You can make a game where there's a strict story and the player has few options. That can get boring because the user doesn't have to think much.
I beg to differ. A good story never gets boring, because a good story has so much depth that it forces the player to think to follow it. There's a reason why novels and movies are still incredibly popular despite being completely non-interactive.
There's no reason why games should have shallow stories -- except that most game makers can't write for toffee and are too proud to admit it and pay for a decent script. So we have to put up with Yet Another Generic Tolkien Ripoff instead...
Can you specify a string in Russian and have the parser not choke on it? What about Chinese? Can it handle Unicode? What if your format is "key=value", and the value contains a "=" or a newline? Can the key contain spaces? If you write "key = value", do the spaces get stripped or not? What if the first character of the value is a space?
Observe that all these things are problems that only arise if you have humans generating the data. If a program generates it, then you never get bogus spaces or text in an encoding the program can't handle.
Guess what? XML is fragile when humans write it, too. What happens if they write a lowercase tag in uppercase? Or if they add a string in Chinese (Big5) to a file that's supposed to be encoded in UTF-8? Or if they forget a closing tag? If they write "<key> value </key>", will the spaces get stripped or not?
Besides, who said anything about designing your own format and writing your own parser for it? It's not like the only ready-made, well-tested, well-designed libraries are XML-based.
I hate to say this, because it is so damn obvious but so unpopular in the USA; I'll say it anyway: what you propose is throwing your vote away.
No, "throwing your vote away" is when you don't vote at all -- which is what the majority of the US population did at the last presidential elections.
Why don't you stop chastigating people who choose to exercise their democratic responsibilities in accordance with what their beliefs and conscience tell them, and instead use your energy to convince everyone who's too lazy to vote at all that it's worth turning out on election day?
The 1992 and 2000 elections proved that running on the third party can actually harm your cause.
You are making the assumption that everyone's cause is aligned with one of the two main parties. If a Green or Libertarian voter does not wish either the Republicans or the Democrats to win, how does it harm her cause to vote for the party she does want to win, thereby raising its profile? And how does it help her cause to vote for a party she does not want to win, thereby giving the false impression that she supports its policies?
The traditional Monopoly game helps teach kids how to understand folding money. Now it's just a video game where the kid can say "here's my card!" instead of having to learn count the bills. This is a sad day.
It's a sad day, but it's a sad day because it appears to be reducing the flexibility of a classic game, not because it's no longer teaching kids an obsolete skill that is only relevant in technologically-backwards societies. Monopoly is great because it's fun, not because it's educational.
Seriously, I've never had more than two or three banknotes in my wallet at a time in the last decade or so, and I expect the number of transactions I use cash for to fall to zero as soon as someone comes up with a decent micropayment scheme. How exactly is knowing how to count out primitive tokens going to be useful to my kids, who I expect to grow up in a fully-electronic society where even carrying a set of cards around seems clumsy and archaic?
LOL - It's compound interest working against you. Calculate it and you'll see.... The credit industry isn't a trillion dollar industry because they give people 1% cash back.
No, it's a trillion-dollar industry because some fools don't pay their balance off in full every month. If you have an explanation of why paying by credit card causes compound interest to work against me, even though I never pay a penny of interest because I always pay my balance off in full every month, then I'd really like to hear it, because I can't for the life of me figure out what you're talking about.
For all practical purposes this was the state of things for many years.
It's a rather misleading description, though. More accurately:
UNIX/Windows NT/OS X - if a program needs more memory, the system gives it more memory; if there is no more memory to give, the program is terminated.
Windows 9x - if a program needs more memory, the system gives it more memory; if there is no more memory to give, your computer crashes.
MacOS 8/9 - if a program needs more memory, the system tells you and you have to fiddle around with a fussy little dialog box to give it more manually and try again, at which point another program will complain that it no longer has enough memory. Repeat ad infinitum, all the while gritting your teeth and reciting the mantra "this is better than Windows, this is better than Windows" until you almost believe it.
More interestingly, spam is predominately from countries with a preponderance o fWindows computers. That should tell you something!
