there is far too much circumstantial evidence pointing his way, enough for me, at least, to believe he's guilty of at least being an accomplice or hiding evidence (if he was framed by the Russian mafia, why the money, passport, and cover up?). This one will be interesting - it's basically the anti-OJ - a poor white geek in an odd murder case instead of a rich black jock. My guess is he fries.
as humorous as that is, there is such a thing as pre-order, so it is possible.
The day I get a $700 Christmas gift (much less a pre-order) is the day my wife wins the lottery. If I get a pre-order graphics card from her, I know the aliens have truly infiltrated earth and replaced my wife with a brain eating monster. She thinks I play games too much as it is - about 10 hours a week - certainly not the 10 hours in a day I did sometimes in college (I was a binge gamer;)
I haven't heard that analogy before, and I don't believe it's correct (though if you mean creating unique trees after placement, possibly yes). It's a bit more primitive than plopping the same model down in a different location.
First off, there was a terminology issue for a while where OpenGL used primitive shader instead of geometry shader, but this seems to have been resolved (from a search, the formal extension is GL_EXT_geometry_shader4, which usually is kept in the ARB/core name), so you may find information under either primitive shader or geometry shader for OpenGL - just a heads up. The OpenGL 2.1 Specification, which is current on most cards that include DirectX 10 DOES NOT have to include geometry shaders since they are still considered extensions (EXT) and not ARB or core (which are required); however nVidia does include the extension in their 8xxx cards and I suspect ATI does in their DX10 cards as well. For more formal information, you may want to search the Khronos site for Long's Peak (which will be 2.2 or 3.0) or Mt Evans (likely 3.0 3.1) releases.
Geometry Shaders are essentially a higher level object than vertex shaders (executed after the vertex shader on a set of vertices and before fragment processing). For example, if you take a triangle strip (the highest level object considered a "primitive," and probably the reason they're called geometry shaders instead of primitive shaders now) forming a cylinder and want a flare at the bottom, you might add vertices to keep it fairly round and move the existing vertices along the bottom ring outward. That probably isn't the main use for it, but is an example (other uses: cube mapping and probably the #1 I've heard of, CPU independent particle systems not limited to sprites)
by "plug-in matrix style" I assume plug in and the reality is entirely in the mind is meant. This was hinted at in early cyberpunk (late 1970s - mid-1980s) and elsewhere in sci-fi, though it really wasn't exploited in the movies much until the 1990s.
Westworld was all about androids going out-of-control. Technology running amok was a common theme in writing of the time (2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance), and for the most part (outside of Asimov), there were two types of robot - servile, and evil. Crichton melded the two servile robot becomes "evil robot" (heck, the first morally questionable android I remember was Bishop in Aliens, mainly due to his "evil" counterpart Ash from Alien).
yes, Peter Cheung is the animator/creator of Aeon Flux. I remember seeing interviews with him on MTV. I believe he is only credited with "characters" for the movie.
I fail to see the argument about longer time - nothing is stopping me from watching gory horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre over and over again or back-to-back with, say, some other horror movies like Hostel 1-2, Turistas and Saw 1-3 if I want. It's even more convenient for me to rewind the DVD player or VCR to replay a scene over and over again or record a gore montage, were I so inclined. I could make it very interactive just by using my remote control. Maybe the fake stuff doesn't do it for me - I need the old "Faces of Death" movies that show real deaths (beat that in a video game). I also play games in small parcels of time of about 1 hour each - I rarely do that with movies.
And no, I don't mean to defend Manhunt 2 - the first game was gory and not appropriate for children or even some adults and this one probably is as bad or worse. The ESRB is voluntary, however - so why not release 'M' and 'unrated' or 'AO' versions like the movies release 'R' and 'Unrated' versions? I believe I know the answer to that (I believe the ESA decided to only allow one official rating per game), but I don't really understand it.
Eventually, this will be a non-issue, as distribution moves more online and there is less dependence on large stores like Wal-Mart to make moral decisions for you, but until these distribution networks are established and carry content of all types, we have to deal with whatever moral values the big boxes have.
most Americans I know would at least understand that one, but queue and till are not used much, and used slightly different contextually, which I think is harder than if it were a separate word. Till makes sense if you're referring directly to the money bin and not the "checkout" machine - say "give me $10 from the till" and it makes perfect sense. Queue also is used in context with lines - you stand in a line, but you "queue up" in that line (so "queue up" or "queue up in line" we'd understand, despite the fact that the latter is redundant).
I had a situation like that in Germany - the waiter listed off their drinks by name instead of asking me what I wanted to drink and all of the words made sense but not in the context he was using (can't remember the beer, but the wine was 'Liebfraumilch' which I would translate to "love[ing] woman/mother milk" or probably more like "milk of a loving mother" - and I even knew that wine, but got hung up on the beer, which I had never heard of - it was somewhat near Liebfrauenkirche where it supposedly originates, if that helps). I had complete brain freeze for about 10 seconds before making the wine connection and guessing the other was a beer.
