Word of mouth only goes so far, and advertising is expensive.
In the days of people having 100s (if not1000s) of "friends" on sites like Facebook, "word of mouth" is a hell of a lot more effective than it ever was before - and that's likely to remain true going forward.
I actually tend to think the opposite. I have so many friends on facebook that aren't my real friends that invites over fb tend to mean less to me then a phone call, or even an email. Plus you know that everyone invites their entire friends list so you don't get the feeling that the person really wants you to be there.
There are too many people answering wheather this is legally possible and not the fundamental question on wheather it's right to go against the lead developers wishes. The reason the GPL was created was not to form communities that want free things, but more to ensure that you have the right to change whatever you want; port to other platforms for example. For better or worse this "freedom" already costs $99 on the iPhone, but enables other developers with cool ideas to add them as soon as they come in. That is what the GPL is protecting.
The reason most GPL programs are free as in beer as well is that the cost of compiling is negligable. Interstingly, in this case it is not. The average person makes out much better by buying a copy from you then compiling the source. If the developer expets you to go into debt to offer this game, he is out of his mind. I think profit sharing is the best model personally, but I have trouble believeing that this guy is not amenable to letting you sell the game at cost.
If he wants the game to be free, let him go through the trouble of maintaing the servers and recompiling for the iPhone. See how he likes paying money every month in order to keep with the "spirit of the GPL".
I'm so glad that this was first post! Tagging !ironic.
I know it's OT, I recommend this well written article, and this about the Alanis song. I also recall something about this from Gerorge Carlin, the king of pedantry:
Darryl Stingley, the pro football player, was paralyzed after a brutal hit by Jack Tatum. Now Darryl Stingley's son plays football, and if the son should become paralyzed while playing, it will not be ironic. It will be coincidental. If Darryl Stingley's son paralyzes someone else, that will be closer to ironic. If he paralyzes Jack Tatum's son, that will be precisely ironic.
This is only according to those stricken with Linus's so-called Microsoft-Hater Disease. It is my understanding that both of those companies *and* apple offered to hook them up with stuff and were declined.
It depends on how they offered to "hook them up". Was Apple willing to license the interesting parts of their OS under GPL so that they could make it work on their hardware without depending on a third party? Was Microsoft willing to pay the salaries of several full time developers the way Red Hatdid?
Why? Politics. It would be seen as selling out to the other backers--the free software crowd. That would make their Slashdot Karma go down.
Your argument doesn't stand up regarding Intel. They already have good standing in the community, they employ some of the best free software developers in their linux lab, and they already have their own netbook OS in the Maemo project. What's more likely is that AMD just made a better offer than Intel did.
How exactly are they reducing the latency from the controller to the cloud? Let alone the roundtrip latency of the video/sound.
The thing that people are missing is that the application is actually now much closer to the Internet with a service like this. Take World of Warcraft for example, if you party with someone and you're both using this service, there is basically no lag between you and him. No more players jumping around on screen showing or actions executed out of order. And which message do you think has more overhead, "move player1 to position 35272,123, cast heal on player2", or "move mouse to position 1323,42, click". In the case of macros all you need to send is a simple key press.
Anything more than 100ms ping time is gunna kill this thing.
Its not a good sign when a company who makes most of the classic games that people remember rejects your ideas, and I'm not sure Sony or MS wants to jump on the bandwagon (though it wouldn't surprise me if MS bought the company if they managed to turn out a decent product).
The console manufacturers have everything to lose and nothing to gain by helping out. If this service succedes no one will be buying specalized gaming systems anymore and this company will be buying comodity hardware to run these games. At best they could each have their own roku type box that connects to the service. Even with the pc games eventually this company will end up wanting volume licensing and start taking a cut of the sale.
This is like going to EMI and asking to license their entire catalog for a new mp3 downloading website. Eventually Apple and Amazon got them to do it, but this is like asking them in 2001.
Actually there are a lot of bike lanes in Manhattan, and there is seemingly pleanty of space. Maybe they sacrificed a car lane when the put the bike lane in, but streets are generally one way and have enough room for someone to pass a double parked car or make impromptu turning lanes, so bikers seem to do alright.
