I've always been irritated by this feature. Yes, it does make sense to limit visible comment lines to a certain amount, but all too often it turns out that only very few lines had to be hidden. The above comment (which I agree on, btw) is a beautiful example: the additional info being displayed when you follow the link is the last empty line.
Thus, instead of a brutal "if NumberOfLines > n then", how about replacing it with something more brainy like "if NumberOfLinesOverLimit > n then"?
You petition your boss, he reads the paper and throws it into the trash.
No... the right thing would be to anonymously post full info about this on the net, faking your data access to make sure you're not the one suspected of doing this. Then show this to your boss and tell him that he'll loose customers and look like a jerk. The solution: up your bandwidth, advertise that, people will be happy.
Mhm. You used to be right, but things have changed a bit.
These days, if you are not a Good Boy and Sit Up And Beg if you're told to do so, they will simply go to your gouverment, and the gouverment will kiss their ass and send some cops to you. These guys will search your apartment and confiscate your computers. It doesn't matter if you're guilty of anything or not. If you're lucky, you'll see them again in a year or so. If you're very lucky, this is the only negative thing to happen to you.
Interested in risking that?
The time of democracies are over. The industry is running the place, which is why a) like hell you're free and b) the entire economy is collapsing badly.
Well, seeing that we have a rather largish computer whom we don't need to stand around wasting (expensive) energy: yes, we turn off our PCs. Even if we only not need them for an hour or so.
Thus: yes, boot-time is important.
Although, sadly, a lot of it depends on the company you work for. In Siemens, for example, you turn on your PC, go get a coffee, have a chat, and perhaps have the PC nearly ready when you come back...
It's not only that you cannot trust companies with encryption (the state will insist on a secret backdoor, every time), but if you are caught with a laptop at, say, the border while entering the USA, these guys will do one of two things (or both):
a) confiscate the laptop b) Force you to give them the key: http://xkcd.com/538/
Encryption might be useful to hide data from your kids/cow-orkers/opponents, but that's about it.
What do you want to do with a TV? Watch advertisements every couple of minutes? Moronic heads babbling nonsense? Listening to some religious crap? Yes, I've heard the argument "But I only watch important bits, like " - but I've never seen it followed. Ever.
I never had a TV. TVs are for idiots. Sit on a nice comfy couch, have some prezels and a beer (which can stand comfortably on your belly), turn on your TV, turn off your brain, and waste a couple of hours every day. Very relaxing, I'm sure.
A computer, on the other hand, can do more or less anything. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Create some art, write a game, do some proton therapy planning, design a house, play a game, read (high-quality) news, chat with friends, crack some serious math problems... And if you want to watch a nice movie with your girldfriend and some candlelight - hey, look, there's a DVD drive in that computer! How useful!
Get them used to having their faces scanned. Get them used to the state collecting info that way, and storing your appearances anywhere. Get them used to being scanned, watched. They'll need it.
So - you're for Freedom Of Information! Stop Censorship! And you're right. Censorship of information, especially on The Net, is an idiotic idea which will never work - typical idea of politicians.
However, it *does* work both ways. If you do stupid things on the net (like writing comments such as this one on a public site;), other people can and will find out. Just imagine you have started a nice business. You're looking for good people. On your desk are ten applications, all of which look good, but you only need two of them. Sniffing them out on the net is a perfect way to get more info about them.
The only way you have to be careful about is finding out the real people. For example, if you google my name, you'll find a german professor for Computer Science. Nice, wish I was a prof, but I'm not;)
Nearly 10 years ago I was in California for a while, on an H-1B visa. While the people are very nice, it was rather nasty comparing that place to Europe (Germany, to be more exact - I'm currently living in Munich).
Medical aid was a mess: when you show up, you have to pay first. No pay, no service. Forgot your wallet at home? Tough luck. And that was one of the better clinics - I brought somebody to one of the poorer hospitals. First in one queue, then the next. Both take about 2h, and it's not nice watching that bleeding guy after the motorbike accident being held upright by his friends for these four hours...
Work is a mess. Very few vacation days (two weeks? I get about 30 work days over here!). Sickness days? If I'm sick for more than, what, 12 days, I don't get paid? Can be fired at any moment, getting lousy support (if any) from the state?
