If Blizzard becomes synonymous with a chain-shitty-sequel-churner I'll be annoyed to sad.
Yes, how would the world survive if the team behind such original franchises as Warcraft II, Warcraft III, World of Warcraft, Diablo II, and the upcoming Diablo III and Starcraft 2.1, Starcraft 2.2 and Starcraft 2.3 was ever reduced to chain-sequel-churning?
All this talk about functional programming is just hype. We have had multithreading for a LONG LONG time.
We've also had functional programming for a LONG LONG time. Like multithreading, it's not used much because there are easier ways of writing programs. All the FP hype is about is the claim that FP makes multithreading easier, so the combination of the two may be a good idea compared to trying to use just one or the other.
Gimp does not do "serious CMYK" yet, though it's being worked on, and most people don't need it anyway.
However, for the minority that do need CMYK, there is no native Linux software that suits. Gimp has a separation plugin, but that's too limited to be very useful; Krita is too immature for serious use (and is heavily specialised towards natural media simulation, in any case).
Many Photoshop versions run fine in Wine, of course, and it's not like VMs are difficult to set up.
This is not entirely true. For example, Apple's cinema displays are 8-bit panels.
It's also not just an Apple thing; if you buy a computer from absolutely anyone, and don't go out of your way to make sure you're getting an expensive monitor, you'll end up with a 6-bit panel. Most people don't care. Gamers even prefer 6-bit panels, because they have better black levels and faster response times.
Manually removing individual adverts? Don't make me laugh. I suggest you get yourself a copy of Firefox with Adblock Plus and learn for yourself what people are talking about when they criticise Opera's lack of adblocking.
(Yeah, if you know what you're doing you can download and import a blacklist for Opera. But Firefox finds the blacklist for you, and keeps it up-to-date automatically.)
Far be it from me to accuse you of lying, but what you're saying is rather implausible and completely contradicts their widely publicised and well-documented behaviour.
If they catch you cheating, your account is permanently banned from their multiplayer servers, and you do have to buy the games again on a different account if you want to play them multiplayer on Valve's servers again. But the account itself is not deactivated; you can still play all your single-player games, and you can still play the multiplayer games on third-party servers that don't block cheaters.
So if you had a dialup connection and weren't playing multiplayer games anyway, then you wouldn't have noticed any ill effects at all from a cheater ban.
Unicode doesn't quite represent all possible characters. There are some different representations of (approximately) the same character in East Asian encodings, for instance, which map to the same character in Unicode...
No they don't, unless you want them to. Unicode provides the CJK Compatibility Ideographs (U+F900-U+FAFF), which contain duplicate copies of various characters, specifically to ensure that it is always possible to do a perfect round-trip mapping from any East Asian encoding, to Unicode, and back again, without losing any information.
Or if you're processing Japanese text, the SHIFT-JIS encoding defines a range for katakana, and then another whole range for the same characters displayed at half width. Converting this to Unicode would preserve the meaning, but not the full character of the original source data...
No it wouldn't, unless you wanted it to. Unicode provides the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms (U+FF00-U+FFEF), which includes a full set of hankaku katakana, specifically to ensure that it is always possible to convert from Shift-JIS to Unicode and back again without losing any information.
That's why it's possible for a programming language to use Unicode throughout as its internal string representation, and only convert to and from other encodings when doing I/O. This makes life much simpler. There is no technical reason not to do it; the only excuses people ever make are based on politics (effectively, "why should the English letter 'A' use the same codepoint as the letter 'A' used in French?") or ignorance.
I assume that this has been fixed in Vista, but I haven't used it, I switched to Mac OS X in the mean time.
Yes, it's been fixed in Vista. Attempts to write outside the proper places are silently redirected to the "virtual store", which is specific to the combination of user and application. The app may think it's written to C:\Program Files, but nothing else can see any changes.
