Actually I have, I remember all too well installing the a and n packages from floppies so I could get the system up and running just enough that I could get online...
And yes, when it came to compiling kernels people (myself included) did have a tendency to only include the bare necessities. Still, it was nothing compared to NT4. And when it came to moving somewhat stock installs from say, 1998 or later, Linux easily beat (and still beats) Windows.
My "trick" back then was to always make sure things were set up to an extremely generic configuration, these days it seems you can mostly just move the disk and then you might have to boot from a CD or USB stick to fix grub. But, Windows is still bad when it comes to this, as I said, I once made the mistake to think that moving a disk between two "identical" machines would be at least somewhat painless, still took quite some time before the seemingly endless reboot cycle was over...
Some people actually use more than one application in their workflow.
Not to mention things like my example, the save/open file dialog which you have to deal with. And that's not even mentioning a host of other little UI quirks that exist. As I stated, it's all about your workflow, for some people there is no difference between one platform and another, for others there are clear differences that make the prone to stick to the platform they are more comfortable with.
Over the years, several times XP woke up in brand-new homes (other used but more capable machines). After multiple reboots discovering new hardware, etc., and sometimes tracking down proper drivers, it kept chugging along; Microsoft was always gracious in re-activating.
Windows has always been horrible when it comes to moving a disk to a new machine. I still remember the horror of migrating the system disk for an NT4 server to a new machine, took the whole day to slowly and methodically install drivers, reboot, repeat.
I suppose that by comparison to that XP was a dream but I'm comparing it to Linux and *BSD where I've frequently moved system disks to completely different machines without any changes beyond "oh, the network devices have new names, better change/etc/ipf.rules". Windows OTOH will throw a multi-hour fit if you move your disk to a seemingly identical machine...
What it comes down to is that a professional buys hardware appropriate for the job, and the OS is only there to load the applications and manage resources, not be cute or colorful.
Workflow my good man, workflow. For some people the Mac OS X user interface simply fits better with their workflow than the Windows UI. Heck, I know that personally I'd take a poorly configured FVWM2 install over any version of Windows (yet I'm stuck running Windows at work, oh well).
It doesn't even have to be the fastest-to-use UI, it can be a lot more subjective than that, depending on your workflow a particular operating system/GUI may just feel more "fluid" because none of your regular interactions with it feel overly slow (a classic example of something which drives me nuts every time I encounter it is the dialog for opening or saving files in Windows Vista/7, it feels so clunky that I just want to find the person who designed it and punch him/her as hard as I can, I'm sure MS figured out it was faster and easier for a certain percentage of regular users but for me it's clunky).
Every laptop (including Windows) has been able to do this for 10 years....
So that's why my "mobile workstation" from a major OEM would (and still does, despite installing every available and relevant update for it) pick randomly between 1) Just keep running 2) Just put the screen to sleep 3) Crash 4) Go to sleep but crash when awoken 5) Actually go to sleep. It makes so much sense now...
Is a Windows sound card not going to work?? I guarantee you it will, the drivers probably come with Windows 7, even on a reformat+fresh install
Same "mobile workstation" as before: touchpad driver seems to be completely broken, sometimes the touchpad will work after rebooting and then forcefully restarting the manufacturer's "management panel"-type software, other times it's just dead and sometimes the "management panel" just sits there eating every available cycle on one of the CPU cores until I kill it.
On my previous "home" laptop (also from a major, but other, OEM) the wireless NIC needed drivers only available from the manufacturer's ftp server in Taiwan (which appeared to always be down at the wrong time so when I finally managed to download things from it I grabbed every available driver and update, just in case). Oh, and the sound card was not supported by Windows at all without another driver from the same ftp server..
Now, when it comes to the wireless and the sound card on my home laptop I managed to figure out why they chose those crappy chips, they are apparently marginally cheaper than more commonly used ones (we're talking a few cents on the dollar but it all adds up and who cares about the user experience, right?).
If they're targeting The Hidden Wiki, how is that "having a conscience"? The Hidden Wiki is not a porn site, it's a wiki site which has links to other hidden sites. It's like DDoSing Google because they are a "child porn website"...
Man... I always thought that you CAN'T drink any booze in public in Sweden,...it is limited to only "south" direction of places? how about public north of that bridge?
