I abstain from buying because I don't think I can pay enough for so many games in good conscience. The games are decent, and the 20 USD I can afford now wouldn't do the games justice.
That's just silly. Whatever you pay, they lose nothing - it's not like you're buying below cost. If you don't buy, they lose.
I'm sure they'd welcome the $20. Besides, a product is worth what people are willing to pay, and right now the market says these games are worth $8 - the site shows the average payment. At $20 you'd be paying over the odds. I can't see them being unhappy with that.
The whole "experiment" is useless without this option, in my opinion.
You might think so, but although the numbers are relatively small, they're tangible, and that's not the only benefit. World of Goo pulled in an average of $3 per download in the last sale. This package is currently at a fraction under $8 - probably in the ballpark for a bundle, though I'd have guessed $10. It's also about what I'd expect to pay for a package of games like this in the frequent Steam discount sales.
When I checked, the total raised was $162,687. That's 160k more than they had before, even divided by seven individually, as well as a LOT of free publicity, and why not?
So although the numbers aren't big, it still looks like a worthwhile exercise to me.
Which is to say, pretty darned feeble. Clever work, but basically rubbish when compared to user expectation.
One of my favourite videos is this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI), dating from the '30s, about how differential gears work. The voice-over is that beautifully clear, precise American newsreader accent of the period, and there isn't any background music to confuse things. If anything should be a perfect candidate for a computer to analyse, it's this.
But the captions are worse than I'd expect from off the shelf software like Dragon Dictate, which isn't particular special itself. A perfectly enunciated "road" with a very clear final D, is misheard as "role", for example. There are mistakes in nearly every line, and while sometimes they're obvious, sometimes they're just bizarre.
I'm tempted to say "nice try, good work for a first shot, and hey, it's a beta so it'll get better." But I've been exposed to software dictation software for over a decade, and it just hasn't, really. So I don't think it will, and I don't think most people will get much use out of it, apart from the odd giggle at the YouTube equivalent of "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all..."
What I would be interested in hearing is whether this, flawed as it is, is useable enough for a deaf person. In context, you'd probably figure out that "role"="road", but would you guess that "outmoded"="are mounted"? Maybe, maybe not - watch the video on mute with the captions on, and it's kinda tricky but you can get the gist of it. But then I'm reminded that this is the best case video I could find, and most will probably be worse. It'll be interesting to see what the feedback is from deaf people, and whether it really makes a difference, and whether the context makes up for the poor quality. I'd like to hope it might do just that.
Alastair Reynolds is a very good sci-fi author and a qualified astronomer. He dealt with the question of near-light speed and FTL travel in various ways in various books.
Worth a read, and hopefully after that you'd be a bit less keen to dismiss the entire community of sci-fi authors as clueless amateurs. There are some very good "hard" SF writers. Their science is still fiction, but at least it makes an effort to remain grounded in what today's science can offer or predict.
I kinda agree (and as a skinny person who travels with little luggage, I'd LOVE to be charged by weight), but realistically, that's just not how it works. The airlines sell tickets per seat, or part thereof. Your 6-year old can't share half a seat with another child. If you need half a seat, you buy a whole seat. If you need 1.5 seats, you buy two seats. If, heaven forbid, you need 2.5 seats, you buy the whole row.
Obviously charging for a fixed-size seat means that everyone who isn't exactly that size (ie: nearly everyone) can grumble about paying for slightly too much seat, or being too tight. But the reality is they're sold as whole units. That's the deal. We have to work with that, and if that means fat people buy two seats when you'd rather they bought 1.5 and shared the other.5 with your kid, too bad. Unless the airlines find a way to introduce much more flexible seating and per-weight charging, that's the only practical way it can work.
So what you're saying is that not only are all disabled people equally unable to perform certain tasks, the rest of society should not make any effort to make it possible for them to narrow the gap, nor should we make any effort to indicate to them which products may suit their constraints?
