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User: Haeleth

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Comments · 2,990

  1. Re:This actually sucks on Microsoft's Patent Problem · · Score: 1

    My grandmother shooting someone? Ludicrous. So far as I know she last saw a gun in 1945. Most muggings round here are teenager-on-teenager over mobile phones, so she's probably safe anyway.

    In case you hadn't guessed, I do hate shootings in all cases. And software patents, too. The very existence of an overly broad patent may put people off implementing a superior algorithm, hence they are a Bad Thing.

  2. Re:Doom 3 verus Half Life 2 on No Doom 3 This Year? · · Score: 1

    Er, right. Of course only people who know nothing about art try to evaluate it. All the reviews you ever read are written by people who know nothing about their subject. Sure.

    I think you're slightly mistaken. Sure, some of the people who compare games are immature, and use their comparisons to claim that people who like the games they don't are inferior. That's the "bad" elitism. But claiming that a whole class of people are ignorant because they try to compare things you don't think should be compared is another example of that sort of thing. Let's try to avoid sweeping generalisations, shall we?

  3. Re:Only if they stop offering it preinstalled. on Red Hat To Drop Boxed Retail Distribution · · Score: 1

    (Never understood why Linux dealers offered ISOs.)

    Because not everyone has the computer they want to install Linux on permanently hooked up to a broadband connection. Because people might want to be able to download Linux once and then install it on several machines.

    SuSE is the only mainstream Linux distro I haven't tried, and that's _entirely_ because their free version is only available for install over the internet, which is not an option for me. If I can't download it over a fast connection, burn it onto CD, and then install it on my machine at home, I'm not going to try it. And if I can't try it, I'm certainly not going to buy it.

  4. Overloading on return types? on Latest Proposals for C++0x · · Score: 1

    And what would "cout << f (b, c)" do then?

  5. Donald Knuth? on "Quick 'n Dirty" vs. "Correct and Proper"? · · Score: 1

    There must be others, as well...

  6. Re:Real story. Very funny. on Naming Your Character In RPGs? · · Score: 2, Funny

    What's vulgar about "ass"? I thought that was a kind of pack animal.

  7. Re:Don't you hate it when people say.... on Last 2.5.x Linux Kernel Released · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, that depends on the user, doesn't it? I have 201,585 XP, so it would be a good idea for me to upgrade from Win2k. But if you're still stuck at level 1, I recommend you go and kill some more goblins before considering it.

  8. Re:Who's this guy? on Patent Granted for Ethical AI · · Score: 1

    Oh, good God, who modded parent up to 5? Whoever they all were, they obviously hadn't RTFA'd either, and we can see another example of Slashdot's reflexive libertarian responses.

    He has not "patented ethics", nor is he trying to "decide morality for everyone else". "Ethical AI" is a _name_ for a system he has invented which he thinks will be useful for automated telephone answering systems. That's it.

  9. Re:If it ain't Baroque... on Cracking the Quicksilver Code · · Score: 1

    It rhymes with "clock", but not with "Bach". The "o" in Baroque and clock is a sound not found in American English.

  10. Re:aren't these just parodies on Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double Bass · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Is that a good thing?

    There's only one small step from a book where Harry meets Gandalf to one where Gandalf sexually abuses Harry, and while the libertarians here will doubtless fight to the death for peoples' rights to produce books like that, I can't help
    feeling that an author deserves some (limited, temporary) right to protect what happens to her characters. Art is not like business; few authors write only for profit.

  11. Re:Does it constitute life? Tough call on Ice Detected Underneath Mars' North Pole · · Score: 1

    You ever read C.S. Lewis' sci-fi trilogy? "Out of the Silent Planet" turns on precisely that concept.

  12. Re:A perpetual motion car? on Slashback: Transparency, USB, Europatents · · Score: 1

    Scientists never thought the world was flat. The Greeks knew it was spherical back at the dawn of science, and that fact has never been forgotten - not even in the so-called Dark Ages. The mistake people actually made was thinking that it was impossible to travel to the southern hemisphere on account of the great heat at the equator.

  13. Re:EULA changes on Microsoft Releases SP4 for Windows 2000 · · Score: 1

    Try 'fc'.

  14. Re:Executive summary: on Petreley On Simplifying Software Installation for Linux · · Score: 1

    Well, assuming that you're experienced enough with Linux to be able to get Debian installed and working in the first place (and yes, I know it has a menu-based installer - sorry, it still isn't easy) - assuming that, then yes, apt-get is easy.

