Note that what happened over here was only possible due to lax laws (political parties could not be outlawed while today no parties that work against the democratic order are allowed), widespread poverty and a congress that was unable to act due to being cluttered with warring micro-parties (which is impossible today as all partis with less than 5% of all votes are irrelevant). The NSDAP had superior marketing - they gave out food to the people and had a somewhat solid plan for creating jobs - and used the lax laws to get rid of their opponents by force. The entire system was unstable and entirely unlike that in most of today's representative democracies.
Also, the two-party system has other downsides: As the parties don't appeal by means of having a popular ideology but by means of saying what the people want to hear politics are in danger of devolving into pandering towards whoever has the most money (as is already happening in the USA). Also, "stable government" might also mean "inflexible government" as the big parties might not be agile enough to react to a changing environment (a low reaction speed an inherent trait of democracies, but with only two parties it might be more pronounced).
Plus, your system has no provisions against one of the big parties doing evil. If one of the two parties decides to take an extremist stance they might win the election through good PR work and voter inertia and the only thing to keep them from doing damage is something like your checks and balances, while in a multiparty system they'd still have to form a coalition, which would reduce their potential to do damage (and might even make it impossible for them to form a working government at all).
And, of course, there is the element of choice. With two virtually indistinguishable parties in the middle you don't have much choice regarding policy. Over here we have some parties with rather pronounced opinions - for example the Greens, which got my vote for fiercely opposing software patents (locally and EU-wide) and for making the protection of consumer rights one of the more important points in their program. If we only had the CDU/CSU and the SPD nobody would oppose software patents because the CDU would say that 100% of all managers they asked were in favor of them and the SPD would say that 100% of the union workers they asked didn't care.
If you're a Democrat living in Texas, or a Republican living in New York, or a third-party supporter living anywhere at all, your vote is 100% completely irrelevent and will not sway the national election by the tiniest bit in favor of your candidate.
I think that's about the biggest problem with the current US election system. Most democracies/constitutional monarchies I know about have more than two relevant parties while the USA don't.
For example in Germany we have two big parties (SPD and CDU/CSU, which are almost only distinguishable by the fact that they always disagree), but neither of them has enough power to form a government. We also have about three smaller parties (a liberal party, the Greens and one and a half leftist parties) who have almost as much power as the big ones, even though they are struggling to get more than the 5% of the votes requied to get into the Bundestag. They are so powerful because none of the big parties can form a government without forming a coalition with one or more of them*, which of course is tied to politcal demands.
That way politics don't completely devolve into populism, as we still have parties with an ideology and whatever a big party does, it has to get into bed with one of them. It's possible for a small party to be important, as long as 5% of all voters vote for it.
I think if the election system of the States would be changed so that minor parties have a chance of getting into congress it would enhance the political health of the country. Of course it would also significantly weaken the power of the two big parties, which is why it will never, ever happen...
* While both a big coalition (SPD/C[DS]U) or a minority government are theoretically possible both options are rather unpopular. A minority government is utterly dependent on everyone else's whim and big coalitions are rare because the big parties more or less live off disagreeing. Nevertheless, we curently have a big coalition.
I think the regular installation detects things like the chipset of your mainboard and extracts only those files necessary. Also, everything is configured at install-time. That way you get a smaller installation that's somewhat tied to your hardware (Windows tends to break when it wakes up with a different chipset than it went to sleep with). The installation also takes a while because of all the configuration stuff.
The image based installation just puts all files for all chipsets etc. into a generic installation and dumps that onto your hard drive. Most of the configuration happens at build-time with only the steps that cannot be done beforehand (such as the actual driver selection) happening at the end of the installation. You end up with a bigger system, because you install everyting, including drivers for thirty RAID adapters you'll never own, but the installation is faster and easier (for the installer, not necessarily for you).
I could be wrong though. IANA Windows Setup developer.
Well... Quad cores + Xen + Linux/Windows dual OS setup + dualcore-optimized apps = fuck yes. I'm waiting for AM2 mainboard prices to go down, then I will finally rejoin the gaming world as booting into Windows does not mean booting out of Linux anymore. Having four cores would mean that even if I have Linux do something in the background (like emerging world) that might not mean a significant slowdown while I play something under Windows, provided that I set up everything so the OSes share as few resources as possible.
