The rhetoric of this post is a little overstated. ANYTHING you'd want a serious tool for? Please, there are plenty of "serious" activities that do not require such color channels. Sure it's a drawback, but to call the program worthless over this one shortcoming is going a little overboard.
Nothing New Under the Sun
on
eBay The Vote
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· Score: 1
Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things -- bread and circuses.
- Juvenal's Satire X (circa second century AD)
Mark my words, it's only a matter of time before the fall.
I found both The Longest Journey and Dreamfall to be fantastic computer games--some of the best I have ever played to be honest. TLJ was more or less just your classic old school adventure. Dreamfall, on the other hand, while maintaining all of those adventure elements, had such minimalist "gameplay" that I would almost describe it as more of an interactive book than anything. This is not necessarily a bad thing like it might sound to some; the strength of the game just has to revolve entirely around exposition and development of its plot, and for Dreamfall that made for a fantastic experience. I would agree with one of the other posters that the fighting elements were kinda lame and out of place, but fortunately they were pretty few and far between, so easily ignored in the greater context.
Overall, a couple of games I'd highly recommend to anybody with a penchant for plots who hasn't played them already.
My favorite BART (and MUNI) cellphone conversations are the ones explicitly dealing with personal relationship/financial/medical issues... at 600 decibels. FFS, nobody wants to know about your stupid personal shit people, take it outside...
Except for the fact that vast tracts of the good ol' US are exactly like he's describing. As soon as you move out of a major metropolitan area, your options start to get extremely limited.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if they're anything like the previous incarnation of the "Core Web Fonts," then I believe they'll be free to download and use for any and all. It's the application UI fonts (Tahoma, Segoe) that Microsoft likes to keep under lock and key.
I think parent's got the long and the short of it. Even grandparent Amazon startup employee admitted in a roundabout way that obvious is precisely what it is.
It is whether or not business method patents that fundamentally simply map a practice in the non-online world ("put this on my account") to the online world ("1 click") should be permitted.
So he's essentially saying it's something that people already did all the time everywhere anyway, but the fact that it was online in Amazon's case made it less obvious? I don't think so.
Amazon's patent amounts to "putting a button on a web page that the user can click to buy what he has selected." That's it. This isn't a matter of hindsight or anything, it's a matter of being just another one of the vast sea of bullshit patents that are only allowed into the system because they append "but do it with a computer" to an utterly facile idea.
This is modded funny, but I personally would have gone for the insightful option.
Re:What is this crazy tags thing?
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Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 1
I for one like what the tags have evolved into. I mean, they're not very useful in the strict sense, but they provide a sort of humorous running commentary on the articles. I like to check the tags for the occasional good chuckle.
Re:Yeah, mutual geeking out is awesome
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 1
It's unabashed accounts of supreme nerdiness like this that bring a tear to a poor nerd's eye... *sniff*
Re:Moderation Tranparency... When?
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 1
Man was I tempted to downmod this. If only there were a "-0.00001 You Asked For It" option....
Man, you can have some of mine. I seem to get 5 a week and I really don't know what to do with them. I mean, I rarely have time to do my "due modding diligence" and actually read through all that rubbish that's under my normal threshold for the occasional gem (although I do make the rare valiant if doomed effort to do so).
Other than the fact that he said he's a programmer? I'm also a programmer and personally can't STAND KDE. Tried it a couple times and each time just really didn't like it, or had its configuration get screwed up beyond my capacity to easily recover.
To me it's even worse than that. The damn phrase is becoming such an integral part of our vernacular it makes me want to vomit. Some creative outfit doesn't ever show you their new design, or product, or what have you anymore. They show their "new IP." Bullshit. Gah, I have to move to a different thread now, I'm getting livid just thinking about it.
As a recent (read: within the last year) convert to Linux, I of course picked up gimp as one of my first package downloads--can never go wrong with having an image editor. While there are a few peculiarities, such as having multiple sets of menus or the whole multiple window thing, I've never really found anything crippling about the gimp UI. I can't help but think most people complain not so much about the fact that it's a bad UI, but more that it's just not Photoshop.
Honestly, I for one like the way it uses multiple windows. It may not be apparent from a Photoshop die-hard's perspective, but in Linux it allows you to take better advantage of multiple virtual workspaces. Perhaps a mode where you can define a tool palette as "sticky" so it will follow you to whatever workspace you change to? Also, given that it's broken up into multiple windows, having multiple menus does make sense.
Really, all I want to see personally are layer hierarchies. And of course some people want support for higher color depths. But as far as the UI goes I just don't buy these silly accusations of "unusable" or "nonsensical." It's just a little different, but arguably for a good reason.
Nobody with even an ounce of sense is arguing that eavesdropping as a whole is wrong or useless. To make a long point short, eavesdrop all you want, just get a goddamn warrant for it. If you can't turn up the minuscule evidence required for that, you have no business eavesdropping, and no business keeping the process a secret from your own people. A democracy that keeps secrets from its constituents is no democracy at all.
Are you saying that a corporation should not always be held responsible for actions committed by their employees, on their behalf, in their name, and through the use of their resources? I'm sorry, but plausible deniability only goes so far...
I could say much the same thing--it's been a long time since I've beaten a game--but for very different reasons. For me, at about halfway through almost every game coming out these days starts feeling entirely disposable. I don't end up really caring how it ends because of the generally generic plots and boring characters, and by about the midway mark everything in current games starts feeling way too repetitive. In fact, I have more half finished games than I really know what to do with. Maybe I'm just becoming an old and jaded gamer:(
Ah, Slashdot is malfunctioning badly for me today. I think I posted a reply just now, but it seems to have disappeared, so sorry if this is a double post...
