I haven't played Gears of War, so I don't know exactly where you're coming from, but you seem to believe that some games need writing that is other than good. No game needs bad writing. Bad writing sometimes doesn't hurt, but good writing always helps to some extent. There are all kinds of good writing; it doesn't have to sound like flowers to be good. Think of Frank Miller, for instance (or Ernest Hemingway).
Anything is better with good writing, but few games depend on it, and judging from prime time television, it's in short supply. I'm happy when games and tv just have *decent* writing.
Because they told the first guy they would publish his comments before they realized that despite having used windows since 3.1, he knew jack-all about it. Here's a summary of his comments, rendered in caveman-speak:
"I use windows long time. Now it pretty! When changing between programs it VERY pretty! But my flash drive doesn't work any more."
Seriously, how can a major news source publish "it just adds to the overall experience." Seriously.
I can't respect a guy who's so utterly hung up on the eye candy. Having my window manager respond instantaneously (go, fluxbox, go!) turns me on much more than it ever would to see 2d windows rendered in 3d perspective.
Not the linked article, but the site of the program that was already named bMail. That's what you get for cease-and-desisting a FOSS project. (not that the author meant to DoS their site, but it's funny that it happened)
Inkscape might be able to replace Visio, if they add an "arrow" object and improve the interface for binding objects together. At this point, the binding scheme is primitive, almost non-existent.
I just can't bring myself to use a large program that's written entirely in java. I'm curious how slowly it would run on my 1.6 GHz / 1 GB laptop, but that's not enough of a motivation for me to install and try it.
I used to believe that the easy portability of OpenOffice couldn't be reached without resorting to Java. But this isn't really the case. Java enables you to distribute a binary that will run anywhere, but if you have the C code, you can compile in whichever environment you plan to use.
OpenOffice might be a good solution for businesses whose employees all use shiny fast desktop boxes, or whose employees don't multitask much. Running photoshop alongside Writer would be a disaster on older machines.
Name, age and location are far too much to share, for any child. If you were interested in victimizing a child, this is all you'd need. The age lets you choose a target, the location to tell you which phonebook to search and the name tells you which page to turn to. Boom, there's your address, and you're just a break-in away from kidnapping the kid.
Let them post pictures and write messages, but for the love of god don't tell people where they live.
You have the wherewithal to take advantage of the monitoring software, or make full use of your daughter's password when she gives it to you, but most parents aren't Slashdot readers.
Myspace is introducing this program for legal protection, not because they think it will make them more popular. They won't do much to promote it, so only a few parents will know about it at all (kids certainly won't tell). Only some of those will have the capacity to take full advantage of the spyware, so overall the adverse impact on myspace should be small.
Has your mother got severe learning difficulties, or do you just enjoy patronising her?
Dude...you don't understand the difficulties people face in learning to use their computers. Sure, young people "just get it" to a certain extent, but not everyone has the intuition that we've grown up with.
If I'd said "This is thunderbird. It is another program for receiving and sending e-mail," she'd have balked. She's used to one thing, and, unfortunately, it's the client she got when she had aol (she's on roadrunner now, but still uses an aol address and software). Switching from software that you're used to to software that you're unfamiliar with is a at worst an annoyance, to the slashdot crowd, and at best, a pleasure. For regular people the barrier of switching is really significant. Switching is so hard that even though aol has terrible ui and still bombards her with advertisements, she will be less efficient and happy with thunderbird and firefox for quite some time.
Explaining *why* she was switching really helped her initiative. The "little man" provided by aol is not as good as the new ones. That kind of metaphor is appealing. It's not patronizing because she knows it's just a metaphor. Do you think it's really a bad one?
I always assumed that when someone got busted on a child pornography charge, it was clear that the photo subjects were under 18 because they looked *much* younger than 18. Is this the case, or is there something more I should know?
I know that people marketing legal porn have to keep records so that they can prove that their girls are of age, but what about the average teenage guy with a folder full of jpgs and mpgs from kazaa?
I have seen a good deal of porn that would seem to be of 15-16 year old girls, if not for its conspicuous placement on high-traffic websites.
How can I make sure that the porn that I keep intentionally is not going to get me in trouble?
With full knowledge of the potential for abuse, I've had "auto-accept" enabled in my IM client for several years. It's a huge time-saver.
With auto-accept:
falladir: send me that song you were talking about
friend: ok
--popup: accept file transfer?--
--click yes--
--wait for download--
Without: same thing but with two of the steps gone. What if I leave the computer? What if I tab into starcraft? I'm sorry that your printer got abused.
Sure, this tubes thing is not a big improvement on existing technology, but it's going to be more convenient than aim transfers, ftps, and shared network folders.
