Also the half-assed clones have features that are missing in the Civ games, or have been implemented there much later (useable networked gaming, hex tilesets, etc.)
While I'm fully aware that a nuclear reactor is technically a piece of "hardware", in the context of SlashDot, doesn't "hardware" usually imply "something that geeks buy to put on their desks, in their pockets, or in their cars"?;)
...the default password for all teachers (and maybe students too?) was the abbreviation of the high school, in all lowercase. E.g.: 'abhs' or 'mnhs' or 'xyhs'.
And how will their IT people and/or management continue to justify said choices in the wake of this?
This is the sort of thing that needs "big iron". Machines that have uptimes measured in decades. Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that they're running it all on a bunch of commodity PCs (or the like) with off-the-shelf software?
"So I was at work, right? And in comes this customer and.... **We interrupt this call to bring you this exciting informational bulletin! Is your toilet getting messy? Try new ShitWipers, new from S. C. Johnson Wax! For a 5-minute instructional tutorial on how to use your new ShitWipers...press...one! To speak to a representative about new ShitWipers...press...two. To learn about our exciting Web site at ShitWipers dot com...press...three. To hear why ShitWipers are superior to competing toilet wipe products...press...four. To resume your phone call, dial...pound...three...five...seven...one. This message will repeat in 5 seconds. **
>FIVE<
I'm sorry, but you didn't respond quickly enough. This message will now repeat.
We interrupt this call to bring you this exciting informational bulletin! Is your toilet getting messy? Try new ShitWipers, new from...
>FIVE<
I'm sorry, you cannot press buttons until this announcement has completed.
We interrupt this call to bring you this exciting informational..."
...he'll probably win. At least in the first court battle. Consider the current political climate. Not only Republicans, but high-profile Democrats as well (thank you, Hillary Roddham Clinton) are coming down hard against those eeeeeevil video games.
Now, on the other hand, it's good that it's Penny-Arcade being threatened and not, say, some random shmoe with some unknown little Website. Penny-Arcade has enough fame to make this a high-profile case, which means a lot of flak will be generated for Jack Thompson and his defenders, which means that the "good guys" have a fighting chance of winning-- maybe even in the short term, and not the long term. If, instead of picking on Gabe and Tycho, he'd decided to pick on, say, some random video game lover, the "good guys" wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell.
What you're talking about is largely due to word-wrap errors. Those are just as likely to happen from one version of Word to the next or even from one computer to the next running the same version of Word, if they have different versions of the fonts or OS installed...
In theory. In practice, MS Word is a lot more compatible with itself (;) ) than people give it credit for.
As for LyX... are you fucking kidding me? I DID mention that I deal extensively with NON-TECHIES, right?
Tell you what. You're welcome to come give my co-workers a 6-month course on the various topics/skills they'll need to even understand the concept of LyX, much less actually use it.
Oh, Christ. You hopeless idealists make me sigh... No, my company is not willing to do this. I'm not in a position to force such a policy on the company, and even if I was, I would not do so. It would be akin to shooting ourselves in the foot. Yeah! Let's piss of all of our clients, partners, vendors, government agencies we deal with, etc. etc. etc... SMART MOVE.
In fact, until its ability to import and export Office documents is at least as good as Office's ability to import and export files from older versions of Office, it's useless in a wide variety of situations.
I work, among many other things, on manuals. Long manuals. Long, long.doc files. If OpenOffice's ability to import.doc files is only, say, "99% perfect", that 1% could seriously fuck me over. Say, if I inserted a page break at the end of a section which, on Word, ends 90% down the page, but when imported into OpenOffice, the table sizes in tables X, Y and Z in that section don't exactly match the sizes I set in Word, so instead of 90% down the page, it's 10% onto the next page.
End result: The document ends up looking unprofessional.
The problem is that the only way to [mostly] guarantee documents will look right (where "right" is "WYSIWYG") is to either:
A) Use NOTHING but MS Word from start to finish
B) Use NOTHING but OpenOffice.org (or another "alternative" (read: non-MS) word processor/office suite) from start to finish.
I deal with non-techies all day. They hand me a.doc made in Word. If I edited it in OpenOffice, I'd probably have to tweak a bunch of things to make things look the way that they originally did in Word, in OpenOffice.
These are NOT simple, long strings of text. They are complex documents with lots of formatting, tables, bullet points, numbered lists, etc. etc. etc... The chances of something subtle being "a bit off"-- say, if OpenOffice.org decides that the default border of a table cell should be 0.125" instead of 0.1", just to pull an example out of my arse-- are pretty large.
