But, then again, I haven't yet seen anyone manage anything approach "paranormal" involving a computer, unless we're counting Windows ME as "supernaturally bad".
You obviously haven't programmed quite enough then. As in encountering a line in the code that says "whatever you do, don't touch the next line. If you change it, the program segfaults. Don't touch this comment either: If you change it, this won't compile." No, it's not strictly paranormal, but, well, it does demonstrate one of the big problems of hard sciences: computer science can only tell us How It Actually Works and the softer side of computer science tells us Why This Is Generally Discouraged, but we need to expand our research to other fields (psychology, sociology, history, yes, perhaps even philosophy and theological studies) that can explain What The Hell Were They Thinking When They Wrote This, and perhaps even If There Is A God, Why He Lets This Get Written. =)
Then... if you need some fun reading, you might want to consider the strange case of a haunted NES, which, upon closer scrutiny, regrettably did not have as many actual paranormal properties as advertised, though. =)
Oh, the world of computers is so full of weird and otherworldly stuff. As a computer guy, I know this box next to me is just a typical example of a very complex system with lots of variables to consider... yet I would think life would be much easier if I'd just think it as a Thing that has a Peculiar Character of its own. This is, as the famous saying goes, technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic. =)
Technically, we're probably already there. When playing music, you are sending electrical signals down a wire - this is a copy of the music. Then you induce vibrations in a speaker corresponding to the music - another copy...
Ahaaaaa! And next thing you know, RIAA and the labels have a whole bunch of quagmire to wade through when those pesky Artists are demanding their cut from the every. single. act. of. copying that occurs between the different production phases, starting from the studio microphones, ending on the CDs on the shelf. What, such specific sets of rights are not part of the contracts yet, and at best, they all just have generic junk about needing to make copies for technical reasons? Tsk, tsk, negotiating terms for these rights should be extremely invigorating - particularly if the artist sees that the labels have been less than generous toward them previously...
People forget that oftentimes, logic works both ways. Consumers make copies of the music for their personal use. If they don't get that right, well, neither should the distributors get any special "automatic" or "obvious" rights when they're handling material that's not fully copyrighted by them.
(...yet, still, the people with most money end up winning in the end anyway.)
You know what's worse? Ungrateful fucks who cry because other people don't do things for them. To me those are the most despicable people on the planet.
Hey now, ungrateful users just annoying to listen to, but ultimately, they're entirely harmless. If the developers would just stand their ground and be firm, they'd be the only ones to suffer, and whining users would take their business elsewhere.
There's a reason why XFree86 is one of the most widely used X11 implementation today, and one of the most thriving examples of open-source development. Why? Developers have to be firm, ignore all this completely unnecessary criticism and be committed to their own goals, needs, schedule and development methodology.
>Sorry, but the "Do it yourself," attitude is just bad.
It's great. That's what open source is all about.
I think you misunderstand what "'do it yourself' attitude" meant there. I think the original poster meant to say "'If you don't like it, go write a better one, or quit whining, goddamn it' attitude".
Asking people to contribute things is good; using contributability (if that's a word) as an excuse to ignore valid criticism is bad.
Klingons will win, only because at the last minute, the Kilrathi got replaced with the... um, things from the movie adaptation (ifyoumaycallitthat). That will leave them no chance at all.
Anything that loads and saves ODF already has reveal codes. Just rename the.odt to.zip, edit the XML files inside, and rename it back to.odt.
That's not exactly user-friendly because it's not integrated to the GUI. The way it worked in WordPerfect 5.1 (the last word processor I used that had this feature) was this: Hit a button, and you get a split-screen editing mode where your normal editing view is above and the code display is below. Make changes, and they appear in code display right away.
Most importantly there was no need to leave the application, wade through non-prettyprinted XML to find the exact spot you was interested of, edit and repack.
I think OpenOffice.org just needs a built-in XML mode. Inkscape is a good example of an application that uses XML documents and has a very nice (document type-specific) XML editor right in the application.
