Can you name the FOUR places where you had to enter your wep key? you just need to run the network wizzard and it is done, in contrast with Linux...
I think he was exagerating, but in windows, a lot of wireless cards come with thier own wireless configuration tool, which may or may not be in use. So it is fairly common for users to enter in their WEP key in the the netwrok wizard, have it not work and then have to enter it again in the wireless cards own configuration utility (which has disabled the windows wizard) in order for it to work. Now you could blame the wirless card manufacturer for this problem, but you can also blame them for not supporting linux, so there you go.
hmmmm... I use VLC in Linux to play movies etc, I had to install it (as the applications that come with Xubuntu are terrible to watch video, and ubuntu and on any other distro you MUST download all the "restricted", "no open source" "devil" "god forbid them" whatever codecs). Oh! and the installation was a time consuming... even to make it play the same types of video I *used* to play with the same program on WINDOWS. So yeah, nice troll there.
Those codecs are proprietary so they can't legally be distributed with Ubuntu. And whoever you downloaded them from (even the windows version) is probably breaking the law. So its not ubuntu having religious problems with them, its that they chose not to break the law. OMG! Ubuntu is not breaking the law to make things easier for you! The bastards!
And it is far, far easier to to get them working under ubuntu too. The instructions are laid out on ubuntuguide.org and only take five minutes. when you're done, all the codecs are installed and will be updated whenever you update the system. Try that on windows.
Why? just intall Nero the NERO Burning ROM CD that came with your CD-RW (or DVD) recorder. If you bought your computer chances are they are already installed. if you pirated windows just pirate it from the same site. Not that I did not need to install a program to burn in Xubuntu... oh! and it was a PAIN in the ass to burn with more than the lousy 8.3 format and more than 7 nested directories... I had finally to sucumb and download KDE's K3B program which I dont like because each time I have to start it it takes ages while it loads all the KDE crap (talk about memory hog) like kdesyscoca and whatever else.
First why the hell are you using xubuntu and not the regular ubuntu? Xubuntu is more for people who know what they're doing which you obviously don't. The 8.3 format is the iso standard for CDs. This has been extended with Joliet (by MS) and Rockridge (for Unix). Rockridge allows long filenames and user permissions. Joliet just allows long filenames. Fortunately every cd burning app I've used in linux burns everything as a hybrid so that it supports both the Joliet and Rockridge extensions. You just fucked around with your cd burning app and made it burn pure iso CDs with no extensions.
Name 1 (ONE) programming language or software that you can run on Linux that can NOT be run on Windows XP....
How about sh script? Oh and maybe a cron daemon so my sh script will run daily. And my sh script will make use of commands like grep, find, sed. And I may need my sh script to check some system settings too. I can do that under windows, right?
I prefer Nautilus to browse my files. Some of my files are on other systems and its able to access these files using ssh. Also the text editor is able to save and load files using ssh too. Makes it really easy to make a quick change to a file on another system over the internet. That works in windows, right?
Sometimes I'm using my laptop and I want to play songs on my desktop which the speakers are connected to. So I just tunnel X over ssh and then my media player/organiser displays on my laptop, but when I press play the sound comes out of the speakers on the desktop.
What exactly do you mean by speed? How fast it boots? how long it takes the web browser to start up? When you click on a folder, how long it takes to open? how long it takes to for a menu item to display?
Other than boot up time, which XP clearly wins on, everything else is instantaneous on my system for both XP and Ubuntu, with XP sometimes having a delay opening My Computer if there's a CD in the drive. And my system isn't exactly top of the line either.
You're doing something worng. CD burning works for me out of the box in Ubuntu. I pop in a blank CD and it asks me if I want to make a data CD or music CD. No password required. I can right click on an iso image and select burn to CD. Windows XP does not do this out of the box.
.NET is MS... not sure why you even expected this to work.
Not sure why you think that XP is faster than Ubuntu. Under load I've always found Linux much more responsive than XP. I suppose Nautilus is pretty craptacular when browsing files over SFTP, but XP doesn't support that. I guess GUI responsiveness varies depending on the app, much like under windows.
Wireless worked for me out of the box on Ubuntu. XP required me to find drivers.
The default video player in Ubuntu, totem, is able to play every single movie I have ever downloaded with no problems. Though you do have to download the codecs (same as with windows) or you could have problems. If you know where to look (ubuntuguide.org) you can find them (same as with windows).
