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User: Fallingcow

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  1. Re:I can see it now on Mozilla Preparing To Scrap Tabbed Browsing? · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's gotta be porn.

    Really, porn needs its own dedicated browser to deal with these things. Pornofox, or something.

  2. Re:The main reason on Why Linux Is Not Yet Ready For the Desktop · · Score: 3, Informative

    There ARE games for Linux: Wine works surprisingly well, but there should be an automatic way of getting the needed libraries for any particular app

    I strongly recommend you try Wine Doors if you haven't already.

    It's probably not included in the default installation because I think you have to have a Windows license to install some of the DLLs and such (then again, who doesn't have a couple of those sitting around?)

  3. Re:Play at your friend's house? Sell a game? Nope. on Why Bother With DRM? · · Score: 1

    AFAIK, all the single-player games on Steam have been cracked anyway, so I'd treat that the same as if I lost a game disc (which happens all the time): I'd "pirate" the game I already paid for. In the mean time, it keeps me legit and makes it so I don't have to keep disc images on my hard drive in case the torrent loses its seeders and no more pop up (if Steam died, there'd be thousands of people pirating the games in the weeks after, so no shortage of torrents to worry about)

    As for the multiplayer ones, who the hell would want to play on unregulated servers anyway? That's one thing these DRM schemes have given us, at least: way, way less cheating in online matches. Any multiplayer game with enough of a following will likely find a way to live on, but most would probably just die, which is what almost all of them do anyway. I bought L4D knowing that I won't be able to play it in 10 years--not because of DRM, but because I won't be able to find 4-8 people who want to play it.

    Meanwhile, if Steam dies next year and 10 years from now I want to play HL2, I'll just dig my torrented, cracked copy off my Super Laser Holodisc external drive and install it in a VMWare instance of XP, or something.

  4. Re:SaaS is the Answer on Why Bother With DRM? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That model would mean the death of so much of what I love about games, that I'm not sure I'd bother to keep playing new ones. Certainly I've got a long enough backlog of older games to play that it'd take me a few years to get through, and that's not counting any re-plays.

    I like being able to re-visit older games, like a book. I like mods, and very often they make the game so much better that it's hard to imagine playing it without them (Morrowind, Oblivion, Rome:Total War). I only play console games on the assumption that by the time I want to re-visit them, if I can't get the game and hardware legitimately then there'll be a PC emulator for it and a .torrent somewhere.

    It doesn't sound like there'd be much room in that model for me or other gamers like me, so we'd just find other stuff to do. God knows I've got enough books on my "to read" list to last me for a decade or so, even if I stopped gaming completely and did nothing for entertainment but read. There's so much good entertainment I haven't seen/read/played/heard yet, in every form, that there could be no more music, games, movies, books, etc. made starting tomorrow and I doubt I'd even care for 15 years, if not more.

  5. Re:Play at your friend's house? Sell a game? Nope. on Why Bother With DRM? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    At least with Steam you can download it as much as you want, so there's that.

    I get your point, though, and now that you just about have to have multiple copies of a game to fire it up at a LAN party I imagine we'll just stick with UT2K4 and earlier, plus L4D (a special case, and something that we'd all been dreaming of for years, so of course we all bought it). Certainly, the bar for buying a multiplayer game has risen since it became impossible or complicated to install one copy on several machines for a quick LAN session, at least among the people I game with. If we don't all want to buy it, there's no reason for anyone to buy it, and only with very rare exceptions (L4D) do any of us do much multiplayer FPS gaming outside our rare LAN parties.

    It's kind of like board gaming, which we also do a lot of. If we all had to have a copy of each game to play, I doubt we'd do it as much, and we'd buy way fewer board games.

    It's a pity none of us can stand console FPS games. The last one we had fun playing (rather than just frustration) was Perfect Dark, which we still break out from time to time. Oh well, there's still SSB.

  6. Re:Uh on Social Networking Behavioral Agreements At Work? · · Score: 1

    Ah yes. I'm familiar with people who have done that. They puff up their resume to get in the door, then when they interview it's apparent that they've wasted my time.

