Facebook and myspace, and xanga, allow users some amount of granularity to control who can view their personal data, which is one of the draws of these websites.
No one's saying that these abilities aren't useful. In fact, it's Facebook's failure to do exactly that which is my problem with it. Sure it allows you to set whether just your friends or all Facebook users can see your profile, but there is absolutely NO WAY to make your profile, or portions thereof, available to non-users. The only use of a Facebook account is to share information with other Facebook users, as well as to serve Facebook as bait for other users to join.
80 is the maximum width such that I can fit two files side by side on most monitors I have used. Anyone who has experienced multiple monitor setups before will understand, since it provides similar benefits. Just because you have a large screen does not mean you want to use the entire thing for one file of code.
I still don't get it. In the case you gave with the possible clause in the windows license, how does this apply:
under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work
If I understand correctly it would only apply if you are paying Microsoft to convey the GPL'd program. I think it would be a stretch to associate this with differently priced versions of windows with and without the clause (though maybe I'm wrong).
Okay, so person A starts shooting everyone. Person B steps in and shoots the shooter. Person C walks in on the situation, sees person B with the gun, and shoots him in a panic. Three more people walk by and pull out their guns in self defence. Not only does this cause chaos, but no-one even knows who the shooter is anymore, let alone whether he is still alive.
If the manufacturer is willing to say "This drive will last for X years or we replace it free," it speaks volumes about their confidence behind their product.
Or maybe the manufacturer just realized that 5 years down the road, a replacement for your then 5 year old HD will cost them peanuts. Accoring to the graph at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drives#Capacity, HD capacity seems to be increasing by roughly ten times every five years.
It's like the CD-R manufacturers stamping all the packaging with 100-year guarantees. They don't really have any good way of telling that they will actually last that long, but the replacement costs nearly nothing, and thus is payed for by the marketing benefits.
That's an easy comment. Name some of these technical issues that you mention. It's not perfect, but I can't for the life of me think of any severe problems.
The first one that comes to mind is that when you stand on top of a vein and mine it out from under you, you stay suspended in the air. You pretty much stay there until you hit a movement key, at which time you start falling. To be fair, though, that's probably a very small bug. I would guess they just forgot a particular event which makes objects go from inactive to active (these probably aren't the actual terms) in the physics simulation.
I hate that they removed the/bug command from the beta, that was quite useful.
I, for one, fear the military applications of this new/. meme, not like it wasn't possible before, but perhaps this might give some people ideas that would ultimately be used to kill people. After all, with geeks the world over tagging things with possible military applications, the military could just throw away their R&D department!
No, it's Levy paid to CRIA for blank CD's and audio tapes (not HDDs or
DVDs), but you can't be sued for downloading music or videos.
I am not a lawyer!
I'm sorry, but I've been pouring through the Canadian Copyright Act, and I
cannot find anything which substantiates your claim. This is the only clause I
can find which is relevant to this situation, but please tell me if I've missed
something. (Edit: now that I am done writing this comment I am no longer as
sure as when I started, so please read to the end)
Copying for Private Use
80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any
substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied
in a sound recording, or
(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a
performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of
the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of
the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound
recording.
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in that subsection is
done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the
things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c):
(a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for
sale or rental;
(b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade;
(c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or
(d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.
1997, c. 24, s. 50.
Now, the first thing to notice here is that this only applies to musical
works, not videos. Next, this only allows copying onto an "audio recording
medium," defined as:
"audio recording medium" means a recording medium, regardless of its material
form, onto which a sound recording may be reproduced and that is of a kind
ordinarily used by individual consumers for that purpose, excluding any
prescribed kind of recording medium;
The last sentence seems somewhat badly phrased, those of you who know french
may agree that it is worded better on the french version of the page:
http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/info/act-f.html#79
"support audio" Tout support audio habituellement utilisé par les
consommateurs pour reproduire des enregistrements sonores, à l'exception
toutefois de ceux exclus par règlement.
Now, I don't know if there are recording mediums which are excluded (or
"exclus par règlement"), but disregarding that, my (possibly unqualified)
judgement suggests to me that HDDs would count as "ordinarily used by
individual consumers for that purpose," especially since many portable music
players use them to store music.
Another important insight is that this only covers the case in which you
make a copy of a work for your own private use. This leads me to believe that,
for example, I could make a copy of my friend's music disk and use it myself,
but it would be copyright infringement for him to make the copy and give it to
me. Together with paragraphs (2) (b) and (c), this leads me to believe that it is not
permitted for you to download music for the purpose of sharing it through the p2p service. Perhaps if the p2p aplication does not permit you to disable uploading you can say it was not your purpose to upload the music? Maybe you can say this in any case? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer.
