Well, we did get a free school bus when I lived in the country now that I think about it, completely forgot about that. The bus company itself was still private though so it's more like your company hiring taxis for you to commute to work for free, they don't run the show at all, they just pay for it.
So bus companies are run by The State? They're not here in the UK, and I doubt they are in Canada either.
This service seems more like a personals ad messageboard though, to the bus company's brothel. I don't think a carpooling service counts as a transport company.
Hey, if anyone is living in the town centre in Aberdeen, Scotland and wants to carpool to work each day, let me know. *wonders if slashdot is going to get shut down for being an unregulated transport company*
Ubuntu has compiz fusion out of the box (and I installed the Compiz Settings Manager out of the default repositories to tweak the settings).
I have an ATI graphics device but was under the impression that nVidia works fine as well. In fact whenever I've used Linux in the past it's always been with an nVidia card, and the 3D support was a lot better. My ATI card is causing flickering when trying to run windowed OpenGL applications at the same time as Compiz, and a lot of other people report the same issue. Grr.
Anyone of the livecd liking type is likely to be better off with Ubuntu. Well I think so anyway.
You don't need a full LiveCD to do a graphical install, so I don't see what that has to do with anything. Has it occured to you that it might be nothing to do with the installer?
I have gone through plenty of text based installers over the years without issue, they're basically exactly the same as the graphical installers, just the graphical ones aren't as fugly. What's wrong with wanting to make things look better? Not 1337 enough for you?
For me it's always been about being able to test out the distro with your hardware, or just seeing if the latest version is worth upgrading to. You can do that in a VM but that doesn't test with your actual hardware (depending on the solution you're using). The Ubuntu 7 liveCD would just lock up on my machine before it ever got into X, but 8.10 went right on through and even had support for my laptop's wireless card, keyboard backlight and function keys etc, so I knew the driver support was finally good enough.
LiveCDs or USB based distros are also useful for IT support stuff like verifying if some hardware isn't working because of Windows or because it's just plain broken; also for recovering files or performing other maintenance on an OS that won't boot, etc.
Thanks for the info. I must have linked Bioshock to EA because of the link with DRM complaints! I definitely think their games have been improving. I didn't particularly like Need for Speed Pro Street as I think the NFS series is much better suited to free roaming craziness than track racing, and there are already plenty of good track racing games out there. Undercover looks like it will be getting back to the old skool NFS formula, which is nice.
And an AVP mud? Awesome concept. I don't have much time for PC gaming these days, but if I have a relapse on my mudding addiction I'll be sure to check it out:)
Yep, I remember playing the demo. It was disorienting compared to normal games because there was no gravity/'down' to use as a reference, but it was not sickening... I just remember thinking the controls were annoying and probably went straight back to playing Quake..
it's surprising how EA have brought out some fairly original games instead of generic-army-FPS-2009, forcing Acti-Blizzard to step up to the plate to become the new evil, un-inspired publisher for gamers. As long as you stick to consoles, that is. No DRM here..... This generation.....
I've been thinking exactly the same thing. A few of the games I've bought recently have ended up being EA games and I didn't even know until the opening titles (Rock Band and Battlefield: Bad Company on PS3 for example). Then there's Spore, Bioshock and now Mirror's Edge. All fairly good games. The only time DRM has affected me recently was when I couldn't copy my Rock Band saved game when I reformatted my PS3, which was annoying. I was quite proud of completing the drumming set list on Hard, and all but 6 of the setlist songs on Expert - some of those tracks are extremely tiring with the triple bass kicks:/
(I don't think anybody is truly immune, there will be some level that will make a person sick)
I've never had motion sickness when watching a screen, so I just don't really understand that. My mum feels sick just playing racing games (or even being in a real car when it's accelerating briskly). I really don't see how there could be a game that would make me feel ill, I've played games with rollercoasters, spaceships, being propelled to great heights and back down again (like in the final boss battle in Half-Life - that was fun:) ).
I also can read in cars, buses, trains etc. Occasionally it gives me a bit of a sore head doing that, but I don't understand why someone would feel sick just from watching a TV screen (and I've got a 40" 1080p TV). I expect I'd have to be physically moved about as well - in a completely unrelated way to what is happening on-screen - to be made to feel ill.
I do feel a bit queasy with heights IRL, but it's more a fear of falling than dizziness. As long as I have something secure to hold onto I don't mind climbing etc. Just watching a video of heights or drops or whatever doesn't have the same element of fear. 25 years of movies and computer games has let me detach them from reality quite well.
