The studio is being retired; there's no value in having the product work at launch. If it takes them a month to get the patch out, so be it, people will blame (the now defunct) Pandemic, and people will continue to buy EA games
There's definitely value in having the product work at launch - if there wasn't value in that, why develop the game at all? EA has spent most of the title's budget by now - now is the time to get income. Looking at EA's results, that income is sorely needed too.
And of course, I recall Daikatana and John Romero. Not a lot of other fiascos from that time, though.
IEEE 754 has plenty of pitfalls for the unwary but it has one big advantage - it is directly supported by the Intel-compatible hardware that 99+% of desktop users are running. Switching to the IEEE 754r in ECMA Script would have meant a speed hit to the language on the Intel platform until Intel supports it in hardware. This is an area where IBM already has a hardware implementation of IEEE 754r - its available on the POWER6 platform and I believe that the z-Series also has a hardware implementation.
ECMAScript is client side, so I don't think that was the issue. Z-series is server only, and POWER6 is almost all servers - and for POWER workstations, the ability to run javascript a little bit faster has almost zero value. The more likely explanation is that IBM has its roots in business, and puts more importance into correct decimal handling than companies with their roots in other areas where this didn't matter much.
So... now you're committing fraud to get access to a service?
IF the price difference was due to differences in VAT etc, I wouldn't mind as much, but it's a flat 2$ wherever you are, not US-price minus US VAT (that Amazon doesn't pay) + localized VAT.
It may not be just because of the price difference. The selection of books available outside the US is much smaller. And for many services, e.g. videos for Apple TV, you have to do it this way. That said, I can't see anything bad about paying for a service and receiving it. You get the service, the provider get their money - and that should be two happy parties.
But I'm hopeful. How long did it take before Apple had to allow non-AAC audio files to play on the first-gen iPods? They only did that because other companies started making players that would play the widely available mp3 files.
iPods were released before the iTunes store, so they have been able to play MP3s even longer than protected AACs.
Indeed - there's a few studies that show that excessive prison sentences don't act as a deterrent. Only increasing the likelihood you get caught does.
Also, for the worst crime - murder - neither is much of a deterrent. The murder rate is low here in Norway., but almost all of the ones which do happen are done by mentally unstable people - e.g. during or after a breakup, or when just plain mentally ill. For these, there is rarely any calculation at all where either the length of the sentence or the chance of getting caught (almost 100%) are considered.
Do you think so? Well, I won't tell otherwise then, except that you don't know the European market (at least the European market which is the one I know): implementation details are, of course, different, but European carriers are as much freak controls and as much in control as their USA counterparts.
I obviously can't speak of all of Europe, but the market here in Norway is functioning a lot better. Some good things about the Norwegian market:
Maximum length of contracts is 12 months for consumers. After this, the phone has to be unlocked.
One common network standard, GSM, makes it easy for customers to switch carriers and harder to lock them in
You also have virtual carriers - carriers using the physical infrastructure of other carriers. This leads to much improved competition
In the US, you have fewer carriers. They use different standards, and since they aren't in a functioning market, they'll not offer good prices if you bring your own phone. And to the best of my knowledge, you can't even bring your own phone if your contract has ended - e.g. go to T-Mobile if your original 2 year contract on the iPhone has expired. And the other carriers don't even physically work with the phone. Due to the market not functioning, ATT and others can keep on charging the same price every month even after their subsidies have been repaid.
These ISPs sold what they ain't got. Sold more bandwidth than they can sustain, and when someone actually takes delivery of what was promised, these telcos bellyache, "we never thought you will ask for all we sold you! whachamagontodoo?
Basically, they want to sell a product with high speed - but not continual use. A product where more of the bandwidth is used - or dedicated, not oversubscribed - is vastly more expensive, and is what they sell to businesses. To fix this problem, they should start with metered costs per gigabyte, or specify the products better so that normal users get their current experience at their current price, and those who really want a different product at the current price, are shifted to that product.
"Bait and switch" would mean that there are malicious intent behind it. I find it more likely that they tried the revenue model, found that it doesn't provide enough money and are tweaking the game to make it more attractive to send them money. The alternative, eventually, would be to shut it down - or at least put less developer effort and/or servers at it.
As users haven't invested anything in the product - just played which is supposed to be fun - I don't think "bait and switch" is the appropriate term.
Sorry, but paying to be playing competitively is something I'd expect in a F2P game with an ingame store, but not in a game that I buy at full price.
