I suppose. However, it could be possible that Joe Schmo doesn't give a flying shit about learning anything to do with engeneering/computers/science. Let turn this around and suggest that we educate the average/.er on the ways of women. An equally daunting task, also aimed at a group who could not care less.
While I certainly can't speak on behalf of some people here, I know enough about women. Besides, my point isn't that Joe Schmoe should become some sort of physicist, just that he shouldn't be ignorant. I don't think anybody on/. really thinks their quake skills are going to get them any. In the same vein, Mr. Schmoe shouldn't be led to think that one extracts cold from water.
Yes, or we can stop bashing people trying to make technical processes understandable to Joe Schmoe...
Here's a novel idea. How about we educate Joe Schmoe so he doesn't go around thinking completely backwards. If everybody were smart to a certain minimum level our engineers could stop trying to make a technical process understandable by explaining it either (a) incorrectly to the level of being the opposite of what is true, or (b) as though it were magic.
I realize Joe Schmoe would like nothing more than to sit back and watch his TV absorb darkness, but people commonly recognize that it actually emits light. If they can grasp that then they can grasp that the colder water is taking energy from the warmer water with a little effort.
It may matter to you, but it couldn't matter in the least to me. When I bought my PS2 I already had a reasonably nice DVD player. I had no reason to use the PS2 as one.
I made use of it as a DVD player once or twice when I travelled home to see my parents (and my brother wanted to play FFX) when my parents didn't have one. It was terrible. I've seen better quality out of cheap $30 Apex DVD players. My VCR seems to play movies at about the same clarity as my PS2. Maybe if I shelled out for component cables for the PS2 like my DVD player has I could get reasonable quality. I doubt it would surpass my DVD player though.
The PS2 DVD player is, in my opinion, so bad that when my DVD player broke after four years of heavy use, I went out and replaced it immediately rather than use the DVD player in the PS2.
Personally, I'd rather see the companies that make equipment stop converging everything into one box. I don't need three or four DVD players around my house. I don't need a bunch of crappy 640x480 digital cameras. I just don't. I'll buy one of good quality and use it. You can't cram a quality "extra" component into a device and keep costs down. Take care of the company rather than relying on crappy gimmicks to sell a few more units at lower profits. Undercut your competition by not having the added price. Just quit increasing the device complexity and reducing the quality.
Unless you're networked to a bunch of other networks you aren't part of an internet. Since you can reach slashdot it's apparent you are, but your internal subnet is not an internet on its own by any means. You have what is refered to as a network. An internet is a network of networks.
Most networks have no reason to be internetworked to another network, excepting through "the Internet" so they can reach other publicly internetworked networks and their publically available services, e.g. HTTP or SMTP. However, there's even further semantic distinction at a network of networks level.
For instance several large companies have branches all over with multiple servers and multiple seperate networks. These tend to be termed intranets since they're internal to a single entity and are networks of networks. I believe this is just a subclassification of internet though, since it clearly fits the definition of an internet as well.
If for some reason a bunch of banks got together and privately networked their networks they would have another internet, but still not "the Internet". They have a network of networks. Both private intranets and internets seem to be disappearing as companies find they can send their data over "the Internet" in some secure form for much less money than by holding private lines.
"the Internet" as it seems to be used is a term for the internetworking of networks that any network can be a part of. Given that it is the largest and by far most globally important internet, I think that the capitalization isn't a bad thing.
BTW, it's much more effective to use a public vehicle. Noone checks buses or taxis, ever.
I suppose if you wanted to be really clever you could get a public emergency vehicle, like an ambulance. That's a large vehicle that could be filled with whatever you choose. And when the sirens are blaring who's gonna stop it to check it's contents?
What does surveillance give you? What is a huge network of cameras going to do? You want to be able to watch from 100 different angles as a crowd is killed? Great.
Because deterrence and and an idea of who did something after the fact is about all you get.
Picture this scenario: A group of 5 or so mad out of their mind people hides a few guns and a load of explosives in a private vehicle, drives into the city. Maybe you can catch them at a security checkpoint, but if you're lulled into thinking surveillance is going to catch them you're likely out of luck. This vehicle then rams an entrance gate, the lunatics set the car bomb timer, get out, and start shooting, herding people towards the car. They stop only when swarmed by the public (unlikely), mown down by security, or out of ammo, using the last bullet on themselves, glorious martyrs to a cause. The bomb hits a highly public area, scares the pants off people (hey, terror from terrorists, novel), and maybe gets a few people or some infrastructure while they're at it. If they're lucky (in the sense of their cause) they get the whole crowd to believe that of the maybe 50-100 people killed it certainly could be them next. They're on the news nonstop with all the security camera coverage a media outlet could ever want.
