I guess step 3 would be running every tool that you can think of to test for vulnerabilities
Whoa, slow down there. If I've learned anything from reading Slashdot, it's that step 3 is always "Profit!". Clearly, since your step 3 is NOT "Profit!", you've made some kind of mistake. Might want to look into that.
Actually, it's not, largely because the distro maintainer has been nice enough to put in the hard yards for you to work around the compiling quirks and library versioning labyrinth endemic to the open source world, but also because they make at least some effort to try and integrate that software with the platform as a whole. Frequently this is little more than automatically adding a menu item, but often it goes as far as widget themes and pre-specified keyboard configurations.
I'm sorry, but I'm finding it very hard to take you seriously. I'm finding it very hard to believe you have any experience on this. One of the benefits of compiling from source is that it neatly gets around most library versioning problems because it compiles against the versions of the libraries you have. It's binary packages that have problems with library versioning. Also, where are the "quirks" in "./configure && make"? Yes, there may be an occasional build error or missing dependency, but since the distribution builders have to package the dependencies anyway, they're not very common.
Yes, it is. If you have a computer capable of running Windows XP or Vista, then you have enough hard disk space to spare a few tens of megabytes.
Yeah, it's not like I would want to store more of MY data on my hard drive.
But none of that is happening.
Yes, it is. The massive explosion in accessibility to computing resources over the last ten - hell, twenty - years is testament to that fact. I've little doubt this pisses you off, since all of those "unworthy" people who know stuff all about computers are actually able to make use of them, but that's the way it is.
LOL, no it's not. Look at Sourceforge one day. Or get a job. 99.9% of software is in Java, C++, VB, or C. Hardly state of the art high level languages. And if you think most software today is designed in a way to trade off size for ease of implementation, you give software designers WAY too much credit.
I doubt any programmer with any sort of real influence over software projects like Windows, OS X or Linux could be accurately described as an "idiot".
LOL. I'm half tempted to use that as my signature. You've obviously never worked as a software developer.
They claim it's unnecessarily "tied directly to the internal workings of the OS", and it is.
How so ?
Well, lets say I find a Windows box, install Opera as the default browser, start up Windows Explorer, and type in "google.com" into the address bar. A logical expectation would be that the website would open in my default web browser, or that it would be an unrecognized filename. Except it doesn't do either of those. It transforms the Windows Explorer into Internet Explorer.
You're saying no-one writes reusable software modules for Windows ? Because that's all IE is.
If anything, I said most software isn't written to be integrated into an operating system and never uninstalled.
KHTML. GNOME's equivalent, which I can't remember the name of off the top of my head.
That's just amazing, cause I have 5 machines that I thought were running Linux, but none of them have ever had KHTML or Gnome installed.
Microsoft, Apple, Ubuntu, etc are all doing this because *that's what the majority of their customers want*.
You seem confused about how a typical Linux distro works. I don't know about Ubuntu specifically, but very little of most Linux distros is actually developed by the distro maintainers. When a Linux distro includes a piece of software, it's just like if you had gone to the software's website and downloaded it. They download the source, compile it, package it, and throw it on the CD. The software is not maintained by the distro. It's not built in, it comes with. It doesn't have to be installed, but if it is, it can be uninstalled like any other program. Window's "extras" are built in. You have to install IE, WMP, the firewall, etc. and they can't be removed. It's quite a big difference.
Disk space is cheap. Anyone quibbling over a few tens (or even hundreds) of megabytes of disk space on modern system is really reaching for something to complain about.
I really hate the "hardware is cheap" argument in favor of bloated programs and lazy programming. First, hardware is NOT cheap for a lot of people. It's great that a Slashdot reading computer geek will drop $100 on a new hard drive, but most of the population would not be so cavalier. Just because a 500 GB hard drive or a 1 GB DIMM is cheaper than it used to be doesn't mean everyone wants to run out and buy one.
