It fulfill the greatly-needed role of making the free-software-unfriendly Linux obsolete and ensuring that a kernel which fits GNU values becomes popular...
In what way you consider Linux to be "free-software-unfriendly"?
If I may quote the Free Software Foundation on the issue, "We use Linux-based GNU systems today for most of our work, and we hope you use them too." (source) And again, "if Linux were already available, and we were considering whether to start writing another kernel---we would not do it." (source)
The latter link is their page explaining why they didn't drop the Hurd when Linux matured. The reason is that they thought Hurd could become better than Linux, not that they had philosophical issues with Linux.
Sounds like the FSF thinks Linux fits GNU values. Why don't you?
Didn't a failed experiment like this happen in the U.S. already? This reminds me of all the free ISPs that used to exist for a brief time that are now all defunct or for pay.
What, like ConnectFree and UK2? Maybe all the free ISPs in the USA died or started charging, I have no idea, but here in the UK they're alive and well.
In other words, what happened in America is no guide to what will happen here.
I don't think you quite understand the point. OOo on Windows already has a perfectly good interface that looks pretty close to the native look and feel, uses the native save/load dialogs, and so on. OOo on MacOS X is currently an X11 application, and as such doesn't integrate at all - it uses X11 save/load dialogs, uses X11 grey menus attached to the windows instead of the Mac's unified screen-top menubar, uses X11 widgets, and so on.
A build of OOo with a Qt option would therefore mean a lot to MacOS X users, since it would provide them with something that looked like a MacOS X application. Meanwhile, Windows users could continue to use their Windows-like build. They would lose nothing, and Mac users would gain a lot. What's the problem with that?
As such, you end up with people needing cars to drive to the train station, at which point they might as well just drive wherever they want to go.
And the reason for that is that gas is so cheap. If you were paying European prices for your fuel, you'd soon see the advantage in only driving as far as the station. I'd guess the average UK price is about $6/gallon right now.
English speakers should stick to short Anglo-Saxon words. You can't always avoid Latin and French words, but try to use the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary where you can.
That's very good advice.
Er... sorry, I shouldn't have used "advice" (via French from Latin "ad visere")... let's rephrase that to "your words are wise." Whoops, I said "rephrase" (re + phrase, via Latin from Greek "phrasis"), that should be "let's use a different word". Oh, but "different" is from Latin "differre". An alternative... nope, Latin again... aha, I think "another" is okay. "Let's use another word".
Damn, this is difficul-- um, hard, isn't it? Blast, I forgot, "damn" is from Latin too!
By the way, I would like to draw attentio-- sorry, to point out that your use of the word "vocabulary" is not a good choice. The Anglo-Saxon term is "word-hoard", which I think you'll agree[1] is much clearer[2].
[1] Agree: from Old French "agreer" [2] Clear: from Latin "clarus" via Old French "cler".
I think you're wrong there. You're saying it's black and white - either you're all paid up, or you're a warez kiddie. (Yes, I'm oversimplifying your argument. Hear me out, please.)
You see, installing a product you bought on more than one machine is one of those moral grey area things to most people - they might be aware they shouldn't be doing it, but "everyone does it" and "it's not hurting anyone". Many small businesses see no problem with it.
Actually going and downloading warez or crackz, however, is in a different league. It forces you to acknowledge that you are violating copyright law.
Speaking purely personally, I frequently violate EULAs, but I would not be happy running something I'd actually cracked. My experience of others' attitudes suggests I'm not unique. I suspect therefore that the parent is correct, and second-hand Win2k will be more popular than cracked WinXP. The end result will be the same, of course - MS will (with any luck) realise that copy protection costs them sales.
Hah, just the sort of C-centric attitude I expect from Slashdot. Null-termination is the root of much evil. They're still invalid in the One True String Storage Method, but that's because they're missing the "length" byte from the beginning.:p
How about, Windows NT 5.1 was supposed to have a home version?
