Or the last year we remember that didn't royally suck. Y2K, 9/11, and the decade of hypercapitalist deception that ensued... yeah, I miss the 90's. The music was better too.
I don't know what kind of PC draws 5W when off, but my monster PC doesn't even register a whole watt. It could have to do with your choice of hardware. When everything is suspended, my entire rig snoozes at 8w, including the four 27" displays on standby.
I figure, if I'm going to be afk for less than eight hours, it's better to suspend than shut down, because a cold boot takes about 5 minutes and averages 1000w while everything spins up and POSTs, since the BIOS is too naïve to handle power management by itself.
Really, if you want this Browser-only mode for the power savings, get an iPad. On a full Mac it's just a gimmick, you're still running all that hardware for nothing.
Suspend to disk has nothing to do with hardware, and everything to do with drivers. From the hardware's perspective, resuming from disk is no different than a cold boot. It's up to the OS to reload the memory contents and initialize hardware back to pre-suspend state.
With the right programming, you could use S2D on an ancient 286 PC. There was a popular game cheating TSR that did just that, to provide "save anywhere" functionality in just about any DOS game. On top of memory dump/restore, it also managed state for a few sound cards like the SB16/Pro and GUS. I can't remember if it was Pro Action Replay or another, but it was pretty big back then.
There are an estimated 34 million Canadian citizens as of 2011. The fabricated estimates would suggest that, on average, each Canadian is responsible for $660 to $1000 worth of counterfeit goods per year, whether produced locally or imported from overseas.
Now, I don't know about you, but I personally don't bring back.$1000 worth of cheap chinese gadgets on annual trips, nor do I burn $1000 worth of movies to DVD-R for resale, though the latter was quite popular a few years back, mostly by *drumroll* unemployed immigrants who couldn't care less about copyright. I know, because those parasitic bastards would come to my store every few days for a spindle of my cheapest DVD media. Today it's probably much less popular, given how easy it is to find and download anything, and the ever-increasing broadband penetration.
So what's left ? Are there massive counterfeiting ops racking up huge volumes, to make up for lack of counterfeiting within the general populace ? Or is the IP Council crying wolf to secure handouts and protectionist legislation ? I'm no expert, but history leads me to believe the latter is the truth.
It probably means memory allocated by the JS interpreter itself, whereas "storage" is more of a file and bitmap cache. Just guessing here (though I have hacked on Firefox code in the past).
Being unable to compile the code as-is would be a tiny setback, compared to the potential knowledge gained from studying and modernizing it.
Prime example: look at any ID Software source code release (Doom, Quake). These games have been ported, upgraded, remade a hundred times over. Did this hurt the company ? Or did it create a huge following of dedicated gamers and modders and source hackers, some of which have gone on to create games of their own, or even work for ID producing great content.
And so what if Intel finally grows a pair and ditches the legacy A20 ? If we're too lazy to fix the code, we'll emulate the stupid old thing. And Creative Labs is fantastically irrelevant, has been for over a decade. They've tried to cheat death with that EAX garbage, but really there is nothing mysterious anymore about outputting sound from a computer. The only secret in that code is the number of bugs their Singapore-based dev team manages to conjure up on a daily basis.
I'm not saying everything should be forcibly open-sourced, but I do firmly believe these companies would do just as well if they concentrated on making their product better than the competition's, rather than relying on secrecy to protect their bottom line.
I think when Apple says "demote the PC and Mac", they mean it will no longer be the primary way people compute. I can see this appliance-ification working for casual web/email users, but it will never catch on with developers, sysadmins, media producers, anyone else with a strong technical approach to computing. My wife could probably do all she needs on an iPad-like gadget, but I don't envision any Apple-made toy replacing my $10k ePeen machine. Not today, not next year, not even by 2019. They would need far too many specialized chips to even come within a tenth of the video performance I get out of this rig. Plus the 80lb tower can double as a weapon when society collapses...
I'm wear both the consultant and contractor hats, and while I'll agree with you that there are many fraudsters abusing those titles, I've been doing my best work since being cut loose from the stability of 9-to-5. Yes, my best work. The fact that my personal standard is the only standard means I just do my thing and GTFO when the job is done. No spacing out and lazing around all day on the company's dime. When my past employers call me back for contract or consulting work, they're getting the best of me, and in the end they're saving a boatload of money by not paying for my lazy time. Then I win, because I'm now motivated to minimize that lazy time and replace it with billable hours.
