Personal use has been legal in holland for some time, and we still got crime and crime-ridden area's.
Personal use or posession of cannabis is not legal in The Netherlands, they just aren't prosecuted and you won't get fined or go to jail if the police finds it on you in a search. But they will take the drugs and they are allowed to use it as incriminating evidence if it's more than the amount allowed for personal use (5 grams). Also coffee shops are not legal, and they are _very_ tightly surveyed, you can almost tell from the number of police cars driving around a neighbourhood how many coffee shops are nearby, a coffee shop that gets caught selling hard drugs or alcohol on only a single occasion will be shut down immediately, and the municipal government will be happy to take any violent incident, alcohol use inside or in front of the shop, or other trouble or criminal activity as a reason to close coffee shops, temporarily or for good. The end result is that coffee shops here are among the safest places in big towns and incidents are rare. Many people I know including myself are regular coffee shop visitors and all of them are normal people with a good job, income and a life.
What's left in terms of cannabis-related crime here is in production. The whole system here is based on the idea that carrying, using or selling are allowed (but not legal) under strict limits, but production of marijuana is still as much as a crime as it can be, and marijuana production is actively being prosecuted. Which results in people trying to make shitloads of money by growing it in the attic, stealing electricity from neighbours, street lighting or whatever, creating dangerous situations and a criminal circuit around production. When this last step would be legalized as well (it's not really an option to just tolerate it because of the fire hazard and nuisance to neighbourhoods) I think we can say the last bit of cannabis-related crime in the Netherlands would be gone as well.
Banning stuff doesn't make it go away. I agree that alchohol does much more damage than cannabis, but prohibition is not the answer. Reducing abuse would be a better idea but it's not easy.
Funny that you picked this particular example, because even strongly typed languages more often than not allow implicit floatint conversions. Take C/C++ for example, which would be a prime example of a strongly typed language but still it allows implicit int->float conversions, and many compilers don't mind going from int->float conversions either, even though it's a narrowing type conversion.
A better example would be something like string s = '0nice' and int i = 1. A typical weakly typed language allows statements such as string t = s + i (yielding '0nice1' for example) or i = i + s (multiple possible interpretations possible, but most languages would convert '0nice' to 0 to get i = i + 0).
We don't cut people's hands off for stealing anymore.
You know what, I think I'd have a really hard time deciding if I'd rather have my hand cut off or be held liable for $2 million, effectively putting me in government-enforced poverty for the rest of my life, without any chance ever being able to earn and spend my own money. Just putting things in perspective...
It doesn't matter from which angle you approach this case, or whether you're an avid 'pirate' or a RIAA representative. Ruining someone's life by holding him or her liable for over 10,000 times the value of the songs distributed is simply beyond anything reasonable.
Maybe they'res a lot more vulnerabilities found in *every version of the linux kernel since 2.0* because *anyone can see the code*? Just guessing...
Vulnerability statistics are completely useless as a measure of OS safety. The only sensible measure would be the number of machines actually affected and being exploited, and the severity and real-world impact of said exploits. But these would be hard to quantify...
Anyway I'm pretty confident that even after correcting for the number of installations world-wide, a Linux box is much, much, MUCH less likely to be exploited than a Windows machine, whatever the reasons. If I interpolate the occasions that I ran into a rooted linux box (0 times) compared to an exploited Windows box (lost track looooong ago), then Windows seems to be infinitely more exploitable than Linux (or OS X, for that matter).
So you've been working on Windows for all your life and tried Ubuntu for 3x half an hour, and concluded it's 'a piece of junk'? No wonder you don't like linux, you'd probably hate OS X too, or any other OS you'll ever try that isn't Windows.
That said, you have a valid point when it comes to hardware drivers for some pieces of hardware, especially wifi cards. Linux still isn't at the same level of hardware and vendor support that Windows is. Funny thing is that if your hardware DOES have drivers (which is true for more and more devices every day, because vendors are finally starting to get the point that Linux users can also be customers) you don't even have to download or install anything, just pop in the Ubuntu install CD and all the drivers are on there already, instead of a small subset of insanely out-of-date drivers as shipped on the Windows CD.
