often end up producing things people want more than they wanted the previously established.
It's just a shame as you say, there isn't more will to make the jump the MW team did. Innovation nowadays seems to come almost entirely from indies.
"It's going to take them a year to produce 6 hours of content."
That's 6 years of dynamic, explorable content.
Which isn't too bad when you consider how long it can take Hollywood to produce 2 hours of static content.
"If you're game cant survive 3 years without one sequel, let alone two it wasn't that good."
Who said it can't survive? Thousands of people still play the original. This is not about being unable to survive, it's about providing sequels for one of the top 5 best selling franchises of this console generation because a) a lot of people enjoy it, and want more, and b) it means more money for them.
What kind of company doesn't try and make more money when there's a massive demand for their product? Certainly not one that's produced a game that can't survive at least.
You really just proved my point, because you demonstrated that the FPS' you like are all playable in a Rambo fashion.
I know full well that RB6 prior to the newer ones and Theif were meant to be about slow speed and tactics, but that's simply not how they played.
The older RB6 games were easily playable in a rambo fashion, and that's the point- you like them because you only like Rambo style games.
L4D is another fine example, you can pretend it's about tactics, but ultimately it's not, it's just a braindead shooter, where the only tactics are not running off ahead of the rest of the group. Completing L4D on hardest difficulty was a push over even with nothing more than a random group that are all too shy to use their headsets.
I get it, I really do- you like fast paced FPS that's fine, but you still seem to have this delusion that all FPS should be fast paced. That's just dumb, not every game should be the same style. If you don't like slower paced games you don't have to play them, but millions do, it's as simple as that. It's not even as if consoles don't have faster paced FPS either- L4D series, CoD series, Halo series all follow this pattern of faster paced gameplay and it works fine- fine enough in fact that far more people play these games on consoles than they do on the PC even.
You mention requiring fine control of shots between fast paced combat, perhaps you should look at people who play Operation Flashpoint on consoles, you need to be able to act fast one minute, whilst switching to pixel perfect sniping the next- so much so that you need to be able to adjust to the pixel your aiming angle so that shots curve down on targets accounting for the range of your target and weapon. All that and again, people play it just fine on consoles.
You see, ultimately there's no difference between a full 360 degree analog thumb stick, and a mouse ball- if you want to move faster, you just up the sensitivity so you get more in game movement for less physical movement. When there's no real difference though it sounds like the issue is simply that you just never got used to using a gamepad. The granularity of units both inputs detect is so small that they can both easily cater to exactly the same levels of sensitivity and movement, the only difference is how fast you can move your thumb, compared to how fast you can move your wrist. It's really just about getting used to the difference in input rather than an inherent disadvantage of the input system.
We had the same arguments from keyboard only folks when mouselook became prominent in the first place- they just didn't want to bother getting used to a new way of controlling, so instead they just sat and whined about that new way telling everyone it was somehow inferior, when really, it simply wasn't.
It's not like we're dealing with the low fidelity analog sticks, or even digital sticks of old, modern analog sticks on the likes of the 360 and PS3 just aren't that gimped.
"It would add about $10 to the total materials cost (if that) and reduce the feeling of being ripped off significantly."
If you feel like you're being ripped off when you buy Apple stuff then you're doing it wrong.
You're supposed to tell yourself it costs more because it's magical and has been blessed by Steve Jobs, hence the extra cost is completely and utterly justified and well worth it.
But what about Java developers?
"I know realism isn't everything (it's only a game) but I think in any FPS there is a certain expectation that sometimes you have to turn around bloody fast, run, shoot vaguely accurately and quickly, and quickly observe your entire surroundings (not all at the same time)."
So in other words, you don't like slower paced FPS' and in your opinion all FPS should be fast paced?
Some of us (quite a lot judging by sales figures of the likes of Gears of War, Rainbow Six etc. that use this style of gameplay) actually like to play games that aren't all about pretending to be Rambo, where using teamwork and cover to flank and so forth actually mean something.
If I want something fast paced, I play MW2 and run round with my knife class and it's fun sometimes, but it'd really really suck if all FPS games had to be this way. There's too little experimentation and differentiation between games nowadays as is, the last thing we need is for every game to be CoD clones, there's too much of that already.
"Such practices are essentially taboo in Windows or Java. But Apple with Cocoa (and ObjC - it is the enabler of the magic) does them quite often."
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure if your example was too simplified and there's more too it, or whether you don't know much about Windows development.
Windows has supported common controls through all it's APIs from the the C based Win32 API, C++ based MFC, to the .NET framework. I'm pretty sure common controls go back before Win32 as well, but I wasn't developing for Windows back that far. If you develop making use of common controls then the OS takes care of how they look and function, you just implement what they do and how the respond to usage. This seems to be exactly the sort of thing you're describing with Cocoa from your example, Is there more to it than that?
