Maybe it's just me, buy watching someone else talk as a method of determining what I want sounds suspiciously like sitting down to discuss a timeshare proposal.
Just because SVN doesn't do what Linus wants, doesn't mean it doesn't do what I (or anyone else who uses it) want. Admittedly, I use it for my personal hobby projects. SVN "server" that runs local on my notebook, so the repository goes everywhere I go anyway. I'm the only developer, so I don't care what anyone else might want with the code. All I care about is that I can keep track of what changes I've made, so that if something breaks I have some obvious places to look.
Everything I've read in this whole discussion seems to center around Linus's talks, distributed repositories (or whatever they're called in git, as someone who has barely registered it aside from hearing about Linus's talk, I'm not really up on what the lingo should be), speed, and branching and merging. Linus might prefer git, but this mere mortal works with SVN just fine. Being able to make a local repos is pointless when the repos IS local. Speed? Small projects, not needed. Branching and merging? I guess I'll deal with that if i need to, but for my single-developer setup a tag is probably more appropriate.
As for the actual question posed by the submitter, it accomplishes what I need. When I worked for a small consulting firm, it served our needs fairly well, and our svn admin was comfortable with using the tools available to handle the "back-end" details of merging. I don't remember ever having a project big enough that we branched, just having to walk through a code change with him when he was creating tags for release (I was only working on documentation, and our manager had to use my laptop one day to commit a fix).
Your two dead giveaways fail in the area I live in. There are a lot of backwards baseball caps worn by young guys, and more than a few shaved heads, even on white guys. I shaved my head last winter so that I could wear a stocking cap and not have to deal with not being presentable after I took it off. Trying to decide on if a person is balding based on a style choice seems a little bit of a stretch.
Here is the US. And the US is one of many countries with statutes, provisions, or acts that create a legal mechanism for citizen's arrest, which includes that minimum wage store clerk. Granted, there are limits on what they can do- but if nothing else, they can follow you to your car, get your plate number, and arrange for the police to greet you at your door.
I realize wiki isn't the greatest source, but I don't have time to google a better one right now:
I would like to comment that around here, bringing in stackable/nestable crates is likely to get you detained temporarily to "see a manager" about your "shoplifting". Seeing as the stores sell a good variety of those and the inbred idiots that they have manning the doors aren't going to be able to tell the difference between one kind and another, all they can go on is that your receipt doesn't have "crate" on it anywhere.
So yeah, good for you, but like GP said, just because it works for you doesn't mean it's going to work for everyone else.
Or it's a good candidate in that if the mechanics all work on a PS2, there should be no loss of game function when translating it over to any of the newer-gen consoles.
Personally, I hate playing Guitar Hero on a Wii. I swear that the difference in the wireless response between the PS2 controller and the Wii's built in wireless actually changes the timing on songs. I can't play on more than medium, partway through for Guitar Hero 3 on the Wii- but I can play through expert on the PS2. Might be my own lack of skill, or the fact that for the first 4 games I started with the PS2 versions and have the muscle memory down to synch the TV and my actions.
Even without that, though, basing the game off the Wii for it's "potential" seems pretty outlandish. It's a basic premise- 5 buttons, a pick toggle, and a tilt-the-guitar motion sensor. Even adding in the drum input, what else do you need that the Wii offers? Better graphics? It's freaking Klax meets Simon no matter how you slice it. Higher quality audio so we can hear how bad the cover band's singer is when they don't get rights to the actual recording?
I'm not trying to bash the Wii. I enjoy the system and think it has a unique niche in the gaming market. But complaining that something isn't designed around the Wii when it's a multi-platform game seems a little odd, considering that it is the "oddball" system of the group.
You're living in a fantasy world. It only takes one- and really, it doesn't even take an idiot. Ever had a blowout on the highway? Would you call yourself an idiot if a piece of debris you couldn't see caused one and sent you into a crash? Didn't think so. Doesn't change the good chance of death you have as a result.
As someone who drives professionally now (and at a previous time in my life), a highway blowout is no reason for an accident (we were taught to never use the word "accident", incidentally. They are collisions.) Someone driving safely will leave themselves a way out of such a situation (open space in front, the side, etc.) and will know where the vehicles are around them. A blowout occurs- and I'll even give the benefit of the doubt that a piece of debris, unseen, caused it- there are 3 questions on my mind:
How close were you to the vehicle in front of you that you didn't have time to react to a road obstacle?
