Any software product that doesn't support menus will work just fine - of course, there'll be no menus, but what the heck, it works...
...or move to a country where Annoying DVD Users is a capital offense - not in law, but it'll be several huge riots, storming of the corporate HQ and several cases of justice from people's own hands. =)
(I haven't really seen any annoying copyright warnings in R2 European/Scandinavian/Finnish discs... Just quick note, sometimes logos, and to the menu. No unskippable ads or anything like that...)
Actually, it's not "creative" spelling, I noted that many people actually don't know how to spell worth a damn, particularly what comes to somewhat trickier-to-spell band names.
Example: DSL + CD-RW drive + a music-loving sister to whom I can't say no is a dangerous combination. I use AudioGalaxy mostly to find really good stuff (which in my case means game soundtracks no one bothers to sell here =), and this copy-protection slowed me down somewhat. But, of course, if some people insist spelling the band names "Uriah Heap" and "Eryhtmics", I didn't have much problems finding them. Except certain names that even clowns like this spell right, which was the reason I installed giFT =)
I remember it because I was, ahem, a honest user, only getting songs that were hard to find from legitimate channels... I spent hours trying to find a no-ratio FTP site that would have some obscure song no one had.
And before Metallica flames me, the reason I bought the Black Album was that I found "Nothing Else Matters" from one site, was filled with good memories from the past, downloaded the file, listened the song, deleted it, and rushed to a now-defunct CD webstore to get the album =)
These days finding interesting obscure stuff is much easier with AudioGalaxy, Limewire and giFT...
In fact, even www.google.com will automatically select the Japanese language if you're browsing from Japan (not sure if they're going off browser settings, IP address, or DNS).
Most likely from browser settings. IP or DNS doesn't seem to be an option, unless they have some sort of database on geographical distribution of IP addresses...
For what it's worth, it seems to pick Finnish for all addresses in *.fi and my computer's reverse domain name which happens to be under suomi.net. And, it seems to pick English if I haven't set Finnish as the first language choice in the browser preferences.
I usually set Google to use the English version of the page because the Finnish version may be some revisions behind - it has "cache" links, but no "translate" links (not that I'd use the translation too often...)
(Google is nice and all... now, if I only got some reason for the people who talk of "Google Groups" and "Fourtalk" instead of Usenet... =)
DNS names are mnemonics, not keywords.
"Right! An excellent comment from you there in the back row!" Agreed wholeheartedly.
I agree with the idea that the URLs should be written in limited character set - it makes the access somewhat easier to implement.
Mozilla's (and thus Netscape's) tabs are entirely optional.
Besides, they work much better than the usual "MDI" interfaces - it's just an usual browser window with an added tab row, easily resizable! Much better usability-wise than the disaster that was Opera 5... =)
Well, one of the local "respected" (read: glossy cover, subdued page layout and no computer term glossary in each issue) computer magazines just had a review of web servers (according to Usenet - I need to go read the while thing in library today, just for laughs. =)
Apache was, according to them, pretty nice, but IIS was the "editor's pick".
Mostly because they put a lot of weight to the "ease of configuration". Hello?
Also, they claimed Apache didn't have any support for PHP, load balancing, or other features like this.
I'm glad I don't subscribe to the magazine any more, and even more glad that I never personally paid for the subscription... =)
I don't think anyone in their right mind would ever claim that Perl is a functional language. Did I miss something? It's probably better described as a procedural language with some OOP sledgehammered in.
Sorry, I should have worded that more carefully - but it was past 3 o'clock in the morning when I wrote it =)
What I meant, of course, was that the universe possibly couldn't be expressed with anything other than a functional language - which Perl isn't, even when it's otherwise an outstanding and practical language.
Now THAT'S ass-talking! What about Lisp, Scheme, ML, etc?
Lisp or Scheme? Bah! "God doesn't play with parentheses..."
