Macs are also comparable in the performance department these days, which is nice.
It was just sad watching the Mac fanboys in the OS8/OS9 days insist that their slow-ass, expensive, and not-even-that-nice-looking machines were better than PCs at 1/2 the price. They weren't. They were dog-slow and crashed surprisingly often.
Now, at least, I don't feel bad for people who love Macs. They're getting something for their money. OSX macs are many, many times better than their predecessors.
I feel that it offers enough value in exchange for the restrictions to make it worth it.
I don't have to keep track of media, and I don't even have to keep a disc image somewhere like I would if I pirated it. Less disc space wasted on that means less time worrying about backups, less money spent on hard drives, etc.
The comfort of knowing that it's taken care of for me is worth the restriction. That said, I NEVER purchase games that have further DRM on them through Steam, like Bioshock. The whole point is that Steam stays out of my way, while providing some benefits that make its mostly-harmless restrictions bearable; more DRM on top of that is NOT acceptable.
I'll also probably stop buying there if they ever have a problem that results in my losing one or more of my games. I don't mind the occasional rare hiccup (though I've yet to experience one) but any permanent loss of something I've purchased or any significant requirement of my time to recover it would be a deal-breaker
Even if your app is 100% standard compliant, it may not be cross browser. Not even if you pull IE out of the equation. Not even if you ONLY TARGET FIREFOX (there are differences between FF2 and FF3. FF2 doesn't even fully implement CSS 2 itself...)
So by now, devs have reverted to another philosophy: make websites that are crossbrowser, and -mostly- standard compliants.
Bingo.
It's one thing when you're developing something as a hobby, but it's another when your boss gives you a.psd from a graphic designer and says "the client wants to see something by tomorrow" and you have no idea which browser he or she will be using.
Any, any time I have to lay out a non-trivial site that will have to work well in IE6 and in modern browsers, I don't even bother trying for standards compliance. Even on the simple ones, I usually design to standards using FF3 as a testbed, then have to break it to get the damned thing working on IE6 (and sometimes even IE7!) in a reasonable timeframe.
Deadlines are great at making you prioritize. I need the site to look good NOW in several browsers, and I need to have extra time for any javascript and PHP work to design it in such a way that it's extensible and maintainable (or pay for it later). (X)HTML/CSS standards compliance is my very last concern, and one of the first things I cut, not because I want to, but because it's my best bad option.
Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10) has further improved the gsudo prompt, giving the option to remember your authorization for an entire session, so if you want you can just do it once per login no matter how much admin-level stuff you're doing.
I'm running the beta on my laptop, and it's pretty cool. Tabbed Nautilus file browsing, too:)
My only complaint is that the boot screen is all screwed up and looks like some sort of 8-bit console gaming system having a seizure, and, remarkably, in a different way every single time I boot. I don't just mean different colors, I mean one time I get a blank, BRIGHT green screen for the whole boot process, next time I get a bunch of horizontal white lines with one moving up and down regularly (must have been the progress bar during that part where it bounces back and forth, though how it ended up the way it did I have no idea), then the next time it's spaced red blocks that seem to be somehow connected to the boot text you see if the graphical boot screen fails to (or if you disable it).
Doesn't actually break anything, though, and it's so funny that I'll kind of be sad when it's fixed.
Anyway, point is, you can look forward to some gksudo improvements if and when you upgrade.
The purpose of the EC is to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
Without the EC, the candidates would not even bother to campaign in flyover country, since their best return would be in the cities. Again, the Founding Fathers have shown great foresight.
A much better purpose for it is to allow citizens to choose qualified electors from their locale to go learn about the candidates and decide which one is the best, since it's absurd to expect the average person to have the time, access, and knowledge to make an informed and intelligent vote for an office so far removed from their everyday experience.
Granted, that went out the window almost immediately, but that's at least a good reason to have it, assuming it worked.
The whole, "it makes them campaign in flyover states!" is ridiculous. It makes them campaign in 5 or 6 states--often the same 5 or 6--with no regard for anything but how close their vote will be. They still ignore most "flyover" states (when was the last time a presidential candidate bothered with Kansas? Wyoming?) and, worse, they ignore the states with the most people in them. I mean, if I'm left with the choice of having the presidential candidates campaign in 5 low- to middle-population states, none of which are mine anyway, and mine likely never, ever will be one of them, or having them go to the 5 most populous states, I'd have to say that the latter makes more sense, and is probably more useful to the country.
