throwaway64

Be careful with model or even revision numbers, always check hardware compatibility lists. very often times the difference between something like a "653" and a "653+" can be an entirely different (and not supported) chipset.

You do not receive the Google Docs login prompt if your browser is not logged into Google at all.

You do, however, receive the login prompt if your browser is logged in through another Google service (like search). Check to make sure nobody has you logged into Google search or something.

This sort of half logged in status is very annoying.

Replay from Intermernet who is dead:

Yes, but being inspired to write a similar book is now a grey area.

As a some-time composer / musician, I like to play around with existing themes and thus create new themes. Many of history's greatest musical pieces reference other pieces (J.S. Bach referenced traditional church pieces, Mussorgsky referenced many traditional folk songs, the list is probably endless), indeed the vast majority of popular music rarely strays from a handful of progressions around a limited palette of chords. Imagine if someone had managed to patent the 12 bar blues early on... No blues explosion, no Rock & Roll, no Elvis, no Beatles, etc. etc.

The argument that patents are for protecting original ideas is becoming more specious with time. It seems that the primary reason many companies now apply for patents is to either protect themselves from future patent cases, or, as is the case with IV, to prosecute any company or individual who tries to bring a similar idea to market.

I belive there is a real moral hazard to selling addicting/impulsive products, especially to children. After all this is part of the reason why zynga has such a bad reputation.

the issue is, if you have a cluster of games/etc managed by steam in your home directory that is already not under the control of package management, what do you gain by splitting out the steam client itself? it is easier from valve's perspective to just allow steam to manage its own updates along with everything else it manages, than to have a rather arbitrary split that gives you no real advantages anyways.

Steam has always been designed on both osx and windows to be a portable folder that you can move around from system to system and run stuff out of wihout worrying about installers and dependancies.

theoreticly you could work around the library/datafile issues with LD_PRELOAD hacks to make it load stuff from your home directory instead, but thats pretty awful.

The problem with this is that with many steam games (such as TF2) the game data itself updates constantly aswell.

how is it irrelivant? if people are wanting games and stuff to be distributed through the package manager, all these issues very much apply.

Even the steam client package itself is something like 100megs, so it becomes painful without diff/delta patches. (steam updates a LOT)

ah the power to unilaterally change terms, knowing your customers have essentially zero alternative.

path prefixes only generally apply to ./configure scripts when you are generating makefiles.

As paths to libs and stuff are hardcoded as part of the ELF spec, it becomes difficult to implement something like this and ive not seen a package manager that can do it.

Steam has a package so dependancies can be satisfied easily without resorting to "install xyz beforehand", and it runs an installer into your home folder because the user has to be able to modify the games directory for many, many games on steam, because stuff like configuration, custom maps, custom models etc, is stored alongside everything else.

Also steam has diff based patching (which requires accress from whoever is running the steam binary) which makes a lot more sense than how package managers operate for large packages, imagine downloading an entire 20 gig game every time there was a minor bugfix, it would be very obnoxious.

Unless the design of both package managers, and how steam games store settings/etc both change radically, this really is the only workable solution.

Luckily, you will still be able to share steam folders cross user, just simply give both users read/write access to the folder.

"we both recognize that wireless broadband is different from the traditional wireline world, in part because the mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly. In recognition of the still-nascent nature of the wireless broadband marketplace, under this proposal we would not now apply most of the wireline principles to wireless, except for the transparency requirement. "

IE, nothing about network neutrality, except telling people what you throttle/etc should apply to wireless.

Its best to always remember this, Google was not on the side of "internet freedom" when they recommended to the FCC that wireless networks didn't need net neutrality.

this ends android as an open source project frankly, open source means freedom to fork, end of story.

for not feeling comfortable with perscriptive posts you certainly make a lot of them

My personal favourite comes from apple

    AVPlayer *player = <#A configured AVPlayer object#>;
    
    CALayer *superlayer = <#Get a CALayer#>;

    AVPlayerLayer *playerLayer = [AVPlayerLayer playerLayerWithPlayer:player];
    
    [superlayer addSublayer:playerLayer];

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AVFou...

its not about putting ads on the homescreen? they have done exactly that with xbox already, 50% of the homescreen is composed of ads

https://d35lb3dl296zwu.cloudfront.net/uploads/photo/image/50...

Whats more they try to justify it with sickeningly transparent lies like ads being "Content users are demanding" now.

namecoins fit the bill rather nicely, its essentially bitcoin, but applied to DNS.

http://www.dot-bit.org/

you might want to take a look at MenuetOS, its written in x86 assembly, and expressly created for clarity and learning.

http://www.menuetos.net/

unfortunately, these devices have no AD integration, or other Enterprise deployment stuff that typically makes windows appealing to businesses.

not certain how much of a market for chrome books there really is

I had previously heard rumours of sales of only 50000 units worldwide (Cannot source atm)

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/few-buy-chromebooks...

the problen with this viewpoint is that metro represents a fundamental shift in the window system. Stuff like appstore only, forced sandboxing and tons of restrictions that have never been an issue on windows before. Microsoft has made it very clear this is how they think everything windows should be moving forward.

Desktop mode might be there for now, but how comfortable should a user remain when everything that gives the system value for them just got marked "legacy"

I for one am moving away from windows as much as i can

At the kind of scales that OP is operating at, you are almost certainly going to need a system administration person with either option.

The problem with this idea when applied to this case is the motivations of people wishing to use some alternate definition. There is a real profit motive in being able to call stuff "open source" when it doesn't grant its users the same kind of freedoms the BSD or the GPL license, etc, do.

If you allow stuff like "shared source" to be called open source, you reduce the term to a meaningless buzzword, like how the term "open" is frequently abused.

citing trademarks is a heavy handed approach, but many parties with a profit motive don't care about anything except strict legality.

This is relevant in particular to this blog because Microsoft has a history of attempting to change what the term means

http://opensource.org/node/280

Open Source a term with a single, specific definition.

It is damaging to the ideas of FLOSS to allow stuff like "shared source" to be called open source.

EDIT: Removed reference to "open source" being trademarked, it is in fact not, apologies for the confusion.

those statements were not about specific games, they were about steam itself, offline mode is very broken for many people.

This kind of armchair criticism is not particularly enlightening, or productive. You can still make useful and largely correct predictions without understanding all of the dynamics in a system.

After all, all science amounts to an approximate model, even your vaunted "hard sciences".

not everyone shares your, or apples ideas, about what constitutes a "good practice"

>here doesn't seem to be anything that openness would have provided him.

you are clearly not familiar with the history of minecraft, they have a long history, especially in the begging of pushing out features very rapidly, along with the bugfixes that inevitably come with rapid development, not to mention their recent weekly development builds anyone can run.

this kind of very rapid development/response was a big factor in the "viral" nature of minecraft, users could get excited about new features that might be comming tomorrow

How much of this would have been possible, while waiting for months for apple/etc approval?

not to mention the huge modding community that has grown up around minecraft, with virtually every multiplier server and most single player clients being heavily customized and modded.

That would be completely impossible under an iOS style system.

this is also another really terrible argument that is used to rationalize bad behaviour constantly.

At least we arn't as bad as THAT guy.

If the USA does not have the level of human rights abuses of say china, does that give them a free pass? They cannot be questioned or criticized until china "cleans up its act", and everyone complaining should complain about china instead?