### We may as will keep believing in the illusion of free will because it's all we've really got.
The core problem with all that free will discussion boils basically down to two things: determinism or randomness
The fun part is, that it simply doesn't matter which one 'wins', since both are the same thing in the end anyway. If something is predetermined, but finding out its next step will change the results or if I can't find out the result in the first place, since its random leads to the same end: I don't can't know what will happen.
However in the end I find the whole discussion rather pointless to begin with, since neither myself being deterministic nor random comes to anything close to what I would call 'free will'. I mean what good is 'free will' when all it means that I behave randomly? Doesn't really sound any better then deterministic.
Discussion about free will in the broad philosophical terms just make much sense, since it doesn't change anything in real life.
it's a damn good game. In fact, it's probably the best single-player game of the year.
Its a lengthy game and a good game, but I definitely wouldn't call it the best. Its full of stupid fetch quests (bug hunt, statue hunt), hasn't really much of any story worth to talk about (neither Ganon nor Zelda play any role in almost all of the game, yet they are the main characters, even Midna isn't an exactly deep character either and all NPC are all boring and uninteresting, they don't even react to events in the game) and it is also extremely linear compared to all the other Zelda games before (its always very clear where the next dungeon is, dungeons never require any backtracking). Zelda:TP has a few tiny points where it gets interesting, but for most part is really just a mission-disk for Ocarina of Time plus better graphics. I'd put it in the spot for most overrated game of the year, but nowhere near best game of the year.
It's 60 new hours of Zelda goodness.
If you follow the main quest, which many people will do, since the game gives you little to no reason to ever explore anything, it shouldn't take you more then 35h to beat the game.
### Linux is easy to install for people who know what they're doing, and Linux is easy to install if it happens to like your hardware, and Linux is easy to install if you know a geek.
So its just as easy as Windows? Windows is *NOT* easy to install if you don't know what you are doing. Try to install a Windows on a Linux machine, without destroying the Linux boot loader for example, good luck with that. I also had numerous cases where a upgrading from a Win98 to WinXP or WinXP to Vista caused a lot of hardware to no longer work or bluescreen the system, thanks to lack of proper drivers.
### Linux NTFS support leaves quite a bit to be desired, like fully-functioning, reliable, and well-supported write support.
So what, I don't get full XFS, ReiserFS, EXT3 Support on Windows either and neither of these out of the box.
### The point is to get Linux mainstream. That requires either OEM distribution
Yes, or at least it requires computers with supported hardware and no preloaded OS. Windows is only popular because it is actually *HARD* to buy a PC without it. Very few people ever install a Windows system themself from scratch, many PCs don't even come with a clean Windows CD but only a custom recovery CD which will only work with that exact hardware.
### The difference is that the stuff needed to get Linux functioning is a lot harder for users than the stuff needed to get Windows functioning. (Kernel modules vs googling "spam blocker", "AIM" and installing the first hit.)
A lot of my hardware gets automatically detected in Linux these days, no googling required *AT ALL* it just works. Can't say the same thing about Windows. Neither do I have to google for AIM, since every Linux distro comes with a ton of ready to use instant messangers.
The thing is that Linux *ALREADY* is as easy as Windows, even easier in many spots. It for sure sucks in some others (installing non-distribution software is still very hard), but Windows isn't perfect either. That of course doesn't make Linux an instant mainstream OS, since you have a lot of vendor lock-in (fileformats, filesystems, etc), PC with preinstalled Windows and such that required a lot more effort from the user to get rid of then just continuing using Windows. All this however doesn't mean that Linux is harder then Windows, its different for sure and not a 100% drop in Windows replacement, but its not actually harder.
### "Installing a key logger is trivial..." if you're root. But see above.
No, its trivial when you are *not* root, thats the point. If Joe User has an account juser and also happens to be root on that same machine and uses both of these account in a normal non-paranoid way, i.e. type in his root password every once in a while or his user password for sudo, it absolutely trivial to catch that password for each and every program that wants to. Once the password is cough that program gets root instantly, no need for security holes beside getting access to the juser account in the first place.
Just to emphasis it again, the point is if a trojan has access to 'juser' account then it has access to the 'root', not instantly but very very quickly if it wants to. By using LD_PRELOAD and friends such a trojan can also make it hard to get detected, just like a rootkit.
### First you were going to restore everything through the package manager in a few minutes.
I think we are talking about different points. The package manager is just there to get your system up to date again *after* you wiped it clean and did a fresh reinstall. Unlike Windows where you might have dozens of manually downloaded and installed pieces of software lying around everywhere, you can restore a Linux with little to no effort. It of course gets easier if you have proper backups at hand, but even without them it just means typing in 'apt-get' a few more times to get all the software you need. Thats why I call/usr,/bin and friends 'worthless', they don't contain anything that you can't restore with very little extra effort.
### There is this thing called a backup.
Who runs regular backup on his desktop? Daily backup? Answer: very, very few people. If/home goes away pretty much everything of value on a computer is lost. Thats really all I am saying:/home has value,/usr doesn't, even a custom/usr/local install is trivially restored compared to a/home, which in turn means that the whole root/user separation really doesn't add practical value on a single-user system, since it only protects what isn't of value to begin with. It of course is another layer of obscurity and makes every break-in a little harder, so its a welcome one, but the root/user separation doesn't really add any more security over a Windows machine running everything has administrator on a single-user desktop (on multi-user systems things look of course very different, but thats not what we are talking about).
For those interested, the WiiLi.org Wiki is full of Wiimote examples using Python, just takes a handfull lines of code to get started with the Wiimote, its really easy.
I don't own a Wii, so here a simple question: Can the Wii do multitasking so that I could use the browser to look up a walkthrough while the game is running/paused in the background? Or do I have to quit the whole game to launch the browser as on the PSP?
### And even when a GUI alternative is present, 99% of the time, Linux gurus will 'help' newbies by telling them the magic words rather than teaching them how to use the GUI alternative.
This is actually not that bad. The reason is simply that CLI is text and forum posts are text as well. So its trivial to describe what the user should do and to copy output of programs into the post. Try that with a GUI where the required option might be a few levels deep hidden in some menu and the error message in a Window that doesn't allow selecting text for copy&paste or worse have a response that can't be captured at all like a quickly flashing window that disappears without any hint, describing that in a forum post properly without causing confusion is a nightmare.
