From what I have heard from a LOT of people, I should really give Planescape Torment a go.
Add one more in that list of people. Planescape: Torment is the best RPG you can get on a pc. The BG series was very good, though not up to par with torment.
The story is very original, the game is very well written. It seems they had DMs on the design team.
You get quests, not your typical fedex quests(you know, go fetch this and bring it back then take this to this guy etc), but quests where you'll need to think. It's not like BG, you don't have to finish all quests to continue, and some you never will. Some quests you won't discover at all. The ones you'll solve, some you'll solve them right away and some after a long time. You can pick up any items you'll find, some of them might have something to do with a future quest or they might be totally useless. But you cann't carry everything with you. And you cann't be certain which items are useful. Sometimes, even garbage might be of some use.
You don't choose an alignment for your character, it chooses you. (soviet russia comes to mind) Depending how you play your alignment will form accordingly.
I could tell you alot more but I'll let you see the game yourself. As you probably realised, this isn't for gamers but for D&D players. ie. if you expect and demand to open every door, solve everything, collect everything and see everything there is to see, then you might be dissapointed. If on the other hand you are a D&D player and you've been dissapointed before by the rest of hack'n'slash mighty magic pseudoRPGs, then you're in for a treat with this one.
I've talked in the past with friends who finished torment and each one's gameplay and experiences was totally different.
No, it's not. I think you misunderstand what multi-user means.
multi-user OS: an OS where multiple users can login and use it at the same time. Not one at a time.
As an example, let's say you're buying a new car. You ask your vendor, is it multi-user? They say ofcourse it is. you can use it and so can your wife, with one caveat. If you both want to go somewhere at the same time, you cann't give a lift to your wife. You'll have to buy another car for your wife instead. Would you put up with that?
The fact that they want end users to PAY for licenses to be able to simultaneously run several users at once is a business decision, not a technical limitation.
It's actually both a technical limitation and a business decision. The OS is broken, but it's broken on purpose. MS can fix it, but they won't. They prefer you go and buy a new copy instead.
Why in the world would you need full desktop access for several people for a HOME computer?
Let's see...because I can use my desktop at the same time as my partner. (we use thin clients on linux). Because I don't have to buy 2-3 expensive machines for each person who wants to use their desktop. Instead, cheap, tiny and noiseless machines will do, since the main computer(linux server) does all the work(hidden away from the living room).
I can also login remotelly to my desktop when I'm away without worrying that I'll kick someone out of their desktop. And ofcourse the server does alot more than just serving a few users. It works as a PVR backend, it does FTP, it does SSH, etc etc.
No it's not. MS will never make a multi user OS. MS wants one user only per copy of windows. They don't like multi user systems. They don't like thin client systems either. (yes, MS sells a terminal server. They had to get into that cause some businesses wanted to go that route. But they're still doing their best to implant the single user mentality to average users. Their mainstream OS has no such capabilities. Plus, MS terminal server is a joke as you pay both for the server and per user. So all cost benefits are negated)
God forbid if people find out what multiuser systems really do. Imagine that! Joe Sixpack would start wondering why he needs a copy of windows for each member of his family. Or maybe he'd go wild and just use dumb terminals to connect to the main computer. (for the uninitiated: dumb terminal doesn't mean 'command line'- you can have your desktop as you know it, running super fast on a cheap and light machine, like a pII-200MHz 32mb)
MS threw dust in your eyes, pretending they have a multiuser OS, just so they don't get behind in the catchwords race. Before you say "but i can have more than one user on my windows machine", can multiple users use the pc at the same time? Try it. Login to your account, then create another user on that machine. Now try to login remotelly with the new user, while you're still logged in with your previous username. Windows will throw a popup, warning you, that another user is logged in and if you continue that user will be logged out. There can only be one!
And ofcourse, even if MS changes tomorrow and decides to go multi user, there is a single-user culture in windows, that's difficult, if not impossible to change. ie. most windows apps would not work.
Not quite, but to ease your concerns, lorentz dilations is not something that you can feel/see yourself about yourself. If you're traveling near to the speed of light, you will notice these effects on other objects which don't travel with you. Observers who don't travel with you will also notice these effects on you. But that wouldn't have any effect on you whatsoever.
Infact, there are objects in the universe that are moving away from us and we are moving away from them right now, with a speed near the speed of light. Do you feel anything?
and not to mention the acceleration itself would be a huge stress to the occupants or payload, unless you want to take weeks to accelerate to high velocities.
