I just said I'm not a lawyer, why would you even ask me?
But since you asked
I don't believe he's breaking any law, but that's not the point. The point isn't what law he IS breaking, but what law the radio station will accuse him of breaking. I doubt Romania would extradite him over this, but that would be the risk.
With perpetual copyrights, we would have perpetual heritage disputes (who owns the works of Aristotle these days?), and all important works locked away.
Perpetual copyright doesn't imply retroactive copyright. Retroactive laws are prohibited in the US by the constitution, IIRC.
But both the US and EU copyright laws are supersets of international copyright law. If he's breaking international copyright law, it may not matter which particular country he's in. I'm not a lawyer, needless to say.
The problem with the TLD system, as with everything on the Internet, is that it was designed by academics who have no clue how the world actually works.
When I wanted to register my last name a couple years ago, what was I supposed to put it under? I'm not an Organization, I'm not a Network, I'm not a Company. I ended up going with.net, which was a mistake because the next year browsers started adding the.com by default if you left the TLD off the URL.
Which, BTW, is why.com is now worth about three times more than any other domain TLD, because browsers add it automatically when guessing what you meant to type.
Ok, go make one that isn't slow as hell, can use all the VPU features, and sell it to Blizzard for mega-bucks.
BTW, this already kind of exists: the Unreal 3.0 engine, for instance, is completely cross-platform, and Blizzard could have simply licensed it if they had wanted to. It runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, Xbox 360 and PS3. (Not sure if it runs on PS2, but probably Unreal 2.0 does.)
In any case, Blizzard is already head and shoulders above the other 95% of the game makers in providing both Windows and Mac support at release. Complaining about them is a little daft; complain about the company who have NEVER provided cross-platform support.
But wait, this is Slashdot... everybody here is sick of unoriginal sequels and wants to see more original games, right? That's what I see whenever any other game announcement comes out.
Personally, I'm very disappointed. I want to see NEW games, not constant rehashes.
aQuantive has an ad technology provider (Atlas) which is at least as large, and perhaps larger, than DoubleClick. It's hard to be sure, because there are no good metrics in this industry to measure by. In addition, aQuantive also owns one of the largest agencies on the Internet, Avenue A.
Hate to break this to you, but aQuantive is much bigger than DoubleClick. Microsoft may have overpaid, but not nearly as much as everybody's claiming.
1) It's funny to criticize Zelda for wanting to be more like an RPG, considering back in "the day", NES fans would frequently refer to Zelda I as a RPG. It's not, but they'd say that.
2) a) Zelda 2 is a great game.
b) Screw you.
Maybe you didn't like it; fine. But I loved Zelda 2, and it's the first Zelda game I could actually finish. (The first Zelda was hard to control and frankly boring to me.) The side-scrolling action made it fun, and the RPG-like features helped invest you in the game. And you certainly can't claim it was too easy a game... the end palace was insane.
To say it "radically sucked" is radically unfair. To imply that Zelda 2 wasn't fun is also radically unfair.
... and more to the point, using ten 'emotion' sounds from a clip-sounds CD is a ton cheaper than actually hiring voice actors in multiple languages!
Come on, man, let's call a spade a spade. Good voice acting can make a bad game good (see: Demonstone.) Bad voice acting can make a mediocre game god-awful (See: Sudeki.)
If you don't want to hear the voice acting, turn the Voice volume to zero and the captions on. But there's no reason (other than cheap) to not even hire the actors in the first place.
The only computer maker with even half-decent support is Apple, and Apple's support is only half-decent if you go into an Apple Store and talk to somebody face-to-face. Getting a Toshiba laptop fixed took a buddy of mine three weeks, and it was only that quick because Fry's did the shipping for him.
The real problem isn't the "is global warming happening" debate.
The real debate should be, "ok, what can we do about it?" And, remember, one of the options should be "nothing."
Once that's been discussed, we need to move on to, "ok, what do we do about it?" And, again, remember that "nothing" is an option.
All I know is that a lot of the energy saving tips the media frequently puts out: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6636521.stm are idiotic. Partly because many of them are unworkable (how much power does turning off your broadband connection really save? Seriously? I could run my home router for a year on the power my water heater uses in half an hour.) But mostly because they don't know how generating capacity works... we need enough generators online for peak load, regardless of whether your broadband router is turned off or not. As long as all those generators are running to meet peak load, you're burning the exact same amount of fuel and releasing the exact same amount of carbon.