That said, OS X isn't much better than Linux when it comes to hardware support and drivers, webcams are a nightmare, WiFi drivers are simply absent and don't dare to try upgrading that video card in your Mac Pro because it won't work if you don't pick the exact model that Apple endorses. Does that mean OS X is 'bad' or 'worse than Windows'? Why do people who use OS X think it's so easy to use then? Because the machine is built for the OS, and you don't *need* to install or upgrade any drivers for normal use. The exact same thing holds for a vendor-supported Linux machine that you buy preinstalled, but that's not what people like you are trying. You're trying to do a clean install on random hardware, there's nothing different from Windows or OS X in that regard when it comes to the hassle it takes to get everything working. And no, a GUI doesn't help you to get a non- or semi- supported WiFi card with buggy drivers working.
Well let's put it this way: I simply disagree with everything you say, but I guess that's personal.
When I have to do stuff in Windows it takes me 10 minutes of mucking around all the stupid settings windows, tabs and icons, every Windows version shuffles all that around, and eventually I find out I have to edit some obscure registry key just to stop some stupid program I didn't install consciously from loading on startup. The fact that you remembered what icons you have to click to get somewhere doesn't mean it's easier to remember or anything, most likely you've had so many stuff to fix on your windows machine that you now know what is where from the top of your head. Most non-geek people I know who use Windows don't even know they have a control panel.
I also don't really get why you think you have to remember any commands for everyday linux use, like many people alread posted a fully working linux system doesn't need the CLI, and it just keeps working unless you deliberately screw it up. It's sometimes a hard way to get there, especially on new hardware, and that's what the CLI is really useful for, much more useful than the Windows GUI (you know how to see the system log for example? Or the boot log? Or the PCI ids of that 'unknown device' on your system).
Last but not least let me add that people often view Windows as 'much easier' because they are used to it, and they bought the machine pre-installed and ready to go. Most people wo think Windows is easy would be completely lost if you gave them a generic installation CD and told them to get the machine up and running with all the hardware working properly.
Try reinstalling that VAIO with a different Windows version, one that hasn't been customized by Sony, and then post your luck getting all the right hardware drivers and configuring the system. You're comparing a PREINSTALLED version that has all the kinks already worked out by some guy at Sony, to a MANUALLY installed operating system you have to configure yourself. It's like saying how much easier it is to just drive that new car you just bought from the dealer to buying the same car and then swapping the engine yourself.
As a counter-example: I once bought an HP pavilion laptop with XP home on it (which I couldn't remove or have upgraded to another XP version by the way because HP tied the license to the machine and didn't offer anything but XP home). Because I needed to logon to a Windows domain, I upgraded to XP pro. After that, I didn't have 3D acceleration, the TV-out stopped working, no wifi until I installed drivers from directly from the card manufacturer and it took 4 months before HP finally released downloadable drivers for the ATI chip that was in it, the stock ones didn't recognize the card because HP screwed with the PCI ids, and the only way to get the machine to work fully was to do a full system recovery. Using the XP home recovery discs...
You have an operating system with buttons or icons you can click to fix any sort of problem you might ever encounter? Must be an insanely cluttered GUI then...
Also I don't see how 'Open the control panel, click on the hardware icon, open the driver panel, click on the devices tab, find small icon with the plus sign before it that reads audio devices, expand it, find the audio card in the expanded list, which would probably be the one that doesn't have the word codec in it, see if it has an exclamation mark before it, right click it and pick properties, go to the resources tab, write down all the values in the list of ports/interrupts en post them here' would be easier than to say 'open the terminal application from the menu and first type 'dmesg' and copy paste the results here, then type 'lspci -v -v -v' and post this output here as well'
Point is, the CLI is much more efficient for many, many tasks. Maybe not the common everyday ones, but that's what we have GUI apps for. Linux is no exception. If you have system problems or have to do crazy stuff to fix something at least in Linux you are able to do that through the CLI and to post instructions for other people to help them, even though they have no idea what they're actually typing. In Windows you're generally stuck unless you know a friend or relative you can offer a beer to fix it (which would be the guy I used to be for half of my family and friends until I finally ditched Windows for OS X and Linux. Now officialy "I know nothing about Windows PC's" anymore;-)
I think you're turning things upside-down, in these games unlocking the extra content is coupled to certain achievements, not the other way around. It's not like the content is tied to the achievements: if you transfer your GamerTag to another console for example, your achievements will be lost but you will still have the unlocked content. In most games, achievements aren't tied to extra content at all.
