I was actually just watching a YouTube video on the extinctions on mega-fauna yesterday. Apparently carbon dating is particularly difficult in Australia as we have an unusually high percentage of carbonate rocks. It causes a lot of environmental contamination. I can't believe I've lived here all my life and didn't know that.
Growing up, I've heard figures about aboriginal arrival in Australia ranging from 40,000 years up to 80,000 ago. Since modern humans hadn't been human all that long 80,000 years ago, I'm leaning towards the lower end of that scale. All the evidence, however, points to mega fauna extinction within a short time after human arrival. A documentary I saw a couple of years ago indicated humans didn't hunt mega fauna to extinction, but the aboriginal practice of periodic burning of the landscape changed the flora, and the larger fauna (marsupial lions, giant goannas, giant kangaroos, and the subject of the article, the "demon duck of doom") weren't able to adapt in time.
I'm guessing, in a place like this, 40,000 years back is all you can accurately carbon date, even under ideal conditions. I don't think anyone (in the scientific community) doubted humans and demon ducks of doom co-existed, we just didn't really know how long that coexistence was.
Re:The same can be said for Microsoft's domination
on
Why Apple Is So Sticky
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· Score: 1
A lot of people have built entire businesses around some combination of apps that are only available for Windows.
So they've specifically chosen those apps. They wouldn't have chosen those apps if they didn't want them, I still don't see how you're "locked" into Windows when it's the apps that are important. It has nothing to do with the platform, it's the app vendor you you should be aiming your bile at.
Many of the people who thought they were stuck with Windows have discovered that they're actually stuck with Windows XP
Ok, now you're just making shit up.
If you had said people were stuck with IE6, you might have a point. Maybe. Nobody in their right mind thinks software will last forever. The only reason there was a Y2k issue was because software actually lasted longer than people anticipated. Anybody "stuck" with IE6 has nobody to blame but themselves. It's almost a decade old and only a die-hard IE fan would think it was going to last that long.
Nobody is "stuck" with XP. Win7 has excellent XP compatibility mode built in. XP was a stupid example.
There are equivalents to MS Publisher and Outlook on other platforms, but I'll grant you the Access example.
Apart from Access, all the examples presented are really examples bad IT management and implementation. It's not the 1980s any more. You have more choice than just Lotus Notes and Visicalc. Lock-in is, for the most part, in the mind of the beholder.
Re:The same can be said for Microsoft's domination
on
Why Apple Is So Sticky
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· Score: 1
People are stuck with DOS? Seriously?
And people aren't "stuck" with Windows, they're "stuck" with the applications they use. If a vendor releases an app for Windows only, how is "the cost to switch too great"? What are they going to switch to? If a game is release on PS3 only, is "the cost to switch" to the 360 too great?
And the only reason MS Office is so popular is because there is no alternative. (No, OO.o is worthless at work, and clunky and awkward at home.) What do you think people can switch to? Using MS Office certainly doesn't tie you to Windows - you can use it on a Mac.
How the hell did your narrow and simplistic post get rated Insightful?
The controversial.xxx domain, if it ever gets approved, would allow people and countries that do not want to see porn to have a way to ensure that they will never see it unless they intentionally go to those sites.
You're living in fantasy land.
For example, a few years ago when my cousin first heard of the.xxx TLD she thought it was great idea. She's into tattoos, gothic clothing (corsets and stuff), and although she's not gay, she likes artistic nudes of women. Every time she searched for the stuff she likes, she was always being bombarded with porn. She loved the idea that all that "porn" would disappear to.xxx and leave her to look at naked women in peace.
I pointed out that my (fundamentalist christian) mother would consider the stuff she subscribes to on DeviantART as porn - should it be moved to.xxx? "No! Of course not, it's not porn!" "How about Suicide Girls?" "No! That's not porn, either!"