When viewed through objective eyes, Vista is the best version of Windows yet on many counts. The problem is all the mindless XP fanboys who refuse to believe that anything that's different from XP could have any merit at all. It's weird how it's the Unix/Linux users like myself who are most able to appreciate the progress Microsoft has made...
My main gripes are the stupid loading zones (those could have been eliminated on the PC version) and the lack of rope arrows.
Actually the loading zones couldn't have been eliminated on the PC version. Don't think people didn't try, once the level editor was released. But the architecture doesn't actually line up, and it would be a heck of a lot of work to fix everything and make the levels work. Not to mention that the engine simply couldn't have handled it on the hardware of the day. Things were jerky enough as it was.
Oh, and you forgot to mention the lack of swimmable water, the lack of special objectives on higher difficulty levels, and the immersion-destroyingly-bad ragdoll effects.
The City levels were pretty cool, though, and the soundtrack was simply awesome.
Linux the kernel isn't responsible for sendmail, but Linux the distribution (by whatever name you use) is... Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, whatever.
None of the distros you name installs sendmail by default: they all prefer MTAs with simpler, saner configuration files. So I guess they're taking that responsibility pretty seriously.
I tried NetworkManager, and my wireless connected one time in ten and dropped out reliably after ten minutes.
Then I tried Wicd, and my wireless wouldn't connect at all.
Then I nuked them both and called wpa_supplicant directly from the command line, and lo and behold, it connects perfectly every time and never drops out.
When talking to grandma about trying Linux since all she wants to do is check e-mail, look at pictures of the grand kids and keep her MySpace page updated, you get the question thrown back..."why so many different ones? Are they all different?"
Only if you tell her that there are so many different ones. Why are you so determined to confuse her by overcomplicating things?
When you moved her off Windows 98, did you start by telling her that she had to choose between XP and and MCE and Vista Home Premium and Ultimate, and did you describe that as a choice between all the different distributions of the NT kernel? No -- you probably said something like "Here's your new computer. It's pretty similar to the old one, only it won't crash so much and you'll be safer on the internet. Some things look a bit different, so just give me a ring if you have any trouble."
And she probably got a bit frustrated for the first week, then got used to it, and still doesn't know which Windows she's using, which suits her fine because quite frankly she couldn't give a damn as long as she can read her emails and view her photos.
We should be able to point the average Windows user to "Linux", a single cohesive product.
Why? Linux is a kernel, not a product.
If you want a single cohesive product to point Windows users to, then you have that today. It's called Ubuntu. Just Ubuntu. Not "the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux". Not "Ubuntu, or you might prefer Kubuntu, or maybe something else like Fedora or Gentoo, no, wait, actually SuSE has this great thing called YaST... or are you more a BSD sort of person, Grandma? There's FreeBSD, and OpenBSD... here, read the GPL and all the BSD manuals and see what you think."
No, you can forget all that. Only nerds care. For everyone else, just stick with Ubuntu. There you have it: a single cohesive product, aimed at being usable, with one packaging system, one standard desktop environment, a marketing machine, plenty of mindshare, and plenty of support. You don't even have to mention the L-word or the D-word.
Really, what was so difficult about that? All you need to do is stop worrying about how complicated it all is. Screen out all the irrelevant bits, and suddenly it's not so complicated any more.
since the motive (revenge/humiliation) was established and intent to harm was also established, its time for them to pay the piper.
Yeah, the only problem with that is that you are completely and utterly wrong.
"The jury unanimously rejected the three felony computer hacking charges that alleged the unauthorized access was part of a scheme to intentionally inflict emotional distress on Megan." (citation)
Hint: generally speaking, when the jury in a criminal case unanimously reject something, that suggests it has not been established.
The UNIX brand nowadays refers to a certification program that covers the complete OS, not just the kernel. GNU/OpenSolaris is not certified, therefore it's still Not UNIX, even if the kernel may be derived from a certified UNIX OS.
i don't know how much choice Brits have with regards to broadband access. if it's anything like the U.S. then BT subscribers probably won't be able to just switch to a different broadband provider and boycott BT's actions.