"How would one explain how the internet works to someone with no clue at all?"
I was setting my mom up with gaim, FireFox and Thunderbird, and I ran into this kind of challenge. She has only ever used AOL for e-mail and browsing.
I told her that the program she had been using, the one provided by AOL, was like a "little man." "Your computer is like a city-state," I told her, "and you are the ruler. The internet is everything outside your city state." By describing each application as a "little man" or, if that broke down, a team of little men, I was very successful in conveying the workings of the internet to her.
"Some of the little men on your computer never leave your kingdom. There are simple ones, like Calc and Notepad, and more complicated ones, like Word and Excel. Basic media playering software also never leaves your kingdom to communicate with the internet.
Your browser is a little man that runs around (or makes phone calls, whatever) to little men in other cities, called (in geekspeak) "servers." You tell your browser to get the content of a webpage, which has an address, (http://www....) and he runs to that address, obtains the content, and runs back to display it for you. He's also able to bring back other kinds of packages than webpages. This is how you download files.
Your chat client is anothel little man. His job is to communicate with other little men who have similar purposes (mentioning the central AOL server is optional).
You can take this analogy pretty far: "when you want to find out if I'm online, mom, you start your chat client (yes, that's gaim) and the first thing he does is to run around to the city-states of all the people on your contact list, finding out who is online and who is not. In the process, he informs any of your online contacts that you can now be reached through him. If you want to send a message to someone that he says is online, you call him before you [at this point, alt+tab or click on the gaim icon in the tray], dictate the message, and tell him to go deliver it."
I think this quote got modded down because he can't legally release the source code under GPL unless he owns the copyright to it, which is what's at issue in the first place.
I've heard that even.rtf isn't universal enough, being a MS-controlled format. But switching to.odt might make you safe.
Word sometimes isn't even compatible with other copies of the same version of Word.
Slashdot Mirror
"companies in the future will start referring to this action"
I'm no lawyer, but I aren't precedents set by courts? The actions of a company's legal team have no effect on the status quo.
I haven't played Gears of War, so I don't know exactly where you're coming from, but you seem to believe that some games need writing that is other than good. No game needs bad writing. Bad writing sometimes doesn't hurt, but good writing always helps to some extent. There are all kinds of good writing; it doesn't have to sound like flowers to be good. Think of Frank Miller, for instance (or Ernest Hemingway).
Anything is better with good writing, but few games depend on it, and judging from prime time television, it's in short supply. I'm happy when games and tv just have *decent* writing.
What guarantee can the free software people give against NDA violations anyway? Their pockets are only so deep.
Informative? Mods on crack?
Because they told the first guy they would publish his comments before they realized that despite having used windows since 3.1, he knew jack-all about it. Here's a summary of his comments, rendered in caveman-speak:
"I use windows long time. Now it pretty! When changing between programs it VERY pretty! But my flash drive doesn't work any more."
Seriously, how can a major news source publish "it just adds to the overall experience." Seriously.
I can't respect a guy who's so utterly hung up on the eye candy. Having my window manager respond instantaneously (go, fluxbox, go!) turns me on much more than it ever would to see 2d windows rendered in 3d perspective.
Thanks for setting me straight. I have been a victim of FUD.
He did make a point. He reminded us of one of the freedoms that Apple denies users. You can't upgrade hardware on a mac. Is that clear enough?
You drop your phone in the toilet while it's flushing, as two people I know have done.
Oh, I wonder where I got that idea? Do you happen to know why it takes so ridiculously long to start up?
Not the linked article, but the site of the program that was already named bMail. That's what you get for cease-and-desisting a FOSS project. (not that the author meant to DoS their site, but it's funny that it happened)
Inkscape might be able to replace Visio, if they add an "arrow" object and improve the interface for binding objects together. At this point, the binding scheme is primitive, almost non-existent.
I just can't bring myself to use a large program that's written entirely in java. I'm curious how slowly it would run on my 1.6 GHz / 1 GB laptop, but that's not enough of a motivation for me to install and try it.
I used to believe that the easy portability of OpenOffice couldn't be reached without resorting to Java. But this isn't really the case. Java enables you to distribute a binary that will run anywhere, but if you have the C code, you can compile in whichever environment you plan to use.
OpenOffice might be a good solution for businesses whose employees all use shiny fast desktop boxes, or whose employees don't multitask much. Running photoshop alongside Writer would be a disaster on older machines.
Name, age and location are far too much to share, for any child. If you were interested in victimizing a child, this is all you'd need. The age lets you choose a target, the location to tell you which phonebook to search and the name tells you which page to turn to. Boom, there's your address, and you're just a break-in away from kidnapping the kid. Let them post pictures and write messages, but for the love of god don't tell people where they live.
