Black & White did have some nice technology: the graphics. I loved the way you could zoom smoothly all the way from basically the outer atmosphere right down to the point where you were watching individual people doing stuff -- even on a relatively modest graphics card. That was a very good engine for the time.
Shame the supposedly revolutionary AI training turned out to be an exercise in frustration, and the rest of the gameplay was nothing but tedious micromanagement. Unless you wanted to be evil... throwing rocks at other gods' worshippers never really got old.
Not to mention that it's simply none of the government's business to create an app that lets people do a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the government! I would rather the DVLA concentrated on administering driver and vehicle licensing, and let the RAC take care of holding the hands of RAC members.
Fight Club is a work of fiction. This means that the things it says are not necessarily true.
The reality is quite clearly different, as we can see by the recent events with Toyota: they were pressured into a massively damaging recall even though regulators were unable to prove that stuck accelerators had actually caused any deaths at all. Public anger is a powerful thing, particularly when the media chooses to fan the flames.
FTFA as an example of what it could be used for: "For instance, HBO could partner with an ISP to verify, at the network level, that a certain user subscribes to HBO, and so should be allowed to watch its programming for free on Hulu.
Why on earth would you want to use Zip+4 for that? It's not unique to a single potential HBO subscriber.
A simpler and better solution to account sharing would be for Hulu to prevent a single account being used from more than one IP address within some suitable period of time. Bingo -- same effect, and you didn't have to tell everyone on the Internet where I live!
Why? Apple have maintained Darwin as an open-source project even though the BSD license meant they didn't have to. And they are contributing very heavily to the open-source releases of LLVM, even though the BSD license means they don't have to. They have enough positive incentives to do it that coercion is unnecessary.
Really? I recently switched to KDE from the supposedly-light-weight Xfce on my tiny underpowered netbook, and I honestly have not noticed any speed difference at all, even with most of the bells and whistles enabled. Haven't run out of memory yet, either, even with Firefox and KDE running.
Gnome might be faster. I wouldn't know because its interface design makes it unusable on netbooks. But if Gnome is faster than Xfce then there's something seriously wrong with the world.
Congratulations to Apple for not pandering to the whims of superstitious peasants.
It won't hurt them, anyway. The sorts of people who can afford to buy iPhones tend to be sufficiently educated to have grown out of that kind of nonsense.
That's a false dichotomy. It is perfectly possible to have unelected judges who can still get fired.
You're also making the assumption that being appointed for life inevitably leads to corruption. You provide no evidence to support this. Indeed, there are plenty of counterexamples, such as the Supreme Court, where justices are appointed for life precisely to reduce the risk of corruption -- and it appears to work pretty well.
Linux not worth bothering with? Adobe doesn't think so. Flash supports Linux just as well as the other platforms -- in fact Linux is currently the only platform for which there's a 64-bit Flash client!
I know which side I'm rooting for in the Apple vs Adobe fight. It's the side that actually believes in cross-platform development, the side that actually believes you should be able to run all content on any device you choose. It's not the side that comes up with arbitrary constantly-shifting rules to restrict what you're allowed to run on their hardware, and claims to love web standards while simultaneously giving anyone who doesn't use their proprietary software a slap in the face.
Maybe AT&T could introduce advertisement filtering into their phones -- and let advertisers be the ones who pay for the privilege of using AT&T bandwidth to reach consumers.
Re:They opensourced the engine, but not the data.
on
Aquaria Goes Open Source
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This opinion has come up in every story about these games. It's simply wrong. There is plenty that can be done with the code, even while the data remains proprietary.
It would be extremely nice, in fact, if it became common practice for commercial games to have open-source code and proprietary data. That way the creators could still have an obvious way to make money, while the community could take care of making the game run on different platforms etc. (I guess it wouldn't work for multiplayer due to the rampant cheating that would ensue...)
1. In standard English, it doesn't mean that. Anyone using it in that sense in formal writing is asking for trouble.
2. In many American dialects, that sense has been common for a very long time. A quick Google shows up this paper from 1975 that says it attracted widespread attention in the 1930s, and it's bound to have been around for many years before that.
