Then why do you want to run Windows apps? F/OSS offerings for it are fairly limited compared to those available for UNIX-derived OSes.
also you seem to have a comprehension issue - software emulation requires greater processing power, i'm concerned with bloat in terms of storage requirements, which is what i repeatedly complained about. see where i talked about footprint?
Let's see, you're comparing an implementation of the win32 API with an implementation of the POSIX standard, plus assortment of programs and libraries to run an implementation of the win32 API, and you expect both to take the same amount of storage? again, get a clue. You can easily get an usable install of Linux in 500MBs, and a full install with more apps than you can shake a stick at on 1.2 GBs. I know, I've done it on my older laptop. Whereas Windows XP takes around 1.2 GBs IIRC straight out of the box, with only the poor excuse of a browser called IE.
heck, just look at the size difference between utorrent and ktorrent. between vlc and media player classic. between k3b and infrarecorder.
Haven't used the first two, but both VLC and K3B do *so* much more than MPC and infrarecorder it's not even funny, so no, apples and elephants comparison here.
A lot of us use Windows for more than jsut gaming, and we are who are really locked in.
Exactly. Trying to help you is too much trouble for too little gain, so for now you're better off with Windows. Gamers on the other hand, typically have all the stuff they use on Windows available for Linux, except of course for the games themselves, *and* they're usually more open about learning new stuff than your average business PC user, so they're a much better deal from a mindshare point of view.
you know what would be really cool? a linux distro that focused *only* on wine, and windows programs.
For what purpose? giving people a free-as-in-beer Windows? ThePirateBay already does it, and better.
i mean the absolute minimum you could possibly have to get a usable wine session - no underlying desktop environment, no python, no perl, no bsh/zsh/csh, no headers, just the kernel, wine, and popular windows freeware like 7-zip, utorrent, ffdshow, media player classic, dvdshrink, firefox.. a complete replacement for windows that actually runs software that people want and are already familiar with.
Complete? no it wouldn't, and you may want to rephrase your statement anyways because it sounds trollish as hell.
no, i don't want to install a 4.5gb distro. i want linux without all the bloat from crap i'll never ever want nor need to run the windows programs i like, and not the painfully different and bizarrely bloated linux versions.
If you only want to run Windows apps, pray tell, why in the FUCKING world do you want to run Linux? ohh, that's right, you're a cheap ass. Go pay for your own damn software, 'kay? ohhh and yes, you *are* a troll, your last statement is conclusive proof of that fact.
how sad and hilarious, right now i use nothing but open source software on windows, and my footprint is MUCH less than linux to do the same. i tried to install the smallest linux distro i could and still get a usable wine session.. 1gb worth of software later i'm up to the point that xp can do with 250mb.
Check the specs for the Playstation. Try to run ePSXe on a PC with double the specs in every area. Get a clue.
As others have said, Dead Space was not a survival horror game, it was a third person shooter and a pretty poor game at that. It's a pretty sad state when people think games like this are good. Standards certainly have lowered in recent years.
Not really. Let me show you why.
The first thing that annoyed me about it was the fact that your character takes up a full 1/3rd of the screen. People try to make excuses about it making the game more "immersive" but that's a load of crap. If they wanted it to be more immersive they could have just made it first person view. The way it is now it's just obnoxious since you can't actually see anything.
Replace "character takes up a full 1/3rd of the screen" with "camera stays fixed at an odd angle", and you have an excellent description of every Resident Evil game up to 4.
The second thing that annoyed me were the horrid controls. Sluggish mouse movement, sloppy camera control (why does the mouse make the camera rotate around the character instead of just making him turn?) and that you have to use two buttons just to fire your weapon (why wouldn't he always have his gun drawn?).
I'm sorry, were you talking about Resident Evil again? ohh, no, it didn't even *have* camera control.
The next thing that annoyed me was the low quality of the voice actors. Wooden acting, badly written dialogue and paper thin plot are all present. Certainly nothing new in this area.
I knew it, you *are* talking about Resident Evil.
