Not that I'm not on the edge of my seat for FreeOrion, though.:)
Whoah. I thought you was joking, but a bit of googling shows it actually exists... just in pre-alpha now. Now look what you're done! I'm on the edge of the seat, too!
Let's see, my strategy thirst has been largely quenched - we have FreeCiv, MegaMek, Stratagus, and one day we'll have FreeOrion. Now I just wish someone hacks FreeCiv to have Alpha Centauri stuff, and I'd be happy happy happy! (Hope that happens before Linux SMAC stops working! Or alternatively hope it will never stop working!)
So then why can't you legally freely distribute fonts that you pay an arm and a leg for from Linotype? If it's not copyright law that's protecting them, then what is?
Copyright tends to protect font files. It doesn't protect typefaces.
The font files you buy from {Lino,Mono,*}type are a) copyrightable graphical vector data (the font data part) and b) copyrightable computer software (the hinting part). The typeface itself is just the shape of the letters.
What you get when you rasterize this font is not copyrightable. You can type up a novel and typeset it in this font and the font vendor can't do a thing! Imagine the horror, the chaos, the multi-national havoc if people could copyright what the typefaces looked like! You couldn't do a thing! Everyone would need to make their own fonts that looked like garbage, or suffer from font licensing woes forever and ever and ever! Or maybe the concept of "open source" fonts would have really caught on that very instant...
You can go to flea market or some weird-cheap-computer-crap-mall and buy a CD-ROM full of million fonts for really cheap price. Those things are not the same things you can buy from Linotype by sending them a shipment of human limbs in return. Yet, they essentially have the same font shapes in them... just probably a) not with the same hinting code, if at all, and probably far too many vector handles and stuff like that, scales like shit, and b) different typeface name, changed due to trademark on the original typeface name.
I'm going to have to wholeheartedly second your Ultima nominations for exactly same reasons. Ultimas were for large part responsible for most of the major innovations in the genre and they managed to balance nicely on the fine line between number-tossing and storytelling. You could focus on either if that was your thing.
Years after it's release, here I am, right now, playing through Ultima VII part 2 the second time =)
FF6 was hardly genre-defining - it was basically just another iteration of the exact same Final Fantasy thing. The only improvements were in graphics, music and story. It was iconic in the genre, not genre-defining. (Kind of like calling Starcraft the definitive RTS game when that honor really should go to Warcraft II and Command & Conquer, two games that took out the remaining rough edges from Dune II descendants.)
And it's just as easy for player software to detect QEMU, Bochs, VMware, or Virtual PC.
But not if it's running in WirthVM (aka "guy with hex dump printout and lots of coffee"), but that also kind of might depend on whether WirthVM knows the program is trying to detect if it is running on WirthVM =)
And if I'm not mistaken, there's a version of it in Animal Crossing for the GameCube.
Yes, except that there's no way to get it in game, code generators aren't able to make code to get it, and Nintendo hasn't released a code to get it either. The only way to get it in AC is with the good old-fashioned Action Replay poking.
Maximum 40GB HDD? Can you even get drives that small anymore?
Yeah, you can, though they are about the smallest HDDs you can get these days (I recently had to get one for a computer from 2000 that had problems with a 60 gig disk). I wholeheartedly agree it's a very silly limitation.
Either way, packages like this should have be in some sort of Debian test version. The Debian devs say they need to postponing x.org so that it won't interfere with the latest release of Debian. But this shows that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Debian release cycle.
When XFree86 4.0 came out, there was a slight delay. I could live with it, after all, it was not like 3.x was seriously broken or anything. During this delay, they made their best efforts to make sure it actually worked with the rest of the things and then released it. The result was that nothing broke. Nothing at all. Subsequent 4.x releases were handled with care.
Move from XFree86 to x.org is yet another major technology move. I can understand they want to not mess it up.
I can understand if some application packages in unstable are messed up from time to time... but X11 is so integral to desktop use that they definitely need to have a somewhat compatibility-tested release there. Just shoving x.org out there and sorting out major snags afterwards is not the way. Shoving somewhat tested x.org out there and sorting out the minors snags is.
