"It appears that the initial licensing was written with a heavy emphasis on CYA, without much thought to whether or not people would agree to it.
Microsoft listened to our arguments, and adjusted the licensing to be friendlier within a day or two."
So Microsoft lets their lawyers create the most greedy, all-encompassing license imaginable, and then passes it on to marketing so they can tweak it down until it rests on the threshold of public tolerance. Now that's what I call a company looking out for their customers. OK, maybe not.
Never mind USB. Despite years of patches, fixes, and upgrades, I *still* have to tell Win98 that I'd like to remove a PCMCIA device, so it can then *allow* me to remove it.
Let's say that Microsoft released financial software for the XBox and people chose to buy and use it. Should Microsoft's centralized database ever get hacked, it would not be a security issue; it would simply be natural selection.:)
MiB = Men in Black
KiB = Kids in Black, the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff.
Seriously, though, I would think that these terms are not meant for the consumer at all. Aren't they simply proposing SI units that reflect the actual "power of two" size, and leaving the original metric "power of ten" approximations for the unwashed masses?
MB and GB won't go away; we can still use them to comfort us when we're feeling down.
...that, should the removal of debris from the moon cause any problems with its orbit or our environment, then we should be terribly concerned about the millions of pounds of cosmic dust that settles on the Earth (and the Moon) each year.
1) When it comes to the best interests of the consumer, never trust any product or service that Microsoft offers for free. It means they're up to something.
2) When it comes to security, never trust any product or service that Microsoft offers.
3) Never trust a company that has more than enough wealth to find anyone's price, not to mention be able to fund lawsuits indefinitely.
It strikes me as odd that, in these days of encryption systems being broken mere weeks after their debut, no one has yet managed to crack the Microsoft Word file format.
Why do they always throw acid in the face of the villian in those horror movies when there are so many other interesting things to use? I suppose the necessary exposition would kind of bog down the story a bit. Unless it was a documentary or something.:-)
...before we consider invading Mars. Remember what happened when they invaded us.:)
"You can argue at length as to how likely it is. But at the end of the day, if you think about the potential of what's really at stake, it's humanity versus a microbe," Lee said.
"Sergei gets a run in on the TVIS, and it is making its clacking noise again. Yuri follows with a session, and a piece of slat breaks off and gets caught in the rear cover, and comes completely out of the tread. We take pictures and send them down. TVIS is out of commission until the long tread slat replacement procedure can be run."
One on't flay rods has gone out of skew on treddle.
Although I think you're overreacting a bit, I do agree with your "priesthood" metaphor.
Long before the internet, when all my programming was done in EDU27 BASIC on a PDP-8 with 16K using cards marked with pencil, I remember a time when I could sit in a restaurant (or any other public place) and, if someone even mentioned the word "computer", my head would snap up from my notes and I would glance around to see who it was. That was a very rare event, indeed.
Most of the time I would try to eavesdrop to determine whether or not they knew what they were talking about.:)
Nowadays people just can't appreciate a christmas tree made out of hundreds of asterisks. The magic is gone...
I remember as a child, before anyone had a personal computer, the very first desktop computer I ever saw.
I was wandering through the Museum of Man and Nature in Winnipeg, Manitoba and there against a wall, where once there had been nothing at all, was (literally) a pedestal. Upon this pedestal lay a small desktop computer. I don't even remember what kind of computer it was (I think it may have been a TRS-80, but I'm not entirely sure).
It was running a simple game (written in BASIC, although I did not know that at the time) in which the "computer" was thinking of a number from 1 to 10 and you had three tries to guess it.
There was no sign describing this strange contraption, and I have a vague recollection of inadvertently stopping the program somehow.
In retrospect, seeing my first computer on a pedestal in a museum seems somehow... prophetic. On one or two levels, even.:)
Many years ago, the Mindset was introduced. I can't remember the year, but I remember drooling over an article in Byte covering its features. It looked like a typical x86 box, but had some extra graphics hardware (my recollection is sketchy at best). I do remember rather wanting one, but that article was the last I heard of the thing. It had a very short lifespan.
Pauvre little Mindset. Does anyone recall any details?
Good lord, someone better ask Doug Miller at Microsoft how it is that a Windows-compatible device like the Dreamcast can sink like a stone while the Linux-based PS2 lives on.
I mean, how on earth can this happen? It's Microsoft Windows CE-compatible, for god's sake!