The author speaks of "IT ninjas", well I'd consider myself one of those. I'm like a specialized tool you bring in when the job is complex or outside your in-house staff's comfort zone. As mentioned, I wear both hats. I do programming work on an almost-full-time basis, with a steady supply of small jobs through an agency. Then on the side, I am often called upon, on a more theoretical/intellectual basis, to weigh in on larger projects where a few hundred dollars worth of my wisdom and cleverness can save the client tens of thousands.
Government contractors on the other hand, that's just a dirty rotten mess of corruption. When working for a big dumb faceless cash cow, it's only human to treat them as such. At least up here in Canada, government orgs hire contractors because it lets them completely sidestep the slow, stupid, and grossly backlogged hiring processes, especially for I.T. staff where they might collect a thousand applications, then spend a year running tests and interviews, and another few months doing god knows what before actually filling the chair with the one sleazy assclown they did choose. A contractor is much easier: you get budget approval, you call the guy, and he shows up. Most of those guys already have a security clearance too, so they're ready to start immediately. Two years vs two weeks, yeah they'll pick the latter option whenever possible, but that is not an accurate representation of the consulting business at large.
Because all games benefit from XBL's friend and chat systems. Even if a game doesn't integrate with XBL (mostly single player titles), I can still join a party and chat idly with the gang until we get enough people online to start a team game. When we do get it going, most games have an "Invite party to game" button. It could not be any easier.
My biggest gripe with it, is that Windows Live is absolute garbage. It shows me a friend list but won't let me join parties or voice chat with them. It will pop up the invitation, but upon accepting it says "Parties are only available on Xbox360". What in the retarded fuck ? It's a PC dammit, it sure as shit can keep track of 6 user IDs and a headset.
Custom hosts ? I just get lists of a country's CIDR ranges from guys like http://www.countryipblocks.net/ . If I'm getting frequently attacked from certain countries, and they're not part of my "target demographic", so to speak, I just block them at the firewall. I know I have no interest in selling to or working with people outside north america and a handful of western european areas, and I'm perfectly content to accept the potential loss of outside business, so I block their SMTP, and serve a different web site to their IP ranges explaining how and why my services aren't available in their area.
I'll second that ratio. I used to work in an office of about 150 users, with 3 dedicated I.T. guys, and by that I mean helpdesky kind of roles. The server admin was handled by contractors, and later on my unit (sister company). For the most part, a properly designed network almost runs itself. Spend a little more money on infrastructure and you'll save it tenfold in support and maintenance time/costs.
The truly difficult part is transitioning from random donated gear to a properly conceived system. A lot of small business owners refuse to accept that spending a little more money on good gear can save them much more in employee efficiency and decreased downtime. It usually takes 3 big disasters, preferably involving the loss of irreplaceable personal data, to hammer the point home, because they all think they're immune to catastrophic crashes, or viruses, or just plain old Shift-Delete stupidity. It happens to everyone, and as the I.T. guy, you have to be a master manipulator to not get blamed for other people's cheapness.
DO create stored procs / functions and grant your scripts execute privs (and not much else). This can be a pain to implement, but it is the most "elegant" solution since you're forced to properly decouple DB functionality from front-end logic. Plus it makes it easier to add different front-ends later if you go multiplatform or something...
-or-
DO run all user-sourced input through "mysql_escape_string" or your DBMS' equivalent. Most DAO implementations already do this.
Prepared statements are a decent half-step, but they aren't easily applicable to variable-length queries such as "advanced search" or anything else with optional parameters. It's far too easy to hit one of these walls and fall back into sloppy coding to get around it, negating what little advantage the prepared statements offered.
I was about to throw my xbox out the window, until I noticed this was for the Activision release. You know, the guys who ruined the CoD franchise.
Wake me when the Infinity Wars guys make a move. My casual clan of sorts all bought Black Ops, played it for a few weeks, hated it throughout for having a clumsy, laggy feel, and went right back to MW2, out of which we still play "the fuck". We even got the newcomers to buy MW1, which shows its age yet it still more fun than Black Ops.
So whenever the guys who made MW1 and 2 make another shooter, that will be "news for nerds". Activision is in the business of taking outsourced turds and passing them off as blockbusters.