Spam is also overwhelmingly sent by countries with human inhabitants. In many cases, the people of spam-sending countries also consume large quantities of food and drink, breathe air, and have electrical power in their homes.
The free market is amoral. Nobody chooses their purchases based on morality.
So why DO people pay extra for fairtrade products, then?
If that were the case Walmart would be broke.
Ah, I see. You merely don't know the difference between "nobody" and "not everybody". There are, in fact, a great number of people who choose their purchases based on morality. It just isn't everybody.
Note also that if everybody did start choosing their purchases based on morality, Walmart would not be broke. Walmart would merely be forced to raise its prices slightly, and to adjust its buying policies.
Anyway, users, as you said, aren't too bright. Just put the firewall setup and de-rootkitter (and whatever else) into a CD labled "Setup" and the user will pop that right in.
And their computer will be clean and safe... right up until the baddies start handing out their own CDs.
This is far better than with Office, where not only is it impossible to open later Office documents in earlier versions
What? This is totally incorrect. I'm continually opening Office 2000 and Office XP documents in Office 97. Rarely, if ever, do I encounter anything more problematic than an annoying warning that some formatting may be lost (something I've never actually observed happen).
Of course, OpenOffice.org also opens Office documents very nicely, which is why I prefer to use it when I don't need macro compatibility. However, frequently I do need macros, in which case I am regrettably forced to use MS Office. Which, as I have said, is far more compatible, both forwards and backwards, than the Slashbot hive mind is prepared to acknowledge.
The difference is that FF8's advancement methods are far more enjoyable--if you know what you're doing, of course.
Well, yeah. I can see you're having a great time being smug at us, Mr. Expert, but you've actually kind of damned the game out of your own mouth there, you know?
If the opening part of a game teaches players -- in excruciating detail -- how to use a deadly boring technique, then players will tend to use that technique and get bored. Games are meant to be fun, and if the fun stuff is so well hidden that many players never find it, then the game has failed.
Look, I shouldn't have to "know what I'm doing" to enjoy a game. If I don't know what I'm doing, I don't expect to win, but I expect to enjoy myself as I lose, and I expect to carry on enjoying myself as I gradually figure out what to do and start winning. In other words, in-depth knowledge about the game should be the difference between victory and defeat. Not the difference between fun and boredom.
Apple interfaces are successful not because of customization. In fact, you're usually stuck with what they give you. However, they clearly put a lot of thought into usability. Those interfaces work because they're clean. I don't necessarily like the visual style, but I appreciate the simplicity.
Let's be honest with ourselves here. Apple's UI sucks. It just sucks less than anybody else's; like democracy, it's the least worst idea anyone's come up with. But that doesn't make it perfect.
*copies and pastes info from Filterset G into urlfilter.ini in my Opera installaton folder.
So you have to find a text file buried deep within your directory structure and edit it by hand? Gotta hand it to those Opera guys -- they clearly have the whole user-friendly UI thing down to a tee! None of this clunky Firefox crap where you have to put up with the tedious process of letting the filterset keep itself up to date without any user intervention at all.
Seriously, Opera has a lot of nice features, and it makes Firefox look embarrassingly slow and resource-hungry -- but I can't imagine admiring its interface.
You say you think they think alike but you don't have any proof whatsoever.
Proof? Of course not. No more than I have proof that you are human. Occam's Razor, however, compels me to assume that you are, because any other explanation would require me to assume the existence of some other form of sentience on Earth, and I do have plenty of proof that humans exist but none that anything else is sentient.
Here we have a situation where two people of similar tastes, buying a card for a third person whom both know very well, choose the same card. The explanations proposed for this are:
1. Coincidence. Two similar people, faced with the same choice, make the same decision. 2. Telepathy. Two people share a psychic bond of some unknown form that permits them, by some unknown means, to transmit some information of unknown nature that causes them, unbeknownst to either, to make the same decision.
Both these theories fit the observed facts, but one of them also fits our current understanding of the universe, while the other requires us to propose a whole raft of unknowns. It is no more logical to say that twins are telepathic than it is to say that every night a swarm of fairies carries braincells from one twin to the other while they sleep. Neither fairies nor telepathy are necessary to explain the phenomenon, therefore neither should be proposed and we should accept the simple and straightforward explanation: that this was just a coincidence, influenced by the fact that the pair had the same genes and similar upbringings, so both nature and nurture would incline them to react in similar ways.
