Eh. It really depends on the game. I can't imagine playing a FPS or RTS without a mouse, but Prince of Persia played wonderfully on a console, and there's simply no other way to play Katamari Damacy. I can take the controller and sit on the couch any which way and play a console game (the distance helps cover up the low TV resolution too) whereas with a PC I am more or less glued to my desk. Takes both kinds, which is why I have both.
Sony must have their controller layout patented or something, because the arrangement of the sticks on other consoles feels completely wrong. That's probably the bigger shame about games on xbox or gc. Anyway, I'd love to see real game controllers supported on the PC, not the crummy PS1-era digital controllers, but it seems unlikely to happen.
> It says "If you want to contribute to a project licensed under me, then you MUST contribute your code to proprietary software vendors that want to use it, and you may not charge them for the privilege."
Funny, I don't see that in the wording.
> The GPL leaves that up to me. It doesn't force me to do anything.
Except of course force others to use the GPL as well, forcing them to forbid that code be made available to the Apples of the world.
Grow up. Your argument is tired. If you don't like what someone else chose for their license, then by all means, don't choose to contribute.
Brad Pitt does not draw a salary. He doesn't put in eight-ish hours working or not on the latest Quarterly Objectives, assuming there are any yet, reading Slashdot. As part of contracts written per movie, he acts (maybe not to your exacting standards) and for this gets a really big fixed chunk, plus residuals of some unknown amount.
I personally don't give a hoot whether you personally like my favorite actors or not, and neither do the people who choose to spend money that pays their check. It's not like they're pulling it out straight out of your paycheck in the fashion of Halliburton no-bid-contracts.
And then you worked in Microsoft somehow. I have been trolled, pardon me. Well done.
PKD's estate gets a dumptruck of cash backed up to it, courtesy of the residuals he gets from optioning his stories. If the movies didn't have the megastars, it's quite possible they might not have had the success enough to get him the cash.
Megastars exist for somewhat similar reasons as pop stars: the audience's familiarity with performance, and better, their desire to see more of it, is more or less a consistent factor. Some people like Tom Cruise (I thought he was great in Collateral, though I rather dislike him otherwise), so they're more inclined to see his movies. This makes them a safer bet, and safe bets are what you want when you're spending eight figures on a movie. Maybe we need more movies with a few less zeros in their budget, but some genres are just expensive in general (Lord of the Rings would have sucked on a shoestring budget)
Yeah, I think they should open up the auditions to lesser-known actors, since there's always a chance that one could just dazzle the director, but it's not quite as cynical a process as you think. Nor is acting just standing up there and saying your lines with face and voice written on the script. If you think it's that easy, try it yourself. I can't easily explain the success of Jennifer Lopez in movies (i.e. how she managed to get into more than 2), but there's a damn good reason the likes of Anthony Hopkins and Denzel Washington are in such demand.
> I can get NEW releases at Walmart or Target for $14.99, and other month(s) old releases for $9.99. I see that as more than fair, and see no reason to pirate a movie.
I don't want to pirate them, I just want to copy them to my hard drive.
I just recently rented Shrek 2 (it's got a few good laughs, worth a cheap rental), and was forced to sit through 10 minutes of trailers. None of the tricks to get through it worked (I don't have chapter selection from the offline menu.. my fault for getting a cheap player). About halfway through the movie, it hit a scuffed part of the disc and I lost a whole chapter. I had to pull the disk out, clean it, put it back in... and watch their ten fucking minutes of previews again.
I might decide to just not rent any more DVDs of Dreamworks movies, but I'd rather just not want to deal with the skips at all, and instead read it with a nice high-quality oversampling scan to my hard drive and let the playback deal with errors more gracefully. Not share it online, not keep it forever, but the fucking studios and MPAA want to make me a criminal for just wanting to play rental DVD's without a hassle. Thus, I either decide to rip the DVD's to my HD and I'll probably only delete them when I want the space back, or I'll just stop buying 'em. Yet another satisfied customer, thanks MPAA. Tell the set designer you lay off why I stopped buying, why don't you.
Well, it's never been Java, unless you view everything from the distortion of Sun's claim that they invented bytecode..NET includes
The CLR
Web services
And that's pretty much it. Passport falls under the very nebulous and overly inclusive #2. Web services was initially their biggest push, and included "services" like Hailstorm, which nobody including yours truly actually wanted.
