While I agree, I would argue that this is a normal way of advancing economies. We've been in this situation (slave wages, people are nothing more than labour) here in Belgium too. But, as time went by, revolutions came, people stood up for their rights, unions formed, and the people became stronger.
True. But that really doesn't mean it'll happen again. Or that it'll lead to anything similar, if it happens. It's not as if the general civilisational framework in today's threshold countries bore any framework to the Western countries during the Enlightment and the Industrialisation. History does tend to repeat itself, but it doesn't work that way.
Yes, it might be brilliant for shiny, plastic-looking, ultra-atmospheric, cramped space-dungeons, but for naturalistic, realistic and expansive real-world scenes it's probably going to be a bit shite.
Let's wait and see, shall we? I mean, I doubt you have some deep insights into the workings of the Doom 3 engine that allow you to make an informed judgement about its ability to display outdoor terrain... For all we know id fucked up the design and it really stinks at displaying space dungeons and shines at outdoors.:) And on a sidenote, when I think Wolf3D, I think Nazi dungeons, and not realistic and expansive scenery - so a dungeon rendering engine would be perfect!
I'm totally clueless on most of these things but I got two comments:
You could use the Mac OS X approach of buffering everything, but that consumes huge amounts of memory.
But that's not a big problem, is it? My graphics card has 128 MB RAM - and it's far from new, I bought it nearly two years ago. Modern cards all have at least 64 MB and go up to 256 megs. If you run a 1280 x 1024 resolution at 32 bits, that'll use up 40 megs leaving 20 to 200 megabytes free for buffering individual windows that are hidden. I guess the way my system works right now is that I use 12 MB (for 1024 x 768 x 16) in Windows and the remaining >100 MB are wasted. Maybe I should make a RAM drive on them...
Under Windows, users need to learn [...]
I don't know if it applies to you, ie if you're actually running Windows, but if you are or know someone who is, try Media Player Classic. Highly customizable (the useful kind - no skinning though!), small, open-source. And MPC plays QuickTime and RealMedia. Doesn't save you from installing the Apple and Real junk players since it uses their libraries, but it does allow you to watch QuickTime in beautiful full-screen glory. And to keep some inkling of being on-topic, the user interface is beautifully simple: it looks just like another window, no bells and whistles - similar to the old Windows Media Player, which explains the name.
Actually, with software there a nice alternative to confirmation dialogues is offering an undo function. I think mostly everything should be undoable - and if possible, there should be multiple undo's in most applications. An example is the Opera browser which since version 7 at least tries to have undo available for every program function - including, for instance, closing browser windows. I can't undo sending already sent emails, though - shame! =) I'd love to see an undo function for the Unix console - of course I realize that's not exactly viable. Filesystem-internal version control would be a start.:)
How is this different from Java? In my opinion Java makes things harder than it needs to be. For starters, enforced exception handling can't auto-box/unbox primitive types and doesn't support arbitrary length parameter lists String.Format() style.
Right. Of course that's all about to change - from the Java 1.5 ("5") new features site:
Autoboxing/Unboxing
This facility eliminates the drudgery of manual conversion between primitive types (such as int) and wrapper types (such as Integer). Refer to JSR 201.
Varargs
This facility eliminates the need for manually boxing up argument lists into an array when invoking methods that accept variable-length argument lists. Refer to JSR 201.
You still need to deal with exceptions - that's a bad thing?
Well, I agree with your result - that the vast majority of bytes transferred using BT have the illegal bit set - but not with your means of getting there: looking at SuprNova is bound to result in a vast majority of the illegal stuff because, well, that's kind of what SuprNova is for. I mean, it's a (semi-) open tracker, sure, but I don't think a lot of people go to SuprNova for their legit torrents.
Sites who do legit torrents usually have their own trackers, since setting up a tracker isn't a very large effort if you already have a site of your own and easily worth the control and overview it gets you. And on the other hand, individuals who do not have a site to spread torrents with rarely do legit torrents.
