I agree with other posters - they should have openly done this and notified the user before "fixing" it - something like "Your hosts file has been modified to prevent access to . Is this desirable to you?" with three options - "Yes", "No", "More information". That way, the techies can click "Yes" and go about their business, average users can click "More information" and maybe actually learn a little bit in the process, then come back and click "Yes" or "No" as per their wishes.
You really think users will bother to click on "More information" and actually read that stuff? "Yes" "Yes" "Yes" is going to be the only thing they see and click, and possibly for some more paranoid people "No". But never "More information" unless you actually like computers.
UAC is enough evidence to show that people will click the confirmation option in any window no matter what it says, just to get the damn thing to disappear. I don't agree with it but I understand why people do it.
If a Samsung phone did end up winning, Apple might sue and argue that this was due to Apple's patented rounded corners being the most aerodynamically efficient design.
Now this is a great example of the DIY nature of true geeks who can build a solution using FOSS components tailored to their particular requirements but without skimping on security, and although initially a bit complicated to set up for the expert, still ultimately has ease of use on the side of the end user (the Dad in this case).
Reading about solutions built like this is one of the reasons I still come back to Slashdot despite the site itself slowly falling into the abyss.
Good point. I'm tempted to wait for the first release of iodoom3 though before I do that, mainly because of all the backend improvements it's likely to have (though they've already specified in an FAQ that the key check won't be removed).
Well, need is subjective. But I like to play Doom 3 every so often (particularly with mods like The Dark Mod, a great Thief clone), and the hosts file is something of a necessity. For those who don't know, Doom 3 originally had old-school CD copy protection (i.e. need the disc in the drive when launching the game). The final patch removed that requirement, but changed it so that the game will attempt to authenticate the serial key against a master key server run by id/Activision. If the key fails (in use by someone else and/or a blacklisted key), the game won't run.
A few years ago I discovered the game thinks my legit serial key is in use/dodgy for some reason, which put me in a bit of a pickle. Fortunately, I discovered that if I put in a particular domain to redirect to 127.0.0.1 in my system hosts file (and this works for both Windows and Linux), the game won't be able to connect to the key server and will simply assume the key is OK and continue. I could have gotten a crack I suppose but I don't want to have to rely on cracks which may or may not have side-effects, plus I doubt one would exist for Linux anyway.
Side note: This is one thing I like about this authentication system in old games like this- if it can't verify your key/access, the game gives the player the benefit of the doubt and keeps working. Hence if the game is played when the Internet is down, or the key server disappears, the game will continue to work. Not like modern commercial games.
Microsoft gives you one more reason to switch to Mac OSX or Ubuntu.
Interesting choice of word there - you said Ubuntu rather than the more generic Linux. Personally I'd suggest Linux Mint but that's based off of Ubuntu so it's all semantics, but perhaps it's just an acceptance that Ubuntu-based distros are the only ones that have any chance of being an alternative to most users in terms of Linux adoption (as small as that change may be).
You smugly believe you humans are the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder. You are not.
Your style of posting is very odd.
"You humans"? What kind of talk is that? You ARE a human! Only someone suffering from a severe detachment from society would consider themselves enough of an outcast to refer to the rest of humanity as "you humans". Unless you're a LOLcat who'd learnt how to type a coherent sentence rather than walking on the keyboard, please try to accept that you're one of us, and as such we're all in this together.
No, it's not FOSS. But it is free as in beer and it also runs on Windows, OS X and Linux (the Linux build though is technically the Windows build packaged via a Wine bottle, all self contained and preconfigured well though). Sounds like the $-free and cross-platform aspects are probably more important overall to your needs than being open source. Plus you don't have to worry about firewalls or anything - I can even access my home system at my workplace through just the browser, no extra ports except 80.
Given that Linux now controls over 50% of the smart phone market, I'd say it is realized.
Bullshit. That's a classic case of "moving the goalposts" - Linux failed to make an impact on the desktop, so those who invested the time and effect to move to it under the assumption it would eventually take hold now needed to change the definition of the phrase "year of linux on the desktop" so that they don't look like fools.
Fuck, just admit it failed on the (mainstream) desktop and move on.
This however is the first time you can get Uplink and SpaceChem for Android though. Besides, a lot of people would have not bought the previous packs which had Uplink and SpaceChem anyway, and given the fact you often can't get a lot of the games features on these bundles anywhere else but on the humble bundle (and especially Linux versions), there's a lot of value in repeat bundles.