I tried to load into AbiWord, but it doesn't understand OpenDocument format at all.
AbiWord does support ODF, but it needs a specific plugin. I was confused about it too, but realised Debian doesn't install that plugin by default; it was in abiword-plugins package. And even then, I've had to occasionally plead and beg AbiWord to notice that it has any plugins installed in the first place!
So it's basically just like MSWord, only in smaller scale, a little bit less swearing, and actually understanding quite a bit of ODF formatting once you get it working =) (I didn't try too complex stuff, but it got my mostly textual, lightly styled document pretty much right.)
I have yet to investigate whether AbiWord's scripting API qualifies as sane in any way; I have some macro stuff to make and OpenOffice.org's API is Not From This Planet. =/
I agree the word processors are horrible, but I think that is because the concept is flaws. What we need is something like Lyx, but a lot more polished: what Lyx would be if it had received the same resources as Open Office.
Yep, I think it's just that the whole concept of word processing is going to the wrong direction. What I'd like to see would be more task-oriented interfaces for the applications.
For example, I'm a fiction writer. I'd push the "new short story" button and get all of the tools I need for writing stories: a separate note sheet with outlines / mind-maps, margin notes for additions, and separately coloured sections that I've marked pending for rewrite. No options for messing with margins and fonts and stuff - if I want to publish this, I can do that later ("export to plain text / web site pseudo-markup / full-blown HTML / LaTeX / PDF in manuscript format"). Likewise, a news reporter or a scientific writer might push "new news article", similar limitations, different tools for different parts of the workflow, and reference/citation management. A blogger might get shortcuts to tools that the blogware supports.
But right now, the WYSIWYG programs cater for those who write memos or letters, and try to be good at writing longer bits of documentation. They basically try too much - both on the writing and formatting departments - and aren't good at either.
Can you be notable for being not-notable? Or famous simply for being famous?... Before you answer "no" think of celebrities like Paris Hilton...
Basically, the situation is this: Notability has its thresholds - either you are notable or not (though where exactly to draw the line is, at times, difficult - but we have pretty clear picture by now). Articles about people, bands, groups, companies, websites, etc. have to have assertions of notability (i.e. "they're really big in Pakistan and have released three albums", or whatever). Notability has to be backed up by reliable sources.
This leads to the situation that 1) people who are famous for failing at something can be considered notable enough for articles of their own (provided someone noticed and documented that in a reliable source), and 2) worthless celebrities are, alas, notable enough for articles because they probably have had verifiable media appearances.
(Think of it this way: if I had not heard about Paris Hilton before, I'd go to the article, come to the conclusion that she's a worthless celebrity, and be done with it. If there was no articles about her, I'd probably ask "hey, this... thing is on TV all the time, what the heck has she done to get there, anyway, and why isn't there an article about her?" =)
I've spent some time building an application in SWT,...
Nothing in Eclipse forces you to use SWT, you can just use Swing (and more or less get just as good results in Java 1.6). Eclipse's Visual Editor also supports Swing.
That said, deploying stuff in Javaland is a bit challenging. In Java, if your libraries don't come with the SDK, your application can be a little bit unfunny to deploy, especially so if it needs native code, like SWT.
Yeah, do we need to go through this ritual every time a service gets popular? My memory may be hazy, but I remember that in Ye Ancient days of Yore (when Taco posted about "Linux may have been spotted somewhere" and Katz posted about "I'm writing way too long ramblings about geeks"), there was a scare about Yahoo / GeoCities terms that had this sort of clause. Not long ago, there was a similar scare about LiveJournal TOS.
All sites do this. They're putting this sort of clauses in TOS so that they can mess with your content just as much is needed to display it to the users (i.e. thumbnail your images, apply site templates, add that stupid ad box, etc), not because they want to own the content. If they don't reserve those rights, they can't modify your stuff at all...
