Re:The "arbitrary barriers" are what annoy me...
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 1
It's been a while since I played FF7, so refresh my memory: was chocobo breeding actually required to complete the plot?
I can only recall needing to do it to eventually get Knights of the Round, which isn't at all necessary for the game, and in which case you could have successfully ignored it.
You could spend time getting all your characters up to level 99 or getting Bahamut Zero materia for every one of your characters before beating the game and not have the meteor crash into the planet. Wouldn't that kill immersion in the same way?
Re:Gamers never know what's good for them
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 1
Well, I stand corrected about the damage. It's always seemed to me that I could hit nightmare bots with rockets (directly) and have them not die far more often than I survive rocket fire. Then again, it's probably because I've been pelted with machine gun fire that I can't hope to imitate. And the rail gun is even worse (it always pisses me off when Major gets both quad damage and a rail gun; even on hardcore I get killed no more than 5 seconds after I spawn with that combination, since she almost never misses).
Re:Gamers never know what's good for them
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 1
And the parents point about "good" AI is excellent also. we enjoy beating up lots of stupid guys in a game because it puts us in the driver's seat, controlling the game flow. If this guy wants good AI's with a selection of weapons, he should fire up some bots in Quake or UT and get his fill of immaculately aimed rail guns up his ass every 5 seconds. Wheee!!!
That's not better AI. That's just proving that the computer knows exactly where I am at all times. I can get pretty damn good at FPS games, but the computer can always aim better, because it knows exactly where I am, and doesn't have to deal with clumsy things like eyes and hands.
I play Quake 3 (against bots; yes, I'm lame) a lot, and I'm really good with rockets on one level. I can often shoot a rocket and predict where it will knock a bot, and send another one to meet it. I can predict where bots will fire their rockets, and side step and avoid them a fair amount. I can outmaneuver them, because I can figure out what's going to happen a little before it happens. Against hardcore bots, I can consistently win with a score of about double the best bot.
When I switch to nightmare, I can't win. Why? Am I now being outsmarted? No; the reason I can't win is that now the bots can hit me from across the level with every bullet in their machine gun, and they do significantly more damage than I do. They're not (much) smarter than hardcore bots; they just have much better 'hand-eye coordination' than I do.
Making the AI better doesn't mean making the computer twice as accurate (as many people here seem to be suggesting); it means making the computer aim about as well as me, but making it use better tactics to defeat me. Have it hide, or predict my actions a little. Something like that.
Yes, I know it's difficult, and I don't expect it very soon. However, arguing that Quake and UT have the better AI than we can possibly handle is misleading, because a lot of that is not about, "the computer can outsmart me;" it's about, "the computer can point at things better than I can." (disclaimer: UT2003 and 2004 may have been better in this regard, I never got too into them; but Quake 3 certainly doesn't fit the bill).
Yes. Hooray for the fine tradition of PC games allowing you to save, shoot an enemy, save, shoot an enemy, save, shoot an enemy, save, get shot a bit, load, shoot an enemy, save...
Christ! Then don't play the game that way! No one's going to argue that completing the game should require you to save constantly. However, if you need to save somewhere (because you need to go do something else, for example, or because, yes, you think doing something will be hard), then you should be able to! You shouldn't have to be forced to lose 20 minutes of gameplay.
And if someone get his rocks off by saving every 15 seconds and loading whenever anything bad happens, why shouldn't he be able to do that, too? Or are you the expert on what's fun for all people?
It's a difference in what people want out of games, I guess. The author of this manifesto wants everything to be ultra-realistic, with spot-on accurate physics, a complete modelled world in case you want to step out of the area the game wants you to be playing in. He probably wants it to be a FPS.
No, he doesn't want it to be an FPS. Look at his example picture, with a snowboarder running into an invisible wall of air. That's distracting. If you can't get somewhere, give a reason, like a real wall of something. Don't just make people bounce off nothing.
[About cinematic cameras:] See. Told you he'd want it to be an FPS.
