Personally I hate the interfaces of both of them, and much of their functionality actually.
Wait, are you using GNOME?
I'm a KDE partisan myself, I must admit. I'd recommend trying out something like Kaffeine (using the Xine engine, perhaps?), I switch off between that and xine-ui for video (xine-ui is a bit less polished-looking, though I suppose that it might be better with a different skin, I just haven't bothered, heh...I got attached to xine-ui when I first started using Linux and KDE, so it's that and a few minor functionality tidbits that has me alternating between the two players.) If you're looking for an interface that doesn't look like crap, try one of those two (Kaffeine'll be much better if you're actually in KDE, you'll need nearly all of the libraries to run it in anything else probably anyways). Each of them has a different way of "not looking like crap". Kaffeine is a native KDE app, so it basically looks like however you have KDE looking at the time; Xine-ui is skinnable so you can make the main interface part look however you want. I'm not saying they're perfect . . . personally I love Media Player Classic;)
I do shy away from OO.o myself somewhat. Despite the bugginess in previous versions (though I haven't had any issues on my current computer) I keep getting called back to KWord. It has issues, certainly, but I like how it's very non-bloated yet doesn't lack essential features (so it isn't like using, say, Wordpad for writing something). I actually like it more than any other "modern" word processor (my ideal one, I must admit, is still WordPerfect 9 I believe it was).
Full disclosure: I'm typing this on my main computer, which runs almost exclusively on Kubuntu 6.10 AMD64. (By "almost exclusively" I mean that I also have WinXP, Vista and OS X installed, but I mainly use each of them for curiosity's sake).
According to this page, Ford noted in a book that it was dysentery while Spielberg at least once said in an interview that is was "the local food", thus perhaps the confusion.
Whenever people mention good Trek games, no one seems to mention DS9: The Fallen Anyone that has actually played it, however, tends to acclaim it! Startrek-gamers gives it extensive praise in their history of Star Trek gaming.
Honestly, I was taken with the game from the moment I played the demo. Granted, I played the demo far after it had come out (as far as I can tell it wasn't nearly as well publicized as it could have been). But when I did! Even just the level of detail in the weather they had added (realistic snow falling, Sisko leaving footprints on the ground) was pretty impressive, especially for the time, and in general it had a solid and true-to-Trek feel to it in contrast to the glitchy, floaty and "mod tacked on to a game engine" nature of most licensed games. And there was a level editor! Yes, that's right, even the demo includes the brilliant UnreadEd package for creating one's own levels. Naturally this has led to some rather impressive fan-made expansions to the game, Convergence being perhaps the most notable. Alas, the oldskool UnrealEd 1 is a bit tricky to get working with newer versions of Windows, but I have it working just fine on my XP SP1 comp (the trick is compatibility mode combined with a working 98 install somewhere that you can copy missing.ocx files it warns you about when you try to start it in XP).
And hey, with everyone buying Macs nowadays it's worth noting that it was officially ported to the Mac long ago (from the official website, "OS 8 or higher (NOTE Runs in OS 9.1 emulation mode in OS X)"). And of course the game is old enough that running it under one form of emulation or another isn't too taxing on a system...in other words, yeah, I'd bet it'll run on Linux;) (I haven't tried myself since I'm running AMD64 on my main Linux install, which, umm, doesn't make cross-platform emulation that easy, heh).
I'd recommend anyone who enjoyed DS9, or just feels like playing a well-made Star Trek game, to at least give the demo a chance. It's free-as-in-beer, after all, and to a large degree the openness of UnrealEd and it's access to the scripting underneath the game makes it closer to free-as-in-speech than most games. And keep your eyes out in bargain bins, it shouldn't be too expensive if you find a copy! (I found my copy really cheap years ago already in an EB games store while I was visiting Monroe, Michigan.)
Actually one of my friends is the big one on this idea.
Step 1: Get access to a smelting plant on the US side of the border. Step 2: Get access to a nearby smelting plant on the Canadian side of that same border. Step 3: ??? (well, you can guess...) Step 4: Profit!
Previously we had realized that the U.S. laws would probably let us get away with melting it all down on the U.S. side, but this change in laws just means back to Plan A, 'tis all.
in my experience, Kaspersky Labs works almost amazingly better against viruses; at least, it has easily fixed computers where AVG couldn't even see a problem. I'm sorry, I know it'd be great to be all "yay AVG!" since it's free, but I've begrudgingly grown to respect Kaspersky. Of course, it's much much better than Norton as well, but that's pretty much for granted.
(Reminds me of a funny story, though. My friend's computer was acting up, in some very odd and rather annoying ways. I tsk-tsked him, implying that he probably caught himself some kind of infection. He went "no, no, this legit copy of Norton I have would have seen it." I took his hard drive out, threw it in my machine, and Kaspersky Labs immediately started deleting. Once the massive infection (mainly of worms) was gone, we put it back in his box, and his Win2k install ran with significantly less hassle; all those mysterious problems were gone, howabout that. Norton, thoughout all of this, just smiled into space like an idiot. And don't get me started on McAfee!)
Kasperksy is also quite configurable for ignoring certain files, and has a rather robust system for doing so; I find it handy myself, considering that I have quite a few programs that have the kinds of engines in them that might be detected heuristically by Kaspersky as being virus-y, for lack of a better term (for example, the smtp engine in anonymail is the kind of setup that a worm might use for using a computer to randomly mail copies of itself around). So if this piece of kinda-mal-ware is to survive its own medicine, that sort of functionality is rather useful (I haven't used AVG for about a year now, but when I last used it I remembered a lack of that kind of breadth of deliberate "leave such-and-such alone).
You're right though, that adding copyright infringement ontop of this is a bit of an issue, but under the circumstances it's an issue of contempt for the end-user anyways. Not saying whether that's justified or not, just that it's deliberately out of the control of whomever owns the infected computer, so it's not like *they'd* be liable anyways . . .
Actually, hey, maybe the creator really likes AVG and doesn't want to give it bad press? There's quite a few possible reasons for this choice, thinking about it.
I mean, I know that this is/. but seriously, it's right near the start there (and this isn't some crappy corporate page that's annoying to have to browse through even).