Well, Sun Java is one of the Giant Bytecode Virtual Machines, and everyone knows that the official versioning scheme of Giant Bytecode Virtual Machines is that of GNU Emacs. So they just decided to drop the first number, like the Emacs folks. Expect the language flame war between Java and C# really flare up into a giant massive global CARNAGE by the time of Java 19 or 20. =) (Though, just for the argument, I can't say C# has any of the redeeming qualities of vi, compared to Java. Both are equally massive. =)
But seriously, yeah, it's more than a bit confusing.
Currently, it appears that jEdithas to open a TCP port, because otherwise it can't communicate with instances of jEdit you have running. With the port closed, if you say "jedit foo.txt", it will open the file in a new instance of jEdit, not the one you have open right now.
Appears the reason for using TCP is that Java has no (cross-platform, at least) support for POSIX local sockets or even named pipes.
So, um, because I'm too lazy to dig through JDK docs right now - is this jEdit developers' fault, or is the state of local IPC on Java really this worrisome? I'm sure local IPC that doesn't depend on TCP/IP ports would be really nice and would undoubtedly help Java's desktop application adoption.
Awesome, just what I've always wanted. Parsing XML is an extremely important requirement in determining the expressiveness of a language, mind you. Except, they're gonna be screwed when CSV files come back. And don't even get me started on what a pickle they'll be in when those.DAT files return to claim their rightful place!
As such, I move to recommend that Java incorporate support for parsing CSV and DAT files into the language.
First of all, Java already has pretty good "language-level" support for XML for short while now - it's called JAXB. Basically, you can say things like "this class, Foo, represents XML tag <foo>" in your code, and use the JAXB Marshaller and Unmarshaller to save and load XML.
And when the CSV files come back, all you need to do is implement String toCsvRow() or String toCsv() in your class and implement a marshaller/unmarshaller that walks your data structure and crunches it into CSV, or back. It's not like CSV would be some sort of rocket science or anything =)
As for mysterious.dat files, Java has had ObjectOutputStream / ObjectInputStream / Serializable for ages for that exact purpose. Producing mysterious binary crap for over a decade now! =)
Actually, I think implementing Wordpad is much more important because some apps may use it. I was pretty amazed when I installed an application and I was guessing it'd get in serious trouble when it was going to display the readme - nope, a clone of Notepad starts up and everything is nice and clean. In similar vein, I'm guessing a lot of Windows app developers may think "I need to show this.rtf file to the user - I guess I'll just start up Wordpad to show it."
It's useful as a document viewer in a pinch, but not really that useful as an application. Everyone uses some other program anyway to write stuff. =)
(In Debian, they would sit in the non-free repositorty).
Or, assuming the license would be DFSG-compliant, in contrib repository. If the software's sole problem is that it depends on non-free packages (or anything that is required to run it), it goes to contrib (like many Java apps go for now, if they absolutely need 1.5 API or newer and thus won't work in GCJ/Classpath and need the Sun JRE). If it fails that and it has a bad license, it would definitely go in non-free.
That said, many of these probably do go in non-free due to licenses...
So they're not actually checking if the user is using Firefox or Adblock - just checking if the browser has a MSIE-style DOM.
Great, browser racism at its worst - you know, they could at least try to do clever stuff like trying to detect if a particular ad has in fact loaded and give a nice detailed comment, but no, they just decide to block all browsers that the site author knows may have some sort of ad blocker for. Because sure as heck 1) it's only Firefox that uses standards-based non-antiquated DOM, and 2) there are absolutely no ad blocking utilities for MSIE, right?
Hmm, wonder how many minutes it would take me to write a GreaseMonkey script that says "if script mentions whyfirefoxisblocked.com, don't run it". Probably many many minutes, because I haven't written too many GreaseMonkey scripts yet. =)
For quite a while, when Neverwinter Nights was still in beta, I tried playing the game and was somewhat annoyed. The game was a little bit slower than in Windows (but still playable), and no matter what I did, all I could get out of it were the slightly blurry 16 megabyte "compatibility mode" textures.
