According to LGPL people, plugins must use the same license, so you can't create an LGPL plugin for commercial software.
Specifically, I'm referring to this clause: 1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.
the keywords are "already present" and "at runtime" - since a downloaded and dynamically installed plugin is not already present at runtime, this would violate the LGPL if it were used before the application was restarted.
Whether it's enforced or not, the wording is clear - the library (in this case plugin) MUST be on the system before the application is started. It's possible clause d0 could be used instead of d1, but I remember that being an issue, as well (it uses section 6 of the GPL). The LGPL people, as I recall, didn't think it would be an issue because the LGPL is for dynamically linked libraries, not applications or plugins.
I and most of my guild think Eye of the North is the worst in the series, for multiple reasons
1) some dungeons take an hour to get to, then 2-3 hours to complete. Since it is almost impossible to find guildies that have 3 contiguous hours on at the same time, they often are done with heroes and henchies and unless you look up the dungeon beforehand, you probably will have to redo it later because you didn't bring a specific subset of builds needed to succeed. Specifically, I'm referring to Rragar's Menagerie and Catacombs of Kathandrax, but there are other bad ones.
2) A couple of bosses were buffed to make them not vulnerable to one skill, but that had the side effect that even some hardcore players have difficulty with the boss (e.g. Ilsundur, Lord of Fire due to Pain Inverter). I have a guildie with over 3000 hours logged and 27 maxed titles, and he couldn't figure out how to beat that boss with his assassin. I managed to do it with an Ele on my second try, but only because I ran a water wards build and had good protection monks.
3) 2 man farm groups with a specific skillset can do the nearly entire Eye of the North in Hard Mode because of the "buff" (nerf) to Chilblains which no longer allows it to indirectly strip certain enchantments. It was the only common indirect strip used by monsters. It's now almost impossible to find teams anymore that aren't composed of two runners with this or a very similar skillset (usually the ritualist variant) and the rest paying, especially at a couple of dungeons.
4) The end boss was simple to beat and, like Nightfall's boss, kind of a letdown. I've never failed to beat either boss, even after the buff to the EotN boss.
5) Emphasizes grinding for titles rather than adding a lot of new content or areas or making any improvements in gameplay. I explored all the new areas in a weekend of maybe 8 hours of playing and mapped it to roughly 99% (based on title). Doing roughly a dungeon a day took about 3 weeks to complete. The solo quests and tournament were again more annoying than fun to me - a very specific limited subset of builds work, everything else doesn't, and it favors 1 or 2 classes, which stinks of bad playtesting.
6) Added tons of new junk to fill up storage and inventory because "people like to collect." - there just are far too many new items. It'd be nice if they boosted storage again.
Don't get me wrong, there are things I liked about GW:EN, like being somewhat open-ended (the maps still feel entirely on rails), had a nice set of heroes, the hall of monuments is nice for anyone with a lot of achievements. The problem is, I think it catered too much to the hardcore PvE player and not enough to more casual players or people like me that tend to split time between PvP and PvE. I don't find the title grind interesting after about 3 runs, so the hundred or so runs necessary to max a title will probably never happen.
By far my favorite RPG of the year is The Witcher, and biggest disappointment is Hellgate:London. I put GW:EN somewhere in the middle - there were things I liked about it, and others I hated.
The system requirements for UTIII aren't too bad - it will run on my 3 year old mid-tier machine with an upgraded graphics card and I consider 2-3 years a necessity if you want high volume sales. The problem is I don't think it generated a lot of buzz, and the demo didn't wow me like the 2004 demo did (a demo of the new mode or at least would have helped). The significantly higher retail price doesn't help, either (UT2004 released at about $20-$25, III at $50+).
Crysis is all about system requirements. My 7 month old $1500 laptop with a Dual Core 2.0GHz processor and an 8600M GS doesn't even meet them because it has Vista (requiring a minimum of a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo). Yes, if I loaded XP I should meet minimum, but I lose the ability to use DX10, and I expect most gamers with 8600 or 8800 cards are running Vista just for DX10. Since the 2.0GHz part is one of the most common, they probably lost a lot of sales right there. If a fairly high end 7 month old machine can't meet minimum specs, you're not going to sell much. I spec'd out a laptop on a couple sites and one that meets minimum requirements is still around $2000 (so I expect a desktop to be about $1400-1600). Again MINIMUM specs.
I see this as a benefit to smaller companies that need high speed storage, but maybe can't switch their entire storage network to fibre channel overnight due to cost. Many routers run Linux, so router manufacturers can probably add this functionality to existing Ethernet routers without hardware changes, making the cost of migration much smaller in the short term.
The GPL is not the solution to all problems. You can't link to GPL without becoming GPL, so if you want to offer a non-commercial library other people can use, even commercially, you're out of luck. This is important for some libraries that want to be universally accepted and not have a wide range of variants, such as zlib and libjpeg.
So you say LGPL - LGPL is valid ONLY for dynamically linked libraries. Plugins are not valid by the GPL or LGPL license unless the parent app has the same license, even though there are many plugins that say they're LGPL that work with commercial software. The problem is a plugin can declare itself LGPL, be downloaded and installed by a non-LGPL app WITHOUT RESTARTING the app and by the wording of the LGPL, the parent app has thus violated the LGPL. In effect, you could make commercial software violate the LGPL by just making an LGPL plugin for it, and that most certainly wouldn't hold up in court. The LGPL people were notified of this during license ratification and decided plugins were not supported by the license unless the license for the app was the same as the plugin.
