The constitutional freedom that says "if it ain't in here, it's a freedom"
There isn't one.
aka, The Ninth Amendment.
The Ninth Amendment doesn't say that.
It says that you have some other rights that are not listed; it does not say anything about what those other rights are. It says that rights which are not listed do not cease to be rights; it does not say that everything that is not listed is a right.
In short, the Ninth Amendment says that the Bill of Rights is not an exhaustive list. That's all.
this isn't news. Because you can't spell NEWs without NEW.
Oh yes I can. "Gnyoos", or "nju:z", or even "i*_r[" (try it on a Japanese keyboard).
But even ignoring such literalist nitpicking, your argument is fallacious because you're arguing from etymology. "News" today means noteworthy current events: novelty is not required. If a million people die in an earthquake, then that's nothing new - it's happened plenty of times before. But it's certainly news.
Can you turn off the stupid unintuitive effect that dragging icons from the dock has?
Just the other day I watched a lifelong Mac user get very upset when she discovered that little quirk. She was trying to make a program start on bootup, and assumed that she could do it by dragging the icon from the dock into the list of startup programs. Oops.
Everywhere else in the interface, you drag an icon to move it, and drag it to the trashcan to delete it. But I guess Apple's famous usability experts felt that finding somewhere to use that cute little puff-of-smoke animation was far more important than trivialities like consistency or predictability.
*sigh* BSODs are like kernel panics in OS X; they used to be quite common (ever use OS X 10.1? Flakiest bit of Apple software I ever saw), and are now practically unknown.
virus, worms,
Your one valid point. Shame that any reasonably clueful user is immune to both. I know viruses and worms exist only because I've seen emails containing them as attachments; no PC I administer has ever been infected with either, and I can't offhand think of any cases where anyone I know has suffered from them either.
As for worms, those are hardly Windows specific. The famous 1988 Morris Worm targeted BSD systems. Yeah, the same BSD that Apple fanboys make so much of being the foundation for OS X...
stolen id,
Phishing attacks generally make use of standards-compliant emails and websites that run just as well in Mail.app and Safari as in any Windows software.
Spyware is easily avoided by not using IE or adware; it's not inherent to Windows in any way, and could theoretically target OS X just as easily, since it mostly relies on users actively deciding to install it (they may not know what the program does, but they think they want it on their system, and would therefore happily enter their password when prompted).
the high cost of the OS, software, etc
Windows costs roughly the same as OS X; it may be cheaper if you factor in Apple's upgrade treadmill. Most GNU/Linux distributions cost about the same too, if your time is valuable enough that you need professional support. The same goes for software: commercial Windows software comes in the same price ranges as equivalent Mac software, and if you want free stuff, most F/OSS applications have Windows ports.
you do it because it has MARKET SHARE. i.e, you do what everybody else is doing, even though they are jumping off cliffs.
No, actually I do it because it gets the job done and I find it pleasant to use; the only real flaw I see in Windows is the crap command-line environment, and Cygwin fixes that. I run GNU/Linux as well, but only because as a programmer I find it useful to have a second platform to test code for portability.
I've used OS X extensively, and I can't see what all the hype is about -- it's just another OS, with some nice features (slick rendering, scriptability) and some nasty annoyances (the dock is a UI nightmare, as is XCode). It's not the flipping silver bullet of perfection or anything, and it's not going to be better than Windows for every user.
the United States spends more on health care than any other industrialized nation
Wait, I thought the free market and privatization was supposed to make things cheaper? While state-run systems like the British NHS were supposed to be horribly inefficient and expensive?
Any economists care to explain what's going on here? Is the free market a failure, or is this the way it's supposed to be? Are those extortionate health costs translating into increased prosperity for America in some way?
Re:If they do, it will all depend upon the license
on
Will Sun Open Source Java?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
In order to be allowed to use the trademarked term "Open Source" however, whatever license they choose must (a) comply with the Open Source Definition, and (b) be approved by the Open Source Initiative.
Did you even read the pages you were linking to? The Open Source Initiative's own certification page, that you linked to, has this to say, right in the first paragraph: "the term 'open source' itself [...] can't be protected as a trademark".