Of course this is all backed up by no evidence at all.:)
While I'm at it, there are several numbers that would be interesting to look at: The relative usage of the various P2P protocols - this is what TFA talks about. This is something you can probably determine fairly well by only looking at the port ranges involved. The percentage of legal traffic compared to the illegal traffic - ie what we've just been talking about. This is extremely difficult and most likely impossible to find out at the backbone level. What I'm interested in is the percentage of the total bandwidth P2P makes up these days. Imagine if something like a third of the total ISP bandwidth is consumed by P2P file sharing - then consider that nearly all of it is illegal. At that point the currently practiced stance on copyright violation is just shown to be absurd: either DO something against it, enforce the laws you already have instead of inventing moronic new ones, or come to terms with a reality that probably won't go away any time soon.
Much of the difficulty is in determining the actual position of a shape from its shadow. Coloring the shape and keeping control once you find it would make the game easier than it is supposed to be. That said, I agree the controls are a bit difficult to use. Some things I noted: Keep the mouse "locked" inside the window when I press a button. Fairly often I would move a block or the view itself and find the mouse outside the window afterwards - letting go of the button then and the game doesn't seem to get the button release event. Maximising the window helps somewhat, but it still happens when the cursor touches the task bar (of course I could also minimze the task bar to alleviate that). As the grandparent says, make some sort of feedback when I can't move a block like I want. On the other hand, that might also make the game easier. Nevertheless, I'd prefer that the mouse cursor stay in place when the block does - that'd keep it from getting "out of sync", ie. I move a block somewhere but when I let go of the mouse and click again, the block isn't under the cursor anymore and I have to find the block all over again. Seperate the view controls from the block controls in some way. Several times, I'd want to change my view and I'd accidently move a block instead - since you don't know where exactly all blocks are at all times, it's difficult to find a "free" area to click in to change your view. Also, let me zoom out with the mouse wheel. Increasing current block height with the mouse wheel would also be an idea (that tower building game of some weeks ago did that) but you'd run into the same "sync" issues I mentioned above.
Otherwise, I got used to the controls fairly fast and can't totally agree with the problems mentioned - you sometimes can't rotate block because there's solid ground or solid blocks in the way, which seems quite reasonable to me, and the usage of space to toggle between rotation and movement axis seemed fairly intuitive to me.
Weird. I don't find this useful at all; I never had any problem with finding the line I stopped - it's always at the same basic spot, after all. Maybe it's something I picked up reading a couple thousand pages worth of e-books on computers...:)
In any event, sounds like im in a harsh minority here, everybody else seems to be thrilled by the idea. And I guess I could always turn it off, beside the fact that it doesn't sound very intrusive at all. Nice.
Okay, I've got to ask this - is there no such thing as an undelete utility for Linux? According to many reports in comments to this story, undeleting is possible but is a really tedious manual process. Does rm delete too thoroughly for an automated tool to reconstruct anything? And if it does, should it? Why not leave enough information behind to reconstruct files unless they've already been overwritten?
For the interested, here's an undelete tool for Windows. Note that it also works for NTFS! Took me a while to find a util that does this - FAT undeleters are extremely common, but when I looked for NTFS undeleters, I mostly found commercial tools. This one is free and does not need to be installed and it actually works.
Oh, I know. But while I do want to put Linux on any potential x86 laptop, I'm not brave enough to put it on a Mac. Although I guess with the ability to run most (all?) Aqua apps from within Linux it's not that big of a jump.
Heh, I know where you're coming from. I'm looking to buy a cheap portable notebook, and to my surprise the 12" iBook G4 just seems to be the best route to go. There are only one or two PC 12" notebooks at that price (~1200) and they all suck (poor battery performance, hot, bad keyboard, and so on). Laptops smaller than 12" are very rare and prohibitively expensive. There are two issues with the iBook, though: I don't want to go Apple. Not that I don't like Apple, I've actually grown up with LCIIs and Performas and Ambrosia is the greatest shareware game developer of all time. But it's just not what I want for a laptop. Part of that is also that OS X runs quite sluggish on my GF's 14" iBook G3, and I want a system that really flies. The other issue is that the iBook is quite heavy for a 12" laptop. It weighs 2.2kg, which although not very heavy for notebook standards, is 200g heavier than the cheapo laptop I mentioned above and 500g heavier than the excellent Samsung X10 laptop with a 14" display.
My favorite choice right now would be the Asus S5200N, which has gotten extremely favorable reviews all over the place (Tom's Hardware, for one). It's a 12" laptop, single-spindle (which apparently means that it has no internal CD-ROM, which is fine by me) has an okay keyboard, is reasonably fast and weighs only 1.6kg. The only thing wrong with it is the moderate battery performance, which is not a big problem since there are batteries with 2x and 3x the juice available for it. Oh and it costs ~1500, which makes it very cheap for a laptop of its class, but a wee bit more than I hoped to pay, and 300 more than the laptop from a hardware manufacturer considered infamously expensive.
