Well, from a moral standpoint, if a product isn't being made anymore but somebody has it in stock, I think it would be wrong to consider the product abandonware. Stores keep things in stock for a reason. I don't consider it terribly wrong to pirate something where there's no royalties to be paid, but still, arguing that it is moral isn't quite so easy. I appreciate people thinking about the artists first, but there's more to business than just content creation. Like them or not, the distributors have a place, unless you want to mail-order everything from the artist, which is hardly profitable for him/her.
It's different when only collectors have it in stock. Of the few things I got off Napster back in the day were the works of Marek i Vacek. I could not find any retailers with new-old-stock records or CDs of their works anywhere, and my original records were destroyed in a flood. When new CDs suddenly popped up out of nowhere a few years ago, of course I bought the official merchandise (specifically, things I didn't already have in my original collection).
What I want to know is why more people don't support dual licenses. I use the MIT license for core components and GPL for the whole project. Yeah, someone else can take all the core components and start their own project, but they still aren't going to uproot my project unless they put in some work.
I think the free software fans are confusing freedom with progress. So long as the end product is open source and I can modify it to my needs, I don't care what license it uses, and most likely, neither does the entire user base. If people are forced to allow modified code back into the parent project, that may arguably spur progress (at least in code, if not program functionality), but it doesn't make things any more free. Freedom is being able to do what you want, not having to walk around the politics and the raging egos because the FSF doesn't like the way your friends license software out to you.
You may not be able to legislate morality, but I think it's wrong to assume by default that there simply is no morality to start with. In the end, the people that make something work properly are going to get my money and/or support.
Rockstar says that it's 'working with SecuROM to post information on our support pages regarding how to remove these inactive traces of the program for users who wish to do so.'
First of all, why the hell do they have to "work with" SecuROM to get a proper uninstaller? Are they saying that SecuROM doesn't even have one to begin with, so Rockstar had to ask for one? That's some hefty bull, right there, and really lets you know how seriously they (meaning both companies) take uninstallation. I was encouraged by the flak Sony BMG took over the root kit fiasco. Something tells me people have been a bit desensitized since those days.
Second, there is no such thing as an inactive trace, IMO. No, I don't care about technical definition. If they are specifically pointing out uninstalled leftovers as "inactive traces", then chances are they are a bit more troubling than your typical junk registry keys.
Third, even if the companies are still around in a few years and their DRM servers are still online, will SecuROM still work on a next-gen platform? This kind of stuff buries itself deep into the OS, so I'd imagine that, like anti-virus software, something will be far less forward-compatible than your typical graphics engine.
This computer is my system, not theirs. They can take their crap and GTFO.
I think an easy solution in this case is to give capitalization some weight. Is it fully capitalized? Then treat it like an acronym. Is it partially capitalized? Give business or project names more priority than if it wasn't capitalized. Nobody I know is going to capitalize a simple noun, like "music", so "MUSIC" shouldn't be treated the same way.
Then again, I got mad when I switched my web page from a Windows server to a Linux server, and none of my links worked because I used to capitalize all my image file names in the HTML. I wish there had been just a tiny bit of leeway there, since I didn't know how to write Perl scripts back then.
I do recall seeing such a device for use on a Mentor Graphics workstation over 15 years ago. It had 6 knobs, 3 for rotating on the object axis, and 3 for rotating relative to the camera's point of view.
I always wondered why I never saw anything like that since all the workstations were replaced by PCs and Macs. Surely there has to be some market demand for such devices.
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for more laptop manufacturers to offer trackballs as an option. I appreciate people trying new things, but we already have a large number of practical input devices. People just won't support them!
I am so sick of these demos. Next people will be showing off a new keyboard interface that lets you play music by wiggling your fingers in thin air... or write a letter by waving a virtual pencil in thin air... or drive your car by pointing in the direction you want to go and yell "vroom!"
