Updating your video driver (or other drivers) is not a fun part of gaming. But for PC games, it's usually the first level you have to play.
"Usually"? Bullshit. It may be true for a handful of the very latest top-budget titles. But the whole point of TFA is that those are actually only a minority interest, and the reason the PC gaming market is so much bigger than the console market is that most popular PC games aren't like that at all.
Maybe you need to expand your understanding of "gaming" slightly. Not every game is Crysis.
Crysis: only played by a tiny minority. Probably requires driver updates. (Though I'm pretty sure it didn't for me.)
Freecell: has been played by practically every PC owner in the world. Does not require driver updates.
Remember the group that made some neat games in college, then got hired by Valve and made Portal? The same kind of routes into console gaming don't really exist yet.
Portal is cross-platform; it runs on PS3 and XBox360 as well as PC. So it seems like that exact route is a route into console gaming. It's just that there isn't a route into console gaming that doesn't start on the PC...
If the other consoles "lose" (even if the Xbox does) nothing stops them from being the gatekeeper of all games and that means higher prices and fewer choices.
I'm sorry? How exactly is this supposed to work? See, PC games and console games are fundamentally different beasts. Consoles are closed platforms. Windows, for all its flaws (and I dislike it, and only use it for games these days), is an open platform.
Developers do not have to pay a fee to develop PC games, and Microsoft has no control whatsoever over the content or pricing of PC games. If PC gaming "wins" (whatever that means), Microsoft will not be a gatekeeper of anything, and we will continue to have a whole range of choices at a whole range of prices.
You would prefer Microsoft's completely closed, completely proprietary platform to defeat Microsoft's open-to-all, zero-cost-of-entry platform? That's a bizarre way to promote freedom.
And return stronger as genuine, cross-platform PC gaming.
Okay, nice idea and all, but back in the real world, when you kill something it's dead, and PC gaming hasn't performed enough miracles for me to have any confidence it'll rise again on the third day.
Me, I'd rather keep the good thing I have, than kill it in the hopes of maybe possibly getting something better one day if I'm really really lucky.
JavaScript has changed that much in 4 years has it?
Well... yes, actually. The language itself is the same, but the way it's used, the libraries and techniques, have changed beyond all recognition.
Didn't think so.
You know, when you don't know the answer to a question, it's generally considered better to wait for someone else to answer it, instead of rushing on and getting it wrong.
But even if the JS world hadn't moved on, even if nothing had changed in the slightest, WanderingHermit would still not be in a position to judge whether or not JS sucks on any objective level. There's this thing we humans have called "memory", which is imperfect, and after a gap of four years is pretty unreliable, particularly when we're thinking about something we have a strong emotional reaction to.
No one has actually bothered to reply to WanderingHermit yet in any real sense, I see. I must be reading SlashDot!
I would dispute that you're reading it. You may be looking at the pictures, but I see no evidence that you're able to comprehend the text.
I'd love to see JavaScript outdated or made obsolete by a real language each browser could understand.
So, uh, did you bother to cast your eyes over TFA at all, or are you just trolling here? The whole point of TFA is that JavaScript 2.0 will have most of the features people complained were missing from JavaScript 1.0, like classes, constants, namespaces, libraries, optional type checking, and (to keep the FP types who already liked JS happy) even some more lovely FP features like union types.
JavaScript will be made obsolete by something that people like you, who never bothered to understand JavaScript, will consider a "real" language. Your wish is coming true. But the general tone of your post implies that your mind is not exactly open to considering anything that has the "JavaScript" name attached to it, which is a shame.
Wow, and obviously the people you know are a perfectly representative sample of the whole of humanity, so you are the only person in the world who can legitimately present anecdotes as proof! I do so envy you.
That's only a pretty recent development, though; for many years there was no such option (even though the Linux port of PowerDVD existed, they refused to sell it to individuals!), so the only way we could play back DVDs on Linux was to bypass the DRM "illegally".
