So this is "better" just because it is consistent?
Yes, being consistent is a big plus. Beside that qwerty isn't that bad and especially its still superior to alphabetic layout.
Alphabetic isnt all bad
Alphabetic is bad, since it doesn't help you at all. You don't know where the rows break and so you have to manually search for the letters and since you end up searching you could use an optimized layout in the first place, which wouldn't result in slowing down newbie, but in increasing long time users speed.
The problem with InstallShield is that it is per-Application, every App still has a slightly different install interface and some are even broken (installing in/Program File/ instead of the localized/Programme/), etc. So handling it in a uniform way OS wide would be better. But I agree that the current situation with having basically no standard way to build a binary package that will run on more than a single distro is a major pain with Linux, it results in tons of duplicate work, current packaging Systems completly fail to address this issue. The Linux Standard Base might help here, even so I find the choice for rpm a bit ugly.
The problem is that Unix failed to provide a way to create 'small and beautiful' things that do a little bit more than just read a stream of bytes and output it again. As soon as it comes to GUIs or well, anything that is a bit more complicated, the programs always had to develop there own huge framework, before they could even start developing small and beautifull. Emacs is small and beatifull in its own sense, dozens of small Elisps scripts at work, unlukily huge framework below that. Same with Perl, KDE, Gnome, Gimp and lots of other stuff, all come with there own more or less incompatible framework.
Unix did a lot of things right, but it kind of stalled 20 years ago and now we are stuck with dozens of incompatible duplicate frameworks around us...
I have to disagree with that, at least partly. The problem with Blenders UI is not getting used to it, the problem is the UI itself. I agree that it isn't fundamentally flawed and there are a lot things that I really really like about it. Being able to simple scroll the button-bar if it doesn't fit on the screen, is much more intuitive and effective than these ugly drop-down menu with the rest of the buttons that kde provides, being able to run in fullscreen is another thing. But having a whole lot of function hidden under secret Ctrl-Alt-somebutton shurtcut does nothing good to the UI, it violates the principell of visibility. Sure there is nothing wrong with having a shortcut, but there should be some context sensitive way to have a look at the currently available functions. Blender also has the problem of often providing no feedback to the user, you press a button or menu entry which doesn't work cause you are in the wrong mode at the moment and Blender gives you zero feedback about what is happening. Emacs has similar problems, but with 'M-x apropos' or 'M-x' in general there is at least always a way to browse through the available functions (still not very context sentitive, but at least it gives error messages in the modline).
Blender UI is not bad, but it could be a whole lot better with a bit more visibility. Luckily it is already getting quite a bit better with the last few releases and turning the tooltips on also helps alot.
Another more serious problem with Blender is the lack of functionality, if you look at Wings3d there are a lot of nice modeling functions that you can't do in Blender without a lot of manual work, which can often make the Blender UI feel not good in some situations, since it simply lacks the functionality.
The #include statement does a simply copy&paste of the content of the include file into your code, if you use #include or manually insert the whole include file doesn't make a difference, thus you are creating a work that contains parts of the GPL'ed code.
While this is a nice example, I wonder if there really is an advantage to this kind of file system, because it seems like it takes more effort to keep track of all those sub-files instead of keeping all the info in a single file. Anyone can shed some light on this?
There is no need to keep track of them manually, after you simply handle your mp3 normally and the filesystem will keep track of the metadata. Its actually inverse, with todays filesystems you have to handle metadata yourself, since the filesystem has no way to know which metadata belongs to which files. Sure with mp3, which can keep metadata inside the file itself, it isn't a big problem, but with other fileformats it is. Beside that new filesystems would allow you to simply manipulate the meta data with 'echo', 'cp' and friends, no need to learn a new tool for each and every fileformat.
Also, what if I format my partitions with different file systems, say Reiserfs 4 and ext3, could there be any imcompatibility issues?
Sure there will be a few compability issues, but they should be handleable by the implementation. If your other filesystem doesn't support metadata, no problem, pack it into a seperate.xml document or so or move it into the file itself, if the filetype supports that.