The reason? For some reason, NWN picked up my Mesa OpenGL libraries. Not the nvidia ones. Yes, the game was quite playable on software rendering!
...annnnd then came the stories of people who played the game over VNC...
There are many reasons for doctoring photos. The point of these isn't to "confuse the enemy", but to "boost morale of the troops", by showing their leaders as so successful that they can sit out in the open, in a living room somewhere, and lead a normal life in the face of the insignificant U.S. forces. While in reality, they're cowering in bunkers or caves, or perhaps hiding in Pakistan or Iran.
Okay, so now they are probably thinking, "Damn, they found out that our motivational photos were photoshopped. I guess it's time to finally cart the office furniture to the bunker, and paint the walls. And on top of that, The Guy doesn't need to lie anymore when he says he has a nice cosy office!"
If done right, that can be slightly more difficult to detect =)
The Featured Article on Wikipedia today is the Supernova: Coincidence? Or a sneaky new method of marketing?
It's an admin cabal conspiracy - probably one of the admins is a RIAA spy who promited the article to Featured status, in order to submit the article vandalism history covertly to RIAA to expose filesharers!
So don't be surprised if humourless men in black knock on the door of your local university's astronomy department and ask inconvenient questions about "pop stars lol".
...obviously.
(I'm a Wikipedia admin so obviously I know what I'm talking about! (Okay, I've recently noted that I also spew a whole lot of rubbish, but that's not the point.))
Games started to add voice - I recall King's Quest V being the first adventure game I've played that had hi-res graphics and voice. How's that bad?
Three words: "Full Motion Video". Two more words: "Interactive movie".
You're right, in most sensible cases, the games really did start to benefit from increased space - it wasn't really all that impressive at first though. (My personal first memories about this include relatively unimpressive stuff like slightly longer animation clips in WarCraft I, or the animated "advisors" of Civilization II...) It took some time before games started to really pack more actual content in the games - the game designers quit thinking in terms of floppies and got the budgets and ambitions to make really huge games...
But then, there were those who wanted to make interactive movies. Tips for creating the masterpieces: Awful acting (games hadn't actually surpassed Hollywood budgets yet), awful video and sound quality (remember, no MPEG4, just BlurryMotion 1.0), and as for game design, well, playability and entertainment value was entirely optional. And, of course, prerendering everything. The thing that killed these was that 3D engines came forth; you no longer had an excuse to have canned movement video clips! Think of that - people spent time rendering walk animations from point A to point B, and that was the height of the creativity!
use the extra space for buttons on the touchscreen
Ugh. I can just imagine myself trying to desperately hit the tiny little on-screen buttons with one hand - let alone two hands if playing non-touchscreen games or GBA games. Pressing the buttons needs a lot of accuracy if they're small; you can try touching the things with fingers, which isn't accurate, or styluses, which tend to require use of multipe fingers in exchange of accuracy of one touch-point.
Just try playing something that needs any kind of accuracy and reflexes and coordination of a couple of buttons in addition to the touchscreen, like Metroid Prime Hunters... Or, heck, try playing Tetris DS with that tiny little on-screen d-pad and buttons.
And next thing you know, N-Gage owners surprise you and say "my, what a ridiculous-looking hacked-up game-phone you have there..." They have had years to build up the sarcasm reserves - can you handle that flood? =)
XHTML 1.0? If you're careful to follow the backward compatibility guidelines.
XHTML 1.1? Not if served properly.
XHTML 2 (whenever it comes out)? no.
I assume that for the sake of exercise, this only concerns opening local files and thus MIME type is irrelevant. In that case, XHTML 1.1 may very well be interpretable - to some extent. XHTML 2 will probably be much more incomprehensible...
For an interesting look at this, Here's how XHTML 1.0 Transitional renders on various versions of particularly tag-soup-friendly, damn-the-standards web browser. =) I'm assuming the earliest versions don't render the right page because of introduction of virtual hosts, but...
