"BETTER" AI is an AI that MORE CLOSELY CONFORMS TO HOW THE SUBJECT WOULD ACTUALLY REACT.
Nope, wrong. If you're talking about games here, then better AI would be MORE FUN.
Not more realistic, more fun. Game designers and players have noticed for a while now that increasing realism (physics, terrain, weapons, etc) can often make the game much less fun. It won't be any different with AI.
A realistic AI for a "devious wizard" would be 3 times as smart as the average player- and paying customers don't like to be outsmarted.
If the military was seen as providing something to their employees, they wouldn't have a recruiting problem.
If the military didn't have a recruiting problem, then their standards for admission wouldn't be so low, and employers wouldn't equate "ex-military" with "couldn't get into college".
Why not just offer large enlistment bonuses and perhaps raise the age limits? I'll bet there are a lot of 40-something geeks who'd be willing to sign up.
Uh, you got an extra $900,000,000 sitting around?
The military already employs major numbers of "40-something geeks", or "Defense Contractors", as they prefer to be called. Those guys work for Northrop and Lockheed designing UAVs and JSFs and are highly compensated. They're no more likely to volunteer for the military than any random US citizen is to mail the IRS an extra $30,000 to help out the war effort.
Most of the people dying in Iraq *are* special skills people: engineers (the old fashioned kind), clerks, logistics and anything else that's non-combat.
Clerking and logistics certainly aren't "special" skills. Even most of the "engineers" aren't so skilled. To civilians, an engineer has a college degree and designs projects- to the military, engineers are high-school equivalent privates who build projects with spade and hammer in hand. (Of course army engineers have officers, but I'm talking about the majority)
And even if the non-combat types were really special skills, you'd be wrong too. Of US+UK military deaths, 75% are in a combat-oriented field like infantry, artillery, recon, or police. Jobs like engineer, sapper, support, HQ, and intel make up less than 25% of deaths.
He had a point in that Linux was using an old architecture, and would have been better designed as a micro-kernel.
No, his point was absolutely wrong.
If Linux had been designed as a microkernel, it would be no more useful today than GNU Hurd is. Both Linux and Hurd are GPLed Unix-like systems with what you (wrongly) call "Bazaar" development, but only one of them is important enough to be mentioned on CNN 20 times in a day.
But advocate stealing any other OS, like Windows, and it's Informative?
It's a subtle point, but SCO is genuinely attempting to steal, while these other guys are only suggesting copyright infringement.
Stealing means to take something away from somebody else, so that she doesn't have it and you do. "Pirating" a program doesn't remove it from the author. It's not actually stolen yet.
But Intellectual Property is not a song or program; it is the right to control copying and distribution of the song or program. If you attempt to take that right away from someone else and have it for yourself, you are stealing.
Therefore what SCO is doing is much closer to the technical definition of theft.
uncouple PC's from the operating system. Maybe that's the remedy the justice department missed.
Uncoupling the PC from the OS is a fine approach. But you've described something rather different. What you suggest goes beyond uncoupling and into forbidding services. It'd be painful for all customers.
The right way to the government could uncouple the OS from the PC is to declare normal MS EULAs invalid, so that people who got Windows(r) with a PC can legally resell it on e-bay.
That would create a fairer market in Windows(r), where the discriminatory pricing Microsoft uses would be revealled and destroyed. No longer could they charge $50 to OEMs and $200 to end users.
There are few because competitively it would likely be more expensive to make them:
Those 3 explanations are nothing. For the kind of user who wants a non-Windows laptop, no support or marketing is needed.
The only reason it would be "more expensive" is if Microsoft has a license with the laptop company forcing them to pay for one Windows(r) license for each system sold. That was true in the past, but is supposedly one of the behaviors they forswore as monopolistically anticompetitive.
I think that we can agree that there are two distinct questions.
Whether EULAs are binding is a third question, and Dashing Leech is correct that you've begged it. However, that point is actually irrelevant to the main concern of installing one software product on two PCs.