Do you know how to respond to a blowout?
Do you know where your escape routes are?
If you can't see the object in front of you, that means you are following too closely in most situations. Some objects are too small to be seen easily from behind the wheel, but those objects are also less likely to cause blowouts in a well-maintained vehicle.
If you don't know how to respond to a blowout, that's a problem that should be corrected. Do not brake immediately- the blowout tends to force the vehicle to one side or another in response to the force of the blowout, and braking only exacerbates that response. Accelerate slightly through the blowout to maintain course and exit the flow of traffic safely.
The answer to number 3 is the major problem many people have. They drive too aggressively and do not leave themselves a way out of a potentially hazardous situation. Attentive driving can help correct this, and if you make a silly game out of it, you can turn it into habit fairly quickly. For example: What would I do if that semi tractor suddenly slows down? Do I have room to take the other lane (or shoulder)? If the car alongside of me suddenly merges over, do I have room to accelerate around him? Should I brake to make room?
In short, defensive driving is the best way to avoid collisions, along with regular vehicular maintenance and such wonderful things as eye exams and hearing tests. If you aren't the driver, you have a responsibility to yourself to ensure that the person driving you is a good driver. Just don't get in the car with someone who does not respect the responsibility of driving a ton and a half of steel and aluminum down the road.
Except that you have business practices to deal with. If a business mis-represents its product intending to profit, that's fraud. If a business claims that its software is Open Source, yet consumers expect software licensed under an OSI-approved license, and don't get what the business represented, that's fraud. I wasn't aware that "Open Source" required OSI-approval, and I've been a user of open source programs for years. I'm looking into releasing some programming tools as open source, but with all of this legal clamoring I might have to make sure to pick a non-OSI approved license as a method of protest- maybe create an "Anti-OSI Open Code License"./me removes tongue from cheek.
More seriously, I ask: If anyone should be defining what is or is not open source (without the pretentious caps), it should be a standards body: perhaps ANSI or ISO? What authority does the OSI have except that given to it by the community (who seem fairly divided on this issue, judging by/.)?
I strongly disagree with the public largely recognizes it as a mark associated with a quality under our control (approved licenses).. John Q. Public has no clue about open source still. Open source is not mainstream enough for that, and I wonder about your logic in saying that consumers even know what on earth you are talking about.
Promote the logo all you want, promote the use of approved licenses and continue to promote the use of the seal/logo as a method of advertising products with approved licenses, but leave the phrase "open source" alone.
I used to work at a retail store that would empty one CD case for Playstation games (the original, not the PS2 DVD-style) for use as the display model. We found that once you get the accursed shrink wrap off, the best way to deal with that strip of tape across the top was to open the jewel case like you would seperate the two halves (start at the part away from the tape, of course). Carefully pull on the flap of the "front" of the case until it is free from the back, and unfold the entire case vertically so the tape is the hinge point. Once that happens, you can peel the case from the tape in one go (usually).
As for the freaking shrink wrap, if you have a table with a "sharp" edge nearby, take the case and run the more "rugged" side of it along the edge of the table lengthwise (so the narrow portion of the face is intersecting the line of the edge). Usually the shrink wrap will bunch and then tear, allowing you easy access to the contents.
As for DVD cases, a small amount of heat will often soften the glue, allowing removal without stretching the clear plastic.
You don't have to forget qwerty. I used dvorak for a while, and while I don't remember it well enough anymore to really be productive with it, I could switch back and forth between the two without too much difficulty. I remember typing faster qwerty (not "correct" qwerty, but my slightly hybrid version) than dvorak, but that was probably 6 years of qwerty vs. 2 months of dvorak.
It's like knowing C and Python seperately. You can code in either C or Python without forgetting the other every time you need to switch languages. You might slip up here and there with syntax or function names until you've built up some decent experience with both of them, but knowing both opens up a lot of options. The same could be said for multiple keyboard layouts. Knowing both provides options.
So, please, stop making it sound like Linux users badly wants to convert people to use Linux - you have the option to do so if you want to, but don't expect Linux users and developers to wipe your ass for you. If you want perfect support, buy Windows.
