Quite clearly not there yet. Who needs ipv6 if it doesn't have/.?
The problem is that on the client side there are a ton of computers with broken IPv6 routing (6to4 for example fails for me with a large number of hosts). So if you have a server with AAAA record and a client with broken IPv6 routing the webpage will stop working or at least be pretty slow, as you have to run into a timeout before falling back to IPv4. Without an AAAA record stuff just works and as there is zero benefit of IPv6 for a service like slashdot.org its just wise to not use it.
The benefit of IPv6 lies in P2P communication, not in the classic client->serverfarm webpage.
AMD already has the bulk of the business from those willing to purchase non-Intel chips and an additional competitor will draw its customers from that group,
I doubt that the group of people who prefer inferior AMD hardware just because its not Intel is large enough to make any noticeable dent. Most people just buy what is cheap or what suits their needs and don't base their buying decisions on countering some potential market monopole.
Sounds to me like Google is doing a little civil disobedience here. The publishers and libraries had now a good 10 years to get their act together and put a decent online offering up, but what have they done? Pretty much nothing. So Google being a little ignorant to the law and doing what they think is the right thing to do, really sounds like a good thing, as it might one way or the other, lead finally to a situation where the Internet is no longer ignored by the other side.
Makers of x86 applications should have been mandated to produce a (Generic) Linux, Windows, and OSX port of all their software.
That would be a pretty shitty way to do it, as you would end up punishing everybody except Microsoft. A proper solution would simply be to force Microsoft to open up all their documentation or even source code, to make it easier for competing products to stay compatible.
In general I never really liked focusing so much on the browser, as Microsoft really isn't doing anything wrong there, they are just doing the same thing everybody else does, as a browser these days is simply expected to come bundled with the OS.
Where is the weird, the fantastic, the horrible and the wonderful?
There are a lot more games that present the weird and fantastic (just look at every second indie game) then there are games that present realistic everyday life. By far most games of course are still about presenting the life of an military action hero, so Heavy Rain is definitively a big change of pace.
Or, for that matter, how many games already been made where the user gets to choose between decisions
I don't know how it will be in Heavy Rain, but what made Fahrenheit/IndigoProphicy great was that the decisions didn't really matter. It was not the BioWare-way of doing where you have idiotic black/white choices of "feed baby" or "eat baby", but simply different things you could do. Which gave the game a great feel of interactivity, without allowing you to break the story in any out-of-character manner. That way of doing things also removed basically all the illogical adventure-type puzzles from the game, as you could do things in different ways or in different orders, but it where all small interactive things (where to hide a knife, bandage bloody arms before taking with police or not, etc.), not black and white decisions.
I'm aware that there is more to the game than this, but I think what makes a video game interesting is the way it abstracts you from the real world.
The problem is that games these days aren't much good at showing you something fresh anymore, as there are way to many gaming cliches that have stacked up over the years and way to many games are just clones of previous years games.
So fighting space aliens might sound exciting to somebody who never played a game, but as a gamer thats pretty much what I have been doing for the last 20 years and its really not that interesting anymore. On the other side having a game that lets you drink orange juice in a realistic manner, is certainly something fresh again as I haven't seen that in a game.
Also of course the mundane tasks aren't the whole game, they are just the setup to the greater crime story in the game and they are there so that you get a better feel for the characters. Instead of being random-nameless JohnDoe, the characters in Heavy Rain have a background, family, friends and jobs.
The whole control scheme is completly different then your average adventure game. It also happens to be rather different then your average third person game or FPS. And most importantly the whole flow of the game is quite different, its not about hording items, illogical puzzles and cardboard cutout characters, but about presenting a realistic and believable experience, which includes plenty of mundane day-to-day tasks.
Its of course not all 100% fresh ideas, Fahrenheit/IndigoProphecy did a lot of that a few years ago, but then even that game already broke away from a ton of normal adventure game conventions.
So yeah, its quite a bit more then just another adventure game.
How can the numbers have been verified to be accurate when the CRU in question admitted to throwing out the RAW data used to generate the numbers?
CRU wasn't the original source for most of the data, they just held a copy of it, which is why them deleting the data is a total non-issue, most original data is still happily sitting around at their original sources.
