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User: wild_berry

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  1. Overlooking your imagination... on Don't Go Down Memory Lane? · · Score: 1

    While gaming is a visual experience, I've recently realised that the impact of imagination in how you experience the story. Get your brain to fill in the details of older and lower-detail gaming, and it's just as much fun again. Kind of like reading a thrilling book can be an exhilarating experience...

  2. Re-enjoying Half Life on Don't Go Down Memory Lane? · · Score: 1

    I struggle with my imagination in newer visually-perfect titles. Re-playing Metroid, Super Metroid, Quake and Half Life in light of, say, Half Life 2, the realism of the game grates until you remember to suspend disbelief. When my imagination smooths over the lower detail of the games I play, the fun remains. When I expect the technology to pick up and improve older games so that they're like the new stuff -- an unreasonable expectation, I think -- the older games suck. (Caveat: I haven't yet played Half Life: Source, but wonder how it will affect my experience of the story.)

  3. Re:Dumbest Article I have ever read on The Ad-Supported Operating System · · Score: 1

    [I]f the OS is free, people will be more willing to upgrade and so the argument 'Linux has no cost' will fall off
    To be replaced by "Linux is free and has no advertising" or "Linux is free and allows me to do what I want with the computer I bought". (That last one's would be irrelevant to, say, a Microsoft Live! Terminal leased from Microsoft to run Live! services over the internet. I'd be more likely to trust a Google terminal that did similar but still want to own my own computer.)

  4. Additional: on An Early Look at Freespire Linux · · Score: 1

    I heard rumours about a friend of a friend who disappeared for using a secret version called conspire; no matter to me: I've got my copy when I burned all my previous computer software and hardware. I rather like using Pyre.

  5. My edition of TFA: on Ubuntu to Bring About Red Hat's Demise? · · Score: 1

    I think he's doing something we see a lot on /.: extrapolating from a few data points (mostly self and friends) with the assumption that the rest of the market would behave as he would. I'd probably say the same if I were forced to make a prediction about the future most-popular home-use GNU/Linux distribution. But, thinking about it...

    I'd say that Ubuntu is easier than Fedora Core for mainstream use because I've moved from FC to Ubuntu 5.10 and 6.06. But I don't know a huge amount about Shutteworth's plans to move Ubuntu into the enterprise: LTS with 6.06 and Ubuntu Server edition are moves in the right direction despite people chiming Debian-remnant horror that he might acutally make money from Linux, and maybe I don't read the right places where adverts for Ubuntu reach managerial people.

    My conclusion, though, would be based on Red Hat apparently having better mind share in the business market and somewhere obvious for people to pay money for support. But I'd at least admit that it's speculation based upon hearsay.

  6. Re:Dear Aunt... on 3D Virtual Reconstructions From Microsoft · · Score: 2, Informative

    I agree with Erich Schubert's blog post (http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/2006073102-micro soft-vapourware, found via http://planet.debian.org/) that it's more vapour than some E3 "rendered in-game" footage. Citing the UWash Photo Tour (http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/) whose technology ultimately makes up PhotoSynth, the processing power required is of the scale of two weeks to place 597 of 2635 images using a 3.4 GHz P4. I doubt that too many home computers will have the grunt to do that on a reasonable time-scale before the end of the decade. I expect it will be a serviceon Microsoft Live, where you submit the pictures and use a viewer.

  7. Re:Bootable? on "iSCSI killer" Native in Linux · · Score: 2, Insightful

    My inexpert guess would involve getting a Tyan Thunder/Tiger motherboard with LinuxBIOS and compiling and configuring your own ATAoE support. Windows would need to think it's a local disk; LinuxBIOS could pretend that it was.

  8. Walking pedant. on Lead PHP Developer Quits · · Score: 1

    I believe you are misusing 'unique' when you should be using 'rare': Of an unique item there is only one; Of a rare item there may only be a small number in proportion to general availability; An ubiquitous item may be found everywhere.