No, he fucking doesn't. What he's complaining about is when you're piloting Mario across a narrow bridge, and suddenly the camera swings around to the side, causing you to walk off the bridge. That's just annoying.
Cinematic cameras can be used well, but there are many times where the camera makes an already difficult action (I have enough trouble walking in the perfect direction with a thumb stick) even more annoying by totally throwing off your sense of direction unnecessarily (Oh! Now I have to gauge how fast to rotate my thumb to compensate for the damn camera movement! How exciting). And many games don't give you an option to lock the camera.
You insisted on the ability to jump in all games (see point 9 above).
In point 9, he's arguing that if a 3 foot tall rock falls in front of you, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get past it. That's not an unreasonable request. If you're going to make an impassible barrier, don't make it look like an obviously passable one.
You insisted on a first-person view (see point 11, subsection '"Cinematic" camera angles' above).
Aside from the fact that you're largely misinterpreting points 9 and 11, I still don't see how your argument here has any merit whatsoever. Jumping in (most) FPS games is very difficult, and puzzles involving it are mostly an exercise in frustration in that genre.
He's not arguing that there shouldn't be any games with jumping puzzles in them (as you seem to be implying). That's what platformers are for. But they're probably the worst part of any FPS game (I seem to recall the Jedi Outcast games being particularly bad in this regard).
Although some of your points are accurate, it seems to me that some are founded more on your presuppositions of the article, rather than what he's actually arguing.
Plus on top of that. Everything that the original articles asks for is very male, 18-35 centric.
You're right! Especially point 5, where he talks about how games objectify women too much. What a fucking moron he is!
As far as I can tell, there are like 2 or 3 points that are "male, 18-35 centric." How does "use hard drives, get rid of save points" fall into that category? How about "get rid of loading screens"? Or "make games about gameplay, not graphics/other features"?
Or are you saying that girls/older men only like games that do lots of loading, focus more on graphics than gameplay, and require you to replay significant portions over and over because you can't always save appropriately?
Thanks but no. I want type-safety in my programming languages, be it C#, C++ or Java.
Go take a gander at languages like Haskell, which don't require you to needlessly pre-declare your variables, and yet, are most likely more type-safe than any of C#, C++ or Java (considering you can circumvent the type system in the latter three with casts).
You know what else is funny? If your Linux system were set up as a desktop, all you'd have to do is start up a friendly add/remove programs application, select what you want to remove, and click a button to have it happen.
If your reason for not using Linux is the difference between '--purge' and '--remove' in apt-get, then you need to get a new reason.
Well, it may be solid, but that doesn't mean it isn't absorbing heat. Melting typically takes significantly more energy than would be absorbed by a temperature increase, so the melting metal would probably actually cool your CPU better than the liquid result.
In addition, metals (by definition, I believe) have good heat conduction properties (that's why some heatsinks use metal heat pipes these days), so a large portion of the metal would probably end up melting and start flowing. You probably wouldn't just get a bubble of super-heated liquid gallium frying your CPU. You'd just start off with a normal-ish metal heatsink until the gallium melted.
Of course, there are other reasons not to use gallium, as other people have mentioned here.
Right, and the specific heat of water is 1 calorie/(gram*degree C) which is approximately 1 calorie/(cc*degree C), depending on the density of your water. That's little-c calorie.
Therefore, the original poster is wrong. Water only absorbs one calorie for each degree, not a kilocalorie. However, he is correct that gallium has a poorer specific heat:
Gallium: 370 J/(kg*K) Water: 4184 J/(kg*K)
And it's, apparently, only about 6 times as dense (if Google hasn't failed me). So the same volume of gallium would heat up about twice as fast as water (correct me if I'm wrong).
Then again, things like heat transfer are probably better with gallium, and it might be easier to cool than water, so who knows?
Incidentally, allow me to add this: if you think that karma whoring is a serious issue, you need your head examined.
First of all, Slashdot is about the least reputable source of news on the internet. The headlines are regularly sensationalized and skewed to increase page hits rather than report what's going on accurately. So incorrect posts getting modded up occasionally are the least of this site's problems.