Then, making matters worse, after I'm done with the document, I have to mail it back to them. And they will open it in... you guessed it... MS Word.
So unless OpenOffice.org's.doc import and.doc export features are 100% "perfect" (read: they do not change layout in any way, no matter how subtle), OpenOffice.org is, as much as I hate to admit it, 100% worthless to me.
"They believe that the intellectual-property system is starting to lean so far in favor of private enrichment that it no longer serves the public interest."
Well, no shit Sherlock.
However, at present, members of the radical, "laissez-faire-no-matter-what-yes-even-if-the-comp anies-are-literally-grinding-their-employees-and-c ustomers-into-ground-beef" school of "greed is good" Randism^H^H^H^H^H^H^HLibertarianism have considerable influence in American politics, as well as online. I predict an influx of the usual suspects brashly asserting that this is "a free market", and that if you don't like the way the Fortune 100 companies do business, "you're welcome to start your own company", and talking about how great patents are, and accusing slashdotters of hating the poor innocent inventors and wanting their children to starve... (ignoring completely the fact that actual inventors are being screwed over by corporations just like consumers are...)
No one's saying that what the leaders of the repressive regimes are doing isn't wrong. In fact, it's BECAUSE what they do is wrong that we're upset American corporations are selling to them.
And by the way, it isn't wrong because they're Marxist. It's wrong because they're wrong.
Both sides are at fault. Them more than us. However, this is a case of "We should be better than that". American corporations should be BETTER than to seek out profits from evil, repressive regimes.
There will still be spyware, even if it's ruled that you can't 'trespass' on peoples' PCs without their knowledge. All that will change is that they will bury some legalistic bullshit which translates roughly to 'by installing MySuperScreensaverz.com on your computer, you give us permission to pwn your box and fling shitloads of pop-ups at you' five pages deep into the EULAs for all spyware-containing software.
I strongly suspect that this has, in fact, already happened in many (most?) cases.
I'm an amateur language Nazi. I notice patterns in how geeks talk and how non-geeks talk. A person, for example, who consistently uses terms like "screen name", "chat room", and who says things like "My Internet is..." (instead of "My Internet link is..." or "My pipe is...") is very unlikely to be a programmer or systems admin.
It's just an observation on the use of language by two different groups (end-users and geeks). Don't shoot the messenger.
It's a difference in terminology. If you call the place you hang out in a 'chat room', you're probably not a geek. Even though 'IRC channels' are 'chat rooms' in a sense. The difference between 'chat room' and 'IRC channel' is like the difference between 'screen name' and 'login'. They are a lot closer in meaning than in implication. (In both cases, the implication of using the former exclusively, rather than the latter, implies non-geekiness. Geeks say 'What's your login?'; non-geeks say 'lol whats ur screen name'. Geeks say 'Yeah, I was in #foo', non-geeks say 'i was in teh chatroom'...
'Chat rooms' historically were AOL/other-walled-garden (Compuserve, etc.) things, and now are largely Web-based or proprietary-software-based things. IRC servers, MU*s, and other geekier things are generally not CALLED 'chat rooms' by their denizens, despite technically being 'chat rooms' by a broader definition of the term.
I'm outraged at this. Although I've never been much for 'chat rooms' (being a geek and all, I hung out on MU*s for social purposes, whereas a non-geek would use chat rooms or, now, IM), I was very active on Internet-based social systems before the age of 18.
Depriving young people of that just because of the miniscule risk of pedophiles is fucking ridiculous.
People are blowing this "ZOMG INTARNAT PEDOPHILES ARE GOING 2 JUMP UOT OF UR SCREEN AND EAT U!!1111" shit way out of proportion. It's fucking ridiculous. They've even spawned vigilante groups to track down Internet pedophiles. One of their recent "catches" claimed to be 19 himself (and by the photo, he might be so), and was caught trying to seduce a PJ mole masquerading as a 13-year-old girl. The site's visitors seem to think that this guy is the slimiest thing since slimed bread, without once considering the simple facts that:
1) The alleged perp was all of 6 (count 'em) years older than his imagined 13-year-old 'dream girl'. He was a teen himself, for Chrissakes. If 13 + 19 ranks (as of 11:25 PM on October 12, 2005) a 4.68 on a 1-5 scale of 'sliminess', then I must ask this: At what point does it go from 'slimy' to 'okay'? How 'slimy' is a 14-year-old with a 20-year-old? How about a 15-year-old with a 21-year-old? 16 with 22? 17 with 23? 18 with 24? At what point does it go from 'slimy' to 'okay'? Many people are married to people with far, far greater age differences than this guy.
