"Why should software developers be treated differently than architects and engineers?"
Well, umm... maybe because architect's creations can collapse and kill people, and engineers' creations can explode and kill people, where the newest Adventure clone can... umm... it can crash. Or it might not print out my score properly! OH NO!! THE HORROR!!!
Now if someone's writing software to control an airplane's engine or a dump truck's brakes, then I agree it must have certification. Unfortunately, legislation like what we're seeing will ensure low quality software in these critical systems. No one can reverse-engineer or check up on Microsoft's "DumptruckBrakesXP", so it can be certified and then page fault in traffic. Crunch.
Not only that, a flaw the average Joe can easily grasp. All you have to say is, "StarOffice (or other OSS product you proselytize) has a full English dictionary and thesaurus. Unlike Microsoft Word."
Anyone else think this will matter to people who have Real Work (tm) to do?
Depends on whether "adult" rated sites (pr0n etc) will continue to use AVS'es or will simply move to using the ratings system.
I doubt much will change. I doubt most AVS sites use AVSes to avoid liability. Technically, you can still do that with a splash screen, an "I am not a kiddie" agreement, and OK and LEAVE buttons. The AVS system makes them money. And they probably wouldn't be as well listed if they weren't on the AVS bandwagon. Just talk to people who run pr0n sites about how much pressure they are under to run "AdultCheck" or one of its clones.
No, AVS and filterware are an industry racket that has little to do with avoiding legal liability, and everything to do with making money. I suppose a few sites might switch, but I doubt many will.
-Kasreyn
P.S. If you're wondering what my beef is with AVSes, it has to do with sites falsely advertising themselves as "free" (Piratemedia is a great example), AVSes charging 25 bucks and providing no service except extortion, and having to have a credit card (???) to prove I'm an adult.
"...instead you have to have access to a certain resource to build some units (and get some other effects IIRC). This leads to the need to get those resources by diplomacy/trade, by building a colony or by war/conquering them."
Let's look at Starcraft and the unit known as the Guardian.
You have to have access to a certain resource, actually, two. Namely, minerals and Vespene gas. Gas is sometimes harder to get than minerals, so it's the sticking point. Each Guardian costs a total, over time, of 150 minerals and 200 gas.
And get some other effects? Yup, once again, sounds just like an RTS. To be able to build Guardians, you must first build all the buildings which allow you to make a Lair, then you must build a Spire, then you must upgrade your Lair to a Hive, then you must upgrade your Spire to a Greater Spire so that your Zerg colony (civilization?) will have the needed "technology" or advancement to produce Guardians. All these upgrades and buildings require a sizable investment in your infrastructure and economy.
Getting resources by diplomacy and trade? Well, Age of Empires includes a "tribute" option where you can give another player some of your resources. Few protest that AoE is an RTS game. And conquest has long been the de facto standard RTS method of seizing resources from an opponent. Diplomacy can be as simple as "don't take that mins expansion or I'll 0w|\|z0r j00."
You describe RTS games to a T. So I wonder how many "horses" it will take to "build" a knight?
One bit of advice is, get a transparent digital camera - that is, one with a clear(ish) plastic housing so you can see the phone board through it. Just a glance at it and you can tell it's not a bomb. Might save you some hassle, though there is the drawback of it looking like a child's toy.
Mine's just a little Earthstink cam though, not very good. Got it free with a membership my dad signed up for recently. =P I don't know if you can get NICE cameras transparent.
Their web page is on a machine not at their village. Not one of the oh-so-hilarious (apparently) wooden boxen. Their village is still without internet service.
Now spit out your foot and read the article next time. =P
Actually, the P4 has better heat management than the Athlon.;-) Take the cooler off a P4, it keeps running, albeit it goes slower. Take the cooler off a P3, it locks. Take the cooler off a T-bird, it destroys itself and the mobo in under 2 seconds. FWAMF!! Sizzle.
Just about the ONLY good thing about the P4 tho.;-)
"GameSpot: How do the trade system's new strategy resources work?