So in general: achievements are not for unlocking extra content, but some games do tie the two together.
Achievements don't unlock extra content. You unlock extra achievements using extra content. As desirability goes, achievements have no other purpose than to show how good you are at a particular game, how long you've been playing it, and how much effort you've been willing to put in to perform all the crazy acts the developers came up with that have nothing to do with the original goal of the game.
That sounds pretty ridiculous if you ask me. The Intel i8x0 graphics and sound drivers (just to name some drivers that are supposedly 'free' and 'open') are in the kernel to be able to use Intel graphics and sound chips. Last time I checked these weren't 'free' in any sense (you have to buy the chips and the IC designs are not open/free), so I fail to see why a 'free' driver for 'non-free' software would have to be excluded from the linux kernel.
Then again, I always get lost when people go over the top in their RMS-like fetish for 'pure and unquestionable freeness' of all the bits and pieces running on their systems. It's just like with the Nvidia binary-only drivers. Finally a leading GPU company decided to offer full support for their hardware, not watered down and on par with the feature set supported on Windows, and still people complain how the source code isn't open. Of course it would be nice if every piece of software and hardware on earth was 'free', but things aren't like that, just live with it. It's not like we have attained world peace, eliminated poverty and created an ecologically sustainable world economy yet, but that doesn't mean initiatives to get closer, even a little bit, are impure, wrong and should be rejected because they aren't perfect or don't apply to yourself.
I'd mod you up if I had points, I don't really get it either. It's a good thing if anti-competetive behaviour is punished but the whole browser story really is beating a dead horse. The EU is trailing reality by a few years again, just like when they forced Microsoft to release a Windows-N without Windows Media Player. All the poisoning Microsoft could have done to the market when it comes to media players is already in the past. There really isn't anything stopping you from installing alternate media players or browsers in WIndows, forcing file associations or whatever. As much as I'd love to see the world move away from Windows and Microsoft, I really don't see the point in making their life hard over media players or browsers right now.
I expect the EU to be fining Microsoft for deliberately screwing up standardization of office document formats... In 2020...
Yes, but you will dump core with a bad_index or an assertion if you write outside iterator bounds, instead of overwriting arbitrary memory, opening up opportunities for exploits.
In Java, C# or about any other language I've ever programmed indexing outside the bounds arrays or other containers will b0rk your program, it's all about _how_ it borks, and in that regard C++ code that only uses STL (properly) is pretty safe against buffer under/overflow exploits.
That's funny, my cat (and some other cats I know) does the chirping/chattering thing when it spots a bird or a bug outside. I always thought they were trying to mimic bird chattering when they do that, to fool the birds or something. They're strange beasties, them cats;-)
You're right about the vocal communication thing, I've never seen cats making sounds to each other either. But they do also carry over many of the non-vocal cues to humans, like headbutting your head, punching, or jumping on you if they need something.
I really feel sad for you if the stuff going on in your life is really so insignificant that you start getting aggrevated about cats littering in your garden, killing the occasional bird and getting paw prints on your beloved car. You do realize that garden soil is full of dead bugs and excrements, composted plants, and that you will get your hands dirty when gardening anyway? That birds also get killed by hitting cars, trains or airplanes or simply by falling out of the nest, and that parking your car under the wrong tree also makes it dirty?
The moment you start getting sincerly bothered and aggrevated about trivialities like that, that you start hating cats for it, is the moment you should figure out something is missing in your life. You'd better not have any kids if you feel that way, they can be extremely annoying at times as well.
Well, as a cat owner I'm not surprised at all. My cat learned quite a few different sounds since I got her, initially it wasn't more than the common meow, but now she uses quite a few different purrs and grunts for different occasions. Like in the morning when feeding time takes too long it's almost like a dog growling in really short bursts, while when you get home it's a more like a high-pitch grunt or purr. I'm sure dogs have similar ways to show their feelings or try to communicate stuff. Cats know damn well what they can and can't do and what will happen when they act some way or another, so it's not a big step from different sounds for different events to learning that certain sounds seem to do trick.
That's not the point. The point is: making it so hard for users to remember their passwords actually results in weaker passwords.