I also certainly don't see why these sorts of practices would be seen as taboo. In general application development I've encountered, abstraction layers to ensure your code is futureproof and portalbe have always been seen as a good thing. It's only where abstraction layers would cause performance issues that they might be avoided, but how many types of applications does that cover really? Even most high end AAA games are fine with various abstraction layers to ensure the game stays pretty much the same to the degree it can based on the hardware whether it's being built for XBox, Playstation or Wii, or something else.
Plus it'll prepare them for the real world thanks to an ever increasing trend towards the surveillance state.
Yep, this is mostly true, if you're making a clone of a game you don't need permission providing you don't infringe on their IP.
Infringement of IP might be using the same names of characters, graphically similar enemies and so forth.
Basically, if the original game is story based you're going to struggle to immitate it without infringing on their IP because their IP is so core to the game, but if you're going for a less story focussed game, let's say something like Streetfighter 2, then clone away, just change the characters, change the moves, change the name, and there's really fuck all they can do- you can still do a fighting game that resembles it and recreate the spirit of the original game without copying their IP.
The same goes for a game like, say Desert Strike or the games in that series- it's fine to make a roughly isometric viewpoint based game where you fly around in a helicopter blowing shit up as long as you change the storyline, and use a slightly different helicopter, or give it different weapons.
So really it comes down to how closely the IP is tied into the gameplay, with Tetris there was really little IP other than the name, it's hard for them to claim coloured blocks as their IP and they cannot class the gameplay as their IP hence why as the parent said, you can clone the shit out of tetris and give it a different name. The same would go for games like Asteroids as long as the name and spaceship aren't quite the same. But then as I say, if you take an platformer like Mario or Sonic then you can copy the gameplay- game mechanics such as jumping on heads to kill, the speed characters move, how high they jump, but you can't copy the characters or enemies so by the time you're done you'll be left with a game that might play like Mario or Sonic, but is otherwise completely and utterly different and just another platformer.
So overall the answer to the question is really just how much of the original game you want to clone- if you just want to make a game that feels like the original, but has fresh characters, storyline, name and so forth then fine. If you want to clone the original characters and storyline then you're out of luck.
As an aside, in my younger days, Valve came in heavy handed against a mod team I was in for trying to create a clone of the original Teamfortress for a different engine and told us we were infringing on their IP because we used the word Fortress in the name even though we didn't use the word Team, and we used the same class names. They told us we could carry on if we removed Fortress from the name, and if we changed the class names. I was 17 at the time so wasn't going to argue, but I suspect they had very little case against us anyway, even more so when you take into account the fact the original TF mod was available free with source code and listed as free to use as you want, even though Valve later removed it and claimed that agreement was no longer valid, something I'm not sure they can retroactively take back anyway. So companies will try it on, if you believe you've done nothing wrong seek proper legal advice, they may just be trying to strong arm you when you have absolutely no case to answer at all.
I would say in the face of modern strengthening of IP laws, the laws surrounding computer game development are actually some of the fairest and most liberal, and I'd argue this is why computer games technology move so fast- we'd probably never have had Call of Duty MW games if Valve had been able to use say Counter-Strike to claim rights to modern warfare FPS games for example.
I think you'd be suprised, there seems to be a similar trend in other universities, I think it's because many departments run on shoe string budgets, and GIS was often an expense they couldn't afford.
Now it's available free to them, and cross platform so they can make use of it anywhere from their desktop to their laptop at home to their mobile phone/PDA in the field.
A friend who is a botanist working at a university in Brazil makes heavy use of it along with the rest of his department to map various plant species, and their spread and decline as a tool for helping map the discovery and decline of species, as well as acting as an aid to give clues as to how newly discovered, or previously poorly classified species might be classified or re-classified taxonomically. It helps give clues to where hybridisation may have led to new distinct species and so forth.
It's a tool his department simply didn't have before, but perhaps that's part of it too. Those who are experts in one field, don't necessarily know enough to know tools like this even exist, until companies like Google make them popular and put them in the public eye. When those experts do see these tools they realise how utterly useful they are- remember, not everyone knows enough about computers to know what's out there, or to realise the many ways in which they can assist their day to day work.
Advancement of the tools matters too- phones/pdas with built in GPS and access to these applications, cameras that tag photos with GPS coordinates, cheaper than ever GPS devices and so on all increase the attractiveness and ease of use of these apps where people may previously have found them too difficult or too much hassle to work with over their existing methods too I suppose.
It had built in accelerometers and GPS that fed back to the beings legs so that they could use their brain for other things than menial tasks like travelling to where they want to be.
Oh, and it had laser blasters on the sides too.
To be fair, I've never found Barclays in the UK to be too bad to me.
GOA (used to run European Dark Age of Camelot) continued to bill me after I'd cancelled my subscription. I spent weeks trying to get hold of them and to get them to refund me and they did. Only they billed me again after that, so I contact the bank and asked them to reverse the charge and block any future charges, and even though it was a debit card, which I was told they will not do that for, they did.