Have I got that about right?
You know what, despite you being a complete ass, I'll concede that you are entirely correct just as soon as you win a foot race against Oscar Pistorius.
Some of it's just a big mental jump, and I think I could get used to it, especially if some of the appearance and behaviour can be customised.
One thing grabbed me right away, though. The idea of slightly minimising the desktop while I'm working with the menu is interesting. But in the examples, look how every item in the menu is truncated. It's all "Home..." and "OpenO..." and "Docu..."
That alone would drive me crazy. If nothing fits in your menus, then your menus are badly designed. If there isn't a option to show just a list, instead of a grid of too-large icons with ellipses everywhere, it's definitely a no for me. Might seem trivial, but I'm going to be looking at that annoyance a LOT.
They want to have their cake and eat it too* * Stupidest expression ever? I think so.
It seems senseless until you realise that it's back to front in today's common usage. The expression means "they want to eat their cake and still have it afterwards".
I can play Half-Life 2 (Episode 2), Titan Quest and Civ IV: Colonization, all great games that are not found anywhere else but the PC.
You may have missed the news, but Orange Box (complete with HL2Ep2) is available for XBox. So is Civilisation (not Civ IV, though, granted, it's a console-specific release).
More and more PC games are released for consoles these days. There are benefits for everyone - among the most obvious are less piracy for the vendors, and less upgrade grind for the customer. There are other upsides I could cite, but that's possibly a different discussion.
And an interesting evolution is that gameplay is becoming more console-friendly. PC FPS and console FPS used to be very different. The controls don't work the same, the environment is different, etc. But HL2 works fine on the XBox. I personally prefer it on PC, but the console version is perfectly playable. OTOH, Halo is now IMO better on XBox than PC. Back then I was used to Quake with a keyboard full of custom bindings, and disliked Halo 1 on XBox because of it. But I just don't feel the need for that style of play with the modern games, because they're designed to be suitable for console play from the start. So the mass-market user expectation is being moved - not by accident - towards a console orientation too.
The point I'm slowly getting to is that gaming is moving towards consoles. I don't think PC gaming is going to go away, but I do feel like it's going to become marginalised as more focus goes on to consoles. The hard-core gamers will stay on PCs, but my feeling is that that niche is narrowing. Also worth noting that it's the same niche that doesn't buy games with DRM. So if you're a vendor who wants to use DRM, the PC platform is not appealing, and getting less appealing all the time. The options are: ditch DRM and try to breathe life back into the PC gaming segment, or give it up and move to consoles. My guess is there will be some of both (and a healthy middle-ground for now - this won't happen overnight). And I have hopes for indie games on PCs. But overall, I expect consoles to get more and more mind- and market-share over time.
So can Ray sue them for professional libel for stating that all of his claims are baseless?
Not unless he can demonstrate material damages, or damage to his reputation. Incidentally, there's no such thing as professional libel. There's criminal libel, and civil libel.
I seriously doubt he'd bother, though: it's just standard mud-slinging. IMHO, anyway - I'm not expert in US libel law, which has some complicated precedents and an annoying habit of varying from state to state:p
"in my opinion" is not a magic word that lets you defame people with impunity.
No it isn't, but fair comment which is honestly held opinion, is an absolute defence against libel.
I'm fairly certain that Mr Beckerman is fully aware of the boundaries here. You don't publish legal commentary without a solid grounding in media law. At least, not for long:)
There was a time when businesses would never drop IBM either. Never.
One day Microsoft will be no more. One day Intel will cease to be. They will either morph into very different companies, or the evolving market will leave them behind, the same as every other company on the market today. That's the way of the world.
So careful with those "nevers". "One day" might be very far away, or it might be around the corner, but it's highly unlikely to be "never".
I have a strong suspicion this is going to get flamebaited, but seriously, although I use Ubuntu every day, and have enormous respect for Mark Shuttleworth (he appeared on our podcast: http://zatechshow.co.za/episode-14), I don't think Ubuntu is ready for mobile environments.