That's why it didn't quite sound right - I believe it was the BPjS the publisher was scared of (not BPjM), but I really only saw the name in passing (reading meeting minutes, and in discussions with the team since I wasn't in on the calls as a contractor). Good to know that the ratings system has improved, but sad to see that it may regress by EU laws.
most MMORPGS have an economy system based on supply and demand. Gold farming tips the balance and gives the rich the supply by artificially driving up the demand (by buying stuff with gold they bought with real money). In some instances this can make it nearly impossible for a person that is not buying gold to be able to obtain certain items without a significant investment of time in the game (hundreds of hours). Although I don't play MMORPGS very much, I've seen this happen in every one I have played. I tried hardcore farming for a month in one and I still didn't have enough gold to buy one of the most expensive items in one game, but after some anti-farming code was added a shor time later (and the price of purchased gold skyrocketed - from something like $15 to $85 for the same amount) that particular item dropped in price to the point where I can buy 3-4 of them.
I believe the door swings both ways.
you asked, who is getting hurt?
The publisher, because he loses the most common subscriber - the one that can't afford the ever-inflating price.
The common consumer, because they either are paying too much for privilege or can't afford to pay for it, establishing the wealthy at the top of the hierarchy.
The developer, because they will not be paid for enhancements or a sequel
who isn't getting hurt?
The gold farmer, because he can feed his family (if it isn't bot-farmed)
The gold seller, because they make a bundle to feed their family
The gold buyer, because they get status and privilege by buying it, not earning it.
how do you know there is even a guy getting fed at the other end? Someone could just download or create a bot and have it repeat the same actions across a farm of machines. When caught and their account is banned, they just buy another license with proceeds and tweak the bot a bit so it isn't detected.
Very few MMORPGS are based predominantly on skill - if you have wealth, you can almost always put yourself on top.
you've summed up pretty much what I was going to say, but I think there's more -
we don't really understand _space_ yet. What are the properties of space? Can we stretch it or bend it? Can we create bubbles of time in it (e.g. warp speed)? To us today this is magic, but tomorrow that might be science.
Then take, for example, cavitation - for years it was only seen as bad in hydrodynamics, then supercavitation was discovered (and recently resurfaced in weapons technology because supercavitating torpedoes can strike a target faster than sonar can detect them). Is there a similar principle about space (and travel through it) that we haven't discovered? We do know particles can travel faster than light speed in certain conditions, but we don't understand why (I forget the name of that - maybe quantum tunneling?)
Medicine is another issue, but who knows where we'll be in 20 years or even 2000 (oh, and technically, we are the only species that can *perform* organ transplants - we performed them on other species first, so other species can survive them). Maybe we'll get nano-bots implanted at birth designed to hunt and kill and adapt better than our own white blood cells, clean out clots, and keep our bodies healthier. And just going to a planet with a completely different bio-sphere doesn't mean that it will instantly be wiped out by some exo-virus as per War of the Worlds. I can show plenty of invasive species of plant and animal that have been moved out of their native habitat to an unknown one and have thrived (dandelions, brown tree snakes, humans...).
Medicine is progressing so fast, and yet sci-fi often seems stuck in 20th century medicine, especially on TV, though probably more for dramatic effect than to show a future. Cancer and no-revival attempt deaths seconds after they happen in in the new Battlestar Galactica? wtf? Star Trek is equally appalling. In books it's better, but I think even I would be surprised at what can be done 50 or 100 years from now (and maybe what can't). I think we're on the verge of potential immortality and perhaps youth - probably too late for my lifetime, but within a few generations. Maybe the decline in birthrates will be replaced with people that live thousands of years. I don't think what we know of as humans today are going to be what we'll be in 100 years, as well - we'll have much more genetic control over our species (yes, moral implications exist, and I believe many people will split from such a movement based on religious belief - much like how the Amish decided not to progress) and much more dependent on micro-bots to keep us healthy.
Honestly, I am not currently up-to-date on the index or how it works, but when I did some game related contract work, the publisher told us that showing children getting hurt or killed was a mandatory 18 in Germany so we couldn't have any. I had pretty much heard the same from a Fallout developer's interview around the same time, so I assumed this was correct. I read about the red vs green blood as a way to get the rating down somewhere else, but never had to worry about it because we never got that far - the publisher turtled and dumped all outside developers. Our game was picked up by one of their in-house teams and released in an alpha state about 3 months later (IMO - it was HORRIBLE and incomplete and deserved every 1 star out of 10 that it got). It never did get localized.
I was referring to the BPjM review, which happens after publication, if I understand correctly. I think the USK is after my time, or else I wasn't really involved enough (that was the publisher's job, since they wanted to localize everywhere).