I, for one, would not have bought half the DVDs I own if the DRM had not been cracked, giving me the ability to watch them.
the simple fact is that BD+ has kept blurays off torrent sites where people are certainly NOT "backing up," and that's the point of DRM, no matter how you would like to pretend they want to steal rights from the customer, it has always been about preventing people from just stealing the movie.
But it's never stopped people making unauthorized copies of the movie (please, let's not be intellectually lazy and call it "stealing"; if you want a short word, "pirating" is a better way of describing this particular illegal and immoral act, with fewer misleading connotations). The movies themselves have always been available, DRM-free, from those torrent sites. All BD+ has done is ensured that the quality of the pirated product is marginally lower. But Joe Pirate doesn't care about that; he's just going to download the best that's available, and the fact that he could get a slightly higher quality product by buying a Blu-Ray disc is irrelevant to him.
So DRM doesn't stop pirates at all. All it does is force them to pirate slightly lower-quality products instead, and they don't care about that; they still get to watch the movie for free. Meanwhile, the DRM does stop people who have actually paid for the DRM-encumbered product from using it in various legal ways.
The US military used to think that you won wars by killing bad guys, and civilians getting caught in the crossfire could be written off as unfortunate accidents. Now they realise that it doesn't matter how many bad guys you kill - if you don't worry about civilians, you will never win. Similarly, the media companies seem to think that you sell movies by "killing piracy", and customers getting screwed over can be written off as an unfortunate side-effect. Sorry, guys, but it just ain't gonna work.
You sell movies by offering a product people want to buy, and that means reasonably-priced downloads that work in any media player on any platform and don't expire after a week. Stop quaking under your beds over phantom "pirates" who can already download your movies for free if they want to, offer up a legitimate product that's as convenient and unencumbered as the illegal alternative, and your servers will collapse under the weight of people rushing to give you their money. Really.
You should have to do more (this much more? Not my decision but it does seem odd) to change your vote. Why'd you change your mind? What made you vote for it in the first place?
IIRC several countries voted "yes with comments". If their comments were not addressed satisfactorily, they might now want to change their vote. What's "wishy-washy" about voting conditionally and then deciding to change your vote when the conditions are not met?
Voters might also have initially missed problems in this incredibly long and complicated document that other participants found; they might therefore have voted "yes" initially, and now desire to change that vote to "no" because the evidence available to them has convinced them that the initial "yes" vote was mistaken. What's wrong with changing your mind when presented with new evidence? What's wrong with listening to competing viewpoints and recognising that the person arguing against your initial belief has valid points?
Or they might have been convinced by Microsoft representatives that OOXML would end global poverty, and have now concluded that the truth doesn't match up to the PR. If someone is convinced by a hard-selling salesman to buy a product they don't need, are they being "wishy-washy" when they cool off and cancel the order? No, they're just displaying common sense.
Above all, why are people so hostile towards anyone who changes their mind these days? Sticking to your guns regardless is not strong or smart, it's stubborn and stupid. We should applaud people who publicly change their opinions, not condemn them. Wait for someone to actually dither indecisively, or flip-flop repeatedly between two options, before you condemn them. There's nothing wrong with merely taking one side initially and then changing your mind.
(And, no, I'm not being partisan here. I would say the same in defence of someone who had initially voted against OOXML and had decided, based on the outcome of the BRM, that they would now support it.)
Um... what? Neither the Republican party nor the Democratic party is remotely socialist, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination.
Come back when you can cite a speech in which any mainstream Republican or Democratic politician has advocated federal ownership of industry, and then we can talk about them being socialist.
Linguistics is not about being a grammar nazi -- it's about realising that pretty much anything any grammar nazi complains about can almost certainly be found in Shakespeare.
(In this case, try"There's few or none do know me; if they did...", in King John.)
however, there are a wide variety of reasons that people attend church. There are those who "practice without belief" -- e.g. WP:"Jewish Atheist" -- as well as those who attend for the community aspect.