And yes, pretty much everything coming out of MS gets tied to.NET. It's practically the new Windows, but at any rate, the CLR is certainly slated to replace the Win32 API (not that it'll ever go away, given that you can still write DOS apps, int13h and all)
Try looking at MSDN sometime, it might prove illuminating.
> store policy, it seems for most retail stores is not to do anything to interfere with a customer who is shoplifting, ripping you off, ect.
When it comes to shoplifters, it's a safety thing. There's pathological shoplifters doing it for the thrill, who are harmless once caught, and there are real criminal types, usually boosting high-value merchandise. You let store security deal with shoplifters, and even store security isn't going to use physical force beyond a little grabbing or getting in the way -- they just call the cops.
And believe me, despite the cult mentality Wal-Mart attempts to instill, the cashiers not only don't give a shit, they're secretly rooting for the scammer.
> SF's public transit system may be "one of the best", but its geography is also one of the most challenging to get around
Bullshit. The streets are laid out in a grid with two diagonals cutting through (Market and Columbus). That windy brick part of Lombard street is one block, the rest of the road once it goes two ways is as wide as a highway. The massive hills aren't even an issue for most people unless they live or work on one of them, and downtown is as flat as a pancake. San Francisco is EASY to get around. You want tough, try Boston. The Big Dig only made it somewhat less hellish.
That said, I envy the skill of the muni drivers going through Chinatown, but it's still one of the SLOWEST ways to get around that part of town.
> you could always use your time on public transport productively. Got a laptop? Read Books? listen to talking books, even?
You try reading when you're wedged between some wino and three screaming children. I listened to some fine audio books on my hour-long DRIVE when I had a commute. You can even get learning materials from audio -- I'd highly recommend Feynmann's lectures for starters.
Buses are seriously last-resort. BART on the other hand is pretty decent, not to mention it's pretty much always on time.
> not like passport's "store everything in one place" service.
Passport the API can be federated. It is in effect the.NET replacement for NTLM. Passport the service is what's going away or at least becoming irrelevant. Liberty Alliance the service doesn't even exist. Even its own members aren't using it.
> I'm 23, and already I can see my mind slipping away into senility.
I'm 32, and I'm definitely not as sharp as I once was, but I have a more pedestrian explanation: lack of exercise. Your mind is a whole lot sharper when you're in shape, so if you're not exercising, you're getting dumber as well as weaker.
As for the "babies are geniuses and we're all stupid in comparison" stuff, it's really not quite as clear cut as that. They have a bit of "bootstrap" programming that's pretty amazing in terms of learning languages and some other skills, but beyond that, it really pales next to the higher-order abstract analysis we're able to do as adults. Don't sell yourself short -- dementia is NOT a natural part of aging.
1. The Cue Cards help system in Office 95/97. This was an outstanding help system. Unfortunately it's gone now, replaced by...
2. Clippy. Heck, one of the agents is bob. The API's wonderful, the concept of reparenting otherwise modal dialogs to a notifier is great, but as always, the execution of it was terrible. Not so bad if you just use the underlying search technology and turn off the agent itself.
Hell yes, and many still do. It only ran and still runs about 17 hojillion business applications for running every office function from appointments billing to veterinarians offices. What decade were you born in?
BSOD is an NT thing that migrated to Win95. On win 3.x, most people called it a GPF.
> I believe Apple gets credit for the GUI because they were the first to do so on a "personal computer".
For that, we have Steve Jobs to thank, for backing the Macintosh. The original plan was to deliver the GUI on the Lisa, which would have cost many thousands of dollars, which could have even delivered dominance to Commodore... who would have no doubt squandered it within a year due largely to their creative accounting that could have well been the inspiration for the likes of Enron and Worldcom.
Don't worry, it will freeze and then a million years later the aliens will thaw you out and resurrect your mommy and daddy from the dried snot on your teddy bear. Don't have a teddy bear anymore? Too bad, go extinct then.
The Red Cross has never been a religious organization. The emblem is a color-inverted swiss flag. The Red Crescent and Red Shield exist because the cross may have extra unwanted connotations in especially religious countries. Moron.
