I think you're the only person on Slashdot who understood my point, though I may have worded it a bit too trollishly (out of force of habit, I suppose).
Give me a break. And if these guys were distributed a closed source version of some GNU software or the Linux kernel, slashdot would be screaming for their heads on a platter. Engage in software piracy, and you're the little guy being persecuted by The Man.
Yeah. I still install nethack on every computer, even though it kind of bores me now. Even the variants are kind of boring. But, hey, the fact that I got 20-25 years of enjoyment out of one game is pretty damn amazing. I can't think of anything else like that, except MAYBE pac man or tetris.
I can understand where he's coming from, but wouldn't Firefox, Open Office, etc also count as "bloatware" under this definition? I don't know about anyone else, but I often find that a bare operating system isn't really all that useful. If it were, then we'd still be using MS DOS 5.0 or BSD 4.4-lite/System V UNIX. I like the idea of having a few essential utilities (SiSoft Sandra, 7zip, Lavasoft AdAware), applications (Mozilla Firefox), and eye candy (extra fonts and desktop backgrounds) preinstalled on my computer, but -- and here's the problem -- I want it to be actually useful. I don't want crappy trial software from IBM, Microsoft, Symantic, etc. When I was building computers, I preinstalled everything on them that I automatically installed on my own PCs. Was that bloatware? If not, why not? It seems like a lot of people think a brand new PC should come with a blank hard drive, and I agree with that, if we're talking about power users and IT professionals, but for most home users, who can't figure out how to install a program from CD/DVD, is this still true? Should they have to go to a computer store and pay $100 just to have someone put a CD or DVD in the drive and click "next" a few times? That seems a bit evil. In my experience, a great majority of people require a period of hand-holding after buying their first PC, and I'm not just talking about grandmas and grandpas here. People of my generation (~35 years old) seem pretty damn clueless.
Both sides of the issue? What issue? There are no issues to teach! The only possible "controversy" comes from people who are not scientists and have something to lose by believing the prevailing theory. Nobody wants to teach the "controversy" that surrounds gravity; it's only when you contradict what people already believe that you end up with this kind of irrational resistance. What are these "open-minded" teachers supposed to do? Read from a Bible, so that kids are exposed to the fundamentalist Christian doctrine of creationism? That's for religion or philosophy class, not science class. Have the CEO of a multinational corporation come in and deny man-made climate change? That's for a politics class, not a science class. Have some crank who doesn't believe in the moon landings preach his conspiracy theory, as an equal opportunity to teaching physics?
This is bullshit, and the supporters know it. They just want to indoctrinate the kids with their message, rather than allowing only what they see as their opponents being able to indoctrinate the kids. If this were politics, philosophy, or religion class, I'd say, "Yes, that's a very good idea. All viewpoints should be heard." But it's not. It's science class, and science class doesn't lend itself to this kind of "all viewpoints are equally valid" philosophy. Just because you have an opinion doesn't mean that you should be able to teach it along side an actual theory.
First of all, Google tries to fix my query for me. I HATE that. I know exactly what I want to search for, and I don't want Google second-guessing me. It's gotten so bad that I can't search for anything without putting it in quotes, because Google will return entirely spurious results (e.g., I search for intel drivers, and I get three pages worth of intelligence tests from stupid quiz sites). Bing doesn't do that. If I search for intel, it only returns results for pages that include the term intel, like a search engine should. If I wanted to search for intelligence, I'd have included that in the search terms.
This second point isn't entirely Google's fault, and I feel a little bad for complaining about it, but Google is absolutely full of spammy and other worthless sites. Page after page of results are from spam/seo sites and, to a lesser extent, shitty blogs, twitter morons, and other social media sites. I don't give a fuck about any result from a social networking site (or, really, any "web 2.0" site). There are a handful of worthwhile blogs that I'd like included in my search results (blogs by people smarter than me: scientists, researchers, kernel developers, etc -- not some bullshit blog by an airhead with a soap box); it's Google's job to identify them, promote them to the first few results, and chuck the rest of them. Google fails miserably at doing this now, when it used to be amazing. When the first two or three pages are nothing but spam, social media, and blogs, I feel like punching babies. Bing, because of its newness, doesn't have such a cottage industry built around SEO and spam, though it does return a lot of pages from social networking and other "web 2.0" sites. It's like having all your searches restricted to Geocities. Ugh.
Finally (and this is more of a concern than an actual complaint), Google is slowly turning into a portal. I don't want e-mail. I don't want newsgroup access. I don't want news. I don't want instant messaging. I certainly don't want an account on some social networking service. I want to do an anonymous search on a search engine. Nothing more, nothing less. Luckily, the main Google page is still pretty clean and minimalistic, but I'm hesitant to believe that it's going to stay that way. In the past, search engines that "diversified" like that have always become very annoying to use, as they insistently prodded you to make use of their other services, so that they could make even more money off of you.
Bonus reason: for all their outrageous, illegal actions, Microsoft have never (to my knowledge) violated anyone's privacy. Google? There's a new controversy every few months. It's starting to make me feel very uncomfortable about using Google, and I'm not even especially protective of my privacy. Hell, I'd post my phone number here, if there were a field for it.