All the points you list there are caused by the illegal distributing of drugs caused by the current laws, not by the drugs themself. If drugs would be come legal nearly all drug-problems you list there would simply go away (no dealer, since you could by stuff in a pharmacy, no bad-fix since stuff would be clean, etc.).
In 1981, a little company called Sierra On-Line (a much different company in those days) wrote a game called Jawbreaker. Atari said that it captured the "magic of Pac-Man", and was therefore a violation of their copyright. Read about it. Then read about later similar suits. Learn.
As far as I remember Nintendo managed it in a similar situation to close down "Gina Sisters", which was basically "Mario Bros." clone with different graphics and different levels, but beside that pretty similar in look and gameplay. They didn't even ran on the same machine, Mario was for Nintendo consoles, while Giana was for C64s.
Interfaces aren't completly copyrightable, but it seems to depend on the specific case and on the people involved.
I don't like what Blizzard did, but I can understand them. After all FreeCraft is a Warcraft2 ripoff, pixel-by-pixel, its not a game that happens to just be based on the same ideas and it isn't a generic RTS engine either at the moment.
Freecraft can run WC2 graphics, which would require to own a legal Warcraft2 CD, thats all.
The free graphic sets did by far not look like Warcraft2, sure they reasembled a few concepts and building types, but thats basically what every RTS does. Its not like Blizzard invented the RTS, that was what Westwoood has done with Dune.
The problem with apt or all package dependency tracking systems in general is that they only work smoothly when all packages come from a single official source, as soon as a unofficial rpm, deb or tar.gz enters the place since are starting to break on all fronts, either you can't compile stuff correctly since its picking includes from/usr/local/ and libraries from/usr/lib, package versions from different sources doesn't match leading to unresolvable dependencies, files from one package overriding another or binary incompabilities arise. Sure there are workarounds and fixes for all these problems, but they all require quite a lot of knowledge about what is going on and they all require time to apply. No matter how much knowledge you have, such stuff wastes a lot of time until you finally figured out what went wrong.
As long as Linux Systems install all stuff into a single directory tree none of these problems is going away. Adding dependency trackers to software doesn't solve the problem, but simply works around it, the solution would be to get rid of most of the dependencies and make software independent of the underlaying system as much as possible, which wouldn't even require any bloat if done correctly. After all I would like to install two versions of a single package parellely one day without messing with --prefix and miles long PATH variables...
JPEG can't reproduce the original pixels reliably without balloning the file size way beyond the PNG.
Huh? If I use Gimp with highest quality setting for JPEG on save, I get a JPEG that is around 40% of the size of the same image as PNG. There is no way to get the JPEG actually bigger than the PNG. That said, this was using a normal 24bit photograph, not some kind of low-color vector-like image, for which your argument is actually true.
Neither is there a single place to go for patches in the Open Source world, Debian and Redhat are fine and all, but so far I haven't seen a single GNU/Linux system that could live without compiling a handfull packages manuelly from the official source, bypassing the packaging system and thus making automatic updates not possible.
Things have shifted away from LucasArts, the controlls in GrimFandango where already awfull and in Monkey4 they combined them with a lot of recycled story and gags. LucasArts adventure games aren't really what they used to be these days.
But there are a handfull of smaller companies who still create good adventure games, stuff like Syberia, The Longest Journey or Runaway. All of them still use the tradional point and click interface and there is even a sequel planed for The Longest Journey so not all is lost.
For those who need an incentive to try Debian, the keyword is stability; their QA process is what make the distrib lag behind in terms of latest versions, but the benefit is a rock solid platform.
Well, I heard this quite a few times now, but my own experience is quite a bit different. Debian stable is at first old, not stable. I have run in quite a few showstopper bugs that were already fixed in upstream and in unstable but which never made it into stable, since the QA process which makes it quite hard for new upstream to ever make it into stable.