I'd like to add laptops to the list of places where you can't play SC2 without internet. I have a little 3G internet stick, but it's not always in signal range, and frankly I shouldn't need to connect to that slow, lossy network just to play a game I already have installed. If I'm on a 2-hour bus/train ride, I'd certainly like the ability to play some SC2 to kill time, on my $2500 gaming-grade laptop. This arbitrary restriction means I have to use a cracked version, which is rather offensive given that I have PAID for the damn game, on launch day no less.
The guys who did "The Witcher 2" got it right. DRM is only marginally usefull up to the launch date (or launch week), beyond that, all software will get cracked anyway, so might as well ditch the DRM. If it helped prevent a prerelease leak, it's already done its job, because that's the one time where you're actually "losing" sales. If there's a leak, and people badly want your game but can't even buy it yet, they will download the leaked version instead. Post-release, the ones who are downloading it, they weren't going to pay for it anyway.
You know, I wouldn't mind the launcher so much, if it actually opened by pressing Meta, and not Meta+1 or Meta+Space or some other Mac-like contraption.
I'm quite used to tapping the Win key, then typing the first few letters of what I want. Sure, I'll assign direct shortcuts to a few main apps like the browser, konsole and a couple others, but for those occasional-use apps the launcher is one of the easier ways to find stuff. I'm not about to go hunting through folders when I already know the name of the program.
The KDE launcher does need a some TLC to make it more consistent and keyboard-friendly, but I don't consider it a bad thing. If it spares me from reaching for the mouse, that's a win.
To some extent, sure, but what does the user see ? They see a touch interface that is mostly self-explanatory. Ask that same user what Linux is, and if they even know, they'll say it's that "matrixy shit with all the hacker typing stuff".
Then tell them Android is Linux and see what happens. Hint: you might get called a bullshitter.
The Linux in Android is just a kernel. We know what that means, but the average user does not, nor do they care. They care about the things with which they interact, and that is the GUI. In that respect, Android's GUI is, considering its environment, light-years ahead of KDE and Gnome.
I still don't understand why KDE and Gnome are such big deals. Maybe I'm too Windows-centric, but what I expect from the GUI is simple: a launcher/taskbar widget, configurable window management and theming, and a handful of integrated utilities or configuration panels that govern common functionality among all apps (e.g. network shares, security defaults, notification prefs, video accel).
Beyond that, the rest of KDE seems like truckloads of cruft to me. I find the bundled apps largely deficient in functionality and stability, they're like "store brand" knockoffs of specialized 3rd party apps. Rather than wasting so much effort on these bastard subprojects, why not deliver a solid API and widget library that allows 3rd parties to properly integrate with the look and feel ? Let the GUI people focus on building the GUI, and let the app people focus on apps.
KDE 3.5 was fast, lean, maybe a little hard on the eyes but it did everything I needed without getting in the way. Everything since then has been a bad acid trip through OSX envy and good-old-fashioned programmer-designed atrocity. Just look at Windows 7, they pared it down from Vista to be as simple and efficient as Microsoft can be. Less baked-in functionality, but plenty of hooks to extend it IF AND WHEN NEEDED. Isn't that supposed to be the Unix way ?
Perhaps, instead of hoarding patents, people's success could be based on quality and merit.
I think Google would have done fine without patents, because their search engine, at least back in the day, was significantly faster and more accurate than all the others. They deserved to win the search wars.
Then can we please, for the sanctity of our future, please lock up every last prostitot FOREVER ?!
Children sexualise children, at least the girls anyway. There is nothing more abhorrent to my libertarian hedonistic eyeballs than the sight of scantily-clad twelve-year-olds at the mall. I swear, every year it gets worse, like I'm trapped in some fucked up reality show called "American Hooker Child" where the winner is the one who gets preggers the youngest.
I mean these kids don't even have freakin' hormones yet and they get called skanks by the local crackwhores. I just want to slap their teenage mothers:P
Fine then. Rather than trying to restrict the camera (no easy task btw), how about a few strategically-placed polygons to "protect" the "offensive" areas ? You know, like underwear !?
Nintendo + government = an even dumber generation of gamer kids that can't think for themselves.
Growing up in the 80s, I'm sure every last one of us knew at least one kid who'd swipe his father or big brother's Playboy/Penthouse and sneak them into the clubhouse to give his friends a peek. It's called being a curious, male, and totally normal kid. Did it ruin our childhood ? Fuck no. Conservative insecure boneheaded nanny-state politicians ruined our childhood!.