You can blame the lack of hardware support and other vendors if you like, but the fact remains that the user experience for Linux laptops is pretty damned iffy. Power management isn't, hibernate and suspend sometimes works, sometimes doesn't and sometimes breaks other pieces of the OS seemingly at random, WiFi support is hit and miss...the list just goes on.
Linux on servers is almost a given now. Linux on desktops is, arguably, a better default option than Windows - I've found gaming under Wine to work faster and better than under Windows natively. But Linux in general on laptops and ultraportables? My experience says no. Not with a generic distro. It can work for locked down platforms like the Asus EEE and Acer Aspire One because the hardware is, like a Mac, predefined and the distro is built to fit, but not for broader use. If you happen get lucky and all your mobile hardware works, then terrific - you're in the same position as a desktop user was ten years ago. But that's not me: Linux on my laptops is very hard work (so a fun hobby), but not something I feel I can trust for any real work.
Which is not to say I don't respect how incredibly far Linux has evolved on laptops. It's come a long way and the community will surely iron out the remaining bugs in due course. But realistically, it's not there yet. I'm impressed that there's a dedicated Ubuntu package for ultraportables and I wouldn't for a moment suggest that team is wasting its time, but I could not in all conscience recommend it to anyone until I've seen some major progress on those big mobile-related issues.
I have a broken Dell laptop, also my primary work machine. Dell is now three weeks late, given the very expensive "next business day" guarantee I paid so much for.
Suppose I should count myself lucky. This particular machine took more than HALF A YEAR to arrive. Six months of fighting with the "support" dept for it to arrive - it was a replacement for another, which was stolen but covered under CompleteCare (hah!).
I have never had a customer experience like it, and never will again. Spent thousands of UK pounds on Dell kit over the years in a corporate role, but now that I'm a consumer/SMB, I get treated like utter and complete crap. That was the last dime they'll get out of me.
This particular Dell laptop, by the way, before being completely non-functional, has had separate onsite replacements of its hard disk, motherboard, bluetooth module, and internal speakers. So apart from the horrendous customer service, I also have a couple of concerns about their build quality right now.
So be very, very grateful for your 1-2 days repair estimate. My next machine will be a Mac, and I consider stories like yours to be ringing endorsements:)
That being said, I am recently finding myself unable to wrap my brain around how photographers charge for their work and how they can justify their business model.
Working in print media, I can safely tell you that I've never worked with photographers like this. All commissioned photography is taken under contracts that include all the necessary copyright permissions (we usually but exclusively use "all rights" contracts because we publish online and in print, and online is global) and always, without exception, result in us getting the processed image files in suitable digital form.
Not RAW files though, which you might think you want but you probably don't really. Part of what I expect a photographer to do for me is correct the RAW image and give me a high res JPG or TIFF. He knows better than my production dept what colour correction needs to be done - they can tweak it later but the initial work on the RAW file is part of what I'm paying the photographer for.
So maybe you need to look up some freelance photographers in your area who work with print media and understand what's what. Expect to pay a lot more than you might think - a good photographer, complete with preproduction work and all rights handed over, is probably orders of magnitude more expensive than the family studio on the corner whose business is the low-margin, high volume opposite.
Guess what! When I went into the store looking for the game, I learned it wasn't due out yet for another couple of days! With a slow sinking feeling I realized that there was no way a magazine that is planned months in advance would be able to review a retail copy of a game when the game's ship date is later than the magazine's.
The media gets promo copies of games long before retail. With about six weeks of editorial planning, that's plenty of time to get a game, play it, review it and print the review before the game's on shelves. Mileage varies - some publishers ship you the game when they ship to distributors, so the lead time is too tight for that. Others are much better. It also depends on how much they're hoping to hype any particular game, of course, and there are many factors at work.