Well, in this particular city there's also a street in the southern part of the city that you can't drink north of. There's a more or less rectangular area that covers the most central parts of the city where you can't drink in public, outside of that area it's ok. The particular bridge I mentioned happens to be on the northern edge of a park so a lot of people end up getting told to go north of the bridge if they want to drink. And apparently a lot of people somehow use this as a justification for thinking the police are assholes for enforcing this (even though technically anyone caught drinking within this area should be fined).
My experience, from Sweden, is that some people are dicks. That's about it.
We have a couple of local cops who are hated by lots of people in their twenties for reasons that seem to mostly revolve around those particular cops being part of the local police department's "youth group" that focuses both on solving crimes committed by teenagers but also keeping an eye on what goes on in local parks in the summer and such things. I know that for a while there was a website that posted a bunch of personal information about one of them.
So basically, some people feel that they are justified in being dicks if the cops ruin their (illegal) fun. I myself have met these particular police officers a few times late at night, the worst that I've ever been subjected to was a "please don't drink beer in public south of that bridge, local ordinances say you can't drink in public south of there"...
So what you're saying is that you're running out of arguments and have to resort to made up attacks on my person? (Note: I have never worked in any fast food restaurant)
I looked around for just who those 700 were and I don't think "700+ climatologists" is the proper description. Just to go through some titles out there: Computer modeler, astronomer, professor of physics, chemist, mathematician, economist. Now, are the there people with relevant backgrounds in there as well? Yes. Are they all relevant? Not really, a whole bunch of them only seem to be involved with climate change matters in the sense that they are self-proclaimed "skeptics".
Surely they aren't climate scientists who's entire livelihood depends on global warming continuing to be accepted as real and dangerous.
Why do you people always bring up this "argument"?
Scientists who do research on the environment, just like scientists who do research on many other things, get funding to answer questions. So you get a research grant to figure out "Is [something] affecting [something else]?" or "What, if any, are the effects of [something] on [something else]?" or perhaps even "Is it possible to [foo] a [bar]?".
They don't suddenly lose all their funding if their research shows something other than that the environment is going straight to hell and that it's humanity's fault.
Now, large corporations with a vested interest in humanity not having anything to do with climate change are on the other hand likely to start losing money if it turns out that they're making money from things which are destroying the environment.
But you just keep telling yourself those damn jews^H^H^H^Hcommies^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hscientists are out to get you and your hard-earned money...
If there's no profit in it, then there's no market for it. If there's no market for it, then there's nobody wanting it badly enough to pay for it. And if nobody wants it badly enough to pay for it, why would we do it?
Because there are things that are worth doing even if there isn't someone with really deep pockets willing to foot the bill?
I just don't get this "the market is always right" hysteria. I'm willing to bet that with that attitude in the 1950's and 1960's we would never have reached LEO, after all "there's no profit in it" (and good luck getting some CxO to sign off on a multi-billion project for "communication satellites", any sane person can see that the ROI on a crazy scheme like that is in no way comparable to broadcast towers and undersea cables which are both things that work right now, are cheap and gosh-darnit the next quarter's profits will show it so I can get my bonus).
My suggestion is to clearly define which country you hail from, so we can all judge the merits, or lack thereof, of your spelling properly.
I see a problem with this. I am Swedish, I learned to speak English from US relatives and US and British television. In school it was British English all the way. For a long time I tried to just use the British way of spelling words (and I still occasionally catch myself doing things like writing "colour" instead of "color") but eventually I just fell into using the americanized way to spell most words.
Now, which way of spelling is "correct" for me, someone who isn't from a commonwealth country or the US?
Bzzzt! That's only true for certain jurisdictions. For example, the US seems big on this "You go to jail and you will never be a proper citizen again because you are bad person and should suffer forever!" thing. In many other developed countries those convicted of serious crimes can still vote (because they are still both human and citizens).
Mechanical scroll wheels are old-fashioned. I have an Apple Magic Mouse (and a Wacom tablet) and while at first it was a bit hard to get used to and the high sensitivity of its touchpad is an issue with some games it does have its advantages, it just takes a while getting used to. On a related note I used to swear by my previous Wacom tablet + mouse, I loved how movement was relative to the tablet and not the mouse, the only problem was getting to work on monday morning and trying to move the mouse pointer up on the screen with the mouse turned 30 degrees to the left only to have it go up and right...