And if Ubuntu can help Debian get x.org tested, that's just really great.
1) You may have 5 pages out of 15124617179945562 that you actually need. Coincidentally, only one of which happens to be in the closed net, and that happens to be the precisely wrong one for that specific case.
2) The company you really needed to find didn't want to get in the closed net because "everybody is in the Web anyway". They don't want partnerships with content portals since "if you want to find us, you can Google us, duh". Plus, the closed net fees are probably higher than public net's, and in any case, they don't want to pay twice.
There definitely is a market for a closed network, that's true. I remain skeptical on whether that can be actually implemented!
This won't catch on in typical FPSes. It might in "ultra-realistic" FPSes, specifically, the ones where the normal behavior for the player is to avoid being hit. The bullet-avoiding bit already has to be in the game mechanics for this to work appropriately - otherwise, this is just pointlessly painful. In many "unrealistic" games, people expect to be scarred a bit, and you may not even get anything done unless you get hit. Would you go rocket-jumping with this thing? I guess not...
Personally, I wouldn't use this device anyway, but if I would, I would use it in Operation Flashpoint - a slow-paced game, quite realistic, and you really have to keep your eyes open to avoid getting shot. I sure wouldn't use this in Urban Terror, even - it's "realistic", but too fast-paced. I sure as hell wouldn't use it in Metroid Prime (the boss fights were pain without this thing's help, thank you very much).
Re:Copyright Infringement!!!
on
**No Title**
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· Score: 5, Informative
And it was a clever rewording of a section of a story published in Kuro5hin ages ago! And the original story had more religio-philosophical values in it, too!
I doubt that the people who would actually care enough to boycott would have bought EA games in the first place.
Good question. I boycott EA right now, but I also have the firm opinion that they used to publish great stuff, but these days publish mostly useless garbage and very, very lame new parts in franchises they've acquired.
It's kind of easy to boycott them when I always expect them to publish their next sacrilegiously awful, generic, or otherwise uninspiring title.
Too bad their marketing actually works, otherwise, no boycott would be needed because nobody would buy the stuff...
Except that didn't exactly keep the companies from publishing more than that... Think of Konami, who got around that by using alternate names (Ultra Software Corporation and Palcom Software).
Actually the Emacsputnik is a lot better, but they couldn't even lift it off the ground...
Actually, they could get it off the ground, they just added bigger thrusters to the rocket. And once it was in orbit, it relayed communications, did outstanding photography on complete spectrum, and also provided far higher resolution telescope images than Hubble ever could. The only catch is, it's twice the size of the Moon, so it's kind of visible and tends to block the sun ocassionally too...
(Sorry, I was in middle of reading Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer =)
Unless there's a new SI unit for satellite size called the Sputnik that I am unaware of, of course.
Well, they already use Libraries of Congress, Football fields and Volkswagen Bugs as comparative units, I think we could use Sputniks to comparatively measure the sizes of satellites...
Shared libraries / frameworks / classes / whatever that the application needs are either stored in the application (the.app directory, as mentioned in the grandparent post) itself, or they can be stored to library directories. Usually people don't seem to do the latter unless they have a very good reason - as mentioned, the whole point of.apps is to keep the application as self-contained as possible.
Great Cthulhu, is that one still valid??? How long has Hiram Maxim been dead now, anyway?
Actually, only copyrights last lifetime-plus-something. Patents have far shorter periods of applicability, usually measured in decades or so...
However, I guess that machine guns are still very much patented. These days, the latest patent is titled "a device and a method for repeatedly shooting a person in face over the Internet."
And actually pay attention to the security. As in "ground-up rewrite".
The real reason why people are switching to Firefox is simple: 1) Even mainstream security organizations are getting loud about this. "Don't use MSIE, it's not secure. Try Firefox or Opera." 2) Even ordinary users are starting to get the message that MSIE is not very secure. They have first hand experience about where the insecurity leads. "Where the hell these pop-ups came from? I've uninstalled these dozens of times! Please do something about them! And what is that Firefox thing anyway? Is it better? Can I have it?"
I hate auto focus with a passion. When you move the mouse out of the way to read the text or whatever the window goes out of focus and you can then no longer type. It's a royal pain.
