Yes, and the PS3 also has 512 MB of RAM, but they've both got to put their textures somewhere, the PS3 just physically divides it 50/50 into GDDR3 and XDR. Personally I would have been very happy to pay another $100 to double the RAM I was given since I already had to pay the obscene price of AU$1000 (US$900) to get something with a pitiful amount of memory but nobody gave me the choice. I'm personally amazed how great (and cheap) the PS3 still is despite the string of fuckups that dominated its development (blueray for one), I'm not sorry to own one but am sure that a nasty looking steel morningstar with me holding it could have helped in its design phase,
I've been using Microsoft's OSes and programs for a quarter of a century, and they used to be the best quality out there. The quality has been declining for all that time
I call bullshit on that. In 1981, when MSDOS first came out there were plenty of advanced UNIX systems with multi-user capability, multitasking, memory protection, device abstraction etc. In 1984 the Mac was released which had a user friendly graphical UI and multimedia abilities while windows wouldn't be common for another 8 years. Now with something like Windows 2k3 server you at least have something that won't crash on a protection fault and will remain responsive most of the time. I wouldn't use it for anything serious, but for general user-desktop use it works fine. Sure, you either have to fork out the price of another two computers, pirate it or get an academic version like I did, but it generally works pretty well. Back in the late 90s of course you had a choice between running Win9X which would run your desktop applications but would provide zero fault tolerance or security or NT4 which simply wouldn't run the bulk of the consumer software that was still coming out but still seemed to get PWNED by a new worm each week. At least with NT5 and Vista there's a single platform you can run your games and consumer apps on so you don't have to go without memory protection to be a home user.
If you want to persist in your mantra that skin colour is the primary determining factor in Australian immigration policy and social attitude you're welcome.
However, if there are dark skinned people reading this, be they African, Indian or pacific islander and have valuable skills to share and an interest in getting involved in Australian culture, please ignore the parent poster who is clearly a jackass. Many Australians would like to equate opposition to illegal immigration and opposition to certain cultural attitudes that promote or tolerate violence as hatred to those with dark skin. This is not true as most dark skinned people are not mistrusted in Australia and most mistrusted people in Australia do not have dark skin. Honestly, I'm pretty certain that if you're black and reading this website you'll quickly be accepted into Australian society and will benefit just as much as the next person from a government policy that keeps undesirables out. If you were considering Australia as a destination before, don't let the scaremongers dissuade you.
I know that the hellenic cultural area spread far beyond what is called Greece now, in fact the primary Greek ethnic group who settled Athen came from Ionia in Asia Minor (Turkey) and the last major Greek speaking empire, the Byzantines, had their capital in Constantinople which is also in modern day Turkey. My point was not that these men did not live in Greek cities but they did not live in modern day Greece. It didn't make them or their communities any less Greek but it was still interesting that those scientists which were the first ones I thought of, granted in retrospect I'm suprised I didn't think of Aristotle who lived in Macedonia and Athens. As for ancient Turkey, geographically, you could say that Lydia fitted that general area during the classical period, they were not ethnically turks of course because they lived far to the east at that time. The comment was more meant as an interesting aside than proof of any ignorance of the geo-politicial situation of that period or any deliberate slight upon those Greeks who have not emmigrated to Australia.
"Normal, white Australian" was intended to mean normal amongst white Australians i.e. no different to someone with British, Irish or Northern European background, but I don't see why I need to justify myself simply because I said something that under some twisted interpretations could been seen to expose racist tendancies.
Oh, and by the way, where are you planning on heading when if country's immigration changes against your liking? Will you go to America with it's patriot act, to Europe with it's almost zero outside immigration quota, to the middle east where denying the divine word of Mohammed often carries prison sentances, breaking women's dress code is punished corporally and homosexuality is punished by death. Maybe to Africa with its political and racial struggles lead to violence against black africans in the Sudan, political opposition and white farmers in Zimbabwe and pretty much everyone in Liberia and Somalia. How about to Japan where they pretend that Ainu and Okinawans don't exist or to China where every religious movement must register with the state and obey its will? How about Indonesia where they deal with the lawlessness of West Papua by sealing the entire province off, claiming that everything is ok and using diplomatic or military force against anyone who tries to get in or out. Even the traditional havens like Canada and New Zealand have things like Quebecois separatists and cultural tensions between Maoris and whites. Humans hate other humans, it's the way it's always been, you want to hate me and have decided that by using the word "normal" I am a racist and started flaming me. Racisim isn't about immigration policy it's about how we treat our neighbours be they all the same or no two alike. If you are not willing to get along with someone it is possibly a good thing that they be kept from you for their sake as well as yours, I believe that most people are willing to get along but there will always be tension between people who can be grouped apart, such as when the peaceful society of Yogoslavia broke apart into nationalistic chaos. If Australian immigration policy has to sacrifice some idealism in order to prevent that from happening here, I'm not against it.