Oh, for crying out loud...
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"State of the art"? For web graphics, perhaps. In fact, for web graphics GIMP has quite a few nifty tricks up its sleeves.
But please don't pretend it's anything like a Photoshop competitor. It doesn't even compete with low-end professional tools like Corel Photopaint. Far from being "at a par with any other graphics suite in the market", for print work GIMP is no more "state of the art" than MS Paintbrush is. It can't even do trivial, bottom-of-the-range, entry-level stuff like simply working with CMYK images (no, the Seperate plugin is not a solution, or even the beginnings of a solution).
Let's not deceive ourselves here. GIMP is a great amateur tool for anyone whose needs begin and end with websites and cheap inkjet printers. But show me a professional who uses it, and I'll show you a professional who someone else has to clean up after before his work is any use to anyone.
take a look inside your passport some time, i expect you'll see a bunch of barcodes
Nope, not a single barcode anywhere on or inside my passport. The closest it gets is where all the information about my name, date of birth, etc. is repeated at the bottom of the back page in a more easily OCR'd format, but it's still all plain human-readable text.
However, my passport is 10 years old now. As you say, I expect things are quite different in the ones they issue today.
I don't think Tycho would like you redefining the meaning of words he invented.
I don't think Tycho gets any say in the matter, any more than we have to apply to Shakespeare's descendants for permission to update the meaning of words he invented. So far, thank God, the English language itself is not open to any "IP" claims, which means that the fact that such-and-such a person claims to have been the first to use a word means precisely nothing. The rest of us can use it however the hell we like, and if everyone understands what we intend to say, then that's what the word means.
Bullshot is used to describe a 'screenshot', and not afaik benchmarks, etc.
For "is" read "was originally", and you'd be spot on. Apparently now it applies to any hyped-up claims about gaming quality. Welcome to the wonderful world of language change, in its accelerated 21st-century form.
Microsoft is not giving Virtual PC away here, they are bundling it with the O/S.
Wrong. Microsoft is not bundling Virtual PC with anything, they are giving it away. It's a free download for any user of Windows 2000 onwards. It's no more "bundled with the OS" than other free-as-in-beer proprietary software, such as Opera.
In all fairness, "Virtual PC" allows you to run Windows on a Mac. So, one should be able to assume that "Virtual PC 2004" was the same program, version 2004.
It is. "Virtual PC" is Microsoft's PC virtualisation/emulation software, just as "Microsoft Office" is Microsoft's office suite. Both are available for both Windows and OS X. Different versions are released for each operating system.
Virtual PC 2004 happens to be a Windows version of Virtual PC. Conversely, Microsoft Office 2004 happens to be a Mac version of Office.
Great way to name your different products, Microsoft.
What would you rather they did? Choose different names for different versions of the same software?
* 95% of my linux software doesn't work on Windows. And that software is WHY I switched, not out of some altruistic nonsense.
It's a lot easier to ssh into Linux from Windows than vice versa. I use Windows as my primary desktop, but that doesn't stop me from e.g. testing websites in Konqueror by running it as a remote X client.
And if you don't have a second computer handy for Linux, there are great free (in all senses) solutions like coLinux, which lets you run Linux and Windows simultaneously on the same hardware.
Now that both Microsoft and the VMware guys have started bringing virtualisation to the masses for free, it seems there are fewer and fewer reasons to switch away from Windows every day. The only real ones left are stability (which was never an issue with the NT line) and security, which is also not much of an issue. (Saying that the only way to avoid viruses and spyware is not to use Windows is like saying that the only way to avoid STDs is not to have sex. There are some religious fanatics who believe it, but in the real world, all you have to do is take some simple precautions.)
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the Microsoft VM didn't let you run anything older than Win2K, seeing as support for Win98 just ended...
Allow me to surprise you, then: just like the market-leading competitor VMWare Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC lets you run whatever operating system you like, from MS-DOS or Windows 95 right through to Linux, FreeBSD, or even BeOS.