If the point of your password policy is to reduce the risk of them getting compromised (which it should be), it's of no use if everyone picks a password like 'a+B12345', changes it to 'B+a12345' the first time, changes it to 'A+b12345' the second time, to 'A+b54321' the third time, and so on, just because they can't pick one of their previous 6 passwords, need to have capitals, special characters and numbers, and so on. Also, when users write down their passwords and keep them lingering around, that makes the situation even worse.
One of the craziest rules of them all is 'you have to change your password and it cannot be one of your last x passwords', I really can't wrap my head around that one, how it should improve password security, anyone care to explain the rationale behind that? When I try to figure it out I always end up with: a) either my password is strong and it isn't hacked, which is good, just leave it like that, or b) my password has been compromised, in which case any attacker can happily abuse it until the next forced password update, which is generally months away, which should leave him plenty of time to exploit the account anyway.
OK, you're talking about the people who call themselves architects and so on. Yeah, I've seen them screw things up royally, and not get caught. It's easy for a mere programmer to suspect, but not easy to *prove*, that the project would have succeeded/been less over budget/etc if this-or-that technical decision had been taken differently.
This sounds very familiar, just having rewritten a 200+ page 'architecture' that ±6 people worked on for a year without completing it, using only 3 (good) engineers, within 3 weeks, resulting in an 'architecture' that consists only of a really thin layer of interfaces implemented in less than 10 classes, and documented in about 5 pages of architecture and of course the generated API documentation. The people who worked on this for a year were pulled from the project but officially because they 'needed to be allocated elsewhere'. I don't think they'll every really be held accountable for the wasted time, effort and money, not even the execs that 'managed' the project.
I partially agree, but that said, you can always over-estimate the complexity of in-game visuals to provide 'immersion'.
As an example, I had this discussion with some random guy on the internet, about Codemasters post-poning the next Colin McRae game to make it a DirectX 11 title. I argued that while both DX10 and DX11 are nice improvements, you should still be able to get to almost (or maybe completely) the same visuals you could achieve with the same card running DX9, now that GPU's have fully programmable shaders. It might be difficult, but it should be possible. His reply was that 'this is exactly what's holding back computer games, sticking with obsolete technology', and 'that would mean PC games would end up with the same crappy low-resolution graphics that consoles have'. Instead we should all buy GTX295 SLI setups that draw 500W of power, and run our DX11 games in 1920x1080 and above.
Well, yesterday I was playing Killzone 2 on the PS3, which has a Geforce 7800 in it, and runs at 720p, which is about on par with PC graphics technology from ~5 years back. I can say I had zero problems getting 'immersed in the game', because the gameplay takes care of that, there so much going on while playing that the number of pixels and polygons is completely irrelevant to the game and how you enjoy it. The same holds for (e.g) Mario or Zelda games, those games don't need realistic or high-def graphics, in fact, they'd probably discount the 'level of immersion'.
With nvidia drivers it's easy as anything, the only problem is in the nvidia-config tool, like the parent mentioned, because it fails to save the config over the old one. You can save it somewhere else though and copy it over/etc/X11/xorg.conf, no big deal. The fact that saving the config doesn't work means the OS fucked up is BS of course, the Nvidia control panel is a third-party tool. Before saving the config it's simply a matter of selecting the resolutions of the monitors and the desktop layout, click apply and you get your dual-screen immediately, it's as easy as on Windows. No idea how ATI drivers handle it, anyway, it's all a matter of proper driver support. You can bitch about X and DRI all day, but as long as there's no specs available, no-one can write a driver for any video card, that's not X's fault. Luckily ATI released lots of docs a while ago, so eventually both ATI and nvidia (which happen to be the only 2 major GPU suppliers that still don't have good open-source 3D drivers available) will be supported to the same level as they are on Windows. Intel, VIA, PowerVR, etc. all have proper drivers already.
As for the rest of your rant about X: I'm really sorry you hate it so much, but I love it, and I think most people who look past the typical 'X is crap'/'X is slow'/'X is bloated' would agree. The whole X stack and things like DRI that bother you so much are there for a reason, which is to allow running network-transparent cross-platform X applications. I wouldn't want to miss that functionality for anything. Right now, I get full network transparency, a 3D accelerated desktop that beats Vista Aero in every aspect even on an Intel 810 chip, and full 1080p GPU assisted video acceleration from a simple Atom board with a low-end nvidia chip.
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty cool actually :-D
Personal use has been legal in holland for some time, and we still got crime and crime-ridden area's.
