Perhaps this kid should have been doing other things than just playing video games. And maybe he should have been a bit more intelligent. Let's see:
1) He spent SEVEN hours per day playing games. Apparently for upwards of two years. This seems to indicate psychological issues in addition to physical ones. This should have been a warning sign, and someone (his parents, maybe?) should have gotten him to go do something else occasionally.
2) He waited TWO FULL YEARS before seeking medical help. If you've got a problem like that, I could see waiting a month; after all, it could just be a fluke. But two years?
Sorry folks, the kid's an idiot, and his parents aren't paying enough attention to keep him from hurting himself, possibly permanently. Keep this in mind: stupidity can be harmful to your health.
Have you considered looking for a newer version of DOS, and running that?
It sounds like it's just what you want.
If you're going to publish a magazine...
on
Free Software Magazine
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...could you try for a degree of professionalism?
The first article I read was "Why C is here to stay." As has already been mentioned, it was poorly researched, and clearly not edited at all. Perhaps I'm being unfair, or languagist or something, but if you're going to publish an article in a language, you really need to find an editor who knows the language.
Well, I wasn't sure whether that was just a fluke, so I read a few more articles; "SourceForge Drifting," "VIM: The popular text editor," and "Upgrading KDE2 to KDE3 from CVS." While none of them were as badly written as the "C" article, none of them were well edited, and all contained basic gramatical and spelling errors. In other words, here's a magazine I won't be reading again.
Add to that the missing PDF files, the fact that the webmaster lies about having validated the HTML, and you have a truly terrible website.
I'm impressed... my website wasn't that bad the first time I validated it, and I wasn't even claiming it complied! (It does now, but that's not the point.)
I wish people would learn HTML before making web pages, particularly if they're trying to look professional.
The only way I can see to make open source a valid point in an election is the issue of cost. If you can show that the city/state/district will save money and either reduce taxes or put more money towards, say, the schools, people might care. Otherwise, bringing it up will probably cause people to either ignore you, or decide you're a nerd and vote against you.
Basically, the thing to remember is that most people who've even heard of linux have had it pitched by rabid fans, who make themselves more enemies than converts. If you're trying to convince these folks that linux/open source is worthwhile, you're going to have a hard time.
"Most computers come with Microsoft Windows pre-installed. Getting the MS Office suite isn't that difficult (either legally or illegally).
The only reason you would NOT use MS Office is ideology. "
True. And by my ideology, stealing is wrong. Since I can't afford to buy a copy of MS Office (and really wouldn't wish to spend that much money simply to read email attachments, even if I could), I don't have MS Office. There's also the little fact that I run linux on my home system, and Office isn't known for it's compatibility with linux. And no, I don't run linux for political or ideological reasons; I run linux because I believe it's a better system. My computer doesn't crash, I don't have to upgrade my system every time a new version is released, and I have massive amounts of free (as in beer) software to play with. The fact that I agree with much of the ideology is a bonus, but wasn't enough to get me over to linux until I found that it suited my needs much better than Windows did.
Really? I can't stand KOffice, I've never managed to get OpenOffice to run, and StarOffice is so slow I try not to use it. Abiword, on the other hand, does everything I need, very little that I don't, and is just as fast as starting an eterm to run VI or just starting emacs. So tell me, how is AbiWord inferior?
Of course, the nice thing about OpenSource is that you can use the version you like, which has lots of features and runs well on your machine, and I can run the version I like, which has almost no features and runs on my machine. For that matter, most of my papers over the past year or so have been written in html, using pine. But whatever.
There is one question here left unanswered; what's the retail markup in Japan, and what is it here? If they're very different, then the retail prices will have nothing to do with how much profit Sony makes on a sale, only how much the retailer makes.
Why do they only write for one OS? Because games only SELL for one OS. Yes, those of us who use linux use games from Loki... but most retail stores don't carry them anymore, because no one buys them. In the past few months I've visited 8 or 10 software stores, and only one had anything on the shelf from them. Most had very little for Macs.
If you want developers to use protocols which are easy to port, give them a reason: start buying games that run on your OS of choice. Even if you don't especially like the game, those dollars give a much more important message than a similar number of posts to message groups.
In a sense, I agree with you. Policy is worth something, and I've made those sorts of decisions in the past, such as paying more for a product because the alternative is to do business with a company I find morally unpleasant.
