I've got the Linux version of FF4B9, and I don't see anywhere to turn on this feature. (Using Ubuntu / Gnome). Is this feature not included in the Linux version?
Wow me too! No idea why Insert is the shoot key. I was 5 so my mum helped me shoot. But there was also a bug in version 1 (or possibly some BIOS problem on my machine) where Space and Insert couldn't be pressed simultaneously, so if one player was firing, the other couldn't jump. Splash.
The links below have been reported to contain Malware, so don't click without reading first.
I'm confused. wikileaks.org redirects to mirror.wikileaks.info. That page looks like WikiLeaks did a year ago (a simple MediaWiki site), but it has up-to-date content. Meanwhile, the official domain we have had for the past fortnight, wikileaks.ch is still running and serving the "new look" which seems to just have the cablegate stuff.
mirror.wikileaks.info links to wikileaks.ch if you click on cablegate. They also claim this is a false spam report; the spam report claims that "Wikileaks.info is NOT connected with Julian Assange or the Wikileaks organization" and that "We also note that the content at mirror.wikileaks.info is rather unlike what's at the real Wikileaks mirrors which suggests that the wikileaks.info site may not be under the control of Wikileaks itself, but rather some other group." (Fair enough; it does claim to be a mirror.)
So is wikileaks.info a malware site or a legitimate WikiLeaks mirror? I'm all for WikiLeaks mirrors, but it seems like the main wikileaks.org domain should link to the main website, not a very different mirror. And if wikileaks.info is a malware site, where do you go to get all the other WikiLeaks content from the old site (it doesn't seem to be available anymore from wikileaks.ch)?
A bunch of guys have been working on the Myst movie for a couple of years now, and recently got picked up by a Hollywood studio. I hope that project goes well. Though it's not technically a video game movie (as the team are quick to point out) -- it is based on the novels which provide a lot of additional backstory to the games.
Maybe more movies should be made based on the backstory of the games, rather than the games themselves?
Exactly, so I am all for a bunch of people in suits making decisions about what labels to stick on boxes so that parents can realise that they perhaps shouldn't be buying it for their thirteen-year-old son.
I don't want the government telling me what I can't watch though.
If you're concerned about your right to steal music/movies/books/etc by getting them from torrent sites, then you are claiming that your "right" to steal trumps the creator's (intellectual) property rights. Not exactly what you had in mind I don't think, but that's what you're complaining about in the current context.
This debate has nothing to do with piracy. It is about the openness of the Internet. What you are saying is "if you think you deserve to be able to view whatever you want online, then you are a thief." Very much like the debate in Australia which has been reduced to "if you think you deserve to be able to view whatever you want online, then you are a child pornographer."
The debate is not "right to steal vs right to monopolise creative works". It is "right to an open communications framework vs censorship." The fact of the matter is that an open Internet allows piracy, something the media companies have to deal with. It is an unfortunate but necessary consequence of an open communications platform, just like the post office lets me send pirated DVDs -- a necessary consequence of the existence of the postal service.
You know what? I am so sick of being told "if you don't like it, vote for someone else." How does that solve anything? I'll have to convince everyone else to vote for someone else too. And that assumes the other guy won't do that, which in this day and age is a pretty slim chance.
My vote doesn't count at all, and even if it did, the other choice is just as bad. I'm glad to live in a democracy, but "vote for the other guy" is never a solution unless you can convince a majority of constituents to vote en masse for a viable alternative.
That's the problem with crying "slippery slope!" If I say "we can't give the government power A, they'll soon give themselves power B", people will just go "so what, A's not so bad. Neither is B." But if I say "we can't give the government power A, they'll soon give themselves power Z", people like you say "that's quite a leap you're making." You people can't connect the dots from A to Z. Next they'll give themselves power B, and you'll say "so what?" Then they'll give themselves power C and you'll say "so what?" By the time they're up to N you'll be so used to powers A, B, C and so on that you'll still say "so what?" Eventually they'll come to granting themselves power Y and we'll say "we can't give them power Y because they'll soon give themselves Z", and you'll say "so what, we already have X. Y isn't so bad and neither is Z." And you'll have forgotten about when they were first proposing power A that you didn't mind because it was a long way from Z.