I have noticed some of the videos in games to be choppy in XP. So go figure.
I guess your mileage may vary on a lot of things. But I can immediately use Ubuntu out of the box and get stuff done, while with windows I have to spend several hours installing drivers, patches, virus scanner, media player, and then uninstall all the crapware that they bundle with these things. Windows boots faster but can become unresponsive if I put in a CD that it doesn't like. IE is faster than FF, but it doesn't render things right unless webdevelopers do a lot of hack to make it work.
I think you're just used to windows. In windows you have to install Nero to burn CDs, so when you use Linux you go looking for an app to burn CDs (and then get one that requires sudo), not realising that it already does this out of the box. You download VLC to play movies, not realising that Totem is already there and just needs codecs. You're used to installing drivers, so you don't consider that step when you think of your wireless working "out of the box".
And yeah there's more software that works under windows. That's because most people use windows. And that's because most software is for windows. And that's because most people use windows. And that's because most software is for windows. And that's because most people use windows. And that's because most software is for windows. And that's because most people use windows. And that's because most software is for windows.
Yeah. CEOs need to learn that the employees are the company, not the executives at the top. If you have good employees making excellent products and services you have a good company. You try to rip the employees off then the employees leave and its someone else that has a good company.
Used to be good employees that are loyal were extremely valuable to a company. Now they've decided that Intellectual Property is all thats needed and employees are disposable. I hope this philosophy fails miserably.
Actually supporting the US in Iraq wasn't against the UK's interest even though the Iraq war itself was. Everyone would have been much better off if the Iraq war never happened, but there was absolutely nothing the UK could do to prevent it. Bush was going to invade Iraq come hell or high water.
The Iraq war was against the UK's interests, but the US losing the Iraq war would be disastrous. So Blair chose what seemed to be the lesser of two evils.
Unfortunately he underestimated the incompetence of the Bush's administration. In hindsight the UK would have been better off to condemn the war from the very start. But no one suspected the US leadership would be as incompetent as if was. I was against the Iraq war from the start, and I knew the Bush administration was incompetent, but even I didn't think they were as spectacularly incompetent as they ended up being.
Ok so you blast a group of people and they run... and trample another group of people. You cause panic within a mob of people. Great idea.
If you place limiters on it, what happens if you have a bunch of angry people in front of you? First burst causes people to run and trample other people. Now people are pissed off. Now you use the second burst on people who are pissed off and got their adreneline flowing. All you're doing is making them more pissed off. Before the operator can switch it to continuous mode the crowd has already beaten him to death.
And no jury will convict anyone in the crowd for killing someone operating this device. "The officer blasted me with a ray gun that made me go temporarily insane".
This thing will cause more deaths than it will prevent.
Konqi and safari are different enough that you can't be sure about it. I've personally seen javascript that ran fine on konqi (and FF, Opera and IE) but failed on safari. And for a smaller shop (or someone just making a personal site in his spare time) its hard to justify the purshase of even a mac mini for just 2% of your site's visitors.
They could also work on developing a death ray of some sort. Or maybe work on opening up a portal to a different dimension that is outside of the jurisdiction of the geneva convention.
There's been around 40 elected presidents, the majority of whom were before the invention of television, and even universal sufferage. So your trend is coming from a country thats almost completely different from the US today. In the 1800s, unless you were a Senator, Governor or a General, most people didn't know you existed. Yes, being a Senator, Governor or General makes people more likely to vote for you, But it doesn't make it impossible that someone outside these professions could win.
You're making a post hoc argument here. If the next President was a Doctor then you could say "In the history of the United States the only people to become president have been Senators, Governors, Generals and Doctors. Therefore only people from these professions have any chance of being President."
Interesting how you don't want to be the customer of a company lead by Bill Gates but you do want to a citizen of a country lead by Bill Gates. How are you sure Bill Gates will beat up on NK but not beat up citizens of the US?
He also said MS was an underdog too. I mean, WTF? He made a sweetheart deal with IBM and from then on it was easy street. Luckydog maybe, but he was never an underdog.
Yeah we should just do away with this democracy thing and let the richest businessmen run everything. That will solve all of the worlds problems because the businessmen know best.
And the UK should have just given all their resources to the businessmen in WWII. Because that strategy has worked so well for the US in the Iraq war hasn't it?
I think the UK was better off with propeller driven spitfires in the Battle of Britain than waiting five years for that era's Bill Gates to develop Jet-powered Spitfire Vista(tm). But then I'm not a businessman so what do I know?