No thanks. No wonder smart people leave after a while....however: for two years, Germany has the highest migration rate since the second world war. Apparently our problems are similar to yours, after all. Wonder where they're all going?
Do you trust a large company with your personal data? Really? Do you trust your state not to listen in to the data transfer, either cracking any encoded info or simply forcing the company to give them the keys? Or simply forcing the company to give them all your data?
Look, even the super-duper-top-secret swiss banking secrecy has been broken, and the swiss banks are sending full data to the USA.
Do not trust any outsider with your data. Ever. Keep it on yourself, encode it, transport it either via USB-stick (32 GB is quite a lot of data), portable hard drive, laptop, whatever. Don't send it over a public cable, don't trust any strangers with it.
You require Steam. No Steam, no game. No internet connection, no game. No owning the game, either (ergo, cannot sell it on eBay). And, in the example given in the link above, the lovely error message "Steam - error: The game is currently unavailable. Please try again at another time."
Yeah, probably fun for a bit (I did like the first F.E.A.R., even though it seemed a bit rushed).
However, these days my very first question is: DRM? And if so, which one? SecuROM and the like have taught me to have a long, hard look at the DRMs of games before even thinking about possibly wanting to buy it.
Nope, I'm afraid I have to disagree with you. I've played plenty of flash games (hey, they're free!), actually supported quite a few of them (PayPal is your friend), but - this game is different.
Every piece of it has been very carefully crafted, nothing here was done to the usual "Don't care, get it out by Friday!" mentaility we see so often. These guys took the time to really Make It Right. The whole thing made me laugh quite a lot, and I very thoroughly enjoyed it. And, just to reply directly to your "over and over" - apparently you haven't played this game very much. It keeps changing, quite a bit in places, and never, ever, seems to repeat itself...
Additionally, no DRM. I actually bought this game three times (download for me, DVD when it appeared, and for a friend), something I've never done before.
So do many of my cow-orkers. And yes, perhaps id has simply switched to producing graphics game engines, and use their games not as a game but as a demonstration of this engine.
But I consider this a great pity. id used to create great games (I've been around since before the original 'Castle Wolfenstein' on the Apple II - thus, yes, I'm an Old Fart), games which we all liked, and which I followed very closely. And now they have dropped into the 'stuff as usual' which we see more and more around us. Game, Game II, Game III, Game 4, Game 5... Film, Film 2, Film 3, Film v4.... boring. Boring. BORING.
Thus I was (am!) upset and replied. Yes, we see comments similar to this a lot. Apparently I am not completely alone with the idea of wanting to see New Stuff.
Perhaps I'm just in a bad mood today, but... what good are these discussions? The whole DRM mess has been chewed over and over and over again, and we always get the same results:
* DRM or not DRM doesn't matter: piracy is around 80% either way. This has not changed for 25 years. * Company managers are too reality-disfunct to realise this, and are willing to pay for (expensive) DRM systems to include in their product. * Dito politicians, usually bought by the industry, and who are worthless by definition anyway. * Nobody will do a boycott. * We cannot change any of these points.
Possible solutions:
* Buy the original with DRM and live with it. * But the original with DRM and download a pirate copy. * Download a pirate copy only. * Refuse any DRM games, buy from the indy market instead.
Note on the last point: I bought very very few 'normal' games in the last few years (I refuse DRM), but quite a few from these interesting small companies. Cheaper, ofter better (even if the graphics usually aren't), lots of fun, and you have the feeling that you're supporting the good programmers directly instead of some worthless CEOs 3rd Mercedes 500SEC. I bought (and can highly recommend) games like "World of Goo" or "Galactic Civilization II".
HOWEVER: some indy games have now come out with DRM. Beware of these! A good example would be "Defense Grid". An excellent, cheap game, but sold only via STEAM or Greenhouse, both of which are a form of DRM not allowing you to play the game without internet access. And even if you install them on a different PC (eg at work, with net access) and transfer the registry info, it won't work as it's registered to your CPU ID. (Yes, I'm very pissed off about this specific example. Particularly as the support from Greenhouse does not exist).