Yes, it'd be interesting. It's just not practical. It would work if we had been doing that since, um... prehistory.
In practical terms, such fine-grained marking of data for all possible sets of rights we have right now is impossible to to keep in hand. Sure, it'd be handy to know easily who created the song of which you can hear small bits of in one scene of your film - it'd probably also help people to buy the song if they are watching it in home. But media has this tendency to get chopped up in smaller and smaller slices that get loaned and mangled and out comes something that might have a passing familiarity. At some point, we simply stop caring. (I'd be terribly interested if I could right-click on the word "fine-grained" earlier and see who came up with that word. If a single word would be copyrightable, that person would be a millionaire or something. Not to even mention the guy who invented "or something"!)
Also, this sort of DRMing won't stop "idea theft", unless you make this system's data persist through human central nervous system (the only way to get the correct metadata to the word "fine-grained" above; if you just automatically assign links to the OED, that's a retroactive hack and you could get the completely wrong entry, dammit, I meant the etymology X and not Y).
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously haven't programmed quite enough then. As in encountering a line in the code that says "whatever you do, don't touch the next line. If you change it, the program segfaults. Don't touch this comment either: If you change it, this won't compile." No, it's not strictly paranormal, but, well, it does demonstrate one of the big problems of hard sciences: computer science can only tell us How It Actually Works and the softer side of computer science tells us Why This Is Generally Discouraged, but we need to expand our research to other fields (psychology, sociology, history, yes, perhaps even philosophy and theological studies) that can explain What The Hell Were They Thinking When They Wrote This, and perhaps even If There Is A God, Why He Lets This Get Written. =)
Then... if you need some fun reading, you might want to consider the strange case of a haunted NES, which, upon closer scrutiny, regrettably did not have as many actual paranormal properties as advertised, though. =)
Oh, the world of computers is so full of weird and otherworldly stuff. As a computer guy, I know this box next to me is just a typical example of a very complex system with lots of variables to consider... yet I would think life would be much easier if I'd just think it as a Thing that has a Peculiar Character of its own. This is, as the famous saying goes, technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic. =)
Ahaaaaa! And next thing you know, RIAA and the labels have a whole bunch of quagmire to wade through when those pesky Artists are demanding their cut from the every. single. act. of. copying that occurs between the different production phases, starting from the studio microphones, ending on the CDs on the shelf. What, such specific sets of rights are not part of the contracts yet, and at best, they all just have generic junk about needing to make copies for technical reasons? Tsk, tsk, negotiating terms for these rights should be extremely invigorating - particularly if the artist sees that the labels have been less than generous toward them previously...
People forget that oftentimes, logic works both ways. Consumers make copies of the music for their personal use. If they don't get that right, well, neither should the distributors get any special "automatic" or "obvious" rights when they're handling material that's not fully copyrighted by them.
(...yet, still, the people with most money end up winning in the end anyway.)
Hey now, ungrateful users just annoying to listen to, but ultimately, they're entirely harmless. If the developers would just stand their ground and be firm, they'd be the only ones to suffer, and whining users would take their business elsewhere.
There's a reason why XFree86 is one of the most widely used X11 implementation today, and one of the most thriving examples of open-source development. Why? Developers have to be firm, ignore all this completely unnecessary criticism and be committed to their own goals, needs, schedule and development methodology.
>Sorry, but the "Do it yourself," attitude is just bad.
It's great. That's what open source is all about.
I think you misunderstand what "'do it yourself' attitude" meant there. I think the original poster meant to say "'If you don't like it, go write a better one, or quit whining, goddamn it' attitude".
Asking people to contribute things is good; using contributability (if that's a word) as an excuse to ignore valid criticism is bad.
Klingons will win, only because at the last minute, the Kilrathi got replaced with the... um, things from the movie adaptation (ifyoumaycallitthat). That will leave them no chance at all.