They were going to die at the culmination of their plans regardless. They have nothing to be deterred from by it being on camera. All the better for them. Physical security is lessened because everybody thinks the cameras are some silver bullet. All this can't be prevented and people are inspected to a closer eye from the government. Who wins, besides the camera makers?
You're completely right and I wrote faster than I thought about it completely. So, we know that there's a non-zero chance of Earth formation but looking at just formation there's little more to know without more data.
For stars in this universe we know that the probability of any of them being Earthlike is at least on the order of 1 in 10^21 because Earth exists. Maybe we got lucky in this universe experiment and some of the initial conditions were favorable, maybe it's just cold hard probability finally coming through on the Xth iteration of the universe experiment. Either way, we're concerned about the specifics of this experiment, and we really need to explore more before writing off any probabilities. It may still be that the probability of an Earth forming is 1 in 10^1000 but due to conditions in this particular experiment it was 1 in 10^10. I guess we can't really say yet.
No, we know that we live on a planet that is capable of supporting life. Most scientists believe that this very planet was formed by some natural process, one which could, in theory, be duplicated elsewhere. So we know that at least one in however many solar systems there are is capable of supporting life. Further, NASA estimates the number of stars in the universe to be on the order of 10^21. While that's a lot of stars, it puts a boundary on what the odds are for a planet like our own forming. Hey, we have a minimum bound on the odds now, about 1 in 10^21.
120 out of 10^21 is nothing. For every one of those 120 stars searched that means there's about 10^19 stars we haven't searched. If you feel the odds are worse than 1 in 10^19 of there being other planets capable of supporting life that's your perogative. Many people think the payoff in knowledge is worth delaying that judgement until we've made more than primitive scans of about 1/10^19th of our universe though.
Personally, I think giving up after exploring 1/10^19 of my surroundings is a tad premature.
We're straying off topic slightly but they should. I also try to avoid grammar fights because I do not know every rule. Further, I tend to abuse the language periodically. However, I am certain of this rule.
Here is just one place that shows it is proper usage in the English language. Try the very first example. Commas should be used to seperate two complete sentences when they are joined with a conjunction.
The real question with the example was whether or not both sentences were intended to be complete. The writer started "I know..." which may have been addressing the latter half of the statement. However, the latter half of the statement was complete on its own, so the comma dictates intent. The comma served to cause confusion, so I recommended a semicolon. That should be easy enough.
"I know that I write more than ever, and that's A Good Thing from the standpoint of literacy."
You know you shouldn't really put that comma in front of the "and"...
That really depends. If he meant that he knows that he writes more as well as knowing that writing more is good then the comma is improperly placed.
If he means that he knows he writes more and is asserting the fact that writing more is good, rather than just knowing it is good, then he has two seperate sentences which then need a comma between the two.
Really though, if the latter is true, then he might consider a semicolon. As in:
I know that I write more than ever; that is A Good Thing (tm) from the standpoint of literacy.
That would likely clear up the confusion as to whether he is asserting or merely knowing.
While I agree you can't crack open everything and find if it infringes, there should be obviousness involved too. Here we have a company that's waiting until a standard is formed before going after anybody about it. That's plain abusive.
I agree with the statement that if there's obvious or known abuse of a patent it should be go after it or lose it. Maybe then we'd see some of these junk patents dropped quickly, as there's no way they'd hold up to scrutiny and since it's use it or lose it then it'd be instantly pointless to try to patent such things.
While it's certainly nice to have a portable format for the games, some of the games just aren't suited to playing a few minutes here, few minutes there like I do with my GBA.
I've played many of the old NES and SNES favorites, and own many as well. These still work with my NES or SNES, which are still going strong. There is zero chance I will repurchase and games I currently have for either of these systems.
On the other hand, if Nintendo starts releasing the rehashes for the GBA at the cost I can find working used carts for my NES or SNES they have a winner. That means about $3 for Super Mario 2, $3 for Excitebike, etc. Games I'd like to play again but haven't gotten around to purchasing for my old systems. Heck, make it 150% of that since it's portable and they might have a deal. However Donkey Kong for even $20 makes me really laugh. $5 and I might be tempted, any more and I'll just find the original.
I was amazed at how many people can be just plain rude and hostile just because someone has to ask one question (I never repeatedly asked for PSP...