This isn't so much directed at you- I'm not presuming to know your stance on this- but at the people who mention that "Linux users don't necessarily want people to convert", and a lot of the *nix and Open Source zealots who constantly piss and moan about Windows security:
If you don't want to help move people, expect to have botnets and zombies all over the net. Expect there to be problems. Expect to read more and more about the horrible things MS is doing. Either help people move, or quit bitching about all the problems MS causes, how their formats aren't open and you can't read this file someone sent you, and the myriad other things I see here and elsewhere regarding MS products. It's a two-way street. If you want widespread security, and open formats to be standard, then do something about it- or shut up.
The thing is, if no one pirated games, then the overly restrictive copy protection would not exist. Now they add copy protection. Copy protection would not be so horrible if they just did what they were intended to do: make it difficult for others to copy and distribute their games to others. Unfortunately, we have copy protection that infects our system causing it to slow down the game, the system, and sometimes even make parts of it fail to function. All that copy protection does is cause more people to go down the pirate route.
They aren't adding copy protection now- they've just switched from dead-tree copy protection to a more invasive version. Anyone who played the older TSR AD&D games remembers the very fragile copy protection wheel that shipped with games like the original Pools of Radiance, or the "page, paragraph, word" method of some of the Wizardry games that depended on keeping the manual in good condition just to get into the game.
Part of that switch has been the change in OS technology- injecting DRM into DOS would be a bit more difficult than hiding "phantom" devices in Windows XP, especially as you went further and furher back into the days of yore. I remember booting an old PC via a DOS boot disk, just to take that out and insert the game floppy. Once you remove the physical media containing all of your system files, how on earth do you install DRM?
I think the problems with determining the chicken v. egg debate regarding pirates and copy-protection are:
The pirates don't advertise how much volume they actually handle, while the publishers publish study after study claiming "losses".
Gone are the days where an incredible game (DOOM, for instance) can be produced by a small team of developers in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time. More people equals greater production costs, greater production costs equals higher prices and more unit sales required to make a profit, creating an incentive to maximize profit by any possible means. This puts statements made by the industry into the "grain of salt" category, but at least it is a moderately "public" motive.
There is an overwhelming motive to claim piracy as a reason for game failing to make a profit, when time and time again the "core" gaming consumer base has shown itself to be fickle and hard to predict when it comes to gaming paradigm shifts. A new game that fails to snag the "core" market initially- being the portion of the market that is most likely to put up with problems and multiple patches- tends to have a higher piracy to purchase ratio than one that is strong enough to encourage purchase. There is no good method of tracking how long those pirated copies stay installed or in use, yet the download rate can be used to claim "Those damn pirates caused our game to flop!"
Poor marketing, design flaws, and a release date that is slightly too late can also all contribute to a game failing to make it big, yet still leave enough of a trace of piracy immediately after release for marketing droids to claim that "massive piracy of the game" contributed to a loss of profit and an inability to continue support. Having worked in the retail side of the gaming industry, I feel safe in saying that a lot of good games that come out and then have patches released shortly after release have a much higher return rate from the non-geek crowd than games that are lower quality but can be played out of the box. Again, we have a situation in which piracy is not necessarily the direct (or even moderately large) loss of profit, but can be made to look as if it was.
People tend to justify their actions so that they feel "good about themselves" when it comes to piracy. This in turn makes the standard "list" of "Why I pirated X and how it's okay" pretty standard, but also means that it is difficult to seperate "real" pirates (those that never/rarely purchase games, but often keep pirated copies) from the ones that honestly do pirate a game to gi
Gitmo is not a prison that anyone will see due to filesharing (unless that sharing is somehow connected to national security through al Qaeda, but that's a different story). I know everyone likes to bash Gitmo and it's the "in" thing to do, but basing your opinion on our prison system on Gitmo is showing ignorance.
That won't, but I won't get the phone call because my dad tried to "fix" something and broke it again. He knows enough to be dangerous, but not enough to actually fix things.
That's too complicated. Sad, but true. I've tried to explain to my parents time and again regarding similar security tactics, and I'm only met with blind stares. My mom looks at anything "bad" as a virus, and that's as far as she is willing to learn. No matter how often I reply to everyone in a mass forward regarding the stupidity of whatever "virus" warning they're sending their entire address book, the next one comes straight to me again.