I think Mirror's Edge feels great to play; it flows very well. The camera movement and blurring just feels quite natural to me, more real than most FPSes. I get the feeling that the levels are going to be pretty linear for the most part though, whereas personally I'd prefer if it was more GTA style with the whole city to run around in any way you choose. Still tempted to buy it though, because even linear levels would be fun. I didn't even know what it was until last night so I'm still in the "wow, cool!" phase.
I was using Songbird as it was the only decent music player I could find for OSX. The browser add-on isn't that 'un-focused'. They are obviously using mozilla as a base, because you get the same kind of interface for adding plug-ins and auto updating plugins (I had an alarm clock plugin for example). The main panel is similar to a web browser, and can browse web pages, but is mostly used for displaying music. The web pages come in for online music searches and work quite well. Lyrics, buying music and other things are possible too obviously.
If you aren't interested just because it is based off mozilla, that's pretty silly IMO. I was interested in Songbird because I read it was started by some Winamp developers, and Winamp is my all time favourite media player just for the combination of built in customisation options for playing music, ripping music, listening to radio, dynamic playlists, media library if you want to use that, etc etc. I even registered it! But I no longer use Windows now and I'd prefer to use a native player than go through WINE.
Installed Ubuntu over OSX this week and now am using Exaile. It's almost perfect for my needs - I prefer to use the file system to organise my music (though Songbird's library was almost as good when I ordered it by path and filename). The only thing lacking in Songbird for me was a proper dynamic playlist. I had a plugin that approximated one, but it didn't support arbitrary reordering of music in the playlist. Exaile is great for creating dynamic playlists, and as a bonus it has a plugin for showing your currently playing song in Pidgin. Previously the only apps that supported that feature in Messenger were Windows Media Player and iTunes, and I don't like either of those.
Ah, well that makes some sense, thanks. Having been on the receiving end of feature creep or outright "that's not what we agreed on" after hours of going through design ideas with management or end users, I can see the sense in setting up demo versions before fleshing everything out to make sure it's what people want.
I don't think I'm particularly stupid or bad as a programmer - a bit rough around the edges perhaps because I didn't make the best use I could have of my time at University so I probably have some bad habits from being largely self taught.
As far as prototyping, what do you mean exactly? How does prototyping differ from just coding something up quickly? Does it imply less testing or less design time or what?
In my experience when I dived straight into writing a fairly complex algorithm without thinking fully through the design and how it works first, it turned out being a mess. I once spent a couple of days writing an algorithm for finding random paths through a graph (for some game AI I was doing) that ended up being crazy complicated, and had a seemingly random bug that I spent hours trying to track down. I then went to sleep, woke up the next morning and was able to write a much better (more concise and easy to follow) version with no bugs in an hour or two since I had a better idea of what was involved in the problem. So I've learned from that that more time spent designing before coding really helps. I can fire through the coding very quickly once I have a clear idea of the design.
And if the library you're using has an obscure bug then you could also end up wasting days of work either having to track down a bug or write your own library.. sometimes it will be fine, but sometimes you might not be saving yourself any time at all, depending on whether the library is open source, how many other people have used it and bugfixed it etc.
If you separate out your database code from the interface code then it would make things a lot simpler when it comes to changing the back end.. it shouldn't matter whether you've written it yourself or been using libraries because you'll only have to make changes in one place, and it should be easy to fire through it without too much hassle (unless you're switching to a new database system that has specific SQL quirks in date handling/binary blob handling or that kind of thing).
Personally I've never gone with frameworks though. With each project I work on I try to learn from past experiences to make my code even more modular. I've also been working on web apps with a lot of feature creep recently.. if you don't manage to keep everything simple it quickly becomes a mess keeping track of the changes.
cyberdemons aren't real so you can't vote for them anyway
I beg to differ. Clippy is real. I have seen him with my own eyes. I enlisted the help of a monastery of technopriests to smite him into the fiery pits of disabled preferences.
"There are reasons games have grown slowly compared to other technologies for political outreach. The most important one is also the most obvious: since 2004, online video and social networks have become the big thing, as blogs were four years ago.
Whoever wrote that must seriously have no life, if they really think that everything in the world has to somehow revolve around their little election.