I'm amazed at how many times a person can ask that one question. At least you may have not asked repeatedly, but every other BB drone feels the need to ask 3+ times. And those "rude" customers get that question every time they buy something at BB. We're sick of it, stop asking. We know you have the things, we know we can get them if we want, and if we do we will ask you for them if we want them, rather than the other way around.
If a store wants nice customers they can treat their customers nicely. BB has decided at a corporate level that they do not care about their customers. It then falls to the employees to berate and verbally abuse the customers with inane questions or be fired for not selling enough PSPs or accessories. While I understand that the employees hate the hoops as much as I do, it is not the customer's fault or problem. When it is made to be such, like the 3+ times about the PSP, nobody should be amazed at the rudeness that is returned. Afterall, it's but a small fraction of what's being directed at the customer.
Perhaps you're falling for it, but "bandwidth-hogging geeks" have the sense of English that tells them that unlimited means exactly that, without limits. I don't give a damn if some stupid business wants to claim unlimited usage because with average usage there won't be problems. I want what I'm offered and am paying for. If it can't be provided for what I'm paying then they'd best start charging more. If they can't keep customers that way then they can clearly define limits. If they can't keep customers that way they can try metering, and if that fails because people will flee like rats from a sinking ship then they can go back to the industry standard of unlimited.
Let's face it, the term unlimited is being used to market and sell these services that are all too often overloaded as it is. I've not seen a single ISP that sells non-dedicated lines give a bandwidth guarantee on said non-dedicated lines. No, it's unlimited with speeds up to X kbps. And they could care less what you actually get as long as you don't complain and you don't break their bank.
Tell you what, when these idiot companies start defining precisely what we will get, and making a guarantee, then, and only then, will geeks all over not have to worry about the semantics of what unlimited means in English vs. alien marketing speak. If I can get a service that gives me 30 GB of traffic both ways, guarantees me some speed from locations capable of providing it, guarantees me uptime, and will back that up with refunds if those terms are not met, all while keeping my bill low then you bet I'd jump on it. Until then, they can whine about how they're misusing language, provide generally ambiguous and unguaranteed service, and we can keep using it as is laid down in the contracts that define the usage as unlimited.
Heck, I'm a reasonable internet customer and I've worked for an ISP and know the hassle with the abusive people. I don't often saturate my pipe and when I do it's usually in bursts of an hour or two to download some isos or something. I doubt that more than 5% of the months I've had broadband I've downloaded more than 30 GB. Should the day ever arise that I receive a call about using too much of my unlimited account, however, I will go balistic. ISPs need to either define their terms clearly or consicely, possibly losing business by doing so, or shut up.
I'd never want it to just obliterate a file if that file were not the stock version of what it put there the last time it installed the package. I'm just saying that if I emerge, say, MySQL and change none of the configuration files then when I upgrade to a new version of MySQL it can feel free to change the config to the proper vanilla configuration for this version. If I so much as changed a single line I'd want it to ask. No changes seems to indicate I want basic, default behavior, however. I'd feel fine letting it do that.
But, I thought that we were looking for info on "emerge?"
Har har. If you do a 'man emerge' you get exactly what you're looking for. A 'man portage' actually gives you more depth into the overall system and includes references to emerge, ebuild and others. This may have changed recently as I remember doing 'man portage' to get emerge command flags for some reason, but the whole system is called portage, thus my pointer to portage's man pages.
"Portage" is what I do with a canoe in order to get around a set of rapids without having to run them.
And dial is something you do with a rotary phone, not when you have your computer send a set of tones over your phone line. Unzip is something you do to your pants, not a compressed set of files. What's your point? There's a ton of examples like that. Language gets abused for the purpose of computing. Deal with it.
Face facts: the general public doesn't want to learn anything about computers: they just want to USE them. And it's hard to fault them for that, really.
No, it isn't hard to fault them for that. I can whine all I want about my car not working properly, but unless I learn to care for it I can either hope to get lucky and not have repairs or go into the shop regularly. My whining about it isn't going to make the automakers create a car that magically changes my oil for me either. All this despite the fact that I'd rather just drive my car rather than maintain it. Sorry, but the facts are that if you want to have nice things and want them to work you have to invest some amount of time learning how to take care of them. While this doesn't necessarily mean go become a linux guru, it does mean that if you wish to use linux because it's free, Free, or whatever other reason, you need to learn a little bit about it. I'd recommend the same for windows, Mac OS, amiga, DOS, you name it.
Have you ever heard the concept of "brainspace?" The idea is that our metal resources are finite, and in order to learn (devote more resources to) a subject, we must begin to forget (devote fewer resources to) other subjects in our minds.