People need tactile input and feedback to do anything meaningful. What is so wrong with having to touch a surface? Why not make a small, wireless glove with pressure sensors on the fingers that allows any surface to act like a trackpad? You won't need to lug around a tablet PC around your own home anymore or set up a camera and have all these damn IR lights all over your body (and be sure to stay away from the Christmas tree or even an open window). You could even use the glove interface by rubbing the palm of your other hand.
The only non-mouse, non-trackpad surface that would be useful is some kind of trackball that could be used independently of the pointing device that allows you to rotate 3D objects, as with CAD work. Stop making visual demos of people flailing their arms in front of cameras, and work on more drivers to use the interfaces we already have in more meaningful ways. Why can't I zoom and pan around my Photoshop images by manipulating a joystick mounted to the left of my tablet? Why am I still restricted to all these idiotic Alt-Something key combinations, rather than letting me use some custom analog controls?
The interface of the future is one that I can configure myself.
I've heard about people trying to attach IR LEDs to the hoods of their jackets to keep their faces obscured from security cameras. The skinny: it doesn't work.
Why place the lights around the screen and risk hurting people's eyes with light they can't see? Just have one IR lamp on the roof of the theater beam a light show on the screen, just like the projector does. Any cell phones recording the performance will have messages like, "enjoy your bootleg, PIRATE WUSSIES!" marquee across the picture. An IR filter will have a hard time taking those out reliably without having massive artifacts left over.
I'd like to punish all those people who buy a game for $50, trade it in for $2 of store credit, and then allow the store to turn around and tries to resell it for $40.
What surprises me so much about the used game business is how many used games are available. If consumers are so willing to be part of the system, can you really bypass it?
I prefer PC gaming, and I almost always buy games new. But, even though I have a lot more money than I did a decade ago, I don't buy as many games as I used to, thanks to the endless amount of stupidity in the PC gaming industry. I, for one, do not think of cracks as a solution. I just play games on consoles, or go without.
Oh yeah, and I complain about it constantly, so developers know why I don't buy their games. I know it's futile, but it's all I can do.
28MPH when the car is fully charged, I assume? How about when the tank is 1/2 full? Does it have a heater for the winter?
A novel idea, but if we're going to make people movers, electric sounds like a more realistic implementation. An electric go-kart isn't that hard to mass produce.
Also, I'm wondering if these guys have mane any progress, lately.
I recall an article about the "Spam King" where he clearly rejected the idea of putting such markers on his e-mails. Legal or not, he said he wouldn't.
There's no such thing as enforcement when faced with billions of messages every single day. You're on your own to protect yourself, bub.
The problem is that most of these interfaces have the same functional value of things we are already using. They are just designed to look cooler and often just introduce ergonomic issues to boot. That sells, but it doesn't really solve many (if any) problems.
I saw a camera recently that had a touch screen interface that covered the whole back of the camera, rather than the usual buttons. When reviewing photos, you see two photos at a time, and you just "swipe" horizontally to scroll between the previous and next pictures. That's the same thing as pushing a left and right button. It's a scroller. It may be a nice alternative, but it's not really a solution to a problem.
Hell, I remember the first time I tried an iPod. It took me a long time to realize how to use the stupid wheel, and the buttons on my MP3 player are far more accurate than fumbling around with the touch interface, trying to keep the focus from skipping between two different menu items. I'm glad I saved myself about $60 by getting something "cheaper" that actually worked better for me.
Frankly, I don't like anything with a touch surface. I have trouble using them compared to something I can manipulate with more than one finger. It amazes me that there aren't more laptops that have a trackball as an option, for people like me that have severe allergic reactions to trackpads. God, I hate those things, and I don't want to drag a mini USB mouse with me everywhere I go. Come on, where did all the trackballs go? Yes, I'd prefer a real mouse on a desktop computer, but anything is better than a trackpad!
3D interfaces are the next big thing. I remember when mouse gestures were the next big thing. I remember when VR goggles were the next big thing. I remember a company pushing an analog stick instead of a mouse as the next big thing. The next big thing rarely pans out. Touchscreens make things more portable, but given the choice, I think a lot of people will stick to their keyboards and mice for a while. Me, being an artist, I use a tablet for almost everything, including playing games. I'll be doing that for a while, too.
