Microsoft is pretty good at buying games and not ruining them, the original Halo aside. I actually think that was a great game in every way except for the monotonous level design in the end, and the lack of cross-platform support. You can't rush greatness, and you shouldn't force your operating system on people. That's kind of what they do, though, so it's not much of a surprise.

Microsoft has their hits, but they also have their significant misses. Where's our Freelancer 2? Handing that franchise to anyone competent and telling them to support capships and not ruin the control scheme would have permitted them to simply print money.

I've bought quite a few Microsoft games, it's one of the things I think they do best in fact, mostly by virtue of not doing it themselves. I hope they don't totally bone it, but I won't be surprised if they do. And if they do, someone will surely replace it.

Anyway, off the topic of Microsoft, and to join in talking about what would be cool for Minecraft, it absolutely must have functioning boats. Along with more realistic water, specifically ocean that fills in to level on its own, it would add a new dimension that would probably give the series a whole new kick in the pants. Ninjas vs. Pirates, anyone?

And with that said, anyone know of any minecraft clones which are capable of doing something like that? You build a ship, and then either roll it into the sea or dig the land out from beneath it? It seems like rather an obvious thing to have wanted to support from the beginning. A one-block boat doesn't do it for me.

Tee hee. Maybe not all of them.

Yeah, look at the other cartoons which were competing with D&D. They were simply handed a complete franchise for a great deal, of course they took it. And it was a flop.

Wood-burning kits are kind of a reasonable crossover, because that was a dying hobby, too.

I would expect the PC game to cost slightly more than the Xbox 180 version, and not have a subscription fee. I presume your other predictions will actually come true. I could also see it being a free-to-pay game, though. Given Windows 10 is going to be free for Windows 7 and 8 users, it might make sense to give MC2 away to Windows 10 users as well, and charge a small fee to other players. Use some lame excuse about having to support older versions of DirectX.

The one thing that Minecraft provably does better than minetest is the GUI. At least, last I checked into minetest, which was not so very long ago. I keep a source tree on my Linux boot. Are there any mods which make the UI at least as good as minecraft? This is not a very high bar.

It's not that I'm not in favor of that, it's that there's a valid counterargument. It may not be compelling, but at least it isn't invented.

Yes, this. Actually, we already have that right now. Minecraft for XBox is already full of licensed DLC for XBox, Dr. Who, etc.
http://www.cinemablend.com/gam...

Minecraft as a cash cow is complete, there's no need to do any more development. It's all business dealings from here on out.

Some Slashdotter put it best a few months back... "Microsoft didn't buy a game, they bought a generation"

Oh, she just uses her own domain, which someone registered for her the week before she was sworn in as Sec of State. clintonemail.com

whois clintonemail.com | grep "Registrant Name"
Registrant Name: PERFECT PRIVACY, LLC

Hey, LOOK everybody, Clinton supports PRIVACY rights from the prying eyes of the NSA!

nmap clintonemail.com

Starting Nmap 6.47 ( http://nmap.org/ ) at 2015-03-03 07:50 PST
Nmap scan report for clintonemail.com (208.91.197.27)
Host is up (0.083s latency).
Not shown: 996 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
53/tcp open domain
80/tcp open http
554/tcp open rtsp
7070/tcp open realserver
... and ... transparency through old video streaming technology.

curl -vi clintonemail.com ... says it's an apache server, so there's that.

Yeah, we tried that with Windows 3.1, but Win32 permitted storing the icon in the executable because you could do that on the Macintosh.

If you want all exes to have a boring icon, use a boring file manager for admin tasks.

Try comparing it to one of the clones. Diddle the settings until you get similar visual detail and then check the frame rates. Prepare for jaw droppage. Minecraft is absolutely awful about performance.

No, just not everyone is complaining. But Minecraft falls down very hard on complex scenes which render fine with e.g. minetest.

Also, they want to sell you paint. Although I have noticed that their primer in particular truly is epic. I've used it even in automotive applications, as a midcoat to get around a paint interaction. I sure wish I knew who made it for them so I could get it at a reasonable price.

What Linux users are pissed off at Microsoft for adding fluff? They must have sad and pathetic lives even by Slashdot standards, because you can turn all that stuff off.

What Linux users get pissed off at Microsoft for is forcing fluff, like when you have to use a GUI tool to configure something. But they are getting much better about embracing the command line. The next Windows will supposedly have even better headless support.

Compiz does do all the eye candy shiny shiny stuff. But you can turn features on and off atomically, and there is a great deal of configuration available for each feature. If for example you like many of the aspects of the OSX desktop, but some of the features bother you or you wish they worked a little bit differently, you can get the precise effect you're looking for with Compiz.

Sadly, my favorite window manager (emerald) is not being developed any more, but between emerald, compiz, and avant-window-navigator it's possible to build a maclike desktop which actually works properly, and which has only useful eye candy like smooth moves (nice for seeing where windows go) and an Expose-like feature with no borders. That is, you can turn them off. And of course, mipmapped previews.

Did you? All I saw in that discussion was an argument over whether it was stupid to need seven lines to split a string instead of one. And it is. It's still a stupid argument, because any problem you can solve with a free and common library is not a real problem.

The idea is that your receptionist should be able to follow the instructions, install Windows, and set up your small office. "Back in the day" it was ordinary to make the receptionist the sysadmin because they were the person in the building deemed to have time to take on additional duties. I've spent some fun times doing UUCP support with someone who has to have Unix characters (like bang and pipe) explained to them as a result.

The GUI is still the primary way to do things.

So you're saying Clinton should maybe be fined for something other than violating recordkeeping policy?

(from the Valerie Plame wikipedia article)