Those games are commonly played on laptops, and are a great way to pass time on the train. Connectivity ain't *that* pervasive yet (or it's just expensive).
That's pretty much what the DMCA is all about, yes. However, Viacom is alleging bad faith on Youtube's part in that a) they do respond in a timely fashion, b) their material is predominantly infringing, and that c) they are profiting off the infringement. There's some precedents to back all these up, but I don't exactly have legal research resources beyond the intarwebs to cite them for you.
Some of these points are debateable, but the preponderance seems to weigh pretty heavily against Youtube.
It's very simple: we like the content, we want everything for free, therefore copyright is evil. The justifications come after the fact.
I hate the RIAA and MPAA as much as anyone, and I think the DRM schemes are a pretty cynical attempt at lock-in and control, but this is pretty clear cut: it's Viacom's stuff that Viacom's advertisers pay Viacom to distribute, and Youtube is cutting them out completely. This is the blatant stuff that makes them push for things like broadcast flags and DRM from end to end.
> when I drag a search box from my address book to my media player does it keep listing addresses or search my music library?
Presumably, when you drag across apps, it would be a "copy" operation, and you'd get a new copy of the widget that would need configuring to work in its new environment. Pointing the widget at a new data source would be the first thing you'd want to do -- in fact, you might just make the drop action a transactional thing that asks for a valid data source within the application, and will abort if it doesn't get one. You could perhaps point it to your library by pointing at the library browser's grid widget, and get some default semantics of grid-widget-searching built in (such as a lucene-ish syntax for addressing columns, or whatever). Assuming the protocols for inter-widget communication are well-designed (a generous assumption there), then you could conceivably replace a previous searchbox widget with a fancier one with a few clicks.
Fact is, this ain't gonna happen in current environments, and it's fairly anathema to GNOME, which isn't exactly about maximum configurability.
It has little to do with faithfulness or whatever other tortured metaphors may apply with respect to the open source community. To me, it has nothing to do with open source: I've lost faith in Novell because their "partner" has them talking down their own product. That's all I gotta say about that.
but assuming that each programs considers its windows to be reconfigurable, you've got a common pool of widgets, and a way for your programs to communicate
> Blu-Ray has the shitty name. It doesn't mean anything to anyone but a geek.
No, it doesn't mean anything, but it doesn't matter as long as it has a catchy brand name. It's not like most of the brands you buy have an immediate meaning either.
Blu-Ray: Two syllables. This matters to us grunting anglo-saxons. Association with a color, association with something high-tech (a "ray").
HD-DVD: Five syllables, four of them with the same vowel sound. Sounds like something out of a standards doc. On the plus side, it corresponds nicely with "HDTV", and if they just start pronouncing it "high def", they may get brand cachet back. Problem is, that isn't a trademark, and Blu-Ray is also a high def format.
> "I thought Blu-Ray was a HD-DVD". What more need be said?
That Blu-Ray has a brand distinction that subsumes even some techies think is a generic category.
I'm sure that some folks have an emotional investment in one format or another and will come out of the woodwork to "defend" HD-DVD against some perceived attack. Don't bother -- my take is that given Sony's track record on formats, they'll find some way to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.
> They won't be the single game in town any longer which will force them to continue to "compete" by offering their discounts.
Thus further driving down the margins, driving the smaller players out of business, leaving only a few larger vendors who can then sit on their thumbs when it comes to continuing support, while any new players in the business will think better of the strategy that destroyed their predecessors.
I'd be all right with paying slightly more if the vendor were honest enough to say that all the demoware on the windows PC partially subsidizes the cost.
> NWN2 and its lack of the chainmail bikini is an excellent example.
Not using the same idiotic juvenile cliche that's been in virtually every other CRPG is hardly the apogee of puritanism.
It is annoying though that the unarmored models in most CRPG's always has some kind of underwear. I always wanted to play one of my favorite D&D characters (under some custom rules), namely a barbarian character that wore woad. And nothing but.
If Citizen Kane was filmed in a garage with a cast entirely under the age of 16 whining about how their mom is suppressing their artistic style, then maybe it would have some parallel to the Columbine game. If someone made a flash game where you got to napalm a bunch of Kim Phuc Phan This, that might also be in the same league.
Making a bad game in poor taste then demanding the world respect you for only that might be a sort of performance art, but it doesn't give the game any merit.
I saw FranOOOMMM and tried it, but it seems to have real problems. The bigger and tougher mobs are quite literally impossible in some places, and also bring anything but a really top-of-the-line PC to a crawl.
So instead I'm using: OOO (of course), Unofficial Overhaul Expansion (UOE) which integrates various mods into OOO, Kobu's Character Advancement System (which pretty much removes the need to "power-level"), and some mod that turns off the compass from the main UI ("Immersive UI" or something like that).
I do have one question: I'm not actually sure if that set of mods fixes the leveled lists problem of quest loot being underpowered at low levels, and bandits carrying full daedric gear. Will I need Francesco's mod or MMM for that after all? Might just be time to reinstall all my mods in that case and try FranOOOMMM again once they fix the mobs.