I can speak as someone who is not blinded by irrational patriotism toward a single gaming platform (i.e., "PS2 RULEZ! DC SUCKZ", etc, etc). I have a Dreamcast and a PS2 (and an N64, Genesis, Saturn, and SNES. Oh, and a PC as well:). This puts me in a position to buy great games regardless of what platform their released for. This does not, unfortunately, mean that I always buy good games.
I bought Seaman during my wait for Shenmue. It sucks. Seaman is just an arrogant asshole who rewards your hard work and tender care by flinging his excrement at you. Very little room for error means starting over at least once, which I was uninclined to do. I was perfectly nice to Seaman all the time. However, I think he turned into an asshole because he kept misinterpreting my pleasant greetings as insults of some kind. (e.g., Me: "How are you today, Seaman?" Seaman: "How rude!"). In the end the game was more creepy than fun.
Then I got Shenmue, which sucks. It sucks for a number of reasons:
- The user interface was designed by a perfectly competent person who has just had fourteen martinis, and this person should never be allowed to work in the games business ever again. It would seem obvious that the analog controller would be perfect for moving the guy about in a 3D world, and then you hold down some other button to put the A/C in "look-around" mode. But, no, you can _only_ move around using the D-pad, and very awkwardly (rather than turning you incrementally, pressing left turns you ninety degrees). This "having to enter zoom mode in order to be able to manipulate anything in the world" concept is also irritating, and pointless.
Also, they provide the analog right trigger as a means to control how fast the guy walks/runs, but there are only three speeds: walking, jogging, and full-out running. Jogging is difficult to do because they have mapped it into the 43-44% range on the trigger. 44% is running. Using an analog control for this was a waste of time. Oh yes, you are unable to customise these absurd controls in any way.
- 90% of the voice acting is bad, as if the people reading the lines are having difficulty reading the lines. Everyone speaks slowly and conversations between characters doesn't flow very well. The dialogue is boring (especially at the beginning, where it's kind of important in order to draw the player into the story, which it doesn't), and these simple, banal conversations are painfully long. Combine this with the fact that game time flows constantly (roughly 1 minute of game time per second of real time) and you have the interesting situation where I can run all the way back to my home across three towns in about fifteen minutes, but it takes half an hour to ask someone a simple question.
- The character models are very good and very detailed (although really using only textures to achieve this - doesn't look like very many polygons were used for each character). However, everybody's face has one (count 'em, one!) expression - it never changes. The only part of the face that animates is the mouth, which does so using very lame linear interpolation. Also, if there's any attempt at lip-synch going on, I couldn't detect it.
So I wandered around three towns asking millions of people, with unfamiliar names I couldn't remember, the same question over and over again, before I ultimately gnawed my own arm off in an attempt to escape from this rediculously dull game.
P.S. I'm not anti-Dreamcast. I still think Soul Calibur for DC is possibly the best fighting game there is. But really, Shenmue and Seaman are dogs (I'm certain that if I had kids, I would be very concerned about letting them play with Seaman - that is one creepy game).
I had to deal with this problem a while ago and here's what I came up with.
I created a spreadsheet containing the following columns:
- Phrase group ID name - Phrase ID name - The actual phrase to be translated (in English) - Description of phrase explaining context (in English - this helps translators for sentence fragments that have multiple potential contexts in other languages) - One column for each language that will contain the translated phrases.
The spreadsheet is e-mailed around to translators who fill out the appropriate column, and new columns can be added whenever another language needs to be supported (You can even make up your own "Dilbert-speak" or other fictional language:).
The spreadsheet, aside from containing simple phrases and sentences, also contains other language-specific elements, such as currency punctuation and other appropriate marks (like double quotes, for example).
I then wrote a perl script that parsed the spreadsheet data, creating a large nested hash table. It was grouped first by language, then by group ID, then finally by entry ID. This script then wrote out conversion tables consisting of entry ID/translated phrase pairs. It used the Headings for each language column in the spreadsheet as the name for each language directory. What was written was something like this:
ProjectDir -> English -> account.hash general.hash signin.hash Spanish -> account.hash general.hash signin.hash German -> account.hash general.hash signin.hash
...etc. Each language directory contains a hash table for each phrase group (I break the phrases into groups to avoid having to load all of the phrases all of the time). I also used these language directories to store language-specific images.
Now I create the HTML pages (I use a simple text editor). Whenever I specify a text phrase I say something like this:
My cgi scripts, written in perl, first initialise the localization code by loading the appropriate hash tables (the correct pathname is determined through another hash table using the customer's selected language of preference). Then, whenever a page is to be output, it is read into a variable which is passed to a function like this, which substitutes each entry ID in curly braces with its translated phrase (my regex "skillz" are not terribly "l33t", sorry):
Note that any text in curly braces found in the translated phrase is interpreted as user information data and filled out in the same fashion (but from a different hash table). This is to accomodate changes in word order from language to language that cause parameters in translated phrases to change order.