I think the main problem here is that the freeze is globally to all packages instead of local to small package groups, in a lot of cases a package is still heavily under development when the freeze happens and then for month or years it will not get updated, even if the upstream becomes a lot more usable and stable.
All this is going to far for my taste, they try to stop a social problem with non-working technical 'solutions'. After all games should be fun to play, but banning people will not be fun, so I think this is the wrong direction.
Instead of banning people I would like to see a solution in the direction of a web-of-trust. A web-of-trust that rates players ability, there experience, there teamplayer, if they are cheater or not and things like that. So if somebody want to start a match he will not only be able to pick a random server, but instead pick one with players that are close to his abilities, so that the game will result in a fair play, instead of having a bunch of newcomers overrun by experienced players.
There could be server that are locked and only accessible for players with a specific trust or ability level and things like that. After all I think that such a solution could result in more fun for the player, while cheater would probally have a harder time, since they would play mostly against other cheaters.
This might not work for eSports and things like that where people play for money and where cheating is a considered a crime, but it should be enough for Joey Gamer who just wants to have fun.
I kind of agree, but on the other site you can't just take both KDE and Gnome, throw them together and get something out that is nearly double as good as one of the two alone. It would require quite a huge amount of work to bring both closer together and to unify the code base, it would also mean that large parts of code need to be thrown away, since they are redundant. After all you can't force programmers of Free Software to do what would be good, but instead they will do what is fun.
KDE and Gnome should make sure that they are compatible with each other and that things like Drag&Drop work in both directions and as far as I know, both sites already working on such compability things.
Never seen a binary while in a source tarball? A icon for a GUI app or a sprite for a game? Why should they be keep at a different place when they are just a part of the source like a normal.c file?
Can you think of any program whose UI isn't confusing the first few times you try it?
The problem with Blenders interface is that it stays confusing even for the third and fourth time you try it. Without a reference manuel or lots of tutorial website, there is basically zero change that ever will get used to the interface. Most interfaces you can learn just by playing around with them, you can't do that with Blender (zero tooltips, zero reaction when you press a button, most functionality only accessible via mode-sensitive keyboard shortcuts).
You can get the job done with Blenders interfaces and it has some nice ideas, but there is still quite huge room for improvments (not only on the interface site, but also on the functionality site, I still miss boolean operations).
Donkey Kong was the first Mario Title and it was released in 1981 according to KLOV.
Super Mario Brothers (one of the many Mario titles) was as far as I remember 'only' one of the first or the first scrolling Jump'n Runs.
Ever painted an image via command line? Well, I prefer Gimp for that task.
Beside that I have seen to much broken config-files with '#' instead of ';' comments, line-breaks where there shouldn't be one, incorrect formated values, typos, etc. Why is that? Because the files are plain text, no syntax checks is done by the editors and the user can see error only after he started the programm or even worse only find the error message in a deeply hidden logfile (and only after enabling debug=1). And well under a GUI I have tooltips and context-sensitive help under command-line I have 200 pages long man-pages, where I have to search half an hour before I find what I need...
Command-lines are nice for a few thinks, but they suck at a lot others. The reason that I still use them often is just because the GNU/Linux GUIs currently suck even more.
Linux doesn't have games, because it doesn't have gamers. WineX can bring a few gamers to Linux, so thats actually a good thing.
The only problem I have with WineX is that transgaming promised to release it back into the main Wine branch, but they never did, nor did they ever publish there user numbers.
There is actually one innovative Free game, its called LiquidWars and actually quite a bit similar to Pikmin, but was released long before it. But well, its not really up to todays standards.
Free Software games lack the tools, the artists and a lot of man power to keep up with commercial ones. And well, if somebody say "Look at the mod" scene under Windows, that doesn't really make a big difference, since they all base there work heavily on the work done by the commercial games. Only few are really independed of that ones.
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So this is "better" just because it is consistent?
Yes, being consistent is a big plus. Beside that qwerty isn't that bad and especially its still superior to alphabetic layout.
