Yeah, I'm with you. I'm switching to Android, as soon as the battery on my current iPhone becomes useless-- couldn't be more than 6 months away.
Frankly, I don't care how good the iPhone 4 is, or the iPhone 5 will be. If it requires iTunes to do simple tasks like syncing my addresses or firmware updates, it's not for me.
Yeah, and the US is already *lot* more generous than other nations are, pirate-wise.
When a Russian ship catches pirates, they (on the theory that they can't hold them as prisoners since there's no declaration of war and they're non-uniformed*) simply set them adrift on whatever small bits of their boat remain floating after the shells exploded.
Frankly, good for the Russians.
*) This lapse in international law, BTW, is the same one that causes the US all kinds of headaches for terrorists we capture. There really needs to be a new Geneva Convention to address protocol when confronted with non-uniformed belligerents when no state of war exists, including pirates and terrorists.
i've seen news specials about this 20 years ago after the wall first fell. as soon as the warsaw pact fell apart the french and some of our allies started spying on us
Did they ever stop?
I've always assumed that every country spies on every other country, at least to some minimal extent.
Obviously, if you're the US, you don't commit a *lot* of resources to spying on, say, Canada. But there'd be at least a small team responsible. And in that Canadian Bacon movie, all the dirt they dug up on Canada came in handy.
I didn't realize we had hairdryer fashionistas here on Slashdot. Who prefer that their hairdryers look fashionable over potentially saving lives. And I can't for the life of me figure out any other reason you'd pick such a bizarrely specific example...
Every time I read this from Europeans, I always wonder: "ok, what's your point exactly?"
Are you saying the US is different than Europe? Then "duh." Are you saying the US should follow the European example? Then "screw you, we're doing pretty well as we are."
And is your last sentence supposed to imply that Europeans only allow facts to sway their judgement? Because I can tell you right now, I've been all over Europe (and Australia and New Zealand) and you have the exact same percentage of crackpots as we do. (Maybe fewer of them are on television, I'll grant you that...)
I was about to wonder about your problems till I saw that last part...you're running iTunes on Windows?
I've run all of this on a mac (older one granted, a G5 Tower I got cheap)...and no problems at all. I'd dare say if you run Apple stuff on Apple products...9 times out of 10, it does just work. Mixing MS windows in the equation is likely asking for trouble.
Oh, so it only crashes, erases songs, etc for 90% of their customers. THAT'S PRETTY GOOD!!! [/sarcasm, if you couldn't tell]
The shitty quality of iTunes and Quicktime on Windows is simply inexcusable. *Especially* since they have other applications, like Safari, that run quite well on Windows. Hell, even is Windows was the one with the 5% marketshare, it would *still* be inexcusable.
iTunes, by virtue of its scummy buggy-ass drivers and services, is the *only* application I've seen on Windows 7 that can still lock-up completely unrelated applications. (In my case, World of Warcraft locked-up for a solid 4 minutes while iTunes was updating my phone's firmware. Figure THAT one out!)
FF doesn't put out an MSI version of their windows package and doesn't do GPO policies *natively*. This stuff is all 3rd party after the fact and FF updates.
Meanwhile I read on/. that Chrome can use the same GPO as IE natively. (I can't find it, though)
Wow, it's almost as if when they ported it to Windows, they *actually* ported it to Windows instead of completely half-assing it!
We've already seen this with "MySQL Workbench". Since Oracle took over, all the MySQL GUI tools were wrapped into a central "MySQL Workbench" program. Which crashes frequently. (If you can install it at all.) If Oracle can bring MySQL down to the level of MySQL Workbench, nobody will be able to use it.
The MySQL GUI tools have *always* been this bad.
Although I will say this: although the UI was designed by aliens from planet Weebow whose only experience with GUI system was a vague explanation over the phone, at least it didn't crash. It was completely useless, but stable.
Well, I think the other problem is how people define "smart". In my opinion, if you can't figure out how to avoid getting jock-locked or swirlied every day, you're not very smart.
Sure, you might read a lot of books about physics, but you're lacking the *practical* intelligence to improve your own life which is far more important.
These environments don't exist. As someone who got bullied, you don't get bullied because you are smart; that is incredibly self-serving to assume and forces people to embrace the concept that intelligence comes with the added benefit of being socially inept and works against people who feel they have to fill their intelligence shoes by NOT being "cool".