While it may be hard to justify the opinion that Suicide Girls isn't porn, my cousin genuinely doesn't see it as such. And DeviantART is full of artistic nudes that a lot of prudes would consider porn. Now, there is a point where something becomes obviously and undeniably porn to any honestly objective observer (e.g. "Backdoor Sluts 9"), but there is a massive grey area where it's debatable. And who's standards should we use? My mother's? My cousin's? Ted Haggard's? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's? Ron Jeremy's?
Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.
Sorry, but I need to modify that statement to: Things cost what people are willing to pay for them.
"Cost" and "worth" are two very different things. I work in the finance industry and most of my clients learned that the hard way over the last few years.
But let's talk about bnetd. Bnetd was where people went to play pirated copies of Starcraft.
No, sorry, bnetd is where I went to play Starcraft. Here in Australia, the official Battlenet servers are unplayable, they simply don't work for us. Blizzard never gave Australia a server of our own.
You can argue some minority of people owned the game and preferred playing. But the reality is, that is where people who didn't pay for the game played.
Fuck you, I paid for the game and got ripped off when Blizzard didn't provide me a playable server. I got double ripped off because I paid for the Battlenet edition of Warcraft II as well. Don't accuse me of being a pirate because I found a way of getting what I paid for.
bnetd was also a great way of being able to play multiplayer Starcraft without an IPX network (before v1.09, when Starcraft finally got UDP support).
So don't call me a fucking pirate because I found a way around the obstacles Blizzard put in my way. Pull your head out of your arse and realise that not everybody is in the same position as you.
your card won't probably be enthusiastic about the highly dynamic nature of the open source stack your drivers are running in
"Highly dynamic"? What reality are you living in? Proprietary drivers have always been superior to the OSS ones I've used, starting with the Tseng Labs ET4000 card in my old 486 running Debian Potato right up to my ATI 3300 running Ubuntu 9.04. OSS drivers have always been either substandard and unable to match resolutions and performance or unstable and flakier than my ex girlfriend.
Even now I can find better proprietary drivers for old hardware (e.g. my old Lexmark 1000, which could print in 600dpix600dpi with proprietary drivers, or 300dpix300dpi with OSS ones). Drivers would be the one example where OSS has ALWAYS failed me, every step of the way. And don't come back with "you've chosen bad hardware", the fact that the hardware is still supported (even as a "legacy" product) shows how much worse the OSS community is at supporting it's userbase. I'm not a programmer and can't write drivers myself, and I have no desire to pay someone to write a driver to support old hardware. Where the hell are you getting "highly dynamic" from?
It [OSS drivers] can be a very pragmatic way to use the card you paid for as long as you like
No. Just no. OSS is an idealistic or political way to use your card. Proprietary driver are a pragmatic way. I've seen OSS software be pragmatic, but I've never seen OSS drivers be anything but a headache or weakness in a complete system.
You can almost get your "Terminator: The Musical!"
Checkout Austrian Death Machine. They're an Arnold impersonator band that sings songs like "Come with me if you want to live", "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle", and "I am a cybernetic organism, living tissue over (metal) endoskeleton". They also sing songs about his other movies, like "If it bleeds, we can kill it", "Get to the Choppa", and "It's not a tumor".
Seriously, torrent their two albums, and if you like them, go buy them. I did:-)
You can't have "usability" without stability. When Ubuntu crashes and drops me back to the logon screen every time I try to do something useful, Canonical is showing it doesn't care about "usability" any more than it cares about stability.
You mean SP3. Vista SP2 has already been released. Your other stereotypes are also false (e.g. Vista ran brilliantly on my 2 year old system in 2007, it never required "bleeding edge hardware", and the whole "nagging" UAC bullshit was always wrong and only spouted by people that had never actually seen it).
I did. Software that worked perfectly under both 98 and Win2k stuttered and halted under XP. Networking had lots of bugs under XP, and a few times I had to open shares right up to everyone or enable the guest user to get things working. The UI was buggy in that windows that you'd just minimised would pop right back in your face when you alt-tab, instead of switching to another already maximised window. The UPnP and RPC didn't help with anything, but allowed me to get cracked just by connecting to the net (the firewall was fixed in later versions).