Figure out how to ACTUALLY slow down the release of carbon (hint: nuclear power does it) and I'll be happy to follow your stupid tips. But as long as you're asking me to unplug my router which won't make a whit of difference except to annoy me, then it's just not going to happen.
(Oh, also, stop being pissy to people who already do more than most to reduce pollution. Every morning I ride a train to work; you tell some people this and they say "wow, those diesel locomotives put out a lot of pollution." Oh yeah, sorry, me and the other 400 people who ride it should all drive our cars instead, thank you Mr. Genius Environmentalist.)
Someday I'm going to make a list of things OS X does worse than OS 9 did. It'll be long.
I will say, though, that while OS X has gotten faster over the years, it has not gotten better. The CPU executing some piece of code a few seconds faster doesn't help me if I'm wasting a half-hour puzzling over the UI. The network bugginess costs me from 5 to 10 minutes of productivity every day when I open my iBook on the train going home.
The poor UI of Finder was only made poorer by the addition of the weird Spotlight window mode, which seems to have its own strange rules of unpredictability than the other two modes Finder windows already had. The "Save Dialog which obscures the text in the window you need to read to figure out what file name to enter" is still going strong, as is the "Dock which randomly moves and shifts around so you can never get used to where your icons are parked" (which includes the exclusive "Trash icon that actually moves out of the way of the file you're trying to drop on it, like one of those joke dialog boxes with the moving OK button" feature.)
Meanwhile, Apple has increased their collection of non-standard window types to 4 or 5 now, which means that third-party developers are also not feeling any particular need to standardize their apps with the OS behaviors.
The point of your post seems to be, "well, it's still better than Windows." While that's true, the difference is that Windows is getting better every version and Macintosh is getting worse. In addition, Microsoft is actually... *gasp* innovating with their UI design, while Apple redesigned their OS from scratch and ended up with the same icons and menus we've always had. I'd rather go with the company that has decent network support and is trying new things.
Turn off iDisk syncing, so you're using the network drive directly. Copy 1000 files to it. Now delete those 1000 files by dragging them to the trash. Grab a stopwatch and time it. It shouldn't take more than a minute for this operation, but with iDisk it takes hours.
Assuming you're using iDisk on a laptop, turn on iDisk syncing, let it do its thing so its synced, then sleep it. Now move into a location that has a wireless connection, but no bandwidth (for instance, the train I ride every morning.) Now wake your laptop, now double-click your iDisk to open a file from it. Grab a stopwatch and measure how long Finder is completely frozen.
(This happens with ALL network shares, also, not just iDisk. The reason it's worse with iDisk is that the entire *point* of turning on offline files is to use iDisk... offline. Sure it works, after two minutes when Finder unfreezes itself, but what a terrible user experience. I think OS X is making the assumption that if it finds a wifi connection at all, that connection must have tons of bandwidth. Bad assumption.)
I've re-formatted the laptop several times, and its never fixed the problems with iDisk. The simple fact of the matter is that they are bugs, blatant bugs. Either you're not coming across them because of dumb luck (not deleting lots of files at once, never being in a location with a flakey wifi connection) or you've subconsciously compensated for them by avoiding operations that you know will seize up Finder.
All applications should use the same theme as the host OS by default, it has nothing to do with them being GTK or whatever.
(BTW, another point: end users do not give a crap what "framework" the program is in. Nobody's going to give GTK a pass for having poor usability because it's a port from Linux. To the end-user, it's just another Windows app. And Mac developers: stop advertising your stupid apps as "100% Cocoa" as if anybody gave a crap.)
That all said, if you *are* going to use a metal theme, at least use a nice-looking one, and not that abomination with square buttons that looks like it was rejected from Windows 3.11.
Then there's refusing to offer a LAN or roll-yer-own iDisk option, yet sticking it in my face at various points in the OS, which amounts to junkware similar to something out of Redmond.
Except the software out of Redmond lets you map a WebDAV share as a drive, and then turn on "Offline Files" for it... thereby offering exactly what iDisk is, except free and without the fanfare Apple gives it. Sure; OS X technically has the capability, as iDisk proves, Apple just doesn't let you use it on an arbitrary WebDAV share, only on.Mac WebDAV shares. Even Microsoft doesn't pull crap like that on its users.
People malign Microsoft, but honestly, given the choice between a mediocre Windows box that can use a network and Finder, I'll take the Windows box for my next computer. I'm sick of OS X getting worse every year. Windows might not be all that great, but at least each version is an improvement over the one that came before. OS X still doesn't even have feature parity with 8-year-old System 9.