This is why it's the slippery slope. It always makes the really bad consequences seem so far off that nobody cares. Of course you should be worried.
That's the model that ended up causing the "Source" engine to be named so.
From what I heard, near the end of the development of Half-Life 1, Valve had their "src" directory (their mainline) and wanted to make some more radical engine improvements. These improvements were too last-minute to make it into the game, so they created a branch for the "gold" version of Half-Life, called "goldsrc", which was only used to commit stable code and polish the game, and the experimental changes were committed to the trunk "src".
Hence, the Half-Life 1 engine ended up being informally known as the "GoldSrc" engine, while the main "src" trunk went on to be officially named the "Source" engine.
My god yes. I played through the entire series and loved it, but that last puzzle in Path of the Shell... I don't know what they were thinking.
Well, actually I do. They planned it as a multiplayer game, where one person would have to stand there, and another person would have to climb up and press something else at the same time. I don't quite remember the details. Then they hastily reworked it into a single player game after the multiplayer collapsed, and turned a lot of the "you need two people to do this" puzzles into timing puzzles where "you press one thing, then wait a bit, then get the result". Which explains a couple of those late-game timing puzzles.
But yeah... I don't know why they decided to do that at all.
Indeed, but even if you have evidence, without the student having admitted cheating it's very hard to get any "real" action taken against the student (likely just deducting marks for the assessment). Saying this as a tutor who has been involved in pressing plagiarism cases against students in the past.
The universities say "we take plagiarism very seriously", and do indeed have serious avenues to pursue plagiarism cases, with serious consequences. But unfortunately this whole "serious about plagiarism" business has a backfiring consequence -- any cases which are not major incidents or without absolute proof can't be taken along the formal process at all (because everyone is scared students might sue the university or something).
So bluffing, having students fess up, then giving them minor penalties is probably a good deal for the professor.
I wonder how far you can take this? For example, a program that requires certain versions of: Mono, glib, gphoto, and other libraries, would it be able to grab all of those?
I don't know about CDE, but apt-get has been able to do this for 15 years.
Maybe it changed since I last installed it, but I had to extract the files to/opt/firefox, changing permissions so te directory is writable by regular users (for automatic updates), create some symlinks, hunt down where the "open source flash" plugin is so I could have "Adobe Flash" etc.
A bit harder than just double clicking on an downloaded.exe and next->next->...->finish.
I'm not sure what steps are involved, but it looks like Mozilla currently provides a.tar.bz2 for Firefox. If you unzip it, it is all there, so you can just run it straight from the directory. I guess installing it would be harder and not for "normal users" which I suppose means it's easier to install Firefox on Windows than on Linux, assuming that Firefox isn't included in the Linux distro's repository (which it almost always is...)
But that isn't a problem with Linux. It's a problem with the way Mozilla packaged it. They could have provided a.deb package, which would install with a double click. Failing that, they could have provided an executable file which installs Firefox manually, just like the Windows version. There is nothing inherently special about Windows that allows installer programs where Linux does not.
And again, it is more difficult to do than just double click a downloaded.exe or.zip. For example - do you know a repository where Firefox is?
Well yeah... in Ubuntu it is installed as the default web browser, and automatically updated. If you don't want the official Ubuntu one, and want a bleeding edge version, you can google "Firefox PPA" which takes you to Launchpad where you can install the Mozilla daily build PPA.
My argument is in the very common case ("it is Debian-approved"), installing software in Linux is a total no-brainer, and much more secure than the Windows way, and it will keep automatically updated. Otherwise, in the case where the provider has done as much work packaging it as they have on Windows, it will be no harder to install on Linux than on Windows. Obviously, if the software provider has done a poorer job packaging than they did on Windows (as Mozilla seem to have), your mileage may vary.
Ever tried to install the actual Firefox on Debian? It's harder than just downloading an installer binary and running it.
I have, in fact, for example tried to run early betas. It's not any harder than installing software on Windows, but it's not quite as nice as when it's already packaged in apt.
Can you install Linux software from CD or flash drive? Will it work with the regular package manager? Let's say i have a PC without internet connection. I can download the software and record it on a CD on my regular PC then go there and install it, Can I do the same with Linux software that is not part of the install CDs?
