I know a lot of people with Android phones, and not one of them cares about flash - despite what the TV ads say. A few of them installed it, but they all got rid of it in short order because they never used it, or the things they tried to use it for didn't work.
I tried Flash on my iPhone (yes, it's possible - look it up) and it worked fine - for what it worked with. It was sluggish, but that could be because it was a hack. More to the point, Flash is only useful for existing content. Anybody doing new work intended for cellphones doesn't use it - they use HTML5, or a native application. So it's used for applets that already exist - games, shitty restaurant websites, and so on. At least 75% didn't like that I didn't have any "mouse" movements that were not also clicks, and were either impossible to use or just extremely finicky. The keyboard, of course, didn't work at all. I got rid of it after a week, because anything in Flash that didn't require mouse or keyboard input didn't really need to be in Flash in the first place.
Hit the reset button on the back and it'll let you back in. Shouldn't be that much to configure, maybe just setting up your DSL login if you have one.
Oh wait, you didn't actually lose your password? You were just being an ass? Never mind then.
Look. If you don't want to open up your wireless, that's fine. But it's hard to deny that if everybody - or just most people - had open wireless, it'd be impossible to assume that the billed person was actually the one who did something bad with it.
Me? I have sensitive data on my network. But I run a VLAN'd off open wifi network for friends and neighbors. I have the fastest internet around, and I'm happy to share it - when I'm not using it (I prioritize internal traffic). If I didn't know how, or lacked the time, resources, or inclination, I wouldn't. But I wouldn't go around making snide sarcastic remarks about it.
Bullshit. I dual-booted OSX and Ubuntu in about 10 minutes, plus the actual file-copy time. Hold down "C" when you start the computer, with a burned CD in the drive. Easier than fiddling with boot ordering. To be clear, this is on a relatively new MBP
suggested allowing jurors to anonymously review each other -- when a given juror is chosen for the "hot seat" (perhaps randomly, perhaps as a result of a history of skewed voting), other jurors are randomly selected from the voting pool, to review that juror's voting record and decide whether that juror has been voting honestly and judiciously, or not.
Have you metamoderated recently? In fact, the whole thing seems like what Slashdot's been doing for years and years. Randomly select moderators based on a number of factors, including previous history and past performance, and so on.
As I understand it, iOS apps can't access it because they're sandboxed off from the system. The file is accessed in the phone backups on the computer. So the moral is don't run untrustworthy software on your computer, unless you're alright with it doing things you don't like.
Apple: A relatively insignificant bug made it through QA, and now that it's been found we're going to fix it in the next update. While we're at it, here's what the facts are, what we do do and collect, and what we use it for - and how it's anonymized before we see.
Because it's backed up so it's restored to the phone if you want to. This is along with every other system and application system. I routinely do "restores" instead of "upgrades" (it seems to make it run better), and the phone is as I left it. I've literally never found something it's missed.
So my assumption is they take a shotgun approach to backing up the phone. Not hard to imagine that a (relatively small) SQLite database could be transferred.
And that's assuming they didn't want to back it up and restore it. If it really is a short-lived cache that someone forgot to cleanup, which to be honest is what it sounds like, then it makes sense to want to hold onto that so the location performance doesn't plummet after a restore.
Much ado about nothing, it seems. If there was any evidence that Apple was getting more than a bastardized, aggregate non-identifiable copy of this sometimes perhaps, I expected to have seen it by now. As far as the data it does send - you *did* read the ELUA online (or requested a copy by mail) before you bought the phone, right?
I should have been more clear. The games that exploit moral ambiguity, and do it well, often turn out fantastically. A game like Bioshock, where you need to either kill the Little Sisters for a payoff now, or save them for a future payoff, forces you to evaluate - how far will you go for your morals, even when nobody's watching and the only judgement comes from a computer?
But it's not escapist. The obligatory xkcd lays this out pretty well. We don't want to humanize the people we're killing. This has been shown time and time and time and time - they made the Germans out to be baby-eaters, after all, for exactly this reason.
People in general don't like killing, even in the computer. It seems "wrong" - because it is. But in games, it's justified. He was shooting at me, or else he's guarding a door I need to get through. The best games I've played tend to bring up this discrepancy, but not harp on it.
