Popularity-contest is off by default; if you want to use it you have to go find it in the settings and turn it on. (And yes, it does clearly explain it's anonymous.)
And along similar lines, don't try to impersonate interface elements of the site you're advertising on.
Recently, I've been seeing adverts disguised as download buttons, that appear on arbitrary websites in the hope of appearing on a download site. (It took me a while to work out what their angle was.)
Perhaps it would be possible to take out insurance against an employee being called on jury duty. (Companies which have that problem would probably need to insure against employee illness, for much the same reason.)
The kernel isn't so important for something like game development, as the libraries.
And the only thing Android has in common with a standard Linux distribution is the kernel; it's actually easier to port a program from a standard Linux DE to Windows than it is to port from Linux to Android, IMO.
Perhaps the most obvious reason is that if someone gives you a bitcoin, although the transfer itself is instantaneous, it takes a noticeable amount of time before you can confirm whether you've received a genuine bitcoin or not. (It can take a while to verify whether or not the original bitcoin was owned by the person who tried to transfer it to you.) This can be a problem, in some cases; for instance in a shop, you don't want to wait in the shop for several hours after spending money for the shopkeeper to determine whether you've actually paid them or not.
I rebound that to alt+space. (And rebound super to alt+super, because I kept hitting it by mistake.) Look in CompizConfig Settings Manager.
I rather like the ideas behind Unity, although it's still very buggy, and the default bindings are unfortunate. (And it's missing some features it badly needs.) It's what I'm using at the moment, and I'm hoping it'll become more usable over time.
ssh -X has some restrictions for security reasons. If you trust the other end, try using ssh -Y instead, which lets it do things like run code on the local GPU (which OpenGL probably cares about).
Right, and the big problem from the package manager's point of view is that it's perfectly reasonable for the user to want to install a kernel module.
Perhaps the best fix would be for packages to contain a list of the permissions they needed to install, and so at least technical users would be able to check if they were far too over-encompassing or not. Doing that's not going to help nontechnical users so much, though.
Right, if you want Wine to protect your system from an unknown Windows program, run it on a separate user account with limited permissions. The same that you'd do for an unknown Linux program. (Note that this isn't foolproof if it contains a security exploit specifically against Linux, but those tend to be fixed quickly.)
OpenGL is the equivalent of Direct3D (a subset of DirectX), as you've made clear in your post. SDL seems to be the most popular library for doing the "rest" of the stuff that DirectX does for crossplatform programs (and also on Linux in particular), it's pretty low-level, acting just to give a unified-across-platforms interface to the hardware, but entirely usable, and has been observed being used by major companies (e.g. the official Linux port of Neverwinter Nights). (It also integrates well with OpenGL.) There are a couple of alternatives, such as FreeGLUT and Allegro, but they don't really have the same sort of marketshare in Linux gaming as SDL does. (I imagine DirectX is much more full-featured than SDL+OpenGL is, though; it's another issue as to how heavily those features are used, though.)
The video game also undergoes incremental changes; they change the rules every year (normally by using radical changes to banlists that ban reasonably arbitrary subsets of Pokémon just to shake things up), and for a while, they've been releasing one-off event Pokémon over wi-fi or at events. (Props to the tournament organisers for banning all the most egregious examples, like Arceus, but when Pokémon obtainable elsewhere get new moves or abilities, they're allowed.) Some of these Pokémon are very rare indeed, so people end up using ones that have been shared around for months (and typically "cloned" via glitches or cheat devices; I think this is against the rules as written, personally, but it's reasonably obvious that there's no way to detect it and the resulting Pokémon have entirely theoretically-legally-obtainable stats; I don't use cloned Pokémon myself, which puts me at a small handicap, but pretty much everyone else does). If it weren't for the ease of duplication of the things, I'm pretty sure they'd sell for quite a bit of money. (There's probably some connection to open source or software piracy or something in here, but I'll lead it to others to find.) (There's also the secondary issue that many of them are likely to be well-constructed fakes rather than genuine.) You also have to have the latest versions of the cartridge games to compete, although that's a much smaller cost than the cards (a few tens of dollars every year or so).