Why would we need to accelarate to such speeds? Why not warp space infront of us instead? Both the warp drive in startrek and wormholes, work with this idea. We wouldn't feel any accelaration because there wouldn't be any.
Either cooltechzone hires trolls, or maybe they cann't resist Bill's checks?
Re:GNOME's audio backend GStreamer to use DRM
on
A Look at GNOME 2.14
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Noone is forcing anything on you. DRM plugins will be in the "ugly" module. You don't have to install this module. GStreamer will still work perfectly fine with the rest of the plugins.
Most distributions, for legal reasons, only ship a small subset of GStreamer 0.8 plugins. Because GStreamer's plugins are built from the same source module, each packager was forced to split it up to remove components that were illegal or unwise to use in their particular area of operation. The amount of custom code caused a number of problems for users. To solve this, 0.10 has five plugin modules called base, good, ugly, bad and ffmpeg. Base and good contain plugins that any distribution can ship without fear of potential legal issues. Ugly contains well-maintained plugins which may or may have legal issues of some form, generally patent or license issues. Bad is an incubation area where new plugins mature before moving to good or ugly. If a plugin never matures, it may remain in bad for the rest of its life. ffmpeg contains wrappers for all the codecs in the ffmpeg package. This new scheme will allow downstream packagers to have more consistent package naming and installation scripts, making it easier for users to discover and install the plugins that they need.
The base package is not intended to contain all the plugins required by a typical GStreamer setup. Instead, it contains one important example of each type of GStreamer plugin. The code and documentation for base plugins will remain current so developers will always be able to create new plugins from a known working code base.
Stelarium and Celestia are great programs, but you forgot Xephem. IMHO *the* most powerful astronomy tool, but it needs a beautiful gtk interface instead of the ugly motif. Heh, you can tell xephem was written by astronomers.:-D
Like you said, "I never deleted them, mostly because I had enough knowledge". Exactly! Clueless users won't know these commands, and once they do they are no longer as clueless.
So when you get to the point where you know su and rm, it's highly unlikely you'll do something as stupid as su to root and rm -rf/
Compare that with windows, where you got admin rights by default, and you can wipe your system clean with the click of a mouse...
BS. Yeah, the first thing a clueless user would think is rm -rf, right? They won't know the rm command exists, let alone use it while they su to root.
All they'd do is use their desktop, be that gnome or kde, and manage the files they see as *icons* with their *mouse*. IF they delete something accidentaly, that obviously cann't be anything vital to the system, since linux won't let you do stupid things like this, while you're logged in as a user.
On the other hand, in windowsland, how many times have you seen a clueless user deleting vital system files? Exactly! TOO many times. ("what's this msblabla2131.dll? hmmm must be a virus, lets delete it.")
This scam *does* target people who get their PCs preconfigured and their OS preinstalled. That's more than 90% of windows users. It doesn't affect linux users or users who build their own machines.
Nope. The scam targets windows boxes since most (if not all) PCs come with windows preinstalled. As soon as you install linux, their scam will be expossed.
And even if they did provide kernel patches for linux preinstalled PCs, it wouldn't work. The scam would show on your next kernel update.
This targets only windows users. The ones who never install another OS or have never removed their cpu from the m/b.
Why is parent modded funny? There are some serious privacy issues here for those accepting this offer. From the A9 site: "Just make sure that you are recognized by name when you use A9.com, and your Instant Reward will be applied automatically"
Hahaha! I actually tried it, "Replace windows with linux", and their top result was "Why linux won't replace windows", and some other gems like "linux is not windows" etc. Hilarious! Either their search algorithms cann't understand a simple frase or, more likely, their search algorithms are biased and adjusted to favor windows and hide linux links under the table. If they feel they need to resort to these kind of dirty tricks, they really *are* afraid of linux and google.
Google, on the other hand, correctly interprets "replace windows with linux" and comes up with "Constructing A Windows-Less Office" and "Windows to Linux Migration Guide".
Thanks! I didn't know about this one. Can I transfer the data from maestro to MMB and just update the dataset, or do I have to download the whole lot again?
I just found out about maestro(Google cache) It's basically the software NASA uses to control the rovers and process their datasets. Looks quite interesting. I'm getting the datasets as I type this.(200MB)
If you're on gentoo, emerge maestro maestro-data
If not, check your distro repos or get it from here.
