Mildly amusing and the concept for melding all of these different sets of toys together is fantastic, but the low-brow name probably won't appeal to the parents who would buy this for their kids very much. Kinda stupid and short-sighted of them, really.
However, OpenOffice (or whatever it is called today) is IMHO superior to Microsoft Office.
OO (and the much better LibreOffice, which is what they're calling the good one these days) are very solid but lacking in more than a few features compared to Office. They're not necessarily essential features, but a lot of it is useful stuff. I would strongly disagree with them being called "superior" - I'd say they're more "adequate" than anything else.
Gimp and Inkscape are great drawing programs.
But neither of them stack up to Photoshop in features, speed, or usability.
Casual games tend to be cross-platform
Yes.
while hard-core games don't universally work on Windows anyway - this is what a game platform is for.
No. That stopped being the case years ago. A low to medium end PC will be able to run most games nowadays pretty decently, barring extreme stuff like Crysis.
We could use that exact logic to attract the hipster crowd.
"OSX? Windows? Nah, those are too mainstream for me. Oh, what do I use? Linux. You've probably never heard of it before, though. It's really underground."
And thus, by hitting the hipster buzz word trifecta ("mainstream", "you've never heard of it", and "underground"), we will get millions of trendy Starbucks loiterers to use it out of spite.
Note to Self: start a company called "Bitcoin Tesla Monster Cables RIAA Apple Linux emacs M$ LLC", sell something (anything!), and make a boatload of money from free/. advertising.
Anyone else notice how Rob Reid "rounds" $6.8 bn to $8 bn? I mean, jeez, talk about fuzzy math!
You kind of lose a fair bit of your credibility when you're being that disingenuous. $1,200,000,000 isn't exactly what I'd call a tiny margin of error.
And the RIAA doesn't get a cent, because all of the local bands I support are smart enough to realize that a) they don't need to get involved with the RIAA anymore to sell albums (if they don't give away the music outright) and b) they're going to make the vast majority of their money off of touring (which you can't really "pirate" anyway, scalping and counterfeit tickets notwithstanding).
For videos, you're not going to really be able to find huge series you can watch like you can most shows. It's the kind of adjustment most people have to make when they watch British TV for the first time (in general, British shows have much shorter seasons that elsewhere - 10 episodes every year or two compared to 20-40 every year for the States). You can find really great shows but they'll often be painfully short, so the best thing is to build up a large pool of stuff to watch.
I'm particularly fond of Next Time on Lonny and anything by freddiew. Cracked.com also hads loads of original, good material. Does Not Compute is pretty decent, Agents of Cracked (which has now run its course) was pretty good, and After Hours is definitely one of the things I most look forward to watching. There's loads of other videos there I haven't checked out as of yet.
I enjoyed the majority of There Will Be Brawl, which is a brilliant parody of Smash Brothers, Sin City, and a whole bunch of other things. It really has to be seen to be believed.
College Humor is good for pretty okay short series, and there's usually excellent shorts on places like Funny or Die starring respectable professionals, such as Don Cheadle is Captain Planet. (Yes, it's really Don Cheadle, and yes he is playing Captain Planet. Yes, he looks ridiculous. Yes, it's hilarious. "Captain Planet, motherfucker!")
As for games, I really enjoy Dwarf Fortress, although it's hugely complex and still very much in Alpha. If you like RTSes or sim games it may interest you, but it's an acquired taste.
For platformers, Spelunky is pretty challenging but possible to beat. I Wanna Be The Guy is practically impossible to beat for all but the most experienced platform players - it is deliberately unfair.
I'm also really fond of Quake Live - it's basically Quake 3 played in your browser, which is nice as you can sign on pretty much anywhere that you can install a browser plugin. It runs really well in general and is still as fun as Quake 3 was (and the netcode is way, way better).
Lastly, an interesting F2P game I've been into as of late is Realm of the Mad God, which is like a top-down shooter but with magic spells, permadeath, and a pretty high skill curve. It got boring for me fast so it's best in small doses.
Hope some of this stuff was helpful. I wish I could delve into it more but I can't really compose myself as well this morning, nor do I have the time. The stuff you'll enjoy the most, I've found, is the stuff you discover yourself. Have fun!
I play it more like tank combat. Less the "main battle tank flying over a hill" type, and more the "quietly creeping up a hill, just barely exposing your turret, and popping the unsuspecting fuck of a Wehrmacht tank crew with an AP shell" kind.
It's kind of like whack-a-mole, only the mole has particle-accelerators for hands.
You don't need to dual boot or use wine to investigate Linux.
