My 2.5 Dual is liquid cooled too. The bastard is heavy too. I wonder if those are connected. When the UPS guy delivered it, he asked if it was a newer design, because it felt heavier than the powermac boxes he'd delivered in the past. When I informed him that yes, it was a new update, he told me that he figured the Apple has started including power supplies in their computer, and that's what made it heavier. I just sort of nodded my head. Maybe he meant a UPS battery or something. Those things are heavy too.
I thought the snail data transfer article was pretty damn amusing. This hacker one, less so, but humor is generally pretty hit or miss.
Slashdot is about a lot of things, one of those being tech news, another being tech humor. There's icons for humor, there's big bold headlines giving you an idea what an article is about. Skim those, and skip what you don't like. That's how it has worked for years. YEARS!
Having a little fun doesn't diminish the quality of the other articles. Go to any news source, they've always got quirky stories lying around somewhere. It doesn't devalue the rest of the content, it's just there because some people like to read it.
Don't pretend like your time is so precious and scarce that you can't be bothered filtering out what you're not interested in. Slashdot is in no way an efficient way to get good news.
Re:Two things wrong with that article...
on
10 Gateway Games
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· Score: 1
The solution is to buy her a gamecube of her own. Finding good gifts is always one of the hardest parts of relationships to me. The nintendo was an easy one. And I can always grab a new game for her if I can't think of anything else.
I find a lot of the driving games are good for sitting down and going. Discounting something like Gran Turismo, driving is something most people are familiar with, and can be pretty simple. Mario Kart is a classic example, but another one that my girlfriend really gets into is Burnout 3. The only Xbox game I've found that she'll play for more than a few minutes. Nintendo really is the best for her interests. She's all about the Donkey Konga Bongos games as well.
Agreed. That's the way things are going to work, and commercial software makers are going to have to factor that in as a cost of business. It means they'll have to do a little more work, but if they consistently make better software, develop compelling features, and hopefully adopt sensible licensing, they'll still make money. Maybe not as much money as they would if they were the only option, but they can still exist and turn profit.
I've heard something to the effect that McDonalds spends thousands of man-hours and large sums of money doing market research, analysis of population growth, traffic flow, etc to find the right place to put their restaurants. Then BurgerKing just builds one across the street. I don't know whether that's true, but it's the same basic idea. Such is life.
The biggest problem with that argument is that there aren't enough people (normal or otherwise) looking to adopt kids. You might not think having a gay couple as foster parents is "normal", or even good, but you'd have a hard time convincing an informed person that growing up in an orphanage is better.
I think complexity is a pretty darn good excuse. The concorde is another impressive engineering feat, no doubt, but I think there's at least one order of magnitude of difference between it and that space shuttle.
I'm not arguing that NASA hasn't made any mistakes. Not even that they haven't made really foolish mistakes. But I think, that overall, the fact that more people haven't died in the space program is rather amazing.
About a hundred shuttle launches, and only two failed. That's not a bad record if you ask me. The space shuttle is one of the most complicated things people have ever done, both technologically, and politically. The fact that it ever flew at all, much less 100 times, is pretty amazing to me.
Not to say that there hasn't been some silly mistakes (you can make a pretty good argument that the basic design of the shuttle wasn't very practical), but I think NASA's safety record is something for them to be proud of.
The political nonsense and bureaucratic mess has certainly made NASA far less useful than that large a group of intelligent engineers should be. There's plenty to criticize them on, but their safety record is pretty darn good.
Your last paragraph doesn't make any sense. They can stop accidents from happening again by shutting down. Other than that, you're going to have to accept that when you're firing rockets up into space, it's dangerous. There's a lot of trial and error on the forefront of technology. How many planes crashed before the Stealth Bomber was developed? A whole lot more than wrecked space ships.
Well, it seems to me that you're over-generalizing a bit, and that this could be useful to some people. Of course, a university giving everyone an iPod might be over-generalizing in the other direction, but it makes for an interesting experiment.
Some people remember things better when they hear them. A lot of people are the opposite way. You could tell me your name 30 times before I remembered it. But if you're wearing a name tag and I read it once, I'll probably never forget it. The human brain is a strange thing.
I would think maybe Adobe could send an email or something to Nikon and work this out. If I were a digital camera manufacturer, I think I'd take the call if the people in charge of Photoshop wanted to talk.
Nikon is run by a bunch of idiots for letting this happen. Amazing.
