Re:$179? No problem.
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Because almost everything Redhat packages is free. There is no reason I should pay $179 USD for a product that should essentially be without cost.
If the $179 isn't paying for anything, then use Fedora; if Fedora isn't good enough, then the $179 must be paying for something worth having. You can't have it both ways.
Really your least experienced, least traveled guys are going to be the most effective terrorist operatives. No chance they'll make a mistake and get caught, since it's their first time doing anything or even leaving their home town.
Would it amaze you to learn that the vast majority of suicide bombers are doing it for the first time?
How long can Nintendo keep using past titles and characters as their main source of creativity?
Hey, it hasn't hurt Hollywood yet, has it?
I'm serious. People play the latest Mario or Zelda in precisely the same way as they watch the latest Bond film, or the latest Julia Roberts vehicle. It hasn't hurt sales yet.
Long story short, Linux should be developing its own strengths and killer apps instead of trying to emulate Microsoft's.
Nonsense. Your average PHB knows what he wants, and what he wants is Word, Excel, and Outlook. He's going to happy with any platform that runs them; he's going to be suspicious about a platform that provides lookalikes and workalikes; but he's going to reject out of hand anything that looks too different from what he's used to, which is why Macs have never caught on outside their established niche.
KDE plus OpenOffice.org has a real chance in the business world; $(funky_window_manager) plus LaTeX has none. That's not mindless herd-speak, it's a simple fact. I've seen people go into a flat spin when they're presented with Mozilla instead of Internet Explorer; a GnuStep desktop would probably kill them.
By all means, develop your unique points and killer apps, if that's what you want to do. Just don't go kidding yourself that that's the way to get Linux mainstream acceptance. Do you want Linux on every desktop? I realise that's not necessarily what everyone does want, but if it is what you want, Linux is going to have to beat Windows at it's own game, not at yours.
Yes, you don't have to release to the rest of the world, but you have to release to your internal users, right? And by the GPL you cannot restrict your users from redistributing the software. Sure, they may be your employees, but technically you'd be violating the GPL by telling them they could not release the software to others.
Not according to the FSF, who claim in their GPL FAQ:
Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company "distribution"?
No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for itself. As a consequence, a company or other organization can develop a modified version and install that version through its own facilities, without giving the staff permission to release that modified version to outsiders. (emphasis mine)
There are "emotion" games out there but emotion leads to sex and that is forbidden in the US of A. Better to kill then fuck. The Sims are a notable exception but they don't really have emotion just stats.
Then why haven't these games made it to the US? Plenty of emotion, no sex, very little violence - and stats, too.
Love stories are a solved problem. It's not that it's hard to make games like that, it's just that nobody thinks Americans are interested... well, not enough to make them commercially viable, anyway.
So if the iPod were a wind-up toy witha clever hierarchial user interface, painstakingly crafted by Swiss watchmakers, you'd consider it patentable, yet because it's electronic, and the user interface is controlled by firmware, it's not?
Precisely.
If I designed a fully lifelike robot cat, I would be able to patent it. Are you saying that I should therefore be able to patent cats?
Well, if Modula were a good scripting language, you could go with Linux Apache Modula Postgres. But I'm having trouble coming up with any other language starting with M.
Er, you can't be trying very hard. ML, Miranda, Mercury, Malbolge? That's just the four that spring to mind.
Probably just as well that there's no popular scripting language starting with C...
...apart from csh, but I guess that's not as popular as it used to be. Doesn't anyone have a COBOL-script?
And, though it's not applicable to the outright-buffer-overflow viruses like this one, not to use systems with the vile design flaw of letting users click on attachments and execute stuff . . . An explicit user driven install ritual should be needed to get such a thing into a context where it can be run.
No thanks. That won't stop lusers infecting themselves, and it will annoy people who know what they're doing.
Current versions of the Firefox browser have a similar "feature" which means you can't run a program by clicking on a link - you have to download it and run it locally. I simply do not understand this: it provides no extra security, and it gets in the way of my browsing. I've actually taken to using the "open in IE" extension to open links to programs I want to run.