Amen.
Whenever people try to imply that only the "smart" kids get beat up, I always say: "what about Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons? He got beat up and was dumb as a post... didn't your school have a Ralph Wiggum?"
That usually gets the point across. The only differentiator is social skills. Not intelligence. Not wealth. Not appearance. Social skills.
The ironic part is that if the people getting beat up were really as "smart" as they implied, they: 1) Wouldn't need me to explain this to them, they'd have figured it out on their own already 2) They'd be smart enough to not figure out a way to not get bullied anymore
Congratulations on being completely off-topic, yet getting modded up.
Thanks to the Windows source code leak years ago, we now know for certain that "bugward compatibility" is built into the Windows OS and its kernel.
1) No matter how many times you type "bugward compatibility" it's not going to catch-on, ok? Your phrase coining is not working, give it up already.
2) That's all been moved into shims, so only the specific application that needs that specific bug is affected now. Every other application gets the default, documented version of the APIs.
Microsoft's shim technology pretty much addresses all of your complaints there.
Microsoft went down the wrong path long, long ago and has been paying for it ever since.
Microsoft (and all OS makers, to some extent) are between a rock and a hard place. Look, they can't do anything to prevent you, the developer, from writing horrible code, from relying on side-effects, from relying on specific internal data structures. Etc. So you, the developer, don't-- so you go all out and put all that shit in your Foobar application because, shit, it runs, right?
Then Microsoft releases a new version of the OS, and what happens? Your Foobar application crashes! And now we get to the end-user. Is the end-user going to think, "wow, Foobar crashes in Windows XP, but it didn't in Windows 2000-- they must be relying on undocumented internal data structures!"? No, the end-user is going to say, "wow, Windows XP sucks shit because it can't run Foobar."
See what happened there? Foobar's problem just became *Microsoft's* problem. And what makes it even worse, and going back to the culture issue you brought up, is that a lot of Windows programmers *side with the end-users on this one!!!*
Look how many developers on this site alone were bitching and moaning about UAC when Vista and Windows 7 added that in. Hey buddy: your program triggers UAC prompts *because it is buggy!!* The only thing that changed from XP to Vista, permissions-wise, is that Microsoft's attitude changed from "grin and bear it" to "let's give these developers a little hint that their apps are broken."
They were sitting here on this site bitching at Microsoft because Microsoft didn't silently fix as many of their errors for them anymore! Unbelievable.
OS X doesn't have this problem because of their hipster mentality where anything older than about 3-4 years doesn't have to work anymore, since the *cool* people have already moved on. Linux solves it by having virtually every user also be a developer.
But because of the Foobar problem above, it's in Microsoft's best interests to keep Windows running everything possible, even if it means adding shims. And that's what they do. And that's why they have such a huge market share.
Large US corporations care more about avoiding highly publicized lawsuits than 'doing the right thing'. By calling MS out by announcing to the world their Windows flaws, it forces MS to either publicly refuse to fix the issue or put some of the ample resources on fixing it.
Microsoft already puts ample resources on fixing it. Jesus Christ, haven't any security researchers read "No Silver Bullet?" There's no reason to believe that Microsoft can do anything to speed up this process in the short term-- putting a freakin' ad in the paper reading, "wanted: 46 random people on the street to fix security holes" isn't going to help!
Look, Windows is a HUGE product. Last I heard, it takes something like 12-15 hours JUST TO BUILD. God knows how long the regression testing takes.
What I love is all the jet-skiing bikini babes just East of the mountains in Seattle.
You're either: 1) Making an ignorant joke 2) Aware of all of the beautiful lakes east of the Cascades which do indeed have jet-skiing bikini babes in them (in the summer)
He's in the UK. Even if he goes outside London, that type of environment simply doesn't exist there... unless he wants to move to a western US state and build there, but then he'd have to ship the tube car.
I'm all about Tribes 2. Not as good as the original Tribes, which you should "try playing some time."
But it didn't have recharging shields. You could recharge your own shields with a repair pack, but that was an item you had to lower your weapon to use, not at all the same thing.
For example, the previous poster said "Realistic weapon loading has been mainstream since Half-Life. At least." and you respond to his post yapping on about weapon loadouts which is a totally different thing.
