Yes, please do. You appear to have thought you were responding to a different post than you actually responded to. The original Point and Counterpoint post, which is the parent of the post where you brought up Novell and NDS, does not contain the text you quoted and, just in case I missed it, Netscape's search function confirms that neither "Novell" nor "Netware" appear in that post. Just for fun, I followed the parent links all the way up and found no ancestor of your post which mentioned Novell or any of its products.
Or is this some meaning of "original post" with which I am not familiar?
What about libraries?/usr/share seems to fit this space fairly nicely
'Fraid not./usr/share is designated for "architecture-independent data". I don't consider libraries to be data and they're certainly not architecture-independent.
I fear that some of the things you claim are useless are, in fact, quite excellent:
mono-pointer makes GUI hard to use
Huh? I don't see what you're getting at - do you mean that multiple pointers would be better? If so, how is the user intended to keep track of which is which and reliably access the one they intend to use? Or do you want to get rid of them entirely?
windows overlapping are really painful when you want to *see* the information you are dealing with
I'd much rather have a nice, big browser to read slashdot in, while it overlaps two terminals running mutt (so I can watch for new mail) and a third at the bottom of the screen running big processes (so I can see when they're done), than have to shrink my browser so that everything can fit onscreen at once without overlapping.
scrollbars should be forgotten for a similar reason
And what alternate method of displaying proportional position in a large document would you consider superior? PageUp/PageDown don't cut it as a scrollbar replacement and I'm not aware of anything onscreen that's more functional per pixel than a scrollbar.
Perhaps I have just "adapted", but that is not a bad thing. Too many people make the mistaken assumption that ease of learning is the same thing as ease of use. A feature is neither bad nor useless simply because it's not immediately obvious to "anybody who doesn't use computers". If it takes 2 hours to learn how to use the feature, but having access to it saves you 5 hours a week after that training is complete, then it's a good feature, even if it makes it harder for someone without training to use the software.
Except that your vote for him helped to effectively put Dubya in the White House...
Yeah, maybe - if you're talking to someone from Florida.
Me? No, I didn't vote for Gore, but my vote didn't "help" Bush one bit because I live in a state that went to Gore anyhow. And I knew it would from the start, so I had no reason to vote for either major party instead of for my preferred candidate.
Ay, but there's the rub... If the API was written by someone who didn't foresee the possibility that you might want to change process management, you're SOL. Or if he did foresee it, but didn't want to allow it.
People should really read the article (or at least the blurb!) before criticizing its claims.
The blurb says that linux is the first to break the 100 petabyte limit. The article also mentions that "Some of the big enterprise vendors have claimed to support Petabyte storage for some time, and of course BeOS has supported 18-Petabyte files for many moons now".
Low-mass ball floating in a viscous liquid. Low mass = low inertia, viscous liquid = significant drag. Cheap and it will stop the ball very quickly when you stop, plus I would expect it to feel more realistic to have to push off against the ground with every step instead of letting the ball spin freely.
I'd argue for a smaller ball, to keep the mass down (as well as making it easier to find a place to put one). The spherical error and distortion could be corrected for fairly easily in the control software, provided that it has a way to track the location of your head, such as with a head-mounted transmitter or a sonar system.
Real VR can map the movement of the head to look around
Umm... Not necessarily. VR doesn't have to be helmet-based; it can also project the scene around you so that head tracking isn't needed. Unless you mean to say that the holodeck isn't VR...
(I do agree with you, though, about mouse/keyboard and VR being a bad mix. It seems that a lot more progress has been made on VR output devices than on VR input methods.)
So, it sounds like M$ is checking the USER-AGENT HTTP header for certain strings, and displaying the "Upgrade to IE" page if
yours doesn't match.
No, not quite. They're blocking you if it does match. It will let random user-agents in - "If you change the Opera string by one letter, it is letting us in." - but is specifically denying access to certain competing products.
Of course, by this argument, the existence and nature of anything is unknowable. Substitute "my mom", "slashdot", or "Osama bin Laden" for "God" in the above post and it remains just as true.
There is a significant difference between temporarily curtailing freedoms in order to counteract a specific event and restricting them on an ongoing basis, just in case something might happen someday.