Yes, yes, I'll be modded as a troll of supreme evil, but... why do you think this must be changed?
Okay, okay. Calm down. Allow me to finish my point. The USA should not, repeat NOT, mess with other countries. If these countries do weird things without very actively endangering you, you should keep your HANDS OFF them and solve your own problems first. Yes, really. You have lots and lots of very major problems which should be solved, and the happenings in other countries are quite simply none of your business.
As to factory workers being abused: one of you was quite right (I do apologize for forgetting you name) - the thing to do in this case is similar to the coffee problem solution, something like a green BIO-sticker, claiming "This product was produced without abusing anybody". It would raise the manufactoring cost by a small amount, would allow them companies to raise the selling price by quite a bit, would make a lot of people happy, and - actually WORK.
Because I can guarantee you that nothing else really will. The decision to help these people would be made by large monolithic companies, run entirely by people interested in profit for the next two quarters, and nothing else. Show them how to make more profit, and they'll do it. Otherwise, they'll simply pay their PR teams, newspapers and TV stations to spread (fake) good news.
Quite frankly, I could care less. DOOM was great, DOOM II real fun. DOOM III was boring (yes, boring!). DOOM IV has pretty graphics. Oooooh, haven't seen pretty graphics in, er, minutes.
id software used to be our heros, but by now I believe they simply dropped out. They used to be at the very fore-front of new ideas, new graphics, amazing ideas - these days, it's just like any other large software company: "Let's do the next version of our old game, and not risk anything really new. We'll advertise via pretty graphics, not with interesting game"
Tech King: "Sure, why not. I'd earn a very large sum of money. My entire life is aimed at nothing else. And I'll find some good PR people who'll turn it positive." Politician: "Duuuuh.... errrrr... *drool*"
Oh - so now that we have new and better hardware, we can drown it in slow systems? Just to make sure the old software doesn't run faster on it?
This is an OPERATING SYSTEM, for heavens sake. Am I such an old fart that my view "The OS stays quietly in the background" is a rare one? An OS handles the execution of other software. It's supposed to be hardly noticable. And if you load an OS into your PC, and it eats up so much RAM that ONE GIGABYTE of RAM is not sufficient for anything but the desktop background, don't you think they're overdoing it a little bit?
Yeah, a GB is not much these days. But seen as a data storage device, it's HUGE. No reason for your OS to eat it all up.
So there are yet another two articles on how great Windows7 will be, how amazing, how it will kill Linux... the exactly same articles we saw before Vista came out. And XP. And 2000 (although there were less anti-Linux articles back then).
And where do these articles come from? By people paid for this from Microsoft, of course. This happens to most magazines. Is this even worth discussing?
Nope, they won't quit. Yes, the RIAA is ridiculous. Yes, they treat humans like scum. Yes, they continuously do things which makes our hair stand on end. Yes, they will continue to do their best to create new, even more idiotic laws.
And that's their job. As long as they keep getting paid by the industry, they will keep standing there as The Bad Guys To Hate. Instead of, say, the industry responsible for this.
Well... I've heard this exact same argument for practically every Windows version so far.
Sorry. I'll admit that - especially for games - Windows XP is actually rather useful. But if they never fiddle with it, people will think it 'outdated', and so they'll never stop messing around with it. Which will, as usual, not exactly improve the performance of the OS while, as I assume most of you'll agree, an OS primarly needs to be quietly in the background, work fast and efficient, and stay out of our way.
Thus: the next version of Windows will again be buggy (especially the version before, say, the second service pack (also known as a debug patch)), slower, have more functionality which practically nobody will need but looks fancy to beginners, and will irritate real users even more.
How about some demos? Yes, while most demos are space-wasting crap, quite a few are actually very nice. For example, have a look at "World of Goo" (http://2dboy.com/), which comes with a very nice and long demo.
Slashdot Mirror
"Read the rest of this comment..."
I've always been irritated by this feature. Yes, it does make sense to limit visible comment lines to a certain amount, but all too often it turns out that only very few lines had to be hidden.
The above comment (which I agree on, btw) is a beautiful example: the additional info being displayed when you follow the link is the last empty line.
