I suppose it was only a matter of time before we saw a "ignorant rednecks against video games" group. Their "facts" are either blatant lies or misrepresentations of fact (Personally, I own every game I play. I also graduated from High School an honor student, with a paticular knack in English classes, where nearly every paper I wrote got 100%, including a couple group projects I decided to take on by myself because of the generally low aptitude and pathetic work ethic I found in my classmates(There's no 'I' in team, unless 'I' am literally doing all the work while being held back creatively by an idiot who is failing English). Being interested in technical things long before I owned my first computer (my interests included short wave radio, electronics, and reading fiction), I was a social outcast with people who were often more interested in snow mobiling and sports. Considering the niche of most things I enjoyed, my freinds were often outcasts as well(not to be confused with traditional nerds -- I was incredibly violent back then(before video games), but years ago I became a pacifist, never to get in another fight, or even another shouting contest, with another person, all while being a huge fan of video games), years before the words "video game" ever entered my vocabulary. To be honest, Video games are a common thread in my generation. Walk up to anyone about 18-30, and talk about video games, and they'll have something to say. This common thread is a boon to those like me who would have otherwise been social outcasts), and they seem to draw conclusions out of thin air(gamers more violent than football players? No fucking way!!!). They also seem intent on pegging social problems directly on video games, where their relationship cannot be even remotely substantiated. People like this are dangerously ignorant, and with their battlecry of "for the children!", are quite capable of circumventing the basic human rights of game developers such as myself(and no, game developers don't have to justify themselves to ANYONE to secure such rights. Anyone who thinks differently is a fascist).
Besides the frightening measures they recommend parents take to help curb this "dangerous" behaviour, or their conclusions, which are downright INSULTING, ON A FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL in some of their assertions, such as Americas army, which is described as "When videogames were linked to the Columbine high school shooters, a frenzy of new research was launched, in which, one team of researchers discovered that first person shooter games do indeed teach gamers with the basic knowledge of how to kill. This research arrived be so conclusive that the U.S. government Army developed a free videogame to be used as a virtual boot camp and killing simulator.". I don't believe there is a single trustworthy fact on the entire web site!
But hey, what do I know? Lets put our kids back in front of the TV set to teach them how they should be living their lives! I mean, there's no violence, no hatred, no ulterior motives, no manipulation of the ignorant masses(like ABC news and their continual smear campaign against video games) in the world of the benevolent TV, no racism, no death, and certainly not 3 months of non-stop coverage of the deaths of thousands of Americans in the twin towers on every channel in America. Lets put our kids back on the football field, since there's nothing more wholesome than teaching children about violence, the value of being bigger than the other guy, the fundamental truth that being good at sports can get you through your life. Lets send our kids back outside, where they are unsupervised, and free to explore things such as the birds and the bees (without parental supervision, no less!). Lets let them sit back and listen to the same music these peoples parents were calling the acts of satan, and listen to Eminem critisize his single mother, Brittany Spears rattle off another half-witted souless piece of musical garbage about the love she just has to have. Or, if those things are also to be taboo, just as video games are to be, why not ban everything? That way, there can be no Walter Cronkite in Vietnam, no sports heroes to inspire youth towards greatness, no understanding of the world outside your parents influence, no System of a downs War or Rage Against the Machines No Shelter. No Fortunate One by...whoever did Fortunate One (Was it CCR?). Destroy the world so we may save the innocent mind of a child, and sacrifice your future so you might live in peace, knowing that your child won't ever have to suffer the consequences of having a thought in his head not placed there by a greater authority. They can have great grades, be popular, be good at sports, and fill every fantasy you had for yourself but were too corrupted to accomplish yourself, and leave your children, who have grown up in your own falsified image, too ignorant of the world to function without being told what to do.
Congratualtions, ignorant idiots, you've destroyed your world. You destroyed it the moment you raised a child so desperate he killed 30 of his schoolmates. You destroyed it the moment you were brought kicking and screaming out of your little innocent utopia because of your own actions against your own children. Welcome to mine. Touch my video games, and I'll break your fingers. Touch them again, and I'll break your fingers. It might take a few dozen tries, but you might finally learn that having a "parent" pin on your chest doesn't mean that you have authority over any other individual. Here's how it works. Democracy. It means that if more people than you want something, you are out of luck. Get over it, it's the way the world should work. If you don't like the laws here, move. If you can't handle my freedom, go somewhere where they'll cut off yours as well. Then, just before you're executed by the witch hunting squad because you were talking about your beliefs in "detail too graphic for the poor children", you'll understand that it's for the good of the children.