Imagine you're playing a game, and there's a guard standing in front of the door you need to go through. So, from the bushes, you take him out. But he was just getting off duty and waiting for his girlfriend so they could walk him, and she runs out at the sound and starts sobbing over his body.
I don't know about you, but I don't play that game any more. Though I can see the value in it.
I don't know if you heard the bit of dialog in HL1, but there's a bit where you can overhear the soldiers saying something like "I know we're all gonna die here, but I'm wanna kill that Gordon Freeman. He's killed all of my buddies..."
In HL2 ep1 as well, you have to kill a few "Stalkers", which are modified humans. Alyx, your AI friend, feels pretty terrible about this - but the situation demands it, because it's keeping the door locked that you need to go through.
I'd say they address and highlight moral ambiguity, but help you justify it. Were they to not, it would be less "fun" - but very possibly more interesting.
Half Life 2 jumps to mind. You kill a guard with your crowbar; they're beating up this guy while his wife scream "please, somebody help". Tha'ts how you get your pistol.
Games aren't the real world. A World War I game that forces you to ask "wait, why am I shooting them again?" just isn't any fun. I think that's why people like WWII so much - by war standards, it was morally unambiguous.
Moral ambiguity bothers people. It's not enjoyable. It shouldn't be enjoyable, and it's good that it bothers us. Is it surprising that we don't like it in games?
It's a good idea, if only because otherwise people will just drop the paper towels on the floor.
But I just don't worry about it. The world is an absolutely filthy place, and as it happens we're up to the task of dealing with it without needing hand sanitizers and constant hand-washing. I know there's probably fecal coliforms on my toothbrush, but they're pretty much everywhere anyway. Same with every other kind of bacteria and virus. But I don't carefully wash my hands after gingerly touching the remote, even though it's more likely to make me sick than my bathroom.
And aside from a day-long cold in November (which was as much an excuse to take a sick day as anything), I haven't been sick in 3 years. Yet the people I know who wash their hands all the time and keep a bottle of sanitizer around are the ones who get sick. Sure, it may work in the other direction (they wash their hands a lot because they get sick), but there's significant evidence that trying to keep everything clean is actually worse for your immune system.
Preload, in Steam land, means just that you download the game but can't play it yet. The idea is so that you don't need to wait for hours after release for the download.
Thanks, I don't keep up on consoles. I was entirely mistaken, it seems. But Portal 2 for PS3 is still shipping on disk, and I don't think they can change that in the next few days.
Thanks, I didn't know that. I don't think it changes the circumstances, though. A big part of this is that Portal 2 is preloaded on thousands of computers already, just waiting for the switch, and that switch is directly under Valve's control. I doubt the PSN allows them the same flexibility.
In any case, I don't think it's going to be sold on the PSN. Not sure how much that matters, or how fast they could change that.
I happen to agree with him. The mouse is a far superior input device for a FPS (even without the S). I was playing a PS3 FPS a few months ago on a friend's machine, might've been MW2 but I don't remember. I was playing with a keyboard and mouse I stole from his desktop, and people kept bitching me out for "hax". I'm not even sure how you'd write an aimbot for a console...
In any case, it makes a huge difference. Consoles are either-or; you're precise or fast. With my mouse, I can rotate around half the screen and accurately target a player's head once I get there. It's just so much faster it's not even funny.
Thankfully, Portal 2 isn't likely to require "twitch"-style aiming. But something like CS:S on PC vs. console would be a joke.
Something's bad if it's advertised? Sure, advertising makes bad things more successful than they "should" be, but plenty of awesome things are heavily advertised.
I saw the ads as more of a "let's show the world this gameplay". The people who bought Portal the first time around, like myself, were already FPS fans. We loved that it wasn't a shoot-em-up, but the exposure was pretty limited outside of that circle.
Meanwhile, something like 40% of Portal players are female. I imagine it took a long time for the ratio to shift that way, because it wasn't presented as a non-"gamer" game. They're definitely trying to change that, to appeal to people who wouldn't play Half-Life or Counter-Strike.