Yes. The apt-get system obviously only works properly when connected. But what apt-get is doing is just automatically downloading and installing.deb files. You can just as easily manually install.deb files from a CD or another website. Once installed, they do work with the regular package manager and appear as a normal package once installed (and can even receive automatic updates if they are also in the online repository).
In fact, most third-party software for Linux comes as a.deb or RPM package which you install by double-clicking. So it's just like Windows except it installs into the package management system.
Linux way of installing software is great until you want to install a program that "the community" does not like for some reason. Maybe the software is closed source. Maybe it uses patented code (even though my country does not recognize software patents and I do not care about them).
Not at all. You're sort of implying that the Linux package manager is like the iPhone store (or more closely, the new Mac App Store), where if Debian doesn't approve, then you can't use the package manager and have to do everything manually. This isn't true at all.
The apt system, by default provides the Debian repository, but you can always add new repositories from any website you like, providing all the benefits of package management. The best example of this is Launchpad, which lets anybody have a "PPA" (personal package archive). I can add your PPA to my system, then install your packages using the regular package manager, receive automatic updates, etc. Of course, I would have to trust you, but the choice is mine. In Ubuntu, there is an easy user interface for adding PPAs and other archives.
So yes, the Linux way of installing software extends beyond the "Debian-approved" (or Ubuntu) packages to everybody who wants to provide a repository, including closed source code.
Having to run the native code installer as an administrator,
Using completely non-standard installation procedures,
Having programs typically install a lot of unwanted side-programs which slow down the computer,
No standard way to automatically update programs, causing every program to either not update at all, or implement its own auto-updater which typically runs in the background at all times,
For developers, extremely difficult installation of libraries, as there is no standard place to put them.
All of which are solved if using the apt-get system or a similar package manager.
I agree that there are a lot of good commercial applications out there for Windows, and far fewer in the commercial space for Linux.
But you should not equate "commercial" with "full applications" (versus "1-function free" apps). I don't do much art stuff but when I do I use Inkscape and it's perfectly fine... it seems to be compatible with illustrator. (Gimp sucks though, but that is simply a bad example of open source.) My brother uses Blender for all his 3D production work.
If your mentality is "you should use what everybody else uses", then obviously you will be using Windows. In that case, I can't argue with you, because it is not the case that everybody uses Linux. We may as well never change anything.
I personally hate MS APIs, especially DirectX. I switched from Direct3D to OpenGL and I find it much nicer, and of course it works across many platforms including on Windows. I agree Visual Studio is a pretty nice IDE but again, it locks you in to using Microsoft everything. If you're happy to use Microsoft languages and Microsoft APIs and write software that only works on Microsoft Windows, then Visual Studio is for you.
I try to be as portable as possible so I avoid using Windows-specific (or Linux-specific) APIs. I don't use an IDE, not because I don't have a good one, but because I am far more comfortable using a really good text editor (vim), a really good command-line (Gnome terminal + bash) and a huge range of perfectly fine compilers for a huge range of languages (gcc, python, ghc, javac, etc). This is where the "do one thing do it well" mentality of Unix works really well: I'd much rather use a bunch of quality disconnected apps than a single monolithic IDE which is only "reasonable" (i.e., just an "ordinary" text editor in Visual Studio).
That may have been the theme of the article, but I think you're vastly underselling Linux. Now obviously most people aren't as comfortable with Linux as they are with good ol' Windows, but I am sure it's just a matter of perspective.
I am fairly technically competent, so I'm perhaps biased, but I frankly don't see how the rest of the planet stands using Windows any longer. I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows XP on my laptop, and my usage consists of running Linux all day for all tasks, and switching to Windows solely when I want to play games or fill in my taxes (in Australia, we have a proprietary Windows program to do taxes... yay).
Doing any non-trivial task in Windows sucks up my patience very quickly. I often feel like throwing my machine out the window after a few minutes. Installing software is a disgrace. It always has been with Windows and it still is. If you want to install a program, you typically google around until you find a few things that look OK, download them from untrustworthy websites, double-click the installers, running untrusted native code on your machine, click through license agreements, choose where to install them, and hope they don't own your machine. Even those that don't contain malware still typically install new icons in your system tray, run services in the background on startup, and/or install browser toolbars. Even open source code still has to be installed by this same process. You talk about a "mish-mash of spaghetti code written by unorganised contributors"... but Microsoft only supports the core OS in Windows, and every other piece of software is a complete gamble.