Sid Meier: It's pretty straightforward. If you don't have certain strategic resources, you can't build certain units. For instance, without horses a player won't be able to build chariots, horsemen, knights, cavalry and so forth. Without oil, you can't build battleships, bombers, tanks etc. Most units, including the special ones, require one or more strategic resources. Players will probably find that their short-term strategy will be shaped by the realities of which resources they have and don't have...launching wars to obtain certain resources, building distant colonies, entering into one-sided trade agreements to gain access to Saltpetre so they can build musket men. All of these changes, along with the changes to the technologies, wonders and units, make Civilization III both more challenging, and more historically realistic."
Are they turning Civ into an RTS, or am I just misinterpreting this? Because we already have RTS games... Maybe TBS?
(for the unclueful, RTS = Real-Time Strategy, TBS = Turn-Based Strategy. Both are wargames. The Command & Conquers, Warcraft 1&2, Starcraft, and the Age of Empire games are all RTSes.)
I'm not sure I'd like Civ to go that route... Civ should always be Civ! =) Ahh, the memories. Nothing like Civ 1 for DOS on a 386 back in the day.
Heh, who'm I kidding? I'll buy it, 'cause it's from Sid. ^_^
"I think Newsbytes has it right - the federal ban is likely to be reinstated soon, they just didn't get around to it this week."
Oh, well that's just fine then. I'm sure Congress won't mind when I send them a bill for the sales tax some greedy official in Greater Podunk will stick me with the next time I try to buy something online.
Way to go, guys. Way to show you REALLY care about getting out of this recession. Pffft.
"Findings of reverse hijacking are relatively rare under ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), even though the system for settling disputes over conflicts between trademark holder and domain-name registrants has seen more than 4,500 cases in less than two years."
Hmmm, now I wonder why that is...
Oh, wait, corporations have more money than ordinary shmoes. I knew there was a simple reason!
When someone stuffs junkmail into my physical mailbox, is EFF saying that is their free speech right? When I avoid getting my phone # / address listed in certain places to avoid snail mail and telephone spam, I'm not curtailing others' first amendment freedoms.
If someone wants to put a message up on a bullettin board in a public place describing their pyramid scam on how to "$$$MAKE MONEY FAST$$$!!!!", then maybe that's their first-amendment protected speech. But that protection ends at MY borders. When someone is in my HOME, they do not have full 1st amendment rights. If I don't like what they are saying, I can tell them to get the fuck out. I see no difference between my home, my physical mailbox, and my email inbox. In neither case is it a public place. No stranger has the right to force his way into my inbox, fill it with spam, and then say "You HAVE to hear me out, the EFF says it's my 1st amendment right!" Unh-uh, buddy, it don't work that way. My private home and territory are private and *I* decide what speech occurs in them. And I include my inboxes in my territory.
The EFF has picked the wrong fight here. Please, folks, I respect the good work you're doing upholding the Bill of Rights. But this one stands too much chance of alienating the techies who are the EFF's main means of support. Please, lay off. Not to mention the ridiculousness of supporting spammers, none of whom care about 1st amendment rights, and most of whom are flybynight scammers anyway. Please, EFF, find an underdog to champion who doesn't actually DESERVE to be an underdog.
I see all these "Bush looks like a Chimp" pages, but looking at that faked up card (which is IMHO quite funny) makes me realize just how much dear old Larry looks like one.
Let's see some "Larry Ellison... or CHIMP?" pages, people!
"In the meantime, the rest of us will enjoy the fruits of an economy created by companies that work and a government that protects their work."
Pity IBM in this case DIDN'T DO THE WORK! I guess then you won't mind the patent being overturned when any one of a billion pieces of prior art are brought up?
Corporate apologists like you disgust me. I don't know whether you're blinkered by your simple-minded faith in capitalism, or are simply being cynical twats. Either way, you need to get your collective heads on straight. A corporation, doing any dirty thing it can manage for money, is not somehow an "honorable" or "right" thing. It is not something we can expect, and it is not a success we must depend on. I for one would as rather live in a country built on the financial misdeeds of a megacorp, than I would live in a country built on any other sort of crime, like genocide.