Second of all, even in the Slashdot universe, karma means approximately dick. The only thing that it's good at is weeding out regular trolls, who have their posts set below 1 by default. Not only is getting enough karma to post at 2 easy without whoring, it's useless, because there's no point in having comments below score 3 or 4 displayed if you actually want remotely-accurate information. Anything worthwhile still has to be found by moderators, so starting with one extra point isn't doing you that much good.
In other words, anyone who actually cares about karma is out of their minds.
Then he admitted he was wrong after you flamed him, and explained his confusion. His post bordered on an apology.
Then you continued being an asshole, and further accused him of lying and karma whoring, even though what you were talking about had nothing to do with his reply.
Then I showed you that there exist monitors which take two DVI cables, so you had no basis for accusing him of lying on that point.
And yet, you're still being a total fucking asshole about it. What's wrong with you?
I'm not Ugulate, although I don't expect you to believe me, because that probably wouldn't give you as much of a hard on.
Yeah, he failed to do a little research and posted some incorrect information. That's no reason to jump all over him and be a dick about it. I hope you don't act like this in real life, because if you do, you're destined to lead a lonely, sterile existence when you drive away everyone around you.
Try reading and understanding those posts (and some of the follow-ups). Then, if you still think this is a huge problem, ask yourself why you're using a general-purpose computer with a general-purpose operating system to do your crypto, when there's probably several even more serious vulnerabilities that affect them as a matter of course.
There's no reason they can't support community content in the future, but it's not there now. It's already there on the PC, and consoles are currently no substitute.
Point me to a game coming out for one of these consoles that has the potential for as much custom content as, say, Neverwinter Nights, and I'll admit that I'm wrong. I haven't seen any mentioned so far, though.
Also, make sure that you can do all the content development on the console, too, because people aren't going to do it on their low end PCs that are just qualified enough to do web browsing and word processing. If you need a high-end PC for editing the custom content (and that may include people playing it, as they may have to open up modules in the editor to add extensions that the author didn't think of), then you can play it on your PC, and there's little point in spending extra money to buy the console as well.
Are there any console games planned that are doing this? Or are you just saying that it's theoretically possible?
There are many gaming areas in which the PC still wipes the floor with consoles. Currently, anything requiring a mouse is inaccessible on a console: RPGs (the D&D kind, not the interactive story-book kind) and real-time strategies come to mind. I also find playing any FPS on a console painful at best, and I know I'm not the only one (I couldn't really stand Halo until I played it on the PC).
In addition, other people here have noted that anything with user-created content won't work very well on consoles, at least as they currently are. Counter Strike, for example, lets you customize all sorts of aspects of the game. Another example is Neverwinter Nights: the included campaigns are all right, but where it really shines is in the custom content community.
I could see consoles overcoming the former limitation, but not the latter.
And incidentally, I can still play most new games on my 4 year old PC (Doom 3 being a possible exception---I haven't tried. I can play Half Life 2).
So you can tow the "consoles have replaced PC gaming" line, as many people here do, but the fact is, the PC still beats the pants off of the console in a few key markets. Your opinion on the subject merely reflects which sorts of games you're interested in (in fact, I have no real desire for any console, and wouldn't want to go without my PC for gaming).
For as long as I remember, Mandrake has been stereotyped as "noob Linux." This was long before most people had ever heard of Gentoo. Red Hat, Debian, Slackware... Those used to be the "real" Linux distros. And Mandrake was easy for new people to use.
So you can brush the chip off of your shoulder. The Gentoo "cyberbullies" (whoever they are) didn't create the stereotype, and didn't invent elitism. They've been around since Gentoo was a gleam in Daniel Robbins' eye.
A foolish consistency, Emerson once said, is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Consistency in the look and feel of GUI elements is not foolish. It makes it easier for the user to know what will happen when he does something within the interface. It's much more difficult to memorize different scenarios for every application.
That's one of the problems with Windows. All applications do things slightly differently. Apple pushes 3rd party developers hard to comply with their standards, and the system is better for it.