Contrast with Debian/Ubuntu, where there is a centralised package management system. It hasn't always been pretty, but the latest Ubuntu releases make it possible to install just about any piece of software (literally, something for every need I've ever had in the past 3 years besides professional games) with the following process: Applications -> Ubuntu Software Center. Type in some keywords to find some software to install. Click the name, then "Install". Within half a minute, the software is downloaded and installed with no questions asked, and can be removed just as easily. All software is open source and vetted by the community, so at a minimum it will not install unwanted launchers or browser plugins or malware. All programs are automatically updated every day, so there is no need for each program to install its own auto updater. Sure, it's written by different contributors, but I don't see the difference between this and Windows, except that on Windows the community is not checking that the programs aren't nasty.
And Debian has had this system for around 15 years. Microsoft is just now (in the wake of Apple's iPhone store) mumbling about making their own app store which might finally alleviate these problems. But these problems are non-existent in the Linux world, and have been for more than a decade. I just don't understand how people put up with Windows, and I can only imagine it's because they have never used a non-Windows computer.
It doesn't sound too "easy" if you're constantly having to untag yourself from photos. There's still the problem that you're in the photos for the world to see, even if your name isn't applied to them.
There's also the period of time between each tag and your untagging. And the photos you've missed.
If you're concerned that there are photos of you online with or without your name attached to them, from a privacy standpoint, then you aren't winning.
I'm all for languages which allow Unicode characters in their source (Unicode strings, Unicode comments). That simply makes it easier for foreign developers and foreign language strings. Luckily, most modern languages (including Go) do allow this.
But Unicode syntax is a nightmare to type. It should be perfectly possible for me to type an entire program using only the symbols I see on my standard US keyboard.
I don't equate "mainstream" with "iPhone" -- certainly iPhone is a mainstream device, but I don't consider not being in the App Store as being "out of the mainstream."
I don't see how it helps the "no DRM" cause to take a GPL'd program, coat it with DRM, and then sell it on a locked device without any legal or technical ability to modify or redistribute the program.
Sure Apple are working to end DRM'd music, but they're one of the biggest supporters of DRM'd software. I'm pretty sure the Free Software Foundation is more concerned with the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got the Linux version of FF4B9, and I don't see anywhere to turn on this feature. (Using Ubuntu / Gnome). Is this feature not included in the Linux version?
Wow me too! No idea why Insert is the shoot key. I was 5 so my mum helped me shoot. But there was also a bug in version 1 (or possibly some BIOS problem on my machine) where Space and Insert couldn't be pressed simultaneously, so if one player was firing, the other couldn't jump. Splash.
Captain Comic
What browser are you using? RockMelt?
No other browser I know of (yet) uses Facebook without my permission.
The links below have been reported to contain Malware, so don't click without reading first.
I'm confused. wikileaks.org redirects to mirror.wikileaks.info. That page looks like WikiLeaks did a year ago (a simple MediaWiki site), but it has up-to-date content. Meanwhile, the official domain we have had for the past fortnight, wikileaks.ch is still running and serving the "new look" which seems to just have the cablegate stuff.
mirror.wikileaks.info links to wikileaks.ch if you click on cablegate. They also claim this is a false spam report; the spam report claims that "Wikileaks.info is NOT connected with Julian Assange or the Wikileaks organization" and that "We also note that the content at mirror.wikileaks.info is rather unlike what's at the real Wikileaks mirrors which suggests that the wikileaks.info site may not be under the control of Wikileaks itself, but rather some other group." (Fair enough; it does claim to be a mirror.)
So is wikileaks.info a malware site or a legitimate WikiLeaks mirror? I'm all for WikiLeaks mirrors, but it seems like the main wikileaks.org domain should link to the main website, not a very different mirror. And if wikileaks.info is a malware site, where do you go to get all the other WikiLeaks content from the old site (it doesn't seem to be available anymore from wikileaks.ch)?
By this logic, FarmVille, with about 62 million users, deserves at least one epic Hollywood blockbuster.