Where's the built-in OS support for tablets? Oh, trendy touchscreen support is more important than the other most useful interface besides the mouse and keyboard.
I think it's backlash against 3D gameplay. I'm not talking about 3D graphics, but rather 3D gameplay and interacting with things in a 3D world.
In 2D, you can do a lot of really cool things because you don't have to think about depth, like how far you have to jump to get to a platform. In 2D, it's obvious. You also don't have to worry about camera angles, which have gotten better in the last 10 years due to improved AI, but they still pretty much suck. I hate backing against a wall in a 3rd-person platform game and seeing the camera go berserk.
I also believe that 2D games, especially platformers, give you more freedom to goof around. If a game has a good "feel", you can go all kinds of cool chain-reaction moves which are pretty much impossible in 3D games. 3D games have usually been more procedural due to the interface complexity. I can jump off a platform, smush rows of goombas, and punch a brick to get a coin in one shot. With a typical 3D platformer, you pretty much do one thing at a time -- walk up to something, jump, move again, pick something up, shoot, walk, talk, then walk some more. That's my theory as to why the Wii's 3D controller is wasted on waggle games. Thinking in 3D is actually very difficult.
Of course, style matters, too. 3D graphics often lacks the color and graphic power of good 2D. I like remakes of old games, but they cannot either be exact replicas of the old games, or use too much technology. Geometry Wars is a real favorite of mind, as it brings back the old arcade feel, but still offers a pretty fireworks show. Games like Mega Man 9 really turn me off. I have fond memories of 8-bit gaming, not 8-bit limitations.
Possibly. Some people believe the dead understand more about the cosmos than the living. Whether said people believe in science, though, is a different story.
But there is no excuse in the way that windows configures itself by default, it sets itself up for failure by having a re-sizable swap partition on the main OS partition.
Except flexibility. I understand the solution is definitely not optimal, but the idea is that not wasting perfectly good hard drive space would outweigh the drawback of bad performance.
Being an ex-Amiga user myself, I still see virtual memory as a crutch, and not a performance enhancing technique. I still remember when a CS major told me it was insanely stupid if an OS could not swap out kernel memory. Really? I wasn't aware that the kernel and low-level drivers used such a huge amount of memory compared to the applications. If you run out of memory for the kernel, I'd be worried about why the apps are using so many system resources, not how the OS handles its own memory.
Well, it would help if people didn't like them so much, or at least tolerate them.
Look at Steam. I hate Steam with a passion on principle, because Valve forced people to install it, and it always ran on the computer even when Valve's games did not. To this day, I still have not installed HL2 or the Orange Box on my system, and I have remained very vocal about the forced installation of background tasks. Other people complained at first, but now, all I hear from people is how awesome Steam is and how they love buying things off it, and I should shut up about it. The fact that it is there all the time, constantly doing things in the background just doesn't phase them. After all, they can simply blame their 3-minute boot times on Microsoft.
What about all the "helper" programs? Every time I install some kind of driver, there's about 3-5 system services that get added to my system. When I search for information about these services, the web pages I encounter tell me that the services are not required, but that they enhance performance, so I shouldn't disable them. Excuse me? Enhance performance? In what respect? What if I only use that part of my system once a day, but it adds about 75-100MB of data to my swap file on startup? If not done correctly, pre-caching can seriously slow down a computer, and I see that every day when I fix other peoples' computers. And yet, other people tell me I shouldn't complain about it?
I stopped using Google Chrome when I found out that it installed an automatic updater with no way to disable it, short of hunting it down and deleting the main executable. Without deleting the file, Chrome just put it right back into active use again. Chrome also used to write about 1.5 gigabytes to my hard drive every time I started it up. Why? Well, that's part of the safe browsing initiative, where the browser downloads and installs a record of bad web sites. What if I have one of those flash drives? Will an app that writes several gigs of data to the drive every day wear it out prematurely? Do the commercial developers care?
No, they don't... because home users don't care, either, or at least they don't know any better.
