Lnks are incredibly broken. Some apps treat them as files, some treat them as links. I have accidentally ended up actually opening an lnk in wordpad more than once (a load of binary junk with several filenames appearing at various different points).
Lnks are good enough for users to make links on their Desktops, but are useless for actually getting a program to believe a file is really there.
Given that this time, they really really know there is prior art, are they just assuming no one can be bothered to have a long lawsuit with someone that rich?
KPDF (from KDE) has an option to make it stop following DRM instructions in PDFs (and they are generally simple flags, not actual encryption or anything). Adobe Acrobat reader is a terrible mess IMHO. Loads slowly, installs weird extensions for viewing video which no one has actually ever used, and doesn't let you do anything useful. It really gives me the feeling that the "user" being catered to is the creator of the PDF.
I should point out that alternative PDF viewers aren't like opening word docs in OO.o or even like "alternative" web browsers. As far as I can see, they pretty much always render pretty much exactly the same.
I don't really know of any proper PDF readers for Windows though. GSview can be kind of unpleasant to use, IMHO. If you are using Windows and want to print a PDF, you could always use the Knoppix LiveCD. Or wait for KDE on Windows, probably later this year. Or I have heard you can pay for a small utility to strip DRM flags from PDF files. But that seems kind of wrong.
The problem with punishing the firms advertised is that it is very hard to prove. It could be that they hired an advertising firm which represented itself as legitimate. It could even be that someone spammed in their name to try and damage their reputation.
How much does it cost to program the plane's computer to recognise very fast-moving small things on the rader? Does a countermeasures system need higher resolution than an airliner has?
In any case, flares seem a more sensible and reliable option than a laser. Have laser-based systems seen much testing? Any (guided) missile likely to be used by terrorist would be a Stinger or similar heat-seaker, and would be very reliably distracted by a flare. (as Stingers are the ones that the US handed out in Afghanistan during the cold war, they are almost certainly the cheapest black-market missiles).
BTW, the principles behind chaff and flare countermeasures are fairly easy. How are these laser devices supposed to work anyway? TFA suggests they are supposed to aim themselves at the nose of the missile, presumably burning out the IR sensors. I would have thought that this is somewhat unreliable. However, I guess flares pose a fire hazard.
I always thought that was a major issue for the stealth-based parts of Deus Ex. Guards would simply ignore them and go about their patrols, whereas if they saw the player they would sound the alarm. It also irritated me that one could throw unconscious people into water, and they would remain unconscious rather than dead.
The best handling of NPC reaction to dead bodies has got to be the Hitman series. They stop dead as if shocked, then run and hide, shout to alert guards, or start glancing around nervously with a gun drawn, depending on character. Altogether the actions of players are done very convincingly (occasional glitches, such as stopping and staring at Mr 47, aside), giving an impressions that they are genuinely a bit panicked by the situation rather than just coldly trying to escape or find the perpetrator.
Stuck your neck out? You are AC. Anyone could have posted that. In fact, I am somewhat doubtful that the parent and GP were even written by the same AC.
Of course they are smart, and of course hushing things up is the answer.
Does Apple not have a reputation for excellent, reliable hardware that "just works"? I know Slashdot knows better, but the majority of people believe what they are told. Hushing things up makes perfectly good business sense, because by annoying a few customers, they avoid many potential customers learning to doubt the reliability of the product. They probably don't care that it isn't very nice for those customers, because they are a corporation and are legally obliged to maximise profits.
Well, I use Linux, but when it comes to 3D accelerated graphics, I use proprietary software too. We're kind of stuck with binary drivers for reasonable desktop 3D performance for the time being, it seems.
I hope the Open Graphics project gets competitive enough to prompt some action on the part of the big GPU manufacturers.
I use Gentoo and can't stand Ubuntu, but I still recommend Ubuntu to people with no experience or Unix-ish OSs. It's far better to start of using something that works easily and tinker with that till you know what you're doing, before switching to anything that actually requires tinkering.
To be fair, I don't know what Gentoo's install is like now. Maybe you can do an install without knowing much.