A single misplaced letter hardly constitutes such a vicious, yet poorly calculated attack. Your use of the language betrays your ignorance. If I might lend a piece of advice to be meticulously followed, lest you once again betray yourself merely by articulating an opinion in an open forum, learn exactly what a word means before you use it. Misuse of words in a vain attempt to feign intelligence is a trademark of the unintelligent and uneducated.
Furthermore, I must express my displeasure at the benchmark you have decided upon. Literacy is not necessarily the rote memorization of spellings, but the understanding and appreciation for both the creation and consumption of literature in all mediums, and a respect and appreciation for those who would advance their own literacy. Certainly, ignore my advice and criticism if you will, but be prepared to face the consequences of such a ill-advised decision.
Finally, I have to disagree with your bourgeois opinion. Don't allow yourself to subscribe to the middle-class cult of ignorance. Literacy is indeed your duty as a patriotic individual. If you shirk this important responsibility, you relegate yourself to become mere cattle, to be ordered around by fascists living under the guise of democracy.
Am I the only one who disagrees with number 5? Why should a site turn it's layout into a virtual infomercial like that? Perhaps I'm the only one who believes in a little literacy among the users of the internet? If you have an attention span so short you need every important word bolded and italisized, and won't read anything longer than a bulleted list, it's possible that you should go back to watching TV.
What are your thoughts on arm-chair project leads? How do you deal with maintaining the hierarchy when such a person starts challenging your decisions?
I used to believe that too, but then one day I went out and acutally looked for a different WM/DE. I found several 3d interfaces for X which didn't even remotely look like Microsofts experiemental one, and I also saw Enlightenment, which isn't at all like windows. I was really impressed by the way that Enlightenment managed to be completely useable while only superficially looking like windows.
BlackBox is another different design, but not really an improvement in usability, IMHO.
I actually like EA. Their policy on releasing classic games is absolutely superb(they actually -- gasp! sell them!), and I've picked up dozens of old titles that way. It's refreshing to see a company which sees that there's some money to be made by deciding not to ignore the abandonware crowd. So... I don't think there's a problem if they become larger than they are.
We've got slightly different circumstances, I think. I too worked in a high school IT dept. for a year, but here's what I found; First off, it wasn't a high school IT dept. The three techs, including myself, were the admins for over 10 schools, with several large high schools with multiple labs. The techs in that lab were good at what they did -- if they weren't, they wouldn't be working in such a demanding job. They work 12 months a year(compare to maybe 10 months tops for teachers) at full-tilt, and when something went down, it needed to be up -- NOW. We're talking about dozens of servers, WAN connections into, out of, and within this area whose bandwidth was good enough to run video conferencing over while still allowing(already large amounts of) regular traffic to run, thousands of workstations... Needless to say, it wasn't exactly a walk in the part ensuring that both the school administrators(ie. principals and secrataries, not computer Administrators) and the thousands of students all were running fine.
One year, they tried to lock everything down tighter than a drum. It all worked, but the security came at a huge cost in terms of flexibility and ease of use, so we were forced to take a different approach. This year, we've placed draconian terms of use onto the students (from the 'legislative' side, not the technical side) so they can't go installing kazaa and banzai buddy on their machines. I was against it when I was a student, but on the other side, it's obvious that the single greatest problem with most of the machines that came in was the fact that they were so crap-laden that nobody could use them, so we're forced to ensure that we could punish people who abused our network. During our summer software rollout, we took special steps to remove all students software from the machines.
By the way, you haven't lived until you've tried to roll out over 10 schools in one month(the other month was dedicated to infastructure, inventory, and server stuff). Especially when A)you have to rewrite the installer because the IEAK installer is so flaky, B)you have to patch every computer in the board because of a bug in IE6 with the IEAK(those who know which one will grimmace with me), C)The Wan connections are going up and down like yoyos because of work being done to them, and D)some of the software on the list needs to be tricked into running as a regular user.
I think this proves they were lying in every concievable sense. There is already a product available which will componentize Windows 98/98SE/ME, and the same company is working on doing the same with 2k/XP.
If I could get away with as much prejury as Microsoft, I'd be able to do all sorts of fun stuff.
"I accuse you of robbing the bank!"
"It's impossible for me to have robbed the bank!"
"Oh. Very well. Here's a slap on the wrist(With a healing rod) and a few bucks for your troubles."