Meanwhile, people still ask me to fix their computers all the time, and the only thing I can do to keep boot times under a minute is disable half their software. Then, their friends tell them to buy a Mac, and all the performance problems will go away. Is that why my Mac only has Apple software installed and takes 1.5 minutes to boot, whereas my XP system boots in 18 seconds with Apache and MySQL in the background?
While I haven't gotten much practical use out of it, I remember doing RAM scans of my Amiga over 10 years ago, and being able to detect what kind of data was in the memory by listening to it in a sound editor. Played at high speed, it was much easier and faster than paging through a memory dump. Locating text is easy, too, since it has a distinct, quieter sound than binary.
It just sounds really cool, too, since back in those days things weren't compressed when in memory, but they were more condensed, so there were more harmonic data tables and less static and pops. While it's nice that modern computers don't crash as much due to memory protection, and memory paging would cause some abrupt breaks, I really miss being able to directly see or hear what's in my computer's memory.
I wonder if there's any kernel-level visual/audio tools for doing just that.
Call me dense, but... don't you mean we simply cannot detect a perfect vacuum, rather than saying it's impossible?
When I first heard about the double slit experiment, I was very confused because the article I read kept using the word "observing". It took me a while to realize that what they meant was that the act of measuring, in an attempt to observe, influences the experiment. So, whether observation disturbs the experiment depends on the method of observation. To a normal person, the term observation isn't seen as a method of interference.
Too bad the national debt clock doesn't show the accumulated interest that has been paid in the past, or how much it costs every year. At this point, just the total interest alone might exceed 2.7 trillion.
Oh, wait... I get it. If we hike the inflation rate to double digits, then 10 trillion won't look quite so bad in a couple years. It's good to keep things in perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, from a moral standpoint, if a product isn't being made anymore but somebody has it in stock, I think it would be wrong to consider the product abandonware. Stores keep things in stock for a reason. I don't consider it terribly wrong to pirate something where there's no royalties to be paid, but still, arguing that it is moral isn't quite so easy. I appreciate people thinking about the artists first, but there's more to business than just content creation. Like them or not, the distributors have a place, unless you want to mail-order everything from the artist, which is hardly profitable for him/her.
It's different when only collectors have it in stock. Of the few things I got off Napster back in the day were the works of Marek i Vacek. I could not find any retailers with new-old-stock records or CDs of their works anywhere, and my original records were destroyed in a flood. When new CDs suddenly popped up out of nowhere a few years ago, of course I bought the official merchandise (specifically, things I didn't already have in my original collection).
What I want to know is why more people don't support dual licenses. I use the MIT license for core components and GPL for the whole project. Yeah, someone else can take all the core components and start their own project, but they still aren't going to uproot my project unless they put in some work.
I think the free software fans are confusing freedom with progress. So long as the end product is open source and I can modify it to my needs, I don't care what license it uses, and most likely, neither does the entire user base. If people are forced to allow modified code back into the parent project, that may arguably spur progress (at least in code, if not program functionality), but it doesn't make things any more free. Freedom is being able to do what you want, not having to walk around the politics and the raging egos because the FSF doesn't like the way your friends license software out to you.
You may not be able to legislate morality, but I think it's wrong to assume by default that there simply is no morality to start with. In the end, the people that make something work properly are going to get my money and/or support.
Rockstar says that it's 'working with SecuROM to post information on our support pages regarding how to remove these inactive traces of the program for users who wish to do so.'
First of all, why the hell do they have to "work with" SecuROM to get a proper uninstaller? Are they saying that SecuROM doesn't even have one to begin with, so Rockstar had to ask for one? That's some hefty bull, right there, and really lets you know how seriously they (meaning both companies) take uninstallation. I was encouraged by the flak Sony BMG took over the root kit fiasco. Something tells me people have been a bit desensitized since those days.
Second, there is no such thing as an inactive trace, IMO. No, I don't care about technical definition. If they are specifically pointing out uninstalled leftovers as "inactive traces", then chances are they are a bit more troubling than your typical junk registry keys.
