This isn't a new concept, and they are simply competing with other platforms that give the same ability to download games in the background while you play.
I also believe that the same concept came to programmers who had to deal with a 56K modem, and decompress the.ZIP files. Given that files in.ZIP can be stored in any order, there isn't really a good reason why the most important bits of a.ZIP are placed first as opposed to being in alphabetical/random order. However, a lack of knowledge/tools of the other developers tended to make this the case.
The Quest for Glory series is pretty free of those kinds of puzzles. At least I think it is, it could be that my familiarity with them makes bizarre puzzles seem logical to me. But most of the puzzles can be solved in multiple ways depending on your character, which would preclude having many puzzles with unique and bizarre solutions.
With QFG3/4, there were changes on how the characters could handle the puzzles, and this is unavoidable even if you could solve it in another fashion. This was basically caused by two of the classes (i.e. Wizard and Paladin) having abilities not available to the other classes, and also to help cut-down on the "Jack-of-all-trades" that you could to in QFG1. QFG5 mostly brought back the ability to solve puzzles in any manner, but instead gave points for solving it most appropriately for your class.
The puzzles in QFG series were also quite easy compared to other adventure games - they only didn't make sense if you didn't have the manual or if you tended to skip conversations. However, you still needed to complete most of them in order to advance the plot.
Ubuntu was easier and more familiar to use then vista
Vista is familiar to me since I've looked at based comparisons between Windows XP and Vista before launch, and because I've also been using Dos/Windows for quite a long time. They also didn't change anything too critical. If Vista is less familiar than Ubuntu (even when you've been using Windows), there must be something else to your opinion.
Like the GP said, switching from Dos/Windows to Linux is a paradigm shift, in the same way you switch from Wordperfect 5.1 to Microsoft Word. The only difference is that ALT-F4 reacts very differently in Microsoft Word, as opposed to the expected behaviour of selecting a block of text.
UAC is also what's responsible for the Program Files change which, as a developer of commercial software, came as a surprise and an annoyance.
It's not that you can't write to Program Files after the product is installed, it's that windows silently reroutes all interacation withe Program Files via a virtual disk store under the user's "Documents and Settings" area. The user is none the wiser. The application is none the wiser. BUT the moment User2 comes along and runs the app, he doesn't get the config file that User1 has edited, oh no, he gets the original one, the one User1 spent hours creating has been hidden away by windows.
Or you can store the configuration file in the user's Application Data folder.
Given that Windows XP was available for at least 5-years, and that it was transitioning the traditional "full-access desktop" to "limited-access", there was plenty of time to prepare for users no longer having that level of access. In fact, most corporate environments don't give full system access, and some are even further locked down by preventing right-clicking.
If it's imperative that all users have full write access to the main application folder, just modify the security descriptors to allow normal users write access. This is easily done in the install process, which is guarenteed to have admin privilages.
BTW, it's not that hidden. If you go into the program directory, there's a link to the compatability files.
PunkBuster requires elevation for multiplayer - otherwise it drops you from the server. The latest versions of Punkbuster may have a background service that's already elevated, but I don't have confirmation on that.
There were complaints about PunkBuster when it first required Admin privilages, mainly concerning use at cyber cafes or places where the user shouldn't have full access to the system.
Contextual ads aren't that contextual. If a given site indicates that they don't want adult-rated material, you can be damn sure that you'll see undressed woman models posing as individuals from your local area, regardless of what else you can find.
At the cost of being slower, making the entire kernel slower, bigger, and buggier, making it harder to adopt new methods and implementations unless their API is compatible, and generally making working on the Linux kernel (as a developer) much harder, so users get less features slower.
That's not quite the reason behind not implementing the stable interface, as I discovered in another thread. The real issue is dependant on the C compiler version and kernel build options which kill compatibility with binary modules, and it's an issue with Linux because of the nature of the kernel. BTW, size doesn't translate into slowness or bugginess - those two are related to bad design rather than simply having more code or "too many functions". It may make the code less maintainable, however.
Even so, you still have to have the driver as a slightly seperate component from the kernal, even if it isn't a via a publically stable API. As you can tell, the kernal is always under development and even if developers are careful, it only takes one undiscovered bug to crash a driver - and if it's kernel level, it brings down the system. (This can happen anytime.)
For everything else, there's already a standard interface through/dev/* for most of the devices, which works if the device doesn't need high performance. That system was used for mice before HID-compliant USB mice were available, and with only a few exceptions, can be a centre for any virtual driver you want.
