If this is really a problem for you, it's because you're planning on pirating the game and this makes it a little harder to do so, not because you're afraid of activating a piece of software you legitimately own.
So, in other words, if you're innocent you've got nothing to fear? I think it's safe to say that's bull no matter whether we're talking games or airline security.
Even if sex imbalance were to be a problem, that's only a problem if polygyny were legalised. Do you really believe that 55% of the population would stand by and let men have multiple partners (who's restricting it to multiple wives?) and not demand that women have an equal right to marry multiple partners?
There are a lot of things that "polygamist" mormons have screwed up: a) polygamy just means multiple marriage, not multiple wives. b) just because radical mormons practicing authoritarian and abusive marriage get all the press, doesn't mean that all polygamy is abusive. (I know you didn't say that, but it's one of the things that "mormons" have screwed up in the common understanding of polygamy.) That'd be like saying that because some husbands abuse their wives, marriage is abusive.
What everyone seems to be missing when they go "WTF?" is WTF actually went wrong. Try reading the actual letter instead of browsing the boobs. It's simple:
1. Nintendo has a policy of promoting their family image. 2. As such, they have a policy of sending cease and desist letters to porn sites who refer to their trademarks because they don't want to be associated in any way with porn. 3. SuicideGirls is a porn site. 4. Without actually checking the content of the site (beyond its "porn" label) and the context of the trademarks' appearance on the site, they send a form-letter cease and desist. 5. They look stupid.
Probably no-one at Nintendo actually knows that they've sent this letter. It was likely generated by web-crawling software, pulled out of a database query into a form letter, and sent to SuicideGirls email automatically.
This is completely normal and reasonable policy. However, since their trademarks are not be exploited for porn-profit and are used in a context where free speech would be protected, they're out of line. However:
1. This is not a copyright infringement, and so Fair Use doesn't apply. 2. The comany's obligation to vigorously defend their trademark does apply, but so tenuously that any court will probably throw it out if Nintendo itself don't realise the inappropriateness of this letter before then.
So there you go. That's WTF.
Re:A computer for half the price of Windows?
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My own desktop is circa 1998: a 600Mhz Classic Athlon, 128MB of RAM. It runs kernel 2.4 compiled for K7, and nVidia drivers for the TNT2.
Firefox, Mozilla, OO.org all run just dandy on it, though OO takes way too long to load. I can even run Firefox and OO.org at the same time, but task-switching between them thrashes the swap partition for a few long seconds.
As I write this I'm running Firefox, Gaim, a system monitor, XMMS, a Gnome Terminal (bloated!) with three terminals, and two BitTornado windows, all on Gnome 2.4. It's using a modest 70MB RAM and 131 of swap. That's running stock Debian i386 binaries: just imagine if I was running Gentoo and all those apps were compiled for k7.
So the answer to your question is, yes, it'll run fine even without stripping anything down, and even better than you'd expect if they have the sense to recompile the key apps for that specific hardware.
As others have noted before, this isn't a regulation, it's a voluntary program.
Second, this has nothing to do with restricting access of violent videogames to kids, it's about a retailer's public profile.
I did a Christmas stint in the electronics department of a Toys R Us when this was new in BC, so I know how the company looks at this from the inside. The whole point is that, Toys R Us being a family-oriented store, complying with this program sends a message that the store is kid-and-parent-friendly.
"Yes," goes the argument, "a kid can go and buy it somewhere else, but you won't catch OUR store peddling violence to your precious, precious children. Do your holiday shopping here!"
This author doesn't know of what he speaks. He keeps harping on the idea that if the user doesn't choose the right GUI then "not all of his programs will work." Since when could a KDE app not be run inside GNOME, given the installed libraries? That's a beautiful given, too, since any distro these days will install any libraries that an app depends on at the same time -- transparently I might add.
His second harping-point is setting up a window manager. It seems that all major distros install X, KDE, GNOME, and some other window manager by default, these days. They also set up a DM by default, and all the DMs allow the ability to painlessly select a different GUI on the very off chance that a newbie will want something other than the default. When was the last time that you installed a distro with default install setting and got a plain login: for your trouble? I recall needed to disable xdm on Debian 2.2 in order to get a nice, clean console at boot rather than a GUI.
Of course, this comment will likely never be read, what with that huge KDE vs. GNOME flamewar going on upstairs.