Personal use or posession of cannabis is not legal in The Netherlands, they just aren't prosecuted and you won't get fined or go to jail if the police finds it on you in a search. But they will take the drugs and they are allowed to use it as incriminating evidence if it's more than the amount allowed for personal use (5 grams). Also coffee shops are not legal, and they are _very_ tightly surveyed, you can almost tell from the number of police cars driving around a neighbourhood how many coffee shops are nearby, a coffee shop that gets caught selling hard drugs or alcohol on only a single occasion will be shut down immediately, and the municipal government will be happy to take any violent incident, alcohol use inside or in front of the shop, or other trouble or criminal activity as a reason to close coffee shops, temporarily or for good. The end result is that coffee shops here are among the safest places in big towns and incidents are rare. Many people I know including myself are regular coffee shop visitors and all of them are normal people with a good job, income and a life.
What's left in terms of cannabis-related crime here is in production. The whole system here is based on the idea that carrying, using or selling are allowed (but not legal) under strict limits, but production of marijuana is still as much as a crime as it can be, and marijuana production is actively being prosecuted. Which results in people trying to make shitloads of money by growing it in the attic, stealing electricity from neighbours, street lighting or whatever, creating dangerous situations and a criminal circuit around production. When this last step would be legalized as well (it's not really an option to just tolerate it because of the fire hazard and nuisance to neighbourhoods) I think we can say the last bit of cannabis-related crime in the Netherlands would be gone as well.
Banning stuff doesn't make it go away. I agree that alchohol does much more damage than cannabis, but prohibition is not the answer. Reducing abuse would be a better idea but it's not easy.
Funny that you picked this particular example, because even strongly typed languages more often than not allow implicit floatint conversions. Take C/C++ for example, which would be a prime example of a strongly typed language but still it allows implicit int->float conversions, and many compilers don't mind going from int->float conversions either, even though it's a narrowing type conversion.
A better example would be something like string s = '0nice' and int i = 1. A typical weakly typed language allows statements such as string t = s + i (yielding '0nice1' for example) or i = i + s (multiple possible interpretations possible, but most languages would convert '0nice' to 0 to get i = i + 0).
We don't cut people's hands off for stealing anymore.
You know what, I think I'd have a really hard time deciding if I'd rather have my hand cut off or be held liable for $2 million, effectively putting me in government-enforced poverty for the rest of my life, without any chance ever being able to earn and spend my own money. Just putting things in perspective...
It doesn't matter from which angle you approach this case, or whether you're an avid 'pirate' or a RIAA representative. Ruining someone's life by holding him or her liable for over 10,000 times the value of the songs distributed is simply beyond anything reasonable.
Maybe they'res a lot more vulnerabilities found in *every version of the linux kernel since 2.0* because *anyone can see the code*? Just guessing...
Vulnerability statistics are completely useless as a measure of OS safety. The only sensible measure would be the number of machines actually affected and being exploited, and the severity and real-world impact of said exploits. But these would be hard to quantify...
Anyway I'm pretty confident that even after correcting for the number of installations world-wide, a Linux box is much, much, MUCH less likely to be exploited than a Windows machine, whatever the reasons. If I interpolate the occasions that I ran into a rooted linux box (0 times) compared to an exploited Windows box (lost track looooong ago), then Windows seems to be infinitely more exploitable than Linux (or OS X, for that matter).
I should cut down on the use of the phrase 'That said...' ;-)
So you've been working on Windows for all your life and tried Ubuntu for 3x half an hour, and concluded it's 'a piece of junk'? No wonder you don't like linux, you'd probably hate OS X too, or any other OS you'll ever try that isn't Windows.
That said, you have a valid point when it comes to hardware drivers for some pieces of hardware, especially wifi cards. Linux still isn't at the same level of hardware and vendor support that Windows is. Funny thing is that if your hardware DOES have drivers (which is true for more and more devices every day, because vendors are finally starting to get the point that Linux users can also be customers) you don't even have to download or install anything, just pop in the Ubuntu install CD and all the drivers are on there already, instead of a small subset of insanely out-of-date drivers as shipped on the Windows CD.