If the answer to either of these is no, it's not really relevant, now is it?
The first reference to my network card is here (did you confuse the display driver with the network driver?)
Also, does the situation change if the answers to the questions are "yes"? It won't if the issue can't be reproduced on another system, or if I can't track down the issue myself. (Speaking of which, I haven't seen that problem for a while, which makes me wonder what happened.)
I think you need to work on your reading comprehension. Why do you think this is relevant?
Because you mentioned low-quality unstable drivers.
As you know, an unstable application with full access can crash the system if it's allowed to continue. The most basic protection, known as memory segmentation, allows any failure to be contained within that one program instance. You can apply this protection to kernel level drivers to also contain any damage they can perform.
Your network card stops working, but Windows restarts it, right? My network card simply doesn't stop working. How exactly are these the same?
If my network card driver fails, attempting to restart the driver crashes the system (although plugging the network cable into the other port works fine.) While I know this is more of a hardware issue, it seems that the driver is expecting a response from the network card and the delay somehow interferes with other devices on the system.
It's not as bad as a failing keyboard driver - especially on an OS that required you to write your own if you wanted to check when a key was pressed/released.
We don't want that support. Those vendors have a tendency to produce low-quality drivers, and reduce the overall stability of the system.
This is countered with a simple rule - if it malfunctions or stalls, it no longer executes.
In the current state, Windows Vista can alert the user to a malfunctioning driver or device (in my case, it states nvlddmkm has failed and been restarted.) If a hardware driver is malfunctioning, the kernel can kill it and send a message to the appropriate monitoring program that a driver has crashed.
With 24 FPS on a 60 Hz monitor, you render two frames every five monitor refreshes. Naturally, this won't be smooth since it generally means frames are displayed for either 2 or 3 frames depending on the cycle.
A better comparison would be 30 FPS and 60 FPS, or some other value that's exactly half of the monitor refresh rate. (Here's one: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1069482). While I notice at least some choppiness in 30FPS, it's tolerable. However, the 24FPS looks incredibly choppy.
Yeah, good luck playing any of those while running an installer on your PC.
I got a dual-core system, and if the installer still causes interference with the game, I can still adjust the priority using task manager.
HL2 uses only one core, and even when it has a higher priority over the installer, it won't block it for too long.
I'd be happy just to be able to play HL2 without stripping Windows down to the bone before running it, never mind while an installer is running.
HL2 works fine for me, even with background applications... Does your system meet the recommended requirements for the game, and have at least 2GB of Ram?
Sure there is. It's called The Real World. Stunning graphics,
Detailed, yes, but not stunning. While there are some places where it is stunning, the day-to-day portion is considered mundane concrete jungle.
no artificial intelligence, but lots of real intelligence.
I noticed you italicized the word "real"... Sarcasm?
In any case, the non-intelligent portion is much more dominant than the real intelligence. For example, most schools feel it's better to hold students back and place as much homework as possible in hopes that the student will learn the material they already mastered. Naturally, that problem cascades into much more serious problems later, since it leaves some students unprepared.
When you were a teenager, did you do two sports, take 7 rigorous classes, participate on a robotics team, do science bowl, have many hours of homework every night, and also attempt to have a life?
Is that considered normal? If so, then teenagers who have free time aren't being worked hard enough to their "full potential". Just remember how to cure Burnout when the teenagers eventually realize that their current position isn't going to help advance their status, career, or future.
Some teenagers recognize useless grinding for what it is - and begin to skip any "useless" assignments. However, it develops into a procrastination habit which bites into legitimate learning material - since teenagers don't yet have a full picture on what they need, they drop the hard material and try specializing in what they can. In some cases, they don't study since they perceive sufficient knowledge of the material even after a low ranking on a few tests in a row. (And courses that train study methods - those don't last either.)
Why not? PC games comparable to the console games you mention on average have much longer install periods than console games. Bioshock, HL2, Crysis, etc, all had long install times, much longer than the 10 or 15 minutes that something like Metal Gear Solid 4 took to install on the PS3.
PCs are multitasking, right? If you want, you can play a game while the installer progresses - such as Bioshock, HL2, Crysis, etc since they can run in windowed mode. Alternativly, you can play multiple games at once, especially with the advent of browser games. If the installer is properly written, you can also see the taskbar slot blink when it needs to have the second CD/DVD inserted.
Then that program should come with a manifest file which describes this requirement.
Actually, those programs weren't designed with Vista in mind. When it is blocked, the operating system simply decides that the program shouldn't run and simply cancels the execution before it starts.