There are still problems with this method, as it doesn't address problems like text printed right to left, or up to down (or both). But it was a suitable solution for my needs. Hope this helps.
Someone can carry one of these little devices into a KFC and settle the "is it eleven herbs and spices or just monosodium glutemate and pepper?" argument.:)
Constructive criticism is a good thing, but you're just being silly.
You're crying "Discrimination!" against people with non-Windows backgrounds. That's like saying a company that manufactures washing machines discriminates against people who grew up washing their clothes by hand.
If you're so intent on snubbing your nose at KDE (and GUIs in general it appears), why don't you just stop running X and live solely in the world of the command line?
I come from a Windows background and I MUCH prefer Linux, despite being a bit frustrated with it at times. I have to say that some of your claims seem hypocritical to me. You complain that many aspects of KDE's design are non-intuitive, but look at Unix! grep? cat? emacs? How intuitive is that? There's a mount program called "mount", but the unmount program is called "umount". That's not very intuitive. In fact, it discriminates against people who grew up having to spell words correctly.
One person's sense is another person's nonsense. Linux people want everyone to use Linux, but the only remaining people not using it are predominantly Windows and Mac users. You can't gain their favour without bending to their needs and wants. This is what I believe the KDE team is trying to do. *nix veterans (such as yourself) may not like this inevitable turn of events, but hey, you don't have to use KDE. Or Gnome. Or any GUI. You can just use the command line if you want. Isn't Linux great?
Slashdot Mirror
BAISIANNBALA = "But Again I State I Am Not (Not Being a Lawyer) Accurate"?
Did I win anything?
So Microsoft lets their lawyers create the most greedy, all-encompassing license imaginable, and then passes it on to marketing so they can tweak it down until it rests on the threshold of public tolerance. Now that's what I call a company looking out for their customers. OK, maybe not.
Never mind USB. Despite years of patches, fixes, and upgrades, I *still* have to tell Win98 that I'd like to remove a PCMCIA device, so it can then *allow* me to remove it.
Let's say that Microsoft released financial software for the XBox and people chose to buy and use it. Should Microsoft's centralized database ever get hacked, it would not be a security issue; it would simply be natural selection. :)
From the paper:
"...it is an error to assume that a secret, distributed along with the information it guards, is never revealed."I don't know about that. It seems to have worked for the Word file format.
...to end up working on crappy embedded systems.
Traipsing through dictionary.com, we find the following definitions for "gigabyte"...
The American Heritage dictionary can't decide:
gigabyte (jg-bt, gg-) n.
1. A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to 1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
2. One billion bytes.
Princeton University's WordNet decided to decide:
gigabyte n : a unit of information equal to one billion (1,000,000,000) bytes or one thousand megabytes.
The Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing chose the power or two, but went "outside the box" when it came to a definition:
2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1024 megabytes.
Roughly the amount of data required to encode a human gene sequence (including all the redundant codons).
MiB = Men in Black
KiB = Kids in Black, the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff.
Seriously, though, I would think that these terms are not meant for the consumer at all. Aren't they simply proposing SI units that reflect the actual "power of two" size, and leaving the original metric "power of ten" approximations for the unwashed masses?
MB and GB won't go away; we can still use them to comfort us when we're feeling down.
...that, should the removal of debris from the moon cause any problems with its orbit or our environment, then we should be terribly concerned about the millions of pounds of cosmic dust that settles on the Earth (and the Moon) each year.
...I thought for the longest time that the enemies said, "Froynlaven!" when they died. :)
1) When it comes to the best interests of the consumer, never trust any product or service that Microsoft offers for free. It means they're up to something.
2) When it comes to security, never trust any product or service that Microsoft offers.
3) Never trust a company that has more than enough wealth to find anyone's price, not to mention be able to fund lawsuits indefinitely.
It strikes me as odd that, in these days of encryption systems being broken mere weeks after their debut, no one has yet managed to crack the Microsoft Word file format.
...or is it meant to succeed it? :)
Why do they always throw acid in the face of the villian in those horror movies when there are so many other interesting things to use? I suppose the necessary exposition would kind of bog down the story a bit. Unless it was a documentary or something. :-)
How do they get the powder onto the filter paper (i.e., set up the experiment) without detonating the stuff?
One on't flay rods has gone out of skew on treddle.