Autofocus and automatical focusing in general are different. I prefer Sloppy Focus (focus all windows when mouse enters, not unfocus when mouse leaves) with AutoFocus turned off (new windows won't automatically receive focus). This way windows I point at automatically get focus, but not ones that automatically appear (unless they manage to pop under my mouse pointer).
Not sure about scalabity and such, but RoR people like to go on about how small and elegant it is... If it's half as small and elegant as they claim, I guess it's scalable then =)
Basecamp is the slick pro site that was done in RoR. The Rails web site has a lot of other examples.
There are MVC frameworks for PHP (a random example I just googled), though I'm fairly certain they're nowhere near as elegant as RoR. phpMVC sure doesn't seem so elegant...
The only thing it couldn't do was let us play our old monochrome GB copy of Tetris, as the GBA slot only supported GBA carts.
So I wasn't the only one who has the automatical reaction of playing GB Tetris on any new GB hardware? =) That certainly was the first game I played with my original GB, the GBA and GB Player.
Due to my personal distinct lack of any and all GBA versions of Tetris, I had to settle for Rampage Puzzle Attack, which indeed had unprecedented picture clarity on this amazing backlit screen.
There's still one original GB's accessory that I use: the headphones. =) And if I can't find a proper carrying bag for DS soon, I may need to use the original GB bag too (which isn't too good for carrying around GBA/DS games, though...)
Holy whatever. Possibly the slimiest yet most hilarious thing I've seen in... days or so.
A brief analysis of the software's capabilities, employing a few different hats:
::puts on "user" hat:: Right, why would anyone download an application to download anything?::puts on "web developer" hat:: Why can't you do this in plain old JavaScript? I mean, it works for File Planet?::puts on "windows user" hat:: this sucks, it doesn't even seem to grab its cache settings from IE's settings.::puts on the "manager" hat:: And thanks for the idea, I'll code the same application over the lunch break in Visual Basic.
I'd call it "moronware". It's designed to troll for idiot users who believe everything they see and fall for stupid schemes. We can lump the Nigerians into this category too, with their stupid cashier's check and phony inheiritence schemes.
Fine with me, except that I usually keep idiotic software and idiotic social engineering far separate issues. Annoyware is one thing, 419 scams are another.
By the way, if you really want to combine best of the both worlds, you may want to read on how people used (reverse) "moronware" to fool 419 scammers! Hilarity ensues! Screenshots included! =)
Slashdot Mirror
Whoah. I thought you was joking, but a bit of googling shows it actually exists... just in pre-alpha now. Now look what you're done! I'm on the edge of the seat, too!
Let's see, my strategy thirst has been largely quenched - we have FreeCiv, MegaMek, Stratagus, and one day we'll have FreeOrion. Now I just wish someone hacks FreeCiv to have Alpha Centauri stuff, and I'd be happy happy happy! (Hope that happens before Linux SMAC stops working! Or alternatively hope it will never stop working!)
Copyright tends to protect font files. It doesn't protect typefaces.
The font files you buy from {Lino,Mono,*}type are a) copyrightable graphical vector data (the font data part) and b) copyrightable computer software (the hinting part). The typeface itself is just the shape of the letters.
What you get when you rasterize this font is not copyrightable. You can type up a novel and typeset it in this font and the font vendor can't do a thing! Imagine the horror, the chaos, the multi-national havoc if people could copyright what the typefaces looked like! You couldn't do a thing! Everyone would need to make their own fonts that looked like garbage, or suffer from font licensing woes forever and ever and ever! Or maybe the concept of "open source" fonts would have really caught on that very instant...
You can go to flea market or some weird-cheap-computer-crap-mall and buy a CD-ROM full of million fonts for really cheap price. Those things are not the same things you can buy from Linotype by sending them a shipment of human limbs in return. Yet, they essentially have the same font shapes in them... just probably a) not with the same hinting code, if at all, and probably far too many vector handles and stuff like that, scales like shit, and b) different typeface name, changed due to trademark on the original typeface name.
That's about that. Is it clearer now?