Popping up a window which says "This is an EXECUTABLE FILE, not a document. If you don't know what that means, then this is almost certainly an EVIL VIRUS. Only click "open" if you are prepared to LOSE ALL YOUR DATA" - and then provides a big button saying "I'm scared, let's not do this", and a tiny button saying "open" - would be a better solution.
Example: If people use the term "web sight" to mean "web site", they are simply wrong. The search should be rejected with an error message (not accepted with a query like Google currently does) and a "[sic]" button for experts meaning "Yes I know this looks silly but I really do mean it".
And how is Google to know what people "mean" by their search terms? What about WebSight Design (in California), Web Sight Limited (in Britain), and other similar products and companies whose names play on these words? Suddenly people searching for them will no longer see their pages, they'll see an error message. Most people don't read error messages, so they'll never see the "[sic]" option and probably wouldn't think of clicking on it if they did.
No, I think it works just fine the way it is, thank you.
...the graphics arms race is reaching a point of diminishing returns. There's such a thing as "good enough", and "more complicated pixel shaders in your 3D" isn't the kind of jump that "now in 3D instead of 2D" was.
I beg to differ.
Think back to the 90s. Think back to the days before even Quake. Remember when ID made that announcement, "Quake will be to Doom as Doom was to Wolfenstein 3D"?
I didn't believe that, because I couldn't imagine at the time how anything could possibly look much more realistic than Doom.
No, graphics aren't going to stop improving any time soon. It's hard to imagine tomorrow's technology today, but I'm fully convinced that in ten years' time we'll look back at the games of 2004, which you're describing as "good enough", and be amazed at how bad they look to our 2014 eyes.
I am a C coder by trade... I like functional programming because its what I do 5 days a week eight hours a day
Um, if you're a C coder, then you are not doing functional programming, you are doing procedural programming. Functional programming means languages like Lisp, ML, and Haskell.
Maybe you'll click "Check" when you're ready, and the file will do what it needs to do-- commit itself, upload itself, send, save, etc.
Nice idea, but it doesn't work.
For example, my email package provides both "save" and "send" as options when composing a message; the former saves the draft I'm working on. And how will my word processor know that what I want to do when I finish typing is "save" the document, not "print" or "email" it?
And both are a heck of a lot better than 'Alt, f, s, Alt, f, x', the way it was done with EDIT under DOS.
Funnily enough, my text-mode editor of choice is jed, precisely because it lets you use that sequence of keystrokes, which is permanently burned into my left hand.
It only looks wrong because you're writing it strangely. If it said "M-f s M-f x" you'd think it was quite intuitive.
Certain characters (like some Japanese chars) have 0 value first bytes for wide characters.
That is just nonsense. I am aware of no character in any widely used character set that has a zero byte for the first byte of a multi-byte character - except for Unicode's first 256 entries, which contain... English!
In Shift_JIS, the character set used by Japanese Windows, a null byte will never occur anywhere in a multi-byte character. You can use it perfectly safely in C without any special handling whatsoever.
How do I convince my Japanese version of Windows XP Home to display OS messages in English?
You don't. The Japanese version of Windows XP is designed for people who want their OS to be in Japanese. If you want it in English you should have bought the English version. It's not like you can't run Japanese software perfectly well in that.
If you're really desperate you can hack the resources yourself, of course...
I can complain that under this version of the OS, a whole bunch of English-language software seems to have uglified small fonts, sometimes to the point of illegibility.
You can. Or you could change your system font settings so they stopped having uglified small fonts, but maybe that would be too much effort for you.
Oh, and how do you enter full-width katakana from the command prompt? It seems impossible.
You can't have tried very hard. You do it in exactly the same way you enter full-width katakana in any application - switch to Japanese input and, like, type it?
Not to mention the way that the IME taskbar widget regularly gets obscured by other taskbar widgets making changing input settings a pain in the neck.
Use the keyboard shortcuts, then. There's no shortage of them.