Zelda is a good combination of Adventure and Platformer.
Zelda has a lot more in common with the 1979 Atari title Adventure then it has with either point&click adventures or platformers. The important innovation of Zelda was how it used items to allow access new areas in an otherwise open world and that items had multiple uses as both weapons and as "keys" to new areas.
Fun part is that the sequel, "Giana Sisters DS" now happens to be a normal licensed DS game. And Giana Sisters wasn't the only clone, Rainbow Arts business model was based on doing clones, Turrican was a Metroid clone and Katakis was an R-Type clone, which happened to be so good, that they where hired to do the official R-Type port.
Puzzloop itself is just a variation of Puzzle Bubble, which was inspired by Columns and friends, which where inspired by Tetris, which was inspired by Pentomino. Cloning and iterating on previous ideas are very common in gaming. And while some clones contribute more original ideas then others, its really just how the industry works. Simpler games of course have the problem that they are much easier to clone, then complex one, but that really shouldn't be used as an argument against cloning, as its questionable if a simple idea should even be copyrightable. With Puzzloop for example you don't even need to play the game to understand how it works, just looking for a second at a screenshot of it tells you pretty much everything you need to know to write a clone of it.
Sounds like a problem with the TV settings, not with the game. Have a look through the TVs menu for a "game mode" or something similar to get rid of the lag.
This particular malware is not because of a security problem with the OS
Wrong. The problem with the OS is that security is more an afterthought and not a core part of the design. There is absolutely no reason why a screensaver should have rights to meddle around with the whole system or even the whole user account, a screensaver should have the right to display pictures on the screen and nothing else, but you don't really get that level of control in an average Linux installation, let alone the frameworks to handle such security issues in a userfriendly matter.
A hell of a lot security issues would just disappear when third party applications would by default be isolated to ~/.appname/, their own application data and a few system libraries. You could even handle loading and saving in a safe manner when the load/save dialogs would be part of the OS and not part of the application, as that would allow to limit an applications access to the outside world to just those files the user explicitly selected, instead of leaving the choice to the application.
Ensuring all controls are programmable would go a long way to helping everyone, not just the disabled (or just my gf, which would improve my standard of living).
The issue with that is that programmable game controls are a really hard problem to solve in a generic way, as you always end up with edge cases that just don't work properly with a different control device and often you need to change game logic to fix the issues, which is why games like Dragon Age have to pretty much completly rewrite their user interface for use with a gamepad instead of a mouse.
That said, having software like joy2key or xpadder can get you quite far and make some games playable with devices which they weren't build for.
This is also the downfall I predict for the experiment that is StackOverflow.
StackOverflow has a very simple well defined purpose: answering programming questions. I don't quite see how moderators/admins would ever have much reason for abuse on that site, especially as all the voting is done by the community or the one asking the question. There is some room on deciding what is ontopic and what is offtopic, but the core is pretty clear.
I have no idea how Slashdot has survived 12 years,
Slashdot, unlike say Digg or Youtube, has a discussion and moderation system that actually works. And having such a system encourages users to write useful comments and it also encourages moderators to give useful moderations. With other sites just trying to read a discussion or follow a thread is already a PITA, having a mod system limited to up down votes on top of that, instead of Slashdots Funny, Informative, Offtopic, etc. just encourages rating on agreement instead of on quality of the comment. On Youtube the video upload can also play censor and remove any comments or lock them, which makes it pretty much impossible to comment on a controversial video. Having a character limit and a crap UI just guarantees that nobody will ever write a useful comment on that system.
Making them a little bit faster, a little bit smaller?
While these are just incremental improvements, having more speed and memory available does open up new possibilities. With storage for example we are crossing a threshold where we can store things faster then we can consume them. $1500 in harddrives for example have enough storage to store your complete life 24/7 in good quality MP3 or Youtube-video quality. And mobile phones are getting fast enough that realtime video streaming from the phone to the Internet gets possible. Battery life so far is still an issue, but we have essentially reached a point where you can record a persons life for cheap. Add to that some GPS tracking and some GoogleMaps/Photosynth and you could have in a few years a realtime 3D map of the earth. Add some speech recognition and automatic translation to it and the whole thing would be searchable and understandable for everybody.
