Those genres are already very popular. This has not killed PC gaming. Therefore, your claim that popularising them will kill PC gaming is transparently false.
The single-screen multiplayer case is not even something the PC "can't handle". The PC handled it very nicely when it last made sense, which was with split-screen games about 15 years ago. Then the internet made split screen look very silly. It's only very recently that the growth in popularity of party games has given shared-screen multiplayer a new purpose.
The whole point of a little netbook ("Oooooh, look at the cute little laptop!") is making your regular (lightweight) notebook apps portable. For the majority of consumers, that means they want to run exactly the same e-mail program, the same browser, the same IM program(s)...
For a significant number of people, that boils down to Firefox plus one of the numerous popular webmail providers and web-based chat clients. Sounds like a market to me...
You are missing the point, this is only an issue when using Windows and the point is to get rid of Windows.
It's not quite that simple.
There are, for example, plenty of cases where people have been able to switch to Linux because they can still run $FAVOURITE_PROGRAM with Wine. And Wine is still tied to x86. I suspect emulating an x86 processor will be a bit beyond most ARM smartbooks.
There are also a lot of people who, like it or not, do use closed-source software on Linux. I have several closed-source programs installed on the very Linux netbook I'm typing this on. Will the vendors of those programs be happy to port them to ARM? They've already taken a risk just supporting the tiny x86 Linux market; the ARM Linux market is even smaller.
Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of ARM smartbooks, and if Dell brings one out with Ubuntu on it, I will buy it without a moment's hesitation. I'm just pointing out that x86 is only irrelevant if you only ever use purely F/OSS software, and that isn't universal even among Linux fans.
Gemini Gold is a pretty decent Privateer remake, if you can cope with the whole borderline-copyright-infringement thing. And Ascii Sector is pure genius in a different way.
And no, Privateer 2 was quite good in some respects. The gameplay sucked, but the setting wasn't bad. Some of those FMV sets were amazing, and the acting, script, and effects were way better than most video-game material of the era. Shame they ruined it with that horrible and totally unnecessary interlacing effect.
Oblivion didn't actually surpass Ultima VII in a few important respects.
Interaction with the environment in Oblivion consisted entirely of trying to pick stuff up and accidentally sending it flying across the room instead. It hardly compares with a game where you could bake your own bread, weave your own cloth, or forge your own sword.
Oblivion's interface consists of computer-like menus, with everything stored in lists of words; Ultima's interface looks like the real world, where you flick through a book to find the spell you want to cast, or rummage through your backpack looking for a particular item. Less streamlined, but a hundred times more immersive.
And how on earth were Oblivion's NPCs better than Ultima's? Oblivion's NPCs were rubbish. They only had a handful of lines each, and most of those were the same for every character in a given town. Oblivion's shallow, undetailed conversations were a step backwards even from Morrowind, which was already rather guilty of genericity! Contrast Ultima VII, where every single NPC has a unique and often deep branching conversation tree.
Don't get me wrong. I love Oblivion. I've probably spent more time playing it than any single Ultima game. But it's a very different product. If you think it's better than Ultima in every respect, I cordially put it to you that it's too long since you played Ultima. Download Exult and fire up Serpent Isle. It's aged surprisingly well.
There's a translation of the Gospels and much of Genesis into Old English. They precede the KJV by about 800 years, or roughly half the length of time between Christ and James I. That's quite a time line mixup!
Wycliffe then comes along about halfway between that and James I. And there are quite a number of other translations before the KJV.
In short, the Bible has been being regularly translated into English for about as long as Christianity has existed in England.
It's true that the Church has often tried to discourage laymen from interpreting scripture for themselves. But the picture you paint -- of a Church continuously actively trying to ban non-Latin Bibles -- is simply a fabrication, invented in more recent times when it became politically expedient to spread such beliefs.
How exactly is an unsubstantiated comment from some random nerd "symptomatic" of anything, other than the well-known level of anti-government paranoia on Slashdot?
To summarise your argument: "There might be loads of aliens out there, all around us, but we can't see them because they're invisible and completely undetectable."