  9. Re:Occam's Razor on Possible Hole in Black Holes · · Score: 1

    Occam's Razor is a good rule of thumb

    I used it twice and am no longer a primate, you insensitive clod!

  10. Happy Zen Customer on True Unlimited Broadband in the UK? · · Score: 2, Informative

    Zen's customer support (home, not business) have been good to me. Their Web Portal's okay for managing your account and their phone support lines have knowledgeable and helpful staff. http://www.adslguide.org.uk/ have their users rate the Zen experience as faster and more reliable than any other service I could compare them to.

  11. Re:The good old days of DOS on Inside Vista's Image-Based Install Process · · Score: 1

    But you do: the Linux is contained in an Ext2/3 'directory' and the Windows in a FAT32/NTFS 'directory' (for non-conventional definitions of the word 'directory').

    WINE makes the only justification I can see for having a Windows installation on the same filesystem as Linux. But even then, the wonders of external tools for NTFS or Kernel VFAT and the mount command's ability to place block devices anywhere in the hierarchy make this unnecessary. WINE can be configured to use your Windows-installed applications from their own partition.

  12. Re:it's simple, really on It's Official - AMD Buys ATI · · Score: 1

    If you credit Charlie at the Inquirer with anything, the Sun Niagaras imply a future where lots of simple processing units in the CPU will replace the large-scale OoOE at present, which would also be an easy place to put unified or vertex/pixel shader support too. He claims Intel has been working on it for a while already, which clarifies why those comments were made about Intel stifling gaming by the head of Epic Megagames as actaully being about Intel delaying things so as to allow their alternative solution to leave their test labs.

    Charlie's convinced (that there is a conspiracy to swap all of the world's bits from 0 to 1 and 1 to 0 at midnight on the 31st September, but that's a side issue, and) that AMD/ATi will leave the chipset business to nVidia so as not to anger them. I'm not sure of that one.

  13. Re:Bigger man than I on Paul Thurrott Bitten by WGA · · Score: 1

    I think someone should apologise for that. Linux and the Open Source movement is part of a rediscovery of the benefits of human cooperation, so I apologise (as part of the collaborative) that noone's been helpful to you. I hope that Ubuntu 6.06 does nicely with your hardware. If you don't want to use it, that's cool.

  14. [ot: wink] on Challenging the Ideas Behind the Semantic Web · · Score: 1

    This stalking thing's hard work. I'm glad I could track you down to ask: I'm interested in downloading your software, where might I find a link to it?

  15. Re:Article offline 2:06pm EST on ReactOS Reviewed in Depth · · Score: 1

    And the one time I write a one-line post, I notice that typo: too few 'o's in the woord 'good'. And we now see where that 'o' escaped to...

  16. Re:Article offline 2:06pm EST on ReactOS Reviewed in Depth · · Score: 1

    I read the thing through the Coral Cache. It remains a god read...

  17. [ot] Summary: NPOV on Wikipedia and the Collective Hive Mind? · · Score: 1

    While I disagree, I will seek to respond in such a way as to catalogue the alternatives in order to allow someone reading about this to make up their mind. ;-)

    There are some people who maintain that Wikipedia's Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) goal is impossible because it cannot be authoritative or accurately represent the middle-ground of a contentious topic. Others maintain that the best way to describe a topic while meeting the NPOV requirements is to describe all sides of an issue, acknowledging their strengths and weaknesses. This leaves an article to the mercy of sins of omission: that criticisms of one or many of the viewpoints are left out in order to make one perspective appear better than others. The consequences which follow are a stub which needs expansion. Click 'Reply' to expand the stub...

  18. Darling, have you heard of Google? on GnuCash 2.0.0 Released · · Score: 1

    GTK 2.10 has an experimental backend for OS X. That was in the changelog for the 2.10.0 release: http://www.gtk.org/gtk-2.10-announcement.html. There is a project page about GTK on OS X at http://developer.imendio.com/wiki/Gtk_Mac_OS_X.