If you've ever looked at the circuit diagram for a simple multiplexer, you'd take that back. Really, how complex the is logic depends on what you want to do with the data off of those wires. To really simplify the idea: if you use serial, you've got to have a muxer/demuxer on the end of that line, and if you use parallel you need to have a clock to syncronise communications on those lines.
In any case, the difference in circuit complexity due to parallel vs. serial, even if one required less than the other, would be a few orders of magnitude less than the complexity of the circuits required to manage the disk itself.
Given the choice between units created by the French, and units created by anyone else, you'd have to choose...
Anyone else.
Unless you're a scientist. Even in backward coutries like the United States, scientists have long ago switched to metric. As long ago as George Washington people knew that metric was the way to go. Did you know that it took a World War to even settle on a standard value for the inch? The same article notes that metric was made law in the US before imperial measures were legally defined, and when they finally were, the legal definition of the inch (etc) was defined in metric.
Praise Google, the Bringer of Semi-Useless Factoids.
Okay, so it's not "pocket sized" according to the article, but I'm sure there are lots of possibilities out there. The fact that this one is so well equipped in the I/O department just caught my eye.
A few days ago this article said exactly that; it had a lot of sensible things to say about the trouble with today's brand of language advocacy, but I think the points he makes are applicable to all advocacy, not just language advocacy. If you didn't read it the first time around, you'd do well to go back and read it.
I'd say more on the Gnome vs. KDE point, but Dominus identifies the crux of it much more eloquently.:)
I question the reasoning in Cliff's comment after the story. He's citing the
common idea that competition in a free market results directly in an
improvement in the competing products, and I'm not sure this applies to the OS
community in such a direct way. After all, how much pressure to improve itself
has Linux felt from *BSD? What about Darwin or the Hurd? Being newer than most
to the community, I put this as a question to those of you who would know it
firsthand.
FurryMUCK? Isn't that the place with all the bestiality and bondage and stuff?
Horray for ignorance! If you actually knew what furry fandom was, you'd realise how stupid the bestiality part of that question is...
Aside from that, the hornball furries are not representative; they're just the most visible and worst stereotype.
Wow, you're a troll and an AC! Talk about breeding from the best stock. When you're done stuffing Microsoft Shaft 2000(TM) up your (_|_), you can go bury your cynical little mentally-handicapped-fixated head in the sand and tell yourself that the we're all a bunch of rabble-raising freeloading bleeding-heart commies. 'Kay sqoodgums?
Rebuttal: 1. Prove 'illiterate,' 'nothing better to do,' 'misguided retards,' and the implication that Linux isn't a movement. (Since when is a collection of bits a movement anyhow? I though Free Software was the movement, silly me.:)
2. It may just be me, but I never heard anything about 'crashing MS stock.'
3. Aha! Use of all caps on a derogatory term that has no basis except the poster's imagination. You're only, oh say, 11 years old, right? I mean maturity-wise, of course.
4. Nuts. I was giving you points for spelling up until now, but that 'sux' bit lost you that. Oh, and qualify the sucking feces bit, aside from any scat-fixation you might have, yourself. Oh, by the way; 'Microsoft' isn't an OS like Solaris or AIX. I assume you mean 'never beat MS OSs...or any other real OS.' FYI, Windows 95/98 isn't a real OS.
Your bit about econimic models? Bunk. Here's a hint: open source isn't an econimic model. It's a software development model. Know what is the more likely reason that Netscape bombed? Few open source developpers want to sift through years of closed kludge. That, and AOL's corporate culture is incompatible with what's left of Netscape's. My case in point here would be RedHat. Are they going under? Hardly.
BTW, I never heard about ESR being fired by Apple Corp. Hey, didja hear that Einstein failed math? Yeah, all the big scientist-like dudes are talking about all the dork-wads that still believe in Einsteinian physics.
--- Hey, that was fun. Keep it coming you twisted soul of black oozing hate. I bet you have a bad rash too, and fuzzy teeth.
If I want to "expand my horizons" I can tune into a Seattle station with the flick of finger.
Note that I don't as a general rule. Canadian music is as much of a mix of good and bad as "international" music is, and some increadible bands just don't get airtime outside the border (Tragically Hip anyone?), not to mention the proliferation of quality local bands that are encouraged by the CanCon laws. The virtue of the Vancouver music scene, in particular, is that it's what Seattle was before the Big Record Labels discovered it. That, and, in Canada, no "[US Company] of Canada" can force out the Canadian content by buying up all the stations.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is really a problem for you, it's because you're planning on pirating the game and this makes it a little harder to do so, not because you're afraid of activating a piece of software you legitimately own.