It certainly wouldn't be easy, but I think it's workable. I could make the same argument about a team writing good code. Maybe the freeciv team could have a mini competition, where anyone who wants to submits their take on a few units, and then they pick the ones that they feel best fits their game. Then that submitter becomes sort of the art lead, and they try and find people to help fill out the rest of the artwork in a similar style.
It wouldn't be easy, or perfect sure, but workable. Add in the fact that since this is a free game made by a bunch of volunteers, you've got a lot more leeway in terms of release dates and scheduling, so things can afford to be more relaxed.
I think civ is especially adaptable in this way, because the game is way more about strategy and game mechanics than the imagery. Way more than a first person shooter or an adventure game. I'm not suggesting they actually do this, but freeciv could even be themeable, if they got a few full collections of graphics and sounds. There's a lot of freedom there.
If there wasn't going to be a useful product made out of it, then what are the Bitkeeper people so upset about? Do they just feel violated? Are they overly possessive about their protocols? Maybe they just like being jerks. I don't get it.
I don't think it would make sense for everyday computing. But in more specialized roles. The article had a picture of some guy waving his hand over a map. I imagine a big screen wall at a police headquarters or something like that, where a couple cops can look at where their different patrol cars are at. They're starting with a zoomed out view of the whole city, when one part catches their eye. So a guy sort of cups his hand around a couple city blocks and then pulls it away from the screen. As he pulls away, the image zooms in to that part, giving them a more detailed view. Then maybe he touches a few of the dots on the screen representing patrol cars which makes the screen display data as to who's in them, how they're armed, etc.
I don't think the best use for this stuff will be for me and you to navigate our harddrives and organize our mp3 collections. But if you could develop a system (ideally without gloves), where a few people could stand around a screen and interact with it collaboratively and freely, it'd be very useful.
If it were in a windows only format, it might be getting the same praise. It depends. Here's what I think is important.
Garageband is a fairly easy to use piece of software that comes free with a bunch of computers. Something like ProTools is, well, it's got pro right in the name. That's sort of intimidating.
The garageband focus really makes it look like Reznor is doing this for the every day fan. That's what makes it so compelling, at least to me. I don't know a damn thing about audio, I'm not a musician, and I've hardly even touched garageband, despite the fact that I've had it sitting on my harddrive for months. Yet now I'm downloading this file so I can mess around with it.
The fact that it can get someone like me excited about making (editing?) music is what's so cool. The fact that you'd like to be able to play around with the tracks in ProTools is entirely understandable. I was more bugged by the bitter tone of your original post than anything else.
I don't see garageband ever coming out for windows. It's cool, fun software, and it's another reason for someone to buy a mac. But that's pretty much where it ends. There's no real market share to compete for there. iTunes went to windows because the more copies that get spread around, the more songs will get purchased on Apple's music store.
Apple doesn't make more money every time someone creates a new garageband song. They make more money everyone buys a mac, so keeping garageband as an incentive makes sense. I guess you could make the argument that people trying out garageband might decide that Apple makes quality software, and start looking at macs more seriously. I've seen some anecdotal evidence of that with iTunes, and definitely with the iPod. But I think garageband might be more work than it's worth.
In the little blurb he wrote up to go with the release, one of the things he talked about was how going to garageband allowed for much smaller file sizes. Maybe nobody wanted to host the full size dealie.
People like you, I just don't understand. Someone gives the world something, a complete gift, and you bitch that it's not enough. What is your problem? If he did put out the ProTools session, you'd probably complain about the EULA. If he made it less restrictive, you'd wonder where the hell the rest of his songs were.
Noone's saying Torvalds should be run out of town, never allowed to touch Linux again. The argument is more that he's just being a dick, and his complaining is pretty inconsistent with the values of a software movement that he, like it or not, is one of the leaders of.
If he's staring down this loaded barrel, it's because he painted himself (and the other linux developers) into this corner. Maybe Trigdell took his paintbrush away, but there was already a problem, and you can make a good argument that Trigdell was trying to come up with a solution.
If Torvalds wasn't happy with any of the open SCM dealies that he could find, he should've organized someone to do it for him. Instead he made a couple bad decisions, taking the easy way out while providing some free PR for a friend.
Turns out the easy way out wasn't the best option (it seldom is), and it collapsed in his face. Linus may not be terribly interested in the philosophical holy war between open and proprietary software, and that's fine. But he should've had the good sense to realize that combining the biggest poster child for OSS with BitKeeper on such a fundamental level was going to cause problems. And a lot of people with the sense to think about it warned him when this decision was being made. That's why noone's impressed when he starts being a jackass about it. He should have known better, or at least listened to people who did.