Affordable quad-core CPUs might not be what J. Random User needs, but I'm quite intrigued. I'm not sure what I'd do with eight cores apart from trying to compile KDE in under an hour, though...
No, but the Bible gives us rather accurate information about the arms race bach then. The Genesis describes the moment when the snakes first deployed weapons of mass depravation.
Regular content sites stream indirectly via the internet. All the traffic goes through one or more servers until it reaches your PC. Gotuit instead streams directly: When you register on their website a magical 10 Gbps NIC appears in your computer. That magical NIC is directly connected to the Gotuit mainframe, so they can stream directly. That's also why there is no buffering.
Actually, the constant "stick it in" options were an Excel Saga reference. One episode parodies dating sims and has selection boxes popping up whenever a certain character has to make a decision. "Stick it in" usually is among the options. (Actually, the "kill her" option was from Excel Saga, too.)
*cheerful, bland MIDI music starts playing* Noriko: *fades in* Brother! Brooootheeeer! Noriko: *makes angry face* You are reading Slashdot again, aren't you? Noriko: You spend too much time on the internet!
[Yes] [No] [Stick it in]
You: Hey, eight hours a day is not that much! Noriko: Yes it is! Noriko: *takes cheerful pose* I can't let you sit in front of the computer all day. Noriko: Today we're going to do something together, no discussion. Noriko: Do you have anything you want to do?
[Play a dating sim together] [Kill her] [Stick it in]
You: Your life is -5, Overrated! Noriko: *makes scared face* What are you doing with that knife? Noriko: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
*screen fades out*
GAME OVER
PS: I'm not trying to undermine my potential +5, Funny, but I don't want to write yet another post. When Wikipediaing for dating sim companies I noticed that according to the 'Pedia Leaf had to release the source code to some of their games under the GPL. Maybe that could be used for a free alternative to the program the TFA talks about? I gTranslated the corresponding page on Leaf's website (http://leaf dot aquaplus dot co dot jp/product/xvid.html - please spare their server if you don't intend to read the text) and it says something about how they distribute the source by email and/or CD. Maybe someone who speaks Japanese might want to get in touch with them...
(And don't tell my that the FOSS community has no need for this. We do things because we can, not because we need them;)
You are in a Slashdot discussion about a dating sim engine. There is a summary and a link to TFA here.
> EXAMINE SELF
You are an average Slashdotter. Your karma is Normal.
> READ SUMMARY
"This program lets you design visual novels. Even though most people think that all visual novels are dating sims, that is not entirely correct."
> READ TFA
Really?
> NO
Thought so.
> WRITE POST
About what do you want to write?
> TEXT ADVENTURES
You write a funny little piece about text adventures that is just barely connected to the thread.
> POST
Unfortunatly for you the moderators are on some particularly bad crack today and your post ends up with a score of -5, Funny. Maybe you should have posted anonymously.
Your karma has been reduced to below zero. As people around you sense your negative karma they shun you, leaving all future posts unread. You are dead, as far as this community's concerned.
Your final score is 5. You must be new here.
Well, if the scenario of an AMD/ATi/NVidia three-way merger would happen we'd still have an entity with close to 50% market share, a tight grip on the gaming market and the possibility for some rather nasty vertical integration (especially nasty as the high-end market would effectively belong to them). Even if it's just AMD/ATi we'd still end up with an imbalanced market.
It is true, however, that AMD might just be chasing after an answer to the 950.
The end result would probably lie between the GGP's "since NVidia and ATI merge they have no need for secets anymore so we get full specs on everything" utopia and the "you're going to buy our stuff anyway, so why should we try to appeal to you?" nightmare I described.
*I* will use the binary drivers Nvidia provides because they fulfill the most important requirement AFAIC: They make my stuff WORK.
Yeah, AIGLX and Xegl work real well with my Geforce FX.
NVidia does provide somewhat decent drivers, but they just fulfill the necessary requirements for being useful. Proper documentation would go all the way to "sufficient".