Now that I've looked at it so closely, however,
Sure, but that's not incompatible with what I said. They aren't restricting the information to themselves, they are making it accessible to the public.
It's interesting that so far, most of the posts here are saying "What's the problem? Don't do stupid and shameful things, no problems", yet wherever the issue of CCTV Brit style comes up, it's nothing but outrage. What's the difference?
The difference is that in this case the public has access to this material, which causes much less concentration of power (bad in my books) than it being restricted to one centralized organization such as the government. Like it or not, as technology progresses, physical privacy is on the way out. I'd much rather lose my privacy to everyone than lose it only to the government.
The other big selling 'heavily instanced' games out there have set the precedent on this one: Diablo (1 and 2) and Guild Wars. Neither of these two games have made you pay anything more than the price of the box (and subsequent expansions).
Don't forget that Phantasy Star Online, which was also a heavily instanced game, managed to pull the pay-per-month scheme pretty successfully.
It will also feature a Hardcore mode similar to that found in Blizzard's Diablo II (...)
Awesome.
For those who don't know, this is the mode where if your character is killed, that's it, he's gone forever. In my last days of playing Diablo II I played this mode pretty much exclusively. When I first got Diablo II this mode didn't appeal to me at all, after all, why play for hours and hours only to lose your character to a monster who was a little too tough?
One thing you learn after playing Diablo II for long enough, and coming to the point where beating normal difficulty becomes a normal occurrence for your characters, is that you have two choices with regards to character planning. One, you pick some skills you like, have some fun levelling them up, then come to find out once you hit mid-nightmare to hell that your strategy, while fun for a while, doesn't pan out. You are left with a character which is ineffective and boring to play, but you still don't want to delete him for all the work you put into him. The second choice is to snoop around on the Internet, identify one of a few "cookie cutter characters", or sets of skills which are particularly effective, and play your way through the entire game focussing on skills which you may not be particularly interested in.
Then, Blizzard released patch 1.10, which added a ridiculous amount of new features and content considering how old the game was by then. One of these new features was in the form of skill synergies, which meant that many skills gave bonuses to related skills when you put points into them. I remember hearing that this was supposed to increase the variety of skills that people would learn, since they would not be completely wasted points even if the player rarely used the skill. However, in the same patch Blizzard drastically increased the difficulty of both nightmare and (especially) hell difficulties. In my experience, the combination of these two changes only tightened the grip these cookie cutter characters had on the players, since now not only did you need certain skills, but you also needed all the other specific skills which had synergies which boosted those few main skills.
Enter Hardcore mode. Recall what I said about what happened when you picked your skills based on personal preference, that you would end up reaching a point in the game where your character was no longer effective, and that you could no longer progress in the game. In Hardcore mode, this is no longer a problem. Once your character ceases to be a head above the monsters in the game, chances are that it will die and you start a new character, trying some completely different strategy. All of a sudden, the game opened up for me, it was no longer about leveling endlessly to create as strong a cookie cutter character as possible and accumulating wealth, it became about trying new things. No longer was Diablo II a long-term work-reward cycle, it was just about playing. Every character was a new experience, and tons of fun. For those of you who have played Diablo II, think sorceresses who threw level 30+ (after +skills) infernos past the edge of the screen, think arctic blast druids. Hardcore is only risky if you put a lot of value into your individual characters, instead of the play itself.
So, I thank the developers at flagship studios. Good choice =).
So how long before someone writes a new mosaic effect which looks as neat as the existing one while actually having little to do with the underlying image?
How is that a problem requiring all developers to approve moving to GPL3? Tracking them all down could be hard enough. Many people tend to change their e-mails (too much spam), etc, once in a while, and if you never exchanged any other form of communication (as is often the case), you might just be out of luck. Maybe they never even gave an e-mail, but showed you the paste-binned code from an IRC room?
My point was that that not all true statements are equally useful. Call me an optimist, but I assume people are telling the truth until I have good reason to suspect otherwise. Knowing that most bosses tell the truth is not useful knowledge, since it's the "default". Knowing that two out of five are liars, on the other hand, tells me something new.
Though I agree with you for the most part (finding the nth character in a UTF-8 string is unnecessarily long), this is wrong:
searching for a character just requires you to compare each 32-bit value to the target, without having to check it isn't a special character that is the first in an escape sequence UTF-8 was designed so that no complete set of bytes representing a character occurs as a substring of any other. This makes the search problem into a simple search for a string inside another string. The searching routine doesn't even need to know whether or not it's a UTF-8 string or not, just as long as it doesn't mangle the last bit.
I'm getting one of these X60 tablets, and I plan to run Linux on it. Do you have any links to information that would be useful to me? How much effort did it take for you to get all this working?