I think this is bound to be a niche game, due to the fact that the animaniacs have well passed their heyday. That being the case, I wish they'd take a different angle on the game.
More specifically, I wish they'd make an adventure game, along the lines Lucas Arts stuff of Day of the Tentacle or Sam&Max hit the Road. And I think the animaniacs would be a perfect fit for that game type. It allows for lots of silliness and clever writing, good times all around.
Silence, slave! MS headhunters had to promise the world to lure those designers over from Fisher-Price. How dare a tiny peon like you question the visual gifts that Redmond was good enough to bestow upon you? Hang your ungrateful head in shame!
It's not petty at all. It's the UI, it totally matters. When Apple first showed of Aqua, a whole new industry, centered around bitching about it, was created. If we can complain about a halfway decent interface on an operating system running on a niche OS, we can certainly have issues with Windows behi
Yeah, but when did MS finally get around to making something functionally comparable? Windows 95 maybe? That's over a decade. I don't think MS had engineers so incompetent that it took them 10+ years to figure it out. They just weren't in any hurry.
Of course, the fact that Apple was making plenty of mistakes in the 90's didn't put any extra pressure on MS.
No, that's not the only thing that was going on, that was just one of the problems. The designer was very finicky about things like the proportions between font sizes and image sizes. Really specific vertical alignments, which CSS doesn't do easily.
I wasn't asking for free form stuff. My own personal website has a fixed width, for the reasons you mention. The content on the majority of these websites is fairly static, but things do change from time to time, and we've run into lots of problems where we had to modify the content to fit into the design, because the design was very limiting in what it could fit without breaking. That's not an optimum solution, in pretty much any case.
Actually, that's not the issue. That's part of the muddying of the issue that the EFF and these websites are trying to create, hoping to make this into a freedom of speech argument.
This is about the violation of an NDA, which is a legally binding agreement with lots of history in both business and the courts. Whether it was printed in a blog or a newspaper, by a journalist or some guy on the street, that's not relevant.
The question "can we blog without legal repercussions?" is not only not the issue, it's a meaningless question without context. It's sort of like asking "can I shoot a gun without legal repercussions?" That depends on where you are, what the gun is pointed at, possibly licensing laws and such.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. I've always thought both of them were mostly silly.
I uhh...think maybe he was being sarcastic...maybe...it seems pretty obvious to me.
My 2.5 Dual is liquid cooled too. The bastard is heavy too. I wonder if those are connected. When the UPS guy delivered it, he asked if it was a newer design, because it felt heavier than the powermac boxes he'd delivered in the past. When I informed him that yes, it was a new update, he told me that he figured the Apple has started including power supplies in their computer, and that's what made it heavier. I just sort of nodded my head. Maybe he meant a UPS battery or something. Those things are heavy too.
Grow up man.
I thought the snail data transfer article was pretty damn amusing. This hacker one, less so, but humor is generally pretty hit or miss.
Slashdot is about a lot of things, one of those being tech news, another being tech humor. There's icons for humor, there's big bold headlines giving you an idea what an article is about. Skim those, and skip what you don't like. That's how it has worked for years. YEARS!
Having a little fun doesn't diminish the quality of the other articles. Go to any news source, they've always got quirky stories lying around somewhere. It doesn't devalue the rest of the content, it's just there because some people like to read it.
Don't pretend like your time is so precious and scarce that you can't be bothered filtering out what you're not interested in. Slashdot is in no way an efficient way to get good news.
The solution is to buy her a gamecube of her own. Finding good gifts is always one of the hardest parts of relationships to me. The nintendo was an easy one. And I can always grab a new game for her if I can't think of anything else.
I find a lot of the driving games are good for sitting down and going. Discounting something like Gran Turismo, driving is something most people are familiar with, and can be pretty simple. Mario Kart is a classic example, but another one that my girlfriend really gets into is Burnout 3. The only Xbox game I've found that she'll play for more than a few minutes. Nintendo really is the best for her interests. She's all about the Donkey Konga Bongos games as well.
Agreed. That's the way things are going to work, and commercial software makers are going to have to factor that in as a cost of business. It means they'll have to do a little more work, but if they consistently make better software, develop compelling features, and hopefully adopt sensible licensing, they'll still make money. Maybe not as much money as they would if they were the only option, but they can still exist and turn profit.
I've heard something to the effect that McDonalds spends thousands of man-hours and large sums of money doing market research, analysis of population growth, traffic flow, etc to find the right place to put their restaurants. Then BurgerKing just builds one across the street. I don't know whether that's true, but it's the same basic idea. Such is life.