I can call anything I like Open Source, and nobody can do a thing to stop me. The new Evil Proprietary License (a viral license that infects any software in the same room with a deadly curse that can only be lifted by the sacrifice of your firstborn) could be called Open Source. What it couldn't legally be called is OSI Certified(tm).
I think you mean "there is no way to represent the English pronunciation of 'Wii' in standard German orthography".
That does not mean that the name "Wii" is unpronounceable in German (it is trivially pronounceable: it will simply be read [vi:]), nor does it mean that no German is capable of uttering the sound [w], as you appear to be claiming.
To claim that "Wii" is unpronounceable in Germany, simply because the Germans will not pronounce it the way you pronounce it, is like claiming that "kimono" is unpronounceable in English, because the Americans do not pronounce it the way the Japanese do. That is to say, it's patent nonsense.
Put in a different perspective, voiceless "l" occurs phonetically in English, but English-speakers would probably find the name "Hlii" a bit awkward.
That's a better example than you may realise, given that (like/wi/ in Japanese) initial/hl/ is a cluster that was perfectly ordinary in Old English, but has fallen out of use.
In the case of English/hl/, the change was to/l/: Old English hlaford becomes Modern English lord.
It would be better for LaTeX to add hypertext links and for browsers to move to a real presentation system.
You're kidding, right? LaTeX was designed by American computer scientists and mathematicians for the use of American computer scientists and mathematicians, and it shows.
Anything remotely interesting requires the use of flaky macro packages built on hacks within hacks. The underlying technologies are obsolete and non-standard; instead of PDF and OpenType, you have to fiddle around in Knuth's sandbox with DVI and MetaFont, and getting fonts in and documents out is a non-trivial process for the average computer user. And it's stuck in the ASCII world of the 1980s; fine for monolingual Americans, an increasing pain for users of other Latin-scripted languages and other alphabets, and an unrelenting nightmare for any language with a large or complex script. (I managed to get pLaTeX -- the hacked version of LaTeX that supports Japanese -- to output a DVI once. I never managed to print it, or to convert it into any useful electronic format.)
Compare this to HTML, which doesn't require the use of any particular accompanying technologies. The fonts can be any sort of font supplied by the user's OS. The character set can be any character set supported by the browser. It all just works.
There is one area, and only one, in which LaTeX is superior to HTML. That is typesetting mathematics. Oh, wait, the next generation of browsers will have full support for inline MathML. Bang goes the last LaTeX advantage.
Incidentally, I would love to see a LaTeX document that produces a reasonable mockup of the Slashdot front page. I'm guessing the LaTeX that generates it would not be anything like as readable as the HTML+CSS that generates the current page...
This site needs a complete overhaul, unless you want to be the only site on the Internet that looks like it was designed in 1998.
What's wrong with looking like you've got a bit of history?
I think many buildings that were designed in 1860 look nicer than buildings that were designed in 1960. I think many books that were printed in 1960 look nicer than books that were printed in 1996. So why do all websites have to be identical ZOMG-ITS-TEH-WEB-2.0? Why not hark back to the 1990s and the golden age of internet growth?
I think of it this way, cars, horses and bikes used to all share the same roadways. Well, we don't let horses on the road anymore really...I think it is time to reconsider the bicycle on most paved roads too...
Man, America really is the land of the automobile. Over on this side of the Atlantic, people still enjoy the freedom to choose the form of transport they want to use according to their own personal tastes, instead of being forced into driving just because everyone else does. There are restrictions on motorways (the equivalent of interstates in the USA); that's all.
The country roads round where I live have all sorts; cars, cyclists, pedestrians (in the road because there's nowhere else for them to walk), horses, farm vehicles (most of which are literally incapable of exceeding walking pace), sometimes livestock.
Guess what? Everything has right of way over cars.
Out of interest, how do things work in Amish areas? I'm guessing you don't think they should be forced to abandon the horse-drawn transport that's fundamental to the way of life they have chosen. So why should cyclists be forced to abandon their way of life, which is healthier and more economical?
they just can't be safe due to the nominal speed differential. If everyone is doing 45, you have a much less chance for accident than if you have 99% going 45, and suddenly coming upon someone going 15mph....
