Well, Pro Evolution Soccer isn't affiliated with anything in particular, players' names are often screwed up and the presentation is generally shockingly bad, but it still outsells FIFA because it's the better game. Personally I wish they'd put some of the massive amounts of money they surely must make out of it into producing some menus and in-game commentary that aren't embarrassingly bad, but however slick FIFA is in comparison, you wouldn't buy it, because it just doesn't play as well.
Gangsterism dressed up as political violence is what it was, for the most part. I'd say the ones who genuinely believed they were fighting for a cause were outnumbered ten to one, on both sides, by those caught up in the "glamour" of it, or who simply fell in with the wrong people and got swept along with it. I know some fundamentally decent people, people I'd still probably consider friends, who didn't exactly go picking up guns and shooting people, but who were stupid enough to get involved in the fringes without really understanding what they were getting involved in. I'm sure many a Slashdotter from cities with a significant gang culture could say exactly the same about people they know. They weren't doing it because they believed in it, they were doing it because they thought it was cool.
'Cos that's all it was, when you stand back and look at it: gangs. Forget about the religion or the politics, it's one set of people having a go at another set, and you can dress it up however you like, but really, there wasn't any more sense to it than that.
What's happening in London and Manchester is no different in essence to what was happening in Northern Ireland. You've got people with illegally-held weapons using them against "their own". By which I don't mean a colour of skin, or a religion, or anything like that, just other people operating in the same circles as they are. Generally speaking, with a few very unfortunate exceptions, if you're not involved, it doesn't affect you (directly - the knock-on effects of having people running around killing each other are plain to see). And just like Northern Ireland, it's nowhere near as big as the problem as the media make it seem to people who are isolated from it (I grew up in a pretty rough part of Belfast, by the way, and am still on nodding terms with some seriously nasty people even now, so I know what I'm talking about)
Now, the American pro-gun lobby often use the argument that if guns are criminalised, only criminals will have them. Which is probably true. But as I just said, they'll mostly only use them against people like themselves. I don't think there's a significantly higher number of potential mass murderers in the US than there are in the UK, yet incidents like this one today are far more common in America. The only reason I can see for this is that when somebody comes completely unhinged, it's easier to reach for a gun and commit an atrocity there. Here in the UK, I couldn't do it if I wanted to. Getting access to a gun would be an absolute pain in the backside, and I speak as someone who has a friend who sells rifles for a living.
It's the ease of access to guns, and the ease with which you can pile up dead bodies once you have one, that makes incidents like this more common. I don't see how anybody could argue otherwise. On the other hand, I don't see what you can do about it now, either. The genie's out of the bottle. You're never going to take those guns back off people. It's part of the culture. We, on the other hand, never had them in the first place, and I think that even if we suddenly had gun laws like America's tomorrow, we wouldn't be going out and buying them either.
All this is a long-winded way of saying "I agree">
I saw some stats on this just this very day, and it's somewhere less than 7% of all visitors to this particular (very, very large and probably fairly representative of the populace as a whole) website. And that's being generous, because those clients which don't provide their resolution are assumed to be 800x600.
But then 720p, which is most content, has to be scaled up, and when there's one-and-a-half real pixels representing each pixel of the picture being presented to the screen, it's never going to look too good.
Have you ever seen standard-definition content on an HDTV that isn't made of glass? It is unwatchable. This is why I really don't get why people are rushing out to buy HDTVs - 95% of the content available to watch on it is standard def and looks awful, and plenty of hi-def stuff looks worse than it could too, because it has to be scaled to fit the resolution of the screen.
Actually I'd rather know how it does 30-70 in gear, as that's the kind of acceleration I actually need - getting up to speed for joining a motorway. Blasting away from the lights is strictly for boy racers, and how fast my car does it is of no practical value to me.
Man, are you still bleating like a stuck pig about this? You know, with the sheer amount of effort you've put into this whine over the past months, you probably could have rewritten Grub from the ground up.
There are plans afoot to harness the ridiculously powerful tides of Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland, and build a turbine of similar generating power to this contraption. The tide there sometimes moves as fast as you can jog.Here's a BBC report on it.
I believe it's also more processor-intensive, so you need faster hardware to do the decoding. It's certainly harder on the batteries in any device that can handle it. On the upside, it's more space-efficient and sounds massively better bit-for-bit, even compared to LAME's best efforts.
Anyway, moral of the story is: go buy a Samsung Z5. Near enough the same size as an iPod Nano, more solidly built, and just as nice UI-wise, but with more functionality, and about twice the battery life. Sounds great, too. Oh, and it's a fair bit cheaper. Yes, it does Ogg.
I've used every version of Windows since 1.0, and I don't remember Microsoft ever making anything more efficient in all that time. Actually, no, possibly Windows 98 was a bit snappier than 95, but apart from that it's been bloat all the way. I don't see this changing.