Wrong is still wrong.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law.
on microcomputers not manufactured by CP/M's publisher
Those "microcomputers" aren't personal computers, which is what matters in terms of marketplace forces. MS DOS was crucial for creating the "PC compatible".
With the Apple, IBM, Next or Be equivalents we would be considerably FARTHER than we are today.
I'm not supporting the current state of Microsoft Windows, but Microsoft DOS had a critical role in the development of the modern PCs. We all owe it a lot.
Prior to MS DOS, every operating system was sold by a hardware manufacturer, and they wouldn't sell the OS without a computer. But Microsoft changed that. With MS DOS, it was possible for computers from two different manufacturers to run the same application without porting or recompiling.
MS DOS allowed Compaq to clone the IBM PC, which introduced real price competetion into the world of PC hardware, and eventually gave us the fast cheap machines we all use.
If IBM hadn't sub-contracted out their OS work to another company, computer technology wouldn't have advanced nearly as fast. (That company didn't necessarily have to be Microsoft, anyone could've done it, but Bill Gates lucked out)
And don't give me some song and dance about it remaining on a system.
It's not a "song and dance". It's US Federal Copyright law. (And equivalent laws exist in every major nation).
To make a copy of a copyrighted work, except in a few circumstances, is illegal without permission of the publisher.
Even if software publishers printed no EULA at all, it would still be illegal. Unless they decided to specifically give you the right to make more copies, you can't install it on multiple PCs.
I never see the flippant attitude here towards the GPL as I see towards M$ EULAs.
Because the GPL is not an EULA. It is totally different from an EULA.The GPL is targeted not at the End User, but at the "Intermediate Developer".
The GPL gives you new rights that you didn't have before (thus it can be considered a valid contract, because you get something out of it).
Some EULAs claim they take away rights that you already had. There is no reason for a customer to agree to that license, because he gets nothing out of it (and he already had a legal right to run one copy of the software as soon as Microsoft handed him a cdrom)
2. You are assuming EULAs are legally binding. AFAIK, that has not been demonstrated, and there's good reason to believe they aren't.
No, he's not assuming that. (Although the ProCD desicion strongly supports the validity of EULAs)
If EULAS are not valid, then the user only has the rights provided by copyright law. That allows her to make copies of the material (software, music, or whatever) in very limited ways.
She can make one copy for "backup purposes", which means that copy should never be read unless the original is destroyed.
She can make partial copies for fair use, which is irrelevant here.
She can make whatever transient copies are necessary to use the material in the most normal way. This includes installing a program on a hard drive, and then copying it to RAM.
If you don't agree with the EULA, or think they don't need to be obeyed, nothing changes. You still must follow copyright law, which says no more than one usable copy of any copyrighted thing at a time.
Much of the text of a typical EULA is actually just a redundant rephrasing of copyright law... they don't actually have to tell you not to distribute copies, because it's already illegal.
he used them in grammatically correct ways. Just because it sounds strange to you doesn't mean it's incorrect,
No, the sentence is grammatically incorrect. It ends with "utlised", which is not part of the English language. Although we can guess the intention was "utilized", it's technically just as wrong as this sintance.
For a sentence to be "correct", first it must be free of spelling errors. Then there must be no grammar errors- but you're still not done. There is more to language than grammar rules, and a typical English teacher would redline the translated passage in multiple places.
The empty clause, the unwarranted hyperbole, and the overall awkward flow peg this speaker as ESL material.
Certainly none that matches the convenience of the Filer windows in RISC OS where you would double-click (or drag) a file to open it, and drag from the application to the Filer to save
That's subjective... I could claim that needing to drag an icon from a text editor to a whole other window (which I'd have to find and make visible first) is painfully slow compared to:wresult3.txt, and in many contexts I'd be right.
That points to one big advantage of the dialog box approach: keyboard compatibility. Desktop environments which offer DnD should provide some (optional) way to perform equivalent actions from the keyboard, but I'm not aware of any having done so.
