This is the inevitable car analogy, but I think that there's a similarity to car buyers that needs to be said.
Given $40k to spend on a car there is one sort of person who will buy the sports car with a huge engine and sunroof. The Imprezza or an M2 attracts this sort of person like a fly to honey. They want the horsepower, the bucket seats, the mags and sports tyres, etc.
Then there's another sort of person who thinks the Imprezza or M2 is impractical. You can't seat four people in comfort, the bucket seats are small and restrictive, the big engine is a waste of petrol for city driving, and the boot is just too small. These people prefer a nice roomy sedan.
My opinion on this is that some people want a car they can show off to their friends. They want to tell everyone how big the engine is, how fast it goes, how much it cost. The sedan owner just wants a car they can use every day, that is practical and useful, and is good value for money.
My Palm Pilot 3 is practical and useful. I also think I'd in all honesty prefer a sedan to a sports car.
Please read the entire thread. I don't agree with the previous person's argument, which is why I began with the devil's advocate position "if this were true...". Not A -> Not B, B, therefore A.
It was non-sensical of the previous person to say that Sony had sued Bleem because Bleem prevents Sony from losing money on each console sale. Sony would have to be stupid to do that.
It's clear that Sony sued Bleem for other reasons than the one the previous person suggested. I'm not willing to delve into pet theories though: it is pure conjecture on the theorists part.
They sell the box for a loss but make it up on the $21/mo service fee. This is exactly the same business model the video game manufacturers use. The super-advanced 3D graphics chips in the PlayStation are cost way more than the selling price, but Sony makes it up in license fees for the games. Hence why Sony is attacking Bleem so ferociously, and the same reason Netpliance is beating on their corresponding "open hardware" hackers: it destroys their business model.
If this were true then Sony would actually be encouraging sales of Bleem because it means there is another person out there with reason to buy the overpriced games and Sony wouldn't have to sell a loss leader console in the first place.
Bleem is effectively a free console for Sony, no loss, and still many money-making license fees from all the games the Bleem user purchases.
uhhhmmm.... no think about it, why would the spacecraft be rotating, the people inside rotating with the craft, but the M&Ms not be rotating
Because that explains the scene. That is the point of the exercise isn't it.
when there is a fly buzzing around in your car and you take a corner hard, does the fly smack into one of the windows?
If you corner hard enough, yes. Think about the situation where you slam the brakes really hard. If you're not wearing a seat belt then you fly through the windshield. If you corner hard then you feel yourself being pressed against the side of the car facing away from the turning corner. A fly does smack against the windshield if you slam the brakes hard (try it, it's fun).
nope, he just keeps flying right around in the middle of your car.
That's because the fly has the ability to fly away from the window which is coming towards it. An M&M doesn't have the muscle power.
the objects inside the space craft share the inertia with the spacecraft
I believe you're thinking of "momentum" and not "inertia".
My devil's advocate theory is that the spacecraft is rotating. The spacecraft causes the occupants to rotate also either by butt friction on seats or by applied force through seatbelts. The M&Ms would only be "attached" to the spacecraft via frictional forces with the air in the craft. This tiny force would certainly allow them to remain stationary while the craft rotates, giving the illusion of rotating M&Ms to all occupants of the craft.
I haven't seen the movie (I don't intend to now either), and I haven't seen the scene, but... Surely the helix of M&Ms could have had zero angular momentum and the craft could have been rotating about the helix. If you were attached to the craft it would then look like the helix was rotating when in fact it was stationary and you were moving around it.
Maybe because he needs a symbolic answer, not the discrete solution that a graphing calculator is going to provider. There are plenty of cases when the discrete integral is useless.
And even if the discrete integral was sufficient, often it's the case that the dataset is simply too large for a calculator to deal with. I'm thinking in particular of some scientists I know who work with 2gigabyte datasets which they integrate. They use 600mhz pentium-3 farms and a typical integral still takes a few hours. The integral is obviously a lot more complicated than Int(sin(x))!
Oh, I guess being an "aging baby boomer" is Bad. That's a shame, because no matter what Jon Katz thinks they were the people who REALLY built the Internet. The rest of us are just using it.
You're not wrong, but you're not 100% right either. Sure, the Baby Boomers are responsible for the nuts and bolts of the Internet. They got the infrastructure running and working.
But the things which people associate with the success of the Internet today or yesterday are Yahoo, Netscape, etc. These were things built by 20-30 year olds with enthusiasm.
And the really interesting developments in the Internet today are server side languages, trusted transactions, online applications, etc. These are things done by the 20-30 year olds of today.
Generation-X were teenagers in the early 90s. Guess what, we're all 20-30 years old now.
It can't match anything much on 'user apparent' speed grounds -- X's event model takes care of that.