Actually, they're not just eye candy. All that swooping and zooming helps people understand where things have gone when they disappear from the screen, and how the system organises things. That "genie effect" you get when you minimise a window certainly could be the boring old flying-corners thing we've had for ages, but if it's not going to have a detrimental effect on usability, why not make things pretty? If I'm going to spend many hours a day using a computer, I'd like it to be as pleasant as possible to use, and they seem to understand that.
I do wish they'd separate active applications and the icons to launch them, though. That tiny arrow pointing to the apps which you have open just isn't sufficient.
Many of you have pointed this out - does it vary from country to country? Because I've just started using a Mac at work these last two weeks, and I too was going crackers without having this keyboard shortcut, till I asked an old Mac hand and he told me to press Command and tilde (~). My keyboard's British.
I'd say the last thing you want if you're doing some serious bogtrotting is for your vehicle to be hunting up and down the gears till it finds one that sticks. Modern automatic transmissions are smart, but people are smarter.
Oh, hang on - they never get taken off road, do they? You're quite right. Carry on.
Ha. If you thought the UK was an extortionately expensive place to live, wait till you see what Dublin has in store for you. Ireland's got plenty going against it too, particularly, for me, the staggeringly corrupt banana-republic approach of the government.
The main problem with it is that it's a lovely idea, but completely contrary to human nature. Man is greedy and competitive and mistrustful of his neighbours. Sharing and co-operating and acting in the common interest just aren't practicable for us. On an intellectual level we can all easily accept that it's the most sensible course of action, but when it comes down to it, we all want wealth and power and we're prepared to screw our fellow man to get them, and in the end there's nothing anybody can do about that.
Likewise. It's just a purely mechanical process - grind it out till it's all filled in. I don't find it satisfying in the least. Give me a good cryptic crossword any day - I put the popularity of sudoku down to the fact that, unlike crosswords, you don't actually need to know anything to be able to do one.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Pro Evolution Soccer isn't affiliated with anything in particular, players' names are often screwed up and the presentation is generally shockingly bad, but it still outsells FIFA because it's the better game. Personally I wish they'd put some of the massive amounts of money they surely must make out of it into producing some menus and in-game commentary that aren't embarrassingly bad, but however slick FIFA is in comparison, you wouldn't buy it, because it just doesn't play as well.
Gangsterism dressed up as political violence is what it was, for the most part. I'd say the ones who genuinely believed they were fighting for a cause were outnumbered ten to one, on both sides, by those caught up in the "glamour" of it, or who simply fell in with the wrong people and got swept along with it. I know some fundamentally decent people, people I'd still probably consider friends, who didn't exactly go picking up guns and shooting people, but who were stupid enough to get involved in the fringes without really understanding what they were getting involved in. I'm sure many a Slashdotter from cities with a significant gang culture could say exactly the same about people they know. They weren't doing it because they believed in it, they were doing it because they thought it was cool.
'Cos that's all it was, when you stand back and look at it: gangs. Forget about the religion or the politics, it's one set of people having a go at another set, and you can dress it up however you like, but really, there wasn't any more sense to it than that.
What's happening in London and Manchester is no different in essence to what was happening in Northern Ireland. You've got people with illegally-held weapons using them against "their own". By which I don't mean a colour of skin, or a religion, or anything like that, just other people operating in the same circles as they are. Generally speaking, with a few very unfortunate exceptions, if you're not involved, it doesn't affect you (directly - the knock-on effects of having people running around killing each other are plain to see). And just like Northern Ireland, it's nowhere near as big as the problem as the media make it seem to people who are isolated from it (I grew up in a pretty rough part of Belfast, by the way, and am still on nodding terms with some seriously nasty people even now, so I know what I'm talking about)
Now, the American pro-gun lobby often use the argument that if guns are criminalised, only criminals will have them. Which is probably true. But as I just said, they'll mostly only use them against people like themselves. I don't think there's a significantly higher number of potential mass murderers in the US than there are in the UK, yet incidents like this one today are far more common in America. The only reason I can see for this is that when somebody comes completely unhinged, it's easier to reach for a gun and commit an atrocity there. Here in the UK, I couldn't do it if I wanted to. Getting access to a gun would be an absolute pain in the backside, and I speak as someone who has a friend who sells rifles for a living.
It's the ease of access to guns, and the ease with which you can pile up dead bodies once you have one, that makes incidents like this more common. I don't see how anybody could argue otherwise. On the other hand, I don't see what you can do about it now, either. The genie's out of the bottle. You're never going to take those guns back off people. It's part of the culture. We, on the other hand, never had them in the first place, and I think that even if we suddenly had gun laws like America's tomorrow, we wouldn't be going out and buying them either.