Digressing down that topic: There have been some small steps made towards keyboard-controlled DnD, but I haven't seen any adequate yet. Of course, some systems let you push a button to steer the mouse from the keypad, but that's too awkward to consider. Some file managers include an abuse of the clipboard metaphor (like a Copy button which makes a "shallow copy", instead of a "deep" one like every other Copy command besides Excel) to provide features that could be better solved by enabling DnD via keyboard. There are assorted taskbar-applets which provide a "shelf" to set down an icon in mid-drag; enhancing one of those to be controllable by keyboard would be the most direct implementation of a solution.
glimpse should be a dependency of kdevelop in the package manager, or perhaps that the kdevelop package should recommend the glimpse package.
That's well and good, but doesn't address this problem. The fact remains that inter-package dependencies are not black and white. The admin will not always know what packages are needed at install time. There should be some more way for a running program to suggest that a new package could increase its functionality.
Package B might not REQUIRE Package A to run, even if it detects and uses A if installed. It's entirely valid for a computer to have only Bee installed and not A. But it would be better if, whenever the user attempts a B function dependent on A, he not only a descriptive message with the name of the missing file, but also a button which he can push to start the install process.
This is something that could be standardized across package systems. It might be as easy as creating a/usr/bin/package_desired which triggers the distribution-specific behavior. (There are obstacles about name ambiguity, of course...)
Tell me, Idiot, where in my response, where I proved your statement inaccurate, did you determine that I hadn't read your post?
Tell me, Idiot, where in your post did you prove him wrong, or even attempt to do so? Your response was so totally irrelevant to his point that you can't possibly have understood what he said.
If you want to prove he was inaccurate, you'll have to point out where a Windows users can get a single DVD containing (as you say) "Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Getright, Visual Studio, Nero, Digital Camera support, optimized ATI drivers, wireless NIC drivers". Like a Microsoft equivalent to this.
Maybe one of the hoodlums peddling software on Hong Kong's sidewalks could set me up with a disc like that for "fie dolla", but can you suggest any non-criminal alternatives?
Whose responsibility is it again to ensure there are no conflicts?
The distro itself. Companies like RedHat and volunteers like Debian take conflicts between packages very seriously and take aggressive action when a user reports one.
For a format thats so highly tied to the printed page, I'm not sure what the fuss is about online readers for PDF's.
Ahem. It is because the format is so tied to the printed page that finding an adequate online reader is such a challenge! If it were easy to repaginate/reflow/rescale PDF files, there'd be a decent Open Source solution by now. The experience of using Linux programs like kghostview and xpdf is only slightly more convenient than reading text pages stored in PNG files.
Distributing information in PDF is an assault on the user because he's almost forced to output it to dead trees, rather than putting it onto pixels that otherwise would be wasted on screensavers.
if you really want to read online you should probably use a format that looks good on screen
By that logic, nobody should use PDF ever again. For any non-trivial published document you can be certain that some viewers will wish to print it and others will like to read it onscreen. To allow for that possibility, stay away from PDF and PS files.
Indeed, which is why RISC OS and ROX-desktop allow you to drag a file onto an application's window or icon.
That still has failings: it doesn't guide you to which applications are valid for opening a certain type of file. If your system has many applications (typical result of a "Full" Linux install from commercial cdroms), then it'd be impossible to have an icon for every app without wasting pixels or inducing squinting. (Both of those are points of opinion that would bother some users and not others)
The system in KDE's Konqueror filemanager is better because it recognizes multiple possible associations for each filetype, allowing a user to right-click to select opening something in the non-default handler. (KDE's approach still needs some improvement; the right-click menus need some streamlining, for example)
You've got a little debate going between proponents of a separate filemanager application and those who prefer popup "Save As" boxes. Each way can have it's pros and cons. The big advantage a good SaveAs implementation can have is avoiding clutter (and extraneous actions like repositioning clutter) because the file widgets aren't displayed until they're needed. While a separate filemanager has the advantage that the user is more aware of it's context before needing to save, and thus needs to spend less time re-orienting herself when the window comes back up.