    It's not even necessarily puffing it up--even putting everything in hyper-positive terms and HR-speak makes me feel dirty, and that's definitely the norm even for people who aren't lying on their résumés. You can't "like" your career, you've gotta be "passionate" about it. You can't be "pretty good", you've gotta be "accomplished". Even if the other terms are, strictly speaking, true, they're still not how I'd describe myself or my feelings in any other setting, let alone in my own head.

    Then again, I think part of it's just me. I had humility pounded in to me throughout my childhood, and I think it might make things that others see as being perfectly honest and normal feel false to me. Between that and the sorts of friends I have, I'm pretty sure my perception of "average" is severely skewed, too. Still feels like dishonesty, though.

  7. Re:Uh on Social Networking Behavioral Agreements At Work? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One assumes you're not going to lie to cover your own ass (whether in court or otherwise) -- I like to believe that most folks learned to stop doing that sometime in their teens.

    Funny, for me it's been the reverse--from a young age I felt that it was very wrong to lie and almost never did (and always felt bad about it). Only later did I discover (much to my surprise and, when participating in it, discomfort) that being disingenuous and even lying outright is not only widely accepted in the adult world, but very often expected.

    This is especially common in business, I've found, where being perfectly honest on a résumé and/or application will practically never land you a job, especially on those "why do you want to work here"-type question (let's face it, 99% of the time the real answer is "I want money and this job sounds like it won't suck too much"). Then there's "networking" which often involves creating a whole false persona. It's sickening, but damn-near unavoidable, and certainly considered to be normal and acceptable.

  8. Re:Uh on Social Networking Behavioral Agreements At Work? · · Score: 4, Funny

    Holy shit, I've been here quite a while and I don't think I've ever had a goatse troll post in response to me!

    Do I get a prize?

    Wait, never mind, even if I do I doubt it's anything I want to know about.

  9. Uh on Social Networking Behavioral Agreements At Work? · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think you just violated it. Oopsie!

  10. Re:Hmm... on Adblock Plus Maker Proposes Change To Help Sites · · Score: 1

    it seems like it's the guy that wrote AdBlock that's creating the derivative work and distributing it to you.

    So the guy who makes FX plugins for an audio editing program is creating and distributing derivative works?

    Answer's yes, if your above statement isn't false, which it is.

    Reductio ad absurdum, gotta love it.

    I just wish that people that felt strongly about blocking ads would have their add-on put something to the request headers that indicated as much. At least let the site owner decide if he wants to deliver you content with non-Flash/non-Java/non-Whatever advertising or not deliver you content at all. That would at least be putting your money where your mouth is, rather than the freeloading that's going on now.

    Man, I bet you hate Tivo, huh? Probably public libraries, too. The book publishers should totally get to decide whether you loan out books for free--after all, it's their content, right? Even after you (or a library) have legally acquired a copy? And god forbid you rip the ads out of one of those old sci-fi books, or a comic book. Ought to be illegal.

    Everyone should have to tell publishers of any copyrighted material what they intend to do with and/or to it before they receive a copy, especially if the publisher's just giving away ad-laden magazines on a street corner to anyone who asks, for free. That way they can refuse to give a copy to someone who's gonna rip the ads out before reading it.

    Ditto for those free newspapers every city seems to have. Ought to have to swear on a bible that you won't just use it for bird cage liner without looking at the ads before you can take one.

  11. Re:Hmm... on Adblock Plus Maker Proposes Change To Help Sites · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's legal to creative derivative works without the consent of the copyright owner?

    How the fuck did this get an "interesting" mod?

    Yes, of course it is. You can do WTF ever you want to copyrighted works, you just can't (necessarily) distribute the original work and/or its derivatives.

    If I hated Coca Cola but loved a song that referenced it, I could clip that part out and only listen to my version--I just couldn't (under most licensing schemes) give the Coke-free version to anyone else. I could even write a program that cut that part out for other people, taking an MP3 or wav file or whatever as input, and distribute the program.

    I hope the person who modded that insightful gets bitchslapped by a meta-mod.