I miss Win2k. I really really missed Win2k in 2005 when my new (at the time) hardware no longer supported it and I had to switch to XP. (My new machine had a SATA drive, and the Win2k install only let you install extra drivers on install via floppy, which my machine didn't have.)
So does misinformation and rumour (e.g. Richard Gere and gerbils).
The overwhelming majority of computer users don't really care about the technical details of why things are done the way they are, so explanations do little to mitigate the problems.
And constantly pretending problems exist when they don't doesn't help, either. There are no problems to mitigate (or at least, you don't mention any valid ones that aren't present in XP). UAC is there to tell you something (e.g. changes are being made that you may not be aware of, or your poorly written software is doing things to your system you may not be aware of). If you don't want to learn from it, then just turn it off and shut up.
And needing more graphics power than was considered normal in order to display a modern UI.
Untrue. My Athlon machine, years old at the time, ran Aero flawlessly.
And UAC being maybe the most annoying thing ever added to any piece of software ever.
Rubbish. I virtually never see a UAC prompt. I'll see one occasionally when I'm installing software, that's it. If you constantly get UAC prompts, then you have incredibly bad user habits, or are using badly written software. In every case I hear someone whinging about UAC prompts, it's a sign the user doesn't know what they're doing.
And inexpicably long file transfer times.
This was true, years ago. It hasn't been the case since mid 2007, months after the initial release.
And backward compatibility.
Considering all the underlying changes, compatibility in Vista was impressive. I'm still able to play old games like Warcraft II in the 64 bit version of Vista. So far the only piece of software that hasn't worked for me was Doom (but that was fixed by downloading Doom Legacy).
The UI lags no matter how much computing power you throw its way.
This demonstrates your lack of understanding. Aero's performance is dependant on GPU, not CPU power. If you don't like Aero or don't have the GPU for it (and a lot of laptops don't), then turn it off. Your UI will perform just like your beloved XP, without the childish Fisher-Price look.
UAC still requires multiple approvals before executing one task.
This is a blatant lie. It never required multiple approvals and of course still doesn't.
I've been running the Win 7 RC and have to say that it appears to fix most all of Vista's problems apart from UAC.
I've been running the RTM version since the beginning of August (never tried the RC) and I can count the number of UAC prompts I've had since that first week (after installing all my software) on one hand. I have no idea what you must be doing to generate all these prompts.
Your post is dishonest and disingenuous. If you're not being dishonest, than you have absolutely no idea how to use a computer.
If you are not willing to contribute anything, why should anyone care about you?
So, you're saying free software is only for developers, and doesn't provide for anyone else? So you're agreeing with me?
Free Software ensures that anyone can get bugs fixed or features added.
No, it ensures a developer can fix bugs, provided it's in a field that he's familiar with (I wouldn't trust a database developer to fix a gamma correction bug in the Gimp, for example).
If, however, someone with an overblown sense of entitlement demands a new feature but offers nothing in return, their request goes straight into the bin. Their feature may be added if someone else wants it, but that's a side-effect.
So, you're confirming that "free" software isn't for general use, and only developers need use it.
If you care about OO.o usability, do some usability studies.
I've done the next best thing - use it. It's not as good as Abiword, let alone MS Office. I'm not a Java developer, and can't fix all the things that are wrong with it. This is why "free" software gets the moniker, It's only free if your time is worthless.
Do you pirate MS Office and then expect MS to implement your feature requests?
They don't have to implement extra features I want like doesn't randomly fuck the formatting, or doesn't randomly hang or crash. Your attitude of contribute or your opinion goes straight in the bin is why "free" software struggles for widespread use. There are many developers that get frustrated by having their contributions ignored, you're compounding the problem by blaming everyone else for the flaws in "free" software culture.
Free software is free as in there are four freedoms that it is guaranteed to provide.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
- Anatole France, from The Red Lily, 1894
Who exactly benefits from these guaranteed freedoms?