Acknowledged, but I do if I want to game on the main system. And I am admittedly too lazy to dual boot, run WINE, or use a second system.
Since you are a gamer, it stands to reason your main machine is powerful.
Er, I'd call my main (and only...) rig powerful like an averagely-endowed man would call his penis "gigantic".
In that case virtualization is the way to go. Get VirtualBox, and get it to boot a live CD Linux image (you don't even need to do an installation, just have VB run the live CD). I virtualize a number of separate Linux machines on my main machine (which incidentally is also a Win7 gaming setup).
I'd like to tinker with it, but it's something that become a hobby. Maybe running Linux off of a thumb drive would be the easiest way to do it without messing around with a lot of config, but it's honestly one of those things that's so low priority that I probably will not get around to it anytime soon.
Ah, I see. Well, I have very little interest in using Linux on my main machine, but I do like it in principle. (I am, unfortunately, a very heavy gamer and far too lazy to dual boot or fool around with stuff like WINE).
Nevertheless, you've been very helpful and enlightening. Thank you!
That's as ridiculous as alien power rangers who, like, need water to restore their power or something. Because the original power rangers got turned into kids or some shit.
We are very near the point where the free stuff out there is good enough to replace the stuff in theaters and on television (and I'm not talking about The Pirate Bay kinda free). Freeware games. *Excellent* YouTube series. Really original daring stuff.
I was all about the Daishi (in 3, at least). The lowest profile of any of the 100 tonners. I equipped it with four PPCs, heat sinks, and loads of armor. It could take a lot of punishment and one alpha strike would nearly make the Daishi go nuclear but it would instantly down any mech. Bonus: firing the alpha strike at anything above 0 heat. Having a thermonuclear suicide bomb as a last resort weapon is always a nice touch.
No, in America they most certainly do not. As a population we're pretty well armed, and remember that we'd be shooting a politician and not necessarily a soldier.
Now if someone would just step forward and take up this clearly suicidal mission.
Aside from the recent issues of outside influence (sadly from my own country), Sweden, Norway, Finland, et. al. are sounding nicer and nicer. They seem to be the last bastions of independence and sanity in the world.
Hurm... that would be a really underhanded way to get around the whole "abstinence-only education" thing. Assign a book (age-appropriate) that has safe sex as a major talking point (like a parent having "the talk" with their teenager) for a book report.
Bonus points, if any of the kids ask "why didn't we learn about this in sex ed", tell them that by law you cannot say anything and to talk to their parents.
P.S., one of my health teachers locked the door and basically violated the law by giving us proper safe sex education. I used to think he was kinda flaky, but he never lost my respect after that. I was one of the few students who understood the risk he was taking.
I'm largely Linux ignorant here, but uh... yeah. Is there any reason a "plug and play" installation would preclude you from doing any sort of tinkering or customization? I'm searching for a bit of insight here. I was under the impression that Linux was incredibly customizable with almost no regard as to when it was installed.
I'd gladly take the corruption in exchange for my privacy.
Did I miss Slashdot becoming the kind of place where giving up our privacy was viewed as a horrible idea? The whole "loss of liberty, temporary security" etc. thing?
In fact, you pointed out how exactly they could spin it. "It'll end corruption and vastly cut down on crime" - except it won't. It'll just make it slightly more technically difficult. After all, thieves managed to adjust to the proliferation of debit cards, credit cards, and the Internet easily enough. In some ways, it's made crime all the more easier from them. A guy in Romania can rob someone without ever leaving the comfort of an Internet café, relatively safe from foreign law.
So crime won't disappear. Corruption will still be trivially easy - after all, it only shows purchases. You can't as easily track a gift to a politician - instead of the cliché briefcase full of money, they'll instead get something more tangible like gold coins, diamonds, or an expensive gift.
And it will also be trivially easy for the government to track us. What about the guy who is (legally) buying aluminium shavings, iron oxide, and magnesium strips? He might be a backyard chemist or someone just dicking around in his back yard, but suddenly he's on a terrorist watchlist. Privacy will be dead.
Slashdot Mirror
But then, the link (http://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/) and this poster... manual... thing, whatever it is, both have the full name on here.
Mildly amusing and the concept for melding all of these different sets of toys together is fantastic, but the low-brow name probably won't appeal to the parents who would buy this for their kids very much. Kinda stupid and short-sighted of them, really.
Exactly! Then, HP can make lots of money selling all of those things they make that aren't PCs or printers!
However, OpenOffice (or whatever it is called today) is IMHO superior to Microsoft Office.
