First of all, Air is broken for GUI apps (on Windows and OS X at least.) It gets many, many basic details of how widgets are supposed to work completely wrong. And, shock and amazement, most of the wrongness is the exact same wrongness that Flash widgets have-- gee! You'd almost think it's just a crummy Flash runtime!
Secondly, RealBasic can target three platforms from a single codebase (Mac, Linux, Windows) and gets two of them completely right. (Linux may be right, but I don't know enough about it to really verify it.) So this is nothing new-- that capability has been in RealBasic for at least 4 years now.
I love these breathless excited summaries. The only real point to take from this is Christian Cantrell is completely ignorant of Flash's competitors in this space. (And kdawson loves hype, the hype-ier the better.)
Yeah it does check with a server. The user authentication server.
So... in the strange world of Anonymous Coward, checking a user authentication server is *not* DRM when Blizzard does it, but it *is* DRM when Ubisoft does it?
Well, I'm convinced.
Neither is the Warden.
Warden definitely resembles "DRM, copy protection, registration, whatever" in the grandparents' word. It does some deep down mojo to your computer, far above and beyond what's required for the game to run.
On a vaguely-related note, the Steam "New Games" list would be a lot more interesting if every other entry weren't another $20 RailWorks add-on.
Seriously. Ok, we get it Steam, RailWorks is well-supported and gets new locomotives every week.
Steam needs a 4-tier system: 1) Game collections (the id Super Pack) 2) Full games 3) Game expansions (Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising) 4) Game content (new locomotives for RailWorks, the infamous horse armor for Oblivion)
Of course there's always fuzziness (for example, is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky* a sequel or an expansion?), but at least that way we could filter some of the crap out.
And while I'm ranting mostly-off-topic, maybe Steam shouldn't blow its wad on New Years sales, then have *zero* decent sales for the first 6 months of the year.
* (At least they finally fixed the bug where the original game was named S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but Clear Sky was named STALKER, meaning they didn't alphabetize anywhere close to each other. Now if only they'd rename "The Ultimate DOOM" so it appears somewhere less than 30 miles from DOOM II and DOOM 3, where I'd expect to find it...)
I can say that Amazon (and Barnes and Noble, and whoever else is carrying this content) isn't going to de-list them until they get a massive PR backlash. They're indirectly making money off of this as much as VDM is.
You could try to get your local consumer advocate news program to cover it, perhaps... that might force Amazon into taking some kind of action.
I have not been one to use pirated games. I have done it exactly once, for revenge... I ordered the expansion pack "Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil"
Why??
and never got it.
They probably assumed you were only ordering it as a prank to piss off your friends. I mean, nobody could actually *want* the expansion to Doom 3 having play the regular game, right? Must be a prank.
I almost was going to stop buying games altogether due to developing trends of asshole DRM mechanisms, but there are still reasonable titles coming out. Even EA seems to be smartening up. (Battlefield Bad Company 2 is relatively hassle free).
I find it amazing that people can completely give up on Ubisoft after, what, 3 titles with bad DRM, but they're perfectly fine with EA games-- despite the fact that EA has been screwing the entire industry for decades.
Then again, I'm talking to a person who actually paid good money (well... Canadian money) for Doom 3: Resurrection Of Evil. So I guess all rationality is out the door.
The message is already out there: the World of Warcraft client doesn't contain anything that would resemble DRM, copy protection, registration, whatever.
Yeah it does. For one thing, it checks-in with a server before you can play-- which is identical to what the Ubisoft products here are doing. For another, it has the Warden anti-cheating system.
This is one of the indicators that the person writing the article is full of shit. He doesn't even know what a youthful developer *looks like*, and yet he's trying to tell Oracle/Java how to recruit them.
The "virtual machine" thing has resulted in ".NET", a virtual machine for x86 only.
Nah, it can run on mobile processors as well, my Zune has no issue running.net apps. And apparently it has no trouble with PPC, as evidenced by the Xbox 360. Hell, it even runs on fucking IA64, for what that's worth.