The biggest problem with that argument is that there aren't enough people (normal or otherwise) looking to adopt kids. You might not think having a gay couple as foster parents is "normal", or even good, but you'd have a hard time convincing an informed person that growing up in an orphanage is better.
I think complexity is a pretty darn good excuse. The concorde is another impressive engineering feat, no doubt, but I think there's at least one order of magnitude of difference between it and that space shuttle.
I'm not arguing that NASA hasn't made any mistakes. Not even that they haven't made really foolish mistakes. But I think, that overall, the fact that more people haven't died in the space program is rather amazing.
About a hundred shuttle launches, and only two failed. That's not a bad record if you ask me. The space shuttle is one of the most complicated things people have ever done, both technologically, and politically. The fact that it ever flew at all, much less 100 times, is pretty amazing to me.
Not to say that there hasn't been some silly mistakes (you can make a pretty good argument that the basic design of the shuttle wasn't very practical), but I think NASA's safety record is something for them to be proud of.
The political nonsense and bureaucratic mess has certainly made NASA far less useful than that large a group of intelligent engineers should be. There's plenty to criticize them on, but their safety record is pretty darn good.
Your last paragraph doesn't make any sense. They can stop accidents from happening again by shutting down. Other than that, you're going to have to accept that when you're firing rockets up into space, it's dangerous. There's a lot of trial and error on the forefront of technology. How many planes crashed before the Stealth Bomber was developed? A whole lot more than wrecked space ships.
Well, it seems to me that you're over-generalizing a bit, and that this could be useful to some people. Of course, a university giving everyone an iPod might be over-generalizing in the other direction, but it makes for an interesting experiment.
Some people remember things better when they hear them. A lot of people are the opposite way. You could tell me your name 30 times before I remembered it. But if you're wearing a name tag and I read it once, I'll probably never forget it. The human brain is a strange thing.
I would think maybe Adobe could send an email or something to Nikon and work this out. If I were a digital camera manufacturer, I think I'd take the call if the people in charge of Photoshop wanted to talk.
Nikon is run by a bunch of idiots for letting this happen. Amazing.
It certainly wouldn't be easy, but I think it's workable. I could make the same argument about a team writing good code. Maybe the freeciv team could have a mini competition, where anyone who wants to submits their take on a few units, and then they pick the ones that they feel best fits their game. Then that submitter becomes sort of the art lead, and they try and find people to help fill out the rest of the artwork in a similar style.
It wouldn't be easy, or perfect sure, but workable. Add in the fact that since this is a free game made by a bunch of volunteers, you've got a lot more leeway in terms of release dates and scheduling, so things can afford to be more relaxed.
I think civ is especially adaptable in this way, because the game is way more about strategy and game mechanics than the imagery. Way more than a first person shooter or an adventure game. I'm not suggesting they actually do this, but freeciv could even be themeable, if they got a few full collections of graphics and sounds. There's a lot of freedom there.
If there wasn't going to be a useful product made out of it, then what are the Bitkeeper people so upset about? Do they just feel violated? Are they overly possessive about their protocols? Maybe they just like being jerks. I don't get it.
Yeah, God forbid anyone try and learn anything from these mistakes.
I don't think it would make sense for everyday computing. But in more specialized roles. The article had a picture of some guy waving his hand over a map. I imagine a big screen wall at a police headquarters or something like that, where a couple cops can look at where their different patrol cars are at. They're starting with a zoomed out view of the whole city, when one part catches their eye. So a guy sort of cups his hand around a couple city blocks and then pulls it away from the screen. As he pulls away, the image zooms in to that part, giving them a more detailed view. Then maybe he touches a few of the dots on the screen representing patrol cars which makes the screen display data as to who's in them, how they're armed, etc.
I don't think the best use for this stuff will be for me and you to navigate our harddrives and organize our mp3 collections. But if you could develop a system (ideally without gloves), where a few people could stand around a screen and interact with it collaboratively and freely, it'd be very useful.
If it were in a windows only format, it might be getting the same praise. It depends. Here's what I think is important.
Garageband is a fairly easy to use piece of software that comes free with a bunch of computers. Something like ProTools is, well, it's got pro right in the name. That's sort of intimidating.
The garageband focus really makes it look like Reznor is doing this for the every day fan. That's what makes it so compelling, at least to me. I don't know a damn thing about audio, I'm not a musician, and I've hardly even touched garageband, despite the fact that I've had it sitting on my harddrive for months. Yet now I'm downloading this file so I can mess around with it.