But to answer your point: yes, it's certainly possible for a magazine to review a game before it has shipped to retail. And I'm talking final version, not beta or pre-release.
And yes, I do run a consumer magazine that includes game reviews.
I still can't add a word to the dictionary with just one click. Try it for yourself, you'll see. Make a typo, right-click on the word once the squiggly red underline appears. It gives suggestions, and not an "Add" menu -- but a submenu. So me, the uncaring user, just wants to add this to the dictionary. I pick "Add" submenu, then I am faced with a choice. "soffice.dic", "standard.dic" and "sun.dic". Um... what?
Just remove the ones you don't want. Tools, Options, Language Settings, Writing Aids...now untick the ones you don't want in the list. You probably just want the standard dictionary - hit 'edit' to see what the different ones include. 'sun' includes a bunch of Sun product names, and 'soffice' includes OpenOffice terminology. You really don't need them, so just remove them.
You'll still have the submenu, but no confusion about which dictionary's which.
I had to recover data from Word 2.0 files once upon a time. Of course Office XP couldn't open them, but OpenOffice can. Give that a try.
That experience of mine, IMHO, demonstrates exactly why properly open formats are essential. Microsoft's own poor support for its proprietary format would have caused me to lose data.
Why? If a paid contributor posts something you feel is overly biased, just change it, or flag it for deletion, or flag the poster for suspension. Wikipedia is self-correcting, and while that doesn't always work as fast or as effectively as some would like, it _does_ work.
If you don't like it, fix it. Don't bitch about it.
Why is that bad design? "Something is broken. Please provide evidence that it is fixed." Seems like a logical solution to the problem to me.
Unless you're working on the assumption that a PC should be able to start up sans keyboard, which in the modern age of PC servers is not unreasonable, but in the early days of PCs? I don't think so.
Nonsense. There are plenty of good forensics tools which deal with Linux/Unix, Apple, and various PDA systems. Plenty of open source forensics tools, for that matter, many of which are Linux specific.
Anyway, what platform a tool runs on makes no difference. Forensic data is acquired to an image which is then taken away for analysis. You never investigate a system in situ, much less using its own operating system. EnCase, probably the best known commercial forensic software, runs on Windows but will happily analyse source data from most common operating systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently so. Or don't you measure volume in cubic metres any more? :)
That's just silly. Whatever you pay, they lose nothing - it's not like you're buying below cost. If you don't buy, they lose.
I'm sure they'd welcome the $20. Besides, a product is worth what people are willing to pay, and right now the market says these games are worth $8 - the site shows the average payment. At $20 you'd be paying over the odds. I can't see them being unhappy with that.
You might think so, but although the numbers are relatively small, they're tangible, and that's not the only benefit. World of Goo pulled in an average of $3 per download in the last sale. This package is currently at a fraction under $8 - probably in the ballpark for a bundle, though I'd have guessed $10. It's also about what I'd expect to pay for a package of games like this in the frequent Steam discount sales.
When I checked, the total raised was $162,687. That's 160k more than they had before, even divided by seven individually, as well as a LOT of free publicity, and why not?
So although the numbers aren't big, it still looks like a worthwhile exercise to me.
Which is to say, pretty darned feeble. Clever work, but basically rubbish when compared to user expectation.
One of my favourite videos is this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI), dating from the '30s, about how differential gears work. The voice-over is that beautifully clear, precise American newsreader accent of the period, and there isn't any background music to confuse things. If anything should be a perfect candidate for a computer to analyse, it's this.
But the captions are worse than I'd expect from off the shelf software like Dragon Dictate, which isn't particular special itself. A perfectly enunciated "road" with a very clear final D, is misheard as "role", for example. There are mistakes in nearly every line, and while sometimes they're obvious, sometimes they're just bizarre.
I'm tempted to say "nice try, good work for a first shot, and hey, it's a beta so it'll get better." But I've been exposed to software dictation software for over a decade, and it just hasn't, really. So I don't think it will, and I don't think most people will get much use out of it, apart from the odd giggle at the YouTube equivalent of "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all..."