> The war in Iraq isn't anything like liberating Europe from the Nazis in WWII.
One major difference is that we marched the whole damn army into Germany, preventing a catastrophic breakdown of order (that, and if we didn't, Stalin sure would have). The field commanders in Iraq knew we needed a massive occupying presence in Iraq to keep order, demanded more troops in order to do this, and Rumsfeld deliberately ignored them. Then Bremer simply disbanded the old army by fiat -- people with weapons who now have no money or jobs. Now we and they are both paying for this arrogance. It was also our duty to keep order according to the Geneva convention, but that convention is pretty well dead now anyway.
Really, I give the fuck up. A majority of this idiotic country voted for this shit. All I can do is hope to help where I can and hope the next asteroid puts us all the fuck out of each other's misery.
As I recall, the Red Cross is sitting on a huge pile of cash for 9/11 victims because they don't want to make them millionaires and the government said they can't use the money for relief efforts that aren't 9/11 related.
I doubt this -- the Red Cross has never earmarked funds for specific disasters before, refuses to do so now, and the government has absolutely zero power to tell the Red Cross what it can do with its own funds. They are a private agency, and they are absolutely fanatical about their independence.
The Red Cross has also never paid out directly to victims. The only direct assistance they do give is in the form of vouchers for food, clothing, shelter, and related items.
So you don't recall anything except what some other very wrong person made up or just repeated from some other mistaken or lying individual.
I bet if I really try, I can come up with a few more URLs that don't show Bill Gates making that quote. Also, there's no mention of George Bush saying that there were no WMD's in Iraq either. Isn't that amazing?
Slashdot Mirror
Eh. It really depends on the game. I can't imagine playing a FPS or RTS without a mouse, but Prince of Persia played wonderfully on a console, and there's simply no other way to play Katamari Damacy. I can take the controller and sit on the couch any which way and play a console game (the distance helps cover up the low TV resolution too) whereas with a PC I am more or less glued to my desk. Takes both kinds, which is why I have both.
Sony must have their controller layout patented or something, because the arrangement of the sticks on other consoles feels completely wrong. That's probably the bigger shame about games on xbox or gc. Anyway, I'd love to see real game controllers supported on the PC, not the crummy PS1-era digital controllers, but it seems unlikely to happen.
> I mean, think about the UTTER stupidity of pronouncing Gnu as "Gah-new".
What does Gary Gnu have to do with RMS?
"No guh-noos is good guh-noos!"
> It says "If you want to contribute to a project licensed under me, then you MUST contribute your code to proprietary software vendors that want to use it, and you may not charge them for the privilege."
Funny, I don't see that in the wording.
> The GPL leaves that up to me. It doesn't force me to do anything.
Except of course force others to use the GPL as well, forcing them to forbid that code be made available to the Apples of the world.
Grow up. Your argument is tired. If you don't like what someone else chose for their license, then by all means, don't choose to contribute.
Brad Pitt does not draw a salary. He doesn't put in eight-ish hours working or not on the latest Quarterly Objectives, assuming there are any yet, reading Slashdot. As part of contracts written per movie, he acts (maybe not to your exacting standards) and for this gets a really big fixed chunk, plus residuals of some unknown amount.
I personally don't give a hoot whether you personally like my favorite actors or not, and neither do the people who choose to spend money that pays their check. It's not like they're pulling it out straight out of your paycheck in the fashion of Halliburton no-bid-contracts.
And then you worked in Microsoft somehow. I have been trolled, pardon me. Well done.
PKD's estate gets a dumptruck of cash backed up to it, courtesy of the residuals he gets from optioning his stories. If the movies didn't have the megastars, it's quite possible they might not have had the success enough to get him the cash.
Megastars exist for somewhat similar reasons as pop stars: the audience's familiarity with performance, and better, their desire to see more of it, is more or less a consistent factor. Some people like Tom Cruise (I thought he was great in Collateral, though I rather dislike him otherwise), so they're more inclined to see his movies. This makes them a safer bet, and safe bets are what you want when you're spending eight figures on a movie. Maybe we need more movies with a few less zeros in their budget, but some genres are just expensive in general (Lord of the Rings would have sucked on a shoestring budget)
Yeah, I think they should open up the auditions to lesser-known actors, since there's always a chance that one could just dazzle the director, but it's not quite as cynical a process as you think. Nor is acting just standing up there and saying your lines with face and voice written on the script. If you think it's that easy, try it yourself. I can't easily explain the success of Jennifer Lopez in movies (i.e. how she managed to get into more than 2), but there's a damn good reason the likes of Anthony Hopkins and Denzel Washington are in such demand.