People in positions of authority on a message board for a professional organisation should probably learn how to spell and use common phrases too (it's "one and the same", if he used his brain he could figure out what that actually means and not say "one in the same"). On top of that he is outright lying, saying he didn't mean to imply anything by his original post:
I had a misunderstanding with regards to our new upcoming forums and website and never meant to infer that if we ban or suspend you on the forums, you would be banned in-game as well.
He did mean to infer that otherwise he wouldn't have outright said it. If he didn't bother to check up then he is an idiot (though I suspect he ws just trying to scare people into playing nice, he sounds like the manipulative type who switches between aggressive/brown-nosing at the drop of a hat). Nobody in their right mind would say it is fair for someone who got banned from a forum to have all the games accounts they paid for annulled just because of one moment of trolling, or a mod having a bad day.
Isn't that just a record of when the words windows, linux and apple have been searched for, rather than the actual OS that was being used when they did the search?
Saying your sales are up x% is a gimmick when the entire market is actually up x+3% sure, but when you say my marketshare is up by x%, that's not a gimmick. And Linux's market share is definitely up according to that chart. Vista doesn't particularly count IMO, you have to take Windows as a whole - because those who are used to Windows will often just take Vista with their new machine. You don't get many machines that come with Linux by default, but lots of PCs just come with Vista these days, and obviously a lot of people either don't know the difference between Windows versions, or still want Vista just because it's the latest thing. So for Linux adoption to be on the rise it shows that people are choosing Linux over Windows.
I wonder how much of the Linux adoption was spurred by devices like the EEE PC or Linux based mobile phones, how much was just webservers, and how much is due to more user friendly distros on desktops and laptops? And if they count Linux on mobile phones in their stats, do they count Windows Mobile as Windows? There's also the matter of what websites the stats are gathered from.. I'd love to see the stats google have on OS hits to google for each country they operate in.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we did get a free school bus when I lived in the country now that I think about it, completely forgot about that. The bus company itself was still private though so it's more like your company hiring taxis for you to commute to work for free, they don't run the show at all, they just pay for it.
So bus companies are run by The State? They're not here in the UK, and I doubt they are in Canada either.
This service seems more like a personals ad messageboard though, to the bus company's brothel. I don't think a carpooling service counts as a transport company.
Hey, if anyone is living in the town centre in Aberdeen, Scotland and wants to carpool to work each day, let me know. *wonders if slashdot is going to get shut down for being an unregulated transport company*
Ubuntu has compiz fusion out of the box (and I installed the Compiz Settings Manager out of the default repositories to tweak the settings).
I have an ATI graphics device but was under the impression that nVidia works fine as well. In fact whenever I've used Linux in the past it's always been with an nVidia card, and the 3D support was a lot better. My ATI card is causing flickering when trying to run windowed OpenGL applications at the same time as Compiz, and a lot of other people report the same issue. Grr.
Anyone of the livecd liking type is likely to be better off with Ubuntu. Well I think so anyway.
You don't need a full LiveCD to do a graphical install, so I don't see what that has to do with anything. Has it occured to you that it might be nothing to do with the installer?
I have gone through plenty of text based installers over the years without issue, they're basically exactly the same as the graphical installers, just the graphical ones aren't as fugly. What's wrong with wanting to make things look better? Not 1337 enough for you?
For me it's always been about being able to test out the distro with your hardware, or just seeing if the latest version is worth upgrading to. You can do that in a VM but that doesn't test with your actual hardware (depending on the solution you're using). The Ubuntu 7 liveCD would just lock up on my machine before it ever got into X, but 8.10 went right on through and even had support for my laptop's wireless card, keyboard backlight and function keys etc, so I knew the driver support was finally good enough.
LiveCDs or USB based distros are also useful for IT support stuff like verifying if some hardware isn't working because of Windows or because it's just plain broken; also for recovering files or performing other maintenance on an OS that won't boot, etc.
After the time of posting, all will be judged. And there shall be weeping and mashing of keyboards.
Thanks for the info. I must have linked Bioshock to EA because of the link with DRM complaints! I definitely think their games have been improving. I didn't particularly like Need for Speed Pro Street as I think the NFS series is much better suited to free roaming craziness than track racing, and there are already plenty of good track racing games out there. Undercover looks like it will be getting back to the old skool NFS formula, which is nice.