I'm going to have to wholeheartedly second your Ultima nominations for exactly same reasons. Ultimas were for large part responsible for most of the major innovations in the genre and they managed to balance nicely on the fine line between number-tossing and storytelling. You could focus on either if that was your thing.
Years after it's release, here I am, right now, playing through Ultima VII part 2 the second time =)
FF6 was hardly genre-defining - it was basically just another iteration of the exact same Final Fantasy thing. The only improvements were in graphics, music and story. It was iconic in the genre, not genre-defining. (Kind of like calling Starcraft the definitive RTS game when that honor really should go to Warcraft II and Command & Conquer, two games that took out the remaining rough edges from Dune II descendants.)
But not if it's running in WirthVM (aka "guy with hex dump printout and lots of coffee"), but that also kind of might depend on whether WirthVM knows the program is trying to detect if it is running on WirthVM =)
Yes, except that there's no way to get it in game, code generators aren't able to make code to get it, and Nintendo hasn't released a code to get it either. The only way to get it in AC is with the good old-fashioned Action Replay poking.
(End of the random nitpick)
Yeah, you can, though they are about the smallest HDDs you can get these days (I recently had to get one for a computer from 2000 that had problems with a 60 gig disk). I wholeheartedly agree it's a very silly limitation.
When XFree86 4.0 came out, there was a slight delay. I could live with it, after all, it was not like 3.x was seriously broken or anything. During this delay, they made their best efforts to make sure it actually worked with the rest of the things and then released it. The result was that nothing broke. Nothing at all. Subsequent 4.x releases were handled with care.
Move from XFree86 to x.org is yet another major technology move. I can understand they want to not mess it up.
I can understand if some application packages in unstable are messed up from time to time... but X11 is so integral to desktop use that they definitely need to have a somewhat compatibility-tested release there. Just shoving x.org out there and sorting out major snags afterwards is not the way. Shoving somewhat tested x.org out there and sorting out the minors snags is.
And if Ubuntu can help Debian get x.org tested, that's just really great.
The reason why closed nets aren't good:
1) You may have 5 pages out of 15124617179945562 that you actually need. Coincidentally, only one of which happens to be in the closed net, and that happens to be the precisely wrong one for that specific case.
2) The company you really needed to find didn't want to get in the closed net because "everybody is in the Web anyway". They don't want partnerships with content portals since "if you want to find us, you can Google us, duh". Plus, the closed net fees are probably higher than public net's, and in any case, they don't want to pay twice.
There definitely is a market for a closed network, that's true. I remain skeptical on whether that can be actually implemented!
This won't catch on in typical FPSes. It might in "ultra-realistic" FPSes, specifically, the ones where the normal behavior for the player is to avoid being hit. The bullet-avoiding bit already has to be in the game mechanics for this to work appropriately - otherwise, this is just pointlessly painful. In many "unrealistic" games, people expect to be scarred a bit, and you may not even get anything done unless you get hit. Would you go rocket-jumping with this thing? I guess not...
Personally, I wouldn't use this device anyway, but if I would, I would use it in Operation Flashpoint - a slow-paced game, quite realistic, and you really have to keep your eyes open to avoid getting shot. I sure wouldn't use this in Urban Terror, even - it's "realistic", but too fast-paced. I sure as hell wouldn't use it in Metroid Prime (the boss fights were pain without this thing's help, thank you very much).
And it was a clever rewording of a section of a story published in Kuro5hin ages ago! And the original story had more religio-philosophical values in it, too!
Good question. I boycott EA right now, but I also have the firm opinion that they used to publish great stuff, but these days publish mostly useless garbage and very, very lame new parts in franchises they've acquired.
It's kind of easy to boycott them when I always expect them to publish their next sacrilegiously awful, generic, or otherwise uninspiring title.
Too bad their marketing actually works, otherwise, no boycott would be needed because nobody would buy the stuff...
Except that didn't exactly keep the companies from publishing more than that... Think of Konami, who got around that by using alternate names (Ultra Software Corporation and Palcom Software).