Solution? Car drivers should drive at the speed that's safe for the road. Is that such a difficult concept?
If you're driving in such a way that you won't see a cyclist ahead until it's too late for you to slow down, then what the hell do you think is going to happen if you turn a corner and find a fallen tree, or a truck that's broken down, or a couple of kids playing in the road?
You should slow down and drive safely, instead of telling other people to give up their right to use the public highway just to decrease the likelihood that you will cause an accident by your unsafe habits. You don't have a God-given right to drive at 45. You do have a personal responsibility to make sure you don't hit anyone else.
I love it when people actually come out in public and admit that they're trying to break the system for everyone else. Thank you for doing your little bit to make Slashdot a worse place.
And? Romeo and Juliet can be distilled down to a one-or-two-paragraph summary that still contains the more intricate plot points, too. This has not led to people saying "most plays have very simplistic plots", and it appears to have been completely irrelevant to the quality of movies made based on it, some of which have been good and others bad.
If you want storyline, you're probably after a book or movie and not a game at all. Gameplay is what games are about, and while storyline is great as icing, it won't make a game.
Books have depth and stretch the imagination, but they don't have important stimuli like movement or soundtracks. Movies lack depth; there are simply limits to what you can fit into 90 minutes. Neither allows any form of interactivity, so you can't influence the plot in the slightest.
Various forms of interactive fiction - taking the depth and imaginative scope of a book, adding movement and sound as in movies, and introducing some form of interactivity to permit the player to have some limited control over the plot - are able to provide a different experience that is not available from books or movies.
Why shouldn't I want something like that?
Why should my entertainment be constrained to fit your narrow definition of what a game is?
For menus at least, every desktop environment save windows lets you specify the font size of menus and other parts. So grap your upgrade of your OS today!;)
Please don't spread misinformation. Windows certainly does let you specify the font size of menus. It's right there in the Appearance tab of the Display control panel: you can configure fonts and sizes individually for most UI elements. Alternatively, you can adjust font sizes globally from the Advanced dialog of the same control panel.
(Note that this is Win2k and XP's classic mode I'm talking about; I don't know if you can do this with the new theming engine in XP. But nor do I know anyone who uses the theming engine in XP, so...)
DX10 COULD be ported to xp if they wanted to, they just WON'T in hopes that this will force the consumers hand.
That's because selling stuff is what companies do. It can't have escaped your notice that Apple, too, makes a habit of restricting new technologies like Spotlight to the latest version of their OS. There's no reason why Spotlight couldn't be ported to Panther, Apple just WON'T. Because it wouldn't make any business sense to.
developers right now need to reach the largest audience as possible to attempt to make money, and depending on sales numbers for Vista (which I believe will be low) Developers will go elsewhere (Mac?)
The only serious competition Vista faces is Microsoft's very own Windows XP. Regardless of how many XP users upgrade to Vista, the largest audience possible will be reached by developing for XP, since Vista is backwards-compatible.
As for the Mac... sorry, but it's simply out of the question. If a developer is motivated by audience size, as you yourself propose, then why would they switch to developing for the platform with the smallest marketshare? Seriously, however badly Vista sells, it will have at least 10% of the market based on OEM sales alone, and the combined Vista/XP platform will still cover the vast majority of PC users. Apple, even with its record growth recently, is still languishing in the single figure range. Developers target Mac users for a variety of reasons, but audience size ain't one of them.
#if sizeof(unsigned char) == 1 typedef unsigned char uint8; #else #error "No uint8 type available" #endif That way the compiler will warn you if there's a problem when you switch platforms.
Um, no, actually it won't, because the sizeof operator returns the size of the type in chars. That is to say, sizeof(char) is 1 by definition, regardless of the number of bits in a char.
The key thing here, for me, is that American judges are blocking the attempts of an American corporation to dodge round a foreign law.