Or it could be that the game sucks, despite every piece of gameplay footage I've ever seen and the fact that Valve has *never* - to my knowledge - released a bad game.
I doubt it. The beauty of Steam/Steam Play is that there's nothing more than a flag in the account. Type in the key, or get a Mac (or PC), and just download the files you're authorized to. For PS3 they'd have to send out a disk (unless the PSN does 10GB+ downloadable games?), and BDs are still expensive to make, and they'd be shipped, so they wouldn't just eat the cost. I could see them doing some nominal fee ($10), but I don't really think there's the demand.
Well, it's probably more like "we can flip the download switch early even if we can't magic the disks into the stores before we'd planned".
The rest of it too, I suppose... but Steam gives them the logistical flexibility to do this kind of thing. They can't just say "oh it's out now, go to Gamestop!" when they feel like it for a PS3 disk.
So your definition of 'slaughter' is to be overtaken after two years of sales by a competitor who only took 9 months? A competitor who makes money on each unit sold, instead of breaking even about 4 years later?
I'd like to be slaughtered by you, if you're not busy.
Hey, at least it doesn't make me enter a new mode to start editing text - you know, the 'delete everything' mode instead of the other one, 'beep constantly'
Hence the comment above. You have a disjoint in your reasoning - while otherwise sound, you are forgetting that there arguably aren't any products comparable in price to the iPad - at least at the moment. That's one of the things TFS was talking about, regarding how the other tablets need to split margins and hence cost more.
Once comparable products at significantly (>$100) lower prices hit the shelves, I'm sure we'll see them gain popularity. But the reason that isn't happening is probably because they aren't there yet, not necessarily that it's all a fad.
But as it stands, it is freeloading. And you're putting words in peoples' mouths. When I hear "pirates are freeloaders", I think about how they're getting things for free that I followed the rules on. I don't like that - in school, in life, in business, or for software.
We should definitely be discussing the rules themselves, but the pirates are absolutely 100% responsible for breaking them as they currently stand. This is inarguable, and they are currently freeloading while others are not. This has nothing to do with what the rules actually are, and discussing them is a separate issue.
Accurate description is not intellectually dishonest. If the description is emotionally charged, perhaps the thing being described is emotionally charged as well. Like I said above, the emotions don't come from what people get, it's how they got it that bothers people. That's what freeloading refers to, so I will continue to use it, even though I basically agree with you about copyright. Freeloading is a more apt description the more I think about it.
That might actually be illegal, for the same reason it's illegal to set beartraps in front of your door even if somebody does break in. Somebody breaking the law does not allow you to break the law in return.
In any case, this is a much smarter business proposition. I think this is hilarious and IMHO the punishment fits the crime - you were too cheap to pay $2.10 for a piece of software you're using, so I'll make you look like a dick. But the developers would come off like assholes if somebody did get killed, somewhat defeating the purpose.
I'm all for this sort of DRM - like the Batman game that put a jump most of the way through that a pirating user couldn't perform.
It's definitely not theft, but piracy is in fact legally prohibited - that is, "against the law" or "illegal". The legal instrument of copyright does in fact exist, and gives the holder the right to charge a price for it - whether the pirates believe it does or not.
So by not paying the price asked and acquiring it through other means, they are in fact freeloading - if you define freeloading as "getting for free that for which payment is expected"
So if you want to condone this action, you need to disagree with the premise of copyright (I don't, though it should be much shorter). Even if you disagree with the implementation of copyright, like I do (penalties for non-commercial infringement, length of time, etc), that is insufficient to condone this action.
Nothing emotional about it. It is pretty unarguably freeloading, and if it makes you feel bad perhaps that's because you should - because it definitely isn't an ad-homenim, it's an accurate description of the behavior you're engaging in. 'You' being someone in general, of course.
The 'radium girls' were about 5 minutes from the house I grew up in - in fact, a local park was once that Superfund site. Terrible story - they were licking the brushes to fix the tips, and it was becoming incorporated into their jawbones.