The easiest example that comes to mind came from an article in Smithsonian, if I recall correctly, about tournament Scrabble players. The key skill in trournament Scrabble play is to have the largest possible collection of valid word spellings to draw on in your mind, in order to not only form your own words, but to challenge the word-spellings of your opponent if they are invalid. Do you know how they do this?
They don't memorize the definitions.
What's your point? I'm not saying that people should put learning about their computer first. I'm saying they should learn something about their computer. Scrabble masters are a nice example and all, but that's an extreme. People can play, and be good at scrabble with only words they know. I know I do and I'm certainly no master at the game. They can't beat the master players, but an average user can't beat an admin anyday of the week either. If your "brainspace" is so small you can't even write down and remember where you put the commands to keep your system up to date then I wonder how you're going to remember where the save and print buttons are in your wordprocessor. Afterall, when we had typewriters the hard copies just magically appeared.
For the vast majority of people who COULD make use of a computer, a custom Knopix CD could serve their needs completely, because they don't need anything more than a black-box to perform their work.
I certainly agree, until the user needs feature X, which means upgrading something. Then they still need to know how to get feature X or know somebody that does.
It's only for the IT professional/hobbyist for whom the computer IS the job does any kind of low-level knowledge of how installations, maintainance, or processing take place make efficient use of brainspace. For everyone else, it is simply a waste.
Personally I do the commands seperate, syncing first, checking for a new version of portage, emerging that if there is, and take care of config files. Then I update the rest of world, or whichever packages I feel like, typically taking care to look through all the config file diffs that portage throws at me. That wasn't so much my point though.
Really I was picking on the clueless that seemed to think that it was confusing and menacing to have to type anything along the lines of:
emerge sync && emerge -UD world
and explaining how it's really not difficult to comprehend that simple line.
Sometimes I wonder if we're in the golden days of Linux right now. We're getting support for more hardware and more high quality features than ever before and a relatively low amount of noise from people who fear things like CLI or heaven forbid, configuration files rather than cute menus and checkboxes. I appreciate all the documentation and boards and such dedicated to helping people who don't understand things. I wonder, however, how long the days of people actually trying to comprehend how to fix problems instead of demanding them fixed right this instant will last. If people fear a simple logical connector I fear it won't be much longer.
There are trivial merges which it does handle well. I think this is for the config files where there's some comments that change and nothing of importance. I don't know for certain but that's how it seems to me.
On major version changes and such it seems to look at the stock config file from the previous version and the stock config on the new version, find no safe way to merge the two together, and then end up asking, despite the fact that they're both basic, default, vanilla config files.
No really big deal to be honest, I can handle sorting through which to keep and replace. It just seems like something that might be automated.
Re:Linux easier than Windows? Unpossible.
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Well, you could do it by typing the two seperate commands in one after another. Do:
emerge sync emerge -UD world
Let's take a look at those, shall we? The emerge sync seems pretty easy. Just run the program responsible for package management and tell it to sync up with a mirror. Hey, that actually makes sense. then emerge -UD world. This one's a little trickier. There's emerge and world, which one might guess means update everything, but the -UD is so weird. Reading the man page for portage shows that these two options will update the currently installed packages and all their dependencies. Damn that manual page for making things clear. The && is just a command line 'and' that allows you to do both in one line (no waiting around for the first to complete) and does the second only if the first succeeds.
I've heard that God Himself has actually forbidden lazy users from learning anything about a CLI these days, but maybe, just maybe some people could take the && from C and guess at it's intent. Given that not everybody is a programmer, maybe somebody could wrap it up pretty in a two line shell script for you, and create an icon on your desktop called "Update" so you can be right at home. That seems to be about the level of effort we could expect from a user, right? Or maybe we could just have it in the crontab by default and save people from realizing their system is ever updated. Why bother having the users know anything about their computer?
That's not to say that Gentoo is unflawed about updates. It's inability to decide whether to just replace old configuration files or not is fairly annoying, forcing it onto the user in some cases. It would be really nice if they'd just check to see if they were old unmodified config files and replace them if they were at the very least, but it hasn't always done that for me.
But, as for the original poster, he's right. There's so much third party stuff that MS isn't allowed to think about keeping updates for on hand because it's all proprietary. Going out to the sites for every single bit of software you use, or doing their in application update is a pain as well and it would be nice if there was a central update. Despite any of Gentoo's downpoints on package management I've found it to be quite nice.
Personally, I think it's for geek scrabble. How else do you get rid of so many pesky high point letters at once? Now, if they can only manage to throw in a Z I could have one heck of a triple word score and use all seven of my tiles. That's an extra 50 points!