That's exactly what Battlefield Heroes is - it's free to play. Apparently, the revenue wasn't enough so they are adjusting aspect of the game to get more money.
If he had caused damage in China, and China argued successfully for his extradition, then he would be tried there. That's the way extradition has worked for ages.
Many countries do not extradite their own citizens. They will extradite others - e.g. citizens of the country requesting extradition, or others. To avoid letting people off the hook that way, they may be trialled in their own country instead. I know Norway has done that on a couple of occasions, and abstained in others to avoid the possibility of death penalty - with the unfortunate side effect that the culprit isn't trialled at all.
Unjust extradition?
Since when? If he committed a crime against the people of another country. Why should he be immune from trial by jury just because he did it remotely
In general, very few countries are willing to extradite their own citizens. Including the US. And, in fact, sending people to the US is worse than most other places as the constitution only applies to citizens. This is how the US have been able to detain and torture prisoners in Guantanamo, without verdict.
The normal way to try him, would be in the UK - why aren't they doing that?
Also, where was the crime committed? If I publish a critical article about e.g. China, should I be tried by Chinese laws? Norwegian laws? Or the US, if the servers happened to be there.
Not only that, the function names are localized too IIRC - meaning that a simple sum() doesn't work, as you should be using summ(). Copy, paste, and just plain sharing internationally doesn't work too well.
Of course when someone steals your laptop which is syncing to dropbox, the data is theirs. You can unlink updates to the stolen device but the data is gone. I'd love a remote wipe facility.
You think you want it. If you think a bit more, you realize it will only help for the scenario where the thief has the password to your account, can log in, dropbox then runs and the computer has a network connection. It won't do anything to protect your data against just reading the hard disk as a super user or from a different computer.
The right way to protect this and other personal data, is to encrypt the whole home directory - Mac, Windows and Linux all have solutions for this (Windows will require the professional version). Make sure to back up frequently, as you've increased your exposure to disk, filesystem or user errors significantly.
Re:Android WILL take over.
on
Less Than Free
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· Score: 1
Every major carrier and every major smartphone maker either already has an Android phone, or has one in the works
RIM, Apple and Nokia don't, so this claim is false. That said, I do believe Android will become number one in smart phones. Apple will continue with their successful formula in the general computer market - a premium product at a premium price. Android seems to try the Windows way - present on everything from netbooks to products comparable to Apple's, and everything inbetween.
So long as OS X is tied to a single vendor, it's absolutely irrelevant to any reasonable person
Windows is also tied to a single vendor - Microsoft. If they screw up - like they did with e.g. Windows ME and Vista - it doesn't matter how many OEMs can deliver the hardware to run it on. Linux is multivendor - and not tied to a specific hardware company - but compared to Windows and Mac it has strengths and weaknesses. It's not the only relevant one.
That's unbelievably lame. If you lose single-click-to-open capability, then it's a huge step backward and a crock. Double click is an abomination. It BARELY had some feeble justification when there was only a single mouse button, but it's a complete crock in the real world of 2 or more buttons.
I would argue that consistency - both with itself, but also with other common GUIs (Windows, Mac) - is one of the most important properties of a desktop environment. Maybe the most important one. Single click is commonly used to select an object in GNOME and elsewhere, thus I don't think that using single-click opening of an object is a good idea. The use of buttons 1-3 should behave as expected - select, options on that object, paste. One of the other mouse buttons could be used for single click (if available), but buttons 1-3 should behave in a way that causes the least surprise.
You think that paying $29 for Snow Leopard gives you a right to run it? It's an upgrade to existing owners - just like all other versions of MacOS X you can buy. Apple doesn't sell barebones systems - or MacOS X for use with non-apple hardware - so they are all upgrades.
George Bush & Ted Kennedy put into law a doctrine called "no child left behind". This enshrines a noble thought, that the USA shoudl educate all of its children, but in effect it focuses all of our resources on those children least able to repay that investment in their education. In my daughter's school, there are no programs for advanced students, there are reasonably adequate programs for "typical" learners, and extravagant resources spent on special education. In our district, special needs students account for 20% of the population but use about 60% of the funding. The town needs to provide funding for special needs students from the early intervention years of 2 until the age of 21.This funding includes transportation out of district if required, all at no cost to the parents.
That sounds like a very good idea... "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". From the studies I've seen (which may be mostly European, but I think the general idea still applies) dropouts are many, many times more likely not to become productive members of society and far more likely to become criminals and benefits recipients. Given the cost of crime to society, the cost of locking a huge part of society up and the cost of benefits rather than taxes, spending money on these children seem like a good idea - even to people so different as Kennedy and Bush.