If I were a developer on the GAIM project, I'd be ashamed of releasing something that hideous and buggy. For some reason, being an open source project makes it ok to not take any pride in your work and release things that the public should never be subjected to.
Look at the second screenshot, the "is buggy" one. Are you seriously telling me that not one single person tested GAIM on Windows XP with the default settings at 1024x768? Not one single person? And they released it to the public this way? It's shameful.
I see it something like the rules for anything. When you're the expert, when you've mastered the field, then you can work on changing the fundamentals. If you start inventing new widgets without researching how and why the current widgets exist, then you're going to cause problems. Like those applications you see that consist of nothing but 40 tabs in a tab-panel, they didn't understand the purpose of tabs, and now they've made something with poor usability.
Actually, the Close button used to be on the other side of the window. Remember? Far away from the others so you wouldn't click it by accident while trying to Zoom? That's the kind of detail Apple used to get right.
The Ars article "About the Finder" describes exactly how Apple could have expanded what it can offer us without losing any consistency. Apple just plain didn't try.
But forget the interface consistency, what about the blatant bugs? How about the crappy network support, so that if I have the audacity to open my iBook somewhere other than "the network its used to" it literally freezes Finder for minutes at a time. Then you go to open something on your (offline) iDisk, and you're frozen for another minute. It's ridiculous. How about when I drag a file from my FTP program to the desktop, Finder seizes up and I have to force-quit it? How about the fact that it takes over three hours to delete 1,000 files from iDisk? Or that iDisk bookmark syncing will suddenly and unexplainably stop working, requiring you to turn the feature off and back on before it works again?
Apple has seriously lost their way since OS X comes back. I want the old Apple back.
Slashdot Mirror
I just said I'm not a lawyer, why would you even ask me?
But since you asked
I don't believe he's breaking any law, but that's not the point. The point isn't what law he IS breaking, but what law the radio station will accuse him of breaking. I doubt Romania would extradite him over this, but that would be the risk.
Is this one of the ways a culture can commit suicide?
Yes. A single columnist writing an article professing an unpopular opinion is exactly what caused the Mayan culture to collapse.
(Cripes, get a grip, people!)
With perpetual copyrights, we would have perpetual heritage disputes (who owns the works of Aristotle these days?), and all important works locked away.
Perpetual copyright doesn't imply retroactive copyright. Retroactive laws are prohibited in the US by the constitution, IIRC.
But both the US and EU copyright laws are supersets of international copyright law. If he's breaking international copyright law, it may not matter which particular country he's in. I'm not a lawyer, needless to say.
Brilliant, but .name didn't exist when I bought mine.
The problem with the TLD system, as with everything on the Internet, is that it was designed by academics who have no clue how the world actually works.
.net, which was a mistake because the next year browsers started adding the .com by default if you left the TLD off the URL.
.com is now worth about three times more than any other domain TLD, because browsers add it automatically when guessing what you meant to type.
When I wanted to register my last name a couple years ago, what was I supposed to put it under? I'm not an Organization, I'm not a Network, I'm not a Company. I ended up going with
Which, BTW, is why
Considering it doesn't exist, I'm going to go out on a limb and say... no.
It also doesn't work on Windows or OS X.
Ok, go make one that isn't slow as hell, can use all the VPU features, and sell it to Blizzard for mega-bucks.
BTW, this already kind of exists: the Unreal 3.0 engine, for instance, is completely cross-platform, and Blizzard could have simply licensed it if they had wanted to. It runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, Xbox 360 and PS3. (Not sure if it runs on PS2, but probably Unreal 2.0 does.)
In any case, Blizzard is already head and shoulders above the other 95% of the game makers in providing both Windows and Mac support at release. Complaining about them is a little daft; complain about the company who have NEVER provided cross-platform support.
Just FYI, World of Warcraft didn't invent that. Starsiege Tribes and (to a lesser extent) Tribes 2 had it, and Tribes came out in 1996 IIRC.
In short, it HAD been developed before, you just haven't played enough games.
But wait, this is Slashdot... everybody here is sick of unoriginal sequels and wants to see more original games, right? That's what I see whenever any other game announcement comes out.
Personally, I'm very disappointed. I want to see NEW games, not constant rehashes.