Third, even if the companies are still around in a few years and their DRM servers are still online, will SecuROM still work on a next-gen platform? This kind of stuff buries itself deep into the OS, so I'd imagine that, like anti-virus software, something will be far less forward-compatible than your typical graphics engine.
This computer is my system, not theirs. They can take their crap and GTFO.
I think an easy solution in this case is to give capitalization some weight. Is it fully capitalized? Then treat it like an acronym. Is it partially capitalized? Give business or project names more priority than if it wasn't capitalized. Nobody I know is going to capitalize a simple noun, like "music", so "MUSIC" shouldn't be treated the same way.
Then again, I got mad when I switched my web page from a Windows server to a Linux server, and none of my links worked because I used to capitalize all my image file names in the HTML. I wish there had been just a tiny bit of leeway there, since I didn't know how to write Perl scripts back then.
I do recall seeing such a device for use on a Mentor Graphics workstation over 15 years ago. It had 6 knobs, 3 for rotating on the object axis, and 3 for rotating relative to the camera's point of view.
I always wondered why I never saw anything like that since all the workstations were replaced by PCs and Macs. Surely there has to be some market demand for such devices.
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for more laptop manufacturers to offer trackballs as an option. I appreciate people trying new things, but we already have a large number of practical input devices. People just won't support them!
So, if you say you're "not desegregating" something, is that a double negative?
I am so sick of these demos. Next people will be showing off a new keyboard interface that lets you play music by wiggling your fingers in thin air... or write a letter by waving a virtual pencil in thin air... or drive your car by pointing in the direction you want to go and yell "vroom!"
People need tactile input and feedback to do anything meaningful. What is so wrong with having to touch a surface? Why not make a small, wireless glove with pressure sensors on the fingers that allows any surface to act like a trackpad? You won't need to lug around a tablet PC around your own home anymore or set up a camera and have all these damn IR lights all over your body (and be sure to stay away from the Christmas tree or even an open window). You could even use the glove interface by rubbing the palm of your other hand.
The only non-mouse, non-trackpad surface that would be useful is some kind of trackball that could be used independently of the pointing device that allows you to rotate 3D objects, as with CAD work. Stop making visual demos of people flailing their arms in front of cameras, and work on more drivers to use the interfaces we already have in more meaningful ways. Why can't I zoom and pan around my Photoshop images by manipulating a joystick mounted to the left of my tablet? Why am I still restricted to all these idiotic Alt-Something key combinations, rather than letting me use some custom analog controls?
The interface of the future is one that I can configure myself.
I've heard about people trying to attach IR LEDs to the hoods of their jackets to keep their faces obscured from security cameras. The skinny: it doesn't work.
Why place the lights around the screen and risk hurting people's eyes with light they can't see? Just have one IR lamp on the roof of the theater beam a light show on the screen, just like the projector does. Any cell phones recording the performance will have messages like, "enjoy your bootleg, PIRATE WUSSIES!" marquee across the picture. An IR filter will have a hard time taking those out reliably without having massive artifacts left over.
And yet, Toyota and Honda can. I haven't the foggiest clue as to why!
I'd like to punish all those people who buy a game for $50, trade it in for $2 of store credit, and then allow the store to turn around and tries to resell it for $40.
What surprises me so much about the used game business is how many used games are available. If consumers are so willing to be part of the system, can you really bypass it?
I prefer PC gaming, and I almost always buy games new. But, even though I have a lot more money than I did a decade ago, I don't buy as many games as I used to, thanks to the endless amount of stupidity in the PC gaming industry. I, for one, do not think of cracks as a solution. I just play games on consoles, or go without.
Oh yeah, and I complain about it constantly, so developers know why I don't buy their games. I know it's futile, but it's all I can do.
I say we stop all development entirely!
Its likely in this cause being that its built on the JVM, that people should probably just use java anyway.
I'm not a Java expert, but... Java does everything that Ruby and LISP does without having to jump through hoops?
28MPH when the car is fully charged, I assume? How about when the tank is 1/2 full? Does it have a heater for the winter?