And of course a CLI tool is often the real tool, so if you have a GUI program you often end up with two users using different wrappers for the same program or bugs being caused by the wrapper itself and not the underlying program, all those issues simply don't happen when you use the CLI tool in the first place.
All that said, good GUI tools are of course important, but they can't be seen in isolation. Very often they simply don't solve any problems, instead they only hide them often badly. The real problem is in many cases the underlying CLI tool, library or kernel interface.
### Tell a user to just apt-get this, and they've learnt nothing but a magic word,
With apt-get I have to disagree, that tool is trivial to use and not really a "magic word", since its also trivial to understand, I mean "apt-get install PROGRAM" is doing exactly what it seems like, its installing a program named PROGRAM, its hard to not get that. But there are other examples where "magic words" can be a real issue, like with things like X11 configuration, modelines and stuff, often neither of the posters in a forum understands them, they just happened to be auto-generated by some install script and 'work' and now they get posted around as a 'magic' cure for some problem. In those cases it would really help a lot if the underlying tool itself would have some more reasonable default and not require so much stuff that nobody really understands anyway. I for example really don't get why I still have to calculate modelines manually instead of just X11 providing reasonable defaults, since in basically all cases people just copy them blindly around anyway.
### and ONLY if the hardware is 100% supported by your distro. Otherwise, "easy" turns into trainwreck.
There might be a few cases where trying to install a Linux will lead to a "trainwreck", i.e. instant crash while trying to boot the install CD, but in by far the most cases the worst thing that can happen is that not all your hardware will be supported right out of the box and thus might need a little bit more manual configuration. Thats however by no means a 'trainwreak'.
If your graphics driver fails, you might need to fall back to the "nv" one without hardware acceleration or in the worst case the Vesa one, which should be by far enough to get you going till you find the time to get the full drivers up and running.
Beside, this really isn't Linux specific, if you install a Windows out of the box you can easily end up in a situation where it will simply blue-screen for no reason and be totally unusable, after all your Windows-CD is already a few years old and your motherboard brand new, so it won't have drivers for anything either. The only thing why you might have missed that experience is because your computer came with Windows preinstalled. With Linux you at least get a fresh install CD every few month, full of the newest drivers, with Windows you can just hope that your version will have enough drivers ready to get you going so that you can download the rest.
### But on my machine, Firefox, for instance, is/usr/bin/firefox, root:root, mode 755. You have to be root to trojan it.
A little wriggling with LD_PRELOAD or even just LD_LIBRARY_PATH should be enough to trojan that one, if done really clever, you wouldn't even notice, since your Bash would be trojaned as well, so no aliases PATH manipulation or stuff like that visible.
### If the root account is compromised, you cannot trust anything on the system.
Very true. The point however is that when the main user account, i.e. the one of the human being who happens to have the root password, is compromised you can't trust much of anything either. Installing a key logger is trivial, all the trojan then has to do is wait for the user to enter the root password, viola, root account is available. Even without root access, the trojan can affect pretty much everything by simply symlinks, LD_PRELOAD hacks, keylogger and stuff like that. I don't need to be root to steal your paypal password and neither do I need root to mail that password around the world.
I am not arguing that the root/user separation should go away, I am just saying that it provides *FAR* less security than some people seem to think, meaning close to none, even when ignoring the ease of gaining full root access, you have everything of value in/home anyway and to that the compromised user account has full access./bin,/usr,/var and friends simply don't matter, they can be restored in a few minutes by reinstalling the system,/home on the other side has real value and is unrecoverable and the root/user separation does nothing to protect it.
### Which is the *ONLY* thing that 99% of the console players want out of an online service!!
I kind of doubt that number. The most interesting thing for me about XBoxLive is that you have easy access to free demos, trailers and stuff. Sure, multiplayer is very nice as well, but having easy access to all those games, even if it are just demos or trial versions can provide a heck of a lot entertainment as well. And as far as I understand, you don't have to pay anything to get access to it, which you can't say about the Wii, where everything, beside Opera, requires you to pay, no demos, no trials, nada.
### SOlution to reload drive again this time with it being primary master, then turn it into slave.
Simply installing Grub properly would have already solved the problem, if you have a grub boot disk at hand its a matter of 30sec. Its not unnormal that Grub gets picky when you switch hard drives around, but I don't think the Windows boot loader would survive that either.
### Download video driver from Nvidia break Xwindows, after spending a few hours talking to a Linux fan boy give up and reload AGAIN.
Never had any trouble with them, not saying that you didn't have any. But looking at/var/log/Xorg.log would have been the right way to react, not reinstalling everything. Basically reinstalling everything is never doing any good, since it won't help you find out what went wrong.
### I didn't even reach the stage of trying to get some of my Games working on WINE.
Many won't work anyway, but then nobody claims that Linux is a 100% Windows replacement, it just happens that it can run some games who were build for Windows, but by far not all.
### Ask Linux online friends how to access NTFS drives in linux after 45 minutes of a MSN conversation, anouther hour browsing forums give up.
'mount/dev/hda1/mnt' or most likely your distribution configured it so that you could just go to/media/windows/ and have everything already usable. Now when I try to access my Linux partition under Windows it just suggest to format it, I see how that is so much better...
### It was only my desire to see Ubunutu and three solid days of browsing forums which got a semi working version of linux on my machine.
Thats kind of the same when you want to get a Windows into a fully usable operation system. It doesn't exactly provide a fully usable system directly out of the box, unlike Linux it doesn't even come with a fraction of the application you need for daily use.
What you miss is that Windows is at least as hard as installing a Linux, it just happens that you have used Windows for a lot longer then you used Linux, so it seems easier. You also seem to apply the Windows way of fixing things, aka. reinstalling, to Linux, which however doesn't work much at all. Linux is very good at providing reproducible results, so if something didn't work at once, there is a good chance that it will never work, no matter how much you reinstall it, figuring out the problem and fixing the problem itself however often leads to quick success.
That said, Linux is of course not without fault, but as said, the main trouble is maintaining it, not installing it in the first place. And as you see, you could get it installed yourself just fine, sure not 100% perfectly configured, but no OS is that right of the box.