It would be of course still "just" be an incremental improvement, but only because we are living right now when all this is happening around us. Its hard to recognize the big technological improvements when they are part of everyday life.
Debian's approach is quite frankly crap. Its better then most of the other crap out there, but compared to the ease of updating a webapp its still crap. Its far to slow at updating, requires far to much user interaction, is far to inflexible and far to brittle.
When you want to make an update process that "just works" you have to do something that is near 100% failsafe and automatic, i.e. something that verifies the up-to-dateness automatically and updates when necessary and something that verifies the integrity of an application on each start, so that you never run into a state where an installed up is broken.
Thats the thing I don't get. What is so hard on upgrading a computer? Couldn't an app just check if there is a new version available and download that transparently in the background and then start it next time the application is restarted (i.e. completly without user interaction)? Now sure, a lot of software upgrade schemes these days suck, but they don't suck because its impossible to do a smooth save upgrade, they suck because most are ad-hoc hacks that where never properly developed to give a smooth user experience.
Gimp is a lot more intuitive than Photoshop if you're used to Gimp.
It really isn't. Gimp lacks of toolbar is annoying (had to patch that in myself), the use of multiple windows gets in the way a lot, no proper line, circle, etc. tools (no, stroking/filling a selection is not the same), the palette editor is abominable, the brush dialog unsortable and there are many other weird little things, like that you have to Ctrl-Alt+mouse-button to just move a selection, that make Gimp less then perfect. And whats the point of the "Floating Selection", why isn't that a normal layer?
The good thing is that Gimp is constantly improving, the bad thing is that it is doing so at a snails pace. Hopefully the availability of some competition will speed things up in the future, Krita is starting to look extremely good in terms of features, its just still a little to broken to be usable.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite clearly not there yet. Who needs ipv6 if it doesn't have /.?
The problem is that on the client side there are a ton of computers with broken IPv6 routing (6to4 for example fails for me with a large number of hosts). So if you have a server with AAAA record and a client with broken IPv6 routing the webpage will stop working or at least be pretty slow, as you have to run into a timeout before falling back to IPv4. Without an AAAA record stuff just works and as there is zero benefit of IPv6 for a service like slashdot.org its just wise to not use it.
The benefit of IPv6 lies in P2P communication, not in the classic client->serverfarm webpage.
A 128kb MP3 is bits, not bytes, so divide the whole thing by a factor of 8.
AMD already has the bulk of the business from those willing to purchase non-Intel chips and an additional competitor will draw its customers from that group,
I doubt that the group of people who prefer inferior AMD hardware just because its not Intel is large enough to make any noticeable dent. Most people just buy what is cheap or what suits their needs and don't base their buying decisions on countering some potential market monopole.
Sounds to me like Google is doing a little civil disobedience here. The publishers and libraries had now a good 10 years to get their act together and put a decent online offering up, but what have they done? Pretty much nothing. So Google being a little ignorant to the law and doing what they think is the right thing to do, really sounds like a good thing, as it might one way or the other, lead finally to a situation where the Internet is no longer ignored by the other side.
Makers of x86 applications should have been mandated to produce a (Generic) Linux, Windows, and OSX port of all their software.
That would be a pretty shitty way to do it, as you would end up punishing everybody except Microsoft. A proper solution would simply be to force Microsoft to open up all their documentation or even source code, to make it easier for competing products to stay compatible.
In general I never really liked focusing so much on the browser, as Microsoft really isn't doing anything wrong there, they are just doing the same thing everybody else does, as a browser these days is simply expected to come bundled with the OS.
Where is the weird, the fantastic, the horrible and the wonderful?
There are a lot more games that present the weird and fantastic (just look at every second indie game) then there are games that present realistic everyday life. By far most games of course are still about presenting the life of an military action hero, so Heavy Rain is definitively a big change of pace.
Or, for that matter, how many games already been made where the user gets to choose between decisions
I don't know how it will be in Heavy Rain, but what made Fahrenheit/IndigoProphicy great was that the decisions didn't really matter. It was not the BioWare-way of doing where you have idiotic black/white choices of "feed baby" or "eat baby", but simply different things you could do. Which gave the game a great feel of interactivity, without allowing you to break the story in any out-of-character manner. That way of doing things also removed basically all the illogical adventure-type puzzles from the game, as you could do things in different ways or in different orders, but it where all small interactive things (where to hide a knife, bandage bloody arms before taking with police or not, etc.), not black and white decisions.