The last thing that annoyed me was the low quality of the visuals. This game looks like it was cranked out of a Russian development house (if you've ever played one of those low quality Russian made games, you'll know exactly what I mean by this). Everything from the terrible design of the main character's suit to the uninspired enemy models and generic metallic "tech" environments that all look exactly the same was poorly done.
Yup, Resident Evil alright.
So no, standards haven't lowered, and we can safely consider Dead Space a member of the survival horror genre. Clunky visuals, third-rate voice acting, stupid dialog, horrid camera angles and nauseating controls are the staples of the genre, even moreso than zombies. In fact, I think TFA says something pretty similar to that.
Your Community Rep is a total dipshit and this stinks of 'publicity stunt', but it does take balls to go against the current industry trend in such a way. I, for one, will buy a boxed copy of this as soon as I get the chance, more than one if it's cheap, and the older games too if there's one still being sold.
Again, thanks for removing the utter shit that is DRM.
one thing they cannot deny is just how solid and reliable console games have been, and continue to be. You put in the cartridge/disc, and the game "Just Works(TM)" from day one. No patches, no bugs, no crashes.
And yet, this is an article about the patch Valve put out to fix a bug in the console version of Left 4 Dead. Not to mention that if you've never had a console game crash on you, you mustn't be a very serious gamer either.
This is a standard which PC developers should obviously be reaching from, yet in over a decade, by objective measures, they have not made one lick of progress in this direction.
Use Steam.
People are not going to put up with imbalanced, glitchy or hacked PC games for months in online play
Exactly. Which is why they won't buy those games for consoles. Compare and contrast the console version of Team Fortress 2 with the PC version, then tell me about "imbalanced".
If companies think they can rip off GPL software and then get off cheap five years later then they wont respect the GPL.
There's just one thing, though: payment for damages isn't a license, so they'll have to pay *AND* release the code or stop distributing the software. And if they refuse to do either, the FSF won't even have to bother, the courts themselves will milk Cisco for money 'til they bleed.
how can you have your view and also acknowledge that technicalities often win cases, even in ones that are 'obvious' for one side yet the other wins due to technicality?
Perhaps then, it is not so 'obvious' after all. Most of the time when I hear that a case was lost when it was so 'obvious', it's due to tons of circumstancial evidence but no 'hard' one to decide the case. And as Sherlock Holmes once put it, "[Circumstancial evidence] may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different". And in the few other cases, it's often because not obeying the "technicality" would've set a much worse precedent than deciding against the 'obvious'. And in law, precedent is a bitch.
also, if you are bringing 'judgement' (of the human kind) into play, then why even have 'mandatory sentencing'? this flys in the face of your reasoning.
If there is no judgement, why have 'mandatory sentencing' at all? why give the judges any room to lower or raise a sentence? I'm sorry, but your example does not favor your argument.
If you are at a stoplight at 3am and there is NO one on the road but you and a cop and you stop at the redlight, look around (seeing no one but that cop) and then cross over that light - you KNOW you'll get a ticket. and you won't be able to defend it, either (there was no danger of any harm due to 'breaking' this stoplight law).
Consequences aren't purely short-term, and if you could be easily 'forgiven' of passing a red light at 3 AM just because no one appeared to be there, more and more people would pass red lights near 3 AM, until some wouldn't even bother looking around, increasing the likelihood of accidents.
If we had judges that could fucking THINK we would not need laws and each judge would judge based on this supposed inherent understanding of right and wrong.
Supposed? by whom? the idea of an 'inherent understanding of right and wrong' isn't a very popular one in Ethics nowadays, and *certainly* not outside of it. Yes, I studied that idea, and yes, I do think it's rubbish. So no, we still need laws, thank you very much.
No. That's why there are judges and not mathematicians deciding on this stuff. Blind justice is one of those cute ideas we left behind millenia ago, like pure democracy or absolute freedom, because we know that approximations work well but the real thing does not.
Ohh, and IANAL if it matters, but I've read a few things about the relationship between 'ethics' and 'law' both from an interest in the former and friends studying the latter.
No, but it is unconceivable to expect a hospitalized transplant patient to show up in court, and it is outrageous that a judge would decide the case against her based on that.