There's a popular belief in Europe, particularly in anti-American circles, that the US refuses to acknowledge that any non-US law could ever apply to a US-based entity. These rulings are very welcome, and should go a long way towards counterbalancing the negative press that America has received over issues like the ICC.
Of course, even as I write this, there will no doubt be some nationalist congressman preparing a diatribe against these "activist judges" who are traitors to the national interest...
Because it's cheaper. And when you buy a Dell, it comes with Windows already installed and set up, so you don't need to buy Windows separately and mess around with Boot Camp. And nobody ever got fired for buying Dell, but you can bet your life you'll be looking for another job if you buy Apples and anything goes even slightly wrong.
I'm glad you're enjoying your happy dream, but welcome to the real world, where Apple is a luxury manufacturer targetting a narrow market segment. Apple is no more going to take over the desktop than Ferrari is going to take over the highway -- and that suits everyone just fine, not least Apple.
An interface that doesn't suck so badly? Seriously, is there anyone who doesn't look at the menus in Office 2003 and despair? I can't imagine how the average computer user copes; presumably they learn, very laboriously, where in the maze of submenus and dialogs they can find the five features they need most often, and then pray they'll never need to do anything different in future.
I've watched intelligent, computer-literate people struggle with Word 2003, and it's not pretty. Even basic actions like getting the spellchecker to use the right language cause massive headaches for people who haven't sat down and literally memorised the menu system. (Sure, it's obvious once you know where to look, but it's nothing like intuitive.)
By all accounts, the new interface will mean things end up in much more logical places, and can be found with far fewer clicks. If it lives up to the hype, it will actually make Word (and all the other word processors, once they clone the new interface) a much pleasanter tool to use.
Realistically they should have used Doom which in my opinion is the easiest level editor in existance.
Doom is a game, not a level editor. You are probably thinking of one of the dozens of third-party level editors for Doom, which range from hideously-hard-to-use all the way down to merely mindbendingly-hard-to-use. Seriously, unless it was released in the last 10 years or so, there's no Doom level editor that even comes close to being as quick and intuitive to use as the Build editor for Duke3D.
Uh... doesn't the internet exist in France? How can you assert that the 'pictures weren't distributed in France?'... they were accessible from France, and that is what prompted the litigation. And hence my point about democracy not being a protected Chinese creation is valid.
Okay, then -- what about photos of the Tiananmen Square massacre? Those photos were taken in China, and those photos are illegal in China. So the situation is an exact analogy with photos taken in France that are illegal in France, right?
So, now you have to address the real point, instead of squirming through loopholes. And the real point is this: should Chinese law apply to those photos, wherever in the world they are published? Their "source" is China, so you appear to be arguing that it should. So are you saying that China should have the right to prosecute Americans for revealing human rights violations in China?
Please state your position clearly, and justify it.
Thankfully, we in the UK have a relatively sensible system of second level domains..net.uk, for example, is ISPs only.
Yes, but that doesn't stop plenty of people in the UK, like me, (ab)using the global.net TLD for personal sites.
And why not? I'm no more a "com"pany or an "org"anisation than I am a "net"work provider. I'm not a "biz"ness, and I'm not dedicated to providing "info"rmation, and the domain is not my real "name". But nor do I want a country-specific domain -- my site is of very limited interest to the vast majority of people, but the tiny community it interests is spread right across the globe. My site isn't aimed particularly at people in the UK, so why should it have a misleading.uk on the end?
What it comes down to is, there is no point whatsoever in trying to force an artificial hierarchy onto something like the internet, which is an interconnected network, not a neat and nicely categorised tree. It doesn't work. It's pointless and confusing. Let's just give it up already, okay?
The difference is that I've heard of Charles Manson and the Star Wars kid, whereas this Slashdot article is the first time I (and, going by the other comments here, most slashdotters) have heard of any of these three people in question.
Slashdot Mirror
The constitutional freedom that says "if it ain't in here, it's a freedom"
There isn't one.
aka, The Ninth Amendment.
The Ninth Amendment doesn't say that.
It says that you have some other rights that are not listed; it does not say anything about what those other rights are. It says that rights which are not listed do not cease to be rights; it does not say that everything that is not listed is a right.