You cannot convince people what is the "safe" thing to do when you're trying to compete with advertising or scare tactics in the media. My soon-to-be brother-in-law tried to help my parents computer out using Spybot, and when there were some problems with the scanner (completely unrelated) my mom begain to panic because she saw "Spybot Search & Destroy" in the Start menu and thought it was a virus damaging her computer. Trying to explain to a non-techie the fact that people can "get" your e-mail address without you giving it to them is almost impossible- "but I only e-mail people I know, so nobody else has my address!" Trying to explain that the bank will not ask for personal information via e-mail is almost impossible.
So, long story short: People are ignorant, and many of them are not willing or incapable of reducing the level of their ignorance. As much as I would like to tell my parents they are too stupid to own a computer, I cannot. Perhaps I should get them a Mac Mini for Christmas this year...
Unless Oblivion is to Morrowind what a modern computer is to a TRS-80, I'll stick with WoW, thanks. I play games for gameplay and atmosphere, not just atmosphere, and Morrowind was the biggest waste of space I ever installed. It made FF8 look good in comparison.
I use Trillian still. Keeps my system tray less cluttered. Granted it does have some interoperability problems (file transfers, direct connections just randomly work/don't work), but for messaging purposes it works fine for me. I even have my personal AIM account and my internal business name on there logged in simultaneously (haven't used the "real" client in so long, I don't know if it supports that or not).
That limitation does only apply to PVP servers- PVE and RP servers allow you to have cross-faction toons. I've never joined an RPPVP server, but I would assume that those are handled like the standard PVP server.
Babbage's isn't a part of EB. Babbage's, FuncoLand, and Software, Etc. are all a part of Gamestop, which is owned by Barnes and Noble (last I knew, anyway). They went down the toilet for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is their inability to pay gamers enough to fund their gaming. When I was a keyholder at Babbage's as a job during college, I wasn't making enough to actually pick up more than one or two new games a month (using the employee "discount")- and I'm supposed to be able to refer customers, to suggestively sell similar titles, and help them with patching issues?
All of the EBs around here do sell used PC games- they have for years. Granted, WoW, Evercrack and the likes are not carried as used games, but you can get a lot of used PC games. That is how I stocked up on BG, BG2, IWD and IWD2 after I had a bunch of my game CDs stolen- I wasn't going to pay full price for games I already purchased just so I could play them occasionally.
Best Buy around here has been consistently shrinking the PC games section, and Target and Walmart are about useless for gaming purposes. The only place to get a decent selection seems to be the stores that sell 2nd hand games, and even then it's pretty slim pickings.
For those of us who won't buy games online, they've effectively shut down the PC games market. I have a feeling that the industry doesn't care, though.
Dammit, that's the 2nd time in two days I forgot to put in paragraph tags.
**le sigh** Here's how that' supposed to look:
That depends on your definition of great art ("high" art) and why you consider it important. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the quality of art is always relative, and that it depends on the observer to determine if the piece is great to them or not. Some pieces speak out to a lot of people. Others do not. If a piece does not speak to a new generation, that is not a loss of society. It is not their job to appreciate what we do. It is their job to create their own art.
Part of the problem with "great" literature isn't just a difference in how people are looking at it- it's a problem with how it applies to them. Shakespeare, for instance, is becoming one of those authors who students (at least from around here) are forced to read five or six plays from. Thanks to that, very few students appreciate Shakespeare because they don't get the chance to approach it at their own pace and in their own amount. Forcing a teenager to read a play that they can barely understand the language of is not a good way to introduce them to the story. A lot of Shakespeare's plots are timeless stories- but at the same time, as language evolves reading him is more and more approaching reading a foreign language. We had one teacher in high school who brought up "Hamlet" in a manner that the students could both latch on to and took the time to "translate" the story into modern language afterwards. Complain about "shouldn't need translation" all you want, but the fact was, a lot of students who were not exactly scholarly could understand the themes and the story a lot better when turns of phrase were "modernized" for them and an explanation was given for why certain events got to Hamlet as much as they did.
Rambling aside, great art is any art that can reach it's audience. There should be no other requirement. It doesn't matter if it's a comic strip (Calvin and Hobbes, for instance) or Picasso. It doesn't matter if it's Hard Rock (A Toute Le Monde) or Classical (Beethoven's 9th). Hell, I can see art in well-written source code- an elegant beauty that is somehow more than just what is there in the text. Art exists for the people. The people have no requirement or responsibility to it. If it doesn't speak to them, that is not their fault, and it is not a fault against the artist. It just is, and to try to read into that is taking it too far. I'm not saying that video games aren't contributing to a divide between the younger generations and what was considered art to other generations, but that to consider this a loss is placing a value judgement on that contribution that really cannot be made. Surely, some of the youth and gamers of today will be the artists of their generation, and likely they will create something that will be considered great to them that we cannot understand. Will their art be "lower" than our art? No. It will just be different.