As it stand, the most populous states are ignored completely. This makes no damned sense.
For the record, I do live in Iowa now, so my vote finally counts for something, which is nice. I was living in Kansas in '04, however, so I know how frustrating it is to know that your vote cannot possibly matter.
Of course, who has the time to fully involve themselves in every issue? There would be noone to keep the country running if everyone were fully-immersed in politics. What we really need is to find people who genuinely care about the fellow men as a whole and are sufficiently robust of character to resist the corrupting influence of power then elect them to political office.
It'd be much easier if we were only expected to keep up with more local issues. Things like macroeconomics and international affairs are simply beyond what the average person can be expected to understand.
Maybe--and I'm just spitballing, here--we could just have the state legislatures choose our Senators. That'd be one big, important office we wouldn't have to concern ourselves with, and as long as we made good, informed choices when electing state officials, we'd be fine.
Or how about if we didn't actually elect the President. See, we could just choose someone from our area whom we trusted, preferably someone experienced and well-educated, to go learn about the candidates and make the choice for us. So, we'd still have a vote, but it'd be on who we wanted making the choice, not on the candidates themselves. We'd need a name, of course. I dunno, how's "Electoral College" sound?
(tongue firmly in cheek, and yes, I am aware that the electoral college no longer serves that purpose, but that is what it was supposed to do)
Wait, that game has multiplayer maps that you have to pay for separately? You can't just auto-grab every new map from someone who has it when you join a server using it?
Seriously?
And people still play it?
Damn.
Re:Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I mostly use the Gimp to cut up images for website layouts, but on the rare occasion that I have to do something like, oh, draw a line, I usually have to do a Google search to figure out WTF to do.
I've got at least 5x as much experience with The Gimp as with Photoshop at this point, and until recently I hadn't used Photoshop for several years. I had to install PS a few weeks ago after discovering that The Gimp was losing drop shadows that our graphic designer was sending to me in.ps files. Holy shit, I'd forgotten how much better it is. Even with my not having used it in a long time, and having way, way more experience with The Gimp, PS is still easier to use. Part of it's that it is simply more intuitive, but it doesn't hurt that I don't have spend half my time fighting with the damned UI, juggling windows around.
I, for one, can't wait for something better to knock The Gimp off its throne as THE open source image editor. I'll throw a party the day that happens.
I'd love to see some more language learning apps. The platform is perfect for that kind of thing. Unfortunately, the only ones I've seen are horrible--there are only three languages available (AFAIK) and in the one I bought (French) I've already spotted numerous errors in the first few lessons I've done (had a couple years of French in college). The concept is solid, though, and the interaction using the stylus is perfect.
Heh, I think it's worse coming from the other direction. A combination of naming convention oddities and heavy reliance on poor analogies in the books I was reading ("Say Bob is a class. Bob wants to buy flowers, so he calls the buyFlowers method in class Sally, who is a florist...") made it take much, much longer than it should have for me to grok OOP.
A class, or object, is a container for functions, arrays, variables, etc. They can be treated like data structures for many purposes, e.g. placement in arrays. You can have more than one of the same class active, or "instantiated", at a time. One class can inherit another's attributes, and "extend" them. They are, above all, tools for making your code more compact, more reusable, and easier to understand. They are not magic, and they really don't do anything that you couldn't do without them.
There. If the first OOP book I had read has just said that on page one, it would have saved me many headaches.
It's SO. FUCKING. SIMPLE. I don't know why most of the introductory OOP books I've seen insist on making it sound so complicated.
From what I've seen, the science of Education is largely driven by people who couldn't remotely be called scientists.
The worst part isn't the university faculties--though they are often quite bad, at least when it comes to research--but the administrators. Many (most?) of them are no good at distinguishing good research from bad, or at evaluating the applicability of said research to their particular school, or even at figuring out which parts of a program will be required to have any hope of repeating a study's results.