This is less about the RIAA and more about the idiot judge, but the fact that it was the RIAA only adds salt to the wound.
C will work great even in forums that lose their linebreaks.
Definining "work" as "will compile and run as intended". You'll still have to spend an hour indenting the damn thing if you want to actually *understand* it, which is usually the prime reason one copies code from the web.
Actually, reading the wikipedia article on Virgin Killer, it seems that it is bonafide child pornography. Or, regardless of your definition of "pornography", there's a naked, under-age* girl on the cover.
Well, so does Nirvana's Nevermind, except it's a boy instead of a girl. So maybe, just maybe, you may want to rethink your definition of "child pornography".
Personally, I think the picture in question is in really bad taste, but I dread the prospect of it being censored and/or made illegal even more, so put me in the "fuck you, UK!" camp.
There are two kinds of stories that one doesn't care about: the type where one may not care but recognizes someone else may have different interests, such as for example an important change in Safari (I use Linux so meh), and the type where the idea that someone truly cares about such a thing diminishes one's faith in humanity, like this one or Britney Spears' many marriages.
I, however, are just here for the lulz inherent to watching Apple fanboys try to spin this in a positive way for Apple;)
The problem is that if we accept that argument, we can apply it in reverse too: what's one lost customer among hundreds of thousands of people copying the game already? let's go to TPB, better customer support, and cheaper to boot.
"The customer is always right" is a good policy for a business to follow, specially when they're going against a 'free' (if not entirely legit) alternative.
Another question you might ask yourself is, are you going to let the CPU designers push you into a programming paradigm you are not effective in?
Another question you might ask yourself is, are you going to avoid utilizing a new, powerful technology simply because you can't use it effectively *now*? I for one won't, I'd rather learn how to do functional programming well than simply say "screw it, I'm going with a single CPU for the rest of my life". Plus from what I've been learning of Lisp it's not hard, it's just different.
Personally, I can see a machine being quite useful with say, 16 or 32 cores just because these machines do more than one thing at a time. But I'd much rather see them speed the cores up than endlessly multiply the number of them. There is a *lot* of room left to do this.
There's also a lot of room left to put extra cores, and for easily-parallelizable algorithms the former is easier and faster. Plus, it's one step closer to the programmer's ideal of 100% efficiency for the "just throw more hardware at it!" philosophy;)
If CPU designers run off towards the horizon making many-core designs, what if no significant number of people follow them there? Which... frankly... pretty much seems to be the case. I've an 8-core machine, and just about the only things that actually use those cores together are the easy ones: graphics and waveform encoding/decoding. Aperture sure enough uses all my cores in a well-balanced fashion and can build a JPEG in a snap; but that's a far cry from my web browser doing the same thing while trying to render a page.
Does your computer struggle trying to render a webpage? mine certainly doesn't, and it's only a 2-core machine. Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't drawing vector graphics easily parallelizable? and in that case, more cores would mean less drawbacks for world-wide adoption of.SVG, which also removes plenty of headaches from web developers. Win-win.
I'm just saying that the direction the CPU folks have chosen lately doesn't have to be the direction we actually end up going, and there are points in favor of this as the best choice.
Given that now even the cheapest of the cheap Intel CPUs are dual-core (IIRC), I'd say that the direction we're actually going *is* multi-core, it's just that us programmers haven't quite caught with it yet. Hence the recent (well, not really, it started a few years ago) interest in functional programming.
Because it doesn't fit your personal usage pattern? Wow. Strong words.
Hyperbole, I'm sure they should've taught it to you in, what, fifth grade?
I agree that it should be easier for you to turn off, and maybe smart enough to work with two languages at once, but come on. Most people consider spell checking an essential feature.
Statistics, please. I'll agree that *many* do, but *many* others don't and in fact see it as completely useless outside of a word processor, so forgive me if I don't accept the "most" without hard data backing it up. Worldwide, preferably, since it tends to bother people whose first language isn't English the most.
"I'm the rare person who wants to leave my headlights on when I turn off the car! Whoever invented the chiming reminder to turn them off should be drawn and quartered!"