Yes, but I originally said "realistic weapon load". Admittedly that could be a confusing way to phrase it, but if he misunderstood what I meant, he should have asked for clarification instead of posting crap.
the unwashed console masses.... being modded by a bunch of kiddies who busted their FPS cherries on Halo.
Realistic weapon loading has been mainstream since Half-Life. At least.
I'm sorry, have you *played* Half-Life? I remember being able to hold:
2 Pistols, a shotgun, 2 assault rifles, a crossbow, a rocket launcher, and at least 2 types of experimental weapons
All simultaneously.
What is with people today trying to counter my arguments with wrongness? You couldn't spend the 15 seconds to look up whether Half-Life had a limited weapon-load or not?
Anyway, Halo's rechargeable shields have always seemed like somewhat limited god-mode to me.
The point of it is so you get behind cover from time to time. It's only "god mode" if you're playing on super-easy.
Well you could take the Armor and/or health recharge mods that have been in every Unreal Tournament game since the beginning, you could look at one of Bungie's older titles, Marathon
UT mods maybe, although I've never played any and you haven't named any.
But I've played the shit out of Marathon, and it didn't have charging shields. You had to go to a socket in the wall and manually charge them up. So... wrong.
If I want to think of a game that didn't really rip off the films, I might say something like Mirror's Edge? Don't get me wrong its not the greatest game in the world, but it certainly was a little more unique in it's style.
Yeah, it didn't ripoff films, but it came pretty goddamned close to Bungie's Oni. You might even say it... ripped off Oni.
(That said, I haven't played it; I don't buy EA games. I'm just going by gameplay footage.)
What else should I say...
Well, for starters, you shouldn't lie about Marathon. I love that fucking game, man. Love it.
Look, anyway. Here's the deal: 1) You don't hate Halo games, but you have some kind of vague "oh it's inferior because frat guys play it" thing going on. That's stupid... just man-up and admit you like the game, stop kowtowing to your geek friends who criticize you for it.
2) Your standards on "ripoff" are pretty crazy. By your standards, pretty much every work of media ever is a ripoff of something or another-- the real world doesn't work that way. No reasonable person would say that Halo is a ripoff of Aliens. They might use the word "homage" or "in the same genre as", but ripoff is definitely going too far.
The problem is that too many, what's the opposite term of "deniers" that gives an equally derogatory tint to talking about people who firmly believe climate change is happening? Let's call them "climees."
The problem is that too many climees are going on the TV and in the newspapers and basically telling us we're all going to die and the world's coming to an end. We've seen that song and dance before, thousands of times before, and the world hasn't ended yet... so I pretty much just filter out claims like that.
Now that said, I'm sure there's actually really good science behind it all. But I'm not seeing the science; I'm seeing the ludicrous fear-mongoring. New York's going to be 30' underwater by 2020! and all that crap.
Here's a tip: if you have a message you want to bring to the public, don't use the same tactics as the drunk homeless bearded religious nut standing in the alleyway. And if you do use those tactics, don't be surprised when people call your position "a religion."
Recharging shield and health was around before Halo,
In what game?
I like Halo, and it IS a good game, but one thing I can't ever give it credit for is originality - which ripped a lot of stuff from Aliens and Predator films, the same way Starcraft did.
If you're including "ripping off films" in your list of original games, even if they really only take the setting and wide-brush concepts, what game would you consider original?
Any of the ones that made the genre? Halo just brought FPS to the fratboy set.
Two points: 1) An accomplishment is an accomplishment. 2) The Halo series are really good games. They've brought tons of new ideas that many, many other games have emulated (recharging shield/health, realistic weapon load), and obviously they've sold very well.
Most people just hate it because they have some "PC Game 1337 Gene" that makes it impossible to appreciate anything involving a game controller.
(Ironically, they much prefer to play games on controllers designed to run office applications... but console players are less 1337. Go figure.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm with you. I'm switching to Android, as soon as the battery on my current iPhone becomes useless-- couldn't be more than 6 months away.
Frankly, I don't care how good the iPhone 4 is, or the iPhone 5 will be. If it requires iTunes to do simple tasks like syncing my addresses or firmware updates, it's not for me.
How does a 1-word post get modded "insightful?" I guess someone thinks that's a good replacement for, "contentless?"