And an AVP mud? Awesome concept. I don't have much time for PC gaming these days, but if I have a relapse on my mudding addiction I'll be sure to check it out :)
Yep, I remember playing the demo. It was disorienting compared to normal games because there was no gravity/'down' to use as a reference, but it was not sickening... I just remember thinking the controls were annoying and probably went straight back to playing Quake..
I can't remember what it went like, and I just replayed the demo 2 hours ago..
it's surprising how EA have brought out some fairly original games instead of generic-army-FPS-2009, forcing Acti-Blizzard to step up to the plate to become the new evil, un-inspired publisher for gamers. As long as you stick to consoles, that is. No DRM here..... This generation.....
I've been thinking exactly the same thing. A few of the games I've bought recently have ended up being EA games and I didn't even know until the opening titles (Rock Band and Battlefield: Bad Company on PS3 for example). Then there's Spore, Bioshock and now Mirror's Edge. All fairly good games. The only time DRM has affected me recently was when I couldn't copy my Rock Band saved game when I reformatted my PS3, which was annoying. I was quite proud of completing the drumming set list on Hard, and all but 6 of the setlist songs on Expert - some of those tracks are extremely tiring with the triple bass kicks :/
(I don't think anybody is truly immune, there will be some level that will make a person sick)
I've never had motion sickness when watching a screen, so I just don't really understand that. My mum feels sick just playing racing games (or even being in a real car when it's accelerating briskly). I really don't see how there could be a game that would make me feel ill, I've played games with rollercoasters, spaceships, being propelled to great heights and back down again (like in the final boss battle in Half-Life - that was fun :) ).
I also can read in cars, buses, trains etc. Occasionally it gives me a bit of a sore head doing that, but I don't understand why someone would feel sick just from watching a TV screen (and I've got a 40" 1080p TV). I expect I'd have to be physically moved about as well - in a completely unrelated way to what is happening on-screen - to be made to feel ill.
I do feel a bit queasy with heights IRL, but it's more a fear of falling than dizziness. As long as I have something secure to hold onto I don't mind climbing etc. Just watching a video of heights or drops or whatever doesn't have the same element of fear. 25 years of movies and computer games has let me detach them from reality quite well.
I think Mirror's Edge feels great to play; it flows very well. The camera movement and blurring just feels quite natural to me, more real than most FPSes. I get the feeling that the levels are going to be pretty linear for the most part though, whereas personally I'd prefer if it was more GTA style with the whole city to run around in any way you choose. Still tempted to buy it though, because even linear levels would be fun. I didn't even know what it was until last night so I'm still in the "wow, cool!" phase.
I was using Songbird as it was the only decent music player I could find for OSX. The browser add-on isn't that 'un-focused'. They are obviously using mozilla as a base, because you get the same kind of interface for adding plug-ins and auto updating plugins (I had an alarm clock plugin for example). The main panel is similar to a web browser, and can browse web pages, but is mostly used for displaying music. The web pages come in for online music searches and work quite well. Lyrics, buying music and other things are possible too obviously.
If you aren't interested just because it is based off mozilla, that's pretty silly IMO. I was interested in Songbird because I read it was started by some Winamp developers, and Winamp is my all time favourite media player just for the combination of built in customisation options for playing music, ripping music, listening to radio, dynamic playlists, media library if you want to use that, etc etc. I even registered it! But I no longer use Windows now and I'd prefer to use a native player than go through WINE.
Installed Ubuntu over OSX this week and now am using Exaile. It's almost perfect for my needs - I prefer to use the file system to organise my music (though Songbird's library was almost as good when I ordered it by path and filename). The only thing lacking in Songbird for me was a proper dynamic playlist. I had a plugin that approximated one, but it didn't support arbitrary reordering of music in the playlist. Exaile is great for creating dynamic playlists, and as a bonus it has a plugin for showing your currently playing song in Pidgin. Previously the only apps that supported that feature in Messenger were Windows Media Player and iTunes, and I don't like either of those.
Ah, well that makes some sense, thanks. Having been on the receiving end of feature creep or outright "that's not what we agreed on" after hours of going through design ideas with management or end users, I can see the sense in setting up demo versions before fleshing everything out to make sure it's what people want.
I don't think I'm particularly stupid or bad as a programmer - a bit rough around the edges perhaps because I didn't make the best use I could have of my time at University so I probably have some bad habits from being largely self taught.
As far as prototyping, what do you mean exactly? How does prototyping differ from just coding something up quickly? Does it imply less testing or less design time or what?