Cute, but until you prove I'm truly "rare", please leave the stupid ad hominem aside. Plus, headlights are there for a *safety* concern, but neither I nor you will die if I write "teh" instead of "the", so your analogy fails regardless.
Well, dunno, when I'm faced with the attrocity that is MS Office on Windows I don't suddenly buy a Mac and think "well, the OSX version is probably better". If a company manages to develop a huge, steaming pile of turd on one platform, chances are the same products for other platforms isn't any better. In fact, their *other* products are probably just as bad, so I'll just stay away from the company.
So, goodbye Rockstar, see ya when the words "no DRM" and "completely bug-free" appear in a review of one of your products. Which from the looks of it, won't be any time soon.
Any single one of your problems, by itself, would've been enough to turn me off from the game (well, maybe not the 15 GB install, though it's still not nice). But *all* of them? I am treating GTA4 like a disease from now on, thanks for the warning.
Besides which, spell check, mouse gestures, etc are hardly world-rocking features. It doesn't affect the user experience much if they aren't there.
Ohh but they do affect the user experience significantly if they are there. You know what I hate the most about Ubuntu? that it takes an hour to install, and two hours to turn the goddamned spell checker off in every single application so I can actually start using the thing without being annoyed by random, ever-present red lines (why ever-present? because I write in both spanish and english, and no spell checker engine has ever been smart enough to correct for both instead of just one at a time).
Whoever invented spell checking should be burned at the stake, and whoever decided it was a good idea to turn it on by default on every fucking application that's ever existed should go with him, only in a slower and even more painful way.
What kind of dumbass are you? The shrinkwrap EULA stays the same whether you get OSX with an Apple or a "compatible" piece of hardware. How does that save you from Apple's EULA?!
If the pertinent section of the EULA is found to be invalid, then the EULA (and others like it) is weaker and OSX users aren't legally bound with it. But I guess you're too much of a fanboy to think before you post your "OMG leave Apple alone!" rant.
Again, WTF ARE YOU SMOKING?! If you don't want an OSX system, don't buy an Apple. You have already indicated that you prefer a typical PC, than an Apple branded one. WHY WOULD YOU BUY AN APPLE BRANDED PC THEN IF YOU DON'T WANT OSX?!
Why are you assuming that the only reason someone would want to run OSX is if they want an Apple-branded computer? is OSX really *that* shitty?
If you *DO* want OSX, then you don't get to return the software since you need that license.
Two words: legal precedent. Plus, you may decide after using it that *gasp* you don't like OSX after all and want a refund.
Apparently, in your case, it also provides freedom from thinking. And those stupid modders too.
Funny, I was gonna say the same for you. Guess the Kool-Aid interferes a bit with neural functions... well, for very fucking large values of "a bit".
What!? the whole point of PJ's rant was that the customer would be fucked either way, therefore there must've been 'special interests' behind the request. In Psystar's case, if they did get their way the customer would be free to buy parts for their PC from companies other than Apple, therefore there's a net freedom gain which makes it possible for an actual customer to be behind such an action, both situations are completely unlike the other, except for the fact that in both cases Apple was the one being sued.
Still some businesses are switching, so the tide MAY be turning, but it's going to be a long while before you see Apple or Linux get the kind of penetration on business workstations that they're starting to get in the home. (At least partially because a lot of businesses have already invested a fortune in those infrastructure synergies, and don't want to lose them)
Actually, it's just Macs who've always had trouble convincing "the suits", and given Apple's choice of advertisements, that doesn't look that'll change any time soon. But it'll sooner be the Year of Linux on the Business Desktop than the Year of Linux on the Home Desktop, the benefits are more easily felt, and the drawbacks less serious, businesses are much more open to the idea of Linux than home users are.
Well, given that those stat modifications are pretty much standard in RPGs for all Orc-race characters, and the fact that Fallout 3 is pretty much Oblivion with a new skin, I don't think it was intentional.
Slashdot Mirror
free, both beer and speech is the idea
Then why do you want to run Windows apps? F/OSS offerings for it are fairly limited compared to those available for UNIX-derived OSes.
also you seem to have a comprehension issue - software emulation requires greater processing power, i'm concerned with bloat in terms of storage requirements, which is what i repeatedly complained about. see where i talked about footprint?