We can't boycott they're products effectively. All manufacturers of GPUs that one could reasonably use for gaming/AIGLX-type-things are just as bad, and in any case, nVidia is not in a position to open it's drivers. If there were a good open-source supporting GPU manufacturer, we could all go and buy their cards, and nVidia and ATI might start thinking about opening the drivers. The Open Graphics Project is trying to create such a GPU, but it'll probably be a while before they have anything but a rather niche device (they currently have a development card with an FPGA in place of the GPU).
Try XP versus 2000. The big diff is the extra graphics. The UI in XP is always less responsive than 2000 (on the same hardware), unless you turn off the theme engine in services. Then it looks like 2000 and reacts only a bit slower.
For example, for want of anything better to do in a programming class years ago, I once wrote a program that scrolled text like a ticker applet across it's window title (so one can minimise it and watch the text move on the taskbar). Watching it in the taskbar didn't work in XP at anything but very slow speeds, while it worked fine in 2000. XP just wouldn't redraw fast enough.
XP in this case was on much better hardware.
There is a good reason for this. The basic code for interface drawing has not been modified much, and not at all with speed in mind, in between, while a lot of extra (mostly blue and arguably a bit tacky) stuff has been added. Of COURSE it's slower. There is simply more stuff to be done. Trolltech has actually looked into how to do things it already does in faster ways, using time they could have spent on extra features. I prefer software developed like that.
The difference is tiny. However, not everyone knows what strings does. Everybody knows that cat isn't a utility to write random data all over the file you give it. People are more likely to try it written this way.
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Lnks are incredibly broken. Some apps treat them as files, some treat them as links. I have accidentally ended up actually opening an lnk in wordpad more than once (a load of binary junk with several filenames appearing at various different points).
Lnks are good enough for users to make links on their Desktops, but are useless for actually getting a program to believe a file is really there.
Given that this time, they really really know there is prior art, are they just assuming no one can be bothered to have a long lawsuit with someone that rich?
KPDF (from KDE) has an option to make it stop following DRM instructions in PDFs (and they are generally simple flags, not actual encryption or anything). Adobe Acrobat reader is a terrible mess IMHO. Loads slowly, installs weird extensions for viewing video which no one has actually ever used, and doesn't let you do anything useful. It really gives me the feeling that the "user" being catered to is the creator of the PDF.
I should point out that alternative PDF viewers aren't like opening word docs in OO.o or even like "alternative" web browsers. As far as I can see, they pretty much always render pretty much exactly the same.
I don't really know of any proper PDF readers for Windows though. GSview can be kind of unpleasant to use, IMHO. If you are using Windows and want to print a PDF, you could always use the Knoppix LiveCD. Or wait for KDE on Windows, probably later this year. Or I have heard you can pay for a small utility to strip DRM flags from PDF files. But that seems kind of wrong.
Alternatively, NPC skill could be unpredictable. That would also be realism.
The problem with punishing the firms advertised is that it is very hard to prove. It could be that they hired an advertising firm which represented itself as legitimate. It could even be that someone spammed in their name to try and damage their reputation.
Is "." a valid tag?
I wonder how easy installing Linux on the PS3 is going to get?
I could see kids getting a console which also does web browsing and IM (because that's what computers are for), and not wanting a Windows box.
Lies! All lies!
The US NEVER sold missiles to terrorists!
The missiles were given away for free, at immense cost to US taxpayers.
How much does it cost to program the plane's computer to recognise very fast-moving small things on the rader? Does a countermeasures system need higher resolution than an airliner has?
In any case, flares seem a more sensible and reliable option than a laser. Have laser-based systems seen much testing? Any (guided) missile likely to be used by terrorist would be a Stinger or similar heat-seaker, and would be very reliably distracted by a flare. (as Stingers are the ones that the US handed out in Afghanistan during the cold war, they are almost certainly the cheapest black-market missiles).
BTW, the principles behind chaff and flare countermeasures are fairly easy. How are these laser devices supposed to work anyway? TFA suggests they are supposed to aim themselves at the nose of the missile, presumably burning out the IR sensors. I would have thought that this is somewhat unreliable. However, I guess flares pose a fire hazard.
They were talking more about reprogramming the printer to do scans from the inside than jMCSE ust sending malicious print jobs, I think.