It's called controversial discussion. I prefer people who go ape about everything to people who don't go ape about anything. All of the things you mentioned do have their drawbacks, and those drawbacks need to be pointed out, discussed and weighed against each other. They are in fact practising their democratic right and duty to actively support what they think is right - something that many people on Slashdot seem to think is below them. Cheering and bitching is the essence of a democratic society.
Take away the unspeakably abhorrent xeno-cidal/-phobic aspects of Nazi doctrine, and you're left with - not much. There really wasn't that much behind the Nazi doctrine, certainly not a working network of public health care. And what was there was not much more than a facade. The fact that the party used to call itself Socialist doesn't make it socialist, and in turn, should not associate any socialist values with theirs.
On a sidenote, there's a difference between social and socialist. There's only one major party here in Germany that calls itself socialist - and they're on the left of the German political spectrum. On the other hand, virtually all parties would consider themselves (or rather, their political agenda) "social". Social democratic on the other hand is the base name for most of Europe's mid-to-left parties, including the currently ruling (in a coalition with another party) party SPD mentioned above somewhere.
Care to write up a (very brief) description of the steps needed to replace Explorer/Explorer/Explorer with Goeshell/Servant Salamander/Firefox? Is it a lot of work?
Arms actively working to balance your body? Is that supposed to be a sign of confidence? Because it sure sounds more like a sign of a walking disability.
People never do that around here. I'd be totally freaked out if a stranger just asked me (the German equivalent of) "how's it goin" on the street or even on the train. Or rather, I'd spend the next day wondering how the hell that person knew me. One thing I am used to is when hiking in the alps, people always greet you (and you greet them back)... but that'd be too time-consuming in a city, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree, I would argue that this is a normal way of advancing economies. We've been in this situation (slave wages, people are nothing more than labour) here in Belgium too. But, as time went by, revolutions came, people stood up for their rights, unions formed, and the people became stronger.
True. But that really doesn't mean it'll happen again. Or that it'll lead to anything similar, if it happens. It's not as if the general civilisational framework in today's threshold countries bore any framework to the Western countries during the Enlightment and the Industrialisation. History does tend to repeat itself, but it doesn't work that way.
Yes, it might be brilliant for shiny, plastic-looking, ultra-atmospheric, cramped space-dungeons, but for naturalistic, realistic and expansive real-world scenes it's probably going to be a bit shite.
:) And on a sidenote, when I think Wolf3D, I think Nazi dungeons, and not realistic and expansive scenery - so a dungeon rendering engine would be perfect!
Let's wait and see, shall we? I mean, I doubt you have some deep insights into the workings of the Doom 3 engine that allow you to make an informed judgement about its ability to display outdoor terrain... For all we know id fucked up the design and it really stinks at displaying space dungeons and shines at outdoors.
I'm totally clueless on most of these things but I got two comments:
You could use the Mac OS X approach of buffering everything, but that consumes huge amounts of memory.
But that's not a big problem, is it? My graphics card has 128 MB RAM - and it's far from new, I bought it nearly two years ago. Modern cards all have at least 64 MB and go up to 256 megs. If you run a 1280 x 1024 resolution at 32 bits, that'll use up 40 megs leaving 20 to 200 megabytes free for buffering individual windows that are hidden. I guess the way my system works right now is that I use 12 MB (for 1024 x 768 x 16) in Windows and the remaining >100 MB are wasted. Maybe I should make a RAM drive on them...
Under Windows, users need to learn [...]
I don't know if it applies to you, ie if you're actually running Windows, but if you are or know someone who is, try Media Player Classic. Highly customizable (the useful kind - no skinning though!), small, open-source. And MPC plays QuickTime and RealMedia. Doesn't save you from installing the Apple and Real junk players since it uses their libraries, but it does allow you to watch QuickTime in beautiful full-screen glory.
And to keep some inkling of being on-topic, the user interface is beautifully simple: it looks just like another window, no bells and whistles - similar to the old Windows Media Player, which explains the name.