Let's see, you're comparing an implementation of the win32 API with an implementation of the POSIX standard, plus assortment of programs and libraries to run an implementation of the win32 API, and you expect both to take the same amount of storage? again, get a clue. You can easily get an usable install of Linux in 500MBs, and a full install with more apps than you can shake a stick at on 1.2 GBs. I know, I've done it on my older laptop. Whereas Windows XP takes around 1.2 GBs IIRC straight out of the box, with only the poor excuse of a browser called IE.
heck, just look at the size difference between utorrent and ktorrent. between vlc and media player classic. between k3b and infrarecorder.
Haven't used the first two, but both VLC and K3B do *so* much more than MPC and infrarecorder it's not even funny, so no, apples and elephants comparison here.
A lot of us use Windows for more than jsut gaming, and we are who are really locked in.
Exactly. Trying to help you is too much trouble for too little gain, so for now you're better off with Windows. Gamers on the other hand, typically have all the stuff they use on Windows available for Linux, except of course for the games themselves, *and* they're usually more open about learning new stuff than your average business PC user, so they're a much better deal from a mindshare point of view.
you know what would be really cool? a linux distro that focused *only* on wine, and windows programs.
For what purpose? giving people a free-as-in-beer Windows? ThePirateBay already does it, and better.
i mean the absolute minimum you could possibly have to get a usable wine session - no underlying desktop environment, no python, no perl, no bsh/zsh/csh, no headers, just the kernel, wine, and popular windows freeware like 7-zip, utorrent, ffdshow, media player classic, dvdshrink, firefox.. a complete replacement for windows that actually runs software that people want and are already familiar with.
Complete? no it wouldn't, and you may want to rephrase your statement anyways because it sounds trollish as hell.
no, i don't want to install a 4.5gb distro. i want linux without all the bloat from crap i'll never ever want nor need to run the windows programs i like, and not the painfully different and bizarrely bloated linux versions.
If you only want to run Windows apps, pray tell, why in the FUCKING world do you want to run Linux? ohh, that's right, you're a cheap ass. Go pay for your own damn software, 'kay? ohhh and yes, you *are* a troll, your last statement is conclusive proof of that fact.
how sad and hilarious, right now i use nothing but open source software on windows, and my footprint is MUCH less than linux to do the same. i tried to install the smallest linux distro i could and still get a usable wine session.. 1gb worth of software later i'm up to the point that xp can do with 250mb.
Check the specs for the Playstation. Try to run ePSXe on a PC with double the specs in every area. Get a clue.
As others have said, Dead Space was not a survival horror game, it was a third person shooter and a pretty poor game at that. It's a pretty sad state when people think games like this are good. Standards certainly have lowered in recent years.
Not really. Let me show you why.
The first thing that annoyed me about it was the fact that your character takes up a full 1/3rd of the screen. People try to make excuses about it making the game more "immersive" but that's a load of crap. If they wanted it to be more immersive they could have just made it first person view. The way it is now it's just obnoxious since you can't actually see anything.
Replace "character takes up a full 1/3rd of the screen" with "camera stays fixed at an odd angle", and you have an excellent description of every Resident Evil game up to 4.
The second thing that annoyed me were the horrid controls. Sluggish mouse movement, sloppy camera control (why does the mouse make the camera rotate around the character instead of just making him turn?) and that you have to use two buttons just to fire your weapon (why wouldn't he always have his gun drawn?).
I'm sorry, were you talking about Resident Evil again? ohh, no, it didn't even *have* camera control.
The next thing that annoyed me was the low quality of the voice actors. Wooden acting, badly written dialogue and paper thin plot are all present. Certainly nothing new in this area.
I knew it, you *are* talking about Resident Evil.
The last thing that annoyed me was the low quality of the visuals. This game looks like it was cranked out of a Russian development house (if you've ever played one of those low quality Russian made games, you'll know exactly what I mean by this). Everything from the terrible design of the main character's suit to the uninspired enemy models and generic metallic "tech" environments that all look exactly the same was poorly done.