This often quoted "fact" is never ever backed up by evidence or experiment. The simple fact is that people who do profile such things (including people from XFree86) find that X isn't a problem as far as speed is concerned.
And I have no idea where your claim that the X event model (of all things) should be the major factor in the "speed grounds".
It isn't extensible, regardless of what everyone else says -- for examle GLX was around donkeys' years ago, but no-one's able to 'extend' XF86 with it until now (you can't extend X at run time, you've gotta hope you've got the source to extend it at compile time, and then you've gotta make it work with your X server)
Far from proving your point, you instead do a fine job of disproving it. X is highly extensible, thus the vast number of extensions in even the most normal X installations (Shape, MITSHM, DGA, DPS, GLX, vidmode, XInput).
Its , network transparency was done better by QNX with their MicroGUI (which based its protocol around distributed IPC). Even NeXT could just redirect object commands and postscript display commands -- X didn't have the display model to keep up.
As a person who had the displeasure to use a NeXt cUbE, I must say that you're speaking crap. NeXT died because it was so goddamn slow compared to X: this should be proof enough that X was the superior design of the two.
QNX's MicroGUI I cannot comment on, but if it is anything like QNX then I'm not going to be at all impressed. QNX is like SYS7 only without all the usability (SYS7 users will note the sarcasm).
Several posts to the livid mailing list have made the claim that you weren't responsible for writing decss, that you weren't involved in the cryptoanalysis of the encryption algorithm, and that you are otherwise totally unrelated to the LiViD project.
My questions are:
Are you a fraud? Are you simply enjoying the prestige of being the "guy who broke the billion dollar CSS algorithm" too much to admit you don't know the first thing about cryptoanalysis?
Do people who fawn all over you, asking where your "legendary skills" came from and wanting to grow up and become just as cool as you, make you sick to the stomach and/or nauseas?
Do you think the release by MoRE of a product which (arguably) was intended for nefarious purposes has harmed the perfectly legal and well intentioned LiViD project? Do you feel ashamed?
Are you in fact using the LiViD project as a shield to hide the reality that you are in fact a lowlife copyright violator? Aren't you disgusted with yourself for ruining LiViD's name like this?
Off topic: Does anyone know why DGA is so much faster than MIT-SHM, and why it needs root?
Normal X operations go over a pipe (usually a fifo or socket). There is one copy from the client into the pipe, one copy out of the pipe into the server, and then the X server decodes the request and does the operation. Note that though this may sound inefficient, in practise you have to do similar copies in any windowing system (ie systems using message passing).
MIT-SHM uses a shared memory (shm) pixmap between the client and the server. The client draws into this pixmap and then XPutImage(3) copies the pixmap onto the screen. This avoids the X pipe and thus saves several copies of the (often large) pixmap data. This is as efficient as you're going to get without some additional knowledge of how the framebuffer memory is laid out.
DGA uses mmap() to map the framebuffer VRAM into your client's memory space. This naturally only works on some cards, and mmap() is a root privileged operation. The client then draws the data directly into the framebuffer. This means it avoids 1 copy over MIT-SHM and avoids X pipe encoding/decoding code. This is as efficient as it gets (without hardware assistance).
There is the possibility of making DGA not require root privileges by using Capability Flags but nobody has actually written any code yet. Note that X isn't any worse than MacOS or Windows in how it handles these things. X may appear to be inefficient but in fact it has similar performance and API complexity to the more media-oriented windowing systems.
I don't like running Starcraft as root, but it doesn't run as smoothly otherwise. For DGA, couldn't the X server create a file mmaped with the necessary I/O range on the graphics card, then set permissions on it to let the X client mmap that same file to write directly into that chunk of RAM without security concerns?
Write the code. If you get it to work then I think the XFree86 team would happily accept your submission. I think you'll find it is not quite as simple as you outline here, though.
OK, it's not 100% positive, the injunction did go through afterall.
Fortunately it does seem the judge isn't a clueless gumby. He makes point on the sixth page that a website's owner isn't responsible for information on sites that you've just linked to. This shows an understanding of the Internet's workings and delineation of responsibility.
He also explicitly permits continued analysis and discussion of the CSS algorithm, even under the injunction, as long as the algorithm and keys aren't distributed. This is mildly positive, as it may mean the other CSS defeater (the 18 second brute force technique) would be legal.
He refutes the claim that the encryption was unusually weak, citing the three year period when it wasn't cracked as being proof. Fortunately it should be easy to bolster the "weakness" claim by getting some expert witnesses in cryptography. I have heard there are only 2^16 unique tests!
He agrees that reverse engineering is "proper means", but only if the DeCSS author didn't agree to the click license. He says that the DVDCCA's argument here is "problematic" as they (1) cannot prove Johansen wrote the code or (2) that he'd agreed to a shrinkwrap license.