I'm not at all offended that you like Rihanna, you're obviously not alone. I like a lot of pop music too, I wouldn't call myself a hipster at all. I can't stand Rihanna but I dig Lady Gaga. That's completely beside the point.
One of the many reasons I'm opposed to selling digital music, and then suing downloaders, is that the industry itself is hypocritical: they'll release "singles" on the radio, cost-free, as a way to promote the rest of the album. Problem is, the singles are often the only good songs on the whole damn disc, so they're effectively giving away the good stuff, and then charging you $18 for filler. If you go and download the free singles, they sue you for infringement, even though the same song has been playing 40 times a day on pop radio.
Just set the dials on your time machine to 11 years ago, when Metallica shat all over Napster. What was the result ? Massive backlash against the band, not increased sales. I still remember that awards show where they aired a skit of the band "borrowing" tangible belongings from a Napster user, leaving him in his underwear in an empty room, as if that were any realistic parallel to file sharing. They didn't get the clue back then, and the industry still doesn't get it today. Music is a social phenomenon. No sane artist would systematically alienate millions of fans like that! The correct response is to adjust your business model to provide more of what the customers want.
File sharing has replaced the mixtape, and if it weren't for countless "personal top 40" torrents on The Pirate Bay, a lot of bands would never find an audience outside their hometown or small country. Do you honestly believe I'd be a huge Dutch metal fan today if my only source of new music was HMV or Wal-Mart ? I'm the only guy in my circle who knows these bands, so if I hadn't stumbled upon the music online, I would never have been exposed to it at all. Now the wife digs it, a couple of friends dig it too, and you can be sure if a Dutch metal band ever comes to Canada we'll be ordering four tickets and train fare to go see them. Four paying customers, acquired for FREE. It didn't even cost them bandwidth, I got the music via P2P. Just hit their facebook pages and you'll find a thousand more stories like mine. These rather obscure bands from half a world away can already look forward to a sold-out concert, despite not spending a penny on advertising over here. Even after the venue takes its cut, that's a six-figure payday. Considering we're crawling out of a recession (supposedly), that's nothing short of a miracle.
I whole-heartedly agree, there isn't much money to be made fixing home PCs. I tried that waaaay back when I was in-between jobs, and it was a royal pain in the ass so I gave up after a month or two. What I did in later years was market myself as a high-end kind of guy, selling indulgent gaming rigs and CAD workstations. To give you an idea, I was pushing 8-way AMD rigs back in 2003, custom paint jobs, active water cooling, arena displays, RAM-based SSDs... the kind of stuff you only buy with someone else's money (or maybe you're a wealthy drug lord gamer).
This progressed into more and more corporate clients, such that now I mostly peddle rack servers and multiple-item PC orders (like 50 identical desktops and/or monitors). I've modeled the business such that once it grows to full time, I'll be earning at least twice as much as my regular job. Each step is a springboard to the next. The whole point is to be saving up enough cash to launch my next project, which might be a dotcom business, or a recording studio, hell maybe even a heavy metal bar.
I know a lot of people are fine with working a dull job for a steady paycheck until 65, and a decent retirement fund thereafter, but that's not me. I get bored way too quickly in that environment, especially if I'm doing something I don't particularly enjoy, but well, that's what it is to be a hedonist: my goal in life is to have fun. Right now, I'm working toward that fun.
You've clearly never signed up for something with a fake name. Today's CS reps, even government staff, are so freakin' ignorant, they actually believe any name you give them.
I've a few friends who get a kick out of doing just that, registering phones, government services, and in one epic stunt a complete set of ID using celebrity or made-up names including:
- Pablo Escobar - Cosmo Kramer - LaToya Jackson - William Shatner - Tony Montana - Travis Bickle - Buck Futter - Ron Jeremy - Charles Manson
Whether you attribute these slip-ups to apathy or cultural differences, the fact remains that it is too damned easy to fake one's identity. Your friends will get a chuckle, but no respectable public servant would dare challenge a funny name on your driver's licence - well, except maybe a cocky police officer, but hey I did say "respectable"...
Slashdot Mirror
So, the most common age of the user is 13?
Or the most common age of their offspring?