Windows NT 5.1 == Windows XP. Last time I checked there was a home version of that. Maybe you meant NT 5.0? But I don't remember them promising that, that was just what they were planning.
How about, Windows 98 will be faster and more reliable?
Windows 98 was faster and more reliable than Windows 95. 98SE was the best product in the whole 9x family, although you're welcome to question whether that's saying much. It's Windows Me that is notorious for being heavily hyped and then turning out to be a POS.
Nope. ID made it into the major league through shareware, sure, but they haven't released anything as shareware since the original Quake, and that was, what, six or seven years ago? Today's market is very different.
This won't work with the versions of VMWare/VirtualPC I've tried. Those programs (atleast earlier versions of them) indeed does support CD images, but only the most basic ones of them, namely ISO images and bin/cue files. This works fine for applications and operating systems, that generally don't have any CD protection schemes, but for almost all games nowadays you've got to use a more advanced imaging tool like Alcohol or CloneCD, and I don't think any virtual machines support those kinds of images yet.
No, you misunderstood. You don't mount the CD image within the VM, you mount it in Daemon Tools or whatever in your real OS, and then you tell the VM to map its CD-ROM to the virtual drive. I do this regularly with Virtual PC.
It's useful for some, perhaps, but I don't speak gobbledygook very well. I'll start getting excited when they release a version that translates into English.
We do? First I've heard of it. To my ears the term sounds rather derogatory, although Americans use it so frequently, and so obviously without malice, that only an idiot would bother to be offended.
I certainly don't object to anti-British sentiment in movies and video games, though, usually it just makes them funnier. Anyone remember the bartender's line from Privateer? "Man, I hate the British. I mean, who doesn't, right?" Did Origin take that line out before releasing it on this side of the Atlantic? Of course not!
Regrettably, there are A LOT of pages that only work correctly under IE now.
And? There are a lot of standards-conforming pages out there that only work correctly under browsers such as Mozilla. The only site I visit at all regularly that still requires IE is Windows Update.
Win2k was decent as an OS, but not there for gaming. (Pursuade me otherwise, and maybe I'll try to buy a copy.)
I run Win2k, and I've never had any problems playing any Windows games. YMMV.
A lot of DOS games don't run, but most of the ones that cause me problems are either old enough to be emulated (Dosbox, VMware if you're rich, hopefully Bochs one day), or have had their engines ported (Exult, ScummVM), or in extreme cases have been hacked to work (System Shock).
I've heard more horror stories about XP being incompatible with games than about Win2k, although that probably reflects the greater number of gamers using XP.
Of course, if you already have Win98SE, and it works for you, why worry about it? It's not like they're sending the secret police round to wipe it from your hard disk.;)
You deserved the "interesting" moderations, but I suspect you're stretching the analogy a little. For example, destroying the ring certainly didn't strengthen the enemy as well in Tolkien...
Um, so what you're saying is, "the constitution has NEVER been changed, except for when it's been changed"?
Just because the changes take the form of amendments tacked onto the end of the text, rather than modifying the text directly, does not alter the fact that the constitution is occasionally modified. And if a document is occasionally modified, doesn't that mean it's, well, dynamic?
Unless you count the convention in some phonetic transcription systems of using a small-caps Q to represent the consonant lengthening denoted in kana by small "tu".</pedantic>
This seems like a rather peculiar list to me, do they not get a lot of the games the US gets?
That, and our tastes differ. What were you expecting, Madden/NFL in the top ten?;)
At least this list, unlike the last few "greatest games of all time" to have shown up on Slashdot, includes Elite. 3D graphics on an 8-bit micro? Now that's impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
It fulfill the greatly-needed role of making the free-software-unfriendly Linux obsolete and ensuring that a kernel which fits GNU values becomes popular...
In what way you consider Linux to be "free-software-unfriendly"?