Yeah, and the US is already *lot* more generous than other nations are, pirate-wise.
When a Russian ship catches pirates, they (on the theory that they can't hold them as prisoners since there's no declaration of war and they're non-uniformed*) simply set them adrift on whatever small bits of their boat remain floating after the shells exploded.
Frankly, good for the Russians.
*) This lapse in international law, BTW, is the same one that causes the US all kinds of headaches for terrorists we capture. There really needs to be a new Geneva Convention to address protocol when confronted with non-uniformed belligerents when no state of war exists, including pirates and terrorists.
i've seen news specials about this 20 years ago after the wall first fell. as soon as the warsaw pact fell apart the french and some of our allies started spying on us
Did they ever stop?
I've always assumed that every country spies on every other country, at least to some minimal extent.
Obviously, if you're the US, you don't commit a *lot* of resources to spying on, say, Canada. But there'd be at least a small team responsible. And in that Canadian Bacon movie, all the dirt they dug up on Canada came in handy.
ruin the looks of a hairdryer
Ruin the *looks* of a hairdryer?
I didn't realize we had hairdryer fashionistas here on Slashdot. Who prefer that their hairdryers look fashionable over potentially saving lives. And I can't for the life of me figure out any other reason you'd pick such a bizarrely specific example...
Every time I read this from Europeans, I always wonder: "ok, what's your point exactly?"
Are you saying the US is different than Europe? Then "duh." Are you saying the US should follow the European example? Then "screw you, we're doing pretty well as we are."
And is your last sentence supposed to imply that Europeans only allow facts to sway their judgement? Because I can tell you right now, I've been all over Europe (and Australia and New Zealand) and you have the exact same percentage of crackpots as we do. (Maybe fewer of them are on television, I'll grant you that...)
Anyway, what exactly is your point?
I was about to wonder about your problems till I saw that last part...you're running iTunes on Windows?
I've run all of this on a mac (older one granted, a G5 Tower I got cheap)...and no problems at all. I'd dare say if you run Apple stuff on Apple products...9 times out of 10, it does just work. Mixing MS windows in the equation is likely asking for trouble.
Oh, so it only crashes, erases songs, etc for 90% of their customers. THAT'S PRETTY GOOD!!! [/sarcasm, if you couldn't tell]
The shitty quality of iTunes and Quicktime on Windows is simply inexcusable. *Especially* since they have other applications, like Safari, that run quite well on Windows. Hell, even is Windows was the one with the 5% marketshare, it would *still* be inexcusable.
iTunes, by virtue of its scummy buggy-ass drivers and services, is the *only* application I've seen on Windows 7 that can still lock-up completely unrelated applications. (In my case, World of Warcraft locked-up for a solid 4 minutes while iTunes was updating my phone's firmware. Figure THAT one out!)
FF doesn't put out an MSI version of their windows package and doesn't do GPO policies *natively*. This stuff is all 3rd party after the fact and FF updates.
Meanwhile I read on /. that Chrome can use the same GPO as IE natively. (I can't find it, though)
Wow, it's almost as if when they ported it to Windows, they *actually* ported it to Windows instead of completely half-assing it!
We've already seen this with "MySQL Workbench". Since Oracle took over, all the MySQL GUI tools were wrapped into a central "MySQL Workbench" program. Which crashes frequently. (If you can install it at all.) If Oracle can bring MySQL down to the level of MySQL Workbench, nobody will be able to use it.
The MySQL GUI tools have *always* been this bad.
Although I will say this: although the UI was designed by aliens from planet Weebow whose only experience with GUI system was a vague explanation over the phone, at least it didn't crash. It was completely useless, but stable.
Well, I think the other problem is how people define "smart". In my opinion, if you can't figure out how to avoid getting jock-locked or swirlied every day, you're not very smart.
Sure, you might read a lot of books about physics, but you're lacking the *practical* intelligence to improve your own life which is far more important.
These environments don't exist. As someone who got bullied, you don't get bullied because you are smart; that is incredibly self-serving to assume and forces people to embrace the concept that intelligence comes with the added benefit of being socially inept and works against people who feel they have to fill their intelligence shoes by NOT being "cool".
Amen.
Whenever people try to imply that only the "smart" kids get beat up, I always say: "what about Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons? He got beat up and was dumb as a post... didn't your school have a Ralph Wiggum?"