No, we'd have one entity that assumes control of most of the market (let's face it, Matrox and VIA are as important to the GPU market as ASRock is to high-end gaming) and puts out shitty but utterly competition-free products until the public is aggravated enough to risk incompatiblity by defecting to a fringe product. It'd be Internet Explorer all over, only this time even more people would have to suffer - for example, how high would accelerated Linux drivers be on the new company's priority list? As for now, Linux compatibility gives a small competitive advantage. When competition is pretty much eliminated such advantages quickly become irrelevant.
Consumer-level hardware currently is pretty much a two-dimensional battlefield: You can choose between AMD and Intel and between NVidia and ATi. Having AMD and ATi merge would probably result in a one-dimensional battlefield - either you use AMD/ATi or Intel/NVidia, as slight incompatibilities will be introduced in order to achieve vertical integration. Or, as a worst case, you have to choose between AMTividia and Intel/Intel.
The sibling is entirely correct. I did not write model, I wrote <<model>>. Those brackets make a big difference in meaning as there are very few (if any) non-UML contexts in which the string <<model>> is used while model is a rather common word.
True. There's a reason why some people see Eastern RPGs as a variant of the action adventure genre. Final Fantasy is more like Zelda with a different combat system* than like, for example, Eye of the Beholder. Yes, I know that Western RPG-like games can do that as well, as Baldur's Gate has illustrated.
* To keep people from posting "But Final Fantasy came before Zelda!": I am aware of that.
How very true. It's rather frustrating when you need to search for terms like <<model>> and all search engines direct you to modelling tutorials, modeling agencies and underage "this is not soft pr0n" "model" websites. Sure, sometimes you can add other search terms (in this case UML) and get more relevant results, but in some cases you still get too much noise.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that what happened over here was only possible due to lax laws (political parties could not be outlawed while today no parties that work against the democratic order are allowed), widespread poverty and a congress that was unable to act due to being cluttered with warring micro-parties (which is impossible today as all partis with less than 5% of all votes are irrelevant). The NSDAP had superior marketing - they gave out food to the people and had a somewhat solid plan for creating jobs - and used the lax laws to get rid of their opponents by force. The entire system was unstable and entirely unlike that in most of today's representative democracies.
Also, the two-party system has other downsides: As the parties don't appeal by means of having a popular ideology but by means of saying what the people want to hear politics are in danger of devolving into pandering towards whoever has the most money (as is already happening in the USA). Also, "stable government" might also mean "inflexible government" as the big parties might not be agile enough to react to a changing environment (a low reaction speed an inherent trait of democracies, but with only two parties it might be more pronounced).
Plus, your system has no provisions against one of the big parties doing evil. If one of the two parties decides to take an extremist stance they might win the election through good PR work and voter inertia and the only thing to keep them from doing damage is something like your checks and balances, while in a multiparty system they'd still have to form a coalition, which would reduce their potential to do damage (and might even make it impossible for them to form a working government at all).
And, of course, there is the element of choice. With two virtually indistinguishable parties in the middle you don't have much choice regarding policy. Over here we have some parties with rather pronounced opinions - for example the Greens, which got my vote for fiercely opposing software patents (locally and EU-wide) and for making the protection of consumer rights one of the more important points in their program. If we only had the CDU/CSU and the SPD nobody would oppose software patents because the CDU would say that 100% of all managers they asked were in favor of them and the SPD would say that 100% of the union workers they asked didn't care.
Not to forget the child molesters. Won't somebody think of the children?
If you're a Democrat living in Texas, or a Republican living in New York, or a third-party supporter living anywhere at all, your vote is 100% completely irrelevent and will not sway the national election by the tiniest bit in favor of your candidate.
I think that's about the biggest problem with the current US election system. Most democracies/constitutional monarchies I know about have more than two relevant parties while the USA don't.
For example in Germany we have two big parties (SPD and CDU/CSU, which are almost only distinguishable by the fact that they always disagree), but neither of them has enough power to form a government. We also have about three smaller parties (a liberal party, the Greens and one and a half leftist parties) who have almost as much power as the big ones, even though they are struggling to get more than the 5% of the votes requied to get into the Bundestag. They are so powerful because none of the big parties can form a government without forming a coalition with one or more of them*, which of course is tied to politcal demands.
That way politics don't completely devolve into populism, as we still have parties with an ideology and whatever a big party does, it has to get into bed with one of them. It's possible for a small party to be important, as long as 5% of all voters vote for it.
