I'm not saying slackware is a bad distro, but as far as mums and dads go, I wouldn't even let them touch CDs.
Slackware, still with a commandline installer. Asks you to run fdsisk manually. Requires you to have actual knowledge of your desired network-setup... The list goes on.
It may be a good distro for it's uses (which for me was learning Linux without all those fancy config-tools), but for the avarage n00b? It's will be a hell for them and a true hell for me having to assist them all the time. And just in case you havent noticed, ordinary users don't want to even know there is a commandline.
I usually dont respond to people nitpicking whatever bad english I may produce as I think it is by every definition offtopic, but in this I'll make an exception.
My bad. Shitty writing. The fact that I'm not a native english speaker, it was early in the morning, I hadn't had my coffee and that I wasn't wearing my contact lenses can't excuse writing that bad. Just let me in advance thank the slashdot community for not making a bigger deal out of it, and preferebly let it slide.
I promise I will more thouroughly take advantage of the preview feature in the future.
I know this can easily turn into a flamefest over a minor detail, but still, I was kinda set back by your comment.
I realize studios might try to sell DVDs of whateever series, and people whording these are sorta pirating stuff. And don't try to teach me how TV-stations make money, as I do know that.
But calling it piracy to download the latest episode of whatever show thats usually aired on fully public radiowaves anyway, thats a far stretch for me.
But hey, if you feel like broadening the concept of piracy to whatever extents, I'm cool. But I do suspect people won't give a damn about piracy anymore when seing a hotdag stand and then moving on to make hot-dogs at home is also considered piracy. I mean, you are after all taking potential profit away from the poor hot-dog guy, as he could have made money if you bought it at his place instead of pirating those damn dogs...
These discussions evidently make me lose my mind. Please forgive me. But don't you dare pirate my hot-dog apocalypse!
Not trying to troll here, but if you by that mean CTRL - Left click, that would be the worst thing that could ever happen for me when using a computer.
I use CTRl-LeftClickety without exception for toggleing things in lists or filebrowers and the likes. Shit-Click is then used for range. I find rhis combinations quite useful.
Too me it just seems like having one button is more about limiting options than making computing easier. I can't see one single advantage, yet I can see tons of disadvantages. For instance how applications must be designed with one mousebutton in mind. Doesn't really sound effective at all to me.
<sarcasm>
But then again the Mac-crowd would probably preach the wonders of the 10-button keyboard if Apple happened to make one.
</sarcasm>.
More often than not, they're just going to skip over it and move on to another page.
That is really interesting. For me its the other way around. DivX and XviD I'm all good with, but there's no way I'm spending time or bandwidth downloading Quicktime or Quicktime movies. I just skip over it and go to another page.
To be fair, it's not as much the fileformat or quality that disgusts me, it's the player. You actually need a seperate player to play the files. To me that's more or less the definition of a crappy format. If I can't play a videoformat in the player of my choice, the videoformat belongs to the pre-2000 era.
And there's no need informing me of the existence of quicktime-alternative, I know of it, but this is a matter of principle. Maybe I'm borderlining stupdity here, but hey I'm man enough to admit it.
If you choose to use Xvid or DivX your users will have to download codecs for those. I'm guessing not too many grandmas and uncles would know how to do this. I reccomend using quicktime
Because Quicktime doesn't have to be installed? Oh, you didn't think of that?
Well, people not having proper MPEG4 codecs installed (WMV just isn't, it's spyware) really shouldn't complain about a miniature download that works seamlessly with the rest of their system and offers them great quality in return.
It's kinda like saying "If people has to buy a DVD player to see the movies, they will stick to VHS". And DVDs are now selling more than CDs.
People downloaded Real and Quicktime before. Why shouldn't they download another, way better alternative now? Espcially if it's use on the web is allready widespread?*
So far, only 50% of the posts in this thread have been reminders about how thise article is about none-winodws users.
So I thought I'd you myself, just in case you missed it, this article is about video-formats for none-windows users, so whatever applies to the windows world is really, really irellevant, because this is after all a article about usage of video-formats in a none-windows environment.
So, did you get it this time? Or should I repeat that it is indeed not about windows, just in case? Just let me know!
