Perhaps a team that isn't forced to respect ass-backwards coding guidelines can attempt to produce something fast and reasonably safe, instead of spending all their time optimizing code for Visual C++ 1.5.
Seriously, Mozilla has their heads so far up the ass that is an ancient codebase, and is extremely slow at fixing the numerous bugs that have shown up over the ages, that I see little chance for them to be a significant competitor in the future, unless they manage to clean up their act in a major way instead of shoving out incremental updates as major versions.
Also if it has a 1-piece aluminum chassis, it will be more difficult to repair, therefore more likely to be replaced, therefore more hardware going into landfills, therefore less eco-friendly. The case itself is sturdier but if it's one hard piece of aluminum, the internals will take more damage and the case will take less. Again, less eco-friendly. A good case for preventing damage would be a replaceable one made of thin, soft metal.
I disagree. An eco-friendly case would ironically be made from plastic, or if necessary some GRP or CFRP. Metal and glass, to use terms of trade, need shitloads of energy to manufacture, and the process is highly lossy. We don't even want to get started about how aluminium is extracted from the ore in the first place, or that a rather rare resource is needlessly wasted. Plastic can be molded to almost the final shape in a single pass, with a relatively low amount of energy (some heat and a vacuum pump).
All that "metal is good for the environment" is bullshit. It's good for marketing, because a laptop that feels like you could use it as a blunt weapon just feels better than "cheap" plastic. And even in that area, I'd put a lot of trust into some CFRP. It's effectively stronger and lighter than aluminium.
"And get soft leather. Good leather will last longer then microfiber."
It may last longer, but it also tends to be icky in environments that aren't air-conditioned to hell and back, i.e. sealed office farms. Replacing good microfiber every 5-10 years, depending on what you do with the chair, is well worth the added comfort in my opinion. As I said, I had mine refurbished after 7 years of more or less nonstop use, but mostly for aesthetic reasons; it's really very sturdy stuff. For cleaning, I just used the vacuum with a brush nozzle. Good leather is also hideously expensive, which may well kill the advantage.
The only thing a cheap chair will do is make your chiropractor rich.
I've been pretty much living in a Martin Stoll F14 for over seven years, and haven't developed back pain. I just had it refurbished, and it's as good as new, thanks to solid steel mechanics. The best advice I can give is to go to a specialized store with trained salespeons. Be prepared to spend quite a bit of money; good desk chairs are expensive. Get a chair that allows and encourages you to move, don't get one that hugs you tight; not moving will kill your back real quick. Instead of leather, get microfiber.
I find VLC highly lacking in several departments. It's gotten so bad that I switched back to WMP on Windows, while I've been using xine and mplayer under Linux after short forays into VLC. At least the default user interface is worse than what gmplayer has, and I've found some "amusing" issues with video playback, e.g. broken seeking in WMV (fails to display correctly until the next keyframe comes along).
The UI and configuration is an exercise in magic numbers, trying to play a DVD routinely requires more mouse clicks than mplayer requires keypresses to play the same disk with audio routed to a custom ALSA device, VLC has forked its own versions of DVD playback libraries, can't use external codecs, and the list goes on.
Seeing as it's meant to go into a consumer device, that pain and suffering may be a design goal however, and maybe VLC with all its restrictions will do well in a severely limited device.
The issue with segregated trials is that you will experience a vastly different community than on real live servers. For example, when I was still playing DAoC, a magazine for the mentally less endowed (no other way to say it more politely) had a trial offer. You could pretty much see the average intelligence drop to negative in the starting areas in the weeks after that. If I had started during that time, I'd have paid to make it stop.
Giving trial players too much influence on the live environment without paying for it on the other hand will make a lot of Chinese extremely happy.
All in all, it's a no-win situation. My idea would be something like a 2 or 3-week trial for a small amount of money, say, 5-7$, which is pretty affordable. People throw away a lot more money on trash food and bad movies on a daily basis. SOE also seems to be working on a new/alternative starting area, which could also be (ab)used as a trial area.