  12. Re:PDF support on Amazon Wins First Kindle Patent; Bigger Screen Expected Soon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wish they'd standardize on about 3 sizes for these things:

    1. Paperback (good for text-only books where formatting doesn't need to be preserved, highly portable)
    2. Trade/Hardback (less portable, OK for pages with some pictures, good for poetry and other things where precise formatting matters, allows larger type while still keeping quite a bit of text on the page, maybe just a tiny bit larger than most current readers)
    3. Oversize (good for 8.5x11 pages, comic book pages, works that are heavily reliant on diagrams and other images, etc.)

    Then publishers could just design to whichever size was appropriate, with the smaller sizes working fine on the large devices and the smaller devices being able to display things meant for larger ones but possibly with formatting errors or hard-to-see images.

    I'd buy the two larger sizes, personally.

  13. Re:Learning or Collecting? on Classic Books of Science? · · Score: 1

    Lockhart in his Lament indicates that the process of discovery is the real heart of mathematics. In that case, reading original works that presumably showcase that process is vital, especially for those just starting out in the field.

    Ideally, though, you'd read them with updated notation.

  14. Re:Demon Haunted on Classic Books of Science? · · Score: 1

    I didn't find the "debunking tools" to be anything new to me. If you've already got skeptical thinking down alright, you're just going to be reading a bunch of world-view-affirming stuff in that book.

    That said, I thought it was (mostly) well written and found it to be interesting. Lagged a bit around the 1/3 mark and near the end, IMO. I'd recommend the two collections of Feynman anecdotes over that, though, if you already grok scientific skepticism. Fun stuff, and loaded with examples of it.

  15. Re:Math Books too, please on Classic Books of Science? · · Score: 1

    Second for Men of Mathematics. Awesome book, highly readable.

  16. Re:St john's College New Mexico on Classic Books of Science? · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's always the classic list of classics (lol), the Great Books of the Western World list by Adler

    That site has tons of other book lists, too.

    Anyway, Adler's list is pretty much the best single answer to this question. I'd add Asimov's many, many essays on science (just start looking for them at used book stores, you'll have a dozen volumes before you know it) and Stephen J. Gould's essay collections.

  17. Re:BeOS left off? on The Biggest Cults In Tech · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Oh, BeOS. Wow. I don't get clingy and fanboy-ish over many tech things, but that's one of them. If it had modern drivers and could run at least most of my software, I'd use BeOS over anything else--Linux, Windows, OSX, *BSD, you name it.

    Hell, I've even begun to need some future-proof, extensive, filesystem-level metadata for my ever-growing collections of various things; if only BeOS were still alive & kicking with a bright future, I could just use BFS. Wish the other operating systems would catch up with where BeOS was years ago. For that matter, I wish they'd act as responsive on a 2GHz dual-core system as BeOS did on a Pentium 166Mhz...

  18. Re:Fans don't matter so much for mainstream IP on Originality Vs. Established IP In Games · · Score: 1

    In the video game domain, Fallout 3 is another example of a game where a small and vocal minority wigged out that Bethesda DARE change anything about their beloved isometric franchise. Even so, Fallout 3 was able to strike a balance between offering a modern realtime experience while adhering fairly close to what came before. The ranting of more obsessive fans had no impact on the game's popularity.

    IMHO, F3 did fail at capturing the feel and play style of the previous Fallouts, but not because of the new combat system or the shift to 3D first person--it's the lack of meaningful non-main-quest quest trees (or webs) that does it. Where's anything like the Vault City/New Reno/Modoc triangle? Or the huge 3-way political struggle between VC/NR/NCR? Or even the VC/Gecko/Broken Hills relationship?

    Instead we get a couple one-quest gimmick towns (which is fine--there were some in the other Fallouts, certainly) and two or three towns that are at best the equivalent of Klamath or The Den in F2. This would still be OK if they'd shifted the series toward having a strong, deep main quest (unlike the first two) but they didn't.

    IMO they should have kept the world map for long-distance travel and just had the cities and surrounding areas + random encounter areas be rendered in the Oblivion engine. The tiny geographic area of F3 was too stifling, and cramming anything close to the quest content of the previous Fallouts into it would have been hard or impossible to do believably.

  19. Re:Maybe it was bad back in 1996 on Controversial Web "Framing" Makes a Comeback · · Score: 1

    Web 2.0 is all about turning every tiny bit of the page in to its own frame (effectively) that can be re-populated with new content without re-loading the page.