That said, I'm not going to reencode all of my mp3s. Why not? In some cases, I don't have the originals any more, and re-encoding from mp3 to ogg seems silly. In one case, because it would mean throwing away a cd full of music and burning a new one, which seems wastefull. What I will do is STOP encoding to mp3, and start using ogg instead. I can't hear a difference, especially through my pc's lousy speakers and sound card.
I also don't see that anyone is going to care if I reencode my mp3s. The software I'd use to do it wouldn't be sending reports to anyone, so how are the companies to know? I'm certainly not going to write them a letter telling them... that's pointless and obnoxious. And I already HAVE the mp3 encoders, so it's not like anyone will notice that I'm not downloading it. *shrug* I'll make the change because I think it works as well, and it's a (socially) better program.
...then it's a pity. I've used SuSE basically since I started using linux, and I like it. Install is easy, enough stuff is included that you don't have to start trying to figure out how to compile your own software until you know something about linux, and so on. I really kind of like YaST, although I have some issues with YaST2. (Primarily that it's slow, it's ineffective, and it doesn't always do what you tell it to) When I'm recommending a distro to someone who JUST wants a desktop OS, that they don't need a lot of special knowledge for, I tell them to try SuSE.
That said, I'm in the process of switching over to debian. Well, libranet, really - they have enough tools that it's not quite as hard as plain debian to set up, but it's still more detailed than suse. My main reason for switching? I'm sick of discovering that I can't install a new program without discovering that SuSE installed something ELSE in a non-standard location. Which makes their support of the standard-base kind of a joke. But anyway.
Basically I like SuSE, and I wish them well, but I may not buy another update due to their odd file placement. If it turns out I want to stay with debian, I plan to tell SuSE that. Maybe they'll start paying attention when people stop buying their software.
Maximum linux did a review - I don't have a link, but I expect you could find it from their site. (and, being at work, I don't have the magazine handy.) They said it was excellent, as long as you followed the install directions.
"Salt accumulation, which has ruined farmers in the Aral Sea basin and California's Imperial Valley, isn't a problem. The plain and underground water table are already salty, and the constant flushing of irigation... ensures that the fields won't esceed the salinity of the water.
In other words, he thinks he's got it figured out. Whether it's true remains to be seen - ask again in 5 years.
The point isn't to do this at a distance from the coasts. Reread the article, especially this bit;
The world has 25,000 miles of desert coast. "If we could develop the coasts" [Hodges] reasons, "we could feed billions.
His goal was to provide a good way to farm along the coast, in areas where the soil wasn't very good for growing. He wasn't trying to create a new method of farming in landlocked areas.
In a lot of ways I agree with this; I, for one, don't use Napster. I want my favourite artists to keep releasing new music, so I buy their albums, in hopes they'll be able to make money. However, there's something wrong with a system where the record company owns all rights to an artists music, and he/she/it gets only a penny or two from each 10 discs sold.
That said, the reason I don't want copy protection is this: I want to listen to my music at work, without having to cary 80 CDs back and forth. If I compress my CD collection into MP3, it takes, what, about 10 discs? Much easier to carry on the bus, don't you think? If I'm not allowed to copy it, I don't have a choice... and if it's not convenient (If, for instance, I need to enter some sort of key, be it password or an actual physical key) to listen to my music, I'm not likely to buy anything new. After all, why spend US$17 on something I can't listen to?
So, regardless of this being "the new thing", I'm not buying it. And, really, if no one buys, it can't be made a standard. After all, they're not gonna keep making something that no-one will pay for.
This is the big melting pot, how can someone expect to be cultured and creative if they only see one side of the world?
As I recall, the US was referred to as "the Melting Pot." And, of course, we all know how cultured and creative the vast majority of Americans are. Simply being able to identify the continents and figure out where most countries are (tho I get confused when they split and change names every week) puts me far ahead of most people in my college class.
Oh yeah! The whole series, really. Civ, Civ2, CTP, and now Alpha Centauri... I've been playing the series for about 11 years, and I'm still not sick of it. Now THATS addictive. (my attention span for video games rivals that of a 3 year old)
Of course, no-one mentioned the old classic, Rogue, and it's decendents, NetHack and Moria. I may have actually played those more than Civ. So what if you need DOS (or *nix) to play 'em, and they have no graphics? They're still good games...
Funny... I didn't get a message like that. Of course, that might be because I use Opera, which fails at a lot of other things, simply because it IS standards compliant...