The episodic game, which will feature many fan favorites from the Penny Arcade universe (including the Fruit Fucker), will be delivered in monthly installments.
Really, what for? Is this an American popular culture term? I haven't come across it before, other than this http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105977/ TV series.
Yeah, it's an American culture term; if you're ever in doubt about something like this again, I'd bet that Urban Dictionary has it. Let me check . . . yup.
That's actually one of the reasons that I tend to use Konqueror when I'm booted into Linux (I've got XP-SP1 and Kubuntu on the machine I'm typing from), it just screws me up so much when Firefox gives the No/Yes thing. I mean, what's that about? The Windows version of Firefox does things conventionally, why does the Linux version have to be so counter-intuitive?
Furthermore, the worst is probably already over for Windows malware issues. Vista will improve things. It's not a permenant advantage for non-Windows OSes.
I hate to have to play devil's advocate, but it's not like XP wasn't touted as being of much the same nature; on paper it looked like a vast improvement, like the reign of malware would be over. Naturally Microsoft is going to be trying to eliminate malware on Vista, and naturally it's going to look good on paper. Microsoft would be crazy not to be playing things that way. However, I wouldn't want to speak too much this early about Vista's imperviousness.
Alot of the problems with Windows are inherent in the design philosophy, not just in the specific implementations of certain technologies. Not that I mean that Windows exclusively sucks for it; personally I'm typing this on my Windows install right now, I like Windows for alot of things even though I would otherwise probably count as a Linux zealot and ideologically I agree with much of what RMS says. It's the same abstract design decisions that lead to things like malware that attracts me to Windows, and my own system, without even a firewall and with yearly-at-best runs of spyware search tools, is unhindered by malicious software.
The simple fact is that the very nature of Windows, which attracts so much of the market and encourages such widespread adoption (apart from heavy-handed techniques and near-gunpoint sales deals on the part of Microsoft, I mean) is predicated on such easy and arbitrary software installation. It's this having to account for nearly any method of code running in Windows that ends up fucking up so many peoples' computers yet leaving me with a stable but far-from-fresh-install OS.
I know I'm being rather abstract here, but this is in fact an abstract issue. One more point is Microsoft software; almost everything is always an exploit in IE or Outlook or WMP or MSN or etc etc. Microsoft may claim "things will be better in Vista, just you watch" but these exploits were never exacly planned. Changing things so that the same kinds of exploits won't work this time will likely just result in rather different exploits popping up; the exploits come from little bugs and from unintended consequences. (Well, okay, most of the time. Some things were just unforgivable in design, but many of these changed with later iterations and patches of XP without much improvement of the malware situation). Tight integration of Microsoft products into the OS is unlikely to change too much; superficially to avoid monopoly charges and lawsuits, perhaps, but for all intents and purposes I'd probably have a heart attack if Microsoft overturned their most winning business practice. (A practice I hate, yes, but I'm sure that most of slashdot will agree that the practice is both very evil and very successful).
That being said, Parent, everything else you wrote was spot-on, and I suppose my own view on this is more skeptical than anything else; you might still be proven right in the end. Of course, with Vista delayed time and again, it'll be awhile 'till we see for sure, eh?;)
GP said:LJ has paid accounts and paid for their servers and setup years ago. its just upkeep now.
P said:Yeah, 'cause there aren't any expansion or maintenance or bandwidth or colocation facility costs to running a website, are there?
Well, it's not like memberships are a one-time thing; people have to keep paying for it. Even I know multiple people in a single group of friends that pay for LiveJournal, and it's a yearly thing that they pay it in.
Of course, that's kindof moot to this whole discussion, isn't it? The bit in question is how they've decided to offer users the choice of having ads in return for getting the kind of benefits (less restrictions on page modifications, more icons, blah blah blah) that paid-accounts get. The part I find offensive about this is just the fact that, well, they pledged never to do this. You can read what their "Social Contract" used to be over at archive.org, since they've changed it now. They said that these were "promises that we will keep" . . . although they have apparently been laying contingencies since at least January 2001, saying that "LiveJournal.com reserves the right to run advertisements and promotions on LiveJournal.com journals in the future".
A good example of saying one thing while in the fine print saying the opposite in much more legal terms.
Slashdot is eating the html code for the archive.org links, making even the entire formatting of my comment screwy, so here's the bare URLs.
Here it's the British-inherited tradition of "fair dealing". Which I suppose usually amounts to the same thing, but it's important to know the true name if you're going to look it up (like looking up fair dealing in Canada on Wikipedia, for example).
Since all this talk is about "fair use" and the American situation, it's often hard to quite know where Canada stands. To be honest, the answer is probably "dragging along behind the States", but as far as Canada has any self-determination over its own laws there are at least a few current sources from which one can gleam the current state, debate and trends. First is noting how recently during the last election any non-serious news shows were forbidden from showing clips from the leaders' debate. A good sample case showing the state of these concepts such as "public domain", eh?
There are two more rather interesting sources that spring to mind. One is this website which is a good source for current news as to copyright laws in Canada with an obvious emphasis on the digital side (which is, after all, where most of these battles are being fought right now). The other source is the book "In The Public Interest", which is a collection of different essays and is available at that link for free download under a creative commons license (nice to see them putting their money where their mouth is!).
The sad part is, we may not have our own DMCA yet . . . but at this rate (note that Bill C-60 only really failed to pass because the government fell before it went through the House) it shouldn't be that long until we do.
I'd say more along the lines of mplayerc; well, that's what I call it, I suppose it's actually Media Player Classic. Sometimes it feels like that's half the reason alone that I still boot into Windows so often; it's not like there aren't video players for Linux, it's just that none that I've ever tried work so well and elegantly.
Especially if we pretend that the article/blog isn't a fake, someone that's likely to have been stuck with Quicktime for their computing history, upon discovering programs like mplayerc.exe . . . well, it's gotta be a bit of a "halleluiah!" moment. I'd place the UI and functionality way over VLC as well, and it certainly fits the "Windows only" criteria here.