Thankfully we have a lot of choice and a very competitive market. It is trivial to switch to a different provider, and while most of your data may still be going over BT's networks, BT won't have a legal leg to stand on if they try to intercept communications belonging to people who aren't even their own customers.
What are you talking about? rpm requires root and so does make install.
What are you talking about? make install does not require root access (unless you choose to install to a location owned by root -- but that is a choice, not an inherent requirement):
./configure --prefix=/home/me make make install # look ma, no root needed!
I would suggest that since humans are a very visual-thinking species...
But even that, right there, can be disputed. There's a reason we abstracted our written records into modern alphabets, syllabaries, and logographs, instead of sticking with the original "visual" pictograms. Text has fought pictures -- and it was text that won.
People have been trying to introduce visual representations of things for decades now. But for example "visual" programming (in the flowchart sense, not the interface design sense) never caught on, except in the niche case of UML, which is only used as support for traditional pages of text. And for all the Jurassic Park-style attempts to give our operating systems "visual" interfaces, it's pretty much still all text -- menus are lists of text, file browsers are lists of text, spreadsheets and databases are grids of text, word processors are pages of text... you know, we seem to be coming back to that T-word over and over again.
Even in cases where pictures are used (pretty much limited to icons on toolbars), a heck of a lot of people find the pictures completely unintuitive, and are totally unable to guess what they mean without being taught; faced with a new toolbar, people resort to hovering over the buttons, waiting for the text to appear; they then learn the picture as a symbol, a modern-day pictograph if you will, and most people are subsequently confused if they ever encounter a different picture, even if it's a different picture of exactly the same concept.
simple things like the classic terminal are *increasing* in popularity, if anything. New Linux users and experienced Mac users are saying things like, "actually, I just use the terminal to do such-and-such a task; it's faster that way."
And it's not even just Unix and Unix-like systems where the terminal's popular. Even Microsoft recognise its importance -- that's why they introduced PowerShell as an alternative to Windows' traditionally rubbish CLI.
Whoever modded this Flamebait was presumably looking for "-1, The Truth Hurts Me".
If you don't want to pay for the nasty overpriced games that the evil corporations insist on putting out in their endless quest to grind your face underfoot, don't play them.
Why not play some real homebrew instead? By which I don't mean "actually pirated, but we're running it in a homebrew emulator", but actual honest-to-God homebrew games. There aren't many for the Xbox360, which is good, because it means less money for the evil corporations. There are plenty for the PC, though. Have fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, how would the world survive if the team behind such original franchises as Warcraft II, Warcraft III, World of Warcraft, Diablo II, and the upcoming Diablo III and Starcraft 2.1, Starcraft 2.2 and Starcraft 2.3 was ever reduced to chain-sequel-churning?
We've also had functional programming for a LONG LONG time. Like multithreading, it's not used much because there are easier ways of writing programs. All the FP hype is about is the claim that FP makes multithreading easier, so the combination of the two may be a good idea compared to trying to use just one or the other.
Gimp does not do "serious CMYK" yet, though it's being worked on, and most people don't need it anyway.
However, for the minority that do need CMYK, there is no native Linux software that suits. Gimp has a separation plugin, but that's too limited to be very useful; Krita is too immature for serious use (and is heavily specialised towards natural media simulation, in any case).
Many Photoshop versions run fine in Wine, of course, and it's not like VMs are difficult to set up.
[citation needed]
A brief google shows nobody supporting your claim, and lots of people claiming that MacBook Pros ship with 6-bit panels (or 18-bit if you prefer).
This is not entirely true. For example, Apple's cinema displays are 8-bit panels.
It's also not just an Apple thing; if you buy a computer from absolutely anyone, and don't go out of your way to make sure you're getting an expensive monitor, you'll end up with a 6-bit panel. Most people don't care. Gamers even prefer 6-bit panels, because they have better black levels and faster response times.
Yes, just like every other laptop on the market (apart from the OLPC).