It wouldn't be so bad if program size was being traded off for cleaner, more intuitive design. Or if the developers were using higher-level languages and decreasing development times. Or if the new software had some revolutionary new features. But none of that is happening. The fact of the matter is, most programmers are idiots. It's not that they're trying to make bloated, bad software, they just don't know any better. Or they're too stupid to tell their boss they need more time to do it right. Or they're too rushed to do it the right way. If there's one benefit of recent off-shoring, it's that "developer time is more expensive than hardware" will no longer be an acceptable excuse for inefficient, bloated code.
They are no more "tied directly to the internal workings of the OS" than they need to be, or than the alternatives from third parties or on other platforms are. Just because Internet Explorer doesn't appear in the Add/Remove software dialog, doesn't mean it's part of the kernel.
Nobody claims IE is a part of the kernel. They claim it's unnecessarily "tied directly to the internal workings of the OS", and it is. And it's not done that way on other platforms or even by third party alternatives on Windows. Can you point out the built-in to the OS equivalent of IE in Linux? You can't, because it doesn't exist.
Wrong. It's everyone's business. Would you fail to prevent a child from stepping into the street in front of a truck simply because it's not your child? Nice language, by the way.
You kind of missed my point. Why can't their parent stop them from stepping in front of the truck? Or better yet, if the kid's parents had simply told them to always look both ways, maybe the kid wouldn't be stepping in front of a truck in the first place. Good parents don't rely on random strangers doing good deeds.
I have better things to do than baby sit other people's children.
Not at all. This is what taxes are for. I don't put a price on the safety of children.
In my opinion, if even one person is falsely accused of being a sexual predator, the costs of implementing this are too high. That's the kind of thing that will fuck up a person's life for a really long time.
Define "parents doing their job". What else is a child who is innocently typing in an age- and topic-appropriate chat-room when some idiot starts in with inappropriate chatter to do? He/she must report the incident to the appropriate people- parents, police, etc.
A parent who's doing their job doesn't hook up a computer, install an IM client and say "Alright kids, Mommy's going shopping. Have fun on the interweb." Just like any decent parent tells their kids to look both ways when crossing the street. Occasionally dropping in and looking at what the kid is doing and occasionally reminding them not to have inappropriate conversations with strangers on the Internet costs nothing and is way more effective than this report to police button.
Yes, your kids will hate it. They'll say they don't like you. They'll whine that nobody else's parents do it. Oh well. That's part of being a parent.
Right. I'd rather have Microsoft work on some new color schemes and kewl games than help protect a child from being raped.
Protecting your children isn't Microsoft's fucking business.
Pardon my extreme sarcasm, but quite frankly I think this is a noble cause. I don't care if there are millions of false reports if even one report is made that protects a child.
Great, then you won't mind paying for all of the false alarms, right? Thinking about the children is great, but parents doing their job would be more effective and wouldn't result in thousands of innocent people being accused of sex crimes.
Why the hell did someone mod the parent troll? It really doesn't support Opera. It redirects here. I know it goes against the usual unabashed fellating of Google, but pointing out a flaw in one of their products is not trolling.
Yes, many users are just stupid and will automatically click "yes" on things, but at that point it's their own damn fault. The hack won't work without the user letting it work.
Most of the problems with Windows are already the user's fault. Sure, there have been a few really gratuitous, show stopping remote execution bugs (okay, more than a few), but the real problem is that users are clueless. Opening and running attachments from strangers? Downloading "free" software crammed with malware? Not installing patches? Visiting shady websites? Autoclicking "Yes/Allow/Okay" for everything? All of those are easily avoidable, but most Windows users seem to screw it up every time.
Windows will never have the reputation of FreeBSD, Linux or Mac. There's just too many idiots running Windows.
I play Diablo 2, SimCity 3000, Civilization 3, GTA3 and Vice City. I said "100% of my games" because every one of those games played flawlessly when I still had a machine with XP.
Though at one time I had Diablo running in Wine better than in Windows. But after updating a few things it stopped working.
Cedega is the most unstable, buggy, and alltogether awful gaming product on Linux. It has done more to hold back Linux gaming than anything I can imagine. Why should a developer waste any resources when "Cedega allows you to run Windows games in Linux!" Newsflash: The games don't FUCKING WORK.