Speaking of video, Virtualdub (or better yet, Vdubmod) is quite the tool. Sure, Final Cut Pro may easily make things that look fancier, but VirtualDubMod is so excessively useful that I tend to use it for almost every bit of video editing I ever do. Some things are a bit harder, but nothing is really impossible and you get much finer and more precise control over it all. That's another program that I desperately wish had a Linux equivalent.
(Sidenote: I'm sitting here crossing my fingers and hoping that some Linux zealot will correct me and point out some marvellous video app for Linux. No, I'm serious, I'd love to be able to do more in Linux but I'm ignorant of any real ways to escape from Windows for how I work and play with video. Audio isn't a problem as much; you have xmms and amaroK for play, and audacity for work (though I haven't used it nearly as much as SoundForge for Windows, so I'm being a bit optimistic here; justifiably so though, I'd suppose). But video alternatives? The bases just don't seem to be covered.)
I've been considering buying a second computer and runnign the Linux version of Freeboat. With BootCamp, I might just buy a new Mac, run windows from Bootcamp with as much isolation from the net as I can manage, and run the Windows version.
If you were considering buying a second comp and running Linux on it, why wouldn't you just dual-boot your Mac? It's not like Linux doesn't have PPC binaries and compiling and blah blah blah technobabble it'll run on Macs, right? Admittedly I've mainly worked with Macs when it's not an option for me to go seriously screwing around with them, so you might have perfectly good reasons why it wouldn't've worked that I don't know about. So (and I suppose this might be a bit of a shocker, this being/. and all, but) I'm actually asking without trying to troll or anything, why couldn't you have dual-booted with Linux long ago?
I'm pretty sure it's because tomorrow is apr1. I think someone sent this out early.
Oh, you silly North American-centric person . . . yeah, okay, I was a bit confused for a second myself, but just think in GMT/UCT and everything makes sense.
I agree though, looks are important, but I guess I left the Windows World (and thus beige boxes) behind 6 years ago and have lost a bit of touch since the.
Funny, I left beige boxes behind the same number of years ago! And yet, here I am typing this from an XP SP1 machine (I've flirted with Linux, but I've yet to settle down on a distro . . . consider me a Linux bachelor). Neither I nor any of my friends have cases that look anything but cool (except for my one friend who found a P4 in the garbage, but that's another story), and I don't mean that we we ultra-geeks and spent huge wads of cash on fancy cases or modding them; these are just cool looking stock cases, which I would have assumed any decent computer store would have shelves of.
And at the time I first got this aluminum-cased full tower that's still sitting beside me now, I noted (or rather, my back noted) how much more of a hassle it was to lug around an iMac at that time than it was my computer; it was actually nicer to carry one moderately heavy CRT and then one light-enough-to-lift-with-my-pinky tower than it was to move iMacs around, carrying handle be damned.
Not that many people aren't impressed by having the entire computer in one package (well, except for keyboard, mouse, decent speakers . . . but yaknow), my point is more a general point that PCs don't have to be fugly and badly designed on a physical level. Now, I'll will concede that likely a majority of PCs sold ARE suffering from such faults, and that gives people the perception that "ooh! these Macs are sooo much better!" when they glance over at them. And don't you be telling me that most PCs are such because it's cheaper, though! My computer here, all nice and windowed and glisteningly silver, is just a cheap chinese no-name brand! So the exact reasons why PC cases are generally so bad while equally priced superior products exist, well, I have my theories but howabout we just leave it sitting at that for now. I'd just like to quote MKlaus (the parent) one last time:
I think Price sells first and foremost, the rest is just added "convinience", that is if they see it.
You're bang on there, especially with the "if they see it", as I think that's exactly why Macs are winning the perception of functional and cool looking, and these people go "wow, I want that!" while continuing in their zombie-like purchasing of bad PC cases while they could buy better ones for the same price . . . they just don't ever see this option.
Actually, another thing occurs to me. All those beige boxes, many of them are purchased by companies for employees to work, right? It reminds me of going to Staples one time and looking at network cables (before I was bothering to just splice my own ethernet cables, which is hella cheaper, but I digress). There were red, blue, yellow and grey cables . . . the grey cost more than the decent-looking colours. "WTF?" I asked the salesperson. He was a kindof cool guy, and he replied "Huh, never noticed that. I guess we can probably get away with it 'cause businesses just buy grey, so we can jack up the price on that one." I walked away that day with some red and some blue, naturally.
So maybe that's part of the problem? Maybe business just creates so much demand for shitty-looking cases? Thinking about it, that might be part of why (as T("pessimistic")FA notes, Apple hasn't broken into the workplace; it doesn't meet the demands of blandness, concrete and sterility. So what's the solution? Will business eventually adopt the Mac, and if so, will that Mac come in a regulation bland box?
Hmm, I suppose there's no "no text" meme in slashdot, I'm just supposed to repeat the title. Oh well:
Same devs, for the most part. Alas, I'm unsure of whether Warren Spector, to name the man at the helm there, is actually working on anything genuinely new at the moment. Naturally his previous studio (the one that created Deus Ex, that is, which was comprised hugely of ex-System Shock and Thief devs) was closed by Ion Storm. Grr.
An FPS with oldschool-style RPG plot, levelling, and equipment would be quite interesting.
Not to sound snide, but what rock have you been hiding under since about 2000? That's when the rather brilliant original "Deus Ex" came out for PC (it has since been released for the Mac and for the PS2). It's generally considered an RPG, and has a tremendous emphasis on both character development and story (the story of which is branching in many ways; for example, if you know later that you're going to have to kill what is now a friendly character, you can often kill that character beforehand. Not that your allies won't freak out about this...)
Okay, so it isn't "oldskool RPG plot" in that I suppose traditionally RPG plot is set in a world of sword and sorcery, but hey, many of the best games are exceptions (Fallout, anyone?). I have met many people who have played Deus Ex, and introduced many more to it personally, and none of them failed to be tremendously enthusiastic about the game afterwards. And eventually the devs even released an SDK, and as UnrealEd is one of the easiest-but-powerful game editors out the IMHO, there's a lot of rather good third-party content out there (they even held an official contest, and you can be sure that the winners are worth checking out). Hell, last LAN party I was at we even took advantage of the later-released (about the time of the SDK) multiplayer part and just hacked up some of the single player levels to deathmatch in; it was a lot of fun, due in no small part to the fact that even to this day the level of detail and interactivity of the levels and the game in general have precious few competitors in the realm of FPS games.