I'd love a license that falls in-between the LGPL and BSD, since I'm from the old school of freeware developers that write open source for a hobby and don't care if it's used commercially, though I'd like to get credit if the application or library is used. Repackage and sell it commercially? Fine, as long as I'm credited. I'd also like the buyer to know the software included is freely available online and that you're paying for packaging and maybe manuals (similar to commercial linux distributions).
same, but VPN means when I'm working 16+ hour days 6 or 7 days a week during crunch (dictated by large customers that set hard deadlines and the marketing idiots^H^H^H^H^H^Hfolks that agree to them) I can still stop by home and see my wife for dinner.
Working from a coffee shop is a bit harder for me - our Nortel VPN still doesn't work with Vista, but my laptop has Vista (and Linux, but they want me to pay for a Linux client - I've fiddled with IPsec a bit to get through without it, but haven't gotten it to work). I therefore use VNC to an XP box and use Remote Desktop from there to my work computer, but that doesn't refresh properly. If you're wondering why I don't VNC to another VNC connection, which does update properly, well, management made the wonderful decision to block VNC and SSH connections due to fear of stealing stuff from reverse connections (people with business majors should not make tech decisions...), so I'm SOL. Oh, and Remote Desktop doesn't tunnel, so I can't use that (a Remote Desktop to a Remote Desktop to a machine - it disconnects). I'm not aware of any other free options that would work, but maybe there is a solution out there that I'm ignorant of.
Red Hat and Mandrake were a breeze for me to install (and SuSE for that matter). Usability-wise, they all had issues (especially involving ATI drivers for the old 8500). I don't think I ran into problems with any of their installers, but I admit all were version 7 or higher. Slackware and Debian were the first two I dabbled with in college, but then took a long time off from Linux before returning and didn't remember much of anything when I got an install CD of SuSE in a developer magazine. At least once a year I install a variant and use it heavily for a few months, usually because there was no easy update other than a reinstall.
For a real challenge, install GenToo from source using a starter CD. That was by far the most painful release for me, but I pretty much asked for it because I wanted to use SATA beta drivers and no release had them yet (I built a machine with no IDE drives, then decided to make it dual boot linux and XP). I certainly hope they've improved the process because it wasn't easy.
Have you tried/had luck with WINE for some of those things? I used to run Office with WINE, but I never had any luck with games without WineX (now Cedega). I hear the WINE DirectX support (non-commercial) is getting better, as well, but is still far from perfect. I'm tempted to not buy Windows for my next machine and make it all Linux. One Laptop with Vista is more than enough frustration for me - doesn't work with my VPN, file sharing was a pain to set up (install, enable, turn on [yes, separate steps in separate areas of the OS], punch a hole in the firewall, and set permissions), a display service dies about every 3-4 restarts forcing a reboot, and the list goes on.
MPEG is commercial and contains patents, so has the same issue as including any other patented technology (MPEG4 I believe even uses the Quicktime codec). HTML doesn't want to use patented tech - gif was free until UNISYS bought Compuserv and started enforcing Lev-Zempel and jpeg was free until a patent troll bought a related patent.
I can see Apple wanting to fight ogg-vorbis, as they have a heavy investment in AAC and Quicktime and I'm sure they would rather see that tech in. I didn't quite understand Nokia's arguments against, however. It's not like this is locking in the format, just what is and what is not a plug-in.
All religions have extremists and I can see many Americans really don't know many Muslims because all they talk about are the extremists. I've worked with one (Pakistani) that drank and smoked and rarely fasted during Ramadan (one time in the 3 years I worked with him) and another (Bangladeshi) that tried to be a perfect Muslim and took breaks to pray several times a day (morning, noon, and afternoon, sometimes evening if working late) and always took 2 hours off on Friday to go to the Mosque. A third (Pakistani) I worked with fell somewhere in-between. I also had a study group in college with two Iraqis that I didn't like very much, but we got along OK (one of them was very rude and blunt, the other was a little better, but impatient). My brother's best friend in college was a female Muslim (she wouldn't date him because he wasn't Muslim, but she was progressive enough to not wear a burka or veil, either, as her mom did). None of them ever asked me not to eat pork (Islamics don't eat it, either) or try to force their beliefs on me. About the only issue was picking a restaurant that worked for the Bangladeshi because he wouldn't eat meat slaughtered incorrectly (needed to be halal - throat slit and bled), but he was also fine with vegetarian (and rarely ate meat, anyway), so that was less of an issue than you might think.
I agree - executing critics is not part of Muslim law - the conservative and radical Islam that is preached in Saudi Arabia and parts of Pakistan made a lot of noise by making death threats to the cartoonists (echoed afterward by some others), and they probably only did it because of the attention it draws (like Iran got threatening Rushdie because of the Satanic Verses) - if they had just said "stop it - that's offensive to us" the rest of the world wouldn't care. The whole cartoon thing, freedom of speech or not, really was in bad taste - if, say, Iran ran a series of cartoons showing stuff like the Pope boning a choir boy (hidden by robes as pornography is illegal there) Catholics would be offended, too. Or how about Jesus, nailed to the cross with a giant chubby under his loincloth and the caption "I'm cuming God!"