Last year, I think I'd have agreed with you. (I came top 8 in the UK in the Pokémon VGC that year; and it was pretty fun. The rules were not that unexpected, but most people didn't have experience with them, and it turned out that there were a huge number of viable options despite the list of legal Pokémon being small enough that you could feasibly consider each one of them individually when designing a strategy.)
They change the rules every year, though, and the 2012 rules are particularly obnoxious because there's such a huge element of luck in it. (Basically, what happened: shortly after the release of Pokémon Black/White a couple of years ago, they added Pokémon that could change the "weather" with an unprecedented lack of drawbacks for non-legendaries. They only became legal this year due to the way the rules worked. Weather was a viable strategy before, but with the significant buff it got, it ended up dominating everything (particularly rain). The main (and only practical) counter to weather is changing the weather yourself to something else; and the default weather to change to (in battles where the top legendaries are banned, as is usual) is sandstorm, because the Pokémon that set sandstorm are rather more powerful than the Pokémon that set other sorts of weather, and so have uses outside just countering weather. Conclusion: most of the time, battles are going to take place in sandstorm in order to prevent enemy weather teams dominating.
The obvious effect of battles usually happening in sandstorm is that people switch to Pokémon that are good and get even better in sandstorm. And there's an ability, Sand Veil, that exists on at least one top-of-top-tier-for-VGC Pokémon (Garchomp) that gives a 20% dodge chance against pretty much everything. Conclusion: a lot of people are playing Garchomp, and as a result, a lot of attacks are missing 20% of the time.
Sadly, Pokémon's a game where luck doesn't get that much of a chance to average out; of course, it all averages eventually, but statistical fluctuations can easily decide the result of a match or a tournament, for instance. Competitive players were annoyed enough about the luck element as it was because it distorted the statistics, but in 2012 it's reached ridiculous and pretty unfun proportions.
I hope they fix the rules for 2013. (Indications aren't looking good, though.)
This could be the result of the reverse effect to the one you're implying. Unions can wield a huge amount of political power if they have a large enough membership (like happened in the UK a few decades ago); this tends to increase the chance of union-friendly politicians being elected. A bit like campaign donations in the US, just a different method of manipulating the outcome. Is it possible to check whether the out of control unions, or workers' rights support, came first?
In general, you want to maximize windows that benefit from it. Browsers benefit from being maximised, for instance; but simple text editing, like composing emails, doesn't need large amounts of horizontal space (vertical space helps), and many simple games (think Minesweeper) don't benefit from space in either dimension.
Usually, I have one maximized window that benefits from horizontal space, or two side by side that don't; it helps to make the best use of a widescreen screen. (I also use virtual desktops; I eventually settled on 2 columns by 3 rows, with the rows for different usage patterns (work, Internet browsing, etc.), and the right-hand column dedicated for media players.)
I never really pinned stuff much in Win7, just email and browser; but now I'm using Ubuntu Unity (which has a basically identical taskbar apart from its position on the screen, right down to the pinning behaviour, and the Super+digit combo to switch to or launch a pinned application), I've pinned a whole load of programs so that they have consistent locations on the task bar (improving muscle memory), even when it makes little sense to launch them directly (e.g. Totem).
However, I still use the Start button equivalent on occasion; I have 10 programs pinned (the ones I use most often), but every now and then, I want to run something else. (And it's a different something each time, often.) If Win7 usage patterns are anything like Unity usage patterns (which wouldn't surprise me), Microsoft's telemetry is misleading them; they see that a feature is rarely used and misleading them, when that feature is the fallback that you use when you want to do something unusual.
