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User: zr-rifle

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  1. Re:Video of Kittinger Jumping on Sonic Skydive's Real Aim Is To Help Astronauts Survive · · Score: 1

    Kittinger is actually acting as a consultant on the Stratos project. This is what makes me think is will be successful this time.

    I am a licensed skydiver and this feat, jumping from so high above and breaking the sound barrier during freefall, has been the dream of my life, since I was a little kid. I'd also do it for free, pity I wasn't as determined and resourceful as Mr. Baumgartner. Hats off to him.

  2. Re:Nice trolling there, kdawson on Italian Draft Wiretapping Law Under Fire · · Score: 1

    MOD PARENT UP.

  3. Re:Amiga games on Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy? · · Score: 1

    It's not our fault games were better on our system. Especially the sound. The ST was a ripoff. Sorry to break the news to you...

  4. Re:Amiga games on Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy? · · Score: 1

    Let me guess... you're an Atari ST owner?

  5. Re:Amiga games on Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy? · · Score: 1

    Still, in its glory days, games were abundant for the Amiga platform, so it must have been a profitable business for those producing them. What killed the Amiga wasn't piracy or the lack of games, but Commodore itself.

  6. A groundbreaking game on Fan-Developed Ultima VI Remake Released · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have very fond memories of Ultima 6. It was the first RPG game I played that had a real depth. Many feature were groundbreaking for its time, such as the daily and nightly schedules for the NPCs, the non-linear storyline and enormous freedom you had in exploring the world. The plot was very well written, dealing with a powerful culture clash between two races, humans and gargoyles. The gargoyles started out as a seemingly stereotyped enemy, but actually turned out to be a very evolved and intelligent race fighting for their survival, and that you had to befriend in order to reach the common goal: peace. A stunning work of art created by Richard Garriott, Warren Spector and Dr. Cat.

  7. Re:Does anybody still use Plone??? on Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook · · Score: 1

    Plone is quite popular and actively developed. Plone.net is a directory that lists many Internet portals and websites deployed with Plone.

    Nowadays, it's pretty simple to setup a hosting environment for it using buildout, a system based on plain text templates that automatically builds and configures Plone instances for you, fetching dependencies as needed.

  8. Re:Okay but... on Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook · · Score: 1

    I forgot to add the most important part: it's free and open-source software.

  9. Re:Okay but... on Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook · · Score: 5, Informative
    Thanks for asking nicely...

    Plone is a Content Management System (CMS) written in Python programming language for the Zope 2 Web Application server. Among the big names that have deployed Plone in the past are NASA, CIA, Akamai and Novell.

    Pros:
    • Mature
    • Flexible
    • Secure (with a proven track record)
    • Cross platform
    • Tons of third party extensions

    Cons:

    • Steep learning curve for developers and integrators
    • Python, not PHP (so uncommon hosting requirements)
    • Some say it's slow... (but have probably failed to correctly setup and optimize caching)
  10. Re:Flamebait on Google Reportedly Ditching Windows · · Score: 2, Informative

    Every single company I've worked with will handle .doc documents and .ppt spreadsheets for legacy reasons. These proprietary formats and read and written to by the iWork and OpenOffice.org suites, which can also read .pptx and .docx files.

    Again, the functionality required by 99% of the workers is more than provided by these alternatives.

  11. Re:Uh, cause that's where everyone's headed? on Canonical Explains Decision to License H.264 For Ubuntu · · Score: 1

    If it's so damn good, why fight it?

    The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...

  12. Re:Apple's grudge with Flash on The End of the PC Era and Apple's Plan To Survive · · Score: 1

    HTML5 apps have a lot of catch up to do. Have you seen any except some proof of concepts? Plus, HTML5 is untied to any specific company. The App Store has a massive advantage over HTML5 apps , so in the mobile scene it will be at most the runner-up.

    Those apps are free in order to attract visitors to the App Store. They cost nothing to produce and put on display, and generate traffic to the App Store (and therefore Apple's e-commerce site). That would not happen with Flash apps, of course.

  13. Apple's grudge with Flash on The End of the PC Era and Apple's Plan To Survive · · Score: 5, Informative

    I thought Apple's grudge against Flash was all about free Flash applications competing with it's own commercial apps from the App Store. Want your lame "fart button"? Just browse to www.fartbutton.com and have a field day for *free*; it's faster than a micro-transaction and less painful, especially when you have to justify to your spouse all those micro-purchases making a macro-dent on your income.

    No Flash, no cool little applications on your Phone for free... your only source for a quick fix is the App Store.

  14. Re:What is that smell? on The End of the PC Era and Apple's Plan To Survive · · Score: 1

    Put simply, your tablet docked to a station providing a more comfortable keyboard: there's your desktop computer. Looks cooler too.

    I'm not drinking the Koolaid (I don't have an iPhone or an iPad and don't plan to buy any of them in the future), but I can see where the technology is going.