### trying to get my Linksys wireless card to install under several distributions.
Classic newbie fault, pick a distribution, best is a very popular one like Ubuntu, and *stick with it*. If you switch distributions you are not solving your problem, you are wasting time. That of course doesn't mean that you won't have problems, but you will have a much easier time solving your problem and finding help.
BTW. I just tried installing a Bluetooth dongle under Windows Vista, however without success, all I got was a blue screen. Now let your grandma try to solve that... Under Linux on the other side it just worked, Plug&Play. I am not blaming Vista on this one, since its a third party driver that isn't Vista certified, it however just shows that sometimes stuff just doesn't work on the first try, under Windows just the same as on Linux.
### If root is compromised, you can end up with trojaned binaries,
So can you with a user account. Doesn't make much of the difference if the hacked binaries lay in/bin/ or in/home/juser/.bin/. If your account is compromised you are in trouble, doesn't make a difference if root is compromised as well or not on a single user machine, since everything that matters is in/home/ and you don't need root to touch that.
### Except that that's only true for a short time after install. What happens after a few updates--or even one?
Updates come from the distribution as well and just require typing 'apt-get upgrade' once to get them all back.
### Still think "that whole root/user separation doesn't provide much benefit at all"?
On a classic single-user desktop the benefit is in organization, not in security. Its simply nice to have user data separated and not scattered all over in the "Program Files" directories as is often the case in Windows. The security benefit however is close to zero, since everything that matters is under the user account anyway. If I rm -rf my home directory I couldn't care less if/usr is still alive and well.
### As in the case two years ago of thousands of Windows PCs (IE IFrame vulnerability) being compromised due to a compromised add server which supplied Web sites all over Europe, and at least some companies in the US.
So what, evil trojans can run under user rights just fine and cause pretty much the same havoc as with a root account.
I am sorry, but that is just bullshit. Linux has been extremely easy to install for years, it also happens to be a heck of a lot easier to install then Windows and lets not forget we have LiveCDs, so giving Linux a quick try is among the most trivial things you can do. Beside from that, installation is totally overrated, you do it like once in a lifetime and then never ever again, if you have trouble with it, find a friend that helps with it. Installation is a pretty much solved problem, with repartitioning being the only thing that requires some thinking.
The real problem isn't installation, but maintaining an Linux, simply things as installing a piece of software you have seen on a webpage can be extremely hard and time consuming, even for somebody with 10+ years of Linux experience, for your grandma such things are simply totally out of reach. Sure we have apt-get and friends, but those help absolutely nothing if a piece of software isn't in your distribution, which kind of is always the case with new software. Unless that changes and software installation becomes a no-brainer, Linux won't stand much a chance in the mass market.
And speaking about security, that one is totally overrated as well. On a desktop computer there is only one account that matters and that is the one of the user using it, lets call it juser. If root or jusers account is compromised doesn't make a difference, since in *both* cases the intruder has full access to everything that matters anyway. If there is something I really don't care about on my Linux then its/bin,/usr,/var and all those other root-write only directories that have absolutely nothing of valuable data, since it comes straight from the distribution CD and is trivial to recover, if/home/juser/ on the other side says bye-bye and you don't have a recent backup, then you can really be in trouble. On large multi-user installations things look different, but on your average desktop that whole root/user separation doesn't provide much benefit at all. That of course doesn't mean we should get rid of it, but you don't really need much more then a password-less sudo.
### The real solution to make Linux more mainstream is to make users more computer litterate.
Good luck trying that, it won't work, ever. The simple reason for that is that computers simply don't make sense. You can teach a person math, because math makes sense and is logic, but handling a computers relies in very large part simply on learning the quicks of its broken software, on Linux just the same as everywhere else. So knowledge from 5 years ago can be totally useless today, lots of computer knowledge is already worthless after a year. Computers simply don't make sense and it requires just way to much time for the average person to learn all the quirks and workarounds. The solution to all this is to simply *fix* all those quirks and bugs so that they never ever touch the users desktop. There simply isn't a logical reason why installing a tar.gz requires me to manually track down dependencies, why there is no undelete and why changing the mouse speed requires editing Xorg.conf while changing mouse acceleration does not, its just bugs and history that made the software the way it is today, there is no logical design principle behind all this. Simply fix it and don't try to teach the user why your software is broken and how to work around it, just a waste of time.
### If the 360 really has a weakness, its the utter lack of diversity in its games. It's a hell of generic sequelism.
Will the Wii have more then another Mario, Metroid, Wario and Zelda next year? Will the PS3 have much more then its MetalGear, GrandTurismo and friends? I kind of doubt it. If you want you can get Viva Pinata, Geometry Wars, any of those EA Sports Titles or simply stick with Dead Rising, BioShock, Gears of War, Assassins Creed and friends, sure, some might come out of genres you already know, but many of these are, as oposed to yet-another Mario, not sequels but original franchises.
There's been a persistent rumour about Nintendo making one or more VC games free as an xmas "gift". Any truth to this?
While there are no free VC games, Nintendo does offer a free game for christmas, its called Mission in Snowdriftland and is a great Flash based 2D jump'n run in the style of SuperMarioBros. Wondering if it will work in the Opera browser on the Wii once that gets released.
### Now that we're a few decades into it, most games are seen as rip-offs or sequels because so much has already been done.
The point isn't that certain gameplay elements have already been used, but that I have to play with the same characters as I already did 20 years ago, that is what gets boring. Give me a new story, new heroes and gameplay that fits them all together and I am happy. The gameplay doesn't have to be 100% original to create a good game, but the characters and story certainly need to get new every now and then.
### What does it take now?
On the DS it takes not any more then back then. That thing is easily to program and you don't need a 50 people stuff to create the graphics. I think one of the core problem today is simply that small dev teams have a hard time to actually publish anything, the big publishers use the handhelds for cheap porting and money making, they don't even care to try an original game.
### How can you infer gravity's direction purely from the local linear accelerations?
Games that use tilting for anything important don't expect the player to make any motions, so getting gravity in those games is easy since the motion vector is always [0,0,0] and the gravity vector is the only thing you ever see. Combining exact tilt with full motions should however get pretty tricky, might even be pretty much impossible for any real world scenarios.