That's not exactly user-friendly because it's not integrated to the GUI. The way it worked in WordPerfect 5.1 (the last word processor I used that had this feature) was this: Hit a button, and you get a split-screen editing mode where your normal editing view is above and the code display is below. Make changes, and they appear in code display right away.
Most importantly there was no need to leave the application, wade through non-prettyprinted XML to find the exact spot you was interested of, edit and repack.
I think OpenOffice.org just needs a built-in XML mode. Inkscape is a good example of an application that uses XML documents and has a very nice (document type-specific) XML editor right in the application.
AbiWord does support ODF, but it needs a specific plugin. I was confused about it too, but realised Debian doesn't install that plugin by default; it was in abiword-plugins package. And even then, I've had to occasionally plead and beg AbiWord to notice that it has any plugins installed in the first place!
So it's basically just like MSWord, only in smaller scale, a little bit less swearing, and actually understanding quite a bit of ODF formatting once you get it working =) (I didn't try too complex stuff, but it got my mostly textual, lightly styled document pretty much right.)
I have yet to investigate whether AbiWord's scripting API qualifies as sane in any way; I have some macro stuff to make and OpenOffice.org's API is Not From This Planet. =/
Yep, I think it's just that the whole concept of word processing is going to the wrong direction. What I'd like to see would be more task-oriented interfaces for the applications.
For example, I'm a fiction writer. I'd push the "new short story" button and get all of the tools I need for writing stories: a separate note sheet with outlines / mind-maps, margin notes for additions, and separately coloured sections that I've marked pending for rewrite. No options for messing with margins and fonts and stuff - if I want to publish this, I can do that later ("export to plain text / web site pseudo-markup / full-blown HTML / LaTeX / PDF in manuscript format"). Likewise, a news reporter or a scientific writer might push "new news article", similar limitations, different tools for different parts of the workflow, and reference/citation management. A blogger might get shortcuts to tools that the blogware supports.
But right now, the WYSIWYG programs cater for those who write memos or letters, and try to be good at writing longer bits of documentation. They basically try too much - both on the writing and formatting departments - and aren't good at either.
Basically, the situation is this: Notability has its thresholds - either you are notable or not (though where exactly to draw the line is, at times, difficult - but we have pretty clear picture by now). Articles about people, bands, groups, companies, websites, etc. have to have assertions of notability (i.e. "they're really big in Pakistan and have released three albums", or whatever). Notability has to be backed up by reliable sources.
This leads to the situation that 1) people who are famous for failing at something can be considered notable enough for articles of their own (provided someone noticed and documented that in a reliable source), and 2) worthless celebrities are, alas, notable enough for articles because they probably have had verifiable media appearances.
(Think of it this way: if I had not heard about Paris Hilton before, I'd go to the article, come to the conclusion that she's a worthless celebrity, and be done with it. If there was no articles about her, I'd probably ask "hey, this... thing is on TV all the time, what the heck has she done to get there, anyway, and why isn't there an article about her?" =)
Nothing in Eclipse forces you to use SWT, you can just use Swing (and more or less get just as good results in Java 1.6). Eclipse's Visual Editor also supports Swing.
That said, deploying stuff in Javaland is a bit challenging. In Java, if your libraries don't come with the SDK, your application can be a little bit unfunny to deploy, especially so if it needs native code, like SWT.
Yeah, do we need to go through this ritual every time a service gets popular? My memory may be hazy, but I remember that in Ye Ancient days of Yore (when Taco posted about "Linux may have been spotted somewhere" and Katz posted about "I'm writing way too long ramblings about geeks"), there was a scare about Yahoo / GeoCities terms that had this sort of clause. Not long ago, there was a similar scare about LiveJournal TOS.
All sites do this. They're putting this sort of clauses in TOS so that they can mess with your content just as much is needed to display it to the users (i.e. thumbnail your images, apply site templates, add that stupid ad box, etc), not because they want to own the content. If they don't reserve those rights, they can't modify your stuff at all...
