Nowadays I don't even bother trying to run a game without cracking it first. There's no point - the cracked version is almost always superior.
I used to do this as well. But in the long run, I think it's too risky. You never know what kind of malware gets bundled with the crack. I need to be able to trust my PC for online banking etc., I can't have keyloggers or trojans on it. Virus scanners are no solution either.
It really sucks: play the original, and get crippling DRM. Play the pirated version, and run the risk of getting infected.
I'll disagree and say that learning your second (or third) 3d app is always hard. I learned 3dsmax first and found it a breeze to learn and a pleasure to use. Then I got my hands on the personal learning edition of Maya. I never really got my head around it, being used to the 3dsmax workflow as I was.
Then, I tried Blender. Using it caused almost physical discomfort. I thought the interface was ugly, alien and counter-intuitive. After a while I became productive with Blender, but I still dislike it. And everything that I did learn I'm sure I have forgotten by now, while I could find my way back into 3dsmax with little trouble - even though I haven't used it for a long time now.
The thing is, whatever you learn first conditions your brain to a certain way of working. Everything else after that is hard(er).
Easy: just get some circumaural headphones. They completely enclose the ears, and therefore exert no pressure on them. The Sennheiser HD580 are a good example of these, I find them quite comfortable.
Why not set up internal Jabber and/or IRC servers? If you can give (and demonstrate) a reasonable alternative to ICQ etc., and present your concerns along with that, surely your opinion will be weighing much more heavily.
Seriously? I have a Mac mini, and couldn't find any region-free firmware for the DVD drive yet. If this works, it would be a boon. But won't inserting a DVD of a different region still change the region coding of the drive, locking it up after 4 changes or so?
At least that's my experience on the PC: region protection is two-fold, in software and hardware. Once the drive's 4 allowed changes are used up, the player won't play anymore, regardless of its own region-setting.
I don't know which version of mplayer you tried, but maybe you should give it another chance. Apparently there's a new version for download at mplayerhq.hu, and it conforms better to OS X standards: Command-Q quits the player window, Command-0 to Command-2 switches play window sizes from half to double size, Command-F toggles fullscreen. You can quit the player window by clicking on the standard "x" window button, and through the menu bar. Like most OS X apps it stays in memory even after you quit the last app window.
But you know, the good thing about mplayer is that it's available for so many platforms. I have a Mac, a Windows PC and a Linux box. I can (and do) use mplayer on all these machines, and the keyboard interface is consistent, although it doesn't conform to the respective OS's gui guidelines. That's a design choice, and in my book a good one. You may disagree (probably because you're not used to it, took me a while to get to like it too), but that doesn't make it a "horrible" interface.
"Does this seem like a little bit of zealotry? I mean, why not use a nice, EASY*TO*USE OS instead of something the under-priviledged people using this machine will have to struggle to learn?"
That was my first thought as well. However, in the long run Linux might actually be the better choice. Unfortunately, the free software culture for OS X is a bit... underdeveloped, in my opinion. Many apps are closed-source and payware, especially the small, useful tools. On the other hand, you can do pretty much everything with Linux without ever paying a penny - the only price is the pain you feel when using it...;-)
You should send your resume to the Bush administration immediately. Upon reading your words of wisdom, I quickly googled for 'Iraq WMD' - 6.8 million results! Gee, who'd have thunk it's that easy to find 'em!
I'm SO glad there's no radio in the iPod. In my country, there's a substantial monthly fee on radio possession. Since I can't stand listening to radio (particularly annoying are the trained monkeys who pretend to be DJs) it would have been a lot of added cost vs. no benefit at all.
Actually, the "computer convergence analogy" would be ONE program that can create text documents, plays games and videos, and offers voice chat functionality. And one could well speculate that such a program would do each of those functions more poorly than a specialized application - hence, this is what we find in reality, as you listed in your analogy.
Convergence and specialization both have their uses and must be balanced against each other. Most likely this is a non-issue, anyway: chances are that there will always be gadgets that cater to both tastes.
As someone else already pointed out, there's no way to install them without user interaction and consent.
Also, Mozilla extensions are inherently open-source. You can simply unzip the.xpi, then unzip the.jar and look at the code. And that's all that they are - ECMAscript and XUL. That makes them cross-platform, too.
They're a lot easier to trust and a lot more likeable than ActiveX controls, don't you think?
Re:We could re-do "real artists"...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
How to say this gently... sorry, but your 3d renders are a far cry from pro level artwork. As soon as you start working with a higher level of detail, and start using more sophisticated lighting and texturing, you'll notice that things take a lot of time to get done.