That's why I don't use Cedega. I've already paid for the games, and if I have to spend MORE money to play them, I'm just going to spend $400 for a Windows PC. Yeah, it's more expensive, but it'll play 100% of my games 100% of the time. It doesn't make sense to pay for something that doesn't work.
I guess that's a benefit of only playing older games.
Alternatively, it could be seen as a move to align Mozilla with one of the few software brands that's known & recognised by non-geeks.
Yeah, it's known, recognised, and hated. To most people who download RealPlayer, Firefox will be just like all the other spyware/adware/crap that RealPlayer installs. Is Firefox so desperate for users that it needs to be distributed like adware?
Maybe next, Mozilla can get someone to write a virus that installs Firefox. Think of the downloads! Think of the publicity!
Well, you're right, Linux gaming would be a pretty small market. But I'd wager that selling a $40-$60 game wouldn't be as difficult as you think.
For one, most Linux users tend to be against piracy and license violation, so the ones who play the game are likely to pay for it. Second, they tend to be pretty technical, which could imply they have decently paying technical jobs, so the $50 won't be too much money. And there's also a distinct lack of native Linux games, so there's not many alternatives.
It might not be worth it to port an existing game, but it shouldn't be too hard to design the next games with portability in mind. Like using OpenGL over DirectX. Or hiding away all OS and hardware interfacing in libraries. If you design it in from the beginning, it won't cost much more.
One important thing is to release periodic updates when a new kernel, gcc or libc would break compatibility. There will always be people who hate companies who won't open source their products, but minimzing breakage would shut most of them up.
99.9% of open source developers work for free in their spare time. They let you download their software for free. They're not obligated to get your shit working. They can be as lazy, self-serving and self-important as they want to.
If you paid for your distro, maybe you should have checked to make sure it was compatible with your hardware. That's like buying a PC game for your Mac. Oops.
It takes less than half an hour to find out if a particular laptop, desktop or piece of hardware will work with Linux. All you have to do is Google it. If you want hardware that works with Linux, do the fucking research. It's nobody's fault but your own if it doesn't work.
If you want to use hardware that's not currently supported, you have 3 options:
Make the drivers yourself or help somebody else make them.
Shut the hell up and wait for somebody else to make the drivers.
Shut the hell up and use an OS that does support the hardware.
You'd probably be fired if you suggested something like that. And for good reason.
Websites aren't nearly important enough to warrant the huge expense of operating in an underground mountain bunker. What's the point? If there were a nuclear war or some other gigantic disaster, there would be so many other outages and problems, not being able to access a website would be the last of people's concerns. That's assuming there'd even be electricity and computers left to access the web. And you'd save so much money just building a regular data center, you could afford to build another one when things settled down again.
Cool thing to do? Yes. Good idea for a business? No.
Personally, I'm waiting till Big Dig Service Pack 2. It usually takes that long for projects to become stable. Although I may be forced to use Big Dig without service packs at work, much to my dismay.
What makes you think you're any better than these people? How about you go and perform brain surgery or rebuild a plane if you're so smart. Not everyone can know everything and while some of these maybe really stupid to us, to others they seem legit.
Well for one, I'm not a fucking moron. From an email in the article:
please check this websit out for me this guy email that I have won 263,some owe dollars allI need to do is pick a courier and pay $500.00 for the winnings thanks for your help marva please write me right back before I pay this guy one penny this may be for real so I really need to know ASAP
That's barely even English. I'm surprised that dumbass can even breath. My 6 year old neice writes better than that. That guy shouldn't be allowed to operate a fork, much less a computer.
And you know what the difference between brain surgery and using a computer is? Billions of fucking idiots think they're fully qualified to use a computer. They should consider themselves lucky they're only being mocked, cause it should be illegal to be that stupid.