It sounds to me like your trouble isn't that Microsoft's software doesn't do what you need, it's that you haven't bothered to learn how to use it. Hint: this is not Microsoft's problem.
I'm no great fan of Java, but I do like the way that there is One True API for most things I might want to do.
So in the case of Java GUIs, is the One True API Swing or SWT? In case you forgot, there's still an ongoing holy war on that one.
What about.NET GUIs? What's the One True API there, System.Windows.Forms or GTK#? Hmm... looks like Microsoft.NET and DotGNU only support System.Windows.Forms, while the Mono project is advocating GTK#...
Not only did they leave it out - well, they do say on the front page that they consider multiplayer to be important - it isn't even in the list of games they let readers vote for at the end.
Nor, unbelievably, is Jedi Knight - the first game I ever played with areas that felt large, unlike the claustrophobic experience of Quake. Even Jedi Outcast is missing.
I can forgive them for leaving them out of the top ten, but leaving every episode in a whole major series out of the list of other candidates beggars belief.
I've never figured out why emulator groups were always so rabid about keeping their emulators closed-source...
Because there are a lot of lamers out there who like nothing better than to steal other people's work and pass it off as their own.
Why might these people target emulators in particular and not other types of program? Because in an emulator, unlike (say) a text editor or an original game, the majority of the difficult code is in the engine rather than the interface, but its visible output is very well defined: two emulators might be totally different inside, but if they do their jobs well enough their output should be indistinguishable.
That's the argument, anyway. In practice it doesn't actually seem to be true, but that's a different matter.;)
Sega? Don't forget Sega are the people who actually licensed a free MegaDrive emulator (KGen, IIRC) and released it in stores with a selection of ROM images. Sega have a pretty positive attitude to emulation (possibly as a result of the collapse of their hardware business).
For phones, Java is great and binary portability makes sense. For the desktop though, I really wonder and don't see the use of binary portability, especially in a gaming sense (unless you are executing distributed objects over multiple platforms, maybe in some kind of MMORPG game....)
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Because almost everything Redhat packages is free. There is no reason I should pay $179 USD for a product that should essentially be without cost.
If the $179 isn't paying for anything, then use Fedora; if Fedora isn't good enough, then the $179 must be paying for something worth having. You can't have it both ways.
Really your least experienced, least traveled guys are going to be the most effective terrorist operatives. No chance they'll make a mistake and get caught, since it's their first time doing anything or even leaving their home town.
Would it amaze you to learn that the vast majority of suicide bombers are doing it for the first time?
How long can Nintendo keep using past titles and characters as their main source of creativity?
Hey, it hasn't hurt Hollywood yet, has it?
I'm serious. People play the latest Mario or Zelda in precisely the same way as they watch the latest Bond film, or the latest Julia Roberts vehicle. It hasn't hurt sales yet.
Long story short, Linux should be developing its own strengths and killer apps instead of trying to emulate Microsoft's.
Nonsense. Your average PHB knows what he wants, and what he wants is Word, Excel, and Outlook. He's going to happy with any platform that runs them; he's going to be suspicious about a platform that provides lookalikes and workalikes; but he's going to reject out of hand anything that looks too different from what he's used to, which is why Macs have never caught on outside their established niche.
KDE plus OpenOffice.org has a real chance in the business world; $(funky_window_manager) plus LaTeX has none. That's not mindless herd-speak, it's a simple fact. I've seen people go into a flat spin when they're presented with Mozilla instead of Internet Explorer; a GnuStep desktop would probably kill them.
By all means, develop your unique points and killer apps, if that's what you want to do. Just don't go kidding yourself that that's the way to get Linux mainstream acceptance. Do you want Linux on every desktop? I realise that's not necessarily what everyone does want, but if it is what you want, Linux is going to have to beat Windows at it's own game, not at yours.
Depending on the numbers used, Linux is equal or greater than Mac use.
Particularly if you secretly represent Linux usage figures in binary.
Not according to the FSF, who claim in their GPL FAQ:
There are "emotion" games out there but emotion leads to sex and that is forbidden in the US of A. Better to kill then fuck. The Sims are a notable exception but they don't really have emotion just stats.
