That sounds true, and added to the fact it seems like it only takes one fool to ruin it for everybody, it may look like a terrible idea.
But look, the point is that most people have some close person who had cancer. Maybe the crackers had/have someone with cancer in their family. They'd probably reconsider going public. If we're in any luck, someone along the chain will.
It sounds too risky, but I'm serious. If it goes wrong in the first week Ubisoft hasn't spent much at all. And, like imakemusic said, they still would have bragging rights. Oh, and look at them now.
Finally, think of the effect on the media and the crackers' own supporters.
I know it's out of fashion to reply to your own thread, but:
The great thing about cancer research is that it benefits everyone in the world. You must be very young not to have anyone in your or your wife's family that had any sort of cancer yet. *Everyone* wants to see their loved ones' chances improve.
But yes, it could be replaced by any other charity.
1. Ubisoft creates a reasonably simple (read cheap) traditional DRM;
2. Ubisoft promises to donate five thousand dollars to cancer research for each day the game goes without being cracked, for a year.
I think they'd have better chances that way. Don't you?
It's obvious because Windows doesn't have distros or package managers, the installation system is not a pleasant experience, but it's pretty much unified across most windows flavors.
Linux, on the other hand, has many different installation systems. It's not reasonable to ask of the developers to create several distinct packages that would probably get rejected by the package system maintainers anyway.
They could provide an installer to x32, but it's not encouraged by many distros to install things that way, and it still would leave out people on different platforms and require lots of libraries at specific versions.
Softsubs were relatively recently properly implemented in Mplayer. (Though "couple of years" technically is "for years" too.)
Likewise, proper MKV support is also very young. Before Mplayer wasn't demuxing the files properly nor could switch between audio/subtitle channels on the file. Due to bogus demuxing audio skips were also common.
Seveal years ago, the MKV format was not used for anime. Today we the 400mb files for 20 minute eps abound, but back then, people simply didn't have the bandwidth to deal with it.
Also, only hard subtitling was used, probably because no good widespread player had support for soft subs.
Audio and video are screwed? I have no idea what you're talking about. I have not had any issues with them for several years.
Managing two soundcards on Linux is not a must. If Gnome and KDE don't know how to force programs that were not designed to be configured by them to use their configurations, it's not my problem or the kernel's. Let them provide their own media apps for their users, while the rest of us use what already works. They got the deep pockets, why are they trying to offload work?
And by the way, no developer cares about "proper optimization" of specific codecs if it doesn't make a difference, and that's exactly the case on any of my machines, even the several years old ones. If somebody did, she would pick it up.
And even after installing all possible drivers, applications and codecs, Linux video playback - especially as anime concerned - is still eons behind of CCCP [cccp-project.net] on Windows.
My good god, are you really a Linux user? You sound like you never heard of mplayer. I have been watching anime on Linux weekly for years, in several formats like mpeg, divx, realmedia and mkv!
I'm not an Ubuntu user, I love the simplicity of elden distros like Debian and Slackware. Maybe it's just that Ubuntu doesn't have an mplayer package, or has its very own "Super Cool Ubuntu Media Player" that overshines it. Could anybody enlight me?
Either way, when I use Windows (it's rare) I use mplayer anyway. The Windows players are that bad. I guess this is what we get for encouraging the average "click on the movie icon" Joe to use Linux, but *man* I didn't know things were this bad.
Next on Slashdot: Linux is way too hard to develop on, it doesn't have a Visual Studio alternative!
The reason is I've been through a lot of interviews that consisted simply of a few questions like "open a connection to an SQL database in C++". Now, what's the answer to that? Perhaps "Okay, right after you tell me what library you're using and give me its API." or maybe "Do you really expect a good developer to remember functions they used just once? If you coded opening connections to databases more than a couple times per project, you're very likely doing something wrong."
I'm not very good with people, but I've still got a proposal for every interview with no test or a decent one, but nothing fruitful ever came from interviews with demented tests.
I think the best tests come from interesting questions that will catch the horrible people on the spot, and give the good people opportunity to shine, like "What's the difference of ++x and x++ in C?". An average person might say "they're different in when x will be incremented", but better people can answer in more details, maybe even including details on how it used to make performance differences in for loops, but doesn't anymore, and why that is so.