Yup, Resident Evil alright.
So no, standards haven't lowered, and we can safely consider Dead Space a member of the survival horror genre. Clunky visuals, third-rate voice acting, stupid dialog, horrid camera angles and nauseating controls are the staples of the genre, even moreso than zombies. In fact, I think TFA says something pretty similar to that.
Your Community Rep is a total dipshit and this stinks of 'publicity stunt', but it does take balls to go against the current industry trend in such a way. I, for one, will buy a boxed copy of this as soon as I get the chance, more than one if it's cheap, and the older games too if there's one still being sold.
Again, thanks for removing the utter shit that is DRM.
one thing they cannot deny is just how solid and reliable console games have been, and continue to be. You put in the cartridge/disc, and the game "Just Works(TM)" from day one. No patches, no bugs, no crashes.
And yet, this is an article about the patch Valve put out to fix a bug in the console version of Left 4 Dead. Not to mention that if you've never had a console game crash on you, you mustn't be a very serious gamer either.
This is a standard which PC developers should obviously be reaching from, yet in over a decade, by objective measures, they have not made one lick of progress in this direction.
Use Steam.
People are not going to put up with imbalanced, glitchy or hacked PC games for months in online play
Exactly. Which is why they won't buy those games for consoles. Compare and contrast the console version of Team Fortress 2 with the PC version, then tell me about "imbalanced".
If companies think they can rip off GPL software and then get off cheap five years later then they wont respect the GPL.
There's just one thing, though: payment for damages isn't a license, so they'll have to pay *AND* release the code or stop distributing the software. And if they refuse to do either, the FSF won't even have to bother, the courts themselves will milk Cisco for money 'til they bleed.
how can you have your view and also acknowledge that technicalities often win cases, even in ones that are 'obvious' for one side yet the other wins due to technicality?
Perhaps then, it is not so 'obvious' after all. Most of the time when I hear that a case was lost when it was so 'obvious', it's due to tons of circumstancial evidence but no 'hard' one to decide the case. And as Sherlock Holmes once put it, "[Circumstancial evidence] may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different". And in the few other cases, it's often because not obeying the "technicality" would've set a much worse precedent than deciding against the 'obvious'. And in law, precedent is a bitch.
also, if you are bringing 'judgement' (of the human kind) into play, then why even have 'mandatory sentencing'? this flys in the face of your reasoning.
If there is no judgement, why have 'mandatory sentencing' at all? why give the judges any room to lower or raise a sentence? I'm sorry, but your example does not favor your argument.
If you are at a stoplight at 3am and there is NO one on the road but you and a cop and you stop at the redlight, look around (seeing no one but that cop) and then cross over that light - you KNOW you'll get a ticket. and you won't be able to defend it, either (there was no danger of any harm due to 'breaking' this stoplight law).
Consequences aren't purely short-term, and if you could be easily 'forgiven' of passing a red light at 3 AM just because no one appeared to be there, more and more people would pass red lights near 3 AM, until some wouldn't even bother looking around, increasing the likelihood of accidents.
If we had judges that could fucking THINK we would not need laws and each judge would judge based on this supposed inherent understanding of right and wrong.
Supposed? by whom? the idea of an 'inherent understanding of right and wrong' isn't a very popular one in Ethics nowadays, and *certainly* not outside of it. Yes, I studied that idea, and yes, I do think it's rubbish. So no, we still need laws, thank you very much.
The problem is that ISPs don't give a shit about other people's business models, as evidenced by this very same story.
I do have some troubles with your interpretation of a world with global copyright infringement, but to dwell on them would be going *way* off-topic.
isn't justice supposed to be blind, though?
No. That's why there are judges and not mathematicians deciding on this stuff. Blind justice is one of those cute ideas we left behind millenia ago, like pure democracy or absolute freedom, because we know that approximations work well but the real thing does not.
Ohh, and IANAL if it matters, but I've read a few things about the relationship between 'ethics' and 'law' both from an interest in the former and friends studying the latter.