I think your imagination is a little limited here. The world is much bigger than desktop PCs.
They gotta get the *basics* of desktop software working before trying for games and multimedia. I've still yet to see a Java GUI program with a UI worth using, although I have to admit Eclipse is getting close.
I personally know a Chiropractor who is fully licensed as a Family Practice M.D., as is everybody who graduates from his Chiropractic school in San Jose. (It's a requirement of the program there.) He proudly calls himself a Chiropractor, and I've never heard him use the term "Osteopath."
Maybe the terminology in the UK is different than the US. (You didn't say where you are.)
But I can guarantee you that any graduate of Palmer College is fully qualified and licensed as a Family Practice M.D. as well as a Chiropractor.
There are Chiropractors who are quacks, but the majority are not.
Real Chiropractors would never make crazy inflated claims about their techniques, like that it can cure cancers. Real Chiropractors generally are also General Practitioners as well, meaning they're just as qualified to diagnose a medical condition as your family doctor.
The real problem is that there's no way to prevent quacks from using (and sullying) the word "Chiropractor."
I don't know of anyone who does regular fuzzy testing. Everyone that matters does unit testing.
Just FYI, Microsoft does fuzz testing in all areas of business, not just Office. The "news" here is really that the Office fuzz testing is done with a cluster of the developers' own computers. (Although it's definitely a good story to get out to all the shitty software houses out there that don't already do fuzz testing.)
When I worked in Xbox game testing back when the Xbox 360 was shiny and new, we had a large pile of Xbox 360s that did nothing but fuzz-testing of new titles by feeding them random controller input.
If I had my way, I would not use it, even OOo is better.
"Better" in what sense? It's certainly not less buggy... hell, some components of OpenOffice.org (ok, I'll name it: Impress) seem to have never been actually tested.
But I know there are people out there who went "What kind kind of name is that for a guy from Essex O.o?".
Are Brits really so racist that they make big-O-period-little-O faces over learning that somebody living in one of their cities has a name that's *gasp* NOT British? Seriously?
Or are you just so enthusiastic to portray yourself as a heroic non-racist that you invent some strawman that you "know" is making stupid smilies over this so that you can valiantly slay their flawed horrible thoughts?
Yes to promote freedom, you should do EXACTLY WHAT I SAY!
Because God knows you won't be free unless you're mindlessly following somebody else's instructions! While you're at it, work on eliminating that damned independent thought.
Because vouchers in general are not about school choice, but a means of forcing taxpayers to pay for religious education: subsidizing those who already send their children to parochial schools.
Is this supposed to outrage me? Because it doesn't bother me at all.
Religious schools have the same accreditation requirements as secular ones, yes? So... who cares?
A school is like a church-- all the value is in the people. You can start a school in an old warehouse, or my living room. All you need is money for basic supplies, which the vouchers would certainly cover.
I'd wager a school in my living room would produce significantly better students than the average high school, if only because the class size would be small.;)
The reason vouchers fail is because of powerful teacher union interference. The idea is sound, and should be tried.
It's obviously an artificial construct (wathan) accidentally invented by an intelligent (though non-sentient) alien species. Obviously, once the wathans granted them sentience they saw it as their moral duty to install wathan-generators on all planets likely to develop life.
As we move to electric cars and other advances cars will be more like a 80mph laptop.
I had a 565 mph laptop last time I flew cross-country. It worked fine, didn't even jog the DVD in it.:)
Another computer should have been watching the system and saying...what the hell are we accelerating for anyways.
So they just need to install the backseat driver disk. (Get it? Driver disk? Backseat driver? That's comedy gold, people!)
Why the hell can cars run this fast anyways. Do we really need a car that will run over 90mph for more than a few seconds during a pass.
Are you American? You should have your citizenship revoked immediately. Hell, my state has freeways where the *average* speed is around 85. I'm guessing you live in a cramped, tiny east coast state?
