Am I the only person who hides the buddy icons and who turns off the ability for other people to set fonts for me to see?
Nope, me too. I also turn off graphical smileys, which I find even more irritating than buddy icons. My LiveJournal has a plain layout and no icon. (And no "friends" list -- it's a journal, not a flipping popularity contest).
(I do have a buddy icon on my AIM account, but it's not a representation of me; it's simply a green square with "red" written in it. Such silliness amuses me).
That line of thought would explain Guantanamo Bay, actually. It's certainly cruel; but, considering the way many other nations treat prisoners, certainly not unusual.
He proposed that convicted felons serve the first month of their sentence in bed so that their muscles would atrophy
That sounds cruel and unusual to me. I believe that the US constitution expressly forbids cruel and unusual punishment. (Disclaimer: I am not an American).
-5 Godwin's Moderation: comparison of any current politician to Hitler.
There should also be an auto-mod for anyone who uses that Ben Franklin quote in order to make their point, but I can't decide whether it should be +5 Extremely Insightful, or -5 Thoroughly Overused.
*raises hand* Due to having a player with a dodgy loading mechanism.
It hasn't swallowed or damaged a CD yet, but I think it's only a matter of time. The (minor) cost and inconvenience of making backup CDs to use in it beats the cost of replacing the player.
I think it's awful that a celebration of free software is stooping to hard-coding the number. Instead, every year should be "nth annual software Freedom Day".
-Stephen
Re:The 90's called and they want their WM back!
on
Enlightenment Lives
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· Score: 1
A standalone window manager is a thing of the past. Now, it has to be integrated with the desktop environment of choice.
Unless there is no desktop environment of choice.
Enlightenment and its ilk are aimed at people who still subscribe to the "window manager, a few graphical apps, and a heck of a lot of xterms" way of doing things. I am one such person. Gnome and KDE are probably both wonderful environments, but I like my iconless, xterm-encrusted environment, and I don't want to change.
New releases of Enlightenment thus make me happy:-)
in a computing environment where processor speed doubles every 18 months, would you rather have a little bit slow execution for now or a fundamentally flawed security paradigm?
"They who would trade essential CPU cycles to gain a little temporary security deserve neither CPU cycles nor security." -- B3nj4m1n Fr4nx0rlin
Hmmm, it seemed considerably funnier in my head...
-Stephen
Re:Looks great, but prefer Ash for scripts
on
Bash 3.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Ash (or dash, as it's called nowadays) is a Linux port of NetBSD's/bin/sh. It's a POSIX shell with separate lineage from bash.
http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/dash/
It's/bin/sh on my system too. Faster and smaller than bash; watch those configure scripts fly!
Seen the Japanese and European box art for Final Fantasy games? Just a plain white label with the logo in the centre. That's all. Utterly minimalist, and very classy looking compared with the US versions.
The UK release of Ocarina of Time had a beautiful box as well, along similar lines: a plain matt black label with the Zelda logo in gold.
I think the LSB says to put them in/lib64, which I find totally broken. Sure it allows for a 64-bit install to be built on top of an already existing 32-bit install.
I agree, it's hideous, for all the reasons you state. I'd go as far as saying that I don't think that "upgrading" an IA-32 installation to an AMD64 installation should even be supported. Backwards compatibility aside, they're separate architectures, and should thus require reinstallation. It's a small amount of short-term pain to avoid masses of legacy cruft building up afterwards.
What should have been done is on 64-bit distros which wish to offer 32-bit backward compatiblity, the default 64-bit libs should be in/lib and the compatibility libs should have been moved to/lib32.
Absolutely Right(tm). The 64-bit distro is in charge, so it gets dibs on/lib. 32-bit legacy compatibility is just that -- legacy compatibility, and can fit in wherever. Maybe not even/lib32; perhaps demote it to/usr/lib32: no legacy binaries should be required to bring the system up, especially before/usr has been mounted.
I'm also pleased that Debian has decided to call the architecture "amd64". "x86-64" looks and sounds ugly, IMHO.
-Stephen
Re:Obviously not talking about Japanese Games...
on
Game with God
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In the case of Xenogears, it was almost not released in North America, as the church would consider it to be almost blasphemous.
As a Christian who has played Xenogears, I can safely state that any accusations of blasphemy against the game are nonsense. The religion portrayed in the game doesn't remotely resemble Christianity, apart from some parallels in the creation story. There are far more Gnostic elements in Xenogears than conventionally Christian parallels.