Yeah, if my girlfriend had tickets to a musical, I'd make an excuse not to go. I guess I'm a WoW addict too, though I thought you actually had to play the game to be considered an addict.
Not enough space? One taskbar for everything is great if you only have the start button, 2 or 3 quicklaunch icons, 3 task items, and a couple of things open in the system tray. But if you want to break up the start menuinto multiple menus (3 in gnome) have more quick launch icons (I have around 5) have more than 3 windows open (I have 6 on my current virtual desktop, more on others) and have a bunch of things in the system tray (I have a mail checker, volume, IM, weather). Yes, you can squeeze all these things on your taskbar by grouping tasks, jamming everything into a single start menu, and haveing a hide button for the quicklaunch and system tray, but these things are only useful if you can see them. On Gnome I'm one click away from everything, on windows it takes two clicks to do a lot of stuff. Even worse you sometimes have to click just to see the features available.
Really the one taskbar interface is just a legacy thing going back to windows 95, which was designed for a 640x480 resolution. Gnome was designed more recently, and even on a 800x600 screen, a 32 pixel panel at the top is worth the sceen space. The windows style single panel interface was fine 10 years ago, but don't you think its time for an update?
Right click the clock, select move, and move it to the lower right. Right click notification area, select move and mave down beside the clock. Right click the top panel, select add to panel, select main menu. Right click the main menu button, select move and move it down to the lower left. Right click the top panel and select "delete this panel". Optional: Remove the "Show desktop" button, Workspace switcher, and trash from the panel.
And now you have the screwed up UI that is windows. But really people would be better off just learning to look at the top of the screen when they want to start something new and at the bottom of the screen when they want to go back to something they're already working on.
Not sure why you'd go to the extra effort to set up KDE just to get a start button in the lower left. You can do that in Gnome in under 10 seconds. Then you wouldn't have to support multiple desktop environments. And if all the users are working in the same environment, they can trade knowledge, so less training costs and the like.
Doesn't it depend on the sound engineer doesn't it? If you're talking about a sound engineer in the 60's or 70's they were intending the music to be heard on vinyl, and would compensate for that. So it was intended to be heard on vinyl. A sound engineer today would be intending stuff to be heard on CDs, so the vinyl version wouldn't be how it was intended to be heard. Now some albums from the 60's and 70's have been remastered, in which case (depending on the skills of the people doing the remastering) the CD version would probably sound better.
But you can't argue that music recorded and mastered before the advent of CDs weren't intended to be heard on vinyl. Do you think the sound engineers at the time mastered it so it would sound good on CDs before CDs were invented?
Note that I don't own any vinyl myself... But I do know that the beatles albumms were intended to be heard on vinyl. But the convenience of mp3s can't be beat.
Oops, the calculation linked above shows how much stuff we could throw out per year to make the GP's landfill last 1000 years: 0.46464 cubic feet per year. Anyway you look at it, he really didn't do the math.
a quick calculation shows that 25 square mile area 200 feet deep would provide enough space for 464.64 cubic feet of garbage per person in the US. This means that if on average we each sent just 1 cubic foot of garbage to the landfill every week (now this is an incredibly lowball estimate, but it makes the math easier) this landfill would be filled in less than 9 years. With a little more realistic numbers (which I can't be bothered to look up) it would be filled in a matter of months.
You don't need to go into too much detail when there are no human players around. You would probably update the farmer's state once every couple of hours. And just keep things simple. ie, if (drought) then farmer->gold -= 10. Then when a player shows up in the area you decide if the farmer is in the field tending the crops or wandering around distraught over his son being lost.
Nah, you just keep track of who has done that quest and when they've done it. Make all kinds of farms and all kinds of caves. If you've never done the lost farm boy quest before, or if you haven't done it in a long time (you'd have to repeat it eventually otherwise you would eventually have players with no quests to do), then you might get it when you talk to the next farmer you see. Also there would have to be a life cycle to the farmer character. If you rescue the farm boy, maybe he will eventually grow up to be a farmer himself and his son will get lost in the cave. If you don't rescue the farm boy, his father goes crazy and when he dies you end up with a haunted farm house, which opens another quest to put the farmer's spirit to rest. You finish that quest then one of the farmer's cousins moves into the farm house and becomes the new farmer. And eventually has a son who wanders off and gets lost in a cave.
