That's the point, though. Gimp, Quanta are quite good, but the fantatic advocates stretch "quite good as a free alternative to" into "complete replacement for" without properly understanding, or in many cases even using, the free software they are advocating.
That's the funniest comment I've read in a long time. Such an excellent caricature of the typical Free software advocate stance: offer inferior alternatives where possible without understanding the domain and discount anything else as 'useless'.
I agree that a lot of PC FPS games have far too accurate controls. But console controls go too far the other way, which is why they mostly have some sort of auto-aim to compensate. I'm halfway through metroid prime 2 at the moment, which would be impossible without the autoaim. The problem is the tiny range of motion of the console controllers: you can either have accuracy but bringing the gun to bear is slow, or rapid turning but innaccurate shooting.
I thought the same about video on a mobile, until as a trial I transcoded a load of Futurama episodes onto a memory card and watched them on my Treo 650 while on a train journey across the featureless plains of Norfolk. It was great: the screen is easily big enough for simple video like cartoons or sitcoms, the battery life is decent (used ~10% in an hour) and it's really enjoyable.
It was inevitable something like this would happen after the whole 90 day detention debacle. Labour kept using the excuse of "needing time to break encryption" for requiring 90 days of detention without trial. Anyone with half a brain told them that any decent encryption is going to take many years to break, so I guess this is their response.
I have the Travelmate 8104. It's a nice enough laptop, but extremely flimsy. It's a little over a year old and the LCD hinges are starting to play up, the shift key fell off, the built-in card reader frequently refuses to work, the power button is getting gradually harder to press, it's made of cheap plastic that flexes when you pick it up.
It's just generally got a cheap feel about it, from the slightly loose IR sensor to the odd and ugly wireless/bluetooth kill switches. It's only been used as a desktop replacement, so it doesn't matter that much.
I own an Acer laptop and my next laptop will certainly not be Acer. The build quality is very poor and all the custom power management etc. software is crappy.
Re:Great way of starting a flamewar
on
KDE 4 Screenshots
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· Score: 1
I haven't used KDE much since 3.3 I think, but back then the default kicker background was some awful greyish-blue gradient. The launch notification was annoying because it wasn't actually part of the mouse cursor, it just lagged along behind it and frequently didn't work properly. Icons in the default theme were too similar, so that it was hard to quickly tell apart different actions in toolbars.
The issue is really open formats, then. As long as you can export into some common format, you can always switch to another program. Closed source software will never die, but I think closed file formats will.
I would quite like to see the commercial Linux software market take off. There is a lot of good open source software and there are a lot of crappy utilities that cost money on Windows, but a lot of the commercial software is far better quality than any Free alternative (compare PS Elements 4 for ~$80 to the free alternatives, for example). I will gladly pay money for software if it saves me time and effort.
Let me get this straight. Because Google won't pay even more money to port their *free* application to your tiny minority-within-a-minority platform, their contribution is a turd and they deserve to be sworn at. Aren't Linux users nice people.
Re:Great way of starting a flamewar
on
KDE 4 Screenshots
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· Score: 1
I've always found the defaults in KDE to be terrible - it used to take me about half an hour of adjusting settings before I could use it. Things like small, ugly fonts, horrible kicker panel background image, bad toolbar button layout with too small buttons, that awful bouncing-ball launch notification, unclear default icon theme, bad window title bar button layout, that annoying windows-style giant tooltip from the kicker.
I think dmix is enabled by default in the latest stable version of ALSA, 1.0.10.
Technical solution to an a***hole problem
on
Polite Cell Phones
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem isn't the phones, it's the morons who use them. I can't get on a bus round here without some group of braindead teenagers watching music videos or oh-so-amusing 'comedy' video clips using the phone's external speaker turned up full. The kind of person who thinks that is acceptable behaviour is not going to bother with a polite phone.
Sinclair Spectrum 128K +2 with the built in tape player. I must have spent hundreds of hours glued to Elite or writing Basic programs on that machine. Second was a Sam Coupe.
Exactly - the internet connection is pretty much the least reliable part of any home computer. What would probably happen is that web app developers will realise this and start pushing more of their webapps client side for reliability, until we end up in exactly the same position as today, except with our apps written in javascript.
I think I'd pay the TV licence fee for Radio 4 alone. For TV I would quite happily see BBC 1 and 3 switched off permanently, or alternatively have the channels sign some sort of contract promising not to commision any more programmes involving celebrities learning to dance or WWII veterans examining underwater shipwrecks.
It would generally be referred to as maximisation of utility, in that the marginal value of £1 to a poor person is much greater than the value to a rich person.
According to the Wikipedia article, combined direct Income tax and National Insurance (health and state pension contributions) is around 25-30% for an average professional.
Of course, you have to add VAT (17.5%) of any money you spend on 'luxury' items, which is basically everything apart from children's clothes and food, IIRC. Things like petrol, cigarettes and alcohol are quite higly taxed as well, mainly in an attempt to make their users' pay for the damge they cause.
The guy is talking about up to twenty years in the future, don't forget. Compare home network connectivity now with 1986 - it must be a couple of orders of magnitude faster now. I'm sure by then the idea of a house *not* having some form of very fast internet connection will be unheard of, whether by it's by wireless or landline.
A lot of software is already sold by download: I bought Adobe PS Elements 4 last week as a 500mb download, £10 cheaper than in shops and far easier than buying it physically. Almost all PDA and smartphone software is sold by download. It's just a matter of bandwidth - my ADSL connection today is four times faster and 20% cheaper than it was two years ago, and will probably speed up by another multiple of four sometime this year. At that rate of progress, a 5 or 10GB game will be feasible to download before long.
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I guess you hate ASCII and Unicode as well, because they are used to write spam?