Clearly there is a difference of some sort, but why on earth should your method of planning make any difference to the sentence? The punishment should fit the crime, not the navigational aids used! And the crime is the same. Burglary is no less distressing for the victim if the burglar got lost three times on the way to the property, so handing out tougher sentences to burglars who used Google Maps is actually an insult to the victims of low-tech criminals.
- Huge amounts of CCTV - one estimate claims the it's the highest in the world
This is the fault of local councils, not Westminster. Local councils have also been responsible for all the phone-tapping abuse scandals in recent years, by the way. They are the biggest danger to civil liberties in the UK.
If you care about privacy, please get out there and vote in your local elections. Hardly anybody bothers, so it's no surprise local government is crap. Quiz the candidates on their personal intentions, and vote accordingly, not along party lines.
- Useless passports that don't work in most airports
Really? *shrug* I've never had any problems... I'm more worried about the fact that they were promised to be unforgeable, which appears to have been a lie.
- An illegal war or two
Not sure about the "illegal" bit, but I certainly have to agree we'd have been better off staying out of Iraq.
- Sponging off the state is more attractive than working
Either you're insane, or trolling, or your mind has been tragically poisoned by extremist propaganda. This simply nonsense.
I had personal experience of both employment and unemployment under Labour. I was vastly happier, and significantly better off, even back when I was in a low-paying temporary job. Unemployment was extremely unpleasant and financially very tight. Once I found a real job (with some great help from the job centre staff) there was no looking back.
BTW, what does welfare have to do with civil liberties?
Yum is still relatively slow, but it's not too bad on modern hardware.
A more serious problem is the lack of any good package management UI. The command line is all very well when you know which package you want to install, but it's not very convenient for searching. The various available GUIs are all painfully slow and rather unpleasant to use, with badly designed unintuitive interfaces and poor-to-nonexistent documentation. I really, really, really miss aptitude.
RC4 is known to have weaknesses if used incorrectly. That is not the same as being "insecure".
RC4 is vulnerable to snooping in the same sense that airplanes are vulnerable to terrorists. In theory something bad can happen if someone malicious gets very lucky and a large number of people fail to do their jobs properly, but in practice it's really not something that should be keeping you awake at night.
I expect the reason Google prefers RC4 over AES is that RC4 is considerably cheaper.
You can't legally run an OEM copy of XP in a VM. OEM copies of Windows are only licensed for use as an operating system on the PC hardware they are sold with.
The PC always was a niche product among gamers. Consoles are nothing new. All that's happened is that the console market has grown massively, while the PC market hasn't.
Let's get back to the real world and markets that matter. Business, for example, where (much as many of us wish it were otherwise) there is no sign whatsoever of any imminent shift away from Microsoft products on fat-client PCs.
Indeed. In Britain we have an established church that is part of the state, with bishops taking part in the legislative process and the Queen officially head of the church. And we have compulsory religious education in schools.
I don't think many American Christians would like the sort of religious education we had, though. We learned more about Hinduism and Buddhism than about Christianity, and the Christian portions tended to be more about the significance of the colours of priests' robes than about how God created the world in six days. At no point was anything presented as anything other than the opinion of whatever religion we were learning about that day.
So much for the idea that the separation of church and state leads to religious freedom and undistorted education, eh?
Indeed, the "Windows" DOS games on Gog.com are pretty much all just bundles of the original DOS game plus a copy of DOSBox anyway. So they work exactly as well on Linux as on Windows; you just need to (apt-get|yum) install dosbox first.
And I can vouch for many of the Windows games running fine in Wine. The Fallout games are perfect on Linux, for example.
1. Lack of browser support for downloading fonts (CSS @font-face and friends)
Not an issue. Microsoft is on board now.
2. Restrictive licenses that do not allow making fonts available
Reading between the lines, something tells me that "Monotype Imaging, a Massachusetts company that owns one of the largest collections of typefaces in the world" might just possibly be in a position to do something about the licensing on that large collection of typefaces they own.