Oh wait, I live in a country built on both... damn.
-Kasreyn
No, this is scary, not funny. I mean that.
on
RIAA to DoS Pirates?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Look.
Up until now the RIAA's sole method of business has been suing people and trying to get fascist legislation passed, and nothing else. As I'm sure we all know, the massive civil disobedience of file sharing doesn't bat an eye at the law, in fact kind of snickers at it, so that hasn't worked.
What this means is, the RIAA is finally getting with the program. They're finally employing a technological solution to a technological problem. Some might claim they already had with SDMI but that was a joke, plus it wasn't aimed at going after the file sharers. Now, with this plan, even though there are ways around it, it looks like it could be semi-successful, especially if their online music services are attractive enough. Picture: J Random Musiclover, uses WinMX and KaZaA, until they bog down terribly slowly. He doesn't know it's the RIAA attacking, and he should "damn the man" and keep on truckin'. He just thinks they've become lame and it's time to move on. And then he sees one of the RIAA offerings, and if they're smart enough to finally go for some sort of cheap subscription or micropayment, he might very well be sold.
And I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. The RIAA has been an ogre in the past, but if it goes the way of micropayments and accepts the fact of filesharing (and that it will never, never, never go away), then perhaps the RIAA will find itself able to move into the future as, if not a friend, then at least an ally of humanity. I would hope so. Otherwise, let's destroy the fuckers.
But let's give them a little respect, because they're finally starting to get with the program.
Take the example of my best friend. He owns TWO copies of every Metallica CD up to the Napster fiasco. One copy of every cassette tape up to then. 4 or 5 posters, up to then. 5 or 6 T-shirts. A baseball cap. He was The World's Biggest Metallica Fan, all caps, in stereo. He was also the second-biggest Napster user I ever met. Then came the Napster Fiasco, and he got banned for an mp3 of No-Leaf Clover, found on his machine, *ripped off his own legitimate CD and not available for downloads*. Result?
Well, first he hacked his way out of the ban like any self-respecting music fan.;-) Second, he dropped Metallica cold, and hates their guts today, Lars in particular. He gets a grim satisfaction from anti-metallica sites like killmetallica.com. He is now one of the biggest Metallica HATERS I know. There is no evidence that his Napster use ever cost them a dime, and he must have spent hundreds on them over the years. Would have spent hundreds more if he'd remained a fan. Now, nothing.
Talk about your Operation: Footbullets.
This is not about fan's respect. A fan who likes a band is MORE likely to share its music. Metallica was all in favor of tape trading back in the day, when they were little. We haven't forgotten, Lars, even if fame has made you forget. Face it - this is about money, and about destroying those fair-use rights that cut in on corporate profit. Nothing more, nothing less.
-Kasreyn
P.S. Doubly ironic, they banned him for a reallu sUxx0r song like No Leaf Clover, when there were also mp3's of Master of Puppets, Orion, One, etc...
InstantDB is strange in that it was often referred to as an open source product by many (including Lutris employees), but no one outside Lutris ever actually got to see the source.
This should have been a great big flashing neon sign right there folks. If no one outside the originating company gets to see the fsckin' source, it AIN'T OPEN SOURCE. How much more simple can you get?
This strikes me, not as a case of an open source program getting closed off by a greedy company, but as a greedy company, who had been lying and calling their (up to then) freeware (not in the GNU sense of free, free as in beer), "open-source" in order to get the warm fuzzy reputation that brings, then backpedalling when they couldn't turn a profit with that. Lutris's deceit was not in closing off the software, but in lying and saying it was OSS in the first place.
Ok, first off, I don't get how this article is "worth a read". Maybe you don't realize, Taco, that MS is designing an OS for total incompetents. I have worked in an office full of middle-aged women who were so computer illiterate, they were almost to the point of calling the mouse the "pointy clicky thingee". Changing file extensions is something that can hose the system up, not in a dangerous way, but it can prevent files from opening properly. I think it's just right in W98 - it's hidden from the lusers and anyone with any curiosity will easily find it under folder options.