Visually, we do not interact with aesthetic objects the way we used to: the ability to appreciate much great painting requires a kind of dogged patience, a kind of restraint, that is very inconsistent with videogame thinking. (This is why I think that videogame aesthetics is almost - almost - a contradiction.) Likewise with literature, etc.
That depends on your definition of great art ("high" art) and why you consider it important. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the quality of art is always relative, and that it depends on the observer to determine if the piece is great to them or not. Some pieces speak out to a lot of people. Others do not. If a piece does not speak to a new generation, that is not a loss of society. It is not their job to appreciate what we do. It is their job to create their own art.
Part of the problem with "great" literature isn't just a difference in how people are looking at it- it's a problem with how it applies to them. Shakespeare, for instance, is becoming one of those authors who students (at least from around here) are forced to read five or six plays from. Thanks to that, very few students appreciate Shakespeare because they don't get the chance to approach it at their own pace and in their own amount. Forcing a teenager to read a play that they can barely understand the language of is not a good way to introduce them to the story. A lot of Shakespeare's plots are timeless stories- but at the same time, as language evolves reading him is more and more approaching reading a foreign language. We had one teacher in high school who brought up "Hamlet" in a manner that the students could both latch on to and took the time to "translate" the story into modern language afterwards. Complain about "shouldn't need translation" all you want, but the fact was, a lot of students who were not exactly scholarly could understand the themes and the story a lot better when turns of phrase were "modernized" for them and an explanation was given for why certain events got to Hamlet as much as they did.
Rambling aside, great art is any art that can reach it's audience. There should be no other requirement. It doesn't matter if it's a comic strip (Calvin and Hobbes, for instance) or Picasso. It doesn't matter if it's Hard Rock (A Toute Le Monde) or Classical (Beethoven's 9th). Hell, I can see art in well-written source code- an elegant beauty that is somehow more than just what is there in the text.
Art exists for the people. The people have no requirement or responsibility to it. If it doesn't speak to them, that is not their fault, and it is not a fault against the artist. It just is, and to try to read into that is taking it too far.
I'm not saying that video games aren't contributing to a divide between the younger generations and what was considered art to other generations, but that to consider this a loss is placing a value judgement on that contribution that really cannot be made. Surely, some of the youth and gamers of today will be the artists of their generation, and likely they will create something that will be considered great to them that we cannot understand. Will their art be "lower" than our art? No. It will just be different.
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Maybe it's just me, buy watching someone else talk as a method of determining what I want sounds suspiciously like sitting down to discuss a timeshare proposal.
Just because SVN doesn't do what Linus wants, doesn't mean it doesn't do what I (or anyone else who uses it) want. Admittedly, I use it for my personal hobby projects. SVN "server" that runs local on my notebook, so the repository goes everywhere I go anyway. I'm the only developer, so I don't care what anyone else might want with the code. All I care about is that I can keep track of what changes I've made, so that if something breaks I have some obvious places to look.
Everything I've read in this whole discussion seems to center around Linus's talks, distributed repositories (or whatever they're called in git, as someone who has barely registered it aside from hearing about Linus's talk, I'm not really up on what the lingo should be), speed, and branching and merging. Linus might prefer git, but this mere mortal works with SVN just fine. Being able to make a local repos is pointless when the repos IS local. Speed? Small projects, not needed. Branching and merging? I guess I'll deal with that if i need to, but for my single-developer setup a tag is probably more appropriate.
As for the actual question posed by the submitter, it accomplishes what I need. When I worked for a small consulting firm, it served our needs fairly well, and our svn admin was comfortable with using the tools available to handle the "back-end" details of merging. I don't remember ever having a project big enough that we branched, just having to walk through a code change with him when he was creating tags for release (I was only working on documentation, and our manager had to use my laptop one day to commit a fix).