Slashdot Mirror
Black & White did have some nice technology: the graphics. I loved the way you could zoom smoothly all the way from basically the outer atmosphere right down to the point where you were watching individual people doing stuff -- even on a relatively modest graphics card. That was a very good engine for the time.
Shame the supposedly revolutionary AI training turned out to be an exercise in frustration, and the rest of the gameplay was nothing but tedious micromanagement. Unless you wanted to be evil ... throwing rocks at other gods' worshippers never really got old.
Not to mention that it's simply none of the government's business to create an app that lets people do a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the government! I would rather the DVLA concentrated on administering driver and vehicle licensing, and let the RAC take care of holding the hands of RAC members.
Fight Club is a work of fiction. This means that the things it says are not necessarily true.
The reality is quite clearly different, as we can see by the recent events with Toyota: they were pressured into a massively damaging recall even though regulators were unable to prove that stuck accelerators had actually caused any deaths at all. Public anger is a powerful thing, particularly when the media chooses to fan the flames.
Why on earth would you want to use Zip+4 for that? It's not unique to a single potential HBO subscriber.
A simpler and better solution to account sharing would be for Hulu to prevent a single account being used from more than one IP address within some suitable period of time. Bingo -- same effect, and you didn't have to tell everyone on the Internet where I live!
Why? Apple have maintained Darwin as an open-source project even though the BSD license meant they didn't have to. And they are contributing very heavily to the open-source releases of LLVM, even though the BSD license means they don't have to. They have enough positive incentives to do it that coercion is unnecessary.
How can it possibly be wrong for KDE to follow the lead of Apple, the acknowledged masters of desktop design?
(Ask any old-time Mac user how they feel about the OS X Finder ...)
Really? I recently switched to KDE from the supposedly-light-weight Xfce on my tiny underpowered netbook, and I honestly have not noticed any speed difference at all, even with most of the bells and whistles enabled. Haven't run out of memory yet, either, even with Firefox and KDE running.
Gnome might be faster. I wouldn't know because its interface design makes it unusable on netbooks. But if Gnome is faster than Xfce then there's something seriously wrong with the world.
Congratulations to Apple for not pandering to the whims of superstitious peasants.
It won't hurt them, anyway. The sorts of people who can afford to buy iPhones tend to be sufficiently educated to have grown out of that kind of nonsense.
That's a false dichotomy. It is perfectly possible to have unelected judges who can still get fired.
You're also making the assumption that being appointed for life inevitably leads to corruption. You provide no evidence to support this. Indeed, there are plenty of counterexamples, such as the Supreme Court, where justices are appointed for life precisely to reduce the risk of corruption -- and it appears to work pretty well.
Linux not worth bothering with? Adobe doesn't think so. Flash supports Linux just as well as the other platforms -- in fact Linux is currently the only platform for which there's a 64-bit Flash client!
I know which side I'm rooting for in the Apple vs Adobe fight. It's the side that actually believes in cross-platform development, the side that actually believes you should be able to run all content on any device you choose. It's not the side that comes up with arbitrary constantly-shifting rules to restrict what you're allowed to run on their hardware, and claims to love web standards while simultaneously giving anyone who doesn't use their proprietary software a slap in the face.
Maybe AT&T could introduce advertisement filtering into their phones -- and let advertisers be the ones who pay for the privilege of using AT&T bandwidth to reach consumers.
This opinion has come up in every story about these games. It's simply wrong. There is plenty that can be done with the code, even while the data remains proprietary.
It would be extremely nice, in fact, if it became common practice for commercial games to have open-source code and proprietary data. That way the creators could still have an obvious way to make money, while the community could take care of making the game run on different platforms etc. (I guess it wouldn't work for multiplayer due to the rampant cheating that would ensue ...)
You use an email program that displays animations? It's like you want to be forced to claw your eyes out.
No. That's not how society works.
It may be unreasonable to expect Apple to do do anything they don't want to, but it is most certainly not unreasonable to ask.
There are two answers to that.