Final Fantasy V was good for allowing the player lots of freedom without removing the absolute nessessity of good story and characters. (Of course, FF3 for NES had this before that even, but the concept really becomes intrieguing with the skills of FFV)
If you don't agree with me about the bolded section above, just ask anyone what they thought of FF8 compared to one of the more storied FF games.
Then again, there's the third category of making the player *feel* like he's making a decision. Things can be very linear, but if you convincingly lead the player through, it won't matter. This is a good way to do things in storied RPGs, since they are generally extremely linear by nessessity.
I had a system which wouldn't run Windows 3.1. Windows 1.0 didn't even have windows. Doesn't really mean anything in context of...well...anything from 95 beyond.
You are aware that OS/2 made it to Version 4, right?
It's ironic, because today I took out my old Warp 3 CD, and downloaded the fixpacks. I plan to revisit this OS, see what it can do, and overall, just let the nostolgia of this pre-win95 OS toy with me.:)
I seriously doubt Microsoft would do this. Why? Because they've never been all that logical to begin with. If they decided to port their software to other platforms just because they were superior, we'd have MS software all over the place.
Judging from the benchmarks, including the fill rate, I think there's probably something terminally wrong with the current silicon or drivers. Hopefully this will be worked out before the product ships.
I say this because it seems odd that a card running at a reasonable clock speed with reasonably fast ram should run so slowly on fill-rate tests.
Are you an obsessive compulsive? Getting more music than you could listen to in three months sustained listening isn't a sign of good mental health. Get help.
If you have a 500GB mp3 collection, the RIAA would like to have a word with you.....and maybe, just maybe, it's time to get off kazaa. Seriously. Just doing some rough calculations, That's over 5,000 hours of standard quality MP3 audio. over 200 days!
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose it was only a matter of time before we saw a "ignorant rednecks against video games" group. Their "facts" are either blatant lies or misrepresentations of fact (Personally, I own every game I play. I also graduated from High School an honor student, with a paticular knack in English classes, where nearly every paper I wrote got 100%, including a couple group projects I decided to take on by myself because of the generally low aptitude and pathetic work ethic I found in my classmates(There's no 'I' in team, unless 'I' am literally doing all the work while being held back creatively by an idiot who is failing English). Being interested in technical things long before I owned my first computer (my interests included short wave radio, electronics, and reading fiction), I was a social outcast with people who were often more interested in snow mobiling and sports. Considering the niche of most things I enjoyed, my freinds were often outcasts as well(not to be confused with traditional nerds -- I was incredibly violent back then(before video games), but years ago I became a pacifist, never to get in another fight, or even another shouting contest, with another person, all while being a huge fan of video games), years before the words "video game" ever entered my vocabulary. To be honest, Video games are a common thread in my generation. Walk up to anyone about 18-30, and talk about video games, and they'll have something to say. This common thread is a boon to those like me who would have otherwise been social outcasts), and they seem to draw conclusions out of thin air(gamers more violent than football players? No fucking way!!!). They also seem intent on pegging social problems directly on video games, where their relationship cannot be even remotely substantiated. People like this are dangerously ignorant, and with their battlecry of "for the children!", are quite capable of circumventing the basic human rights of game developers such as myself(and no, game developers don't have to justify themselves to ANYONE to secure such rights. Anyone who thinks differently is a fascist).
Besides the frightening measures they recommend parents take to help curb this "dangerous" behaviour, or their conclusions, which are downright INSULTING, ON A FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL in some of their assertions, such as Americas army, which is described as "When videogames were linked to the Columbine high school shooters, a frenzy of new research was launched, in which, one team of researchers discovered that first person shooter games do indeed teach gamers with the basic knowledge of how to kill. This research arrived be so conclusive that the U.S. government Army developed a free videogame to be used as a virtual boot camp and killing simulator.". I don't believe there is a single trustworthy fact on the entire web site!