Actually, they could get it off the ground, they just added bigger thrusters to the rocket. And once it was in orbit, it relayed communications, did outstanding photography on complete spectrum, and also provided far higher resolution telescope images than Hubble ever could. The only catch is, it's twice the size of the Moon, so it's kind of visible and tends to block the sun ocassionally too...
(Sorry, I was in middle of reading Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer =)
Well, they already use Libraries of Congress, Football fields and Volkswagen Bugs as comparative units, I think we could use Sputniks to comparatively measure the sizes of satellites...
Shared libraries / frameworks / classes / whatever that the application needs are either stored in the application (the .app directory, as mentioned in the grandparent post) itself, or they can be stored to library directories. Usually people don't seem to do the latter unless they have a very good reason - as mentioned, the whole point of .apps is to keep the application as self-contained as possible.
Actually, only copyrights last lifetime-plus-something. Patents have far shorter periods of applicability, usually measured in decades or so...
However, I guess that machine guns are still very much patented. These days, the latest patent is titled "a device and a method for repeatedly shooting a person in face over the Internet."
And actually pay attention to the security. As in "ground-up rewrite".
The real reason why people are switching to Firefox is simple: 1) Even mainstream security organizations are getting loud about this. "Don't use MSIE, it's not secure. Try Firefox or Opera." 2) Even ordinary users are starting to get the message that MSIE is not very secure. They have first hand experience about where the insecurity leads. "Where the hell these pop-ups came from? I've uninstalled these dozens of times! Please do something about them! And what is that Firefox thing anyway? Is it better? Can I have it?"
I have seen this alleged problem happening once, with any firefox version, and I visit Slashdot pretty heavily.
Though, I've heard this problem appears more if you're on slower connection. I'm always browsing from home-DSL or university...
Autofocus and automatical focusing in general are different. I prefer Sloppy Focus (focus all windows when mouse enters, not unfocus when mouse leaves) with AutoFocus turned off (new windows won't automatically receive focus). This way windows I point at automatically get focus, but not ones that automatically appear (unless they manage to pop under my mouse pointer).
Not sure about scalabity and such, but RoR people like to go on about how small and elegant it is... If it's half as small and elegant as they claim, I guess it's scalable then =)
Basecamp is the slick pro site that was done in RoR. The Rails web site has a lot of other examples.
There are MVC frameworks for PHP (a random example I just googled), though I'm fairly certain they're nowhere near as elegant as RoR. phpMVC sure doesn't seem so elegant...
From Eurogamer article:
So I wasn't the only one who has the automatical reaction of playing GB Tetris on any new GB hardware? =) That certainly was the first game I played with my original GB, the GBA and GB Player.
Due to my personal distinct lack of any and all GBA versions of Tetris, I had to settle for Rampage Puzzle Attack, which indeed had unprecedented picture clarity on this amazing backlit screen.
There's still one original GB's accessory that I use: the headphones. =) And if I can't find a proper carrying bag for DS soon, I may need to use the original GB bag too (which isn't too good for carrying around GBA/DS games, though...)
Nero Express is severely stripped down, the real thing supports burning ISOs quite easily.
And I've definitely used Nero Express to burn a Gnoppix CD... can't remember which version it was though, but it wasn't really that difficult.
Holy whatever. Possibly the slimiest yet most hilarious thing I've seen in... days or so.
A brief analysis of the software's capabilities, employing a few different hats:
::puts on "user" hat:: Right, why would anyone download an application to download anything? ::puts on "web developer" hat:: Why can't you do this in plain old JavaScript? I mean, it works for File Planet? ::puts on "windows user" hat:: this sucks, it doesn't even seem to grab its cache settings from IE's settings. ::puts on the "manager" hat:: And thanks for the idea, I'll code the same application over the lunch break in Visual Basic.
Fine with me, except that I usually keep idiotic software and idiotic social engineering far separate issues. Annoyware is one thing, 419 scams are another.
By the way, if you really want to combine best of the both worlds, you may want to read on how people used (reverse) "moronware" to fool 419 scammers! Hilarity ensues! Screenshots included! =)
There's GNOME-vfs subsystem, which is a bug-ridden half-working excuse of KIOslaves... but who cares as long as webdav works :)