It's a bit like the UK rail system, I guess; there are all sorts of complex railway tickets for doing various specific types of journey, and those are what you'll mostly use throughout your life. But if you want to do something unusual (like happened to me recently), you can just get a super-flexible ticket where you specify your start point and destination, and can go between them via any reasonable route, make as many stops along the way and the way back as you like, and can return at any point in the next month; it's obviously more expensive, but sometimes, you really need those options. (It'd be very rare to need all the options at once, of course; but the point is, it will have the options you happen to need.) That ticket's the Start menu of the railways; it's not going to be bought much, but it's very important that it's there.
Crystal radios can only decode AM, not FM. FM requires considerably more complex circuitry to decode; it's not out of reach for a hobbyist, but it's not the sort of thing you'd expect a kid to play around with.
I mapped Caps Lock to Compose, and use Compose more often than I used to use Caps Lock. (Most long-time Slashdotters will likely have it mapped to Control or Escape, depending on whether they're Emacs or vi fans.)
Control-Z is still end-of-file on DOS, and on the Windows command prompt. (Because Windows is pretending to be DOS, and DOS is pretending to be CP/M, and CP/M used control-Z.)
On most models of laptop, you can do it by pressing the left-click and right-click buttons below it simultaneously.
(Depending on the sort of touchpad you have and the drivers you have for it, tapping the extreme top-right corner, or tapping it with three fingers at once, may also work.)
For non-Brits who don't know: the paragraph in question, although it was written as a joke, is turning out to be surprisingly accurate (the numbers aren't 100% spot on, but the basic concept is). Fortunately, the earnings tax goes away after you've paid off enough money, but it can still last quite a while.
There were student riots over this last year (not the big riots in London, smaller ones in individual universities).
Slashdot Mirror
Popularity-contest is off by default; if you want to use it you have to go find it in the settings and turn it on. (And yes, it does clearly explain it's anonymous.)
And along similar lines, don't try to impersonate interface elements of the site you're advertising on.
Recently, I've been seeing adverts disguised as download buttons, that appear on arbitrary websites in the hope of appearing on a download site. (It took me a while to work out what their angle was.)
Perhaps it would be possible to take out insurance against an employee being called on jury duty. (Companies which have that problem would probably need to insure against employee illness, for much the same reason.)
The kernel isn't so important for something like game development, as the libraries.
And the only thing Android has in common with a standard Linux distribution is the kernel; it's actually easier to port a program from a standard Linux DE to Windows than it is to port from Linux to Android, IMO.
Perhaps the most obvious reason is that if someone gives you a bitcoin, although the transfer itself is instantaneous, it takes a noticeable amount of time before you can confirm whether you've received a genuine bitcoin or not. (It can take a while to verify whether or not the original bitcoin was owned by the person who tried to transfer it to you.) This can be a problem, in some cases; for instance in a shop, you don't want to wait in the shop for several hours after spending money for the shopkeeper to determine whether you've actually paid them or not.
I rebound that to alt+space. (And rebound super to alt+super, because I kept hitting it by mistake.) Look in CompizConfig Settings Manager.
I rather like the ideas behind Unity, although it's still very buggy, and the default bindings are unfortunate. (And it's missing some features it badly needs.) It's what I'm using at the moment, and I'm hoping it'll become more usable over time.
ssh -X has some restrictions for security reasons. If you trust the other end, try using ssh -Y instead, which lets it do things like run code on the local GPU (which OpenGL probably cares about).
Right, and the big problem from the package manager's point of view is that it's perfectly reasonable for the user to want to install a kernel module.
Perhaps the best fix would be for packages to contain a list of the permissions they needed to install, and so at least technical users would be able to check if they were far too over-encompassing or not. Doing that's not going to help nontechnical users so much, though.
By default, your X server will refuse any attempt by it to draw to the screen, so it'd be stuck in your terminal (not really ideal for gaming).