The Wikipedia article has more info if you're curious. Really, if you're looking for a FPS with RPG style plot (and the ability to interact and converse with NPCs in Deus Ex beats out even most other RPGs), levelling and equipment, then honestly, try out Deus Ex! You won't be disappointed!
(A word of caution, though . . . please don't mistake this game for the sequel, "Deus Ex: Invisible War". Opinion on the quality of that one is a bit more . . . shall we say . . . divided?)
Depends quite what signal it was getting, but maybe it was getting 1080i and can't do a good job of deinterlacing? Seriously, it bothers me that we're still stuck with interlacing after all this time.
I've also heard reports of fuzziness resulting from a lack of ability of some televisions to properly figure out exactly what HDTV signal it's getting ("wait, is this 1080i/50? 1080i/60? 720p? Gaaah, I can't understand!") so it just drops down the signal a bunch. Naturally, the places that sell these things are the last place that is going to know anything about them (so sad, but so true) so I could see them not understanding that, and probably having caused it to some degree somehow.
> Every word after Obi-Wan cuts off Skywalker's legs is a negative, e.g. "I loved you man!" is something no actor needs to say; it's evident from the acting. The worst lines in all six movies is when the dying Portman (shades of "Love Story") says, "I think I'll spoil one of the plots points of the next movie by telling the audience that Luke has a sister named Leia on Alderan."
You note that he shouldn't have had to say the lines, and you're entirely correct, but that was one case in the movies that I felt that these actors, good elsewhere but terrible under the thumb of Lucas, actually showed some chops.
Alas, it misled me in the trailer, with that little clip of it that made me sit up and go "hey, maybe the characterization and acting will actually be good in this one!" Oh, foolish optimism. See, seeing one bit of that outburst out of context had an impact, as Obi-Wan's pure emotion was palpable; having to watch that scene and hear every bland iteration of redundant dialogue was painful, and I felt a sympathy for what amounted to torture of the actors.
Not to say that I didn't rather enjoy the film. But I only saw it once, and admittedly the bad parts of the first bit of the film were glossed over by a brilliant suggestion by one of my friends: in order to survive the dialogue and acting, she suggested beforehand that we pop into the nearby pub. So that was kindof cheating.
Maybe they don't want to see the translations, but rather, see who out there understands these languages? Especially people who read alot of it but don't contribute translations back . . . aha! Must be an evildoer!
Naw, I don't really believe it. But it does sound like there must be some sort of workable paranoid conspiracy thing here somewhere . . .
Admittedly, it's also the reason I have an Xbox in the first place; a friend of mine had to scrap his when the DVD-ROM drive just up and started not reading discs with the kind of reliability you need to actually, well, play them. So I have an Xbox, hacked it, but the way to play games is to copy them over my LAN onto the HDD, or sometimes one can convince the disc drive to copy a game to the hard drive, but it's impossible to actually play legit games legitimately.
What I've done instead is turn it into a media system (playing downloaded or ripped movies and TV shows when I'm not playing from my computer, ex. if I'm bringing it to a friends' house and they don't have their home system set up to play videos from their computers) and also an emulator; my old NES broke a few years ago, much to my dismay, but now once again I can play Super Mario 3 on a console! Granted, it's a bit insane to be playing those kinds of games on a system as much more advanced as the Xbox, but that just makes it oddly more delicious.
So basically, because MS used rather defective DVD-ROM drives, they really don't get much money from me for the Xbox (other than a controller I bought; the others I have are also either second-hand or even second-hand-patched-back-together-with-electrical- tape).
But to me that's the best part of the Xbox, using it as a true multimedia piece of electronics. It's even relatively portable; not as portable as a laptop, but a hell of a lot less expensive and certainly much more portable than a full tower and all its peripherals. If the 360 was truly hacked, I would be quite interested in it; I would probably even buy legit games and all, it's just that it doesn't have the selling point if I can't have stuff like the XBMC or my old NES games on it.
I'm quite content that notepad has remained almost entirely unchanged since Win95, actually. It's nice to be able to open up a *pure* text editor, no frills whatsoever, when I want. You have a point that they should include a better text editor, but then again that's already taken over by wordpad; not that wordpad doesn't suck, but I don't see why notepad is getting all the hate here. It's just a edit-plain-text-period editor, and that's fine with me. But avoiding being too pedantic here, yeah, wordpad isn't really anything more than support for some font formatting and the like, it's not much improvement especially compared to the kinds of little neat things that other 3rd party text editors have been doing since Win95.
And sure, Microsoft should be working on some snazzier looking basic apps, and writing them to showcase.NET might be a good move . . . but it's not going to happen for text editors. For Windows the idea is notepad as a legacy plaintext editor (which I respect), then wordpad as a sucky slightly higher-level app so that people can barely read word documents and get suckered into buying Office. Yes, I realize that there is a difference between a text editor and a word processor, but Microsoft wants you to use Word and the other Office apps for everything, so they're not going to give you any apps that even so much as remind people that there are more choices other than either absurdly-basic (notepad/wordpad) and full-office-suite (Office, naturally). It's in their interests to maintain this binary picture of text apps in the mind of Windows users.
Okay, so that doesn't work for ya (and I often myself, if I'm doing plaintext editing on Windows for one reason or another, use something other than notepad). But hey, not to give in to the rampant bashing of Microsoft here on Slashdot but there are some pretty good reasons why people abbreviate it M$, right? Maybe I'm just driving out in Conspiracy Land here, but it seems to me that it's actually a business strategy for Microsoft not to have any better default editors.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I hate the interfaces of both of them, and much of their functionality actually.
;)
Wait, are you using GNOME?