Focusing on the "dialog vs filemanager" question ignores a more important UI design choice, though: Should each application include its own GUI code to pick files, or reference a centralized GUI system to perform that operation?
Many of the problems you've cited with SaveAs are the result of poor and inconsistent implementations of dialogs, not file-dialogs per se.
Ideally, the application program would be written at a higher conceptual level, where details like dialog boxes and icons are implementation trivia handled by a GUI control process. That way each user could load/save files in exactly the way she prefers, regardless of the biases of any specific application's author.
Most Unix systems won't get infected and cannot be infected.
It's rare, but there is such a thing as spyware for Unix. It's produced by Evenbalance.com, and distributed by the Pentagon; it's included free when you install America's Army (for Windows or Linux)
Punkbuster might have somewhat different goals and methods than the majority of spyware, but it still deserves that name. A program which allows a stranger across the internet to scan your RAM for patterns or download periodic screenshots can't be called anything but spyware.
The difference with Punkbuster, of course, is that the developer is quite open about the purpose of the spyware, and it's something the users will agree with. But still, anyone with sensitive files on a PC should be aware there are whole categories of spyware which Ad-Aware will never flag, but which might be subverted to look for passwords and usernames rather than just wallhacks and aimbots.
(Someday the FBI might visit evenbalance.com with a wiretap warrant to inspect the players of those violent, kill-trainer games for hints of terrorist-tendencies...)
What are you talking about? If you use Microsoft IE, I'd assume there already is a WMV plugin included... right?
Or if you're one of those Linux freaks, they can get Mplayer for Mozilla. (As long as you stick to Intel-style CPU of course)
But remember that non-IE browsers use mimetype (rather than file extension) to determine which plugin should view a download. Since your planning24h.jp server doesn't report a mimetype for WMV, the plugin might not be invoked.
Which is it? Dialogue is completely separate from plot. Especially if you get dubs, you should expect the dialog to stink (there've been only 3-4 exceptions I've heard)
Slashdot Mirror
"BETTER" AI is an AI that MORE CLOSELY CONFORMS TO HOW THE SUBJECT WOULD ACTUALLY REACT.
Nope, wrong. If you're talking about games here, then better AI would be MORE FUN.
Not more realistic, more fun. Game designers and players have noticed for a while now that increasing realism (physics, terrain, weapons, etc) can often make the game much less fun. It won't be any different with AI.
A realistic AI for a "devious wizard" would be 3 times as smart as the average player- and paying customers don't like to be outsmarted.
If the military was seen as providing something to their employees, they wouldn't have a recruiting problem.
If the military didn't have a recruiting problem, then their standards for admission wouldn't be so low, and employers wouldn't equate "ex-military" with "couldn't get into college".
Why not just offer large enlistment bonuses and perhaps raise the age limits? I'll bet there are a lot of 40-something geeks who'd be willing to sign up.
Uh, you got an extra $900,000,000 sitting around?
The military already employs major numbers of "40-something geeks", or "Defense Contractors", as they prefer to be called. Those guys work for Northrop and Lockheed designing UAVs and JSFs and are highly compensated. They're no more likely to volunteer for the military than any random US citizen is to mail the IRS an extra $30,000 to help out the war effort.
Most of the people dying in Iraq *are* special skills people: engineers (the old fashioned kind), clerks, logistics and anything else that's non-combat.
Clerking and logistics certainly aren't "special" skills. Even most of the "engineers" aren't so skilled. To civilians, an engineer has a college degree and designs projects- to the military, engineers are high-school equivalent privates who build projects with spade and hammer in hand. (Of course army engineers have officers, but I'm talking about the majority)
And even if the non-combat types were really special skills, you'd be wrong too. Of US+UK military deaths, 75% are in a combat-oriented field like infantry, artillery, recon, or police. Jobs like engineer, sapper, support, HQ, and intel make up less than 25% of deaths.