Thus, instead of a brutal "if NumberOfLines > n then", how about replacing it with something more brainy like "if NumberOfLinesOverLimit > n then"?
Ciao,
Klaus
Won't work.
You petition your boss, he reads the paper and throws it into the trash.
No... the right thing would be to anonymously post full info about this on the net, faking your data access to make sure you're not the one suspected of doing this.
Then show this to your boss and tell him that he'll loose customers and look like a jerk. The solution: up your bandwidth, advertise that, people will be happy.
Mhm. You used to be right, but things have changed a bit.
These days, if you are not a Good Boy and Sit Up And Beg if you're told to do so, they will simply go to your gouverment, and the gouverment will kiss their ass and send some cops to you. These guys will search your apartment and confiscate your computers. It doesn't matter if you're guilty of anything or not.
If you're lucky, you'll see them again in a year or so. If you're very lucky, this is the only negative thing to happen to you.
Interested in risking that?
The time of democracies are over. The industry is running the place, which is why a) like hell you're free and b) the entire economy is collapsing badly.
Well, seeing that we have a rather largish computer whom we don't need to stand around wasting (expensive) energy: yes, we turn off our PCs. Even if we only not need them for an hour or so.
Thus: yes, boot-time is important.
Although, sadly, a lot of it depends on the company you work for. In Siemens, for example, you turn on your PC, go get a coffee, have a chat, and perhaps have the PC nearly ready when you come back...
It's not only that you cannot trust companies with encryption (the state will insist on a secret backdoor, every time), but if you are caught with a laptop at, say, the border while entering the USA, these guys will do one of two things (or both):
a) confiscate the laptop
b) Force you to give them the key: http://xkcd.com/538/
Encryption might be useful to hide data from your kids/cow-orkers/opponents, but that's about it.
"Who would win, TV or computers?"
What do you want to do with a TV? Watch advertisements every couple of minutes? Moronic heads babbling nonsense? Listening to some religious crap?
Yes, I've heard the argument "But I only watch important bits, like " - but I've never seen it followed. Ever.
I never had a TV. TVs are for idiots. Sit on a nice comfy couch, have some prezels and a beer (which can stand comfortably on your belly), turn on your TV, turn off your brain, and waste a couple of hours every day.
Very relaxing, I'm sure.
A computer, on the other hand, can do more or less anything. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Create some art, write a game, do some proton therapy planning, design a house, play a game, read (high-quality) news, chat with friends, crack some serious math problems...
And if you want to watch a nice movie with your girldfriend and some candlelight - hey, look, there's a DVD drive in that computer! How useful!
Get them used to having their faces scanned. Get them used to the state collecting info that way, and storing your appearances anywhere.
Get them used to being scanned, watched. They'll need it.
And for heavens sake, ban the "1984" book.
>> then the gun freaks go ape-shit.
Yup, you're right. And guy answering immediately proved your point ;)
> The reason they're called terrorists, is because they try to cause terror -- unreasoning fear is their goal.
You've just described most politicians.
So - you're for Freedom Of Information! Stop Censorship!
And you're right. Censorship of information, especially on The Net, is an idiotic idea which will never work - typical idea of politicians.
However, it *does* work both ways. ;), other people can and will find out.
If you do stupid things on the net (like writing comments such as this one on a public site
Just imagine you have started a nice business. You're looking for good people. On your desk are ten applications, all of which look good, but you only need two of them. Sniffing them out on the net is a perfect way to get more info about them.
The only way you have to be careful about is finding out the real people. For example, if you google my name, you'll find a german professor for Computer Science. Nice, wish I was a prof, but I'm not ;)
Nearly 10 years ago I was in California for a while, on an H-1B visa.
While the people are very nice, it was rather nasty comparing that place to Europe (Germany, to be more exact - I'm currently living in Munich).
Medical aid was a mess: when you show up, you have to pay first. No pay, no service. Forgot your wallet at home? Tough luck.
And that was one of the better clinics - I brought somebody to one of the poorer hospitals. First in one queue, then the next. Both take about 2h, and it's not nice watching that bleeding guy after the motorbike accident being held upright by his friends for these four hours...