In short, the Ninth Amendment says that the Bill of Rights is not an exhaustive list. That's all.
this isn't news. Because you can't spell NEWs without NEW.
Oh yes I can. "Gnyoos", or "nju:z", or even "i*_r[" (try it on a Japanese keyboard).
But even ignoring such literalist nitpicking, your argument is fallacious because you're arguing from etymology. "News" today means noteworthy current events: novelty is not required. If a million people die in an earthquake, then that's nothing new - it's happened plenty of times before. But it's certainly news.
you know you can turn that off, right?
Can you turn off the stupid unintuitive effect that dragging icons from the dock has?
Just the other day I watched a lifelong Mac user get very upset when she discovered that little quirk. She was trying to make a program start on bootup, and assumed that she could do it by dragging the icon from the dock into the list of startup programs. Oops.
Everywhere else in the interface, you drag an icon to move it, and drag it to the trashcan to delete it. But I guess Apple's famous usability experts felt that finding somewhere to use that cute little puff-of-smoke animation was far more important than trivialities like consistency or predictability.
You do it not because you like the BSOD,
*sigh*
BSODs are like kernel panics in OS X; they used to be quite common (ever use OS X 10.1? Flakiest bit of Apple software I ever saw), and are now practically unknown.
virus, worms,
Your one valid point. Shame that any reasonably clueful user is immune to both. I know viruses and worms exist only because I've seen emails containing them as attachments; no PC I administer has ever been infected with either, and I can't offhand think of any cases where anyone I know has suffered from them either.
As for worms, those are hardly Windows specific. The famous 1988 Morris Worm targeted BSD systems. Yeah, the same BSD that Apple fanboys make so much of being the foundation for OS X...
stolen id,
Phishing attacks generally make use of standards-compliant emails and websites that run just as well in Mail.app and Safari as in any Windows software.
Spyware is easily avoided by not using IE or adware; it's not inherent to Windows in any way, and could theoretically target OS X just as easily, since it mostly relies on users actively deciding to install it (they may not know what the program does, but they think they want it on their system, and would therefore happily enter their password when prompted).
the high cost of the OS, software, etc
Windows costs roughly the same as OS X; it may be cheaper if you factor in Apple's upgrade treadmill. Most GNU/Linux distributions cost about the same too, if your time is valuable enough that you need professional support. The same goes for software: commercial Windows software comes in the same price ranges as equivalent Mac software, and if you want free stuff, most F/OSS applications have Windows ports.
you do it because it has MARKET SHARE. i.e, you do what everybody else is doing, even though they are jumping off cliffs.
No, actually I do it because it gets the job done and I find it pleasant to use; the only real flaw I see in Windows is the crap command-line environment, and Cygwin fixes that. I run GNU/Linux as well, but only because as a programmer I find it useful to have a second platform to test code for portability.
I've used OS X extensively, and I can't see what all the hype is about -- it's just another OS, with some nice features (slick rendering, scriptability) and some nasty annoyances (the dock is a UI nightmare, as is XCode). It's not the flipping silver bullet of perfection or anything, and it's not going to be better than Windows for every user.
the United States spends more on health care than any other industrialized nation
Wait, I thought the free market and privatization was supposed to make things cheaper? While state-run systems like the British NHS were supposed to be horribly inefficient and expensive?
Any economists care to explain what's going on here? Is the free market a failure, or is this the way it's supposed to be? Are those extortionate health costs translating into increased prosperity for America in some way?
In order to be allowed to use the trademarked term "Open Source" however, whatever license they choose must (a) comply with the Open Source Definition, and (b) be approved by the Open Source Initiative.
Did you even read the pages you were linking to? The Open Source Initiative's own certification page, that you linked to, has this to say, right in the first paragraph: "the term 'open source' itself [...] can't be protected as a trademark".
I can call anything I like Open Source, and nobody can do a thing to stop me. The new Evil Proprietary License (a viral license that infects any software in the same room with a deadly curse that can only be lifted by the sacrifice of your firstborn) could be called Open Source. What it couldn't legally be called is OSI Certified(tm).