A bunch of guys have been working on the Myst movie for a couple of years now, and recently got picked up by a Hollywood studio. I hope that project goes well. Though it's not technically a video game movie (as the team are quick to point out) -- it is based on the novels which provide a lot of additional backstory to the games.
Maybe more movies should be made based on the backstory of the games, rather than the games themselves?
Exactly, so I am all for a bunch of people in suits making decisions about what labels to stick on boxes so that parents can realise that they perhaps shouldn't be buying it for their thirteen-year-old son.
I don't want the government telling me what I can't watch though.
This debate has nothing to do with piracy. It is about the openness of the Internet. What you are saying is "if you think you deserve to be able to view whatever you want online, then you are a thief." Very much like the debate in Australia which has been reduced to "if you think you deserve to be able to view whatever you want online, then you are a child pornographer."
The debate is not "right to steal vs right to monopolise creative works". It is "right to an open communications framework vs censorship." The fact of the matter is that an open Internet allows piracy, something the media companies have to deal with. It is an unfortunate but necessary consequence of an open communications platform, just like the post office lets me send pirated DVDs -- a necessary consequence of the existence of the postal service.
You know what? I am so sick of being told "if you don't like it, vote for someone else." How does that solve anything? I'll have to convince everyone else to vote for someone else too. And that assumes the other guy won't do that, which in this day and age is a pretty slim chance.
My vote doesn't count at all, and even if it did, the other choice is just as bad. I'm glad to live in a democracy, but "vote for the other guy" is never a solution unless you can convince a majority of constituents to vote en masse for a viable alternative.
That's the problem with crying "slippery slope!" If I say "we can't give the government power A, they'll soon give themselves power B", people will just go "so what, A's not so bad. Neither is B." But if I say "we can't give the government power A, they'll soon give themselves power Z", people like you say "that's quite a leap you're making." You people can't connect the dots from A to Z. Next they'll give themselves power B, and you'll say "so what?" Then they'll give themselves power C and you'll say "so what?" By the time they're up to N you'll be so used to powers A, B, C and so on that you'll still say "so what?" Eventually they'll come to granting themselves power Y and we'll say "we can't give them power Y because they'll soon give themselves Z", and you'll say "so what, we already have X. Y isn't so bad and neither is Z." And you'll have forgotten about when they were first proposing power A that you didn't mind because it was a long way from Z.
This is why it's the slippery slope. It always makes the really bad consequences seem so far off that nobody cares. Of course you should be worried.
That's the model that ended up causing the "Source" engine to be named so.
From what I heard, near the end of the development of Half-Life 1, Valve had their "src" directory (their mainline) and wanted to make some more radical engine improvements. These improvements were too last-minute to make it into the game, so they created a branch for the "gold" version of Half-Life, called "goldsrc", which was only used to commit stable code and polish the game, and the experimental changes were committed to the trunk "src".
Hence, the Half-Life 1 engine ended up being informally known as the "GoldSrc" engine, while the main "src" trunk went on to be officially named the "Source" engine.
My god yes. I played through the entire series and loved it, but that last puzzle in Path of the Shell... I don't know what they were thinking.
Well, actually I do. They planned it as a multiplayer game, where one person would have to stand there, and another person would have to climb up and press something else at the same time. I don't quite remember the details. Then they hastily reworked it into a single player game after the multiplayer collapsed, and turned a lot of the "you need two people to do this" puzzles into timing puzzles where "you press one thing, then wait a bit, then get the result". Which explains a couple of those late-game timing puzzles.
But yeah ... I don't know why they decided to do that at all.
They can, however, have their entire business taken out of existence on the whim of the Attorney General.
Indeed, but even if you have evidence, without the student having admitted cheating it's very hard to get any "real" action taken against the student (likely just deducting marks for the assessment). Saying this as a tutor who has been involved in pressing plagiarism cases against students in the past.
The universities say "we take plagiarism very seriously", and do indeed have serious avenues to pursue plagiarism cases, with serious consequences. But unfortunately this whole "serious about plagiarism" business has a backfiring consequence -- any cases which are not major incidents or without absolute proof can't be taken along the formal process at all (because everyone is scared students might sue the university or something).
So bluffing, having students fess up, then giving them minor penalties is probably a good deal for the professor.
What? Have you used Linux (Debian or Ubuntu, but most other distros support a package manager in one form or another)?