Well, there are games like Grand Turismo (most enjoyable driving somiulator I've played), Tekken (beat em up), Devil May Cry (action adventure), Dark Chronicle (adventure), not to mention the very famous GTA series, which for some period was a PS2-exclusive.
I guess you could list a lot of games for the PC that has decent replay value, like Civ. I really liked Civ, but I played that ages ago on my Amiga. In the end, I couldn't be bothered anymore. As much as it's a good example, I think it's to old to be valid one.
But you may be right. Maybe in fact times have changed, and that the PC now has tons of games worth playing again and again. However when I bought my PS2, and for some years after, PC games seemed to exclusively focus on good graphics, but had lousy gameplay.
While the PS2 hardware now is more or less obsolete, it still doesn't take the fun out of the games. Now I realize fun is a highly subjective quality, but I was merely replying to someone claiming anyone with a PS2 was moron trying to be cool.
But fact of the matter is most PS2 games I've played have had a feel to it that just makes them (in my eyes) so much better than any PC game I've ever played, regardless of graphics and what not a common PC today can easily beat. I even played GTA Vice City on a PC, and quite frankly iy sucked. I don't know how they did it, but all the fun was somehow taken out of it compared to the PS2-version. Better graphics as usual, though.
Anyway, sitting in my couch in front of my 29" telly with multiple controllers playing games on my PS2 with my friends is a considerable more social event than staring at your computer typing "fragfest!" in a chatwindow.
For all I know, the consoles are about having a jolly good time with your friends, while PC games seem to focus on just being good games.
The reason I play games on my PS2 is not because it's cool. If I was in for being cool I'd buy, mod and seriously hack a Xbox just to show off what my cool console could do.
I bought into that cool image I'd mention pirate every Xbox game there was, and show of all those cool new games and show them off the week before they'd hit the stores.
If I was in for awesome, cool graphics, I'd buy anything but the PS2, as it seems most consoles have a more capable GPU.
I play the SP2 because of the games and their replay value.
My main reason for not playing games, or investing money in PC-gaming at all, is because I think all the PS2 games I've played have a higher entertainment value and especially replay value. This goes for anyone I know with a PS2.
Ok, my bad for not getting the joke. I'll accept full responsibility.
I was under the understanding that most language groups had their own keyboard layouts
True, but in my experience these layouts differ minimally from the standard qwerty layout, to allow for a few local additions. What usually varies the most are the mappings of brackets, commas, dots and in general special characters, not the actual letters themselves.
What are the least QWERTY-friendly language, in your experience?
German and french can be quite tiresome, at least with the norwegian qwerty layout (which is also a slightly modfied, but mostly standard qwerty layout), as the special modifiers needed for some "local characters" are put on the far right and even some even need modifier keys in addition, before even typing the letter to be modfied.
Norwegian letters like Æ, Ø and Å are also put to the far right end, which in my opinion really doesn't correspond to their frequency of use.
In my opinion qwerty seems well enough suited for the english language and probably most others languages sticking to the vanilla A-Z alphabet.
But I still find the entire ultimate keymapping debate horribly ignorant of the fact that there are more languages than just english.
You can troll all you want for qewrty or dvorak layout. You all seem to be missing a fundamental piece of the picture though.
When discussing what layout recquires least handmovement and so on, you all seem to assume everyone in the world types in english, or that all other languages in the world has the same basic construction of words with the same sounds.
Let me inform you, as I'm not even from a country where english is native language and am somewhat capable in at least three other languages, that this is definetly not the case. My effiency when it comes to words per minute is very dependent on what language I write. Not because I have to stop and think about the language, but because the keyboard mapping may be practical for that language or not.
So all you idiots trolling about qwerty or dvorak, would you please shut up? If you take into account that different languages relies on regular use of character combinations different from your english, you should easily be able to realize there is no such thing as an ultimate(tm) keyboard layout.
So please shut up, and try to think before you crap out any more nonsense.
They might add a few more "security" warnings, internet zones, even more craptastic cookie management informing you with a big, undisableable "Ok" that a cookie has been blocked. Oh, with a "don't show me this warning again" for a per cookie basis just for the kicks of it.