You're obviously trolling but I'll bite. GPL software is free as in freedom. You can do anything you want with it, including modifying and redistributing the source as long as you release your modifications under the same GPL licence for the benefit of the whole community. There is also commercial open source software out there that is GPL'd and it's free as in freedom but not free as in beer.
And what exactly doesn't inter-operate with other licences and why does it have to? If the GPL was compatible with MS licences or other closed source licenses you'd lose your freedom on the software. And vice-versa. If MS were to make their licences compatible with the GPL, they would have to abandon their control over the source and give all the freedom the GPL provides. They'd never do that.
R.Stallman can change what at will? If you release your software under the GPLv2 and GPL is revised to v3, you can still continue to release your software under GPLv2. I don't see your point. Or maybe I do, you intended to mislead and spread disinformation.
There are just so many little things about the Earth that are balanced in favor of life (e.g. Distance from Sun, size of star, size of planet/gravity, magnetic field strength, atmosphere composition, etc.)
The distance from the sun, is not as important as it seems to be. The habitable zone has not been at 1AU at all times and it's going to change again in the future. There was a time when Mars was in the habitable zone and Earth was not. Similarly, when the sun will get older and on its way of becoming a red giant, Mars will again be in the habitable zone while Earth will be as hot as Venus.
The size of a planet and its gravity doesn't necessarily favor or hinder the development of life, as long as you don't take the extremes into account(ie. life would most likely not develop on an asteroid or a gas giant, though there could be exceptions). Mars is a small rocky planet with a gravity of 0.376 Gs which is quite low for humans. But that doesn't mean life didn't exist there. Earth's 1G is not some kind of universal standard for life. It's just the gravity, earth species live on. The same goes for atmospheric composition and magnetic field strenght. It's the enviroment we evolved and live in, not a universal standard. Humans would have as hard a time adapting to a lower/higher G enviroment, or to a deviant atmospheric composition, as a lifeform from somewhere else would have on Earth.
Also don't forget evolution. Life can adapt to a changing enviroment. If we send humans to live on Mars, after several generations, their successors won't be able to live on Earth's gravity. Which btw I think it's the key for colonization of other planets. If we ever find a way to accelerate evolution changes on ourselves, it'd be easier to do this instead of terraforming other planets.
Firefox doesn't use any native gtk widgets on my system. It tries to look more consistent with gtk, but you can tell it's CSS themes and not native widgets althouth it looks quite similar. And all dialogs(open/save) look like windows dialogs.
Slashdot Mirror
The story is very original, the game is very well written. It seems they had DMs on the design team.
You get quests, not your typical fedex quests(you know, go fetch this and bring it back then take this to this guy etc), but quests where you'll need to think. It's not like BG, you don't have to finish all quests to continue, and some you never will. Some quests you won't discover at all. The ones you'll solve, some you'll solve them right away and some after a long time. You can pick up any items you'll find, some of them might have something to do with a future quest or they might be totally useless. But you cann't carry everything with you. And you cann't be certain which items are useful. Sometimes, even garbage might be of some use.
You don't choose an alignment for your character, it chooses you. (soviet russia comes to mind) Depending how you play your alignment will form accordingly.
I could tell you alot more but I'll let you see the game yourself. As you probably realised, this isn't for gamers but for D&D players. ie. if you expect and demand to open every door, solve everything, collect everything and see everything there is to see, then you might be dissapointed. If on the other hand you are a D&D player and you've been dissapointed before by the rest of hack'n'slash mighty magic pseudoRPGs, then you're in for a treat with this one.
I've talked in the past with friends who finished torment and each one's gameplay and experiences was totally different.
NT has been multi-user for a long, long time.
No, it's not. I think you misunderstand what multi-user means.
multi-user OS: an OS where multiple users can login and use it at the same time. Not one at a time.
As an example, let's say you're buying a new car. You ask your vendor, is it multi-user? They say ofcourse it is. you can use it and so can your wife, with one caveat. If you both want to go somewhere at the same time, you cann't give a lift to your wife. You'll have to buy another car for your wife instead. Would you put up with that?
The fact that they want end users to PAY for licenses to be able to simultaneously run several users at once is a business decision, not a technical limitation.