He had a point in that Linux was using an old architecture, and would have been better designed as a micro-kernel.
No, his point was absolutely wrong.
If Linux had been designed as a microkernel, it would be no more useful today than GNU Hurd is. Both Linux and Hurd are GPLed Unix-like systems with what you (wrongly) call "Bazaar" development, but only one of them is important enough to be mentioned on CNN 20 times in a day.
But advocate stealing any other OS, like Windows, and it's Informative?
It's a subtle point, but SCO is genuinely attempting to steal, while these other guys are only suggesting copyright infringement.
Stealing means to take something away from somebody else, so that she doesn't have it and you do. "Pirating" a program doesn't remove it from the author. It's not actually stolen yet.
But Intellectual Property is not a song or program; it is the right to control copying and distribution of the song or program. If you attempt to take that right away from someone else and have it for yourself, you are stealing.
Therefore what SCO is doing is much closer to the technical definition of theft.
uncouple PC's from the operating system. Maybe that's the remedy the justice department missed.
Uncoupling the PC from the OS is a fine approach. But you've described something rather different. What you suggest goes beyond uncoupling and into forbidding services. It'd be painful for all customers.
The right way to the government could uncouple the OS from the PC is to declare normal MS EULAs invalid, so that people who got Windows(r) with a PC can legally resell it on e-bay.
That would create a fairer market in Windows(r), where the discriminatory pricing Microsoft uses would be revealled and destroyed. No longer could they charge $50 to OEMs and $200 to end users.
There are few because competitively it would likely be more expensive to make them:
Those 3 explanations are nothing. For the kind of user who wants a non-Windows laptop, no support or marketing is needed.
The only reason it would be "more expensive" is if Microsoft has a license with the laptop company forcing them to pay for one Windows(r) license for each system sold. That was true in the past, but is supposedly one of the behaviors they forswore as monopolistically anticompetitive.
Whether EULAs are binding is a third question, and Dashing Leech is correct that you've begged it. However, that point is actually irrelevant to the main concern of installing one software product on two PCs.
Wrong is still wrong.
That, of course, assumes the perpetrator makes no attempt to conceal the offense, even daring the police to arrest him for it.
on microcomputers not manufactured by CP/M's publisher
Those "microcomputers" aren't personal computers, which is what matters in terms of marketplace forces. MS DOS was crucial for creating the "PC compatible".
With the Apple, IBM, Next or Be equivalents we would be considerably FARTHER than we are today.
I'm not supporting the current state of Microsoft Windows, but Microsoft DOS had a critical role in the development of the modern PCs. We all owe it a lot.
Prior to MS DOS, every operating system was sold by a hardware manufacturer, and they wouldn't sell the OS without a computer. But Microsoft changed that. With MS DOS, it was possible for computers from two different manufacturers to run the same application without porting or recompiling.
MS DOS allowed Compaq to clone the IBM PC, which introduced real price competetion into the world of PC hardware, and eventually gave us the fast cheap machines we all use.
If IBM hadn't sub-contracted out their OS work to another company, computer technology wouldn't have advanced nearly as fast. (That company didn't necessarily have to be Microsoft, anyone could've done it, but Bill Gates lucked out)
And don't give me some song and dance about it remaining on a system.
It's not a "song and dance". It's US Federal Copyright law. (And equivalent laws exist in every major nation).
To make a copy of a copyrighted work, except in a few circumstances, is illegal without permission of the publisher.
Even if software publishers printed no EULA at all, it would still be illegal. Unless they decided to specifically give you the right to make more copies, you can't install it on multiple PCs.
I never see the flippant attitude here towards the GPL as I see towards M$ EULAs.
Because the GPL is not an EULA. It is totally different from an EULA.The GPL is targeted not at the End User, but at the "Intermediate Developer".
