Yes! The language setting is terrible. Things that need improvement:
1) Put the setting somewhere else. There is no logical connection to the font dialog it's controlled in right now. Put it in the context menu, at the very least - although the context menu already is fairly crowded because pretty much everything is controllable from it.
2) Have a means to reduce the number of possible languages. As it is, you have to wade through every imaginable language when typically you only use a few languages in your life, and often only one or two in a single document. I can't stress enough how annoying that is.
3) Preferably, have a way to auto-detect the language I use. I think MS Word does that. If 8 out of 10 words in a paragraph are misspelt in the current language, and there exists a dictionary associated with another language where only 1 out of 10 os misspelt, switch that paragraph to the other language. Alternatively, ask me whether to switch, or make it extremely convenient to switch. Have a preference panel to control this behaviour.
4) Keep the setting when I create a new paragraph or slide.
In a related vein, OOo doesn't "ship" with a thesaurus for British English, I think. It does ship with one for AE. Obviously, nearly everything that applies to the AE thesaurus also would apply to the BE thesaurus. The same is true within most other dialect groups - a thesaurus for German would also be applicable to a text written in German (Switzerland). There is no functionality to that degree as it is - if you write a text set to be English (Great Britain), there is no thesaurus function available. The whole design of treating dialects as seperate entities with no relationship to each other is just way off and has a lot of unwanted consequences. It'd make more sense to have a language/dialect tree.
I was going to argue that this is false and OOo starts way faster than that. But when I tested it, it actually took pretty much exactly 30 seconds. I have a decidedly mid-end CPU, though (XP 1800+). And it's not like it was slow to use once it's done "booting"... at least not in my experience. (This is all OOo 2 BTW, I never really bothered with 1.x.)
No, they haven't. But for what it's worth, the grandparent is correct in saying it's a factor when buying an MP3 player, and when I bought my iPod mini a few months back, it was the decisive one: the iPod mini had close to twice the battery life of the competing products.
That javascript isn't ever refered to in the body of the page. It's never called. At least not as far as I can see. The form certainly doesn't. Maybe it's an artifact of the development or something.
If you're using WinAmp and you're happy with it, more power to you. Personally, I switched to foobar mostly for two reasons:
1) I couldn't bear WinAmp's (and most of the other media player's) skinned interface anymore.
2) I wanted to easily control the media player using global hotkeys. I listen to music pretty much all the time when I'm sitting at the computer, and I wanted global hotkeys that worked from within games. There are plugins to do that for WinaAmp, but I wasn't happy with any of them. Foobar does it right out of the box.
Everything else is a bonus. The volume thing is a bitch, though, I agree. That took me while to figure out, as well, and nearly made me uninstall the whole thing. The fact that there isn't a volume slider anywhere on the standard interface is a bit of a joke. But at least the volume is independent of the system volume - some players don't do that which is way more of a joke than the bad interface ever could be.
Note that I didn't read any documentation ever when using foobar, as complex as the interface (the preference pane only, really) might be, I don't see how you'd need a manual for it...
(Yes, I know they can do other stuff, but so can the scroll wheel on a mouse)
Actually now that you mention it - is there any easy way to make the scroll wheel control the system volume when used with a modifier key/mouse button? Anyone?
Alt Gr is standard on all German keyboards and has, in some cases, a different function than "vanilla" Alt (which is on the left side of the space bar). Some special characters such as the Euro symbol, the at symbol (@) and curly braces require using Alt Gr as the meta-key, or alternatively Alt + Control. (However, Alt Gr is not the same as Alt + Control - ie. you don't trigger Ctrl - Alt - Del by pressing Alt Gr - Del.) It sounds more confusing than it is.:)
If that's your attitude, maybe you should start reading the New York Times for your computing news instead of Slashdot. I'd wager that among the Slashdot users, foobar already is half as popular as Winamp, maybe more so. Like the first post says: "Winamp? I think my grandparents use to use that back in the early twentieth century..."
Huh? They're reviewing 2 (two) mice per manufacturer, six mice overall. The reviewer doesn't like the Razer Viper very much, but he calls the Razer Diamondback a "superb mouse".