One month of totalitarianism to save millions of people, just like rationing during World War 2, would be unpleasant and distasteful, but justifiable.
Open-ended laws which expand government power without a well-defined terminating condition which do not address an imminent threat, however, are not acceptable.
Note that I am not talking about numbers here, although they have a place as well. (Should 300 million people give up their rights for 10 years in order to save 1 life? I would say no.) My point is that heightened airport security for a couple months is tolerable, but it must not be permanent[1]. Long-term restrictions on crypto, which prevent lawful citizens from securely going about their lawful business, are not acceptable unless overbearing evidence is presented to demonstrate that lives would actually be saved, and even then, it would, IMO, be questionable. Laws which would permanently raise petty vandalism (web site defacement) to be a more heinous crime than multiple murder are an atrocity.
[1] Bush's 'until every terrorist in the world has been dealt with' is the same as permanent. Even if that goal could be attained, we would have no way of knowing that the mission is complete.
That sounds more like a reason to ban laptops in classrooms entirely rather than just cutting off net access. A student taking notes on his laptop generates more noise than one surfing the web or reading his email - the note-taker is entering substantial amounts of data (many keystrokes, more-or-less continuous typing), while the goof-off is just navigating (a single keystroke or click every now and then).
I DON'T "get" how you tell what your current stockpile is
That's easy: You don't have a stockpile of anything except gold. Kohan is pretty strictly pay-as-you-go for other resources.
I couldn't see anything happening when I slipped into negative production ratings
Run your mouse across the ratings and wait for the tooltips to pop up... It appears that you can substitute gold for any other resource, so if you have a shortfall of, e.g., 2 iron/minute, you automatically make up for it by spending 2 gold/minute.
Ditto. My copy of the full version is somewhere in the mail...
The stuipid units (zombies for instance) seem to get stuck more often than the smart ones for some reason. Also, if a unit gets too far seperated from it's company it will be "lost in the wilderness" and you will have to wait in your supply zone to regnerate it.
Cool! I hadn't noticed either of these details. You sound like you're annoyed at the pathfinding's imperfections, but I'd say these sound like features, not bugs.
higher level players will be the ones with superior strategies instead of the fastest clickers
Yup. The 'strategic RTS' (as one review called it) aspect is what I think I like best about the game.
There is something about an immortal race of beings that get converted to artefacts (amulets actually) when they die.
My impression is that the amulets are artifacts created to trap the immortals rather than an aspect of them dying.
How'd you get modded up to 3 without reading the article? It states rather clearly that access to source code is one of the major reasons these countries are pushing for software libre. Yeah, money is a reason too, but copying proprietary software without paying for it doesn't get you the source.
BTW, "libre" is Spanish for "free as in free speech, not free beer". Nice how it avoids the ambiguity we have in English and explictly state their primary motivation, no?
Doesn't really matter for me, I have nothing to hide, and I don't plan on shoplifting or using bad credit cards
Last weekend, I was chatting with some people at the local Renn Faire and they mentioned someone who no longer works there. It seems that he was mistakenly identified as a convicted sex offender and a woman who overheard this then went around to all the booths in the area informing people of his (imagined) crimes. He didn't bother coming back because his reputation was trashed and repairing it would have been rather difficult, particularly in the current political climate.
Now think about how most people view computers. Computers know everything and are nigh infallible in the common view. If a computer fingered you for something you didn't do, how much more difficult would it be to repair the damage done to you?
On occasion, I happen to find it rather relaxing
to compose messages in bricktext. It's an oddly
amusing linguistic exercise and I find it to not
be nearly so difficult as one might expect. But
there are also those maniacs who have chosen (as
I have not) to take it further, by combining the
technique you used earlier with that which I now
use to produce the dreaded acrostic bricktext, a
feat which sane men fear to even consider. Even
that is not the true pinnacle of this black art.
The ultimate feat, and one which I have seen but
a single time, is the double-acrostic bricktext,
which bears one message in the first position of
each line and another in the line's last letter.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhh... Now it makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.
Please, read twice before posting.