Actually, roads are for cyclists as well, except as otherwise explicitly posted.
Thanks for that post. Not only that, but sidewalks (previously suggested) are definitely not for cyclists. That shit drives me batshit insane as a pedestrian every time some dumbass cyclist practically bowls me over because he's going 15 mph on a sidewalk, in a vehicle that's probably three times as large as the width of a person's shoulders, in a city that doesn't have enough sidewalk space to begin with.
Did you read GP's post? Then the Pirate Bay guys would have a cool $8 million to start up a new company with the intention of pirating media, where before they had no money. Why would the MAFIAA want that?
They've probably re-dubbed the movie in Farsi to make Sauron the good guy.
Nah, it's easier to keep him the bad guy but align him with the demonstrators:
Then there is the sly nod to Ahmadinejad. Iranian films are dubbed (forget the wretched dubbing into English in the U.S.; in Iran dubbing is a craft) and there are plenty of references to "kootoole," little person, the Farsi word used in the movie for hobbit and dwarf. "Kootoole," of course, was, is, the term used in many of the chants out on the street against President Ahmadinejad. He is the "little person."
The loans are part of the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which provides incentives to new and established automakers to build more fuel-efficient vehicles.
It's better to give companies loans for actually doing something. Rather then giving them 25 billion dollars just for "struggling".
Especially if the reason they're struggling is because they make shitty cars. At least the when we fund companies that create electric cars we get a quality product out of it.
Released under the MIT license, which is a pretty typical non copyleft OSS license. What the author probably meant was that Nintendo prohibits copyleft licenses, which is a small technicality.
Can they just license the original engine from lucasarts then? Give some royalty checks to steve purcell and ron gilbert and whoever else made it as part of the deal!
That would cost money. The copyright violation is free (until you get caught).
Anyone who has already purchased one of these games, or who receives a copy from someone who has, has the right to demand this now.
Actually this is not correct. The game was not distributed under the terms of the GPLv2, but rather was distributed illegally, by violating copyright. As shown in the blog post above, the copyright holder tried to get Atari to release the game under the GPL, but they were unwilling. The copyright holder then settled out of court for a nice contribution to the Free Software Foundation and a promise to destroy all remaining stock.
Well said, random reads are an order of magnitude faster. What's interesting is to see the article neglect this mark, when the desktop/laptop computing experience relies most on this exact variable.
I don't expect enterprise data centers to be using SSD to host my flikr photos any time soon (outside of a few specialized workloads such as database write cache), but the laptop and the solid state disk are a match made in heaven.
This is some seriously shoddy reporting. Take for example this gem:
Next I transferred a 1GB folder filled with photos and video files to the drives from a USB drive. Both the SSD and the HDD accomplished the file transfer in about 50 seconds (the Seagate was 2 seconds slower).
Hmm, interesting that they both performed exactly the same. I would have expected the HDD to be faster transfering sequential data, except they were probably both limited by the transfer rate of the older, generic USB drive you were using. Way to go, you've successfully benchmarked the transfer rate for a USB drive that you weren't even reviewing.
Or this:
A lot depends on how you expect to use your computer. If you're a college student writing papers and surfing the Internet for information, the advantages of an SSD are negligible, but if you're downloading video and using multiple applications at the same time, an SSD will give you a very noticeable performance boost, Wong said.
This is exactly backwards. The college student downloading video will need the extra hard drive space, where the college student writing papers and surfing the internet is going to have a much better experience with storage that performs better under random io workloads. But then again, what college student these days doesn't have an external usb hard drive for all their media?
They also mention that consumers will likely look for larger storage regardless of the type of underlying technology. But the consumers likely to care are the same as those likely to know the difference between HDD and SDD in the first place. The consumer that doesn't is more likely to make a purchase based on "wow 20 second bootup" and "MS Office starts in a snap, and everything goes faster" than anything else.
but burst speed measured with HDTach is the only metric that's important when you wish to make your point that traditional rotating platter based hard drives are "nearly as fast" as quality SSD drives.
seriously.....
is there anyone by now that HASN'T seen the extensive test by Anandtech that completely DESTROYS this bullshit article?
All that matters in the real world for HDD performance is Random read and write speeds.