I still don't think it's very necessary review, TBH, there hasn't been a significant feature in the mousing sector since optical mice that track on pretty much every surface (that was two years ago), and apart from that there isn't very much left to review objectively. There are lots of subjective things which are best left to find out for yourselves by trying out the mice at a local store - maybe you can't stand the feeling of that Logitech mouse the guy likes, for example.
Maybe this is news for Winamp users - I doubt it, but I don't use it myself. But there has been software to download songs from the iPod to your harddrive for ages. The inability to do so is pretty much limited to iTunes, every other application dealing with the iPod (and there are dozens) enables you to do that. One popular example for Windows is EphPod. Lots and lots more can be found for multiple platforms at iPodlounge.
Personally, I use foo_pod, a plugin for the foobar2000 audio player. It's quite powerful, including such features as automatic conversion of formats the iPod doesn't know (e.g. ogg or shorten) and automatic generation of audiobooks. For what it's worth - Wired seems to care - foobar and foo_pod are yet half as small than Winamp and that plugin is. Hah.
You're thinking of the wrong construction. The correct one involves deixis: "Generic reference to social bookmarking communities. Del.icio.us is such a community." Granted, it might also be stress - "This is such a lovely evening!" - but I think that's unlikely.
By your logic no one is bound by any laws which do not directly effect someone else.
You're totally missing his point. People might still be considered to be bound by those laws by everyone else; however, they might not feel bound to them themselves, which constitutes a reason for them to violate those laws. Whether or not they affect someone else is irrelevant, really. The original poster (explicitly!) wasn't arguing on a legal level, but on the level of ethics.
Note also that he (explicitly!) wasn't stating his own thoughts on the matter, but merely showing some ways other people might think and argue. This is something most people on Slashdot don't even seem to be able to do.
I don't recall agreeing to any contract with the govt. not to shoot you, so I guess it's legal and ethical, and you certainly need to be shot for spewing such nonsense.
No, it's cleary not legal (in the common definition of the word), but it might be ethical in your eyes - although I have a hard time seeing how it could be.
There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith.
That's the best example for "dimming the magic"? You've got to be kidding me. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. How does providing users with illegal copies dim their magic, much less anyone else's? When I'm watching the movie tomorrow night, I certainly won't care if somebody downloaded it off the net.
The question really isn't 3D or 2D, but rather one of perspective. Civ4 will be rendered in 3D, but the perspective is pretty much exactly the same as before - top-down isometric. I don't see any reason not to go with 3D rendering at this point - it doesn't look worse, and arguably better, and it's got the positive aspects of giving you "free" rotation and zooming and deformation and all the cool things you can do when you have actual geometry on the stuff displayed as opposed to "dumb" bitmaps.
Actually I'm not sure if I got my terminology right, anyway the camera is looking at the board at an angle somewhere in between 45 and 90, the same way it is in Civ3. Personally, I think that looking straight down (ie. a 90 angle) looks worse but plays better - I play FreeCiv that way, but in any case it doesn't play much better and it's probably just not mass-market compatible. FWIW, you could even render a 90 camera in 3D and retain some positive aspects of the 3D model. And in fact the new Civ could offer a user-adjustable camera if it's in full 3D, giving me the option to go 90 if I chose so. We'll see.
All that said, I don't think they're using the 3D engine to its full extend, judging by the screenshots. For instance, those mountains look terrible, even worse than in the previous Civs. There is no such thing as a mountain range, it's just pretty much a conical mountain next to a very similar mountain. It shouldn't be that hard to check whether a mountain is on a connected tile and make them look more natural. I also don't like the coast lines that follow the gameplay tiles really closely - I realize that's hard to cover up, but hey, at least pretend to do so.
In any event, yay for the new engine - this is something I have been clamoring for for years, and even more yay for the new Civ, it sounds just great.
Re:LPI's policy page (as referenced in the review)
on
LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2
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· Score: 1
Try posting as plain old text next time. Despite the name, plain old text actually accepts HTML formatting - in fact I guess the only difference between plain old text and HTML is that the former converts your regular line breaks into HTML br-tags.