As for Dr Mohammed Haneef, I don't see how this is related to the subject, but am I to somehow feel outraged that he is back in a middle class suburb of Bangalore with his wife and newborn daughter because Australian inteligence agents think he might be a terrorist? He's not locked in Gitmo being waterboarded without charge and he isn't even being accused of being a terrorist, he just doesn't have a guest worker visa anymore because he's seen as a risk. He is surly more related to his two terrorist cousins than he is to any Greek but that didn't stop you from making the connection.
Have you ever been to Australia? Greeks in South Eastern Australia are as common as any other ancestry, you find them everywhere from blue collar labour to business, politics, entertainment and broadband research. Even Australia's most nationalistic rednecks don't see them as anything but normal, white Aussies anymore. Personally, I hear a Greek name and immediately think: Melbourne, because how much useful research has ever been done in Greece? Archimedes lived in Sicily, Pythagorus and Zeno lived in Italy, Thales lived in Turkey and both Ptolomy and Euclid lived in Egypt.
I don't know what snakes are like where you live but I know that the Oxyuranus (taipan) and Pseudonaja (brown snake) families, which between them make up most of the worlds most poisonous snakes and all of the top 3 most poisonous, have round pupils. Taipans tend to be readily identifiable, being notably longer and thinner than anything else in the area that they live in, but brown snakes are often confused with the less poisonous (but often deadly) black snakes or even tiger snakes since they vary in colour and pattern within the species almost as much as between species. As I understand it, at least down here, the only way to tell them apart for sure is to count the scales, the number of which is consistent within a species and generally narrows it down far enough to know if it is toxic and which antivenom one should use. Otherwise, you should probably just stay away from snakes which you can't identify.
The vast majority of people, speaking from the perspective of an absolute intelligence, are pretty dumb.
The vast majority of people are able to make and use tools, reason abstractly to solve problems, communicate with each other with vocabularies of many thousands of words and learn hundreds of new facts and concepts every day. I would really like to know what average humans are dumb compared to. Unless of course you mean they are dumb compared to smart humans which is a pretty self evident and meaningless statement, sort of like saying that the average jet interceptor is slow because some can do over Mach 3 but most travel at about Mach 2. Quit your misanthropy and give our species a break.
Virtual Machine Monitor and Hypervisor are synonyms. Hypervisor however generally implies a monitor running on the bare hardware (type 1 virtual machine) whereas VMM may also refer to a monitor running as a userspace process on a host kernel (type 2 virtual machine). Thus it is correct to call bluepill either a hypervisor or a VMM.
Generally the term VMM is much more common with implementors of these systems, however hypervisor is easier to say and sounds cooler so its common with users.
Not only is the Isle of Man both man and an island (take that John Donne) but it also has three feet on its flag (a Triskelion) so presumably at any point in time it can set foot in one more country than even the most nimble of humans (take that OP).
UT3 on PS3, will have mouse/kb support
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 2, Informative
I've long been of the mindset that if the console folks would wake up and give me a keyboard and / or a
mouse / trackball interface, I would switch to consoles for all my gaming needs tomorrow.
Unreal Tournament 3 on PS3, will have mouse/kb support in order to keep its old hardcore fanbase happy and hopefully the trend will continue. For what its worth though, they took the copy protection right out of the last PC UT game so I doubt that the PC port is going to exactly redefine evil.