### I suspect there is a separate tilt sensor, similar to what they have on planes.
Nope, there is just the accelerometer and the sensorbar, no other sensor in the Wiimote. That the sensorbar can detect tilt in one axis is simply the result of having two (or more) IR dots. available, tilt detection in racing games works via the accelerometer, the tilt info from the sensorbar might be used for those funny pointer rotations.
### Oh, and anyone know why there isn't yet a game that tries to find your wiimote's absolute location at all times by integrating accelerations from the last known data from the sensor bar?
Because its pretty much impossible to do, you don't even get exact tilt/motion information with the Wiimote, trying to use that already inexact data to estimate an absolute location would result in a mess. I don't expect to ever see true 1:1 mapping in any Wii game, since its simply impossible with the available sensory, the closest you can get is shown in WarioWare and Elebits.
### Who cares if the wiimote is off by a few inches from the actual display on the screen?
The problem is simply that adding proper calibration that would fix this issue once and for all would be trivial, but all the Wii offers is a generic "Above/Below TV" settings, which of course can't give you accurate Wiimote->Cursor pointing.
### while you mention starfox, I dont think this is a quick buck port,
Its not a "quick buck port", but its one of those lousy sequels that would have been better if they would never have created it in the first place, kind of in the good old tradition of StarFox games (first one awesome, second one good, rest junk).
### super mario 64 also was no straight port but altered
The graphics are a bit improved and a few levels added, it was a very well done port, but still just a port. I however do consider it to be the best game available on the DS, its Mario64 after all.
### but it had the usual first lineup problem they did not know how to get the controls right.
I consider Mario64 to be one of those games where the controls were almost perfect. Sure, the "touchscreen as analogstick" thing was a bad idea and pretty much unplayable, but you could simply say "so what?" and enjoy the game with the dpad. The camera control and map on the touchscreen worked very well and especially the map was a welcome addition. I would love if more games just slap a map down on the second screen instead of trying to get 'original'.
### Besides that there are things like another code, trauma center etc... which are very original and not original Nintendo.
Another Code is great, but its also very short and the normal puzzles just aren't very good, DS puzzle however can be quite fun. I would love to see some of what Another Code did in a full length game. Another Code just happens to be one of those games that just did feel more like half a game then a full one. I like the basic idea of Trauma Center, but the game itself turned to much into a click-as-fast-as-you-can mini-game type of thing, I would have preferred some more thinking when doing instead of pure reflexes when doing surgery.
### But it is like with every other nintendo system, the original concepts are more to be found on the nintendo side, and the most boring stuff usually is from EA, while the rest has a hard time to reach a good quality level to be able to rival with nintendo.
Yep, in the end I can't really blame the DS for what it is, since its more a problem with the gaming industry as a whole, then something specific with the DS. I just wish there would be more then a handful of original and good games on the DS, somehow in the old days of the Amiga and SNES there simply was more original stuff around then today, especially in terms of franchises. Sony, Mario and Yoshi are all fine, but where are some new jump'n run heroes?
Can't agree with you on that, just look at DS compared to PSP.
Look at NfS:Most Wanted, Tomb Raider or Burnout on the DS and tell me that those are not the perfect definition of making a quick buck with a crappy port. Those games are however only the tip of the iceberg, the DS has tons a bad games, in fact a lot more bad ones then the PSP, even so the DS has fewer games in total. Don't believe it? Just look at the ratings
There really aren't that much original games on the DS, lots of it are ports or sequels (Mario64, Advance Wars, Mario&Luigi, YoshiIsland2, Sonic, WarioWare, Final Fantasy), old franchises with new (worse) controls (Starfox, Metroid) or simply plain junk (to many to list). What sells the DS are in large part those 'non-games' BrainAge, Nintendogs and friends, most of those are first-party games by Nintendo. The PSP of course isn't without fault either, quite the oposite it gets far far to many PS2 games and far to little original ones, but that really just proves the point, if publishers see a way to make an easy buck, they will try doing so as hard as they can.
Overall I consider both DS and PSP a failures, hardware wise both do a good job at what they do, but in terms of games both are a huge disappointment, far away from the good old days of the SNES when there where a ton of original and good games created. On both the DS and the PSP I have a hard time finding anything interesting, since there simply is to little original and good stuff around (i.e. stuff like Yoshi Touch & Go is original, but simply not any good in the long run).
I don't see much change with that on the Wii, just like on the PSP and DS the developers can easily recycle a lot of old stuff. Why develop something new if the old stuff still sells enough? Even Nintendo is riding the sequel wave Mario, Zelda and Co. are all good and fine, but where is the Wii killer-game that goes beyond being a nice little Wiimote tech-demo?
### I agree laws are necessary however censorship of entertainment such as that occurs in Germany and Australia is to put it in Penn & Teller terms, bullshit.
mandatory ratings != censorship. There really isn't much practical difference between how it works in germany and in the USA in the end, only real difference is that 'no sell to minors' is enforced by state in germany, while it is enforced by the policy of large-cooperations (Walmart) in the USA. Another difference is that germany cares about violence while USA cares about sex, which is why Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy got cut in USA, while in germany it got an 'age 16' rating and nobody really ever cared about that bit of sex. Its still perfectly fine to buy 'age 16' games for a ten year old in germany, the only illegal part is to sell it to them, so if the parents buy it everything is fine.
### This whole Wiimote strap thing just made me wonder, why do Wiimotes fly as tennis rackets hardly ever fly?
Tennis rackets have special grip tape, are thicker at the bottom, weight more, are often held with two hands and last not least you are supposed to hit a ball with them, which will absorb a lot of the energy you put into your swing. Most importantly however tennis rackets are not advertised and meant to be used inside in front of multi thousand dollar tv sets. If your tennis racket goes flying you pick it back up, no big deal, if Wiimote goes flying at max speed it will going to hit something and hit it hard.
The problem is very simple: Nintendo did either not do enough testing under real world conditions or tested with a non-final product (i.e. wrist strap might have been changed in the final product), so the faulty strap got into the hand of the consumers. Its Nintendos fault and they are already fixing it by offering new wrist straps, so I don't see much point in the lawsuit, especially since it doesn't talk at all about the broken TVs.
And before somebody tells again that you shall not swing like a madman, why the hell is Nintendo advertising the Wiimote then that way?