It's true that Microsoft OSes are supported better, but nothing is actively obstructed.
VMware Workstation is still a better product, being both faster and more powerful, particularly if you want to run something like Linux in it (though for Linux, coLinux is even better). But Virtual PC is not particularly bad or evil.
The wikipedia has a clear fault in that its references are only hyperlinks.
Um, no, they're not. Wikipedia has the advantage over dead-tree encyclopedias that its references can include hyperlinks. But it can, and does, also use traditional references just like everyone else: the name of the source, its author, its date of publication, and a page number.
It (obviously) can't reference film reels, newspapers, recorded sound bites and so forth, unless those sources have been added to the web. And have they all? No, of course not. There are thousands of such sources of information that have not, and probably will not, be added. Thus, it is difficult to properly reference everything that occured before say, 1990.
No, it can reference these things just as well as anyone else can.
The problem isn't that Wikipedia can't cite reliable sources, it's that it doesn't do so consistently. Wikipedia has many excellent, well-sourced articles on things that took place not only before the invention of the web, but even before the discovery of America, the development of English, or the evolution of human intelligence.
It's difficult to cite various articles of criticism on Montaigne, for example, unless they have been uploaded to Project Gutenberg or some such.
The only possible response to this is: you don't have a clue what you're talking about. If it's difficult to cite a work that's not on the web, how come billions of people across the globe have no problem whatsoever doing so on a daily basis?
Since Wikipedia's new policy of no original content, there's basically less and less difference between the information in Wikipedia and the information you could get from a good search. The difference is conciseness.
What "new" policy? "No Original Research" has been Wikipedia policy from the very start, while original content is permitted: i.e. Wikipedia, like all encyclopedias, is intended to be composed of original content that provides the fundamental facts about established ideas, and lists the primary and secondary sources used so that readers can refer to those for more in-depth information. This is exactly the way Wikipedia has always been.
The ideal Wikipedia article (these days) is a concise summary of all the information that's available on the web, with each fact linked to a footnote consisting of a link to the URL of the page the fact came from.
This is complete and utter nonsense. Web sources are not preferred in any way: in fact, since web sources are generally less reliable and harder to assess for reliability, printed books and articles are the preferred sources to cite. Web sources are common because they're easier to search for, but the key thing is that claims included in Wikipedia should be accompanied by a citation to support the claim. It does not have to be a website. And there is absolutely no suggestion that nothing should be included that is not on the web.
Slashdot Mirror
You can make a game where there's a strict story and the player has few options. That can get boring because the user doesn't have to think much.
I beg to differ. A good story never gets boring, because a good story has so much depth that it forces the player to think to follow it. There's a reason why novels and movies are still incredibly popular despite being completely non-interactive.
There's no reason why games should have shallow stories -- except that most game makers can't write for toffee and are too proud to admit it and pay for a decent script. So we have to put up with Yet Another Generic Tolkien Ripoff instead...
Glad to see you enjoyed the Kool-Aid.
Can you specify a string in Russian and have the parser not choke on it? What about Chinese? Can it handle Unicode? What if your format is "key=value", and the value contains a "=" or a newline? Can the key contain spaces? If you write "key = value", do the spaces get stripped or not? What if the first character of the value is a space?
Observe that all these things are problems that only arise if you have humans generating the data. If a program generates it, then you never get bogus spaces or text in an encoding the program can't handle.
Guess what? XML is fragile when humans write it, too. What happens if they write a lowercase tag in uppercase? Or if they add a string in Chinese (Big5) to a file that's supposed to be encoded in UTF-8? Or if they forget a closing tag? If they write "<key> value </key>", will the spaces get stripped or not?
Besides, who said anything about designing your own format and writing your own parser for it? It's not like the only ready-made, well-tested, well-designed libraries are XML-based.
I hate to say this, because it is so damn obvious but so unpopular in the USA; I'll say it anyway: what you propose is throwing your vote away.
No, "throwing your vote away" is when you don't vote at all -- which is what the majority of the US population did at the last presidential elections.
Why don't you stop chastigating people who choose to exercise their democratic responsibilities in accordance with what their beliefs and conscience tell them, and instead use your energy to convince everyone who's too lazy to vote at all that it's worth turning out on election day?