Are we all so brainwashed by action movies we pretend we might need to run away from a maniac we probably couldn't outrun anyways.
We could if our cars could do 90 for more than a few seconds.
Though, honest Abe might have been an exception to the rule when it came to the corrupting nature of power...who knows?
Or maybe he was a supervillian who was assassinated before having time to put his diabolical plan into action. (He didn't have a lot of time to develop the corrupting nature of power, is what I'm saying... who knows what would have happened had it lived longer.)
It was designed to increase the speed and safety of travel of all vehicles so, yes, that includes military vehicles. (Of course, tanks would be on the back of trucks unless it was a dire emergency-- a tank would beat the crap out of the paving. Especially modern tanks, which can do 40+ MPH.)
This isn't new, BTW. Highway 9 in Washington State was built partially because the government determined that Highway 99 was too close to the coast-- in wartime, an enemy fleet offshore could theoretically bombard it. That concern placed Highway 9 eastward to its current location.
I would hope any government keeps civil defense in mind while planning infrastructure.
Oh yah, I guess there wasn't time for bullying with all that child molestation going on.
Seriously, though, I still don't buy it. You give me *facts*, then you'll convince me. You give me fuzzy pie-in-the-sky nostalgia, and I call bullshit.
I am thankful that these sorts of issues were pretty much unknown when I went to school.
Bullcrap.
Three factors here:
1) The news was much more local and much less national, it certainly wasn't completely soundbyte-based and on 4-5 channels 24/7. There are a lot of things you hear about now that you'd have never heard of pre-CNN.
2) Until fairly recently, suicide carried a huge stigma in American society. No parent would admit that their kid committed suicide, and the press wouldn't cover it (for fear that it would cause copycat suicides).
3) Nostalgia is a mind-disease. If you're looking back at the past fondly, most likely, your brain is deluding you. In reality, the past sucked ass.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, Air is broken for GUI apps (on Windows and OS X at least.) It gets many, many basic details of how widgets are supposed to work completely wrong. And, shock and amazement, most of the wrongness is the exact same wrongness that Flash widgets have-- gee! You'd almost think it's just a crummy Flash runtime!
Secondly, RealBasic can target three platforms from a single codebase (Mac, Linux, Windows) and gets two of them completely right. (Linux may be right, but I don't know enough about it to really verify it.) So this is nothing new-- that capability has been in RealBasic for at least 4 years now.
I love these breathless excited summaries. The only real point to take from this is Christian Cantrell is completely ignorant of Flash's competitors in this space. (And kdawson loves hype, the hype-ier the better.)
Yeah it does check with a server. The user authentication server.
So... in the strange world of Anonymous Coward, checking a user authentication server is *not* DRM when Blizzard does it, but it *is* DRM when Ubisoft does it?
Well, I'm convinced.
Neither is the Warden.
Warden definitely resembles "DRM, copy protection, registration, whatever" in the grandparents' word. It does some deep down mojo to your computer, far above and beyond what's required for the game to run.
On a vaguely-related note, the Steam "New Games" list would be a lot more interesting if every other entry weren't another $20 RailWorks add-on.
Seriously. Ok, we get it Steam, RailWorks is well-supported and gets new locomotives every week.
Steam needs a 4-tier system:
1) Game collections (the id Super Pack)
2) Full games
3) Game expansions (Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising)
4) Game content (new locomotives for RailWorks, the infamous horse armor for Oblivion)
Of course there's always fuzziness (for example, is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky* a sequel or an expansion?), but at least that way we could filter some of the crap out.
And while I'm ranting mostly-off-topic, maybe Steam shouldn't blow its wad on New Years sales, then have *zero* decent sales for the first 6 months of the year.
* (At least they finally fixed the bug where the original game was named S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but Clear Sky was named STALKER, meaning they didn't alphabetize anywhere close to each other. Now if only they'd rename "The Ultimate DOOM" so it appears somewhere less than 30 miles from DOOM II and DOOM 3, where I'd expect to find it...)