But hey, what do I know? Lets put our kids back in front of the TV set to teach them how they should be living their lives! I mean, there's no violence, no hatred, no ulterior motives, no manipulation of the ignorant masses(like ABC news and their continual smear campaign against video games) in the world of the benevolent TV, no racism, no death, and certainly not 3 months of non-stop coverage of the deaths of thousands of Americans in the twin towers on every channel in America. Lets put our kids back on the football field, since there's nothing more wholesome than teaching children about violence, the value of being bigger than the other guy, the fundamental truth that being good at sports can get you through your life. Lets send our kids back outside, where they are unsupervised, and free to explore things such as the birds and the bees (without parental supervision, no less!). Lets let them sit back and listen to the same music these peoples parents were calling the acts of satan, and listen to Eminem critisize his single mother, Brittany Spears rattle off another half-witted souless piece of musical garbage about the love she just has to have. Or, if those things are also to be taboo, just as video games are to be, why not ban everything? That way, there can be no Walter Cronkite in Vietnam, no sports heroes to inspire youth towards greatness, no understanding of the world outside your parents influence, no System of a downs War or Rage Against the Machines No Shelter. No Fortunate One by...whoever did Fortunate One (Was it CCR?). Destroy the world so we may save the innocent mind of a child, and sacrifice your future so you might live in peace, knowing that your child won't ever have to suffer the consequences of having a thought in his head not placed there by a greater authority. They can have great grades, be popular, be good at sports, and fill every fantasy you had for yourself but were too corrupted to accomplish yourself, and leave your children, who have grown up in your own falsified image, too ignorant of the world to function without being told what to do.
Congratualtions, ignorant idiots, you've destroyed your world. You destroyed it the moment you raised a child so desperate he killed 30 of his schoolmates. You destroyed it the moment you were brought kicking and screaming out of your little innocent utopia because of your own actions against your own children. Welcome to mine. Touch my video games, and I'll break your fingers. Touch them again, and I'll break your fingers. It might take a few dozen tries, but you might finally learn that having a "parent" pin on your chest doesn't mean that you have authority over any other individual. Here's how it works. Democracy. It means that if more people than you want something, you are out of luck. Get over it, it's the way the world should work. If you don't like the laws here, move. If you can't handle my freedom, go somewhere where they'll cut off yours as well. Then, just before you're executed by the witch hunting squad because you were talking about your beliefs in "detail too graphic for the poor children", you'll understand that it's for the good of the children.
What was the reason Microsoft gave for avoiding the "pac-man like" GPL again?
which linux, and when?
Linux progresses faster than any other OS. I like the latest round of linux distributions very much.
Very easy and functional.
I can't speak for others, but I really liked BeOS. Sadly, it is all but useless until the Opnbeos project bears some fruit.
I can't really see the allure of OSX though. Sure, it's unix-like, but for $0, I can get no less than three unix-likes for a $200(new, mind you) PC.
I know in your little world it's cheaper to replace an entire hardware platform to get UNIX, but it's not.
A single misplaced letter hardly constitutes such a vicious, yet poorly calculated attack. Your use of the language betrays your ignorance. If I might lend a piece of advice to be meticulously followed, lest you once again betray yourself merely by articulating an opinion in an open forum, learn exactly what a word means before you use it. Misuse of words in a vain attempt to feign intelligence is a trademark of the unintelligent and uneducated.
Furthermore, I must express my displeasure at the benchmark you have decided upon. Literacy is not necessarily the rote memorization of spellings, but the understanding and appreciation for both the creation and consumption of literature in all mediums, and a respect and appreciation for those who would advance their own literacy. Certainly, ignore my advice and criticism if you will, but be prepared to face the consequences of such a ill-advised decision.
Finally, I have to disagree with your bourgeois opinion. Don't allow yourself to subscribe to the middle-class cult of ignorance. Literacy is indeed your duty as a patriotic individual. If you shirk this important responsibility, you relegate yourself to become mere cattle, to be ordered around by fascists living under the guise of democracy.
Am I the only one who disagrees with number 5? Why should a site turn it's layout into a virtual infomercial like that? Perhaps I'm the only one who believes in a little literacy among the users of the internet? If you have an attention span so short you need every important word bolded and italisized, and won't read anything longer than a bulleted list, it's possible that you should go back to watching TV.
What are your thoughts on arm-chair project leads? How do you deal with maintaining the hierarchy when such a person starts challenging your decisions?
The greatest trick Microsoft ever played was convincing the world that it's software was secure.
I used to believe that too, but then one day I went out and acutally looked for a different WM/DE. I found several 3d interfaces for X which didn't even remotely look like Microsofts experiemental one, and I also saw Enlightenment, which isn't at all like windows. I was really impressed by the way that Enlightenment managed to be completely useable while only superficially looking like windows.
BlackBox is another different design, but not really an improvement in usability, IMHO.
I actually like EA. Their policy on releasing classic games is absolutely superb(they actually -- gasp! sell them!), and I've picked up dozens of old titles that way. It's refreshing to see a company which sees that there's some money to be made by deciding not to ignore the abandonware crowd. So... I don't think there's a problem if they become larger than they are.