I don't see how you can possibly see the game as being more PVP focused now; they've more or less completely given up on organized PVP balance, and even specs that were traditionally balanced for PVP first (ex. Frost Mages, Arms Warriors) are now changed in favor of PVE over PVP.
It used to be that the game was designed for PvE with PvP being something you could do on the side (as in, world PvP, no battlegrounds or arena, no ladders or such things). And if you look at the players there are a lot more players who play for PvP these days, it used to be that PvP was something you did when you had some time to kill ("hey, let's go to hillsbrad!").
[...] totally worthless with no hope of a fix in sight (Tol'Barad).
The worst thing about Tol'Barad was the win-trading that went on before they "fixed" it. Lots of annoying gankers who got their first full set of PvP gear thanks to that...
That kind of "PvP" is a lot more common these days (or was until Blizzard decided to deploy "countermeasures").
Back in vanilla it was more about actual fights (this was back when reaching level 60 was an accomplishment in itself and a few level 50s could at least have a chance against a level 60), these days you zoom to 85 and you're pretty much untouchable by anyone lower than level 81-82...
Well, I've only ever seen that way of working in environments where everyone was working on something different from the others (one guy taking assets from an artist and creating HTML+CSS templates with some JS to tie it together, another one working on the base "framework" while a third is building modules for the framework).
I do agree that once you start doing stuff that affects other people's code it becomes a lot harder (but still workable in smaller teams, once you have 4-5 developers I suspect it will become unworkable pretty quickly).
Well, world PvP was fun. On the realm I started my first character on there were daily attacks on Darkshire, lots of fun for everyone over level 25-30 or so. These days "world PvP" seems to be about ganking (my "favorite" being the blood elf mage + undead rogue tag teams that roam the world looking for other players to gank).
You'd be surprised at how much gold a lot of in-game items are worth at the auction house.
There's been heavy inflation going on for quite some time, items comparable to what used to be very expensive 2000G items are now selling for 20-25kG on many realms ("comparable" when compared to what the current top tier of equipment and items is).
Player A puts pet up for sale in in-game auction house
Player B buys pet for in-game currency ("gold")
Player A receives in-game currency
THAT is what was meant with "WoW To Add Avenue For Real-Money Gold Buying". Just as there are plenty of people with real-world money to spend there are plenty of people in-game with too much gold to spend, to them it makes more sense to just throw some gold at it rather than buying the pet using real money.
I'm mostly annoyed at the focus they've been giving PvP (as in, organized PvP, not random world PvP).
It used to be that PvP was a secondary thing in WoW, PvE was the main draw. These days if you check out just about any WoW it seems to be a lot more about PvP than PvE for a lot of the active players.
Would you drag a hand cart behind you if you had a car ready and the skills to use it? Only one who neglects the usefulness of the car will use the cart. And when the axle of the cart breaks he will shrug, take the most valuable stuff and carry it instead of fixing the cart, as he simply lacks the skill for that.
If I was trying to haul stuff from the parking lot to an apartment building I would probably use the cart instead of the car. Each tool has its advantages and disadvantages.
And yes, you should have a VCS but there are also situations in which it is not as important as some people like to think. And amazingly enough some skilled developers will arrive at a company that doesnt use a VCS, shrug and carry on with their job (while looking for something better every day when they get home). For sufficiently small projects and teams you may actually have an easier time getting things done without a VCS (if your "team" is three guys in a rented office that track feature implementation on a piece of A3 paper on one of the walls it's not that hard to make sure you're not messing with code someone else just changed, at least not as long as there are good backups).
IMO there's a difference between "should" and "must or you will fail horribly and your entire extended family and all their friends will be killed by Cthulhu" (the latter being how some people seemingly feel about those not using VC, formalized deployment procedures, unit testing and any number of other things).
While I agree about version control I have seen a couple of environments where they for various misguided managerial reasons didn't use version control. Both had instead developed a set of rules for how to back things up and "version" their code.
One place even had a set of scripts for handling these snapshots.
Is using Git, Subversion or even CVS better than their solution? Yes. But it worked for them.