The GPL gives you new rights that you didn't have before (thus it can be considered a valid contract, because you get something out of it).
Some EULAs claim they take away rights that you already had. There is no reason for a customer to agree to that license, because he gets nothing out of it (and he already had a legal right to run one copy of the software as soon as Microsoft handed him a cdrom)
No, he's not assuming that. (Although the ProCD desicion strongly supports the validity of EULAs)
If EULAS are not valid, then the user only has the rights provided by copyright law. That allows her to make copies of the material (software, music, or whatever) in very limited ways.
If you don't agree with the EULA, or think they don't need to be obeyed, nothing changes. You still must follow copyright law, which says no more than one usable copy of any copyrighted thing at a time.
Much of the text of a typical EULA is actually just a redundant rephrasing of copyright law... they don't actually have to tell you not to distribute copies, because it's already illegal.
he used them in grammatically correct ways. Just because it sounds strange to you doesn't mean it's incorrect,
No, the sentence is grammatically incorrect. It ends with "utlised", which is not part of the English language. Although we can guess the intention was "utilized", it's technically just as wrong as this sintance.
For a sentence to be "correct", first it must be free of spelling errors. Then there must be no grammar errors- but you're still not done. There is more to language than grammar rules, and a typical English teacher would redline the translated passage in multiple places.
The empty clause, the unwarranted hyperbole, and the overall awkward flow peg this speaker as ESL material.
Certainly none that matches the convenience of the Filer windows in RISC OS where you would double-click (or drag) a file to open it, and drag from the application to the Filer to save
:wresult3.txt, and in many contexts I'd be right.
That's subjective... I could claim that needing to drag an icon from a text editor to a whole other window (which I'd have to find and make visible first) is painfully slow compared to
That points to one big advantage of the dialog box approach: keyboard compatibility. Desktop environments which offer DnD should provide some (optional) way to perform equivalent actions from the keyboard, but I'm not aware of any having done so.
Digressing down that topic:
There have been some small steps made towards keyboard-controlled DnD, but I haven't seen any adequate yet. Of course, some systems let you push a button to steer the mouse from the keypad, but that's too awkward to consider. Some file managers include an abuse of the clipboard metaphor (like a Copy button which makes a "shallow copy", instead of a "deep" one like every other Copy command besides Excel) to provide features that could be better solved by enabling DnD via keyboard. There are assorted taskbar-applets which provide a "shelf" to set down an icon in mid-drag; enhancing one of those to be controllable by keyboard would be the most direct implementation of a solution.
glimpse should be a dependency of kdevelop in the package manager, or perhaps that the kdevelop package should recommend the glimpse package.
/usr/bin/package_desired which triggers the distribution-specific behavior. (There are obstacles about name ambiguity, of course...)
That's well and good, but doesn't address this problem. The fact remains that inter-package dependencies are not black and white. The admin will not always know what packages are needed at install time. There should be some more way for a running program to suggest that a new package could increase its functionality.
Package B might not REQUIRE Package A to run, even if it detects and uses A if installed. It's entirely valid for a computer to have only Bee installed and not A. But it would be better if, whenever the user attempts a B function dependent on A, he not only a descriptive message with the name of the missing file, but also a button which he can push to start the install process.
This is something that could be standardized across package systems. It might be as easy as creating a
Tell me, Idiot, where in my response, where I proved your statement inaccurate, did you determine that I hadn't read your post?
Tell me, Idiot, where in your post did you prove him wrong, or even attempt to do so? Your response was so totally irrelevant to his point that you can't possibly have understood what he said.
If you want to prove he was inaccurate, you'll have to point out where a Windows users can get a single DVD containing (as you say) "Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Getright, Visual Studio, Nero, Digital Camera support, optimized ATI drivers, wireless NIC drivers". Like a Microsoft equivalent to this.