Some of the restrictions in Germany include no killing of children in video games (which is why many games built for an international audience have no children and games like Fallout removed them) and no killing of anything with red blood (zombies and aliens are good, people bad). Now they blame some nut-job shooting a bunch of red blooded children _in_Germany_ and blaming it on video games. Maybe if this guy had a playground massacre simulator it'd never have happened (hey, I'm a moderate - I throw gas on the fire on both sides;)
But this is not about German laws - this is about banning them more universally, like across Europe.
To be fair, most companies make more changes than would be necessary to make sure they're not put on a blacklist in Germany because it is illegal to review a game before it is published there (which is, by law, censorship). A more uniform European law may be better for Europe as a whole than a bunch of mixed laws.
seems they noticed my (or other similar) rants about LGPLv2, because the definitions (section 0), the combined library clause (section 5) and clause 4d1a finally make mac application bundles with shared frameworks that include an LGPL library legal.
still, 4d1 is ugly and seems to imply static linking is still not allowed by the LGPL (contrary to thread starter)...
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.
Since a statically linked library is bound and copied into the application at compile time, it would be in violation of 4d1a.
And while I'm sure this clause is meant to forbid static linked libraries, it also inadvertently could make a closed source application violate the LGPL without trying. Here's how: create an LGPL plugin (which is a really a dynamic library that does linking in runtime) and then have a non GPL/LGPL browser download and use it without shutting down. Think of how browsers load something like Flash players now - you don't restart the browser, you just click a link to download and install it, then you view Flash media. Since the library did not exist at the OS when the application was started, you could argue that the plugin did not exist on the OS at run time and therefore violates the LGPLv3. The other alternative is to say that a plugin is not a library - fair enough, then the plugin cannot be LGPLv3 because according to clause 0:
"The Library" refers to a covered work governed by this License, other than an Application or a Combined Work as defined below.
That said, you could alway do something like that by removing a non-LGPL library and replacing it with an LGPL library to cause the application to violate parts of the LGPL, so I would expect that is unenforcible. I'm just giving a hypothetical scenario of how someone like Microsoft might read it, just so they can say LGPL is EVIL.
I don't know how true that is, but it's completely unenforcible.
Anyone that uses the open part of my wireless freenet is not logged, and even if I did log, I could only keep about 50k of logfiles (the free space available on my router). If my ISP was spying on me, they may get all sorts of stuff coming through my router that is not being downloaded by me, and unless they find it on my machine (which they won't, since it's routed to a separate subnet), there's not much they can do about it. As a matter of fact, even if I turn on logging, it is completely restricted by available memory on the router, which isn't much. I have no control over what people use my network for, nor does any coffee shop owner or airport or anyone else that offers free wireless. I expect mine is mostly used for business, since it happens to be fairly close to a major downtown headed bus-stop (a park-n-ride), but I really don't know.
Serves me right for writing that hastily from work - video teletypes (VT) at around 10 characters per second. Anyhow, I was referring to this being built-in (on motherboard), but I didn't know about the TV Typewriter. The main difference is the Apple one is synchronous (~60 characters per second). I recalled an interview wit Woz about this and I thought he said they got sued over it from a Magnavox patent (where they had the idea, but not any idea of how to do it), but I can't find the interview.
Apple ][ was a typo - I meant Apple I. The Apple ][ was the first to include color graphics.
I tend to think of the US Government as the slow child that got left behind as far as tech goes (or a typical PHB, take your pick), but the point of this appears just to be to expose dangers that are around on the internet and I'm OK with that. The document says there are 1 billion internet users worldwide, but that is between 1/6 and 1/7 the world population (~6.6 billion, I think), meaning there are a lot of people that may not be aware.
That said, I'd prefer it be internet awareness month instead of internet dangers month - this resolution only targets the "bad stuff" and once again doesn't promote the "good stuff" at all. Even the evening news has a fluff story or two and a sports segment to offset all the bad news. If you're going to name things to be aware of on the internet that are possibly harmful, also name some good productive uses, too - something you can point your children to (like Wikipedia, news sites, kids online games, etc).
I think Sun mostly opened it up to a) show it was a hardware company and software should be free (as they did with giving away Java a couple of years prior), but also to thumb its nose at Microsoft at not having to pay for 40000+ licenses for Office (if I recall correctly, all Sun employees had a Windows laptop primarily to run Office) and b) as an open source experiment. StarOffice was already being offered as a free download before forming OOo, and it already ran on a portable C++ layer and had been ported to several OS's. I even recall a CD-ROM I got (at JavaOne in 1999?) that had several versions on the same disc - I think Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX.
The original reason for starting to sell the StarOffice variant of OOo was to add fonts, which Sun had to purchase per license. Scott McNealy (I believe) said originally they were going to just sell the font license for a couple of bucks (they may have even done this briefly - I didn't really care at the time), but businesses didn't see value in $2 and wouldn't buy them, so they made the package $70 (apparently they would offer support in either case).