I'm obviously not saying that one shouldn't spend money on the brightest, just that spending enough money on at-risk children seem like a good investment and even more necessary. Increase funding to do both.
. Instead of selling the OS to everyone for $100, they will sell upgrades for $30, as they did with Snow Leopard, but I suspect full versions will rocket to prices comparable to MS products. This will provide no benefit to OS X users.
All retail versions of MacOS X are upgrades. All Macs ship with a licensed copy to upgrade from.
To be socially conservative is, at heart, to be anti-intellectual.
That seems like a rather sweeping statement... what do mean by "social conservative"? Conservatism means a lot of different things, in different places - all from the islamic theocracy in Iran, via the unstable coalition of right wing economics and religious nuts in the US to liberal conservative parties in e.g. Scandinavia and Germany. Calling all of these for anti-intellectual would probably imply that you think everyone who disagrees with you are anti-intellectual... which isn't a very good basis for a useful discussion.
The education system (run by the left wing for the past 30 years)
As I'm not living in the US, could you expand on that a bit? Not living in the US anymore, the only time I hear about political fighting in the schools is when religions zealots complain about not teaching their world view(creationism/ID) as fact. That, and not forcing everyone to adhere to their own religious practices in school. Neither of those sound very left/right to me, more sanity vs. disturbed.
"aptitude install " (or the pointy-clicky equivalent) works for me.
No, it doesn't. "yum install firefox" and similar things like apt install something called firefox. In many cases this will be ok, but in many others it won't. E.g. when new releases of openoffice.org or firefox arrives. This often won't show up in normal repositories for a while, if it shows up at all before a later release of the distribution they are running.
if you buy an app on the appstore, you are able to install it on as many devices as you want (at least for me)
Exactly. I was just wondering if this was accounted for when talking about piracy. Given that getting apps in the app store are cheap (usually), fast and easy most arguments people use for pirating are even worse than usual. Some stupid geographical limitations remain (I can't get Civilization Revolutions or Last.FM here in Norway, to give two examples), but pricing is fairly similar and most apps are available everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
The studio is being retired; there's no value in having the product work at launch. If it takes them a month to get the patch out, so be it, people will blame (the now defunct) Pandemic, and people will continue to buy EA games
There's definitely value in having the product work at launch - if there wasn't value in that, why develop the game at all? EA has spent most of the title's budget by now - now is the time to get income. Looking at EA's results, that income is sorely needed too.
And of course, I recall Daikatana and John Romero. Not a lot of other fiascos from that time, though.
IEEE 754 has plenty of pitfalls for the unwary but it has one big advantage - it is directly supported by the Intel-compatible hardware that 99+% of desktop users are running. Switching to the IEEE 754r in ECMA Script would have meant a speed hit to the language on the Intel platform until Intel supports it in hardware. This is an area where IBM already has a hardware implementation of IEEE 754r - its available on the POWER6 platform and I believe that the z-Series also has a hardware implementation.
ECMAScript is client side, so I don't think that was the issue. Z-series is server only, and POWER6 is almost all servers - and for POWER workstations, the ability to run javascript a little bit faster has almost zero value. The more likely explanation is that IBM has its roots in business, and puts more importance into correct decimal handling than companies with their roots in other areas where this didn't matter much.
So ... now you're committing fraud to get access to a service?
IF the price difference was due to differences in VAT etc, I wouldn't mind as much, but it's a flat 2$ wherever you are, not US-price minus US VAT (that Amazon doesn't pay) + localized VAT.
It may not be just because of the price difference. The selection of books available outside the US is much smaller. And for many services, e.g. videos for Apple TV, you have to do it this way. That said, I can't see anything bad about paying for a service and receiving it. You get the service, the provider get their money - and that should be two happy parties.
But I'm hopeful. How long did it take before Apple had to allow non-AAC audio files to play on the first-gen iPods? They only did that because other companies started making players that would play the widely available mp3 files.
iPods were released before the iTunes store, so they have been able to play MP3s even longer than protected AACs.
Speaking as someone not living in the US ... and hence out of the AT&T whispernet, the fact that this can work over WiFi is a huge plus.
I live in Norway, and my Kindle works just fine with the cell network here for downloading books etc.
Indeed - there's a few studies that show that excessive prison sentences don't act as a deterrent. Only increasing the likelihood you get caught does.