The main consumers of graphic adventure games (Myst, Monkey Island, King's Quest, etc) were girls. The boys got violent, blood-soaked action games (DOOM was released the same year as Myst), and the girls got nice little story-based games, where you uncover a wacky adventure. That's not to say there weren't also violent graphical adventure games (Police Quest) or lewd ones (Leisure Suit Larry), but it was basically dominated by female-demographic titles.
Eventually, the genre died, as puzzle games took over the female demographic.
The quickest way to cause me to roll my eyes and discount anything else you have to say is to use terms like "visual novel" or "genre film". It says to me that you're so insecure about the subject's ability to stand on its own two feet that you have to invent overwrought euphemisms (seriously, "visual novel"? Does anyone call a movie a "motion novel"?).
God. It's a comic book.
I was iffy on reading the article in the first place, as it seemed too self-congratulatory and nostalgic, but I lost all motivation once I ran into that stop phrase.
How the fuck did you get that system to even power up with only 35W? RAM itself can use up most of that, unless you're using ancient PC100 RAM, and only 64MB of it.
I don't play games for little kids, so I can't help you with that. If your kids are looking for popular games, you can probably find a list on any good gaming site, though many of the games may be too violent for the Nintendo demographic.
If you're looking for Disneyesque games for kids, World of Warcraft might be up your alley.
Not everyone wants to mod games, and not everyone wants to use mods. PC gaming has much more than just mods. My PC can kick the shit out of any console. That means that I can play games that would never run on a console, thanks to having specs twice as good as a PS3 or Xbox 360. If a game doesn't allow modding, then so be it. That doesn't mean I won't play it, and it doesn't mean that I'm going to a console that's half the speed of my PC.
Slashdot Mirror
"chief open source officer", "chief strategy officer"
Huh? Is this what you call someone who sits around all day at a computer, playing solitaire?
I think you're the only person on Slashdot who understood my point, though I may have worded it a bit too trollishly (out of force of habit, I suppose).
Give me a break. And if these guys were distributed a closed source version of some GNU software or the Linux kernel, slashdot would be screaming for their heads on a platter. Engage in software piracy, and you're the little guy being persecuted by The Man.
Yeah. I still install nethack on every computer, even though it kind of bores me now. Even the variants are kind of boring. But, hey, the fact that I got 20-25 years of enjoyment out of one game is pretty damn amazing. I can't think of anything else like that, except MAYBE pac man or tetris.
Or Slackware jumping from 4.0 to 7.0, without any 5.0 or 6.0.
I can understand where he's coming from, but wouldn't Firefox, Open Office, etc also count as "bloatware" under this definition? I don't know about anyone else, but I often find that a bare operating system isn't really all that useful. If it were, then we'd still be using MS DOS 5.0 or BSD 4.4-lite/System V UNIX. I like the idea of having a few essential utilities (SiSoft Sandra, 7zip, Lavasoft AdAware), applications (Mozilla Firefox), and eye candy (extra fonts and desktop backgrounds) preinstalled on my computer, but -- and here's the problem -- I want it to be actually useful. I don't want crappy trial software from IBM, Microsoft, Symantic, etc. When I was building computers, I preinstalled everything on them that I automatically installed on my own PCs. Was that bloatware? If not, why not? It seems like a lot of people think a brand new PC should come with a blank hard drive, and I agree with that, if we're talking about power users and IT professionals, but for most home users, who can't figure out how to install a program from CD/DVD, is this still true? Should they have to go to a computer store and pay $100 just to have someone put a CD or DVD in the drive and click "next" a few times? That seems a bit evil. In my experience, a great majority of people require a period of hand-holding after buying their first PC, and I'm not just talking about grandmas and grandpas here. People of my generation (~35 years old) seem pretty damn clueless.
Both sides of the issue? What issue? There are no issues to teach! The only possible "controversy" comes from people who are not scientists and have something to lose by believing the prevailing theory. Nobody wants to teach the "controversy" that surrounds gravity; it's only when you contradict what people already believe that you end up with this kind of irrational resistance. What are these "open-minded" teachers supposed to do? Read from a Bible, so that kids are exposed to the fundamentalist Christian doctrine of creationism? That's for religion or philosophy class, not science class. Have the CEO of a multinational corporation come in and deny man-made climate change? That's for a politics class, not a science class. Have some crank who doesn't believe in the moon landings preach his conspiracy theory, as an equal opportunity to teaching physics?
This is bullshit, and the supporters know it. They just want to indoctrinate the kids with their message, rather than allowing only what they see as their opponents being able to indoctrinate the kids. If this were politics, philosophy, or religion class, I'd say, "Yes, that's a very good idea. All viewpoints should be heard." But it's not. It's science class, and science class doesn't lend itself to this kind of "all viewpoints are equally valid" philosophy. Just because you have an opinion doesn't mean that you should be able to teach it along side an actual theory.
oops. That should be "harder", not "easier". I don't know what I was thinking.
