Well, when 3.0 came out and I went through the PHB, I freaking hated it as well. Then it started dawning upon me: I play games to have fun, not look up tables. These are a few reasons that crop up as to why I ended up preferring the 3.x line:
The standardized, easy to mentally calculate, attribute bonuses are a definite plus that couldn't be easily retrofitted into 2nd Ed.
Having armour class go up and having a Base Attack Bonus rather than a THAC0 is exactly the same, only it's actually more intuitive (higher BAB = better, higher AC = better).
Simplifying the weapon tables was a good thing too. Why oh why does a longsword inflict more damage to big targets than small ones anyway? Why does it inflict more damage on large targets when broad swords inflict less? In a game that has little to no aspiration to be historical, why do we have to have separate stats for 20 slightly different polearms? Streamlining these things and just allowing you to call your generic polearm whatever you want is a move towards better roleplay, not worse.
Saving Throws! That was the first thing that made me realize that 3rd Ed was actually better than 2nd Ed. Saving throws based on the type of the effect rather than its source makes so much more sense. When you get a death ray, in 2nd Ed you have to figure out if it comes from a wand, or perhaps a breath weapon. Oh wait, death magic is a category on its own. In 3.0, it's a standard ranged touch attack for the ray to hit you, and a fortitude save to resist the effect. Physical fortitude against a Death Ray, makes sense. Sure, if it were a psionic death ray that turned you into a vegetable, perhaps a Willpower save would be more appropriate, but at least you have a standard to go by.
The class restrictions system also comes to mind. Why did humans dual-class and demi-humans multi-class? Why did demi-humans have a level cap? Not to mention the horrible rules for how multi-classing and dual-classing work. And the different XP progressions for each class. All of these scream out "we couldn't adequately balance the classes/races so they were comparable in power at the same level, so we came up with a hack and called it a day". The 3.0 class system isn't perfect, but at least it managed to keep the "humans are more versatile" theme they always wanted, while simplifying the levelling and multi-classing processes immensely (they opened up the way for prestige class abuse too, but that's a different story).
All in all, I'd call these very fundamental changes that justify a 3rd Edition, all of them perfectly sensible (unless you're the sort whose notion of fun involves looking up tables because the system can't be consistent). Granted, I still don't like the feat system, it feels tacked on, and way too artificial. But that's a small price to pay for all the pluses (and a powergamer's paradise too, to boot).
I agree it's not a particularly grievous offense in the grand scheme of insecure settings, but I was being a fair, balanced guy, and enumerating what I thought might be Apple's fault in this issue, despite being an Apple user.
for example, if you 'accept' that you need to run programs from many different people (because they don't share code with each other, e.g. realplayer don't share code with ubuntu or apple) then you're more vulnerable to these types of social engineering
But I *do* run software from a ton of people on my free software based systems. Desktop by GNOME, office suite by OpenOffice.org,mp3 and ogg codecs by... someone else I don't really know. I have more than once need packages that are not in the basic Ubuntu repositories, like strange sets of patches for nethack, Mathematica, etc etc.
on a free system, you might just say "well if this codec was so good, surely debian would have packaged it". You might look for the codec on apt-cache instead of downloading software from a previously-unknown website.
and then
and if you're still undecided at that point, you have the additional security layer of saying "well if debian don't want to package it, then maybe I don't want to run it" -- after all, they're usually pretty good at identifying good software and evil software.
Except that repositories are great with popular or semi-popular packages. Obscure packages are not necessarily in the repositories. Hell, last time I checked ubuntu didn't have decent support for midi out of the box.
More directly at your arguments, "well if this codec was so good, surely debian would have packaged it" and "well if debian don't want to package it, then maybe I don't want to run it", at this point the social engineering aspect of the attack has already failed. You, the user, are doubting the origin of the package, or the need for it. You're being technologically savvy. And free software has nothing to do with that (well, it does because it's mostly a geek thing -- for now).
We're simply talking about social engineering. Windows, OS X, *BSD, Linux (and probably most other operating systems out there) are all vulnerable to this sort of attack, there's just little in the way of motivation to actually do it.