Going on and arbitrarily breaking conventions for Windows just adds to the problem. Of course, Windows sucks pretty heavily in this regard anyway, so it probably doesn't make much of a difference, but it's still hypocritical. You can wail all you want about how the Windows standards "sucks" (which is debatable at best in this case), but in this case, breaking the standards just makes things worse than following the standards you don't like in the first place.
Then again, I don't expect you to listen to any of these arguments, as you seem to be the quintessential Apple fan-boy. Have you ever provided any evidence that you actually work for or are in any way associated with Apple? I've seen you take credit for many design decisions and developments at Apple, and I've seen several people debunking your claims that you're actually an Apple developer of some sort. Do you have any evidence that you speak authoritatively about Apple's internal policies, or do you just refer to Apple as "we" to get more karma?
How is fiddling with conflicting IRQs similar to typing in "./configure && make && make install"?
And how is "I want that program. *click*" not simple enough for "end users"?
You know what? Windows XP is just a graphical front end sitting on top of the NT kernel. And OSX is just a graphical front end on top of Darwin. The difference is that DOS and Windows 95 sucked a lot more than NT, Linux, etc.
Giving things away for free for the purpose freedom is different than giving things away for free in order to cement an illegal monopoly and drive competition out of the market, is it not? Both may kill companies, but only one allows a company to gouge its customers.
If you're testing the performance of a compiler, it is one possible metric.
As I recall, many KDE developers stuck with GCC 2.95 for development long after 3.x was out, because 3.x compiled C++ significantly slower. It isn't merely a concern for Gentoo users.
Should we all start making cracks about, "is it that surprising that people at Pixar use rendering time as a performance metric?" Boy, that's hilarious.
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That's not true. The recommended resolution for my 17" CRT is 1280x1024, but it runs beautifully at 1400x1050.
You've got red on you.
It's been a while since I played FF7, so refresh my memory: was chocobo breeding actually required to complete the plot?
I can only recall needing to do it to eventually get Knights of the Round, which isn't at all necessary for the game, and in which case you could have successfully ignored it.
You could spend time getting all your characters up to level 99 or getting Bahamut Zero materia for every one of your characters before beating the game and not have the meteor crash into the planet. Wouldn't that kill immersion in the same way?
Well, I stand corrected about the damage. It's always seemed to me that I could hit nightmare bots with rockets (directly) and have them not die far more often than I survive rocket fire. Then again, it's probably because I've been pelted with machine gun fire that I can't hope to imitate. And the rail gun is even worse (it always pisses me off when Major gets both quad damage and a rail gun; even on hardcore I get killed no more than 5 seconds after I spawn with that combination, since she almost never misses).
And the parents point about "good" AI is excellent also. we enjoy beating up lots of stupid guys in a game because it puts us in the driver's seat, controlling the game flow. If this guy wants good AI's with a selection of weapons, he should fire up some bots in Quake or UT and get his fill of immaculately aimed rail guns up his ass every 5 seconds. Wheee!!!
That's not better AI. That's just proving that the computer knows exactly where I am at all times. I can get pretty damn good at FPS games, but the computer can always aim better, because it knows exactly where I am, and doesn't have to deal with clumsy things like eyes and hands.
I play Quake 3 (against bots; yes, I'm lame) a lot, and I'm really good with rockets on one level. I can often shoot a rocket and predict where it will knock a bot, and send another one to meet it. I can predict where bots will fire their rockets, and side step and avoid them a fair amount. I can outmaneuver them, because I can figure out what's going to happen a little before it happens. Against hardcore bots, I can consistently win with a score of about double the best bot.
When I switch to nightmare, I can't win. Why? Am I now being outsmarted? No; the reason I can't win is that now the bots can hit me from across the level with every bullet in their machine gun, and they do significantly more damage than I do. They're not (much) smarter than hardcore bots; they just have much better 'hand-eye coordination' than I do.
Making the AI better doesn't mean making the computer twice as accurate (as many people here seem to be suggesting); it means making the computer aim about as well as me, but making it use better tactics to defeat me. Have it hide, or predict my actions a little. Something like that.