Also, for the worst crime - murder - neither is much of a deterrent. The murder rate is low here in Norway., but almost all of the ones which do happen are done by mentally unstable people - e.g. during or after a breakup, or when just plain mentally ill. For these, there is rarely any calculation at all where either the length of the sentence or the chance of getting caught (almost 100%) are considered.
Do you think so? Well, I won't tell otherwise then, except that you don't know the European market (at least the European market which is the one I know): implementation details are, of course, different, but European carriers are as much freak controls and as much in control as their USA counterparts.
I obviously can't speak of all of Europe, but the market here in Norway is functioning a lot better. Some good things about the Norwegian market:
In the US, you have fewer carriers. They use different standards, and since they aren't in a functioning market, they'll not offer good prices if you bring your own phone. And to the best of my knowledge, you can't even bring your own phone if your contract has ended - e.g. go to T-Mobile if your original 2 year contract on the iPhone has expired. And the other carriers don't even physically work with the phone. Due to the market not functioning, ATT and others can keep on charging the same price every month even after their subsidies have been repaid.
These ISPs sold what they ain't got. Sold more bandwidth than they can sustain, and when someone actually takes delivery of what was promised, these telcos bellyache, "we never thought you will ask for all we sold you! whachamagontodoo?
Basically, they want to sell a product with high speed - but not continual use. A product where more of the bandwidth is used - or dedicated, not oversubscribed - is vastly more expensive, and is what they sell to businesses. To fix this problem, they should start with metered costs per gigabyte, or specify the products better so that normal users get their current experience at their current price, and those who really want a different product at the current price, are shifted to that product.
"Bait and switch" comes to mind here.
"Bait and switch" would mean that there are malicious intent behind it. I find it more likely that they tried the revenue model, found that it doesn't provide enough money and are tweaking the game to make it more attractive to send them money. The alternative, eventually, would be to shut it down - or at least put less developer effort and/or servers at it.
As users haven't invested anything in the product - just played which is supposed to be fun - I don't think "bait and switch" is the appropriate term.
Sorry, but paying to be playing competitively is something I'd expect in a F2P game with an ingame store, but not in a game that I buy at full price.
That's exactly what Battlefield Heroes is - it's free to play. Apparently, the revenue wasn't enough so they are adjusting aspect of the game to get more money.
If he had caused damage in China, and China argued successfully for his extradition, then he would be tried there. That's the way extradition has worked for ages.
Many countries do not extradite their own citizens. They will extradite others - e.g. citizens of the country requesting extradition, or others. To avoid letting people off the hook that way, they may be trialled in their own country instead. I know Norway has done that on a couple of occasions, and abstained in others to avoid the possibility of death penalty - with the unfortunate side effect that the culprit isn't trialled at all.
Unjust extradition? Since when? If he committed a crime against the people of another country. Why should he be immune from trial by jury just because he did it remotely
In general, very few countries are willing to extradite their own citizens. Including the US. And, in fact, sending people to the US is worse than most other places as the constitution only applies to citizens. This is how the US have been able to detain and torture prisoners in Guantanamo, without verdict.
The normal way to try him, would be in the UK - why aren't they doing that?
Also, where was the crime committed? If I publish a critical article about e.g. China, should I be tried by Chinese laws? Norwegian laws? Or the US, if the servers happened to be there.
Not only that, the function names are localized too IIRC - meaning that a simple sum() doesn't work, as you should be using summ(). Copy, paste, and just plain sharing internationally doesn't work too well.
Of course when someone steals your laptop which is syncing to dropbox, the data is theirs. You can unlink updates to the stolen device but the data is gone. I'd love a remote wipe facility.
You think you want it. If you think a bit more, you realize it will only help for the scenario where the thief has the password to your account, can log in, dropbox then runs and the computer has a network connection. It won't do anything to protect your data against just reading the hard disk as a super user or from a different computer.
The right way to protect this and other personal data, is to encrypt the whole home directory - Mac, Windows and Linux all have solutions for this (Windows will require the professional version). Make sure to back up frequently, as you've increased your exposure to disk, filesystem or user errors significantly.
Every major carrier and every major smartphone maker either already has an Android phone, or has one in the works
RIM, Apple and Nokia don't, so this claim is false. That said, I do believe Android will become number one in smart phones. Apple will continue with their successful formula in the general computer market - a premium product at a premium price. Android seems to try the Windows way - present on everything from netbooks to products comparable to Apple's, and everything inbetween.