So, in other words, if you're innocent you've got nothing to fear? I think it's safe to say that's bull no matter whether we're talking games or airline security.
Even if sex imbalance were to be a problem, that's only a problem if polygyny were legalised. Do you really believe that 55% of the population would stand by and let men have multiple partners (who's restricting it to multiple wives?) and not demand that women have an equal right to marry multiple partners?
There are a lot of things that "polygamist" mormons have screwed up:
a) polygamy just means multiple marriage, not multiple wives.
b) just because radical mormons practicing authoritarian and abusive marriage get all the press, doesn't mean that all polygamy is abusive. (I know you didn't say that, but it's one of the things that "mormons" have screwed up in the common understanding of polygamy.) That'd be like saying that because some husbands abuse their wives, marriage is abusive.
What everyone seems to be missing when they go "WTF?" is WTF actually went wrong. Try reading the actual letter instead of browsing the boobs. It's simple:
1. Nintendo has a policy of promoting their family image.
2. As such, they have a policy of sending cease and desist letters to porn sites who refer to their trademarks because they don't want to be associated in any way with porn.
3. SuicideGirls is a porn site.
4. Without actually checking the content of the site (beyond its "porn" label) and the context of the trademarks' appearance on the site, they send a form-letter cease and desist.
5. They look stupid.
Probably no-one at Nintendo actually knows that they've sent this letter. It was likely generated by web-crawling software, pulled out of a database query into a form letter, and sent to SuicideGirls email automatically.
This is completely normal and reasonable policy. However, since their trademarks are not be exploited for porn-profit and are used in a context where free speech would be protected, they're out of line. However:
1. This is not a copyright infringement, and so Fair Use doesn't apply.
2. The comany's obligation to vigorously defend their trademark does apply, but so tenuously that any court will probably throw it out if Nintendo itself don't realise the inappropriateness of this letter before then.
So there you go. That's WTF.
My own desktop is circa 1998: a 600Mhz Classic Athlon, 128MB of RAM. It runs kernel 2.4 compiled for K7, and nVidia drivers for the TNT2.
Firefox, Mozilla, OO.org all run just dandy on it, though OO takes way too long to load. I can even run Firefox and OO.org at the same time, but task-switching between them thrashes the swap partition for a few long seconds.
As I write this I'm running Firefox, Gaim, a system monitor, XMMS, a Gnome Terminal (bloated!) with three terminals, and two BitTornado windows, all on Gnome 2.4. It's using a modest 70MB RAM and 131 of swap. That's running stock Debian i386 binaries: just imagine if I was running Gentoo and all those apps were compiled for k7.
So the answer to your question is, yes, it'll run fine even without stripping anything down, and even better than you'd expect if they have the sense to recompile the key apps for that specific hardware.
As others have noted before, this isn't a regulation, it's a voluntary program.
Second, this has nothing to do with restricting access of violent videogames to kids, it's about a retailer's public profile.
I did a Christmas stint in the electronics department of a Toys R Us when this was new in BC, so I know how the company looks at this from the inside. The whole point is that, Toys R Us being a family-oriented store, complying with this program sends a message that the store is kid-and-parent-friendly.
"Yes," goes the argument, "a kid can go and buy it somewhere else, but you won't catch OUR store peddling violence to your precious, precious children. Do your holiday shopping here!"
This author doesn't know of what he speaks. He keeps harping on the idea that if the user doesn't choose the right GUI then "not all of his programs will work." Since when could a KDE app not be run inside GNOME, given the installed libraries? That's a beautiful given, too, since any distro these days will install any libraries that an app depends on at the same time -- transparently I might add.
His second harping-point is setting up a window manager. It seems that all major distros install X, KDE, GNOME, and some other window manager by default, these days. They also set up a DM by default, and all the DMs allow the ability to painlessly select a different GUI on the very off chance that a newbie will want something other than the default. When was the last time that you installed a distro with default install setting and got a plain login: for your trouble? I recall needed to disable xdm on Debian 2.2 in order to get a nice, clean console at boot rather than a GUI.
Of course, this comment will likely never be read, what with that huge KDE vs. GNOME flamewar going on upstairs.
--
> (less wires = less logic).
If you've ever looked at the circuit diagram for a simple multiplexer, you'd take that back. Really, how complex the is logic depends on what you want to do with the data off of those wires. To really simplify the idea: if you use serial, you've got to have a muxer/demuxer on the end of that line, and if you use parallel you need to have a clock to syncronise communications on those lines.