When I get an assignment like this, I try to take a proactive stance. First, I add the project to my action item list. Then I formulate a list of stakeholders in the project. Then I call a meeting to open a dialog between the stakeholders and myself. After drilling down and making sure we're all on the same page, I draft a scope document. When I'm satisfied with the scope document, I hold a sidebar meeting to touch base with the shareholders and verify the document meets their requirements.
Usually by that time the project gets assigned to someone else.
Pity that on a spare 400mhz ubuntu machine i got at work, firefox runs, in latest version, with 128 mb under gnome (and of course lighter stuff like xfce4) and doesn't even swap. So if it's not funny it's wrong.
So? I could quite happily surf the web in 1996 with 40 megs of RAM and a 100 MHz pentium. And believe it or not, the web hasn't changed too much since then. Just because Firefox isn't consuming all of your memory doesn't mean it's not using a lot more than it should be.
They're also taking a chomp out of grocery chain profits since I refuse to shop at a store that forces me to do their work for them. What's next, stores that make you stock their shelves?
Hell yeah! I wouldn't mind so much if they gave some kind of discount.
Hate to disappoint you, but you're probably not going to find a tutorial and code that conveniently meets your requirements. For starters, eliminating OpenGL and D3D is going to remove a large number of tutorials, simply because it doesn't make sense for most people to roll their own rendering code.
Your best bet would be to look through "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice" by Foley, van Dam, Feiner and Hughes. It covers a large number of topics, in enough detail to get a good idea of how to get started and where to look for more information. Also "Real-Time Rendering" by Tomas Möller and Eric Haines. Despite the name, a large portion of the book is applicable to almost all computer graphics, not just real-time. Also, a book on linear algebra would probably be helpful.
What? MSN's search doesn't have anything on the page other than a search box. You do know you can just go to search.msn.com, right? In fact, in Opera, you can just add a new search using:
Does that make MSN.com the most accessible compliant search page?
I know/read that MSN.com has the highest complaince for CSS and HTML compared to the other portal pages.
But accessible I think not.
This is blatant FUD. Unless you're blind, previously blind, or some kind of useability expert specializing interfaces for the blind, nobody gives a fuck about your opinion. Do you have ANY evidence whatsoever that MSN's search results are less accessible to the blind? Have you done some kind of study or something? No, you haven't, so shut the fuck up. You're just saying that because you're a Google whore, or because you hate Microsoft.
They were putting no more copies into commercial circulation than there were before they edited the movies, the movies are exchanged on a one-for-one basis with original copies. The author/publisher/etc. still made their cut on each and every DVD edited by Cleanflix. This cannot be compared to "I'm going to sample this one CD in my work and sell 10,000 copies of it."
That's interesting, too bad it's wrong. Copyright is NOT about the author/publisher getting their cut. Copyright grants the copyright holder the exclusive rights to reproduce, adapt, publish, perform, and display their copyrighted works. It also allows them to grant those rights to other people. In this case, Cleanflix and others were distributing (publishing) derivative (adapted) works without the permission of the studios. The fact that they were or weren't getting paid and the number of movies in commercial circulation doesn't matter.
No, copyright law is to protect profits from a work (anything more than that and it runs up against the First Amendment). As I just said in the previous paragraph, the movie companies are still making as much profit as they would before (if not moreso). This isn't copyright law, this is like software licensing, where the movie companies want to impose their rules on how you can use your legitimately purchased media. This is what fair use was supposed to support.
Wrong again. It has nothing to do with profits or fair use. Fair use is what you can do with something you own, such as a DVD. In general, as long as you don't distribute any of the results, everything is legal. I can edit my DVDs all day long, completely legally. The second I sell, trade or give away one of the edited copies without permission from the copyright holder, it becomes a copyright violation.
I agree that windows is insecure. But it isn't exactly practical for a lot of people to switch to another OS. I hate windows, but I'm pretty much forced to use it because I have no idea how to run Linux well, and apple doesn't run any of the applications I use often.
Oh, you poor thing. I have an idea which may help you: Stop bitching.