I have an iPhone now, and each time I pick up and Android device to see how it is (or, heaven forbid, have to fix my mother's droid), I'm reminded of all the wasted hours of customization. Are there things I would like to change? YES. Is it worth the added complexity in my life? Not right now...maybe in ten years when I'm not as busy with, well, life.
The customizability of Android is optional. Most Android phones speced similarly to iPhones perform very competitively out of the box without requiring any major customization. It's just that Android allows you to further customize should you wish it, whereas iPhone is vastly limited.
Just because you couldn't discipline yourself to stop wasting time customization at some point, doesn't mean that the availability of customizable features is a bad thing. Wasting hours on customization is NOT mandatory with Android to get a working product. But it's nice that the option is there.
I've started using Deluge (http://deluge-torrent.org/) as an alternative. The reason I like it is because it has a very similar GUI to uTorrent and mostly the same functionality (including full.magnet support), plus they've finally got a good Windows installer that isn't too large and doesn't install as much cruft as it used to. Plus since it's open source and cross platform it means that once I give up Windows for good (given the way the platform is headed), I'll have gained enough familiarity with it that the full transition to Linux will hopefully be less painful. I'd transition now except that their desktop situation is still in a bit of a flux and I'm waiting for some stability in what people end up using.
A nice thing about the Windows build of Deluge is that unlike uTorrent, it's a clean, quick and painless install. Tthey don't even try to trick you into installing ads or WinZip I think it was recently, and it doesn't come up with some shit-for-brains neutered interface by default you have to disable to get some control over your torrents.
The interesting thing about your post is that, while a lot of people might go "well that's all just common sense", the fact that so many men seem to get this wrong (even non-geeks who'd you expect to have a bit more social skill given the fact they didn't focus all their attention on computers), perhaps it's not actually "common sense" after all.
The way I see it, steps like this are more likely to be followed by a geek anyway, since it's like code - a sequential list of instructions with some occasional branching, written in such a way that when followed correctly produces the desired outcome (return sex;) Who better to understand such an algorithm than the analytical mind of a geek?
Where I work we've investigated OpenGL, but our programmers work with CUDA because the NVIDIA cards are just so, so more advanced and capable than anything else out there, CUDA provides much greater return for the investment. Sometimes open standards just aren't worth much if they're immature.
Magazines and clips are completely different things. People tend to say clip when they should have said magazine, and now you're using both terms together!
If I was a gun nut I would rip you a new one. But since I'm not i'll just let you off with a warning.:)
I'm Australian, which means that despite following guys like FPSRussia and playing my fair share of FPSes, there are still gaps in my knowledge when it comes to firearms.
Which leads me to this question:
They're also great at emptying your wallet, since a 30rd mag goes in about 5 seconds.
How much does it cost to load up a 30 round magazine? Let's assume an AR-15, a variant or something in that category. Wouldn't your pervasive gun culture mean that ammo is reasonably cheap?
Then I don't buy games with Starforce, easy. We have a glutton of PC gamers out there that one CAN be fussy about sifting through the DRM bullshit in a legal fashion and still have fun with more games than they'll ever have time to play/finish. As for the older games, graphics don't make the game and you know this surely. If it did, no-one would play classics like the original Deus Ex or even Unreal Tournament 2004 in this day and age. Graphics can help a game yes, but they aren't enough to detract if the game is still great fun.
I thought you were smarter than this. I like you hairyfeet because you do seem to post genuinely insightful posts at time, but you seem to be going out of your way to denigrate anyone who chooses not to deal with DRM and who refuses to join the circlejerk that is Valve and Steam.
Should I really be required to go to the trouble of cracking games I bought legitimately in order to play them should Steam disappear? Are you 100% certain that every single game, no matter how obscure, has a crack? Are you certain cracks exist for the latest version of a game available on Steam and not some older version that no longer exists? Are you certain cracks will exist for games should Steam on Linux become a success?
As for old games, old seems to be a dirty word for some reason. Stick to GOG for example and you've have way more games than time available, just like Steam. If you've having fun either way, so what? New doesn't automatically equal better. Maybe I just got jaded with modern developers/publishers, but it makes things easier for me I guess.