That said, OS X isn't much better than Linux when it comes to hardware support and drivers, webcams are a nightmare, WiFi drivers are simply absent and don't dare to try upgrading that video card in your Mac Pro because it won't work if you don't pick the exact model that Apple endorses. Does that mean OS X is 'bad' or 'worse than Windows'? Why do people who use OS X think it's so easy to use then? Because the machine is built for the OS, and you don't *need* to install or upgrade any drivers for normal use. The exact same thing holds for a vendor-supported Linux machine that you buy preinstalled, but that's not what people like you are trying. You're trying to do a clean install on random hardware, there's nothing different from Windows or OS X in that regard when it comes to the hassle it takes to get everything working. And no, a GUI doesn't help you to get a non- or semi- supported WiFi card with buggy drivers working.
Well let's put it this way: I simply disagree with everything you say, but I guess that's personal.
When I have to do stuff in Windows it takes me 10 minutes of mucking around all the stupid settings windows, tabs and icons, every Windows version shuffles all that around, and eventually I find out I have to edit some obscure registry key just to stop some stupid program I didn't install consciously from loading on startup. The fact that you remembered what icons you have to click to get somewhere doesn't mean it's easier to remember or anything, most likely you've had so many stuff to fix on your windows machine that you now know what is where from the top of your head. Most non-geek people I know who use Windows don't even know they have a control panel.
I also don't really get why you think you have to remember any commands for everyday linux use, like many people alread posted a fully working linux system doesn't need the CLI, and it just keeps working unless you deliberately screw it up. It's sometimes a hard way to get there, especially on new hardware, and that's what the CLI is really useful for, much more useful than the Windows GUI (you know how to see the system log for example? Or the boot log? Or the PCI ids of that 'unknown device' on your system).
Last but not least let me add that people often view Windows as 'much easier' because they are used to it, and they bought the machine pre-installed and ready to go. Most people wo think Windows is easy would be completely lost if you gave them a generic installation CD and told them to get the machine up and running with all the hardware working properly.
Try reinstalling that VAIO with a different Windows version, one that hasn't been customized by Sony, and then post your luck getting all the right hardware drivers and configuring the system. You're comparing a PREINSTALLED version that has all the kinks already worked out by some guy at Sony, to a MANUALLY installed operating system you have to configure yourself. It's like saying how much easier it is to just drive that new car you just bought from the dealer to buying the same car and then swapping the engine yourself.
As a counter-example: I once bought an HP pavilion laptop with XP home on it (which I couldn't remove or have upgraded to another XP version by the way because HP tied the license to the machine and didn't offer anything but XP home). Because I needed to logon to a Windows domain, I upgraded to XP pro. After that, I didn't have 3D acceleration, the TV-out stopped working, no wifi until I installed drivers from directly from the card manufacturer and it took 4 months before HP finally released downloadable drivers for the ATI chip that was in it, the stock ones didn't recognize the card because HP screwed with the PCI ids, and the only way to get the machine to work fully was to do a full system recovery. Using the XP home recovery discs...
You have an operating system with buttons or icons you can click to fix any sort of problem you might ever encounter? Must be an insanely cluttered GUI then...
Also I don't see how 'Open the control panel, click on the hardware icon, open the driver panel, click on the devices tab, find small icon with the plus sign before it that reads audio devices, expand it, find the audio card in the expanded list, which would probably be the one that doesn't have the word codec in it, see if it has an exclamation mark before it, right click it and pick properties, go to the resources tab, write down all the values in the list of ports/interrupts en post them here' would be easier than to say 'open the terminal application from the menu and first type 'dmesg' and copy paste the results here, then type 'lspci -v -v -v' and post this output here as well'
Point is, the CLI is much more efficient for many, many tasks. Maybe not the common everyday ones, but that's what we have GUI apps for. Linux is no exception. If you have system problems or have to do crazy stuff to fix something at least in Linux you are able to do that through the CLI and to post instructions for other people to help them, even though they have no idea what they're actually typing. In Windows you're generally stuck unless you know a friend or relative you can offer a beer to fix it (which would be the guy I used to be for half of my family and friends until I finally ditched Windows for OS X and Linux. Now officialy "I know nothing about Windows PC's" anymore ;-)
I think you're turning things upside-down, in these games unlocking the extra content is coupled to certain achievements, not the other way around. It's not like the content is tied to the achievements: if you transfer your GamerTag to another console for example, your achievements will be lost but you will still have the unlocked content. In most games, achievements aren't tied to extra content at all.
So in general: achievements are not for unlocking extra content, but some games do tie the two together.