Secondly, I don't see how you "honestly never thought about" is before. I'm "honestly" disappointed in you, Rob. =P
Forcing MS to quit hiding OS functions won't help things. Forcing them to stop embracing, extending, and crushing open standards, WILL.
"...In 1993 and 1994, two terrorist bombs planted by the I.R.A. exploded in London's financial district, a historic and densely packed square mile known as the City of London. In response to widespread public anxiety about terrorism, the government decided to install a ''ring of steel'' -- a network of closed-circuit television cameras mounted on the eight official entry gates that control access to the City."
I find this supremely ironic, given Kurt Vonnegut's previous use of the term "ring of steel" in Cat's Cradle.
If you don't understand, by all means, go read it.
The Matrix (the unnamed city in the Matrix was I think Sydney or Perth), Matrix sequels, LotR, Phantom Menace (some parts)... does anyone know why Australia seems to be such a popular choice for filming movies these days? Is it a good choice in terms of political or financial considerations involving shooting a film, or is it just very popular?
Ok ok, I know that LotR and maybe Phantom Menace were shot in NZ (IIRC). Still, it makes me wonder what's so hot about shooting films Down Under.
Slashdot Mirror
Will that, like, have nude pinups of RMS and ESR?
Yum! I want one for my wall!
-Kasreyn
P.S. YES, THAT WAS A JOKE, YOU SICK FREAKS.
No one ever takes power with the intention of giving it back up.
There will be an attempt to extend this in 2005.
The ACLU might as well start writing the speeches and picking its lobbyists now.
-Kasreyn
"Why should software developers be treated differently than architects and engineers?"
Well, umm... maybe because architect's creations can collapse and kill people, and engineers' creations can explode and kill people, where the newest Adventure clone can... umm... it can crash. Or it might not print out my score properly! OH NO!! THE HORROR!!!
Now if someone's writing software to control an airplane's engine or a dump truck's brakes, then I agree it must have certification. Unfortunately, legislation like what we're seeing will ensure low quality software in these critical systems. No one can reverse-engineer or check up on Microsoft's "DumptruckBrakesXP", so it can be certified and then page fault in traffic. Crunch.
Just some food for thought.
-Kasreyn
Not only that, a flaw the average Joe can easily grasp. All you have to say is, "StarOffice (or other OSS product you proselytize) has a full English dictionary and thesaurus. Unlike Microsoft Word."
Anyone else think this will matter to people who have Real Work (tm) to do?
-Kasreyn
Depends on whether "adult" rated sites (pr0n etc) will continue to use AVS'es or will simply move to using the ratings system.
I doubt much will change. I doubt most AVS sites use AVSes to avoid liability. Technically, you can still do that with a splash screen, an "I am not a kiddie" agreement, and OK and LEAVE buttons. The AVS system makes them money. And they probably wouldn't be as well listed if they weren't on the AVS bandwagon. Just talk to people who run pr0n sites about how much pressure they are under to run "AdultCheck" or one of its clones.
No, AVS and filterware are an industry racket that has little to do with avoiding legal liability, and everything to do with making money. I suppose a few sites might switch, but I doubt many will.
-Kasreyn
P.S. If you're wondering what my beef is with AVSes, it has to do with sites falsely advertising themselves as "free" (Piratemedia is a great example), AVSes charging 25 bucks and providing no service except extortion, and having to have a credit card (???) to prove I'm an adult.
"...instead you have to have access to a certain resource to build some units (and get some other effects IIRC). This leads to the need to get those resources by diplomacy/trade, by building a colony or by war/conquering them."
Let's look at Starcraft and the unit known as the Guardian.
You have to have access to a certain resource, actually, two. Namely, minerals and Vespene gas. Gas is sometimes harder to get than minerals, so it's the sticking point. Each Guardian costs a total, over time, of 150 minerals and 200 gas.