Slashdot Mirror
### We may as will keep believing in the illusion of free will because it's all we've really got.
The core problem with all that free will discussion boils basically down to two things: determinism or randomness
The fun part is, that it simply doesn't matter which one 'wins', since both are the same thing in the end anyway. If something is predetermined, but finding out its next step will change the results or if I can't find out the result in the first place, since its random leads to the same end: I don't can't know what will happen.
However in the end I find the whole discussion rather pointless to begin with, since neither myself being deterministic nor random comes to anything close to what I would call 'free will'. I mean what good is 'free will' when all it means that I behave randomly? Doesn't really sound any better then deterministic.
Discussion about free will in the broad philosophical terms just make much sense, since it doesn't change anything in real life.
You probally posted in "HTML Formatted" mode instead of "Plain Old Text" mode (little box right beside "Submit").
Its a lengthy game and a good game, but I definitely wouldn't call it the best. Its full of stupid fetch quests (bug hunt, statue hunt), hasn't really much of any story worth to talk about (neither Ganon nor Zelda play any role in almost all of the game, yet they are the main characters, even Midna isn't an exactly deep character either and all NPC are all boring and uninteresting, they don't even react to events in the game) and it is also extremely linear compared to all the other Zelda games before (its always very clear where the next dungeon is, dungeons never require any backtracking). Zelda:TP has a few tiny points where it gets interesting, but for most part is really just a mission-disk for Ocarina of Time plus better graphics. I'd put it in the spot for most overrated game of the year, but nowhere near best game of the year.
If you follow the main quest, which many people will do, since the game gives you little to no reason to ever explore anything, it shouldn't take you more then 35h to beat the game.
### Linux is easy to install for people who know what they're doing, and Linux is easy to install if it happens to like your hardware, and Linux is easy to install if you know a geek.
So its just as easy as Windows? Windows is *NOT* easy to install if you don't know what you are doing. Try to install a Windows on a Linux machine, without destroying the Linux boot loader for example, good luck with that. I also had numerous cases where a upgrading from a Win98 to WinXP or WinXP to Vista caused a lot of hardware to no longer work or bluescreen the system, thanks to lack of proper drivers.
### Linux NTFS support leaves quite a bit to be desired, like fully-functioning, reliable, and well-supported write support.
So what, I don't get full XFS, ReiserFS, EXT3 Support on Windows either and neither of these out of the box.
### The point is to get Linux mainstream. That requires either OEM distribution
Yes, or at least it requires computers with supported hardware and no preloaded OS. Windows is only popular because it is actually *HARD* to buy a PC without it. Very few people ever install a Windows system themself from scratch, many PCs don't even come with a clean Windows CD but only a custom recovery CD which will only work with that exact hardware.
### The difference is that the stuff needed to get Linux functioning is a lot harder for users than the stuff needed to get Windows functioning. (Kernel modules vs googling "spam blocker", "AIM" and installing the first hit.)
A lot of my hardware gets automatically detected in Linux these days, no googling required *AT ALL* it just works. Can't say the same thing about Windows. Neither do I have to google for AIM, since every Linux distro comes with a ton of ready to use instant messangers.
The thing is that Linux *ALREADY* is as easy as Windows, even easier in many spots. It for sure sucks in some others (installing non-distribution software is still very hard), but Windows isn't perfect either. That of course doesn't make Linux an instant mainstream OS, since you have a lot of vendor lock-in (fileformats, filesystems, etc), PC with preinstalled Windows and such that required a lot more effort from the user to get rid of then just continuing using Windows. All this however doesn't mean that Linux is harder then Windows, its different for sure and not a 100% drop in Windows replacement, but its not actually harder.
### "Installing a key logger is trivial..." if you're root. But see above.
/usr, /bin and friends 'worthless', they don't contain anything that you can't restore with very little extra effort.
/home goes away pretty much everything of value on a computer is lost. Thats really all I am saying: /home has value, /usr doesn't, even a custom /usr/local install is trivially restored compared to a /home, which in turn means that the whole root/user separation really doesn't add practical value on a single-user system, since it only protects what isn't of value to begin with. It of course is another layer of obscurity and makes every break-in a little harder, so its a welcome one, but the root/user separation doesn't really add any more security over a Windows machine running everything has administrator on a single-user desktop (on multi-user systems things look of course very different, but thats not what we are talking about).
No, its trivial when you are *not* root, thats the point. If Joe User has an account juser and also happens to be root on that same machine and uses both of these account in a normal non-paranoid way, i.e. type in his root password every once in a while or his user password for sudo, it absolutely trivial to catch that password for each and every program that wants to. Once the password is cough that program gets root instantly, no need for security holes beside getting access to the juser account in the first place.
Just to emphasis it again, the point is if a trojan has access to 'juser' account then it has access to the 'root', not instantly but very very quickly if it wants to. By using LD_PRELOAD and friends such a trojan can also make it hard to get detected, just like a rootkit.
### First you were going to restore everything through the package manager in a few minutes.
I think we are talking about different points. The package manager is just there to get your system up to date again *after* you wiped it clean and did a fresh reinstall. Unlike Windows where you might have dozens of manually downloaded and installed pieces of software lying around everywhere, you can restore a Linux with little to no effort. It of course gets easier if you have proper backups at hand, but even without them it just means typing in 'apt-get' a few more times to get all the software you need. Thats why I call
### There is this thing called a backup.
Who runs regular backup on his desktop? Daily backup? Answer: very, very few people. If
For those interested, the WiiLi.org Wiki is full of Wiimote examples using Python, just takes a handfull lines of code to get started with the Wiimote, its really easy.
I don't own a Wii, so here a simple question: Can the Wii do multitasking so that I could use the browser to look up a walkthrough while the game is running/paused in the background? Or do I have to quit the whole game to launch the browser as on the PSP?
### And even when a GUI alternative is present, 99% of the time, Linux gurus will 'help' newbies by telling them the magic words rather than teaching them how to use the GUI alternative.
This is actually not that bad. The reason is simply that CLI is text and forum posts are text as well. So its trivial to describe what the user should do and to copy output of programs into the post. Try that with a GUI where the required option might be a few levels deep hidden in some menu and the error message in a Window that doesn't allow selecting text for copy&paste or worse have a response that can't be captured at all like a quickly flashing window that disappears without any hint, describing that in a forum post properly without causing confusion is a nightmare.