The fact that it can get someone like me excited about making (editing?) music is what's so cool. The fact that you'd like to be able to play around with the tracks in ProTools is entirely understandable. I was more bugged by the bitter tone of your original post than anything else.
I don't see garageband ever coming out for windows. It's cool, fun software, and it's another reason for someone to buy a mac. But that's pretty much where it ends. There's no real market share to compete for there. iTunes went to windows because the more copies that get spread around, the more songs will get purchased on Apple's music store.
Apple doesn't make more money every time someone creates a new garageband song. They make more money everyone buys a mac, so keeping garageband as an incentive makes sense. I guess you could make the argument that people trying out garageband might decide that Apple makes quality software, and start looking at macs more seriously. I've seen some anecdotal evidence of that with iTunes, and definitely with the iPod. But I think garageband might be more work than it's worth.
In the little blurb he wrote up to go with the release, one of the things he talked about was how going to garageband allowed for much smaller file sizes. Maybe nobody wanted to host the full size dealie.
People like you, I just don't understand. Someone gives the world something, a complete gift, and you bitch that it's not enough. What is your problem? If he did put out the ProTools session, you'd probably complain about the EULA. If he made it less restrictive, you'd wonder where the hell the rest of his songs were.
Noone's saying Torvalds should be run out of town, never allowed to touch Linux again. The argument is more that he's just being a dick, and his complaining is pretty inconsistent with the values of a software movement that he, like it or not, is one of the leaders of.
If he's staring down this loaded barrel, it's because he painted himself (and the other linux developers) into this corner. Maybe Trigdell took his paintbrush away, but there was already a problem, and you can make a good argument that Trigdell was trying to come up with a solution.
If Torvalds wasn't happy with any of the open SCM dealies that he could find, he should've organized someone to do it for him. Instead he made a couple bad decisions, taking the easy way out while providing some free PR for a friend.
Turns out the easy way out wasn't the best option (it seldom is), and it collapsed in his face. Linus may not be terribly interested in the philosophical holy war between open and proprietary software, and that's fine. But he should've had the good sense to realize that combining the biggest poster child for OSS with BitKeeper on such a fundamental level was going to cause problems. And a lot of people with the sense to think about it warned him when this decision was being made. That's why noone's impressed when he starts being a jackass about it. He should have known better, or at least listened to people who did.
I think this is bound to be a niche game, due to the fact that the animaniacs have well passed their heyday. That being the case, I wish they'd take a different angle on the game.
More specifically, I wish they'd make an adventure game, along the lines Lucas Arts stuff of Day of the Tentacle or Sam&Max hit the Road. And I think the animaniacs would be a perfect fit for that game type. It allows for lots of silliness and clever writing, good times all around.
Silence, slave! MS headhunters had to promise the world to lure those designers over from Fisher-Price. How dare a tiny peon like you question the visual gifts that Redmond was good enough to bestow upon you? Hang your ungrateful head in shame!
It's not petty at all. It's the UI, it totally matters. When Apple first showed of Aqua, a whole new industry, centered around bitching about it, was created. If we can complain about a halfway decent interface on an operating system running on a niche OS, we can certainly have issues with Windows behi
Yeah, but when did MS finally get around to making something functionally comparable? Windows 95 maybe? That's over a decade. I don't think MS had engineers so incompetent that it took them 10+ years to figure it out. They just weren't in any hurry.
Of course, the fact that Apple was making plenty of mistakes in the 90's didn't put any extra pressure on MS.
No, that's not the only thing that was going on, that was just one of the problems. The designer was very finicky about things like the proportions between font sizes and image sizes. Really specific vertical alignments, which CSS doesn't do easily.
I wasn't asking for free form stuff. My own personal website has a fixed width, for the reasons you mention. The content on the majority of these websites is fairly static, but things do change from time to time, and we've run into lots of problems where we had to modify the content to fit into the design, because the design was very limiting in what it could fit without breaking. That's not an optimum solution, in pretty much any case.
Actually, that's not the issue. That's part of the muddying of the issue that the EFF and these websites are trying to create, hoping to make this into a freedom of speech argument.
This is about the violation of an NDA, which is a legally binding agreement with lots of history in both business and the courts. Whether it was printed in a blog or a newspaper, by a journalist or some guy on the street, that's not relevant.
The question "can we blog without legal repercussions?" is not only not the issue, it's a meaningless question without context. It's sort of like asking "can I shoot a gun without legal repercussions?" That depends on where you are, what the gun is pointed at, possibly licensing laws and such.