What I would be interested in hearing is whether this, flawed as it is, is useable enough for a deaf person. In context, you'd probably figure out that "role"="road", but would you guess that "outmoded"="are mounted"? Maybe, maybe not - watch the video on mute with the captions on, and it's kinda tricky but you can get the gist of it. But then I'm reminded that this is the best case video I could find, and most will probably be worse. It'll be interesting to see what the feedback is from deaf people, and whether it really makes a difference, and whether the context makes up for the poor quality. I'd like to hope it might do just that.
Alastair Reynolds is a very good sci-fi author and a qualified astronomer. He dealt with the question of near-light speed and FTL travel in various ways in various books.
Worth a read, and hopefully after that you'd be a bit less keen to dismiss the entire community of sci-fi authors as clueless amateurs. There are some very good "hard" SF writers. Their science is still fiction, but at least it makes an effort to remain grounded in what today's science can offer or predict.
I kinda agree (and as a skinny person who travels with little luggage, I'd LOVE to be charged by weight), but realistically, that's just not how it works. The airlines sell tickets per seat, or part thereof. Your 6-year old can't share half a seat with another child. If you need half a seat, you buy a whole seat. If you need 1.5 seats, you buy two seats. If, heaven forbid, you need 2.5 seats, you buy the whole row.
Obviously charging for a fixed-size seat means that everyone who isn't exactly that size (ie: nearly everyone) can grumble about paying for slightly too much seat, or being too tight. But the reality is they're sold as whole units. That's the deal. We have to work with that, and if that means fat people buy two seats when you'd rather they bought 1.5 and shared the other .5 with your kid, too bad. Unless the airlines find a way to introduce much more flexible seating and per-weight charging, that's the only practical way it can work.
So what you're saying is that not only are all disabled people equally unable to perform certain tasks, the rest of society should not make any effort to make it possible for them to narrow the gap, nor should we make any effort to indicate to them which products may suit their constraints?
Have I got that about right?
You know what, despite you being a complete ass, I'll concede that you are entirely correct just as soon as you win a foot race against Oscar Pistorius.
Let me know how that goes.
Some of it's just a big mental jump, and I think I could get used to it, especially if some of the appearance and behaviour can be customised.
One thing grabbed me right away, though. The idea of slightly minimising the desktop while I'm working with the menu is interesting. But in the examples, look how every item in the menu is truncated. It's all "Home..." and "OpenO..." and "Docu..."
That alone would drive me crazy. If nothing fits in your menus, then your menus are badly designed. If there isn't a option to show just a list, instead of a grid of too-large icons with ellipses everywhere, it's definitely a no for me. Might seem trivial, but I'm going to be looking at that annoyance a LOT.
It seems senseless until you realise that it's back to front in today's common usage. The expression means "they want to eat their cake and still have it afterwards".
Irony, thy name is Slashdot.
Your writing. Possessive pronouns do not take an apostrophe: its, his, your, etc.
You may have missed the news, but Orange Box (complete with HL2Ep2) is available for XBox. So is Civilisation (not Civ IV, though, granted, it's a console-specific release).
More and more PC games are released for consoles these days. There are benefits for everyone - among the most obvious are less piracy for the vendors, and less upgrade grind for the customer. There are other upsides I could cite, but that's possibly a different discussion.
And an interesting evolution is that gameplay is becoming more console-friendly. PC FPS and console FPS used to be very different. The controls don't work the same, the environment is different, etc. But HL2 works fine on the XBox. I personally prefer it on PC, but the console version is perfectly playable. OTOH, Halo is now IMO better on XBox than PC. Back then I was used to Quake with a keyboard full of custom bindings, and disliked Halo 1 on XBox because of it. But I just don't feel the need for that style of play with the modern games, because they're designed to be suitable for console play from the start. So the mass-market user expectation is being moved - not by accident - towards a console orientation too.