OO (and the much better LibreOffice, which is what they're calling the good one these days) are very solid but lacking in more than a few features compared to Office. They're not necessarily essential features, but a lot of it is useful stuff. I would strongly disagree with them being called "superior" - I'd say they're more "adequate" than anything else.
Gimp and Inkscape are great drawing programs.
But neither of them stack up to Photoshop in features, speed, or usability.
Casual games tend to be cross-platform
Yes.
while hard-core games don't universally work on Windows anyway - this is what a game platform is for.
No. That stopped being the case years ago. A low to medium end PC will be able to run most games nowadays pretty decently, barring extreme stuff like Crysis.
We could use that exact logic to attract the hipster crowd.
"OSX? Windows? Nah, those are too mainstream for me. Oh, what do I use? Linux. You've probably never heard of it before, though. It's really underground."
And thus, by hitting the hipster buzz word trifecta ("mainstream", "you've never heard of it", and "underground"), we will get millions of trendy Starbucks loiterers to use it out of spite.
Whoops, you're right! I still think $200,000,000 is a pretty big chunk to be rounding off, though.
Need more coffee...
Note to Self: start a company called "Bitcoin Tesla Monster Cables RIAA Apple Linux emacs M$ LLC", sell something (anything!), and make a boatload of money from free /. advertising.
Anyone else notice how Rob Reid "rounds" $6.8 bn to $8 bn? I mean, jeez, talk about fuzzy math!
You kind of lose a fair bit of your credibility when you're being that disingenuous. $1,200,000,000 isn't exactly what I'd call a tiny margin of error.
Yet, I almost never buy music anymore.
I buy loads of it, both MP3s and CDs.
And the RIAA doesn't get a cent, because all of the local bands I support are smart enough to realize that a) they don't need to get involved with the RIAA anymore to sell albums (if they don't give away the music outright) and b) they're going to make the vast majority of their money off of touring (which you can't really "pirate" anyway, scalping and counterfeit tickets notwithstanding).
Uh, sure, I can list some stuff.
For videos, you're not going to really be able to find huge series you can watch like you can most shows. It's the kind of adjustment most people have to make when they watch British TV for the first time (in general, British shows have much shorter seasons that elsewhere - 10 episodes every year or two compared to 20-40 every year for the States). You can find really great shows but they'll often be painfully short, so the best thing is to build up a large pool of stuff to watch.
I'm particularly fond of Next Time on Lonny and anything by freddiew. Cracked.com also hads loads of original, good material. Does Not Compute is pretty decent, Agents of Cracked (which has now run its course) was pretty good, and After Hours is definitely one of the things I most look forward to watching. There's loads of other videos there I haven't checked out as of yet.
I enjoyed the majority of There Will Be Brawl, which is a brilliant parody of Smash Brothers, Sin City, and a whole bunch of other things. It really has to be seen to be believed.
College Humor is good for pretty okay short series, and there's usually excellent shorts on places like Funny or Die starring respectable professionals, such as Don Cheadle is Captain Planet. (Yes, it's really Don Cheadle, and yes he is playing Captain Planet. Yes, he looks ridiculous. Yes, it's hilarious. "Captain Planet, motherfucker!")
As for games, I really enjoy Dwarf Fortress, although it's hugely complex and still very much in Alpha. If you like RTSes or sim games it may interest you, but it's an acquired taste.
For platformers, Spelunky is pretty challenging but possible to beat. I Wanna Be The Guy is practically impossible to beat for all but the most experienced platform players - it is deliberately unfair.
I'm also really fond of Quake Live - it's basically Quake 3 played in your browser, which is nice as you can sign on pretty much anywhere that you can install a browser plugin. It runs really well in general and is still as fun as Quake 3 was (and the netcode is way, way better).
Lastly, an interesting F2P game I've been into as of late is Realm of the Mad God, which is like a top-down shooter but with magic spells, permadeath, and a pretty high skill curve. It got boring for me fast so it's best in small doses.
Hope some of this stuff was helpful. I wish I could delve into it more but I can't really compose myself as well this morning, nor do I have the time. The stuff you'll enjoy the most, I've found, is the stuff you discover yourself. Have fun!
I play it more like tank combat. Less the "main battle tank flying over a hill" type, and more the "quietly creeping up a hill, just barely exposing your turret, and popping the unsuspecting fuck of a Wehrmacht tank crew with an AP shell" kind.
It's kind of like whack-a-mole, only the mole has particle-accelerators for hands.
SAT question:
The vast majority of US soldiers are:
a) Psychopaths would shoot American citizens clearly disatisfied with their government.
b) Generally good people who swear an oath to protect the Constitution, not the government.
You don't need to dual boot or use wine to investigate Linux.