Consequently, they are prone to a few major errors, namely:
a) taking any old pop-(education-)science at face value. b) reading a SINGLE study of a SINGLE school (or even a single class) and assuming that the methods used in that study will have a similar effect in any school. c) failing to fully implement programs that have been proven to work, thus causing them to fail while simultaneously inconveniencing everyone with the parts that are used (ineffectively).
The way our trig and calc homework was graded in high school was very discouraging, on top of, as you mentioned, taking obscene amounts of time (2-3 hours a day, if you didn't go back and check everything). Each assignment, no matter the length, was 5 points. Each problem that wasn't done, was incomplete, or had an error in it subtracted a point.
One minor calculation error in one of a set of 15 problems? Well, now you're at a 4/5 (80%, B-). Made two (you almost certainly did, since you didn't have another 1-2 hours to check everything thoroughly)? Now you're at a 3/5 (60%, D-). Very frustrating to do all that fucking work, make a couple minor mistakes, and end up with a D- or worse. Manage to get half the homework done, but you didn't have the time for the last half? You're probably looking at a 0%, despite the hour and a half you spent on it.
What this meant was that if you didn't have the time to finish every single problem, you might as well not do any of it. Is it ten problems, each of which take over a page to complete, and you won't have time to go over the work when you're done? Might as well not do it, since the best you could hope for is about a 40% F, and you'll probably get worse.
That teacher was good in many ways, but the way she graded homework was horrible.
I'm fairly sure you can *ahem* get a copy somewhere. If not, then my tears shall come forth in torrents.
And yes, it is fast as hell. Also great as a media player; Windows and Linux on a dual-core processor w/ 1GB or more of RAM still manage to stutter or have minor distortions in media playback if I do anything else at all with my computer while it's playing, but in my experience MP3 playback in BeOS on a Pentium 133 w/ 64MB ram WILL NOT STUTTER even if you abuse the shit out of it. On machines that would have trouble sharing time between WinAmp and ICQ under Win98, BeOS would remain relatively responsive under much larger loads.
QNX also used to be pretty good about that, though it's not as user friendly as BeOS. Another fast-booter, too.
Especially in historical or war simulation RTS or turn-based games, I want the AI to be smart as hell but not to have any "fake" advantages. The Total War series is especially annoying in this regard; the AI is notoriously stupid in battle, and turning up the difficulty just gives their units better stats. I don't want the AI to "cheat". I want it to play smart. Ambush me, try something a little wild once in a while, attempt some real strategy but be ready to fall back on "charge and hope for the best" if I counter it.
I could buy it and have to pirate it anyway, but that might encourage more of this stupidity.
I could not play it at all and spend the money on a game that doesn't hijack my computer.
I could pirate it and play it, while also spending the money on a non-crippled game, which gives all of the benefits of the first two options with none of the drawbacks.
I don't like it. RA2 is--maybe second to Starcraft, depends on my mood--my #1, desert-island RTS, but I find RA1 to be unplayable.
Thing is, I love the original C&C. RA2 plays too much like C&C, I think, but with worse units. The cutscenes are great and all, but the gameplay simply isn't there, IMO.
There are cracked copies out there. If you really must pay them money, just buy one and then download a cracked one anyway.
I, for one, refuse to pay for a product when I'm going to be risking harassment for pirating it anyway. Thanks, I'll still play it, but the money will go to another developer who hasn't put viruses in their software.
Spent the money I was going to spend on it on STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl instead. Bioshock deserved the money more, but I won't pay to fuck up my machine, ESPECIALLY when the game's already on Steam. I also won't miss an opportunity to play a (reputedly) great game over principles, and paying money for a legit copy while having to pirate it anyway just to make it usable is retarded.. *shrug*
Oooh, yeah. I always forget about that and have to uninstall the damned thing. One of the few areas where Ubuntu's behavior isn't what I'd expect it to be. Make the nuts type "apt-get install apache1" or something. "apache" should mean "Apache 2"
I remember waiting so long for it to resolve dependencies that my (much slower) Gentoo machine could have already downloaded, compiled, and installed everything I needed:) Seriously, I'm glad to hear it's made progress. Back then, the only possible use I could see for it was as an avenue to install APT for RPM.
