And who would you say covers "the big stuff" in better detail? The BBC News site has strength in both breadth and depth, and I've yet to come across any site that's anywhere near as comprehensive. If you've found better then why not share with us please?
What bit of "Bollywood isn't exactly overly blessed with quality" did you find ambiguous then?
I wasn't trying to slag off Hollywood, I was merely trying to point out that Hollywood's just as capable of producing dross as any other film industry in the world.
Yeah? And how many of those Bollywood films with Hindi dialogue have you seen playing at your local multiplex? Unless they live in an area that has a huge Asian population, how much choice over whether they watch a Hollywood film or a Bollywood film does the typical North American, European or Australasian movie-goer get?
In fact, how many non-American productions even get a look-in in the US? The odd British or Australian film, perhaps, but I'd bet that 95+ percent of the US movie-going public has a choice of Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood or Hollywood.
Your not so-veiled insinuation that Hollywood is the wine whilst Bollywood is the vinegar is flawed. For every Godfather or Shawshank Redemption there are dozens movies as dire as Battlefield Earth or Batman Returns.
Bollywood isn't exactly overly blessed with quality but Hollywood is exactly the same in at regard.
If the trolls on IMDb try to use the logic that one films sucks because another did better in the box office you seem to be twistig that logic entirely: that popularity automatically denotes inferority.
OK, so that's true for UT2004. That's one game out of how many? Go ahead, find another ten games that are that straightforward to install under Linux. There will still be hundreds that aren't, and that's the point.
I'm not badmouthing something when I don't have the information, I'm simply pointing out the accurate fact that gaming on Linux is a lot more complex than gaming on Windows and almost always involves some user input and/or configuration beyond "click, click, click, play". The fact that the example that you mention involves dropping down to the command line only proves my point.
It's called gambling for a reason: sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. Unless you're mentally deficient then you know that you've got less chance of winning than losing. Duh.
Casinos seem morally irresponsible to me, letting people run up debt to the point where they put a burdon on society in order to make a profit. I'm sure this is an argument for another place at another time, but that's how I feel.
I'm sorry, but in the US couldn't you apply that label to hospitals too? Medical bills that run into 5 or 6 figures aren't uncommon and it's a sad fact that the biggest factor in personal bankrupcy in the US is unpaid (and, more importantly, unpayable) medical bills.
And, out of interest, where do you draw the line at what is and what isn't gambling? Is playing the lottery gambling? And in a so-called "free" society, shouldn't you be able to do what you want with your hard-earned cash? Does anyone really have the right to tell you how you can and can't use it to entertain (and possibly enrich) yourself if you're not hurting anyone else in the process?
To be honest, I'm not in favour of unchecked gambling, but then I'm not in favour of unchecked alcohol abuse either, but you don't see church and state bringing the roof down on that ballgame, do you?
Sorry but you're displaying your ignorance. Gambling is legal in most societies, and in some (eg, Hong Kong) it's a common activity that the majority of the population enjoy.
Betting on the result of a sporting event, or anything else, via a legally authorised bookmaker is no more shady than having a cup of coffee.
Just because you have this image of gambling that seems to be more to do with smoke-filled secret back rooms where you have to know the password and the guy behind the bar to get in than legitimate, publicly-traded and -scrutinied businesses that doesn't make it a reality.
The gambling sites being DDOSed aren't run by crooks, they're the legitimate and legal online presences of bricks-and-mortar bookmakers as well as internet gambling start-ups.
Windows may not have been designed to be a gaming platform, any more than it was designed to be any other kind of platform, but gaming has been around on PCs since way before Windows was around.
We've evolved past the point where you needed to know how to configure autoexec.bat, config.sys and QEMM to get a DOS-based game to run properly and we've now progressed to the point where you install a game, it self detects your hardware, tells you if it needs updated Windows components (requires DirectX version x, installs that other software once you give it the go-ahead, and is ready to run.
From hours of messing around to a few simple clicks: don't underestimate the amount of credit that sort of simplicity deserves for the PC gaming market being so big today. Even so, that's a heck of a lot more interaction than is involved in getting a PS2 or other console game up and running.