Only extremist groups preach the type of Islam that breeds terrorists. In fact, every Muslim I've ever talked to about it believes terrorism is not justified by Islam. Defending your home is not attacking a foreign country you're not at war with, starting a war with them (as Al Qaeda did) and dying to save your home is not intentionally killing yourself.
The real problem is, the extremists have the loudest voice - they're the ones that will go out and kill to get attention to themselves or their cause if they have to, and killing people makes a loud noise - just look at school and mall shootings and you can see that for yourself. Negative publicity is still publicity, and you draw radicals that think like you because of it.
Heh - and my first thought was "don't quit your day job."
Yoda would probably say "technical achievement not master of violin make," but since he died long ago and far, far away, I should probably not think of it in Yoda-isms and stick to "wow, that's pretty impressive for a robot."
Still, I've seen dexterous robots and am a decent cellist, so I know how far it has to go. In some ways it reminds me a bit of listening to an orchestral piece in MIDI - all the parts are there and the piece itself may be amazing (no, I don't mean pomp and circumstance is), but it lacks the dynamics, articulation and phrasing that make music an art.
you're assuming we don't want to have an open router, which is incorrect
I actually have 2 wireless routers - one a (throttled) relatively open network (neighbor-net) using an old 802.11g router, and the other my private encrypted 802.11n router.
The problem with this legislation is 1) the definition of illegal is overly broad 2) it requires active monitoring of users because there is no way to identify graphical crimes like child porn without looking at it, which has huge invasion of privacy issues 3) Creates a hostile work environment because admins have to view and screen all the material, whether it's legal or not. 4) incriminates anyone that bought a router that was open by default 5) filtration methods have been proven unreliable and won't hold up in court. 6) requires information on the user such as age - some activities that are legal for adults may be illegal if the user is a child. No wifi operator I know of collects age information. 7) Would be incredibly expensive for smaller providers and would shut many down. I have 1 admin, myself, and I work for free and provide the service for free at a cost of about $20/month out of my own pocket (pro-rating the bandwidth I share to the chunk I hog for myself). I would have to hire someone to watch my connection 24/7/365 and multiple admins during peak hours. That would cost me more than my yearly income and even with a single admin and non prorated costs, is about 75x more expensive.
Given the above, I will happily file court papers to throw out this law were it to pass if someone doesn't beat me to it. COPA had the exact same problems with its wording and also failed a legal challenge. Congress seems obsessed with poorly written, unenforceable legislation.
did you miss something - this has been the precedent for years.
Of COURSE they want to tie content to a single device and charge extra to move it to other devices and they always have. Does encryption or anti-piracy measures like intentional errors in the tracks stop DVD piracy? No, because the real pirates that make money off of it (like in China) burn the disks verbatim, keeping encryption and even errors intact. Does the DMCA rules protect against piracy? No - it prevents consumers from decrypting protected content by making any device that can circumvent the encryption illegal and therefore prevents them from copying the content onto another device. The technology for copying DVDs is well known and publicly available in other countries, but is illegal to import or use in the United States - I'm sure that stops criminals.
It's not like the MPAA is working alone in this trend - did you ever notice Windows OEM software is tied to the motherboard by license and their DRM? Only the much more expensive non-OEM version is not tied to a motherboard. OEM software used to just mean you didn't get support or manuals for it, but MS sneakily tied it to the Mobo (people did cry out about it, but eventually most moved to XP). Apple doesn't do this, but it's not because of the goodness of their heart - it's because they already tie their hardware and software together and they know every commercial OS sale is technically an upgrade (for legal use - the license agreement says it can only be run on Apple macs).
There was also speculation that MS was pushing TPM for better hardware tie-in but they backed off on this. I had originally heard it would be a requirement for Vista (actually probably still called Longhorn at that time) and speculation that it would be tied to a hardware based WGA program.
It could be worse - imagine the MMORPG model applied to all media - you buy a license for the media first, then you pay a monthly fee to keep using it. You can quit using the media, but if you use it again you need to start paying again. The media company is also free to alter the content or even stop providing it if they so desire, without your consent. For a ridiculous case, imagine that with purchased sheet music - buy it, then pay a rental fee every month to practice or play it, then the night before your big concert, the sheet music provider decide to stop providing because it isn't making them enough money and you're SOL.
I can imagine it now - XBox Live has issued a hotfix for insecure wireless controllers. This patch contains the Microsoft patented double ROT13 "cleartext" encoding and is mandatory for all users.
In other news, Sony announced today that they have agreed to license Microsoft's exclusive technology for use in their PS3 controllers and settled the multi-billion dollar lawsuit filed against them earlier this year.
2s, 3s, and 4s do appear, but rarely, and the really bad ones usually don't get published by major publishers, so a true bell curve with 5 as the median really isn't a fair judgment. Usually a rating under 5 means there are fundamental issues with the game (horrible controls, badly dated graphics, bad gameplay, lots of crashes, etc). The reality is you end up with a compression slightly above the middle for most games. There aren't many 1s, but there also aren't many 10s, either.
I've played ET on the 2600, and it deserved a 1 (thankfully, it was rented). When you have that as your bottom standard it skews the curve, as well. Top is harder for me, as it varies by game type (my personal favs by genre are Fallout [RPG], The Longest Journey [Adv], UT2004 [shooter], Civilization [strategy], Starcraft [RTS], Gran Turismo [racing], and still Wing Commander [space] because I've never really loved a space sim since - I have no opinion on Flight Sims).