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Macs are also comparable in the performance department these days, which is nice.
It was just sad watching the Mac fanboys in the OS8/OS9 days insist that their slow-ass, expensive, and not-even-that-nice-looking machines were better than PCs at 1/2 the price. They weren't. They were dog-slow and crashed surprisingly often.
Now, at least, I don't feel bad for people who love Macs. They're getting something for their money. OSX macs are many, many times better than their predecessors.
If DX died, I'd expect a lot more companies to get behind OGL. You'd see it take off in a short period of time.
The US alone is ~5% of the world's population. Not half a percent.
The UK is ~1%.
I feel that it offers enough value in exchange for the restrictions to make it worth it.
I don't have to keep track of media, and I don't even have to keep a disc image somewhere like I would if I pirated it. Less disc space wasted on that means less time worrying about backups, less money spent on hard drives, etc.
The comfort of knowing that it's taken care of for me is worth the restriction. That said, I NEVER purchase games that have further DRM on them through Steam, like Bioshock. The whole point is that Steam stays out of my way, while providing some benefits that make its mostly-harmless restrictions bearable; more DRM on top of that is NOT acceptable.
I'll also probably stop buying there if they ever have a problem that results in my losing one or more of my games. I don't mind the occasional rare hiccup (though I've yet to experience one) but any permanent loss of something I've purchased or any significant requirement of my time to recover it would be a deal-breaker
Bingo.
It's one thing when you're developing something as a hobby, but it's another when your boss gives you a .psd from a graphic designer and says "the client wants to see something by tomorrow" and you have no idea which browser he or she will be using.
Any, any time I have to lay out a non-trivial site that will have to work well in IE6 and in modern browsers, I don't even bother trying for standards compliance. Even on the simple ones, I usually design to standards using FF3 as a testbed, then have to break it to get the damned thing working on IE6 (and sometimes even IE7!) in a reasonable timeframe.
Deadlines are great at making you prioritize. I need the site to look good NOW in several browsers, and I need to have extra time for any javascript and PHP work to design it in such a way that it's extensible and maintainable (or pay for it later). (X)HTML/CSS standards compliance is my very last concern, and one of the first things I cut, not because I want to, but because it's my best bad option.
Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10) has further improved the gsudo prompt, giving the option to remember your authorization for an entire session, so if you want you can just do it once per login no matter how much admin-level stuff you're doing.
I'm running the beta on my laptop, and it's pretty cool. Tabbed Nautilus file browsing, too :)
My only complaint is that the boot screen is all screwed up and looks like some sort of 8-bit console gaming system having a seizure, and, remarkably, in a different way every single time I boot. I don't just mean different colors, I mean one time I get a blank, BRIGHT green screen for the whole boot process, next time I get a bunch of horizontal white lines with one moving up and down regularly (must have been the progress bar during that part where it bounces back and forth, though how it ended up the way it did I have no idea), then the next time it's spaced red blocks that seem to be somehow connected to the boot text you see if the graphical boot screen fails to (or if you disable it).
Doesn't actually break anything, though, and it's so funny that I'll kind of be sad when it's fixed.
Anyway, point is, you can look forward to some gksudo improvements if and when you upgrade.
A much better purpose for it is to allow citizens to choose qualified electors from their locale to go learn about the candidates and decide which one is the best, since it's absurd to expect the average person to have the time, access, and knowledge to make an informed and intelligent vote for an office so far removed from their everyday experience.
Granted, that went out the window almost immediately, but that's at least a good reason to have it, assuming it worked.
The whole, "it makes them campaign in flyover states!" is ridiculous. It makes them campaign in 5 or 6 states--often the same 5 or 6--with no regard for anything but how close their vote will be. They still ignore most "flyover" states (when was the last time a presidential candidate bothered with Kansas? Wyoming?) and, worse, they ignore the states with the most people in them. I mean, if I'm left with the choice of having the presidential candidates campaign in 5 low- to middle-population states, none of which are mine anyway, and mine likely never, ever will be one of them, or having them go to the 5 most populous states, I'd have to say that the latter makes more sense, and is probably more useful to the country.
As it stand, the most populous states are ignored completely. This makes no damned sense.