You've highlighted a liability of "free" software. "Free" software is for developers, not end users. And although a lot of spotty geeks will froth and call me a $hill, it's attitudes like yours that is stopping projects like OO.o from being usable. Yes, it's usable by the/. crowd, isolated in their parent's basement, but not by anyone else in the real world. I try to use free software where possible (e.g. Firefox, Gimp, Foobar2000, XN-View), but that's because they cost me nothing, neither time nor money. Foobar2000 is great (for me), I couldn't care less whether or not I have access to the source code. What would I do with it if I had access? Rely on somebody like you to ensure I'm looked after?
"If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom."
- Robert Frost
When? When will the problems be fixed? Who will fix them? You?
The myth that problems can fixed simply because a project is "open source" is akin to believing a food must be good for you based on the fact it tastes bad.
The ideas and principles that most religions are based on are sound and sane. When you look at the ideals of a few world religions (christianity, islam, judaism, buddhism, hinduism...), you'll notice that they all somehow focus on an attempt to get society to work well together.
Sorry, I have to pull you up on that comment.
Religions aren't about getting people to "work together", that's a beneficial side-effect (when it actually happens). Religions are about conformity, about making everybody the same or killing off those that aren't. Don't forget that in the first crusade, the Crusaders killed more Christians than Muslims, because they were brown Christians. There's a reason that most politically conservative people are religious, and most religious people are politically conservative. They're scared of people that are different. It has nothing to do with working together, it's about sending those Mexicans back where they came from, about punishing those that have a different sexual preference, about harsher punishments for those that break their laws.
The only "religion" I've ever seen that is about working together is a joke religion from the late 50's, early 60's. Discordianism is about being constructive, whether it's ordered or not. It teaches that there's constructive order and constructive disorder, just like there's destructive order and destructive disorder. It focuses on the "constructive" part, and it's the only religion I've ever seen that does.
The other religions you mentioned are all about conformity (except for Buddhism, which Discordianism is based on).
Pirating was the main reason for bnetd. Period. If you can't come to terms with this, then you aren't living in reality.
This is one of the most dishonest things I've ever read on Slashdot. If the entire world has to match the negativity you see in front of you, then you are a very sad person.
I currently run a bnetd server (PvPGN) because Blizzard never bothered giving Australia an official Battle.net server.
If they provide a service 10 years after a game is released, it shows a hell of a commitment to that game.
Using your logic, if they never provided a service to begin with, then they have no commitment to the game. Blizzard has never given my country a usable Battle.net server. The official servers give a ping of anywhere from 460ms to 920ms. My bnetd gives 3ms.
Your comments tell me you're a prick, and you've drunk the DRM coolaid. Some of us want our monies worth. I've paid for Starcraft and Broodwar, and simply want to be able to play friends across town. Blizzard hasn't given us that ability, and so I've done it myself. And you call me a pirate. Fuck you.
Slashdot Mirror
I was actually just watching a YouTube video on the extinctions on mega-fauna yesterday. Apparently carbon dating is particularly difficult in Australia as we have an unusually high percentage of carbonate rocks. It causes a lot of environmental contamination. I can't believe I've lived here all my life and didn't know that.
Growing up, I've heard figures about aboriginal arrival in Australia ranging from 40,000 years up to 80,000 ago. Since modern humans hadn't been human all that long 80,000 years ago, I'm leaning towards the lower end of that scale. All the evidence, however, points to mega fauna extinction within a short time after human arrival. A documentary I saw a couple of years ago indicated humans didn't hunt mega fauna to extinction, but the aboriginal practice of periodic burning of the landscape changed the flora, and the larger fauna (marsupial lions, giant goannas, giant kangaroos, and the subject of the article, the "demon duck of doom") weren't able to adapt in time.
I'm guessing, in a place like this, 40,000 years back is all you can accurately carbon date, even under ideal conditions. I don't think anyone (in the scientific community) doubted humans and demon ducks of doom co-existed, we just didn't really know how long that coexistence was.
So they've specifically chosen those apps. They wouldn't have chosen those apps if they didn't want them, I still don't see how you're "locked" into Windows when it's the apps that are important. It has nothing to do with the platform, it's the app vendor you you should be aiming your bile at.