The 1992 and 2000 elections proved that running on the third party can actually harm your cause.
You are making the assumption that everyone's cause is aligned with one of the two main parties. If a Green or Libertarian voter does not wish either the Republicans or the Democrats to win, how does it harm her cause to vote for the party she does want to win, thereby raising its profile? And how does it help her cause to vote for a party she does not want to win, thereby giving the false impression that she supports its policies?
The traditional Monopoly game helps teach kids how to understand folding money. Now it's just a video game where the kid can say "here's my card!" instead of having to learn count the bills. This is a sad day.
It's a sad day, but it's a sad day because it appears to be reducing the flexibility of a classic game, not because it's no longer teaching kids an obsolete skill that is only relevant in technologically-backwards societies. Monopoly is great because it's fun, not because it's educational.
Seriously, I've never had more than two or three banknotes in my wallet at a time in the last decade or so, and I expect the number of transactions I use cash for to fall to zero as soon as someone comes up with a decent micropayment scheme. How exactly is knowing how to count out primitive tokens going to be useful to my kids, who I expect to grow up in a fully-electronic society where even carrying a set of cards around seems clumsy and archaic?
LOL - It's compound interest working against you. Calculate it and you'll see. ... The credit industry isn't a trillion dollar industry because they give people 1% cash back.
No, it's a trillion-dollar industry because some fools don't pay their balance off in full every month. If you have an explanation of why paying by credit card causes compound interest to work against me, even though I never pay a penny of interest because I always pay my balance off in full every month, then I'd really like to hear it, because I can't for the life of me figure out what you're talking about.
It will be a pointed-shaped vehicle one sixth of a football field tall
American or European football?
It's a rather misleading description, though. More accurately:
More interestingly, spam is predominately from countries with a preponderance o fWindows computers. That should tell you something!
Spam is also overwhelmingly sent by countries with human inhabitants. In many cases, the people of spam-sending countries also consume large quantities of food and drink, breathe air, and have electrical power in their homes.
The free market is amoral. Nobody chooses their purchases based on morality.
So why DO people pay extra for fairtrade products, then?
If that were the case Walmart would be broke.
Ah, I see. You merely don't know the difference between "nobody" and "not everybody". There are, in fact, a great number of people who choose their purchases based on morality. It just isn't everybody.
Note also that if everybody did start choosing their purchases based on morality, Walmart would not be broke. Walmart would merely be forced to raise its prices slightly, and to adjust its buying policies.
Anyway, users, as you said, aren't too bright. Just put the firewall setup and de-rootkitter (and whatever else) into a CD labled "Setup" and the user will pop that right in.
And their computer will be clean and safe... right up until the baddies start handing out their own CDs.
This is far better than with Office, where not only is it impossible to open later Office documents in earlier versions
What? This is totally incorrect. I'm continually opening Office 2000 and Office XP documents in Office 97. Rarely, if ever, do I encounter anything more problematic than an annoying warning that some formatting may be lost (something I've never actually observed happen).
Of course, OpenOffice.org also opens Office documents very nicely, which is why I prefer to use it when I don't need macro compatibility. However, frequently I do need macros, in which case I am regrettably forced to use MS Office. Which, as I have said, is far more compatible, both forwards and backwards, than the Slashbot hive mind is prepared to acknowledge.
The difference is that FF8's advancement methods are far more enjoyable--if you know what you're doing, of course.
Well, yeah. I can see you're having a great time being smug at us, Mr. Expert, but you've actually kind of damned the game out of your own mouth there, you know?
If the opening part of a game teaches players -- in excruciating detail -- how to use a deadly boring technique, then players will tend to use that technique and get bored. Games are meant to be fun, and if the fun stuff is so well hidden that many players never find it, then the game has failed.
Look, I shouldn't have to "know what I'm doing" to enjoy a game. If I don't know what I'm doing, I don't expect to win, but I expect to enjoy myself as I lose, and I expect to carry on enjoying myself as I gradually figure out what to do and start winning. In other words, in-depth knowledge about the game should be the difference between victory and defeat. Not the difference between fun and boredom.