For example, according to astrology Leos often act as if they have something to prove. Well, in the West, Leos are usually the youngest in their school class
But astrology doesn't say "Leos in the West have acted as if they have something to prove since the introduction of universal education". Astrology claims to be an ancient discipline that is universally applicable, i.e. "Leos all over the world have always acted as if they have something to prove". This latter claim is incorrect for the majority of the world's population and the majority of human history.
Therefore I suggest that we can dismiss as coincidence the fact that the former claim happens to match observations in today's America.
Just because astrology teaches it doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.
Just because the random claims made by astrologers happen, by sheer coincidence, to match reality from time to time, does not mean that there is any value at all in listening to the random claims made by astrologers.
If you want to know about how schoolchildren react to being in school, you should be listening to people who are making scientific studies of schoolchildren's actual behaviour, not to astrologers' descriptions of the personalities they claim are associated with star signs.
For my good old platformers and RPGs, I much prefer the game pad.
Granted for platformers. RPGs however tend to be menu-heavy, and for things like moving stuff around in my inventory I vastly prefer a mouse over the various clunky gamepad interfaces I've tried over the years. As for regular gameplay, first-person RPGs might well benefit from FPS-style controls, while some types of third-person game can be driven very naturally with a point-and-click system: I personally think it much more convenient to click on the other side of a room and have my character walk over there himself, than to have to physically hold the analog stick in a certain position to make him walk and have to manually navigate him around obstacles.
In short, perhaps the reason you prefer the game pad for RPGs is simply that it's all most RPGs have ever provided, so you've never really thought about what other interfaces there could be. This is why more support for a wider variety of input devices, including pointing devices as well as joystick/gamepad style things, could only be a good thing for console gaming.
Question is, is there another way to tell the stories that isn't so formulaic and that doesn't give such an incorrect impression?
Yeah. Sure -- if you're, like, good at your job.
Okay, let's rephrase the question then. There are many science journalists who write formulaic and misleading stories. By your definition, they are clearly not good at their jobs. So: why have they not been fired?
The sad likelihood is that their employers do not share your definition of "good" science journalism. To people employing journalists, I deduce, a good journalist is one who writes stories that sell, period -- regardless of accuracy or originality.
It's even possible that formulaic and misleading stories sell better than accurate and original stories, in which case a journalist who wrote good science would be a bad journalist... though I can't actually draw that conclusion, given that I don't have any actual data on which kinds of stories sell best, so I'm really just speculating here.
This isn't the first set of blatant hypocrisy around these parts.
Yeah, because Slashdot is of course a single entity with a single opinion on every subject, not a huge and diverse community whose members hold a wide range of opinions, and indeed disagree so strongly with one another that they waste vast amounts of their time on endless flame wars.
You can make accusations of hypocrisy when you have collected some statistics that show that the majority of Slashdot posters hold both the contradictory views you mention. Shouldn't be too hard to prove, if it's that blatant.
The windowed GUI was an obvious quantum improvement for the vast majority of computer users (yes, I realize that on/. command line is king)
Even command-line users pretty much all run their terminals under a windowing system these days. Even if they use traditional editors like emacs and vi, most people default to using versions of those that take advantage of the features that GUI environments provide. And how many people do you think browse Slashdot from the command-line? Methinks the number is small.
So I think it's safe to say that the number of people who do not see any benefit from graphical windowed environments is infinitesimally small, even among hardcore *nix hacker types.
but there has been no movement forward for nearly 20 years.
How old are mouse gestures, out of interest? Most people who use them seem to think they're a step forward, and they've only been a mainstream concept for a few years, though I'm sure they've existed for far longer than that as a research concept or whatever.
Piclens looks cool and all, but it's just a proprietary program (like Google Earth, really) that happens to run in a web browser.