At work we exclusively use Cherry keyboards and I hate them. They just feel disgusting (not enough click, I think), and I type considerably slower because of it. Obviously, my home keyboard is a rubber dome design - all cheap keyboards are, and nearly all of the medium to expensive ones (like Logitech or MS) are. I'll have to check the Cherry keyboard once one is suitably fried, they might be different though.
Anyway, there probably is no such thing as better or worse - it depends on what you're used to. Maybe one or the other is better ergonomically, though.
Eh, I never used that anyway. I love the shell integration because I never have to open the program.
Good for you. I use it all the time on WinRAR, and it's my reason not to use 7z at the moment. I love the shell integration for the same reason, and the best compression program is one I mostly don't see at all. I see way too much of 7z on my laptop.
This is actually my favorite feature of 7zip.
No, it's not because 7z doesn't do what I describe. But obviously I wasn't clear enough on that (sorry!), see my other post (if you care) for a more elaborate description. But it's more stuff similar to what you never use anyway, so you probably don't need it and don't care.
I don't know what you're using but 7-zip is so much more friendly and versitile.
Wow, just how non-sensical can you get? If you don't know what I use, you can't know if 7z is more friendly and "versitile". Of course you could know what I use, given that I wrote what I use in the post you replied to, but oh well. Obviously, WinRAR can do mostly everything that 7z can do in much the same way as 7z does it, including extracting 7z files for that matter, oh my. Don't know how a subset of functionality can be more "versitile", but I guess 7z is magic.
Sorry for a somewhat condescending attitude - I don't have anything against 7z, I think it's okay, it's just that the few things it can't do totally break my workflow - I don't ever want to deal with a dialog for extracting things, and I never have to with WinRAR. Once 7z does that, I'll probably use it instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! The language setting is terrible. Things that need improvement:
1) Put the setting somewhere else. There is no logical connection to the font dialog it's controlled in right now. Put it in the context menu, at the very least - although the context menu already is fairly crowded because pretty much everything is controllable from it.
2) Have a means to reduce the number of possible languages. As it is, you have to wade through every imaginable language when typically you only use a few languages in your life, and often only one or two in a single document. I can't stress enough how annoying that is.
3) Preferably, have a way to auto-detect the language I use. I think MS Word does that. If 8 out of 10 words in a paragraph are misspelt in the current language, and there exists a dictionary associated with another language where only 1 out of 10 os misspelt, switch that paragraph to the other language. Alternatively, ask me whether to switch, or make it extremely convenient to switch. Have a preference panel to control this behaviour.
4) Keep the setting when I create a new paragraph or slide.
In a related vein, OOo doesn't "ship" with a thesaurus for British English, I think. It does ship with one for AE. Obviously, nearly everything that applies to the AE thesaurus also would apply to the BE thesaurus. The same is true within most other dialect groups - a thesaurus for German would also be applicable to a text written in German (Switzerland). There is no functionality to that degree as it is - if you write a text set to be English (Great Britain), there is no thesaurus function available. The whole design of treating dialects as seperate entities with no relationship to each other is just way off and has a lot of unwanted consequences. It'd make more sense to have a language/dialect tree.
That's just me being picky though.
Not really. PDF export is THE major feature that OOo has over MS Office. The only extra feature that's comprehensible to a casual user, anway.
I was going to argue that this is false and OOo starts way faster than that. But when I tested it, it actually took pretty much exactly 30 seconds. I have a decidedly mid-end CPU, though (XP 1800+). And it's not like it was slow to use once it's done "booting"... at least not in my experience. (This is all OOo 2 BTW, I never really bothered with 1.x.)
Quite a shock to me, too. Good thing I rarely wear belts.
No, they haven't. But for what it's worth, the grandparent is correct in saying it's a factor when buying an MP3 player, and when I bought my iPod mini a few months back, it was the decisive one: the iPod mini had close to twice the battery life of the competing products.
Wow. WTF happened to AMD in early January?
That javascript isn't ever refered to in the body of the page. It's never called. At least not as far as I can see. The form certainly doesn't. Maybe it's an artifact of the development or something.