There's technically no reason why it couldn't be done, it's just MS needs a way to force an upgrade.
And why not? Nobody complained when Apple failed to backport Quartz 2D Extreme to Panther.
There's technically no reason why Microsoft couldn't give away free copies of Vista to everyone in the world. That doesn't mean you're entitled to it.
Apple interfaces are successful not because of customization. In fact, you're usually stuck with what they give you. However, they clearly put a lot of thought into usability. Those interfaces work because they're clean. I don't necessarily like the visual style, but I appreciate the simplicity.
Yeah, Apple's UI is wonderful, isn't it?
So intuitive. So clean and simple.
Let's be honest with ourselves here. Apple's UI sucks. It just sucks less than anybody else's; like democracy, it's the least worst idea anyone's come up with. But that doesn't make it perfect.
*copies and pastes info from Filterset G into urlfilter.ini in my Opera installaton folder.
So you have to find a text file buried deep within your directory structure and edit it by hand? Gotta hand it to those Opera guys -- they clearly have the whole user-friendly UI thing down to a tee! None of this clunky Firefox crap where you have to put up with the tedious process of letting the filterset keep itself up to date without any user intervention at all.
Seriously, Opera has a lot of nice features, and it makes Firefox look embarrassingly slow and resource-hungry -- but I can't imagine admiring its interface.
You say you think they think alike but you don't have any proof whatsoever.
Proof? Of course not. No more than I have proof that you are human. Occam's Razor, however, compels me to assume that you are, because any other explanation would require me to assume the existence of some other form of sentience on Earth, and I do have plenty of proof that humans exist but none that anything else is sentient.
Here we have a situation where two people of similar tastes, buying a card for a third person whom both know very well, choose the same card. The explanations proposed for this are:
1. Coincidence. Two similar people, faced with the same choice, make the same decision.
2. Telepathy. Two people share a psychic bond of some unknown form that permits them, by some unknown means, to transmit some information of unknown nature that causes them, unbeknownst to either, to make the same decision.
Both these theories fit the observed facts, but one of them also fits our current understanding of the universe, while the other requires us to propose a whole raft of unknowns. It is no more logical to say that twins are telepathic than it is to say that every night a swarm of fairies carries braincells from one twin to the other while they sleep. Neither fairies nor telepathy are necessary to explain the phenomenon, therefore neither should be proposed and we should accept the simple and straightforward explanation: that this was just a coincidence, influenced by the fact that the pair had the same genes and similar upbringings, so both nature and nurture would incline them to react in similar ways.
"State of the art"? For web graphics, perhaps. In fact, for web graphics GIMP has quite a few nifty tricks up its sleeves.
But please don't pretend it's anything like a Photoshop competitor. It doesn't even compete with low-end professional tools like Corel Photopaint. Far from being "at a par with any other graphics suite in the market", for print work GIMP is no more "state of the art" than MS Paintbrush is. It can't even do trivial, bottom-of-the-range, entry-level stuff like simply working with CMYK images (no, the Seperate plugin is not a solution, or even the beginnings of a solution).
Let's not deceive ourselves here. GIMP is a great amateur tool for anyone whose needs begin and end with websites and cheap inkjet printers. But show me a professional who uses it, and I'll show you a professional who someone else has to clean up after before his work is any use to anyone.
take a look inside your passport some time, i expect you'll see a bunch of barcodes
Nope, not a single barcode anywhere on or inside my passport. The closest it gets is where all the information about my name, date of birth, etc. is repeated at the bottom of the back page in a more easily OCR'd format, but it's still all plain human-readable text.
However, my passport is 10 years old now. As you say, I expect things are quite different in the ones they issue today.
I don't think Tycho would like you redefining the meaning of words he invented.
I don't think Tycho gets any say in the matter, any more than we have to apply to Shakespeare's descendants for permission to update the meaning of words he invented. So far, thank God, the English language itself is not open to any "IP" claims, which means that the fact that such-and-such a person claims to have been the first to use a word means precisely nothing. The rest of us can use it however the hell we like, and if everyone understands what we intend to say, then that's what the word means.
