I second this. Currently I've been exposed to Starcraft (the original!) by Blizzard. It's good news that the game got so popular that Blizzard themselves patched their latest version so you wouldn't need to put the damn CD in there.

So now I'm looking for a place where I can purchase the product legally and get my legit key to play in battle.net.

So, with or without DRM, it's the game that makes me want to buy it. Still, kinda sucks that Blizzard are so DRM-obsessed.

Obligatory webcomic links:

http://www.vanvonhunter.com/vvh124.html
http://www.vanvonhunter.com/vvh125.html

I thought the project had been retaken a couple of months ago.

Source: http://www.3drealms.com/

You hit the nail on the head. I've recently been promoted to a more bureaucratic place at my company, and I've come to realize that a lot of things I considered of uttermost importance in software development were not as crucial as I thought. Now, I'm not saying they're not necessary. But I overestimated them. Also, I've learned that it's the sales department which makes the companies earn their income. No income, no salaries. No salaries, no employees.

Linux devs who have never understood the management and marketing side of companies, simply lack the vision needed to improve and promote the kernel/OS they love so much.

About a year ago I upgraded my synaptic (the only user-friendly package manager I know so far). Turns out that the Debian guys missed a critical flaw which made Synaptic crash when loading the repos. Downgrading synaptic using command-line tools was a royal pain in the ass. That's the kind of errors that I hate, and the guys criticizing Ubuntu are much more prone to commit them.

While I don't like Ubuntu myself (for some glitches I've experienced - ironically, in the user-friendliness area), I do agree that it has set the bar on user-friendliness. More user-friendly = more popular. More popular = more pressure on the devs to write software that just works.

As an example, I'll use Mepis 8.5 - it's being released with the latest version of KDE. Well guess what, the installation screen is quite unusable if you have an nVidia video card. You're stuck at 640x480 (or 800x600 if you're lucky), and the installation screens are clipped. Sure, you can install the drivers in RAM, but then you have to reboot. DOH. All installed drivers vanish. Another problem that could be solved with community support.

With more community support, these problems will go again after the devs realize that the world they're writing software for is NOT a world filled with closets stacked with old network cards, cables, old consoles, a hard disk full of debugging and developing software and regexp cheat sheets stappled on a nearby wall.

As much as it hurts, the devs need to get off their clouds, open their eyes and see that the people who use distros like Ubuntu are people who have a life - ok, a busy life - and don't have the resources, the time, nor the brains to solve those pesky problems.

I still remember the days where one had to edit the xfree86 .conf file by hand after following a series of instructions. I sincerely hope those days don't ever come back again.

Ah, but first time criminals aren't aware of the situation. It's those that are easiest to catch. And the police better do it before they become SERIAL criminals.

On the other hand, iPhone storing screenshots of the GPS indicating where you've been... it's outright creepy. Orwell was right, man.

Yes, there was a redundant x in "h4xx0r5".

It makes all sense now! With current technology, the only thing that can make a machine CRASH is a faulty DRIVER!

And don't forget Blackjack, and hookers!

Come to think about it, forget about the bad teachers and child abusers.

Worse. They're saying it's an ILLEGAL exchange.

The DMCA makes it legal UNTIL a takedown notice is issued.

There, fixed it for ya.

Why settle for LIDAR when you can have Orichalcum?

A friend of mine has been recently interested in BDSM. Not as porn, but as a sexual lifestyle, and he's currently exploring contacts in his city. Of course, since this was a completely foreign practice to him, he had to do research.

Where do you think he researched? Wikipedia, of course!

This puts one to think: Is searching for sex articles (in an educational way) bad, even if they're considered "porn"? Let's suppose a couple engages in a wrongly-educated BDSM sexual act, and due to their lack of information, they end up harming each other, in a very bad (bad as in "OMG we need to go to the hospital") way?

This friend of mine told me all the things he learned about SSC (Sane, Safe, Consensual) in Wikipedia. Let's suppose one of these days, these articles vanish.

Poof.

Is ignorance and censorship the right way to do things? Are we going back to the dark ages?

For starters, what the fuck is this "porn in wikipedia" you speak of? So far I've never seen any!

From the article:

"The times in which we living knows a huge widening of the frontiers of communication," he said (according to our Italian fixer/producer) and the new media of this new age points to a more "egalitarian and pluralistic" forum. But, he went on to say, it also opens a new hole, the "digital divide" between haves and have-nots. Even more ominous, he said, it exacerbates tensions between nations and within nations themselves. And it increases the "dangers of ... intellectual and moral relativism," which can lead to "multiple forms of degradation and humiliation" of the essence of a person, and to the "pollution of the spirit." All in all, it seemed a pretty grim view of the wide open communication parameters being demanded by the Internet age."

The Pope wasn't talking about transparency. He talked about the dangers of the information age. The "digital divide" between haves and have-nots is a very good example of it.

Nothing new here, move along.

"Alice and Bob go into a bar..."