In my experience when I dived straight into writing a fairly complex algorithm without thinking fully through the design and how it works first, it turned out being a mess. I once spent a couple of days writing an algorithm for finding random paths through a graph (for some game AI I was doing) that ended up being crazy complicated, and had a seemingly random bug that I spent hours trying to track down. I then went to sleep, woke up the next morning and was able to write a much better (more concise and easy to follow) version with no bugs in an hour or two since I had a better idea of what was involved in the problem. So I've learned from that that more time spent designing before coding really helps. I can fire through the coding very quickly once I have a clear idea of the design.
Yeah, I guess I was thinking more about 'patterns' than 'frameworks'.
And if the library you're using has an obscure bug then you could also end up wasting days of work either having to track down a bug or write your own library.. sometimes it will be fine, but sometimes you might not be saving yourself any time at all, depending on whether the library is open source, how many other people have used it and bugfixed it etc.
If you separate out your database code from the interface code then it would make things a lot simpler when it comes to changing the back end.. it shouldn't matter whether you've written it yourself or been using libraries because you'll only have to make changes in one place, and it should be easy to fire through it without too much hassle (unless you're switching to a new database system that has specific SQL quirks in date handling/binary blob handling or that kind of thing).
Personally I've never gone with frameworks though. With each project I work on I try to learn from past experiences to make my code even more modular. I've also been working on web apps with a lot of feature creep recently.. if you don't manage to keep everything simple it quickly becomes a mess keeping track of the changes.
yeah that's why it's already (partially) in use by every auto-updating game on steam and several HL2 mods.
There's an awful lot of superheated water vapour whooshing right over your head there - be careful!
cyberdemons aren't real so you can't vote for them anyway
I beg to differ. Clippy is real. I have seen him with my own eyes. I enlisted the help of a monastery of technopriests to smite him into the fiery pits of disabled preferences.
Exactly.
"There are reasons games have grown slowly compared to other technologies for political outreach. The most important one is also the most obvious: since 2004, online video and social networks have become the big thing, as blogs were four years ago.
Whoever wrote that must seriously have no life, if they really think that everything in the world has to somehow revolve around their little election.
People in positions of authority on a message board for a professional organisation should probably learn how to spell and use common phrases too (it's "one and the same", if he used his brain he could figure out what that actually means and not say "one in the same"). On top of that he is outright lying, saying he didn't mean to imply anything by his original post:
I had a misunderstanding with regards to our new upcoming forums and website and never meant to infer that if we ban or suspend you on the forums, you would be banned in-game as well.
He did mean to infer that otherwise he wouldn't have outright said it. If he didn't bother to check up then he is an idiot (though I suspect he ws just trying to scare people into playing nice, he sounds like the manipulative type who switches between aggressive/brown-nosing at the drop of a hat). Nobody in their right mind would say it is fair for someone who got banned from a forum to have all the games accounts they paid for annulled just because of one moment of trolling, or a mod having a bad day.
Isn't that just a record of when the words windows, linux and apple have been searched for, rather than the actual OS that was being used when they did the search?
joe sexpack
Odds are pretty high that there is a pornstar with this name, but I don't particularly want to check up on it!
Saying your sales are up x% is a gimmick when the entire market is actually up x+3% sure, but when you say my marketshare is up by x%, that's not a gimmick. And Linux's market share is definitely up according to that chart. Vista doesn't particularly count IMO, you have to take Windows as a whole - because those who are used to Windows will often just take Vista with their new machine. You don't get many machines that come with Linux by default, but lots of PCs just come with Vista these days, and obviously a lot of people either don't know the difference between Windows versions, or still want Vista just because it's the latest thing. So for Linux adoption to be on the rise it shows that people are choosing Linux over Windows.
I wonder how much of the Linux adoption was spurred by devices like the EEE PC or Linux based mobile phones, how much was just webservers, and how much is due to more user friendly distros on desktops and laptops? And if they count Linux on mobile phones in their stats, do they count Windows Mobile as Windows? There's also the matter of what websites the stats are gathered from.. I'd love to see the stats google have on OS hits to google for each country they operate in.
Does your computer all of a sudden realize that it can't win and give in and never lock up again?
Your are finally on the path to becoming a true IT warlord - well done! May your digital subjects fear you, and your scheduled tasks never be tardy.
No problem, it is nice to know that acting on my wildly ignorant opinions makes you feel good :p