Posts by Steve P 32 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2007
It's the mutually assured destruction defence. You're free to use these patents unless you use your patents against us.
It's as good as relinquishing all rights, but retaining some protection for themselves against others who have a less philanthropic view of patents.
But yeah, I definitely agree with the other posters suggesting that the patent system is broken.
Free games with adverts, no problem.
Purchased games with adverts, no way.
Firstly, as others have stated, placing adverts in non-contemporary settings can kill the sense of immersion.
If we, the gamers, only reject the games that violate that immersion, then the publishers will respond by publishing games that are less likely to be rejected. That means more games in contemporary scenarios, and less games in the sci-fi/fantasy/just-plain-out-there arenas.
Given the relative paucity, already, of games that are not clones of Quake/C&C/EA (Sport) 200x/Last Year's Surprise Hit, this can only be a bad thing.
Therefore, I think we gamers must reject advertising in purchased games completely.
I figure it'd actually be the other way around - Office will import ODF OK, and may even save it in a compliant document - but when you try to save you'll get worrying messages about losing formatting, features will not be preserved, etc.
And the resultant document will almost work in OpenOffice. It won't look the same, there will be many little formatting and layout problems, and will have a whole load of MS-proprietary XML in it, so Office can pretend it can load it correctly.
Microsoft will announce that any shortcomings are limitations of ODF that aren't present if you use docx format (or OXML)
And some users will try to move away from Office, find that their ODF documents saved out from Microsoft Word need to be reformatted, will realise how much extra work that still needs to be done, so will go back to using Office, and the lesson they will take away is that OpenOffice and ODF just don't work.
That is how I expect it will play out. :(
I think you might need to clarify your use of the word 'standard' in respect to RTF. Microsoft call it a standard, yet its specification seems to change in lockstep with Office releases.
Certainly saving an Office document as RTF is no guarantee that TextPad can display it as Office will.
This is also the normal behaviour of Internet Explorer - if the error page is too small, it too displays its own page.
(Though whether or not it's 'right' for either to do this is a matter of debate - on the Microsoft side, the page displayed is intended to help. On the Google side, the page is intended to help, and make money for Google.)
"presumably any halfway competant gamer can still download it via steam"
If the game is actually banned in Brazil then Valve won't sell it to you if they think you come from Brazil.
I live in New Zealand, where the game Manhunt is banned. I can't even get to the purchase page within Steam - it redirects me away to the main game list. Nor can I get to the games collection which includes Manhunt.
I don't know how this all works if you owned a copy of the game before the ban came into effect.
Nor do I know how 'deep' their detection is - it could simply be some setting in my profile somewhere. I've not really been that concerned about trying to find out how they do it - I don't actually want Manhunt, but I was interested in seeing whether they would sell it to me. :)
I'm curious - do you distinguish at all between Perl.com - O'Reilly's site for selling Perl related books and conferences, and the Perl community?
And, it is possible to write a Perl script to check that one's web page hasn't been hijacked. Of course their page hadn't been hijacked - it was a trusted third party.
To anticipate your next statement, I'm not sure that it is, in general, possible to prevent scenarios like this. Advertisement brokers tend to require that a site link the scripts etc. directly from the broker's server, essentially bypassing the content provider.
This is done so the broker can update the scripts whenever they need to, and can help protect against content providers gaming the system.
However, once they are out of the loop, content providers have little ability to control what is displayed.
This problem has happened once in approximately 10 years, and yes, it is embarrassing for O'Reilly Media, but I can't really see what could be done within the current model of advertisement serving.
Taint checks are a optional feature of Perl. If you weren't so intent on taking the quote out of context, you might have noticed that even if they were being used, it wouldn't have helped in this case.
Though, from the second paragraph, I suspect even if Perl.com had been running on IIS, written in C# talking to a SQL Server back end, you'd still say it was somehow the Perl community's fault.
"Cox actively manages network traffic through ... protocol filtering. Cox does not ... discriminate against any specific services in any way"
Unless the service just happens to use a filtered protocol, I guess.
Meh.
Are these ISPs offering 'all-you-can-eat' style connections?
And if there is a 'pay-as-you-go' option, do they still play funnies with the RST on it?
For someone subject to U.S. Law (i.e. a citizen or foreign national residing in the U.S.) they need to have permission from the Treasury department to travel to Cuba. (I looked it up late last year)
I went to Cuba at the start of this year, and Cuba does not stamp passports: apparently it causes trouble for people who then travel to the U.S., only to be turned away at the border.
I suspect the U.S. administration will stay 'annoyed' at Cuba until restitution has been made: Castro nationalised all U.S. company-held assets in a tit-for-tat trade retaliation, so some very wealthy U.S.-based families ended up losing lots of money. (The Bacardi family spring to mind)
The problem was that Firefox registers the 'firefoxurl:' URL scheme and failed to validate the data they were getting through it. That they are not validating the data is what makes it a Firefox problem.
They are using the same mechanism that Real Player uses to register 'rtsp:', Media Player to register 'mms:', Steam to register 'steam:', your mail program uses to register 'mailto:', and your browser uses to register 'http:' and 'https:'.
With the variety of url schemes supported, it's hardly reasonable to assume Microsoft can really validate each type.
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