Achievements don't unlock extra content. You unlock extra achievements using extra content. As desirability goes, achievements have no other purpose than to show how good you are at a particular game, how long you've been playing it, and how much effort you've been willing to put in to perform all the crazy acts the developers came up with that have nothing to do with the original goal of the game.
Yet another reason I cannot take people in general seriously
That sounds pretty ridiculous if you ask me. The Intel i8x0 graphics and sound drivers (just to name some drivers that are supposedly 'free' and 'open') are in the kernel to be able to use Intel graphics and sound chips. Last time I checked these weren't 'free' in any sense (you have to buy the chips and the IC designs are not open/free), so I fail to see why a 'free' driver for 'non-free' software would have to be excluded from the linux kernel.
Then again, I always get lost when people go over the top in their RMS-like fetish for 'pure and unquestionable freeness' of all the bits and pieces running on their systems. It's just like with the Nvidia binary-only drivers. Finally a leading GPU company decided to offer full support for their hardware, not watered down and on par with the feature set supported on Windows, and still people complain how the source code isn't open. Of course it would be nice if every piece of software and hardware on earth was 'free', but things aren't like that, just live with it. It's not like we have attained world peace, eliminated poverty and created an ecologically sustainable world economy yet, but that doesn't mean initiatives to get closer, even a little bit, are impure, wrong and should be rejected because they aren't perfect or don't apply to yourself.
I'd mod you up if I had points, I don't really get it either. It's a good thing if anti-competetive behaviour is punished but the whole browser story really is beating a dead horse. The EU is trailing reality by a few years again, just like when they forced Microsoft to release a Windows-N without Windows Media Player. All the poisoning Microsoft could have done to the market when it comes to media players is already in the past. There really isn't anything stopping you from installing alternate media players or browsers in WIndows, forcing file associations or whatever. As much as I'd love to see the world move away from Windows and Microsoft, I really don't see the point in making their life hard over media players or browsers right now.
I expect the EU to be fining Microsoft for deliberately screwing up standardization of office document formats... In 2020...
Yes, but you will dump core with a bad_index or an assertion if you write outside iterator bounds, instead of overwriting arbitrary memory, opening up opportunities for exploits.
In Java, C# or about any other language I've ever programmed indexing outside the bounds arrays or other containers will b0rk your program, it's all about _how_ it borks, and in that regard C++ code that only uses STL (properly) is pretty safe against buffer under/overflow exploits.
That's funny, my cat (and some other cats I know) does the chirping/chattering thing when it spots a bird or a bug outside. I always thought they were trying to mimic bird chattering when they do that, to fool the birds or something. They're strange beasties, them cats ;-)
You're right about the vocal communication thing, I've never seen cats making sounds to each other either. But they do also carry over many of the non-vocal cues to humans, like headbutting your head, punching, or jumping on you if they need something.
People: why do people love them so much?
I really feel sad for you if the stuff going on in your life is really so insignificant that you start getting aggrevated about cats littering in your garden, killing the occasional bird and getting paw prints on your beloved car. You do realize that garden soil is full of dead bugs and excrements, composted plants, and that you will get your hands dirty when gardening anyway? That birds also get killed by hitting cars, trains or airplanes or simply by falling out of the nest, and that parking your car under the wrong tree also makes it dirty?
The moment you start getting sincerly bothered and aggrevated about trivialities like that, that you start hating cats for it, is the moment you should figure out something is missing in your life. You'd better not have any kids if you feel that way, they can be extremely annoying at times as well.
Well, as a cat owner I'm not surprised at all. My cat learned quite a few different sounds since I got her, initially it wasn't more than the common meow, but now she uses quite a few different purrs and grunts for different occasions. Like in the morning when feeding time takes too long it's almost like a dog growling in really short bursts, while when you get home it's a more like a high-pitch grunt or purr. I'm sure dogs have similar ways to show their feelings or try to communicate stuff. Cats know damn well what they can and can't do and what will happen when they act some way or another, so it's not a big step from different sounds for different events to learning that certain sounds seem to do trick.
That's not the point. The point is: making it so hard for users to remember their passwords actually results in weaker passwords.