-AI
Or the last year we remember that didn't royally suck. Y2K, 9/11, and the decade of hypercapitalist deception that ensued... yeah, I miss the 90's. The music was better too.
I don't know what kind of PC draws 5W when off, but my monster PC doesn't even register a whole watt. It could have to do with your choice of hardware. When everything is suspended, my entire rig snoozes at 8w, including the four 27" displays on standby.
I figure, if I'm going to be afk for less than eight hours, it's better to suspend than shut down, because a cold boot takes about 5 minutes and averages 1000w while everything spins up and POSTs, since the BIOS is too naïve to handle power management by itself.
Really, if you want this Browser-only mode for the power savings, get an iPad. On a full Mac it's just a gimmick, you're still running all that hardware for nothing.
Suspend to disk has nothing to do with hardware, and everything to do with drivers. From the hardware's perspective, resuming from disk is no different than a cold boot. It's up to the OS to reload the memory contents and initialize hardware back to pre-suspend state.
With the right programming, you could use S2D on an ancient 286 PC. There was a popular game cheating TSR that did just that, to provide "save anywhere" functionality in just about any DOS game. On top of memory dump/restore, it also managed state for a few sound cards like the SB16/Pro and GUS. I can't remember if it was Pro Action Replay or another, but it was pretty big back then.
Let's put this into perspective:
There are an estimated 34 million Canadian citizens as of 2011. The fabricated estimates would suggest that, on average, each Canadian is responsible for $660 to $1000 worth of counterfeit goods per year, whether produced locally or imported from overseas.
Now, I don't know about you, but I personally don't bring back.$1000 worth of cheap chinese gadgets on annual trips, nor do I burn $1000 worth of movies to DVD-R for resale, though the latter was quite popular a few years back, mostly by *drumroll* unemployed immigrants who couldn't care less about copyright. I know, because those parasitic bastards would come to my store every few days for a spindle of my cheapest DVD media. Today it's probably much less popular, given how easy it is to find and download anything, and the ever-increasing broadband penetration.
So what's left ? Are there massive counterfeiting ops racking up huge volumes, to make up for lack of counterfeiting within the general populace ? Or is the IP Council crying wolf to secure handouts and protectionist legislation ? I'm no expert, but history leads me to believe the latter is the truth.
It probably means memory allocated by the JS interpreter itself, whereas "storage" is more of a file and bitmap cache. Just guessing here (though I have hacked on Firefox code in the past).
Being unable to compile the code as-is would be a tiny setback, compared to the potential knowledge gained from studying and modernizing it.
Prime example: look at any ID Software source code release (Doom, Quake). These games have been ported, upgraded, remade a hundred times over. Did this hurt the company ? Or did it create a huge following of dedicated gamers and modders and source hackers, some of which have gone on to create games of their own, or even work for ID producing great content.
And so what if Intel finally grows a pair and ditches the legacy A20 ? If we're too lazy to fix the code, we'll emulate the stupid old thing. And Creative Labs is fantastically irrelevant, has been for over a decade. They've tried to cheat death with that EAX garbage, but really there is nothing mysterious anymore about outputting sound from a computer. The only secret in that code is the number of bugs their Singapore-based dev team manages to conjure up on a daily basis.
I'm not saying everything should be forcibly open-sourced, but I do firmly believe these companies would do just as well if they concentrated on making their product better than the competition's, rather than relying on secrecy to protect their bottom line.
I think when Apple says "demote the PC and Mac", they mean it will no longer be the primary way people compute. I can see this appliance-ification working for casual web/email users, but it will never catch on with developers, sysadmins, media producers, anyone else with a strong technical approach to computing. My wife could probably do all she needs on an iPad-like gadget, but I don't envision any Apple-made toy replacing my $10k ePeen machine. Not today, not next year, not even by 2019. They would need far too many specialized chips to even come within a tenth of the video performance I get out of this rig. Plus the 80lb tower can double as a weapon when society collapses...
I'm wear both the consultant and contractor hats, and while I'll agree with you that there are many fraudsters abusing those titles, I've been doing my best work since being cut loose from the stability of 9-to-5. Yes, my best work. The fact that my personal standard is the only standard means I just do my thing and GTFO when the job is done. No spacing out and lazing around all day on the company's dime. When my past employers call me back for contract or consulting work, they're getting the best of me, and in the end they're saving a boatload of money by not paying for my lazy time. Then I win, because I'm now motivated to minimize that lazy time and replace it with billable hours.