Then why haven't these games made it to the US? Plenty of emotion, no sex, very little violence - and stats, too.
Love stories are a solved problem. It's not that it's hard to make games like that, it's just that nobody thinks Americans are interested... well, not enough to make them commercially viable, anyway.
So if the iPod were a wind-up toy witha clever hierarchial user interface, painstakingly crafted by Swiss watchmakers, you'd consider it patentable, yet because it's electronic, and the user interface is controlled by firmware, it's not?
Precisely.
If I designed a fully lifelike robot cat, I would be able to patent it. Are you saying that I should therefore be able to patent cats?
Well, if Modula were a good scripting language, you could go with Linux Apache Modula Postgres. But I'm having trouble coming up with any other language starting with M.
...apart from csh, but I guess that's not as popular as it used to be. Doesn't anyone have a COBOL-script?
Er, you can't be trying very hard. ML, Miranda, Mercury, Malbolge? That's just the four that spring to mind.
Probably just as well that there's no popular scripting language starting with C...
And, though it's not applicable to the outright-buffer-overflow viruses like this one, not to use systems with the vile design flaw of letting users click on attachments and execute stuff . . . An explicit user driven install ritual should be needed to get such a thing into a context where it can be run.
No thanks. That won't stop lusers infecting themselves, and it will annoy people who know what they're doing.
Current versions of the Firefox browser have a similar "feature" which means you can't run a program by clicking on a link - you have to download it and run it locally. I simply do not understand this: it provides no extra security, and it gets in the way of my browsing. I've actually taken to using the "open in IE" extension to open links to programs I want to run.
Popping up a window which says "This is an EXECUTABLE FILE, not a document. If you don't know what that means, then this is almost certainly an EVIL VIRUS. Only click "open" if you are prepared to LOSE ALL YOUR DATA" - and then provides a big button saying "I'm scared, let's not do this", and a tiny button saying "open" - would be a better solution.
Example: If people use the term "web sight" to mean "web site", they are simply wrong. The search should be rejected with an error message (not accepted with a query like Google currently does) and a "[sic]" button for experts meaning "Yes I know this looks silly but I really do mean it".
And how is Google to know what people "mean" by their search terms? What about WebSight Design (in California), Web Sight Limited (in Britain), and other similar products and companies whose names play on these words? Suddenly people searching for them will no longer see their pages, they'll see an error message. Most people don't read error messages, so they'll never see the "[sic]" option and probably wouldn't think of clicking on it if they did.
No, I think it works just fine the way it is, thank you.
...the graphics arms race is reaching a point of diminishing returns. There's such a thing as "good enough", and "more complicated pixel shaders in your 3D" isn't the kind of jump that "now in 3D instead of 2D" was.
I beg to differ.
Think back to the 90s. Think back to the days before even Quake. Remember when ID made that announcement, "Quake will be to Doom as Doom was to Wolfenstein 3D"?
I didn't believe that, because I couldn't imagine at the time how anything could possibly look much more realistic than Doom.
No, graphics aren't going to stop improving any time soon. It's hard to imagine tomorrow's technology today, but I'm fully convinced that in ten years' time we'll look back at the games of 2004, which you're describing as "good enough", and be amazed at how bad they look to our 2014 eyes.
I am a C coder by trade... I like functional programming because its what I do 5 days a week eight hours a day
Um, if you're a C coder, then you are not doing functional programming, you are doing procedural programming. Functional programming means languages like Lisp, ML, and Haskell.
To be quickly followed by ... "cockerel"
Why do you think the common American term is "rooster"?
Maybe you'll click "Check" when you're ready,
and the file will do what it needs to do--
commit itself, upload itself, send, save, etc.
Nice idea, but it doesn't work.
For example, my email package provides both "save" and "send" as options when composing a message; the former saves the draft I'm working on. And how will my word processor know that what I want to do when I finish typing is "save" the document, not "print" or "email" it?