All useless features that does make the browser appear safer, better and whatever, but still doesn't adress any of the many fundamental flaws or exploits.
And whatever it does, it will regularly inform you that you are surfing "safer". I swear, that will be written in the Longhorn installer.
Oh, and as a final touch, the MSIE6.00000001 executable will be named explorer.exe or taskman.exe, just definetly not iexplore.exe. Anything that implies that it can't be removed from the system, really.
Btw I'm unemployed. Does this rant qualify me to work at Microsoft's strategic planning department?
There's this really, really far fetched, yet simple theory derived from Quantum mechanics and Quantum probabilities stating that everything that can exist does infact exists.
No references or googled links, just thought I'd spice up the conversation here. Now, we don't know if tachyons exist as of yet, but it's not that long ago since black holes were thought to be nothing more than a bad case of theory.
Not to mention the infinite amount of energy you would need to reach the speed of light in the first place.
If you solve that bit, please do go on and figure out the imaginary numbers in your energy-equations.
You are aware that the majority of users dont give a flying fuck about closed or open source, right?
They just want software that works out of the box, and doesn't take a wizard to operate.
Yes, I use Opera, yes I like the open-source philosophy, but encountering a few broken sites every now and then, still doesnt alter my preferences. To me Opera is superior to Firefox in every signle usability issue I can come up with.
The article is ment as a joke, as it is now even mentioned in the article itself.
I know this is slashdot and that reading full articles isn't really what people do here, but "Hey slashdot readers. This is a joke about bad journalism." is actually the first thing you would see, if you read TFA.
I probably should have made myself clearer. What I ment was big business is only after big profits, and if screwing everyone else over accomplishes that, there's no moral stopping them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying slackware is a bad distro, but as far as mums and dads go, I wouldn't even let them touch CDs.
Slackware, still with a commandline installer. Asks you to run fdsisk manually. Requires you to have actual knowledge of your desired network-setup... The list goes on.
It may be a good distro for it's uses (which for me was learning Linux without all those fancy config-tools), but for the avarage n00b? It's will be a hell for them and a true hell for me having to assist them all the time. And just in case you havent noticed, ordinary users don't want to even know there is a commandline.
Do you even live on this planet? I call troll.
I usually dont respond to people nitpicking whatever bad english I may produce as I think it is by every definition offtopic, but in this I'll make an exception.
My bad. Shitty writing. The fact that I'm not a native english speaker, it was early in the morning, I hadn't had my coffee and that I wasn't wearing my contact lenses can't excuse writing that bad. Just let me in advance thank the slashdot community for not making a bigger deal out of it, and preferebly let it slide. I promise I will more thouroughly take advantage of the preview feature in the future.
I know this can easily turn into a flamefest over a minor detail, but still, I was kinda set back by your comment.
I realize studios might try to sell DVDs of whateever series, and people whording these are sorta pirating stuff. And don't try to teach me how TV-stations make money, as I do know that.
But calling it piracy to download the latest episode of whatever show thats usually aired on fully public radiowaves anyway, thats a far stretch for me.
But hey, if you feel like broadening the concept of piracy to whatever extents, I'm cool. But I do suspect people won't give a damn about piracy anymore when seing a hotdag stand and then moving on to make hot-dogs at home is also considered piracy. I mean, you are after all taking potential profit away from the poor hot-dog guy, as he could have made money if you bought it at his place instead of pirating those damn dogs...
These discussions evidently make me lose my mind. Please forgive me. But don't you dare pirate my hot-dog apocalypse!
Not trying to troll here, but if you by that mean CTRL - Left click, that would be the worst thing that could ever happen for me when using a computer.
I use CTRl-LeftClickety without exception for toggleing things in lists or filebrowers and the likes. Shit-Click is then used for range. I find rhis combinations quite useful.
Too me it just seems like having one button is more about limiting options than making computing easier. I can't see one single advantage, yet I can see tons of disadvantages. For instance how applications must be designed with one mousebutton in mind. Doesn't really sound effective at all to me.
<sarcasm>
But then again the Mac-crowd would probably preach the wonders of the 10-button keyboard if Apple happened to make one.