Want to use it on Linux? Sorry, you're out of luck, it's Win/Mac only for now; they say there'll be a Linux port one day; but as this is a proprietary technology, you won't get Linux support until they deign to implement it.
Want to use it with Opera? Sorry, you're out of luck, it's IE/Safari/Firefox only for now; and it will probably remain so, as they say they're not interested in supporting minority browsers; and as it's a proprietary technology, Opera can't add their own support for it.
Microsoft is also working to get the Linux version of Silverlight going by working with the Mono peeps, and Microsoft is also fully producing the OS X version as well as supporting as many browsers as they can at the same time, including Firefox, etc. So if this was MS trying to lock people in, it would be Windows and IE only, instead it has potential to be far more crossplatform than Flash.
Funny that you should mention IE. See, if you remember, back when IE was new, that was cross-platform too. It was great - Microsoft was making this free browser that ran on Windows, Mac, Solaris, even HP-UX!
And yet, strange to say, for some reason you don't seem to be able to get IE for anything but Windows any more...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you need to expand your understanding of "gaming" slightly. Not every game is Crysis.
Crysis: only played by a tiny minority. Probably requires driver updates. (Though I'm pretty sure it didn't for me.)
Freecell: has been played by practically every PC owner in the world. Does not require driver updates.
Developers do not have to pay a fee to develop PC games, and Microsoft has no control whatsoever over the content or pricing of PC games. If PC gaming "wins" (whatever that means), Microsoft will not be a gatekeeper of anything, and we will continue to have a whole range of choices at a whole range of prices.
You would prefer Microsoft's completely closed, completely proprietary platform to defeat Microsoft's open-to-all, zero-cost-of-entry platform? That's a bizarre way to promote freedom.Okay, nice idea and all, but back in the real world, when you kill something it's dead, and PC gaming hasn't performed enough miracles for me to have any confidence it'll rise again on the third day.
Me, I'd rather keep the good thing I have, than kill it in the hopes of maybe possibly getting something better one day if I'm really really lucky.
But even if the JS world hadn't moved on, even if nothing had changed in the slightest, WanderingHermit would still not be in a position to judge whether or not JS sucks on any objective level. There's this thing we humans have called "memory", which is imperfect, and after a gap of four years is pretty unreliable, particularly when we're thinking about something we have a strong emotional reaction to.I would dispute that you're reading it. You may be looking at the pictures, but I see no evidence that you're able to comprehend the text.
JavaScript will be made obsolete by something that people like you, who never bothered to understand JavaScript, will consider a "real" language. Your wish is coming true. But the general tone of your post implies that your mind is not exactly open to considering anything that has the "JavaScript" name attached to it, which is a shame.
That's only a pretty recent development, though; for many years there was no such option (even though the Linux port of PowerDVD existed, they refused to sell it to individuals!), so the only way we could play back DVDs on Linux was to bypass the DRM "illegally".
I, for one, would not have bought half the DVDs I own if the DRM had not been cracked, giving me the ability to watch them.
So DRM doesn't stop pirates at all. All it does is force them to pirate slightly lower-quality products instead, and they don't care about that; they still get to watch the movie for free. Meanwhile, the DRM does stop people who have actually paid for the DRM-encumbered product from using it in various legal ways.
The US military used to think that you won wars by killing bad guys, and civilians getting caught in the crossfire could be written off as unfortunate accidents. Now they realise that it doesn't matter how many bad guys you kill - if you don't worry about civilians, you will never win. Similarly, the media companies seem to think that you sell movies by "killing piracy", and customers getting screwed over can be written off as an unfortunate side-effect. Sorry, guys, but it just ain't gonna work.
You sell movies by offering a product people want to buy, and that means reasonably-priced downloads that work in any media player on any platform and don't expire after a week. Stop quaking under your beds over phantom "pirates" who can already download your movies for free if they want to, offer up a legitimate product that's as convenient and unencumbered as the illegal alternative, and your servers will collapse under the weight of people rushing to give you their money. Really.