That was a maybe not-so-obvious reference to hyperinflation, where in Germany in the 1920s it was cheaper to burn money than to buy firewood with it. The value of the old Mark never did recover, and for a while they backed the new Mark with gold, as I recall (just like the US did at that time).
If you want to burn someone else's money, take one out of the trash after the crash;)
There is a Wes Craven movie about this - The Serpent and the Rainbow, loosely based on the nonfiction story "To Circle the Rainbow" by Wade Davis. The Wiki entry says Wade wasn't too pleased with the movie.
Or just watch the value of the dollar slide to zero and trade a Euro for $40 trillion. You can then burn as many $20s as you want (it's still good for kindling...).
I always thought of it more a oligarchic-syndicate kleptocracy. The rich Clinton-Bush dynasty manipulate the laws to steal money from the middle class to line their pockets and helping the rich that can't rule - big business (which also lines their pockets).
Maybe if neither a Bush or Clinton is in power, corporations don't control the white house and drive government we can call it a plutocracy.
So... what was the topic again? Something about making a PC work sorta like a mac, as I recall. That's sorta like dressing up a representative Republic and calling it a Democracy, isn't it?
Incidentally, I was going to point out that Siberia has the highest temperature variance in the world, but you did first. Russia is not alone in extreme continental cooling/heating, however, as many regions that border the tropical and arctic border also have high variance. In fact, Minnesota in midwestern North America has an average temperature variance only.6C less than Siberia, as I recall (ranking #2).
As far as extreme cold goes, Siberia easily beats any non-arctic competitors, with one city recording a record low of -71C. I don't believe it ever gets close to 36C in that town, however, probably much closer to the near arctic Canadian mining town I stayed in for a summer as a kid (my mom's best friend taught elementary school there) - highs were lucky to break into double digits in July and the record high was, I believe, 17C.
Fiber To The Home, it's actually an old acronym, as is FTTC (Fiber To The Curb). Now they use Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) and Fiber To The Neighborhood (FTTN)
Any self respecting geek would know that:)
In the US It's a pipe dream for anyone not currently a Verizon customer. As much as I dislike Verizon for doing crap like crippling their cell phones, at least they modernize their networks. I unfortunately am in a Qwest zone, so I will see it either when Verizon buys Qwest or when hell begins its second ice age (so never or never and a day).
Having said that, I think they ought to port it to Linux and Mac. They already have their engine running on the PS3 (which means it isn't using DX at all) so it can't be that hard.
In fact, the PS3 is a big-endian Power based system (the Cell processor) running OpenGL. That means the game itself should port to older PPC macs trivially (Intel may even be more work to port, depending on if the API calls are abstracted or hard coded). If a port is done, there often is a bit of file system and gui work that is required on the side. Note, however, the Orange Box was ported to PS3 by EA, and EA does mac ports using Cider (an Intel-mac only transgaming product being merged back into Cedega), so were they to do a mac port, they'd probably use Cider, not the code developed for PS3.
The real killer, to porting, however, is probably external libraries and stuff like networking, physics, etc, which often license per-platform. If they can't justify dropping $50 grand for the mac version of Havok (or whatever the going rate is), it is hard to justify making the port. Some libraries may not be available at all (e.g. if they used, say, the now deprecated DirectPlay for networking).
Incidentally, if 20% of people have DX10 cards but only 9% Vista, you could use OpenGL extensions for 20% of the market. There is a performance hit, however, and the reworked APIs to fix performance issues were recently delayed (and hopefully will be finalized by the end of the month). The ones to roll up the latest Extensions into ARB or core will come a few months later, so over a year after they were released in Vista (an issue because an EXT doesn't have to be supported by a card).
actually, it is technically correct, just misleading (intentionally, it was a joke). I may have gotten the name wrong, as I remembered ES (embedded systems) not CF (compact framework), or maybe a rebranding.
but yes, Windows CE itself is an OS, and you can compile programs for it - you don't need.NET..NET itself is a bytecode interpreter just like java, with the difference being java has one language that compiles into bytecodes (.class files) and.NET has many. I don't own a Windows mobile phone, but I have used one a few times, including a couple of.NET based games (nothing taxing, unfortunately).
It sounds like everything on android is intended to be a java app, but we'll have to see if companies stick to that, as it is running Linux.
Windows Mobile is essentially Windows CE +.NET ES. .NET ES is a bytecode interpreter platform for VB, C#, J#, etc. ergo, by postulate "Java means Real slow phones," Windows Mobile also means real slow phones.
Anyone have a problem with that?:)
Seriously, both.NET and Java are pretty mixed when it comes to real world performance and memory usage. In a tiny app I wrote as an experiment in C#, I found.NET about 10% faster and 20% less memory efficient than the Java app it was based on. I've read.NET apps outperform java memory-wise in some real world conditions, as well as.NET having a problem with hitting memory bounds (and running very slow or crashing) much faster than java so as we say in the industry, YMWV. Both are generally about 10%-30% slower than C/C++, and both require memory tweaking by the programmer at times. For most mobile uses, this will be a non-issue - either is fast enough, and most apps won't put too much stress on available memory.
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According to LGPL people, plugins must use the same license, so you can't create an LGPL plugin for commercial software.