Ok, now you're just making shit up.
If you had said people were stuck with IE6, you might have a point. Maybe. Nobody in their right mind thinks software will last forever. The only reason there was a Y2k issue was because software actually lasted longer than people anticipated. Anybody "stuck" with IE6 has nobody to blame but themselves. It's almost a decade old and only a die-hard IE fan would think it was going to last that long.
Nobody is "stuck" with XP. Win7 has excellent XP compatibility mode built in. XP was a stupid example.
There are equivalents to MS Publisher and Outlook on other platforms, but I'll grant you the Access example.
Apart from Access, all the examples presented are really examples bad IT management and implementation. It's not the 1980s any more. You have more choice than just Lotus Notes and Visicalc. Lock-in is, for the most part, in the mind of the beholder.
People are stuck with DOS? Seriously?
And people aren't "stuck" with Windows, they're "stuck" with the applications they use. If a vendor releases an app for Windows only, how is "the cost to switch too great"? What are they going to switch to? If a game is release on PS3 only, is "the cost to switch" to the 360 too great?
And the only reason MS Office is so popular is because there is no alternative. (No, OO.o is worthless at work, and clunky and awkward at home.) What do you think people can switch to? Using MS Office certainly doesn't tie you to Windows - you can use it on a Mac.
How the hell did your narrow and simplistic post get rated Insightful?
You're living in fantasy land.
For example, a few years ago when my cousin first heard of the .xxx TLD she thought it was great idea. She's into tattoos, gothic clothing (corsets and stuff), and although she's not gay, she likes artistic nudes of women. Every time she searched for the stuff she likes, she was always being bombarded with porn. She loved the idea that all that "porn" would disappear to .xxx and leave her to look at naked women in peace.
I pointed out that my (fundamentalist christian) mother would consider the stuff she subscribes to on DeviantART as porn - should it be moved to .xxx? "No! Of course not, it's not porn!" "How about Suicide Girls?" "No! That's not porn, either!"
While it may be hard to justify the opinion that Suicide Girls isn't porn, my cousin genuinely doesn't see it as such. And DeviantART is full of artistic nudes that a lot of prudes would consider porn. Now, there is a point where something becomes obviously and undeniably porn to any honestly objective observer (e.g. "Backdoor Sluts 9"), but there is a massive grey area where it's debatable. And who's standards should we use? My mother's? My cousin's? Ted Haggard's? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's? Ron Jeremy's?
T,FTFY
Sorry, but I need to modify that statement to: Things cost what people are willing to pay for them.
"Cost" and "worth" are two very different things. I work in the finance industry and most of my clients learned that the hard way over the last few years.
If you ordered a pizza, and it was missing two thirds of what you expected, would you be happy?
"Sure we didn't give you any olives or pepperoni, but we gave you three times as many mushrooms, so it's just as good!"
No, sorry, bnetd is where I went to play Starcraft. Here in Australia, the official Battlenet servers are unplayable, they simply don't work for us. Blizzard never gave Australia a server of our own.
Fuck you, I paid for the game and got ripped off when Blizzard didn't provide me a playable server. I got double ripped off because I paid for the Battlenet edition of Warcraft II as well. Don't accuse me of being a pirate because I found a way of getting what I paid for.
bnetd was also a great way of being able to play multiplayer Starcraft without an IPX network (before v1.09, when Starcraft finally got UDP support).
So don't call me a fucking pirate because I found a way around the obstacles Blizzard put in my way. Pull your head out of your arse and realise that not everybody is in the same position as you.
ATM machines? You really just said ATM machines? Seriously, GTFO out!
It's that kind of attitude that allows so many people to dismiss RMS and his bleating followers.
Did your childish comment have a point?
To the best of my knowledge, Gandhi didn't chew his own toenails.