And the difference in the two is an order of magnitude or more using the very fastest consumer drives (WDVR) and a quality SSD (Intel X-25).
The best part is that this isn't even an article, just a random slashdot user musing that SSD's aren't worth it and a review of two of the newest high performance disk drives.
Or maybe there is a typo and he actually wanted to link to this story?
You beat me to it, but in the spirit of adding value, there's a good article here. Another benefit of nilfs2 is that you can easily snapshot and undelete files, giving it a sort of built in "time machine" technology (to use apple's terminology).
I'm just surprised that none of the linux distros are talking about it yet. You would think with the apple and ibm laptops using SSD today that there would be some option somewhere. I think everyone is distracted by btrfs.
I remember that the Budweiser article read like a marketing brochure one time, but it appears to have been cleaned up. The worst offender I've seen is the Debeers. I went there once after reading an article about successful marketing of diamonds for wedding rings in Japan, and was shocked to find that it didn't even have a history page (it now does). Revisions of the article from it's early days gave me a pretty good idea of it's history. You can see a great deal of controversy via it's talk page.
...or a real actor or a well-payed sportsman. Okay, maybe in the sports case it's less study and more physical training.
You apparently don't need a lot of study to become a politican, or a big business leader. Remember those stories about how politicians would hide people in the executive chain in AIG as favors for the good work they've done? Or how Michael Brown falsified portions of his resume and was awarded director of FEMA as payback for a favor? All you need to do is have the good fortune of being born a Kenedy, a Kerry, or a Bush and ask your daddy to get you into Yale.
It always confounds me that the people who complain about sports players that obviously work their ass off (A Rod gets 33 mil) also completely neglect the obvious inequity for C level execs that make 10x that..
Slashdot Mirror
Word of mouth only goes so far, and advertising is expensive.
In the days of people having 100s (if not1000s) of "friends" on sites like Facebook, "word of mouth" is a hell of a lot more effective than it ever was before - and that's likely to remain true going forward.
I actually tend to think the opposite. I have so many friends on facebook that aren't my real friends that invites over fb tend to mean less to me then a phone call, or even an email. Plus you know that everyone invites their entire friends list so you don't get the feeling that the person really wants you to be there.
Yeah, you will. Evidently 'flamebait' and 'troll' are the new 'I disagree with this person and am too lazy to write a good rebuttal' mods.
New? I think this has been happening since the mod system came out...
There are too many people answering wheather this is legally possible and not the fundamental question on wheather it's right to go against the lead developers wishes. The reason the GPL was created was not to form communities that want free things, but more to ensure that you have the right to change whatever you want; port to other platforms for example. For better or worse this "freedom" already costs $99 on the iPhone, but enables other developers with cool ideas to add them as soon as they come in. That is what the GPL is protecting.
The reason most GPL programs are free as in beer as well is that the cost of compiling is negligable. Interstingly, in this case it is not. The average person makes out much better by buying a copy from you then compiling the source. If the developer expets you to go into debt to offer this game, he is out of his mind. I think profit sharing is the best model personally, but I have trouble believeing that this guy is not amenable to letting you sell the game at cost.
If he wants the game to be free, let him go through the trouble of maintaing the servers and recompiling for the iPhone. See how he likes paying money every month in order to keep with the "spirit of the GPL".
I know it's OT, I recommend this well written article, and this about the Alanis song. I also recall something about this from Gerorge Carlin, the king of pedantry:
Darryl Stingley, the pro football player, was paralyzed after a brutal hit by Jack Tatum. Now Darryl Stingley's son plays football, and if the son should become paralyzed while playing, it will not be ironic. It will be coincidental. If Darryl Stingley's son paralyzes someone else, that will be closer to ironic. If he paralyzes Jack Tatum's son, that will be precisely ironic.
This is only according to those stricken with Linus's so-called Microsoft-Hater Disease. It is my understanding that both of those companies *and* apple offered to hook them up with stuff and were declined.
It depends on how they offered to "hook them up". Was Apple willing to license the interesting parts of their OS under GPL so that they could make it work on their hardware without depending on a third party? Was Microsoft willing to pay the salaries of several full time developers the way Red Hat did?