So really you just have to make up some random farmer names and maybe a couple of different farmer models, but that's not really hard. Then you keep track in a database what quests you've done, so that if you get to the cave you might find out an evil nobleman abducted the child, but if you've already killed an evil nobelman character recently you'll find out it was a witch, or whatever. This is pretty basic stuff on a technical level. The story writers would just have to write small parts of stories and then decide which stories can be connected together. If you've done the farm boy quest yesterday, the next farmer you meet will either give you another quest, or just talk about the weather until you get bored and leave. If you go back and find the same farmer you helped earlier, he will give you some free food in gratitiude.
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I think he was exagerating, but in windows, a lot of wireless cards come with thier own wireless configuration tool, which may or may not be in use. So it is fairly common for users to enter in their WEP key in the the netwrok wizard, have it not work and then have to enter it again in the wireless cards own configuration utility (which has disabled the windows wizard) in order for it to work. Now you could blame the wirless card manufacturer for this problem, but you can also blame them for not supporting linux, so there you go.
Those codecs are proprietary so they can't legally be distributed with Ubuntu. And whoever you downloaded them from (even the windows version) is probably breaking the law. So its not ubuntu having religious problems with them, its that they chose not to break the law. OMG! Ubuntu is not breaking the law to make things easier for you! The bastards!
And it is far, far easier to to get them working under ubuntu too. The instructions are laid out on ubuntuguide.org and only take five minutes. when you're done, all the codecs are installed and will be updated whenever you update the system. Try that on windows.
First why the hell are you using xubuntu and not the regular ubuntu? Xubuntu is more for people who know what they're doing which you obviously don't. The 8.3 format is the iso standard for CDs. This has been extended with Joliet (by MS) and Rockridge (for Unix). Rockridge allows long filenames and user permissions. Joliet just allows long filenames. Fortunately every cd burning app I've used in linux burns everything as a hybrid so that it supports both the Joliet and Rockridge extensions. You just fucked around with your cd burning app and made it burn pure iso CDs with no extensions.
How about sh script? Oh and maybe a cron daemon so my sh script will run daily. And my sh script will make use of commands like grep, find, sed. And I may need my sh script to check some system settings too. I can do that under windows, right?
I prefer Nautilus to browse my files. Some of my files are on other systems and its able to access these files using ssh. Also the text editor is able to save and load files using ssh too. Makes it really easy to make a quick change to a file on another system over the internet. That works in windows, right?
Sometimes I'm using my laptop and I want to play songs on my desktop which the speakers are connected to. So I just tunnel X over ssh and then my media player/organiser displays on my laptop, but when I press play the sound comes out of the speakers on the desktop.
All that would work on Windows XP, right? Hello?
What exactly do you mean by speed? How fast it boots? how long it takes the web browser to start up? When you click on a folder, how long it takes to open? how long it takes to for a menu item to display?
Other than boot up time, which XP clearly wins on, everything else is instantaneous on my system for both XP and Ubuntu, with XP sometimes having a delay opening My Computer if there's a CD in the drive. And my system isn't exactly top of the line either.
You're doing something worng. CD burning works for me out of the box in Ubuntu. I pop in a blank CD and it asks me if I want to make a data CD or music CD. No password required. I can right click on an iso image and select burn to CD. Windows XP does not do this out of the box.
.NET is MS... not sure why you even expected this to work.
Not sure why you think that XP is faster than Ubuntu. Under load I've always found Linux much more responsive than XP. I suppose Nautilus is pretty craptacular when browsing files over SFTP, but XP doesn't support that. I guess GUI responsiveness varies depending on the app, much like under windows.
Wireless worked for me out of the box on Ubuntu. XP required me to find drivers.
The default video player in Ubuntu, totem, is able to play every single movie I have ever downloaded with no problems. Though you do have to download the codecs (same as with windows) or you could have problems. If you know where to look (ubuntuguide.org) you can find them (same as with windows).
I have noticed some of the videos in games to be choppy in XP. So go figure.
I guess your mileage may vary on a lot of things. But I can immediately use Ubuntu out of the box and get stuff done, while with windows I have to spend several hours installing drivers, patches, virus scanner, media player, and then uninstall all the crapware that they bundle with these things. Windows boots faster but can become unresponsive if I put in a CD that it doesn't like. IE is faster than FF, but it doesn't render things right unless webdevelopers do a lot of hack to make it work.