While it is true that the established church in Xenogears is sinister and corrupt, the breakaway Nisan sect is portrayed very positively, as a force for good in the world. I wonder if it was inspired by the situation in Europe at the time of the Reformation.
-Stephen
Re:It exists for shock value.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
A prime example of this is Doom. I think most people feel more freaked out when they walk down a hallway and see certain symbols on the walls.
There's at least one place in Doom where it goes further than simply freaking the player out: in E2M1, one of the corridors has a wall section shaped like an inverted cross. If you stand still between those walls, you take damage.
Duke Nukem 3D has a "shock value" scene as well -- near the beginning of the game, there's a chapel. If you stand in front of the cross ornament and pressed the action button, you invert the cross, which has the effect of transforming the room into an evil chapel.
I still have no idea where to place my updated textures, music files and models to get them into my game under Linux.:-(
Heehee, I was wrestling with this yesterday evening.
I resorted to using strace, redirecting stdout and stderr to a file, then searching through the trace for the string "No such file" to see where it was expecting the files to be. I installed Doomsday into/usr/local, so the data files were in a directory tree under/usr/local/share/deng; if you're still having problems when you read this comment, post a reply and I'll give you more details. (Can't do it at the moment as I'm at work. And The Boss's desk is right behind mine. Talk about living dangerously;-)
To add to the problems, Doomsday seemed to be expecting a case-insensitive filesystem (a legacy of its Windows origins, no doubt), as it seemed quite inconsistent in its use of (for example) "jdoom" vs. "jDoom", "md2" vs. "MD2" etc, so I ended up mounting a FAT32 partition under/vfat and symlinking the data directory into it. What fun. There's probably a "proper" way of solving that one, mind.
Normally switching to another window and doing some typing or something would clear it up for me, IIRC.... It actually seemed to just lose focusing abilities, not just copy and paste.
I've found that opening and dismissing the Preferences window clears the problem up. Annoying, but I can live with it.
I've only noticed this bug with Firefox (0.8, haven't tried 0.9 yet) and Mozilla (1.6) under Linux. I haven't experienced the bug with Firefox (0.8 and 0.9) under Windows.
Oh cool, you're ex-Warwick? I graduated in 1998; if you were around at the same time, you might have seen me hanging around in the Fyshbowl; I was the short geeky one who wrote the second iteration of the MP3 server that ran pretty much perpetually in there:-)
The keyboards were unusually pleasant
The arrow keys always used to confound me; I guess that's what I get for being a wimpy Emacs user, not a vi user like everyone else:-)
My alma mater had loads of ADM3e terminals dotted around the computer science department. One student liked them so much that he wrote "xadm", an ADM3e-compatible X11 terminal emulator; it was a quite accurate emulation. (Sorry that I can't provide source; I google for it every so often but have never found it. I guess he never released it to the world).
If X.ORG is marked as conflicting with XFree86, then apt will uninstall XFree86 for me -- along with everything that depends on it. KDE, Gnome, all my X applications... ack!
Assuming you're using Debian (since you mentioned apt), those packages don't depend on XFree86. They depend on one or more of the X11 library packages, which at present are built from the XFree86 sources. A hypothetical future Debianized x.org will provide the same packages, thus ensuring that the dependencies continue to be satisfied. No applications should require rebuilding, because the XFree86 libraries and x.org libraries provide the same API.
Personally, I'm not touching x.org until it gets as far as Debian's testing stream. The XFree86 server and libraries in Debian testing Work For Me(tm), so I'm in no hurry to replace them just because.
I can't decide just to have the web browser and html editor: but I'd rather use my existing email app so I don't want that taking up resources on my machine.
If you build it from source, you can. That's not a solution for everyone, of course, but it's an option for the more technically-minded users.
If you use Debian, separate packages are provided for the browser ("mozilla-browser"), mail/news component ("mozilla-mailnews"), IRC client ("mozilla-chatzilla") etc., so you can pick and choose which components you want. Other distributors may well have similar schemes for Mozilla packaging.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only person who hides the buddy icons and who turns off the ability for other people to set fonts for me to see?
Nope, me too. I also turn off graphical smileys, which I find even more irritating than buddy icons. My LiveJournal has a plain layout and no icon. (And no "friends" list -- it's a journal, not a flipping popularity contest).
(I do have a buddy icon on my AIM account, but it's not a representation of me; it's simply a green square with "red" written in it. Such silliness amuses me).