Your two dead giveaways fail in the area I live in. There are a lot of backwards baseball caps worn by young guys, and more than a few shaved heads, even on white guys. I shaved my head last winter so that I could wear a stocking cap and not have to deal with not being presentable after I took it off. Trying to decide on if a person is balding based on a style choice seems a little bit of a stretch.
Here is the US. And the US is one of many countries with statutes, provisions, or acts that create a legal mechanism for citizen's arrest, which includes that minimum wage store clerk. Granted, there are limits on what they can do- but if nothing else, they can follow you to your car, get your plate number, and arrange for the police to greet you at your door.
I realize wiki isn't the greatest source, but I don't have time to google a better one right now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Arrest
Aside from that, when I used the word detained I meant slowed down or delayed, not arrested. I probably should have chosen a different word.
I would like to comment that around here, bringing in stackable/nestable crates is likely to get you detained temporarily to "see a manager" about your "shoplifting". Seeing as the stores sell a good variety of those and the inbred idiots that they have manning the doors aren't going to be able to tell the difference between one kind and another, all they can go on is that your receipt doesn't have "crate" on it anywhere.
So yeah, good for you, but like GP said, just because it works for you doesn't mean it's going to work for everyone else.
Saying they're the best ever Australian band is like saying they're the smartest European or the fastest cripple.
**ducks**
Or it's a good candidate in that if the mechanics all work on a PS2, there should be no loss of game function when translating it over to any of the newer-gen consoles.
Personally, I hate playing Guitar Hero on a Wii. I swear that the difference in the wireless response between the PS2 controller and the Wii's built in wireless actually changes the timing on songs. I can't play on more than medium, partway through for Guitar Hero 3 on the Wii- but I can play through expert on the PS2. Might be my own lack of skill, or the fact that for the first 4 games I started with the PS2 versions and have the muscle memory down to synch the TV and my actions.
Even without that, though, basing the game off the Wii for it's "potential" seems pretty outlandish. It's a basic premise- 5 buttons, a pick toggle, and a tilt-the-guitar motion sensor. Even adding in the drum input, what else do you need that the Wii offers? Better graphics? It's freaking Klax meets Simon no matter how you slice it. Higher quality audio so we can hear how bad the cover band's singer is when they don't get rights to the actual recording?
I'm not trying to bash the Wii. I enjoy the system and think it has a unique niche in the gaming market. But complaining that something isn't designed around the Wii when it's a multi-platform game seems a little odd, considering that it is the "oddball" system of the group.
But I Watch Law & Order.
As someone who drives professionally now (and at a previous time in my life), a highway blowout is no reason for an accident (we were taught to never use the word "accident", incidentally. They are collisions.) Someone driving safely will leave themselves a way out of such a situation (open space in front, the side, etc.) and will know where the vehicles are around them. A blowout occurs- and I'll even give the benefit of the doubt that a piece of debris, unseen, caused it- there are 3 questions on my mind:
If you can't see the object in front of you, that means you are following too closely in most situations. Some objects are too small to be seen easily from behind the wheel, but those objects are also less likely to cause blowouts in a well-maintained vehicle.
If you don't know how to respond to a blowout, that's a problem that should be corrected. Do not brake immediately- the blowout tends to force the vehicle to one side or another in response to the force of the blowout, and braking only exacerbates that response. Accelerate slightly through the blowout to maintain course and exit the flow of traffic safely.
The answer to number 3 is the major problem many people have. They drive too aggressively and do not leave themselves a way out of a potentially hazardous situation. Attentive driving can help correct this, and if you make a silly game out of it, you can turn it into habit fairly quickly. For example: What would I do if that semi tractor suddenly slows down? Do I have room to take the other lane (or shoulder)? If the car alongside of me suddenly merges over, do I have room to accelerate around him? Should I brake to make room?
In short, defensive driving is the best way to avoid collisions, along with regular vehicular maintenance and such wonderful things as eye exams and hearing tests. If you aren't the driver, you have a responsibility to yourself to ensure that the person driving you is a good driver. Just don't get in the car with someone who does not respect the responsibility of driving a ton and a half of steel and aluminum down the road.
More seriously, I ask: If anyone should be defining what is or is not open source (without the pretentious caps), it should be a standards body: perhaps ANSI or ISO? What authority does the OSI have except that given to it by the community (who seem fairly divided on this issue, judging by /.)?