I fully agree with you that some of the early OOo code I saw was a mess (some was quite good, too), but almost every time I look at an existing codebase I find something that I think is a mess, and I've had other programmers look at my maintained code and think it's a mess (even after I tell them there is a lot of legacy code). Like everyone, I am a victim of deadlines, even in my open source work - if a project I'm on happens to have a release at the same time as I have work crunch, I will often only have time to hack in a solution, and sometimes that hack lives for years before I get around to fixing it properly. I can even think of one in a project I'm working on now, where I set the cwd (current working directory for you non-programmers) and traverse down a hard coded file path rather than using Finder (as long as nothing moves inside a mac.app file, it works fine). The hard coded path was used because file names could be duplicated as long as directory subpaths varied, but there have been a number of messy bugs related to this hack (like datafiles including fixed paths, which is how they were being written by a conversion tool). StarOffice had a lot of legacy code from the original owner, StarDivision, which I believe started as a 1 programmer project in Germany and expanded from there.
the first mass produced computer for the home was probably the Altair. The first with a video display was, I believe, the Apple ][. The first 'kit' computer for the home is generally recognized as the Berkeley Simon (design published in Radio Electronics magazine).
The Commodore had some nice features, but one horrible flaw - anemic disk and tape drives. 15 minutes to load a program from tape or 3-4 from disk was absurd, in my opinion. Loved the MIDI, though. The PET and Vic 20 were trash, but the 64, 128, and Amiga were all decent machines for the price (aside from storage).
I got my start on a tape drive Apple ][ (in grade school) and that also was pretty anemic from a file storage standpoint and only had integer basic (that's the non-Microsoft one). Fortunately, when the moved to ][+ they all had Disk ][, Dos 3.1, and Applesoft BASIC (that is the MS one). Applesoft BASIC was more convenient to work with than Integer BASIC (no separate disk), but due to its slowness, I moved to assembly by about 1981-82 (yes, still grade school). It was fun going to computer camp that year and writing material meant to be done in BASIC in assembler, but I can't imagine doing that today (nor working with only 2 registers and an accumulator).
They also had some of the boot in ROM memory back then, which allowed them to sue anyone that made a clone unless they reverse engineered the ROM. Incidentally, that was how Franklin got busted - Apple dug through the ROM (essentially BIOS) and found the string 'Apple II+' in it. The Peach (another clone) was actually a physical and ROM identical clone built in Asia. Some other cloners did reverse engineer the ROM and Apple lost the lawsuits against them, as I recall, but by then Apple was a juggernaut and they were a niche.
So I hate to break it to you, but Apple has always been IP protective as a company, even when Woz was there.
well I can speak for Fallout 3, and Bethesda has never written or had a game ported to mac, at least none that I'm aware of.
according to this,they are open to it (and Linux), but will not do it themselves unless they get a porting house to make an offer. This makes sense to me because Bethesda uses DirectX and a true port to Mac and/or Linux would require a conversion to OpenGL. I don't know if it's DX9 or DX10, but if its the latter, it may also need the new OpenGL profile due toward the end of this year, as well (and certainly don't expect the game before mid-2009).
Blizzard does concurrent development and testing on Mac and PC, which often is the most cost-effective and profitable, but also has the most expensive up-front costs.
yes, but the real problem is the frequencies used by radio and TV are considered public and part of the agreement for using those frequencies is to abide by a set of restrictions set by the FCC as "decent" for everyone to listen to. Obviously this was been pushed to the limits by people like Don Imus and Howard Stern, eventually leading to their firings (and many fines).
They're not saying that you can't say it, just that you can't say it in public space or you'll be fined or arrested - think of it like going to Times Square and running around naked - I personally don't care that you're naked in public, but someone else might be.
When it comes to swear words, it bothers me when someone swears just for the sake of swearing, like "I's f*cking gonna motherf*cking f*ck your f*cking asses, ya f*cking beatches," but "That's some real deep shit, man" or "sweet f*ck all, why'd ya have to go do that!?" To be quite honest, people ending every sentence with FTW (For The Win) in MMORPGs bugs me as much as them spamming f*ck.
They originally disagreed over licensing, now they claim it's much more efficient to just write mac code and not have to coordinate with other platforms - basically, they're saying its easier for them to maintain a fork than it is to coordinate with OOo. The bottom line, however, is NeoOffice code is all GPL, so there is no way for them to legally contribute any of their code to OOo without violating the GPL (unless the original writer submitted it). I don't think OOo is going to move to the GPL, so you've got an impasse.
the "6 year wait" is partly because OOo 1.x was incompatible with MacOS X because of the way symbol bindings were handled (I think it was basically a hack, anyway, exploiting a "feature" in most UNIX-based OSes), so the port really couldn't start until 2.0 (which was heavily rewritten). I was involved in another project when 2.0 came out (I believe STLport, which I think I actually got involved with due to OOo, but X.3 had all the STL features I needed, so I moved on), so I really didn't follow the split that started NeoOffice.