The part where the dmg is automatically opened is the only thing that even resembles a vulnerability as such, though it should actually be filed under "insecure default settings" rather than a vulnerability per se. This said, both linked articles are quite sparse with information regarding the actual installation. From my experience Safari should say something about the archive/disk image containing an application before actually mounting the dmg, and then prompting for an administrator password for the package to be installed. If either of these steps are compromised, you can call this interesting, because there's an exploit at work. If not, then it's a bog standard social engineering attack, to which every platform is vulnerable. The only news here are that you can't browse the web with your Mac in a completely carefree manner anymore, because there are some Bad Things out there targeting you.
Sure, all those things generate some pollution too. Question is: is that pollution greater smaller than that produced by feeding the tram for the duration of its service life? If so, then you have a victory, however minor it may be.
Now, this of course does not in any way invalidate the argument that moving to a saner daily routine would help far more, but until then, this helps.
Actually, 95/98/Me are not in the same lineage as 2K/XP/Vista.
So you have
(...)
4 - NT4
5 - 2000
5.1 - XP
6 - Vista
7 - ?
Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....
on
Gaming Usability 101
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Like I said before: You're reacting to the game as if it were meant to be played like you play most computer games, where the board game perspective is much more adequate. You're not supposed to win first time 'round. Or the 20th time 'round either, for that matter. It's all about the learning experience. You'll soon be able to get to the bottom of the gnomish mines in a couple of hours tops, or perhaps to Sokoban if your class/race/alignment combo isn't very favourable to doing the mines right away.
Don't get me wrong: It's perfectly ok that you don't like the game. It's just that I think you made that decision without fully understanding what sort of game you were playing. Like going into Rainbox Six: Rogue Spear guns blazing and complaining that the hostages that got in the way were the designers screwing with you
Nethack is all about the learning experience. You're supposed to eventuallly figure out that even though item descriptions change from game to game, every effect is always worth the same amount of gold. So if you #chat a vendor up, and he tells you that he'll sell a certain spell book for 100 coins, you'll know that that sort of spell book is one of a limited amount of spells. If you engrave letters on the floor with a wand, you'll get different effects depending on the wand you used. Did the bugs on the floor stop moving? That was either a wand of death or a wand of sleep. Did the bugs vanish? It's either invisibility or teleportation. This sort of logic works for a lot more stuff. Drop items to the floor, and let your pet walk over it. If it avoids the item like all hell, it's probably cursed. If it walks all over it without trouble, it's safe to wear.
Then there's good sense. You need food, sure, but eating the corpse of other humanoids is considered cannibalism, which is a no-no with your god. Eating the corpses of zombies is a baaaaad plan, as the meat will be rotted to all hell and back. Old kills are the same. Lichens don't rot though. Stuff like this piles up, and you'll soon have figured out how to survive through a fair bit of stuff.
Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....
on
Gaming Usability 101
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I was about to bring up nethack myself. The trick is how you look at the game. I'll give you a moderately similar example -- chess.
The first few games of chess you play, you'll get your arse handed to you in a platter within 10 moves. Then you start making sense of how to protect yourself from elementary attacks, and you get owned after, say, 20 moves. Then you actually start getting the hang of the early game, and can keep yourself alive for long enough to see the mid-game. At this point you might even win a few matches, get a few neat combo plays, whatever. Etc. etc. etc. Anybody who ever got into chess knows what I'm talking about.
The key issue here is how the game is designed. Some games (JRPGs come to mind) are meant to take you through one looooong, mostly linear, trip. Replay value is either nil, or limited to a few different endings, and there's no real reward for playing it much more after you've cracked all the secrets and explored all the finales. So you save and you save and you save yet again, trying to keep your options open, so you won't have to go through 20 hours of gameplay to change the course of that one decision you made that killed off half the game world or whatever. Other games, like Tetris, Chess, Checkers, etc are oriented towards playing loads of individual matches. As a learner in chess, you might want to take back a play or two to explore different angles and as a learning experience, but mostly these games are made of having a very real chance to lose. How quickly would chess become BORING as hell if you were allowed to backtrack all your mistakes once you found out they were wrong? Such a game model should give the possibility to adjourn the game, but never, EVER to allow you to actually backtrack without consequences.