From the view of a returned player who played shortly after release, and then stopped for 10 months, I can say that the game has really improved a lot performance-wise, and has a rather mature and friendly community. Apart from that it's a perfectly normal MMO, with long-standing bugs that still need to be fixed since beta, class rebalancing with each update, surprise features, etc.
I am the OP. And I also replied to the "lot of work" comment, thank you very much.
My point is not so much that OO.o sucks, but that OO.o continues to suck in aspects that are well-known to be far, far sub-par, and that were announced to receive attention a long time ago, but then were blissfully ignored in favor of just polishing the interface some more. To get to your point, IMO saying that OO.o is somehow "better" at math is an overstatement. It is different, but at least as far from being "good" as the competition. In that light, building a first-number release on adding 768 columns to the spreadsheet is hypocritical at best.
Oh, one more thing: OO.o desperately begs to be compared to MS Ori^H^Hffice, so I don't see an issue with actually doing so. The LaTeX toolchain(s) have no issues with properly handling vector graphics and other niceties that would make a common office suite hide under a rock, and guess what: they're "FREE" too. And they don't run around crying for attention.
I've been looking around. The OO.o people know exactly that their drawing framework stinks out loud, and they announced far-reaching changes for 2.0. What they came up with is XCanvas. OO.o and Inkscape were officially started around the same time. Both had a base to work from. In that time, Inkscape has evolved into a quite powerful vector graphics tool with a rendering engine (libcairo) that is extremely capable, and with an interface that's actually fun to work on. OO.o on the other hand has done... what exactly? From my point of view, and judging by the set of functionality I regularly use, they've done exactly dick except changing the icon set every now and then and calling that a release. All issues that I found had already been discussed ad nauseam, but never resolved. Issues I found in Inkscape were actually fixed by the next release (which looked pretty much the same but was much better to use).
If the word processing tool hadn't worked from the start, OO.o would be dead and gone by now, since it has no other working features. I'm not wasting my time on that. (Plus I'm no good with praphics.)
Try e.g. setting the equivalent of a simple LaTeX inline $\frac{1+\alpha}{2}$ in OO.o or pretty much every other word processor or presentation tool that's not based on TeX. It will have font issues, ugly inside spacing, will break line spacing, and be generally a pain in the ass to create in the first place. Even simple stuff like $1^2$ will break things significantly. In TeX, you'd have to do pretty nasty stuff like typeset chain fractions before line spacing breaks even inline. Even if you fiddle around with it, it'll look strange because sub/superscripts are in the wrong places of the font size is off. I had the "joy" of porting a paper from LaTeX to Word, and I'm seriously planning to never do that again, unless I get published in a very good journal.
I'm missing the "complete rewrite of rendering API and functionality", as well as proper SVG handling (or EPS, or PDF, hell native support for any proper vector graphics format!), and other things that would keep Impress presentations from looking like ass. What about uniform lines, circles that look at least remotely like circles, etc.? What about proper inline (and display) math typesetting? Instead of trying to remain bug-compatible with MS Office at all cost, they should perhaps think about, well, not sucking as bad.
SMTP is completely broken. It has no accountability beyond the end of the connection. Hence, I don't see a reason to set up my server to be "RFC-Compliant", but just drop that crap right away. If you want to send me something important, use phone, fax, IM, or carrier pigeon. I'm sure we can find a suitable mode of communication that won't get you re-routed to the deep dark places where the IMAP folders don't reach.
The one big problem with Gnome is that it embodies exactly what ordinary folk would imagine when you asked them about the meaning of "computer nerd". The image is that of a clumsy, pimply boy living somewhere in a basement, desperately trying to be anti-establishment. In a way, it wants to be a techno-hippie. Now imagine that the nerd's world was suddenly turned upside down by his views becoming mainstream, at least to a certain degree. By now, it has become kind of common to think and say that Microsoft is the devil, that the whole proprietary software crap should be buried in an unmarked grave, etc.