A novel idea, but if we're going to make people movers, electric sounds like a more realistic implementation. An electric go-kart isn't that hard to mass produce.
Also, I'm wondering if these guys have mane any progress, lately.
You mis-spelled p tags.
I recall an article about the "Spam King" where he clearly rejected the idea of putting such markers on his e-mails. Legal or not, he said he wouldn't.
There's no such thing as enforcement when faced with billions of messages every single day. You're on your own to protect yourself, bub.
So now the web truly remembers everything!
I take it there's no silver bullet for building and packaging projects, either.
The vast majority of validation problems are actually syntax errors. It kind of helps that the browser will parse the tree properly.
The problem is that most of these interfaces have the same functional value of things we are already using. They are just designed to look cooler and often just introduce ergonomic issues to boot. That sells, but it doesn't really solve many (if any) problems.
I saw a camera recently that had a touch screen interface that covered the whole back of the camera, rather than the usual buttons. When reviewing photos, you see two photos at a time, and you just "swipe" horizontally to scroll between the previous and next pictures. That's the same thing as pushing a left and right button. It's a scroller. It may be a nice alternative, but it's not really a solution to a problem.
Hell, I remember the first time I tried an iPod. It took me a long time to realize how to use the stupid wheel, and the buttons on my MP3 player are far more accurate than fumbling around with the touch interface, trying to keep the focus from skipping between two different menu items. I'm glad I saved myself about $60 by getting something "cheaper" that actually worked better for me.
Frankly, I don't like anything with a touch surface. I have trouble using them compared to something I can manipulate with more than one finger. It amazes me that there aren't more laptops that have a trackball as an option, for people like me that have severe allergic reactions to trackpads. God, I hate those things, and I don't want to drag a mini USB mouse with me everywhere I go. Come on, where did all the trackballs go? Yes, I'd prefer a real mouse on a desktop computer, but anything is better than a trackpad!
3D interfaces are the next big thing. I remember when mouse gestures were the next big thing. I remember when VR goggles were the next big thing. I remember a company pushing an analog stick instead of a mouse as the next big thing. The next big thing rarely pans out. Touchscreens make things more portable, but given the choice, I think a lot of people will stick to their keyboards and mice for a while. Me, being an artist, I use a tablet for almost everything, including playing games. I'll be doing that for a while, too.
Where's the built-in OS support for tablets? Oh, trendy touchscreen support is more important than the other most useful interface besides the mouse and keyboard.
I think it's backlash against 3D gameplay. I'm not talking about 3D graphics, but rather 3D gameplay and interacting with things in a 3D world.
In 2D, you can do a lot of really cool things because you don't have to think about depth, like how far you have to jump to get to a platform. In 2D, it's obvious. You also don't have to worry about camera angles, which have gotten better in the last 10 years due to improved AI, but they still pretty much suck. I hate backing against a wall in a 3rd-person platform game and seeing the camera go berserk.
I also believe that 2D games, especially platformers, give you more freedom to goof around. If a game has a good "feel", you can go all kinds of cool chain-reaction moves which are pretty much impossible in 3D games. 3D games have usually been more procedural due to the interface complexity. I can jump off a platform, smush rows of goombas, and punch a brick to get a coin in one shot. With a typical 3D platformer, you pretty much do one thing at a time -- walk up to something, jump, move again, pick something up, shoot, walk, talk, then walk some more. That's my theory as to why the Wii's 3D controller is wasted on waggle games. Thinking in 3D is actually very difficult.
Of course, style matters, too. 3D graphics often lacks the color and graphic power of good 2D. I like remakes of old games, but they cannot either be exact replicas of the old games, or use too much technology. Geometry Wars is a real favorite of mind, as it brings back the old arcade feel, but still offers a pretty fireworks show. Games like Mega Man 9 really turn me off. I have fond memories of 8-bit gaming, not 8-bit limitations.
Possibly. Some people believe the dead understand more about the cosmos than the living. Whether said people believe in science, though, is a different story.
