As a Linode customer, this post was news to me and cause for concern.

But then I saw that Rackspace had 12:
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/rackspace.com
and I was glad to have left for Linode after Rackspace bought Slicehost.

And saw that others were worse, with Dreamhost at 25:
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/dreamhost.com

If you're someone who spends all their time creating things, spending your life fighting about those things is a soul-sucking, wretched process that takes you away from doing what you love.

I've had work ripped off, sometimes in high-profile ways. But there's a choice to be made: do you keep creating new things and move on, or do you spend your life in litigation, calling people out, and dealing with discussions like what we see here. Being ripped off is bad, but the latter choice is truly awful, and means you're not making newer things and getting better at it.

I'm a bit sad not to see System Shock on that list. I still see it as one of the keystone games that took the action genre to the next level, from the "shoot everything" story-light (*cough*Doom*cough*) to something with more depth and character development.

Sounds like a really good idea, so that Canonical can put actual numbers behind the number of users they have. Also good for the Linux community, so that Canonical can publish those numbers to show more people using at least one major distribution.

On the other hand, the "at least for now" part of "That's all that canonical-census does" is so pathetic. Why is that necessary? Having found nothing nefarious, why still insinuate that Canonical might in the future do something bad? I'm obsessive about privacy too, but you might argue that Canonical has done enough good for the community that they deserve the benefit of the doubt. What's with the community fighting its own?

I run an open source project that reports similar information when checking for updates. It's enormously helpful for us to understand what versions our users are running, and on what platforms. It also helps to have real numbers (rather than "downloads", which are arbitrarily high) when we're trying to make the case for the project, or funding, or whatever.

...or Apple could remove the approval process, and they wouldn't even put themselves in the position of making blown calls.

The reviewers and their 10,000 app workload has nothing to do with it, especially when Apple is charging $100/yr for the privilege of having your work put through this idiotic process.

What everyone predicted has happened.
The servers fail just after the game is released, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of customers are highly unsatisfied, not to say irate.
This is already a PR disaster, should the servers keep failing (whatever the reasons - the people don't care if your servers are to weak to handle the load or if some /b/tards decide to DDOS them for "pool's closed" - they only care that they cannot play the game they BOUGHT) it will become a massive one.
Oh, and since Silent Hunter 5 was already cracked I suspect a crack for Assassin's Creed 2 won't be long.
So in a way, Ubisoft, you decided to ignore the warnings, now your tears, they taste delicious.

I have the dubious joy of working in a medium sized (I'd say 40 to 50 square meters) office with 5 more coworkers. Not only do we three south-side windows (along the south side wall of the building) but also the pipes for heating the 20+ other offices in the building run through ours along two walls. Add to that the body-heat of 6 humans, 12 PCs (two for each of us) 18 monitors (three for each of us - LCDs fortunately) - no air-conditioning of course. And now, to keep really comfy, put the guy who feels cold at 15 degrees celsius right next to the windows... Joy...

Hmmmm.....
Pay big bucks to legally play a game that puts me at the publisher's fickle mercy and demands constant internet access - and bandwith - responding with draconian punishment if I fail to provide this.

OR

Pay nothing and get an illegal copy that works fine from the word "GO"

Decisions, decisions...

DRM, that is Digital Right Management, is actually three evils in one.
First of all, many publishers view DRM as a way to manage (read increase) their rights while reducing the rights of the consumers, i.e. restrict the resale, activation limits, remote killswitches etc.
Secondly, many legitimate consumers find DRM annoying - they purchased a product but cannot use it as they see fit - be it that cannot transfer their music CD to their MP3 player, or play that game without contacting the publisher's master server.
And thirdly DRM is an excellent excuse NOT purchase something, but rather obtain it illegally. After all, stealing from a "nice company" does feel wrong. Screwing some corporate morloch that does its best to screw you feels much less wrong.

Long ago I did not mind ads. Sure, I did not click any significant number of them, but I did neither mind those banners and whatnot being displayed. This changed as they became more and more intrusive and obnoxious. Blinking in bright colors; pop-up; pop-under; pop-in-front-of-the-actual-webpage; punch-the-monkey; you-are-the-100000000st-visitor; *brrrring**brrriiing*-now-with-sound. So I decided to to what I had to do; these "guests" had outstayed their welcome, and now I showed them the door.

You mean like PDF? And TIFF?

Thanks, Captain Anecdote, but you've left out even the anecdotal evidence. What's all this exclusive writing you're doing with Ruby? I've been doing all my grocery list work in Ruby too, and it's *totally* fast enough.

I think Ruby is a fantastic language, but then I see comments like this modded up to 5 that are completely nonsensical. This makes Ruby fandom seem more like Java 1999, which makes me think twice about my positive opinion of it.