Yes, I know it's difficult, and I don't expect it very soon. However, arguing that Quake and UT have the better AI than we can possibly handle is misleading, because a lot of that is not about, "the computer can outsmart me;" it's about, "the computer can point at things better than I can." (disclaimer: UT2003 and 2004 may have been better in this regard, I never got too into them; but Quake 3 certainly doesn't fit the bill).
Well, I suppose all Christians would be blind and handless, so it's a start.
Some points:
Yes. Hooray for the fine tradition of PC games allowing you to save, shoot an enemy, save, shoot an enemy, save, shoot an enemy, save, get shot a bit, load, shoot an enemy, save...
Christ! Then don't play the game that way! No one's going to argue that completing the game should require you to save constantly. However, if you need to save somewhere (because you need to go do something else, for example, or because, yes, you think doing something will be hard), then you should be able to! You shouldn't have to be forced to lose 20 minutes of gameplay.
And if someone get his rocks off by saving every 15 seconds and loading whenever anything bad happens, why shouldn't he be able to do that, too? Or are you the expert on what's fun for all people?
It's a difference in what people want out of games, I guess. The author of this manifesto wants everything to be ultra-realistic, with spot-on accurate physics, a complete modelled world in case you want to step out of the area the game wants you to be playing in. He probably wants it to be a FPS.
No, he doesn't want it to be an FPS. Look at his example picture, with a snowboarder running into an invisible wall of air. That's distracting. If you can't get somewhere, give a reason, like a real wall of something. Don't just make people bounce off nothing.
[About cinematic cameras:] See. Told you he'd want it to be an FPS.
No, he fucking doesn't. What he's complaining about is when you're piloting Mario across a narrow bridge, and suddenly the camera swings around to the side, causing you to walk off the bridge. That's just annoying.
Cinematic cameras can be used well, but there are many times where the camera makes an already difficult action (I have enough trouble walking in the perfect direction with a thumb stick) even more annoying by totally throwing off your sense of direction unnecessarily (Oh! Now I have to gauge how fast to rotate my thumb to compensate for the damn camera movement! How exciting). And many games don't give you an option to lock the camera.
You insisted on the ability to jump in all games (see point 9 above).
In point 9, he's arguing that if a 3 foot tall rock falls in front of you, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get past it. That's not an unreasonable request. If you're going to make an impassible barrier, don't make it look like an obviously passable one.
You insisted on a first-person view (see point 11, subsection '"Cinematic" camera angles' above).
Aside from the fact that you're largely misinterpreting points 9 and 11, I still don't see how your argument here has any merit whatsoever. Jumping in (most) FPS games is very difficult, and puzzles involving it are mostly an exercise in frustration in that genre.
He's not arguing that there shouldn't be any games with jumping puzzles in them (as you seem to be implying). That's what platformers are for. But they're probably the worst part of any FPS game (I seem to recall the Jedi Outcast games being particularly bad in this regard).
Although some of your points are accurate, it seems to me that some are founded more on your presuppositions of the article, rather than what he's actually arguing.
Plus on top of that. Everything that the original articles asks for is very male, 18-35 centric.
You're right! Especially point 5, where he talks about how games objectify women too much. What a fucking moron he is!
As far as I can tell, there are like 2 or 3 points that are "male, 18-35 centric." How does "use hard drives, get rid of save points" fall into that category? How about "get rid of loading screens"? Or "make games about gameplay, not graphics/other features"?
Or are you saying that girls/older men only like games that do lots of loading, focus more on graphics than gameplay, and require you to replay significant portions over and over because you can't always save appropriately?
Yes, but most people don't follow every clever little maxim to their potentially absurd logical conclusions.
Thanks but no. I want type-safety in my programming languages, be it C#, C++ or Java.
Go take a gander at languages like Haskell, which don't require you to needlessly pre-declare your variables, and yet, are most likely more type-safe than any of C#, C++ or Java (considering you can circumvent the type system in the latter three with casts).
Get with the times, Jethro.