That usually gets the point across. The only differentiator is social skills. Not intelligence. Not wealth. Not appearance. Social skills.
The ironic part is that if the people getting beat up were really as "smart" as they implied, they:
1) Wouldn't need me to explain this to them, they'd have figured it out on their own already
2) They'd be smart enough to not figure out a way to not get bullied anymore
Congratulations on being completely off-topic, yet getting modded up.
Thanks to the Windows source code leak years ago, we now know for certain that "bugward compatibility" is built into the Windows OS and its kernel.
1) No matter how many times you type "bugward compatibility" it's not going to catch-on, ok? Your phrase coining is not working, give it up already.
2) That's all been moved into shims, so only the specific application that needs that specific bug is affected now. Every other application gets the default, documented version of the APIs.
Microsoft's shim technology pretty much addresses all of your complaints there.
Microsoft went down the wrong path long, long ago and has been paying for it ever since.
Microsoft (and all OS makers, to some extent) are between a rock and a hard place. Look, they can't do anything to prevent you, the developer, from writing horrible code, from relying on side-effects, from relying on specific internal data structures. Etc. So you, the developer, don't-- so you go all out and put all that shit in your Foobar application because, shit, it runs, right?
Then Microsoft releases a new version of the OS, and what happens? Your Foobar application crashes! And now we get to the end-user. Is the end-user going to think, "wow, Foobar crashes in Windows XP, but it didn't in Windows 2000-- they must be relying on undocumented internal data structures!"? No, the end-user is going to say, "wow, Windows XP sucks shit because it can't run Foobar."
See what happened there? Foobar's problem just became *Microsoft's* problem. And what makes it even worse, and going back to the culture issue you brought up, is that a lot of Windows programmers *side with the end-users on this one!!!*
Look how many developers on this site alone were bitching and moaning about UAC when Vista and Windows 7 added that in. Hey buddy: your program triggers UAC prompts *because it is buggy!!* The only thing that changed from XP to Vista, permissions-wise, is that Microsoft's attitude changed from "grin and bear it" to "let's give these developers a little hint that their apps are broken."
They were sitting here on this site bitching at Microsoft because Microsoft didn't silently fix as many of their errors for them anymore! Unbelievable.
OS X doesn't have this problem because of their hipster mentality where anything older than about 3-4 years doesn't have to work anymore, since the *cool* people have already moved on. Linux solves it by having virtually every user also be a developer.
But because of the Foobar problem above, it's in Microsoft's best interests to keep Windows running everything possible, even if it means adding shims. And that's what they do. And that's why they have such a huge market share.
Why would they care if a Microsoft employee joins the list? I mean, their policy is to disclose ASAP anyway-- what do they think is going to happen?
Large US corporations care more about avoiding highly publicized lawsuits than 'doing the right thing'. By calling MS out by announcing to the world their Windows flaws, it forces MS to either publicly refuse to fix the issue or put some of the ample resources on fixing it.
Microsoft already puts ample resources on fixing it. Jesus Christ, haven't any security researchers read "No Silver Bullet?" There's no reason to believe that Microsoft can do anything to speed up this process in the short term-- putting a freakin' ad in the paper reading, "wanted: 46 random people on the street to fix security holes" isn't going to help!
Look, Windows is a HUGE product. Last I heard, it takes something like 12-15 hours JUST TO BUILD. God knows how long the regression testing takes.
Meanwhile, everybody's ignoring the sieve-like Adobe suite of products which are infecting thousands of new computers every day.
What I love is all the jet-skiing bikini babes just East of the mountains in Seattle.
You're either:
1) Making an ignorant joke
2) Aware of all of the beautiful lakes east of the Cascades which do indeed have jet-skiing bikini babes in them (in the summer)
But I'm not sure which one!
He's in the UK. Even if he goes outside London, that type of environment simply doesn't exist there... unless he wants to move to a western US state and build there, but then he'd have to ship the tube car.
Dude.
I'm all about Tribes 2. Not as good as the original Tribes, which you should "try playing some time."
But it didn't have recharging shields. You could recharge your own shields with a repair pack, but that was an item you had to lower your weapon to use, not at all the same thing.
For example, the previous poster said "Realistic weapon loading has been mainstream since Half-Life. At least." and you respond to his post yapping on about weapon loadouts which is a totally different thing.