Nethack clearly fits into the category of games where you can play through the game several times in one day, and the focus is on playing loads of individual games, not on progressing in one long thread of gaming. So having only the option to adjourn the game is the way to go.
Since we already have nethack up, let's measure it against these usability rules!
Nethack never, EVER prompts you to save. You either go on playing, #quit, die, or type 'S' to save (and adjourn the game)
After asking you a few questions about your character, Nethack gives you a short message and prompts "--more--". Sure, it's not "press any key", but both space and enter, the biggest keys on any reasonable keyboard, will proceed forwards. Not perfect, but hardly the worst ever
Nethack doesn't let you remap the controls, other than choosing between two basic layouts, whichever is most appropriate for your keyboard. It also has the most extensive key list ever, but at least all the actions are bound to sensible keys, and there's nothing you can do (other than movement) that can't be cancelled, so you'll never get really hurt by missing a key. All in all, bad, but not the worst
Cutscenes? No dungeon crawler worth its salt has cutscenes. Next!
Top down camera that always shows the totality of the level you're in. If your character knows it, you can see it. It's primitive, but once you think about it for a few minutes, it's actually one of the best interface design choices ever.
Nethack uses loads of keys because it needs to. The alternative is making it much more verbose and difficult to play. But I'll grant you that using every bloody letter in the keyboard is pretty hardcore, so no cookie here.
I don't really think accessibility even applies to nethack, so I'll skip this one.
Unbeatable opponents? Now *this* is one of the game's crown jewels. There might be some pretty close to impossible monsters, but you can get out of most situations if you play your cards right. In fact, that's what the game is all about.
In-game is actually pretty good: simply pressing '?' will result in you being given help on mostly anything that you're not supposed to learn through playing,
Let me just get it straight. It's easier for you to accept that PGP has a malicious backdoor than it is to accept that they have a sensible feature that is quite useful (if ill-documented, but apparently it's mentioned in the knowledge base)?
A small dose of paranoia is healthy, but we're talking about a feature that has to be activated by someone who actually has access to the keys to begin with, that is, supposedly, valid for only one reboot, and that has a very valid use case.
Actually never mind. The editor just chose to list the priciest cables available (the 12' set), which are the ones Randi commented on, rather than the 3' set the review lists.
Hmmm, wait. You say you're a software engineer? Only economists and weather forecasters have less moral authority to ask that of a poor innocent guitar than you.
Short version: Site A has a service, and an API to access that service. Site B has another service with its own API. Some guy comes in, grabs the two services and mashes them up into one piece. Wikipedia has an article on the subject, and suggests mapping Craiglist listings on a Google Maps map as an example of a mashup.
REALLY Short version: Imagine the stuff you do with the standard *NIX toolchain and pipes. Now apply the concept to the web.
Re:Sad that this has to be asked...but...
on
Lair Review
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· Score: 1
Never mind that. If you re-mortgage your house to afford a PS3, you have seriously fucked up priorities that need revising ASAP. Unless you're too busy playing GTA of course.
(...) reading TFA. It's a poorly written crock of bull from someone who's not even that well informed over what he's writing. I don't comment much here, and I never *ever* flame, but this guy's obtuseness got me really riled up
For instance, in the keyboard selection step, the only way to know the differences between two U.S. English International layouts or the classical, left hand, or right hand versions of the Dvorak keyboard is to know them beforehand, to research them on another computer, or to try each systematically in the field provided for the purpose.
I don't know about you, but when I think of the prospect of installing a system for someone who uses a foreign keyboard of some sort (I'm looking into a position as admin at my university's computer labs), the possibility to just type some letters "systematically" as he puts it and have the installer divine the right keymap is supterb. And really, what does he expect from the keymap list? a picture with the layout?
Yet despite the thoughtfulness that shows in the basic Ubuntu desktop, it also contains what might be considered over-simplifications. By default, the GRUB menu does not appear, so users might easily miss the availability of a recover mode or memory test of an initial option.