I'd considered doing so but realized that it would require more work than recording it in a little book at the pump. Knowing myself I'd leave them in a stack in my car for a while and then process a whole bunch of them only occasionally, making it a hassle, making it take longer than just calculating the average milage for the month or so. That means I probably wouldn't do it very often, defeating the system entirely.
I actually get good milage considering that I drive hard now and then. It tends to just be fast starts, I don't mind coasting to a stop, but I periodically shift right before red. It's more fun that way. Anyway, I get around 30 mpg, which is what the EPA says my old Altima should get on the highways. Not bad considering I mostly drive short trips in the city.
On a site that's purportedly news for nerds... am I supposed to feel dissed for being called a big nerd? And if I'm a loser in your eyes because I care a little bit about my vehicle so be it, I don't really care.
Seriously, it takes all of 30 seconds at the pump and serves as an early warning system for many problems. Maybe you have enough cash on hand that you can just afford to let your fuel economy sink to terrible levels and have your car repaired after the real damage is done. My car feels like new at 135,000 miles because I take the time to look after it. I just can't help it if I'm not cool enough to trash my vehicle.
I actually do likewise when filling up, but I like to keep the paper trail as well. Maybe I was driving hard and didn't get the same milage as usual, or did more city driving, or a number of factors. With the book I can maintain a trend.
At this time I'm also driving in spurts. Sometimes I'll go through a couple tanks of gas in a month, sometimes it'll take a couple months to finish a single tank. There's too much time in there for me to forget what the last few months had for milage. And I track when I change oil, filters, etc. in the same book. It's easy and doesn't take more than a couple seconds.
And I fully agree that there are things that won't affect your fuel economy that should be watched for, but there are a ton of things that will. Many engine troubles or exhaust problems will play havoc with one's milage. For a first step towards preventative care I think tracking fuel economy is a pretty easy thing.
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While I certainly can't speak on behalf of some people here, I know enough about women. Besides, my point isn't that Joe Schmoe should become some sort of physicist, just that he shouldn't be ignorant. I don't think anybody on /. really thinks their quake skills are going to get them any. In the same vein, Mr. Schmoe shouldn't be led to think that one extracts cold from water.
Wow. Hats off to you. That's what any of us likely should have done in the first place.
Here's a novel idea. How about we educate Joe Schmoe so he doesn't go around thinking completely backwards. If everybody were smart to a certain minimum level our engineers could stop trying to make a technical process understandable by explaining it either (a) incorrectly to the level of being the opposite of what is true, or (b) as though it were magic.
I realize Joe Schmoe would like nothing more than to sit back and watch his TV absorb darkness, but people commonly recognize that it actually emits light. If they can grasp that then they can grasp that the colder water is taking energy from the warmer water with a little effort.
I made use of it as a DVD player once or twice when I travelled home to see my parents (and my brother wanted to play FFX) when my parents didn't have one. It was terrible. I've seen better quality out of cheap $30 Apex DVD players. My VCR seems to play movies at about the same clarity as my PS2. Maybe if I shelled out for component cables for the PS2 like my DVD player has I could get reasonable quality. I doubt it would surpass my DVD player though.
The PS2 DVD player is, in my opinion, so bad that when my DVD player broke after four years of heavy use, I went out and replaced it immediately rather than use the DVD player in the PS2.
Personally, I'd rather see the companies that make equipment stop converging everything into one box. I don't need three or four DVD players around my house. I don't need a bunch of crappy 640x480 digital cameras. I just don't. I'll buy one of good quality and use it. You can't cram a quality "extra" component into a device and keep costs down. Take care of the company rather than relying on crappy gimmicks to sell a few more units at lower profits. Undercut your competition by not having the added price. Just quit increasing the device complexity and reducing the quality.
Most networks have no reason to be internetworked to another network, excepting through "the Internet" so they can reach other publicly internetworked networks and their publically available services, e.g. HTTP or SMTP. However, there's even further semantic distinction at a network of networks level.
For instance several large companies have branches all over with multiple servers and multiple seperate networks. These tend to be termed intranets since they're internal to a single entity and are networks of networks. I believe this is just a subclassification of internet though, since it clearly fits the definition of an internet as well.
If for some reason a bunch of banks got together and privately networked their networks they would have another internet, but still not "the Internet". They have a network of networks. Both private intranets and internets seem to be disappearing as companies find they can send their data over "the Internet" in some secure form for much less money than by holding private lines.
"the Internet" as it seems to be used is a term for the internetworking of networks that any network can be a part of. Given that it is the largest and by far most globally important internet, I think that the capitalization isn't a bad thing.