Anyway, right you are. I've got to remember to proofread my comments when they're even remotely involved or I always end up embarrassing myself!
I have heard that myself, which is why, specifically, I used the word panacea. Feel free to replace "leeches" with whatever you please and my point still stands:)
Slashdot Mirror
The rhetoric of this post is a little overstated. ANYTHING you'd want a serious tool for? Please, there are plenty of "serious" activities that do not require such color channels. Sure it's a drawback, but to call the program worthless over this one shortcoming is going a little overboard.
Mark my words, it's only a matter of time before the fall.
I found both The Longest Journey and Dreamfall to be fantastic computer games--some of the best I have ever played to be honest. TLJ was more or less just your classic old school adventure. Dreamfall, on the other hand, while maintaining all of those adventure elements, had such minimalist "gameplay" that I would almost describe it as more of an interactive book than anything. This is not necessarily a bad thing like it might sound to some; the strength of the game just has to revolve entirely around exposition and development of its plot, and for Dreamfall that made for a fantastic experience. I would agree with one of the other posters that the fighting elements were kinda lame and out of place, but fortunately they were pretty few and far between, so easily ignored in the greater context.
Overall, a couple of games I'd highly recommend to anybody with a penchant for plots who hasn't played them already.
My favorite BART (and MUNI) cellphone conversations are the ones explicitly dealing with personal relationship/financial/medical issues... at 600 decibels. FFS, nobody wants to know about your stupid personal shit people, take it outside...
Except for the fact that vast tracts of the good ol' US are exactly like he's describing. As soon as you move out of a major metropolitan area, your options start to get extremely limited.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if they're anything like the previous incarnation of the "Core Web Fonts," then I believe they'll be free to download and use for any and all. It's the application UI fonts (Tahoma, Segoe) that Microsoft likes to keep under lock and key.
Amazon's patent amounts to "putting a button on a web page that the user can click to buy what he has selected." That's it. This isn't a matter of hindsight or anything, it's a matter of being just another one of the vast sea of bullshit patents that are only allowed into the system because they append "but do it with a computer" to an utterly facile idea.
This is modded funny, but I personally would have gone for the insightful option.
I for one like what the tags have evolved into. I mean, they're not very useful in the strict sense, but they provide a sort of humorous running commentary on the articles. I like to check the tags for the occasional good chuckle.
It's unabashed accounts of supreme nerdiness like this that bring a tear to a poor nerd's eye... *sniff*
Man was I tempted to downmod this. If only there were a "-0.00001 You Asked For It" option....
Man, you can have some of mine. I seem to get 5 a week and I really don't know what to do with them. I mean, I rarely have time to do my "due modding diligence" and actually read through all that rubbish that's under my normal threshold for the occasional gem (although I do make the rare valiant if doomed effort to do so).
Other than the fact that he said he's a programmer? I'm also a programmer and personally can't STAND KDE. Tried it a couple times and each time just really didn't like it, or had its configuration get screwed up beyond my capacity to easily recover.
To me it's even worse than that. The damn phrase is becoming such an integral part of our vernacular it makes me want to vomit. Some creative outfit doesn't ever show you their new design, or product, or what have you anymore. They show their "new IP." Bullshit. Gah, I have to move to a different thread now, I'm getting livid just thinking about it.
Woops. It's early and my brain decided carriage returns would be sufficient for making new paragraphs on Slashdot :( Sorry for the wall of text.
As a recent (read: within the last year) convert to Linux, I of course picked up gimp as one of my first package downloads--can never go wrong with having an image editor. While there are a few peculiarities, such as having multiple sets of menus or the whole multiple window thing, I've never really found anything crippling about the gimp UI. I can't help but think most people complain not so much about the fact that it's a bad UI, but more that it's just not Photoshop. Honestly, I for one like the way it uses multiple windows. It may not be apparent from a Photoshop die-hard's perspective, but in Linux it allows you to take better advantage of multiple virtual workspaces. Perhaps a mode where you can define a tool palette as "sticky" so it will follow you to whatever workspace you change to? Also, given that it's broken up into multiple windows, having multiple menus does make sense. Really, all I want to see personally are layer hierarchies. And of course some people want support for higher color depths. But as far as the UI goes I just don't buy these silly accusations of "unusable" or "nonsensical." It's just a little different, but arguably for a good reason.
Nobody with even an ounce of sense is arguing that eavesdropping as a whole is wrong or useless. To make a long point short, eavesdrop all you want, just get a goddamn warrant for it. If you can't turn up the minuscule evidence required for that, you have no business eavesdropping, and no business keeping the process a secret from your own people. A democracy that keeps secrets from its constituents is no democracy at all.
Are you saying that a corporation should not always be held responsible for actions committed by their employees, on their behalf, in their name, and through the use of their resources? I'm sorry, but plausible deniability only goes so far...
I could say much the same thing--it's been a long time since I've beaten a game--but for very different reasons. For me, at about halfway through almost every game coming out these days starts feeling entirely disposable. I don't end up really caring how it ends because of the generally generic plots and boring characters, and by about the midway mark everything in current games starts feeling way too repetitive. In fact, I have more half finished games than I really know what to do with. Maybe I'm just becoming an old and jaded gamer :(
It's "a la carte," meaning "by the menu."
P.S. Thank you for the correction.
Ah, Slashdot is malfunctioning badly for me today. I think I posted a reply just now, but it seems to have disappeared, so sorry if this is a double post... Anyway, right you are. I've got to remember to proofread my comments when they're even remotely involved or I always end up embarrassing myself!
I have heard that myself, which is why, specifically, I used the word panacea. Feel free to replace "leeches" with whatever you please and my point still stands :)