I do this as a hobby, too, although I've been creating game objects for Morrowind mods, not complete 3d scenes. I find that to get something look just right, it takes a lot of tweaking, contemplating, experimenting - in other words, a lot of hours, even for simple objects.
"Myst in a month" IS impossible, particularly if you want to do it with style.
That means that you haven't installed any security updates in the last half year. I think there were a few remotely exploitable issues. Would you mind posting your IP adress?
Seriously, OS X is nice, but it isn't the holy grail of operating systems. I'm a user of OS X, Linux and Windows, and from a UI standpoint, I still prefer the latter.
Also, what's so great about spotlight? No-one who keeps his files tidy and organized really needs this.
I still don't get it, though. A human "playing" a slot maching is such a sad sight to see: inserting coins and pushing buttuns like a trained monkey, and not even receiving food for his toil.
The great humanists and educators like Lessing surely would despair at seeing a human lowering himself to such a level through his own free will.
I truly pity those who think that slot maching gambling is fun, or a rewarding activity on par with doing sports or going to a concert. A human, as a creature of the mind, surely should see that it is not, and that he his only hurting himself.
As part of the meeting, you could demo Firefox and its powerful plug-in system.
First, show them just the naked browser, and how it doesn't differ much from IE in its capabilities.
Then begin installing extensions, as diverse as possible: maybe mouse gestures, adblock, an RSS reader, scrapbook, smoothwheel, tab extensions and so on.
Finally make the point that all of this is only possible because every part of the browser is open and can be extended or overwritten by extensions.
Now while such a demo might not be overly spectacular, I can't think of a better and more tangible example of OSS. Doing a few live edits of Wikipedia is certainly a good idea, too.
"Humans in space are still humans just like the one on this blue ball."
Actually, I'm not too sure of that. Numerous astronauts report that the trip into space changes a man - and I think I can understand that, sort of.
It's a radical change of perspective. Viewed from down here, our earth seems rather huge, and if you try to get the "big picture", the only way to do so is via maps. Conveniently, all those maps come equipped with fat, red, obvious national borders, making it easy to divide the earth in "us" and "them".
From space, it's totally different. Not only will you suddenly have a very hard time pinpointing your hometown, let alone your country. Also, it becomes hard to think of the planet as "big" when you buzz around it in less than two hour's time (the orbital period of the ISS is ~90min) and when the atmosphere is just a sliver over the sphere's mass. Or when you watch the earth shrink to the size of a ping-pong ball when making the minutest of celestial excursions, for example to our moon.
I find it very understandable that humans will act less crazy and childish in such an environment, and it's this hope for the betterment of mankind which made me an enthusiast of manned space travel.
Actually, I'm not sure if it's that good an idea. The BitTorrent "swarm idea" doesn't really work if most participants don't share to a 1:1 ratio.
I'd imagine that, with a browser-embedded client, it's much more tempting to just close the torrent once the download is complete - and never mind the ratio. Especially if they just look like normal download windows. I fear that massive leeching might ensue...
So, it will remain to be seen what the impact on BT swarms will be. But I do agree that this lowers the entry threshold to BT usage, and that certainly is a good thing.
As far as I know, it's only the reactor shielding which has a limited lifespan and becomes (mildly) radioactive over time. There are no "fuel rods" of any sort which would produce the nuclear waste as we know it from fission plants.
In terms of toxicity, radioactivity and quantity, fusion plants would be (by orders of magnitude) cleaner than fission plants.
I was planning to back these claims up with a link, but I cannot seem to find the page with the info anymore, sorry...
I think there should and will always be a hierarchical folder system at least as a fallback option.
A traditional hierarchical file system has one huge advantage over a query-based one: it's fully explorable. Sometimes, I search for a file, but don't know its exact location or file-name. No problem: I can traverse the most likely places in the folder structure, and usually, I'll know the file when I see it. This is a fast and reliable process.
But what would I do if I can't formulate the proper search query for a specific file, or if I somehow messed up its metadata? I can easily see such a "filesystem database" become a cluttered boneyard for files that were created and forgotten, or became irretrievable.
I'm sure my rejection of the idea stems from the fact that I've been organizing my files in folders for what, 15 years? It'll be a hard habit to break.
Slashdot Mirror
You've just essentially described Titan Quest. Best Diablo Clone ever, BTW.
Nowadays I don't even bother trying to run a game without cracking it first. There's no point - the cracked version is almost always superior.
I used to do this as well. But in the long run, I think it's too risky. You never know what kind of malware gets bundled with the crack. I need to be able to trust my PC for online banking etc., I can't have keyloggers or trojans on it. Virus scanners are no solution either.