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Actually I have, I remember all too well installing the a and n packages from floppies so I could get the system up and running just enough that I could get online...
And yes, when it came to compiling kernels people (myself included) did have a tendency to only include the bare necessities. Still, it was nothing compared to NT4. And when it came to moving somewhat stock installs from say, 1998 or later, Linux easily beat (and still beats) Windows.
My "trick" back then was to always make sure things were set up to an extremely generic configuration, these days it seems you can mostly just move the disk and then you might have to boot from a CD or USB stick to fix grub. But, Windows is still bad when it comes to this, as I said, I once made the mistake to think that moving a disk between two "identical" machines would be at least somewhat painless, still took quite some time before the seemingly endless reboot cycle was over...
Some people actually use more than one application in their workflow.
Not to mention things like my example, the save/open file dialog which you have to deal with. And that's not even mentioning a host of other little UI quirks that exist. As I stated, it's all about your workflow, for some people there is no difference between one platform and another, for others there are clear differences that make the prone to stick to the platform they are more comfortable with.
Over the years, several times XP woke up in brand-new homes (other used but more capable machines). After multiple reboots discovering new hardware, etc., and sometimes tracking down proper drivers, it kept chugging along; Microsoft was always gracious in re-activating.
Windows has always been horrible when it comes to moving a disk to a new machine. I still remember the horror of migrating the system disk for an NT4 server to a new machine, took the whole day to slowly and methodically install drivers, reboot, repeat.
I suppose that by comparison to that XP was a dream but I'm comparing it to Linux and *BSD where I've frequently moved system disks to completely different machines without any changes beyond "oh, the network devices have new names, better change /etc/ipf.rules". Windows OTOH will throw a multi-hour fit if you move your disk to a seemingly identical machine...
What it comes down to is that a professional buys hardware appropriate for the job, and the OS is only there to load the applications and manage resources, not be cute or colorful.
Workflow my good man, workflow. For some people the Mac OS X user interface simply fits better with their workflow than the Windows UI. Heck, I know that personally I'd take a poorly configured FVWM2 install over any version of Windows (yet I'm stuck running Windows at work, oh well).
It doesn't even have to be the fastest-to-use UI, it can be a lot more subjective than that, depending on your workflow a particular operating system/GUI may just feel more "fluid" because none of your regular interactions with it feel overly slow (a classic example of something which drives me nuts every time I encounter it is the dialog for opening or saving files in Windows Vista/7, it feels so clunky that I just want to find the person who designed it and punch him/her as hard as I can, I'm sure MS figured out it was faster and easier for a certain percentage of regular users but for me it's clunky).
Every laptop (including Windows) has been able to do this for 10 years....
So that's why my "mobile workstation" from a major OEM would (and still does, despite installing every available and relevant update for it) pick randomly between 1) Just keep running 2) Just put the screen to sleep 3) Crash 4) Go to sleep but crash when awoken 5) Actually go to sleep. It makes so much sense now...
Is a Windows sound card not going to work?? I guarantee you it will, the drivers probably come with Windows 7, even on a reformat+fresh install
Same "mobile workstation" as before: touchpad driver seems to be completely broken, sometimes the touchpad will work after rebooting and then forcefully restarting the manufacturer's "management panel"-type software, other times it's just dead and sometimes the "management panel" just sits there eating every available cycle on one of the CPU cores until I kill it.
On my previous "home" laptop (also from a major, but other, OEM) the wireless NIC needed drivers only available from the manufacturer's ftp server in Taiwan (which appeared to always be down at the wrong time so when I finally managed to download things from it I grabbed every available driver and update, just in case). Oh, and the sound card was not supported by Windows at all without another driver from the same ftp server..
Now, when it comes to the wireless and the sound card on my home laptop I managed to figure out why they chose those crappy chips, they are apparently marginally cheaper than more commonly used ones (we're talking a few cents on the dollar but it all adds up and who cares about the user experience, right?).
If they're targeting The Hidden Wiki, how is that "having a conscience"? The Hidden Wiki is not a porn site, it's a wiki site which has links to other hidden sites. It's like DDoSing Google because they are a "child porn website"...
Maybe he's talking about Vichy France? Can't say it makes much sense though...