Yeah, in my case, the problem was that when we played D&D (the original =) was that I didn't have that many friends to play with, and now that each of us has moved to different towns, I suppose we won't be playing anymore - I don't even know how these people are doing these days =)
These days, I like GURPS - but I don't have locals to play with (I suppose I should see what the RPG club of the university is doing =) I have played GURPS a couple of times over E-mail and IRC, it seemed to be nice enough. Some day, I'll try GURPS Myth, with Myth II to e-roleplay the massive combat situations =)
And yes, I'm really waiting for NWN, and will try the editing tools next time I reboot to 'doze =)
Since some people were posting about the strange stuff too, here's mine:
My home PC came with no less than two sets of crappy speakers. (As a music lover, this insult was severe enough to make me decide to buy the next PC in parts =)
Anyway, one set of the speakers was supposed to be attached to the monitor somehow (more cabling than anyone ever needs).
I plugged the speakers in. I couldn't hear a thing.
I unplugged it. It worked.
I used the speakers from my old PC, and now I have a nice 4.1 speaker set - so that... I... don't... need to... think... of the... haunted... speakers... in the... *shiver* box... in the... cellar. *shiver*
Maybe I won't sleep that well tonight, now that I was reminded of this thing...
We mere mortals do likewise, but won't be able to fit it on 80 characters.
Ah, but while Perl is a nice language, it isn't purely functional. No, Haskell is the only real choice here. Since I'm no way expert in that language, I'm not so sure of this, but I think Haskell had its own whitespace rules, so you wouldn't be able to fit it on one line.
(I'm only posting this to prevent further entirely predictable jokes. My apologies.)
Following all these stories of Napster seem to have the pattern... Napster was born, people loved it, Napster was sued by lots of people, Napster gets subjugated to the will of music industry, and finally eaten by a large music company.
It's drama, people.
A multi-million budgeted movie that you can't rent, but you can download it from Slashdot archives.
BMG is just playing along! This is what the script says! "Act 10: One of the Bad Guys takes the corpse of the now very much dead hero, and makes a coffee mug of his skull."
And in the next act, the rest of the heroes find the mutilated and decapitated corpse, and kill the bad guys; Or maybe there's a Peasant Uprising. I don't know how it's going to end, but it's pretty predictable anyway. Ask the MPAA.
I couldn't care less of what the moderators actually think, and dare not to speculate exactly why it was moderated that way... =)
ObRemoteControl: if I only could use a remote controller that would have lots of buttons, could work nicely with LIRC, and receiver would use USB... My current remote works nicely with LIRC, but doesn't have much ports and uses serial port. *sigh* And yes, the widget in the story is pretty interesting.
Hey, that one was made ages ago: Commodore Executive 64 (SX64/DX64). =)
(Though neither had Datassette port, and I'm not sure about cartridge support - but on C64, floppy loading times were never Utterly Horrible (especially with disk turbo), even if they're slow by today's standards...)
(Oh, and getting a SX64/DX64 is a bit hard. An used laptop, a Linux install and VICE would probably be cheaper =)
The funny thing is, I think that back before Vivendi came to the picture, they supported homegrown projects somewhat, and I think they even offered job for someone who did an outstanding job reverse-engineering WarCraft II file formats...
You know, I agree with one editor and columnist in a local game mag: First, there are game companies that are driven by their artistic vision of good games; However, as soon as the monster known as Stock Market enters the picture, things tend to get worse - the investors want some Money to come out of the company...
The quote from him that sums it up: "Any company that is involved in creative activity, but that summarizes its goal with the always popular slogan 'the only purpose of the company is to bring profit for the shareholders', is going down."
Besides, I don't think I will be in much of rush to buy Warcraft III myself - I recently sold my heart to the Myth series =)
I personally sincerely doubt the "non-massive-multiplayer" battle.net games are going to subscription model.
<accent type="american>I'll buy that with a credit card!</accent>
...and we poor students from middle of nowhere and no credit card end up being screwed and will rather download a copy of bnetd through some "unofficial" channel, rather than trying to bother with the unbearable hassle of trying to pay.