Slashdot Mirror
'It's advertised'!='customers value highly'
I know a lot of people with Android phones, and not one of them cares about flash - despite what the TV ads say. A few of them installed it, but they all got rid of it in short order because they never used it, or the things they tried to use it for didn't work.
I tried Flash on my iPhone (yes, it's possible - look it up) and it worked fine - for what it worked with. It was sluggish, but that could be because it was a hack. More to the point, Flash is only useful for existing content. Anybody doing new work intended for cellphones doesn't use it - they use HTML5, or a native application. So it's used for applets that already exist - games, shitty restaurant websites, and so on. At least 75% didn't like that I didn't have any "mouse" movements that were not also clicks, and were either impossible to use or just extremely finicky. The keyboard, of course, didn't work at all. I got rid of it after a week, because anything in Flash that didn't require mouse or keyboard input didn't really need to be in Flash in the first place.
Hit the reset button on the back and it'll let you back in. Shouldn't be that much to configure, maybe just setting up your DSL login if you have one.
Oh wait, you didn't actually lose your password? You were just being an ass? Never mind then.
Look. If you don't want to open up your wireless, that's fine. But it's hard to deny that if everybody - or just most people - had open wireless, it'd be impossible to assume that the billed person was actually the one who did something bad with it.
Me? I have sensitive data on my network. But I run a VLAN'd off open wifi network for friends and neighbors. I have the fastest internet around, and I'm happy to share it - when I'm not using it (I prioritize internal traffic). If I didn't know how, or lacked the time, resources, or inclination, I wouldn't. But I wouldn't go around making snide sarcastic remarks about it.
Bullshit. I dual-booted OSX and Ubuntu in about 10 minutes, plus the actual file-copy time. Hold down "C" when you start the computer, with a burned CD in the drive. Easier than fiddling with boot ordering. To be clear, this is on a relatively new MBP
suggested allowing jurors to anonymously review each other -- when a given juror is chosen for the "hot seat" (perhaps randomly, perhaps as a result of a history of skewed voting), other jurors are randomly selected from the voting pool, to review that juror's voting record and decide whether that juror has been voting honestly and judiciously, or not.
Have you metamoderated recently? In fact, the whole thing seems like what Slashdot's been doing for years and years. Randomly select moderators based on a number of factors, including previous history and past performance, and so on.
As I understand it, iOS apps can't access it because they're sandboxed off from the system. The file is accessed in the phone backups on the computer. So the moral is don't run untrustworthy software on your computer, unless you're alright with it doing things you don't like.
Even better:
Apple: A relatively insignificant bug made it through QA, and now that it's been found we're going to fix it in the next update. While we're at it, here's what the facts are, what we do do and collect, and what we use it for - and how it's anonymized before we see.
Because it's backed up so it's restored to the phone if you want to. This is along with every other system and application system. I routinely do "restores" instead of "upgrades" (it seems to make it run better), and the phone is as I left it. I've literally never found something it's missed.
So my assumption is they take a shotgun approach to backing up the phone. Not hard to imagine that a (relatively small) SQLite database could be transferred.
And that's assuming they didn't want to back it up and restore it. If it really is a short-lived cache that someone forgot to cleanup, which to be honest is what it sounds like, then it makes sense to want to hold onto that so the location performance doesn't plummet after a restore.
Much ado about nothing, it seems. If there was any evidence that Apple was getting more than a bastardized, aggregate non-identifiable copy of this sometimes perhaps, I expected to have seen it by now. As far as the data it does send - you *did* read the ELUA online (or requested a copy by mail) before you bought the phone, right?
I should have been more clear. The games that exploit moral ambiguity, and do it well, often turn out fantastically. A game like Bioshock, where you need to either kill the Little Sisters for a payoff now, or save them for a future payoff, forces you to evaluate - how far will you go for your morals, even when nobody's watching and the only judgement comes from a computer?
But it's not escapist. The obligatory xkcd lays this out pretty well. We don't want to humanize the people we're killing. This has been shown time and time and time and time - they made the Germans out to be baby-eaters, after all, for exactly this reason.
People in general don't like killing, even in the computer. It seems "wrong" - because it is. But in games, it's justified. He was shooting at me, or else he's guarding a door I need to get through. The best games I've played tend to bring up this discrepancy, but not harp on it.