Better panels draw more power.
Manually removing individual adverts? Don't make me laugh. I suggest you get yourself a copy of Firefox with Adblock Plus and learn for yourself what people are talking about when they criticise Opera's lack of adblocking.
(Yeah, if you know what you're doing you can download and import a blacklist for Opera. But Firefox finds the blacklist for you, and keeps it up-to-date automatically.)
So basically you're cutting off your nose to spite someone else's face? That sounds like perfectly rational behaviour.
Far be it from me to accuse you of lying, but what you're saying is rather implausible and completely contradicts their widely publicised and well-documented behaviour.
If they catch you cheating, your account is permanently banned from their multiplayer servers, and you do have to buy the games again on a different account if you want to play them multiplayer on Valve's servers again. But the account itself is not deactivated; you can still play all your single-player games, and you can still play the multiplayer games on third-party servers that don't block cheaters.
So if you had a dialup connection and weren't playing multiplayer games anyway, then you wouldn't have noticed any ill effects at all from a cheater ban.
No they don't, unless you want them to. Unicode provides the CJK Compatibility Ideographs (U+F900-U+FAFF), which contain duplicate copies of various characters, specifically to ensure that it is always possible to do a perfect round-trip mapping from any East Asian encoding, to Unicode, and back again, without losing any information.
No it wouldn't, unless you wanted it to. Unicode provides the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms (U+FF00-U+FFEF), which includes a full set of hankaku katakana, specifically to ensure that it is always possible to convert from Shift-JIS to Unicode and back again without losing any information.
That's why it's possible for a programming language to use Unicode throughout as its internal string representation, and only convert to and from other encodings when doing I/O. This makes life much simpler. There is no technical reason not to do it; the only excuses people ever make are based on politics (effectively, "why should the English letter 'A' use the same codepoint as the letter 'A' used in French?") or ignorance.
Yes, it's been fixed in Vista. Attempts to write outside the proper places are silently redirected to the "virtual store", which is specific to the combination of user and application. The app may think it's written to C:\Program Files, but nothing else can see any changes.
When viewed through objective eyes, Vista is the best version of Windows yet on many counts. The problem is all the mindless XP fanboys who refuse to believe that anything that's different from XP could have any merit at all. It's weird how it's the Unix/Linux users like myself who are most able to appreciate the progress Microsoft has made...
Actually the loading zones couldn't have been eliminated on the PC version. Don't think people didn't try, once the level editor was released. But the architecture doesn't actually line up, and it would be a heck of a lot of work to fix everything and make the levels work. Not to mention that the engine simply couldn't have handled it on the hardware of the day. Things were jerky enough as it was.
Oh, and you forgot to mention the lack of swimmable water, the lack of special objectives on higher difficulty levels, and the immersion-destroyingly-bad ragdoll effects.
The City levels were pretty cool, though, and the soundtrack was simply awesome.
Sounds like you're running Linux on a pretty old computer, if it runs at resolutions like 1024x768 or 800x600. Most likely your hardware is faulty.
None of the distros you name installs sendmail by default: they all prefer MTAs with simpler, saner configuration files. So I guess they're taking that responsibility pretty seriously.
I tried NetworkManager, and my wireless connected one time in ten and dropped out reliably after ten minutes.
Then I tried Wicd, and my wireless wouldn't connect at all.
Then I nuked them both and called wpa_supplicant directly from the command line, and lo and behold, it connects perfectly every time and never drops out.
So much for GUIs making life easier...
Only if you tell her that there are so many different ones. Why are you so determined to confuse her by overcomplicating things?
When you moved her off Windows 98, did you start by telling her that she had to choose between XP and and MCE and Vista Home Premium and Ultimate, and did you describe that as a choice between all the different distributions of the NT kernel? No -- you probably said something like "Here's your new computer. It's pretty similar to the old one, only it won't crash so much and you'll be safer on the internet. Some things look a bit different, so just give me a ring if you have any trouble."