Meh. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. These guys showed their leader an operating system that can run a lot of Windows software without any worry about backdoor access to the yanks. That's at least a way of ensuring you stay in the good books.
I had to do the homework regardless; this way I got to listen to great live music and have a pint while I was doing it.
You'd have to be in the tiny minority who's brains can still suitably concentrate when loud music and alcohol are both flowing through you. Assume of course, that you still got decent work done in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
You really think users will bother to click on "More information" and actually read that stuff? "Yes" "Yes" "Yes" is going to be the only thing they see and click, and possibly for some more paranoid people "No". But never "More information" unless you actually like computers.
UAC is enough evidence to show that people will click the confirmation option in any window no matter what it says, just to get the damn thing to disappear. I don't agree with it but I understand why people do it.
If a Samsung phone did end up winning, Apple might sue and argue that this was due to Apple's patented rounded corners being the most aerodynamically efficient design.
Now this is a great example of the DIY nature of true geeks who can build a solution using FOSS components tailored to their particular requirements but without skimping on security, and although initially a bit complicated to set up for the expert, still ultimately has ease of use on the side of the end user (the Dad in this case).
Reading about solutions built like this is one of the reasons I still come back to Slashdot despite the site itself slowly falling into the abyss.
Good point. I'm tempted to wait for the first release of iodoom3 though before I do that, mainly because of all the backend improvements it's likely to have (though they've already specified in an FAQ that the key check won't be removed).
Surely you know he's joking. Surely you're sarcasm detector isn't *that* broken. Surely?
Well, need is subjective. But I like to play Doom 3 every so often (particularly with mods like The Dark Mod, a great Thief clone), and the hosts file is something of a necessity. For those who don't know, Doom 3 originally had old-school CD copy protection (i.e. need the disc in the drive when launching the game). The final patch removed that requirement, but changed it so that the game will attempt to authenticate the serial key against a master key server run by id/Activision. If the key fails (in use by someone else and/or a blacklisted key), the game won't run.
A few years ago I discovered the game thinks my legit serial key is in use/dodgy for some reason, which put me in a bit of a pickle. Fortunately, I discovered that if I put in a particular domain to redirect to 127.0.0.1 in my system hosts file (and this works for both Windows and Linux), the game won't be able to connect to the key server and will simply assume the key is OK and continue. I could have gotten a crack I suppose but I don't want to have to rely on cracks which may or may not have side-effects, plus I doubt one would exist for Linux anyway.
Side note: This is one thing I like about this authentication system in old games like this- if it can't verify your key/access, the game gives the player the benefit of the doubt and keeps working. Hence if the game is played when the Internet is down, or the key server disappears, the game will continue to work. Not like modern commercial games.
Interesting choice of word there - you said Ubuntu rather than the more generic Linux. Personally I'd suggest Linux Mint but that's based off of Ubuntu so it's all semantics, but perhaps it's just an acceptance that Ubuntu-based distros are the only ones that have any chance of being an alternative to most users in terms of Linux adoption (as small as that change may be).
Your style of posting is very odd.
"You humans"? What kind of talk is that? You ARE a human! Only someone suffering from a severe detachment from society would consider themselves enough of an outcast to refer to the rest of humanity as "you humans". Unless you're a LOLcat who'd learnt how to type a coherent sentence rather than walking on the keyboard, please try to accept that you're one of us, and as such we're all in this together.
I'd suggest TeamViewer (http://www.teamviewer.com/)
No, it's not FOSS. But it is free as in beer and it also runs on Windows, OS X and Linux (the Linux build though is technically the Windows build packaged via a Wine bottle, all self contained and preconfigured well though). Sounds like the $-free and cross-platform aspects are probably more important overall to your needs than being open source. Plus you don't have to worry about firewalls or anything - I can even access my home system at my workplace through just the browser, no extra ports except 80.
This however is the first time you can get Uplink and SpaceChem for Android though. Besides, a lot of people would have not bought the previous packs which had Uplink and SpaceChem anyway, and given the fact you often can't get a lot of the games features on these bundles anywhere else but on the humble bundle (and especially Linux versions), there's a lot of value in repeat bundles.
The customizability of Android is optional. Most Android phones speced similarly to iPhones perform very competitively out of the box without requiring any major customization. It's just that Android allows you to further customize should you wish it, whereas iPhone is vastly limited.