Replace "aliens" with "angels" and it becomes immediately clear that you are engaging in religious discourse. There's nothing wrong with that. I subscribe to certain religious beliefs myself. But I don't pretend they have any place in scientific discussions.
Two episodes now have revolved around a mixed-race female with realistic body proportions and sensible clothes, while the plot has been driven entirely by elderly people, one of whom is both black and disabled.
They've been critically acclaimed and sold gazillions of copies.
It's unclear. The FSF's position is that dynamic linking against a GPL library does produce a derivative work that is covered by the GPL. Some other people disagree. The question has never been tested in court, so the safest option is to assume that the FSF are right.
I had hoped that a post making such detailed and unequivocal statements might cite at least one court case. It's not enough for you to assert the precedent exists -- you have to show us, as well, or we simply won't believe you.
Using a.emacs file is a bad idea. You should be using a.emacs.d directory, with various types of customisation split up into different files. Then you stick the whole lot in version control. Much more manageable.
Of course, if you want to control where things go, you can't really use customize-mode. But it's not that hard to do things properly. Look up set-face-foreground.
Emacs is not an IDE. That term is limited to one type of work (development), while Emacs is good for pretty much anything that involves working with text. "IDE" also conjures up images of endless busy toolbars and wizards and snapins and docked windows and proprietary file formats and non-standard tools everywhere you look, while Emacs provides a single interface (the buffer) and builds on standard tools and file formats.
I'd call Emacs an "operating environment". That covers its ability to provide a unified interface to most tasks, while acknowledging that it doesn't replace the operating system (Emacs is crippled without some flavour of GNU or UNIX behind it.)
I think it's better overall that not a single iPhone, Mac, Linux or other device works on their network. That way they will ship a proper client and support it.
I admire your optimism. Unfortunately history does not support it.
A similar example that nearly bit me recently was ebooks. There's no Mobipocket reader for Mac, iPhone, or Linux, despite years of people clamouring for one (and a total lack of any technical issues preventing it).
Either some companies are happy with 90% and simply don't care about 10% of customers, or Microsoft is leaning on people. It's probably just the former. All these cases involve markets with massive barriers to entry; established players don't have to worry about good service because there's no real competition.
It's not really what I'd call a "debate". Only one side is reading and countering the other side's claims with rational arguments; the other side is simply parroting long-discredited talking points ad nauseam.
The funny thing? Both sides will agree with the above statement, but will disagree on its interpretation.
No false sense of security created by seeing https and a lock icon, due to not understanding the difference between encryption and authentication.
Then don't display the fucking lock icon for self-signed certificates. It doesn't take a genius to think of these things.
Like it or not, self-signed certificates are widely used for perfectly legitimate purposes. No browser maker can do anything to change that. Crying wolf every time you see one merely makes users less likely to take notice of useful warnings, and is therefore a very bad idea.
No need for scare quotes. A hinted TrueType font file is a program by anyone's definition. It contains bytecode which is literally executed to render the characters.
Also, all this only applies to US law. Font outlines are covered by copyright in some other countries. Remember what the first two letters of "www" stand for...
Looking at the fonts I have installed on my Ubuntu system, I can't help but see a certain pattern emerging. Let's run through the fonts that are suitable (i.e. look good on screen and have a full set of weights and styles):
There are some fonts from Bitstream: Vera, Charter, etc.
There are some fonts from URW: Nimbus Sans, etc.
There are the Liberation fonts, from Ascender Corp.
That's about it. There are other fonts available -- Luxi and Lucida from B&H, Adobe's Utopia, etc -- but those have restrictive licenses.
What I don't see is a single decent font that was produced by any sort of community effort. They were all, without exception, produced by professional type designers who were paid for their work.
You want me to trust you that communities will magically appear and suddenly start making fonts that are worth using? I'll believe it when I see it. They haven't bothered to do it for all the other things we use fonts for -- why suppose that websites are going to be the catalyst that suddenly makes a large number of people invest considerable time and effort in learning a difficult skill in order to give away their work for free?