I think if the election system of the States would be changed so that minor parties have a chance of getting into congress it would enhance the political health of the country. Of course it would also significantly weaken the power of the two big parties, which is why it will never, ever happen...
* While both a big coalition (SPD/C[DS]U) or a minority government are theoretically possible both options are rather unpopular. A minority government is utterly dependent on everyone else's whim and big coalitions are rare because the big parties more or less live off disagreeing. Nevertheless, we curently have a big coalition.
I would say it the other way around. Men are OS X and Women are Linus.
No. Just... no.
I think the regular installation detects things like the chipset of your mainboard and extracts only those files necessary. Also, everything is configured at install-time. That way you get a smaller installation that's somewhat tied to your hardware (Windows tends to break when it wakes up with a different chipset than it went to sleep with). The installation also takes a while because of all the configuration stuff.
The image based installation just puts all files for all chipsets etc. into a generic installation and dumps that onto your hard drive. Most of the configuration happens at build-time with only the steps that cannot be done beforehand (such as the actual driver selection) happening at the end of the installation. You end up with a bigger system, because you install everyting, including drivers for thirty RAID adapters you'll never own, but the installation is faster and easier (for the installer, not necessarily for you).
I could be wrong though. IANA Windows Setup developer.
The last beta of Windows Vista I tried, after the installation of the OS alone, took up 16 GB of disk space!
Did it also take 20 minutes to take a 17 megabyte file from one folder to another?
Well... Quad cores + Xen + Linux/Windows dual OS setup + dualcore-optimized apps = fuck yes. I'm waiting for AM2 mainboard prices to go down, then I will finally rejoin the gaming world as booting into Windows does not mean booting out of Linux anymore. Having four cores would mean that even if I have Linux do something in the background (like emerging world) that might not mean a significant slowdown while I play something under Windows, provided that I set up everything so the OSes share as few resources as possible.
Affordable quad-core CPUs might not be what J. Random User needs, but I'm quite intrigued. I'm not sure what I'd do with eight cores apart from trying to compile KDE in under an hour, though...
No, but the Bible gives us rather accurate information about the arms race bach then. The Genesis describes the moment when the snakes first deployed weapons of mass depravation.
Regular content sites stream indirectly via the internet. All the traffic goes through one or more servers until it reaches your PC. Gotuit instead streams directly: When you register on their website a magical 10 Gbps NIC appears in your computer. That magical NIC is directly connected to the Gotuit mainframe, so they can stream directly. That's also why there is no buffering.
Actually, the constant "stick it in" options were an Excel Saga reference. One episode parodies dating sims and has selection boxes popping up whenever a certain character has to make a decision. "Stick it in" usually is among the options. (Actually, the "kill her" option was from Excel Saga, too.)
*cheerful, bland MIDI music starts playing*
;)
Noriko: *fades in* Brother! Brooootheeeer!
Noriko: *makes angry face* You are reading Slashdot again, aren't you?
Noriko: You spend too much time on the internet!
[Yes] [No] [Stick it in]
You: Hey, eight hours a day is not that much!
Noriko: Yes it is!
Noriko: *takes cheerful pose* I can't let you sit in front of the computer all day.
Noriko: Today we're going to do something together, no discussion.
Noriko: Do you have anything you want to do?
[Play a dating sim together] [Kill her] [Stick it in]
You: Your life is -5, Overrated!
Noriko: *makes scared face* What are you doing with that knife?
Noriko: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
*screen fades out*
GAME OVER
PS: I'm not trying to undermine my potential +5, Funny, but I don't want to write yet another post. When Wikipediaing for dating sim companies I noticed that according to the 'Pedia Leaf had to release the source code to some of their games under the GPL. Maybe that could be used for a free alternative to the program the TFA talks about? I gTranslated the corresponding page on Leaf's website (http://leaf dot aquaplus dot co dot jp/product/xvid.html - please spare their server if you don't intend to read the text) and it says something about how they distribute the source by email and/or CD. Maybe someone who speaks Japanese might want to get in touch with them...
(And don't tell my that the FOSS community has no need for this. We do things because we can, not because we need them
Free Visual Novel Design Engine Released
You are in a Slashdot discussion about a dating sim engine. There is a summary and a link to TFA here.