</sarcasm>.
Stupid us, huh? Now mod this post to hell if you like.
That is really interesting. For me its the other way around. DivX and XviD I'm all good with, but there's no way I'm spending time or bandwidth downloading Quicktime or Quicktime movies. I just skip over it and go to another page.
To be fair, it's not as much the fileformat or quality that disgusts me, it's the player. You actually need a seperate player to play the files. To me that's more or less the definition of a crappy format. If I can't play a videoformat in the player of my choice, the videoformat belongs to the pre-2000 era.
And there's no need informing me of the existence of quicktime-alternative, I know of it, but this is a matter of principle. Maybe I'm borderlining stupdity here, but hey I'm man enough to admit it.
Because Quicktime doesn't have to be installed? Oh, you didn't think of that?
Well, people not having proper MPEG4 codecs installed (WMV just isn't, it's spyware) really shouldn't complain about a miniature download that works seamlessly with the rest of their system and offers them great quality in return.
It's kinda like saying "If people has to buy a DVD player to see the movies, they will stick to VHS". And DVDs are now selling more than CDs.
People downloaded Real and Quicktime before. Why shouldn't they download another, way better alternative now? Espcially if it's use on the web is allready widespread?*
*maybe not at commercial sites, no :)
So far, only 50% of the posts in this thread have been reminders about how thise article is about none-winodws users.
So I thought I'd you myself, just in case you missed it, this article is about video-formats for none-windows users, so whatever applies to the windows world is really, really irellevant, because this is after all a article about usage of video-formats in a none-windows environment.
So, did you get it this time? Or should I repeat that it is indeed not about windows, just in case? Just let me know!
Well, there are games like Grand Turismo (most enjoyable driving somiulator I've played), Tekken (beat em up), Devil May Cry (action adventure), Dark Chronicle (adventure), not to mention the very famous GTA series, which for some period was a PS2-exclusive.
I guess you could list a lot of games for the PC that has decent replay value, like Civ. I really liked Civ, but I played that ages ago on my Amiga. In the end, I couldn't be bothered anymore. As much as it's a good example, I think it's to old to be valid one.
But you may be right. Maybe in fact times have changed, and that the PC now has tons of games worth playing again and again. However when I bought my PS2, and for some years after, PC games seemed to exclusively focus on good graphics, but had lousy gameplay.
While the PS2 hardware now is more or less obsolete, it still doesn't take the fun out of the games. Now I realize fun is a highly subjective quality, but I was merely replying to someone claiming anyone with a PS2 was moron trying to be cool.
But fact of the matter is most PS2 games I've played have had a feel to it that just makes them (in my eyes) so much better than any PC game I've ever played, regardless of graphics and what not a common PC today can easily beat. I even played GTA Vice City on a PC, and quite frankly iy sucked. I don't know how they did it, but all the fun was somehow taken out of it compared to the PS2-version. Better graphics as usual, though.
Anyway, sitting in my couch in front of my 29" telly with multiple controllers playing games on my PS2 with my friends is a considerable more social event than staring at your computer typing "fragfest!" in a chatwindow.
For all I know, the consoles are about having a jolly good time with your friends, while PC games seem to focus on just being good games.
The reason I play games on my PS2 is not because it's cool. If I was in for being cool I'd buy, mod and seriously hack a Xbox just to show off what my cool console could do.
I bought into that cool image I'd mention pirate every Xbox game there was, and show of all those cool new games and show them off the week before they'd hit the stores.
If I was in for awesome, cool graphics, I'd buy anything but the PS2, as it seems most consoles have a more capable GPU.
I play the SP2 because of the games and their replay value. My main reason for not playing games, or investing money in PC-gaming at all, is because I think all the PS2 games I've played have a higher entertainment value and especially replay value. This goes for anyone I know with a PS2.
You, mister, are way off.
Ok, my bad for not getting the joke. I'll accept full responsibility.
True, but in my experience these layouts differ minimally from the standard qwerty layout, to allow for a few local additions. What usually varies the most are the mappings of brackets, commas, dots and in general special characters, not the actual letters themselves.