A temporary elevation of rights for a single process (and its children) is the goal here, and it appears UAC only elevates a specific action, not the process containing it.
On some apps, it's a per application basis. One example is opening a command prompt by right-clicking it and choosing "Run as administrator", which allows you to run any command or activity with elevated permissions.
With Windows Vista, I do have specific complaints about UAC elevation: - It's an automatic prompt on some applications (i.e. anything called Setup.exe triggers UAC even when it isn't required.) - If you block UAC on some programs, the program doesn't even attempt to run. In some cases, this is inappropriate since the program in question doesn't require those additional privilages or is semi-capable of running without them. - If you run one elevated command, any subprocesses it creates have full access. You can use this to temporarily disable UAC, but... - For Windows Explorer, it only does elevation for one task. In some cases, the elevated permissions need to persist a bit more to do what you want. - Also in Windows Explorer, it sometimes interprets a file already being in use as a necessity to use UAC (consequently causing the filer operation to fail again.) - It bumped the "Run As" prompt, which prevents running applications through other accounts.
This feature is easily disabled in the control panel. Of course, you might as well login to a Linux box as root.
I could, for example, give flamboyant answers, injecting deliberate grammatical errors into my responses, demonstrate extreme mood swings, etc.
In theory, those could be emulated by the computer. - If a human does flamboyant answers from time to time, the AI can easily do the same. (e.g. have a 25% chance per session of going rogue and start making wild claims such as an alien invasion). In a way, flamboyant answers generally ignore context and aside from repeating an already used answer, it's very difficult to tell the difference here. - Gramattical errors were already attempted. One bot was designed to appear to have a very minimal grasp of the english language, that he almost passed as a human. However, they noticed that the bot was sometimes missing the context of the conversation. - For extreme mood swings, see flamboyant answers. However, these are actually a bit more effective since emotions are a bit harder to handle by a computer (and more easily tripped up by an AI.)
Beta means "it may change without warning". With traditional apps you have a choice to upgrade or not, but not with web applications.
While some traditional applications may give a choice in upgrading, those apps are ultimately trying to force the upgrade. For example, developing for Windows 9x is more difficult than Windows XP, since MSVC will try to default to code optimized for the newer operating system.
The only case where you have a "true" choice is if there's a rollback function, as with the Xp/Vista driver update system. Traditional apps tend to resist this, by insisting they won't update a newer version or by not allowing a rollback.
First, students cannot be punished for failing to abide by any "code of conduct" while off campus.
From the summary: A federal judge has ruled that a school district didn't violate a student's free speech rights when it suspended her for a parody MySpace page she created calling her principal a sex addict who "hits on students".
The act in question may have occurred off campus property - however, it is within jurisdiction of the school since it targets the principal within his official capacity, and is likely provided to other members within the campus. Also, accusations like that are extremely damaging to the institution, and as a result they may take necessary steps to prevent said damage (see laws concerning slander/libel in the appropriate state for more information.)
The summary also mentions that it's a "parody Myspace" page. Depending on how it's done (e.g. an earlier version of http://weeklyradioaddress.com/, which copied the layout of the original site), it may appear to be directly from the principal or campus. In those cases, it's automatically their jurisdiction since it's pretends to be campus-related.
By the way - did you see the MySpace page in question? It didn't appear linked on a quick glance, and as such there's a lot of context missing.
Second, it's not clear whether there was sufficient evidence of libel in this case or not, and even if there was, being a minor the punishment would probably not be particularly severe.
A page like that is evidence of libel - it shows the act of libel itself. Unless the student has something that wasn't published, it's also done without intent of checking accuracy - possibly out of malice. Given the few first paragraphs of the article, it appears the student was claiming it was "off-campus" rather than it not happening or that it was someone else.
Third, minors do have full constitutional rights,
So do adults. In this case, the principal has the right not to be cruelly and unusually punished when knee-jerk reactionists throw him in jail and put him on a sex-offender list. There's already more than enough stories where students accuse principals for shits and giggles, while remaining immune to any real punishment, and neither the campus nor the principal want another story added to the growing list.
"... but what other explanation is there for Firefox, Netscape, Windoze, or other programs to keep INSISTING that I MUST upgrade my software immediately OR ELSE face dire consequences?"
That's because morons like you, with vintage software, are responsible for all the hundreds of thousands of bots flooding the net with spam and other nasty stuff.