My PS3 is the first console I've had since my childhood SNES, and being a PC gamer I've also had a little bit of trouble getting used to the Playstation's FPS controls. With Sony's dual analogue control schema (left thumb moves/strafes, right thumb aims. essentially congruent to mouse in right palm, wsad under ring, middle and index fingers of left), things have improved much since the last console FPS I played which was Goldeneye in 1997 (left thumb moves/turns but aims when a button is held). It's still not quite as good as the PC controls, but once you get used to it and you realise that the controls are all part of the game, consoles FPSs become almost as fun.
Bioshock isn't exactly the twitchiest game out there anyway, we're not exactly talking about hitting an adversary midair with the railgun or anything in this game. Guns tend to be inaccurate like shotguns, chemical throwers, grenade launchers and sub machine guns. Plasmids (the kinda psychic powers in this game) tend to fudge the aim a little to hit the target. The only weapon that could benefit much from the mouse's precision is the crossbow, which never has enough steel bolts for a direct attack anyway. I've only played this on PC, but I'd wager if either one of us were to buy a 360 and learn its controls we'd be every bit as happy with this game on console and even more happy because one can lie on the lounge when one does not need a mousing surface.
Sure, the first party and third party publishers are doing OK, but won't someone please think of the second party!
Though technically speaking the first and second party interchangeable, since the first party is defined by convention to be the platform manufacturer (in this case Microsoft), the second party who is the other direct participant in a transaction must therefore be the end user of the platform. This is of course outside of Nintendo related literature where the second party is redefined to mean the semi autonomous subsidiaries and affiliates of the platform creator.
For PCs I think the end user (second party) is doing as well in the the game manufacturing market as it has done since the days where people bought their home computers for the express purpose of hacking up tick tac toe playing AIs and text adventures. With things like python and VB.net users can program their own new games with less bother than in the past. With todays moddable games, users can whip up a new game without having to touch more than a few lines of code. As for consoles, I think that has reached a highpoint too as Linux can be installed easily on the PS3 with the support of the manufacturer and can even be thrown onto a xbox with a little more time and effort.
While the second party has far to go before it can challenge anyone for market dominance, things are heading in the right direction.
The Australian Army did not let it in and were the only ones to check inside of it. Also, this was filmed months before APEC when the only security concern with the opera house was preventing drunk students from farting in the tubas.
Christian Science church != Church of Scientology, they are completely unrelated religious groups.
Christian Science are a little bit crazy with their faith healing stuff, but are not pathological bullies, liars and cheats out for money like the COS.
We HAVE software to manage all dependancies, they are called package managers and almost every distro has one. You can use apt, portage, yum or whatever and I guarentee that anything that is stable and complete enough for "Joe User" to be bothered using is in there. MythTV for example is in at least Debian, Ubuntu universe, Gentoo and I'd confidently conjecture most of the other ones too. You either type the name of the piece of software, or click on something in your graphical package manager and you get it installed, simple. Face it, package managers are the standard way software is installed in Linux, if your doing it any other way either you're using alpha software that Mr J User should not use, you don't know how to use a package manager (point and click nowdays), you're an expert with special requirements or you've got one of those stupid hangups that only geeks seem to get.
Joe User CAN install MythTV, the fact that you can't, really doesn't reflect on anything but yourself.
Apparently there were numerous complaints from Korea about WC3 being a less "sport" friendly game than StarCraft, and that was one of the reasons mentioned.
If flashy graphics keeps overcompetitive buttholes away who's idea of a fun afternoon's entertainment is mechanically bashing out one of the three statistically optimal build sequences in order to make sure that nobody can win who doesn't play at least eight games a week or more, it sounds even more appealing to me.
How about going final fantasy style and every time a siege tank shoots you see a ten minute full screen animation of the shell turning into a blue dragon and breathing lightning on its target before it does its 5hp worth of damage or whatever. That would piss me off for sure, but what would it do to the delicate psyche of a South Korean addict who's watching it for the nintieth time that day. That would be awesome
C&C3 worked fine on my '04 vintage Athlon64 with 1gb of ram and a GF6600GT graphics card. Either you got screwed a year ago when you bought your "top of the line computer" or you're just whining because you are one of those naturally grumpy people (ok, maybe a little bit ad Hominem there). I enjoyed the new 3d graphics, shader effects and other neat things like having fireteams of infantry and found it to be far more immersive than previous iterations were, even back in the day they were made when I was an easily impressed teenager. I'm glad Westwood has decided to take advantage of the improvements to computer technology that have presented themselves since they wrote the first command and conquer game back in '95. Sprite based games such as Red Alert 2 really don't look as nice and don't allow for some more complex abilities and simulation elements.