And a general gripe: from the crazy leveled lists to the compass+markers in the main UI, I get a real bad vibe from Bethesda. Also I hear that for stability and space reasons, cells reset themselves after a time. No more kings of spoons, I suspect (google for 'morrowind "king of spoons"' for a good laugh) Oh well, at least it's still crazy moddable, and still a freaking amazing game. Except for the voice acting. Dear lord, they blew their voice acting budget on Patrick Stewart's two minutes of dialogue, and must have had interns do the rest.
> I wonder what metrics they are using to determine importance,
The author's favorite games. These lists are complete filler -- the publishers just thank their lucky stars that slashdot is here to gulp them up and drive up ad impressions.
Real Time Strategy games is a misnomer since strategy involves moving troops around like Risk and resolving battles at the macro level; not micromanagement of individual units as most of the games currently play. Making units dance in Warhammer 40K to confuse the AI lock-on? Come on!
There's hope with Supreme commander.
RED: "Haha, you can't hit me" BLUE: [launches nukes] BLUE: "dodge this"
> How are you going to play Civilization IV on a console?
Really easy if you start with a control scheme that makes sense on a console, using menus instead of pointers wherever possible. Radial menus work really well with console controllers. There really aren't that many individual unit commands in civ, and some like "upgrade" make more sense as separate menus rather than individual commands.
The control scheme for The Sims turned out to be better on the PS2 than on the PC, though I could have used a "cycle through nearby objects" button. When I tried the Sims 2 on my PC, I found I just couldn't go back to the mouse to play it (I also got tired of the whole concept of babysitting incredibly stupid AIs that took over an hour to pee)
> but isn't there legal standing in place for "abandonware," or circumventing copy protection if the content that's protected is from a company that no longer exists or no longer supports the platform?
None whatsoever, nada zip zilch. Granted, however, the original copyright holder is usually not in a position to sue you, but usually there's some parent company that now owns it that will.
Slashdot Mirror
> So you went from making a reasonable point to being a troll.
Is it trolling if the boat don't move? I pointed out that lame justifications would follow, and someone happily obliged.
> let me just say that if you respond to this in disagreement it is clear proof that I am right.
Now you get to brag to everyone that you won an argument on slashdot.
(that's a troll)
Those games are commonly played on laptops, and are a great way to pass time on the train. Connectivity ain't *that* pervasive yet (or it's just expensive).
Took less than five minutes for justification #1. Any more takers?
> a) they do respond in a timely fashion
Should be "they do not respond in a timely fashion" of course. Sigh.
That's pretty much what the DMCA is all about, yes. However, Viacom is alleging bad faith on Youtube's part in that a) they do respond in a timely fashion, b) their material is predominantly infringing, and that c) they are profiting off the infringement. There's some precedents to back all these up, but I don't exactly have legal research resources beyond the intarwebs to cite them for you.
Some of these points are debateable, but the preponderance seems to weigh pretty heavily against Youtube.
It's very simple: we like the content, we want everything for free, therefore copyright is evil. The justifications come after the fact.
I hate the RIAA and MPAA as much as anyone, and I think the DRM schemes are a pretty cynical attempt at lock-in and control, but this is pretty clear cut: it's Viacom's stuff that Viacom's advertisers pay Viacom to distribute, and Youtube is cutting them out completely. This is the blatant stuff that makes them push for things like broadcast flags and DRM from end to end.
> when I drag a search box from my address book to my media player does it keep listing addresses or search my music library?
Presumably, when you drag across apps, it would be a "copy" operation, and you'd get a new copy of the widget that would need configuring to work in its new environment. Pointing the widget at a new data source would be the first thing you'd want to do -- in fact, you might just make the drop action a transactional thing that asks for a valid data source within the application, and will abort if it doesn't get one. You could perhaps point it to your library by pointing at the library browser's grid widget, and get some default semantics of grid-widget-searching built in (such as a lucene-ish syntax for addressing columns, or whatever). Assuming the protocols for inter-widget communication are well-designed (a generous assumption there), then you could conceivably replace a previous searchbox widget with a fancier one with a few clicks.
Fact is, this ain't gonna happen in current environments, and it's fairly anathema to GNOME, which isn't exactly about maximum configurability.
> Not that long ago, there was an article about the cost of 0wnership (that first letter is a zero, not an o).
The easiest way to disambiguate that spelling is spell it: "Total Cost of Pwnership"
(TCP might not be the best way to abbreviate it though)
It has little to do with faithfulness or whatever other tortured metaphors may apply with respect to the open source community. To me, it has nothing to do with open source: I've lost faith in Novell because their "partner" has them talking down their own product. That's all I gotta say about that.
but assuming that each programs considers its windows to be reconfigurable, you've got a common pool of widgets, and a way for your programs to communicate
I believe you're looking for this
It's got your drag and drop widget goodness. It won't make them magically work of course.
No, it doesn't mean anything, but it doesn't matter as long as it has a catchy brand name. It's not like most of the brands you buy have an immediate meaning either.
> "I thought Blu-Ray was a HD-DVD". What more need be said?
That Blu-Ray has a brand distinction that subsumes even some techies think is a generic category.