Maybe one of the hoodlums peddling software on Hong Kong's sidewalks could set me up with a disc like that for "fie dolla", but can you suggest any non-criminal alternatives?
Whose responsibility is it again to ensure there are no conflicts?
The distro itself. Companies like RedHat and volunteers like Debian take conflicts between packages very seriously and take aggressive action when a user reports one.
For a format thats so highly tied to the printed page, I'm not sure what the fuss is about online readers for PDF's.
Ahem. It is because the format is so tied to the printed page that finding an adequate online reader is such a challenge! If it were easy to repaginate/reflow/rescale PDF files, there'd be a decent Open Source solution by now. The experience of using Linux programs like kghostview and xpdf is only slightly more convenient than reading text pages stored in PNG files.
Distributing information in PDF is an assault on the user because he's almost forced to output it to dead trees, rather than putting it onto pixels that otherwise would be wasted on screensavers.
if you really want to read online you should probably use a format that looks good on screen
By that logic, nobody should use PDF ever again. For any non-trivial published document you can be certain that some viewers will wish to print it and others will like to read it onscreen. To allow for that possibility, stay away from PDF and PS files.
That still has failings: it doesn't guide you to which applications are valid for opening a certain type of file. If your system has many applications (typical result of a "Full" Linux install from commercial cdroms), then it'd be impossible to have an icon for every app without wasting pixels or inducing squinting. (Both of those are points of opinion that would bother some users and not others)
The system in KDE's Konqueror filemanager is better because it recognizes multiple possible associations for each filetype, allowing a user to right-click to select opening something in the non-default handler. (KDE's approach still needs some improvement; the right-click menus need some streamlining, for example)
Focusing on the "dialog vs filemanager" question ignores a more important UI design choice, though: Should each application include its own GUI code to pick files, or reference a centralized GUI system to perform that operation?
Many of the problems you've cited with SaveAs are the result of poor and inconsistent implementations of dialogs, not file-dialogs per se.
Ideally, the application program would be written at a higher conceptual level, where details like dialog boxes and icons are implementation trivia handled by a GUI control process. That way each user could load/save files in exactly the way she prefers, regardless of the biases of any specific application's author.
Most Unix systems won't get infected and cannot be infected.
It's rare, but there is such a thing as spyware for Unix. It's produced by Evenbalance.com, and distributed by the Pentagon; it's included free when you install America's Army (for Windows or Linux)
Punkbuster might have somewhat different goals and methods than the majority of spyware, but it still deserves that name. A program which allows a stranger across the internet to scan your RAM for patterns or download periodic screenshots can't be called anything but spyware.
The difference with Punkbuster, of course, is that the developer is quite open about the purpose of the spyware, and it's something the users will agree with. But still, anyone with sensitive files on a PC should be aware there are whole categories of spyware which Ad-Aware will never flag, but which might be subverted to look for passwords and usernames rather than just wallhacks and aimbots.
(Someday the FBI might visit evenbalance.com with a wiretap warrant to inspect the players of those violent, kill-trainer games for hints of terrorist-tendencies...)
free WMV plugin?
What are you talking about? If you use Microsoft IE, I'd assume there already is a WMV plugin included... right?
Or if you're one of those Linux freaks, they can get Mplayer for Mozilla. (As long as you stick to Intel-style CPU of course)
But remember that non-IE browsers use mimetype (rather than file extension) to determine which plugin should view a download. Since your planning24h.jp server doesn't report a mimetype for WMV, the plugin might not be invoked.
because of the horrible dialogue/plot.
Which is it? Dialogue is completely separate from plot. Especially if you get dubs, you should expect the dialog to stink (there've been only 3-4 exceptions I've heard)
Gentoo had WineX in its repository at one time but was forced to take it out.
Then what is the meaning of this page, which records that the Gentoo version of winex was updated just 2 weeks ago?
What series isn't filled with way too much exposition?
The recent Last Exile anime is refreshingly low on exposition. (Almost excessively... the world background is a little threadbare)