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there is far too much circumstantial evidence pointing his way, enough for me, at least, to believe he's guilty of at least being an accomplice or hiding evidence (if he was framed by the Russian mafia, why the money, passport, and cover up?). This one will be interesting - it's basically the anti-OJ - a poor white geek in an odd murder case instead of a rich black jock. My guess is he fries.
as humorous as that is, there is such a thing as pre-order, so it is possible.
;)
The day I get a $700 Christmas gift (much less a pre-order) is the day my wife wins the lottery. If I get a pre-order graphics card from her, I know the aliens have truly infiltrated earth and replaced my wife with a brain eating monster. She thinks I play games too much as it is - about 10 hours a week - certainly not the 10 hours in a day I did sometimes in college (I was a binge gamer
I haven't heard that analogy before, and I don't believe it's correct (though if you mean creating unique trees after placement, possibly yes). It's a bit more primitive than plopping the same model down in a different location.
First off, there was a terminology issue for a while where OpenGL used primitive shader instead of geometry shader, but this seems to have been resolved (from a search, the formal extension is GL_EXT_geometry_shader4, which usually is kept in the ARB/core name), so you may find information under either primitive shader or geometry shader for OpenGL - just a heads up. The OpenGL 2.1 Specification, which is current on most cards that include DirectX 10 DOES NOT have to include geometry shaders since they are still considered extensions (EXT) and not ARB or core (which are required); however nVidia does include the extension in their 8xxx cards and I suspect ATI does in their DX10 cards as well. For more formal information, you may want to search the Khronos site for Long's Peak (which will be 2.2 or 3.0) or Mt Evans (likely 3.0 3.1) releases.
Geometry Shaders are essentially a higher level object than vertex shaders (executed after the vertex shader on a set of vertices and before fragment processing). For example, if you take a triangle strip (the highest level object considered a "primitive," and probably the reason they're called geometry shaders instead of primitive shaders now) forming a cylinder and want a flare at the bottom, you might add vertices to keep it fairly round and move the existing vertices along the bottom ring outward. That probably isn't the main use for it, but is an example (other uses: cube mapping and probably the #1 I've heard of, CPU independent particle systems not limited to sprites)
and the gaming addicts say: "No Pain, No Game"
heh - that old Pet Shop Boys song was the first thing that popped into my head too.
Unfortunately, my younger brother got the brains, looks, and money. I got the better twitch reflexes.
by "plug-in matrix style" I assume plug in and the reality is entirely in the mind is meant. This was hinted at in early cyberpunk (late 1970s - mid-1980s) and elsewhere in sci-fi, though it really wasn't exploited in the movies much until the 1990s.
Westworld was all about androids going out-of-control. Technology running amok was a common theme in writing of the time (2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance), and for the most part (outside of Asimov), there were two types of robot - servile, and evil. Crichton melded the two servile robot becomes "evil robot" (heck, the first morally questionable android I remember was Bishop in Aliens, mainly due to his "evil" counterpart Ash from Alien).
yes, Peter Cheung is the animator/creator of Aeon Flux. I remember seeing interviews with him on MTV. I believe he is only credited with "characters" for the movie.
I fail to see the argument about longer time - nothing is stopping me from watching gory horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre over and over again or back-to-back with, say, some other horror movies like Hostel 1-2, Turistas and Saw 1-3 if I want. It's even more convenient for me to rewind the DVD player or VCR to replay a scene over and over again or record a gore montage, were I so inclined. I could make it very interactive just by using my remote control. Maybe the fake stuff doesn't do it for me - I need the old "Faces of Death" movies that show real deaths (beat that in a video game). I also play games in small parcels of time of about 1 hour each - I rarely do that with movies.
And no, I don't mean to defend Manhunt 2 - the first game was gory and not appropriate for children or even some adults and this one probably is as bad or worse. The ESRB is voluntary, however - so why not release 'M' and 'unrated' or 'AO' versions like the movies release 'R' and 'Unrated' versions? I believe I know the answer to that (I believe the ESA decided to only allow one official rating per game), but I don't really understand it.
Eventually, this will be a non-issue, as distribution moves more online and there is less dependence on large stores like Wal-Mart to make moral decisions for you, but until these distribution networks are established and carry content of all types, we have to deal with whatever moral values the big boxes have.
most Americans I know would at least understand that one, but queue and till are not used much, and used slightly different contextually, which I think is harder than if it were a separate word. Till makes sense if you're referring directly to the money bin and not the "checkout" machine - say "give me $10 from the till" and it makes perfect sense. Queue also is used in context with lines - you stand in a line, but you "queue up" in that line (so "queue up" or "queue up in line" we'd understand, despite the fact that the latter is redundant).