Yes, but I originally said "realistic weapon load". Admittedly that could be a confusing way to phrase it, but if he misunderstood what I meant, he should have asked for clarification instead of posting crap.
the unwashed console masses. ... being modded by a bunch of kiddies who busted their FPS cherries on Halo.
Wow, you are an asshole. Go fuck yourself.
Realistic weapon loading has been mainstream since Half-Life. At least.
I'm sorry, have you *played* Half-Life? I remember being able to hold:
2 Pistols,
a shotgun,
2 assault rifles,
a crossbow,
a rocket launcher,
and at least 2 types of experimental weapons
All simultaneously.
What is with people today trying to counter my arguments with wrongness? You couldn't spend the 15 seconds to look up whether Half-Life had a limited weapon-load or not?
Anyway, Halo's rechargeable shields have always seemed like somewhat limited god-mode to me.
The point of it is so you get behind cover from time to time. It's only "god mode" if you're playing on super-easy.
Well you could take the Armor and/or health recharge mods that have been in every Unreal Tournament game since the beginning, you could look at one of Bungie's older titles, Marathon
UT mods maybe, although I've never played any and you haven't named any.
But I've played the shit out of Marathon, and it didn't have charging shields. You had to go to a socket in the wall and manually charge them up. So... wrong.
If I want to think of a game that didn't really rip off the films, I might say something like Mirror's Edge? Don't get me wrong its not the greatest game in the world, but it certainly was a little more unique in it's style.
Yeah, it didn't ripoff films, but it came pretty goddamned close to Bungie's Oni. You might even say it... ripped off Oni.
(That said, I haven't played it; I don't buy EA games. I'm just going by gameplay footage.)
What else should I say...
Well, for starters, you shouldn't lie about Marathon. I love that fucking game, man. Love it.
Look, anyway. Here's the deal:
1) You don't hate Halo games, but you have some kind of vague "oh it's inferior because frat guys play it" thing going on. That's stupid... just man-up and admit you like the game, stop kowtowing to your geek friends who criticize you for it.
2) Your standards on "ripoff" are pretty crazy. By your standards, pretty much every work of media ever is a ripoff of something or another-- the real world doesn't work that way. No reasonable person would say that Halo is a ripoff of Aliens. They might use the word "homage" or "in the same genre as", but ripoff is definitely going too far.
3) Don't lie about Marathon, man.
Cheers.
The problem is that too many, what's the opposite term of "deniers" that gives an equally derogatory tint to talking about people who firmly believe climate change is happening? Let's call them "climees."
The problem is that too many climees are going on the TV and in the newspapers and basically telling us we're all going to die and the world's coming to an end. We've seen that song and dance before, thousands of times before, and the world hasn't ended yet... so I pretty much just filter out claims like that.
Now that said, I'm sure there's actually really good science behind it all. But I'm not seeing the science; I'm seeing the ludicrous fear-mongoring. New York's going to be 30' underwater by 2020! and all that crap.
Here's a tip: if you have a message you want to bring to the public, don't use the same tactics as the drunk homeless bearded religious nut standing in the alleyway. And if you do use those tactics, don't be surprised when people call your position "a religion."
No you're being played, but you don't realize that, because you're too "intelligent" and "independent" to realize it.
Gee, maybe every individual has a different opinion on the matter and we should treat them as individuals! ... Naaaah.
Recharging shield and health was around before Halo,
In what game?
I like Halo, and it IS a good game, but one thing I can't ever give it credit for is originality - which ripped a lot of stuff from Aliens and Predator films, the same way Starcraft did.
If you're including "ripping off films" in your list of original games, even if they really only take the setting and wide-brush concepts, what game would you consider original?
Let's put some money where your mouth is.
Any of the ones that made the genre?
Halo just brought FPS to the fratboy set.
Two points:
1) An accomplishment is an accomplishment.
2) The Halo series are really good games. They've brought tons of new ideas that many, many other games have emulated (recharging shield/health, realistic weapon load), and obviously they've sold very well.
Most people just hate it because they have some "PC Game 1337 Gene" that makes it impossible to appreciate anything involving a game controller.
(Ironically, they much prefer to play games on controllers designed to run office applications... but console players are less 1337. Go figure.)