Posts by Topperfalkon 32 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2011
> You claim he must be doing something right, but you have no way of knowing how much better the project may be doing if he wasn't such a d1ck about things like this.
You mean one of the widest deployed operating system kernels on the planet? As much as I wish he'd be a bit more chill, I have a hard time figuring out how Linux could be doing better than it already is.
As far as I could tell through the press releases, it'll be supported through Microsoft's DirectStorage API, which will be part of DirectX, so basically, yes. Doesn't necessarily mean engine developers have to support those features mind you.
It seems to be replicating what UE5 demonstrated in their PS5 demo, so I sort of expect Epic to integrate it as a supported feature in UE5 at the very least. Which means it should just come out of the box with a large number of games that end up using that engine.
I suspect it's labelled as an acquisition rather than a sale for a reason.
You also can't really have responsible disclosure with a wholly open source project... because it's open.
What he needs is an established business already comfortable operating in this space willing to take on a service that may have fairly low commercial profitability.
"Nobody is suggesting that we can't apply to rejoin after we've left, but right now we have already left and living two final years under the rules of membership is merely to give everyone time to adapt to the change."
This is the most wrong statement I've seen about Brexit in some time. Congratulations. No, we have not yet left the EU as the Article 50 process has not concluded. The two years are the time we get to bargain over what our future relationship with the EU is, whether there's going to be a "cooling off" period where we pretend to be basically members of the EU still without having the rights of an EU member state, in order to give ourselves time to set up things we'll need when the EU stops providing them, and whether we have ongoing obligations (unhelpfully being referred to as a "divorce bill", whereas it's more like a contract abandonment penalty). It's also been made clear that the EU will probably be receptive to us walking away from the whole "leaving the EU" idea if it starts sounding a bit too crazy to us.
And yes, we could rejoin the EU at a later date, but we'd be in a significantly poorer position than we're already in, because we'd have to fight again for all the exceptions we sought in our years of membership, and the EU is unlikely to be convinced that giving extra benefits to an already unreliable member is worth their while.
The whole point of whistleblowing is that you need to protect sources from a state liable to react vindictively towards them for leaking something that is uncomfortable.
Unfortunately, Wikileaks seems to have moved further away from that mission to becoming an extension of Assange's anti-state mentality.
The Government absolutely can take rights away. It's their prerogative as the UK's legislative body.
For a subset of those rights we defer to the EU and/or the ECHR however, such as in this case, where it's the Gov'ts job to argue that their legislation is allowed and/or challenge existing EU legislation.
And regardless on your opinions on format shifting, implementing a levy on copying media to "compensate" a limited group of people seems completely unjust, as it's a targeted tax on a media that may not even be used for the activities for which these people want to be compensated.
For example, in a hypothetical UK where such a levy is introduced, I would expect that if I used any such media to make a copy of a work that has waived its copyrights (for instance, any non-commercial copy of Linux, or any FOSS software), I shouldn't have to pay a levy, or I should be able to claim back against the levy. Also, I don't understand how the levy would really work, given that most writeable media these days can make multiple copies.
I'd be against a general fund that pays into the industry for copying "compensation" as this money will get caught up in middlemen and the current schemes these companies use tend to disproportionately favour bigger creators (though admittedly I'm basing this off testimony from The Indelicates from a few years back). I'd sooner have some kind of funding available through the UK arts and culture funding that is applied flatly to all artists for any of their works. That would act as an incentive to keep creating.
Good luck doing that if you have more than one hard drive.
Took me a while of searching when 8.1 first came out that it was that causing the upgrade to fail, because the actual error returned by the installer was absolutely useless
But they don't take a hit.
In fact in research commissioned by OfCom, it has been shown that infringers may well spend more on legal products than non-infringers. And certain categories of infringers may spend far more than non-infringers and other types of infringers.
Needless to say, this supports what many have thought for some time now. So, tackling copyright infringement may actually cause a negative impact on sales, rather than improving them. (Of course that won't happen anyway, infringers will just use VPNs instead.)
Source: http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/2012/11/online-copyright-research/
In answer to the first, you're kidding right? We're still struggling to get politicians to force the banks to lend to small businesses at the moment. Banks surely prefer to make low risk loan investments to protect them from their casino investment strategies in stocks and properties.
In answer to the second, it's easier to pay back a loan with a negligible value product that retails at the same or higher rate than the initial investment, than to pay it back in cashy-money plus interest.
'Piracy', or copyright infringement to give it it's proper name, is not stealing. The Theft Act relatively specifically states that theft is the taking or depriving someone of a physical, tangible item. Copyright infringement is the infringement of a person's exclusive right to make copies of a work. Note the work itself is intangible, so therefore it isn't theft.
So yes, 'you wouldn't steal a car', but if it were possible you'd probably copy it if you could. And yes, you'd probably spare a moment's thought for the manufacturer who missed out on a purchase, before remembering the reason you didn't go to them in the first place. The service they offer at extortionate prices is worse than no service and simply making a copy.
If labels were more concerned with making decent music and sending acts on tour rather than fiddling with our already fragile legislation, if software companies offered software at decent prices without layers of innocent consumer confounding DRM (which doesn't appear on pirate copies, funnily enough), if movie producers were concerned more with gripping stories than production values and special effects, then piracy would cease to be the issue they feared. Sure, it wouldn't get rid of it, but it wouldn't really matter either.
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