That's exactly the situation Icaza and his cronies are finding themselves in. They wanted to be rebels, even saviors. One sign of that is the (rather fruitless) experiment that is Gnome. In an attempt to describe it, I arrived at the following:
Gnome is like the intersection of the Apple and Microsoft design teams without the resources or the skills.
Or in other words: Epic fail! You want proof? Until today, Gnome has consistently failed to even grow a usable file selection dialog. I rest my case.
Ironically, denouncing the rest of the "scene" has that way become the logical way to again be different. It's a purely religious reflex: if someone threatens your perceived dominance, it is declared evil. If you think about it, deep in its absolute retardedness, it's kinda cute on that level.
It boggles the mind why Sony didn't just buy out Eve years ago and do exactly this.
I'm glad they didn't. Just look at their current leper Vanguard... They acquired it and almost immediately started dumbing it down. If they got hold of Eve, they'd probably rip out the entire economics part just because it's complex. Now, just to appease the Vanguard players: I've got a copy and a dormant account lying around. I still think the game has massive potential, but judging from the patch notes, it still needs a lot of work. It started out very ambitious, but didn't manage, which I guess was at least in part the fault of the original producer. However, SOE is trying to make it a direct competitor to that other game, which obviously won't fly. Eve on the other hand is aimed at a completely different demographic which gives it its own (spacious) niche. Sony will never go niche.
I also kinda like Eve's combat system. True, it's a bit strange, but with the variety of weapons (long and short range, different damage types against shields and armor,...) I find it quite neat so far. It comes close to being what Freelancer should have been.
PoE specifies a rather huge range of input voltages, so if you're using PoE-enabled devices like the (apparently mostly defunct) MeshCubes, you can hook it up to pretty much every power source with a minimum of filters and transformers/voltage regulation. I'd imagine that using the common "wall wart" inputs could cause problems since those may require inputs in a rather narrow range. A simple car battery with some regulation electronics may do the trick though.
The main problem I see with the scenario is that if you don't have electricity, internet access becomes a secondary (tertiary? more-ary?) issue. Get some fridges running first and get clean drinking water, care about pr0n later. But if you have that, how about a base station with combined satellite up- and downlink and WiFi mesh capabilities? That could give you a good starting point and a valid excuse for more solar-powered mesh nodes.
The demo didn't install any of those things on my system. Might be because I got it by Bittorrent from the Piratebay tracker... (Yes, I was wondering about a 1.9GB demo from TPB...)
This is becoming ridiculous at an alarming rate. AFAIK, SecuROM does two things that the technologically impaired could call a rootkit (plus something they've all gotten used to), and boy do they whine.
A registry entry is made to store key information. This key contains null characters and is therefore not deletable by regedit. There are two things to say about it: (1) Windows uses the exact same scheme to keep stupid users from deleting password information. (2) This is more of a failure of regedit than anything else. Other tools are perfectly able to remove such keys.
There is a SecuROM directory in %appdata% with files with invalid names that Explorer can't delete. This is again a failure of a Windows component, i.e. Explorer. On request, SecuROM will provide information on how to remove such entries (hint: rd/s.
SecuROM uses hardware fingerprinting to tie the installation to up to two computers. Sounds familiar? Right! That's again the exact same thing Windows does! So if you're busy whining, perhaps dig up your MS aversion again, ADD boy.
The part that's bad is actually support, and 2K and SecuROM should be working on fixing that if they haven't already. There appear(ed) to be problems with "reclaiming" activations by uninstalling the game, and support inquiries got lost in a responsibility mixup between 2K and SR.
By the way, I've been playing the game for perhaps six or seven hours in two sessions. It installed without a hitch, went through activation just fine, and didn't crash even once. Neither did it show graphical corruption.
Seriously, those are the same people that sell us music compressed to a 3dB dynamic range. Having them complain about the effects of the other compression is fucked up. If they are so picky, they might as well sell songs as 24bit/192kHz FLAC or Shorten files, which would beat every medium sold in the record stores.