So long as OS X is tied to a single vendor, it's absolutely irrelevant to any reasonable person
Windows is also tied to a single vendor - Microsoft. If they screw up - like they did with e.g. Windows ME and Vista - it doesn't matter how many OEMs can deliver the hardware to run it on. Linux is multivendor - and not tied to a specific hardware company - but compared to Windows and Mac it has strengths and weaknesses. It's not the only relevant one.
That's unbelievably lame. If you lose single-click-to-open capability, then it's a huge step backward and a crock. Double click is an abomination. It BARELY had some feeble justification when there was only a single mouse button, but it's a complete crock in the real world of 2 or more buttons.
I would argue that consistency - both with itself, but also with other common GUIs (Windows, Mac) - is one of the most important properties of a desktop environment. Maybe the most important one. Single click is commonly used to select an object in GNOME and elsewhere, thus I don't think that using single-click opening of an object is a good idea. The use of buttons 1-3 should behave as expected - select, options on that object, paste. One of the other mouse buttons could be used for single click (if available), but buttons 1-3 should behave in a way that causes the least surprise.
2040 over 30 is 68! I'm sure I'm missing something here.
Yes, he is converting from feet over seconds to mph at the same time.
You think that paying $29 for Snow Leopard gives you a right to run it? It's an upgrade to existing owners - just like all other versions of MacOS X you can buy. Apple doesn't sell barebones systems - or MacOS X for use with non-apple hardware - so they are all upgrades.
George Bush & Ted Kennedy put into law a doctrine called "no child left behind". This enshrines a noble thought, that the USA shoudl educate all of its children, but in effect it focuses all of our resources on those children least able to repay that investment in their education. In my daughter's school, there are no programs for advanced students, there are reasonably adequate programs for "typical" learners, and extravagant resources spent on special education. In our district, special needs students account for 20% of the population but use about 60% of the funding. The town needs to provide funding for special needs students from the early intervention years of 2 until the age of 21.This funding includes transportation out of district if required, all at no cost to the parents.
That sounds like a very good idea... "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". From the studies I've seen (which may be mostly European, but I think the general idea still applies) dropouts are many, many times more likely not to become productive members of society and far more likely to become criminals and benefits recipients. Given the cost of crime to society, the cost of locking a huge part of society up and the cost of benefits rather than taxes, spending money on these children seem like a good idea - even to people so different as Kennedy and Bush.
I'm obviously not saying that one shouldn't spend money on the brightest, just that spending enough money on at-risk children seem like a good investment and even more necessary. Increase funding to do both.
. Instead of selling the OS to everyone for $100, they will sell upgrades for $30, as they did with Snow Leopard, but I suspect full versions will rocket to prices comparable to MS products. This will provide no benefit to OS X users.
All retail versions of MacOS X are upgrades. All Macs ship with a licensed copy to upgrade from.
To be socially conservative is, at heart, to be anti-intellectual.
That seems like a rather sweeping statement... what do mean by "social conservative"? Conservatism means a lot of different things, in different places - all from the islamic theocracy in Iran, via the unstable coalition of right wing economics and religious nuts in the US to liberal conservative parties in e.g. Scandinavia and Germany. Calling all of these for anti-intellectual would probably imply that you think everyone who disagrees with you are anti-intellectual... which isn't a very good basis for a useful discussion.
The education system (run by the left wing for the past 30 years)
As I'm not living in the US, could you expand on that a bit? Not living in the US anymore, the only time I hear about political fighting in the schools is when religions zealots complain about not teaching their world view(creationism/ID) as fact. That, and not forcing everyone to adhere to their own religious practices in school. Neither of those sound very left/right to me, more sanity vs. disturbed.
"aptitude install " (or the pointy-clicky equivalent) works for me.
No, it doesn't. "yum install firefox" and similar things like apt install something called firefox. In many cases this will be ok, but in many others it won't. E.g. when new releases of openoffice.org or firefox arrives. This often won't show up in normal repositories for a while, if it shows up at all before a later release of the distribution they are running.
if you buy an app on the appstore, you are able to install it on as many devices as you want (at least for me)
Exactly. I was just wondering if this was accounted for when talking about piracy. Given that getting apps in the app store are cheap (usually), fast and easy most arguments people use for pirating are even worse than usual. Some stupid geographical limitations remain (I can't get Civilization Revolutions or Last.FM here in Norway, to give two examples), but pricing is fairly similar and most apps are available everywhere.