And both are a heck of a lot better than 'Alt, f, s, Alt, f, x', the way it was done with EDIT under DOS.
Funnily enough, my text-mode editor of choice is jed, precisely because it lets you use that sequence of keystrokes, which is permanently burned into my left hand.
It only looks wrong because you're writing it strangely. If it said "M-f s M-f x" you'd think it was quite intuitive.
you type on the 'typewriter'
Actually, the least computer-literate people I know refer to the thing they type on as the "desktop".
Because it's on top of their desk.
Did you remember to set your default locale to Japanese? That fixes most of the obvious problems with menus and dialog boxes.
Certain characters (like some Japanese chars) have 0 value first bytes for wide characters.
That is just nonsense. I am aware of no character in any widely used character set that has a zero byte for the first byte of a multi-byte character - except for Unicode's first 256 entries, which contain... English!
In Shift_JIS, the character set used by Japanese Windows, a null byte will never occur anywhere in a multi-byte character. You can use it perfectly safely in C without any special handling whatsoever.
How do I convince my Japanese version of Windows XP Home to display OS messages in English?
You don't. The Japanese version of Windows XP is designed for people who want their OS to be in Japanese. If you want it in English you should have bought the English version. It's not like you can't run Japanese software perfectly well in that.
If you're really desperate you can hack the resources yourself, of course...
I can complain that under this version of the OS, a whole bunch of English-language software seems to have uglified small fonts, sometimes to the point of illegibility.
You can. Or you could change your system font settings so they stopped having uglified small fonts, but maybe that would be too much effort for you.
Oh, and how do you enter full-width katakana from the command prompt? It seems impossible.
You can't have tried very hard. You do it in exactly the same way you enter full-width katakana in any application - switch to Japanese input and, like, type it?
Not to mention the way that the IME taskbar widget regularly gets obscured by other taskbar widgets making changing input settings a pain in the neck.
Use the keyboard shortcuts, then. There's no shortage of them.
It sounds to me like your trouble isn't that Microsoft's software doesn't do what you need, it's that you haven't bothered to learn how to use it. Hint: this is not Microsoft's problem.
I'm no great fan of Java, but I do like the way that there is One True API for most things I might want to do.
.NET GUIs? What's the One True API there, System.Windows.Forms or GTK#? Hmm... looks like Microsoft .NET and DotGNU only support System.Windows.Forms, while the Mono project is advocating GTK#...
So in the case of Java GUIs, is the One True API Swing or SWT? In case you forgot, there's still an ongoing holy war on that one.
What about
Not only did they leave it out - well, they do say on the front page that they consider multiplayer to be important - it isn't even in the list of games they let readers vote for at the end.
Nor, unbelievably, is Jedi Knight - the first game I ever played with areas that felt large, unlike the claustrophobic experience of Quake. Even Jedi Outcast is missing.
I can forgive them for leaving them out of the top ten, but leaving every episode in a whole major series out of the list of other candidates beggars belief.
I've never figured out why emulator groups were always so rabid about keeping their emulators closed-source...
;)
Because there are a lot of lamers out there who like nothing better than to steal other people's work and pass it off as their own.
Why might these people target emulators in particular and not other types of program? Because in an emulator, unlike (say) a text editor or an original game, the majority of the difficult code is in the engine rather than the interface, but its visible output is very well defined: two emulators might be totally different inside, but if they do their jobs well enough their output should be indistinguishable.
That's the argument, anyway. In practice it doesn't actually seem to be true, but that's a different matter.
As would Sega, Microsoft, Sony, SNK, etc...
Sega? Don't forget Sega are the people who actually licensed a free MegaDrive emulator (KGen, IIRC) and released it in stores with a selection of ROM images. Sega have a pretty positive attitude to emulation (possibly as a result of the collapse of their hardware business).
For phones, Java is great and binary portability makes sense. For the desktop though, I really wonder and don't see the use of binary portability, especially in a gaming sense (unless you are executing distributed objects over multiple platforms, maybe in some kind of MMORPG game....)
What, like Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates for example?