If I may quote the Free Software Foundation on the issue, "We use Linux-based GNU systems today for most of our work, and we hope you use them too." (source) And again, "if Linux were already available, and we were considering whether to start writing another kernel---we would not do it." (source)
The latter link is their page explaining why they didn't drop the Hurd when Linux matured. The reason is that they thought Hurd could become better than Linux, not that they had philosophical issues with Linux.
Sounds like the FSF thinks Linux fits GNU values. Why don't you?
Didn't a failed experiment like this happen in the U.S. already? This reminds me of all the free ISPs that used to exist for a brief time that are now all defunct or for pay.
What, like ConnectFree and UK2? Maybe all the free ISPs in the USA died or started charging, I have no idea, but here in the UK they're alive and well.
In other words, what happened in America is no guide to what will happen here.
I don't think you quite understand the point. OOo on Windows already has a perfectly good interface that looks pretty close to the native look and feel, uses the native save/load dialogs, and so on. OOo on MacOS X is currently an X11 application, and as such doesn't integrate at all - it uses X11 save/load dialogs, uses X11 grey menus attached to the windows instead of the Mac's unified screen-top menubar, uses X11 widgets, and so on.
A build of OOo with a Qt option would therefore mean a lot to MacOS X users, since it would provide them with something that looked like a MacOS X application. Meanwhile, Windows users could continue to use their Windows-like build. They would lose nothing, and Mac users would gain a lot. What's the problem with that?
As such, you end up with people needing cars to drive to the train station, at which point they might as well just drive wherever they want to go.
And the reason for that is that gas is so cheap. If you were paying European prices for your fuel, you'd soon see the advantage in only driving as far as the station. I'd guess the average UK price is about $6/gallon right now.
English speakers should stick to short Anglo-Saxon words. You can't always avoid Latin and French words, but try to use the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary where you can.
That's very good advice.
Er... sorry, I shouldn't have used "advice" (via French from Latin "ad visere")... let's rephrase that to "your words are wise." Whoops, I said "rephrase" (re + phrase, via Latin from Greek "phrasis"), that should be "let's use a different word". Oh, but "different" is from Latin "differre". An alternative... nope, Latin again... aha, I think "another" is okay. "Let's use another word".
Damn, this is difficul-- um, hard, isn't it? Blast, I forgot, "damn" is from Latin too!
By the way, I would like to draw attentio-- sorry, to point out that your use of the word "vocabulary" is not a good choice. The Anglo-Saxon term is "word-hoard", which I think you'll agree[1] is much clearer[2].
[1] Agree: from Old French "agreer"
[2] Clear: from Latin "clarus" via Old French "cler".
I think you're wrong there. You're saying it's black and white - either you're all paid up, or you're a warez kiddie. (Yes, I'm oversimplifying your argument. Hear me out, please.)
You see, installing a product you bought on more than one machine is one of those moral grey area things to most people - they might be aware they shouldn't be doing it, but "everyone does it" and "it's not hurting anyone". Many small businesses see no problem with it.
Actually going and downloading warez or crackz, however, is in a different league. It forces you to acknowledge that you are violating copyright law.
Speaking purely personally, I frequently violate EULAs, but I would not be happy running something I'd actually cracked. My experience of others' attitudes suggests I'm not unique. I suspect therefore that the parent is correct, and second-hand Win2k will be more popular than cracked WinXP. The end result will be the same, of course - MS will (with any luck) realise that copy protection costs them sales.
Hah, just the sort of C-centric attitude I expect from Slashdot. Null-termination is the root of much evil. They're still invalid in the One True String Storage Method, but that's because they're missing the "length" byte from the beginning. :p
It will be now known as the RIAC....
Royal Institute for Anonymous Cowards?
How about, Windows NT 5.1 was supposed to have a home version?
Windows NT 5.1 == Windows XP. Last time I checked there was a home version of that. Maybe you meant NT 5.0? But I don't remember them promising that, that was just what they were planning.
How about, Windows 98 will be faster and more reliable?