And she probably got a bit frustrated for the first week, then got used to it, and still doesn't know which Windows she's using, which suits her fine because quite frankly she couldn't give a damn as long as she can read her emails and view her photos.
Why? Linux is a kernel, not a product.
If you want a single cohesive product to point Windows users to, then you have that today. It's called Ubuntu. Just Ubuntu. Not "the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux". Not "Ubuntu, or you might prefer Kubuntu, or maybe something else like Fedora or Gentoo, no, wait, actually SuSE has this great thing called YaST... or are you more a BSD sort of person, Grandma? There's FreeBSD, and OpenBSD... here, read the GPL and all the BSD manuals and see what you think."
No, you can forget all that. Only nerds care. For everyone else, just stick with Ubuntu. There you have it: a single cohesive product, aimed at being usable, with one packaging system, one standard desktop environment, a marketing machine, plenty of mindshare, and plenty of support. You don't even have to mention the L-word or the D-word.
Really, what was so difficult about that? All you need to do is stop worrying about how complicated it all is. Screen out all the irrelevant bits, and suddenly it's not so complicated any more.
Yeah, the only problem with that is that you are completely and utterly wrong.
"The jury unanimously rejected the three felony computer hacking charges that alleged the unauthorized access was part of a scheme to intentionally inflict emotional distress on Megan." (citation)
Hint: generally speaking, when the jury in a criminal case unanimously reject something, that suggests it has not been established.
The UNIX brand nowadays refers to a certification program that covers the complete OS, not just the kernel. GNU/OpenSolaris is not certified, therefore it's still Not UNIX, even if the kernel may be derived from a certified UNIX OS.
Neither Perl nor CPAN requires a specific C compiler. Maybe you shouldn't comment on things you know nothing about.
Thankfully we have a lot of choice and a very competitive market. It is trivial to switch to a different provider, and while most of your data may still be going over BT's networks, BT won't have a legal leg to stand on if they try to intercept communications belonging to people who aren't even their own customers.
What are you talking about? make install does not require root access (unless you choose to install to a location owned by root -- but that is a choice, not an inherent requirement):
But even that, right there, can be disputed. There's a reason we abstracted our written records into modern alphabets, syllabaries, and logographs, instead of sticking with the original "visual" pictograms. Text has fought pictures -- and it was text that won.
People have been trying to introduce visual representations of things for decades now. But for example "visual" programming (in the flowchart sense, not the interface design sense) never caught on, except in the niche case of UML, which is only used as support for traditional pages of text. And for all the Jurassic Park-style attempts to give our operating systems "visual" interfaces, it's pretty much still all text -- menus are lists of text, file browsers are lists of text, spreadsheets and databases are grids of text, word processors are pages of text... you know, we seem to be coming back to that T-word over and over again.
Even in cases where pictures are used (pretty much limited to icons on toolbars), a heck of a lot of people find the pictures completely unintuitive, and are totally unable to guess what they mean without being taught; faced with a new toolbar, people resort to hovering over the buttons, waiting for the text to appear; they then learn the picture as a symbol, a modern-day pictograph if you will, and most people are subsequently confused if they ever encounter a different picture, even if it's a different picture of exactly the same concept.
Are we really as visual as all that?
And it's not even just Unix and Unix-like systems where the terminal's popular. Even Microsoft recognise its importance -- that's why they introduced PowerShell as an alternative to Windows' traditionally rubbish CLI.
Erratum: for "the world", read "the USA".
Whoever modded this Flamebait was presumably looking for "-1, The Truth Hurts Me".
If you don't want to pay for the nasty overpriced games that the evil corporations insist on putting out in their endless quest to grind your face underfoot, don't play them.
Why not play some real homebrew instead? By which I don't mean "actually pirated, but we're running it in a homebrew emulator", but actual honest-to-God homebrew games. There aren't many for the Xbox360, which is good, because it means less money for the evil corporations. There are plenty for the PC, though. Have fun.