For the record, I do live in Iowa now, so my vote finally counts for something, which is nice. I was living in Kansas in '04, however, so I know how frustrating it is to know that your vote cannot possibly matter.
It'd be much easier if we were only expected to keep up with more local issues. Things like macroeconomics and international affairs are simply beyond what the average person can be expected to understand.
Maybe--and I'm just spitballing, here--we could just have the state legislatures choose our Senators. That'd be one big, important office we wouldn't have to concern ourselves with, and as long as we made good, informed choices when electing state officials, we'd be fine.
Or how about if we didn't actually elect the President. See, we could just choose someone from our area whom we trusted, preferably someone experienced and well-educated, to go learn about the candidates and make the choice for us. So, we'd still have a vote, but it'd be on who we wanted making the choice, not on the candidates themselves. We'd need a name, of course. I dunno, how's "Electoral College" sound?
(tongue firmly in cheek, and yes, I am aware that the electoral college no longer serves that purpose, but that is what it was supposed to do)
Wait, that game has multiplayer maps that you have to pay for separately? You can't just auto-grab every new map from someone who has it when you join a server using it?
Seriously?
And people still play it?
Damn.
Yeah, I mostly use the Gimp to cut up images for website layouts, but on the rare occasion that I have to do something like, oh, draw a line, I usually have to do a Google search to figure out WTF to do.
I've got at least 5x as much experience with The Gimp as with Photoshop at this point, and until recently I hadn't used Photoshop for several years. I had to install PS a few weeks ago after discovering that The Gimp was losing drop shadows that our graphic designer was sending to me in .ps files. Holy shit, I'd forgotten how much better it is. Even with my not having used it in a long time, and having way, way more experience with The Gimp, PS is still easier to use. Part of it's that it is simply more intuitive, but it doesn't hurt that I don't have spend half my time fighting with the damned UI, juggling windows around.
I, for one, can't wait for something better to knock The Gimp off its throne as THE open source image editor. I'll throw a party the day that happens.
I'd love to see some more language learning apps. The platform is perfect for that kind of thing. Unfortunately, the only ones I've seen are horrible--there are only three languages available (AFAIK) and in the one I bought (French) I've already spotted numerous errors in the first few lessons I've done (had a couple years of French in college). The concept is solid, though, and the interaction using the stylus is perfect.
I got an 8600GT 1GB card for the same, at Best Buy no less (my old card, a 6600GT 128MB, fried, and I couldn't wait for Newegg or Tigerdirect)
Heh, I think it's worse coming from the other direction. A combination of naming convention oddities and heavy reliance on poor analogies in the books I was reading ("Say Bob is a class. Bob wants to buy flowers, so he calls the buyFlowers method in class Sally, who is a florist...") made it take much, much longer than it should have for me to grok OOP.
A class, or object, is a container for functions, arrays, variables, etc. They can be treated like data structures for many purposes, e.g. placement in arrays. You can have more than one of the same class active, or "instantiated", at a time. One class can inherit another's attributes, and "extend" them. They are, above all, tools for making your code more compact, more reusable, and easier to understand. They are not magic, and they really don't do anything that you couldn't do without them.
There. If the first OOP book I had read has just said that on page one, it would have saved me many headaches.
It's SO. FUCKING. SIMPLE. I don't know why most of the introductory OOP books I've seen insist on making it sound so complicated.
From what I've seen, the science of Education is largely driven by people who couldn't remotely be called scientists.
The worst part isn't the university faculties--though they are often quite bad, at least when it comes to research--but the administrators. Many (most?) of them are no good at distinguishing good research from bad, or at evaluating the applicability of said research to their particular school, or even at figuring out which parts of a program will be required to have any hope of repeating a study's results.
Consequently, they are prone to a few major errors, namely:
a) taking any old pop-(education-)science at face value.
b) reading a SINGLE study of a SINGLE school (or even a single class) and assuming that the methods used in that study will have a similar effect in any school.
c) failing to fully implement programs that have been proven to work, thus causing them to fail while simultaneously inconveniencing everyone with the parts that are used (ineffectively).