So in Germany, "Wii" is simply unpronounceable.
I think you mean "there is no way to represent the English pronunciation of 'Wii' in standard German orthography".
That does not mean that the name "Wii" is unpronounceable in German (it is trivially pronounceable: it will simply be read [vi:]), nor does it mean that no German is capable of uttering the sound [w], as you appear to be claiming.
To claim that "Wii" is unpronounceable in Germany, simply because the Germans will not pronounce it the way you pronounce it, is like claiming that "kimono" is unpronounceable in English, because the Americans do not pronounce it the way the Japanese do. That is to say, it's patent nonsense.
Put in a different perspective, voiceless "l" occurs phonetically in English, but English-speakers would probably find the name "Hlii" a bit awkward.
/wi/ in Japanese) initial /hl/ is a cluster that was perfectly ordinary in Old English, but has fallen out of use.
/hl/, the change was to /l/: Old English hlaford becomes Modern English lord.
That's a better example than you may realise, given that (like
In the case of English
It would be better for LaTeX to add hypertext links and for browsers to move to a real presentation system.
You're kidding, right? LaTeX was designed by American computer scientists and mathematicians for the use of American computer scientists and mathematicians, and it shows.
Anything remotely interesting requires the use of flaky macro packages built on hacks within hacks. The underlying technologies are obsolete and non-standard; instead of PDF and OpenType, you have to fiddle around in Knuth's sandbox with DVI and MetaFont, and getting fonts in and documents out is a non-trivial process for the average computer user. And it's stuck in the ASCII world of the 1980s; fine for monolingual Americans, an increasing pain for users of other Latin-scripted languages and other alphabets, and an unrelenting nightmare for any language with a large or complex script. (I managed to get pLaTeX -- the hacked version of LaTeX that supports Japanese -- to output a DVI once. I never managed to print it, or to convert it into any useful electronic format.)
Compare this to HTML, which doesn't require the use of any particular accompanying technologies. The fonts can be any sort of font supplied by the user's OS. The character set can be any character set supported by the browser. It all just works.
There is one area, and only one, in which LaTeX is superior to HTML. That is typesetting mathematics. Oh, wait, the next generation of browsers will have full support for inline MathML. Bang goes the last LaTeX advantage.
Incidentally, I would love to see a LaTeX document that produces a reasonable mockup of the Slashdot front page. I'm guessing the LaTeX that generates it would not be anything like as readable as the HTML+CSS that generates the current page...
This site needs a complete overhaul, unless you want to be the only site on the Internet that looks like it was designed in 1998.
What's wrong with looking like you've got a bit of history?
I think many buildings that were designed in 1860 look nicer than buildings that were designed in 1960. I think many books that were printed in 1960 look nicer than books that were printed in 1996. So why do all websites have to be identical ZOMG-ITS-TEH-WEB-2.0? Why not hark back to the 1990s and the golden age of internet growth?
I think of it this way, cars, horses and bikes used to all share the same roadways. Well, we don't let horses on the road anymore really...I think it is time to reconsider the bicycle on most paved roads too...
Man, America really is the land of the automobile. Over on this side of the Atlantic, people still enjoy the freedom to choose the form of transport they want to use according to their own personal tastes, instead of being forced into driving just because everyone else does. There are restrictions on motorways (the equivalent of interstates in the USA); that's all.
The country roads round where I live have all sorts; cars, cyclists, pedestrians (in the road because there's nowhere else for them to walk), horses, farm vehicles (most of which are literally incapable of exceeding walking pace), sometimes livestock.
Guess what? Everything has right of way over cars.
Out of interest, how do things work in Amish areas? I'm guessing you don't think they should be forced to abandon the horse-drawn transport that's fundamental to the way of life they have chosen. So why should cyclists be forced to abandon their way of life, which is healthier and more economical?
they just can't be safe due to the nominal speed differential. If everyone is doing 45, you have a much less chance for accident than if you have 99% going 45, and suddenly coming upon someone going 15mph....