Specifically, I'm referring to this clause:
1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.
the keywords are "already present" and "at runtime" - since a downloaded and dynamically installed plugin is not already present at runtime, this would violate the LGPL if it were used before the application was restarted.
Whether it's enforced or not, the wording is clear - the library (in this case plugin) MUST be on the system before the application is started. It's possible clause d0 could be used instead of d1, but I remember that being an issue, as well (it uses section 6 of the GPL). The LGPL people, as I recall, didn't think it would be an issue because the LGPL is for dynamically linked libraries, not applications or plugins.
I and most of my guild think Eye of the North is the worst in the series, for multiple reasons
1) some dungeons take an hour to get to, then 2-3 hours to complete. Since it is almost impossible to find guildies that have 3 contiguous hours on at the same time, they often are done with heroes and henchies and unless you look up the dungeon beforehand, you probably will have to redo it later because you didn't bring a specific subset of builds needed to succeed. Specifically, I'm referring to Rragar's Menagerie and Catacombs of Kathandrax, but there are other bad ones.
2) A couple of bosses were buffed to make them not vulnerable to one skill, but that had the side effect that even some hardcore players have difficulty with the boss (e.g. Ilsundur, Lord of Fire due to Pain Inverter). I have a guildie with over 3000 hours logged and 27 maxed titles, and he couldn't figure out how to beat that boss with his assassin. I managed to do it with an Ele on my second try, but only because I ran a water wards build and had good protection monks.
3) 2 man farm groups with a specific skillset can do the nearly entire Eye of the North in Hard Mode because of the "buff" (nerf) to Chilblains which no longer allows it to indirectly strip certain enchantments. It was the only common indirect strip used by monsters. It's now almost impossible to find teams anymore that aren't composed of two runners with this or a very similar skillset (usually the ritualist variant) and the rest paying, especially at a couple of dungeons.
4) The end boss was simple to beat and, like Nightfall's boss, kind of a letdown. I've never failed to beat either boss, even after the buff to the EotN boss.
5) Emphasizes grinding for titles rather than adding a lot of new content or areas or making any improvements in gameplay. I explored all the new areas in a weekend of maybe 8 hours of playing and mapped it to roughly 99% (based on title). Doing roughly a dungeon a day took about 3 weeks to complete. The solo quests and tournament were again more annoying than fun to me - a very specific limited subset of builds work, everything else doesn't, and it favors 1 or 2 classes, which stinks of bad playtesting.
6) Added tons of new junk to fill up storage and inventory because "people like to collect." - there just are far too many new items. It'd be nice if they boosted storage again.
Don't get me wrong, there are things I liked about GW:EN, like being somewhat open-ended (the maps still feel entirely on rails), had a nice set of heroes, the hall of monuments is nice for anyone with a lot of achievements. The problem is, I think it catered too much to the hardcore PvE player and not enough to more casual players or people like me that tend to split time between PvP and PvE. I don't find the title grind interesting after about 3 runs, so the hundred or so runs necessary to max a title will probably never happen.
By far my favorite RPG of the year is The Witcher, and biggest disappointment is Hellgate:London. I put GW:EN somewhere in the middle - there were things I liked about it, and others I hated.
First Teaser was in 2001
Second Teaser in late 2007
by extrapolation,
Alpha somewhere around 2013
Beta in 2020
Release in 2027 or 2028, give or take.
The system requirements for UTIII aren't too bad - it will run on my 3 year old mid-tier machine with an upgraded graphics card and I consider 2-3 years a necessity if you want high volume sales. The problem is I don't think it generated a lot of buzz, and the demo didn't wow me like the 2004 demo did (a demo of the new mode or at least would have helped). The significantly higher retail price doesn't help, either (UT2004 released at about $20-$25, III at $50+).
Crysis is all about system requirements. My 7 month old $1500 laptop with a Dual Core 2.0GHz processor and an 8600M GS doesn't even meet them because it has Vista (requiring a minimum of a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo). Yes, if I loaded XP I should meet minimum, but I lose the ability to use DX10, and I expect most gamers with 8600 or 8800 cards are running Vista just for DX10. Since the 2.0GHz part is one of the most common, they probably lost a lot of sales right there. If a fairly high end 7 month old machine can't meet minimum specs, you're not going to sell much. I spec'd out a laptop on a couple sites and one that meets minimum requirements is still around $2000 (so I expect a desktop to be about $1400-1600). Again MINIMUM specs.
I see this as a benefit to smaller companies that need high speed storage, but maybe can't switch their entire storage network to fibre channel overnight due to cost. Many routers run Linux, so router manufacturers can probably add this functionality to existing Ethernet routers without hardware changes, making the cost of migration much smaller in the short term.
The GPL is not the solution to all problems. You can't link to GPL without becoming GPL, so if you want to offer a non-commercial library other people can use, even commercially, you're out of luck. This is important for some libraries that want to be universally accepted and not have a wide range of variants, such as zlib and libjpeg.
So you say LGPL - LGPL is valid ONLY for dynamically linked libraries. Plugins are not valid by the GPL or LGPL license unless the parent app has the same license, even though there are many plugins that say they're LGPL that work with commercial software. The problem is a plugin can declare itself LGPL, be downloaded and installed by a non-LGPL app WITHOUT RESTARTING the app and by the wording of the LGPL, the parent app has thus violated the LGPL. In effect, you could make commercial software violate the LGPL by just making an LGPL plugin for it, and that most certainly wouldn't hold up in court. The LGPL people were notified of this during license ratification and decided plugins were not supported by the license unless the license for the app was the same as the plugin.