I suppose if you wanted to be really clever you could get a public emergency vehicle, like an ambulance. That's a large vehicle that could be filled with whatever you choose. And when the sirens are blaring who's gonna stop it to check it's contents?
Because deterrence and and an idea of who did something after the fact is about all you get.
Picture this scenario: A group of 5 or so mad out of their mind people hides a few guns and a load of explosives in a private vehicle, drives into the city. Maybe you can catch them at a security checkpoint, but if you're lulled into thinking surveillance is going to catch them you're likely out of luck. This vehicle then rams an entrance gate, the lunatics set the car bomb timer, get out, and start shooting, herding people towards the car. They stop only when swarmed by the public (unlikely), mown down by security, or out of ammo, using the last bullet on themselves, glorious martyrs to a cause. The bomb hits a highly public area, scares the pants off people (hey, terror from terrorists, novel), and maybe gets a few people or some infrastructure while they're at it. If they're lucky (in the sense of their cause) they get the whole crowd to believe that of the maybe 50-100 people killed it certainly could be them next. They're on the news nonstop with all the security camera coverage a media outlet could ever want.
They were going to die at the culmination of their plans regardless. They have nothing to be deterred from by it being on camera. All the better for them. Physical security is lessened because everybody thinks the cameras are some silver bullet. All this can't be prevented and people are inspected to a closer eye from the government. Who wins, besides the camera makers?
For stars in this universe we know that the probability of any of them being Earthlike is at least on the order of 1 in 10^21 because Earth exists. Maybe we got lucky in this universe experiment and some of the initial conditions were favorable, maybe it's just cold hard probability finally coming through on the Xth iteration of the universe experiment. Either way, we're concerned about the specifics of this experiment, and we really need to explore more before writing off any probabilities. It may still be that the probability of an Earth forming is 1 in 10^1000 but due to conditions in this particular experiment it was 1 in 10^10. I guess we can't really say yet.
120 out of 10^21 is nothing. For every one of those 120 stars searched that means there's about 10^19 stars we haven't searched. If you feel the odds are worse than 1 in 10^19 of there being other planets capable of supporting life that's your perogative. Many people think the payoff in knowledge is worth delaying that judgement until we've made more than primitive scans of about 1/10^19th of our universe though.
Personally, I think giving up after exploring 1/10^19 of my surroundings is a tad premature.
And I'm pretty sure they're not going to have the cash on hand to afford one of Apple's music players either. =)
Here is just one place that shows it is proper usage in the English language. Try the very first example. Commas should be used to seperate two complete sentences when they are joined with a conjunction.
The real question with the example was whether or not both sentences were intended to be complete. The writer started "I know..." which may have been addressing the latter half of the statement. However, the latter half of the statement was complete on its own, so the comma dictates intent. The comma served to cause confusion, so I recommended a semicolon. That should be easy enough.
You know you shouldn't really put that comma in front of the "and"...
That really depends. If he meant that he knows that he writes more as well as knowing that writing more is good then the comma is improperly placed.
If he means that he knows he writes more and is asserting the fact that writing more is good, rather than just knowing it is good, then he has two seperate sentences which then need a comma between the two.
Really though, if the latter is true, then he might consider a semicolon. As in:
I know that I write more than ever; that is A Good Thing (tm) from the standpoint of literacy.
That would likely clear up the confusion as to whether he is asserting or merely knowing.
I agree with the statement that if there's obvious or known abuse of a patent it should be go after it or lose it. Maybe then we'd see some of these junk patents dropped quickly, as there's no way they'd hold up to scrutiny and since it's use it or lose it then it'd be instantly pointless to try to patent such things.
I've played many of the old NES and SNES favorites, and own many as well. These still work with my NES or SNES, which are still going strong. There is zero chance I will repurchase and games I currently have for either of these systems.
On the other hand, if Nintendo starts releasing the rehashes for the GBA at the cost I can find working used carts for my NES or SNES they have a winner. That means about $3 for Super Mario 2, $3 for Excitebike, etc. Games I'd like to play again but haven't gotten around to purchasing for my old systems. Heck, make it 150% of that since it's portable and they might have a deal. However Donkey Kong for even $20 makes me really laugh. $5 and I might be tempted, any more and I'll just find the original.
I'm amazed at how many times a person can ask that one question. At least you may have not asked repeatedly, but every other BB drone feels the need to ask 3+ times. And those "rude" customers get that question every time they buy something at BB. We're sick of it, stop asking. We know you have the things, we know we can get them if we want, and if we do we will ask you for them if we want them, rather than the other way around.