I'm a KDE partisan myself, I must admit. I'd recommend trying out something like Kaffeine (using the Xine engine, perhaps?), I switch off between that and xine-ui for video (xine-ui is a bit less polished-looking, though I suppose that it might be better with a different skin, I just haven't bothered, heh...I got attached to xine-ui when I first started using Linux and KDE, so it's that and a few minor functionality tidbits that has me alternating between the two players.) If you're looking for an interface that doesn't look like crap, try one of those two (Kaffeine'll be much better if you're actually in KDE, you'll need nearly all of the libraries to run it in anything else probably anyways). Each of them has a different way of "not looking like crap". Kaffeine is a native KDE app, so it basically looks like however you have KDE looking at the time; Xine-ui is skinnable so you can make the main interface part look however you want. I'm not saying they're perfect . . . personally I love Media Player Classic
I do shy away from OO.o myself somewhat. Despite the bugginess in previous versions (though I haven't had any issues on my current computer) I keep getting called back to KWord. It has issues, certainly, but I like how it's very non-bloated yet doesn't lack essential features (so it isn't like using, say, Wordpad for writing something). I actually like it more than any other "modern" word processor (my ideal one, I must admit, is still WordPerfect 9 I believe it was).
Full disclosure: I'm typing this on my main computer, which runs almost exclusively on Kubuntu 6.10 AMD64. (By "almost exclusively" I mean that I also have WinXP, Vista and OS X installed, but I mainly use each of them for curiosity's sake).
According to this page, Ford noted in a book that it was dysentery while Spielberg at least once said in an interview that is was "the local food", thus perhaps the confusion.
Whenever people mention good Trek games, no one seems to mention DS9: The Fallen Anyone that has actually played it, however, tends to acclaim it! Startrek-gamers gives it extensive praise in their history of Star Trek gaming.
.ocx files it warns you about when you try to start it in XP).
;) (I haven't tried myself since I'm running AMD64 on my main Linux install, which, umm, doesn't make cross-platform emulation that easy, heh).
Honestly, I was taken with the game from the moment I played the demo. Granted, I played the demo far after it had come out (as far as I can tell it wasn't nearly as well publicized as it could have been). But when I did! Even just the level of detail in the weather they had added (realistic snow falling, Sisko leaving footprints on the ground) was pretty impressive, especially for the time, and in general it had a solid and true-to-Trek feel to it in contrast to the glitchy, floaty and "mod tacked on to a game engine" nature of most licensed games. And there was a level editor! Yes, that's right, even the demo includes the brilliant UnreadEd package for creating one's own levels. Naturally this has led to some rather impressive fan-made expansions to the game, Convergence being perhaps the most notable. Alas, the oldskool UnrealEd 1 is a bit tricky to get working with newer versions of Windows, but I have it working just fine on my XP SP1 comp (the trick is compatibility mode combined with a working 98 install somewhere that you can copy missing
And hey, with everyone buying Macs nowadays it's worth noting that it was officially ported to the Mac long ago (from the official website, "OS 8 or higher (NOTE Runs in OS 9.1 emulation mode in OS X)"). And of course the game is old enough that running it under one form of emulation or another isn't too taxing on a system...in other words, yeah, I'd bet it'll run on Linux
I'd recommend anyone who enjoyed DS9, or just feels like playing a well-made Star Trek game, to at least give the demo a chance. It's free-as-in-beer, after all, and to a large degree the openness of UnrealEd and it's access to the scripting underneath the game makes it closer to free-as-in-speech than most games. And keep your eyes out in bargain bins, it shouldn't be too expensive if you find a copy! (I found my copy really cheap years ago already in an EB games store while I was visiting Monroe, Michigan.)
Actually one of my friends is the big one on this idea.
Step 1: Get access to a smelting plant on the US side of the border.
Step 2: Get access to a nearby smelting plant on the Canadian side of that same border.
Step 3: ??? (well, you can guess...)
Step 4: Profit!
Previously we had realized that the U.S. laws would probably let us get away with melting it all down on the U.S. side, but this change in laws just means back to Plan A, 'tis all.
in my experience, Kaspersky Labs works almost amazingly better against viruses; at least, it has easily fixed computers where AVG couldn't even see a problem. I'm sorry, I know it'd be great to be all "yay AVG!" since it's free, but I've begrudgingly grown to respect Kaspersky. Of course, it's much much better than Norton as well, but that's pretty much for granted.
(Reminds me of a funny story, though. My friend's computer was acting up, in some very odd and rather annoying ways. I tsk-tsked him, implying that he probably caught himself some kind of infection. He went "no, no, this legit copy of Norton I have would have seen it." I took his hard drive out, threw it in my machine, and Kaspersky Labs immediately started deleting. Once the massive infection (mainly of worms) was gone, we put it back in his box, and his Win2k install ran with significantly less hassle; all those mysterious problems were gone, howabout that. Norton, thoughout all of this, just smiled into space like an idiot. And don't get me started on McAfee!)
Kasperksy is also quite configurable for ignoring certain files, and has a rather robust system for doing so; I find it handy myself, considering that I have quite a few programs that have the kinds of engines in them that might be detected heuristically by Kaspersky as being virus-y, for lack of a better term (for example, the smtp engine in anonymail is the kind of setup that a worm might use for using a computer to randomly mail copies of itself around). So if this piece of kinda-mal-ware is to survive its own medicine, that sort of functionality is rather useful (I haven't used AVG for about a year now, but when I last used it I remembered a lack of that kind of breadth of deliberate "leave such-and-such alone).
You're right though, that adding copyright infringement ontop of this is a bit of an issue, but under the circumstances it's an issue of contempt for the end-user anyways. Not saying whether that's justified or not, just that it's deliberately out of the control of whomever owns the infected computer, so it's not like *they'd* be liable anyways . . .
Actually, hey, maybe the creator really likes AVG and doesn't want to give it bad press? There's quite a few possible reasons for this choice, thinking about it.
cracker is a racial slur
Really, what for? Is this an American popular culture term? I haven't come across it before, other than this http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105977/ TV series.
Yeah, it's an American culture term; if you're ever in doubt about something like this again, I'd bet that Urban Dictionary has it. Let me check . . . yup.