Thinkwiki was very useful for me (even though their installation guides were for a different distro), though I'm not sure how much x60-specific info they have. That and the gentoo handbook were the main resources I used. Screen rotation "just works" with newer video drivers, X, xrandr, etc., but the tablet itself was a little tricky, since I needed to compile a patched version of linuxwacom to get the on-demand rotation support.
This probably won't be an issue for you unless you are installing gentoo, but I could never get the gentoo minimum install live-cd to boot properly from usb (it had trouble finding the scsi hard drives or something of the sort) so I installed from knoppix instead, which worked fine. Knoppix also did a pretty good job of autodetecting hardware, making lsmod very useful =).
FTFA (the fourth link)
Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding of our intentions I'm going to ask that you either give the pc away or send it back when you no longer need it for product reviews. The summary is still wrong, but not as wrong as you make out.
People have to stop thinking that higher resulotion means the graphics are smaller. Things like fonts specified in pt (which is a physical size, not a number of pixels) should appear the same size on any display. Of course, if you want to make use of the extra detail by making everything smaller, that's your choice.
Slashdot Mirror
No one's saying that these abilities aren't useful. In fact, it's Facebook's failure to do exactly that which is my problem with it. Sure it allows you to set whether just your friends or all Facebook users can see your profile, but there is absolutely NO WAY to make your profile, or portions thereof, available to non-users. The only use of a Facebook account is to share information with other Facebook users, as well as to serve Facebook as bait for other users to join.
80 is the maximum width such that I can fit two files side by side on most monitors I have used. Anyone who has experienced multiple monitor setups before will understand, since it provides similar benefits. Just because you have a large screen does not mean you want to use the entire thing for one file of code.
Okay, so person A starts shooting everyone. Person B steps in and shoots the shooter. Person C walks in on the situation, sees person B with the gun, and shoots him in a panic. Three more people walk by and pull out their guns in self defence. Not only does this cause chaos, but no-one even knows who the shooter is anymore, let alone whether he is still alive.
I can snake even better in real life!
Or maybe the manufacturer just realized that 5 years down the road, a replacement for your then 5 year old HD will cost them peanuts. Accoring to the graph at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drives#Capacity, HD capacity seems to be increasing by roughly ten times every five years.
It's like the CD-R manufacturers stamping all the packaging with 100-year guarantees. They don't really have any good way of telling that they will actually last that long, but the replacement costs nearly nothing, and thus is payed for by the marketing benefits.
Too bad it's not infinitely improbable. . .
The first one that comes to mind is that when you stand on top of a vein and mine it out from under you, you stay suspended in the air. You pretty much stay there until you hit a movement key, at which time you start falling. To be fair, though, that's probably a very small bug. I would guess they just forgot a particular event which makes objects go from inactive to active (these probably aren't the actual terms) in the physics simulation.
I hate that they removed the /bug command from the beta, that was quite useful.
I, for one, fear the military applications of this new /. meme, not like it wasn't possible before, but perhaps this might give some people ideas that would ultimately be used to kill people. After all, with geeks the world over tagging things with possible military applications, the military could just throw away their R&D department!
Sorry, I just couldn't resist. . .
No, it's Levy paid to CRIA for blank CD's and audio tapes (not HDDs or DVDs), but you can't be sued for downloading music or videos.
I am not a lawyer!
I'm sorry, but I've been pouring through the Canadian Copyright Act, and I cannot find anything which substantiates your claim. This is the only clause I can find which is relevant to this situation, but please tell me if I've missed something. (Edit: now that I am done writing this comment I am no longer as sure as when I started, so please read to the end)
From http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/info/act-e.html#80: (emphasis mine)
Copying for Private Use
80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or
(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in that subsection is done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c):
(a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental;
(b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade;
(c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or
(d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.
1997, c. 24, s. 50.
Now, the first thing to notice here is that this only applies to musical works, not videos. Next, this only allows copying onto an "audio recording medium," defined as:
http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/info/act-e.html#79
"audio recording medium" means a recording medium, regardless of its material form, onto which a sound recording may be reproduced and that is of a kind ordinarily used by individual consumers for that purpose, excluding any prescribed kind of recording medium;
The last sentence seems somewhat badly phrased, those of you who know french may agree that it is worded better on the french version of the page: http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/info/act-f.html#79
"support audio" Tout support audio habituellement utilisé par les consommateurs pour reproduire des enregistrements sonores, à l'exception toutefois de ceux exclus par règlement.
Now, I don't know if there are recording mediums which are excluded (or "exclus par règlement"), but disregarding that, my (possibly unqualified) judgement suggests to me that HDDs would count as "ordinarily used by individual consumers for that purpose," especially since many portable music players use them to store music.