I challenge the author to find a user who could actually put either recover mode or a memory test to good use without outside help that can't figure out quite quickly how to get to the GRUB menu. GRUB being configured to show the boot menu (which, sensibly, is the default behavior if a windows partition is detected) would be about as logical as windows giving you the "safe mode/command prompt/safe mode command prompt" choices at boot every single bloody time. This is called good design. If you don't need to look at it for normal activity, you tuck it away somewhere unobtrusive.
Ubuntu also seems to have taken an idea from SymphonyOS, and placed key icons such as the logout, trash, main menu, and Show Desktop at the four corners of the desktop. Unfortunately, at high resolution, these icons are so small that they are easy to overlook, which defeats the effort to make better use of the corners of the screen.
This is nitpicking, but what the hell. The trick with using the corners for "hot spots" (and really, both OSX and Windows already use it -- think start menu and the X button for maximized windows) works best when you don't really rationally think about what you're doing. You just act -- and in those circumstances, the actual size of the icon on-screen is irrelevant. OSX's hot corners have no graphical representation at all, to the eternal chagrin of every Mac newbie I let touch my laptop.
In addition to Synaptic, the most common graphical package manager in Debian-based distros and an update applet, Gutsy also includes the Add/Remove Applications tool(...)
Well, Synaptic is basically a graphical frontend for apt-get, it's not really meant to be any easier to use than its command line equivalent, except insofar as its browsing capabilities are concerned. Of course, the newbies will appreciate not having to drop to a shell to install stuff. The whole command line thing is a lot more confusing to most people than most geeks think, so it's a good thing that synaptic is precisely a GUI version of apt-get. Think about it. Add/Remove Program is, IIRC, focused on local packages. debs you download from some random spot and want to install. Perhaps "installer" support could be integrated into the file browser, a la.msi, and the uninstalling handled via synaptic. But I don't really see this as being an issue. The updater is a small, specialized thing that does its job wonderfully. I don't think that running the whole of synaptics is warranted when updates can be handled by the tiny little thing that does them right now.
One of the best-known of Ubuntu's features is the use of sudo for
For the most part, it is the most important news about it. AFAIK, it's not a revolutionary new compiler architecture, it brings no interesting new features to the table, or generate blistering fast code. It's just another C compiler, that happens to be BSD licensed. Since there is a rather large set of people for whom that is important, you can objectively say that it is the most important aspect of the release, even if the politics don't interest you specifically.
On one side, you have a CD: It has a more or less fixed (for any given project) initial production cost, and costs a tiny amount per copy to make virtually limitless amounts of copies of it. On the other side, you have a concert, each night an individual piece of work, with hard-capped supplies for tickets. Of course the prices for one and the prices for the other shouldn't be held to the same standard. It's sort of like expecting oil paintings to be held to the same pricing standards as mass-produced posters.
Not necessarily. you write a piece of software, and publish it under the BSD license. I then grab it, adapt it to my needs, and sell it closed source. That's a "common", and well understood scenario. But what if I changed the code, and published it under the GPL? What happens then?
From reading this, I get the impression that, from
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. you should conclude that, effectively, if you redistribute BSD code, it stays BSD.
While you might make a solid point there (I don't really follow assistive technologies much), you're missing an important, more pragmatic point: The (perceived?) cost of migration.
Imagine I'm Joe CTO. If I just change my users from MS Office to OpenOffice, I have to handle transitioning just one piece of software (albeit a big one). Last thing I want is to change both office suite and operating system in one go. So I need Open Office with all the bells and whistles *now*, and once that transition is complete, I'll worry about changing people from Windows to Gnome/KDE and enjoy the same bells and whistles there.
And there's always the moral point: If we're out to accuse MS to be evil monopolists, we should do so from moral high ground. And that means that you don't say "KDE/GNOME have the feature so screw the Windows users".