Slashdot Mirror
Those genres are already very popular. This has not killed PC gaming. Therefore, your claim that popularising them will kill PC gaming is transparently false.
The single-screen multiplayer case is not even something the PC "can't handle". The PC handled it very nicely when it last made sense, which was with split-screen games about 15 years ago. Then the internet made split screen look very silly. It's only very recently that the growth in popularity of party games has given shared-screen multiplayer a new purpose.
Actually, I work with a netbook and I still tend rather to value text I can read and buttons that are big enough to hit.
Titlebar + menubar + address bar + tab bar + status bar still leaves 480 vertical pixels, which should be enough for anyone.
For a significant number of people, that boils down to Firefox plus one of the numerous popular webmail providers and web-based chat clients. Sounds like a market to me ...
It's not quite that simple.
There are, for example, plenty of cases where people have been able to switch to Linux because they can still run $FAVOURITE_PROGRAM with Wine. And Wine is still tied to x86. I suspect emulating an x86 processor will be a bit beyond most ARM smartbooks.
There are also a lot of people who, like it or not, do use closed-source software on Linux. I have several closed-source programs installed on the very Linux netbook I'm typing this on. Will the vendors of those programs be happy to port them to ARM? They've already taken a risk just supporting the tiny x86 Linux market; the ARM Linux market is even smaller.
Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of ARM smartbooks, and if Dell brings one out with Ubuntu on it, I will buy it without a moment's hesitation. I'm just pointing out that x86 is only irrelevant if you only ever use purely F/OSS software, and that isn't universal even among Linux fans.
Gemini Gold is a pretty decent Privateer remake, if you can cope with the whole borderline-copyright-infringement thing. And Ascii Sector is pure genius in a different way.
And no, Privateer 2 was quite good in some respects. The gameplay sucked, but the setting wasn't bad. Some of those FMV sets were amazing, and the acting, script, and effects were way better than most video-game material of the era. Shame they ruined it with that horrible and totally unnecessary interlacing effect.
Oblivion didn't actually surpass Ultima VII in a few important respects.
Interaction with the environment in Oblivion consisted entirely of trying to pick stuff up and accidentally sending it flying across the room instead. It hardly compares with a game where you could bake your own bread, weave your own cloth, or forge your own sword.
Oblivion's interface consists of computer-like menus, with everything stored in lists of words; Ultima's interface looks like the real world, where you flick through a book to find the spell you want to cast, or rummage through your backpack looking for a particular item. Less streamlined, but a hundred times more immersive.
And how on earth were Oblivion's NPCs better than Ultima's? Oblivion's NPCs were rubbish. They only had a handful of lines each, and most of those were the same for every character in a given town. Oblivion's shallow, undetailed conversations were a step backwards even from Morrowind, which was already rather guilty of genericity! Contrast Ultima VII, where every single NPC has a unique and often deep branching conversation tree.
Don't get me wrong. I love Oblivion. I've probably spent more time playing it than any single Ultima game. But it's a very different product. If you think it's better than Ultima in every respect, I cordially put it to you that it's too long since you played Ultima. Download Exult and fire up Serpent Isle. It's aged surprisingly well.
There's a translation of the Gospels and much of Genesis into Old English. They precede the KJV by about 800 years, or roughly half the length of time between Christ and James I. That's quite a time line mixup!
Wycliffe then comes along about halfway between that and James I. And there are quite a number of other translations before the KJV.
In short, the Bible has been being regularly translated into English for about as long as Christianity has existed in England.
It's true that the Church has often tried to discourage laymen from interpreting scripture for themselves. But the picture you paint -- of a Church continuously actively trying to ban non-Latin Bibles -- is simply a fabrication, invented in more recent times when it became politically expedient to spread such beliefs.
How exactly is an unsubstantiated comment from some random nerd "symptomatic" of anything, other than the well-known level of anti-government paranoia on Slashdot?
To summarise your argument: "There might be loads of aliens out there, all around us, but we can't see them because they're invisible and completely undetectable."
Replace "aliens" with "angels" and it becomes immediately clear that you are engaging in religious discourse. There's nothing wrong with that. I subscribe to certain religious beliefs myself. But I don't pretend they have any place in scientific discussions.