That's actually one of the reasons that I tend to use Konqueror when I'm booted into Linux (I've got XP-SP1 and Kubuntu on the machine I'm typing from), it just screws me up so much when Firefox gives the No/Yes thing. I mean, what's that about? The Windows version of Firefox does things conventionally, why does the Linux version have to be so counter-intuitive?
I have no mod points, so I will simply reply with a "lol!"
Because yes, indeed, I did laugh out loud. Parent, that was the perfect response to Grandparent, bravo!
In Korea . . . umm . . . only old people welcome classic overlords of Soviet Russia? Or something?
Furthermore, the worst is probably already over for Windows malware issues. Vista will improve things. It's not a permenant advantage for non-Windows OSes.
;)
I hate to have to play devil's advocate, but it's not like XP wasn't touted as being of much the same nature; on paper it looked like a vast improvement, like the reign of malware would be over. Naturally Microsoft is going to be trying to eliminate malware on Vista, and naturally it's going to look good on paper. Microsoft would be crazy not to be playing things that way. However, I wouldn't want to speak too much this early about Vista's imperviousness.
Alot of the problems with Windows are inherent in the design philosophy, not just in the specific implementations of certain technologies. Not that I mean that Windows exclusively sucks for it; personally I'm typing this on my Windows install right now, I like Windows for alot of things even though I would otherwise probably count as a Linux zealot and ideologically I agree with much of what RMS says. It's the same abstract design decisions that lead to things like malware that attracts me to Windows, and my own system, without even a firewall and with yearly-at-best runs of spyware search tools, is unhindered by malicious software.
The simple fact is that the very nature of Windows, which attracts so much of the market and encourages such widespread adoption (apart from heavy-handed techniques and near-gunpoint sales deals on the part of Microsoft, I mean) is predicated on such easy and arbitrary software installation. It's this having to account for nearly any method of code running in Windows that ends up fucking up so many peoples' computers yet leaving me with a stable but far-from-fresh-install OS.
I know I'm being rather abstract here, but this is in fact an abstract issue. One more point is Microsoft software; almost everything is always an exploit in IE or Outlook or WMP or MSN or etc etc. Microsoft may claim "things will be better in Vista, just you watch" but these exploits were never exacly planned. Changing things so that the same kinds of exploits won't work this time will likely just result in rather different exploits popping up; the exploits come from little bugs and from unintended consequences. (Well, okay, most of the time. Some things were just unforgivable in design, but many of these changed with later iterations and patches of XP without much improvement of the malware situation). Tight integration of Microsoft products into the OS is unlikely to change too much; superficially to avoid monopoly charges and lawsuits, perhaps, but for all intents and purposes I'd probably have a heart attack if Microsoft overturned their most winning business practice. (A practice I hate, yes, but I'm sure that most of slashdot will agree that the practice is both very evil and very successful).
That being said, Parent, everything else you wrote was spot-on, and I suppose my own view on this is more skeptical than anything else; you might still be proven right in the end. Of course, with Vista delayed time and again, it'll be awhile 'till we see for sure, eh?
GP said: LJ has paid accounts and paid for their servers and setup years ago. its just upkeep now.
P said: Yeah, 'cause there aren't any expansion or maintenance or bandwidth or colocation facility costs to running a website, are there?
Well, it's not like memberships are a one-time thing; people have to keep paying for it. Even I know multiple people in a single group of friends that pay for LiveJournal, and it's a yearly thing that they pay it in.
Of course, that's kindof moot to this whole discussion, isn't it? The bit in question is how they've decided to offer users the choice of having ads in return for getting the kind of benefits (less restrictions on page modifications, more icons, blah blah blah) that paid-accounts get. The part I find offensive about this is just the fact that, well, they pledged never to do this. You can read what their "Social Contract" used to be over at archive.org, since they've changed it now. They said that these were "promises that we will keep" . . . although they have apparently been laying contingencies since at least January 2001, saying that "LiveJournal.com reserves the right to run advertisements and promotions on LiveJournal.com journals in the future".
A good example of saying one thing while in the fine print saying the opposite in much more legal terms.
Slashdot is eating the html code for the archive.org links, making even the entire formatting of my comment screwy, so here's the bare URLs.
The Social Contract: http://web.archive.org/web/20040401175244/http://
The Terms of Service circa Jan 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20010126132600/http://
Man, slashcode sure does some weird stuff sometimes. This is what it looks like if I try to do one of those URLs as a link:
Why don't you click over http://www.livejournal.com/site/contract.bml>here
Here it's the British-inherited tradition of "fair dealing". Which I suppose usually amounts to the same thing, but it's important to know the true name if you're going to look it up (like looking up fair dealing in Canada on Wikipedia, for example).
Since all this talk is about "fair use" and the American situation, it's often hard to quite know where Canada stands. To be honest, the answer is probably "dragging along behind the States", but as far as Canada has any self-determination over its own laws there are at least a few current sources from which one can gleam the current state, debate and trends. First is noting how recently during the last election any non-serious news shows were forbidden from showing clips from the leaders' debate. A good sample case showing the state of these concepts such as "public domain", eh?
There are two more rather interesting sources that spring to mind. One is this website which is a good source for current news as to copyright laws in Canada with an obvious emphasis on the digital side (which is, after all, where most of these battles are being fought right now). The other source is the book "In The Public Interest", which is a collection of different essays and is available at that link for free download under a creative commons license (nice to see them putting their money where their mouth is!).
The sad part is, we may not have our own DMCA yet . . . but at this rate (note that Bill C-60 only really failed to pass because the government fell before it went through the House) it shouldn't be that long until we do.
I'd say more along the lines of mplayerc; well, that's what I call it, I suppose it's actually Media Player Classic. Sometimes it feels like that's half the reason alone that I still boot into Windows so often; it's not like there aren't video players for Linux, it's just that none that I've ever tried work so well and elegantly.
Especially if we pretend that the article/blog isn't a fake, someone that's likely to have been stuck with Quicktime for their computing history, upon discovering programs like mplayerc.exe . . . well, it's gotta be a bit of a "halleluiah!" moment. I'd place the UI and functionality way over VLC as well, and it certainly fits the "Windows only" criteria here.