Work is a mess. Very few vacation days (two weeks? I get about 30 work days over here!). Sickness days? If I'm sick for more than, what, 12 days, I don't get paid?
Can be fired at any moment, getting lousy support (if any) from the state?
No thanks. No wonder smart people leave after a while. ...however: for two years, Germany has the highest migration rate since the second world war. Apparently our problems are similar to yours, after all. Wonder where they're all going?
Do you trust a large company with your personal data? Really?
Do you trust your state not to listen in to the data transfer, either cracking any encoded info or simply forcing the company to give them the keys?
Or simply forcing the company to give them all your data?
Look, even the super-duper-top-secret swiss banking secrecy has been broken, and the swiss banks are sending full data to the USA.
Do not trust any outsider with your data. Ever. Keep it on yourself, encode it, transport it either via USB-stick (32 GB is quite a lot of data), portable hard drive, laptop, whatever.
Don't send it over a public cable, don't trust any strangers with it.
...and here it is:
http://citizengame.ca/2009/02/11/fear-2-and-drm-the-case-for-piracy/
You require Steam. No Steam, no game. No internet connection, no game. No owning the game, either (ergo, cannot sell it on eBay).
And, in the example given in the link above, the lovely error message "Steam - error: The game is currently unavailable. Please try again at another time."
No thanks.
Yeah, probably fun for a bit (I did like the first F.E.A.R., even though it seemed a bit rushed).
However, these days my very first question is: DRM? And if so, which one?
SecuROM and the like have taught me to have a long, hard look at the DRMs of games before even thinking about possibly wanting to buy it.
Nope, I'm afraid I have to disagree with you.
I've played plenty of flash games (hey, they're free!), actually supported quite a few of them (PayPal is your friend), but - this game is different.
Every piece of it has been very carefully crafted, nothing here was done to the usual "Don't care, get it out by Friday!" mentaility we see so often. These guys took the time to really Make It Right. The whole thing made me laugh quite a lot, and I very thoroughly enjoyed it.
And, just to reply directly to your "over and over" - apparently you haven't played this game very much. It keeps changing, quite a bit in places, and never, ever, seems to repeat itself...
Additionally, no DRM. I actually bought this game three times (download for me, DVD when it appeared, and for a friend), something I've never done before.
> Personally, I thought Doom 3 was great.
So do many of my cow-orkers. And yes, perhaps id has simply switched to producing graphics game engines, and use their games not as a game but as a demonstration of this engine.
But I consider this a great pity. id used to create great games (I've been around since before the original 'Castle Wolfenstein' on the Apple II - thus, yes, I'm an Old Fart), games which we all liked, and which I followed very closely.
And now they have dropped into the 'stuff as usual' which we see more and more around us. Game, Game II, Game III, Game 4, Game 5... Film, Film 2, Film 3, Film v4.... boring. Boring. BORING.
Thus I was (am!) upset and replied. Yes, we see comments similar to this a lot. Apparently I am not completely alone with the idea of wanting to see New Stuff.
Perhaps I'm just in a bad mood today, but... what good are these discussions?
The whole DRM mess has been chewed over and over and over again, and we always get the same results:
* DRM or not DRM doesn't matter: piracy is around 80% either way. This has not changed for 25 years.
* Company managers are too reality-disfunct to realise this, and are willing to pay for (expensive) DRM systems to include in their product.
* Dito politicians, usually bought by the industry, and who are worthless by definition anyway.
* Nobody will do a boycott.
* We cannot change any of these points.
Possible solutions:
* Buy the original with DRM and live with it.
* But the original with DRM and download a pirate copy.
* Download a pirate copy only.
* Refuse any DRM games, buy from the indy market instead.
Note on the last point: I bought very very few 'normal' games in the last few years (I refuse DRM), but quite a few from these interesting small companies. Cheaper, ofter better (even if the graphics usually aren't), lots of fun, and you have the feeling that you're supporting the good programmers directly instead of some worthless CEOs 3rd Mercedes 500SEC.
I bought (and can highly recommend) games like "World of Goo" or "Galactic Civilization II".