The author speaks of "IT ninjas", well I'd consider myself one of those. I'm like a specialized tool you bring in when the job is complex or outside your in-house staff's comfort zone. As mentioned, I wear both hats. I do programming work on an almost-full-time basis, with a steady supply of small jobs through an agency. Then on the side, I am often called upon, on a more theoretical/intellectual basis, to weigh in on larger projects where a few hundred dollars worth of my wisdom and cleverness can save the client tens of thousands.
Government contractors on the other hand, that's just a dirty rotten mess of corruption. When working for a big dumb faceless cash cow, it's only human to treat them as such. At least up here in Canada, government orgs hire contractors because it lets them completely sidestep the slow, stupid, and grossly backlogged hiring processes, especially for I.T. staff where they might collect a thousand applications, then spend a year running tests and interviews, and another few months doing god knows what before actually filling the chair with the one sleazy assclown they did choose. A contractor is much easier: you get budget approval, you call the guy, and he shows up. Most of those guys already have a security clearance too, so they're ready to start immediately. Two years vs two weeks, yeah they'll pick the latter option whenever possible, but that is not an accurate representation of the consulting business at large.
Because all games benefit from XBL's friend and chat systems. Even if a game doesn't integrate with XBL (mostly single player titles), I can still join a party and chat idly with the gang until we get enough people online to start a team game. When we do get it going, most games have an "Invite party to game" button. It could not be any easier.
My biggest gripe with it, is that Windows Live is absolute garbage. It shows me a friend list but won't let me join parties or voice chat with them. It will pop up the invitation, but upon accepting it says "Parties are only available on Xbox360". What in the retarded fuck ? It's a PC dammit, it sure as shit can keep track of 6 user IDs and a headset.
Custom hosts ? I just get lists of a country's CIDR ranges from guys like http://www.countryipblocks.net/ . If I'm getting frequently attacked from certain countries, and they're not part of my "target demographic", so to speak, I just block them at the firewall. I know I have no interest in selling to or working with people outside north america and a handful of western european areas, and I'm perfectly content to accept the potential loss of outside business, so I block their SMTP, and serve a different web site to their IP ranges explaining how and why my services aren't available in their area.
I'll second that ratio. I used to work in an office of about 150 users, with 3 dedicated I.T. guys, and by that I mean helpdesky kind of roles. The server admin was handled by contractors, and later on my unit (sister company). For the most part, a properly designed network almost runs itself. Spend a little more money on infrastructure and you'll save it tenfold in support and maintenance time/costs.
The truly difficult part is transitioning from random donated gear to a properly conceived system. A lot of small business owners refuse to accept that spending a little more money on good gear can save them much more in employee efficiency and decreased downtime. It usually takes 3 big disasters, preferably involving the loss of irreplaceable personal data, to hammer the point home, because they all think they're immune to catastrophic crashes, or viruses, or just plain old Shift-Delete stupidity. It happens to everyone, and as the I.T. guy, you have to be a master manipulator to not get blamed for other people's cheapness.
Alternately,
DO create stored procs / functions and grant your scripts execute privs (and not much else). This can be a pain to implement, but it is the most "elegant" solution since you're forced to properly decouple DB functionality from front-end logic. Plus it makes it easier to add different front-ends later if you go multiplatform or something...
-or-
DO run all user-sourced input through "mysql_escape_string" or your DBMS' equivalent. Most DAO implementations already do this.
Prepared statements are a decent half-step, but they aren't easily applicable to variable-length queries such as "advanced search" or anything else with optional parameters. It's far too easy to hit one of these walls and fall back into sloppy coding to get around it, negating what little advantage the prepared statements offered.
I was about to throw my xbox out the window, until I noticed this was for the Activision release. You know, the guys who ruined the CoD franchise.
Wake me when the Infinity Wars guys make a move. My casual clan of sorts all bought Black Ops, played it for a few weeks, hated it throughout for having a clumsy, laggy feel, and went right back to MW2, out of which we still play "the fuck". We even got the newcomers to buy MW1, which shows its age yet it still more fun than Black Ops.
So whenever the guys who made MW1 and 2 make another shooter, that will be "news for nerds". Activision is in the business of taking outsourced turds and passing them off as blockbusters.