On a higher (but still technical) level, you probably just want to know who likes to know the technologies that are important to them in depth. With that in mind, I think it's a lot more useful to ask "Tell me about a detail of your language of choice you think I don't know about/that surprised you in your work." than telling somebody to create a very small program in an hour or to solve a bug in a program they've never seen.
Of course, that is considering you want good programmers to work on a mid-sized or even larger project. If you just want some guys to program for your sweatshop, my honest advice is you hire average skilled, unambitious people, or people who have been a few years at other sweatshops.
"Ironically your complaint that your son didn't try to figure it out himself, when you didn't try to figure out smash brothers system is itself a bit humorous.:)"
Actually, I think it's quite consistent with the way he said he plays. He just tries to find out how to play inside the game. Add to that a bunch of 10 year olds screaming in your ear how they're better than the old timer, and I think I can understand his position perfectly. In fact, getting help online would be against everything he said.
Anyway, you can't play the game without knowing the damage % isn't directly related to your performance. What counts is to make the opponent fly outside the screen through any of the four sides.
You made programming more than typing for the rest of us. That is probably the single most important professional programming contribution there is. Thank you very much for your efforts.
Would you care to share your thoughts on the current developments concerning the structuring of professional programming knowledge?
I'm a geek with limited social skills, you insensitive clod! Commitment isn't a social skill and never was the problem of any geek.
The real problem is to speak to people who have no sense of logic whatsoever and who don't listen to what you say, even though you go to great lengths to speak respectfully and precisely.
Communicating with those people is a social skill I don't have and it's the same for at least some geeks I know as well.
I started programming when I was fourteen. My parents aren't programmers, so I had to find my own way through curiosity. I just tried creating a couple websites with frontpage and later dreamweaver.
A couple months later I found out about javascript and bought a book about it. Then it was Perl and the Cammel, then C.
I think you should try to show him skills that seem valuable to him, maybe because he could brag about it to his friends, or (if he admires you), he could get some recognition from his pop, or even try to make a little money creating a website.
Anyhow, the bottom line is that I think you should give him what he will find valuable and useful. I'm sure he'll find his way to unix soon enough, I did.
Did you even notice you're using the same tactics as Dell is purported to be using?
Just troll through my posts to see that I am absolutely not a Dell shill Is anyone really going to spend valuable time plowing through your posts?
Is anyone really going to spend valuable time on the phone again and again to get support?
I know we all love to bash microsoft, and it's all good, but I think we shouldn't underestimate them either.
They're not stupid, and a good reason to enter this market is to strike a blow on apple's momentum and profits. It's like car racing. If on every turn the guy behind you says hi through your mirror, it slows you down.
If apple knows microsoft will always be on its heels, it'll know it can't make a huge mistake. Microsoft will always be there in case they're not strong enough -- and when they do, they will do a lot of damage.
Why not have some easily editable script control the creation of the GUI.
Then to make it even better, allow users to easily (id est with just a couple of clicks) share their custom GUIs at www.mygimpgui.org and rate other people's submissions.
You probably know, however, that this doesn't invalidate many of the posts in this thread. For instance, if I don't let my wife know where I am ("oh, honey, stop being ridiculous...") she can be pretty sure I'm up to no good ("if you think this is ridiculous, then that's what you married to. And send it right now.").
One could always argue that's for the best of all of us, but it doesn't make it less true that it burns some of your privacy.
(has anyone else noticed there's been a lot less spelling mistakes with 2.0 on slashdot? it's a little bit funny...)
Wait, I'm also all for movie studio and corporate bashing, however, pirate fanboyism isn't the answer either. The parent can't be insightful, because whenever any industry declines, it takes a lot of people with it. See the automobile industry, the 1929 crash, etc.
It could be said that the special effects dept isn't important and that would make all movies more content focused, but you can't deny that dept will suffer, as will other non-essential depts.
...
oh my, is it even thinkable the american movie industry is not truly viable?
Of course they can *make* you move by delivering lousier and lousier security patches or maybe a couple that exchange security for performance, since XP users are obviously not gaming enthusiasts...
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds true, and added to the fact it seems like it only takes one fool to ruin it for everybody, it may look like a terrible idea.
But look, the point is that most people have some close person who had cancer. Maybe the crackers had/have someone with cancer in their family. They'd probably reconsider going public. If we're in any luck, someone along the chain will.