Yes, please do. You appear to have thought you were responding to a different post than you actually responded to. The original Point and Counterpoint post, which is the parent of the post where you brought up Novell and NDS, does not contain the text you quoted and, just in case I missed it, Netscape's search function confirms that neither "Novell" nor "Netware" appear in that post. Just for fun, I followed the parent links all the way up and found no ancestor of your post which mentioned Novell or any of its products.
Or is this some meaning of "original post" with which I am not familiar?
I see no mention of the network server in question running Novell, much less NDS.
Yup. When it comes to prototyping, rapid or otherwise, just about everyone forgets the most important step: Throwing the prototype away.
Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow. - Fred Brooks
Agreed as far as movies and DVDs go, but that doesn't apply to Buffy.
"Oh geez, get rid of that resume. It's a Bernie Shifman."
Or, if you're feeling lazy, just use his initials:
"Oh geez, get rid of that resume. It's B.S."
Monetize my desktop? Great! I could use some decent art.
Or the version from Zodiac: Assume that everybody can see you. Assume they're all out to run you down. Ride accordingly.
What about libraries? /usr/share seems to fit this space fairly nicely
/usr/share is designated for "architecture-independent data". I don't consider libraries to be data and they're certainly not architecture-independent.
'Fraid not.
I fear that some of the things you claim are useless are, in fact, quite excellent:
mono-pointer makes GUI hard to use
Huh? I don't see what you're getting at - do you mean that multiple pointers would be better? If so, how is the user intended to keep track of which is which and reliably access the one they intend to use? Or do you want to get rid of them entirely?
windows overlapping are really painful when you want to *see* the information you are dealing with
I'd much rather have a nice, big browser to read slashdot in, while it overlaps two terminals running mutt (so I can watch for new mail) and a third at the bottom of the screen running big processes (so I can see when they're done), than have to shrink my browser so that everything can fit onscreen at once without overlapping.
scrollbars should be forgotten for a similar reason
And what alternate method of displaying proportional position in a large document would you consider superior? PageUp/PageDown don't cut it as a scrollbar replacement and I'm not aware of anything onscreen that's more functional per pixel than a scrollbar.
Perhaps I have just "adapted", but that is not a bad thing. Too many people make the mistaken assumption that ease of learning is the same thing as ease of use. A feature is neither bad nor useless simply because it's not immediately obvious to "anybody who doesn't use computers". If it takes 2 hours to learn how to use the feature, but having access to it saves you 5 hours a week after that training is complete, then it's a good feature, even if it makes it harder for someone without training to use the software.
Except that your vote for him helped to effectively put Dubya in the White House...
Yeah, maybe - if you're talking to someone from Florida.
Me? No, I didn't vote for Gore, but my vote didn't "help" Bush one bit because I live in a state that went to Gore anyhow. And I knew it would from the start, so I had no reason to vote for either major party instead of for my preferred candidate.
Ain't this a wonderfully broken system we've got?
Ay, but there's the rub... If the API was written by someone who didn't foresee the possibility that you might want to change process management, you're SOL. Or if he did foresee it, but didn't want to allow it.
People should really read the article (or at least the blurb!) before criticizing its claims.
The blurb says that linux is the first to break the 100 petabyte limit. The article also mentions that "Some of the big enterprise vendors have claimed to support Petabyte storage for some time, and of course BeOS has supported 18-Petabyte files for many moons now".
Low-mass ball floating in a viscous liquid. Low mass = low inertia, viscous liquid = significant drag. Cheap and it will stop the ball very quickly when you stop, plus I would expect it to feel more realistic to have to push off against the ground with every step instead of letting the ball spin freely.
I'd argue for a smaller ball, to keep the mass down (as well as making it easier to find a place to put one). The spherical error and distortion could be corrected for fairly easily in the control software, provided that it has a way to track the location of your head, such as with a head-mounted transmitter or a sonar system.
Umm... Not necessarily. VR doesn't have to be helmet-based; it can also project the scene around you so that head tracking isn't needed. Unless you mean to say that the holodeck isn't VR...
(I do agree with you, though, about mouse/keyboard and VR being a bad mix. It seems that a lot more progress has been made on VR output devices than on VR input methods.)
So, it sounds like M$ is checking the USER-AGENT HTTP header for certain strings, and displaying the "Upgrade to IE" page if
yours doesn't match.