-Stephen
(Spoiler for original story below)
.
.
.
In the director's edition, the bacteria that eventually kill the aliens will be replaced with walkie-talkies.
-Stephen
That line of thought would explain Guantanamo Bay, actually. It's certainly cruel; but, considering the way many other nations treat prisoners, certainly not unusual.
-Stephen
He proposed that convicted felons serve the first month of their sentence in bed so that their muscles would atrophy
That sounds cruel and unusual to me. I believe that the US constitution expressly forbids cruel and unusual punishment. (Disclaimer: I am not an American).
-Stephen
Terra's moon, Luna
A lot of moons in the Solar System have Greek names, not Roman names. Following this convention, the Moon's name would be Selene, I think.
-Stephen
-5 Godwin's Moderation: comparison of any current politician to Hitler.
There should also be an auto-mod for anyone who uses that Ben Franklin quote in order to make their point, but I can't decide whether it should be +5 Extremely Insightful, or -5 Thoroughly Overused.
-Stephen
I hope Microsoft never decide to copy that idea.
Talking plush Clippy: "It looks like you are trying to cuddle me. Would you like me to offer suggestions for improving your hugging technique?"
-Stephen
Who here actually backs up their DVD's or CD's?
*raises hand* Due to having a player with a dodgy loading mechanism.
It hasn't swallowed or damaged a CD yet, but I think it's only a matter of time. The (minor) cost and inconvenience of making backup CDs to use in it beats the cost of replacing the player.
-Stephen
How many of these would be required to power a time machine?
-Stephen
I think it's awful that a celebration of free software is stooping to hard-coding the number. Instead, every year should be "nth annual software Freedom Day".
-Stephen
A standalone window manager is a thing of the past. Now, it has to be integrated with the desktop environment of choice.
:-)
Unless there is no desktop environment of choice.
Enlightenment and its ilk are aimed at people who still subscribe to the "window manager, a few graphical apps, and a heck of a lot of xterms" way of doing things. I am one such person. Gnome and KDE are probably both wonderful environments, but I like my iconless, xterm-encrusted environment, and I don't want to change.
New releases of Enlightenment thus make me happy
-Stephen
Mine dumped me for the office fax machine.
-Stephen
in a computing environment where processor speed doubles every 18 months, would you rather have a little bit slow execution for now or a fundamentally flawed security paradigm?
"They who would trade essential CPU cycles to gain a little temporary security deserve neither CPU cycles nor security."
-- B3nj4m1n Fr4nx0rlin
Hmmm, it seemed considerably funnier in my head...
-Stephen
Ash (or dash, as it's called nowadays) is a Linux port of NetBSD's /bin/sh. It's a POSIX shell with separate lineage from bash.
/bin/sh on my system too. Faster and smaller than bash; watch those configure scripts fly!
http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/dash/
It's
-Stephen
Seen the Japanese and European box art for Final Fantasy games? Just a plain white label with the logo in the centre. That's all. Utterly minimalist, and very classy looking compared with the US versions.
The UK release of Ocarina of Time had a beautiful box as well, along similar lines: a plain matt black label with the Zelda logo in gold.
-Stephen
I think the LSB says to put them in /lib64, which I find totally broken. Sure it allows for a 64-bit install to be built on top of an already existing 32-bit install.
/lib and the compatibility libs should have been moved to /lib32.
/lib. 32-bit legacy compatibility is just that -- legacy compatibility, and can fit in wherever. Maybe not even /lib32; perhaps demote it to /usr/lib32: no legacy binaries should be required to bring the system up, especially before /usr has been mounted.
I agree, it's hideous, for all the reasons you state. I'd go as far as saying that I don't think that "upgrading" an IA-32 installation to an AMD64 installation should even be supported. Backwards compatibility aside, they're separate architectures, and should thus require reinstallation. It's a small amount of short-term pain to avoid masses of legacy cruft building up afterwards.
What should have been done is on 64-bit distros which wish to offer 32-bit backward compatiblity, the default 64-bit libs should be in
Absolutely Right(tm). The 64-bit distro is in charge, so it gets dibs on
I'm also pleased that Debian has decided to call the architecture "amd64". "x86-64" looks and sounds ugly, IMHO.
-Stephen
In the case of Xenogears, it was almost not released in North America, as the church would consider it to be almost blasphemous.