And get some other effects? Yup, once again, sounds just like an RTS. To be able to build Guardians, you must first build all the buildings which allow you to make a Lair, then you must build a Spire, then you must upgrade your Lair to a Hive, then you must upgrade your Spire to a Greater Spire so that your Zerg colony (civilization?) will have the needed "technology" or advancement to produce Guardians. All these upgrades and buildings require a sizable investment in your infrastructure and economy.
Getting resources by diplomacy and trade? Well, Age of Empires includes a "tribute" option where you can give another player some of your resources. Few protest that AoE is an RTS game. And conquest has long been the de facto standard RTS method of seizing resources from an opponent. Diplomacy can be as simple as "don't take that mins expansion or I'll 0w|\|z0r j00."
You describe RTS games to a T. So I wonder how many "horses" it will take to "build" a knight?
"Sorry... not enough horses. Breed more horses!"
-Kasreyn
One bit of advice is, get a transparent digital camera - that is, one with a clear(ish) plastic housing so you can see the phone board through it. Just a glance at it and you can tell it's not a bomb. Might save you some hassle, though there is the drawback of it looking like a child's toy.
Mine's just a little Earthstink cam though, not very good. Got it free with a membership my dad signed up for recently. =P I don't know if you can get NICE cameras transparent.
-Kasreyn
no text
/. is like having a shit filter on your ass" - anon.
lalala
I don't like lameness filters.
"having a lameness filter on
Their web page is on a machine not at their village. Not one of the oh-so-hilarious (apparently) wooden boxen. Their village is still without internet service.
Now spit out your foot and read the article next time. =P
-Kasreyn.
Actually, the P4 has better heat management than the Athlon. ;-) Take the cooler off a P4, it keeps running, albeit it goes slower. Take the cooler off a P3, it locks. Take the cooler off a T-bird, it destroys itself and the mobo in under 2 seconds. FWAMF!! Sizzle.
;-)
Just about the ONLY good thing about the P4 tho.
-Kasreyn
"GameSpot: How do the trade system's new strategy resources work?
Sid Meier: It's pretty straightforward. If you don't have certain strategic resources, you can't build certain units. For instance, without horses a player won't be able to build chariots, horsemen, knights, cavalry and so forth. Without oil, you can't build battleships, bombers, tanks etc. Most units, including the special ones, require one or more strategic resources. Players will probably find that their short-term strategy will be shaped by the realities of which resources they have and don't have...launching wars to obtain certain resources, building distant colonies, entering into one-sided trade agreements to gain access to Saltpetre so they can build musket men. All of these changes, along with the changes to the technologies, wonders and units, make Civilization III both more challenging, and more historically realistic."
Are they turning Civ into an RTS, or am I just misinterpreting this? Because we already have RTS games... Maybe TBS?
(for the unclueful, RTS = Real-Time Strategy, TBS = Turn-Based Strategy. Both are wargames. The Command & Conquers, Warcraft 1&2, Starcraft, and the Age of Empire games are all RTSes.)
I'm not sure I'd like Civ to go that route... Civ should always be Civ! =) Ahh, the memories. Nothing like Civ 1 for DOS on a 386 back in the day.
Heh, who'm I kidding? I'll buy it, 'cause it's from Sid. ^_^
-Kasreyn, once and future Zulu warlord!
"I think Newsbytes has it right - the federal ban is likely to be reinstated soon, they just didn't get around to it this week."
Oh, well that's just fine then. I'm sure Congress won't mind when I send them a bill for the sales tax some greedy official in Greater Podunk will stick me with the next time I try to buy something online.
Way to go, guys. Way to show you REALLY care about getting out of this recession. Pffft.
-Kasreyn
"Findings of reverse hijacking are relatively rare under ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), even though the system for settling disputes over conflicts between trademark holder and domain-name registrants has seen more than 4,500 cases in less than two years."
Hmmm, now I wonder why that is...
Oh, wait, corporations have more money than ordinary shmoes. I knew there was a simple reason!