The point I'm slowly getting to is that gaming is moving towards consoles. I don't think PC gaming is going to go away, but I do feel like it's going to become marginalised as more focus goes on to consoles. The hard-core gamers will stay on PCs, but my feeling is that that niche is narrowing. Also worth noting that it's the same niche that doesn't buy games with DRM. So if you're a vendor who wants to use DRM, the PC platform is not appealing, and getting less appealing all the time. The options are: ditch DRM and try to breathe life back into the PC gaming segment, or give it up and move to consoles. My guess is there will be some of both (and a healthy middle-ground for now - this won't happen overnight). And I have hopes for indie games on PCs. But overall, I expect consoles to get more and more mind- and market-share over time.
Not unless he can demonstrate material damages, or damage to his reputation. Incidentally, there's no such thing as professional libel. There's criminal libel, and civil libel.
I seriously doubt he'd bother, though: it's just standard mud-slinging. IMHO, anyway - I'm not expert in US libel law, which has some complicated precedents and an annoying habit of varying from state to state :p
No it isn't, but fair comment which is honestly held opinion, is an absolute defence against libel.
I'm fairly certain that Mr Beckerman is fully aware of the boundaries here. You don't publish legal commentary without a solid grounding in media law. At least, not for long :)
There was a time when businesses would never drop IBM either. Never.
One day Microsoft will be no more. One day Intel will cease to be. They will either morph into very different companies, or the evolving market will leave them behind, the same as every other company on the market today. That's the way of the world.
So careful with those "nevers". "One day" might be very far away, or it might be around the corner, but it's highly unlikely to be "never".
No.
"Letters carried by individuals...are not considered to be mail, even if they are stamped, and thus are subject to a border search..."
I have a strong suspicion this is going to get flamebaited, but seriously, although I use Ubuntu every day, and have enormous respect for Mark Shuttleworth (he appeared on our podcast: http://zatechshow.co.za/episode-14), I don't think Ubuntu is ready for mobile environments.
You can blame the lack of hardware support and other vendors if you like, but the fact remains that the user experience for Linux laptops is pretty damned iffy. Power management isn't, hibernate and suspend sometimes works, sometimes doesn't and sometimes breaks other pieces of the OS seemingly at random, WiFi support is hit and miss...the list just goes on.
Linux on servers is almost a given now. Linux on desktops is, arguably, a better default option than Windows - I've found gaming under Wine to work faster and better than under Windows natively. But Linux in general on laptops and ultraportables? My experience says no. Not with a generic distro. It can work for locked down platforms like the Asus EEE and Acer Aspire One because the hardware is, like a Mac, predefined and the distro is built to fit, but not for broader use. If you happen get lucky and all your mobile hardware works, then terrific - you're in the same position as a desktop user was ten years ago. But that's not me: Linux on my laptops is very hard work (so a fun hobby), but not something I feel I can trust for any real work.
Which is not to say I don't respect how incredibly far Linux has evolved on laptops. It's come a long way and the community will surely iron out the remaining bugs in due course. But realistically, it's not there yet. I'm impressed that there's a dedicated Ubuntu package for ultraportables and I wouldn't for a moment suggest that team is wasting its time, but I could not in all conscience recommend it to anyone until I've seen some major progress on those big mobile-related issues.
I'm sorry, I must have misheard you. Which part of Skype trying to claim that the GPL violates antitrust statutes doesn't sound like "being a prick"?
They just listened better, when the judge told them to STOP being a prick.
I am very disappointed with Skype, myself.
1-2 days? Luxury.
:)
I have a broken Dell laptop, also my primary work machine. Dell is now three weeks late, given the very expensive "next business day" guarantee I paid so much for.
Suppose I should count myself lucky. This particular machine took more than HALF A YEAR to arrive. Six months of fighting with the "support" dept for it to arrive - it was a replacement for another, which was stolen but covered under CompleteCare (hah!).