No, but it is unconceivable to expect a hospitalized transplant patient to show up in court, and it is outrageous that a judge would decide the case against her based on that.
This is less about the RIAA and more about the idiot judge, but the fact that it was the RIAA only adds salt to the wound.
C will work great even in forums that lose their linebreaks.
Definining "work" as "will compile and run as intended". You'll still have to spend an hour indenting the damn thing if you want to actually *understand* it, which is usually the prime reason one copies code from the web.
Actually, reading the wikipedia article on Virgin Killer, it seems that it is bonafide child pornography. Or, regardless of your definition of "pornography", there's a naked, under-age* girl on the cover.
Well, so does Nirvana's Nevermind, except it's a boy instead of a girl. So maybe, just maybe, you may want to rethink your definition of "child pornography".
Personally, I think the picture in question is in really bad taste, but I dread the prospect of it being censored and/or made illegal even more, so put me in the "fuck you, UK!" camp.
Also, it's documented well. After using the horrors of MSDN to learn the .NET Framework, yes, there's a *huge* difference.
There are two kinds of stories that one doesn't care about: the type where one may not care but recognizes someone else may have different interests, such as for example an important change in Safari (I use Linux so meh), and the type where the idea that someone truly cares about such a thing diminishes one's faith in humanity, like this one or Britney Spears' many marriages.
I, however, are just here for the lulz inherent to watching Apple fanboys try to spin this in a positive way for Apple ;)
The problem is that if we accept that argument, we can apply it in reverse too: what's one lost customer among hundreds of thousands of people copying the game already? let's go to TPB, better customer support, and cheaper to boot.
"The customer is always right" is a good policy for a business to follow, specially when they're going against a 'free' (if not entirely legit) alternative.
Another question you might ask yourself is, are you going to let the CPU designers push you into a programming paradigm you are not effective in?
Another question you might ask yourself is, are you going to avoid utilizing a new, powerful technology simply because you can't use it effectively *now*? I for one won't, I'd rather learn how to do functional programming well than simply say "screw it, I'm going with a single CPU for the rest of my life". Plus from what I've been learning of Lisp it's not hard, it's just different.
Personally, I can see a machine being quite useful with say, 16 or 32 cores just because these machines do more than one thing at a time. But I'd much rather see them speed the cores up than endlessly multiply the number of them. There is a *lot* of room left to do this.
There's also a lot of room left to put extra cores, and for easily-parallelizable algorithms the former is easier and faster. Plus, it's one step closer to the programmer's ideal of 100% efficiency for the "just throw more hardware at it!" philosophy ;)
If CPU designers run off towards the horizon making many-core designs, what if no significant number of people follow them there? Which... frankly... pretty much seems to be the case. I've an 8-core machine, and just about the only things that actually use those cores together are the easy ones: graphics and waveform encoding/decoding. Aperture sure enough uses all my cores in a well-balanced fashion and can build a JPEG in a snap; but that's a far cry from my web browser doing the same thing while trying to render a page.
Does your computer struggle trying to render a webpage? mine certainly doesn't, and it's only a 2-core machine. Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't drawing vector graphics easily parallelizable? and in that case, more cores would mean less drawbacks for world-wide adoption of .SVG, which also removes plenty of headaches from web developers. Win-win.
I'm just saying that the direction the CPU folks have chosen lately doesn't have to be the direction we actually end up going, and there are points in favor of this as the best choice.
Given that now even the cheapest of the cheap Intel CPUs are dual-core (IIRC), I'd say that the direction we're actually going *is* multi-core, it's just that us programmers haven't quite caught with it yet. Hence the recent (well, not really, it started a few years ago) interest in functional programming.
Because it doesn't fit your personal usage pattern? Wow. Strong words.
Hyperbole, I'm sure they should've taught it to you in, what, fifth grade?
I agree that it should be easier for you to turn off, and maybe smart enough to work with two languages at once, but come on. Most people consider spell checking an essential feature.
Statistics, please. I'll agree that *many* do, but *many* others don't and in fact see it as completely useless outside of a word processor, so forgive me if I don't accept the "most" without hard data backing it up. Worldwide, preferably, since it tends to bother people whose first language isn't English the most.