We need more lesbian ass!
aQuantive has an ad technology provider (Atlas) which is at least as large, and perhaps larger, than DoubleClick. It's hard to be sure, because there are no good metrics in this industry to measure by. In addition, aQuantive also owns one of the largest agencies on the Internet, Avenue A.
Hate to break this to you, but aQuantive is much bigger than DoubleClick. Microsoft may have overpaid, but not nearly as much as everybody's claiming.
1) It's funny to criticize Zelda for wanting to be more like an RPG, considering back in "the day", NES fans would frequently refer to Zelda I as a RPG. It's not, but they'd say that.
2) a) Zelda 2 is a great game.
b) Screw you.
Maybe you didn't like it; fine. But I loved Zelda 2, and it's the first Zelda game I could actually finish. (The first Zelda was hard to control and frankly boring to me.) The side-scrolling action made it fun, and the RPG-like features helped invest you in the game. And you certainly can't claim it was too easy a game... the end palace was insane.
To say it "radically sucked" is radically unfair. To imply that Zelda 2 wasn't fun is also radically unfair.
... and more to the point, using ten 'emotion' sounds from a clip-sounds CD is a ton cheaper than actually hiring voice actors in multiple languages!
Come on, man, let's call a spade a spade. Good voice acting can make a bad game good (see: Demonstone.) Bad voice acting can make a mediocre game god-awful (See: Sudeki.)
If you don't want to hear the voice acting, turn the Voice volume to zero and the captions on. But there's no reason (other than cheap) to not even hire the actors in the first place.
Zelda 2 was better.
The only computer maker with even half-decent support is Apple, and Apple's support is only half-decent if you go into an Apple Store and talk to somebody face-to-face. Getting a Toshiba laptop fixed took a buddy of mine three weeks, and it was only that quick because Fry's did the shipping for him.
The real problem isn't the "is global warming happening" debate.
The real debate should be, "ok, what can we do about it?" And, remember, one of the options should be "nothing."
Once that's been discussed, we need to move on to, "ok, what do we do about it?" And, again, remember that "nothing" is an option.
All I know is that a lot of the energy saving tips the media frequently puts out: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6636521.stm are idiotic. Partly because many of them are unworkable (how much power does turning off your broadband connection really save? Seriously? I could run my home router for a year on the power my water heater uses in half an hour.) But mostly because they don't know how generating capacity works... we need enough generators online for peak load, regardless of whether your broadband router is turned off or not. As long as all those generators are running to meet peak load, you're burning the exact same amount of fuel and releasing the exact same amount of carbon.
Figure out how to ACTUALLY slow down the release of carbon (hint: nuclear power does it) and I'll be happy to follow your stupid tips. But as long as you're asking me to unplug my router which won't make a whit of difference except to annoy me, then it's just not going to happen.
(Oh, also, stop being pissy to people who already do more than most to reduce pollution. Every morning I ride a train to work; you tell some people this and they say "wow, those diesel locomotives put out a lot of pollution." Oh yeah, sorry, me and the other 400 people who ride it should all drive our cars instead, thank you Mr. Genius Environmentalist.)
Someday I'm going to make a list of things OS X does worse than OS 9 did. It'll be long.
I will say, though, that while OS X has gotten faster over the years, it has not gotten better. The CPU executing some piece of code a few seconds faster doesn't help me if I'm wasting a half-hour puzzling over the UI. The network bugginess costs me from 5 to 10 minutes of productivity every day when I open my iBook on the train going home.
The poor UI of Finder was only made poorer by the addition of the weird Spotlight window mode, which seems to have its own strange rules of unpredictability than the other two modes Finder windows already had. The "Save Dialog which obscures the text in the window you need to read to figure out what file name to enter" is still going strong, as is the "Dock which randomly moves and shifts around so you can never get used to where your icons are parked" (which includes the exclusive "Trash icon that actually moves out of the way of the file you're trying to drop on it, like one of those joke dialog boxes with the moving OK button" feature.)
Meanwhile, Apple has increased their collection of non-standard window types to 4 or 5 now, which means that third-party developers are also not feeling any particular need to standardize their apps with the OS behaviors.
The point of your post seems to be, "well, it's still better than Windows." While that's true, the difference is that Windows is getting better every version and Macintosh is getting worse. In addition, Microsoft is actually... *gasp* innovating with their UI design, while Apple redesigned their OS from scratch and ended up with the same icons and menus we've always had. I'd rather go with the company that has decent network support and is trying new things.