Well, I'm using it now. I've been using it for 10 minutes, and I've already stopped noticing the ad (singular) which they display. There's no requirement to put any personal data in, and the browser is still smaller, faster, and more stable than IE or netscape.
It's not that annoying. Besides - It saves me a lot of money. (Pay once for Windoze, once for Linux... how much do I owe them again?)
Why stop there? Do what I do - don't spend your time watching TV and movies. My TV gets used for playing games and watching anime. And rarely that. I know a few people who don't own TVs, and don't miss 'em. If I lost mine, it'd be too bad, but hardly a tragedy. After about a year and a half of not watching TV, I turned it on one day. And you know what? I realized that, with very few exceptions, current television shows, and most current movies, are really, really dumb. Actually, I'm not sure my TV still works. I'm fairly certain my VCR doesn't....
Go read a book, or go for a walk, or go out and socialize. Don't sit around watching movies all day.
So basically what you're saying is that this game will invade your hard-drive, pull information out of all your applications, read your e-mail, and post random stuff to the net about you. Isn't this what everyone complains about microsoft doing?
Seriously, though: If I'm gaming, I don't want that game reading me my email, looking through my address books, and so on. Especially if that's then going to be used in multiplayer. The game looks good, and if it ever gets released I'll probably get a copy, but the fact that it can pull data off my hard drive and incorporate it into the game isn't a big selling point to me; quite the opposite, really. And if this were a program put out by Microsoft, everyone would be yelling at how horrible it was that it could read their mail...
...they could telerobotically control a mobile robot to perform functions in the world for them...
And while we're at it, how about eliminating space walks? Safe as an EVA suit is, staying inside the shuttle is safer. A good set of VR goggles and a robot running off brain-waves would make a space-walk a lot less dangerous. For that matter, with a high enough bandwidth we could eliminate manned spaceflight altogether, although that's not necessarily such a good idea...
...they must have some kind of copyright law, right?
Why must they? What makes it such a brilliant notion, so inherent to human conciousness, that every country in the world has a copyright law? While I do, I admit, sometimes fall into the trap of thinking of my own country (the US) as being a good representation of the rest of the world, it's not. Don't try to use it as one.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps this kid should have been doing other things than just playing video games. And maybe he should have been a bit more intelligent. Let's see:
1) He spent SEVEN hours per day playing games. Apparently for upwards of two years. This seems to indicate psychological issues in addition to physical ones. This should have been a warning sign, and someone (his parents, maybe?) should have gotten him to go do something else occasionally.
2) He waited TWO FULL YEARS before seeking medical help. If you've got a problem like that, I could see waiting a month; after all, it could just be a fluke. But two years?
Sorry folks, the kid's an idiot, and his parents aren't paying enough attention to keep him from hurting himself, possibly permanently. Keep this in mind: stupidity can be harmful to your health.
-Carik
Have you considered looking for a newer version of DOS, and running that?
It sounds like it's just what you want.
...could you try for a degree of professionalism?
The first article I read was "Why C is here to stay." As has already been mentioned, it was poorly researched, and clearly not edited at all. Perhaps I'm being unfair, or languagist or something, but if you're going to publish an article in a language, you really need to find an editor who knows the language.
Well, I wasn't sure whether that was just a fluke, so I read a few more articles; "SourceForge Drifting," "VIM: The popular text editor," and "Upgrading KDE2 to KDE3 from CVS." While none of them were as badly written as the "C" article, none of them were well edited, and all contained basic gramatical and spelling errors. In other words, here's a magazine I won't be reading again.
Add to that the missing PDF files, the fact that the webmaster lies about having validated the HTML, and you have a truly terrible website.
I'm impressed... my website wasn't that bad the first time I validated it, and I wasn't even claiming it complied! (It does now, but that's not the point.)
I wish people would learn HTML before making web pages, particularly if they're trying to look professional.
The only way I can see to make open source a valid point in an election is the issue of cost. If you can show that the city/state/district will save money and either reduce taxes or put more money towards, say, the schools, people might care. Otherwise, bringing it up will probably cause people to either ignore you, or decide you're a nerd and vote against you.
Basically, the thing to remember is that most people who've even heard of linux have had it pitched by rabid fans, who make themselves more enemies than converts. If you're trying to convince these folks that linux/open source is worthwhile, you're going to have a hard time.