Solution? Car drivers should drive at the speed that's safe for the road. Is that such a difficult concept?
If you're driving in such a way that you won't see a cyclist ahead until it's too late for you to slow down, then what the hell do you think is going to happen if you turn a corner and find a fallen tree, or a truck that's broken down, or a couple of kids playing in the road?
You should slow down and drive safely, instead of telling other people to give up their right to use the public highway just to decrease the likelihood that you will cause an accident by your unsafe habits. You don't have a God-given right to drive at 45. You do have a personal responsibility to make sure you don't hit anyone else.
I try to meta-moderate as much as possible. I mark all positive mods "fair" and all negative mods "unfair".
GNAA troll modded "Insightful"? Yeah, obviously that's fair.
GNAA troll modded "Troll"? Yeah, obviously that's unfair.
I love it when people actually come out in public and admit that they're trying to break the system for everyone else. Thank you for doing your little bit to make Slashdot a worse place.
And? Romeo and Juliet can be distilled down to a one-or-two-paragraph summary that still contains the more intricate plot points, too. This has not led to people saying "most plays have very simplistic plots", and it appears to have been completely irrelevant to the quality of movies made based on it, some of which have been good and others bad.
If you want storyline, you're probably after a book or movie and not a game at all. Gameplay is what games are about, and while storyline is great as icing, it won't make a game.
Books have depth and stretch the imagination, but they don't have important stimuli like movement or soundtracks. Movies lack depth; there are simply limits to what you can fit into 90 minutes. Neither allows any form of interactivity, so you can't influence the plot in the slightest.
Various forms of interactive fiction - taking the depth and imaginative scope of a book, adding movement and sound as in movies, and introducing some form of interactivity to permit the player to have some limited control over the plot - are able to provide a different experience that is not available from books or movies.
Why shouldn't I want something like that?
Why should my entertainment be constrained to fit your narrow definition of what a game is?
For menus at least, every desktop environment save windows lets you specify the font size of menus and other parts. So grap your upgrade of your OS today! ;)
Please don't spread misinformation. Windows certainly does let you specify the font size of menus. It's right there in the Appearance tab of the Display control panel: you can configure fonts and sizes individually for most UI elements. Alternatively, you can adjust font sizes globally from the Advanced dialog of the same control panel.
(Note that this is Win2k and XP's classic mode I'm talking about; I don't know if you can do this with the new theming engine in XP. But nor do I know anyone who uses the theming engine in XP, so...)
DX10 COULD be ported to xp if they wanted to, they just WON'T in hopes that this will force the consumers hand.
That's because selling stuff is what companies do. It can't have escaped your notice that Apple, too, makes a habit of restricting new technologies like Spotlight to the latest version of their OS. There's no reason why Spotlight couldn't be ported to Panther, Apple just WON'T. Because it wouldn't make any business sense to.
developers right now need to reach the largest audience as possible to attempt to make money, and depending on sales numbers for Vista (which I believe will be low) Developers will go elsewhere (Mac?)
The only serious competition Vista faces is Microsoft's very own Windows XP. Regardless of how many XP users upgrade to Vista, the largest audience possible will be reached by developing for XP, since Vista is backwards-compatible.
As for the Mac... sorry, but it's simply out of the question. If a developer is motivated by audience size, as you yourself propose, then why would they switch to developing for the platform with the smallest marketshare? Seriously, however badly Vista sells, it will have at least 10% of the market based on OEM sales alone, and the combined Vista/XP platform will still cover the vast majority of PC users. Apple, even with its record growth recently, is still languishing in the single figure range. Developers target Mac users for a variety of reasons, but audience size ain't one of them.
#if sizeof(unsigned char) == 1
typedef unsigned char uint8;
#else
#error "No uint8 type available"
#endif
That way the compiler will warn you if there's a problem when you switch platforms.
Um, no, actually it won't, because the sizeof operator returns the size of the type in chars. That is to say, sizeof(char) is 1 by definition, regardless of the number of bits in a char.
The key thing here, for me, is that American judges are blocking the attempts of an American corporation to dodge round a foreign law.