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There's actually an open bug concerning an update of the guidelines. But frankly, they have too many of those.
Perhaps a team that isn't forced to respect ass-backwards coding guidelines can attempt to produce something fast and reasonably safe, instead of spending all their time optimizing code for Visual C++ 1.5.
Seriously, Mozilla has their heads so far up the ass that is an ancient codebase, and is extremely slow at fixing the numerous bugs that have shown up over the ages, that I see little chance for them to be a significant competitor in the future, unless they manage to clean up their act in a major way instead of shoving out incremental updates as major versions.
Also if it has a 1-piece aluminum chassis, it will be more difficult to repair, therefore more likely to be replaced, therefore more hardware going into landfills, therefore less eco-friendly. The case itself is sturdier but if it's one hard piece of aluminum, the internals will take more damage and the case will take less. Again, less eco-friendly. A good case for preventing damage would be a replaceable one made of thin, soft metal.
I disagree. An eco-friendly case would ironically be made from plastic, or if necessary some GRP or CFRP. Metal and glass, to use terms of trade, need shitloads of energy to manufacture, and the process is highly lossy. We don't even want to get started about how aluminium is extracted from the ore in the first place, or that a rather rare resource is needlessly wasted. Plastic can be molded to almost the final shape in a single pass, with a relatively low amount of energy (some heat and a vacuum pump).
All that "metal is good for the environment" is bullshit. It's good for marketing, because a laptop that feels like you could use it as a blunt weapon just feels better than "cheap" plastic. And even in that area, I'd put a lot of trust into some CFRP. It's effectively stronger and lighter than aluminium.
You know, it'll always be 70 degrees relative to something... But wouldn't that be radians today?
"And get soft leather. Good leather will last longer then microfiber."
It may last longer, but it also tends to be icky in environments that aren't air-conditioned to hell and back, i.e. sealed office farms. Replacing good microfiber every 5-10 years, depending on what you do with the chair, is well worth the added comfort in my opinion. As I said, I had mine refurbished after 7 years of more or less nonstop use, but mostly for aesthetic reasons; it's really very sturdy stuff. For cleaning, I just used the vacuum with a brush nozzle. Good leather is also hideously expensive, which may well kill the advantage.
The only thing a cheap chair will do is make your chiropractor rich.
I've been pretty much living in a Martin Stoll F14 for over seven years, and haven't developed back pain. I just had it refurbished, and it's as good as new, thanks to solid steel mechanics. The best advice I can give is to go to a specialized store with trained salespeons. Be prepared to spend quite a bit of money; good desk chairs are expensive. Get a chair that allows and encourages you to move, don't get one that hugs you tight; not moving will kill your back real quick. Instead of leather, get microfiber.
I find VLC highly lacking in several departments. It's gotten so bad that I switched back to WMP on Windows, while I've been using xine and mplayer under Linux after short forays into VLC. At least the default user interface is worse than what gmplayer has, and I've found some "amusing" issues with video playback, e.g. broken seeking in WMV (fails to display correctly until the next keyframe comes along).
The UI and configuration is an exercise in magic numbers, trying to play a DVD routinely requires more mouse clicks than mplayer requires keypresses to play the same disk with audio routed to a custom ALSA device, VLC has forked its own versions of DVD playback libraries, can't use external codecs, and the list goes on.
Seeing as it's meant to go into a consumer device, that pain and suffering may be a design goal however, and maybe VLC with all its restrictions will do well in a severely limited device.
To quote the slashtot tagline I see under the comments right now (omitting the typewriter-markup):
The issue with segregated trials is that you will experience a vastly different community than on real live servers. For example, when I was still playing DAoC, a magazine for the mentally less endowed (no other way to say it more politely) had a trial offer. You could pretty much see the average intelligence drop to negative in the starting areas in the weeks after that. If I had started during that time, I'd have paid to make it stop.
Giving trial players too much influence on the live environment without paying for it on the other hand will make a lot of Chinese extremely happy.