Voters might also have initially missed problems in this incredibly long and complicated document that other participants found; they might therefore have voted "yes" initially, and now desire to change that vote to "no" because the evidence available to them has convinced them that the initial "yes" vote was mistaken. What's wrong with changing your mind when presented with new evidence? What's wrong with listening to competing viewpoints and recognising that the person arguing against your initial belief has valid points?
Or they might have been convinced by Microsoft representatives that OOXML would end global poverty, and have now concluded that the truth doesn't match up to the PR. If someone is convinced by a hard-selling salesman to buy a product they don't need, are they being "wishy-washy" when they cool off and cancel the order? No, they're just displaying common sense.
Above all, why are people so hostile towards anyone who changes their mind these days? Sticking to your guns regardless is not strong or smart, it's stubborn and stupid. We should applaud people who publicly change their opinions, not condemn them. Wait for someone to actually dither indecisively, or flip-flop repeatedly between two options, before you condemn them. There's nothing wrong with merely taking one side initially and then changing your mind.
(And, no, I'm not being partisan here. I would say the same in defence of someone who had initially voted against OOXML and had decided, based on the outcome of the BRM, that they would now support it.)
Come back when you can cite a speech in which any mainstream Republican or Democratic politician has advocated federal ownership of industry, and then we can talk about them being socialist.
Linguistics is not about being a grammar nazi -- it's about realising that pretty much anything any grammar nazi complains about can almost certainly be found in Shakespeare.
(In this case, try"There's few or none do know me; if they did...", in King John.)
Therefore I suggest that we can dismiss as coincidence the fact that the former claim happens to match observations in today's America.Just because the random claims made by astrologers happen, by sheer coincidence, to match reality from time to time, does not mean that there is any value at all in listening to the random claims made by astrologers.
If you want to know about how schoolchildren react to being in school, you should be listening to people who are making scientific studies of schoolchildren's actual behaviour, not to astrologers' descriptions of the personalities they claim are associated with star signs.
In short, perhaps the reason you prefer the game pad for RPGs is simply that it's all most RPGs have ever provided, so you've never really thought about what other interfaces there could be. This is why more support for a wider variety of input devices, including pointing devices as well as joystick/gamepad style things, could only be a good thing for console gaming.
The sad likelihood is that their employers do not share your definition of "good" science journalism. To people employing journalists, I deduce, a good journalist is one who writes stories that sell, period -- regardless of accuracy or originality.
It's even possible that formulaic and misleading stories sell better than accurate and original stories, in which case a journalist who wrote good science would be a bad journalist... though I can't actually draw that conclusion, given that I don't have any actual data on which kinds of stories sell best, so I'm really just speculating here.
You can make accusations of hypocrisy when you have collected some statistics that show that the majority of Slashdot posters hold both the contradictory views you mention. Shouldn't be too hard to prove, if it's that blatant.
So I think it's safe to say that the number of people who do not see any benefit from graphical windowed environments is infinitesimally small, even among hardcore *nix hacker types.How old are mouse gestures, out of interest? Most people who use them seem to think they're a step forward, and they've only been a mainstream concept for a few years, though I'm sure they've existed for far longer than that as a research concept or whatever.
Piclens looks cool and all, but it's just a proprietary program (like Google Earth, really) that happens to run in a web browser.
Want to use it on Linux? Sorry, you're out of luck, it's Win/Mac only for now; they say there'll be a Linux port one day; but as this is a proprietary technology, you won't get Linux support until they deign to implement it.
Want to use it with Opera? Sorry, you're out of luck, it's IE/Safari/Firefox only for now; and it will probably remain so, as they say they're not interested in supporting minority browsers; and as it's a proprietary technology, Opera can't add their own support for it.
Want to use it on an iPhone? Sorry...
This is not a step forward.
And yet, strange to say, for some reason you don't seem to be able to get IE for anything but Windows any more...