You know what else is funny? If your Linux system were set up as a desktop, all you'd have to do is start up a friendly add/remove programs application, select what you want to remove, and click a button to have it happen.
If your reason for not using Linux is the difference between '--purge' and '--remove' in apt-get, then you need to get a new reason.
Well, it may be solid, but that doesn't mean it isn't absorbing heat. Melting typically takes significantly more energy than would be absorbed by a temperature increase, so the melting metal would probably actually cool your CPU better than the liquid result.
In addition, metals (by definition, I believe) have good heat conduction properties (that's why some heatsinks use metal heat pipes these days), so a large portion of the metal would probably end up melting and start flowing. You probably wouldn't just get a bubble of super-heated liquid gallium frying your CPU. You'd just start off with a normal-ish metal heatsink until the gallium melted.
Of course, there are other reasons not to use gallium, as other people have mentioned here.
Right, and the specific heat of water is 1 calorie/(gram*degree C) which is approximately 1 calorie/(cc*degree C), depending on the density of your water. That's little-c calorie.
Therefore, the original poster is wrong. Water only absorbs one calorie for each degree, not a kilocalorie. However, he is correct that gallium has a poorer specific heat:
Gallium: 370 J/(kg*K)
Water: 4184 J/(kg*K)
And it's, apparently, only about 6 times as dense (if Google hasn't failed me). So the same volume of gallium would heat up about twice as fast as water (correct me if I'm wrong).
Then again, things like heat transfer are probably better with gallium, and it might be easier to cool than water, so who knows?
Incidentally, allow me to add this: if you think that karma whoring is a serious issue, you need your head examined.
First of all, Slashdot is about the least reputable source of news on the internet. The headlines are regularly sensationalized and skewed to increase page hits rather than report what's going on accurately. So incorrect posts getting modded up occasionally are the least of this site's problems.
Second of all, even in the Slashdot universe, karma means approximately dick. The only thing that it's good at is weeding out regular trolls, who have their posts set below 1 by default. Not only is getting enough karma to post at 2 easy without whoring, it's useless, because there's no point in having comments below score 3 or 4 displayed if you actually want remotely-accurate information. Anything worthwhile still has to be found by moderators, so starting with one extra point isn't doing you that much good.
In other words, anyone who actually cares about karma is out of their minds.
Yeah, I read his initial post. It was wrong.
Then he admitted he was wrong after you flamed him, and explained his confusion. His post bordered on an apology.
Then you continued being an asshole, and further accused him of lying and karma whoring, even though what you were talking about had nothing to do with his reply.
Then I showed you that there exist monitors which take two DVI cables, so you had no basis for accusing him of lying on that point.
And yet, you're still being a total fucking asshole about it. What's wrong with you?
I'm not Ugulate, although I don't expect you to believe me, because that probably wouldn't give you as much of a hard on.
Yeah, he failed to do a little research and posted some incorrect information. That's no reason to jump all over him and be a dick about it. I hope you don't act like this in real life, because if you do, you're destined to lead a lonely, sterile existence when you drive away everyone around you.
Then again, that's probably why you're posting anonymously.
Here are some good threads to read:
= 12565806
= 12565741
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149843&cid
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149843&cid
Try reading and understanding those posts (and some of the follow-ups). Then, if you still think this is a huge problem, ask yourself why you're using a general-purpose computer with a general-purpose operating system to do your crypto, when there's probably several even more serious vulnerabilities that affect them as a matter of course.
There's no reason they can't support community content in the future, but it's not there now. It's already there on the PC, and consoles are currently no substitute.
Point me to a game coming out for one of these consoles that has the potential for as much custom content as, say, Neverwinter Nights, and I'll admit that I'm wrong. I haven't seen any mentioned so far, though.
Also, make sure that you can do all the content development on the console, too, because people aren't going to do it on their low end PCs that are just qualified enough to do web browsing and word processing. If you need a high-end PC for editing the custom content (and that may include people playing it, as they may have to open up modules in the editor to add extensions that the author didn't think of), then you can play it on your PC, and there's little point in spending extra money to buy the console as well.