All in all, it's a no-win situation. My idea would be something like a 2 or 3-week trial for a small amount of money, say, 5-7$, which is pretty affordable. People throw away a lot more money on trash food and bad movies on a daily basis. SOE also seems to be working on a new/alternative starting area, which could also be (ab)used as a trial area.
From the view of a returned player who played shortly after release, and then stopped for 10 months, I can say that the game has really improved a lot performance-wise, and has a rather mature and friendly community. Apart from that it's a perfectly normal MMO, with long-standing bugs that still need to be fixed since beta, class rebalancing with each update, surprise features, etc.
OK, this is as good a place as any.
FUCKING IDIOT NOOB ASSHOLES!!!!!1!
I am the OP. And I also replied to the "lot of work" comment, thank you very much.
My point is not so much that OO.o sucks, but that OO.o continues to suck in aspects that are well-known to be far, far sub-par, and that were announced to receive attention a long time ago, but then were blissfully ignored in favor of just polishing the interface some more. To get to your point, IMO saying that OO.o is somehow "better" at math is an overstatement. It is different, but at least as far from being "good" as the competition. In that light, building a first-number release on adding 768 columns to the spreadsheet is hypocritical at best.
Oh, one more thing: OO.o desperately begs to be compared to MS Ori^H^Hffice, so I don't see an issue with actually doing so. The LaTeX toolchain(s) have no issues with properly handling vector graphics and other niceties that would make a common office suite hide under a rock, and guess what: they're "FREE" too. And they don't run around crying for attention.
I've been looking around. The OO.o people know exactly that their drawing framework stinks out loud, and they announced far-reaching changes for 2.0. What they came up with is XCanvas. OO.o and Inkscape were officially started around the same time. Both had a base to work from. In that time, Inkscape has evolved into a quite powerful vector graphics tool with a rendering engine (libcairo) that is extremely capable, and with an interface that's actually fun to work on. OO.o on the other hand has done... what exactly? From my point of view, and judging by the set of functionality I regularly use, they've done exactly dick except changing the icon set every now and then and calling that a release. All issues that I found had already been discussed ad nauseam, but never resolved. Issues I found in Inkscape were actually fixed by the next release (which looked pretty much the same but was much better to use).
If the word processing tool hadn't worked from the start, OO.o would be dead and gone by now, since it has no other working features. I'm not wasting my time on that. (Plus I'm no good with praphics.)
Try e.g. setting the equivalent of a simple LaTeX inline $\frac{1+\alpha}{2}$ in OO.o or pretty much every other word processor or presentation tool that's not based on TeX. It will have font issues, ugly inside spacing, will break line spacing, and be generally a pain in the ass to create in the first place. Even simple stuff like $1^2$ will break things significantly. In TeX, you'd have to do pretty nasty stuff like typeset chain fractions before line spacing breaks even inline. Even if you fiddle around with it, it'll look strange because sub/superscripts are in the wrong places of the font size is off. I had the "joy" of porting a paper from LaTeX to Word, and I'm seriously planning to never do that again, unless I get published in a very good journal.
I'm missing the "complete rewrite of rendering API and functionality", as well as proper SVG handling (or EPS, or PDF, hell native support for any proper vector graphics format!), and other things that would keep Impress presentations from looking like ass. What about uniform lines, circles that look at least remotely like circles, etc.? What about proper inline (and display) math typesetting? Instead of trying to remain bug-compatible with MS Office at all cost, they should perhaps think about, well, not sucking as bad.
SMTP is completely broken. It has no accountability beyond the end of the connection. Hence, I don't see a reason to set up my server to be "RFC-Compliant", but just drop that crap right away. If you want to send me something important, use phone, fax, IM, or carrier pigeon. I'm sure we can find a suitable mode of communication that won't get you re-routed to the deep dark places where the IMAP folders don't reach.