I'd like to add laptops to the list of places where you can't play SC2 without internet. I have a little 3G internet stick, but it's not always in signal range, and frankly I shouldn't need to connect to that slow, lossy network just to play a game I already have installed. If I'm on a 2-hour bus/train ride, I'd certainly like the ability to play some SC2 to kill time, on my $2500 gaming-grade laptop. This arbitrary restriction means I have to use a cracked version, which is rather offensive given that I have PAID for the damn game, on launch day no less.
The guys who did "The Witcher 2" got it right. DRM is only marginally usefull up to the launch date (or launch week), beyond that, all software will get cracked anyway, so might as well ditch the DRM. If it helped prevent a prerelease leak, it's already done its job, because that's the one time where you're actually "losing" sales. If there's a leak, and people badly want your game but can't even buy it yet, they will download the leaked version instead. Post-release, the ones who are downloading it, they weren't going to pay for it anyway.
You know, I wouldn't mind the launcher so much, if it actually opened by pressing Meta, and not Meta+1 or Meta+Space or some other Mac-like contraption.
I'm quite used to tapping the Win key, then typing the first few letters of what I want. Sure, I'll assign direct shortcuts to a few main apps like the browser, konsole and a couple others, but for those occasional-use apps the launcher is one of the easier ways to find stuff. I'm not about to go hunting through folders when I already know the name of the program.
The KDE launcher does need a some TLC to make it more consistent and keyboard-friendly, but I don't consider it a bad thing. If it spares me from reaching for the mouse, that's a win.
To some extent, sure, but what does the user see ? They see a touch interface that is mostly self-explanatory. Ask that same user what Linux is, and if they even know, they'll say it's that "matrixy shit with all the hacker typing stuff".
Then tell them Android is Linux and see what happens. Hint: you might get called a bullshitter.
The Linux in Android is just a kernel. We know what that means, but the average user does not, nor do they care. They care about the things with which they interact, and that is the GUI. In that respect, Android's GUI is, considering its environment, light-years ahead of KDE and Gnome.
I still don't understand why KDE and Gnome are such big deals. Maybe I'm too Windows-centric, but what I expect from the GUI is simple: a launcher/taskbar widget, configurable window management and theming, and a handful of integrated utilities or configuration panels that govern common functionality among all apps (e.g. network shares, security defaults, notification prefs, video accel).
Beyond that, the rest of KDE seems like truckloads of cruft to me. I find the bundled apps largely deficient in functionality and stability, they're like "store brand" knockoffs of specialized 3rd party apps. Rather than wasting so much effort on these bastard subprojects, why not deliver a solid API and widget library that allows 3rd parties to properly integrate with the look and feel ? Let the GUI people focus on building the GUI, and let the app people focus on apps.
KDE 3.5 was fast, lean, maybe a little hard on the eyes but it did everything I needed without getting in the way. Everything since then has been a bad acid trip through OSX envy and good-old-fashioned programmer-designed atrocity. Just look at Windows 7, they pared it down from Vista to be as simple and efficient as Microsoft can be. Less baked-in functionality, but plenty of hooks to extend it IF AND WHEN NEEDED. Isn't that supposed to be the Unix way ?
Perhaps, instead of hoarding patents, people's success could be based on quality and merit.
I think Google would have done fine without patents, because their search engine, at least back in the day, was significantly faster and more accurate than all the others. They deserved to win the search wars.
Then can we please, for the sanctity of our future, please lock up every last prostitot FOREVER ?!
Children sexualise children, at least the girls anyway. There is nothing more abhorrent to my libertarian hedonistic eyeballs than the sight of scantily-clad twelve-year-olds at the mall. I swear, every year it gets worse, like I'm trapped in some fucked up reality show called "American Hooker Child" where the winner is the one who gets preggers the youngest.
I mean these kids don't even have freakin' hormones yet and they get called skanks by the local crackwhores. I just want to slap their teenage mothers :P
Fine then. Rather than trying to restrict the camera (no easy task btw), how about a few strategically-placed polygons to "protect" the "offensive" areas ? You know, like underwear !?
Nintendo + government = an even dumber generation of gamer kids that can't think for themselves.
Growing up in the 80s, I'm sure every last one of us knew at least one kid who'd swipe his father or big brother's Playboy/Penthouse and sneak them into the clubhouse to give his friends a peek. It's called being a curious, male, and totally normal kid. Did it ruin our childhood ? Fuck no. Conservative insecure boneheaded nanny-state politicians ruined our childhood!.