Imagine you're playing a game, and there's a guard standing in front of the door you need to go through. So, from the bushes, you take him out. But he was just getting off duty and waiting for his girlfriend so they could walk him, and she runs out at the sound and starts sobbing over his body.
I don't know about you, but I don't play that game any more. Though I can see the value in it.
I don't know if you heard the bit of dialog in HL1, but there's a bit where you can overhear the soldiers saying something like "I know we're all gonna die here, but I'm wanna kill that Gordon Freeman. He's killed all of my buddies..."
In HL2 ep1 as well, you have to kill a few "Stalkers", which are modified humans. Alyx, your AI friend, feels pretty terrible about this - but the situation demands it, because it's keeping the door locked that you need to go through.
I'd say they address and highlight moral ambiguity, but help you justify it. Were they to not, it would be less "fun" - but very possibly more interesting.
Half Life 2 jumps to mind. You kill a guard with your crowbar; they're beating up this guy while his wife scream "please, somebody help". Tha'ts how you get your pistol.
Games aren't the real world. A World War I game that forces you to ask "wait, why am I shooting them again?" just isn't any fun. I think that's why people like WWII so much - by war standards, it was morally unambiguous.
Moral ambiguity bothers people. It's not enjoyable. It shouldn't be enjoyable, and it's good that it bothers us. Is it surprising that we don't like it in games?
It's a good idea, if only because otherwise people will just drop the paper towels on the floor.
But I just don't worry about it. The world is an absolutely filthy place, and as it happens we're up to the task of dealing with it without needing hand sanitizers and constant hand-washing. I know there's probably fecal coliforms on my toothbrush, but they're pretty much everywhere anyway. Same with every other kind of bacteria and virus. But I don't carefully wash my hands after gingerly touching the remote, even though it's more likely to make me sick than my bathroom.
And aside from a day-long cold in November (which was as much an excuse to take a sick day as anything), I haven't been sick in 3 years. Yet the people I know who wash their hands all the time and keep a bottle of sanitizer around are the ones who get sick. Sure, it may work in the other direction (they wash their hands a lot because they get sick), but there's significant evidence that trying to keep everything clean is actually worse for your immune system.
Preload, in Steam land, means just that you download the game but can't play it yet. The idea is so that you don't need to wait for hours after release for the download.
Thanks, I don't keep up on consoles. I was entirely mistaken, it seems. But Portal 2 for PS3 is still shipping on disk, and I don't think they can change that in the next few days.
Thanks, I didn't know that. I don't think it changes the circumstances, though. A big part of this is that Portal 2 is preloaded on thousands of computers already, just waiting for the switch, and that switch is directly under Valve's control. I doubt the PSN allows them the same flexibility.
In any case, I don't think it's going to be sold on the PSN. Not sure how much that matters, or how fast they could change that.
I happen to agree with him. The mouse is a far superior input device for a FPS (even without the S). I was playing a PS3 FPS a few months ago on a friend's machine, might've been MW2 but I don't remember. I was playing with a keyboard and mouse I stole from his desktop, and people kept bitching me out for "hax". I'm not even sure how you'd write an aimbot for a console...
In any case, it makes a huge difference. Consoles are either-or; you're precise or fast. With my mouse, I can rotate around half the screen and accurately target a player's head once I get there. It's just so much faster it's not even funny.
Thankfully, Portal 2 isn't likely to require "twitch"-style aiming. But something like CS:S on PC vs. console would be a joke.
Something's bad if it's advertised? Sure, advertising makes bad things more successful than they "should" be, but plenty of awesome things are heavily advertised.
I saw the ads as more of a "let's show the world this gameplay". The people who bought Portal the first time around, like myself, were already FPS fans. We loved that it wasn't a shoot-em-up, but the exposure was pretty limited outside of that circle.
Meanwhile, something like 40% of Portal players are female. I imagine it took a long time for the ratio to shift that way, because it wasn't presented as a non-"gamer" game. They're definitely trying to change that, to appeal to people who wouldn't play Half-Life or Counter-Strike.