    Except that not everyone has a direct connection to the internet, you know. Some of us need to download software on other machines, even on machines running different OSS. So for those there's still all the hassle of repeatedly downloading new packages until everything has all its dependencies.

    Oh, and not every application is packaged, and of those that are, a lot of packages are outdated. So if you want to do anything out of the ordinary, you're back to compiling your own, or begging someone to package it.

    Tired old arguments, I know, but every time installation issues come up on /. we get a dozen Debian advocates shouting "apt-get! apt-get!". Could it be much easier? parent asks. Yes, it could. For most Windows software, you download a single executable file - from the site of your choice, on any machine you like - run it, and your software is installed and works. Now, that's easy.

  15. Re:Both sides of the story on Should You Hire a Hacker? · · Score: 1

    So you only get five chances in life, do you? That's news to me.

    Much as I dread the potential damage to my karma from mentioning religion on /., I have to say that the insistence on giving everyone at least 490 chances is one of the nicer points of Christianity.

    Or if you prefer a more scientific argument, saying that five failures proves something is impossible is "proof by example", a logical fallacy.

    Have you ever exceeded the speed limit? If you got caught, would that mean you should never be allowed to work as a bus driver?

  16. Re:This doesn't automatically mean higher performa on Translucent Windows for X using OpenGL · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It can be quite useful to have windows which become translucent when dragging or resizing. It gives a nice halfway ground between showing outlines and showing contents. This is the setup I use on my Win2k box; it'd be nice to be able to have the same in Linux.

  17. Re:Proof of Poincare conjecture.... on Poincaré Conjecture May Be Solved · · Score: 1

    You can simplify that considerably. The most elegant proof on these lines is "Me. Hammer. Give me the cash."

  18. Re:Consequences. on Blackboard Campus IDs: Security Thru Cease & Desist · · Score: 1

    Doesn't pissing in public in a manner likely to cause distress or offence to another count as indecent exposure?

  19. Do tell me... on The Hundred-Year Language · · Score: 1

    ...how do you suppose the computers to which these future people speak are produced?

    So you have someone tell their computer to fire up a communications package and get them a line to somebody back on Earth. Well, I don't know about you, but I don't use C++ whenever I want to send an email.

    So, to take a better example, you have some science guy go up to a computer and say "analyze these figures". Well? Most of the science people I know don't pop open a C++ compiler when they want to analyze figures, they use something much more abstract. Something probably providing an interface implemented in an interpreted language which itself might have been built with C++. That's not programming.

    Talking to computers is an interface issue. I'm sure you could point me to a Star Trek episode where someone does something that today could only be done with a programming language, but I suspect those things are the exception.

  20. Re:This could be a liability on Have You Really Read Your ISP's TOS? · · Score: 1

    Not being in America didn't help Jon Johansen. Well, it didn't stop them suing him, anyway.

  21. RTFA. on Google Vs. Yahoo: When We Last Met... · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yahoo owns Inktomi, but, according to the NY Times article, still uses Google's index at present.

  22. Re:Emulation and DMCA on Gameboy Advance Clone Superemulator · · Score: 1

    "Dark Law: Meaning of Death" had a few fatal crashes in ZSNES last time I tried it...

  23. Re:Icons are Evil. on Susan Kare: Mother of Icons You Love (or Hate) · · Score: 1

    Er, do you really believe that our genetic makeup defines everything about us? That's rather like saying that your average Linux box is no different from a Windows system because the hardware is the same. Software is key, and we're only the same until the brain has been programmed.

  24. Re:Some of her icons at images.google.com on Susan Kare: Mother of Icons You Love (or Hate) · · Score: 1

    Mind you, the typical geek definition of "attractive woman" is any vaguely female entity who fails to run away screaming at the first encounter...

  25. Re:Still inferior on The Next XFree86 Wars: XFT2 vs STSF · · Score: 1

    That's nonsense. In Windows 2000, Start->Settings->Control Panel->Display->Settings->Advanced...->Gener al has an option which allows you to set the font resolution to anything from 19 to 480 dpi. The option has existed since Win95 at least.

    I run Windows with fonts at 133 dpi myself. There are a few issues with poorly coded applications sizing dialog boxes in pixels, but X has some pretty ugly applications as well.