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Comment Re:One thing that's incorrect (Score 1) 276

The Exchange support for Snow Leopard was built using Exchange Web Services, just like the next version of Microsoft's client, Entourage.

Entourage is the current Mac analogue of Outlook. It will be phased out next year when Office for Mac come with an actual version of Outlook.

Incorrect. The "Outlook for Mac" is just a rebranded Entourage, so you're still getting the same thing.

Outlook for Mac is promised to be a complete rewrite, so it's the "same thing" as Entourage only in that it's the mail/calendar/contact app component of Microsoft Office. The program itself could be quite different.

Games

Unusual Physics Engine Game Ported To Linux 117

christian.einfeldt writes "Halloween has come early for Linux-loving gamers in the form of the scary Penumbra game trilogy, which has just recently been ported natively to GNU-Linux by the manufacturer, Frictional Games. The Penumbra games, named Overture, Black Plague and Requiem, are first-person survival horror and physics puzzle games which challenge the player to survive in a mine in Greenland which has been taken over by a monstrous infection/demon/cthulhu-esque thing. The graphics, sounds, and plot are all admirable in a scary sort of way. The protagonist is an ordinary human with no particular powers at all, who fumbles around in the dark mine fighting zombified dogs or fleeing from infected humans. But the game is remarkable for its physics engine — rather than just bump and acquire, the player must use the mouse to physically turn knobs and open doors; and the player can grab and throw pretty much anything in the environment. The physics engine drives objects to fly and fall exactly as one would expect. The porting of a game with such a deft physics engine natively to Linux might be one of the most noteworthy events for GNU-Linux gamers since the World of Goo Linux port."
Education

HTML Tags For Academic Printing? 338

meketrefi writes "It's been quite a while since I got interested in the idea of using html (instead of .doc. or .odf) as a standard for saving documents — including the more official ones like academic papers. The problem is using HTML to create pages with a stable size that would deal with bibliographical references, page breaks, different printers, etc. Does anyone think it is possible to develop a decent tag like 'div,' but called 'page,' specially for this? Something that would make no use of CSS? Maybe something with attributes as follows: {page size="A4" borders="2.5cm,2.5cm,2cm,2cm" page_numbering="bottomleft,startfrom0"} — You get the idea... { /page} I guess you would not be able to tell when the page would be full, so the browser would have to be in charge of breaking the content into multiple pages when needed. Bibliographical references would probably need a special tag as well, positioned inside the tag ..." Is this such a crazy idea? What would you advise?

Comment Re:Suspect?.... (Score 3, Insightful) 403

Except there's no good evidence here to show that the NTSB is in any way being political; the statement isn't political in and of itself, and there's no evidence that there was any political pressure anywhere being applied.

Here's the facts: other organizations investigating the Air France crash have pointed to possible airspeed malfunctions as a contributing cause. Meanwhile, the NTSB has looked into similar matters and has announced it's looking into two completely separate cases in which it appears that the same kind of aircraft may have had airspeed indicator malfunctions. It has nothing directly to do with the Air France case.

And re: MACC's observation below, the NTSB reported that due to a flaw in the Boeing 777's engines there was an urgent need for a component redesign. I don't see how that's shifting blame away from Boeing at all. (And the British AAIB announced that the incident was probably caused by an accumulation of ice in the fuel system and also caused for a system redesign; that's not wildly different from the NTSB's statement.)

Comment Re:Every time I see an article about Apple... (Score 5, Insightful) 230

Every time I see an article about Apple which gets basic facts about the company's policies wrong, I get just a little more annoyed.

Seriously. There is no "90-day" refund policy. Read the iTunes Store terms and conditions -- no mention of a 90-day period. In fact, the only mention of refunds is that you can get a refund if they can't deliver the purchase to you; otherwise, as it clearly states, "no refunds are available."

Moreover, there are thousands of app store applications and developers. Is there a single one who has complained about this refund policy screwing them over?

Methinks overheated rhetoric like the one in this post and tomhudson's below about how developing for the iPhone used to be fun but is now "about money and control and refunds and chargebacks" is farcical.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 404

A Mac is a genuine Unix workstation that is much easier to administer, and has much better software and hardware support than Linux.

Apart from if you want to run the most popular scripting language.

The lesson, which any Mac developer with a clue has known for years, is that if you want to work with your own customized perl installation, install your own Perl, don't extent the preinstalled version which Apple might change in a future update. Since installing perl on a Mac involves, basically a) downloading the software; b) typing "sh Configure -de"; c) typing "make"; d) typing "make install." Not too tough, really.

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