I don't see what you are complaining about though, the original Command & Conquer is still quite a fun, playable game even though it lacks the computationally intensive refinements that you claim not to want. I still play classic games like it, despite my willingness to spend admittedly a largish chunk of my income to keep up with the latest hardware advances it stands to reason that you should too if you are unwilling to upgrade.
As for Starcraft II, I hope they set a moderately ambitious hardware target, more detail to look at and cool effects do a lot for attracting those beyond the core of hardcore Blizzard fans who would buy it even if it was just the old game with different missions. But I doubt they will, blizzard is more conservative with these things than even Westwood, I'm sure you'll get what you want this time.
If they were to make it so that I could pause the game, scroll around the map, and give orders, I would probably really enjoy the game. I love RTS when they can accommodate my quirks.
If you want true task isolation together with realtime action, try a Total War game. You can either get the latest Medievil II iteration or the now-cheap Rome, Medievil or Shogun varients. The campaign, with building, recruitment and deployment are turnbased while battles are realtime. In these realtime battles, not only can you move the camera and give orders while paused, you can only have one battle and there is no base to worry about when that happens. Furthermore units are grouped into formations of 40-200 soldiers depending on type so you've only got a very finite amount to worry about (up to 20 formations and not always that many). Plus pinning an enemy flank with a couple of phalanxes then breaking them with a charge by heavy cavalry from the side makes you feel like a big man nomatter how many times you do it, but that's beside the point. Also beside the point is that its one of the only games where battle organisation counts for far more than base building, citys have limited productivity and so you've gotta make what you can produce count and the units are grouped and simulated in a way that you CAN do clever things with them such as ambushes, flanking, hit and run, encirclement and use weapons of fear and they work a lot better than a blunt charge with superior numbers.
If you wanna stick strictly in the genre though, try Supreme Commander which allows you to pan, zoom and give orders when it is paused, queue up orders, edit order queues, automate some tasks (like construction, rebuilding and air transportation) or even split your screen and point half of it at your base to give a wakeup call when something explodes in it. Its pseudo precursor Total Annihilation is similar but doesn't need the same computational grunt as SupCom.
Anyway, I hope you try either of those games, I believe they accommodate your quirks well and they are great games to boot. Another thing to consider is that both games also allow you to change the speed of time in single player battles which could help you no end.
Yes, and Australian broadband prices and speeds are still embarrassingly shit, even worse than the US by my last evaluation. I REALLY don't think we have anything to brag about despite our government's attempts to pull Telstra into line.
Since when are ad hominem arguments "Insightful"? The grandparent did not use ad hominem. Ad hominem is where you attack the person and credibility of your opponent in an argument when it is irrelivent. An example would be: "your argument is wrong because you are stupid/are ugly/have a promiscuous mother". The falicy being that if an argument is advocated by a highly flawed person, it is flawed itself. However, if the argument is about someone's reaction to a stimulus (such as a legal warning) and the author cites his own response, his bravery IS part of the discussion since his own reaction to something is based on his outlook, in this case his courage.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and the PS3 also has 512 MB of RAM, but they've both got to put their textures somewhere, the PS3 just physically divides it 50/50 into GDDR3 and XDR. Personally I would have been very happy to pay another $100 to double the RAM I was given since I already had to pay the obscene price of AU$1000 (US$900) to get something with a pitiful amount of memory but nobody gave me the choice. I'm personally amazed how great (and cheap) the PS3 still is despite the string of fuckups that dominated its development (blueray for one), I'm not sorry to own one but am sure that a nasty looking steel morningstar with me holding it could have helped in its design phase,
The assertion i=i+1 just made the field of complex numbers one step more, um, complex.
If you want to persist in your mantra that skin colour is the primary determining factor in Australian immigration policy and social attitude you're welcome.