Computers get infected because users auto-click on everything. If anything, vintage software is resistant to these attacks, since they don't allow Javascript to run (and thus are immune to the exploit which uses an infinite Javascript loop to force download a package.) In addition, they don't auto-dump downloaded files onto a location where they can be easily executed (i.e. they don't create a second "My Computer" icon.)
Speaking of updates, an upgrade for Firefox 2 caused the browser to crash frequently. While this could be avoided by upgrading to Firefox 3, the "Check for updates" doesn't detect that version of Firefox. It's also a "data-loss" type upgrade, since you lose information on when you last visited a certain site in the list of bookmarks.
If anybody on your design team suggests that restricting the player's ability to save the game would make your title "unique" or "challenging", sack them.
A game with restricted or no saved games needs to be designed differently than one that does. The same applies to games that are meant to be played where you aren't supposed to reload saves more than once.
For example, Angband gives the player an infinite amount of time to become as powerful as possible (ignoring the Ironman setting.) Because of this, the player is generally expected to collect as most resistances and also have means to get a second wind (e.g. healing potions.) Giving free saving/reloading would unbalance the game well in favour of the player, thus making the end-boss look like a small fry opponent that doesn't cause much harm. Other games with restricted saves include most horizontal/vertical shmups - saving the game would defeat the purpose of most of them.
On the other end of the scale, you shouldn't need to save the game after every single step. My example de jour is King's Quest III remake - going to the village requires you to exactly navigate the character down a winding path (part of which is occluded). After clearing that screen, most normal people don't expect that you can still fall off the path and will have to reload a save before going down the winding mountain path.
You didn't answer the "Now, what have you done to make your claim?" question.
Of course, if you believe it collapsed through controlled demolition, you'd probably be able to explain how they managed to install the necessary explosives - within the five days after the the bomb sniffing dogs were taken off-site, and without being detected loading and unloading the quantity of explosives required. If you need reference, look at the inside job done at Hudson's.
that also mandates that the speed of the collapse was WAY too fast if the official domino collapse of the towers were true. The inertia of the large mass of the buildings below the crash sites should have slowed the rate of collapse significantly. The videos of collapse instead show that it took place in the same amount of time that a free falling object tossed from the roof buildings would have taken.
The second rule is to do math. From these frames, it started at second 3, and ended on second 16, totalling 13 seconds with.5 seconds of error. If it were free fall, the start point is 830m above ground, which is 190m higher than the world's tallest building. An object tossed from the top of the tower would take 10 seconds to hit the ground.
The third rule is to know what you measure. I measured from where the dust cloud started to grow rapidly until no further downward movement is visible, which is valid but different from a definition of collapse where any debris touches the ground. I also measured with two significant digits.
Anything that outputs volume already has a volume slider, why do I need another one?
Some applications and/or games forget something this simple. While they do allow "muting", they assume that the host environment (i.e. Adobe Flash) already provides a volume control. In some other cases, the volume control is logarithmic rather than linear, resulting in sounds being too loud for a "middle" setting.
This alone isn't a reason to use PulseAudio, but rather to use that feature.
Lots of things corrupt, and not one of us is entirely uncorrupted. Power just happens to be one of the most reliable corrupters, and because the very desire to HAVE power is already corruption... well the more you get, the more corrupt you must become.
The examples I gave aren't as rare as you'd like them to be - especially when compared side-by-side. Power causes no corruption. You may be as powerful as you want, but you ultimately will lose power when you die. Immunity (or perception thereof) causes corruption, since there are no issues from any activity you can do.
When you compare the examples side-by-side, you have a CEO of a major corporation, and an anonymous Internet troll. One of these is powerful, but the other has immunity. The CEO of said corporation, since he has to answer to shareholders, isn't corrupt (or if he is, won't remain CEO over the long term.) The anonymous troll can fling about links to various shock sites with impunity without worry about being punished, and is highly corrupt.
While power may appear to be the corrupter, it's only a correlation. As you know, the various school/mall shootings appear to have an individual with enough power to inflict damage (in these cases, a firearm) and picks defenceless targets. However, the actual problem is that they are immune to retaliation - they already have nothing to lose, and planned on causing as much damage as possible before taking their own life.
Power only reliably corrupts if it is linked with immunity, and even then, it's not the power doing the work. If you remove immunity, people will only be as corrupt as their own nature.
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This isn't a new concept, and they are simply competing with other platforms that give the same ability to download games in the background while you play.