Yet compare that to the situation under Linux. If you're an expert, have plenty of time on your hands and enjoy a challenge then I'm sure you've got no problem trying to get games to work. But if you're not an expert, or don't have the time or don't enjoy hitting your head against a brick wall a few dozen times then Linux is not the gaming platform for you.
Maybe to people higher up the distribution chain, including the manufacturer? Those chips may have cost $0.02 to produce but you conveniently forget that the first chip cost several orders of magnitude more than that to make. You didn't think that fabrication plants grew on trees, did you?
As other people have pointed out elsewhere in the broader discussion, major contibutions from for-profit software companies have bankrolled the Mozilla/Firefox development teams.
It's not like the full-time coders who worked on those open source projects weren't being paid, it's just that the people paying them weren't the people who most visibly benefited from their work (ie, the end-users).
As for conditions that nobody else is subject to, well, just about every other browser out there is funded or subsidised by other products (it's true for MSIE, Mozilla/Firefox, Netscape, Safari), so Opera are playing a slightly different ballgame because their success and failure is totally dependent on creating a great product, whereas their competitors could put out a complete wreck (or do nothing at all) and still be no worse off.
Anyway, the post that you objected to was aimed at those people who insist that anything not open source is somehow evil. Talk of whip hands and whatever else are entirely inappropriate when you're talking about one of the most ethically run closed source software companies around. Like I pointed out earlier, if Opera were one of the bad guys then they would have software patented everything up to the hilt and Firefox would look like nothing more than a MSIE clone with a fraction of the feature set.
Gmail isn't an issue: fixed in Opera 8, which has a very stable beta available right now.
Also, Opera 8 has a raft of other features, including an RSS reader, voice command support, etc. Some aspects of the UI have undergone minor changes but it's pretty much more cool features under the same roof - and it's still a smaller download than Firefox.
Because, frankly, Opera is better. If both Firefox and Opera were open source (or both closed source) then we wouldn't even be having this debate. 95 percent of Firefox's appeal over Opera is open source.
Well, gee, call me a fascist for using the better closed source product over the open source one.
Oh, and you don't have to look at the unobtrusive Google ads that Opera runs if you don't want to: all you have to do is shell out $20 to buy the thing. Yes, $20, which is less than the price of an average meal out.
As a long-time Opera user, I'll just point out that half the features that people rave about in Firefox were Opera innovations.
Like it or not, Opera is a great piece of software and it's helped to make Firefox a great piece of software. Had Opera the company been litiguous in nature, they could easily have stamped down on some of those borrowed features, but Opera is one of the good guys and, if I remember correctly, opposed to software patents, etc.
Yet you still choose to paint a picture of Opera that's negative with your talk of whip hands, etc. Well, newsflash for you buddy: they good people at Opera still have to put food on their own tables and roofs above their heads so I and others will continue to appreciate the hard work they put into what many people regard as the best browser (with in-built mail client, RSS reader, etc) available by putting our money where our mouths are.
The Mac Mini looks like it's the thing for me. I've never owned a Mac in my life - I've used a few in my time and I've been to a few Mac Expos with Mac-owning friends - but I think that's about to change.
This is the Mac for all of us who said Macs were too expensive. For around £400 (yeah, Apple just like the rest of them loves screwing non-Americans when it comes to exchange rates) I'll have a nice little toy that'll give me some first-hand experience of MacOS 10.4 plus my girlfriend will have a easy-to-use machine that she can play with when I'm hogging my PC.
Hopefully, it'll work with the PS/2 keyboards and mice that I've got lying around, if not then I suppose that I'll be shelling out for USB ones but that's no great loss.
Mark my words: these babies are going to sell like hot cakes.
No, I didn't talk about people being lynched literally, I chose my words more carefully than that and the exact phrase I used was "the 21st century equivalent of a lynching".
If either you or CaptainCarrot choose to interpret that as meaning an actual 'noose-round-the-neck' lynching then that's not my fault, is it?
Uh, that kid that I referred to in my first post in this thread received death threats. Doctors who work at abortion clinics regularly receive the same, some have their homes and families targetted by pro-lifers who refuse to acknowledge their legal rights and some have even been assassinated too.
If you were that kid wouldn't you be afraid? If you were one of the many doctors who work under such constant threats wouldn't you be afraid to tell casual acquaintances what you do for a living? Doesn't that sort of intimidation count as oppression to you?