I'm aware that there is more to the game than this, but I think what makes a video game interesting is the way it abstracts you from the real world.
The problem is that games these days aren't much good at showing you something fresh anymore, as there are way to many gaming cliches that have stacked up over the years and way to many games are just clones of previous years games.
So fighting space aliens might sound exciting to somebody who never played a game, but as a gamer thats pretty much what I have been doing for the last 20 years and its really not that interesting anymore. On the other side having a game that lets you drink orange juice in a realistic manner, is certainly something fresh again as I haven't seen that in a game.
Also of course the mundane tasks aren't the whole game, they are just the setup to the greater crime story in the game and they are there so that you get a better feel for the characters. Instead of being random-nameless JohnDoe, the characters in Heavy Rain have a background, family, friends and jobs.
The whole control scheme is completly different then your average adventure game. It also happens to be rather different then your average third person game or FPS. And most importantly the whole flow of the game is quite different, its not about hording items, illogical puzzles and cardboard cutout characters, but about presenting a realistic and believable experience, which includes plenty of mundane day-to-day tasks.
Its of course not all 100% fresh ideas, Fahrenheit/IndigoProphecy did a lot of that a few years ago, but then even that game already broke away from a ton of normal adventure game conventions.
So yeah, its quite a bit more then just another adventure game.
why would a warmer Earth be bad?
All our infrastructure is build around our current climate and having to change it all due to climate change would get kind of expensive.
That is why they labeled it a "travesty" that the data doesn't support their socialistic political agenda.
Go watch this and learn that the quoted text happen to be all out of context and none of them so far indicate actual fraud.
How can the numbers have been verified to be accurate when the CRU in question admitted to throwing out the RAW data used to generate the numbers?
CRU wasn't the original source for most of the data, they just held a copy of it, which is why them deleting the data is a total non-issue, most original data is still happily sitting around at their original sources.
Zelda is a good combination of Adventure and Platformer.
Zelda has a lot more in common with the 1979 Atari title Adventure then it has with either point&click adventures or platformers. The important innovation of Zelda was how it used items to allow access new areas in an otherwise open world and that items had multiple uses as both weapons and as "keys" to new areas.
In this case the clone was banned
Fun part is that the sequel, "Giana Sisters DS" now happens to be a normal licensed DS game. And Giana Sisters wasn't the only clone, Rainbow Arts business model was based on doing clones, Turrican was a Metroid clone and Katakis was an R-Type clone, which happened to be so good, that they where hired to do the official R-Type port.
Puzzloop itself is just a variation of Puzzle Bubble, which was inspired by Columns and friends, which where inspired by Tetris, which was inspired by Pentomino. Cloning and iterating on previous ideas are very common in gaming. And while some clones contribute more original ideas then others, its really just how the industry works. Simpler games of course have the problem that they are much easier to clone, then complex one, but that really shouldn't be used as an argument against cloning, as its questionable if a simple idea should even be copyrightable. With Puzzloop for example you don't even need to play the game to understand how it works, just looking for a second at a screenshot of it tells you pretty much everything you need to know to write a clone of it.
The guy that wrote flOw was part of the Spore team.
Sounds like a problem with the TV settings, not with the game. Have a look through the TVs menu for a "game mode" or something similar to get rid of the lag.
This particular malware is not because of a security problem with the OS
Wrong. The problem with the OS is that security is more an afterthought and not a core part of the design. There is absolutely no reason why a screensaver should have rights to meddle around with the whole system or even the whole user account, a screensaver should have the right to display pictures on the screen and nothing else, but you don't really get that level of control in an average Linux installation, let alone the frameworks to handle such security issues in a userfriendly matter.
A hell of a lot security issues would just disappear when third party applications would by default be isolated to ~/.appname/, their own application data and a few system libraries. You could even handle loading and saving in a safe manner when the load/save dialogs would be part of the OS and not part of the application, as that would allow to limit an applications access to the outside world to just those files the user explicitly selected, instead of leaving the choice to the application.