If you're using WinAmp and you're happy with it, more power to you. Personally, I switched to foobar mostly for two reasons:
1) I couldn't bear WinAmp's (and most of the other media player's) skinned interface anymore.
2) I wanted to easily control the media player using global hotkeys. I listen to music pretty much all the time when I'm sitting at the computer, and I wanted global hotkeys that worked from within games. There are plugins to do that for WinaAmp, but I wasn't happy with any of them. Foobar does it right out of the box.
Everything else is a bonus. The volume thing is a bitch, though, I agree. That took me while to figure out, as well, and nearly made me uninstall the whole thing. The fact that there isn't a volume slider anywhere on the standard interface is a bit of a joke. But at least the volume is independent of the system volume - some players don't do that which is way more of a joke than the bad interface ever could be.
Note that I didn't read any documentation ever when using foobar, as complex as the interface (the preference pane only, really) might be, I don't see how you'd need a manual for it...
(Yes, I know they can do other stuff, but so can the scroll wheel on a mouse)
Actually now that you mention it - is there any easy way to make the scroll wheel control the system volume when used with a modifier key/mouse button? Anyone?
Alt Gr is standard on all German keyboards and has, in some cases, a different function than "vanilla" Alt (which is on the left side of the space bar). Some special characters such as the Euro symbol, the at symbol (@) and curly braces require using Alt Gr as the meta-key, or alternatively Alt + Control. (However, Alt Gr is not the same as Alt + Control - ie. you don't trigger Ctrl - Alt - Del by pressing Alt Gr - Del.) It sounds more confusing than it is. :)
See also (haha): Wikipedia on Alt Gr
If that's your attitude, maybe you should start reading the New York Times for your computing news instead of Slashdot. I'd wager that among the Slashdot users, foobar already is half as popular as Winamp, maybe more so. Like the first post says: "Winamp? I think my grandparents use to use that back in the early twentieth century..."
Huh? They're reviewing 2 (two) mice per manufacturer, six mice overall. The reviewer doesn't like the Razer Viper very much, but he calls the Razer Diamondback a "superb mouse".
I still don't think it's very necessary review, TBH, there hasn't been a significant feature in the mousing sector since optical mice that track on pretty much every surface (that was two years ago), and apart from that there isn't very much left to review objectively. There are lots of subjective things which are best left to find out for yourselves by trying out the mice at a local store - maybe you can't stand the feeling of that Logitech mouse the guy likes, for example.
Maybe this is news for Winamp users - I doubt it, but I don't use it myself. But there has been software to download songs from the iPod to your harddrive for ages. The inability to do so is pretty much limited to iTunes, every other application dealing with the iPod (and there are dozens) enables you to do that. One popular example for Windows is EphPod. Lots and lots more can be found for multiple platforms at iPodlounge.
Personally, I use foo_pod, a plugin for the foobar2000 audio player. It's quite powerful, including such features as automatic conversion of formats the iPod doesn't know (e.g. ogg or shorten) and automatic generation of audiobooks. For what it's worth - Wired seems to care - foobar and foo_pod are yet half as small than Winamp and that plugin is. Hah.
Damn, still no torrent for Q^22. :(
You're thinking of the wrong construction. The correct one involves deixis: "Generic reference to social bookmarking communities. Del.icio.us is such a community." Granted, it might also be stress - "This is such a lovely evening!" - but I think that's unlikely.
Yeah, you're right - they're just like those Debian guys with their logo. And we all know they don't care about openness!
By your logic no one is bound by any laws which do not directly effect someone else.
You're totally missing his point. People might still be considered to be bound by those laws by everyone else; however, they might not feel bound to them themselves, which constitutes a reason for them to violate those laws. Whether or not they affect someone else is irrelevant, really. The original poster (explicitly!) wasn't arguing on a legal level, but on the level of ethics.
Note also that he (explicitly!) wasn't stating his own thoughts on the matter, but merely showing some ways other people might think and argue. This is something most people on Slashdot don't even seem to be able to do.
I don't recall agreeing to any contract with the govt. not to shoot you, so I guess it's legal and ethical, and you certainly need to be shot for spewing such nonsense.