That's the most useless statement ever. That can mean that famine is nearly a thing of the past, because overweight people are not all that common, and that we're at one of our best moments *ever* in overall fitness. Or it might mean that the world's population is at an alarming point of imbalance, with population spread towards the two ends of the spectrum, and properly nourished (neither over nor under) are scarce as hen's teeth. Of course, most people have enough context to know that it's neither (but closer to the latter), but, really, the quote by itself is not really useful.
Assuming you're gambling against a casino, yes. If you're gambling against other players (I'll go out on a limb and assume he's playing Poker here), it's about even if everybody's clueless, or profitable for those who understand the game better, because usually games that pit the players against each other have completely symmetrical rules.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually as a combat rogue I have adrenaline rushes every 5 minutes, on demand.
Well, when 3.0 came out and I went through the PHB, I freaking hated it as well. Then it started dawning upon me: I play games to have fun, not look up tables. These are a few reasons that crop up as to why I ended up preferring the 3.x line:
All in all, I'd call these very fundamental changes that justify a 3rd Edition, all of them perfectly sensible (unless you're the sort whose notion of fun involves looking up tables because the system can't be consistent). Granted, I still don't like the feat system, it feels tacked on, and way too artificial. But that's a small price to pay for all the pluses (and a powergamer's paradise too, to boot).
I agree it's not a particularly grievous offense in the grand scheme of insecure settings, but I was being a fair, balanced guy, and enumerating what I thought might be Apple's fault in this issue, despite being an Apple user.
But I *do* run software from a ton of people on my free software based systems. Desktop by GNOME, office suite by OpenOffice.org,mp3 and ogg codecs by... someone else I don't really know. I have more than once need packages that are not in the basic Ubuntu repositories, like strange sets of patches for nethack, Mathematica, etc etc.
on a free system, you might just say "well if this codec was so good, surely debian would have packaged it". You might look for the codec on apt-cache instead of downloading software from a previously-unknown website.and then
and if you're still undecided at that point, you have the additional security layer of saying "well if debian don't want to package it, then maybe I don't want to run it" -- after all, they're usually pretty good at identifying good software and evil software.Except that repositories are great with popular or semi-popular packages. Obscure packages are not necessarily in the repositories. Hell, last time I checked ubuntu didn't have decent support for midi out of the box.
More directly at your arguments, "well if this codec was so good, surely debian would have packaged it" and "well if debian don't want to package it, then maybe I don't want to run it", at this point the social engineering aspect of the attack has already failed. You, the user, are doubting the origin of the package, or the need for it. You're being technologically savvy. And free software has nothing to do with that (well, it does because it's mostly a geek thing -- for now).
We're simply talking about social engineering. Windows, OS X, *BSD, Linux (and probably most other operating systems out there) are all vulnerable to this sort of attack, there's just little in the way of motivation to actually do it.
The part where the dmg is automatically opened is the only thing that even resembles a vulnerability as such, though it should actually be filed under "insecure default settings" rather than a vulnerability per se. This said, both linked articles are quite sparse with information regarding the actual installation. From my experience Safari should say something about the archive/disk image containing an application before actually mounting the dmg, and then prompting for an administrator password for the package to be installed. If either of these steps are compromised, you can call this interesting, because there's an exploit at work. If not, then it's a bog standard social engineering attack, to which every platform is vulnerable. The only news here are that you can't browse the web with your Mac in a completely carefree manner anymore, because there are some Bad Things out there targeting you.
Sure, all those things generate some pollution too. Question is: is that pollution greater smaller than that produced by feeding the tram for the duration of its service life? If so, then you have a victory, however minor it may be.
Now, this of course does not in any way invalidate the argument that moving to a saner daily routine would help far more, but until then, this helps.
It's called a pun.
Actually, 95/98/Me are not in the same lineage as 2K/XP/Vista. So you have (...) 4 - NT4 5 - 2000 5.1 - XP 6 - Vista 7 - ?
Like I said before: You're reacting to the game as if it were meant to be played like you play most computer games, where the board game perspective is much more adequate. You're not supposed to win first time 'round. Or the 20th time 'round either, for that matter. It's all about the learning experience. You'll soon be able to get to the bottom of the gnomish mines in a couple of hours tops, or perhaps to Sokoban if your class/race/alignment combo isn't very favourable to doing the mines right away.