I have never had a customer experience like it, and never will again. Spent thousands of UK pounds on Dell kit over the years in a corporate role, but now that I'm a consumer/SMB, I get treated like utter and complete crap. That was the last dime they'll get out of me.
This particular Dell laptop, by the way, before being completely non-functional, has had separate onsite replacements of its hard disk, motherboard, bluetooth module, and internal speakers. So apart from the horrendous customer service, I also have a couple of concerns about their build quality right now.
So be very, very grateful for your 1-2 days repair estimate. My next machine will be a Mac, and I consider stories like yours to be ringing endorsements
Working in print media, I can safely tell you that I've never worked with photographers like this. All commissioned photography is taken under contracts that include all the necessary copyright permissions (we usually but exclusively use "all rights" contracts because we publish online and in print, and online is global) and always, without exception, result in us getting the processed image files in suitable digital form.
Not RAW files though, which you might think you want but you probably don't really. Part of what I expect a photographer to do for me is correct the RAW image and give me a high res JPG or TIFF. He knows better than my production dept what colour correction needs to be done - they can tweak it later but the initial work on the RAW file is part of what I'm paying the photographer for.
So maybe you need to look up some freelance photographers in your area who work with print media and understand what's what. Expect to pay a lot more than you might think - a good photographer, complete with preproduction work and all rights handed over, is probably orders of magnitude more expensive than the family studio on the corner whose business is the low-margin, high volume opposite.
The media gets promo copies of games long before retail. With about six weeks of editorial planning, that's plenty of time to get a game, play it, review it and print the review before the game's on shelves. Mileage varies - some publishers ship you the game when they ship to distributors, so the lead time is too tight for that. Others are much better. It also depends on how much they're hoping to hype any particular game, of course, and there are many factors at work.
But to answer your point: yes, it's certainly possible for a magazine to review a game before it has shipped to retail. And I'm talking final version, not beta or pre-release.
And yes, I do run a consumer magazine that includes game reviews.
Just remove the ones you don't want. Tools, Options, Language Settings, Writing Aids...now untick the ones you don't want in the list. You probably just want the standard dictionary - hit 'edit' to see what the different ones include. 'sun' includes a bunch of Sun product names, and 'soffice' includes OpenOffice terminology. You really don't need them, so just remove them.
You'll still have the submenu, but no confusion about which dictionary's which.
I had to recover data from Word 2.0 files once upon a time. Of course Office XP couldn't open them, but OpenOffice can. Give that a try.
That experience of mine, IMHO, demonstrates exactly why properly open formats are essential. Microsoft's own poor support for its proprietary format would have caused me to lose data.
Why? If a paid contributor posts something you feel is overly biased, just change it, or flag it for deletion, or flag the poster for suspension. Wikipedia is self-correcting, and while that doesn't always work as fast or as effectively as some would like, it _does_ work.
If you don't like it, fix it. Don't bitch about it.
Why is that bad design? "Something is broken. Please provide evidence that it is fixed." Seems like a logical solution to the problem to me.
Unless you're working on the assumption that a PC should be able to start up sans keyboard, which in the modern age of PC servers is not unreasonable, but in the early days of PCs? I don't think so.
Call me suspicious, but hey. I AM suspicious of anything that looks like an email chain letter, even one espousing a good cause.
C'mon Tim, if you're out there: prove me wrong :)
Nonsense. There are plenty of good forensics tools which deal with Linux/Unix, Apple, and various PDA systems. Plenty of open source forensics tools, for that matter, many of which are Linux specific.
http://opensourceforensics.org/
Anyway, what platform a tool runs on makes no difference. Forensic data is acquired to an image which is then taken away for analysis. You never investigate a system in situ, much less using its own operating system. EnCase, probably the best known commercial forensic software, runs on Windows but will happily analyse source data from most common operating systems.