    Still, writing your essay on a notebook on a train while going to the Uni seems more comfortable... at least until someone invents a foldable iPad or trains start sporting docking stations embedded in the passenger seats.

  15. Re:Try Plone on Simple CMS For Mixed Mac/Windows Team? · · Score: 1

    Funny, but unfair.

    To get it up and running you just need to run the unified installer (also for Mac) and then point your browser to your chosen port. Administration is done with a simple and friendly GUI.

    You don't need to install a LAMP stack and setup a database, so it's fast and pretty easy to get running; it's not the brutish beast you are depicting, so please don't spread FUD about a great piece of free software.

    If this guy knows his way around a command-line, he might want to try installing it the "correct way" by using zc.buildout and PythonPaste, which is a bit more complicated but in no way mandatory.

  16. Try Plone on Simple CMS For Mixed Mac/Windows Team? · · Score: 2, Informative

    Try Plone: it's cross-platform, open source and quite mature.

    I recently helped implement an intranet document sharing portal for a big bank in my country and it works remarkably well. Just make sure you use iw.fss or zope blobs to store those big files. With a vanilla Plone site you get fully indexed PDF, Microsoft Word and Openoffice documents indexed right out of the box. You can access your Plone site through WebDAV and define some fine grained ACLs to set group and user permissions. Also, versioning and some great workflow functionality is there.

    Ok, some may argue that Plone is actually a big and complex system, but the core functionality works straight away once it's installed and the Plone community is full of very helpful people. Worth a look.

  17. Re:Sorry but... on EA Launches Ultima-Based Browser Game · · Score: 1

    Feeding a troll, but still... The Ultima universe *was* Britannia, with its towns, cities and landmarks. A griefer playground with an anglosaxon-ish name created from scratch just isn't enough, in my book.

  18. Sorry but... on EA Launches Ultima-Based Browser Game · · Score: 4, Interesting

    if Lord British is not involved in the project it really doesn't qualify as a real Ultima for me. So it's merely an attempt to cash in on the Ultima franchise while it's still lukewarm. Oh, and by the way...

    > feared conquerors using armies of knights and mages to crush their enemies one by one in maniacal glee.

    Why... very Ultimish I would say... what happened to the eight virtues, making ethical decisions in order to become an Avatar (U4), resolving conflicts thorugh the use of peace and diplomacy (U6), etc...?

    Just call it 'WOW in a browser'.

  19. Don't try this at home on YouTube, Now In Text Mode! · · Score: 1

    Actually, you can to this easily with VLC, since it supports ASCII streaming of video files. Take a look at the available video outputs. Quite an amusing april fools prank, but a better one would have been switching back to '90s realvideo (H.263) with the soul-crushing, endless pre-buffering.

  20. Logic is important on Math Skills For Programmers — Necessary Or Not? · · Score: 1

    From my experience I found the understanding of Mathematical Logic to be absolutely essential for any programmer.

  21. Re:64-bit?! on Commodore 64 Primed For a Comeback In June · · Score: 2, Informative

    LOAD "VMLINUZ",8,1

  22. Re:The C64, an eulogy on Commodore 64 Primed For a Comeback In June · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Tramiel had nothing to do with the Amiga or Commodore's reknown bad management, that came *after* he left the company; try asking David Pleasance about that. Atari was already in bad shape when Tramiel and his son took over.

    Tramiel did try to buy out project Lorraine from Hi-Toro, but Commodore managed to land the deal (and 'f*ck up' the machine, as a famous Workbench easter egg recited).

    By the way, long live Jay Miner, Commodore's Steve Wozniak.

  23. Re:The C64, an eulogy on Commodore 64 Primed For a Comeback In June · · Score: 1

    Correction, I made a couple of typos and I really meant "for the masses, not for the classes", as Jack said it.

  24. Re:The C64, an eulogy on Commodore 64 Primed For a Comeback In June · · Score: 1

    Yes, sorry about my typo. I actually meant as it says on Wikipedia, else my reasoning wouldn't have made much sense (not it ever did... oh my...)

  25. Re:Not really a comeback on Commodore 64 Primed For a Comeback In June · · Score: 1

    I might be feeding the trolls, but still...

    >Yes, in a suitable emulator.
    Then just get a free emulator such as VICE or Frodo, that more than capable of running on even a 486DX2.

    Using PEEK or POKE from a BASIC prompt is at least an order of magnitude easier and more straightforward that messing with around with a kernel debugger of a such a massive operating system such as GNU/Linux. To replicate the Commodore experience you'd need a very stripped down and moderately powerful machine that boots directly into a friendly Python interpreter and provides simple, manipulable hooks into system resources such as the GPU and the sound chip (or any layer of abstraction above). Currently, I do not know of any comparatively easy way to do it on any Linux distribution.

    Still, there might be an untapped market for such a device, that might be well understood by dads in their early thirties and fourties. Now that would be something similiar to the C64.