Bullshot is used to describe a 'screenshot', and not afaik benchmarks, etc.
For "is" read "was originally", and you'd be spot on. Apparently now it applies to any hyped-up claims about gaming quality. Welcome to the wonderful world of language change, in its accelerated 21st-century form.
Wrong. Microsoft is not bundling Virtual PC with anything, they are giving it away. It's a free download for any user of Windows 2000 onwards. It's no more "bundled with the OS" than other free-as-in-beer proprietary software, such as Opera.
In all fairness, "Virtual PC" allows you to run Windows on a Mac. So, one should be able to assume that "Virtual PC 2004" was the same program, version 2004.
It is. "Virtual PC" is Microsoft's PC virtualisation/emulation software, just as "Microsoft Office" is Microsoft's office suite. Both are available for both Windows and OS X. Different versions are released for each operating system.
Virtual PC 2004 happens to be a Windows version of Virtual PC. Conversely, Microsoft Office 2004 happens to be a Mac version of Office.
Great way to name your different products, Microsoft.
What would you rather they did? Choose different names for different versions of the same software?
* 95% of my linux software doesn't work on Windows. And that software is WHY I switched, not out of some altruistic nonsense.
It's a lot easier to ssh into Linux from Windows than vice versa. I use Windows as my primary desktop, but that doesn't stop me from e.g. testing websites in Konqueror by running it as a remote X client.
And if you don't have a second computer handy for Linux, there are great free (in all senses) solutions like coLinux, which lets you run Linux and Windows simultaneously on the same hardware.
Now that both Microsoft and the VMware guys have started bringing virtualisation to the masses for free, it seems there are fewer and fewer reasons to switch away from Windows every day. The only real ones left are stability (which was never an issue with the NT line) and security, which is also not much of an issue. (Saying that the only way to avoid viruses and spyware is not to use Windows is like saying that the only way to avoid STDs is not to have sex. There are some religious fanatics who believe it, but in the real world, all you have to do is take some simple precautions.)
The wikipedia has a clear fault in that its references are only hyperlinks.
Um, no, they're not. Wikipedia has the advantage over dead-tree encyclopedias that its references can include hyperlinks. But it can, and does, also use traditional references just like everyone else: the name of the source, its author, its date of publication, and a page number.
It (obviously) can't reference film reels, newspapers, recorded sound bites and so forth, unless those sources have been added to the web. And have they all? No, of course not. There are thousands of such sources of information that have not, and probably will not, be added. Thus, it is difficult to properly reference everything that occured before say, 1990.
No, it can reference these things just as well as anyone else can.
The problem isn't that Wikipedia can't cite reliable sources, it's that it doesn't do so consistently. Wikipedia has many excellent, well-sourced articles on things that took place not only before the invention of the web, but even before the discovery of America, the development of English, or the evolution of human intelligence.
It's difficult to cite various articles of criticism on Montaigne, for example, unless they have been uploaded to Project Gutenberg or some such.
The only possible response to this is: you don't have a clue what you're talking about. If it's difficult to cite a work that's not on the web, how come billions of people across the globe have no problem whatsoever doing so on a daily basis?
Since Wikipedia's new policy of no original content, there's basically less and less difference between the information in Wikipedia and the information you could get from a good search. The difference is conciseness.
What "new" policy? "No Original Research" has been Wikipedia policy from the very start, while original content is permitted: i.e. Wikipedia, like all encyclopedias, is intended to be composed of original content that provides the fundamental facts about established ideas, and lists the primary and secondary sources used so that readers can refer to those for more in-depth information. This is exactly the way Wikipedia has always been.
The ideal Wikipedia article (these days) is a concise summary of all the information that's available on the web, with each fact linked to a footnote consisting of a link to the URL of the page the fact came from.
This is complete and utter nonsense. Web sources are not preferred in any way: in fact, since web sources are generally less reliable and harder to assess for reliability, printed books and articles are the preferred sources to cite. Web sources are common because they're easier to search for, but the key thing is that claims included in Wikipedia should be accompanied by a citation to support the claim. It does not have to be a website. And there is absolutely no suggestion that nothing should be included that is not on the web.