If you hate Windows so much, take some fucking initiative and learn something else. What the hell are you waiting for? Someone to volunteer to teach you? For Linux to become a Windows clone? Guess what? It's not gonna happen. Ever.
If you hate Windows, but still use it, it's your own fault. Stop crying to everyone on Slashdot that you're too stupid too learn.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa, slow down there. If I've learned anything from reading Slashdot, it's that step 3 is always "Profit!". Clearly, since your step 3 is NOT "Profit!", you've made some kind of mistake. Might want to look into that.
Oops, I didn't know you were trolling.
I'm sorry, but I'm finding it very hard to take you seriously. I'm finding it very hard to believe you have any experience on this. One of the benefits of compiling from source is that it neatly gets around most library versioning problems because it compiles against the versions of the libraries you have. It's binary packages that have problems with library versioning. Also, where are the "quirks" in "./configure && make"? Yes, there may be an occasional build error or missing dependency, but since the distribution builders have to package the dependencies anyway, they're not very common.
Yeah, it's not like I would want to store more of MY data on my hard drive.
LOL, no it's not. Look at Sourceforge one day. Or get a job. 99.9% of software is in Java, C++, VB, or C. Hardly state of the art high level languages. And if you think most software today is designed in a way to trade off size for ease of implementation, you give software designers WAY too much credit.
LOL. I'm half tempted to use that as my signature. You've obviously never worked as a software developer.
Well, lets say I find a Windows box, install Opera as the default browser, start up Windows Explorer, and type in "google.com" into the address bar. A logical expectation would be that the website would open in my default web browser, or that it would be an unrecognized filename. Except it doesn't do either of those. It transforms the Windows Explorer into Internet Explorer.
If anything, I said most software isn't written to be integrated into an operating system and never uninstalled.
That's just amazing, cause I have 5 machines that I thought were running Linux, but none of them have ever had KHTML or Gnome installed.
You seem confused about how a typical Linux distro works. I don't know about Ubuntu specifically, but very little of most Linux distros is actually developed by the distro maintainers. When a Linux distro includes a piece of software, it's just like if you had gone to the software's website and downloaded it. They download the source, compile it, package it, and throw it on the CD. The software is not maintained by the distro. It's not built in, it comes with. It doesn't have to be installed, but if it is, it can be uninstalled like any other program. Window's "extras" are built in. You have to install IE, WMP, the firewall, etc. and they can't be removed. It's quite a big difference.
I really hate the "hardware is cheap" argument in favor of bloated programs and lazy programming. First, hardware is NOT cheap for a lot of people. It's great that a Slashdot reading computer geek will drop $100 on a new hard drive, but most of the population would not be so cavalier. Just because a 500 GB hard drive or a 1 GB DIMM is cheaper than it used to be doesn't mean everyone wants to run out and buy one.
It wouldn't be so bad if program size was being traded off for cleaner, more intuitive design. Or if the developers were using higher-level languages and decreasing development times. Or if the new software had some revolutionary new features. But none of that is happening. The fact of the matter is, most programmers are idiots. It's not that they're trying to make bloated, bad software, they just don't know any better. Or they're too stupid to tell their boss they need more time to do it right. Or they're too rushed to do it the right way. If there's one benefit of recent off-shoring, it's that "developer time is more expensive than hardware" will no longer be an acceptable excuse for inefficient, bloated code.
Nobody claims IE is a part of the kernel. They claim it's unnecessarily "tied directly to the internal workings of the OS", and it is. And it's not done that way on other platforms or even by third party alternatives on Windows. Can you point out the built-in to the OS equivalent of IE in Linux? You can't, because it doesn't exist.
You kind of missed my point. Why can't their parent stop them from stepping in front of the truck? Or better yet, if the kid's parents had simply told them to always look both ways, maybe the kid wouldn't be stepping in front of a truck in the first place. Good parents don't rely on random strangers doing good deeds.
I have better things to do than baby sit other people's children.
In my opinion, if even one person is falsely accused of being a sexual predator, the costs of implementing this are too high. That's the kind of thing that will fuck up a person's life for a really long time.