Although I think you're overreacting a bit, I do agree with your "priesthood" metaphor.
:)
Long before the internet, when all my programming was done in EDU27 BASIC on a PDP-8 with 16K using cards marked with pencil, I remember a time when I could sit in a restaurant (or any other public place) and, if someone even mentioned the word "computer", my head would snap up from my notes and I would glance around to see who it was. That was a very rare event, indeed.
Most of the time I would try to eavesdrop to determine whether or not they knew what they were talking about.
Nowadays people just can't appreciate a christmas tree made out of hundreds of asterisks. The magic is gone...
I remember as a child, before anyone had a personal computer, the very first desktop computer I ever saw.
:)
I was wandering through the Museum of Man and Nature in Winnipeg, Manitoba and there against a wall, where once there had been nothing at all, was (literally) a pedestal. Upon this pedestal lay a small desktop computer. I don't even remember what kind of computer it was (I think it may have been a TRS-80, but I'm not entirely sure).
It was running a simple game (written in BASIC, although I did not know that at the time) in which the "computer" was thinking of a number from 1 to 10 and you had three tries to guess it.
There was no sign describing this strange contraption, and I have a vague recollection of inadvertently stopping the program somehow.
In retrospect, seeing my first computer on a pedestal in a museum seems somehow... prophetic. On one or two levels, even.
Many years ago, the Mindset was introduced. I can't remember the year, but I remember drooling over an article in Byte covering its features. It looked like a typical x86 box, but had some extra graphics hardware (my recollection is sketchy at best). I do remember rather wanting one, but that article was the last I heard of the thing. It had a very short lifespan. Pauvre little Mindset. Does anyone recall any details?
Good lord, someone better ask Doug Miller at Microsoft how it is that a Windows-compatible device like the Dreamcast can sink like a stone while the Linux-based PS2 lives on. I mean, how on earth can this happen? It's Microsoft Windows CE-compatible, for god's sake!
I can speak as someone who is not blinded by irrational patriotism toward a single gaming platform (i.e., "PS2 RULEZ! DC SUCKZ", etc, etc). I have a Dreamcast and a PS2 (and an N64, Genesis, Saturn, and SNES. Oh, and a PC as well :). This puts me in a position to buy great games regardless of what platform their released for. This does not, unfortunately, mean that I always buy good games.
I bought Seaman during my wait for Shenmue. It sucks. Seaman is just an arrogant asshole who rewards your hard work and tender care by flinging his excrement at you. Very little room for error means starting over at least once, which I was uninclined to do. I was perfectly nice to Seaman all the time. However, I think he turned into an asshole because he kept misinterpreting my pleasant greetings as insults of some kind. (e.g., Me: "How are you today, Seaman?" Seaman: "How rude!"). In the end the game was more creepy than fun.
Then I got Shenmue, which sucks. It sucks for a number of reasons:
- The user interface was designed by a perfectly competent person who has just had fourteen martinis, and this person should never be allowed to work in the games business ever again. It would seem obvious that the analog controller would be perfect for moving the guy about in a 3D world, and then you hold down some other button to put the A/C in "look-around" mode. But, no, you can _only_ move around using the D-pad, and very awkwardly (rather than turning you incrementally, pressing left turns you ninety degrees). This "having to enter zoom mode in order to be able to manipulate anything in the world" concept is also irritating, and pointless.
Also, they provide the analog right trigger as a means to control how fast the guy walks/runs, but there are only three speeds: walking, jogging, and full-out running. Jogging is difficult to do because they have mapped it into the 43-44% range on the trigger. 44% is running. Using an analog control for this was a waste of time. Oh yes, you are unable to customise these absurd controls in any way.
- 90% of the voice acting is bad, as if the people reading the lines are having difficulty reading the lines. Everyone speaks slowly and conversations between characters doesn't flow very well. The dialogue is boring (especially at the beginning, where it's kind of important in order to draw the player into the story, which it doesn't), and these simple, banal conversations are painfully long. Combine this with the fact that game time flows constantly (roughly 1 minute of game time per second of real time) and you have the interesting situation where I can run all the way back to my home across three towns in about fifteen minutes, but it takes half an hour to ask someone a simple question.
- The character models are very good and very detailed (although really using only textures to achieve this - doesn't look like very many polygons were used for each character). However, everybody's face has one (count 'em, one!) expression - it never changes. The only part of the face that animates is the mouth, which does so using very lame linear interpolation. Also, if there's any attempt at lip-synch going on, I couldn't detect it.