And good luck in your run!
"Most computers come with Microsoft Windows pre-installed. Getting the MS Office suite isn't that difficult (either legally or illegally).
The only reason you would NOT use MS Office is ideology. "
True. And by my ideology, stealing is wrong. Since I can't afford to buy a copy of MS Office (and really wouldn't wish to spend that much money simply to read email attachments, even if I could), I don't have MS Office. There's also the little fact that I run linux on my home system, and Office isn't known for it's compatibility with linux. And no, I don't run linux for political or ideological reasons; I run linux because I believe it's a better system. My computer doesn't crash, I don't have to upgrade my system every time a new version is released, and I have massive amounts of free (as in beer) software to play with. The fact that I agree with much of the ideology is a bonus, but wasn't enough to get me over to linux until I found that it suited my needs much better than Windows did.
Really? I can't stand KOffice, I've never managed to get OpenOffice to run, and StarOffice is so slow I try not to use it. Abiword, on the other hand, does everything I need, very little that I don't, and is just as fast as starting an eterm to run VI or just starting emacs. So tell me, how is AbiWord inferior?
Of course, the nice thing about OpenSource is that you can use the version you like, which has lots of features and runs well on your machine, and I can run the version I like, which has almost no features and runs on my machine. For that matter, most of my papers over the past year or so have been written in html, using pine. But whatever.
There is one question here left unanswered; what's the retail markup in Japan, and what is it here? If they're very different, then the retail prices will have nothing to do with how much profit Sony makes on a sale, only how much the retailer makes.
Why do they only write for one OS? Because games only SELL for one OS. Yes, those of us who use linux use games from Loki... but most retail stores don't carry them anymore, because no one buys them. In the past few months I've visited 8 or 10 software stores, and only one had anything on the shelf from them. Most had very little for Macs.
If you want developers to use protocols which are easy to port, give them a reason: start buying games that run on your OS of choice. Even if you don't especially like the game, those dollars give a much more important message than a similar number of posts to message groups.
-Carik
In a sense, I agree with you. Policy is worth something, and I've made those sorts of decisions in the past, such as paying more for a product because the alternative is to do business with a company I find morally unpleasant.
That said, I'm not going to reencode all of my mp3s. Why not? In some cases, I don't have the originals any more, and re-encoding from mp3 to ogg seems silly. In one case, because it would mean throwing away a cd full of music and burning a new one, which seems wastefull. What I will do is STOP encoding to mp3, and start using ogg instead. I can't hear a difference, especially through my pc's lousy speakers and sound card.
I also don't see that anyone is going to care if I reencode my mp3s. The software I'd use to do it wouldn't be sending reports to anyone, so how are the companies to know? I'm certainly not going to write them a letter telling them... that's pointless and obnoxious. And I already HAVE the mp3 encoders, so it's not like anyone will notice that I'm not downloading it. *shrug* I'll make the change because I think it works as well, and it's a (socially) better program.
Anyway, I'll stop rambling now.
-Carik
...then it's a pity. I've used SuSE basically since I started using linux, and I like it. Install is easy, enough stuff is included that you don't have to start trying to figure out how to compile your own software until you know something about linux, and so on. I really kind of like YaST, although I have some issues with YaST2. (Primarily that it's slow, it's ineffective, and it doesn't always do what you tell it to) When I'm recommending a distro to someone who JUST wants a desktop OS, that they don't need a lot of special knowledge for, I tell them to try SuSE.
That said, I'm in the process of switching over to debian. Well, libranet, really - they have enough tools that it's not quite as hard as plain debian to set up, but it's still more detailed than suse. My main reason for switching? I'm sick of discovering that I can't install a new program without discovering that SuSE installed something ELSE in a non-standard location. Which makes their support of the standard-base kind of a joke. But anyway.
Basically I like SuSE, and I wish them well, but I may not buy another update due to their odd file placement. If it turns out I want to stay with debian, I plan to tell SuSE that. Maybe they'll start paying attention when people stop buying their software.
-Carik
So try an earlier version, and get the newest one if you decide you like it.
And as always - if you don't like the way they do business, don't do business with them.
-Carik
Maximum linux did a review - I don't have a link, but I expect you could find it from their site. (and, being at work, I don't have the magazine handy.) They said it was excellent, as long as you followed the install directions.