  19. [ot] commentary on Is Simplified Spelling Worth Reform? · · Score: 1

    You beat me to it... I was going to say:
    >>rather arbitrary use of "a" vs. "the"
    >I know that, when I use the word 'the' I intend to point out a specific instance
    >of the word the; it is possible that a general instance of the word 'the' may be
    >referred to with 'a', not 'the. But I disagree with your claim that it is arbitrary.

  20. Re:Umm... Question on Futurama Star Billy West Answers Slashdot Questions · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I took the comment to mean that you always buy something -- whether the HiDef screen, the HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive, the speakers, the portable media player, the discs or tapes or what. Only dyed-in-the-wool crooks nick everything. You're not nicking TV by watching its adverts and not spending money on advertised products -- your money's already been spent on the equipment and license to watch the TV shows (whether a subscription, pay-per-view or year-long license).

  21. Copylefting MS? on EU Fines for Microsoft Approved, Off the Record · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Relieving Microsoft of their copyrights within EU member states would only serve to worsen the addiction to Microsoft's proprietary software. The present path is best: financial incentives to comply with a demand for documentation so that other software companies can develop software to inter-operate with Microsoft's offerings on the same footing as MS has.

    Were the EU to deny Microsoft copyright protection in its member states, I suspect that the Microsoft would lobby the US Government to act in WIPO and WTO (with other small countries bullied) to impose sanctions upon Europe. It's been a while since we've had some empire-wrangling (well, since the allegations that Saddam Hussein was planning to sell Iraq's oil in Euros before 2003's 'liberation') and that could interesting times indeed.

  22. [ot] Nitpicking on Shuttle Launch Success · · Score: 1

    in Empire Niall Ferguson points out that by 1773 and the Boston Tea Party, taxation had all but disappeared from the American Colonies. The right to impose taxes was the issue, which at that time had been levied by British Parliament operating under same marginal 'permission' to do so by the British Monarch as is today in Britain, and it had been that way for over 100 years by 1776. Constitutionally, Britain is run by the Parliament with a hat-tip every so often to the reigning Monarch.

    The Declaration of Independence, while uniting the 13 states that signed it and having great support, did also leave approximately one in five colonists supporting the Crown during the war of Independence, dividing families and communities.

    Finally, I don't think that the idea of a monarchy is so repulsive to citizens of the United States of America. American History is framed in such a way as to give people the idea that Independence was about rejecting the Crown -- but "no taxation without representation" was a call for a local legislation on the same footing as Britain's Westminster Parliament. Admittedly, it's the British Parliament's fault for spend the forty years before the 1770's centralizing power and control throughout the colonies of the British Empire.

  23. [ot] agreed on Fedora Core 6 Preview · · Score: 1

    That's exactly my point: updating or installing software using Yum or Apt or Aptitude resolves dependencies for you. It seems it's only trolls who don't know that the repositories of managed software are best used with clever package managers like these.

  24. Re:[ot] anti-personnel deployment. on Networked Landmines Work Together · · Score: 1

    I'd hate to see this tech deployed in an anti-personnel minefield and I see the potential for it protecting an anti-tank land mine barrage, as explained by the author of the parent to my original post; I was asking whether people still used anti-personnel land mines in light of the 1999 Ottawa treaty. Now that I've read up, it seems that the USA is among the 10 countries who stepped back from Ottawa's provisions, sticking with the rules previously agreed in Section II of the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons, which makes anti-personnel land mines at least detectable by metal detectors.

  25. [ot] I wish I had mod points right now! on Nerds Switching from Apple to Ubuntu? · · Score: 1

    You're kind. Thanks. [blush]. Excuse the buzzwords, but I'm sure that the collaborative nature of Free Software/Open Source means that each person should use their knowledge to benefit others. Trying to be helpful like that has parallels with writing good, clean and free code...