(Like I've said before, international banking is a pain in the neck =)
Besides, think of it: The legal threats can't stop distribution of bnetd - even when they admittedly are trying pretty hard and use rather nasty means to achieve that goal. Blizzard probably knows this. So, the only way for them not to make a complete mess of it is to keep battle.net free - if they just make it a subscription service now that there's a free alternative out, only idiots will pay for it. (In a free service, yes, I think I can tolerate ocassional "Connection interrupted" in Diablo II - but I wouldn't pay for this =)
Bla bla bla... here I am yapping something incoherent again - must quit before I start talking how Nethack 3.4.0's improved mouse support destroyed Diablo II in a fine retaliatory strike from the open source community =)
Psst! Subselects! And the other stuff that's still missing from ANSI SQL compliance!
and the database is cheap enough
Well, so is PostgreSQL - and it has had transactions, subselects, and whole bunch of stuff that MySQL hasn't had for ages or only got recently. Plus, for BSD folks out there, it's also in "more free" license than MySQL =)
Sequences instead of "auto_increment"... *drool*... Actually good client program... yummy.
Re:Television Looks Like Shit, Hi-Res Monitors Don
on
Linux DVD Players Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You know...
I have a pretty decent 17" monitor and a pretty nice but not stellar 20" TV.
I have a very good desk, but the chair really isn't good for sitting all through the movie. The monitor isn't really good for watching stuff from far away. TV, on the other hand, looks just nice from my couch or bed.
Also, the fact that television looks like shit is a good thing. No, it may not be always desired with DVDs. But for video tapes, VideoCDs, or DivX-recorded clips, the TV viewed from far away, or even about one meter, is much better than computer screen - because on the monitor I can see the artifacts and the horror that is VHS. Somewhat softer image is sometimes a very good thing =)
Yep, Xine has a pretty bad UI, and combine that with some crashiness when "experimenting" with the UI...
However, I usually use Xine as the GNOME tool to handle MPEG/AVI/etc... Just double click the file in Nautilus and there's no need to mess with the so-called file dialogs. =) Same with command-line use: xine filename.mpg...
The most recent version in Debian had a small bug - doesn't like filenames that have ':'...
Slashdot Mirror
Any software product that doesn't support menus will work just fine - of course, there'll be no menus, but what the heck, it works...
...or move to a country where Annoying DVD Users is a capital offense - not in law, but it'll be several huge riots, storming of the corporate HQ and several cases of justice from people's own hands. =)
(I haven't really seen any annoying copyright warnings in R2 European/Scandinavian/Finnish discs... Just quick note, sometimes logos, and to the menu. No unskippable ads or anything like that...)
Actually, it's not "creative" spelling, I noted that many people actually don't know how to spell worth a damn, particularly what comes to somewhat trickier-to-spell band names.
Example: DSL + CD-RW drive + a music-loving sister to whom I can't say no is a dangerous combination. I use AudioGalaxy mostly to find really good stuff (which in my case means game soundtracks no one bothers to sell here =), and this copy-protection slowed me down somewhat. But, of course, if some people insist spelling the band names "Uriah Heap" and "Eryhtmics", I didn't have much problems finding them. Except certain names that even clowns like this spell right, which was the reason I installed giFT =)
Donkey Kong 64 has multiplayer mode - sort of like Quake. That wasn't that much fun with 4 players only, but it'd rock in net play =)
The game levels itself might be interesting in net play, too...
I remember it because I was, ahem, a honest user, only getting songs that were hard to find from legitimate channels... I spent hours trying to find a no-ratio FTP site that would have some obscure song no one had.
And before Metallica flames me, the reason I bought the Black Album was that I found "Nothing Else Matters" from one site, was filled with good memories from the past, downloaded the file, listened the song, deleted it, and rushed to a now-defunct CD webstore to get the album =)
These days finding interesting obscure stuff is much easier with AudioGalaxy, Limewire and giFT...
Most likely from browser settings. IP or DNS doesn't seem to be an option, unless they have some sort of database on geographical distribution of IP addresses...
For what it's worth, it seems to pick Finnish for all addresses in *.fi and my computer's reverse domain name which happens to be under suomi.net. And, it seems to pick English if I haven't set Finnish as the first language choice in the browser preferences.