You can repro one of my gripes very easily:
Turn off iDisk syncing, so you're using the network drive directly. Copy 1000 files to it. Now delete those 1000 files by dragging them to the trash. Grab a stopwatch and time it. It shouldn't take more than a minute for this operation, but with iDisk it takes hours.
Assuming you're using iDisk on a laptop, turn on iDisk syncing, let it do its thing so its synced, then sleep it. Now move into a location that has a wireless connection, but no bandwidth (for instance, the train I ride every morning.) Now wake your laptop, now double-click your iDisk to open a file from it. Grab a stopwatch and measure how long Finder is completely frozen.
(This happens with ALL network shares, also, not just iDisk. The reason it's worse with iDisk is that the entire *point* of turning on offline files is to use iDisk... offline. Sure it works, after two minutes when Finder unfreezes itself, but what a terrible user experience. I think OS X is making the assumption that if it finds a wifi connection at all, that connection must have tons of bandwidth. Bad assumption.)
I've re-formatted the laptop several times, and its never fixed the problems with iDisk. The simple fact of the matter is that they are bugs, blatant bugs. Either you're not coming across them because of dumb luck (not deleting lots of files at once, never being in a location with a flakey wifi connection) or you've subconsciously compensated for them by avoiding operations that you know will seize up Finder.
All applications should use the same theme as the host OS by default, it has nothing to do with them being GTK or whatever.
(BTW, another point: end users do not give a crap what "framework" the program is in. Nobody's going to give GTK a pass for having poor usability because it's a port from Linux. To the end-user, it's just another Windows app. And Mac developers: stop advertising your stupid apps as "100% Cocoa" as if anybody gave a crap.)
That all said, if you *are* going to use a metal theme, at least use a nice-looking one, and not that abomination with square buttons that looks like it was rejected from Windows 3.11.
Then there's refusing to offer a LAN or roll-yer-own iDisk option, yet sticking it in my face at various points in the OS, which amounts to junkware similar to something out of Redmond.
.Mac WebDAV shares. Even Microsoft doesn't pull crap like that on its users.
Except the software out of Redmond lets you map a WebDAV share as a drive, and then turn on "Offline Files" for it... thereby offering exactly what iDisk is, except free and without the fanfare Apple gives it. Sure; OS X technically has the capability, as iDisk proves, Apple just doesn't let you use it on an arbitrary WebDAV share, only on
People malign Microsoft, but honestly, given the choice between a mediocre Windows box that can use a network and Finder, I'll take the Windows box for my next computer. I'm sick of OS X getting worse every year. Windows might not be all that great, but at least each version is an improvement over the one that came before. OS X still doesn't even have feature parity with 8-year-old System 9.
1) Windows is not Gaim's native platform.
How does that makes it ok?
If I were a developer on the GAIM project, I'd be ashamed of releasing something that hideous and buggy. For some reason, being an open source project makes it ok to not take any pride in your work and release things that the public should never be subjected to.
Look at the second screenshot, the "is buggy" one. Are you seriously telling me that not one single person tested GAIM on Windows XP with the default settings at 1024x768? Not one single person? And they released it to the public this way? It's shameful.
"Languishing" in this context means making the OS less consistent. They're not enforcing the standards they themselves wrote.
"Autistic?"
I see it something like the rules for anything. When you're the expert, when you've mastered the field, then you can work on changing the fundamentals. If you start inventing new widgets without researching how and why the current widgets exist, then you're going to cause problems. Like those applications you see that consist of nothing but 40 tabs in a tab-panel, they didn't understand the purpose of tabs, and now they've made something with poor usability.
Actually, the Close button used to be on the other side of the window. Remember? Far away from the others so you wouldn't click it by accident while trying to Zoom? That's the kind of detail Apple used to get right.
The Ars article "About the Finder" describes exactly how Apple could have expanded what it can offer us without losing any consistency. Apple just plain didn't try.
But forget the interface consistency, what about the blatant bugs? How about the crappy network support, so that if I have the audacity to open my iBook somewhere other than "the network its used to" it literally freezes Finder for minutes at a time. Then you go to open something on your (offline) iDisk, and you're frozen for another minute. It's ridiculous. How about when I drag a file from my FTP program to the desktop, Finder seizes up and I have to force-quit it? How about the fact that it takes over three hours to delete 1,000 files from iDisk? Or that iDisk bookmark syncing will suddenly and unexplainably stop working, requiring you to turn the feature off and back on before it works again?
Apple has seriously lost their way since OS X comes back. I want the old Apple back.