Actually, with software there a nice alternative to confirmation dialogues is offering an undo function. I think mostly everything should be undoable - and if possible, there should be multiple undo's in most applications. An example is the Opera browser which since version 7 at least tries to have undo available for every program function - including, for instance, closing browser windows. I can't undo sending already sent emails, though - shame! =) I'd love to see an undo function for the Unix console - of course I realize that's not exactly viable. Filesystem-internal version control would be a start. :)
Ho-humm.
Hmm... I wonder how much of Dell's revenue is made through U.S. government contracts in one way or another...
Right. Of course that's all about to change - from the Java 1.5 ("5") new features site:
You still need to deal with exceptions - that's a bad thing?
Well, I agree with your result - that the vast majority of bytes transferred using BT have the illegal bit set - but not with your means of getting there: looking at SuprNova is bound to result in a vast majority of the illegal stuff because, well, that's kind of what SuprNova is for. I mean, it's a (semi-) open tracker, sure, but I don't think a lot of people go to SuprNova for their legit torrents.
:)
Sites who do legit torrents usually have their own trackers, since setting up a tracker isn't a very large effort if you already have a site of your own and easily worth the control and overview it gets you. And on the other hand, individuals who do not have a site to spread torrents with rarely do legit torrents.
Of course this is all backed up by no evidence at all.
While I'm at it, there are several numbers that would be interesting to look at: The relative usage of the various P2P protocols - this is what TFA talks about. This is something you can probably determine fairly well by only looking at the port ranges involved. The percentage of legal traffic compared to the illegal traffic - ie what we've just been talking about. This is extremely difficult and most likely impossible to find out at the backbone level.
What I'm interested in is the percentage of the total bandwidth P2P makes up these days. Imagine if something like a third of the total ISP bandwidth is consumed by P2P file sharing - then consider that nearly all of it is illegal. At that point the currently practiced stance on copyright violation is just shown to be absurd: either DO something against it, enforce the laws you already have instead of inventing moronic new ones, or come to terms with a reality that probably won't go away any time soon.
Much of the difficulty is in determining the actual position of a shape from its shadow. Coloring the shape and keeping control once you find it would make the game easier than it is supposed to be. That said, I agree the controls are a bit difficult to use.
Some things I noted: Keep the mouse "locked" inside the window when I press a button. Fairly often I would move a block or the view itself and find the mouse outside the window afterwards - letting go of the button then and the game doesn't seem to get the button release event. Maximising the window helps somewhat, but it still happens when the cursor touches the task bar (of course I could also minimze the task bar to alleviate that).
As the grandparent says, make some sort of feedback when I can't move a block like I want. On the other hand, that might also make the game easier. Nevertheless, I'd prefer that the mouse cursor stay in place when the block does - that'd keep it from getting "out of sync", ie. I move a block somewhere but when I let go of the mouse and click again, the block isn't under the cursor anymore and I have to find the block all over again.
Seperate the view controls from the block controls in some way. Several times, I'd want to change my view and I'd accidently move a block instead - since you don't know where exactly all blocks are at all times, it's difficult to find a "free" area to click in to change your view. Also, let me zoom out with the mouse wheel. Increasing current block height with the mouse wheel would also be an idea (that tower building game of some weeks ago did that) but you'd run into the same "sync" issues I mentioned above.
Otherwise, I got used to the controls fairly fast and can't totally agree with the problems mentioned - you sometimes can't rotate block because there's solid ground or solid blocks in the way, which seems quite reasonable to me, and the usage of space to toggle between rotation and movement axis seemed fairly intuitive to me.
Fun game, overall.
Cool. I wish Opera had that. And I think that's the first time I've said this.
Weird. I don't find this useful at all; I never had any problem with finding the line I stopped - it's always at the same basic spot, after all. Maybe it's something I picked up reading a couple thousand pages worth of e-books on computers... :)
In any event, sounds like im in a harsh minority here, everybody else seems to be thrilled by the idea. And I guess I could always turn it off, beside the fact that it doesn't sound very intrusive at all. Nice.
The email client doesn't know if a particular mail is spam or not!
Okay, I've got to ask this - is there no such thing as an undelete utility for Linux? According to many reports in comments to this story, undeleting is possible but is a really tedious manual process. Does rm delete too thoroughly for an automated tool to reconstruct anything? And if it does, should it? Why not leave enough information behind to reconstruct files unless they've already been overwritten?