I can say that Amazon (and Barnes and Noble, and whoever else is carrying this content) isn't going to de-list them until they get a massive PR backlash. They're indirectly making money off of this as much as VDM is.
You could try to get your local consumer advocate news program to cover it, perhaps... that might force Amazon into taking some kind of action.
I have not been one to use pirated games. I have done it exactly once, for revenge... I ordered the expansion pack "Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil"
Why??
and never got it.
They probably assumed you were only ordering it as a prank to piss off your friends. I mean, nobody could actually *want* the expansion to Doom 3 having play the regular game, right? Must be a prank.
I almost was going to stop buying games altogether due to developing trends of asshole DRM mechanisms, but there are still reasonable titles coming out. Even EA seems to be smartening up. (Battlefield Bad Company 2 is relatively hassle free).
I find it amazing that people can completely give up on Ubisoft after, what, 3 titles with bad DRM, but they're perfectly fine with EA games-- despite the fact that EA has been screwing the entire industry for decades.
Then again, I'm talking to a person who actually paid good money (well... Canadian money) for Doom 3: Resurrection Of Evil. So I guess all rationality is out the door.
The message is already out there: the World of Warcraft client doesn't contain anything that would resemble DRM, copy protection, registration, whatever.
Yeah it does. For one thing, it checks-in with a server before you can play-- which is identical to what the Ubisoft products here are doing. For another, it has the Warden anti-cheating system.
This is one of the indicators that the person writing the article is full of shit. He doesn't even know what a youthful developer *looks like*, and yet he's trying to tell Oracle/Java how to recruit them.
The "virtual machine" thing has resulted in ".NET", a virtual machine for x86 only.
Nah, it can run on mobile processors as well, my Zune has no issue running .net apps. And apparently it has no trouble with PPC, as evidenced by the Xbox 360. Hell, it even runs on fucking IA64, for what that's worth.
I think your imagination is a little limited here. The world is much bigger than desktop PCs.
They gotta get the *basics* of desktop software working before trying for games and multimedia. I've still yet to see a Java GUI program with a UI worth using, although I have to admit Eclipse is getting close.
Bullshit.
I personally know a Chiropractor who is fully licensed as a Family Practice M.D., as is everybody who graduates from his Chiropractic school in San Jose. (It's a requirement of the program there.) He proudly calls himself a Chiropractor, and I've never heard him use the term "Osteopath."
Maybe the terminology in the UK is different than the US. (You didn't say where you are.)
But I can guarantee you that any graduate of Palmer College is fully qualified and licensed as a Family Practice M.D. as well as a Chiropractor.
You wanna unravel that one, professor? What the holy shit is your point?
There are Chiropractors who are quacks, but the majority are not.
Real Chiropractors would never make crazy inflated claims about their techniques, like that it can cure cancers. Real Chiropractors generally are also General Practitioners as well, meaning they're just as qualified to diagnose a medical condition as your family doctor.
The real problem is that there's no way to prevent quacks from using (and sullying) the word "Chiropractor."
I don't know of anyone who does regular fuzzy testing. Everyone that matters does unit testing.
Just FYI, Microsoft does fuzz testing in all areas of business, not just Office. The "news" here is really that the Office fuzz testing is done with a cluster of the developers' own computers. (Although it's definitely a good story to get out to all the shitty software houses out there that don't already do fuzz testing.)
When I worked in Xbox game testing back when the Xbox 360 was shiny and new, we had a large pile of Xbox 360s that did nothing but fuzz-testing of new titles by feeding them random controller input.
I use Word 2007 at work and it is very buggy.
Undoubtedly true.
If I had my way, I would not use it, even OOo is better.
"Better" in what sense? It's certainly not less buggy... hell, some components of OpenOffice.org (ok, I'll name it: Impress) seem to have never been actually tested.
But I know there are people out there who went "What kind kind of name is that for a guy from Essex O.o?".