However, if there are dark skinned people reading this, be they African, Indian or pacific islander and have valuable skills to share and an interest in getting involved in Australian culture, please ignore the parent poster who is clearly a jackass. Many Australians would like to equate opposition to illegal immigration and opposition to certain cultural attitudes that promote or tolerate violence as hatred to those with dark skin. This is not true as most dark skinned people are not mistrusted in Australia and most mistrusted people in Australia do not have dark skin. Honestly, I'm pretty certain that if you're black and reading this website you'll quickly be accepted into Australian society and will benefit just as much as the next person from a government policy that keeps undesirables out. If you were considering Australia as a destination before, don't let the scaremongers dissuade you.
I know that the hellenic cultural area spread far beyond what is called Greece now, in fact the primary Greek ethnic group who settled Athen came from Ionia in Asia Minor (Turkey) and the last major Greek speaking empire, the Byzantines, had their capital in Constantinople which is also in modern day Turkey. My point was not that these men did not live in Greek cities but they did not live in modern day Greece. It didn't make them or their communities any less Greek but it was still interesting that those scientists which were the first ones I thought of, granted in retrospect I'm suprised I didn't think of Aristotle who lived in Macedonia and Athens. As for ancient Turkey, geographically, you could say that Lydia fitted that general area during the classical period, they were not ethnically turks of course because they lived far to the east at that time. The comment was more meant as an interesting aside than proof of any ignorance of the geo-politicial situation of that period or any deliberate slight upon those Greeks who have not emmigrated to Australia.
"Normal, white Australian" was intended to mean normal amongst white Australians i.e. no different to someone with British, Irish or Northern European background, but I don't see why I need to justify myself simply because I said something that under some twisted interpretations could been seen to expose racist tendancies.
Oh, and by the way, where are you planning on heading when if country's immigration changes against your liking? Will you go to America with it's patriot act, to Europe with it's almost zero outside immigration quota, to the middle east where denying the divine word of Mohammed often carries prison sentances, breaking women's dress code is punished corporally and homosexuality is punished by death. Maybe to Africa with its political and racial struggles lead to violence against black africans in the Sudan, political opposition and white farmers in Zimbabwe and pretty much everyone in Liberia and Somalia. How about to Japan where they pretend that Ainu and Okinawans don't exist or to China where every religious movement must register with the state and obey its will? How about Indonesia where they deal with the lawlessness of West Papua by sealing the entire province off, claiming that everything is ok and using diplomatic or military force against anyone who tries to get in or out. Even the traditional havens like Canada and New Zealand have things like Quebecois separatists and cultural tensions between Maoris and whites. Humans hate other humans, it's the way it's always been, you want to hate me and have decided that by using the word "normal" I am a racist and started flaming me. Racisim isn't about immigration policy it's about how we treat our neighbours be they all the same or no two alike. If you are not willing to get along with someone it is possibly a good thing that they be kept from you for their sake as well as yours, I believe that most people are willing to get along but there will always be tension between people who can be grouped apart, such as when the peaceful society of Yogoslavia broke apart into nationalistic chaos. If Australian immigration policy has to sacrifice some idealism in order to prevent that from happening here, I'm not against it.
As for Dr Mohammed Haneef, I don't see how this is related to the subject, but am I to somehow feel outraged that he is back in a middle class suburb of Bangalore with his wife and newborn daughter because Australian inteligence agents think he might be a terrorist? He's not locked in Gitmo being waterboarded without charge and he isn't even being accused of being a terrorist, he just doesn't have a guest worker visa anymore because he's seen as a risk. He is surly more related to his two terrorist cousins than he is to any Greek but that didn't stop you from making the connection.
Have you ever been to Australia? Greeks in South Eastern Australia are as common as any other ancestry, you find them everywhere from blue collar labour to business, politics, entertainment and broadband research. Even Australia's most nationalistic rednecks don't see them as anything but normal, white Aussies anymore. Personally, I hear a Greek name and immediately think: Melbourne, because how much useful research has ever been done in Greece? Archimedes lived in Sicily, Pythagorus and Zeno lived in Italy, Thales lived in Turkey and both Ptolomy and Euclid lived in Egypt.