I think you're just used to windows. In windows you have to install Nero to burn CDs, so when you use Linux you go looking for an app to burn CDs (and then get one that requires sudo), not realising that it already does this out of the box. You download VLC to play movies, not realising that Totem is already there and just needs codecs. You're used to installing drivers, so you don't consider that step when you think of your wireless working "out of the box".
And yeah there's more software that works under windows. That's because most people use windows. And that's because most software is for windows. And that's because most people use windows. And that's because most software is for windows. And that's because most people use windows. And that's because most software is for windows. And that's because most people use windows. And that's because most software is for windows.
Yeah. CEOs need to learn that the employees are the company, not the executives at the top. If you have good employees making excellent products and services you have a good company. You try to rip the employees off then the employees leave and its someone else that has a good company.
Used to be good employees that are loyal were extremely valuable to a company. Now they've decided that Intellectual Property is all thats needed and employees are disposable. I hope this philosophy fails miserably.
Actually supporting the US in Iraq wasn't against the UK's interest even though the Iraq war itself was. Everyone would have been much better off if the Iraq war never happened, but there was absolutely nothing the UK could do to prevent it. Bush was going to invade Iraq come hell or high water. The Iraq war was against the UK's interests, but the US losing the Iraq war would be disastrous. So Blair chose what seemed to be the lesser of two evils. Unfortunately he underestimated the incompetence of the Bush's administration. In hindsight the UK would have been better off to condemn the war from the very start. But no one suspected the US leadership would be as incompetent as if was. I was against the Iraq war from the start, and I knew the Bush administration was incompetent, but even I didn't think they were as spectacularly incompetent as they ended up being.
Yup. Under the terms of the GPL they must provide the source to the UK (and anyone else they sell the planes to) upon request.
Of course the DoD has bigger guns the FSF.
Ok so you blast a group of people and they run... and trample another group of people. You cause panic within a mob of people. Great idea.
If you place limiters on it, what happens if you have a bunch of angry people in front of you? First burst causes people to run and trample other people. Now people are pissed off. Now you use the second burst on people who are pissed off and got their adreneline flowing. All you're doing is making them more pissed off. Before the operator can switch it to continuous mode the crowd has already beaten him to death.
And no jury will convict anyone in the crowd for killing someone operating this device. "The officer blasted me with a ray gun that made me go temporarily insane".
This thing will cause more deaths than it will prevent.
Konqi and safari are different enough that you can't be sure about it. I've personally seen javascript that ran fine on konqi (and FF, Opera and IE) but failed on safari. And for a smaller shop (or someone just making a personal site in his spare time) its hard to justify the purshase of even a mac mini for just 2% of your site's visitors.
They could also work on developing a death ray of some sort. Or maybe work on opening up a portal to a different dimension that is outside of the jurisdiction of the geneva convention.
There's been around 40 elected presidents, the majority of whom were before the invention of television, and even universal sufferage. So your trend is coming from a country thats almost completely different from the US today. In the 1800s, unless you were a Senator, Governor or a General, most people didn't know you existed. Yes, being a Senator, Governor or General makes people more likely to vote for you, But it doesn't make it impossible that someone outside these professions could win.
You're making a post hoc argument here. If the next President was a Doctor then you could say "In the history of the United States the only people to become president have been Senators, Governors, Generals and Doctors. Therefore only people from these professions have any chance of being President."
Interesting how you don't want to be the customer of a company lead by Bill Gates but you do want to a citizen of a country lead by Bill Gates. How are you sure Bill Gates will beat up on NK but not beat up citizens of the US?
He also said MS was an underdog too. I mean, WTF? He made a sweetheart deal with IBM and from then on it was easy street. Luckydog maybe, but he was never an underdog.
Yeah we should just do away with this democracy thing and let the richest businessmen run everything. That will solve all of the worlds problems because the businessmen know best.
And the UK should have just given all their resources to the businessmen in WWII. Because that strategy has worked so well for the US in the Iraq war hasn't it?
I think the UK was better off with propeller driven spitfires in the Battle of Britain than waiting five years for that era's Bill Gates to develop Jet-powered Spitfire Vista(tm). But then I'm not a businessman so what do I know?
I don't know... you'd have to be pretty sadistic to unleash windows on to the world.
Yeah, if my girlfriend had tickets to a musical, I'd make an excuse not to go. I guess I'm a WoW addict too, though I thought you actually had to play the game to be considered an addict.