See the Ubuntu Software Center.
I don't know about CDE, but apt-get has been able to do this for 15 years.
I'm not sure what steps are involved, but it looks like Mozilla currently provides a .tar.bz2 for Firefox. If you unzip it, it is all there, so you can just run it straight from the directory. I guess installing it would be harder and not for "normal users" which I suppose means it's easier to install Firefox on Windows than on Linux, assuming that Firefox isn't included in the Linux distro's repository (which it almost always is...)
But that isn't a problem with Linux. It's a problem with the way Mozilla packaged it. They could have provided a .deb package, which would install with a double click. Failing that, they could have provided an executable file which installs Firefox manually, just like the Windows version. There is nothing inherently special about Windows that allows installer programs where Linux does not.
Well yeah ... in Ubuntu it is installed as the default web browser, and automatically updated. If you don't want the official Ubuntu one, and want a bleeding edge version, you can google "Firefox PPA" which takes you to Launchpad where you can install the Mozilla daily build PPA.
My argument is in the very common case ("it is Debian-approved"), installing software in Linux is a total no-brainer, and much more secure than the Windows way, and it will keep automatically updated. Otherwise, in the case where the provider has done as much work packaging it as they have on Windows, it will be no harder to install on Linux than on Windows. Obviously, if the software provider has done a poorer job packaging than they did on Windows (as Mozilla seem to have), your mileage may vary.
Ever tried to install the actual Firefox on Debian? It's harder than just downloading an installer binary and running it.
I have, in fact, for example tried to run early betas. It's not any harder than installing software on Windows, but it's not quite as nice as when it's already packaged in apt.
Can you install Linux software from CD or flash drive? Will it work with the regular package manager? Let's say i have a PC without internet connection. I can download the software and record it on a CD on my regular PC then go there and install it, Can I do the same with Linux software that is not part of the install CDs?
Yes. The apt-get system obviously only works properly when connected. But what apt-get is doing is just automatically downloading and installing .deb files. You can just as easily manually install .deb files from a CD or another website. Once installed, they do work with the regular package manager and appear as a normal package once installed (and can even receive automatic updates if they are also in the online repository).
In fact, most third-party software for Linux comes as a .deb or RPM package which you install by double-clicking. So it's just like Windows except it installs into the package management system.
Linux way of installing software is great until you want to install a program that "the community" does not like for some reason. Maybe the software is closed source. Maybe it uses patented code (even though my country does not recognize software patents and I do not care about them).
Not at all. You're sort of implying that the Linux package manager is like the iPhone store (or more closely, the new Mac App Store), where if Debian doesn't approve, then you can't use the package manager and have to do everything manually. This isn't true at all.
The apt system, by default provides the Debian repository, but you can always add new repositories from any website you like, providing all the benefits of package management. The best example of this is Launchpad, which lets anybody have a "PPA" (personal package archive). I can add your PPA to my system, then install your packages using the regular package manager, receive automatic updates, etc. Of course, I would have to trust you, but the choice is mine. In Ubuntu, there is an easy user interface for adding PPAs and other archives.
So yes, the Linux way of installing software extends beyond the "Debian-approved" (or Ubuntu) packages to everybody who wants to provide a repository, including closed source code.
No, as I explained, I have a problem:
All of which are solved if using the apt-get system or a similar package manager.
I agree that there are a lot of good commercial applications out there for Windows, and far fewer in the commercial space for Linux.
But you should not equate "commercial" with "full applications" (versus "1-function free" apps). I don't do much art stuff but when I do I use Inkscape and it's perfectly fine ... it seems to be compatible with illustrator. (Gimp sucks though, but that is simply a bad example of open source.) My brother uses Blender for all his 3D production work.
If your mentality is "you should use what everybody else uses", then obviously you will be using Windows. In that case, I can't argue with you, because it is not the case that everybody uses Linux. We may as well never change anything.
I personally hate MS APIs, especially DirectX. I switched from Direct3D to OpenGL and I find it much nicer, and of course it works across many platforms including on Windows. I agree Visual Studio is a pretty nice IDE but again, it locks you in to using Microsoft everything. If you're happy to use Microsoft languages and Microsoft APIs and write software that only works on Microsoft Windows, then Visual Studio is for you.