No, not quite. They're blocking you if it does match. It will let random user-agents in - "If you change the Opera string by one letter, it is letting us in." - but is specifically denying access to certain competing products.
IMO, that's far worse.
Of course, by this argument, the existence and nature of anything is unknowable. Substitute "my mom", "slashdot", or "Osama bin Laden" for "God" in the above post and it remains just as true.
Ain't solipsism grand?
As regards your question...
There is a significant difference between temporarily curtailing freedoms in order to counteract a specific event and restricting them on an ongoing basis, just in case something might happen someday.
One month of totalitarianism to save millions of people, just like rationing during World War 2, would be unpleasant and distasteful, but justifiable.
Open-ended laws which expand government power without a well-defined terminating condition which do not address an imminent threat, however, are not acceptable.
Note that I am not talking about numbers here, although they have a place as well. (Should 300 million people give up their rights for 10 years in order to save 1 life? I would say no.) My point is that heightened airport security for a couple months is tolerable, but it must not be permanent[1]. Long-term restrictions on crypto, which prevent lawful citizens from securely going about their lawful business, are not acceptable unless overbearing evidence is presented to demonstrate that lives would actually be saved, and even then, it would, IMO, be questionable. Laws which would permanently raise petty vandalism (web site defacement) to be a more heinous crime than multiple murder are an atrocity.
[1] Bush's 'until every terrorist in the world has been dealt with' is the same as permanent. Even if that goal could be attained, we would have no way of knowing that the mission is complete.
That sounds more like a reason to ban laptops in classrooms entirely rather than just cutting off net access. A student taking notes on his laptop generates more noise than one surfing the web or reading his email - the note-taker is entering substantial amounts of data (many keystrokes, more-or-less continuous typing), while the goof-off is just navigating (a single keystroke or click every now and then).
That's easy: You don't have a stockpile of anything except gold. Kohan is pretty strictly pay-as-you-go for other resources.
I couldn't see anything happening when I slipped into negative production ratings
Run your mouse across the ratings and wait for the tooltips to pop up... It appears that you can substitute gold for any other resource, so if you have a shortfall of, e.g., 2 iron/minute, you automatically make up for it by spending 2 gold/minute.
Ditto. My copy of the full version is somewhere in the mail...
The stuipid units (zombies for instance) seem to get stuck more often than the smart ones for some reason. Also, if a unit gets too far seperated from it's company it will be "lost in the wilderness" and you will have to wait in your supply zone to regnerate it.
Cool! I hadn't noticed either of these details. You sound like you're annoyed at the pathfinding's imperfections, but I'd say these sound like features, not bugs.
higher level players will be the ones with superior strategies instead of the fastest clickers
Yup. The 'strategic RTS' (as one review called it) aspect is what I think I like best about the game.
There is something about an immortal race of beings that get converted to artefacts (amulets actually) when they die.
My impression is that the amulets are artifacts created to trap the immortals rather than an aspect of them dying.
BTW, "libre" is Spanish for "free as in free speech, not free beer". Nice how it avoids the ambiguity we have in English and explictly state their primary motivation, no?
Last weekend, I was chatting with some people at the local Renn Faire and they mentioned someone who no longer works there. It seems that he was mistakenly identified as a convicted sex offender and a woman who overheard this then went around to all the booths in the area informing people of his (imagined) crimes. He didn't bother coming back because his reputation was trashed and repairing it would have been rather difficult, particularly in the current political climate.
Now think about how most people view computers. Computers know everything and are nigh infallible in the common view. If a computer fingered you for something you didn't do, how much more difficult would it be to repair the damage done to you?
-1 Asked to be modded down
to compose messages in bricktext. It's an oddly
amusing linguistic exercise and I find it to not
be nearly so difficult as one might expect. But
there are also those maniacs who have chosen (as
I have not) to take it further, by combining the
technique you used earlier with that which I now
use to produce the dreaded acrostic bricktext, a
feat which sane men fear to even consider. Even
that is not the true pinnacle of this black art.
The ultimate feat, and one which I have seen but
a single time, is the double-acrostic bricktext,
which bears one message in the first position of
each line and another in the line's last letter.