Not enough space? One taskbar for everything is great if you only have the start button, 2 or 3 quicklaunch icons, 3 task items, and a couple of things open in the system tray. But if you want to break up the start menuinto multiple menus (3 in gnome) have more quick launch icons (I have around 5) have more than 3 windows open (I have 6 on my current virtual desktop, more on others) and have a bunch of things in the system tray (I have a mail checker, volume, IM, weather). Yes, you can squeeze all these things on your taskbar by grouping tasks, jamming everything into a single start menu, and haveing a hide button for the quicklaunch and system tray, but these things are only useful if you can see them. On Gnome I'm one click away from everything, on windows it takes two clicks to do a lot of stuff. Even worse you sometimes have to click just to see the features available.
Really the one taskbar interface is just a legacy thing going back to windows 95, which was designed for a 640x480 resolution. Gnome was designed more recently, and even on a 800x600 screen, a 32 pixel panel at the top is worth the sceen space. The windows style single panel interface was fine 10 years ago, but don't you think its time for an update?
Gnome to windows in 6 or 7 easy steps:
Right click the clock, select move, and move it to the lower right.
Right click notification area, select move and mave down beside the clock.
Right click the top panel, select add to panel, select main menu.
Right click the main menu button, select move and move it down to the lower left.
Right click the top panel and select "delete this panel".
Optional: Remove the "Show desktop" button, Workspace switcher, and trash from the panel.
And now you have the screwed up UI that is windows. But really people would be better off just learning to look at the top of the screen when they want to start something new and at the bottom of the screen when they want to go back to something they're already working on.
Not sure why you'd go to the extra effort to set up KDE just to get a start button in the lower left. You can do that in Gnome in under 10 seconds. Then you wouldn't have to support multiple desktop environments. And if all the users are working in the same environment, they can trade knowledge, so less training costs and the like.
I don't think that you understand the meaning of the word "freedom".
Doesn't it depend on the sound engineer doesn't it? If you're talking about a sound engineer in the 60's or 70's they were intending the music to be heard on vinyl, and would compensate for that. So it was intended to be heard on vinyl. A sound engineer today would be intending stuff to be heard on CDs, so the vinyl version wouldn't be how it was intended to be heard. Now some albums from the 60's and 70's have been remastered, in which case (depending on the skills of the people doing the remastering) the CD version would probably sound better.
But you can't argue that music recorded and mastered before the advent of CDs weren't intended to be heard on vinyl. Do you think the sound engineers at the time mastered it so it would sound good on CDs before CDs were invented?
Note that I don't own any vinyl myself... But I do know that the beatles albumms were intended to be heard on vinyl. But the convenience of mp3s can't be beat.
I don't know if that's a fact, but it feels right to me.
Oops, the calculation linked above shows how much stuff we could throw out per year to make the GP's landfill last 1000 years: 0.46464 cubic feet per year. Anyway you look at it, he really didn't do the math.
a quick calculation shows that 25 square mile area 200 feet deep would provide enough space for 464.64 cubic feet of garbage per person in the US. This means that if on average we each sent just 1 cubic foot of garbage to the landfill every week (now this is an incredibly lowball estimate, but it makes the math easier) this landfill would be filled in less than 9 years. With a little more realistic numbers (which I can't be bothered to look up) it would be filled in a matter of months.
So yeah, the GP is full of shit.
You don't need to go into too much detail when there are no human players around. You would probably update the farmer's state once every couple of hours. And just keep things simple. ie, if (drought) then farmer->gold -= 10. Then when a player shows up in the area you decide if the farmer is in the field tending the crops or wandering around distraught over his son being lost.
You could gain experience. And don't forget about the loot the wizard dropped. And whenever you visit that farm you'll get free food.
Of course if you're character is good knight, he wouldn't expect a reward, would he?
So really you just have to make up some random farmer names and maybe a couple of different farmer models, but that's not really hard. Then you keep track in a database what quests you've done, so that if you get to the cave you might find out an evil nobleman abducted the child, but if you've already killed an evil nobelman character recently you'll find out it was a witch, or whatever. This is pretty basic stuff on a technical level. The story writers would just have to write small parts of stories and then decide which stories can be connected together. If you've done the farm boy quest yesterday, the next farmer you meet will either give you another quest, or just talk about the weather until you get bored and leave. If you go back and find the same farmer you helped earlier, he will give you some free food in gratitiude.