Are Brits really so racist that they make big-O-period-little-O faces over learning that somebody living in one of their cities has a name that's *gasp* NOT British? Seriously?
Or are you just so enthusiastic to portray yourself as a heroic non-racist that you invent some strawman that you "know" is making stupid smilies over this so that you can valiantly slay their flawed horrible thoughts?
Either way, WTF man.
Yes to promote freedom, you should do EXACTLY WHAT I SAY!
Because God knows you won't be free unless you're mindlessly following somebody else's instructions! While you're at it, work on eliminating that damned independent thought.
Because vouchers in general are not about school choice, but a means of forcing taxpayers to pay for religious education: subsidizing those who already send their children to parochial schools.
Is this supposed to outrage me? Because it doesn't bother me at all.
Religious schools have the same accreditation requirements as secular ones, yes? So... who cares?
A school is like a church-- all the value is in the people. You can start a school in an old warehouse, or my living room. All you need is money for basic supplies, which the vouchers would certainly cover.
I'd wager a school in my living room would produce significantly better students than the average high school, if only because the class size would be small. ;)
The reason vouchers fail is because of powerful teacher union interference. The idea is sound, and should be tried.
It's obviously an artificial construct (wathan) accidentally invented by an intelligent (though non-sentient) alien species. Obviously, once the wathans granted them sentience they saw it as their moral duty to install wathan-generators on all planets likely to develop life.
Duh.
As we move to electric cars and other advances cars will be more like a 80mph laptop.
I had a 565 mph laptop last time I flew cross-country. It worked fine, didn't even jog the DVD in it. :)
Another computer should have been watching the system and saying...what the hell are we accelerating for anyways.
So they just need to install the backseat driver disk. (Get it? Driver disk? Backseat driver? That's comedy gold, people!)
Why the hell can cars run this fast anyways. Do we really need a car that will run over 90mph for more than a few seconds during a pass.
Are you American? You should have your citizenship revoked immediately. Hell, my state has freeways where the *average* speed is around 85. I'm guessing you live in a cramped, tiny east coast state?
Are we all so brainwashed by action movies we pretend we might need to run away from a maniac we probably couldn't outrun anyways.
We could if our cars could do 90 for more than a few seconds.
The extra z means extra zing!
http://www.yellow5.com/pokey/archive/index296.html
Though, honest Abe might have been an exception to the rule when it came to the corrupting nature of power...who knows?
Or maybe he was a supervillian who was assassinated before having time to put his diabolical plan into action. (He didn't have a lot of time to develop the corrupting nature of power, is what I'm saying... who knows what would have happened had it lived longer.)
It was designed to increase the speed and safety of travel of all vehicles so, yes, that includes military vehicles. (Of course, tanks would be on the back of trucks unless it was a dire emergency-- a tank would beat the crap out of the paving. Especially modern tanks, which can do 40+ MPH.)
This isn't new, BTW. Highway 9 in Washington State was built partially because the government determined that Highway 99 was too close to the coast-- in wartime, an enemy fleet offshore could theoretically bombard it. That concern placed Highway 9 eastward to its current location.
I would hope any government keeps civil defense in mind while planning infrastructure.
Oh yah, I guess there wasn't time for bullying with all that child molestation going on.
Seriously, though, I still don't buy it. You give me *facts*, then you'll convince me. You give me fuzzy pie-in-the-sky nostalgia, and I call bullshit.
I am thankful that these sorts of issues were pretty much unknown when I went to school.
Bullcrap.
Three factors here:
1) The news was much more local and much less national, it certainly wasn't completely soundbyte-based and on 4-5 channels 24/7. There are a lot of things you hear about now that you'd have never heard of pre-CNN.
2) Until fairly recently, suicide carried a huge stigma in American society. No parent would admit that their kid committed suicide, and the press wouldn't cover it (for fear that it would cause copycat suicides).
3) Nostalgia is a mind-disease. If you're looking back at the past fondly, most likely, your brain is deluding you. In reality, the past sucked ass.