(sigh)
-Kasreyn
When someone stuffs junkmail into my physical mailbox, is EFF saying that is their free speech right? When I avoid getting my phone # / address listed in certain places to avoid snail mail and telephone spam, I'm not curtailing others' first amendment freedoms.
If someone wants to put a message up on a bullettin board in a public place describing their pyramid scam on how to "$$$MAKE MONEY FAST$$$!!!!", then maybe that's their first-amendment protected speech. But that protection ends at MY borders. When someone is in my HOME, they do not have full 1st amendment rights. If I don't like what they are saying, I can tell them to get the fuck out. I see no difference between my home, my physical mailbox, and my email inbox. In neither case is it a public place. No stranger has the right to force his way into my inbox, fill it with spam, and then say "You HAVE to hear me out, the EFF says it's my 1st amendment right!" Unh-uh, buddy, it don't work that way. My private home and territory are private and *I* decide what speech occurs in them. And I include my inboxes in my territory.
The EFF has picked the wrong fight here. Please, folks, I respect the good work you're doing upholding the Bill of Rights. But this one stands too much chance of alienating the techies who are the EFF's main means of support. Please, lay off. Not to mention the ridiculousness of supporting spammers, none of whom care about 1st amendment rights, and most of whom are flybynight scammers anyway. Please, EFF, find an underdog to champion who doesn't actually DESERVE to be an underdog.
-Kasreyn
I see all these "Bush looks like a Chimp" pages, but looking at that faked up card (which is IMHO quite funny) makes me realize just how much dear old Larry looks like one.
Let's see some "Larry Ellison... or CHIMP?" pages, people!
-Kasreyn
"In the meantime, the rest of us will enjoy the fruits of an economy created by companies that work and a government that protects their work."
Pity IBM in this case DIDN'T DO THE WORK! I guess then you won't mind the patent being overturned when any one of a billion pieces of prior art are brought up?
Corporate apologists like you disgust me. I don't know whether you're blinkered by your simple-minded faith in capitalism, or are simply being cynical twats. Either way, you need to get your collective heads on straight. A corporation, doing any dirty thing it can manage for money, is not somehow an "honorable" or "right" thing. It is not something we can expect, and it is not a success we must depend on. I for one would as rather live in a country built on the financial misdeeds of a megacorp, than I would live in a country built on any other sort of crime, like genocide.
Oh wait, I live in a country built on both... damn.
-Kasreyn
Look.
Up until now the RIAA's sole method of business has been suing people and trying to get fascist legislation passed, and nothing else. As I'm sure we all know, the massive civil disobedience of file sharing doesn't bat an eye at the law, in fact kind of snickers at it, so that hasn't worked.
What this means is, the RIAA is finally getting with the program. They're finally employing a technological solution to a technological problem. Some might claim they already had with SDMI but that was a joke, plus it wasn't aimed at going after the file sharers. Now, with this plan, even though there are ways around it, it looks like it could be semi-successful, especially if their online music services are attractive enough. Picture: J Random Musiclover, uses WinMX and KaZaA, until they bog down terribly slowly. He doesn't know it's the RIAA attacking, and he should "damn the man" and keep on truckin'. He just thinks they've become lame and it's time to move on. And then he sees one of the RIAA offerings, and if they're smart enough to finally go for some sort of cheap subscription or micropayment, he might very well be sold.
And I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. The RIAA has been an ogre in the past, but if it goes the way of micropayments and accepts the fact of filesharing (and that it will never, never, never go away), then perhaps the RIAA will find itself able to move into the future as, if not a friend, then at least an ally of humanity. I would hope so. Otherwise, let's destroy the fuckers.
But let's give them a little respect, because they're finally starting to get with the program.
-Kasreyn
Take the example of my best friend. He owns TWO copies of every Metallica CD up to the Napster fiasco. One copy of every cassette tape up to then. 4 or 5 posters, up to then. 5 or 6 T-shirts. A baseball cap. He was The World's Biggest Metallica Fan, all caps, in stereo. He was also the second-biggest Napster user I ever met. Then came the Napster Fiasco, and he got banned for an mp3 of No-Leaf Clover, found on his machine, *ripped off his own legitimate CD and not available for downloads*. Result?