-Carik
From the article:
In other words, he thinks he's got it figured out. Whether it's true remains to be seen - ask again in 5 years.
The point isn't to do this at a distance from the coasts. Reread the article, especially this bit;
His goal was to provide a good way to farm along the coast, in areas where the soil wasn't very good for growing. He wasn't trying to create a new method of farming in landlocked areas.
In a lot of ways I agree with this; I, for one, don't use Napster. I want my favourite artists to keep releasing new music, so I buy their albums, in hopes they'll be able to make money. However, there's something wrong with a system where the record company owns all rights to an artists music, and he/she/it gets only a penny or two from each 10 discs sold.
That said, the reason I don't want copy protection is this: I want to listen to my music at work, without having to cary 80 CDs back and forth. If I compress my CD collection into MP3, it takes, what, about 10 discs? Much easier to carry on the bus, don't you think? If I'm not allowed to copy it, I don't have a choice... and if it's not convenient (If, for instance, I need to enter some sort of key, be it password or an actual physical key) to listen to my music, I'm not likely to buy anything new. After all, why spend US$17 on something I can't listen to?
So, regardless of this being "the new thing", I'm not buying it. And, really, if no one buys, it can't be made a standard. After all, they're not gonna keep making something that no-one will pay for.
This is the big melting pot, how can someone expect to be cultured and creative if they only see one side of the world?
As I recall, the US was referred to as "the Melting Pot." And, of course, we all know how cultured and creative the vast majority of Americans are. Simply being able to identify the continents and figure out where most countries are (tho I get confused when they split and change names every week) puts me far ahead of most people in my college class.
Oh yeah! The whole series, really. Civ, Civ2, CTP, and now Alpha Centauri... I've been playing the series for about 11 years, and I'm still not sick of it. Now THATS addictive. (my attention span for video games rivals that of a 3 year old)
Of course, no-one mentioned the old classic, Rogue, and it's decendents, NetHack and Moria. I may have actually played those more than Civ. So what if you need DOS (or *nix) to play 'em, and they have no graphics? They're still good games...
Funny... I didn't get a message like that. Of course, that might be because I use Opera, which fails at a lot of other things, simply because it IS standards compliant...
Well, I'm using it now. I've been using it for 10 minutes, and I've already stopped noticing the ad (singular) which they display. There's no requirement to put any personal data in, and the browser is still smaller, faster, and more stable than IE or netscape.
It's not that annoying. Besides - It saves me a lot of money. (Pay once for Windoze, once for Linux... how much do I owe them again?)
Why stop there? Do what I do - don't spend your time watching TV and movies. My TV gets used for playing games and watching anime. And rarely that. I know a few people who don't own TVs, and don't miss 'em. If I lost mine, it'd be too bad, but hardly a tragedy. After about a year and a half of not watching TV, I turned it on one day. And you know what? I realized that, with very few exceptions, current television shows, and most current movies, are really, really dumb. Actually, I'm not sure my TV still works. I'm fairly certain my VCR doesn't....
Go read a book, or go for a walk, or go out and socialize. Don't sit around watching movies all day.
So basically what you're saying is that this game will invade your hard-drive, pull information out of all your applications, read your e-mail, and post random stuff to the net about you. Isn't this what everyone complains about microsoft doing?
Seriously, though: If I'm gaming, I don't want that game reading me my email, looking through my address books, and so on. Especially if that's then going to be used in multiplayer. The game looks good, and if it ever gets released I'll probably get a copy, but the fact that it can pull data off my hard drive and incorporate it into the game isn't a big selling point to me; quite the opposite, really. And if this were a program put out by Microsoft, everyone would be yelling at how horrible it was that it could read their mail...
And while we're at it, how about eliminating space walks? Safe as an EVA suit is, staying inside the shuttle is safer. A good set of VR goggles and a robot running off brain-waves would make a space-walk a lot less dangerous. For that matter, with a high enough bandwidth we could eliminate manned spaceflight altogether, although that's not necessarily such a good idea...
...they must have some kind of copyright law, right?
Why must they? What makes it such a brilliant notion, so inherent to human conciousness, that every country in the world has a copyright law? While I do, I admit, sometimes fall into the trap of thinking of my own country (the US) as being a good representation of the rest of the world, it's not. Don't try to use it as one.
In the eyes of the RIAA, if you like a song, you must pay for it
Wrong. In the eyes of the RIAA, if you like a song, you must buy the album.