You want to talk about 21st century lynchings? Well there they are.
My original point still stands: it's not just in Iran where people find themselves oppressed, and it's not just the state that's capable of oppression.
So it's not as easy as just typing my nick into Google: did I ever say it was? Again, just because you're too damn lazy or incapable of doing something that doesn't mean it's impossible.
Can you just go back to constantly calling me "dumbass"? Your conversation was far more cerebral then.
Does it really matter if the censorship is imposed by the state or the general population? If saying something out of turn is enough to get you the 21st century equivalent of a lynching by the moral majority then you're being just as oppressed as you would be if the state was the one doing it to you.
And, by the way, those were just examples. You don't think the current US administration has been taking action against those most vocally opposed to its PNAC agenda?
If you want to find out who I am, etc then use your browser and your brain and just do it. I didn't say that I gave that information out on request, I said that you could find it using nothing more than my Slashdot nickname. If you're too damn lazy to do that then that's your problem not mine.
Now, unless you've actually got something sensible to contribute, quit following me around Slashdot with these sad little AC comments that do nothing but reinforce my initial opinion of you.
Didn't Politically Incorrect get taken off the air because one of its presenters dared to say that flying a plane into a building was less cowardly than dropping a bomb on someone's head?
Seems like a clear case of someone being silenced because they had something unpopular to say.
Didn't a muslim student speaking at Harvard University receive threats of violence because he had titled his speech "My American Jihad", "jihad" being the islamic word for "struggle"?
Challenging the status quo, voicing an unpopular or minority opinion, or any deviation from the norm whatsoever comes with risks everywhere, not just Iran.
Slashdot Mirror
And who would you say covers "the big stuff" in better detail? The BBC News site has strength in both breadth and depth, and I've yet to come across any site that's anywhere near as comprehensive. If you've found better then why not share with us please?
I see, a few lightweight, fluffy news stories and the whole site is suddenly worthless and lacking in any real news? yeah, right.
What bit of "Bollywood isn't exactly overly blessed with quality" did you find ambiguous then?
I wasn't trying to slag off Hollywood, I was merely trying to point out that Hollywood's just as capable of producing dross as any other film industry in the world.
Yeah? And how many of those Bollywood films with Hindi dialogue have you seen playing at your local multiplex? Unless they live in an area that has a huge Asian population, how much choice over whether they watch a Hollywood film or a Bollywood film does the typical North American, European or Australasian movie-goer get?
In fact, how many non-American productions even get a look-in in the US? The odd British or Australian film, perhaps, but I'd bet that 95+ percent of the US movie-going public has a choice of Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood or Hollywood.
Your not so-veiled insinuation that Hollywood is the wine whilst Bollywood is the vinegar is flawed. For every Godfather or Shawshank Redemption there are dozens movies as dire as Battlefield Earth or Batman Returns.
Bollywood isn't exactly overly blessed with quality but Hollywood is exactly the same in at regard.
If the trolls on IMDb try to use the logic that one films sucks because another did better in the box office you seem to be twistig that logic entirely: that popularity automatically denotes inferority.
OK, so that's true for UT2004. That's one game out of how many? Go ahead, find another ten games that are that straightforward to install under Linux. There will still be hundreds that aren't, and that's the point.
I'm not badmouthing something when I don't have the information, I'm simply pointing out the accurate fact that gaming on Linux is a lot more complex than gaming on Windows and almost always involves some user input and/or configuration beyond "click, click, click, play". The fact that the example that you mention involves dropping down to the command line only proves my point.
"Buy our soft drink and get tooth decay and diabetes."
"Buy our car and have twice the chance that it'll get broken into or stolen."
"Buy our notebook PC and have a 1/4 chance that it'll break down within a year."
"Buy our burgers and watch your health suffer."
"Buy a ticket to come see our totally unappealing movie."
"Buy our sports shoes and clothing that were made by child labourers in a far eastern sweatshop."
"Buy our clothes that lose their colours and their shape after minimal wear."
"Buy our toothpaste, which is the least effective on the market."
Yeah, right. Business and shady go hand-in-hand 99 percent of the time.
It's called gambling for a reason: sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. Unless you're mentally deficient then you know that you've got less chance of winning than losing. Duh.