Just because you couldn't discipline yourself to stop wasting time customization at some point, doesn't mean that the availability of customizable features is a bad thing. Wasting hours on customization is NOT mandatory with Android to get a working product. But it's nice that the option is there.
I've started using Deluge (http://deluge-torrent.org/) as an alternative. The reason I like it is because it has a very similar GUI to uTorrent and mostly the same functionality (including full .magnet support), plus they've finally got a good Windows installer that isn't too large and doesn't install as much cruft as it used to. Plus since it's open source and cross platform it means that once I give up Windows for good (given the way the platform is headed), I'll have gained enough familiarity with it that the full transition to Linux will hopefully be less painful. I'd transition now except that their desktop situation is still in a bit of a flux and I'm waiting for some stability in what people end up using.
A nice thing about the Windows build of Deluge is that unlike uTorrent, it's a clean, quick and painless install. Tthey don't even try to trick you into installing ads or WinZip I think it was recently, and it doesn't come up with some shit-for-brains neutered interface by default you have to disable to get some control over your torrents.
So what's this then from over three years ago (also with a listed price of $1.6 million)?
http://slashdot.org/story/09/05/05/2146246/teslas-new-york-laboratory-up-for-sale
Anyone who knows more, please let me/us know.
The interesting thing about your post is that, while a lot of people might go "well that's all just common sense", the fact that so many men seem to get this wrong (even non-geeks who'd you expect to have a bit more social skill given the fact they didn't focus all their attention on computers), perhaps it's not actually "common sense" after all.
The way I see it, steps like this are more likely to be followed by a geek anyway, since it's like code - a sequential list of instructions with some occasional branching, written in such a way that when followed correctly produces the desired outcome (return sex;) Who better to understand such an algorithm than the analytical mind of a geek?
Where I work we've investigated OpenGL, but our programmers work with CUDA because the NVIDIA cards are just so, so more advanced and capable than anything else out there, CUDA provides much greater return for the investment. Sometimes open standards just aren't worth much if they're immature.
Magazines and clips are completely different things. People tend to say clip when they should have said magazine, and now you're using both terms together!
If I was a gun nut I would rip you a new one. But since I'm not i'll just let you off with a warning. :)
What kind of civilian acquirable firearm costs 50 grand? Honest question.
I'm Australian, which means that despite following guys like FPSRussia and playing my fair share of FPSes, there are still gaps in my knowledge when it comes to firearms.
Which leads me to this question:
How much does it cost to load up a 30 round magazine? Let's assume an AR-15, a variant or something in that category. Wouldn't your pervasive gun culture mean that ammo is reasonably cheap?
He won't learn anything. It's easier (and apparently more fun) to attack than it is to understand.
Then I don't buy games with Starforce, easy. We have a glutton of PC gamers out there that one CAN be fussy about sifting through the DRM bullshit in a legal fashion and still have fun with more games than they'll ever have time to play/finish. As for the older games, graphics don't make the game and you know this surely. If it did, no-one would play classics like the original Deus Ex or even Unreal Tournament 2004 in this day and age. Graphics can help a game yes, but they aren't enough to detract if the game is still great fun.
I thought you were smarter than this. I like you hairyfeet because you do seem to post genuinely insightful posts at time, but you seem to be going out of your way to denigrate anyone who chooses not to deal with DRM and who refuses to join the circlejerk that is Valve and Steam.
Should I really be required to go to the trouble of cracking games I bought legitimately in order to play them should Steam disappear? Are you 100% certain that every single game, no matter how obscure, has a crack? Are you certain cracks exist for the latest version of a game available on Steam and not some older version that no longer exists? Are you certain cracks will exist for games should Steam on Linux become a success?
As for old games, old seems to be a dirty word for some reason. Stick to GOG for example and you've have way more games than time available, just like Steam. If you've having fun either way, so what? New doesn't automatically equal better. Maybe I just got jaded with modern developers/publishers, but it makes things easier for me I guess.
Meh. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. These guys showed their leader an operating system that can run a lot of Windows software without any worry about backdoor access to the yanks. That's at least a way of ensuring you stay in the good books.
You'd have to be in the tiny minority who's brains can still suitably concentrate when loud music and alcohol are both flowing through you. Assume of course, that you still got decent work done in the first place.
You better hope so, otherwise all those games will cease to function should Valve go out of business.
Long life GOG.com.