I'd love a license that falls in-between the LGPL and BSD, since I'm from the old school of freeware developers that write open source for a hobby and don't care if it's used commercially, though I'd like to get credit if the application or library is used. Repackage and sell it commercially? Fine, as long as I'm credited. I'd also like the buyer to know the software included is freely available online and that you're paying for packaging and maybe manuals (similar to commercial linux distributions).
same, but VPN means when I'm working 16+ hour days 6 or 7 days a week during crunch (dictated by large customers that set hard deadlines and the marketing idiots^H^H^H^H^H^Hfolks that agree to them) I can still stop by home and see my wife for dinner.
Working from a coffee shop is a bit harder for me - our Nortel VPN still doesn't work with Vista, but my laptop has Vista (and Linux, but they want me to pay for a Linux client - I've fiddled with IPsec a bit to get through without it, but haven't gotten it to work). I therefore use VNC to an XP box and use Remote Desktop from there to my work computer, but that doesn't refresh properly. If you're wondering why I don't VNC to another VNC connection, which does update properly, well, management made the wonderful decision to block VNC and SSH connections due to fear of stealing stuff from reverse connections (people with business majors should not make tech decisions...), so I'm SOL. Oh, and Remote Desktop doesn't tunnel, so I can't use that (a Remote Desktop to a Remote Desktop to a machine - it disconnects). I'm not aware of any other free options that would work, but maybe there is a solution out there that I'm ignorant of.
Red Hat and Mandrake were a breeze for me to install (and SuSE for that matter). Usability-wise, they all had issues (especially involving ATI drivers for the old 8500). I don't think I ran into problems with any of their installers, but I admit all were version 7 or higher. Slackware and Debian were the first two I dabbled with in college, but then took a long time off from Linux before returning and didn't remember much of anything when I got an install CD of SuSE in a developer magazine. At least once a year I install a variant and use it heavily for a few months, usually because there was no easy update other than a reinstall.
For a real challenge, install GenToo from source using a starter CD. That was by far the most painful release for me, but I pretty much asked for it because I wanted to use SATA beta drivers and no release had them yet (I built a machine with no IDE drives, then decided to make it dual boot linux and XP). I certainly hope they've improved the process because it wasn't easy.
Have you tried/had luck with WINE for some of those things? I used to run Office with WINE, but I never had any luck with games without WineX (now Cedega). I hear the WINE DirectX support (non-commercial) is getting better, as well, but is still far from perfect. I'm tempted to not buy Windows for my next machine and make it all Linux. One Laptop with Vista is more than enough frustration for me - doesn't work with my VPN, file sharing was a pain to set up (install, enable, turn on [yes, separate steps in separate areas of the OS], punch a hole in the firewall, and set permissions), a display service dies about every 3-4 restarts forcing a reboot, and the list goes on.
MPEG is commercial and contains patents, so has the same issue as including any other patented technology (MPEG4 I believe even uses the Quicktime codec). HTML doesn't want to use patented tech - gif was free until UNISYS bought Compuserv and started enforcing Lev-Zempel and jpeg was free until a patent troll bought a related patent.
I can see Apple wanting to fight ogg-vorbis, as they have a heavy investment in AAC and Quicktime and I'm sure they would rather see that tech in. I didn't quite understand Nokia's arguments against, however. It's not like this is locking in the format, just what is and what is not a plug-in.
All religions have extremists and I can see many Americans really don't know many Muslims because all they talk about are the extremists. I've worked with one (Pakistani) that drank and smoked and rarely fasted during Ramadan (one time in the 3 years I worked with him) and another (Bangladeshi) that tried to be a perfect Muslim and took breaks to pray several times a day (morning, noon, and afternoon, sometimes evening if working late) and always took 2 hours off on Friday to go to the Mosque. A third (Pakistani) I worked with fell somewhere in-between. I also had a study group in college with two Iraqis that I didn't like very much, but we got along OK (one of them was very rude and blunt, the other was a little better, but impatient). My brother's best friend in college was a female Muslim (she wouldn't date him because he wasn't Muslim, but she was progressive enough to not wear a burka or veil, either, as her mom did). None of them ever asked me not to eat pork (Islamics don't eat it, either) or try to force their beliefs on me. About the only issue was picking a restaurant that worked for the Bangladeshi because he wouldn't eat meat slaughtered incorrectly (needed to be halal - throat slit and bled), but he was also fine with vegetarian (and rarely ate meat, anyway), so that was less of an issue than you might think.
I agree - executing critics is not part of Muslim law - the conservative and radical Islam that is preached in Saudi Arabia and parts of Pakistan made a lot of noise by making death threats to the cartoonists (echoed afterward by some others), and they probably only did it because of the attention it draws (like Iran got threatening Rushdie because of the Satanic Verses) - if they had just said "stop it - that's offensive to us" the rest of the world wouldn't care. The whole cartoon thing, freedom of speech or not, really was in bad taste - if, say, Iran ran a series of cartoons showing stuff like the Pope boning a choir boy (hidden by robes as pornography is illegal there) Catholics would be offended, too. Or how about Jesus, nailed to the cross with a giant chubby under his loincloth and the caption "I'm cuming God!"