I strongly disagree with the public largely recognizes it as a mark associated with a quality under our control (approved licenses).. John Q. Public has no clue about open source still. Open source is not mainstream enough for that, and I wonder about your logic in saying that consumers even know what on earth you are talking about.
Promote the logo all you want, promote the use of approved licenses and continue to promote the use of the seal/logo as a method of advertising products with approved licenses, but leave the phrase "open source" alone.
I used to work at a retail store that would empty one CD case for Playstation games (the original, not the PS2 DVD-style) for use as the display model. We found that once you get the accursed shrink wrap off, the best way to deal with that strip of tape across the top was to open the jewel case like you would seperate the two halves (start at the part away from the tape, of course). Carefully pull on the flap of the "front" of the case until it is free from the back, and unfold the entire case vertically so the tape is the hinge point. Once that happens, you can peel the case from the tape in one go (usually).
As for the freaking shrink wrap, if you have a table with a "sharp" edge nearby, take the case and run the more "rugged" side of it along the edge of the table lengthwise (so the narrow portion of the face is intersecting the line of the edge). Usually the shrink wrap will bunch and then tear, allowing you easy access to the contents.
As for DVD cases, a small amount of heat will often soften the glue, allowing removal without stretching the clear plastic.
I always heard it as take a drink whenever there's a good guy in black on screen, or a bad guy in white on screen.
Any idea how many stormtroopers are in those IV-VI? I know I lost count partway through IV, and nobody remembered if we finished the movies or not.
You don't have to forget qwerty. I used dvorak for a while, and while I don't remember it well enough anymore to really be productive with it, I could switch back and forth between the two without too much difficulty. I remember typing faster qwerty (not "correct" qwerty, but my slightly hybrid version) than dvorak, but that was probably 6 years of qwerty vs. 2 months of dvorak.
It's like knowing C and Python seperately. You can code in either C or Python without forgetting the other every time you need to switch languages. You might slip up here and there with syntax or function names until you've built up some decent experience with both of them, but knowing both opens up a lot of options. The same could be said for multiple keyboard layouts. Knowing both provides options.
This isn't so much directed at you- I'm not presuming to know your stance on this- but at the people who mention that "Linux users don't necessarily want people to convert", and a lot of the *nix and Open Source zealots who constantly piss and moan about Windows security:
If you don't want to help move people, expect to have botnets and zombies all over the net. Expect there to be problems. Expect to read more and more about the horrible things MS is doing. Either help people move, or quit bitching about all the problems MS causes, how their formats aren't open and you can't read this file someone sent you, and the myriad other things I see here and elsewhere regarding MS products. It's a two-way street. If you want widespread security, and open formats to be standard, then do something about it- or shut up.
It goes well with Vodka??
They aren't adding copy protection now- they've just switched from dead-tree copy protection to a more invasive version. Anyone who played the older TSR AD&D games remembers the very fragile copy protection wheel that shipped with games like the original Pools of Radiance, or the "page, paragraph, word" method of some of the Wizardry games that depended on keeping the manual in good condition just to get into the game.
Part of that switch has been the change in OS technology- injecting DRM into DOS would be a bit more difficult than hiding "phantom" devices in Windows XP, especially as you went further and furher back into the days of yore. I remember booting an old PC via a DOS boot disk, just to take that out and insert the game floppy. Once you remove the physical media containing all of your system files, how on earth do you install DRM?
I think the problems with determining the chicken v. egg debate regarding pirates and copy-protection are:
Gitmo is not a prison that anyone will see due to filesharing (unless that sharing is somehow connected to national security through al Qaeda, but that's a different story). I know everyone likes to bash Gitmo and it's the "in" thing to do, but basing your opinion on our prison system on Gitmo is showing ignorance.
That won't, but I won't get the phone call because my dad tried to "fix" something and broke it again. He knows enough to be dangerous, but not enough to actually fix things.
There's a simple answer:
That's too complicated. Sad, but true. I've tried to explain to my parents time and again regarding similar security tactics, and I'm only met with blind stares. My mom looks at anything "bad" as a virus, and that's as far as she is willing to learn. No matter how often I reply to everyone in a mass forward regarding the stupidity of whatever "virus" warning they're sending their entire address book, the next one comes straight to me again.