Are there any console games planned that are doing this? Or are you just saying that it's theoretically possible?
You're a moron.
Here is a monitor that takes two (or actually, up to 4) single-link DVI connections to drive it. They do exist.
He said that many people think that that the Apple display is such a monitor. This is also true.
Next time, read the fucking post before you respond to it.
There are many gaming areas in which the PC still wipes the floor with consoles. Currently, anything requiring a mouse is inaccessible on a console: RPGs (the D&D kind, not the interactive story-book kind) and real-time strategies come to mind. I also find playing any FPS on a console painful at best, and I know I'm not the only one (I couldn't really stand Halo until I played it on the PC).
In addition, other people here have noted that anything with user-created content won't work very well on consoles, at least as they currently are. Counter Strike, for example, lets you customize all sorts of aspects of the game. Another example is Neverwinter Nights: the included campaigns are all right, but where it really shines is in the custom content community.
I could see consoles overcoming the former limitation, but not the latter.
And incidentally, I can still play most new games on my 4 year old PC (Doom 3 being a possible exception---I haven't tried. I can play Half Life 2).
So you can tow the "consoles have replaced PC gaming" line, as many people here do, but the fact is, the PC still beats the pants off of the console in a few key markets. Your opinion on the subject merely reflects which sorts of games you're interested in (in fact, I have no real desire for any console, and wouldn't want to go without my PC for gaming).
For as long as I remember, Mandrake has been stereotyped as "noob Linux." This was long before most people had ever heard of Gentoo. Red Hat, Debian, Slackware... Those used to be the "real" Linux distros. And Mandrake was easy for new people to use.
So you can brush the chip off of your shoulder. The Gentoo "cyberbullies" (whoever they are) didn't create the stereotype, and didn't invent elitism. They've been around since Gentoo was a gleam in Daniel Robbins' eye.
How am I a troll, exactly?
A foolish consistency, Emerson once said, is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Consistency in the look and feel of GUI elements is not foolish. It makes it easier for the user to know what will happen when he does something within the interface. It's much more difficult to memorize different scenarios for every application.
That's one of the problems with Windows. All applications do things slightly differently. Apple pushes 3rd party developers hard to comply with their standards, and the system is better for it.
Going on and arbitrarily breaking conventions for Windows just adds to the problem. Of course, Windows sucks pretty heavily in this regard anyway, so it probably doesn't make much of a difference, but it's still hypocritical. You can wail all you want about how the Windows standards "sucks" (which is debatable at best in this case), but in this case, breaking the standards just makes things worse than following the standards you don't like in the first place.
Then again, I don't expect you to listen to any of these arguments, as you seem to be the quintessential Apple fan-boy. Have you ever provided any evidence that you actually work for or are in any way associated with Apple? I've seen you take credit for many design decisions and developments at Apple, and I've seen several people debunking your claims that you're actually an Apple developer of some sort. Do you have any evidence that you speak authoritatively about Apple's internal policies, or do you just refer to Apple as "we" to get more karma?
How is fiddling with conflicting IRQs similar to typing in "./configure && make && make install"?
And how is "I want that program. *click*" not simple enough for "end users"?
You know what? Windows XP is just a graphical front end sitting on top of the NT kernel. And OSX is just a graphical front end on top of Darwin. The difference is that DOS and Windows 95 sucked a lot more than NT, Linux, etc.
Illegal monopolies aside
Oh, we can just leave that out?
Giving things away for free for the purpose freedom is different than giving things away for free in order to cement an illegal monopoly and drive competition out of the market, is it not? Both may kill companies, but only one allows a company to gouge its customers.
3% of our DNA aside, we're all chimps.
If you're testing the performance of a compiler, it is one possible metric.
As I recall, many KDE developers stuck with GCC 2.95 for development long after 3.x was out, because 3.x compiled C++ significantly slower. It isn't merely a concern for Gentoo users.
Should we all start making cracks about, "is it that surprising that people at Pixar use rendering time as a performance metric?" Boy, that's hilarious.