HOWEVER: some indy games have now come out with DRM. Beware of these! A good example would be "Defense Grid". An excellent, cheap game, but sold only via STEAM or Greenhouse, both of which are a form of DRM not allowing you to play the game without internet access. And even if you install them on a different PC (eg at work, with net access) and transfer the registry info, it won't work as it's registered to your CPU ID.
(Yes, I'm very pissed off about this specific example. Particularly as the support from Greenhouse does not exist).
Yes, yes, I'll be modded as a troll of supreme evil, but... why do you think this must be changed?
Okay, okay. Calm down. Allow me to finish my point.
The USA should not, repeat NOT, mess with other countries. If these countries do weird things without very actively endangering you, you should keep your HANDS OFF them and solve your own problems first. Yes, really. You have lots and lots of very major problems which should be solved, and the happenings in other countries are quite simply none of your business.
As to factory workers being abused: one of you was quite right (I do apologize for forgetting you name) - the thing to do in this case is similar to the coffee problem solution, something like a green BIO-sticker, claiming "This product was produced without abusing anybody". It would raise the manufactoring cost by a small amount, would allow them companies to raise the selling price by quite a bit, would make a lot of people happy, and - actually WORK.
Because I can guarantee you that nothing else really will. The decision to help these people would be made by large monolithic companies, run entirely by people interested in profit for the next two quarters, and nothing else. Show them how to make more profit, and they'll do it. Otherwise, they'll simply pay their PR teams, newspapers and TV stations to spread (fake) good news.
Quite frankly, I could care less.
DOOM was great, DOOM II real fun. DOOM III was boring (yes, boring!). DOOM IV has pretty graphics. Oooooh, haven't seen pretty graphics in, er, minutes.
id software used to be our heros, but by now I believe they simply dropped out. They used to be at the very fore-front of new ideas, new graphics, amazing ideas - these days, it's just like any other large software company: "Let's do the next version of our old game, and not risk anything really new. We'll advertise via pretty graphics, not with interesting game"
Tech King: "Sure, why not. I'd earn a very large sum of money. My entire life is aimed at nothing else. And I'll find some good PR people who'll turn it positive."
Politician: "Duuuuh.... errrrr... *drool*"
Oh - so now that we have new and better hardware, we can drown it in slow systems? Just to make sure the old software doesn't run faster on it?
This is an OPERATING SYSTEM, for heavens sake. Am I such an old fart that my view "The OS stays quietly in the background" is a rare one? An OS handles the execution of other software. It's supposed to be hardly noticable. And if you load an OS into your PC, and it eats up so much RAM that ONE GIGABYTE of RAM is not sufficient for anything but the desktop background, don't you think they're overdoing it a little bit?
Yeah, a GB is not much these days. But seen as a data storage device, it's HUGE. No reason for your OS to eat it all up.
So there are yet another two articles on how great Windows7 will be, how amazing, how it will kill Linux... the exactly same articles we saw before Vista came out. And XP. And 2000 (although there were less anti-Linux articles back then).
And where do these articles come from? By people paid for this from Microsoft, of course. This happens to most magazines.
Is this even worth discussing?
Nope, they won't quit.
Yes, the RIAA is ridiculous. Yes, they treat humans like scum. Yes, they continuously do things which makes our hair stand on end. Yes, they will continue to do their best to create new, even more idiotic laws.
And that's their job. As long as they keep getting paid by the industry, they will keep standing there as The Bad Guys To Hate. Instead of, say, the industry responsible for this.
Well... I've heard this exact same argument for practically every Windows version so far.
Sorry. I'll admit that - especially for games - Windows XP is actually rather useful. But if they never fiddle with it, people will think it 'outdated', and so they'll never stop messing around with it. Which will, as usual, not exactly improve the performance of the OS while, as I assume most of you'll agree, an OS primarly needs to be quietly in the background, work fast and efficient, and stay out of our way.
Thus: the next version of Windows will again be buggy (especially the version before, say, the second service pack (also known as a debug patch)), slower, have more functionality which practically nobody will need but looks fancy to beginners, and will irritate real users even more.
How about some demos?
Yes, while most demos are space-wasting crap, quite a few are actually very nice. For example, have a look at "World of Goo" (http://2dboy.com/), which comes with a very nice and long demo.