Right, if you want Wine to protect your system from an unknown Windows program, run it on a separate user account with limited permissions. The same that you'd do for an unknown Linux program. (Note that this isn't foolproof if it contains a security exploit specifically against Linux, but those tend to be fixed quickly.)
OpenGL is the equivalent of Direct3D (a subset of DirectX), as you've made clear in your post. SDL seems to be the most popular library for doing the "rest" of the stuff that DirectX does for crossplatform programs (and also on Linux in particular), it's pretty low-level, acting just to give a unified-across-platforms interface to the hardware, but entirely usable, and has been observed being used by major companies (e.g. the official Linux port of Neverwinter Nights). (It also integrates well with OpenGL.) There are a couple of alternatives, such as FreeGLUT and Allegro, but they don't really have the same sort of marketshare in Linux gaming as SDL does. (I imagine DirectX is much more full-featured than SDL+OpenGL is, though; it's another issue as to how heavily those features are used, though.)
The video game also undergoes incremental changes; they change the rules every year (normally by using radical changes to banlists that ban reasonably arbitrary subsets of Pokémon just to shake things up), and for a while, they've been releasing one-off event Pokémon over wi-fi or at events. (Props to the tournament organisers for banning all the most egregious examples, like Arceus, but when Pokémon obtainable elsewhere get new moves or abilities, they're allowed.) Some of these Pokémon are very rare indeed, so people end up using ones that have been shared around for months (and typically "cloned" via glitches or cheat devices; I think this is against the rules as written, personally, but it's reasonably obvious that there's no way to detect it and the resulting Pokémon have entirely theoretically-legally-obtainable stats; I don't use cloned Pokémon myself, which puts me at a small handicap, but pretty much everyone else does). If it weren't for the ease of duplication of the things, I'm pretty sure they'd sell for quite a bit of money. (There's probably some connection to open source or software piracy or something in here, but I'll lead it to others to find.) (There's also the secondary issue that many of them are likely to be well-constructed fakes rather than genuine.) You also have to have the latest versions of the cartridge games to compete, although that's a much smaller cost than the cards (a few tens of dollars every year or so).
Last year, I think I'd have agreed with you. (I came top 8 in the UK in the Pokémon VGC that year; and it was pretty fun. The rules were not that unexpected, but most people didn't have experience with them, and it turned out that there were a huge number of viable options despite the list of legal Pokémon being small enough that you could feasibly consider each one of them individually when designing a strategy.)
They change the rules every year, though, and the 2012 rules are particularly obnoxious because there's such a huge element of luck in it. (Basically, what happened: shortly after the release of Pokémon Black/White a couple of years ago, they added Pokémon that could change the "weather" with an unprecedented lack of drawbacks for non-legendaries. They only became legal this year due to the way the rules worked. Weather was a viable strategy before, but with the significant buff it got, it ended up dominating everything (particularly rain). The main (and only practical) counter to weather is changing the weather yourself to something else; and the default weather to change to (in battles where the top legendaries are banned, as is usual) is sandstorm, because the Pokémon that set sandstorm are rather more powerful than the Pokémon that set other sorts of weather, and so have uses outside just countering weather. Conclusion: most of the time, battles are going to take place in sandstorm in order to prevent enemy weather teams dominating.
The obvious effect of battles usually happening in sandstorm is that people switch to Pokémon that are good and get even better in sandstorm. And there's an ability, Sand Veil, that exists on at least one top-of-top-tier-for-VGC Pokémon (Garchomp) that gives a 20% dodge chance against pretty much everything. Conclusion: a lot of people are playing Garchomp, and as a result, a lot of attacks are missing 20% of the time.
Sadly, Pokémon's a game where luck doesn't get that much of a chance to average out; of course, it all averages eventually, but statistical fluctuations can easily decide the result of a match or a tournament, for instance. Competitive players were annoyed enough about the luck element as it was because it distorted the statistics, but in 2012 it's reached ridiculous and pretty unfun proportions.