"Highly dynamic"? What reality are you living in? Proprietary drivers have always been superior to the OSS ones I've used, starting with the Tseng Labs ET4000 card in my old 486 running Debian Potato right up to my ATI 3300 running Ubuntu 9.04. OSS drivers have always been either substandard and unable to match resolutions and performance or unstable and flakier than my ex girlfriend.
Even now I can find better proprietary drivers for old hardware (e.g. my old Lexmark 1000, which could print in 600dpix600dpi with proprietary drivers, or 300dpix300dpi with OSS ones). Drivers would be the one example where OSS has ALWAYS failed me, every step of the way. And don't come back with "you've chosen bad hardware", the fact that the hardware is still supported (even as a "legacy" product) shows how much worse the OSS community is at supporting it's userbase. I'm not a programmer and can't write drivers myself, and I have no desire to pay someone to write a driver to support old hardware. Where the hell are you getting "highly dynamic" from?
No. Just no. OSS is an idealistic or political way to use your card. Proprietary driver are a pragmatic way. I've seen OSS software be pragmatic, but I've never seen OSS drivers be anything but a headache or weakness in a complete system.
You can almost get your "Terminator: The Musical!"
:-)
Checkout Austrian Death Machine. They're an Arnold impersonator band that sings songs like "Come with me if you want to live", "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle", and "I am a cybernetic organism, living tissue over (metal) endoskeleton". They also sing songs about his other movies, like "If it bleeds, we can kill it", "Get to the Choppa", and "It's not a tumor".
Seriously, torrent their two albums, and if you like them, go buy them. I did
You can't have "usability" without stability. When Ubuntu crashes and drops me back to the logon screen every time I try to do something useful, Canonical is showing it doesn't care about "usability" any more than it cares about stability.
You mean SP3. Vista SP2 has already been released. Your other stereotypes are also false (e.g. Vista ran brilliantly on my 2 year old system in 2007, it never required "bleeding edge hardware", and the whole "nagging" UAC bullshit was always wrong and only spouted by people that had never actually seen it).
/. groupthink ruin a great post.
But don't let
I am a fanboi of a particular OS, and as a BSD fanboi I need to ask - what the fuck has Apple done to our rock-solid OS?
I did. Software that worked perfectly under both 98 and Win2k stuttered and halted under XP. Networking had lots of bugs under XP, and a few times I had to open shares right up to everyone or enable the guest user to get things working. The UI was buggy in that windows that you'd just minimised would pop right back in your face when you alt-tab, instead of switching to another already maximised window. The UPnP and RPC didn't help with anything, but allowed me to get cracked just by connecting to the net (the firewall was fixed in later versions).
I miss Win2k. I really really missed Win2k in 2005 when my new (at the time) hardware no longer supported it and I had to switch to XP. (My new machine had a SATA drive, and the Win2k install only let you install extra drivers on install via floppy, which my machine didn't have.)
So does misinformation and rumour (e.g. Richard Gere and gerbils).
And constantly pretending problems exist when they don't doesn't help, either. There are no problems to mitigate (or at least, you don't mention any valid ones that aren't present in XP). UAC is there to tell you something (e.g. changes are being made that you may not be aware of, or your poorly written software is doing things to your system you may not be aware of). If you don't want to learn from it, then just turn it off and shut up.
Untrue. My Athlon machine, years old at the time, ran Aero flawlessly.
Rubbish. I virtually never see a UAC prompt. I'll see one occasionally when I'm installing software, that's it. If you constantly get UAC prompts, then you have incredibly bad user habits, or are using badly written software. In every case I hear someone whinging about UAC prompts, it's a sign the user doesn't know what they're doing.
This was true, years ago. It hasn't been the case since mid 2007, months after the initial release.
Considering all the underlying changes, compatibility in Vista was impressive. I'm still able to play old games like Warcraft II in the 64 bit version of Vista. So far the only piece of software that hasn't worked for me was Doom (but that was fixed by downloading Doom Legacy).
This demonstrates your lack of understanding. Aero's performance is dependant on GPU, not CPU power. If you don't like Aero or don't have the GPU for it (and a lot of laptops don't), then turn it off . Your UI will perform just like your beloved XP, without the childish Fisher-Price look.