> EXAMINE SELF
You are an average Slashdotter. Your karma is Normal.
> READ SUMMARY
"This program lets you design visual novels. Even though most people think that all visual novels are dating sims, that is not entirely correct."
> READ TFA
Really?
> NO
Thought so.
> WRITE POST
About what do you want to write?
> TEXT ADVENTURES
You write a funny little piece about text adventures that is just barely connected to the thread.
> POST
Unfortunatly for you the moderators are on some particularly bad crack today and your post ends up with a score of -5, Funny. Maybe you should have posted anonymously.
Your karma has been reduced to below zero. As people around you sense your negative karma they shun you, leaving all future posts unread. You are dead, as far as this community's concerned.
Your final score is 5. You must be new here.
Any information on charges?
Electrons: negative
Neutrons: neutral
Protons: positive
I thought it was a 12-step plan to world domination, but then again, Bungie already has a 7-step plan for that and they work for Microsoft.
No, an RSS aggregator just collects feeds. Slashdot also repeats them, making it an RSS aggravator. ;)
Well, if the scenario of an AMD/ATi/NVidia three-way merger would happen we'd still have an entity with close to 50% market share, a tight grip on the gaming market and the possibility for some rather nasty vertical integration (especially nasty as the high-end market would effectively belong to them). Even if it's just AMD/ATi we'd still end up with an imbalanced market.
It is true, however, that AMD might just be chasing after an answer to the 950.
The end result would probably lie between the GGP's "since NVidia and ATI merge they have no need for secets anymore so we get full specs on everything" utopia and the "you're going to buy our stuff anyway, so why should we try to appeal to you?" nightmare I described.
...except for the fact that most new APs do with WEP or WPA enabled by default.
*I* will use the binary drivers Nvidia provides because they fulfill the most important requirement AFAIC: They make my stuff WORK.
Yeah, AIGLX and Xegl work real well with my Geforce FX.
NVidia does provide somewhat decent drivers, but they just fulfill the necessary requirements for being useful. Proper documentation would go all the way to "sufficient".
No, we'd have one entity that assumes control of most of the market (let's face it, Matrox and VIA are as important to the GPU market as ASRock is to high-end gaming) and puts out shitty but utterly competition-free products until the public is aggravated enough to risk incompatiblity by defecting to a fringe product. It'd be Internet Explorer all over, only this time even more people would have to suffer - for example, how high would accelerated Linux drivers be on the new company's priority list? As for now, Linux compatibility gives a small competitive advantage. When competition is pretty much eliminated such advantages quickly become irrelevant.
Consumer-level hardware currently is pretty much a two-dimensional battlefield: You can choose between AMD and Intel and between NVidia and ATi. Having AMD and ATi merge would probably result in a one-dimensional battlefield - either you use AMD/ATi or Intel/NVidia, as slight incompatibilities will be introduced in order to achieve vertical integration. Or, as a worst case, you have to choose between AMTividia and Intel/Intel.
Ah yes, I know that. The friction got so bad I had to cancel my subscription to--
*ahem* I mean, yes, I know that. From work. Yeah. Definitely work.
Most likely we'll start hearing "we lost the depositions" or something like that.
No, IBM destroyed the developers before they could be brought to court.
The sibling is entirely correct. I did not write model, I wrote <<model>>. Those brackets make a big difference in meaning as there are very few (if any) non-UML contexts in which the string <<model>> is used while model is a rather common word.
True. There's a reason why some people see Eastern RPGs as a variant of the action adventure genre. Final Fantasy is more like Zelda with a different combat system* than like, for example, Eye of the Beholder. Yes, I know that Western RPG-like games can do that as well, as Baldur's Gate has illustrated.
* To keep people from posting "But Final Fantasy came before Zelda!": I am aware of that.
I'll be waiting for Sweetknuckle Junction 2.0.
How very true. It's rather frustrating when you need to search for terms like <<model>> and all search engines direct you to modelling tutorials, modeling agencies and underage "this is not soft pr0n" "model" websites. Sure, sometimes you can add other search terms (in this case UML) and get more relevant results, but in some cases you still get too much noise.