Another important insight is that this only covers the case in which you make a copy of a work for your own private use. This leads me to believe that, for example, I could make a copy of my friend's music disk and use it myself, but it would be copyright infringement for him to make the copy and give it to me. Together with paragraphs (2) (b) and (c), this leads me to believe that it is not permitted for you to download music for the purpose of sharing it through the p2p service. Perhaps if the p2p aplication does not permit you to disable uploading you can say it was not your purpose to upload the music? Maybe you can say this in any case? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. Now that I've looked at it so closely, however,
Sure, but that's not incompatible with what I said. They aren't restricting the information to themselves, they are making it accessible to the public.
The difference is that in this case the public has access to this material, which causes much less concentration of power (bad in my books) than it being restricted to one centralized organization such as the government. Like it or not, as technology progresses, physical privacy is on the way out. I'd much rather lose my privacy to everyone than lose it only to the government.
Don't forget that Phantasy Star Online, which was also a heavily instanced game, managed to pull the pay-per-month scheme pretty successfully.
Awesome.
For those who don't know, this is the mode where if your character is killed, that's it, he's gone forever. In my last days of playing Diablo II I played this mode pretty much exclusively. When I first got Diablo II this mode didn't appeal to me at all, after all, why play for hours and hours only to lose your character to a monster who was a little too tough?
One thing you learn after playing Diablo II for long enough, and coming to the point where beating normal difficulty becomes a normal occurrence for your characters, is that you have two choices with regards to character planning. One, you pick some skills you like, have some fun levelling them up, then come to find out once you hit mid-nightmare to hell that your strategy, while fun for a while, doesn't pan out. You are left with a character which is ineffective and boring to play, but you still don't want to delete him for all the work you put into him. The second choice is to snoop around on the Internet, identify one of a few "cookie cutter characters", or sets of skills which are particularly effective, and play your way through the entire game focussing on skills which you may not be particularly interested in.
Then, Blizzard released patch 1.10, which added a ridiculous amount of new features and content considering how old the game was by then. One of these new features was in the form of skill synergies, which meant that many skills gave bonuses to related skills when you put points into them. I remember hearing that this was supposed to increase the variety of skills that people would learn, since they would not be completely wasted points even if the player rarely used the skill. However, in the same patch Blizzard drastically increased the difficulty of both nightmare and (especially) hell difficulties. In my experience, the combination of these two changes only tightened the grip these cookie cutter characters had on the players, since now not only did you need certain skills, but you also needed all the other specific skills which had synergies which boosted those few main skills.
Enter Hardcore mode. Recall what I said about what happened when you picked your skills based on personal preference, that you would end up reaching a point in the game where your character was no longer effective, and that you could no longer progress in the game. In Hardcore mode, this is no longer a problem. Once your character ceases to be a head above the monsters in the game, chances are that it will die and you start a new character, trying some completely different strategy. All of a sudden, the game opened up for me, it was no longer about leveling endlessly to create as strong a cookie cutter character as possible and accumulating wealth, it became about trying new things. No longer was Diablo II a long-term work-reward cycle, it was just about playing. Every character was a new experience, and tons of fun. For those of you who have played Diablo II, think sorceresses who threw level 30+ (after +skills) infernos past the edge of the screen, think arctic blast druids. Hardcore is only risky if you put a lot of value into your individual characters, instead of the play itself.
So, I thank the developers at flagship studios. Good choice =).
So how long before someone writes a new mosaic effect which looks as neat as the existing one while actually having little to do with the underlying image?
My point was that that not all true statements are equally useful. Call me an optimist, but I assume people are telling the truth until I have good reason to suspect otherwise. Knowing that most bosses tell the truth is not useful knowledge, since it's the "default". Knowing that two out of five are liars, on the other hand, tells me something new.
In other news, most countries aren't being invaded by the United States.
I'm getting one of these X60 tablets, and I plan to run Linux on it. Do you have any links to information that would be useful to me? How much effort did it take for you to get all this working?
Thinkwiki was very useful for me (even though their installation guides were for a different distro), though I'm not sure how much x60-specific info they have. That and the gentoo handbook were the main resources I used. Screen rotation "just works" with newer video drivers, X, xrandr, etc., but the tablet itself was a little tricky, since I needed to compile a patched version of linuxwacom to get the on-demand rotation support.
This probably won't be an issue for you unless you are installing gentoo, but I could never get the gentoo minimum install live-cd to boot properly from usb (it had trouble finding the scsi hard drives or something of the sort) so I installed from knoppix instead, which worked fine. Knoppix also did a pretty good job of autodetecting hardware, making lsmod very useful =).
Until then, go fuck yourselves.
And the Earth.
People have to stop thinking that higher resulotion means the graphics are smaller. Things like fonts specified in pt (which is a physical size, not a number of pixels) should appear the same size on any display. Of course, if you want to make use of the extra detail by making everything smaller, that's your choice.