Or it could be that the game sucks, despite every piece of gameplay footage I've ever seen and the fact that Valve has *never* - to my knowledge - released a bad game.
I doubt it. The beauty of Steam/Steam Play is that there's nothing more than a flag in the account. Type in the key, or get a Mac (or PC), and just download the files you're authorized to. For PS3 they'd have to send out a disk (unless the PSN does 10GB+ downloadable games?), and BDs are still expensive to make, and they'd be shipped, so they wouldn't just eat the cost. I could see them doing some nominal fee ($10), but I don't really think there's the demand.
Well, it's probably more like "we can flip the download switch early even if we can't magic the disks into the stores before we'd planned".
The rest of it too, I suppose... but Steam gives them the logistical flexibility to do this kind of thing. They can't just say "oh it's out now, go to Gamestop!" when they feel like it for a PS3 disk.
So your definition of 'slaughter' is to be overtaken after two years of sales by a competitor who only took 9 months? A competitor who makes money on each unit sold, instead of breaking even about 4 years later?
I'd like to be slaughtered by you, if you're not busy.
Hey, at least it doesn't make me enter a new mode to start editing text - you know, the 'delete everything' mode instead of the other one, 'beep constantly'
Hence the comment above. You have a disjoint in your reasoning - while otherwise sound, you are forgetting that there arguably aren't any products comparable in price to the iPad - at least at the moment. That's one of the things TFS was talking about, regarding how the other tablets need to split margins and hence cost more.
Once comparable products at significantly (>$100) lower prices hit the shelves, I'm sure we'll see them gain popularity. But the reason that isn't happening is probably because they aren't there yet, not necessarily that it's all a fad.
But as it stands, it is freeloading. And you're putting words in peoples' mouths. When I hear "pirates are freeloaders", I think about how they're getting things for free that I followed the rules on. I don't like that - in school, in life, in business, or for software.
We should definitely be discussing the rules themselves, but the pirates are absolutely 100% responsible for breaking them as they currently stand. This is inarguable, and they are currently freeloading while others are not. This has nothing to do with what the rules actually are, and discussing them is a separate issue.
Accurate description is not intellectually dishonest. If the description is emotionally charged, perhaps the thing being described is emotionally charged as well. Like I said above, the emotions don't come from what people get, it's how they got it that bothers people. That's what freeloading refers to, so I will continue to use it, even though I basically agree with you about copyright. Freeloading is a more apt description the more I think about it.
That might actually be illegal, for the same reason it's illegal to set beartraps in front of your door even if somebody does break in. Somebody breaking the law does not allow you to break the law in return.
In any case, this is a much smarter business proposition. I think this is hilarious and IMHO the punishment fits the crime - you were too cheap to pay $2.10 for a piece of software you're using, so I'll make you look like a dick. But the developers would come off like assholes if somebody did get killed, somewhat defeating the purpose.
I'm all for this sort of DRM - like the Batman game that put a jump most of the way through that a pirating user couldn't perform.
Horse shit.
It's definitely not theft, but piracy is in fact legally prohibited - that is, "against the law" or "illegal". The legal instrument of copyright does in fact exist, and gives the holder the right to charge a price for it - whether the pirates believe it does or not.
So by not paying the price asked and acquiring it through other means, they are in fact freeloading - if you define freeloading as "getting for free that for which payment is expected"
So if you want to condone this action, you need to disagree with the premise of copyright (I don't, though it should be much shorter). Even if you disagree with the implementation of copyright, like I do (penalties for non-commercial infringement, length of time, etc), that is insufficient to condone this action.
Nothing emotional about it. It is pretty unarguably freeloading, and if it makes you feel bad perhaps that's because you should - because it definitely isn't an ad-homenim, it's an accurate description of the behavior you're engaging in. 'You' being someone in general, of course.
When I collide my large hardon I sometimes get bosom hugs too.
Oh.... hadron...
I like mine better.
Yes, it was. Had cesium on my mind.
The 'radium girls' were about 5 minutes from the house I grew up in - in fact, a local park was once that Superfund site. Terrible story - they were licking the brushes to fix the tips, and it was becoming incorporated into their jawbones.