A parent who's doing their job doesn't hook up a computer, install an IM client and say "Alright kids, Mommy's going shopping. Have fun on the interweb." Just like any decent parent tells their kids to look both ways when crossing the street. Occasionally dropping in and looking at what the kid is doing and occasionally reminding them not to have inappropriate conversations with strangers on the Internet costs nothing and is way more effective than this report to police button.
Yes, your kids will hate it. They'll say they don't like you. They'll whine that nobody else's parents do it. Oh well. That's part of being a parent.
Protecting your children isn't Microsoft's fucking business.
Great, then you won't mind paying for all of the false alarms, right? Thinking about the children is great, but parents doing their job would be more effective and wouldn't result in thousands of innocent people being accused of sex crimes.
Shouldn't you be practicing homosexuality, doing drugs, or checking your myspace at the Apple store right now?
Why the hell did someone mod the parent troll? It really doesn't support Opera. It redirects here. I know it goes against the usual unabashed fellating of Google, but pointing out a flaw in one of their products is not trolling.
Most of the problems with Windows are already the user's fault. Sure, there have been a few really gratuitous, show stopping remote execution bugs (okay, more than a few), but the real problem is that users are clueless. Opening and running attachments from strangers? Downloading "free" software crammed with malware? Not installing patches? Visiting shady websites? Autoclicking "Yes/Allow/Okay" for everything? All of those are easily avoidable, but most Windows users seem to screw it up every time.
Windows will never have the reputation of FreeBSD, Linux or Mac. There's just too many idiots running Windows.
I play Diablo 2, SimCity 3000, Civilization 3, GTA3 and Vice City. I said "100% of my games" because every one of those games played flawlessly when I still had a machine with XP.
Though at one time I had Diablo running in Wine better than in Windows. But after updating a few things it stopped working.
That's why I don't use Cedega. I've already paid for the games, and if I have to spend MORE money to play them, I'm just going to spend $400 for a Windows PC. Yeah, it's more expensive, but it'll play 100% of my games 100% of the time. It doesn't make sense to pay for something that doesn't work.
I guess that's a benefit of only playing older games.
Yeah, it's known, recognised, and hated. To most people who download RealPlayer, Firefox will be just like all the other spyware/adware/crap that RealPlayer installs. Is Firefox so desperate for users that it needs to be distributed like adware?
Maybe next, Mozilla can get someone to write a virus that installs Firefox. Think of the downloads! Think of the publicity!
Well, you're right, Linux gaming would be a pretty small market. But I'd wager that selling a $40-$60 game wouldn't be as difficult as you think.
For one, most Linux users tend to be against piracy and license violation, so the ones who play the game are likely to pay for it. Second, they tend to be pretty technical, which could imply they have decently paying technical jobs, so the $50 won't be too much money. And there's also a distinct lack of native Linux games, so there's not many alternatives.
It might not be worth it to port an existing game, but it shouldn't be too hard to design the next games with portability in mind. Like using OpenGL over DirectX. Or hiding away all OS and hardware interfacing in libraries. If you design it in from the beginning, it won't cost much more.
One important thing is to release periodic updates when a new kernel, gcc or libc would break compatibility. There will always be people who hate companies who won't open source their products, but minimzing breakage would shut most of them up.
Fuck off.
99.9% of open source developers work for free in their spare time. They let you download their software for free. They're not obligated to get your shit working. They can be as lazy, self-serving and self-important as they want to.
If you paid for your distro, maybe you should have checked to make sure it was compatible with your hardware. That's like buying a PC game for your Mac. Oops.
It takes less than half an hour to find out if a particular laptop, desktop or piece of hardware will work with Linux. All you have to do is Google it. If you want hardware that works with Linux, do the fucking research. It's nobody's fault but your own if it doesn't work.
If you want to use hardware that's not currently supported, you have 3 options:
You'd probably be fired if you suggested something like that. And for good reason.