It's actually both a technical limitation and a business decision. The OS is broken, but it's broken on purpose. MS can fix it, but they won't. They prefer you go and buy a new copy instead.
Why in the world would you need full desktop access for several people for a HOME computer?
Let's see...because I can use my desktop at the same time as my partner. (we use thin clients on linux). Because I don't have to buy 2-3 expensive machines for each person who wants to use their desktop. Instead, cheap, tiny and noiseless machines will do, since the main computer(linux server) does all the work(hidden away from the living room). I can also login remotelly to my desktop when I'm away without worrying that I'll kick someone out of their desktop. And ofcourse the server does alot more than just serving a few users. It works as a PVR backend, it does FTP, it does SSH, etc etc.
Vista is pretty much multi-user on the Unix level
No it's not. MS will never make a multi user OS. MS wants one user only per copy of windows. They don't like multi user systems. They don't like thin client systems either. (yes, MS sells a terminal server. They had to get into that cause some businesses wanted to go that route. But they're still doing their best to implant the single user mentality to average users. Their mainstream OS has no such capabilities. Plus, MS terminal server is a joke as you pay both for the server and per user. So all cost benefits are negated)
God forbid if people find out what multiuser systems really do. Imagine that! Joe Sixpack would start wondering why he needs a copy of windows for each member of his family. Or maybe he'd go wild and just use dumb terminals to connect to the main computer. (for the uninitiated: dumb terminal doesn't mean 'command line'- you can have your desktop as you know it, running super fast on a cheap and light machine, like a pII-200MHz 32mb)
MS threw dust in your eyes, pretending they have a multiuser OS, just so they don't get behind in the catchwords race. Before you say "but i can have more than one user on my windows machine", can multiple users use the pc at the same time? Try it. Login to your account, then create another user on that machine. Now try to login remotelly with the new user, while you're still logged in with your previous username. Windows will throw a popup, warning you, that another user is logged in and if you continue that user will be logged out. There can only be one!
And ofcourse, even if MS changes tomorrow and decides to go multi user, there is a single-user culture in windows, that's difficult, if not impossible to change. ie. most windows apps would not work.
Infact, there are objects in the universe that are moving away from us and we are moving away from them right now, with a speed near the speed of light. Do you feel anything?
Why would we need to accelarate to such speeds? Why not warp space infront of us instead? Both the warp drive in startrek and wormholes, work with this idea. We wouldn't feel any accelaration because there wouldn't be any.
Is it wrong to love MS?
Linux is doomed, Thanks to MS.
Either cooltechzone hires trolls, or maybe they cann't resist Bill's checks?
From gnomejournal:
Stelarium and Celestia are great programs, but you forgot Xephem. IMHO *the* most powerful astronomy tool, but it needs a beautiful gtk interface instead of the ugly motif. Heh, you can tell xephem was written by astronomers. :-D
Like you said, "I never deleted them, mostly because I had enough knowledge". Exactly! Clueless users won't know these commands, and once they do they are no longer as clueless.
/
So when you get to the point where you know su and rm, it's highly unlikely you'll do something as stupid as su to root and rm -rf
Compare that with windows, where you got admin rights by default, and you can wipe your system clean with the click of a mouse...
BS. Yeah, the first thing a clueless user would think is rm -rf, right? They won't know the rm command exists, let alone use it while they su to root.
All they'd do is use their desktop, be that gnome or kde, and manage the files they see as *icons* with their *mouse*. IF they delete something accidentaly, that obviously cann't be anything vital to the system, since linux won't let you do stupid things like this, while you're logged in as a user.
On the other hand, in windowsland, how many times have you seen a clueless user deleting vital system files? Exactly! TOO many times. ("what's this msblabla2131.dll? hmmm must be a virus, lets delete it.")
I agree. "Proper use of english: Episode 12", will clarify everything about the subject.
wtf? How is my parent post flamebait?
This scam *does* target people who get their PCs preconfigured and their OS preinstalled. That's more than 90% of windows users. It doesn't affect linux users or users who build their own machines.
Nope. The scam targets windows boxes since most (if not all) PCs come with windows preinstalled. As soon as you install linux, their scam will be expossed.
And even if they did provide kernel patches for linux preinstalled PCs, it wouldn't work. The scam would show on your next kernel update.
This targets only windows users. The ones who never install another OS or have never removed their cpu from the m/b.
Autoformating can be fun though.