I had a situation like that in Germany - the waiter listed off their drinks by name instead of asking me what I wanted to drink and all of the words made sense but not in the context he was using (can't remember the beer, but the wine was 'Liebfraumilch' which I would translate to "love[ing] woman/mother milk" or probably more like "milk of a loving mother" - and I even knew that wine, but got hung up on the beer, which I had never heard of - it was somewhat near Liebfrauenkirche where it supposedly originates, if that helps). I had complete brain freeze for about 10 seconds before making the wine connection and guessing the other was a beer.
That's why it didn't quite sound right - I believe it was the BPjS the publisher was scared of (not BPjM), but I really only saw the name in passing (reading meeting minutes, and in discussions with the team since I wasn't in on the calls as a contractor). Good to know that the ratings system has improved, but sad to see that it may regress by EU laws.
most MMORPGS have an economy system based on supply and demand. Gold farming tips the balance and gives the rich the supply by artificially driving up the demand (by buying stuff with gold they bought with real money). In some instances this can make it nearly impossible for a person that is not buying gold to be able to obtain certain items without a significant investment of time in the game (hundreds of hours). Although I don't play MMORPGS very much, I've seen this happen in every one I have played. I tried hardcore farming for a month in one and I still didn't have enough gold to buy one of the most expensive items in one game, but after some anti-farming code was added a shor time later (and the price of purchased gold skyrocketed - from something like $15 to $85 for the same amount) that particular item dropped in price to the point where I can buy 3-4 of them.
I believe the door swings both ways.
you asked, who is getting hurt?
The publisher, because he loses the most common subscriber - the one that can't afford the ever-inflating price.
The common consumer, because they either are paying too much for privilege or can't afford to pay for it, establishing the wealthy at the top of the hierarchy.
The developer, because they will not be paid for enhancements or a sequel
who isn't getting hurt?
The gold farmer, because he can feed his family (if it isn't bot-farmed)
The gold seller, because they make a bundle to feed their family
The gold buyer, because they get status and privilege by buying it, not earning it.
how do you know there is even a guy getting fed at the other end? Someone could just download or create a bot and have it repeat the same actions across a farm of machines. When caught and their account is banned, they just buy another license with proceeds and tweak the bot a bit so it isn't detected.
Very few MMORPGS are based predominantly on skill - if you have wealth, you can almost always put yourself on top.
you've summed up pretty much what I was going to say, but I think there's more -
we don't really understand _space_ yet. What are the properties of space? Can we stretch it or bend it? Can we create bubbles of time in it (e.g. warp speed)? To us today this is magic, but tomorrow that might be science.
Then take, for example, cavitation - for years it was only seen as bad in hydrodynamics, then supercavitation was discovered (and recently resurfaced in weapons technology because supercavitating torpedoes can strike a target faster than sonar can detect them). Is there a similar principle about space (and travel through it) that we haven't discovered? We do know particles can travel faster than light speed in certain conditions, but we don't understand why (I forget the name of that - maybe quantum tunneling?)
Medicine is another issue, but who knows where we'll be in 20 years or even 2000 (oh, and technically, we are the only species that can *perform* organ transplants - we performed them on other species first, so other species can survive them). Maybe we'll get nano-bots implanted at birth designed to hunt and kill and adapt better than our own white blood cells, clean out clots, and keep our bodies healthier. And just going to a planet with a completely different bio-sphere doesn't mean that it will instantly be wiped out by some exo-virus as per War of the Worlds. I can show plenty of invasive species of plant and animal that have been moved out of their native habitat to an unknown one and have thrived (dandelions, brown tree snakes, humans...).
Medicine is progressing so fast, and yet sci-fi often seems stuck in 20th century medicine, especially on TV, though probably more for dramatic effect than to show a future. Cancer and no-revival attempt deaths seconds after they happen in in the new Battlestar Galactica? wtf? Star Trek is equally appalling. In books it's better, but I think even I would be surprised at what can be done 50 or 100 years from now (and maybe what can't). I think we're on the verge of potential immortality and perhaps youth - probably too late for my lifetime, but within a few generations. Maybe the decline in birthrates will be replaced with people that live thousands of years. I don't think what we know of as humans today are going to be what we'll be in 100 years, as well - we'll have much more genetic control over our species (yes, moral implications exist, and I believe many people will split from such a movement based on religious belief - much like how the Amish decided not to progress) and much more dependent on micro-bots to keep us healthy.
Honestly, I am not currently up-to-date on the index or how it works, but when I did some game related contract work, the publisher told us that showing children getting hurt or killed was a mandatory 18 in Germany so we couldn't have any. I had pretty much heard the same from a Fallout developer's interview around the same time, so I assumed this was correct. I read about the red vs green blood as a way to get the rating down somewhere else, but never had to worry about it because we never got that far - the publisher turtled and dumped all outside developers. Our game was picked up by one of their in-house teams and released in an alpha state about 3 months later (IMO - it was HORRIBLE and incomplete and deserved every 1 star out of 10 that it got). It never did get localized.
I was referring to the BPjM review, which happens after publication, if I understand correctly. I think the USK is after my time, or else I wasn't really involved enough (that was the publisher's job, since they wanted to localize everywhere).