Alphabetic isnt all bad
Alphabetic is bad, since it doesn't help you at all. You don't know where the rows break and so you have to manually search for the letters and since you end up searching you could use an optimized layout in the first place, which wouldn't result in slowing down newbie, but in increasing long time users speed.
Producing child porn and distributing it are two very different things.
The problem with InstallShield is that it is per-Application, every App still has a slightly different install interface and some are even broken (installing in /Program File/ instead of the localized /Programme/), etc. So handling it in a uniform way OS wide would be better. But I agree that the current situation with having basically no standard way to build a binary package that will run on more than a single distro is a major pain with Linux, it results in tons of duplicate work, current packaging Systems completly fail to address this issue. The Linux Standard Base might help here, even so I find the choice for rpm a bit ugly.
The problem is that Unix failed to provide a way to create 'small and beautiful' things that do a little bit more than just read a stream of bytes and output it again. As soon as it comes to GUIs or well, anything that is a bit more complicated, the programs always had to develop there own huge framework, before they could even start developing small and beautifull. Emacs is small and beatifull in its own sense, dozens of small Elisps scripts at work, unlukily huge framework below that. Same with Perl, KDE, Gnome, Gimp and lots of other stuff, all come with there own more or less incompatible framework.
Unix did a lot of things right, but it kind of stalled 20 years ago and now we are stuck with dozens of incompatible duplicate frameworks around us...
Blender UI is not bad, but it could be a whole lot better with a bit more visibility. Luckily it is already getting quite a bit better with the last few releases and turning the tooltips on also helps alot.
Another more serious problem with Blender is the lack of functionality, if you look at Wings3d there are a lot of nice modeling functions that you can't do in Blender without a lot of manual work, which can often make the Blender UI feel not good in some situations, since it simply lacks the functionality.
The #include statement does a simply copy&paste of the content of the include file into your code, if you use #include or manually insert the whole include file doesn't make a difference, thus you are creating a work that contains parts of the GPL'ed code.
All the points you list there are caused by the illegal distributing of drugs caused by the current laws, not by the drugs themself. If drugs would be come legal nearly all drug-problems you list there would simply go away (no dealer, since you could by stuff in a pharmacy, no bad-fix since stuff would be clean, etc.).
Interfaces aren't completly copyrightable, but it seems to depend on the specific case and on the people involved.
I don't like what Blizzard did, but I can understand them. After all FreeCraft is a Warcraft2 ripoff, pixel-by-pixel, its not a game that happens to just be based on the same ideas and it isn't a generic RTS engine either at the moment.
Freecraft can run WC2 graphics, which would require to own a legal Warcraft2 CD, thats all.
The free graphic sets did by far not look like Warcraft2, sure they reasembled a few concepts and building types, but thats basically what every RTS does. Its not like Blizzard invented the RTS, that was what Westwoood has done with Dune.
The problem with apt or all package dependency tracking systems in general is that they only work smoothly when all packages come from a single official source, as soon as a unofficial rpm, deb or tar.gz enters the place since are starting to break on all fronts, either you can't compile stuff correctly since its picking includes from /usr/local/ and libraries from /usr/lib, package versions from different sources doesn't match leading to unresolvable dependencies, files from one package overriding another or binary incompabilities arise. Sure there are workarounds and fixes for all these problems, but they all require quite a lot of knowledge about what is going on and they all require time to apply. No matter how much knowledge you have, such stuff wastes a lot of time until you finally figured out what went wrong.
As long as Linux Systems install all stuff into a single directory tree none of these problems is going away. Adding dependency trackers to software doesn't solve the problem, but simply works around it, the solution would be to get rid of most of the dependencies and make software independent of the underlaying system as much as possible, which wouldn't even require any bloat if done correctly.
After all I would like to install two versions of a single package parellely one day without messing with --prefix and miles long PATH variables...
Neither is there a single place to go for patches in the Open Source world, Debian and Redhat are fine and all, but so far I haven't seen a single GNU/Linux system that could live without compiling a handfull packages manuelly from the official source, bypassing the packaging system and thus making automatic updates not possible.
