why not FFIV? you start the game on the Red Wings as Cecil!

haven't you seen star wars? if you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

it's not such a bad thing for the government to *gasp* be held accountable.

i sorta think the author of TFA is looking at a page full of kanji and is equating that to being a busy mess of a design. I wonder if the same exact page, translated to English, would evoke the same feelings.

this is one thing we DO NOT WANT from slashdot's readerbase.

the biggest change this has for me is that it has moved installing adblocking software from just 'something i do for my personal computers' to 'something i do on any computer i touch, even professionally'.

it was the ad server's responsibility to regulate what they distribute. instead, they have just become an avenue for zero-day attacks that can spread across the web in no time at all. since they did NOT act responsibly in preventing this type of attack (really, is there NO review process at all on what they serve out to millions of people?), it falls on us, the users, to protect ourselves. when companies complain about lost revenue due to adblocking software, this is your justification.

gritty!? the new show will be garbage if it doesn't feature natalie portman naked and petrified and covered in hot grits.

(P.S. mods: this is a homage to vintage /., not a genuine troll)

while i realize that there are some positives that can be garnered by war spending, can you imagine where we might be if the past 7-8 years of military budget were instead spent on scientific endeavors such as the space program? if those billions were instead going into cancer and aids research?

regardless, i am glad that even in a time of belt tightening, we still have people aiming for the stars (and not just at other people).

there's two questions here:

1) is GAMING dying?
2) is CONSOLE GAMING dying?

1. no. people continue to want to play games. it will only grow as current gamers grow older and have kids who become new gamers.

2. no. while PC gaming will continue to have its niche market, especially in areas where keyboard and mouse have dynamic advantages (especially MMO and RTS games), console gaming makes modern games accessible to the masses who cannot (through lack of knowledge or lack of money) continually upgrade their PC's to keep up. Consoles give a consistent platform for several years where upgrading is not necessary, and games will "just work".

Sure during recession all forms of entertainment will suffer cuts, but gaming is far from being alone here.

yes, yes it can be worse. (still worth seeing though)

i remember the days of downloading phoenix each time i logged onto a lab computer. it was so small, compact, fast and great back then. firefox has come a long way and added a slew of useful features, but a lot of what once made it great is lost.

this summary is misleading. they were asked to choose which they thought sounded better. the listeners DID notice a difference between the two, and for some reason 1/3 of the participants enjoyed the lower bitrate version better. perhaps it had less harsh high tones or something about it was more pleasurable to them... that doesn't mean that the higher bitrate didn't honestly sound more accurate to the source material. Perhaps uncompressed audio should have also been incorporated into the test. If they still choose the lower bitrate over uncompressed, then it's clear that some listeners prefer the song with the changes inherent to compression.

this was a very unscientific study, with a very small sample size, and really shouldn't be front page on slashdot.

if it's obsolete it should not be for sale on new computers. but that's not the case here. Win 3.1 is obsolete. it's NOT like you can still go to a store and buy a new PC with Windows 3.1. But you certainly can with XP.

since vista can't run well enough on netbooks and windows 7 isn't ready yet, XP is truly the best option in many situations. don't blame the user for choosing the best option available to them (apart from using either a generic UI on top of Linux, or having to install their own stuff.)

i think the GP's point was that they're still bringing in new revenue on XP sales, and as such they should be able to staff a team to continue squashing bugs until a time when Windows 7 is widely available and has replaced XP on most netbooks.

it's been a while since we all got to vent our frustrations out on darl. to be fair, SCO has been a fun punching bag over the years, if nothing else.

even our very own CmdrTaco ran AnimeFu.com, which seems to have fallen by the wayside.

i do agree that Ubuntu 9.04 looks slick. i installed a few of my favorite fonts (Futura, Droid) and adjusted the theme. (it's really simple... anybody who complains about the default really needs to learn how to click System -> Preferences -> Appearance and choose one of the alternatives, including *gasp* blue/gray themes! That's right, THEY'RE INCLUDED! YOUR MAIN GRIPE AGAINST UBUNTU IS SOLVED! :-P ) I must say though, those Gnome folks have really improved the font situation in Linux over the years, to the point where fonts look just as nice in Linux as they do on a Mac, IMHO.

but what isn't slick is support for some webcams (mine "works" but in an unusable state), media codecs that must be installed separately and then don't always work (in my personal experience, even VLC has run poorly)... which may be caused by still inferior (to Windows') video card drivers (even when using 1st party drivers from ATI/nVidia). The sad truth is that a hacked together osx86 install gives better media performance and capabilities than a legit Ubuntu install.

I would love for a release of Ubuntu to focus primarily on multimedia and drivers. this is where Ubuntu must concentrate in order to convince users to switch from Windows (if that is in fact a goal). i understand the licensing issues that prevent some codecs from being included. but is there really a need for my Dell's onboard sound card to be listed as a Pulseaudio device AND an ALSA device AND an OSS device? Why not unify this? I plugged in a webcam which had it's own mic, and suddenly i have a dozen possible devices to choose from as an input device in every application that can use a mic. how about just two?

medibuntu repositories should be available by default. people DO want codecs and 3rd party software like Skype, despite what people like RMS might think. they don't need to be installed by default, but at least have the capability there by default. (Totem does go out and search for codecs now at least, which is a good thing.)

in my experience, it's still not there as a desktop OS yet, but Ubuntu is progressing. with each release, we get closer.