> I can get NEW releases at Walmart or Target for $14.99, and other month(s) old releases for $9.99. I see that as more than fair, and see no reason to pirate a movie.
.. my fault for getting a cheap player). About halfway through the movie, it hit a scuffed part of the disc and I lost a whole chapter. I had to pull the disk out, clean it, put it back in ... and watch their ten fucking minutes of previews again.
I don't want to pirate them, I just want to copy them to my hard drive.
I just recently rented Shrek 2 (it's got a few good laughs, worth a cheap rental), and was forced to sit through 10 minutes of trailers. None of the tricks to get through it worked (I don't have chapter selection from the offline menu
I might decide to just not rent any more DVDs of Dreamworks movies, but I'd rather just not want to deal with the skips at all, and instead read it with a nice high-quality oversampling scan to my hard drive and let the playback deal with errors more gracefully. Not share it online, not keep it forever, but the fucking studios and MPAA want to make me a criminal for just wanting to play rental DVD's without a hassle. Thus, I either decide to rip the DVD's to my HD and I'll probably only delete them when I want the space back, or I'll just stop buying 'em. Yet another satisfied customer, thanks MPAA. Tell the set designer you lay off why I stopped buying, why don't you.
And that's pretty much it. Passport falls under the very nebulous and overly inclusive #2. Web services was initially their biggest push, and included "services" like Hailstorm, which nobody including yours truly actually wanted.
And yes, pretty much everything coming out of MS gets tied to
Try looking at MSDN sometime, it might prove illuminating.
> store policy, it seems for most retail stores is not to do anything to interfere with a customer who is shoplifting, ripping you off, ect.
When it comes to shoplifters, it's a safety thing. There's pathological shoplifters doing it for the thrill, who are harmless once caught, and there are real criminal types, usually boosting high-value merchandise. You let store security deal with shoplifters, and even store security isn't going to use physical force beyond a little grabbing or getting in the way -- they just call the cops.
And believe me, despite the cult mentality Wal-Mart attempts to instill, the cashiers not only don't give a shit, they're secretly rooting for the scammer.
> SF's public transit system may be "one of the best", but its geography is also one of the most challenging to get around
Bullshit. The streets are laid out in a grid with two diagonals cutting through (Market and Columbus). That windy brick part of Lombard street is one block, the rest of the road once it goes two ways is as wide as a highway. The massive hills aren't even an issue for most people unless they live or work on one of them, and downtown is as flat as a pancake. San Francisco is EASY to get around. You want tough, try Boston. The Big Dig only made it somewhat less hellish.
That said, I envy the skill of the muni drivers going through Chinatown, but it's still one of the SLOWEST ways to get around that part of town.
> When I lived in SF I could drive for 5-10 minutes to work, spend 0-5 minutes finding parking within a couple blocks, and be done
Holy crap, where do you work, Bayview? You try finding street parking in North Beach, let alone >2 hour parking.
> you could always use your time on public transport productively. Got a laptop? Read Books? listen to talking books, even?
You try reading when you're wedged between some wino and three screaming children. I listened to some fine audio books on my hour-long DRIVE when I had a commute. You can even get learning materials from audio -- I'd highly recommend Feynmann's lectures for starters.
Buses are seriously last-resort. BART on the other hand is pretty decent, not to mention it's pretty much always on time.
> not like passport's "store everything in one place" service.
.NET replacement for NTLM. Passport the service is what's going away or at least becoming irrelevant. Liberty Alliance the service doesn't even exist. Even its own members aren't using it.
Passport the API can be federated. It is in effect the
> the whole north american continent would be called Canada, which wouldnt be such a bad thing.
Except that Canada would inherit the cultural legacy of America. Remember, these Puritans were such intolerable prigs, they got kicked out of England.
Elucidate means "to shed light on". Maybe you meant epiphany?