Well, Sun Java is one of the Giant Bytecode Virtual Machines, and everyone knows that the official versioning scheme of Giant Bytecode Virtual Machines is that of GNU Emacs. So they just decided to drop the first number, like the Emacs folks. Expect the language flame war between Java and C# really flare up into a giant massive global CARNAGE by the time of Java 19 or 20. =) (Though, just for the argument, I can't say C# has any of the redeeming qualities of vi, compared to Java. Both are equally massive. =)
But seriously, yeah, it's more than a bit confusing.
Appears the reason for using TCP is that Java has no (cross-platform, at least) support for POSIX local sockets or even named pipes.
So, um, because I'm too lazy to dig through JDK docs right now - is this jEdit developers' fault, or is the state of local IPC on Java really this worrisome? I'm sure local IPC that doesn't depend on TCP/IP ports would be really nice and would undoubtedly help Java's desktop application adoption.
As such, I move to recommend that Java incorporate support for parsing CSV and DAT files into the language.
First of all, Java already has pretty good "language-level" support for XML for short while now - it's called JAXB. Basically, you can say things like "this class, Foo, represents XML tag <foo>" in your code, and use the JAXB Marshaller and Unmarshaller to save and load XML.
And when the CSV files come back, all you need to do is implement String toCsvRow() or String toCsv() in your class and implement a marshaller/unmarshaller that walks your data structure and crunches it into CSV, or back. It's not like CSV would be some sort of rocket science or anything =)
As for mysterious .dat files, Java has had ObjectOutputStream / ObjectInputStream / Serializable for ages for that exact purpose. Producing mysterious binary crap for over a decade now! =)
Actually, I think implementing Wordpad is much more important because some apps may use it. I was pretty amazed when I installed an application and I was guessing it'd get in serious trouble when it was going to display the readme - nope, a clone of Notepad starts up and everything is nice and clean. In similar vein, I'm guessing a lot of Windows app developers may think "I need to show this .rtf file to the user - I guess I'll just start up Wordpad to show it."
It's useful as a document viewer in a pinch, but not really that useful as an application. Everyone uses some other program anyway to write stuff. =)
Or, assuming the license would be DFSG-compliant, in contrib repository. If the software's sole problem is that it depends on non-free packages (or anything that is required to run it), it goes to contrib (like many Java apps go for now, if they absolutely need 1.5 API or newer and thus won't work in GCJ/Classpath and need the Sun JRE). If it fails that and it has a bad license, it would definitely go in non-free.
That said, many of these probably do go in non-free due to licenses...
Fascinating. The jacklewis.net site appears to do the following JavaScript code:
(Read the site with elinks. Block that, pro. =)
So they're not actually checking if the user is using Firefox or Adblock - just checking if the browser has a MSIE-style DOM.
Great, browser racism at its worst - you know, they could at least try to do clever stuff like trying to detect if a particular ad has in fact loaded and give a nice detailed comment, but no, they just decide to block all browsers that the site author knows may have some sort of ad blocker for. Because sure as heck 1) it's only Firefox that uses standards-based non-antiquated DOM, and 2) there are absolutely no ad blocking utilities for MSIE, right?
Hmm, wonder how many minutes it would take me to write a GreaseMonkey script that says "if script mentions whyfirefoxisblocked.com, don't run it". Probably many many minutes, because I haven't written too many GreaseMonkey scripts yet. =)
No, for me, Windows (T-)2000 rang the Terminator bell much louder... =)
Hah, that's nothing.
For quite a while, when Neverwinter Nights was still in beta, I tried playing the game and was somewhat annoyed. The game was a little bit slower than in Windows (but still playable), and no matter what I did, all I could get out of it were the slightly blurry 16 megabyte "compatibility mode" textures.
The reason? For some reason, NWN picked up my Mesa OpenGL libraries. Not the nvidia ones. Yes, the game was quite playable on software rendering!
...annnnd then came the stories of people who played the game over VNC...