And of course a CLI tool is often the real tool, so if you have a GUI program you often end up with two users using different wrappers for the same program or bugs being caused by the wrapper itself and not the underlying program, all those issues simply don't happen when you use the CLI tool in the first place.
All that said, good GUI tools are of course important, but they can't be seen in isolation. Very often they simply don't solve any problems, instead they only hide them often badly. The real problem is in many cases the underlying CLI tool, library or kernel interface.
### Tell a user to just apt-get this, and they've learnt nothing but a magic word,
With apt-get I have to disagree, that tool is trivial to use and not really a "magic word", since its also trivial to understand, I mean "apt-get install PROGRAM" is doing exactly what it seems like, its installing a program named PROGRAM, its hard to not get that. But there are other examples where "magic words" can be a real issue, like with things like X11 configuration, modelines and stuff, often neither of the posters in a forum understands them, they just happened to be auto-generated by some install script and 'work' and now they get posted around as a 'magic' cure for some problem. In those cases it would really help a lot if the underlying tool itself would have some more reasonable default and not require so much stuff that nobody really understands anyway. I for example really don't get why I still have to calculate modelines manually instead of just X11 providing reasonable defaults, since in basically all cases people just copy them blindly around anyway.
### and ONLY if the hardware is 100% supported by your distro. Otherwise, "easy" turns into trainwreck.
There might be a few cases where trying to install a Linux will lead to a "trainwreck", i.e. instant crash while trying to boot the install CD, but in by far the most cases the worst thing that can happen is that not all your hardware will be supported right out of the box and thus might need a little bit more manual configuration. Thats however by no means a 'trainwreak'.
If your graphics driver fails, you might need to fall back to the "nv" one without hardware acceleration or in the worst case the Vesa one, which should be by far enough to get you going till you find the time to get the full drivers up and running.
Beside, this really isn't Linux specific, if you install a Windows out of the box you can easily end up in a situation where it will simply blue-screen for no reason and be totally unusable, after all your Windows-CD is already a few years old and your motherboard brand new, so it won't have drivers for anything either. The only thing why you might have missed that experience is because your computer came with Windows preinstalled. With Linux you at least get a fresh install CD every few month, full of the newest drivers, with Windows you can just hope that your version will have enough drivers ready to get you going so that you can download the rest.
### But on my machine, Firefox, for instance, is /usr/bin/firefox, root:root, mode 755. You have to be root to trojan it.
/home anyway and to that the compromised user account has full access. /bin, /usr, /var and friends simply don't matter, they can be restored in a few minutes by reinstalling the system, /home on the other side has real value and is unrecoverable and the root/user separation does nothing to protect it.
A little wriggling with LD_PRELOAD or even just LD_LIBRARY_PATH should be enough to trojan that one, if done really clever, you wouldn't even notice, since your Bash would be trojaned as well, so no aliases PATH manipulation or stuff like that visible.
### If the root account is compromised, you cannot trust anything on the system.
Very true. The point however is that when the main user account, i.e. the one of the human being who happens to have the root password, is compromised you can't trust much of anything either. Installing a key logger is trivial, all the trojan then has to do is wait for the user to enter the root password, viola, root account is available. Even without root access, the trojan can affect pretty much everything by simply symlinks, LD_PRELOAD hacks, keylogger and stuff like that. I don't need to be root to steal your paypal password and neither do I need root to mail that password around the world.
I am not arguing that the root/user separation should go away, I am just saying that it provides *FAR* less security than some people seem to think, meaning close to none, even when ignoring the ease of gaining full root access, you have everything of value in
### Which is the *ONLY* thing that 99% of the console players want out of an online service!!
I kind of doubt that number. The most interesting thing for me about XBoxLive is that you have easy access to free demos, trailers and stuff. Sure, multiplayer is very nice as well, but having easy access to all those games, even if it are just demos or trial versions can provide a heck of a lot entertainment as well. And as far as I understand, you don't have to pay anything to get access to it, which you can't say about the Wii, where everything, beside Opera, requires you to pay, no demos, no trials, nada.
### SOlution to reload drive again this time with it being primary master, then turn it into slave.
/var/log/Xorg.log would have been the right way to react, not reinstalling everything. Basically reinstalling everything is never doing any good, since it won't help you find out what went wrong.
/dev/hda1 /mnt' or most likely your distribution configured it so that you could just go to /media/windows/ and have everything already usable. Now when I try to access my Linux partition under Windows it just suggest to format it, I see how that is so much better...
Simply installing Grub properly would have already solved the problem, if you have a grub boot disk at hand its a matter of 30sec. Its not unnormal that Grub gets picky when you switch hard drives around, but I don't think the Windows boot loader would survive that either.
### Download video driver from Nvidia break Xwindows, after spending a few hours talking to a Linux fan boy give up and reload AGAIN.
Never had any trouble with them, not saying that you didn't have any. But looking at
### I didn't even reach the stage of trying to get some of my Games working on WINE.
Many won't work anyway, but then nobody claims that Linux is a 100% Windows replacement, it just happens that it can run some games who were build for Windows, but by far not all.
### Ask Linux online friends how to access NTFS drives in linux after 45 minutes of a MSN conversation, anouther hour browsing forums give up.
'mount
### It was only my desire to see Ubunutu and three solid days of browsing forums which got a semi working version of linux on my machine.
Thats kind of the same when you want to get a Windows into a fully usable operation system. It doesn't exactly provide a fully usable system directly out of the box, unlike Linux it doesn't even come with a fraction of the application you need for daily use.
What you miss is that Windows is at least as hard as installing a Linux, it just happens that you have used Windows for a lot longer then you used Linux, so it seems easier. You also seem to apply the Windows way of fixing things, aka. reinstalling, to Linux, which however doesn't work much at all. Linux is very good at providing reproducible results, so if something didn't work at once, there is a good chance that it will never work, no matter how much you reinstall it, figuring out the problem and fixing the problem itself however often leads to quick success.
That said, Linux is of course not without fault, but as said, the main trouble is maintaining it, not installing it in the first place. And as you see, you could get it installed yourself just fine, sure not 100% perfectly configured, but no OS is that right of the box.