It sounds too risky, but I'm serious. If it goes wrong in the first week Ubisoft hasn't spent much at all. And, like imakemusic said, they still would have bragging rights. Oh, and look at them now.
Finally, think of the effect on the media and the crackers' own supporters.
I know it's out of fashion to reply to your own thread, but:
The great thing about cancer research is that it benefits everyone in the world. You must be very young not to have anyone in your or your wife's family that had any sort of cancer yet. *Everyone* wants to see their loved ones' chances improve.
But yes, it could be replaced by any other charity.
How about this DRM:
1. Ubisoft creates a reasonably simple (read cheap) traditional DRM;
2. Ubisoft promises to donate five thousand dollars to cancer research for each day the game goes without being cracked, for a year.
I think they'd have better chances that way. Don't you?
It's obvious because Windows doesn't have distros or package managers, the installation system is not a pleasant experience, but it's pretty much unified across most windows flavors.
Linux, on the other hand, has many different installation systems. It's not reasonable to ask of the developers to create several distinct packages that would probably get rejected by the package system maintainers anyway.
They could provide an installer to x32, but it's not encouraged by many distros to install things that way, and it still would leave out people on different platforms and require lots of libraries at specific versions.
Softsubs were relatively recently properly implemented in Mplayer. (Though "couple of years" technically is "for years" too.)
Likewise, proper MKV support is also very young. Before Mplayer wasn't demuxing the files properly nor could switch between audio/subtitle channels on the file. Due to bogus demuxing audio skips were also common.
Seveal years ago, the MKV format was not used for anime. Today we the 400mb files for 20 minute eps abound, but back then, people simply didn't have the bandwidth to deal with it.
Also, only hard subtitling was used, probably because no good widespread player had support for soft subs.
Audio and video are screwed? I have no idea what you're talking about. I have not had any issues with them for several years.
Managing two soundcards on Linux is not a must. If Gnome and KDE don't know how to force programs that were not designed to be configured by them to use their configurations, it's not my problem or the kernel's. Let them provide their own media apps for their users, while the rest of us use what already works. They got the deep pockets, why are they trying to offload work?
And by the way, no developer cares about "proper optimization" of specific codecs if it doesn't make a difference, and that's exactly the case on any of my machines, even the several years old ones. If somebody did, she would pick it up.
And even after installing all possible drivers, applications and codecs, Linux video playback - especially as anime concerned - is still eons behind of CCCP [cccp-project.net] on Windows.
My good god, are you really a Linux user? You sound like you never heard of mplayer. I have been watching anime on Linux weekly for years, in several formats like mpeg, divx, realmedia and mkv!
I'm not an Ubuntu user, I love the simplicity of elden distros like Debian and Slackware. Maybe it's just that Ubuntu doesn't have an mplayer package, or has its very own "Super Cool Ubuntu Media Player" that overshines it. Could anybody enlight me?
Either way, when I use Windows (it's rare) I use mplayer anyway. The Windows players are that bad. I guess this is what we get for encouraging the average "click on the movie icon" Joe to use Linux, but *man* I didn't know things were this bad.
Next on Slashdot: Linux is way too hard to develop on, it doesn't have a Visual Studio alternative!
We want to implement seat belts for every citizen. Should we:
a. mandate every business and residence to keep a stash of belts on their walks; or
b. mandate every car to have seat belts built in?
The browser should ask the user if they want to keep the cookie or not. Much easier to regulate and implement.
There, do I get the job?
Nope, you took the explicit "in C" part of the question and threw it out the window. Programmers ought to know the rules of their game.
And, in C++ you can always say "Except of course in C++ there's this awkward situation in which..."
Yes, and I was talking about C, because you can always say that "Except of course in C++ there's this awkward situation in which..."
The reason is I've been through a lot of interviews that consisted simply of a few questions like "open a connection to an SQL database in C++". Now, what's the answer to that? Perhaps "Okay, right after you tell me what library you're using and give me its API." or maybe "Do you really expect a good developer to remember functions they used just once? If you coded opening connections to databases more than a couple times per project, you're very likely doing something wrong."
I'm not very good with people, but I've still got a proposal for every interview with no test or a decent one, but nothing fruitful ever came from interviews with demented tests.
I think the best tests come from interesting questions that will catch the horrible people on the spot, and give the good people opportunity to shine, like "What's the difference of ++x and x++ in C?". An average person might say "they're different in when x will be incremented", but better people can answer in more details, maybe even including details on how it used to make performance differences in for loops, but doesn't anymore, and why that is so.