It really sucks: play the original, and get crippling DRM. Play the pirated version, and run the risk of getting infected.
I'll disagree and say that learning your second (or third) 3d app is always hard. I learned 3dsmax first and found it a breeze to learn and a pleasure to use. Then I got my hands on the personal learning edition of Maya. I never really got my head around it, being used to the 3dsmax workflow as I was.
Then, I tried Blender. Using it caused almost physical discomfort. I thought the interface was ugly, alien and counter-intuitive. After a while I became productive with Blender, but I still dislike it. And everything that I did learn I'm sure I have forgotten by now, while I could find my way back into 3dsmax with little trouble - even though I haven't used it for a long time now.
The thing is, whatever you learn first conditions your brain to a certain way of working. Everything else after that is hard(er).
You're thinking about turning a $500 games console (which will likely draw >100W constant) into a router? That's crazy.
Easy: just get some circumaural headphones. They completely enclose the ears, and therefore exert no pressure on them. The Sennheiser HD580 are a good example of these, I find them quite comfortable.
Why not set up internal Jabber and/or IRC servers? If you can give (and demonstrate) a reasonable alternative to ICQ etc., and present your concerns along with that, surely your opinion will be weighing much more heavily.
Try the keys "9" and "0" to change the volume on mplayer.
Seriously? I have a Mac mini, and couldn't find any region-free firmware for the DVD drive yet. If this works, it would be a boon. But won't inserting a DVD of a different region still change the region coding of the drive, locking it up after 4 changes or so?
At least that's my experience on the PC: region protection is two-fold, in software and hardware. Once the drive's 4 allowed changes are used up, the player won't play anymore, regardless of its own region-setting.
I don't know which version of mplayer you tried, but maybe you should give it another chance. Apparently there's a new version for download at mplayerhq.hu, and it conforms better to OS X standards: Command-Q quits the player window, Command-0 to Command-2 switches play window sizes from half to double size, Command-F toggles fullscreen. You can quit the player window by clicking on the standard "x" window button, and through the menu bar. Like most OS X apps it stays in memory even after you quit the last app window.
But you know, the good thing about mplayer is that it's available for so many platforms. I have a Mac, a Windows PC and a Linux box. I can (and do) use mplayer on all these machines, and the keyboard interface is consistent, although it doesn't conform to the respective OS's gui guidelines. That's a design choice, and in my book a good one. You may disagree (probably because you're not used to it, took me a while to get to like it too), but that doesn't make it a "horrible" interface.
You're right execpt for one thing: AFAIK, Apple licensed from Xerox. Subtle difference there...
That was my first thought as well. However, in the long run Linux might actually be the better choice. Unfortunately, the free software culture for OS X is a bit... underdeveloped, in my opinion. Many apps are closed-source and payware, especially the small, useful tools. On the other hand, you can do pretty much everything with Linux without ever paying a penny - the only price is the pain you feel when using it...
"Googling 'ipod nano screen scratch' yields 521,000 results."
You should send your resume to the Bush administration immediately. Upon reading your words of wisdom, I quickly googled for 'Iraq WMD' - 6.8 million results! Gee, who'd have thunk it's that easy to find 'em!
I'm SO glad there's no radio in the iPod. In my country, there's a substantial monthly fee on radio possession. Since I can't stand listening to radio (particularly annoying are the trained monkeys who pretend to be DJs) it would have been a lot of added cost vs. no benefit at all.
Actually, the "computer convergence analogy" would be ONE program that can create text documents, plays games and videos, and offers voice chat functionality. And one could well speculate that such a program would do each of those functions more poorly than a specialized application - hence, this is what we find in reality, as you listed in your analogy.
Convergence and specialization both have their uses and must be balanced against each other. Most likely this is a non-issue, anyway: chances are that there will always be gadgets that cater to both tastes.
As someone else already pointed out, there's no way to install them without user interaction and consent.
.xpi, then unzip the .jar and look at the code. And that's all that they are - ECMAscript and XUL. That makes them cross-platform, too.
Also, Mozilla extensions are inherently open-source. You can simply unzip the
They're a lot easier to trust and a lot more likeable than ActiveX controls, don't you think?
How to say this gently... sorry, but your 3d renders are a far cry from pro level artwork. As soon as you start working with a higher level of detail, and start using more sophisticated lighting and texturing, you'll notice that things take a lot of time to get done.
I do this as a hobby, too, although I've been creating game objects for Morrowind mods, not complete 3d scenes. I find that to get something look just right, it takes a lot of tweaking, contemplating, experimenting - in other words, a lot of hours, even for simple objects.
