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User: fm6

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Comments · 12,706

  1. Re:Free-To-Play === No DRM? on Ubisoft Claims PC Piracy Rate of 93-95% · · Score: 1

    You make a good point. But you should copy your files off that floppy disk. Not the most reliable medium.

    Hey, I think I'll take a break and play Day of the Tentacle. Runs just fine on ScrummVM,

  2. Re:Not a phone interface. on Former Xerox PARC Researcher: Windows 8 Is a Cognitive Burden · · Score: 2

    A mobile paradigm is the user interface paradigm for a mobile device. What's a mobile device? See above.

  3. Re:Not a phone interface. on Former Xerox PARC Researcher: Windows 8 Is a Cognitive Burden · · Score: 1

    I actually saw a concept car that steered with a joystick. The steering wheel paradigm has mindshare lockin (like QWERTY keyboards) not technical superiority.

  4. Re:Hide? Why? on Ask Slashdot: What Would Your 'I've Got To Disappear' Plan Look Like? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Your lawyer would then suffer a nasty accident, your press contact would be murdered, and the police would discover evidence implicating you in the crime. Also, psychiatric records demonstrating your delusional personality would turn up. Jeez, don't you get cable?

  5. I'm stuck in a bad movie and I can't get out!

  6. Re:Not a phone interface. on Former Xerox PARC Researcher: Windows 8 Is a Cognitive Burden · · Score: 2

    Thing is, tablets mostly run the same OS and use the same UI conventions as smart phones. I'm studying Android programming, and there's a big emphasis on designing the app display so that it works equally well on a 3-inch display and a 10-inch display.

    You may not like the word "mobile" but the fact remains that both the widely-used tablet paradigms (Android and iOS) are scaled up smartphone interfaces, not scaled-down desktop interfaces. Perhaps the limitations of this approach will become apparent once tablets start being used for PC-type tasks, but so far it's been pretty much accepted.

  7. Re:Didn't they sell on Ubisoft Claims PC Piracy Rate of 93-95% · · Score: 2

    So, share with us why you consider F2P to be a turd sandwich.

  8. Re:Not a phone interface. on Former Xerox PARC Researcher: Windows 8 Is a Cognitive Burden · · Score: 1

    Lines between "mobile" and "PC" are pretty arbitrary. Does an Android tablet suddenly become non-mobile because it's got a 10-inch screen, bigger than many laptops? No, because it's Android, which follows a mobile paradigm. As does Windows 8.

    I agree with the rest of what you said.

  9. Re:stop bringing up the bullshit argument! on Ex-Marine Detained For Facebook Posts Deemed "Terrorist in Nature" · · Score: 1

    Everyone's right to weapons is limited by the government in order to prevent some loon from going on a murderous rampage.

    And yet loons continue to go on rampages. The limitations imposed are clearly not effective. Yet anytime anybody suggests some common-sense measures (don't sell guns that are easily retrofitted to full-auto; don't sell 20-shot magazines; make people take a gun safety course; do something about all those untraceable gun sales) we're accused of wanting to ban guns completely.

    You know what would be great? If the NRA types would admit they've won the whole "right to bear arms" argument and move on from there. Nobody's going to take away your guns because the Supreme court says they can't, and anyway gun culture is too deeply embedded in American society to be eliminated. So enjoy your victory and don't get so bent out of shape when the rest of try to restrict illegitimate use of guns.

  10. Not a phone interface. on Former Xerox PARC Researcher: Windows 8 Is a Cognitive Burden · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's a mobile device interface. Still, definitely a mistake.

    Here's what I think happened: MS decided (along with half the industry) that tablets will gradually replace desktop computer and decided they had to invent a new GUI paradigm that made Windows tablet-friendly. Whereupon they made the same mistake they've made many times before — they forgot that many of their users still need the old paradigm. We're still using laptops and desktops; we're even plugging keyboards and mice into our tablets and using them as desktops.

    I actually own a 10-year-old Windows tablet (running Windows 7) and except for handwriting and button support, Windows is not that different from that on regular systems. Pity they didn't consult the people who designed their existing tablet support. But they've probably all left the company by now, having been marginalized by the rest of the company for many years.

  11. Re:Didn't they sell on Ubisoft Claims PC Piracy Rate of 93-95% · · Score: 4, Informative

    Your math is off. It would be 20-30 million. Still unlikely, I admit.

    But the thing that's missing from the headline is that Guillemot is claiming 95-97% pirated copies for all games, not just Ubisoft's. And the only reason he even cares is that it helps justify him switching to a Free to Play model, where the percentages of users who pay is also about 5% and costs are much lower.