### trying to get my Linksys wireless card to install under several distributions.
Classic newbie fault, pick a distribution, best is a very popular one like Ubuntu, and *stick with it*. If you switch distributions you are not solving your problem, you are wasting time. That of course doesn't mean that you won't have problems, but you will have a much easier time solving your problem and finding help.
BTW. I just tried installing a Bluetooth dongle under Windows Vista, however without success, all I got was a blue screen. Now let your grandma try to solve that... Under Linux on the other side it just worked, Plug&Play. I am not blaming Vista on this one, since its a third party driver that isn't Vista certified, it however just shows that sometimes stuff just doesn't work on the first try, under Windows just the same as on Linux.
### If root is compromised, you can end up with trojaned binaries,
/bin/ or in /home/juser/.bin/. If your account is compromised you are in trouble, doesn't make a difference if root is compromised as well or not on a single user machine, since everything that matters is in /home/ and you don't need root to touch that.
/usr is still alive and well.
So can you with a user account. Doesn't make much of the difference if the hacked binaries lay in
### Except that that's only true for a short time after install. What happens after a few updates--or even one?
Updates come from the distribution as well and just require typing 'apt-get upgrade' once to get them all back.
### Still think "that whole root/user separation doesn't provide much benefit at all"?
On a classic single-user desktop the benefit is in organization, not in security. Its simply nice to have user data separated and not scattered all over in the "Program Files" directories as is often the case in Windows. The security benefit however is close to zero, since everything that matters is under the user account anyway. If I rm -rf my home directory I couldn't care less if
### As in the case two years ago of thousands of Windows PCs (IE IFrame vulnerability) being compromised due to a compromised add server which supplied Web sites all over Europe, and at least some companies in the US.
So what, evil trojans can run under user rights just fine and cause pretty much the same havoc as with a root account.
### Ease of installation.
/bin, /usr, /var and all those other root-write only directories that have absolutely nothing of valuable data, since it comes straight from the distribution CD and is trivial to recover, if /home/juser/ on the other side says bye-bye and you don't have a recent backup, then you can really be in trouble. On large multi-user installations things look different, but on your average desktop that whole root/user separation doesn't provide much benefit at all. That of course doesn't mean we should get rid of it, but you don't really need much more then a password-less sudo.
I am sorry, but that is just bullshit. Linux has been extremely easy to install for years, it also happens to be a heck of a lot easier to install then Windows and lets not forget we have LiveCDs, so giving Linux a quick try is among the most trivial things you can do. Beside from that, installation is totally overrated, you do it like once in a lifetime and then never ever again, if you have trouble with it, find a friend that helps with it. Installation is a pretty much solved problem, with repartitioning being the only thing that requires some thinking.
The real problem isn't installation, but maintaining an Linux, simply things as installing a piece of software you have seen on a webpage can be extremely hard and time consuming, even for somebody with 10+ years of Linux experience, for your grandma such things are simply totally out of reach. Sure we have apt-get and friends, but those help absolutely nothing if a piece of software isn't in your distribution, which kind of is always the case with new software. Unless that changes and software installation becomes a no-brainer, Linux won't stand much a chance in the mass market.
And speaking about security, that one is totally overrated as well. On a desktop computer there is only one account that matters and that is the one of the user using it, lets call it juser. If root or jusers account is compromised doesn't make a difference, since in *both* cases the intruder has full access to everything that matters anyway. If there is something I really don't care about on my Linux then its
### The real solution to make Linux more mainstream is to make users more computer litterate.
Good luck trying that, it won't work, ever. The simple reason for that is that computers simply don't make sense. You can teach a person math, because math makes sense and is logic, but handling a computers relies in very large part simply on learning the quicks of its broken software, on Linux just the same as everywhere else. So knowledge from 5 years ago can be totally useless today, lots of computer knowledge is already worthless after a year. Computers simply don't make sense and it requires just way to much time for the average person to learn all the quirks and workarounds. The solution to all this is to simply *fix* all those quirks and bugs so that they never ever touch the users desktop. There simply isn't a logical reason why installing a tar.gz requires me to manually track down dependencies, why there is no undelete and why changing the mouse speed requires editing Xorg.conf while changing mouse acceleration does not, its just bugs and history that made the software the way it is today, there is no logical design principle behind all this. Simply fix it and don't try to teach the user why your software is broken and how to work around it, just a waste of time.
### If the 360 really has a weakness, its the utter lack of diversity in its games. It's a hell of generic sequelism.
Will the Wii have more then another Mario, Metroid, Wario and Zelda next year? Will the PS3 have much more then its MetalGear, GrandTurismo and friends? I kind of doubt it. If you want you can get Viva Pinata, Geometry Wars, any of those EA Sports Titles or simply stick with Dead Rising, BioShock, Gears of War, Assassins Creed and friends, sure, some might come out of genres you already know, but many of these are, as oposed to yet-another Mario, not sequels but original franchises.
While there are no free VC games, Nintendo does offer a free game for christmas, its called Mission in Snowdriftland and is a great Flash based 2D jump'n run in the style of SuperMarioBros. Wondering if it will work in the Opera browser on the Wii once that gets released.
### Now that we're a few decades into it, most games are seen as rip-offs or sequels because so much has already been done.
The point isn't that certain gameplay elements have already been used, but that I have to play with the same characters as I already did 20 years ago, that is what gets boring. Give me a new story, new heroes and gameplay that fits them all together and I am happy. The gameplay doesn't have to be 100% original to create a good game, but the characters and story certainly need to get new every now and then.
### What does it take now?
On the DS it takes not any more then back then. That thing is easily to program and you don't need a 50 people stuff to create the graphics. I think one of the core problem today is simply that small dev teams have a hard time to actually publish anything, the big publishers use the handhelds for cheap porting and money making, they don't even care to try an original game.
### How can you infer gravity's direction purely from the local linear accelerations?
Games that use tilting for anything important don't expect the player to make any motions, so getting gravity in those games is easy since the motion vector is always [0,0,0] and the gravity vector is the only thing you ever see. Combining exact tilt with full motions should however get pretty tricky, might even be pretty much impossible for any real world scenarios.
### I suspect there is a separate tilt sensor, similar to what they have on planes.
Nope, there is just the accelerometer and the sensorbar, no other sensor in the Wiimote. That the sensorbar can detect tilt in one axis is simply the result of having two (or more) IR dots. available, tilt detection in racing games works via the accelerometer, the tilt info from the sensorbar might be used for those funny pointer rotations.
