Posts by Carney3

Meet the Frenchman masterminding a Google-free Android

Re: What about Replicant?

It is bizarre that Replicant was completely ignored in this article. Why re-invent the wheel?

Mark Shuttleworth says some free software folk are 'deeply anti-social' and 'love to hate'

Re: summary: People resist when somebody else set the agenda without consulting them

That's a legitimate point, but some of the resentment comes from the fact that there's a zero-sum game ni man-hours, momentum, mind-share, and credibility, and so the more forking there is, the more fewer resources there are behind any one project and thus the overall progress of the scene is harmed.

Not only do big mainstream figures like Shuttleworth get flack for forking and diverting that, but so do groups of "nobodies" - enthusiasts, who take their ball and go home when they don't like how something's going.

Stallman's Free Software Foundation says we need a free phone OS

It's not FSF's fault that Gnash is limited at best. Adobe's absurdly draconian licensing requirements in effect created a requirement that the only people legally permitted to do Gnash development were people who had NEVER used Flash, ever. In any browser, on any PC or device they had ever used. That made it almost impossible to find Gnash developers.

Computer says: Stop using MacWrite II, human!

Something evil about force-feeding Word on students who wanted to use MacWrite instead.

But not as bad as some of the other little tricks.

One of the worst was to put an alias to the shutdown command into a Mac's startup items folder. Start up, shut down. Start up again, shut down. Whee! And this was back when startup took a LONG time.

As for Windows, a boss of mine at work put in place a long sound file onto his own PC to replace the very brief error "ding". The sound file was a clip from "True Romance", in Christopher Walken's voice:

"You see that?" *sound of a punch landing* "That smarts, doesn't it? Getting slammed in the nose. F---s you all up. You get that pain shootin' through your brain, your eyes fill up with water. That ain't any kind of fun, but what I have to offer you, that's as good as it's gonna get. And it won't ever get that good again. "

As that clip played it would take over the whole computer. The little hourglass icon was there, and you could do nothing as it played. You just had to sit through it.

And of course, since it was a replacement for an error sound, it only ever happened when something went wrong - when the computer refused to do something my boss wanted, for example.

So the natural frustration of having the computer refuse a command (say, to select something away from an open dialog box demanding his attention) was compounded by the fact that this happened together with a long sound clip, COMPOUNDED by the fact that in context the computer was taunting him and telling him it was only going to get worse. He'd get real frustrated, sit there steaming, as the sound would play over and over again, as he tried to do something.

AND HE DID IT TO HIMSELF.

Running the Gauntlet: Atari's classic ... now and then

Pentagram on splash screen

The new version's splash screen features four icons under the Gauntlet logo, each clearly meant to correspond to one of the four characters. One of them is a pentagram, apparently meant as the logo for the wizard (still called Merlin?) What an unwise choice. The pentagram is widely viewed as a pagan or even Satanic symbol, not only by many Christians but also by many self-proclaimed pagans and "Satanists". Unnecessarily provocative and controversial, even offensive. Why do something so off-putting and sour the debut of the latest installment of a popular and fondly viewed franchise?

DON'T BOTHER RESPONDING WITH HOW IT DOESN'T BOTHER YOU, OR WITH ATTACKS ON CHRISTIANS. Both are irrelevant.