That's the point, though. Gimp, Quanta are quite good, but the fantatic advocates stretch "quite good as a free alternative to" into "complete replacement for" without properly understanding, or in many cases even using, the free software they are advocating.
That's the funniest comment I've read in a long time. Such an excellent caricature of the typical Free software advocate stance: offer inferior alternatives where possible without understanding the domain and discount anything else as 'useless'.
I agree that a lot of PC FPS games have far too accurate controls. But console controls go too far the other way, which is why they mostly have some sort of auto-aim to compensate. I'm halfway through metroid prime 2 at the moment, which would be impossible without the autoaim. The problem is the tiny range of motion of the console controllers: you can either have accuracy but bringing the gun to bear is slow, or rapid turning but innaccurate shooting.
I thought the same about video on a mobile, until as a trial I transcoded a load of Futurama episodes onto a memory card and watched them on my Treo 650 while on a train journey across the featureless plains of Norfolk. It was great: the screen is easily big enough for simple video like cartoons or sitcoms, the battery life is decent (used ~10% in an hour) and it's really enjoyable.
It was inevitable something like this would happen after the whole 90 day detention debacle. Labour kept using the excuse of "needing time to break encryption" for requiring 90 days of detention without trial. Anyone with half a brain told them that any decent encryption is going to take many years to break, so I guess this is their response.
I have the Travelmate 8104. It's a nice enough laptop, but extremely flimsy. It's a little over a year old and the LCD hinges are starting to play up, the shift key fell off, the built-in card reader frequently refuses to work, the power button is getting gradually harder to press, it's made of cheap plastic that flexes when you pick it up.
It's just generally got a cheap feel about it, from the slightly loose IR sensor to the odd and ugly wireless/bluetooth kill switches. It's only been used as a desktop replacement, so it doesn't matter that much.
I own an Acer laptop and my next laptop will certainly not be Acer. The build quality is very poor and all the custom power management etc. software is crappy.
I haven't used KDE much since 3.3 I think, but back then the default kicker background was some awful greyish-blue gradient. The launch notification was annoying because it wasn't actually part of the mouse cursor, it just lagged along behind it and frequently didn't work properly. Icons in the default theme were too similar, so that it was hard to quickly tell apart different actions in toolbars.
The issue is really open formats, then. As long as you can export into some common format, you can always switch to another program. Closed source software will never die, but I think closed file formats will.
I would quite like to see the commercial Linux software market take off. There is a lot of good open source software and there are a lot of crappy utilities that cost money on Windows, but a lot of the commercial software is far better quality than any Free alternative (compare PS Elements 4 for ~$80 to the free alternatives, for example). I will gladly pay money for software if it saves me time and effort.
How does an application stop working? If google goes out of business tomorrow, does Picasa have some sort of self-destruct system?
Let me get this straight. Because Google won't pay even more money to port their *free* application to your tiny minority-within-a-minority platform, their contribution is a turd and they deserve to be sworn at. Aren't Linux users nice people.
I've always found the defaults in KDE to be terrible - it used to take me about half an hour of adjusting settings before I could use it. Things like small, ugly fonts, horrible kicker panel background image, bad toolbar button layout with too small buttons, that awful bouncing-ball launch notification, unclear default icon theme, bad window title bar button layout, that annoying windows-style giant tooltip from the kicker.
I think dmix is enabled by default in the latest stable version of ALSA, 1.0.10.
The problem isn't the phones, it's the morons who use them. I can't get on a bus round here without some group of braindead teenagers watching music videos or oh-so-amusing 'comedy' video clips using the phone's external speaker turned up full. The kind of person who thinks that is acceptable behaviour is not going to bother with a polite phone.
Sinclair Spectrum 128K +2 with the built in tape player. I must have spent hundreds of hours glued to Elite or writing Basic programs on that machine. Second was a Sam Coupe.
Exactly - the internet connection is pretty much the least reliable part of any home computer. What would probably happen is that web app developers will realise this and start pushing more of their webapps client side for reliability, until we end up in exactly the same position as today, except with our apps written in javascript.
I think I'd pay the TV licence fee for Radio 4 alone. For TV I would quite happily see BBC 1 and 3 switched off permanently, or alternatively have the channels sign some sort of contract promising not to commision any more programmes involving celebrities learning to dance or WWII veterans examining underwater shipwrecks.
It would generally be referred to as maximisation of utility, in that the marginal value of £1 to a poor person is much greater than the value to a rich person.
According to the Wikipedia article, combined direct Income tax and National Insurance (health and state pension contributions) is around 25-30% for an average professional.
Of course, you have to add VAT (17.5%) of any money you spend on 'luxury' items, which is basically everything apart from children's clothes and food, IIRC. Things like petrol, cigarettes and alcohol are quite higly taxed as well, mainly in an attempt to make their users' pay for the damge they cause.
The guy is talking about up to twenty years in the future, don't forget. Compare home network connectivity now with 1986 - it must be a couple of orders of magnitude faster now. I'm sure by then the idea of a house *not* having some form of very fast internet connection will be unheard of, whether by it's by wireless or landline.
A lot of software is already sold by download: I bought Adobe PS Elements 4 last week as a 500mb download, £10 cheaper than in shops and far easier than buying it physically. Almost all PDA and smartphone software is sold by download. It's just a matter of bandwidth - my ADSL connection today is four times faster and 20% cheaper than it was two years ago, and will probably speed up by another multiple of four sometime this year. At that rate of progress, a 5 or 10GB game will be feasible to download before long.
HD isn't related to aspect ratio, though. Most digital TV here (UK) is widescreen SD.
IIRC, the iPod video has a seperate chip for decoding the movie streams, so it's not just a software issue.