Only extremist groups preach the type of Islam that breeds terrorists. In fact, every Muslim I've ever talked to about it believes terrorism is not justified by Islam. Defending your home is not attacking a foreign country you're not at war with, starting a war with them (as Al Qaeda did) and dying to save your home is not intentionally killing yourself.
The real problem is, the extremists have the loudest voice - they're the ones that will go out and kill to get attention to themselves or their cause if they have to, and killing people makes a loud noise - just look at school and mall shootings and you can see that for yourself. Negative publicity is still publicity, and you draw radicals that think like you because of it.
Heh - and my first thought was "don't quit your day job."
Yoda would probably say "technical achievement not master of violin make," but since he died long ago and far, far away, I should probably not think of it in Yoda-isms and stick to "wow, that's pretty impressive for a robot."
Still, I've seen dexterous robots and am a decent cellist, so I know how far it has to go. In some ways it reminds me a bit of listening to an orchestral piece in MIDI - all the parts are there and the piece itself may be amazing (no, I don't mean pomp and circumstance is), but it lacks the dynamics, articulation and phrasing that make music an art.
you're assuming we don't want to have an open router, which is incorrect
I actually have 2 wireless routers - one a (throttled) relatively open network (neighbor-net) using an old 802.11g router, and the other my private encrypted 802.11n router.
The problem with this legislation is
1) the definition of illegal is overly broad
2) it requires active monitoring of users because there is no way to identify graphical crimes like child porn without looking at it, which has huge invasion of privacy issues
3) Creates a hostile work environment because admins have to view and screen all the material, whether it's legal or not.
4) incriminates anyone that bought a router that was open by default
5) filtration methods have been proven unreliable and won't hold up in court.
6) requires information on the user such as age - some activities that are legal for adults may be illegal if the user is a child. No wifi operator I know of collects age information.
7) Would be incredibly expensive for smaller providers and would shut many down. I have 1 admin, myself, and I work for free and provide the service for free at a cost of about $20/month out of my own pocket (pro-rating the bandwidth I share to the chunk I hog for myself). I would have to hire someone to watch my connection 24/7/365 and multiple admins during peak hours. That would cost me more than my yearly income and even with a single admin and non prorated costs, is about 75x more expensive.
Given the above, I will happily file court papers to throw out this law were it to pass if someone doesn't beat me to it. COPA had the exact same problems with its wording and also failed a legal challenge. Congress seems obsessed with poorly written, unenforceable legislation.
did you miss something - this has been the precedent for years.
Of COURSE they want to tie content to a single device and charge extra to move it to other devices and they always have. Does encryption or anti-piracy measures like intentional errors in the tracks stop DVD piracy? No, because the real pirates that make money off of it (like in China) burn the disks verbatim, keeping encryption and even errors intact. Does the DMCA rules protect against piracy? No - it prevents consumers from decrypting protected content by making any device that can circumvent the encryption illegal and therefore prevents them from copying the content onto another device. The technology for copying DVDs is well known and publicly available in other countries, but is illegal to import or use in the United States - I'm sure that stops criminals.
It's not like the MPAA is working alone in this trend - did you ever notice Windows OEM software is tied to the motherboard by license and their DRM? Only the much more expensive non-OEM version is not tied to a motherboard. OEM software used to just mean you didn't get support or manuals for it, but MS sneakily tied it to the Mobo (people did cry out about it, but eventually most moved to XP). Apple doesn't do this, but it's not because of the goodness of their heart - it's because they already tie their hardware and software together and they know every commercial OS sale is technically an upgrade (for legal use - the license agreement says it can only be run on Apple macs).
There was also speculation that MS was pushing TPM for better hardware tie-in but they backed off on this. I had originally heard it would be a requirement for Vista (actually probably still called Longhorn at that time) and speculation that it would be tied to a hardware based WGA program.
It could be worse - imagine the MMORPG model applied to all media - you buy a license for the media first, then you pay a monthly fee to keep using it. You can quit using the media, but if you use it again you need to start paying again. The media company is also free to alter the content or even stop providing it if they so desire, without your consent. For a ridiculous case, imagine that with purchased sheet music - buy it, then pay a rental fee every month to practice or play it, then the night before your big concert, the sheet music provider decide to stop providing because it isn't making them enough money and you're SOL.
um, yeah...
I can imagine it now - XBox Live has issued a hotfix for insecure wireless controllers. This patch contains the Microsoft patented double ROT13 "cleartext" encoding and is mandatory for all users.
In other news, Sony announced today that they have agreed to license Microsoft's exclusive technology for use in their PS3 controllers and settled the multi-billion dollar lawsuit filed against them earlier this year.
2s, 3s, and 4s do appear, but rarely, and the really bad ones usually don't get published by major publishers, so a true bell curve with 5 as the median really isn't a fair judgment. Usually a rating under 5 means there are fundamental issues with the game (horrible controls, badly dated graphics, bad gameplay, lots of crashes, etc). The reality is you end up with a compression slightly above the middle for most games. There aren't many 1s, but there also aren't many 10s, either.
I've played ET on the 2600, and it deserved a 1 (thankfully, it was rented). When you have that as your bottom standard it skews the curve, as well. Top is harder for me, as it varies by game type (my personal favs by genre are Fallout [RPG], The Longest Journey [Adv], UT2004 [shooter], Civilization [strategy], Starcraft [RTS], Gran Turismo [racing], and still Wing Commander [space] because I've never really loved a space sim since - I have no opinion on Flight Sims).