I also believe that the same concept came to programmers who had to deal with a 56K modem, and decompress the .ZIP files. Given that files in .ZIP can be stored in any order, there isn't really a good reason why the most important bits of a .ZIP are placed first as opposed to being in alphabetical/random order. However, a lack of knowledge/tools of the other developers tended to make this the case.
The Quest for Glory series is pretty free of those kinds of puzzles. At least I think it is, it could be that my familiarity with them makes bizarre puzzles seem logical to me. But most of the puzzles can be solved in multiple ways depending on your character, which would preclude having many puzzles with unique and bizarre solutions.
With QFG3/4, there were changes on how the characters could handle the puzzles, and this is unavoidable even if you could solve it in another fashion. This was basically caused by two of the classes (i.e. Wizard and Paladin) having abilities not available to the other classes, and also to help cut-down on the "Jack-of-all-trades" that you could to in QFG1. QFG5 mostly brought back the ability to solve puzzles in any manner, but instead gave points for solving it most appropriately for your class.
The puzzles in QFG series were also quite easy compared to other adventure games - they only didn't make sense if you didn't have the manual or if you tended to skip conversations. However, you still needed to complete most of them in order to advance the plot.
Ubuntu was easier and more familiar to use then vista
Vista is familiar to me since I've looked at based comparisons between Windows XP and Vista before launch, and because I've also been using Dos/Windows for quite a long time. They also didn't change anything too critical. If Vista is less familiar than Ubuntu (even when you've been using Windows), there must be something else to your opinion.
Like the GP said, switching from Dos/Windows to Linux is a paradigm shift, in the same way you switch from Wordperfect 5.1 to Microsoft Word. The only difference is that ALT-F4 reacts very differently in Microsoft Word, as opposed to the expected behaviour of selecting a block of text.
UAC is also what's responsible for the Program Files change which, as a developer of commercial software, came as a surprise and an annoyance.
It's not that you can't write to Program Files after the product is installed, it's that windows silently reroutes all interacation withe Program Files via a virtual disk store under the user's "Documents and Settings" area. The user is none the wiser. The application is none the wiser. BUT the moment User2 comes along and runs the app, he doesn't get the config file that User1 has edited, oh no, he gets the original one, the one User1 spent hours creating has been hidden away by windows.
Or you can store the configuration file in the user's Application Data folder.
Given that Windows XP was available for at least 5-years, and that it was transitioning the traditional "full-access desktop" to "limited-access", there was plenty of time to prepare for users no longer having that level of access. In fact, most corporate environments don't give full system access, and some are even further locked down by preventing right-clicking.
If it's imperative that all users have full write access to the main application folder, just modify the security descriptors to allow normal users write access. This is easily done in the install process, which is guarenteed to have admin privilages.
BTW, it's not that hidden. If you go into the program directory, there's a link to the compatability files.
PunkBuster requires elevation for multiplayer - otherwise it drops you from the server. The latest versions of Punkbuster may have a background service that's already elevated, but I don't have confirmation on that.
There were complaints about PunkBuster when it first required Admin privilages, mainly concerning use at cyber cafes or places where the user shouldn't have full access to the system.
Contextual ads aren't that contextual. If a given site indicates that they don't want adult-rated material, you can be damn sure that you'll see undressed woman models posing as individuals from your local area, regardless of what else you can find.
At the cost of being slower, making the entire kernel slower, bigger, and buggier, making it harder to adopt new methods and implementations unless their API is compatible, and generally making working on the Linux kernel (as a developer) much harder, so users get less features slower.
That's not quite the reason behind not implementing the stable interface, as I discovered in another thread. The real issue is dependant on the C compiler version and kernel build options which kill compatibility with binary modules, and it's an issue with Linux because of the nature of the kernel. BTW, size doesn't translate into slowness or bugginess - those two are related to bad design rather than simply having more code or "too many functions". It may make the code less maintainable, however.
Even so, you still have to have the driver as a slightly seperate component from the kernal, even if it isn't a via a publically stable API. As you can tell, the kernal is always under development and even if developers are careful, it only takes one undiscovered bug to crash a driver - and if it's kernel level, it brings down the system. (This can happen anytime.)
For everything else, there's already a standard interface through /dev/* for most of the devices, which works if the device doesn't need high performance. That system was used for mice before HID-compliant USB mice were available, and with only a few exceptions, can be a centre for any virtual driver you want.
If the answer to either of these is no, it's not really relevant, now is it?
The first reference to my network card is here (did you confuse the display driver with the network driver?)