    Frames didn't die--they evolved and conquerd fucking EVERYTHING. They don't break the fundamental model of a modern web page, because they are the fundamental model of a modern web page, which is just a collection of boxes that all load data from a variety of different sources.

  20. Re:Okay on Linux Reaches 1% Usage Share · · Score: 1

    Yes, I know it's possible, but I don't think most people spending significant money on gaming rigs will be willing to take the risk that their game will suffer a repeatable and inevitable crash half way through or any number of other problems that can crop up on an unsupported platform (or on a supported one if you're running a Bethesda game, I suppose), to say nothing of the always-uncertain state of 3D drivers for newly-released graphical chipsets and other high-end, very new hardware.

    The ability to play Windows games on Linux is nice for people who'd probably use it anyway, but it's still inferior to using Windows for a number of reasons. It's a bonus, not a draw. You *can* game, but if the main thing you want to do is game then you're better off in Windows. I game enough that it's worth keeping the dreaded Redmond OS around just for that, though not much else.

  21. Re:Okay on Linux Reaches 1% Usage Share · · Score: 2, Informative

    If they don't:

    1. Game,
    2. Use Adobe products, or
    3. Use some other Windows-only software

    then it's already desirable for non-tech-literate users. Certainly if it's already installed and configured by a manufacturer, with a simple recovery disc that fixes everything if you somehow manage to break it (no more likely than with Windows, and probably a bit less likely).

    Where it fails, IMO, is with professionals in various fields who are reliant on software that's Windows-only and with hardcore users who want bleeding-edge hardware and the games to go with it.

    Where it succeeds is with your basic email+IM+browser+Flash games+Solitaire+MS Word (OO.org writer) users and with tinkerers/coders who appreciate *nix power tools. It's great for the non-tech-literate, and has been since, oh, Ubuntu 6.06 or so.

  22. Re:Response to piracy on Stardock Declares Victory Over Demigod Piracy · · Score: 1

    My group of friends is full of big readers, and the fastest of them does maybe, maybe 220-240 pages/hour. Remembers the material as well as any of us, too. He's crazy fast, IMO. I doubt I break 120 pages/hour for a paperback, or 80-100 for a non-large-print hardcover. That dude puts all of us to shame, and we're all fairly intelligent people who read way more than the average person.

    Then again, we usually read for fun or for deep comprehension (philosophy's big in our group, as is history) so we're not rushing toward the end. In fact, I think my reading speed has slowed down over the years as I've branched out and started reading good literature alongside the usual entertaining but crappy stuff. Why wouldn't you take your time with a really well-written novel?

  23. Re:Mandrive versus Ubuntu on Mandriva 2009 Spring Released · · Score: 1

    Yeah, that's how I remember it. Used it because it was better than Red Hat and I didn't understand Debian yet.

    I dropped it around version 9 when it became completely horrible. Started going downhill in 8. Haven't been back since--moved on to a combination of Debian and Gentoo, then eventually to Ubuntu.

  24. Re:Dont' bash CSS... on Styling Web Pages With CSS · · Score: 1

    That's my opinion, as well... most of the problems revolve around centering, but multi-column displays can be very "hackey" with CSS, especially with dynamic content in which you can't tell which column will be the tallest.

    I've finally gotten used to thinking in CSS, and can create most common layouts from memory and (usually) in a non-hacky way (maybe one or two container divs, but nothing too atrocious).

    I just wish the purist dipshits would let us have float: center*, and vertical centering while they're at it. It should not be easier to do positioning like that with the wrong tools than with the right one.

    * No, float: center would not be the same thing as "margin: 0px auto".

  25. Re:CSS is Awesome on Styling Web Pages With CSS · · Score: 1

    Looks like it's the code's fault, actually. Possibly a div container with floated contents and poorly-thought-out overflow control. Things like that are pretty damn common, especially if you start cranking up the text size in your browser.

    They're also not likely to go anywhere unless managers and clients start valuing extremely high accessibility over prettier, more precisely laid out pages with somewhat lower accessibility. God knows I've made pages that go all to hell if you set the font size too high, and I doubt many professional web developers can say that they haven't.