;-) Second, he dropped Metallica cold, and hates their guts today, Lars in particular. He gets a grim satisfaction from anti-metallica sites like killmetallica.com. He is now one of the biggest Metallica HATERS I know. There is no evidence that his Napster use ever cost them a dime, and he must have spent hundreds on them over the years. Would have spent hundreds more if he'd remained a fan. Now, nothing.
Well, first he hacked his way out of the ban like any self-respecting music fan.
Talk about your Operation: Footbullets.
This is not about fan's respect. A fan who likes a band is MORE likely to share its music. Metallica was all in favor of tape trading back in the day, when they were little. We haven't forgotten, Lars, even if fame has made you forget. Face it - this is about money, and about destroying those fair-use rights that cut in on corporate profit. Nothing more, nothing less.
-Kasreyn
P.S. Doubly ironic, they banned him for a reallu sUxx0r song like No Leaf Clover, when there were also mp3's of Master of Puppets, Orion, One, etc...
From the article:
InstantDB is strange in that it was often referred to as an open source product by many (including Lutris employees), but no one outside Lutris ever actually got to see the source.
This should have been a great big flashing neon sign right there folks. If no one outside the originating company gets to see the fsckin' source, it AIN'T OPEN SOURCE. How much more simple can you get?
This strikes me, not as a case of an open source program getting closed off by a greedy company, but as a greedy company, who had been lying and calling their (up to then) freeware (not in the GNU sense of free, free as in beer), "open-source" in order to get the warm fuzzy reputation that brings, then backpedalling when they couldn't turn a profit with that. Lutris's deceit was not in closing off the software, but in lying and saying it was OSS in the first place.
-Kasreyn
I mean, it's clear they're planning to go all the way to 0.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.9 before releasing 1.0. Or did I not have enough decimal places there?
They should start at that many decimal places in the first place instead of suddenly having to add them in order to avoid a 1.0 release. =P
-Kasreyn,
who thinks the first release of ANY software should be 1.0, and it starts to get good around 3.2.
We understand the concept of the battery, smartass.
We need a UPS instead. And the "u" part is the tough part.
-Kasreyn
Ok, first off, I don't get how this article is "worth a read". Maybe you don't realize, Taco, that MS is designing an OS for total incompetents. I have worked in an office full of middle-aged women who were so computer illiterate, they were almost to the point of calling the mouse the "pointy clicky thingee". Changing file extensions is something that can hose the system up, not in a dangerous way, but it can prevent files from opening properly. I think it's just right in W98 - it's hidden from the lusers and anyone with any curiosity will easily find it under folder options.
Secondly, I don't see how you "honestly never thought about" is before. I'm "honestly" disappointed in you, Rob. =P
Forcing MS to quit hiding OS functions won't help things. Forcing them to stop embracing, extending, and crushing open standards, WILL.
-Kasreyn
"...In 1993 and 1994, two terrorist bombs planted by the I.R.A. exploded in London's financial district, a historic and densely packed square mile known as the City of London. In response to widespread public anxiety about terrorism, the government decided to install a ''ring of steel'' -- a network of closed-circuit television cameras mounted on the eight official entry gates that control access to the City."
I find this supremely ironic, given Kurt Vonnegut's previous use of the term "ring of steel" in Cat's Cradle.
If you don't understand, by all means, go read it.
-Kasreyn
The Matrix (the unnamed city in the Matrix was I think Sydney or Perth), Matrix sequels, LotR, Phantom Menace (some parts)... does anyone know why Australia seems to be such a popular choice for filming movies these days? Is it a good choice in terms of political or financial considerations involving shooting a film, or is it just very popular?
Ok ok, I know that LotR and maybe Phantom Menace were shot in NZ (IIRC). Still, it makes me wonder what's so hot about shooting films Down Under.
-Kasreyn
Does this mean I won't lose 1 life point every time they hit me?
Oh wait, this isn't the Diablo forum!
-Kasreyn