For the interested, here's an undelete tool for Windows. Note that it also works for NTFS! Took me a while to find a util that does this - FAT undeleters are extremely common, but when I looked for NTFS undeleters, I mostly found commercial tools. This one is free and does not need to be installed and it actually works.
You're marginalizing yourself TWICE because you're using a mostly ignored OS on a mostly ignored architecture.
;)
Yep - that sentence is what I was thinking exactly. Literally, if it weren't for the fact that I'm typically thinking in German.
Oh, I know. But while I do want to put Linux on any potential x86 laptop, I'm not brave enough to put it on a Mac. Although I guess with the ability to run most (all?) Aqua apps from within Linux it's not that big of a jump.
Heh, I know where you're coming from. I'm looking to buy a cheap portable notebook, and to my surprise the 12" iBook G4 just seems to be the best route to go. There are only one or two PC 12" notebooks at that price (~1200) and they all suck (poor battery performance, hot, bad keyboard, and so on). Laptops smaller than 12" are very rare and prohibitively expensive.
There are two issues with the iBook, though: I don't want to go Apple. Not that I don't like Apple, I've actually grown up with LCIIs and Performas and Ambrosia is the greatest shareware game developer of all time. But it's just not what I want for a laptop. Part of that is also that OS X runs quite sluggish on my GF's 14" iBook G3, and I want a system that really flies.
The other issue is that the iBook is quite heavy for a 12" laptop. It weighs 2.2kg, which although not very heavy for notebook standards, is 200g heavier than the cheapo laptop I mentioned above and 500g heavier than the excellent Samsung X10 laptop with a 14" display.
My favorite choice right now would be the Asus S5200N, which has gotten extremely favorable reviews all over the place (Tom's Hardware, for one). It's a 12" laptop, single-spindle (which apparently means that it has no internal CD-ROM, which is fine by me) has an okay keyboard, is reasonably fast and weighs only 1.6kg. The only thing wrong with it is the moderate battery performance, which is not a big problem since there are batteries with 2x and 3x the juice available for it. Oh and it costs ~1500, which makes it very cheap for a laptop of its class, but a wee bit more than I hoped to pay, and 300 more than the laptop from a hardware manufacturer considered infamously expensive.
It's called controversial discussion. I prefer people who go ape about everything to people who don't go ape about anything. All of the things you mentioned do have their drawbacks, and those drawbacks need to be pointed out, discussed and weighed against each other. They are in fact practising their democratic right and duty to actively support what they think is right - something that many people on Slashdot seem to think is below them. Cheering and bitching is the essence of a democratic society.
Give it another 20 to 30 years and voter participation will be down to those levels anyway...
Oh the keys work fine, it's just the lowercase versions that don't work for him.
Is there really that large a demographic for this?
Yes. Europe and Japan. That is, if reliable cellular networks is all it takes.
Take away the unspeakably abhorrent xeno-cidal/-phobic aspects of Nazi doctrine, and you're left with - not much. There really wasn't that much behind the Nazi doctrine, certainly not a working network of public health care. And what was there was not much more than a facade. The fact that the party used to call itself Socialist doesn't make it socialist, and in turn, should not associate any socialist values with theirs.
On a sidenote, there's a difference between social and socialist. There's only one major party here in Germany that calls itself socialist - and they're on the left of the German political spectrum. On the other hand, virtually all parties would consider themselves (or rather, their political agenda) "social". Social democratic on the other hand is the base name for most of Europe's mid-to-left parties, including the currently ruling (in a coalition with another party) party SPD mentioned above somewhere.
Yes. Recent releases often use XviD, and of course all DivX files are not created equal, ie. there are several different versions.
Care to write up a (very brief) description of the steps needed to replace Explorer/Explorer/Explorer with Goeshell/Servant Salamander/Firefox? Is it a lot of work?
True, but the grandparent wasn't referring to running. Or at least that was my presupposition.
Arms actively working to balance your body? Is that supposed to be a sign of confidence? Because it sure sounds more like a sign of a walking disability.
People never do that around here. I'd be totally freaked out if a stranger just asked me (the German equivalent of) "how's it goin" on the street or even on the train. Or rather, I'd spend the next day wondering how the hell that person knew me. One thing I am used to is when hiking in the alps, people always greet you (and you greet them back)... but that'd be too time-consuming in a city, anyway.