Some of the restrictions in Germany include no killing of children in video games (which is why many games built for an international audience have no children and games like Fallout removed them) and no killing of anything with red blood (zombies and aliens are good, people bad). Now they blame some nut-job shooting a bunch of red blooded children _in_Germany_ and blaming it on video games. Maybe if this guy had a playground massacre simulator it'd never have happened (hey, I'm a moderate - I throw gas on the fire on both sides ;)
But this is not about German laws - this is about banning them more universally, like across Europe.
To be fair, most companies make more changes than would be necessary to make sure they're not put on a blacklist in Germany because it is illegal to review a game before it is published there (which is, by law, censorship). A more uniform European law may be better for Europe as a whole than a bunch of mixed laws.
still, 4d1 is ugly and seems to imply static linking is still not allowed by the LGPL (contrary to thread starter)...
Since a statically linked library is bound and copied into the application at compile time, it would be in violation of 4d1a.
And while I'm sure this clause is meant to forbid static linked libraries, it also inadvertently could make a closed source application violate the LGPL without trying. Here's how: create an LGPL plugin (which is a really a dynamic library that does linking in runtime) and then have a non GPL/LGPL browser download and use it without shutting down. Think of how browsers load something like Flash players now - you don't restart the browser, you just click a link to download and install it, then you view Flash media. Since the library did not exist at the OS when the application was started, you could argue that the plugin did not exist on the OS at run time and therefore violates the LGPLv3. The other alternative is to say that a plugin is not a library - fair enough, then the plugin cannot be LGPLv3 because according to clause 0:
That said, you could alway do something like that by removing a non-LGPL library and replacing it with an LGPL library to cause the application to violate parts of the LGPL, so I would expect that is unenforcible. I'm just giving a hypothetical scenario of how someone like Microsoft might read it, just so they can say LGPL is EVIL.
I don't know how true that is, but it's completely unenforcible.
Anyone that uses the open part of my wireless freenet is not logged, and even if I did log, I could only keep about 50k of logfiles (the free space available on my router). If my ISP was spying on me, they may get all sorts of stuff coming through my router that is not being downloaded by me, and unless they find it on my machine (which they won't, since it's routed to a separate subnet), there's not much they can do about it. As a matter of fact, even if I turn on logging, it is completely restricted by available memory on the router, which isn't much. I have no control over what people use my network for, nor does any coffee shop owner or airport or anyone else that offers free wireless. I expect mine is mostly used for business, since it happens to be fairly close to a major downtown headed bus-stop (a park-n-ride), but I really don't know.
It's not just Windows - it happens on mac too
Safari is a CPU pig, firefox is a resource pig (OOTB).
Serves me right for writing that hastily from work - video teletypes (VT) at around 10 characters per second. Anyhow, I was referring to this being built-in (on motherboard), but I didn't know about the TV Typewriter. The main difference is the Apple one is synchronous (~60 characters per second). I recalled an interview wit Woz about this and I thought he said they got sued over it from a Magnavox patent (where they had the idea, but not any idea of how to do it), but I can't find the interview.
Apple ][ was a typo - I meant Apple I. The Apple ][ was the first to include color graphics.
I tend to think of the US Government as the slow child that got left behind as far as tech goes (or a typical PHB, take your pick), but the point of this appears just to be to expose dangers that are around on the internet and I'm OK with that. The document says there are 1 billion internet users worldwide, but that is between 1/6 and 1/7 the world population (~6.6 billion, I think), meaning there are a lot of people that may not be aware.
That said, I'd prefer it be internet awareness month instead of internet dangers month - this resolution only targets the "bad stuff" and once again doesn't promote the "good stuff" at all. Even the evening news has a fluff story or two and a sports segment to offset all the bad news. If you're going to name things to be aware of on the internet that are possibly harmful, also name some good productive uses, too - something you can point your children to (like Wikipedia, news sites, kids online games, etc).
I think Sun mostly opened it up to a) show it was a hardware company and software should be free (as they did with giving away Java a couple of years prior), but also to thumb its nose at Microsoft at not having to pay for 40000+ licenses for Office (if I recall correctly, all Sun employees had a Windows laptop primarily to run Office) and b) as an open source experiment. StarOffice was already being offered as a free download before forming OOo, and it already ran on a portable C++ layer and had been ported to several OS's. I even recall a CD-ROM I got (at JavaOne in 1999?) that had several versions on the same disc - I think Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX.
.app file, it works fine). The hard coded path was used because file names could be duplicated as long as directory subpaths varied, but there have been a number of messy bugs related to this hack (like datafiles including fixed paths, which is how they were being written by a conversion tool). StarOffice had a lot of legacy code from the original owner, StarDivision, which I believe started as a 1 programmer project in Germany and expanded from there.