Oh, true...as long as they stay on myspace they can't pollute the rest of the net. Except digg. They seem to like digg.
You have the wherewithal to take advantage of the monitoring software, or make full use of your daughter's password when she gives it to you, but most parents aren't Slashdot readers.
Myspace is introducing this program for legal protection, not because they think it will make them more popular. They won't do much to promote it, so only a few parents will know about it at all (kids certainly won't tell). Only some of those will have the capacity to take full advantage of the spyware, so overall the adverse impact on myspace should be small.
Has your mother got severe learning difficulties, or do you just enjoy patronising her?
Dude...you don't understand the difficulties people face in learning to use their computers. Sure, young people "just get it" to a certain extent, but not everyone has the intuition that we've grown up with.
If I'd said "This is thunderbird. It is another program for receiving and sending e-mail," she'd have balked. She's used to one thing, and, unfortunately, it's the client she got when she had aol (she's on roadrunner now, but still uses an aol address and software). Switching from software that you're used to to software that you're unfamiliar with is a at worst an annoyance, to the slashdot crowd, and at best, a pleasure. For regular people the barrier of switching is really significant. Switching is so hard that even though aol has terrible ui and still bombards her with advertisements, she will be less efficient and happy with thunderbird and firefox for quite some time.
Explaining *why* she was switching really helped her initiative. The "little man" provided by aol is not as good as the new ones. That kind of metaphor is appealing. It's not patronizing because she knows it's just a metaphor. Do you think it's really a bad one?
I always assumed that when someone got busted on a child pornography charge, it was clear that the photo subjects were under 18 because they looked *much* younger than 18. Is this the case, or is there something more I should know?
I know that people marketing legal porn have to keep records so that they can prove that their girls are of age, but what about the average teenage guy with a folder full of jpgs and mpgs from kazaa?
I have seen a good deal of porn that would seem to be of 15-16 year old girls, if not for its conspicuous placement on high-traffic websites.
How can I make sure that the porn that I keep intentionally is not going to get me in trouble?
With full knowledge of the potential for abuse, I've had "auto-accept" enabled in my IM client for several years. It's a huge time-saver. With auto-accept: falladir: send me that song you were talking about friend: ok --popup: accept file transfer?-- --click yes-- --wait for download-- Without: same thing but with two of the steps gone. What if I leave the computer? What if I tab into starcraft? I'm sorry that your printer got abused. Sure, this tubes thing is not a big improvement on existing technology, but it's going to be more convenient than aim transfers, ftps, and shared network folders.
"How would one explain how the internet works to someone with no clue at all?" I was setting my mom up with gaim, FireFox and Thunderbird, and I ran into this kind of challenge. She has only ever used AOL for e-mail and browsing. I told her that the program she had been using, the one provided by AOL, was like a "little man." "Your computer is like a city-state," I told her, "and you are the ruler. The internet is everything outside your city state." By describing each application as a "little man" or, if that broke down, a team of little men, I was very successful in conveying the workings of the internet to her. "Some of the little men on your computer never leave your kingdom. There are simple ones, like Calc and Notepad, and more complicated ones, like Word and Excel. Basic media playering software also never leaves your kingdom to communicate with the internet. Your browser is a little man that runs around (or makes phone calls, whatever) to little men in other cities, called (in geekspeak) "servers." You tell your browser to get the content of a webpage, which has an address, (http://www....) and he runs to that address, obtains the content, and runs back to display it for you. He's also able to bring back other kinds of packages than webpages. This is how you download files. Your chat client is anothel little man. His job is to communicate with other little men who have similar purposes (mentioning the central AOL server is optional). You can take this analogy pretty far: "when you want to find out if I'm online, mom, you start your chat client (yes, that's gaim) and the first thing he does is to run around to the city-states of all the people on your contact list, finding out who is online and who is not. In the process, he informs any of your online contacts that you can now be reached through him. If you want to send a message to someone that he says is online, you call him before you [at this point, alt+tab or click on the gaim icon in the tray], dictate the message, and tell him to go deliver it."
Maybe he wrote the article. You never know, with Wikipedia.
I think this quote got modded down because he can't legally release the source code under GPL unless he owns the copyright to it, which is what's at issue in the first place.
I've heard that even .rtf isn't universal enough, being a MS-controlled format. But switching to .odt might make you safe.
Word sometimes isn't even compatible with other copies of the same version of Word.
Yeah, and I bet it won't be possible to get it for free in warez rings, either.
If the helmet is rigid, heavy and cushioned, the damage from a headshot would be minimal. The weight is the problematic part.
*suspense