So I wandered around three towns asking millions of people, with unfamiliar names I couldn't remember, the same question over and over again, before I ultimately gnawed my own arm off in an attempt to escape from this rediculously dull game.
P.S. I'm not anti-Dreamcast. I still think Soul Calibur for DC is possibly the best fighting game there is. But really, Shenmue and Seaman are dogs (I'm certain that if I had kids, I would be very concerned about letting them play with Seaman - that is one creepy game).
Cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I add
I had to deal with this problem a while ago and here's what I came up with.
:).
I created a spreadsheet containing the following columns:
- Phrase group ID name
- Phrase ID name
- The actual phrase to be translated (in English)
- Description of phrase explaining context (in English - this helps translators for sentence fragments that have multiple potential contexts in other languages)
- One column for each language that will contain the translated phrases.
The spreadsheet is e-mailed around to translators who fill out the appropriate column, and new columns can be added whenever another language needs to be supported (You can even make up your own "Dilbert-speak" or other fictional language
The spreadsheet, aside from containing simple phrases and sentences, also contains other language-specific elements, such as currency punctuation and other appropriate marks (like double quotes, for example).
I then wrote a perl script that parsed the spreadsheet data, creating a large nested hash table. It was grouped first by language, then by group ID, then finally by entry ID. This script then wrote out conversion tables consisting of entry ID/translated phrase pairs. It used the Headings for each language column in the spreadsheet as the name for each language directory. What was written was something like this:
ProjectDir -> English -> account.hash
general.hash
signin.hash
Spanish -> account.hash
general.hash
signin.hash
German -> account.hash
general.hash
signin.hash
...etc. Each language directory contains a hash table for each phrase group (I break the phrases into groups to avoid having to load all of the phrases all of the time). I also used these language directories to store language-specific images.
Now I create the HTML pages (I use a simple text editor). Whenever I specify a text phrase I say something like this:
...INPUT TYPE=RESET VALUE="{SIGN_IN_CLEAR}"...
...INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT NAME="ACTION" VALUE="{SIGN_IN_CHG_PW}"...
...INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT NAME="ACTION" VALUE="{SIGN_IN}"...
My cgi scripts, written in perl, first initialise the localization code by loading the appropriate hash tables (the correct pathname is determined through another hash table using the customer's selected language of preference). Then, whenever a page is to be output, it is read into a variable which is passed to a function like this, which substitutes each entry ID in curly braces with its translated phrase (my regex "skillz" are not terribly "l33t", sorry):
sub sendHTML
{
my $content = shift;
$content =~ s/(\{)([A-Z|0-9|_]+)(\})/translate($2)/ge;
print $content;
}
The translate() function is equally simple. It uses the ID to look up the phrase from the locale hash table:
sub translate
{
my $key = shift;
my $s = $GV{textStrings}{$key};
$s =~ s/(\{)([A-Z|0-9|_]+)(\})/$GV{userData}{$2}/ge;
return $s;
}
Note that any text in curly braces found in the translated phrase is interpreted as user information data and filled out in the same fashion (but from a different hash table). This is to accomodate changes in word order from language to language that cause parameters in translated phrases to change order.
There are still problems with this method, as it doesn't address problems like text printed right to left, or up to down (or both). But it was a suitable solution for my needs. Hope this helps.
Someone can carry one of these little devices into a KFC and settle the "is it eleven herbs and spices or just monosodium glutemate and pepper?" argument. :)
Constructive criticism is a good thing, but you're just being silly.
You're crying "Discrimination!" against people with non-Windows backgrounds. That's like saying a company that manufactures washing machines discriminates against people who grew up washing their clothes by hand.
If you're so intent on snubbing your nose at KDE (and GUIs in general it appears), why don't you just stop running X and live solely in the world of the command line?
I come from a Windows background and I MUCH prefer Linux, despite being a bit frustrated with it at times. I have to say that some of your claims seem hypocritical to me. You complain that many aspects of KDE's design are non-intuitive, but look at Unix! grep? cat? emacs? How intuitive is that? There's a mount program called "mount", but the unmount program is called "umount". That's not very intuitive. In fact, it discriminates against people who grew up having to spell words correctly.
One person's sense is another person's nonsense. Linux people want everyone to use Linux, but the only remaining people not using it are predominantly Windows and Mac users. You can't gain their favour without bending to their needs and wants. This is what I believe the KDE team is trying to do. *nix veterans (such as yourself) may not like this inevitable turn of events, but hey, you don't have to use KDE. Or Gnome. Or any GUI. You can just use the command line if you want. Isn't Linux great?
"This is Unix. I know this."