2) Sorry to be blunt, but there are far, far better things to waste one's time on than Internet "pedophiles" going after HORNY TEENAGERS for CONSENSUAL SEX. I've heard the "BUT U CANT GIVE TEH INFORMED CONSENT UNTIL UR 18 LOL!1!1!!111' rubbish a billion times, and I'm not buying it. When I was 13, I was assembling computers and programming; I was certainly capable of comprehending what sex was, and I wanted it very, very badly. As does, of course, nearly every other 13-year-old in existence. Even their mole, playing the part of a 13-year-old girl, responded to an offer of sex with a tease:
wa55up (4:17:02 PM): are u a virgin
nickcater_ismahman (4:17:14 PM): yah
wa55up (4:17:46 PM): are u lookin to change that
nickcater_ismahman (4:18:02 PM): lol maybe
Jesus fucking Christ, this "OMG PEDOPHILES!!11!11!!!11" shit is ridiculous. The other species of the planet got it right in this regard: They mate the instant they get old enough to have a libido, which means puberty. Now, coercing (not seducing, coercing) or, of course, raping underaged kids is a whole different ball of wax, but for fuck's sake, humanity is the only species that cruelly denies some of its horniest members the ability to mate. Some would say that it's because young people would make unwise decisions about sex, but in reality, it's just because of a medieval notion of "morality" that the churches and mosques (and, to a lesser degree, synagogues) of the world have managed to carry with them all the way into this twenty-first century... (This is very similar to people who claim that they oppose homosexuality because it's "dangerous", but in reality, they simply find it "immoral").
God. I'm fucking disgusted at this. This anti-"pedophile" shit is almost as ridiculous and loathsome as the actual, find-a-6-year-old-girl-and-rape-her pedophiles themselves.
I'd say lock the loony anti-pedophile crusaders and the actual rape-a-child pedophiles in a room together somewhere. They deserve each others' company.
Why do people write things like "$150,000 dollars"? The dollar sign ("$") means "dollars", so writing "$150,000 dollars" is like writing "150,000 dollars dollars".
It's like those twits who say "ATM Machine" (Automated Teller Machine Machine).
Slashdot Mirror
TLDR.
I did, however, search for "cap" and "case", but I didn't find any reference to things having to be in all uppercase/allcaps.
Please explain what this says about allcaps?
o/~ Oooooooooh... if you want it to be possessive, it's just I T S, but if you want it to be a contraction, it's I T apostrophe S... scallawag! o/~
Translation: Nobody likes pop-ups, pop-unders, annoying Flash ads, "Will you take our survey?" ads, or obvious commercial slant on Web pages.
Not to mention support for, say, Linux...
While I'm fully aware that a nuclear reactor is technically a piece of "hardware", in the context of SlashDot, doesn't "hardware" usually imply "something that geeks buy to put on their desks, in their pockets, or in their cars"? ;)
...the default password for all teachers (and maybe students too?) was the abbreviation of the high school, in all lowercase. E.g.: 'abhs' or 'mnhs' or 'xyhs'.
What OS do they run?
What software do they use?
And how will their IT people and/or management continue to justify said choices in the wake of this?
This is the sort of thing that needs "big iron". Machines that have uptimes measured in decades. Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that they're running it all on a bunch of commodity PCs (or the like) with off-the-shelf software?
"So I was at work, right? And in comes this customer and.... **We interrupt this call to bring you this exciting informational bulletin! Is your toilet getting messy? Try new ShitWipers, new from S. C. Johnson Wax! For a 5-minute instructional tutorial on how to use your new ShitWipers...press...one! To speak to a representative about new ShitWipers...press...two. To learn about our exciting Web site at ShitWipers dot com...press...three. To hear why ShitWipers are superior to competing toilet wipe products...press...four. To resume your phone call, dial...pound...three...five...seven...one. This message will repeat in 5 seconds. **
>FIVE<
I'm sorry, but you didn't respond quickly enough. This message will now repeat.
We interrupt this call to bring you this exciting informational bulletin! Is your toilet getting messy? Try new ShitWipers, new from...
>FIVE<
I'm sorry, you cannot press buttons until this announcement has completed.
We interrupt this call to bring you this exciting informational..."
...he'll probably win. At least in the first court battle. Consider the current political climate. Not only Republicans, but high-profile Democrats as well (thank you, Hillary Roddham Clinton) are coming down hard against those eeeeeevil video games.
Now, on the other hand, it's good that it's Penny-Arcade being threatened and not, say, some random shmoe with some unknown little Website. Penny-Arcade has enough fame to make this a high-profile case, which means a lot of flak will be generated for Jack Thompson and his defenders, which means that the "good guys" have a fighting chance of winning-- maybe even in the short term, and not the long term. If, instead of picking on Gabe and Tycho, he'd decided to pick on, say, some random video game lover, the "good guys" wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell.