Casinos seem morally irresponsible to me, letting people run up debt to the point where they put a burdon on society in order to make a profit. I'm sure this is an argument for another place at another time, but that's how I feel.
I'm sorry, but in the US couldn't you apply that label to hospitals too? Medical bills that run into 5 or 6 figures aren't uncommon and it's a sad fact that the biggest factor in personal bankrupcy in the US is unpaid (and, more importantly, unpayable) medical bills.
And, out of interest, where do you draw the line at what is and what isn't gambling? Is playing the lottery gambling? And in a so-called "free" society, shouldn't you be able to do what you want with your hard-earned cash? Does anyone really have the right to tell you how you can and can't use it to entertain (and possibly enrich) yourself if you're not hurting anyone else in the process?
To be honest, I'm not in favour of unchecked gambling, but then I'm not in favour of unchecked alcohol abuse either, but you don't see church and state bringing the roof down on that ballgame, do you?
Sorry but you're displaying your ignorance. Gambling is legal in most societies, and in some (eg, Hong Kong) it's a common activity that the majority of the population enjoy.
Betting on the result of a sporting event, or anything else, via a legally authorised bookmaker is no more shady than having a cup of coffee.
Just because you have this image of gambling that seems to be more to do with smoke-filled secret back rooms where you have to know the password and the guy behind the bar to get in than legitimate, publicly-traded and -scrutinied businesses that doesn't make it a reality.
The gambling sites being DDOSed aren't run by crooks, they're the legitimate and legal online presences of bricks-and-mortar bookmakers as well as internet gambling start-ups.
Windows may not have been designed to be a gaming platform, any more than it was designed to be any other kind of platform, but gaming has been around on PCs since way before Windows was around.
We've evolved past the point where you needed to know how to configure autoexec.bat, config.sys and QEMM to get a DOS-based game to run properly and we've now progressed to the point where you install a game, it self detects your hardware, tells you if it needs updated Windows components (requires DirectX version x, installs that other software once you give it the go-ahead, and is ready to run.
From hours of messing around to a few simple clicks: don't underestimate the amount of credit that sort of simplicity deserves for the PC gaming market being so big today. Even so, that's a heck of a lot more interaction than is involved in getting a PS2 or other console game up and running.
Yet compare that to the situation under Linux. If you're an expert, have plenty of time on your hands and enjoy a challenge then I'm sure you've got no problem trying to get games to work. But if you're not an expert, or don't have the time or don't enjoy hitting your head against a brick wall a few dozen times then Linux is not the gaming platform for you.
Maybe to people higher up the distribution chain, including the manufacturer? Those chips may have cost $0.02 to produce but you conveniently forget that the first chip cost several orders of magnitude more than that to make. You didn't think that fabrication plants grew on trees, did you?
As other people have pointed out elsewhere in the broader discussion, major contibutions from for-profit software companies have bankrolled the Mozilla/Firefox development teams.
It's not like the full-time coders who worked on those open source projects weren't being paid, it's just that the people paying them weren't the people who most visibly benefited from their work (ie, the end-users).
As for conditions that nobody else is subject to, well, just about every other browser out there is funded or subsidised by other products (it's true for MSIE, Mozilla/Firefox, Netscape, Safari), so Opera are playing a slightly different ballgame because their success and failure is totally dependent on creating a great product, whereas their competitors could put out a complete wreck (or do nothing at all) and still be no worse off.
Anyway, the post that you objected to was aimed at those people who insist that anything not open source is somehow evil. Talk of whip hands and whatever else are entirely inappropriate when you're talking about one of the most ethically run closed source software companies around. Like I pointed out earlier, if Opera were one of the bad guys then they would have software patented everything up to the hilt and Firefox would look like nothing more than a MSIE clone with a fraction of the feature set.
Gmail isn't an issue: fixed in Opera 8, which has a very stable beta available right now.
Also, Opera 8 has a raft of other features, including an RSS reader, voice command support, etc. Some aspects of the UI have undergone minor changes but it's pretty much more cool features under the same roof - and it's still a smaller download than Firefox.
Because, frankly, Opera is better. If both Firefox and Opera were open source (or both closed source) then we wouldn't even be having this debate. 95 percent of Firefox's appeal over Opera is open source.