Slashdot is so fucking useless. They can't even figure out how to implement an "edit your post" feature.
Yeah. I was going to say that, but then I decided that my time would be better spent trolling an easier target.
Seriously? Ubuntu, cloud computing, and Dell. It's like they're actively trying to make me not give a shit.
No, of course not. But that won't stop Slashdot from posting flamebait.
Not in my experience.
First of all, Google tries to fix my query for me. I HATE that. I know exactly what I want to search for, and I don't want Google second-guessing me. It's gotten so bad that I can't search for anything without putting it in quotes, because Google will return entirely spurious results (e.g., I search for intel drivers, and I get three pages worth of intelligence tests from stupid quiz sites). Bing doesn't do that. If I search for intel, it only returns results for pages that include the term intel, like a search engine should. If I wanted to search for intelligence, I'd have included that in the search terms.
This second point isn't entirely Google's fault, and I feel a little bad for complaining about it, but Google is absolutely full of spammy and other worthless sites. Page after page of results are from spam/seo sites and, to a lesser extent, shitty blogs, twitter morons, and other social media sites. I don't give a fuck about any result from a social networking site (or, really, any "web 2.0" site). There are a handful of worthwhile blogs that I'd like included in my search results (blogs by people smarter than me: scientists, researchers, kernel developers, etc -- not some bullshit blog by an airhead with a soap box); it's Google's job to identify them, promote them to the first few results, and chuck the rest of them. Google fails miserably at doing this now, when it used to be amazing. When the first two or three pages are nothing but spam, social media, and blogs, I feel like punching babies. Bing, because of its newness, doesn't have such a cottage industry built around SEO and spam, though it does return a lot of pages from social networking and other "web 2.0" sites. It's like having all your searches restricted to Geocities. Ugh.
Finally (and this is more of a concern than an actual complaint), Google is slowly turning into a portal. I don't want e-mail. I don't want newsgroup access. I don't want news. I don't want instant messaging. I certainly don't want an account on some social networking service. I want to do an anonymous search on a search engine. Nothing more, nothing less. Luckily, the main Google page is still pretty clean and minimalistic, but I'm hesitant to believe that it's going to stay that way. In the past, search engines that "diversified" like that have always become very annoying to use, as they insistently prodded you to make use of their other services, so that they could make even more money off of you.
Bonus reason: for all their outrageous, illegal actions, Microsoft have never (to my knowledge) violated anyone's privacy. Google? There's a new controversy every few months. It's starting to make me feel very uncomfortable about using Google, and I'm not even especially protective of my privacy. Hell, I'd post my phone number here, if there were a field for it.
Maybe the problem is that you're not a girl.
The main consumers of graphic adventure games (Myst, Monkey Island, King's Quest, etc) were girls. The boys got violent, blood-soaked action games (DOOM was released the same year as Myst), and the girls got nice little story-based games, where you uncover a wacky adventure. That's not to say there weren't also violent graphical adventure games (Police Quest) or lewd ones (Leisure Suit Larry), but it was basically dominated by female-demographic titles.
Eventually, the genre died, as puzzle games took over the female demographic.
The quickest way to cause me to roll my eyes and discount anything else you have to say is to use terms like "visual novel" or "genre film". It says to me that you're so insecure about the subject's ability to stand on its own two feet that you have to invent overwrought euphemisms (seriously, "visual novel"? Does anyone call a movie a "motion novel"?).
God. It's a comic book.
I was iffy on reading the article in the first place, as it seemed too self-congratulatory and nostalgic, but I lost all motivation once I ran into that stop phrase.
How the fuck did you get that system to even power up with only 35W? RAM itself can use up most of that, unless you're using ancient PC100 RAM, and only 64MB of it.
Holy crap.
You finally used a capital letter!
Congratulations! Now, if we can just make that a habit...
I don't play games for little kids, so I can't help you with that. If your kids are looking for popular games, you can probably find a list on any good gaming site, though many of the games may be too violent for the Nintendo demographic.
If you're looking for Disneyesque games for kids, World of Warcraft might be up your alley.
Being autistic is a crime in Italy?
Bad news for Slashdotters.
Good God, you really are an Aspie, aren't you?
What?! OK. YOu continue gaming at 640x400, and keep telling yourself that it doesn't matter.
Yeah. Angelica Huston's career isn't doing too well.
The Wii doesn't even support HD.
What's not working? Dosbox usually works just fine for any game. Do you need help with the config file?
So what?
Not everyone wants to mod games, and not everyone wants to use mods. PC gaming has much more than just mods. My PC can kick the shit out of any console. That means that I can play games that would never run on a console, thanks to having specs twice as good as a PS3 or Xbox 360. If a game doesn't allow modding, then so be it. That doesn't mean I won't play it, and it doesn't mean that I'm going to a console that's half the speed of my PC.
You're seriously asking if Blizzard "gets" PC gaming?
Maybe you've heard of the Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft franchises? They're only the best-selling games of all time on the PC.
How are consoles different?