Man... I always thought that you CAN'T drink any booze in public in Sweden,...it is limited to only "south" direction of places? how about public north of that bridge?
Well, in this particular city there's also a street in the southern part of the city that you can't drink north of. There's a more or less rectangular area that covers the most central parts of the city where you can't drink in public, outside of that area it's ok. The particular bridge I mentioned happens to be on the northern edge of a park so a lot of people end up getting told to go north of the bridge if they want to drink. And apparently a lot of people somehow use this as a justification for thinking the police are assholes for enforcing this (even though technically anyone caught drinking within this area should be fined).
My experience, from Sweden, is that some people are dicks. That's about it.
We have a couple of local cops who are hated by lots of people in their twenties for reasons that seem to mostly revolve around those particular cops being part of the local police department's "youth group" that focuses both on solving crimes committed by teenagers but also keeping an eye on what goes on in local parks in the summer and such things. I know that for a while there was a website that posted a bunch of personal information about one of them.
So basically, some people feel that they are justified in being dicks if the cops ruin their (illegal) fun. I myself have met these particular police officers a few times late at night, the worst that I've ever been subjected to was a "please don't drink beer in public south of that bridge, local ordinances say you can't drink in public south of there"...
So what you're saying is that you're running out of arguments and have to resort to made up attacks on my person? (Note: I have never worked in any fast food restaurant)
[...] 700+ climatologists [...]
I looked around for just who those 700 were and I don't think "700+ climatologists" is the proper description. Just to go through some titles out there: Computer modeler, astronomer, professor of physics, chemist, mathematician, economist. Now, are the there people with relevant backgrounds in there as well? Yes. Are they all relevant? Not really, a whole bunch of them only seem to be involved with climate change matters in the sense that they are self-proclaimed "skeptics".
Surely they aren't climate scientists who's entire livelihood depends on global warming continuing to be accepted as real and dangerous.
Why do you people always bring up this "argument"?
Scientists who do research on the environment, just like scientists who do research on many other things, get funding to answer questions. So you get a research grant to figure out "Is [something] affecting [something else]?" or "What, if any, are the effects of [something] on [something else]?" or perhaps even "Is it possible to [foo] a [bar]?".
They don't suddenly lose all their funding if their research shows something other than that the environment is going straight to hell and that it's humanity's fault.
Now, large corporations with a vested interest in humanity not having anything to do with climate change are on the other hand likely to start losing money if it turns out that they're making money from things which are destroying the environment.
But you just keep telling yourself those damn jews^H^H^H^Hcommies^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hscientists are out to get you and your hard-earned money...
If there's no profit in it, then there's no market for it. If there's no market for it, then there's nobody wanting it badly enough to pay for it. And if nobody wants it badly enough to pay for it, why would we do it?
Because there are things that are worth doing even if there isn't someone with really deep pockets willing to foot the bill?
I just don't get this "the market is always right" hysteria. I'm willing to bet that with that attitude in the 1950's and 1960's we would never have reached LEO, after all "there's no profit in it" (and good luck getting some CxO to sign off on a multi-billion project for "communication satellites", any sane person can see that the ROI on a crazy scheme like that is in no way comparable to broadcast towers and undersea cables which are both things that work right now, are cheap and gosh-darnit the next quarter's profits will show it so I can get my bonus).
My suggestion is to clearly define which country you hail from, so we can all judge the merits, or lack thereof, of your spelling properly.
I see a problem with this. I am Swedish, I learned to speak English from US relatives and US and British television. In school it was British English all the way. For a long time I tried to just use the British way of spelling words (and I still occasionally catch myself doing things like writing "colour" instead of "color") but eventually I just fell into using the americanized way to spell most words.
Now, which way of spelling is "correct" for me, someone who isn't from a commonwealth country or the US?
Depends. A felon can no longer vote.
Bzzzt! That's only true for certain jurisdictions. For example, the US seems big on this "You go to jail and you will never be a proper citizen again because you are bad person and should suffer forever!" thing. In many other developed countries those convicted of serious crimes can still vote (because they are still both human and citizens).