In theory. In practice, MS Word is a lot more compatible with itself (
As for LyX... are you fucking kidding me? I DID mention that I deal extensively with NON-TECHIES, right?
Tell you what. You're welcome to come give my co-workers a 6-month course on the various topics/skills they'll need to even understand the concept of LyX, much less actually use it.
Oh, Christ. You hopeless idealists make me sigh... No, my company is not willing to do this. I'm not in a position to force such a policy on the company, and even if I was, I would not do so. It would be akin to shooting ourselves in the foot. Yeah! Let's piss of all of our clients, partners, vendors, government agencies we deal with, etc. etc. etc... SMART MOVE.
(The message to be displayed when the cache gets corrupt...)
*dodges tomatoes*
In fact, until its ability to import and export Office documents is at least as good as Office's ability to import and export files from older versions of Office, it's useless in a wide variety of situations.
.doc files. If OpenOffice's ability to import .doc files is only, say, "99% perfect", that 1% could seriously fuck me over. Say, if I inserted a page break at the end of a section which, on Word, ends 90% down the page, but when imported into OpenOffice, the table sizes in tables X, Y and Z in that section don't exactly match the sizes I set in Word, so instead of 90% down the page, it's 10% onto the next page.
.doc made in Word. If I edited it in OpenOffice, I'd probably have to tweak a bunch of things to make things look the way that they originally did in Word, in OpenOffice.
.doc import and .doc export features are 100% "perfect" (read: they do not change layout in any way, no matter how subtle), OpenOffice.org is, as much as I hate to admit it, 100% worthless to me.
I work, among many other things, on manuals. Long manuals. Long, long
End result: The document ends up looking unprofessional.
The problem is that the only way to [mostly] guarantee documents will look right (where "right" is "WYSIWYG") is to either:
A) Use NOTHING but MS Word from start to finish
B) Use NOTHING but OpenOffice.org (or another "alternative" (read: non-MS) word processor/office suite) from start to finish.
I deal with non-techies all day. They hand me a
These are NOT simple, long strings of text. They are complex documents with lots of formatting, tables, bullet points, numbered lists, etc. etc. etc... The chances of something subtle being "a bit off"-- say, if OpenOffice.org decides that the default border of a table cell should be 0.125" instead of 0.1", just to pull an example out of my arse-- are pretty large.
Then, making matters worse, after I'm done with the document, I have to mail it back to them. And they will open it in... you guessed it... MS Word.
So unless OpenOffice.org's
"They believe that the intellectual-property system is starting to lean so far in favor of private enrichment that it no longer serves the public interest."
p anies-are-literally-grinding-their-employees-and-c ustomers-into-ground-beef" school of "greed is good" Randism^H^H^H^H^H^H^HLibertarianism have considerable influence in American politics, as well as online. I predict an influx of the usual suspects brashly asserting that this is "a free market", and that if you don't like the way the Fortune 100 companies do business, "you're welcome to start your own company", and talking about how great patents are, and accusing slashdotters of hating the poor innocent inventors and wanting their children to starve... (ignoring completely the fact that actual inventors are being screwed over by corporations just like consumers are...)
Well, no shit Sherlock.
However, at present, members of the radical, "laissez-faire-no-matter-what-yes-even-if-the-com
Um, what?
No one's saying that what the leaders of the repressive regimes are doing isn't wrong. In fact, it's BECAUSE what they do is wrong that we're upset American corporations are selling to them.
And by the way, it isn't wrong because they're Marxist. It's wrong because they're wrong.
Both sides are at fault. Them more than us. However, this is a case of "We should be better than that". American corporations should be BETTER than to seek out profits from evil, repressive regimes.
There will still be spyware, even if it's ruled that you can't 'trespass' on peoples' PCs without their knowledge. All that will change is that they will bury some legalistic bullshit which translates roughly to 'by installing MySuperScreensaverz.com on your computer, you give us permission to pwn your box and fling shitloads of pop-ups at you' five pages deep into the EULAs for all spyware-containing software.
I strongly suspect that this has, in fact, already happened in many (most?) cases.
I'm an amateur language Nazi. I notice patterns in how geeks talk and how non-geeks talk. A person, for example, who consistently uses terms like "screen name", "chat room", and who says things like "My Internet is..." (instead of "My Internet link is..." or "My pipe is...") is very unlikely to be a programmer or systems admin.
It's just an observation on the use of language by two different groups (end-users and geeks). Don't shoot the messenger.