Why? Politics. It would be seen as selling out to the other backers--the free software crowd. That would make their Slashdot Karma go down.
Your argument doesn't stand up regarding Intel. They already have good standing in the community, they employ some of the best free software developers in their linux lab, and they already have their own netbook OS in the Maemo project. What's more likely is that AMD just made a better offer than Intel did.
you mean like that rfid door opener in naked gun?
How exactly are they reducing the latency from the controller to the cloud? Let alone the roundtrip latency of the video/sound.
The thing that people are missing is that the application is actually now much closer to the Internet with a service like this. Take World of Warcraft for example, if you party with someone and you're both using this service, there is basically no lag between you and him. No more players jumping around on screen showing or actions executed out of order. And which message do you think has more overhead, "move player1 to position 35272,123, cast heal on player2", or "move mouse to position 1323,42, click". In the case of macros all you need to send is a simple key press.
Anything more than 100ms ping time is gunna kill this thing.
Slashdot's ping time is ~35 ms, so it is doable.
Its not a good sign when a company who makes most of the classic games that people remember rejects your ideas, and I'm not sure Sony or MS wants to jump on the bandwagon (though it wouldn't surprise me if MS bought the company if they managed to turn out a decent product).
The console manufacturers have everything to lose and nothing to gain by helping out. If this service succedes no one will be buying specalized gaming systems anymore and this company will be buying comodity hardware to run these games. At best they could each have their own roku type box that connects to the service. Even with the pc games eventually this company will end up wanting volume licensing and start taking a cut of the sale.
This is like going to EMI and asking to license their entire catalog for a new mp3 downloading website. Eventually Apple and Amazon got them to do it, but this is like asking them in 2001.
Actually there are a lot of bike lanes in Manhattan, and there is seemingly pleanty of space. Maybe they sacrificed a car lane when the put the bike lane in, but streets are generally one way and have enough room for someone to pass a double parked car or make impromptu turning lanes, so bikers seem to do alright.
Actually, roads are for cyclists as well, except as otherwise explicitly posted.
Thanks for that post. Not only that, but sidewalks (previously suggested) are definitely not for cyclists. That shit drives me batshit insane as a pedestrian every time some dumbass cyclist practically bowls me over because he's going 15 mph on a sidewalk, in a vehicle that's probably three times as large as the width of a person's shoulders, in a city that doesn't have enough sidewalk space to begin with.
Did you read GP's post? Then the Pirate Bay guys would have a cool $8 million to start up a new company with the intention of pirating media, where before they had no money. Why would the MAFIAA want that?
...that google contacted the AP and bought a license to redistribute the copyrighted material? Is that really hard to figure out?
They've probably re-dubbed the movie in Farsi to make Sauron the good guy.
Nah, it's easier to keep him the bad guy but align him with the demonstrators:
Then there is the sly nod to Ahmadinejad. Iranian films are dubbed (forget the wretched dubbing into English in the U.S.; in Iran dubbing is a craft) and there are plenty of references to "kootoole," little person, the Farsi word used in the movie for hobbit and dwarf. "Kootoole," of course, was, is, the term used in many of the chants out on the street against President Ahmadinejad. He is the "little person."
The loans are part of the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which provides incentives to new and established automakers to build more fuel-efficient vehicles.
It's better to give companies loans for actually doing something. Rather then giving them 25 billion dollars just for "struggling".
Especially if the reason they're struggling is because they make shitty cars. At least the when we fund companies that create electric cars we get a quality product out of it.
"Lua is free software: it can be used for any purpose, including commercial purposes, at absolutely no cost. No paperwork, no royalties, no GNU-like "copyleft" restrictions, either."
Released under the MIT license, which is a pretty typical non copyleft OSS license. What the author probably meant was that Nintendo prohibits copyleft licenses, which is a small technicality.
Can they just license the original engine from lucasarts then? Give some royalty checks to steve purcell and ron gilbert and whoever else made it as part of the deal!
That would cost money. The copyright violation is free (until you get caught).
Anyone who has already purchased one of these games, or who receives a copy from someone who has, has the right to demand this now.