Speaking of video, Virtualdub (or better yet, Vdubmod) is quite the tool. Sure, Final Cut Pro may easily make things that look fancier, but VirtualDubMod is so excessively useful that I tend to use it for almost every bit of video editing I ever do. Some things are a bit harder, but nothing is really impossible and you get much finer and more precise control over it all. That's another program that I desperately wish had a Linux equivalent.
(Sidenote: I'm sitting here crossing my fingers and hoping that some Linux zealot will correct me and point out some marvellous video app for Linux. No, I'm serious, I'd love to be able to do more in Linux but I'm ignorant of any real ways to escape from Windows for how I work and play with video. Audio isn't a problem as much; you have xmms and amaroK for play, and audacity for work (though I haven't used it nearly as much as SoundForge for Windows, so I'm being a bit optimistic here; justifiably so though, I'd suppose). But video alternatives? The bases just don't seem to be covered.)
I've been considering buying a second computer and runnign the Linux version of Freeboat. With BootCamp, I might just buy a new Mac, run windows from Bootcamp with as much isolation from the net as I can manage, and run the Windows version.
/. and all, but) I'm actually asking without trying to troll or anything, why couldn't you have dual-booted with Linux long ago?
If you were considering buying a second comp and running Linux on it, why wouldn't you just dual-boot your Mac? It's not like Linux doesn't have PPC binaries and compiling and blah blah blah technobabble it'll run on Macs, right? Admittedly I've mainly worked with Macs when it's not an option for me to go seriously screwing around with them, so you might have perfectly good reasons why it wouldn't've worked that I don't know about. So (and I suppose this might be a bit of a shocker, this being
I'm pretty sure it's because tomorrow is apr1. I think someone sent this out early.
Oh, you silly North American-centric person . . . yeah, okay, I was a bit confused for a second myself, but just think in GMT/UCT and everything makes sense.
I agree though, looks are important, but I guess I left the Windows World (and thus beige boxes) behind 6 years ago and have lost a bit of touch since the.
Funny, I left beige boxes behind the same number of years ago! And yet, here I am typing this from an XP SP1 machine (I've flirted with Linux, but I've yet to settle down on a distro . . . consider me a Linux bachelor). Neither I nor any of my friends have cases that look anything but cool (except for my one friend who found a P4 in the garbage, but that's another story), and I don't mean that we we ultra-geeks and spent huge wads of cash on fancy cases or modding them; these are just cool looking stock cases, which I would have assumed any decent computer store would have shelves of.
And at the time I first got this aluminum-cased full tower that's still sitting beside me now, I noted (or rather, my back noted) how much more of a hassle it was to lug around an iMac at that time than it was my computer; it was actually nicer to carry one moderately heavy CRT and then one light-enough-to-lift-with-my-pinky tower than it was to move iMacs around, carrying handle be damned.
Not that many people aren't impressed by having the entire computer in one package (well, except for keyboard, mouse, decent speakers . . . but yaknow), my point is more a general point that PCs don't have to be fugly and badly designed on a physical level. Now, I'll will concede that likely a majority of PCs sold ARE suffering from such faults, and that gives people the perception that "ooh! these Macs are sooo much better!" when they glance over at them. And don't you be telling me that most PCs are such because it's cheaper, though! My computer here, all nice and windowed and glisteningly silver, is just a cheap chinese no-name brand! So the exact reasons why PC cases are generally so bad while equally priced superior products exist, well, I have my theories but howabout we just leave it sitting at that for now. I'd just like to quote MKlaus (the parent) one last time:
I think Price sells first and foremost, the rest is just added "convinience", that is if they see it.
You're bang on there, especially with the "if they see it", as I think that's exactly why Macs are winning the perception of functional and cool looking, and these people go "wow, I want that!" while continuing in their zombie-like purchasing of bad PC cases while they could buy better ones for the same price . . . they just don't ever see this option.
Actually, another thing occurs to me. All those beige boxes, many of them are purchased by companies for employees to work, right? It reminds me of going to Staples one time and looking at network cables (before I was bothering to just splice my own ethernet cables, which is hella cheaper, but I digress). There were red, blue, yellow and grey cables . . . the grey cost more than the decent-looking colours. "WTF?" I asked the salesperson. He was a kindof cool guy, and he replied "Huh, never noticed that. I guess we can probably get away with it 'cause businesses just buy grey, so we can jack up the price on that one." I walked away that day with some red and some blue, naturally.
So maybe that's part of the problem? Maybe business just creates so much demand for shitty-looking cases? Thinking about it, that might be part of why (as T("pessimistic")FA notes, Apple hasn't broken into the workplace; it doesn't meet the demands of blandness, concrete and sterility. So what's the solution? Will business eventually adopt the Mac, and if so, will that Mac come in a regulation bland box?
I meant to say that the Spector branch of Ion Storm was closed by Eidos.
Bah, damn "Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment"!
Hmm, I suppose there's no "no text" meme in slashdot, I'm just supposed to repeat the title. Oh well:
Same devs, for the most part. Alas, I'm unsure of whether Warren Spector, to name the man at the helm there, is actually working on anything genuinely new at the moment. Naturally his previous studio (the one that created Deus Ex, that is, which was comprised hugely of ex-System Shock and Thief devs) was closed by Ion Storm. Grr.
An FPS with oldschool-style RPG plot, levelling, and equipment would be quite interesting.
Not to sound snide, but what rock have you been hiding under since about 2000? That's when the rather brilliant original "Deus Ex" came out for PC (it has since been released for the Mac and for the PS2). It's generally considered an RPG, and has a tremendous emphasis on both character development and story (the story of which is branching in many ways; for example, if you know later that you're going to have to kill what is now a friendly character, you can often kill that character beforehand. Not that your allies won't freak out about this...)