I don't know what snakes are like where you live but I know that the Oxyuranus (taipan) and Pseudonaja (brown snake) families, which between them make up most of the worlds most poisonous snakes and all of the top 3 most poisonous, have round pupils. Taipans tend to be readily identifiable, being notably longer and thinner than anything else in the area that they live in, but brown snakes are often confused with the less poisonous (but often deadly) black snakes or even tiger snakes since they vary in colour and pattern within the species almost as much as between species. As I understand it, at least down here, the only way to tell them apart for sure is to count the scales, the number of which is consistent within a species and generally narrows it down far enough to know if it is toxic and which antivenom one should use. Otherwise, you should probably just stay away from snakes which you can't identify.
Hardy Heron I believe. Sadly it's so intuitive to shorten it to "hardon" that people probably will.
The article forgot to mention that he needed to install blue tail lights so they appeared red to those behind him after Doppler shift.
The vast majority of people are able to make and use tools, reason abstractly to solve problems, communicate with each other with vocabularies of many thousands of words and learn hundreds of new facts and concepts every day. I would really like to know what average humans are dumb compared to. Unless of course you mean they are dumb compared to smart humans which is a pretty self evident and meaningless statement, sort of like saying that the average jet interceptor is slow because some can do over Mach 3 but most travel at about Mach 2. Quit your misanthropy and give our species a break.
Virtual Machine Monitor and Hypervisor are synonyms. Hypervisor however generally implies a monitor running on the bare hardware (type 1 virtual machine) whereas VMM may also refer to a monitor running as a userspace process on a host kernel (type 2 virtual machine). Thus it is correct to call bluepill either a hypervisor or a VMM.
Generally the term VMM is much more common with implementors of these systems, however hypervisor is easier to say and sounds cooler so its common with users.
Not only is the Isle of Man both man and an island (take that John Donne) but it also has three feet on its flag (a Triskelion) so presumably at any point in time it can set foot in one more country than even the most nimble of humans (take that OP).
Unreal Tournament 3 on PS3, will have mouse/kb support in order to keep its old hardcore fanbase happy and hopefully the trend will continue. For what its worth though, they took the copy protection right out of the last PC UT game so I doubt that the PC port is going to exactly redefine evil.
My PS3 is the first console I've had since my childhood SNES, and being a PC gamer I've also had a little bit of trouble getting used to the Playstation's FPS controls. With Sony's dual analogue control schema (left thumb moves/strafes, right thumb aims. essentially congruent to mouse in right palm, wsad under ring, middle and index fingers of left), things have improved much since the last console FPS I played which was Goldeneye in 1997 (left thumb moves/turns but aims when a button is held). It's still not quite as good as the PC controls, but once you get used to it and you realise that the controls are all part of the game, consoles FPSs become almost as fun.
Bioshock isn't exactly the twitchiest game out there anyway, we're not exactly talking about hitting an adversary midair with the railgun or anything in this game. Guns tend to be inaccurate like shotguns, chemical throwers, grenade launchers and sub machine guns. Plasmids (the kinda psychic powers in this game) tend to fudge the aim a little to hit the target. The only weapon that could benefit much from the mouse's precision is the crossbow, which never has enough steel bolts for a direct attack anyway. I've only played this on PC, but I'd wager if either one of us were to buy a 360 and learn its controls we'd be every bit as happy with this game on console and even more happy because one can lie on the lounge when one does not need a mousing surface.
Though technically speaking the first and second party interchangeable, since the first party is defined by convention to be the platform manufacturer (in this case Microsoft), the second party who is the other direct participant in a transaction must therefore be the end user of the platform. This is of course outside of Nintendo related literature where the second party is redefined to mean the semi autonomous subsidiaries and affiliates of the platform creator.
For PCs I think the end user (second party) is doing as well in the the game manufacturing market as it has done since the days where people bought their home computers for the express purpose of hacking up tick tac toe playing AIs and text adventures. With things like python and VB.net users can program their own new games with less bother than in the past. With todays moddable games, users can whip up a new game without having to touch more than a few lines of code. As for consoles, I think that has reached a highpoint too as Linux can be installed easily on the PS3 with the support of the manufacturer and can even be thrown onto a xbox with a little more time and effort.
While the second party has far to go before it can challenge anyone for market dominance, things are heading in the right direction.