As a Christian who has played Xenogears, I can safely state that any accusations of blasphemy against the game are nonsense. The religion portrayed in the game doesn't remotely resemble Christianity, apart from some parallels in the creation story. There are far more Gnostic elements in Xenogears than conventionally Christian parallels.
While it is true that the established church in Xenogears is sinister and corrupt, the breakaway Nisan sect is portrayed very positively, as a force for good in the world. I wonder if it was inspired by the situation in Europe at the time of the Reformation.
-Stephen
A prime example of this is Doom. I think most people feel more freaked out when they walk down a hallway and see certain symbols on the walls.
There's at least one place in Doom where it goes further than simply freaking the player out: in E2M1, one of the corridors has a wall section shaped like an inverted cross. If you stand still between those walls, you take damage.
Duke Nukem 3D has a "shock value" scene as well -- near the beginning of the game, there's a chapel. If you stand in front of the cross ornament and pressed the action button, you invert the cross, which has the effect of transforming the room into an evil chapel.
-Stephen
I still have no idea where to place my updated textures, music files and models to get them into my game under Linux. :-(
/usr/local, so the data files were in a directory tree under /usr/local/share/deng; if you're still having problems when you read this comment, post a reply and I'll give you more details. (Can't do it at the moment as I'm at work. And The Boss's desk is right behind mine. Talk about living dangerously ;-)
/vfat and symlinking the data directory into it. What fun. There's probably a "proper" way of solving that one, mind.
Heehee, I was wrestling with this yesterday evening.
I resorted to using strace, redirecting stdout and stderr to a file, then searching through the trace for the string "No such file" to see where it was expecting the files to be. I installed Doomsday into
To add to the problems, Doomsday seemed to be expecting a case-insensitive filesystem (a legacy of its Windows origins, no doubt), as it seemed quite inconsistent in its use of (for example) "jdoom" vs. "jDoom", "md2" vs. "MD2" etc, so I ended up mounting a FAT32 partition under
-Stephen
Normally switching to another window and doing some typing or something would clear it up for me, IIRC. ... It actually seemed to just lose focusing abilities, not just copy and paste.
I've found that opening and dismissing the Preferences window clears the problem up. Annoying, but I can live with it.
I've only noticed this bug with Firefox (0.8, haven't tried 0.9 yet) and Mozilla (1.6) under Linux. I haven't experienced the bug with Firefox (0.8 and 0.9) under Windows.
-Stephen
Guess where I met my ADM3e experience :-)
:-)
:-)
Oh cool, you're ex-Warwick? I graduated in 1998; if you were around at the same time, you might have seen me hanging around in the Fyshbowl; I was the short geeky one who wrote the second iteration of the MP3 server that ran pretty much perpetually in there
The keyboards were unusually pleasant
The arrow keys always used to confound me; I guess that's what I get for being a wimpy Emacs user, not a vi user like everyone else
-Stephen
My alma mater had loads of ADM3e terminals dotted around the computer science department. One student liked them so much that he wrote "xadm", an ADM3e-compatible X11 terminal emulator; it was a quite accurate emulation. (Sorry that I can't provide source; I google for it every so often but have never found it. I guess he never released it to the world).
-Stephen
If X.ORG is marked as conflicting with XFree86, then apt will uninstall XFree86 for me -- along with everything that depends on it. KDE, Gnome, all my X applications... ack!
Assuming you're using Debian (since you mentioned apt), those packages don't depend on XFree86. They depend on one or more of the X11 library packages, which at present are built from the XFree86 sources. A hypothetical future Debianized x.org will provide the same packages, thus ensuring that the dependencies continue to be satisfied. No applications should require rebuilding, because the XFree86 libraries and x.org libraries provide the same API.
Personally, I'm not touching x.org until it gets as far as Debian's testing stream. The XFree86 server and libraries in Debian testing Work For Me(tm), so I'm in no hurry to replace them just because.
-Stephen
I can't decide just to have the web browser and html editor: but I'd rather use my existing email app so I don't want that taking up resources on my machine.
If you build it from source, you can. That's not a solution for everyone, of course, but it's an option for the more technically-minded users.
If you use Debian, separate packages are provided for the browser ("mozilla-browser"), mail/news component ("mozilla-mailnews"), IRC client ("mozilla-chatzilla") etc., so you can pick and choose which components you want. Other distributors may well have similar schemes for Mozilla packaging.
-Stephen
monoculture of their monopoly (enough monos for you?).
.NET mono{culture,poly} :-)
Not quite -- you forgot the one that might help deal with the
-Stephen