Also, does the situation change if the answers to the questions are "yes"? It won't if the issue can't be reproduced on another system, or if I can't track down the issue myself. (Speaking of which, I haven't seen that problem for a while, which makes me wonder what happened.)
I think you need to work on your reading comprehension. Why do you think this is relevant?
Because you mentioned low-quality unstable drivers.
As you know, an unstable application with full access can crash the system if it's allowed to continue. The most basic protection, known as memory segmentation, allows any failure to be contained within that one program instance. You can apply this protection to kernel level drivers to also contain any damage they can perform.
Your network card stops working, but Windows restarts it, right? My network card simply doesn't stop working. How exactly are these the same?
If my network card driver fails, attempting to restart the driver crashes the system (although plugging the network cable into the other port works fine.) While I know this is more of a hardware issue, it seems that the driver is expecting a response from the network card and the delay somehow interferes with other devices on the system.
It's not as bad as a failing keyboard driver - especially on an OS that required you to write your own if you wanted to check when a key was pressed/released.
We don't want that support. Those vendors have a tendency to produce low-quality drivers, and reduce the overall stability of the system.
This is countered with a simple rule - if it malfunctions or stalls, it no longer executes.
In the current state, Windows Vista can alert the user to a malfunctioning driver or device (in my case, it states nvlddmkm has failed and been restarted.) If a hardware driver is malfunctioning, the kernel can kill it and send a message to the appropriate monitoring program that a driver has crashed.
With 24 FPS on a 60 Hz monitor, you render two frames every five monitor refreshes. Naturally, this won't be smooth since it generally means frames are displayed for either 2 or 3 frames depending on the cycle.
A better comparison would be 30 FPS and 60 FPS, or some other value that's exactly half of the monitor refresh rate. (Here's one: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1069482). While I notice at least some choppiness in 30FPS, it's tolerable. However, the 24FPS looks incredibly choppy.
Yeah, good luck playing any of those while running an installer on your PC.
I got a dual-core system, and if the installer still causes interference with the game, I can still adjust the priority using task manager.
HL2 uses only one core, and even when it has a higher priority over the installer, it won't block it for too long.
I'd be happy just to be able to play HL2 without stripping Windows down to the bone before running it, never mind while an installer is running.
HL2 works fine for me, even with background applications... Does your system meet the recommended requirements for the game, and have at least 2GB of Ram?
Sure there is. It's called The Real World. Stunning graphics,
Detailed, yes, but not stunning. While there are some places where it is stunning, the day-to-day portion is considered mundane concrete jungle.
no artificial intelligence, but lots of real intelligence.
I noticed you italicized the word "real"... Sarcasm?
In any case, the non-intelligent portion is much more dominant than the real intelligence. For example, most schools feel it's better to hold students back and place as much homework as possible in hopes that the student will learn the material they already mastered. Naturally, that problem cascades into much more serious problems later, since it leaves some students unprepared.
When you were a teenager, did you do two sports, take 7 rigorous classes, participate on a robotics team, do science bowl, have many hours of homework every night, and also attempt to have a life?
Is that considered normal? If so, then teenagers who have free time aren't being worked hard enough to their "full potential". Just remember how to cure Burnout when the teenagers eventually realize that their current position isn't going to help advance their status, career, or future.
Some teenagers recognize useless grinding for what it is - and begin to skip any "useless" assignments. However, it develops into a procrastination habit which bites into legitimate learning material - since teenagers don't yet have a full picture on what they need, they drop the hard material and try specializing in what they can. In some cases, they don't study since they perceive sufficient knowledge of the material even after a low ranking on a few tests in a row. (And courses that train study methods - those don't last either.)
Why not? PC games comparable to the console games you mention on average have much longer install periods than console games. Bioshock, HL2, Crysis, etc, all had long install times, much longer than the 10 or 15 minutes that something like Metal Gear Solid 4 took to install on the PS3.
PCs are multitasking, right? If you want, you can play a game while the installer progresses - such as Bioshock, HL2, Crysis, etc since they can run in windowed mode. Alternativly, you can play multiple games at once, especially with the advent of browser games. If the installer is properly written, you can also see the taskbar slot blink when it needs to have the second CD/DVD inserted.
I know you're joking, but that's a checksum digit: http://www.beachnet.com/~hstiles/cardtype.html
You can easily get that from reverse engineering.
Then that program should come with a manifest file which describes this requirement.
Actually, those programs weren't designed with Vista in mind. When it is blocked, the operating system simply decides that the program shouldn't run and simply cancels the execution before it starts.