Well now, considering the first DoA game was released in 1996, these "children" should be well in their thirties by now ;)
I'm not at all offended that you like Rihanna, you're obviously not alone. I like a lot of pop music too, I wouldn't call myself a hipster at all. I can't stand Rihanna but I dig Lady Gaga. That's completely beside the point.
One of the many reasons I'm opposed to selling digital music, and then suing downloaders, is that the industry itself is hypocritical: they'll release "singles" on the radio, cost-free, as a way to promote the rest of the album. Problem is, the singles are often the only good songs on the whole damn disc, so they're effectively giving away the good stuff, and then charging you $18 for filler. If you go and download the free singles, they sue you for infringement, even though the same song has been playing 40 times a day on pop radio.
Just set the dials on your time machine to 11 years ago, when Metallica shat all over Napster. What was the result ? Massive backlash against the band, not increased sales. I still remember that awards show where they aired a skit of the band "borrowing" tangible belongings from a Napster user, leaving him in his underwear in an empty room, as if that were any realistic parallel to file sharing. They didn't get the clue back then, and the industry still doesn't get it today. Music is a social phenomenon. No sane artist would systematically alienate millions of fans like that! The correct response is to adjust your business model to provide more of what the customers want.
File sharing has replaced the mixtape, and if it weren't for countless "personal top 40" torrents on The Pirate Bay, a lot of bands would never find an audience outside their hometown or small country. Do you honestly believe I'd be a huge Dutch metal fan today if my only source of new music was HMV or Wal-Mart ? I'm the only guy in my circle who knows these bands, so if I hadn't stumbled upon the music online, I would never have been exposed to it at all. Now the wife digs it, a couple of friends dig it too, and you can be sure if a Dutch metal band ever comes to Canada we'll be ordering four tickets and train fare to go see them. Four paying customers, acquired for FREE. It didn't even cost them bandwidth, I got the music via P2P. Just hit their facebook pages and you'll find a thousand more stories like mine. These rather obscure bands from half a world away can already look forward to a sold-out concert, despite not spending a penny on advertising over here. Even after the venue takes its cut, that's a six-figure payday. Considering we're crawling out of a recession (supposedly), that's nothing short of a miracle.
I whole-heartedly agree, there isn't much money to be made fixing home PCs. I tried that waaaay back when I was in-between jobs, and it was a royal pain in the ass so I gave up after a month or two. What I did in later years was market myself as a high-end kind of guy, selling indulgent gaming rigs and CAD workstations. To give you an idea, I was pushing 8-way AMD rigs back in 2003, custom paint jobs, active water cooling, arena displays, RAM-based SSDs... the kind of stuff you only buy with someone else's money (or maybe you're a wealthy drug lord gamer).
This progressed into more and more corporate clients, such that now I mostly peddle rack servers and multiple-item PC orders (like 50 identical desktops and/or monitors). I've modeled the business such that once it grows to full time, I'll be earning at least twice as much as my regular job. Each step is a springboard to the next. The whole point is to be saving up enough cash to launch my next project, which might be a dotcom business, or a recording studio, hell maybe even a heavy metal bar.
I know a lot of people are fine with working a dull job for a steady paycheck until 65, and a decent retirement fund thereafter, but that's not me. I get bored way too quickly in that environment, especially if I'm doing something I don't particularly enjoy, but well, that's what it is to be a hedonist: my goal in life is to have fun. Right now, I'm working toward that fun.
You've clearly never signed up for something with a fake name. Today's CS reps, even government staff, are so freakin' ignorant, they actually believe any name you give them.
I've a few friends who get a kick out of doing just that, registering phones, government services, and in one epic stunt a complete set of ID using celebrity or made-up names including:
- Pablo Escobar
- Cosmo Kramer
- LaToya Jackson
- William Shatner
- Tony Montana
- Travis Bickle
- Buck Futter
- Ron Jeremy
- Charles Manson
Whether you attribute these slip-ups to apathy or cultural differences, the fact remains that it is too damned easy to fake one's identity. Your friends will get a chuckle, but no respectable public servant would dare challenge a funny name on your driver's licence - well, except maybe a cocky police officer, but hey I did say "respectable"...
<AHNOLD>That's the joke</AHNOLD>