    So, even though his facts are very dubious, he's using them to justify moving away from DRM. So, who cares?

  12. Re:Does Anybody Care? on Slackware Documentation Project Begins In Earnest · · Score: 1

    More briefly put, its apparent disadvantages are actually advantages when you have old or limited hardware. Fair enough.

  13. Re:All This And Flying Cars Too on Cheap Four-fingered Robot Hand Edges Closer To Human Dexterity · · Score: 1

    Neither of which had a significant impact on the growth of computer technology, which has been exponential since the 1940s. And I mean "exponential" in the literal sense, not as a buzzword for "really big".

  14. Does Anybody Care? on Slackware Documentation Project Begins In Earnest · · Score: 0

    So what distinguishes Slackware from other distros? No public bug tracking. Closed development process. A primitive character-mode installer. All administration is done from the command line. No dependency tracking. Minimal feature set.

    Could somebody who uses this thing explain why they prefer it to a more modern and open distro?

  15. As Oscar Wilde Said on Slackware Documentation Project Begins In Earnest · · Score: 1

    It's important to be Earnest.

  16. Re:Look at the bright side on Earth's Corner of the Galaxy Just Got a Little Lonelier · · Score: 1

    Oh my. We can barely put a tiny payload on planets in our own solar system, and you're daydreaming about building planets 6 light-years away. Do you have some fusion-rocket plans you're not telling us about?

  17. Re:All This And Flying Cars Too on Cheap Four-fingered Robot Hand Edges Closer To Human Dexterity · · Score: 1

    Excuse me? Come to a halt? Moore's Law is a myth? All those university compsci departments are just shams?

  18. Re:Just block all ads and don't worry about it on Ask Slashdot: To AdBlock Or Not To AdBlock? · · Score: 1

    And now we come to the personal attack copout.

  19. Re:THIS IS NOT NEWS! on The Worst Apple Store In America — An Employee Confession · · Score: 1

    Excuse me, where did I say that you shouldn't fire thieves? Oh excuse me, they're all thieves, aren't they. You must be a joy to work for. Teamwork, trust...

  20. Re:THIS IS NOT NEWS! on The Worst Apple Store In America — An Employee Confession · · Score: 1

    Your notion of how insurance works is pretty unrealistic. You can't just insure against a potential problem and then consider it a non-issue. If you do, you soon won't be able to afford insurance.

    Those Apple stores with their "geniuses" (my scare quotes are based on a less enthusiastic evaluation of their intelligence) are a big selling point for a corporation whose market cap is slightly greater than God's. If one of them is as badly run as this article claims, it's news all right.

  21. Re:Just block all ads and don't worry about it on Ask Slashdot: To AdBlock Or Not To AdBlock? · · Score: 1, Insightful

    And that is yet another copout. You perfectly willing to argue until you run out of answers. Then you hide behind "I see things differently."

    Consider a more mature possibility. "OK, you're right, and I'm wrong." It's something every truely honest person has to say now and then.

  22. Re:Just block all ads and don't worry about it on Ask Slashdot: To AdBlock Or Not To AdBlock? · · Score: 0

    So, you rip off people who actually need the money and provide you with content you find useful and excuse yourself by claiming they're part of a "corrupt system". A pretty lame copout.

    Since you';re also part of the corrupt system (you're online, aren't you?), you can't object if I break into your house and steal your computer, right?

  23. Re:Just block all ads and don't worry about it on Ask Slashdot: To AdBlock Or Not To AdBlock? · · Score: 0

    And I should have mentioned that if you feel free to rip off content providers, the ones that will be hurt most will be the independents who actually give a shit about the same things you do, not the big media monopolies.

  24. Re:Just block all ads and don't worry about it on Ask Slashdot: To AdBlock Or Not To AdBlock? · · Score: 2

    I share your contempt for the big media monopolies. (Promoting infinite copyright is only one of their many sins.) But not every content provider is an arm of Time Warner or Disney.

  25. All This And Flying Cars Too on Cheap Four-fingered Robot Hand Edges Closer To Human Dexterity · · Score: 2

    This exemplifies why Science Fiction was too optimistic when it assumed that robots (real thinking robots, not the programmable waldos that presently go by that name) would be ubiquitous by now. The basic things humans can do — parse visual data, parse language, manipulate object, make decisions based on complicated data sets — appear to be simple, but are actually complicated processes that resulted from millions of years of evolutionary tweaking.

    I'd mention the problems with the Three Laws of Robotics, but that always starts a flame war with some rabid Asimov fan, so I'll refrain. I will say that I think that machines that can truly think are still a long way away, and when they do appear they'll be as different from us as airplanes are from birds.