But a 1337 filter for legitimate printing jobs would be brilliant. Imagine some poor technician trying to diagnose that...
I always thought that was a major issue for the stealth-based parts of Deus Ex. Guards would simply ignore them and go about their patrols, whereas if they saw the player they would sound the alarm. It also irritated me that one could throw unconscious people into water, and they would remain unconscious rather than dead.
The best handling of NPC reaction to dead bodies has got to be the Hitman series. They stop dead as if shocked, then run and hide, shout to alert guards, or start glancing around nervously with a gun drawn, depending on character. Altogether the actions of players are done very convincingly (occasional glitches, such as stopping and staring at Mr 47, aside), giving an impressions that they are genuinely a bit panicked by the situation rather than just coldly trying to escape or find the perpetrator.
Stuck your neck out? You are AC. Anyone could have posted that. In fact, I am somewhat doubtful that the parent and GP were even written by the same AC.
Of course they are smart, and of course hushing things up is the answer.
Does Apple not have a reputation for excellent, reliable hardware that "just works"? I know Slashdot knows better, but the majority of people believe what they are told. Hushing things up makes perfectly good business sense, because by annoying a few customers, they avoid many potential customers learning to doubt the reliability of the product. They probably don't care that it isn't very nice for those customers, because they are a corporation and are legally obliged to maximise profits.
Well, I use Linux, but when it comes to 3D accelerated graphics, I use proprietary software too. We're kind of stuck with binary drivers for reasonable desktop 3D performance for the time being, it seems.
I hope the Open Graphics project gets competitive enough to prompt some action on the part of the big GPU manufacturers.
The complaint is reasonable and mostly well put, but perhaps the speculation at then end annoyed them enough to make them remove it?
It still comes across as a bit unreasonable to remove it, however. But it's Apple. They don't expect you to upgrade things on your own.
And the high res image is gone.
You know a Government agency is underfunded when you can slashdot it from a post halfway down the page.
Hoping for an out-of-court settlement through vague threats?
I use Gentoo and can't stand Ubuntu, but I still recommend Ubuntu to people with no experience or Unix-ish OSs. It's far better to start of using something that works easily and tinker with that till you know what you're doing, before switching to anything that actually requires tinkering.
To be fair, I don't know what Gentoo's install is like now. Maybe you can do an install without knowing much.
We can't boycott they're products effectively. All manufacturers of GPUs that one could reasonably use for gaming/AIGLX-type-things are just as bad, and in any case, nVidia is not in a position to open it's drivers. If there were a good open-source supporting GPU manufacturer, we could all go and buy their cards, and nVidia and ATI might start thinking about opening the drivers. The Open Graphics Project is trying to create such a GPU, but it'll probably be a while before they have anything but a rather niche device (they currently have a development card with an FPGA in place of the GPU).
Dear god, Outlook is ugly in that screenshot. I hope vista is 3rd-party themeable without replacing system DLLs.
I want hardware like that.
Try XP versus 2000. The big diff is the extra graphics. The UI in XP is always less responsive than 2000 (on the same hardware), unless you turn off the theme engine in services. Then it looks like 2000 and reacts only a bit slower.
For example, for want of anything better to do in a programming class years ago, I once wrote a program that scrolled text like a ticker applet across it's window title (so one can minimise it and watch the text move on the taskbar). Watching it in the taskbar didn't work in XP at anything but very slow speeds, while it worked fine in 2000. XP just wouldn't redraw fast enough.
XP in this case was on much better hardware.
There is a good reason for this. The basic code for interface drawing has not been modified much, and not at all with speed in mind, in between, while a lot of extra (mostly blue and arguably a bit tacky) stuff has been added. Of COURSE it's slower. There is simply more stuff to be done. Trolltech has actually looked into how to do things it already does in faster ways, using time they could have spent on extra features. I prefer software developed like that.
Maybe when the kerning stuff is fixed so that it's actually worth using kword, people will be more interested in fixing other stuff...
The difference is tiny. However, not everyone knows what strings does. Everybody knows that cat isn't a utility to write random data all over the file you give it. People are more likely to try it written this way.
Why was the fortune file sitting in RAM?