Ensuring all controls are programmable would go a long way to helping everyone, not just the disabled (or just my gf, which would improve my standard of living).
The issue with that is that programmable game controls are a really hard problem to solve in a generic way, as you always end up with edge cases that just don't work properly with a different control device and often you need to change game logic to fix the issues, which is why games like Dragon Age have to pretty much completly rewrite their user interface for use with a gamepad instead of a mouse.
That said, having software like joy2key or xpadder can get you quite far and make some games playable with devices which they weren't build for.
This is also the downfall I predict for the experiment that is StackOverflow.
StackOverflow has a very simple well defined purpose: answering programming questions. I don't quite see how moderators/admins would ever have much reason for abuse on that site, especially as all the voting is done by the community or the one asking the question. There is some room on deciding what is ontopic and what is offtopic, but the core is pretty clear.
I have no idea how Slashdot has survived 12 years,
Slashdot, unlike say Digg or Youtube, has a discussion and moderation system that actually works. And having such a system encourages users to write useful comments and it also encourages moderators to give useful moderations. With other sites just trying to read a discussion or follow a thread is already a PITA, having a mod system limited to up down votes on top of that, instead of Slashdots Funny, Informative, Offtopic, etc. just encourages rating on agreement instead of on quality of the comment. On Youtube the video upload can also play censor and remove any comments or lock them, which makes it pretty much impossible to comment on a controversial video. Having a character limit and a crap UI just guarantees that nobody will ever write a useful comment on that system.
Making them a little bit faster, a little bit smaller?
While these are just incremental improvements, having more speed and memory available does open up new possibilities. With storage for example we are crossing a threshold where we can store things faster then we can consume them. $1500 in harddrives for example have enough storage to store your complete life 24/7 in good quality MP3 or Youtube-video quality. And mobile phones are getting fast enough that realtime video streaming from the phone to the Internet gets possible. Battery life so far is still an issue, but we have essentially reached a point where you can record a persons life for cheap. Add to that some GPS tracking and some GoogleMaps/Photosynth and you could have in a few years a realtime 3D map of the earth. Add some speech recognition and automatic translation to it and the whole thing would be searchable and understandable for everybody.
It would be of course still "just" be an incremental improvement, but only because we are living right now when all this is happening around us. Its hard to recognize the big technological improvements when they are part of everyday life.
Debian's approach is quite frankly crap. Its better then most of the other crap out there, but compared to the ease of updating a webapp its still crap. Its far to slow at updating, requires far to much user interaction, is far to inflexible and far to brittle.
When you want to make an update process that "just works" you have to do something that is near 100% failsafe and automatic, i.e. something that verifies the up-to-dateness automatically and updates when necessary and something that verifies the integrity of an application on each start, so that you never run into a state where an installed up is broken.
Thats the thing I don't get. What is so hard on upgrading a computer? Couldn't an app just check if there is a new version available and download that transparently in the background and then start it next time the application is restarted (i.e. completly without user interaction)? Now sure, a lot of software upgrade schemes these days suck, but they don't suck because its impossible to do a smooth save upgrade, they suck because most are ad-hoc hacks that where never properly developed to give a smooth user experience.
Gimp is a lot more intuitive than Photoshop if you're used to Gimp.
It really isn't. Gimp lacks of toolbar is annoying (had to patch that in myself), the use of multiple windows gets in the way a lot, no proper line, circle, etc. tools (no, stroking/filling a selection is not the same), the palette editor is abominable, the brush dialog unsortable and there are many other weird little things, like that you have to Ctrl-Alt+mouse-button to just move a selection, that make Gimp less then perfect. And whats the point of the "Floating Selection", why isn't that a normal layer?
The good thing is that Gimp is constantly improving, the bad thing is that it is doing so at a snails pace. Hopefully the availability of some competition will speed things up in the future, Krita is starting to look extremely good in terms of features, its just still a little to broken to be usable.
And the fact that it won't look at what's on the clipboard, and use those dimensions when I go to file->new.
If you want the content of the clipboard just do Create/From Clipbboard.
True, but you don't have to use solar panels to use solar energy. You can use good old mirrors to heat water and drive a turbine.