Okay, so it isn't "oldskool RPG plot" in that I suppose traditionally RPG plot is set in a world of sword and sorcery, but hey, many of the best games are exceptions (Fallout, anyone?). I have met many people who have played Deus Ex, and introduced many more to it personally, and none of them failed to be tremendously enthusiastic about the game afterwards. And eventually the devs even released an SDK, and as UnrealEd is one of the easiest-but-powerful game editors out the IMHO, there's a lot of rather good third-party content out there (they even held an official contest, and you can be sure that the winners are worth checking out). Hell, last LAN party I was at we even took advantage of the later-released (about the time of the SDK) multiplayer part and just hacked up some of the single player levels to deathmatch in; it was a lot of fun, due in no small part to the fact that even to this day the level of detail and interactivity of the levels and the game in general have precious few competitors in the realm of FPS games.
The Wikipedia article has more info if you're curious. Really, if you're looking for a FPS with RPG style plot (and the ability to interact and converse with NPCs in Deus Ex beats out even most other RPGs), levelling and equipment, then honestly, try out Deus Ex! You won't be disappointed!
(A word of caution, though . . . please don't mistake this game for the sequel, "Deus Ex: Invisible War". Opinion on the quality of that one is a bit more . . . shall we say . . . divided?)
Depends quite what signal it was getting, but maybe it was getting 1080i and can't do a good job of deinterlacing? Seriously, it bothers me that we're still stuck with interlacing after all this time.
I've also heard reports of fuzziness resulting from a lack of ability of some televisions to properly figure out exactly what HDTV signal it's getting ("wait, is this 1080i/50? 1080i/60? 720p? Gaaah, I can't understand!") so it just drops down the signal a bunch. Naturally, the places that sell these things are the last place that is going to know anything about them (so sad, but so true) so I could see them not understanding that, and probably having caused it to some degree somehow.
> Every word after Obi-Wan cuts off Skywalker's legs is a negative, e.g. "I loved you man!" is something no actor needs to say; it's evident from the acting. The worst lines in all six movies is when the dying Portman (shades of "Love Story") says, "I think I'll spoil one of the plots points of the next movie by telling the audience that Luke has a sister named Leia on Alderan."
You note that he shouldn't have had to say the lines, and you're entirely correct, but that was one case in the movies that I felt that these actors, good elsewhere but terrible under the thumb of Lucas, actually showed some chops.
Alas, it misled me in the trailer, with that little clip of it that made me sit up and go "hey, maybe the characterization and acting will actually be good in this one!" Oh, foolish optimism. See, seeing one bit of that outburst out of context had an impact, as Obi-Wan's pure emotion was palpable; having to watch that scene and hear every bland iteration of redundant dialogue was painful, and I felt a sympathy for what amounted to torture of the actors.
Not to say that I didn't rather enjoy the film. But I only saw it once, and admittedly the bad parts of the first bit of the film were glossed over by a brilliant suggestion by one of my friends: in order to survive the dialogue and acting, she suggested beforehand that we pop into the nearby pub. So that was kindof cheating.
Maybe they don't want to see the translations, but rather, see who out there understands these languages? Especially people who read alot of it but don't contribute translations back . . . aha! Must be an evildoer!
Naw, I don't really believe it. But it does sound like there must be some sort of workable paranoid conspiracy thing here somewhere . . .
Admittedly, it's also the reason I have an Xbox in the first place; a friend of mine had to scrap his when the DVD-ROM drive just up and started not reading discs with the kind of reliability you need to actually, well, play them. So I have an Xbox, hacked it, but the way to play games is to copy them over my LAN onto the HDD, or sometimes one can convince the disc drive to copy a game to the hard drive, but it's impossible to actually play legit games legitimately.
- tape).
What I've done instead is turn it into a media system (playing downloaded or ripped movies and TV shows when I'm not playing from my computer, ex. if I'm bringing it to a friends' house and they don't have their home system set up to play videos from their computers) and also an emulator; my old NES broke a few years ago, much to my dismay, but now once again I can play Super Mario 3 on a console! Granted, it's a bit insane to be playing those kinds of games on a system as much more advanced as the Xbox, but that just makes it oddly more delicious.
So basically, because MS used rather defective DVD-ROM drives, they really don't get much money from me for the Xbox (other than a controller I bought; the others I have are also either second-hand or even second-hand-patched-back-together-with-electrical
But to me that's the best part of the Xbox, using it as a true multimedia piece of electronics. It's even relatively portable; not as portable as a laptop, but a hell of a lot less expensive and certainly much more portable than a full tower and all its peripherals. If the 360 was truly hacked, I would be quite interested in it; I would probably even buy legit games and all, it's just that it doesn't have the selling point if I can't have stuff like the XBMC or my old NES games on it.
I'm quite content that notepad has remained almost entirely unchanged since Win95, actually. It's nice to be able to open up a *pure* text editor, no frills whatsoever, when I want. You have a point that they should include a better text editor, but then again that's already taken over by wordpad; not that wordpad doesn't suck, but I don't see why notepad is getting all the hate here. It's just a edit-plain-text-period editor, and that's fine with me. But avoiding being too pedantic here, yeah, wordpad isn't really anything more than support for some font formatting and the like, it's not much improvement especially compared to the kinds of little neat things that other 3rd party text editors have been doing since Win95.
.NET might be a good move . . . but it's not going to happen for text editors. For Windows the idea is notepad as a legacy plaintext editor (which I respect), then wordpad as a sucky slightly higher-level app so that people can barely read word documents and get suckered into buying Office. Yes, I realize that there is a difference between a text editor and a word processor, but Microsoft wants you to use Word and the other Office apps for everything, so they're not going to give you any apps that even so much as remind people that there are more choices other than either absurdly-basic (notepad/wordpad) and full-office-suite (Office, naturally). It's in their interests to maintain this binary picture of text apps in the mind of Windows users.
And sure, Microsoft should be working on some snazzier looking basic apps, and writing them to showcase
Okay, so that doesn't work for ya (and I often myself, if I'm doing plaintext editing on Windows for one reason or another, use something other than notepad). But hey, not to give in to the rampant bashing of Microsoft here on Slashdot but there are some pretty good reasons why people abbreviate it M$, right? Maybe I'm just driving out in Conspiracy Land here, but it seems to me that it's actually a business strategy for Microsoft not to have any better default editors.