Mechanical scroll wheels are old-fashioned. I have an Apple Magic Mouse (and a Wacom tablet) and while at first it was a bit hard to get used to and the high sensitivity of its touchpad is an issue with some games it does have its advantages, it just takes a while getting used to. On a related note I used to swear by my previous Wacom tablet + mouse, I loved how movement was relative to the tablet and not the mouse, the only problem was getting to work on monday morning and trying to move the mouse pointer up on the screen with the mouse turned 30 degrees to the left only to have it go up and right...
I don't see how you can possibly see the game as being more PVP focused now; they've more or less completely given up on organized PVP balance, and even specs that were traditionally balanced for PVP first (ex. Frost Mages, Arms Warriors) are now changed in favor of PVE over PVP.
It used to be that the game was designed for PvE with PvP being something you could do on the side (as in, world PvP, no battlegrounds or arena, no ladders or such things). And if you look at the players there are a lot more players who play for PvP these days, it used to be that PvP was something you did when you had some time to kill ("hey, let's go to hillsbrad!").
[...] totally worthless with no hope of a fix in sight (Tol'Barad).
The worst thing about Tol'Barad was the win-trading that went on before they "fixed" it. Lots of annoying gankers who got their first full set of PvP gear thanks to that...
That kind of "PvP" is a lot more common these days (or was until Blizzard decided to deploy "countermeasures").
Back in vanilla it was more about actual fights (this was back when reaching level 60 was an accomplishment in itself and a few level 50s could at least have a chance against a level 60), these days you zoom to 85 and you're pretty much untouchable by anyone lower than level 81-82...
Well, I've only ever seen that way of working in environments where everyone was working on something different from the others (one guy taking assets from an artist and creating HTML+CSS templates with some JS to tie it together, another one working on the base "framework" while a third is building modules for the framework).
I do agree that once you start doing stuff that affects other people's code it becomes a lot harder (but still workable in smaller teams, once you have 4-5 developers I suspect it will become unworkable pretty quickly).
Well, world PvP was fun. On the realm I started my first character on there were daily attacks on Darkshire, lots of fun for everyone over level 25-30 or so. These days "world PvP" seems to be about ganking (my "favorite" being the blood elf mage + undead rogue tag teams that roam the world looking for other players to gank).
You'd be surprised at how much gold a lot of in-game items are worth at the auction house.
There's been heavy inflation going on for quite some time, items comparable to what used to be very expensive 2000G items are now selling for 20-25kG on many realms ("comparable" when compared to what the current top tier of equipment and items is).
THAT is what was meant with "WoW To Add Avenue For Real-Money Gold Buying". Just as there are plenty of people with real-world money to spend there are plenty of people in-game with too much gold to spend, to them it makes more sense to just throw some gold at it rather than buying the pet using real money.
I'm mostly annoyed at the focus they've been giving PvP (as in, organized PvP, not random world PvP).
It used to be that PvP was a secondary thing in WoW, PvE was the main draw. These days if you check out just about any WoW it seems to be a lot more about PvP than PvE for a lot of the active players.
Would you drag a hand cart behind you if you had a car ready and the skills to use it? Only one who neglects the usefulness of the car will use the cart. And when the axle of the cart breaks he will shrug, take the most valuable stuff and carry it instead of fixing the cart, as he simply lacks the skill for that.
If I was trying to haul stuff from the parking lot to an apartment building I would probably use the cart instead of the car. Each tool has its advantages and disadvantages.
And yes, you should have a VCS but there are also situations in which it is not as important as some people like to think. And amazingly enough some skilled developers will arrive at a company that doesnt use a VCS, shrug and carry on with their job (while looking for something better every day when they get home). For sufficiently small projects and teams you may actually have an easier time getting things done without a VCS (if your "team" is three guys in a rented office that track feature implementation on a piece of A3 paper on one of the walls it's not that hard to make sure you're not messing with code someone else just changed, at least not as long as there are good backups).
IMO there's a difference between "should" and "must or you will fail horribly and your entire extended family and all their friends will be killed by Cthulhu" (the latter being how some people seemingly feel about those not using VC, formalized deployment procedures, unit testing and any number of other things).
While I agree about version control I have seen a couple of environments where they for various misguided managerial reasons didn't use version control. Both had instead developed a set of rules for how to back things up and "version" their code.
One place even had a set of scripts for handling these snapshots.
Is using Git, Subversion or even CVS better than their solution? Yes. But it worked for them.