Two episodes now have revolved around a mixed-race female with realistic body proportions and sensible clothes, while the plot has been driven entirely by elderly people, one of whom is both black and disabled.
They've been critically acclaimed and sold gazillions of copies.
It's unclear. The FSF's position is that dynamic linking against a GPL library does produce a derivative work that is covered by the GPL. Some other people disagree. The question has never been tested in court, so the safest option is to assume that the FSF are right.
I had hoped that a post making such detailed and unequivocal statements might cite at least one court case. It's not enough for you to assert the precedent exists -- you have to show us, as well, or we simply won't believe you.
Smarter than us? The average modern "AI" couldn't even pass for a Digg user.
longlines-mode is obsolete. Use visual-line-mode, like the Atomic Rabbit says. Or just (setq word-wrap t).
Using a .emacs file is a bad idea. You should be using a .emacs.d directory, with various types of customisation split up into different files. Then you stick the whole lot in version control. Much more manageable.
Of course, if you want to control where things go, you can't really use customize-mode. But it's not that hard to do things properly. Look up set-face-foreground.
Emacs is not an IDE. That term is limited to one type of work (development), while Emacs is good for pretty much anything that involves working with text. "IDE" also conjures up images of endless busy toolbars and wizards and snapins and docked windows and proprietary file formats and non-standard tools everywhere you look, while Emacs provides a single interface (the buffer) and builds on standard tools and file formats.
I'd call Emacs an "operating environment". That covers its ability to provide a unified interface to most tasks, while acknowledging that it doesn't replace the operating system (Emacs is crippled without some flavour of GNU or UNIX behind it.)
I admire your optimism. Unfortunately history does not support it.
A similar example that nearly bit me recently was ebooks. There's no Mobipocket reader for Mac, iPhone, or Linux, despite years of people clamouring for one (and a total lack of any technical issues preventing it).
Either some companies are happy with 90% and simply don't care about 10% of customers, or Microsoft is leaning on people. It's probably just the former. All these cases involve markets with massive barriers to entry; established players don't have to worry about good service because there's no real competition.
It's not really what I'd call a "debate". Only one side is reading and countering the other side's claims with rational arguments; the other side is simply parroting long-discredited talking points ad nauseam.
The funny thing? Both sides will agree with the above statement, but will disagree on its interpretation.
You're not supposed to take anything to do with "gaming" seriously. There's kind of a hint in the name.
Then don't display the fucking lock icon for self-signed certificates. It doesn't take a genius to think of these things.
Like it or not, self-signed certificates are widely used for perfectly legitimate purposes. No browser maker can do anything to change that. Crying wolf every time you see one merely makes users less likely to take notice of useful warnings, and is therefore a very bad idea.
No need for scare quotes. A hinted TrueType font file is a program by anyone's definition. It contains bytecode which is literally executed to render the characters.
Also, all this only applies to US law. Font outlines are covered by copyright in some other countries. Remember what the first two letters of "www" stand for ...
Looking at the fonts I have installed on my Ubuntu system, I can't help but see a certain pattern emerging. Let's run through the fonts that are suitable (i.e. look good on screen and have a full set of weights and styles):
There are some fonts from Bitstream: Vera, Charter, etc.
There are some fonts from URW: Nimbus Sans, etc.
There are the Liberation fonts, from Ascender Corp.
That's about it. There are other fonts available -- Luxi and Lucida from B&H, Adobe's Utopia, etc -- but those have restrictive licenses.
What I don't see is a single decent font that was produced by any sort of community effort. They were all, without exception, produced by professional type designers who were paid for their work.
You want me to trust you that communities will magically appear and suddenly start making fonts that are worth using? I'll believe it when I see it. They haven't bothered to do it for all the other things we use fonts for -- why suppose that websites are going to be the catalyst that suddenly makes a large number of people invest considerable time and effort in learning a difficult skill in order to give away their work for free?
For the same reason you need more than 16 colours.
Someone should tell Apple.
Some Europeans use a comma. Not all by any means.