A temporary elevation of rights for a single process (and its children) is the goal here, and it appears UAC only elevates a specific action, not the process containing it.
On some apps, it's a per application basis. One example is opening a command prompt by right-clicking it and choosing "Run as administrator", which allows you to run any command or activity with elevated permissions.
With Windows Vista, I do have specific complaints about UAC elevation:
- It's an automatic prompt on some applications (i.e. anything called Setup.exe triggers UAC even when it isn't required.)
- If you block UAC on some programs, the program doesn't even attempt to run. In some cases, this is inappropriate since the program in question doesn't require those additional privilages or is semi-capable of running without them.
- If you run one elevated command, any subprocesses it creates have full access. You can use this to temporarily disable UAC, but...
- For Windows Explorer, it only does elevation for one task. In some cases, the elevated permissions need to persist a bit more to do what you want.
- Also in Windows Explorer, it sometimes interprets a file already being in use as a necessity to use UAC (consequently causing the filer operation to fail again.)
- It bumped the "Run As" prompt, which prevents running applications through other accounts.
This feature is easily disabled in the control panel. Of course, you might as well login to a Linux box as root.
I could, for example, give flamboyant answers, injecting deliberate grammatical errors into my responses, demonstrate extreme mood swings, etc.
In theory, those could be emulated by the computer.
- If a human does flamboyant answers from time to time, the AI can easily do the same. (e.g. have a 25% chance per session of going rogue and start making wild claims such as an alien invasion). In a way, flamboyant answers generally ignore context and aside from repeating an already used answer, it's very difficult to tell the difference here.
- Gramattical errors were already attempted. One bot was designed to appear to have a very minimal grasp of the english language, that he almost passed as a human. However, they noticed that the bot was sometimes missing the context of the conversation.
- For extreme mood swings, see flamboyant answers. However, these are actually a bit more effective since emotions are a bit harder to handle by a computer (and more easily tripped up by an AI.)
Beta means "it may change without warning". With traditional apps you have a choice to upgrade or not, but not with web applications.
While some traditional applications may give a choice in upgrading, those apps are ultimately trying to force the upgrade. For example, developing for Windows 9x is more difficult than Windows XP, since MSVC will try to default to code optimized for the newer operating system.
The only case where you have a "true" choice is if there's a rollback function, as with the Xp/Vista driver update system. Traditional apps tend to resist this, by insisting they won't update a newer version or by not allowing a rollback.
First, students cannot be punished for failing to abide by any "code of conduct" while off campus.
From the summary: A federal judge has ruled that a school district didn't violate a student's free speech rights when it suspended her for a parody MySpace page she created calling her principal a sex addict who "hits on students".
The act in question may have occurred off campus property - however, it is within jurisdiction of the school since it targets the principal within his official capacity, and is likely provided to other members within the campus. Also, accusations like that are extremely damaging to the institution, and as a result they may take necessary steps to prevent said damage (see laws concerning slander/libel in the appropriate state for more information.)
The summary also mentions that it's a "parody Myspace" page. Depending on how it's done (e.g. an earlier version of http://weeklyradioaddress.com/, which copied the layout of the original site), it may appear to be directly from the principal or campus. In those cases, it's automatically their jurisdiction since it's pretends to be campus-related.
By the way - did you see the MySpace page in question? It didn't appear linked on a quick glance, and as such there's a lot of context missing.
Second, it's not clear whether there was sufficient evidence of libel in this case or not, and even if there was, being a minor the punishment would probably not be particularly severe.
A page like that is evidence of libel - it shows the act of libel itself. Unless the student has something that wasn't published, it's also done without intent of checking accuracy - possibly out of malice. Given the few first paragraphs of the article, it appears the student was claiming it was "off-campus" rather than it not happening or that it was someone else.
Third, minors do have full constitutional rights,
So do adults. In this case, the principal has the right not to be cruelly and unusually punished when knee-jerk reactionists throw him in jail and put him on a sex-offender list. There's already more than enough stories where students accuse principals for shits and giggles, while remaining immune to any real punishment, and neither the campus nor the principal want another story added to the growing list.
"... but what other explanation is there for Firefox, Netscape, Windoze, or other programs to keep INSISTING that I MUST upgrade my software immediately OR ELSE face dire consequences?"
That's because morons like you, with vintage software, are responsible for all the hundreds of thousands of bots flooding the net with spam and other nasty stuff.