Sony released some kind of software update tool that removes the rootkit pretty cleanly.
Sony removes it pretty cleanly? Are you sure? You might be interested in reading this.
Why is parent modded funny? There are some serious privacy issues here for those accepting this offer. From the A9 site: "Just make sure that you are recognized by name when you use A9.com, and your Instant Reward will be applied automatically"
Hahaha! I actually tried it, "Replace windows with linux", and their top result was "Why linux won't replace windows", and some other gems like "linux is not windows" etc.
Hilarious! Either their search algorithms cann't understand a simple frase or, more likely, their search algorithms are biased and adjusted to favor windows and hide linux links under the table. If they feel they need to resort to these kind of dirty tricks, they really *are* afraid of linux and google.
Google, on the other hand, correctly interprets "replace windows with linux" and comes up with "Constructing A Windows-Less Office" and "Windows to Linux Migration Guide".
the killers for me at least are Excel, Visio and Project. The OpenOffice version of the first doesn't scale near to where I need it
What you really mean is "I'm locked in but I can't be bothered to free myself from MS". Openoffice Calc is an excellent equavalent to MS Excel.
the second two still don't have any real equivalents in the Linux space.
Yes they do.
Visio -> Dia
Project -> Planner
Thanks! I didn't know about this one. Can I transfer the data from maestro to MMB and just update the dataset, or do I have to download the whole lot again?
I just found out about maestro(Google cache) It's basically the software NASA uses to control the rovers and process their datasets. Looks quite interesting. I'm getting the datasets as I type this.(200MB)
If you're on gentoo,
emerge maestro maestro-data
If not, check your distro repos or get it from here.
Parent is not offtopic. :) See http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/1 0/12/1610249&threshold=-1&tid=102&tid=11
the stable 2.0 release will come before any recently purchased cartons of milk expire in your refrigerator.
You're obviously trolling but I'll bite. GPL software is free as in freedom. You can do anything you want with it, including modifying and redistributing the source as long as you release your modifications under the same GPL licence for the benefit of the whole community. There is also commercial open source software out there that is GPL'd and it's free as in freedom but not free as in beer.
And what exactly doesn't inter-operate with other licences and why does it have to? If the GPL was compatible with MS licences or other closed source licenses you'd lose your freedom on the software. And vice-versa. If MS were to make their licences compatible with the GPL, they would have to abandon their control over the source and give all the freedom the GPL provides. They'd never do that.
R.Stallman can change what at will? If you release your software under the GPLv2 and GPL is revised to v3, you can still continue to release your software under GPLv2. I don't see your point. Or maybe I do, you intended to mislead and spread disinformation.
There are just so many little things about the Earth that are balanced in favor of life (e.g. Distance from Sun, size of star, size of planet/gravity, magnetic field strength, atmosphere composition, etc.)
The distance from the sun, is not as important as it seems to be. The habitable zone has not been at 1AU at all times and it's going to change again in the future. There was a time when Mars was in the habitable zone and Earth was not. Similarly, when the sun will get older and on its way of becoming a red giant, Mars will again be in the habitable zone while Earth will be as hot as Venus.
The size of a planet and its gravity doesn't necessarily favor or hinder the development of life, as long as you don't take the extremes into account(ie. life would most likely not develop on an asteroid or a gas giant, though there could be exceptions). Mars is a small rocky planet with a gravity of 0.376 Gs which is quite low for humans. But that doesn't mean life didn't exist there. Earth's 1G is not some kind of universal standard for life. It's just the gravity, earth species live on. The same goes for atmospheric composition and magnetic field strenght. It's the enviroment we evolved and live in, not a universal standard. Humans would have as hard a time adapting to a lower/higher G enviroment, or to a deviant atmospheric composition, as a lifeform from somewhere else would have on Earth.
Also don't forget evolution. Life can adapt to a changing enviroment. If we send humans to live on Mars, after several generations, their successors won't be able to live on Earth's gravity. Which btw I think it's the key for colonization of other planets. If we ever find a way to accelerate evolution changes on ourselves, it'd be easier to do this instead of terraforming other planets.
and last but not least
3. install a port knocking daemon, like fwknop, or knockd
Firefox doesn't use any native gtk widgets on my system. It tries to look more consistent with gtk, but you can tell it's CSS themes and not native widgets althouth it looks quite similar. And all dialogs(open/save) look like windows dialogs.