This is a blatant lie. It never required multiple approvals and of course still doesn't.
I've been running the RTM version since the beginning of August (never tried the RC) and I can count the number of UAC prompts I've had since that first week (after installing all my software) on one hand. I have no idea what you must be doing to generate all these prompts.
Your post is dishonest and disingenuous. If you're not being dishonest, than you have absolutely no idea how to use a computer.
So, you're saying free software is only for developers, and doesn't provide for anyone else? So you're agreeing with me?
No, it ensures a developer can fix bugs, provided it's in a field that he's familiar with (I wouldn't trust a database developer to fix a gamma correction bug in the Gimp, for example).
So, you're confirming that "free" software isn't for general use, and only developers need use it.
I've done the next best thing - use it. It's not as good as Abiword, let alone MS Office. I'm not a Java developer, and can't fix all the things that are wrong with it. This is why "free" software gets the moniker, It's only free if your time is worthless.
They don't have to implement extra features I want like doesn't randomly fuck the formatting, or doesn't randomly hang or crash. Your attitude of contribute or your opinion goes straight in the bin is why "free" software struggles for widespread use. There are many developers that get frustrated by having their contributions ignored, you're compounding the problem by blaming everyone else for the flaws in "free" software culture.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
/. crowd, isolated in their parent's basement, but not by anyone else in the real world. I try to use free software where possible (e.g. Firefox, Gimp, Foobar2000, XN-View), but that's because they cost me nothing, neither time nor money. Foobar2000 is great (for me), I couldn't care less whether or not I have access to the source code. What would I do with it if I had access? Rely on somebody like you to ensure I'm looked after?
- Anatole France, from The Red Lily, 1894
Who exactly benefits from these guaranteed freedoms?
You've highlighted a liability of "free" software. "Free" software is for developers, not end users. And although a lot of spotty geeks will froth and call me a $hill, it's attitudes like yours that is stopping projects like OO.o from being usable. Yes, it's usable by the
"If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom."
- Robert Frost
When? When will the problems be fixed? Who will fix them? You?
The myth that problems can fixed simply because a project is "open source" is akin to believing a food must be good for you based on the fact it tastes bad.
Sorry, I have to pull you up on that comment.
Religions aren't about getting people to "work together", that's a beneficial side-effect (when it actually happens). Religions are about conformity, about making everybody the same or killing off those that aren't. Don't forget that in the first crusade, the Crusaders killed more Christians than Muslims, because they were brown Christians. There's a reason that most politically conservative people are religious, and most religious people are politically conservative. They're scared of people that are different. It has nothing to do with working together, it's about sending those Mexicans back where they came from, about punishing those that have a different sexual preference, about harsher punishments for those that break their laws.
The only "religion" I've ever seen that is about working together is a joke religion from the late 50's, early 60's. Discordianism is about being constructive, whether it's ordered or not. It teaches that there's constructive order and constructive disorder, just like there's destructive order and destructive disorder. It focuses on the "constructive" part, and it's the only religion I've ever seen that does.
The other religions you mentioned are all about conformity (except for Buddhism, which Discordianism is based on).
This is one of the most dishonest things I've ever read on Slashdot. If the entire world has to match the negativity you see in front of you, then you are a very sad person.
I currently run a bnetd server (PvPGN) because Blizzard never bothered giving Australia an official Battle.net server.
Using your logic, if they never provided a service to begin with, then they have no commitment to the game. Blizzard has never given my country a usable Battle.net server. The official servers give a ping of anywhere from 460ms to 920ms. My bnetd gives 3ms.
Your comments tell me you're a prick, and you've drunk the DRM coolaid. Some of us want our monies worth. I've paid for Starcraft and Broodwar, and simply want to be able to play friends across town. Blizzard hasn't given us that ability, and so I've done it myself. And you call me a pirate. Fuck you.
I think you meant SP3, SP2 has already been released. But your trolling aside, Seven really does feel like I'm still using Vista.