Well, gee, call me a fascist for using the better closed source product over the open source one.
Oh, and you don't have to look at the unobtrusive Google ads that Opera runs if you don't want to: all you have to do is shell out $20 to buy the thing. Yes, $20, which is less than the price of an average meal out.
Are you looking at the old prices that are still on the site? The very ones linked to in the story summary as "previous cost"?
As a long-time Opera user, I'll just point out that half the features that people rave about in Firefox were Opera innovations.
Like it or not, Opera is a great piece of software and it's helped to make Firefox a great piece of software. Had Opera the company been litiguous in nature, they could easily have stamped down on some of those borrowed features, but Opera is one of the good guys and, if I remember correctly, opposed to software patents, etc.
Yet you still choose to paint a picture of Opera that's negative with your talk of whip hands, etc. Well, newsflash for you buddy: they good people at Opera still have to put food on their own tables and roofs above their heads so I and others will continue to appreciate the hard work they put into what many people regard as the best browser (with in-built mail client, RSS reader, etc) available by putting our money where our mouths are.
The Mac Mini looks like it's the thing for me. I've never owned a Mac in my life - I've used a few in my time and I've been to a few Mac Expos with Mac-owning friends - but I think that's about to change.
This is the Mac for all of us who said Macs were too expensive. For around £400 (yeah, Apple just like the rest of them loves screwing non-Americans when it comes to exchange rates) I'll have a nice little toy that'll give me some first-hand experience of MacOS 10.4 plus my girlfriend will have a easy-to-use machine that she can play with when I'm hogging my PC.
Hopefully, it'll work with the PS/2 keyboards and mice that I've got lying around, if not then I suppose that I'll be shelling out for USB ones but that's no great loss.
Mark my words: these babies are going to sell like hot cakes.
No, I didn't talk about people being lynched literally, I chose my words more carefully than that and the exact phrase I used was "the 21st century equivalent of a lynching".
If either you or CaptainCarrot choose to interpret that as meaning an actual 'noose-round-the-neck' lynching then that's not my fault, is it?
Uh, that kid that I referred to in my first post in this thread received death threats. Doctors who work at abortion clinics regularly receive the same, some have their homes and families targetted by pro-lifers who refuse to acknowledge their legal rights and some have even been assassinated too.
If you were that kid wouldn't you be afraid? If you were one of the many doctors who work under such constant threats wouldn't you be afraid to tell casual acquaintances what you do for a living? Doesn't that sort of intimidation count as oppression to you?
You want to talk about 21st century lynchings? Well there they are.
My original point still stands: it's not just in Iran where people find themselves oppressed, and it's not just the state that's capable of oppression.
So it's not as easy as just typing my nick into Google: did I ever say it was? Again, just because you're too damn lazy or incapable of doing something that doesn't mean it's impossible.
Can you just go back to constantly calling me "dumbass"? Your conversation was far more cerebral then.
Does it really matter if the censorship is imposed by the state or the general population? If saying something out of turn is enough to get you the 21st century equivalent of a lynching by the moral majority then you're being just as oppressed as you would be if the state was the one doing it to you.
And, by the way, those were just examples. You don't think the current US administration has been taking action against those most vocally opposed to its PNAC agenda?
If you want to find out who I am, etc then use your browser and your brain and just do it. I didn't say that I gave that information out on request, I said that you could find it using nothing more than my Slashdot nickname. If you're too damn lazy to do that then that's your problem not mine.
Now, unless you've actually got something sensible to contribute, quit following me around Slashdot with these sad little AC comments that do nothing but reinforce my initial opinion of you.
Don't you know how to do basic research? Guess you're heading for a career at McDonalds then.
Didn't Politically Incorrect get taken off the air because one of its presenters dared to say that flying a plane into a building was less cowardly than dropping a bomb on someone's head?
Seems like a clear case of someone being silenced because they had something unpopular to say.
Didn't a muslim student speaking at Harvard University receive threats of violence because he had titled his speech "My American Jihad", "jihad" being the islamic word for "struggle"?
Challenging the status quo, voicing an unpopular or minority opinion, or any deviation from the norm whatsoever comes with risks everywhere, not just Iran.
What does it say about you that you insist on constantly calling me dumbass but yet are incapable of using the web to perform a simple task?