Things have shifted away from LucasArts, the controlls in GrimFandango where already awfull and in Monkey4 they combined them with a lot of recycled story and gags. LucasArts adventure games aren't really what they used to be these days.
But there are a handfull of smaller companies who still create good adventure games, stuff like Syberia, The Longest Journey or Runaway. All of them still use the tradional point and click interface and there is even a sequel planed for The Longest Journey so not all is lost.
Well, I heard this quite a few times now, but my own experience is quite a bit different. Debian stable is at first old, not stable. I have run in quite a few showstopper bugs that were already fixed in upstream and in unstable but which never made it into stable, since the QA process which makes it quite hard for new upstream to ever make it into stable.
I think the main problem here is that the freeze is globally to all packages instead of local to small package groups, in a lot of cases a package is still heavily under development when the freeze happens and then for month or years it will not get updated, even if the upstream becomes a lot more usable and stable.
All this is going to far for my taste, they try to stop a social problem with non-working technical 'solutions'. After all games should be fun to play, but banning people will not be fun, so I think this is the wrong direction. Instead of banning people I would like to see a solution in the direction of a web-of-trust. A web-of-trust that rates players ability, there experience, there teamplayer, if they are cheater or not and things like that. So if somebody want to start a match he will not only be able to pick a random server, but instead pick one with players that are close to his abilities, so that the game will result in a fair play, instead of having a bunch of newcomers overrun by experienced players. There could be server that are locked and only accessible for players with a specific trust or ability level and things like that. After all I think that such a solution could result in more fun for the player, while cheater would probally have a harder time, since they would play mostly against other cheaters. This might not work for eSports and things like that where people play for money and where cheating is a considered a crime, but it should be enough for Joey Gamer who just wants to have fun.
I kind of agree, but on the other site you can't just take both KDE and Gnome, throw them together and get something out that is nearly double as good as one of the two alone. It would require quite a huge amount of work to bring both closer together and to unify the code base, it would also mean that large parts of code need to be thrown away, since they are redundant. After all you can't force programmers of Free Software to do what would be good, but instead they will do what is fun.
KDE and Gnome should make sure that they are compatible with each other and that things like Drag&Drop work in both directions and as far as I know, both sites already working on such compability things.
Never seen a binary while in a source tarball? A icon for a GUI app or a sprite for a game? Why should they be keep at a different place when they are just a part of the source like a normal .c file?
You can shift-click them to enter numbers as normal.
Donkey Kong was the first Mario Title and it was released in 1981 according to KLOV. Super Mario Brothers (one of the many Mario titles) was as far as I remember 'only' one of the first or the first scrolling Jump'n Runs.
Ever painted an image via command line? Well, I prefer Gimp for that task. Beside that I have seen to much broken config-files with '#' instead of ';' comments, line-breaks where there shouldn't be one, incorrect formated values, typos, etc. Why is that? Because the files are plain text, no syntax checks is done by the editors and the user can see error only after he started the programm or even worse only find the error message in a deeply hidden logfile (and only after enabling debug=1). And well under a GUI I have tooltips and context-sensitive help under command-line I have 200 pages long man-pages, where I have to search half an hour before I find what I need... Command-lines are nice for a few thinks, but they suck at a lot others. The reason that I still use them often is just because the GNU/Linux GUIs currently suck even more.
Linux doesn't have games, because it doesn't have gamers. WineX can bring a few gamers to Linux, so thats actually a good thing. The only problem I have with WineX is that transgaming promised to release it back into the main Wine branch, but they never did, nor did they ever publish there user numbers.
There is actually one innovative Free game, its called LiquidWars and actually quite a bit similar to Pikmin, but was released long before it. But well, its not really up to todays standards.
Free Software games lack the tools, the artists and a lot of man power to keep up with commercial ones. And well, if somebody say "Look at the mod" scene under Windows, that doesn't really make a big difference, since they all base there work heavily on the work done by the commercial games. Only few are really independed of that ones.