I usually set Google to use the English version of the page because the Finnish version may be some revisions behind - it has "cache" links, but no "translate" links (not that I'd use the translation too often...)
(Google is nice and all... now, if I only got some reason for the people who talk of "Google Groups" and "Fourtalk" instead of Usenet... =)
...and the ghosts of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy to star in B&W comedy "Still Copyrighted"... oh, wait, didn't Hardy get reincarnated as a horse? =)
I liked Mozilla tabs much more than anything on Opera... maybe I just got grumpy after the huge headache from the blinking banner ad. =)
Mozilla's (and thus Netscape's) tabs are entirely optional.
Besides, they work much better than the usual "MDI" interfaces - it's just an usual browser window with an added tab row, easily resizable! Much better usability-wise than the disaster that was Opera 5... =)
Apache was, according to them, pretty nice, but IIS was the "editor's pick".
Mostly because they put a lot of weight to the "ease of configuration". Hello?
Also, they claimed Apache didn't have any support for PHP, load balancing, or other features like this.
I'm glad I don't subscribe to the magazine any more, and even more glad that I never personally paid for the subscription... =)
Yes, I suppose, but I guess a "build your own damn money-handling application" isn't an option for most end-users.
(Besides, Perl is all good and well, but I wouldn't trust my money on MySQL. PostgreSQL, maybe, but not MySQL... =)
A very much unbranded monitor from a mysterious country in the east.
People suggested electromagnetic induction or something equally UFOish...
Sorry, I should have worded that more carefully - but it was past 3 o'clock in the morning when I wrote it =)
What I meant, of course, was that the universe possibly couldn't be expressed with anything other than a functional language - which Perl isn't, even when it's otherwise an outstanding and practical language.
Lisp or Scheme? Bah! "God doesn't play with parentheses..."
=)
Yeah, in my case, the problem was that when we played D&D (the original =) was that I didn't have that many friends to play with, and now that each of us has moved to different towns, I suppose we won't be playing anymore - I don't even know how these people are doing these days =)
These days, I like GURPS - but I don't have locals to play with (I suppose I should see what the RPG club of the university is doing =) I have played GURPS a couple of times over E-mail and IRC, it seemed to be nice enough. Some day, I'll try GURPS Myth, with Myth II to e-roleplay the massive combat situations =)
And yes, I'm really waiting for NWN, and will try the editing tools next time I reboot to 'doze =)
My home PC came with no less than two sets of crappy speakers. (As a music lover, this insult was severe enough to make me decide to buy the next PC in parts =)
Anyway, one set of the speakers was supposed to be attached to the monitor somehow (more cabling than anyone ever needs).
I plugged the speakers in. I couldn't hear a thing.
I unplugged it. It worked.
I used the speakers from my old PC, and now I have a nice 4.1 speaker set - so that... I... don't... need to... think... of the... haunted... speakers... in the... *shiver* box... in the... cellar. *shiver*
Maybe I won't sleep that well tonight, now that I was reminded of this thing...
We mere mortals do likewise, but won't be able to fit it on 80 characters.
Ah, but while Perl is a nice language, it isn't purely functional. No, Haskell is the only real choice here. Since I'm no way expert in that language, I'm not so sure of this, but I think Haskell had its own whitespace rules, so you wouldn't be able to fit it on one line.
(I'm only posting this to prevent further entirely predictable jokes. My apologies.)
Fate.
Following all these stories of Napster seem to have the pattern... Napster was born, people loved it, Napster was sued by lots of people, Napster gets subjugated to the will of music industry, and finally eaten by a large music company.
It's drama, people.
A multi-million budgeted movie that you can't rent, but you can download it from Slashdot archives.
BMG is just playing along! This is what the script says! "Act 10: One of the Bad Guys takes the corpse of the now very much dead hero, and makes a coffee mug of his skull."
And in the next act, the rest of the heroes find the mutilated and decapitated corpse, and kill the bad guys; Or maybe there's a Peasant Uprising. I don't know how it's going to end, but it's pretty predictable anyway. Ask the MPAA.