"I'm the rare person who wants to leave my headlights on when I turn off the car! Whoever invented the chiming reminder to turn them off should be drawn and quartered!"
Cute, but until you prove I'm truly "rare", please leave the stupid ad hominem aside. Plus, headlights are there for a *safety* concern, but neither I nor you will die if I write "teh" instead of "the", so your analogy fails regardless.
Well, dunno, when I'm faced with the attrocity that is MS Office on Windows I don't suddenly buy a Mac and think "well, the OSX version is probably better". If a company manages to develop a huge, steaming pile of turd on one platform, chances are the same products for other platforms isn't any better. In fact, their *other* products are probably just as bad, so I'll just stay away from the company.
So, goodbye Rockstar, see ya when the words "no DRM" and "completely bug-free" appear in a review of one of your products. Which from the looks of it, won't be any time soon.
Any single one of your problems, by itself, would've been enough to turn me off from the game (well, maybe not the 15 GB install, though it's still not nice). But *all* of them? I am treating GTA4 like a disease from now on, thanks for the warning.
Besides which, spell check, mouse gestures, etc are hardly world-rocking features. It doesn't affect the user experience much if they aren't there.
Ohh but they do affect the user experience significantly if they are there. You know what I hate the most about Ubuntu? that it takes an hour to install, and two hours to turn the goddamned spell checker off in every single application so I can actually start using the thing without being annoyed by random, ever-present red lines (why ever-present? because I write in both spanish and english, and no spell checker engine has ever been smart enough to correct for both instead of just one at a time).
Whoever invented spell checking should be burned at the stake, and whoever decided it was a good idea to turn it on by default on every fucking application that's ever existed should go with him, only in a slower and even more painful way.
What kind of dumbass are you? The shrinkwrap EULA stays the same whether you get OSX with an Apple or a "compatible" piece of hardware. How does that save you from Apple's EULA?!
If the pertinent section of the EULA is found to be invalid, then the EULA (and others like it) is weaker and OSX users aren't legally bound with it. But I guess you're too much of a fanboy to think before you post your "OMG leave Apple alone!" rant.
Again, WTF ARE YOU SMOKING?! If you don't want an OSX system, don't buy an Apple. You have already indicated that you prefer a typical PC, than an Apple branded one. WHY WOULD YOU BUY AN APPLE BRANDED PC THEN IF YOU DON'T WANT OSX?!
Why are you assuming that the only reason someone would want to run OSX is if they want an Apple-branded computer? is OSX really *that* shitty?
If you *DO* want OSX, then you don't get to return the software since you need that license.
Two words: legal precedent. Plus, you may decide after using it that *gasp* you don't like OSX after all and want a refund.
Apparently, in your case, it also provides freedom from thinking. And those stupid modders too.
Funny, I was gonna say the same for you. Guess the Kool-Aid interferes a bit with neural functions... well, for very fucking large values of "a bit".
What!? the whole point of PJ's rant was that the customer would be fucked either way, therefore there must've been 'special interests' behind the request. In Psystar's case, if they did get their way the customer would be free to buy parts for their PC from companies other than Apple, therefore there's a net freedom gain which makes it possible for an actual customer to be behind such an action, both situations are completely unlike the other, except for the fact that in both cases Apple was the one being sued.
Still some businesses are switching, so the tide MAY be turning, but it's going to be a long while before you see Apple or Linux get the kind of penetration on business workstations that they're starting to get in the home. (At least partially because a lot of businesses have already invested a fortune in those infrastructure synergies, and don't want to lose them)
Actually, it's just Macs who've always had trouble convincing "the suits", and given Apple's choice of advertisements, that doesn't look that'll change any time soon. But it'll sooner be the Year of Linux on the Business Desktop than the Year of Linux on the Home Desktop, the benefits are more easily felt, and the drawbacks less serious, businesses are much more open to the idea of Linux than home users are.
Well, given that those stat modifications are pretty much standard in RPGs for all Orc-race characters, and the fact that Fallout 3 is pretty much Oblivion with a new skin, I don't think it was intentional.