If the point of your password policy is to reduce the risk of them getting compromised (which it should be), it's of no use if everyone picks a password like 'a+B12345', changes it to 'B+a12345' the first time, changes it to 'A+b12345' the second time, to 'A+b54321' the third time, and so on, just because they can't pick one of their previous 6 passwords, need to have capitals, special characters and numbers, and so on. Also, when users write down their passwords and keep them lingering around, that makes the situation even worse.
One of the craziest rules of them all is 'you have to change your password and it cannot be one of your last x passwords', I really can't wrap my head around that one, how it should improve password security, anyone care to explain the rationale behind that? When I try to figure it out I always end up with: a) either my password is strong and it isn't hacked, which is good, just leave it like that, or b) my password has been compromised, in which case any attacker can happily abuse it until the next forced password update, which is generally months away, which should leave him plenty of time to exploit the account anyway.
Dude, just give it up alright and be happy, you're really getting into all this a little too much.
OK, you're talking about the people who call themselves architects and so on. Yeah, I've seen them screw things up royally, and not get caught. It's easy for a mere programmer to suspect, but not easy to *prove*, that the project would have succeeded/been less over budget/etc if this-or-that technical decision had been taken differently.
This sounds very familiar, just having rewritten a 200+ page 'architecture' that ±6 people worked on for a year without completing it, using only 3 (good) engineers, within 3 weeks, resulting in an 'architecture' that consists only of a really thin layer of interfaces implemented in less than 10 classes, and documented in about 5 pages of architecture and of course the generated API documentation. The people who worked on this for a year were pulled from the project but officially because they 'needed to be allocated elsewhere'. I don't think they'll every really be held accountable for the wasted time, effort and money, not even the execs that 'managed' the project.
I partially agree, but that said, you can always over-estimate the complexity of in-game visuals to provide 'immersion'.
As an example, I had this discussion with some random guy on the internet, about Codemasters post-poning the next Colin McRae game to make it a DirectX 11 title. I argued that while both DX10 and DX11 are nice improvements, you should still be able to get to almost (or maybe completely) the same visuals you could achieve with the same card running DX9, now that GPU's have fully programmable shaders. It might be difficult, but it should be possible. His reply was that 'this is exactly what's holding back computer games, sticking with obsolete technology', and 'that would mean PC games would end up with the same crappy low-resolution graphics that consoles have'. Instead we should all buy GTX295 SLI setups that draw 500W of power, and run our DX11 games in 1920x1080 and above.
Well, yesterday I was playing Killzone 2 on the PS3, which has a Geforce 7800 in it, and runs at 720p, which is about on par with PC graphics technology from ~5 years back. I can say I had zero problems getting 'immersed in the game', because the gameplay takes care of that, there so much going on while playing that the number of pixels and polygons is completely irrelevant to the game and how you enjoy it. The same holds for (e.g) Mario or Zelda games, those games don't need realistic or high-def graphics, in fact, they'd probably discount the 'level of immersion'.
With nvidia drivers it's easy as anything, the only problem is in the nvidia-config tool, like the parent mentioned, because it fails to save the config over the old one. You can save it somewhere else though and copy it over /etc/X11/xorg.conf, no big deal. The fact that saving the config doesn't work means the OS fucked up is BS of course, the Nvidia control panel is a third-party tool. Before saving the config it's simply a matter of selecting the resolutions of the monitors and the desktop layout, click apply and you get your dual-screen immediately, it's as easy as on Windows. No idea how ATI drivers handle it, anyway, it's all a matter of proper driver support. You can bitch about X and DRI all day, but as long as there's no specs available, no-one can write a driver for any video card, that's not X's fault. Luckily ATI released lots of docs a while ago, so eventually both ATI and nvidia (which happen to be the only 2 major GPU suppliers that still don't have good open-source 3D drivers available) will be supported to the same level as they are on Windows. Intel, VIA, PowerVR, etc. all have proper drivers already.
As for the rest of your rant about X: I'm really sorry you hate it so much, but I love it, and I think most people who look past the typical 'X is crap'/'X is slow'/'X is bloated' would agree. The whole X stack and things like DRI that bother you so much are there for a reason, which is to allow running network-transparent cross-platform X applications. I wouldn't want to miss that functionality for anything. Right now, I get full network transparency, a 3D accelerated desktop that beats Vista Aero in every aspect even on an Intel 810 chip, and full 1080p GPU assisted video acceleration from a simple Atom board with a low-end nvidia chip.
I don't really see the problem with X...