IRC isn't a 'chat room'.
It's a difference in terminology. If you call the place you hang out in a 'chat room', you're probably not a geek. Even though 'IRC channels' are 'chat rooms' in a sense. The difference between 'chat room' and 'IRC channel' is like the difference between 'screen name' and 'login'. They are a lot closer in meaning than in implication. (In both cases, the implication of using the former exclusively, rather than the latter, implies non-geekiness. Geeks say 'What's your login?'; non-geeks say 'lol whats ur screen name'. Geeks say 'Yeah, I was in #foo', non-geeks say 'i was in teh chatroom'...
'Chat rooms' historically were AOL/other-walled-garden (Compuserve, etc.) things, and now are largely Web-based or proprietary-software-based things. IRC servers, MU*s, and other geekier things are generally not CALLED 'chat rooms' by their denizens, despite technically being 'chat rooms' by a broader definition of the term.
I'm outraged at this. Although I've never been much for 'chat rooms' (being a geek and all, I hung out on MU*s for social purposes, whereas a non-geek would use chat rooms or, now, IM), I was very active on Internet-based social systems before the age of 18.
Depriving young people of that just because of the miniscule risk of pedophiles is fucking ridiculous.
People are blowing this "ZOMG INTARNAT PEDOPHILES ARE GOING 2 JUMP UOT OF UR SCREEN AND EAT U!!1111" shit way out of proportion. It's fucking ridiculous. They've even spawned vigilante groups to track down Internet pedophiles. One of their recent "catches" claimed to be 19 himself (and by the photo, he might be so), and was caught trying to seduce a PJ mole masquerading as a 13-year-old girl. The site's visitors seem to think that this guy is the slimiest thing since slimed bread, without once considering the simple facts that:
1) The alleged perp was all of 6 (count 'em) years older than his imagined 13-year-old 'dream girl'. He was a teen himself, for Chrissakes. If 13 + 19 ranks (as of 11:25 PM on October 12, 2005) a 4.68 on a 1-5 scale of 'sliminess', then I must ask this: At what point does it go from 'slimy' to 'okay'? How 'slimy' is a 14-year-old with a 20-year-old? How about a 15-year-old with a 21-year-old? 16 with 22? 17 with 23? 18 with 24? At what point does it go from 'slimy' to 'okay'? Many people are married to people with far, far greater age differences than this guy.
2) Sorry to be blunt, but there are far, far better things to waste one's time on than Internet "pedophiles" going after HORNY TEENAGERS for CONSENSUAL SEX. I've heard the "BUT U CANT GIVE TEH INFORMED CONSENT UNTIL UR 18 LOL!1!1!!111' rubbish a billion times, and I'm not buying it. When I was 13, I was assembling computers and programming; I was certainly capable of comprehending what sex was, and I wanted it very, very badly. As does, of course, nearly every other 13-year-old in existence. Even their mole, playing the part of a 13-year-old girl, responded to an offer of sex with a tease:
Jesus fucking Christ, this "OMG PEDOPHILES!!11!11!!!11" shit is ridiculous. The other species of the planet got it right in this regard: They mate the instant they get old enough to have a libido, which means puberty. Now, coercing (not seducing, coercing) or, of course, raping underaged kids is a whole different ball of wax, but for fuck's sake, humanity is the only species that cruelly denies some of its horniest members the ability to mate. Some would say that it's because young people would make unwise decisions about sex, but in reality, it's just because of a medieval notion of "morality" that the churches and mosques (and, to a lesser degree, synagogues) of the world have managed to carry with them all the way into this twenty-first century... (This is very similar to people who claim that they oppose homosexuality because it's "dangerous", but in reality, they simply find it "immoral").
God. I'm fucking disgusted at this. This anti-"pedophile" shit is almost as ridiculous and loathsome as the actual, find-a-6-year-old-girl-and-rape-her pedophiles themselves.
I'd say lock the loony anti-pedophile crusaders and the actual rape-a-child pedophiles in a room together somewhere. They deserve each others' company.
Great. Just what we need... for our beloved FLOSS community to become buzzword-compliant.
Maybe they could make some use for my buzzphrase generator...
FINALLY... someone else who Gets It.
What do you think the "N" in "PIN" stands for?
...and they actually named it vivi.
Windows just barely got the TTF part with Win95.
Um. What? TTF predates Win95.
Why do people write things like "$150,000 dollars"? The dollar sign ("$") means "dollars", so writing "$150,000 dollars" is like writing "150,000 dollars dollars".
It's like those twits who say "ATM Machine" (Automated Teller Machine Machine).