You cannot convince people what is the "safe" thing to do when you're trying to compete with advertising or scare tactics in the media. My soon-to-be brother-in-law tried to help my parents computer out using Spybot, and when there were some problems with the scanner (completely unrelated) my mom begain to panic because she saw "Spybot Search & Destroy" in the Start menu and thought it was a virus damaging her computer. Trying to explain to a non-techie the fact that people can "get" your e-mail address without you giving it to them is almost impossible- "but I only e-mail people I know, so nobody else has my address!" Trying to explain that the bank will not ask for personal information via e-mail is almost impossible.
So, long story short: People are ignorant, and many of them are not willing or incapable of reducing the level of their ignorance. As much as I would like to tell my parents they are too stupid to own a computer, I cannot. Perhaps I should get them a Mac Mini for Christmas this year...
Unless Oblivion is to Morrowind what a modern computer is to a TRS-80, I'll stick with WoW, thanks. I play games for gameplay and atmosphere, not just atmosphere, and Morrowind was the biggest waste of space I ever installed. It made FF8 look good in comparison.
I use Trillian still. Keeps my system tray less cluttered. Granted it does have some interoperability problems (file transfers, direct connections just randomly work/don't work), but for messaging purposes it works fine for me. I even have my personal AIM account and my internal business name on there logged in simultaneously (haven't used the "real" client in so long, I don't know if it supports that or not).
NASA, not NSA.
That limitation does only apply to PVP servers- PVE and RP servers allow you to have cross-faction toons. I've never joined an RPPVP server, but I would assume that those are handled like the standard PVP server.
All of the EBs around here do sell used PC games- they have for years. Granted, WoW, Evercrack and the likes are not carried as used games, but you can get a lot of used PC games. That is how I stocked up on BG, BG2, IWD and IWD2 after I had a bunch of my game CDs stolen- I wasn't going to pay full price for games I already purchased just so I could play them occasionally.
Best Buy around here has been consistently shrinking the PC games section, and Target and Walmart are about useless for gaming purposes. The only place to get a decent selection seems to be the stores that sell 2nd hand games, and even then it's pretty slim pickings.
For those of us who won't buy games online, they've effectively shut down the PC games market. I have a feeling that the industry doesn't care, though.
Dammit, that's the 2nd time in two days I forgot to put in paragraph tags.
**le sigh** Here's how that' supposed to look:
That depends on your definition of great art ("high" art) and why you consider it important. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the quality of art is always relative, and that it depends on the observer to determine if the piece is great to them or not. Some pieces speak out to a lot of people. Others do not. If a piece does not speak to a new generation, that is not a loss of society. It is not their job to appreciate what we do. It is their job to create their own art.
Part of the problem with "great" literature isn't just a difference in how people are looking at it- it's a problem with how it applies to them. Shakespeare, for instance, is becoming one of those authors who students (at least from around here) are forced to read five or six plays from. Thanks to that, very few students appreciate Shakespeare because they don't get the chance to approach it at their own pace and in their own amount. Forcing a teenager to read a play that they can barely understand the language of is not a good way to introduce them to the story. A lot of Shakespeare's plots are timeless stories- but at the same time, as language evolves reading him is more and more approaching reading a foreign language. We had one teacher in high school who brought up "Hamlet" in a manner that the students could both latch on to and took the time to "translate" the story into modern language afterwards. Complain about "shouldn't need translation" all you want, but the fact was, a lot of students who were not exactly scholarly could understand the themes and the story a lot better when turns of phrase were "modernized" for them and an explanation was given for why certain events got to Hamlet as much as they did.
Rambling aside, great art is any art that can reach it's audience. There should be no other requirement. It doesn't matter if it's a comic strip (Calvin and Hobbes, for instance) or Picasso. It doesn't matter if it's Hard Rock (A Toute Le Monde) or Classical (Beethoven's 9th). Hell, I can see art in well-written source code- an elegant beauty that is somehow more than just what is there in the text. Art exists for the people. The people have no requirement or responsibility to it. If it doesn't speak to them, that is not their fault, and it is not a fault against the artist. It just is, and to try to read into that is taking it too far. I'm not saying that video games aren't contributing to a divide between the younger generations and what was considered art to other generations, but that to consider this a loss is placing a value judgement on that contribution that really cannot be made. Surely, some of the youth and gamers of today will be the artists of their generation, and likely they will create something that will be considered great to them that we cannot understand. Will their art be "lower" than our art? No. It will just be different.