Windows 98 was faster and more reliable than Windows 95. 98SE was the best product in the whole 9x family, although you're welcome to question whether that's saying much. It's Windows Me that is notorious for being heavily hyped and then turning out to be a POS.
Ah well, three out of five ain't bad.
Nope. ID made it into the major league through shareware, sure, but they haven't released anything as shareware since the original Quake, and that was, what, six or seven years ago? Today's market is very different.
This won't work with the versions of VMWare/VirtualPC I've tried. Those programs (atleast earlier versions of them) indeed does support CD images, but only the most basic ones of them, namely ISO images and bin/cue files. This works fine for applications and operating systems, that generally don't have any CD protection schemes, but for almost all games nowadays you've got to use a more advanced imaging tool like Alcohol or CloneCD, and I don't think any virtual machines support those kinds of images yet.
No, you misunderstood. You don't mount the CD image within the VM, you mount it in Daemon Tools or whatever in your real OS, and then you tell the VM to map its CD-ROM to the virtual drive. I do this regularly with Virtual PC.
Yet VB is a real, Turing-complete language.
;)
This is true.
Here's another real Turing-complete language: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/bf/.
And another: http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/.
Maybe Turing-completeness isn't a very useful criterion in evaluating a language.
It's useful for some, perhaps, but I don't speak gobbledygook very well. I'll start getting excited when they release a version that translates into English.
Brits call themselves brits...
We do? First I've heard of it. To my ears the term sounds rather derogatory, although Americans use it so frequently, and so obviously without malice, that only an idiot would bother to be offended.
I certainly don't object to anti-British sentiment in movies and video games, though, usually it just makes them funnier. Anyone remember the bartender's line from Privateer? "Man, I hate the British. I mean, who doesn't, right?" Did Origin take that line out before releasing it on this side of the Atlantic? Of course not!
> all Internet Explorer except the latest
Regrettably, there are A LOT of pages that only work correctly under IE now.
And? There are a lot of standards-conforming pages out there that only work correctly under browsers such as Mozilla. The only site I visit at all regularly that still requires IE is Windows Update.
Yes, it will make Win98 abandonware.
Unfortunately the term "abandonware" has no legal meaning; it will still be illegal to distribute unauthorised copies of the program.
Win2k was decent as an OS, but not there for gaming. (Pursuade me otherwise, and maybe I'll try to buy a copy.)
;)
I run Win2k, and I've never had any problems playing any Windows games. YMMV.
A lot of DOS games don't run, but most of the ones that cause me problems are either old enough to be emulated (Dosbox, VMware if you're rich, hopefully Bochs one day), or have had their engines ported (Exult, ScummVM), or in extreme cases have been hacked to work (System Shock).
I've heard more horror stories about XP being incompatible with games than about Win2k, although that probably reflects the greater number of gamers using XP.
Of course, if you already have Win98SE, and it works for you, why worry about it? It's not like they're sending the secret police round to wipe it from your hard disk.
You deserved the "interesting" moderations, but I suspect you're stretching the analogy a little. For example, destroying the ring certainly didn't strengthen the enemy as well in Tolkien...
Um, so what you're saying is, "the constitution has NEVER been changed, except for when it's been changed"?
Just because the changes take the form of amendments tacked onto the end of the text, rather than modifying the text directly, does not alter the fact that the constitution is occasionally modified. And if a document is occasionally modified, doesn't that mean it's, well, dynamic?
Um... are you sure?
I suspect it's "trails" as in "trailers".
After all, there is no "Q" in Japanese.
Unless you count the convention in some phonetic transcription systems of using a small-caps Q to represent the consonant lengthening denoted in kana by small "tu".</pedantic>
This seems like a rather peculiar list to me, do they not get a lot of the games the US gets?
;)
That, and our tastes differ. What were you expecting, Madden/NFL in the top ten?
At least this list, unlike the last few "greatest games of all time" to have shown up on Slashdot, includes Elite. 3D graphics on an 8-bit micro? Now that's impressive.