Websites aren't nearly important enough to warrant the huge expense of operating in an underground mountain bunker. What's the point? If there were a nuclear war or some other gigantic disaster, there would be so many other outages and problems, not being able to access a website would be the last of people's concerns. That's assuming there'd even be electricity and computers left to access the web. And you'd save so much money just building a regular data center, you could afford to build another one when things settled down again.
Cool thing to do? Yes. Good idea for a business? No.
Personally, I'm waiting till Big Dig Service Pack 2. It usually takes that long for projects to become stable. Although I may be forced to use Big Dig without service packs at work, much to my dismay.
Well for one, I'm not a fucking moron. From an email in the article:
That's barely even English. I'm surprised that dumbass can even breath. My 6 year old neice writes better than that. That guy shouldn't be allowed to operate a fork, much less a computer.
And you know what the difference between brain surgery and using a computer is? Billions of fucking idiots think they're fully qualified to use a computer. They should consider themselves lucky they're only being mocked, cause it should be illegal to be that stupid.
When I get an assignment like this, I try to take a proactive stance. First, I add the project to my action item list. Then I formulate a list of stakeholders in the project. Then I call a meeting to open a dialog between the stakeholders and myself. After drilling down and making sure we're all on the same page, I draft a scope document. When I'm satisfied with the scope document, I hold a sidebar meeting to touch base with the shareholders and verify the document meets their requirements.
Usually by that time the project gets assigned to someone else.
So? I could quite happily surf the web in 1996 with 40 megs of RAM and a 100 MHz pentium. And believe it or not, the web hasn't changed too much since then. Just because Firefox isn't consuming all of your memory doesn't mean it's not using a lot more than it should be.
Hell yeah! I wouldn't mind so much if they gave some kind of discount.
Hate to disappoint you, but you're probably not going to find a tutorial and code that conveniently meets your requirements. For starters, eliminating OpenGL and D3D is going to remove a large number of tutorials, simply because it doesn't make sense for most people to roll their own rendering code.
Your best bet would be to look through "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice" by Foley, van Dam, Feiner and Hughes. It covers a large number of topics, in enough detail to get a good idea of how to get started and where to look for more information. Also "Real-Time Rendering" by Tomas Möller and Eric Haines. Despite the name, a large portion of the book is applicable to almost all computer graphics, not just real-time. Also, a book on linear algebra would probably be helpful.
What? MSN's search doesn't have anything on the page other than a search box. You do know you can just go to search.msn.com, right? In fact, in Opera, you can just add a new search using:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=%25s
And not even need to go there.
Also, if you add this to your user CSS:
It will get rid of the ads in the search results.
This is blatant FUD. Unless you're blind, previously blind, or some kind of useability expert specializing interfaces for the blind, nobody gives a fuck about your opinion. Do you have ANY evidence whatsoever that MSN's search results are less accessible to the blind? Have you done some kind of study or something? No, you haven't, so shut the fuck up. You're just saying that because you're a Google whore, or because you hate Microsoft.
That's interesting, too bad it's wrong. Copyright is NOT about the author/publisher getting their cut. Copyright grants the copyright holder the exclusive rights to reproduce, adapt, publish, perform, and display their copyrighted works. It also allows them to grant those rights to other people. In this case, Cleanflix and others were distributing (publishing) derivative (adapted) works without the permission of the studios. The fact that they were or weren't getting paid and the number of movies in commercial circulation doesn't matter.
Wrong again. It has nothing to do with profits or fair use. Fair use is what you can do with something you own, such as a DVD. In general, as long as you don't distribute any of the results, everything is legal. I can edit my DVDs all day long, completely legally. The second I sell, trade or give away one of the edited copies without permission from the copyright holder, it becomes a copyright violation.
Oh, you poor thing. I have an idea which may help you: Stop bitching.
If you hate Windows so much, take some fucking initiative and learn something else. What the hell are you waiting for? Someone to volunteer to teach you? For Linux to become a Windows clone? Guess what? It's not gonna happen. Ever.
If you hate Windows, but still use it, it's your own fault. Stop crying to everyone on Slashdot that you're too stupid too learn.