Okay, so now they are probably thinking, "Damn, they found out that our motivational photos were photoshopped. I guess it's time to finally cart the office furniture to the bunker, and paint the walls. And on top of that, The Guy doesn't need to lie anymore when he says he has a nice cosy office!"
If done right, that can be slightly more difficult to detect =)
It's an admin cabal conspiracy - probably one of the admins is a RIAA spy who promited the article to Featured status, in order to submit the article vandalism history covertly to RIAA to expose filesharers!
So don't be surprised if humourless men in black knock on the door of your local university's astronomy department and ask inconvenient questions about "pop stars lol".
...obviously.
(I'm a Wikipedia admin so obviously I know what I'm talking about! (Okay, I've recently noted that I also spew a whole lot of rubbish, but that's not the point.))
I'm agreeing with you on most points, however...
Three words: "Full Motion Video". Two more words: "Interactive movie".
You're right, in most sensible cases, the games really did start to benefit from increased space - it wasn't really all that impressive at first though. (My personal first memories about this include relatively unimpressive stuff like slightly longer animation clips in WarCraft I, or the animated "advisors" of Civilization II...) It took some time before games started to really pack more actual content in the games - the game designers quit thinking in terms of floppies and got the budgets and ambitions to make really huge games...
But then, there were those who wanted to make interactive movies. Tips for creating the masterpieces: Awful acting (games hadn't actually surpassed Hollywood budgets yet), awful video and sound quality (remember, no MPEG4, just BlurryMotion 1.0), and as for game design, well, playability and entertainment value was entirely optional. And, of course, prerendering everything. The thing that killed these was that 3D engines came forth; you no longer had an excuse to have canned movement video clips! Think of that - people spent time rendering walk animations from point A to point B, and that was the height of the creativity!
Ugh. I can just imagine myself trying to desperately hit the tiny little on-screen buttons with one hand - let alone two hands if playing non-touchscreen games or GBA games. Pressing the buttons needs a lot of accuracy if they're small; you can try touching the things with fingers, which isn't accurate, or styluses, which tend to require use of multipe fingers in exchange of accuracy of one touch-point.
Just try playing something that needs any kind of accuracy and reflexes and coordination of a couple of buttons in addition to the touchscreen, like Metroid Prime Hunters... Or, heck, try playing Tetris DS with that tiny little on-screen d-pad and buttons.
And next thing you know, N-Gage owners surprise you and say "my, what a ridiculous-looking hacked-up game-phone you have there..." They have had years to build up the sarcasm reserves - can you handle that flood? =)
I assume that for the sake of exercise, this only concerns opening local files and thus MIME type is irrelevant. In that case, XHTML 1.1 may very well be interpretable - to some extent. XHTML 2 will probably be much more incomprehensible...
For an interesting look at this, Here's how XHTML 1.0 Transitional renders on various versions of particularly tag-soup-friendly, damn-the-standards web browser. =) I'm assuming the earliest versions don't render the right page because of introduction of virtual hosts, but...
Yes, it'd be interesting. It's just not practical. It would work if we had been doing that since, um... prehistory.
In practical terms, such fine-grained marking of data for all possible sets of rights we have right now is impossible to to keep in hand. Sure, it'd be handy to know easily who created the song of which you can hear small bits of in one scene of your film - it'd probably also help people to buy the song if they are watching it in home. But media has this tendency to get chopped up in smaller and smaller slices that get loaned and mangled and out comes something that might have a passing familiarity. At some point, we simply stop caring. (I'd be terribly interested if I could right-click on the word "fine-grained" earlier and see who came up with that word. If a single word would be copyrightable, that person would be a millionaire or something. Not to even mention the guy who invented "or something"!)
Also, this sort of DRMing won't stop "idea theft", unless you make this system's data persist through human central nervous system (the only way to get the correct metadata to the word "fine-grained" above; if you just automatically assign links to the OED, that's a retroactive hack and you could get the completely wrong entry, dammit, I meant the etymology X and not Y).