There's a popular belief in Europe, particularly in anti-American circles, that the US refuses to acknowledge that any non-US law could ever apply to a US-based entity. These rulings are very welcome, and should go a long way towards counterbalancing the negative press that America has received over issues like the ICC.
Of course, even as I write this, there will no doubt be some nationalist congressman preparing a diatribe against these "activist judges" who are traitors to the national interest...
Why would anyone bother buying a Dell now?
Because it's cheaper. And when you buy a Dell, it comes with Windows already installed and set up, so you don't need to buy Windows separately and mess around with Boot Camp. And nobody ever got fired for buying Dell, but you can bet your life you'll be looking for another job if you buy Apples and anything goes even slightly wrong.
I'm glad you're enjoying your happy dream, but welcome to the real world, where Apple is a luxury manufacturer targetting a narrow market segment. Apple is no more going to take over the desktop than Ferrari is going to take over the highway -- and that suits everyone just fine, not least Apple.
What does it give me that Office 2003 doesn't?
An interface that doesn't suck so badly? Seriously, is there anyone who doesn't look at the menus in Office 2003 and despair? I can't imagine how the average computer user copes; presumably they learn, very laboriously, where in the maze of submenus and dialogs they can find the five features they need most often, and then pray they'll never need to do anything different in future.
I've watched intelligent, computer-literate people struggle with Word 2003, and it's not pretty. Even basic actions like getting the spellchecker to use the right language cause massive headaches for people who haven't sat down and literally memorised the menu system. (Sure, it's obvious once you know where to look, but it's nothing like intuitive.)
By all accounts, the new interface will mean things end up in much more logical places, and can be found with far fewer clicks. If it lives up to the hype, it will actually make Word (and all the other word processors, once they clone the new interface) a much pleasanter tool to use.
Realistically they should have used Doom which in my opinion is the easiest level editor in existance.
Doom is a game, not a level editor. You are probably thinking of one of the dozens of third-party level editors for Doom, which range from hideously-hard-to-use all the way down to merely mindbendingly-hard-to-use. Seriously, unless it was released in the last 10 years or so, there's no Doom level editor that even comes close to being as quick and intuitive to use as the Build editor for Duke3D.
Uh... doesn't the internet exist in France? How can you assert that the 'pictures weren't distributed in France?'... they were accessible from France, and that is what prompted the litigation. And hence my point about democracy not being a protected Chinese creation is valid.
Okay, then -- what about photos of the Tiananmen Square massacre? Those photos were taken in China, and those photos are illegal in China. So the situation is an exact analogy with photos taken in France that are illegal in France, right?
So, now you have to address the real point, instead of squirming through loopholes. And the real point is this: should Chinese law apply to those photos, wherever in the world they are published? Their "source" is China, so you appear to be arguing that it should. So are you saying that China should have the right to prosecute Americans for revealing human rights violations in China?
Please state your position clearly, and justify it.
Thankfully, we in the UK have a relatively sensible system of second level domains. .net.uk, for example, is ISPs only.
.net TLD for personal sites.
.uk on the end?
Yes, but that doesn't stop plenty of people in the UK, like me, (ab)using the global
And why not? I'm no more a "com"pany or an "org"anisation than I am a "net"work provider. I'm not a "biz"ness, and I'm not dedicated to providing "info"rmation, and the domain is not my real "name". But nor do I want a country-specific domain -- my site is of very limited interest to the vast majority of people, but the tiny community it interests is spread right across the globe. My site isn't aimed particularly at people in the UK, so why should it have a misleading
What it comes down to is, there is no point whatsoever in trying to force an artificial hierarchy onto something like the internet, which is an interconnected network, not a neat and nicely categorised tree. It doesn't work. It's pointless and confusing. Let's just give it up already, okay?
And? Why should there be an article about this website in Wikipedia? You wouldn't expect to find one in Britannica or Encarta.
The difference is that I've heard of Charles Manson and the Star Wars kid, whereas this Slashdot article is the first time I (and, going by the other comments here, most slashdotters) have heard of any of these three people in question.
So clearly they aren't famous in the same sense.