I hope they fix the rules for 2013. (Indications aren't looking good, though.)
Same with Gnome, btw; a launcher without execute permission will get opened in a text editor if you double-click on it.
This could be the result of the reverse effect to the one you're implying. Unions can wield a huge amount of political power if they have a large enough membership (like happened in the UK a few decades ago); this tends to increase the chance of union-friendly politicians being elected. A bit like campaign donations in the US, just a different method of manipulating the outcome. Is it possible to check whether the out of control unions, or workers' rights support, came first?
In general, you want to maximize windows that benefit from it. Browsers benefit from being maximised, for instance; but simple text editing, like composing emails, doesn't need large amounts of horizontal space (vertical space helps), and many simple games (think Minesweeper) don't benefit from space in either dimension.
Usually, I have one maximized window that benefits from horizontal space, or two side by side that don't; it helps to make the best use of a widescreen screen. (I also use virtual desktops; I eventually settled on 2 columns by 3 rows, with the rows for different usage patterns (work, Internet browsing, etc.), and the right-hand column dedicated for media players.)
I never really pinned stuff much in Win7, just email and browser; but now I'm using Ubuntu Unity (which has a basically identical taskbar apart from its position on the screen, right down to the pinning behaviour, and the Super+digit combo to switch to or launch a pinned application), I've pinned a whole load of programs so that they have consistent locations on the task bar (improving muscle memory), even when it makes little sense to launch them directly (e.g. Totem).
However, I still use the Start button equivalent on occasion; I have 10 programs pinned (the ones I use most often), but every now and then, I want to run something else. (And it's a different something each time, often.) If Win7 usage patterns are anything like Unity usage patterns (which wouldn't surprise me), Microsoft's telemetry is misleading them; they see that a feature is rarely used and misleading them, when that feature is the fallback that you use when you want to do something unusual.
It's a bit like the UK rail system, I guess; there are all sorts of complex railway tickets for doing various specific types of journey, and those are what you'll mostly use throughout your life. But if you want to do something unusual (like happened to me recently), you can just get a super-flexible ticket where you specify your start point and destination, and can go between them via any reasonable route, make as many stops along the way and the way back as you like, and can return at any point in the next month; it's obviously more expensive, but sometimes, you really need those options. (It'd be very rare to need all the options at once, of course; but the point is, it will have the options you happen to need.) That ticket's the Start menu of the railways; it's not going to be bought much, but it's very important that it's there.
Crystal radios can only decode AM, not FM. FM requires considerably more complex circuitry to decode; it's not out of reach for a hobbyist, but it's not the sort of thing you'd expect a kid to play around with.
I mapped Caps Lock to Compose, and use Compose more often than I used to use Caps Lock. (Most long-time Slashdotters will likely have it mapped to Control or Escape, depending on whether they're Emacs or vi fans.)
Control-Z is still end-of-file on DOS, and on the Windows command prompt. (Because Windows is pretending to be DOS, and DOS is pretending to be CP/M, and CP/M used control-Z.)
Oracle may be evil, but they're lawful evil. So they'll end up helping other people out if it's also in their own interests.
On most models of laptop, you can do it by pressing the left-click and right-click buttons below it simultaneously.
(Depending on the sort of touchpad you have and the drivers you have for it, tapping the extreme top-right corner, or tapping it with three fingers at once, may also work.)
+5 flamebait is no longer possible; the adjective gets hidden if it contradicts the number.
For non-Brits who don't know: the paragraph in question, although it was written as a joke, is turning out to be surprisingly accurate (the numbers aren't 100% spot on, but the basic concept is). Fortunately, the earnings tax goes away after you've paid off enough money, but it can still last quite a while.
There were student riots over this last year (not the big riots in London, smaller ones in individual universities).
Yes it is; it's bad practice to pad a proof out just so it looks more proofy when it genuinely is that simple.