We've got slightly different circumstances, I think. I too worked in a high school IT dept. for a year, but here's what I found; First off, it wasn't a high school IT dept. The three techs, including myself, were the admins for over 10 schools, with several large high schools with multiple labs. The techs in that lab were good at what they did -- if they weren't, they wouldn't be working in such a demanding job. They work 12 months a year(compare to maybe 10 months tops for teachers) at full-tilt, and when something went down, it needed to be up -- NOW. We're talking about dozens of servers, WAN connections into, out of, and within this area whose bandwidth was good enough to run video conferencing over while still allowing(already large amounts of) regular traffic to run, thousands of workstations... Needless to say, it wasn't exactly a walk in the part ensuring that both the school administrators(ie. principals and secrataries, not computer Administrators) and the thousands of students all were running fine.
One year, they tried to lock everything down tighter than a drum. It all worked, but the security came at a huge cost in terms of flexibility and ease of use, so we were forced to take a different approach. This year, we've placed draconian terms of use onto the students (from the 'legislative' side, not the technical side) so they can't go installing kazaa and banzai buddy on their machines. I was against it when I was a student, but on the other side, it's obvious that the single greatest problem with most of the machines that came in was the fact that they were so crap-laden that nobody could use them, so we're forced to ensure that we could punish people who abused our network. During our summer software rollout, we took special steps to remove all students software from the machines.
By the way, you haven't lived until you've tried to roll out over 10 schools in one month(the other month was dedicated to infastructure, inventory, and server stuff). Especially when A)you have to rewrite the installer because the IEAK installer is so flaky, B)you have to patch every computer in the board because of a bug in IE6 with the IEAK(those who know which one will grimmace with me), C)The Wan connections are going up and down like yoyos because of work being done to them, and D)some of the software on the list needs to be tricked into running as a regular user.
D'oh! My HTML is gone!
www.litepc.net is the evidence.
I think this proves they were lying in every concievable sense. There is already a product available which will componentize Windows 98/98SE/ME, and the same company is working on doing the same with 2k/XP.
If I could get away with as much prejury as Microsoft, I'd be able to do all sorts of fun stuff.
"I accuse you of robbing the bank!"
"It's impossible for me to have robbed the bank!"
"Oh. Very well. Here's a slap on the wrist(With a healing rod) and a few bucks for your troubles."
Final Fantasy V was good for allowing the player lots of freedom without removing the absolute nessessity of good story and characters. (Of course, FF3 for NES had this before that even, but the concept really becomes intrieguing with the skills of FFV)
If you don't agree with me about the bolded section above, just ask anyone what they thought of FF8 compared to one of the more storied FF games.
Then again, there's the third category of making the player *feel* like he's making a decision. Things can be very linear, but if you convincingly lead the player through, it won't matter. This is a good way to do things in storied RPGs, since they are generally extremely linear by nessessity.
Uh huh.
I had a system which wouldn't run Windows 3.1.
Windows 1.0 didn't even have windows. Doesn't really mean anything in context of...well...anything from 95 beyond.
You are aware that OS/2 made it to Version 4, right?
It's ironic, because today I took out my old Warp 3 CD, and downloaded the fixpacks. I plan to revisit this OS, see what it can do, and overall, just let the nostolgia of this pre-win95 OS toy with me. :)
I seriously doubt Microsoft would do this. Why? Because they've never been all that logical to begin with. If they decided to port their software to other platforms just because they were superior, we'd have MS software all over the place.
I'm kind of dissapointed that there was no mention of the .7 release of K-Meleon, after a full year of development.
Judging from the benchmarks, including the fill rate, I think there's probably something terminally wrong with the current silicon or drivers. Hopefully this will be worked out before the product ships.
I say this because it seems odd that a card running at a reasonable clock speed with reasonably fast ram should run so slowly on fill-rate tests.
Are you an obsessive compulsive? Getting more music than you could listen to in three months sustained listening isn't a sign of good mental health. Get help.
Okay, even doubling file size, it's STILL over one-hundred days of MP3s.
If you have a 500GB mp3 collection, the RIAA would like to have a word with you. ....and maybe, just maybe, it's time to get off kazaa. Seriously. Just doing some rough calculations, That's over 5,000 hours of standard quality MP3 audio. over 200 days!
The presentation is deceptive. Proof?
There's a cancel button on the ads. Guess what it does?
I'd rather assume he's a troll because he's comparing a legitimate Linux ISO set with a pirated copy of Windows 2000 already on his hard drive!
When factoring TCO, you must also realize that 500,000 per infraction is a lot to pay if you're caught for software piracy.