The way our trig and calc homework was graded in high school was very discouraging, on top of, as you mentioned, taking obscene amounts of time (2-3 hours a day, if you didn't go back and check everything). Each assignment, no matter the length, was 5 points. Each problem that wasn't done, was incomplete, or had an error in it subtracted a point.
One minor calculation error in one of a set of 15 problems? Well, now you're at a 4/5 (80%, B-). Made two (you almost certainly did, since you didn't have another 1-2 hours to check everything thoroughly)? Now you're at a 3/5 (60%, D-). Very frustrating to do all that fucking work, make a couple minor mistakes, and end up with a D- or worse. Manage to get half the homework done, but you didn't have the time for the last half? You're probably looking at a 0%, despite the hour and a half you spent on it.
What this meant was that if you didn't have the time to finish every single problem, you might as well not do any of it. Is it ten problems, each of which take over a page to complete, and you won't have time to go over the work when you're done? Might as well not do it, since the best you could hope for is about a 40% F, and you'll probably get worse.
That teacher was good in many ways, but the way she graded homework was horrible.
I'm fairly sure you can *ahem* get a copy somewhere. If not, then my tears shall come forth in torrents.
And yes, it is fast as hell. Also great as a media player; Windows and Linux on a dual-core processor w/ 1GB or more of RAM still manage to stutter or have minor distortions in media playback if I do anything else at all with my computer while it's playing, but in my experience MP3 playback in BeOS on a Pentium 133 w/ 64MB ram WILL NOT STUTTER even if you abuse the shit out of it. On machines that would have trouble sharing time between WinAmp and ICQ under Win98, BeOS would remain relatively responsive under much larger loads.
QNX also used to be pretty good about that, though it's not as user friendly as BeOS. Another fast-booter, too.
EXACTLY what I came here to say.
Especially in historical or war simulation RTS or turn-based games, I want the AI to be smart as hell but not to have any "fake" advantages. The Total War series is especially annoying in this regard; the AI is notoriously stupid in battle, and turning up the difficulty just gives their units better stats. I don't want the AI to "cheat". I want it to play smart. Ambush me, try something a little wild once in a while, attempt some real strategy but be ready to fall back on "charge and hope for the best" if I counter it.
*shrug* life's too short, you know?
I could buy it and have to pirate it anyway, but that might encourage more of this stupidity.
I could not play it at all and spend the money on a game that doesn't hijack my computer.
I could pirate it and play it, while also spending the money on a non-crippled game, which gives all of the benefits of the first two options with none of the drawbacks.
I don't like it. RA2 is--maybe second to Starcraft, depends on my mood--my #1, desert-island RTS, but I find RA1 to be unplayable.
Thing is, I love the original C&C. RA2 plays too much like C&C, I think, but with worse units. The cutscenes are great and all, but the gameplay simply isn't there, IMO.
Oh, right. Duh. I guess it's just that most of the times I'm in contact with OSX, it's to install it or upgrade it :)
There are cracked copies out there. If you really must pay them money, just buy one and then download a cracked one anyway.
I, for one, refuse to pay for a product when I'm going to be risking harassment for pirating it anyway. Thanks, I'll still play it, but the money will go to another developer who hasn't put viruses in their software.
I just pirated the damned thing.
Spent the money I was going to spend on it on STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl instead. Bioshock deserved the money more, but I won't pay to fuck up my machine, ESPECIALLY when the game's already on Steam. I also won't miss an opportunity to play a (reputedly) great game over principles, and paying money for a legit copy while having to pirate it anyway just to make it usable is retarded.. *shrug*
Oooh, yeah. I always forget about that and have to uninstall the damned thing. One of the few areas where Ubuntu's behavior isn't what I'd expect it to be. Make the nuts type "apt-get install apache1" or something. "apache" should mean "Apache 2"
Oh, and incidentally, I believe I was thinking of "rpm -i [package-filename]". So that didn't just come from no-where. :)
I have used YUM, it's just been a few years :)
Whoa, I guess a lot has changed!
I remember waiting so long for it to resolve dependencies that my (much slower) Gentoo machine could have already downloaded, compiled, and installed everything I needed :) Seriously, I'm glad to hear it's made progress. Back then, the only possible use I could see for it was as an avenue to install APT for RPM.