But there is no excuse in the way that windows configures itself by default, it sets itself up for failure by having a re-sizable swap partition on the main OS partition.
Except flexibility. I understand the solution is definitely not optimal, but the idea is that not wasting perfectly good hard drive space would outweigh the drawback of bad performance.
Being an ex-Amiga user myself, I still see virtual memory as a crutch, and not a performance enhancing technique. I still remember when a CS major told me it was insanely stupid if an OS could not swap out kernel memory. Really? I wasn't aware that the kernel and low-level drivers used such a huge amount of memory compared to the applications. If you run out of memory for the kernel, I'd be worried about why the apps are using so many system resources, not how the OS handles its own memory.
Well, it would help if people didn't like them so much, or at least tolerate them.
Look at Steam. I hate Steam with a passion on principle, because Valve forced people to install it, and it always ran on the computer even when Valve's games did not. To this day, I still have not installed HL2 or the Orange Box on my system, and I have remained very vocal about the forced installation of background tasks. Other people complained at first, but now, all I hear from people is how awesome Steam is and how they love buying things off it, and I should shut up about it. The fact that it is there all the time, constantly doing things in the background just doesn't phase them. After all, they can simply blame their 3-minute boot times on Microsoft.
What about all the "helper" programs? Every time I install some kind of driver, there's about 3-5 system services that get added to my system. When I search for information about these services, the web pages I encounter tell me that the services are not required, but that they enhance performance, so I shouldn't disable them. Excuse me? Enhance performance? In what respect? What if I only use that part of my system once a day, but it adds about 75-100MB of data to my swap file on startup? If not done correctly, pre-caching can seriously slow down a computer, and I see that every day when I fix other peoples' computers. And yet, other people tell me I shouldn't complain about it?
I stopped using Google Chrome when I found out that it installed an automatic updater with no way to disable it, short of hunting it down and deleting the main executable. Without deleting the file, Chrome just put it right back into active use again. Chrome also used to write about 1.5 gigabytes to my hard drive every time I started it up. Why? Well, that's part of the safe browsing initiative, where the browser downloads and installs a record of bad web sites. What if I have one of those flash drives? Will an app that writes several gigs of data to the drive every day wear it out prematurely? Do the commercial developers care?
No, they don't... because home users don't care, either, or at least they don't know any better.
Meanwhile, people still ask me to fix their computers all the time, and the only thing I can do to keep boot times under a minute is disable half their software. Then, their friends tell them to buy a Mac, and all the performance problems will go away. Is that why my Mac only has Apple software installed and takes 1.5 minutes to boot, whereas my XP system boots in 18 seconds with Apache and MySQL in the background?
While I haven't gotten much practical use out of it, I remember doing RAM scans of my Amiga over 10 years ago, and being able to detect what kind of data was in the memory by listening to it in a sound editor. Played at high speed, it was much easier and faster than paging through a memory dump. Locating text is easy, too, since it has a distinct, quieter sound than binary.
It just sounds really cool, too, since back in those days things weren't compressed when in memory, but they were more condensed, so there were more harmonic data tables and less static and pops. While it's nice that modern computers don't crash as much due to memory protection, and memory paging would cause some abrupt breaks, I really miss being able to directly see or hear what's in my computer's memory.
I wonder if there's any kernel-level visual/audio tools for doing just that.
Call me dense, but... don't you mean we simply cannot detect a perfect vacuum, rather than saying it's impossible?
When I first heard about the double slit experiment, I was very confused because the article I read kept using the word "observing". It took me a while to realize that what they meant was that the act of measuring, in an attempt to observe, influences the experiment. So, whether observation disturbs the experiment depends on the method of observation. To a normal person, the term observation isn't seen as a method of interference.
In other words, the Mac Tax is the vertical monopoly.
Too bad the national debt clock doesn't show the accumulated interest that has been paid in the past, or how much it costs every year. At this point, just the total interest alone might exceed 2.7 trillion.
Oh, wait... I get it. If we hike the inflation rate to double digits, then 10 trillion won't look quite so bad in a couple years. It's good to keep things in perspective.