The one big problem with Gnome is that it embodies exactly what ordinary folk would imagine when you asked them about the meaning of "computer nerd". The image is that of a clumsy, pimply boy living somewhere in a basement, desperately trying to be anti-establishment. In a way, it wants to be a techno-hippie. Now imagine that the nerd's world was suddenly turned upside down by his views becoming mainstream, at least to a certain degree. By now, it has become kind of common to think and say that Microsoft is the devil, that the whole proprietary software crap should be buried in an unmarked grave, etc.
That's exactly the situation Icaza and his cronies are finding themselves in. They wanted to be rebels, even saviors. One sign of that is the (rather fruitless) experiment that is Gnome. In an attempt to describe it, I arrived at the following:
Or in other words: Epic fail! You want proof? Until today, Gnome has consistently failed to even grow a usable file selection dialog. I rest my case.
Ironically, denouncing the rest of the "scene" has that way become the logical way to again be different. It's a purely religious reflex: if someone threatens your perceived dominance, it is declared evil. If you think about it, deep in its absolute retardedness, it's kinda cute on that level.
I'm glad they didn't. Just look at their current leper Vanguard... They acquired it and almost immediately started dumbing it down. If they got hold of Eve, they'd probably rip out the entire economics part just because it's complex. Now, just to appease the Vanguard players: I've got a copy and a dormant account lying around. I still think the game has massive potential, but judging from the patch notes, it still needs a lot of work. It started out very ambitious, but didn't manage, which I guess was at least in part the fault of the original producer. However, SOE is trying to make it a direct competitor to that other game, which obviously won't fly. Eve on the other hand is aimed at a completely different demographic which gives it its own (spacious) niche. Sony will never go niche.
I also kinda like Eve's combat system. True, it's a bit strange, but with the variety of weapons (long and short range, different damage types against shields and armor, ...) I find it quite neat so far. It comes close to being what Freelancer should have been.
With hash values getting longer and longer, wouldn't it be more economic to just use Identity as the hashing function?
Here's your grain of salt...
Goddamn, he even said he is one himself. Why is that fucktard repeatedly featured here? It's not like he has any significance.
As seen on CSI: http://www.smithsdetection.com/eng/1383.php
Caltech - Reinventing the wheel ever since.
PoE specifies a rather huge range of input voltages, so if you're using PoE-enabled devices like the (apparently mostly defunct) MeshCubes, you can hook it up to pretty much every power source with a minimum of filters and transformers/voltage regulation. I'd imagine that using the common "wall wart" inputs could cause problems since those may require inputs in a rather narrow range. A simple car battery with some regulation electronics may do the trick though.
The main problem I see with the scenario is that if you don't have electricity, internet access becomes a secondary (tertiary? more-ary?) issue. Get some fridges running first and get clean drinking water, care about pr0n later. But if you have that, how about a base station with combined satellite up- and downlink and WiFi mesh capabilities? That could give you a good starting point and a valid excuse for more solar-powered mesh nodes.
The demo didn't install any of those things on my system. Might be because I got it by Bittorrent from the Piratebay tracker... (Yes, I was wondering about a 1.9GB demo from TPB...)
This is becoming ridiculous at an alarming rate. AFAIK, SecuROM does two things that the technologically impaired could call a rootkit (plus something they've all gotten used to), and boy do they whine.
The part that's bad is actually support, and 2K and SecuROM should be working on fixing that if they haven't already. There appear(ed) to be problems with "reclaiming" activations by uninstalling the game, and support inquiries got lost in a responsibility mixup between 2K and SR.
By the way, I've been playing the game for perhaps six or seven hours in two sessions. It installed without a hitch, went through activation just fine, and didn't crash even once. Neither did it show graphical corruption.
Low-tech solutions sometimes are the best... What about a small piece of whiteboard or the paper/cardboard idea mentioned before?
Other ideas include an Ouija board.
Seriously, those are the same people that sell us music compressed to a 3dB dynamic range. Having them complain about the effects of the other compression is fucked up. If they are so picky, they might as well sell songs as 24bit/192kHz FLAC or Shorten files, which would beat every medium sold in the record stores.