On a higher (but still technical) level, you probably just want to know who likes to know the technologies that are important to them in depth. With that in mind, I think it's a lot more useful to ask "Tell me about a detail of your language of choice you think I don't know about/that surprised you in your work." than telling somebody to create a very small program in an hour or to solve a bug in a program they've never seen.
Of course, that is considering you want good programmers to work on a mid-sized or even larger project. If you just want some guys to program for your sweatshop, my honest advice is you hire average skilled, unambitious people, or people who have been a few years at other sweatshops.
For me at least. Same goes for Diablo.
"Ironically your complaint that your son didn't try to figure it out himself, when you didn't try to figure out smash brothers system is itself a bit humorous. :)"
Actually, I think it's quite consistent with the way he said he plays. He just tries to find out how to play inside the game. Add to that a bunch of 10 year olds screaming in your ear how they're better than the old timer, and I think I can understand his position perfectly. In fact, getting help online would be against everything he said.
Anyway, you can't play the game without knowing the damage % isn't directly related to your performance. What counts is to make the opponent fly outside the screen through any of the four sides.
You made programming more than typing for the rest of us. That is probably the single most important professional programming contribution there is. Thank you very much for your efforts.
Would you care to share your thoughts on the current developments concerning the structuring of professional programming knowledge?
I'm a geek with limited social skills, you insensitive clod! Commitment isn't a social skill and never was the problem of any geek.
The real problem is to speak to people who have no sense of logic whatsoever and who don't listen to what you say, even though you go to great lengths to speak respectfully and precisely.
Communicating with those people is a social skill I don't have and it's the same for at least some geeks I know as well.
Deploy airbag? [Cancel | Allow]
me: allow!
car: "Dear Aunt, lets set so double the killer delete select all" is not an acceptable reply.
car: Deploy airbag? [Cancel | Allow]
A couple months later I found out about javascript and bought a book about it. Then it was Perl and the Cammel, then C.
I think you should try to show him skills that seem valuable to him, maybe because he could brag about it to his friends, or (if he admires you), he could get some recognition from his pop, or even try to make a little money creating a website.
Anyhow, the bottom line is that I think you should give him what he will find valuable and useful. I'm sure he'll find his way to unix soon enough, I did.
I run my own one man IT business [...] It is great for collaboration purposes.
Come on now, I think you could collaborate fine with yourself with just notepad, couldn't you?
I know we all love to bash microsoft, and it's all good, but I think we shouldn't underestimate them either.
They're not stupid, and a good reason to enter this market is to strike a blow on apple's momentum and profits. It's like car racing. If on every turn the guy behind you says hi through your mirror, it slows you down.
If apple knows microsoft will always be on its heels, it'll know it can't make a huge mistake. Microsoft will always be there in case they're not strong enough -- and when they do, they will do a lot of damage.
Why not have some easily editable script control the creation of the GUI.
Then to make it even better, allow users to easily (id est with just a couple of clicks) share their custom GUIs at www.mygimpgui.org and rate other people's submissions.
You probably know, however, that this doesn't invalidate many of the posts in this thread. For instance, if I don't let my wife know where I am ("oh, honey, stop being ridiculous...") she can be pretty sure I'm up to no good ("if you think this is ridiculous, then that's what you married to. And send it right now.").
One could always argue that's for the best of all of us, but it doesn't make it less true that it burns some of your privacy.
(has anyone else noticed there's been a lot less spelling mistakes with 2.0 on slashdot? it's a little bit funny...)
Wait, I'm also all for movie studio and corporate bashing, however, pirate fanboyism isn't the answer either. The parent can't be insightful, because whenever any industry declines, it takes a lot of people with it. See the automobile industry, the 1929 crash, etc.
...
It could be said that the special effects dept isn't important and that would make all movies more content focused, but you can't deny that dept will suffer, as will other non-essential depts.
oh my, is it even thinkable the american movie industry is not truly viable?
Of course they can *make* you move by delivering lousier and lousier security patches or maybe a couple that exchange security for performance, since XP users are obviously not gaming enthusiasts...
"If you're so smart, how come I broke you?" -Homer Simpson, Hit and Run
if FreeDOS was finally released, does this mean I can hope for DNF this Christmas?