If a store wants nice customers they can treat their customers nicely. BB has decided at a corporate level that they do not care about their customers. It then falls to the employees to berate and verbally abuse the customers with inane questions or be fired for not selling enough PSPs or accessories. While I understand that the employees hate the hoops as much as I do, it is not the customer's fault or problem. When it is made to be such, like the 3+ times about the PSP, nobody should be amazed at the rudeness that is returned. Afterall, it's but a small fraction of what's being directed at the customer.
Let's face it, the term unlimited is being used to market and sell these services that are all too often overloaded as it is. I've not seen a single ISP that sells non-dedicated lines give a bandwidth guarantee on said non-dedicated lines. No, it's unlimited with speeds up to X kbps. And they could care less what you actually get as long as you don't complain and you don't break their bank.
Tell you what, when these idiot companies start defining precisely what we will get, and making a guarantee, then, and only then, will geeks all over not have to worry about the semantics of what unlimited means in English vs. alien marketing speak. If I can get a service that gives me 30 GB of traffic both ways, guarantees me some speed from locations capable of providing it, guarantees me uptime, and will back that up with refunds if those terms are not met, all while keeping my bill low then you bet I'd jump on it. Until then, they can whine about how they're misusing language, provide generally ambiguous and unguaranteed service, and we can keep using it as is laid down in the contracts that define the usage as unlimited.
Heck, I'm a reasonable internet customer and I've worked for an ISP and know the hassle with the abusive people. I don't often saturate my pipe and when I do it's usually in bursts of an hour or two to download some isos or something. I doubt that more than 5% of the months I've had broadband I've downloaded more than 30 GB. Should the day ever arise that I receive a call about using too much of my unlimited account, however, I will go balistic. ISPs need to either define their terms clearly or consicely, possibly losing business by doing so, or shut up.
I'd never want it to just obliterate a file if that file were not the stock version of what it put there the last time it installed the package. I'm just saying that if I emerge, say, MySQL and change none of the configuration files then when I upgrade to a new version of MySQL it can feel free to change the config to the proper vanilla configuration for this version. If I so much as changed a single line I'd want it to ask. No changes seems to indicate I want basic, default behavior, however. I'd feel fine letting it do that.
But, I thought that we were looking for info on "emerge?"
Har har. If you do a 'man emerge' you get exactly what you're looking for. A 'man portage' actually gives you more depth into the overall system and includes references to emerge, ebuild and others. This may have changed recently as I remember doing 'man portage' to get emerge command flags for some reason, but the whole system is called portage, thus my pointer to portage's man pages.
"Portage" is what I do with a canoe in order to get around a set of rapids without having to run them.
And dial is something you do with a rotary phone, not when you have your computer send a set of tones over your phone line. Unzip is something you do to your pants, not a compressed set of files. What's your point? There's a ton of examples like that. Language gets abused for the purpose of computing. Deal with it.
Face facts: the general public doesn't want to learn anything about computers: they just want to USE them. And it's hard to fault them for that, really.
No, it isn't hard to fault them for that. I can whine all I want about my car not working properly, but unless I learn to care for it I can either hope to get lucky and not have repairs or go into the shop regularly. My whining about it isn't going to make the automakers create a car that magically changes my oil for me either. All this despite the fact that I'd rather just drive my car rather than maintain it. Sorry, but the facts are that if you want to have nice things and want them to work you have to invest some amount of time learning how to take care of them. While this doesn't necessarily mean go become a linux guru, it does mean that if you wish to use linux because it's free, Free, or whatever other reason, you need to learn a little bit about it. I'd recommend the same for windows, Mac OS, amiga, DOS, you name it.
Have you ever heard the concept of "brainspace?" The idea is that our metal resources are finite, and in order to learn (devote more resources to) a subject, we must begin to forget (devote fewer resources to) other subjects in our minds.
The easiest example that comes to mind came from an article in Smithsonian, if I recall correctly, about tournament Scrabble players. The key skill in trournament Scrabble play is to have the largest possible collection of valid word spellings to draw on in your mind, in order to not only form your own words, but to challenge the word-spellings of your opponent if they are invalid. Do you know how they do this? They don't memorize the definitions.
What's your point? I'm not saying that people should put learning about their computer first. I'm saying they should learn something about their computer. Scrabble masters are a nice example and all, but that's an extreme. People can play, and be good at scrabble with only words they know. I know I do and I'm certainly no master at the game. They can't beat the master players, but an average user can't beat an admin anyday of the week either. If your "brainspace" is so small you can't even write down and remember where you put the commands to keep your system up to date then I wonder how you're going to remember where the save and print buttons are in your wordprocessor. Afterall, when we had typewriters the hard copies just magically appeared.