Computers get infected because users auto-click on everything. If anything, vintage software is resistant to these attacks, since they don't allow Javascript to run (and thus are immune to the exploit which uses an infinite Javascript loop to force download a package.) In addition, they don't auto-dump downloaded files onto a location where they can be easily executed (i.e. they don't create a second "My Computer" icon.)
Speaking of updates, an upgrade for Firefox 2 caused the browser to crash frequently. While this could be avoided by upgrading to Firefox 3, the "Check for updates" doesn't detect that version of Firefox. It's also a "data-loss" type upgrade, since you lose information on when you last visited a certain site in the list of bookmarks.
If anybody on your design team suggests that restricting the player's ability to save the game would make your title "unique" or "challenging", sack them.
A game with restricted or no saved games needs to be designed differently than one that does. The same applies to games that are meant to be played where you aren't supposed to reload saves more than once.
For example, Angband gives the player an infinite amount of time to become as powerful as possible (ignoring the Ironman setting.) Because of this, the player is generally expected to collect as most resistances and also have means to get a second wind (e.g. healing potions.) Giving free saving/reloading would unbalance the game well in favour of the player, thus making the end-boss look like a small fry opponent that doesn't cause much harm. Other games with restricted saves include most horizontal/vertical shmups - saving the game would defeat the purpose of most of them.
On the other end of the scale, you shouldn't need to save the game after every single step. My example de jour is King's Quest III remake - going to the village requires you to exactly navigate the character down a winding path (part of which is occluded). After clearing that screen, most normal people don't expect that you can still fall off the path and will have to reload a save before going down the winding mountain path.
You didn't answer the "Now, what have you done to make your claim?" question.
Of course, if you believe it collapsed through controlled demolition, you'd probably be able to explain how they managed to install the necessary explosives - within the five days after the the bomb sniffing dogs were taken off-site, and without being detected loading and unloading the quantity of explosives required. If you need reference, look at the inside job done at Hudson's.
...Its simple physics....
that also mandates that the speed of the collapse was WAY too fast if the official domino collapse of the towers were true. The inertia of the large mass of the buildings below the crash sites should have slowed the rate of collapse significantly. The videos of collapse instead show that it took place in the same amount of time that a free falling object tossed from the roof buildings would have taken.
Speaking of simple physics: The first rule is to measure. You can do that to +/- .5 seconds at: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/videos/ntc_frames.html
The second rule is to do math. From these frames, it started at second 3, and ended on second 16, totalling 13 seconds with .5 seconds of error. If it were free fall, the start point is 830m above ground, which is 190m higher than the world's tallest building. An object tossed from the top of the tower would take 10 seconds to hit the ground.
The third rule is to know what you measure. I measured from where the dust cloud started to grow rapidly until no further downward movement is visible, which is valid but different from a definition of collapse where any debris touches the ground. I also measured with two significant digits.
Now, what have you done to make your claim?
Anything that outputs volume already has a volume slider, why do I need another one?
Some applications and/or games forget something this simple. While they do allow "muting", they assume that the host environment (i.e. Adobe Flash) already provides a volume control. In some other cases, the volume control is logarithmic rather than linear, resulting in sounds being too loud for a "middle" setting.
This alone isn't a reason to use PulseAudio, but rather to use that feature.
Lots of things corrupt, and not one of us is entirely uncorrupted. Power just happens to be one of the most reliable corrupters, and because the very desire to HAVE power is already corruption... well the more you get, the more corrupt you must become.
The examples I gave aren't as rare as you'd like them to be - especially when compared side-by-side. Power causes no corruption. You may be as powerful as you want, but you ultimately will lose power when you die. Immunity (or perception thereof) causes corruption, since there are no issues from any activity you can do.
When you compare the examples side-by-side, you have a CEO of a major corporation, and an anonymous Internet troll. One of these is powerful, but the other has immunity. The CEO of said corporation, since he has to answer to shareholders, isn't corrupt (or if he is, won't remain CEO over the long term.) The anonymous troll can fling about links to various shock sites with impunity without worry about being punished, and is highly corrupt.
While power may appear to be the corrupter, it's only a correlation. As you know, the various school/mall shootings appear to have an individual with enough power to inflict damage (in these cases, a firearm) and picks defenceless targets. However, the actual problem is that they are immune to retaliation - they already have nothing to lose, and planned on causing as much damage as possible before taking their own life.
Power only reliably corrupts if it is linked with immunity, and even then, it's not the power doing the work. If you remove immunity, people will only be as corrupt as their own nature.