The original reason for starting to sell the StarOffice variant of OOo was to add fonts, which Sun had to purchase per license. Scott McNealy (I believe) said originally they were going to just sell the font license for a couple of bucks (they may have even done this briefly - I didn't really care at the time), but businesses didn't see value in $2 and wouldn't buy them, so they made the package $70 (apparently they would offer support in either case).
I fully agree with you that some of the early OOo code I saw was a mess (some was quite good, too), but almost every time I look at an existing codebase I find something that I think is a mess, and I've had other programmers look at my maintained code and think it's a mess (even after I tell them there is a lot of legacy code). Like everyone, I am a victim of deadlines, even in my open source work - if a project I'm on happens to have a release at the same time as I have work crunch, I will often only have time to hack in a solution, and sometimes that hack lives for years before I get around to fixing it properly. I can even think of one in a project I'm working on now, where I set the cwd (current working directory for you non-programmers) and traverse down a hard coded file path rather than using Finder (as long as nothing moves inside a mac
the first mass produced computer for the home was probably the Altair. The first with a video display was, I believe, the Apple ][. The first 'kit' computer for the home is generally recognized as the Berkeley Simon (design published in Radio Electronics magazine).
The Commodore had some nice features, but one horrible flaw - anemic disk and tape drives. 15 minutes to load a program from tape or 3-4 from disk was absurd, in my opinion. Loved the MIDI, though. The PET and Vic 20 were trash, but the 64, 128, and Amiga were all decent machines for the price (aside from storage).
I got my start on a tape drive Apple ][ (in grade school) and that also was pretty anemic from a file storage standpoint and only had integer basic (that's the non-Microsoft one). Fortunately, when the moved to ][+ they all had Disk ][, Dos 3.1, and Applesoft BASIC (that is the MS one). Applesoft BASIC was more convenient to work with than Integer BASIC (no separate disk), but due to its slowness, I moved to assembly by about 1981-82 (yes, still grade school). It was fun going to computer camp that year and writing material meant to be done in BASIC in assembler, but I can't imagine doing that today (nor working with only 2 registers and an accumulator).
They also had some of the boot in ROM memory back then, which allowed them to sue anyone that made a clone unless they reverse engineered the ROM. Incidentally, that was how Franklin got busted - Apple dug through the ROM (essentially BIOS) and found the string 'Apple II+' in it. The Peach (another clone) was actually a physical and ROM identical clone built in Asia. Some other cloners did reverse engineer the ROM and Apple lost the lawsuits against them, as I recall, but by then Apple was a juggernaut and they were a niche.
So I hate to break it to you, but Apple has always been IP protective as a company, even when Woz was there.
well I can speak for Fallout 3, and Bethesda has never written or had a game ported to mac, at least none that I'm aware of.
according to this,they are open to it (and Linux), but will not do it themselves unless they get a porting house to make an offer. This makes sense to me because Bethesda uses DirectX and a true port to Mac and/or Linux would require a conversion to OpenGL. I don't know if it's DX9 or DX10, but if its the latter, it may also need the new OpenGL profile due toward the end of this year, as well (and certainly don't expect the game before mid-2009).
Blizzard does concurrent development and testing on Mac and PC, which often is the most cost-effective and profitable, but also has the most expensive up-front costs.
yes, but the real problem is the frequencies used by radio and TV are considered public and part of the agreement for using those frequencies is to abide by a set of restrictions set by the FCC as "decent" for everyone to listen to. Obviously this was been pushed to the limits by people like Don Imus and Howard Stern, eventually leading to their firings (and many fines).
They're not saying that you can't say it, just that you can't say it in public space or you'll be fined or arrested - think of it like going to Times Square and running around naked - I personally don't care that you're naked in public, but someone else might be.
When it comes to swear words, it bothers me when someone swears just for the sake of swearing, like "I's f*cking gonna motherf*cking f*ck your f*cking asses, ya f*cking beatches," but "That's some real deep shit, man" or "sweet f*ck all, why'd ya have to go do that!?" To be quite honest, people ending every sentence with FTW (For The Win) in MMORPGs bugs me as much as them spamming f*ck.
They originally disagreed over licensing, now they claim it's much more efficient to just write mac code and not have to coordinate with other platforms - basically, they're saying its easier for them to maintain a fork than it is to coordinate with OOo. The bottom line, however, is NeoOffice code is all GPL, so there is no way for them to legally contribute any of their code to OOo without violating the GPL (unless the original writer submitted it). I don't think OOo is going to move to the GPL, so you've got an impasse.
the "6 year wait" is partly because OOo 1.x was incompatible with MacOS X because of the way symbol bindings were handled (I think it was basically a hack, anyway, exploiting a "feature" in most UNIX-based OSes), so the port really couldn't start until 2.0 (which was heavily rewritten). I was involved in another project when 2.0 came out (I believe STLport, which I think I actually got involved with due to OOo, but X.3 had all the STL features I needed, so I moved on), so I really didn't follow the split that started NeoOffice.