"Myst in a month" IS impossible, particularly if you want to do it with style.
"I havent restarted my computer in 138 days"
That means that you haven't installed any security updates in the last half year. I think there were a few remotely exploitable issues. Would you mind posting your IP adress?
Seriously, OS X is nice, but it isn't the holy grail of operating systems. I'm a user of OS X, Linux and Windows, and from a UI standpoint, I still prefer the latter.
Also, what's so great about spotlight? No-one who keeps his files tidy and organized really needs this.
I still don't get it, though. A human "playing" a slot maching is such a sad sight to see: inserting coins and pushing buttuns like a trained monkey, and not even receiving food for his toil.
The great humanists and educators like Lessing surely would despair at seeing a human lowering himself to such a level through his own free will.
I truly pity those who think that slot maching gambling is fun, or a rewarding activity on par with doing sports or going to a concert. A human, as a creature of the mind, surely should see that it is not, and that he his only hurting himself.
Ok, now mod me down...
As part of the meeting, you could demo Firefox and its powerful plug-in system.
First, show them just the naked browser, and how it doesn't differ much from IE in its capabilities.
Then begin installing extensions, as diverse as possible: maybe mouse gestures, adblock, an RSS reader, scrapbook, smoothwheel, tab extensions and so on.
Finally make the point that all of this is only possible because every part of the browser is open and can be extended or overwritten by extensions.
Now while such a demo might not be overly spectacular, I can't think of a better and more tangible example of OSS. Doing a few live edits of Wikipedia is certainly a good idea, too.
How about this box? 1.2 TB (with RAID 5) in a neat little package. Since it's an embedded system, it should be ok in the noise/power usage department.
Unfortunately, I don't own one, so I don't know know if there are any "showstoppers"...
"Humans in space are still humans just like the one on this blue ball."
Actually, I'm not too sure of that. Numerous astronauts report that the trip into space changes a man - and I think I can understand that, sort of.
It's a radical change of perspective. Viewed from down here, our earth seems rather huge, and if you try to get the "big picture", the only way to do so is via maps. Conveniently, all those maps come equipped with fat, red, obvious national borders, making it easy to divide the earth in "us" and "them".
From space, it's totally different. Not only will you suddenly have a very hard time pinpointing your hometown, let alone your country. Also, it becomes hard to think of the planet as "big" when you buzz around it in less than two hour's time (the orbital period of the ISS is ~90min) and when the atmosphere is just a sliver over the sphere's mass. Or when you watch the earth shrink to the size of a ping-pong ball when making the minutest of celestial excursions, for example to our moon.
I find it very understandable that humans will act less crazy and childish in such an environment, and it's this hope for the betterment of mankind which made me an enthusiast of manned space travel.
Actually, I'm not sure if it's that good an idea. The BitTorrent "swarm idea" doesn't really work if most participants don't share to a 1:1 ratio.
I'd imagine that, with a browser-embedded client, it's much more tempting to just close the torrent once the download is complete - and never mind the ratio. Especially if they just look like normal download windows. I fear that massive leeching might ensue...
So, it will remain to be seen what the impact on BT swarms will be. But I do agree that this lowers the entry threshold to BT usage, and that certainly is a good thing.
As far as I know, it's only the reactor shielding which has a limited lifespan and becomes (mildly) radioactive over time. There are no "fuel rods" of any sort which would produce the nuclear waste as we know it from fission plants.
In terms of toxicity, radioactivity and quantity, fusion plants would be (by orders of magnitude) cleaner than fission plants.
I was planning to back these claims up with a link, but I cannot seem to find the page with the info anymore, sorry...
Be Inc. tried this approach and failed miserably: remember BeOS R5 PE? The OS got a spectacular number of downloads, but flopped in the stores.
People will use free stuff as long and as much as they can, so I think an "OS X PE" would seal Apple's fate pretty quickly...
I think there should and will always be a hierarchical folder system at least as a fallback option.
A traditional hierarchical file system has one huge advantage over a query-based one: it's fully explorable. Sometimes, I search for a file, but don't know its exact location or file-name. No problem: I can traverse the most likely places in the folder structure, and usually, I'll know the file when I see it. This is a fast and reliable process.
But what would I do if I can't formulate the proper search query for a specific file, or if I somehow messed up its metadata? I can easily see such a "filesystem database" become a cluttered boneyard for files that were created and forgotten, or became irretrievable.
I'm sure my rejection of the idea stems from the fact that I've been organizing my files in folders for what, 15 years? It'll be a hard habit to break.