1. In standard English, it doesn't mean that. Anyone using it in that sense in formal writing is asking for trouble.
2. In many American dialects, that sense has been common for a very long time. A quick Google shows up this paper from 1975 that says it attracted widespread attention in the 1930s, and it's bound to have been around for many years before that.
Clearly there is a difference of some sort, but why on earth should your method of planning make any difference to the sentence? The punishment should fit the crime, not the navigational aids used! And the crime is the same. Burglary is no less distressing for the victim if the burglar got lost three times on the way to the property, so handing out tougher sentences to burglars who used Google Maps is actually an insult to the victims of low-tech criminals.
This is the fault of local councils, not Westminster. Local councils have also been responsible for all the phone-tapping abuse scandals in recent years, by the way. They are the biggest danger to civil liberties in the UK.
If you care about privacy, please get out there and vote in your local elections. Hardly anybody bothers, so it's no surprise local government is crap. Quiz the candidates on their personal intentions, and vote accordingly, not along party lines.
Really? *shrug* I've never had any problems ... I'm more worried about the fact that they were promised to be unforgeable, which appears to have been a lie.
Not sure about the "illegal" bit, but I certainly have to agree we'd have been better off staying out of Iraq.
Either you're insane, or trolling, or your mind has been tragically poisoned by extremist propaganda. This simply nonsense.
I had personal experience of both employment and unemployment under Labour. I was vastly happier, and significantly better off, even back when I was in a low-paying temporary job. Unemployment was extremely unpleasant and financially very tight. Once I found a real job (with some great help from the job centre staff) there was no looking back.
BTW, what does welfare have to do with civil liberties?
Yum is still relatively slow, but it's not too bad on modern hardware.
A more serious problem is the lack of any good package management UI. The command line is all very well when you know which package you want to install, but it's not very convenient for searching. The various available GUIs are all painfully slow and rather unpleasant to use, with badly designed unintuitive interfaces and poor-to-nonexistent documentation. I really, really, really miss aptitude.
RC4 is known to have weaknesses if used incorrectly. That is not the same as being "insecure".
RC4 is vulnerable to snooping in the same sense that airplanes are vulnerable to terrorists. In theory something bad can happen if someone malicious gets very lucky and a large number of people fail to do their jobs properly, but in practice it's really not something that should be keeping you awake at night.
I expect the reason Google prefers RC4 over AES is that RC4 is considerably cheaper.
No, it makes it a clone.
You wouldn't call DR-DOS an MS-DOS emulator or simulator, would you? WINE is a Win32 clone.
You can't legally run an OEM copy of XP in a VM. OEM copies of Windows are only licensed for use as an operating system on the PC hardware they are sold with.
The PC always was a niche product among gamers. Consoles are nothing new. All that's happened is that the console market has grown massively, while the PC market hasn't.
Let's get back to the real world and markets that matter. Business, for example, where (much as many of us wish it were otherwise) there is no sign whatsoever of any imminent shift away from Microsoft products on fat-client PCs.
Indeed. In Britain we have an established church that is part of the state, with bishops taking part in the legislative process and the Queen officially head of the church. And we have compulsory religious education in schools.
I don't think many American Christians would like the sort of religious education we had, though. We learned more about Hinduism and Buddhism than about Christianity, and the Christian portions tended to be more about the significance of the colours of priests' robes than about how God created the world in six days. At no point was anything presented as anything other than the opinion of whatever religion we were learning about that day.
So much for the idea that the separation of church and state leads to religious freedom and undistorted education, eh?
Indeed, the "Windows" DOS games on Gog.com are pretty much all just bundles of the original DOS game plus a copy of DOSBox anyway. So they work exactly as well on Linux as on Windows; you just need to (apt-get|yum) install dosbox first.
And I can vouch for many of the Windows games running fine in Wine. The Fallout games are perfect on Linux, for example.
Not an issue. Microsoft is on board now.
Reading between the lines, something tells me that "Monotype Imaging, a Massachusetts company that owns one of the largest collections of typefaces in the world" might just possibly be in a position to do something about the licensing on that large collection of typefaces they own.