> I'm 23, and already I can see my mind slipping away into senility.
I'm 32, and I'm definitely not as sharp as I once was, but I have a more pedestrian explanation: lack of exercise. Your mind is a whole lot sharper when you're in shape, so if you're not exercising, you're getting dumber as well as weaker.
As for the "babies are geniuses and we're all stupid in comparison" stuff, it's really not quite as clear cut as that. They have a bit of "bootstrap" programming that's pretty amazing in terms of learning languages and some other skills, but beyond that, it really pales next to the higher-order abstract analysis we're able to do as adults. Don't sell yourself short -- dementia is NOT a natural part of aging.
Actually, Bob lived on in two ways:
1. The Cue Cards help system in Office 95/97. This was an outstanding help system. Unfortunately it's gone now, replaced by...
2. Clippy. Heck, one of the agents is bob. The API's wonderful, the concept of reparenting otherwise modal dialogs to a notifier is great, but as always, the execution of it was terrible. Not so bad if you just use the underlying search technology and turn off the agent itself.
"blah blah TCO blah blah blah TCO blah TCO blah blah blah TCO blah blah blah TCO hold on gotta reboot blah blah blah TCO"
Win 3.1?
Usefull?
Have you used it?
Hell yes, and many still do. It only ran and still runs about 17 hojillion business applications for running every office function from appointments billing to veterinarians offices. What decade were you born in?
BSOD is an NT thing that migrated to Win95. On win 3.x, most people called it a GPF.
> I believe Apple gets credit for the GUI because they were the first to do so on a "personal computer".
... who would have no doubt squandered it within a year due largely to their creative accounting that could have well been the inspiration for the likes of Enron and Worldcom.
For that, we have Steve Jobs to thank, for backing the Macintosh. The original plan was to deliver the GUI on the Lisa, which would have cost many thousands of dollars, which could have even delivered dominance to Commodore
Don't worry, it will freeze and then a million years later the aliens will thaw you out and resurrect your mommy and daddy from the dried snot on your teddy bear. Don't have a teddy bear anymore? Too bad, go extinct then.
> An athiest donating to the Red Cross... WOW!
The Red Cross has never been a religious organization. The emblem is a color-inverted swiss flag. The Red Crescent and Red Shield exist because the cross may have extra unwanted connotations in especially religious countries. Moron.
> The war in Iraq isn't anything like liberating Europe from the Nazis in WWII.
One major difference is that we marched the whole damn army into Germany, preventing a catastrophic breakdown of order (that, and if we didn't, Stalin sure would have). The field commanders in Iraq knew we needed a massive occupying presence in Iraq to keep order, demanded more troops in order to do this, and Rumsfeld deliberately ignored them. Then Bremer simply disbanded the old army by fiat -- people with weapons who now have no money or jobs. Now we and they are both paying for this arrogance. It was also our duty to keep order according to the Geneva convention, but that convention is pretty well dead now anyway.
Really, I give the fuck up. A majority of this idiotic country voted for this shit. All I can do is hope to help where I can and hope the next asteroid puts us all the fuck out of each other's misery.
So what you're saying is ... we're not killing Iraqis efficiently enough?
It's probably better to just cite the dollar figures.
As I recall, the Red Cross is sitting on a huge pile of cash for 9/11 victims because they don't want to make them millionaires and the government said they can't use the money for relief efforts that aren't 9/11 related.
I doubt this -- the Red Cross has never earmarked funds for specific disasters before, refuses to do so now, and the government has absolutely zero power to tell the Red Cross what it can do with its own funds. They are a private agency, and they are absolutely fanatical about their independence.
The Red Cross has also never paid out directly to victims. The only direct assistance they do give is in the form of vouchers for food, clothing, shelter, and related items.
So you don't recall anything except what some other very wrong person made up or just repeated from some other mistaken or lying individual.
Here's a source where there is no mention of gates making the 640K quote:
p
3 22 9&tid=137&tid=1
http://www.rcn.com/internet/networking/index.ph
Here's another
http://www.craigslist.org/pen/acc/53773545.html
And another:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/29/173
I bet if I really try, I can come up with a few more URLs that don't show Bill Gates making that quote. Also, there's no mention of George Bush saying that there were no WMD's in Iraq either. Isn't that amazing?