German and french can be quite tiresome, at least with the norwegian qwerty layout (which is also a slightly modfied, but mostly standard qwerty layout), as the special modifiers needed for some "local characters" are put on the far right and even some even need modifier keys in addition, before even typing the letter to be modfied.
Norwegian letters like Æ, Ø and Å are also put to the far right end, which in my opinion really doesn't correspond to their frequency of use.
In my opinion qwerty seems well enough suited for the english language and probably most others languages sticking to the vanilla A-Z alphabet. But I still find the entire ultimate keymapping debate horribly ignorant of the fact that there are more languages than just english.
You can troll all you want for qewrty or dvorak layout. You all seem to be missing a fundamental piece of the picture though.
When discussing what layout recquires least handmovement and so on, you all seem to assume everyone in the world types in english, or that all other languages in the world has the same basic construction of words with the same sounds.
Let me inform you, as I'm not even from a country where english is native language and am somewhat capable in at least three other languages, that this is definetly not the case. My effiency when it comes to words per minute is very dependent on what language I write. Not because I have to stop and think about the language, but because the keyboard mapping may be practical for that language or not.
So all you idiots trolling about qwerty or dvorak, would you please shut up? If you take into account that different languages relies on regular use of character combinations different from your english, you should easily be able to realize there is no such thing as an ultimate(tm) keyboard layout.
So please shut up, and try to think before you crap out any more nonsense.
It sounds like a low-quality implementation. Especially with redundant A's in the deafult design spec.
They might add a few more "security" warnings, internet zones, even more craptastic cookie management informing you with a big, undisableable "Ok" that a cookie has been blocked. Oh, with a "don't show me this warning again" for a per cookie basis just for the kicks of it.
All useless features that does make the browser appear safer, better and whatever, but still doesn't adress any of the many fundamental flaws or exploits.
And whatever it does, it will regularly inform you that you are surfing "safer". I swear, that will be written in the Longhorn installer.
Oh, and as a final touch, the MSIE6.00000001 executable will be named explorer.exe or taskman.exe, just definetly not iexplore.exe. Anything that implies that it can't be removed from the system, really.
Btw I'm unemployed. Does this rant qualify me to work at Microsoft's strategic planning department?
Parent got mod'ed insightfull? Either it was a attempt at being funny, and if not it should be mod'ed -1, stupid guy doesn't know relativity.
In the latter case the mods should be lose all future mod-privilegies.
There's this really, really far fetched, yet simple theory derived from Quantum mechanics and Quantum probabilities stating that everything that can exist does infact exists.
No references or googled links, just thought I'd spice up the conversation here. Now, we don't know if tachyons exist as of yet, but it's not that long ago since black holes were thought to be nothing more than a bad case of theory.
Not to mention the infinite amount of energy you would need to reach the speed of light in the first place. If you solve that bit, please do go on and figure out the imaginary numbers in your energy-equations.
I like how you put Satan-worshippping and anti-war in the same stereotype. But I guess your target audience won't even notice the irony.
You are aware that the majority of users dont give a flying fuck about closed or open source, right?
They just want software that works out of the box, and doesn't take a wizard to operate.
Yes, I use Opera, yes I like the open-source philosophy, but encountering a few broken sites every now and then, still doesnt alter my preferences. To me Opera is superior to Firefox in every signle usability issue I can come up with.
The article is ment as a joke, as it is now even mentioned in the article itself.
I know this is slashdot and that reading full articles isn't really what people do here, but "Hey slashdot readers. This is a joke about bad journalism." is actually the first thing you would see, if you read TFA.
Jeez, this is a none-case. Wisen up.
I probably should have made myself clearer. What I ment was big business is only after big profits, and if screwing everyone else over accomplishes that, there's no moral stopping them.
So basicly we agree.
While I oppose the restrictions on DVDs, a DVD can be copied and spread on the internet. Can you do that with hardware?
No. Didn't think so.
And that is why voltage-converters exist. Excuse me for asking, but isn't this elementary knowledge?
Tried for hacking your own printer catridge? C'mon! What judge would not feel fundamentaly insulted for having a case like that in his courtroom?