Acknowledged, but I do if I want to game on the main system. And I am admittedly too lazy to dual boot, run WINE, or use a second system.
Since you are a gamer, it stands to reason your main machine is powerful.
Er, I'd call my main (and only...) rig powerful like an averagely-endowed man would call his penis "gigantic".
In that case virtualization is the way to go. Get VirtualBox, and get it to boot a live CD Linux image (you don't even need to do an installation, just have VB run the live CD). I virtualize a number of separate Linux machines on my main machine (which incidentally is also a Win7 gaming setup).
I'd like to tinker with it, but it's something that become a hobby. Maybe running Linux off of a thumb drive would be the easiest way to do it without messing around with a lot of config, but it's honestly one of those things that's so low priority that I probably will not get around to it anytime soon.
I believe they mean "moh-BYE-el", not "MOH-bul". As in the European term for cell phone.
Incidentally (as per usual with cell phones), Japan has had this feature for years. They also can act like the Tokyo equivalent of Metrocards.
Ah, I see. Well, I have very little interest in using Linux on my main machine, but I do like it in principle. (I am, unfortunately, a very heavy gamer and far too lazy to dual boot or fool around with stuff like WINE).
Nevertheless, you've been very helpful and enlightening. Thank you!
That's as ridiculous as alien power rangers who, like, need water to restore their power or something. Because the original power rangers got turned into kids or some shit.
Just stop.
We are very near the point where the free stuff out there is good enough to replace the stuff in theaters and on television (and I'm not talking about The Pirate Bay kinda free). Freeware games. *Excellent* YouTube series. Really original daring stuff.
Just stop watching Hollywood's crap.
I was all about the Daishi (in 3, at least). The lowest profile of any of the 100 tonners. I equipped it with four PPCs, heat sinks, and loads of armor. It could take a lot of punishment and one alpha strike would nearly make the Daishi go nuclear but it would instantly down any mech. Bonus: firing the alpha strike at anything above 0 heat. Having a thermonuclear suicide bomb as a last resort weapon is always a nice touch.
"Other symptoms made include a 'flip-flopping syndrome', where shit comes out the opposite end of the body. There is no known cure."
And they have all the guns.
No, in America they most certainly do not. As a population we're pretty well armed, and remember that we'd be shooting a politician and not necessarily a soldier.
Now if someone would just step forward and take up this clearly suicidal mission.
A maxim Slashdotters will appreciate:
The Bible is the world's first EULA. People agree to what's in it without ever reading it.
Aside from the recent issues of outside influence (sadly from my own country), Sweden, Norway, Finland, et. al. are sounding nicer and nicer. They seem to be the last bastions of independence and sanity in the world.
Hurm... that would be a really underhanded way to get around the whole "abstinence-only education" thing. Assign a book (age-appropriate) that has safe sex as a major talking point (like a parent having "the talk" with their teenager) for a book report.
Bonus points, if any of the kids ask "why didn't we learn about this in sex ed", tell them that by law you cannot say anything and to talk to their parents.
P.S., one of my health teachers locked the door and basically violated the law by giving us proper safe sex education. I used to think he was kinda flaky, but he never lost my respect after that. I was one of the few students who understood the risk he was taking.
Indeed. Klingon's allowed in Scrabble, right?
I'm largely Linux ignorant here, but uh... yeah. Is there any reason a "plug and play" installation would preclude you from doing any sort of tinkering or customization? I'm searching for a bit of insight here. I was under the impression that Linux was incredibly customizable with almost no regard as to when it was installed.
I'd gladly take the corruption in exchange for my privacy.
Did I miss Slashdot becoming the kind of place where giving up our privacy was viewed as a horrible idea? The whole "loss of liberty, temporary security" etc. thing?
In fact, you pointed out how exactly they could spin it. "It'll end corruption and vastly cut down on crime" - except it won't. It'll just make it slightly more technically difficult. After all, thieves managed to adjust to the proliferation of debit cards, credit cards, and the Internet easily enough. In some ways, it's made crime all the more easier from them. A guy in Romania can rob someone without ever leaving the comfort of an Internet café, relatively safe from foreign law.
So crime won't disappear. Corruption will still be trivially easy - after all, it only shows purchases. You can't as easily track a gift to a politician - instead of the cliché briefcase full of money, they'll instead get something more tangible like gold coins, diamonds, or an expensive gift.
And it will also be trivially easy for the government to track us. What about the guy who is (legally) buying aluminium shavings, iron oxide, and magnesium strips? He might be a backyard chemist or someone just dicking around in his back yard, but suddenly he's on a terrorist watchlist. Privacy will be dead.