Don't get me wrong: It's perfectly ok that you don't like the game. It's just that I think you made that decision without fully understanding what sort of game you were playing. Like going into Rainbox Six: Rogue Spear guns blazing and complaining that the hostages that got in the way were the designers screwing with you
Nethack is all about the learning experience. You're supposed to eventuallly figure out that even though item descriptions change from game to game, every effect is always worth the same amount of gold. So if you #chat a vendor up, and he tells you that he'll sell a certain spell book for 100 coins, you'll know that that sort of spell book is one of a limited amount of spells. If you engrave letters on the floor with a wand, you'll get different effects depending on the wand you used. Did the bugs on the floor stop moving? That was either a wand of death or a wand of sleep. Did the bugs vanish? It's either invisibility or teleportation. This sort of logic works for a lot more stuff. Drop items to the floor, and let your pet walk over it. If it avoids the item like all hell, it's probably cursed. If it walks all over it without trouble, it's safe to wear.
Then there's good sense. You need food, sure, but eating the corpse of other humanoids is considered cannibalism, which is a no-no with your god. Eating the corpses of zombies is a baaaaad plan, as the meat will be rotted to all hell and back. Old kills are the same. Lichens don't rot though. Stuff like this piles up, and you'll soon have figured out how to survive through a fair bit of stuff.
I was about to bring up nethack myself. The trick is how you look at the game. I'll give you a moderately similar example -- chess.
The first few games of chess you play, you'll get your arse handed to you in a platter within 10 moves. Then you start making sense of how to protect yourself from elementary attacks, and you get owned after, say, 20 moves. Then you actually start getting the hang of the early game, and can keep yourself alive for long enough to see the mid-game. At this point you might even win a few matches, get a few neat combo plays, whatever. Etc. etc. etc. Anybody who ever got into chess knows what I'm talking about.
The key issue here is how the game is designed. Some games (JRPGs come to mind) are meant to take you through one looooong, mostly linear, trip. Replay value is either nil, or limited to a few different endings, and there's no real reward for playing it much more after you've cracked all the secrets and explored all the finales. So you save and you save and you save yet again, trying to keep your options open, so you won't have to go through 20 hours of gameplay to change the course of that one decision you made that killed off half the game world or whatever. Other games, like Tetris, Chess, Checkers, etc are oriented towards playing loads of individual matches. As a learner in chess, you might want to take back a play or two to explore different angles and as a learning experience, but mostly these games are made of having a very real chance to lose. How quickly would chess become BORING as hell if you were allowed to backtrack all your mistakes once you found out they were wrong? Such a game model should give the possibility to adjourn the game, but never, EVER to allow you to actually backtrack without consequences.
Nethack clearly fits into the category of games where you can play through the game several times in one day, and the focus is on playing loads of individual games, not on progressing in one long thread of gaming. So having only the option to adjourn the game is the way to go.
Since we already have nethack up, let's measure it against these usability rules!
Let me just get it straight. It's easier for you to accept that PGP has a malicious backdoor than it is to accept that they have a sensible feature that is quite useful (if ill-documented, but apparently it's mentioned in the knowledge base)?
A small dose of paranoia is healthy, but we're talking about a feature that has to be activated by someone who actually has access to the keys to begin with, that is, supposedly, valid for only one reboot, and that has a very valid use case.
Actually never mind. The editor just chose to list the priciest cables available (the 12' set), which are the ones Randi commented on, rather than the 3' set the review lists.
There's a rather important typo on the summary. TFA lists the cables at $2,750 a set rather than $7,250 a set. It's "only" a factor of 3...
Hmmm, wait. You say you're a software engineer? Only economists and weather forecasters have less moral authority to ask that of a poor innocent guitar than you.
Short version: Site A has a service, and an API to access that service. Site B has another service with its own API. Some guy comes in, grabs the two services and mashes them up into one piece. Wikipedia has an article on the subject, and suggests mapping Craiglist listings on a Google Maps map as an example of a mashup.
REALLY Short version: Imagine the stuff you do with the standard *NIX toolchain and pipes. Now apply the concept to the web.