That was a maybe not-so-obvious reference to hyperinflation, where in Germany in the 1920s it was cheaper to burn money than to buy firewood with it. The value of the old Mark never did recover, and for a while they backed the new Mark with gold, as I recall (just like the US did at that time).
;)
If you want to burn someone else's money, take one out of the trash after the crash
There is a Wes Craven movie about this - The Serpent and the Rainbow, loosely based on the nonfiction story "To Circle the Rainbow" by Wade Davis. The Wiki entry says Wade wasn't too pleased with the movie.
Or just watch the value of the dollar slide to zero and trade a Euro for $40 trillion. You can then burn as many $20s as you want (it's still good for kindling...).
I always thought of it more a oligarchic-syndicate kleptocracy. The rich Clinton-Bush dynasty manipulate the laws to steal money from the middle class to line their pockets and helping the rich that can't rule - big business (which also lines their pockets).
Maybe if neither a Bush or Clinton is in power, corporations don't control the white house and drive government we can call it a plutocracy.
So... what was the topic again? Something about making a PC work sorta like a mac, as I recall. That's sorta like dressing up a representative Republic and calling it a Democracy, isn't it?
Welcome to Gulag call center. We run nice operation. Give bad folks good jobs. Everyone is sandwich*, so no-one escape. Perfect for your need.
*the sandwich is the skinny guy you take with you when you escape a Gulag so you don't starve to death crossing Siberia.
Incidentally, I was going to point out that Siberia has the highest temperature variance in the world, but you did first. Russia is not alone in extreme continental cooling/heating, however, as many regions that border the tropical and arctic border also have high variance. In fact, Minnesota in midwestern North America has an average temperature variance only .6C less than Siberia, as I recall (ranking #2).
As far as extreme cold goes, Siberia easily beats any non-arctic competitors, with one city recording a record low of -71C. I don't believe it ever gets close to 36C in that town, however, probably much closer to the near arctic Canadian mining town I stayed in for a summer as a kid (my mom's best friend taught elementary school there) - highs were lucky to break into double digits in July and the record high was, I believe, 17C.
Fiber To The Home, it's actually an old acronym, as is FTTC (Fiber To The Curb). Now they use Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) and Fiber To The Neighborhood (FTTN)
:)
Any self respecting geek would know that
In the US It's a pipe dream for anyone not currently a Verizon customer. As much as I dislike Verizon for doing crap like crippling their cell phones, at least they modernize their networks. I unfortunately am in a Qwest zone, so I will see it either when Verizon buys Qwest or when hell begins its second ice age (so never or never and a day).
In fact, the PS3 is a big-endian Power based system (the Cell processor) running OpenGL. That means the game itself should port to older PPC macs trivially (Intel may even be more work to port, depending on if the API calls are abstracted or hard coded). If a port is done, there often is a bit of file system and gui work that is required on the side. Note, however, the Orange Box was ported to PS3 by EA, and EA does mac ports using Cider (an Intel-mac only transgaming product being merged back into Cedega), so were they to do a mac port, they'd probably use Cider, not the code developed for PS3.
The real killer, to porting, however, is probably external libraries and stuff like networking, physics, etc, which often license per-platform. If they can't justify dropping $50 grand for the mac version of Havok (or whatever the going rate is), it is hard to justify making the port. Some libraries may not be available at all (e.g. if they used, say, the now deprecated DirectPlay for networking).
Incidentally, if 20% of people have DX10 cards but only 9% Vista, you could use OpenGL extensions for 20% of the market. There is a performance hit, however, and the reworked APIs to fix performance issues were recently delayed (and hopefully will be finalized by the end of the month). The ones to roll up the latest Extensions into ARB or core will come a few months later, so over a year after they were released in Vista (an issue because an EXT doesn't have to be supported by a card).
actually, it is technically correct, just misleading (intentionally, it was a joke). I may have gotten the name wrong, as I remembered ES (embedded systems) not CF (compact framework), or maybe a rebranding.
.NET. .NET itself is a bytecode interpreter just like java, with the difference being java has one language that compiles into bytecodes (.class files) and .NET has many. I don't own a Windows mobile phone, but I have used one a few times, including a couple of .NET based games (nothing taxing, unfortunately).
but yes, Windows CE itself is an OS, and you can compile programs for it - you don't need
It sounds like everything on android is intended to be a java app, but we'll have to see if companies stick to that, as it is running Linux.
Let me think about that for a sec...
.NET ES.
.NET ES is a bytecode interpreter platform for VB, C#, J#, etc.
:)
.NET and Java are pretty mixed when it comes to real world performance and memory usage. In a tiny app I wrote as an experiment in C#, I found .NET about 10% faster and 20% less memory efficient than the Java app it was based on. I've read .NET apps outperform java memory-wise in some real world conditions, as well as .NET having a problem with hitting memory bounds (and running very slow or crashing) much faster than java so as we say in the industry, YMWV. Both are generally about 10%-30% slower than C/C++, and both require memory tweaking by the programmer at times. For most mobile uses, this will be a non-issue - either is fast enough, and most apps won't put too much stress on available memory.
Windows Mobile is essentially Windows CE +
ergo, by postulate "Java means Real slow phones,"
Windows Mobile also means real slow phones.
Anyone have a problem with that?
Seriously, both