All this is a long-winded way of saying "I agree">
I saw some stats on this just this very day, and it's somewhere less than 7% of all visitors to this particular (very, very large and probably fairly representative of the populace as a whole) website. And that's being generous, because those clients which don't provide their resolution are assumed to be 800x600.
Sure you could. I mean, you can see the difference on a laptop monitor, and they're a lot smaller than that.
But then 720p, which is most content, has to be scaled up, and when there's one-and-a-half real pixels representing each pixel of the picture being presented to the screen, it's never going to look too good.
Have you ever seen standard-definition content on an HDTV that isn't made of glass? It is unwatchable. This is why I really don't get why people are rushing out to buy HDTVs - 95% of the content available to watch on it is standard def and looks awful, and plenty of hi-def stuff looks worse than it could too, because it has to be scaled to fit the resolution of the screen.
Actually I'd rather know how it does 30-70 in gear, as that's the kind of acceleration I actually need - getting up to speed for joining a motorway. Blasting away from the lights is strictly for boy racers, and how fast my car does it is of no practical value to me.
I dunno, I quite like the idea of taking a swim in my savings, like Scrooge McDuck.
Not so fast, pardner - I mean, your wife didn't immediately kick you to the kerb when she took delivery of her Rampant Rabbit, did she?
Man, are you still bleating like a stuck pig about this? You know, with the sheer amount of effort you've put into this whine over the past months, you probably could have rewritten Grub from the ground up.
Any chance of you putting a sock in it?
What on earth are we going to do with this now that Johnny Cash is dead? Eh?
There are plans afoot to harness the ridiculously powerful tides of Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland, and build a turbine of similar generating power to this contraption. The tide there sometimes moves as fast as you can jog.Here's a BBC report on it.
Yeah, Musepack's great, but if you thought Ogg Vorbis was poorly supported on hardware, you ain't seen nuthin' yet...
I believe it's also more processor-intensive, so you need faster hardware to do the decoding. It's certainly harder on the batteries in any device that can handle it. On the upside, it's more space-efficient and sounds massively better bit-for-bit, even compared to LAME's best efforts.
Anyway, moral of the story is: go buy a Samsung Z5. Near enough the same size as an iPod Nano, more solidly built, and just as nice UI-wise, but with more functionality, and about twice the battery life. Sounds great, too. Oh, and it's a fair bit cheaper. Yes, it does Ogg.
I've used every version of Windows since 1.0, and I don't remember Microsoft ever making anything more efficient in all that time. Actually, no, possibly Windows 98 was a bit snappier than 95, but apart from that it's been bloat all the way. I don't see this changing.
Actually, they're not just eye candy. All that swooping and zooming helps people understand where things have gone when they disappear from the screen, and how the system organises things. That "genie effect" you get when you minimise a window certainly could be the boring old flying-corners thing we've had for ages, but if it's not going to have a detrimental effect on usability, why not make things pretty? If I'm going to spend many hours a day using a computer, I'd like it to be as pleasant as possible to use, and they seem to understand that.
I do wish they'd separate active applications and the icons to launch them, though. That tiny arrow pointing to the apps which you have open just isn't sufficient.
Many of you have pointed this out - does it vary from country to country? Because I've just started using a Mac at work these last two weeks, and I too was going crackers without having this keyboard shortcut, till I asked an old Mac hand and he told me to press Command and tilde (~). My keyboard's British.
I'd say the last thing you want if you're doing some serious bogtrotting is for your vehicle to be hunting up and down the gears till it finds one that sticks. Modern automatic transmissions are smart, but people are smarter.
Oh, hang on - they never get taken off road, do they? You're quite right. Carry on.
Ha. If you thought the UK was an extortionately expensive place to live, wait till you see what Dublin has in store for you. Ireland's got plenty going against it too, particularly, for me, the staggeringly corrupt banana-republic approach of the government.
No. This picture is what's being alluded to.
The main problem with it is that it's a lovely idea, but completely contrary to human nature. Man is greedy and competitive and mistrustful of his neighbours. Sharing and co-operating and acting in the common interest just aren't practicable for us. On an intellectual level we can all easily accept that it's the most sensible course of action, but when it comes down to it, we all want wealth and power and we're prepared to screw our fellow man to get them, and in the end there's nothing anybody can do about that.
Likewise. It's just a purely mechanical process - grind it out till it's all filled in. I don't find it satisfying in the least. Give me a good cryptic crossword any day - I put the popularity of sudoku down to the fact that, unlike crosswords, you don't actually need to know anything to be able to do one.
Does it say "Aboot Netscape" in the Help menu?
Dialling numbers whilst driving is what the built-in voice recognition is for. Use it before you kill somebody.