The Australian Army did not let it in and were the only ones to check inside of it. Also, this was filmed months before APEC when the only security concern with the opera house was preventing drunk students from farting in the tubas.
Christian Science church != Church of Scientology, they are completely unrelated religious groups.
Christian Science are a little bit crazy with their faith healing stuff, but are not pathological bullies, liars and cheats out for money like the COS.
Why do we keep getting comments like these?
We HAVE software to manage all dependancies, they are called package managers and almost every distro has one. You can use apt, portage, yum or whatever and I guarentee that anything that is stable and complete enough for "Joe User" to be bothered using is in there. MythTV for example is in at least Debian, Ubuntu universe, Gentoo and I'd confidently conjecture most of the other ones too. You either type the name of the piece of software, or click on something in your graphical package manager and you get it installed, simple. Face it, package managers are the standard way software is installed in Linux, if your doing it any other way either you're using alpha software that Mr J User should not use, you don't know how to use a package manager (point and click nowdays), you're an expert with special requirements or you've got one of those stupid hangups that only geeks seem to get.
Joe User CAN install MythTV, the fact that you can't, really doesn't reflect on anything but yourself.
In Australia we generally speak English. There is somewhat of an Australian dialect but I assure you that no judge speaks it.
If flashy graphics keeps overcompetitive buttholes away who's idea of a fun afternoon's entertainment is mechanically bashing out one of the three statistically optimal build sequences in order to make sure that nobody can win who doesn't play at least eight games a week or more, it sounds even more appealing to me.
How about going final fantasy style and every time a siege tank shoots you see a ten minute full screen animation of the shell turning into a blue dragon and breathing lightning on its target before it does its 5hp worth of damage or whatever. That would piss me off for sure, but what would it do to the delicate psyche of a South Korean addict who's watching it for the nintieth time that day. That would be awesome
I don't see what you are complaining about though, the original Command & Conquer is still quite a fun, playable game even though it lacks the computationally intensive refinements that you claim not to want. I still play classic games like it, despite my willingness to spend admittedly a largish chunk of my income to keep up with the latest hardware advances it stands to reason that you should too if you are unwilling to upgrade.
As for Starcraft II, I hope they set a moderately ambitious hardware target, more detail to look at and cool effects do a lot for attracting those beyond the core of hardcore Blizzard fans who would buy it even if it was just the old game with different missions. But I doubt they will, blizzard is more conservative with these things than even Westwood, I'm sure you'll get what you want this time.
If you want true task isolation together with realtime action, try a Total War game. You can either get the latest Medievil II iteration or the now-cheap Rome, Medievil or Shogun varients. The campaign, with building, recruitment and deployment are turnbased while battles are realtime. In these realtime battles, not only can you move the camera and give orders while paused, you can only have one battle and there is no base to worry about when that happens. Furthermore units are grouped into formations of 40-200 soldiers depending on type so you've only got a very finite amount to worry about (up to 20 formations and not always that many). Plus pinning an enemy flank with a couple of phalanxes then breaking them with a charge by heavy cavalry from the side makes you feel like a big man nomatter how many times you do it, but that's beside the point. Also beside the point is that its one of the only games where battle organisation counts for far more than base building, citys have limited productivity and so you've gotta make what you can produce count and the units are grouped and simulated in a way that you CAN do clever things with them such as ambushes, flanking, hit and run, encirclement and use weapons of fear and they work a lot better than a blunt charge with superior numbers.
If you wanna stick strictly in the genre though, try Supreme Commander which allows you to pan, zoom and give orders when it is paused, queue up orders, edit order queues, automate some tasks (like construction, rebuilding and air transportation) or even split your screen and point half of it at your base to give a wakeup call when something explodes in it. Its pseudo precursor Total Annihilation is similar but doesn't need the same computational grunt as SupCom.
Anyway, I hope you try either of those games, I believe they accommodate your quirks well and they are great games to boot. Another thing to consider is that both games also allow you to change the speed of time in single player battles which could help you no end.
Yes, and Australian broadband prices and speeds are still embarrassingly shit, even worse than the US by my last evaluation. I REALLY don't think we have anything to brag about despite our government's attempts to pull Telstra into line.