I'm sure that some folks have an emotional investment in one format or another and will come out of the woodwork to "defend" HD-DVD against some perceived attack. Don't bother -- my take is that given Sony's track record on formats, they'll find some way to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.
FACTS prove that humans are a failure. If they weren't, there would be more humans than insects.
> They rivet the cases shut on Dells!
Just where you work, to keep your grabbenmittens out. Mine swings right open and the drives slide right in and out.
> I hate feeling stupid, someone please enlighten me!
Clue must come from within, grasshoppa.
http://www.compusa.com/products/products.asp?N=0&N tt=modem&D=modem&Ntk=All&Nty=1&Dx=mode%20matchall
Seems like there's plenty of them even after you skip the "cable modems". The PCI ones are probably not winmodems.
PLEASE supply tar archives of your drivers and source! I'm sick to death of picking apart your bloody RPMs to get what I need :(
So install alien, silly. It's one command to convert to a tarball.
> They won't be the single game in town any longer which will force them to continue to "compete" by offering their discounts.
Thus further driving down the margins, driving the smaller players out of business, leaving only a few larger vendors who can then sit on their thumbs when it comes to continuing support, while any new players in the business will think better of the strategy that destroyed their predecessors.
I'd be all right with paying slightly more if the vendor were honest enough to say that all the demoware on the windows PC partially subsidizes the cost.
> NWN2 and its lack of the chainmail bikini is an excellent example.
Not using the same idiotic juvenile cliche that's been in virtually every other CRPG is hardly the apogee of puritanism.
It is annoying though that the unarmored models in most CRPG's always has some kind of underwear. I always wanted to play one of my favorite D&D characters (under some custom rules), namely a barbarian character that wore woad. And nothing but.
If Citizen Kane was filmed in a garage with a cast entirely under the age of 16 whining about how their mom is suppressing their artistic style, then maybe it would have some parallel to the Columbine game. If someone made a flash game where you got to napalm a bunch of Kim Phuc Phan This, that might also be in the same league.
Making a bad game in poor taste then demanding the world respect you for only that might be a sort of performance art, but it doesn't give the game any merit.
Ah, answering my own question, it looks like OOO does get rid of the gratuitous monster leveling, and UOE adds a leveled loot fix for quest items.
Now if someone would put out a patch to fix the voice acting. Yowza.
> Games and movies developed suspenseful storylines often predicated upon a last-minute twist.
Um, Billy Shakespeare did a few plots like that too, and I suspect he didn't invent the technique either.
I saw FranOOOMMM and tried it, but it seems to have real problems. The bigger and tougher mobs are quite literally impossible in some places, and also bring anything but a really top-of-the-line PC to a crawl.
So instead I'm using: OOO (of course), Unofficial Overhaul Expansion (UOE) which integrates various mods into OOO, Kobu's Character Advancement System (which pretty much removes the need to "power-level"), and some mod that turns off the compass from the main UI ("Immersive UI" or something like that).
I do have one question: I'm not actually sure if that set of mods fixes the leveled lists problem of quest loot being underpowered at low levels, and bandits carrying full daedric gear. Will I need Francesco's mod or MMM for that after all? Might just be time to reinstall all my mods in that case and try FranOOOMMM again once they fix the mobs.
And a general gripe: from the crazy leveled lists to the compass+markers in the main UI, I get a real bad vibe from Bethesda. Also I hear that for stability and space reasons, cells reset themselves after a time. No more kings of spoons, I suspect (google for 'morrowind "king of spoons"' for a good laugh) Oh well, at least it's still crazy moddable, and still a freaking amazing game. Except for the voice acting. Dear lord, they blew their voice acting budget on Patrick Stewart's two minutes of dialogue, and must have had interns do the rest.
> I wonder what metrics they are using to determine importance,
The author's favorite games. These lists are complete filler -- the publishers just thank their lucky stars that slashdot is here to gulp them up and drive up ad impressions.
Real Time Strategy games is a misnomer since strategy involves moving troops around like Risk and resolving battles at the macro level; not micromanagement of individual units as most of the games currently play. Making units dance in Warhammer 40K to confuse the AI lock-on? Come on!
There's hope with Supreme commander.
RED: "Haha, you can't hit me"
BLUE: [launches nukes]
BLUE: "dodge this"
> How are you going to play Civilization IV on a console?
Really easy if you start with a control scheme that makes sense on a console, using menus instead of pointers wherever possible. Radial menus work really well with console controllers. There really aren't that many individual unit commands in civ, and some like "upgrade" make more sense as separate menus rather than individual commands.
The control scheme for The Sims turned out to be better on the PS2 than on the PC, though I could have used a "cycle through nearby objects" button. When I tried the Sims 2 on my PC, I found I just couldn't go back to the mouse to play it (I also got tired of the whole concept of babysitting incredibly stupid AIs that took over an hour to pee)
> but isn't there legal standing in place for "abandonware," or circumventing copy protection if the content that's protected is from a company that no longer exists or no longer supports the platform?
None whatsoever, nada zip zilch. Granted, however, the original copyright holder is usually not in a position to sue you, but usually there's some parent company that now owns it that will.