For the vast majority of people who COULD make use of a computer, a custom Knopix CD could serve their needs completely, because they don't need anything more than a black-box to perform their work.
I certainly agree, until the user needs feature X, which means upgrading something. Then they still need to know how to get feature X or know somebody that does.
It's only for the IT professional/hobbyist for whom the computer IS the job does any kind of low-level knowledge of how installations, maintainance, or processing take place make efficient use of brainspace. For everyone else, it is simply a waste.
Really I was picking on the clueless that seemed to think that it was confusing and menacing to have to type anything along the lines of:
emerge sync && emerge -UD world
and explaining how it's really not difficult to comprehend that simple line.
Sometimes I wonder if we're in the golden days of Linux right now. We're getting support for more hardware and more high quality features than ever before and a relatively low amount of noise from people who fear things like CLI or heaven forbid, configuration files rather than cute menus and checkboxes. I appreciate all the documentation and boards and such dedicated to helping people who don't understand things. I wonder, however, how long the days of people actually trying to comprehend how to fix problems instead of demanding them fixed right this instant will last. If people fear a simple logical connector I fear it won't be much longer.
On major version changes and such it seems to look at the stock config file from the previous version and the stock config on the new version, find no safe way to merge the two together, and then end up asking, despite the fact that they're both basic, default, vanilla config files.
No really big deal to be honest, I can handle sorting through which to keep and replace. It just seems like something that might be automated.
emerge sync
emerge -UD world
Let's take a look at those, shall we? The emerge sync seems pretty easy. Just run the program responsible for package management and tell it to sync up with a mirror. Hey, that actually makes sense. then emerge -UD world. This one's a little trickier. There's emerge and world, which one might guess means update everything, but the -UD is so weird. Reading the man page for portage shows that these two options will update the currently installed packages and all their dependencies. Damn that manual page for making things clear. The && is just a command line 'and' that allows you to do both in one line (no waiting around for the first to complete) and does the second only if the first succeeds.
I've heard that God Himself has actually forbidden lazy users from learning anything about a CLI these days, but maybe, just maybe some people could take the && from C and guess at it's intent. Given that not everybody is a programmer, maybe somebody could wrap it up pretty in a two line shell script for you, and create an icon on your desktop called "Update" so you can be right at home. That seems to be about the level of effort we could expect from a user, right? Or maybe we could just have it in the crontab by default and save people from realizing their system is ever updated. Why bother having the users know anything about their computer?
That's not to say that Gentoo is unflawed about updates. It's inability to decide whether to just replace old configuration files or not is fairly annoying, forcing it onto the user in some cases. It would be really nice if they'd just check to see if they were old unmodified config files and replace them if they were at the very least, but it hasn't always done that for me.
But, as for the original poster, he's right. There's so much third party stuff that MS isn't allowed to think about keeping updates for on hand because it's all proprietary. Going out to the sites for every single bit of software you use, or doing their in application update is a pain as well and it would be nice if there was a central update. Despite any of Gentoo's downpoints on package management I've found it to be quite nice.
Personally, I think it's for geek scrabble. How else do you get rid of so many pesky high point letters at once? Now, if they can only manage to throw in a Z I could have one heck of a triple word score and use all seven of my tiles. That's an extra 50 points!
I actually get good milage considering that I drive hard now and then. It tends to just be fast starts, I don't mind coasting to a stop, but I periodically shift right before red. It's more fun that way. Anyway, I get around 30 mpg, which is what the EPA says my old Altima should get on the highways. Not bad considering I mostly drive short trips in the city.
Seriously, it takes all of 30 seconds at the pump and serves as an early warning system for many problems. Maybe you have enough cash on hand that you can just afford to let your fuel economy sink to terrible levels and have your car repaired after the real damage is done. My car feels like new at 135,000 miles because I take the time to look after it. I just can't help it if I'm not cool enough to trash my vehicle.
At this time I'm also driving in spurts. Sometimes I'll go through a couple tanks of gas in a month, sometimes it'll take a couple months to finish a single tank. There's too much time in there for me to forget what the last few months had for milage. And I track when I change oil, filters, etc. in the same book. It's easy and doesn't take more than a couple seconds.
And I fully agree that there are things that won't affect your fuel economy that should be watched for, but there are a ton of things that will. Many engine troubles or exhaust problems will play havoc with one's milage. For a first step towards preventative care I think tracking fuel economy is a pretty easy thing.