I was also double charged by a hotel (Delta) and Airline (Air Canada) in the past, and in both cases the bank was happy to refund the overdraw charges these incurred.
I've even been victim of card fraud, where an online retailer had their database hacked and obviously didn't store card details in an encrypted form such that my details were used in Italy to buy 350 euros worth of Italian mobile phone credit. It was a ball ache, but at least there was no real hassle in getting the money back other than filling in the forms for a fraudulent transaction report they were quite helpful about it all, even allowing me a temporary overdraw limit with no charges incurred for using it so that I wasn't out of money for the 10 day period they investigated it and returned the money over.
Don't get me wrong, it should still be handled better, I personally have no interest in the ability to get negative on my debit card account so frankly I'd rather they bank had just refused the second charging requests altogether because I didn't have money in my account for the second charge in both cases, but I recognise that's how they make their money to offer these accounts free in the UK- by taking advantage of stupid people who really do spend more than they have. I also don't think it was sensible that they allowed use of my card from Italy, when I'd used it around the same time in the UK either - I can't be in two places at once for crying out loud, so there's certainly a lot they could do.
The point is though, in the cases where things like this did happen to me through no fault of my own, Barclays have always been fair in resolving the issue for me.
I can't really comment on other banks, I know my parents had problems with Natwest though when my grandmother became ill, such that although my grandmother had given permission and filled in all the forms to allow my parents to manage her account on their behalf, Natwest still refused access and blocked my grandmother out too claiming she was mentally unfit to access her own money, and that she was also mentally unfit to allow my parents to manage it for her! Luckily in their case the FSA intervened and sorted Natwest out for them though because they were actually breaking their legal obligations, so certainly it's not always a pretty picture.
"PR has problems too, since you don;t have your "own" MP, local issues tend to get less attention."
So what? My MP has demonstrated he has no interest anyway. He disagrees with me on most things and votes that way, he's pro-ID card, pro-DEB, anti-equal rights and so forth. I couldn't give a toss if I didn't have a local representative because they only serve the minority of the country (33% of the population under the current government) that voted them in.
You might as well have national MPs you can contact that are at least interested in your issues and will hence bring them up and vote the way you would like, than local MPs that aren't interested and vote against your interests.
I'd rather have a vote, than no vote at all and hence get lumped with a representative who doesn't represent me whatsoever.
You don't even have to do PR in a centralised manner, you can still make it so that MPs pulled in through proportional vote must be distributed sensibly across regions (i.e. in proportion to population) meaning you still have representatives from the Midlands, Yorkshire, and so forth- it doesn't really need to be subdivided less than that in most the country, Yorkshire's issues for example are pretty uniform across it, but importantly people in Yorkshire could always then almost certainly at least find an MP who is interested in each of their issues.
The point is, even though PR isn't perfect, it's a damn sight more fair for everyone- at least everyone's on an equal footing in terms of vote and representation then. This is how it works in Europe, where countries have representatives allocated in proportion to their population. It doesn't mean people in each country don't have representatives who share their interests which they can contact though. You can still get in touch with the euro MP who best suits your needs in your region, rather than be left with a choice of only one who doesn't represent you at all.
Even here in Yorkshire?
I'll be impressed when I see it happen here! I'm not originally from here, but the mentality in these villages near where I live now stinks, they're all still voting Labour because they think they're still rebelling against Thatcher which is, well, madness. That was all so long ago, it's irrelevant now and even then they could vote Lib Dem, Greens or whatever to make the same point but they don't.
This constituency has been held by Labour without skipping a single election since 1918, so it's not just that I guess, it seems like it's just kind of brainwashed into them to vote Labour from birth.
Might depend where you are I guess, I've certainly heard it used here in the UK down the pub and such a fair bit.
The problem is, Labour have a majority of around 14,000 here.
Even if my entire village voted for the next closest candidate, it still wouldn't matter, because he has the mining villages for life.
I do vote still, but I feel it's pointless, because my vote is no different to having no vote whatsoever.
I'm very pro-EU because as the EU is based on PR, despite the fact my vote in the European elections is diluted amongst a few hundred thousand people that's still a vote that actually has some value.
It's sad that I can affect UK policy slightly through European elections, but not in the slightest through our very own national elections. The Conservative, UKIP and BNP's position on Europe seems quite laughable to me in this respect, because they talk of removing power from Brussels back to the UK, but ironically, this would actually give me LESS of a say in my own country. How fucked up is that, that I have to rely on Brussels for any say whatsoever in my own country? and how sad is it that the nationalist ideology behind bringing power back from Brussels actually just means more power for politicians, and less for citizens stuck in areas where they don't support the winning candidate (safe seats) - i.e. the majority of the population, 67% last election in fact.
When people use that phrase, they're simply being sarcastic, saying they could care less, when they mean that no, really, they couldn't.
It'll hopefully be slightly less annoying for you in future now you know the tone in which people intend that phrase be read.