Actually this is not correct. The game was not distributed under the terms of the GPLv2, but rather was distributed illegally, by violating copyright. As shown in the blog post above, the copyright holder tried to get Atari to release the game under the GPL, but they were unwilling. The copyright holder then settled out of court for a nice contribution to the Free Software Foundation and a promise to destroy all remaining stock.
Let me put it this way, would you rather have 4GB of DDR2 ram or 512MB of DDR3 ram?
I'd rather have 512 MB of DDR3 ram with SSD hard disk. I wouldn't need the extra 3.5 GB of page cache with the disk accesses being that much faster.
Well said, random reads are an order of magnitude faster. What's interesting is to see the article neglect this mark, when the desktop/laptop computing experience relies most on this exact variable.
I don't expect enterprise data centers to be using SSD to host my flikr photos any time soon (outside of a few specialized workloads such as database write cache), but the laptop and the solid state disk are a match made in heaven.
Next I transferred a 1GB folder filled with photos and video files to the drives from a USB drive. Both the SSD and the HDD accomplished the file transfer in about 50 seconds (the Seagate was 2 seconds slower).
Hmm, interesting that they both performed exactly the same. I would have expected the HDD to be faster transfering sequential data, except they were probably both limited by the transfer rate of the older, generic USB drive you were using. Way to go, you've successfully benchmarked the transfer rate for a USB drive that you weren't even reviewing.
Or this:
A lot depends on how you expect to use your computer. If you're a college student writing papers and surfing the Internet for information, the advantages of an SSD are negligible, but if you're downloading video and using multiple applications at the same time, an SSD will give you a very noticeable performance boost, Wong said.
This is exactly backwards. The college student downloading video will need the extra hard drive space, where the college student writing papers and surfing the internet is going to have a much better experience with storage that performs better under random io workloads. But then again, what college student these days doesn't have an external usb hard drive for all their media?
They also mention that consumers will likely look for larger storage regardless of the type of underlying technology. But the consumers likely to care are the same as those likely to know the difference between HDD and SDD in the first place. The consumer that doesn't is more likely to make a purchase based on "wow 20 second bootup" and "MS Office starts in a snap, and everything goes faster" than anything else.
For interactive workloads nothing beats SSD.
time to tag this 'typoinsummary'
but burst speed measured with HDTach is the only metric that's important when you wish to make your point that traditional rotating platter based hard drives are "nearly as fast" as quality SSD drives.
seriously.....
is there anyone by now that HASN'T seen the extensive test by Anandtech that completely DESTROYS this bullshit article?
All that matters in the real world for HDD performance is Random read and write speeds. And the difference in the two is an order of magnitude or more using the very fastest consumer drives (WDVR) and a quality SSD (Intel X-25).
The best part is that this isn't even an article, just a random slashdot user musing that SSD's aren't worth it and a review of two of the newest high performance disk drives.
Or maybe there is a typo and he actually wanted to link to this story?
You beat me to it, but in the spirit of adding value, there's a good article here. Another benefit of nilfs2 is that you can easily snapshot and undelete files, giving it a sort of built in "time machine" technology (to use apple's terminology).
I'm just surprised that none of the linux distros are talking about it yet. You would think with the apple and ibm laptops using SSD today that there would be some option somewhere. I think everyone is distracted by btrfs.
I remember that the Budweiser article read like a marketing brochure one time, but it appears to have been cleaned up. The worst offender I've seen is the Debeers. I went there once after reading an article about successful marketing of diamonds for wedding rings in Japan, and was shocked to find that it didn't even have a history page (it now does). Revisions of the article from it's early days gave me a pretty good idea of it's history. You can see a great deal of controversy via it's talk page.
...or a real actor or a well-payed sportsman. Okay, maybe in the sports case it's less study and more physical training.
You apparently don't need a lot of study to become a politican, or a big business leader. Remember those stories about how politicians would hide people in the executive chain in AIG as favors for the good work they've done? Or how Michael Brown falsified portions of his resume and was awarded director of FEMA as payback for a favor? All you need to do is have the good fortune of being born a Kenedy, a Kerry, or a Bush and ask your daddy to get you into Yale.
It always confounds me that the people who complain about sports players that obviously work their ass off (A Rod gets 33 mil) also completely neglect the obvious inequity for C level execs that make 10x that..