I try to be as portable as possible so I avoid using Windows-specific (or Linux-specific) APIs. I don't use an IDE, not because I don't have a good one, but because I am far more comfortable using a really good text editor (vim), a really good command-line (Gnome terminal + bash) and a huge range of perfectly fine compilers for a huge range of languages (gcc, python, ghc, javac, etc). This is where the "do one thing do it well" mentality of Unix works really well: I'd much rather use a bunch of quality disconnected apps than a single monolithic IDE which is only "reasonable" (i.e., just an "ordinary" text editor in Visual Studio).
That may have been the theme of the article, but I think you're vastly underselling Linux. Now obviously most people aren't as comfortable with Linux as they are with good ol' Windows, but I am sure it's just a matter of perspective.
I am fairly technically competent, so I'm perhaps biased, but I frankly don't see how the rest of the planet stands using Windows any longer. I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows XP on my laptop, and my usage consists of running Linux all day for all tasks, and switching to Windows solely when I want to play games or fill in my taxes (in Australia, we have a proprietary Windows program to do taxes ... yay).
Doing any non-trivial task in Windows sucks up my patience very quickly. I often feel like throwing my machine out the window after a few minutes. Installing software is a disgrace. It always has been with Windows and it still is. If you want to install a program, you typically google around until you find a few things that look OK, download them from untrustworthy websites, double-click the installers, running untrusted native code on your machine, click through license agreements, choose where to install them, and hope they don't own your machine. Even those that don't contain malware still typically install new icons in your system tray, run services in the background on startup, and/or install browser toolbars. Even open source code still has to be installed by this same process. You talk about a "mish-mash of spaghetti code written by unorganised contributors"... but Microsoft only supports the core OS in Windows, and every other piece of software is a complete gamble.
Contrast with Debian/Ubuntu, where there is a centralised package management system. It hasn't always been pretty, but the latest Ubuntu releases make it possible to install just about any piece of software (literally, something for every need I've ever had in the past 3 years besides professional games) with the following process: Applications -> Ubuntu Software Center. Type in some keywords to find some software to install. Click the name, then "Install". Within half a minute, the software is downloaded and installed with no questions asked, and can be removed just as easily. All software is open source and vetted by the community, so at a minimum it will not install unwanted launchers or browser plugins or malware. All programs are automatically updated every day, so there is no need for each program to install its own auto updater. Sure, it's written by different contributors, but I don't see the difference between this and Windows, except that on Windows the community is not checking that the programs aren't nasty.
And Debian has had this system for around 15 years. Microsoft is just now (in the wake of Apple's iPhone store) mumbling about making their own app store which might finally alleviate these problems. But these problems are non-existent in the Linux world, and have been for more than a decade. I just don't understand how people put up with Windows, and I can only imagine it's because they have never used a non-Windows computer.
It doesn't sound too "easy" if you're constantly having to untag yourself from photos. There's still the problem that you're in the photos for the world to see, even if your name isn't applied to them.
There's also the period of time between each tag and your untagging. And the photos you've missed.
If you're concerned that there are photos of you online with or without your name attached to them, from a privacy standpoint, then you aren't winning.
By "not being in the App Store" I didn't mean "in some other jailbroken iPhone repository" (if that's what you mean). I meant "not on the iPhone".
In other words, VLC is still quite mainstream (on PCs and other platforms) without having to be on the iPhone.
I'm all for languages which allow Unicode characters in their source (Unicode strings, Unicode comments). That simply makes it easier for foreign developers and foreign language strings. Luckily, most modern languages (including Go) do allow this.
But Unicode syntax is a nightmare to type. It should be perfectly possible for me to type an entire program using only the symbols I see on my standard US keyboard.
I don't equate "mainstream" with "iPhone" -- certainly iPhone is a mainstream device, but I don't consider not being in the App Store as being "out of the mainstream."
I don't see how it helps the "no DRM" cause to take a GPL'd program, coat it with DRM, and then sell it on a locked device without any legal or technical ability to modify or redistribute the program.
Sure Apple are working to end DRM'd music, but they're one of the biggest supporters of DRM'd software. I'm pretty sure the Free Software Foundation is more concerned with the latter.
Lol.