In any case, the difference in circuit complexity due to parallel vs. serial, even if one required less than the other, would be a few orders of magnitude less than the complexity of the circuits required to manage the disk itself.
Given the choice between units created by the French, and units created by anyone else, you'd have to choose...
Anyone else.
Unless you're a scientist. Even in backward coutries like the United States, scientists have long ago switched to metric. As long ago as George Washington people knew that metric was the way to go.
Did you know that it took a World War to even settle on a standard value for the inch? The same article notes that metric was made law in the US before imperial measures were legally defined, and when they finally were, the legal definition of the inch (etc) was defined in metric.
Praise Google, the Bringer of Semi-Useless Factoids.
Okaaay...
Why the heck did Slashcode decide it necessary to add "[canadacomputes.com]" there?
You mean something like this?
Okay, so it's not "pocket sized" according to the article, but I'm sure there are lots of possibilities out there. The fact that this one is so well equipped in the I/O department just caught my eye.
You're thinking of MUD Shell.
It's an interesting toy, if only to read what the designers think of the traditional *nix file structure.
A few days ago this article said exactly that; it had a lot of sensible things to say about the trouble with today's brand of language advocacy, but I think the points he makes are applicable to all advocacy, not just language advocacy. If you didn't read it the first time around, you'd do well to go back and read it.
:)
I'd say more on the Gnome vs. KDE point, but Dominus identifies the crux of it much more eloquently.
I question the reasoning in Cliff's comment after the story. He's citing the common idea that competition in a free market results directly in an improvement in the competing products, and I'm not sure this applies to the OS community in such a direct way. After all, how much pressure to improve itself has Linux felt from *BSD? What about Darwin or the Hurd? Being newer than most to the community, I put this as a question to those of you who would know it firsthand.
FurryMUCK? Isn't that the place with all the bestiality and bondage and stuff?
Horray for ignorance! If you actually knew what furry fandom was, you'd realise how stupid the bestiality part of that question is...
Aside from that, the hornball furries are not representative; they're just the most visible and worst stereotype.
Wow, you're a troll and an AC! Talk about breeding from the best stock. When you're done stuffing Microsoft Shaft 2000(TM) up your (_|_), you can go bury your cynical little mentally-handicapped-fixated head in the sand and tell yourself that the we're all a bunch of rabble-raising freeloading bleeding-heart commies. 'Kay sqoodgums?
Rebuttal: 1. Prove 'illiterate,' 'nothing better to do,' 'misguided retards,' and the implication that Linux isn't a movement. (Since when is a collection of bits a movement anyhow? I though Free Software was the movement, silly me. :)
2. It may just be me, but I never heard anything about 'crashing MS stock.'
3. Aha! Use of all caps on a derogatory term that has no basis except the poster's imagination. You're only, oh say, 11 years old, right? I mean maturity-wise, of course.
4. Nuts. I was giving you points for spelling up until now, but that 'sux' bit lost you that. Oh, and qualify the sucking feces bit, aside from any scat-fixation you might have, yourself. Oh, by the way; 'Microsoft' isn't an OS like Solaris or AIX. I assume you mean 'never beat MS OSs...or any other real OS.' FYI, Windows 95/98 isn't a real OS.
Your bit about econimic models? Bunk. Here's a hint: open source isn't an econimic model. It's a software development model. Know what is the more likely reason that Netscape bombed? Few open source developpers want to sift through years of closed kludge. That, and AOL's corporate culture is incompatible with what's left of Netscape's. My case in point here would be RedHat. Are they going under? Hardly.
BTW, I never heard about ESR being fired by Apple Corp. Hey, didja hear that Einstein failed math? Yeah, all the big scientist-like dudes are talking about all the dork-wads that still believe in Einsteinian physics.
---
Hey, that was fun. Keep it coming you twisted soul of black oozing hate. I bet you have a bad rash too, and fuzzy teeth.
If I want to "expand my horizons" I can tune into a Seattle station with the flick of finger.
Note that I don't as a general rule. Canadian music is as much of a mix of good and bad as "international" music is, and some increadible bands just don't get airtime outside the border (Tragically Hip anyone?), not to mention the proliferation of quality local bands that are encouraged by the CanCon laws. The virtue of the Vancouver music scene, in particular, is that it's what Seattle was before the Big Record Labels discovered it. That, and, in Canada, no "[US Company] of Canada" can force out the Canadian content by buying up all the stations.
Geez, who shoved a glass rod down *your* urethra today?