### Oh, and anyone know why there isn't yet a game that tries to find your wiimote's absolute location at all times by integrating accelerations from the last known data from the sensor bar?
Because its pretty much impossible to do, you don't even get exact tilt/motion information with the Wiimote, trying to use that already inexact data to estimate an absolute location would result in a mess. I don't expect to ever see true 1:1 mapping in any Wii game, since its simply impossible with the available sensory, the closest you can get is shown in WarioWare and Elebits.
### Who cares if the wiimote is off by a few inches from the actual display on the screen? The problem is simply that adding proper calibration that would fix this issue once and for all would be trivial, but all the Wii offers is a generic "Above/Below TV" settings, which of course can't give you accurate Wiimote->Cursor pointing.
### while you mention starfox, I dont think this is a quick buck port,
Its not a "quick buck port", but its one of those lousy sequels that would have been better if they would never have created it in the first place, kind of in the good old tradition of StarFox games (first one awesome, second one good, rest junk).
### super mario 64 also was no straight port but altered
The graphics are a bit improved and a few levels added, it was a very well done port, but still just a port. I however do consider it to be the best game available on the DS, its Mario64 after all.
### but it had the usual first lineup problem they did not know how to get the controls right.
I consider Mario64 to be one of those games where the controls were almost perfect. Sure, the "touchscreen as analogstick" thing was a bad idea and pretty much unplayable, but you could simply say "so what?" and enjoy the game with the dpad. The camera control and map on the touchscreen worked very well and especially the map was a welcome addition. I would love if more games just slap a map down on the second screen instead of trying to get 'original'.
### Besides that there are things like another code, trauma center etc... which are very original and not original Nintendo.
Another Code is great, but its also very short and the normal puzzles just aren't very good, DS puzzle however can be quite fun. I would love to see some of what Another Code did in a full length game. Another Code just happens to be one of those games that just did feel more like half a game then a full one. I like the basic idea of Trauma Center, but the game itself turned to much into a click-as-fast-as-you-can mini-game type of thing, I would have preferred some more thinking when doing instead of pure reflexes when doing surgery.
### But it is like with every other nintendo system, the original concepts are more to be found on the nintendo side, and the most boring stuff usually is from EA, while the rest has a hard time to reach a good quality level to be able to rival with nintendo.
Yep, in the end I can't really blame the DS for what it is, since its more a problem with the gaming industry as a whole, then something specific with the DS. I just wish there would be more then a handful of original and good games on the DS, somehow in the old days of the Amiga and SNES there simply was more original stuff around then today, especially in terms of franchises. Sony, Mario and Yoshi are all fine, but where are some new jump'n run heroes?
Look at NfS:Most Wanted, Tomb Raider or Burnout on the DS and tell me that those are not the perfect definition of making a quick buck with a crappy port. Those games are however only the tip of the iceberg, the DS has tons a bad games, in fact a lot more bad ones then the PSP, even so the DS has fewer games in total. Don't believe it? Just look at the ratings
There really aren't that much original games on the DS, lots of it are ports or sequels (Mario64, Advance Wars, Mario&Luigi, YoshiIsland2, Sonic, WarioWare, Final Fantasy), old franchises with new (worse) controls (Starfox, Metroid) or simply plain junk (to many to list). What sells the DS are in large part those 'non-games' BrainAge, Nintendogs and friends, most of those are first-party games by Nintendo. The PSP of course isn't without fault either, quite the oposite it gets far far to many PS2 games and far to little original ones, but that really just proves the point, if publishers see a way to make an easy buck, they will try doing so as hard as they can.
Overall I consider both DS and PSP a failures, hardware wise both do a good job at what they do, but in terms of games both are a huge disappointment, far away from the good old days of the SNES when there where a ton of original and good games created. On both the DS and the PSP I have a hard time finding anything interesting, since there simply is to little original and good stuff around (i.e. stuff like Yoshi Touch & Go is original, but simply not any good in the long run).
I don't see much change with that on the Wii, just like on the PSP and DS the developers can easily recycle a lot of old stuff. Why develop something new if the old stuff still sells enough? Even Nintendo is riding the sequel wave Mario, Zelda and Co. are all good and fine, but where is the Wii killer-game that goes beyond being a nice little Wiimote tech-demo?
### I agree laws are necessary however censorship of entertainment such as that occurs in Germany and Australia is to put it in Penn & Teller terms, bullshit.
mandatory ratings != censorship. There really isn't much practical difference between how it works in germany and in the USA in the end, only real difference is that 'no sell to minors' is enforced by state in germany, while it is enforced by the policy of large-cooperations (Walmart) in the USA. Another difference is that germany cares about violence while USA cares about sex, which is why Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy got cut in USA, while in germany it got an 'age 16' rating and nobody really ever cared about that bit of sex. Its still perfectly fine to buy 'age 16' games for a ten year old in germany, the only illegal part is to sell it to them, so if the parents buy it everything is fine.
### This whole Wiimote strap thing just made me wonder, why do Wiimotes fly as tennis rackets hardly ever fly?
Tennis rackets have special grip tape, are thicker at the bottom, weight more, are often held with two hands and last not least you are supposed to hit a ball with them, which will absorb a lot of the energy you put into your swing. Most importantly however tennis rackets are not advertised and meant to be used inside in front of multi thousand dollar tv sets. If your tennis racket goes flying you pick it back up, no big deal, if Wiimote goes flying at max speed it will going to hit something and hit it hard.
The problem is very simple: Nintendo did either not do enough testing under real world conditions or tested with a non-final product (i.e. wrist strap might have been changed in the final product), so the faulty strap got into the hand of the consumers. Its Nintendos fault and they are already fixing it by offering new wrist straps, so I don't see much point in the lawsuit, especially since it doesn't talk at all about the broken TVs.
And before somebody tells again that you shall not swing like a madman, why the hell is Nintendo advertising the Wiimote then that way?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE4Q5yqW9wM
### I don't want to deal with some joker naming a file "-rf" or something like that
'--' helps with that on GNU tools, every argument after '--' is handled as non-option argument (i.e. file in most cases):
$ rm -- -rf
rm: cannot remove `-rf': No such file or directory