=)
I couldn't care less of what the moderators actually think, and dare not to speculate exactly why it was moderated that way... =)
ObRemoteControl: if I only could use a remote controller that would have lots of buttons, could work nicely with LIRC, and receiver would use USB... My current remote works nicely with LIRC, but doesn't have much ports and uses serial port. *sigh* And yes, the widget in the story is pretty interesting.
Ha! Myth series still rocks - even if Bungie was eaten by the Empire.
(Myth III is really nice - too bad it hasn't been ported to Linux, like Myth II =)
Ummmmmmmmm...
Firewire?
Super-mega-turbo-ultra-fast cable connection to send a very small chunk data to small device?
Can we spell "overkill"? =)
Besides, I would still like to remind that while USB is catching on, Firewire port isn't yet a standard PC feature. *sigh*
Hey, that one was made ages ago: Commodore Executive 64 (SX64/DX64). =)
(Though neither had Datassette port, and I'm not sure about cartridge support - but on C64, floppy loading times were never Utterly Horrible (especially with disk turbo), even if they're slow by today's standards...)
(Oh, and getting a SX64/DX64 is a bit hard. An used laptop, a Linux install and VICE would probably be cheaper =)
The funny thing is, I think that back before Vivendi came to the picture, they supported homegrown projects somewhat, and I think they even offered job for someone who did an outstanding job reverse-engineering WarCraft II file formats...
You know, I agree with one editor and columnist in a local game mag: First, there are game companies that are driven by their artistic vision of good games; However, as soon as the monster known as Stock Market enters the picture, things tend to get worse - the investors want some Money to come out of the company...
The quote from him that sums it up: "Any company that is involved in creative activity, but that summarizes its goal with the always popular slogan 'the only purpose of the company is to bring profit for the shareholders', is going down."
Besides, I don't think I will be in much of rush to buy Warcraft III myself - I recently sold my heart to the Myth series =)
I personally sincerely doubt the "non-massive-multiplayer" battle.net games are going to subscription model.
<accent type="american>I'll buy that with a credit card!</accent>
...and we poor students from middle of nowhere and no credit card end up being screwed and will rather download a copy of bnetd through some "unofficial" channel, rather than trying to bother with the unbearable hassle of trying to pay.
(Like I've said before, international banking is a pain in the neck =)
Besides, think of it: The legal threats can't stop distribution of bnetd - even when they admittedly are trying pretty hard and use rather nasty means to achieve that goal. Blizzard probably knows this. So, the only way for them not to make a complete mess of it is to keep battle.net free - if they just make it a subscription service now that there's a free alternative out, only idiots will pay for it. (In a free service, yes, I think I can tolerate ocassional "Connection interrupted" in Diablo II - but I wouldn't pay for this =)
Bla bla bla... here I am yapping something incoherent again - must quit before I start talking how Nethack 3.4.0's improved mouse support destroyed Diablo II in a fine retaliatory strike from the open source community =)
Sequences instead of "auto_increment"... *drool*... Actually good client program... yummy.
You know...
I have a pretty decent 17" monitor and a pretty nice but not stellar 20" TV.
I have a very good desk, but the chair really isn't good for sitting all through the movie. The monitor isn't really good for watching stuff from far away. TV, on the other hand, looks just nice from my couch or bed.
Also, the fact that television looks like shit is a good thing. No, it may not be always desired with DVDs. But for video tapes, VideoCDs, or DivX-recorded clips, the TV viewed from far away, or even about one meter, is much better than computer screen - because on the monitor I can see the artifacts and the horror that is VHS. Somewhat softer image is sometimes a very good thing =)
Yep, Xine has a pretty bad UI, and combine that with some crashiness when "experimenting" with the UI...
However, I usually use Xine as the GNOME tool to handle MPEG/AVI/etc... Just double click the file in Nautilus and there's no need to mess with the so-called file dialogs. =) Same with command-line use: xine filename.mpg...
The most recent version in Debian had a small bug - doesn't like filenames that have ':'...