No, it's cleary not legal (in the common definition of the word), but it might be ethical in your eyes - although I have a hard time seeing how it could be.
There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith.
That's the best example for "dimming the magic"? You've got to be kidding me. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. How does providing users with illegal copies dim their magic, much less anyone else's? When I'm watching the movie tomorrow night, I certainly won't care if somebody downloaded it off the net.
No "we" aren't. We just buy ourselves comfy desk chairs. Problem solved.
The question really isn't 3D or 2D, but rather one of perspective. Civ4 will be rendered in 3D, but the perspective is pretty much exactly the same as before - top-down isometric. I don't see any reason not to go with 3D rendering at this point - it doesn't look worse, and arguably better, and it's got the positive aspects of giving you "free" rotation and zooming and deformation and all the cool things you can do when you have actual geometry on the stuff displayed as opposed to "dumb" bitmaps.
Actually I'm not sure if I got my terminology right, anyway the camera is looking at the board at an angle somewhere in between 45 and 90, the same way it is in Civ3. Personally, I think that looking straight down (ie. a 90 angle) looks worse but plays better - I play FreeCiv that way, but in any case it doesn't play much better and it's probably just not mass-market compatible. FWIW, you could even render a 90 camera in 3D and retain some positive aspects of the 3D model. And in fact the new Civ could offer a user-adjustable camera if it's in full 3D, giving me the option to go 90 if I chose so. We'll see.
All that said, I don't think they're using the 3D engine to its full extend, judging by the screenshots. For instance, those mountains look terrible, even worse than in the previous Civs. There is no such thing as a mountain range, it's just pretty much a conical mountain next to a very similar mountain. It shouldn't be that hard to check whether a mountain is on a connected tile and make them look more natural. I also don't like the coast lines that follow the gameplay tiles really closely - I realize that's hard to cover up, but hey, at least pretend to do so.
In any event, yay for the new engine - this is something I have been clamoring for for years, and even more yay for the new Civ, it sounds just great.
Try posting as plain old text next time. Despite the name, plain old text actually accepts HTML formatting - in fact I guess the only difference between plain old text and HTML is that the former converts your regular line breaks into HTML br-tags.
At work we exclusively use Cherry keyboards and I hate them. They just feel disgusting (not enough click, I think), and I type considerably slower because of it. Obviously, my home keyboard is a rubber dome design - all cheap keyboards are, and nearly all of the medium to expensive ones (like Logitech or MS) are. I'll have to check the Cherry keyboard once one is suitably fried, they might be different though.
Anyway, there probably is no such thing as better or worse - it depends on what you're used to. Maybe one or the other is better ergonomically, though.
I used to read virus descriptions as entertainment - here's one: Tremor, "the first known polymorphic stealth virus."
Eh, I never used that anyway. I love the shell integration because I never have to open the program.
Good for you. I use it all the time on WinRAR, and it's my reason not to use 7z at the moment. I love the shell integration for the same reason, and the best compression program is one I mostly don't see at all. I see way too much of 7z on my laptop.
This is actually my favorite feature of 7zip.
No, it's not because 7z doesn't do what I describe. But obviously I wasn't clear enough on that (sorry!), see my other post (if you care) for a more elaborate description. But it's more stuff similar to what you never use anyway, so you probably don't need it and don't care.
I don't know what you're using but 7-zip is so much more friendly and versitile.
Wow, just how non-sensical can you get? If you don't know what I use, you can't know if 7z is more friendly and "versitile". Of course you could know what I use, given that I wrote what I use in the post you replied to, but oh well. Obviously, WinRAR can do mostly everything that 7z can do in much the same way as 7z does it, including extracting 7z files for that matter, oh my. Don't know how a subset of functionality can be more "versitile", but I guess 7z is magic.
Sorry for a somewhat condescending attitude - I don't have anything against 7z, I think it's okay, it's just that the few things it can't do totally break my workflow - I don't ever want to deal with a dialog for extracting things, and I never have to with WinRAR. Once 7z does that, I'll probably use it instead.