Never mind that. If you re-mortgage your house to afford a PS3, you have seriously fucked up priorities that need revising ASAP. Unless you're too busy playing GTA of course.
Actually lasts a wee bit less than 5 minutes for some people
(...) reading TFA. It's a poorly written crock of bull from someone who's not even that well informed over what he's writing. I don't comment much here, and I never *ever* flame, but this guy's obtuseness got me really riled up
I don't know about you, but when I think of the prospect of installing a system for someone who uses a foreign keyboard of some sort (I'm looking into a position as admin at my university's computer labs), the possibility to just type some letters "systematically" as he puts it and have the installer divine the right keymap is supterb. And really, what does he expect from the keymap list? a picture with the layout?
I challenge the author to find a user who could actually put either recover mode or a memory test to good use without outside help that can't figure out quite quickly how to get to the GRUB menu. GRUB being configured to show the boot menu (which, sensibly, is the default behavior if a windows partition is detected) would be about as logical as windows giving you the "safe mode/command prompt/safe mode command prompt" choices at boot every single bloody time. This is called good design. If you don't need to look at it for normal activity, you tuck it away somewhere unobtrusive.
This is nitpicking, but what the hell. The trick with using the corners for "hot spots" (and really, both OSX and Windows already use it -- think start menu and the X button for maximized windows) works best when you don't really rationally think about what you're doing. You just act -- and in those circumstances, the actual size of the icon on-screen is irrelevant. OSX's hot corners have no graphical representation at all, to the eternal chagrin of every Mac newbie I let touch my laptop.
For the most part, it is the most important news about it. AFAIK, it's not a revolutionary new compiler architecture, it brings no interesting new features to the table, or generate blistering fast code. It's just another C compiler, that happens to be BSD licensed. Since there is a rather large set of people for whom that is important, you can objectively say that it is the most important aspect of the release, even if the politics don't interest you specifically.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
On one side, you have a CD: It has a more or less fixed (for any given project) initial production cost, and costs a tiny amount per copy to make virtually limitless amounts of copies of it. On the other side, you have a concert, each night an individual piece of work, with hard-capped supplies for tickets. Of course the prices for one and the prices for the other shouldn't be held to the same standard. It's sort of like expecting oil paintings to be held to the same pricing standards as mass-produced posters.
Not necessarily. you write a piece of software, and publish it under the BSD license. I then grab it, adapt it to my needs, and sell it closed source. That's a "common", and well understood scenario. But what if I changed the code, and published it under the GPL? What happens then?
From reading this, I get the impression that, from
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. you should conclude that, effectively, if you redistribute BSD code, it stays BSD.No, no, no.
Profit is always the BOTTOM line. So your table should look like this:
While you might make a solid point there (I don't really follow assistive technologies much), you're missing an important, more pragmatic point: The (perceived?) cost of migration.
Imagine I'm Joe CTO. If I just change my users from MS Office to OpenOffice, I have to handle transitioning just one piece of software (albeit a big one). Last thing I want is to change both office suite and operating system in one go. So I need Open Office with all the bells and whistles *now*, and once that transition is complete, I'll worry about changing people from Windows to Gnome/KDE and enjoy the same bells and whistles there.
And there's always the moral point: If we're out to accuse MS to be evil monopolists, we should do so from moral high ground. And that means that you don't say "KDE/GNOME have the feature so screw the Windows users".
That's the most useless statement ever. That can mean that famine is nearly a thing of the past, because overweight people are not all that common, and that we're at one of our best moments *ever* in overall fitness. Or it might mean that the world's population is at an alarming point of imbalance, with population spread towards the two ends of the spectrum, and properly nourished (neither over nor under) are scarce as hen's teeth. Of course, most people have enough context to know that it's neither (but closer to the latter), but, really, the quote by itself is not really useful.
Assuming you're gambling against a casino, yes. If you're gambling against other players (I'll go out on a limb and assume he's playing Poker here), it's about even if everybody's clueless, or profitable for those who understand the game better, because usually games that pit the players against each other have completely symmetrical rules.