Finally he strongly emphasises that the real reason that he's granting the injunction is because the harm to DVDCCA by not granting the injunction is far greater than the harm to everyday users by granting the injunction. This strikes me as being fair enough.
My overall impression is that the judge does understand the issues here and that the judge is intelligent and thoughtful. Also the decision to grant the injunction is the fairest decision that could be made: it minimises harm to all parties given that the judge doesn't know what the truth of the matter is.
I would think the 6 page statement also says quite clearly to the EFF how they should proceed. The EFF needs to prove that 40-bit encyption is weak, that the reverse engineering was undertaken for "proper means", and that Johansen could not have been held under the "click license". If the EFF can prove these points then they answer all of the open-ended questions in the judges report.
... on my Thinkpad 760E. The XFree86/SVGALIB support is perfect (full use of all modes). Both PCMCIA slots work fine. The IBM EtherJet card works (in a fashion). With a little mucking about IrDA works (for syncing to PalmPilot). Floppy drive works fine. APM seems to work sometimes.
In fact the only damn thing which doesn't work is the MWave modem and sound. Using the "DOS Hack" you can upload soundblaster 1.5 emulation code to the MWave DSP, then the standard Linux soundblaster driver works. But you can imagine that booting through DOS/loadlin isn't a lot fun.
One incredibly simple fix that only IBM can provide would be to release the source code to MWD. IBM already provides a good collection of precompiled MWave/DSP code for the benefit of DOS users. With MWD/Linux you could upload these DSP binaries and then use existing Linux drivers with the emulated soundblaster 1.5.
At least then us Linux/MWave users would have sound, and I can personally live without the builtin MWave modem, but IBM doesn't even bother to reply when you politely ask for assistance (customer support, yeah right).
You sound a little bitter about his success, and I'm sure you have your own personal reasons for that, largely boiling down to jealousy and/or disappointment in your own achievements
Why is it that such a huge proportion of slashdot readers are amateur (quack) psychologists?
Here's my own opinion: not all criticism is caused by deep-rooted resentment and bitterness and jealousy.
One day I'd like to see a critique on slashdot that isn't immediately followed by a half dozen "you are jealous" knee-jerk reactions.
Whether he retired or not is beside the point. It doesn't have to be new to the world to be predictable, it just has to be new to me.
In fact, I can make another prediction. I predict that in any/. posting where you express an opinion you are guaranteed one banal reply of "Don't Try And Force Your Opinions On Me! What Gives You The Right To Oppress Me! I Have The Right To Free Speech!".
User Friendly isn't funny. But I don't think this is because it makes fun of clueless users: I mean, the BOFH is piss funny and it also makes fun of the clueless.
No, unlike Dilbert or the BOFH, User Friendly is simply predictable. The jokes aren't funny because of clever wit, but instead rely on you thinking "yeah I've been there". Predictability is what destroys good humour, and is one of the reasons why Far Side and Dilbert are getting pretty dull these days, and why South Park started to suck after the first season. There's an easy litmus test. Normal non-geeks laugh heartily at Dilbert. Go find a single User Friendly strip that anybody except a full-time-I-live-for-Linux geek would laugh at.
My question is of similar nature to that asked of Ken...
Q: With the benefit of hindsight, is there any aspect of the original Apple, either hardware or software, that you'd now design differently?
PS: I have a small shrine to Woz sitting next to my electronics bench. I pray to the Spirit of Woz to bless my ratnest circuits before power-on. If the magic smoke escapes, I know that I've angered the Spirit of Woz. When the circuit works, I can be certain that Woz has blessed me. Is this weird?
The true loser decision was made by the Ford executive who was on the witness stand, happily explaining this reasoning to the judge. The judge got fairly angry.
It has nothing to do with being "expert level", but understanding the basics should be a given, such as how pieces move and what the rules are, before blithering away.
You can hardly "explore" a chess puzzle if you don't know chess. This would be like trying to find a syntax bug in your code without knowing the language or how to invoke the compiler.
People would rightly complain if some ninny came onto comp.lang.c and tried to fix someone's bug with "have you tried putting line numbers in? I think that might help". Same thing here.
FYI, my post had nothing to do with my own chess skills (which are pitiful). This is nothing more than an underhanded personal attack: equivalent to crying "communist" to avoid the real argument.
Whether you love chess or hate it, you have to admit it's a passtime in which many nerds (and geeks too, for that matter) engage
Do you think so? I don't see how that explains the god-awful chess skills being shown here then.
People thinking it's fine to move a piece so as to put yourself into "check".
People thinking it's fine to move a piece so as to put yourself into "mate"!
People not knowing what a "move" is in the game of chess, thinking instead of a "ply".
People not knowing what a "mate" means in chess, instead posting answers for "check".
People thinking it's fine to remain in check while you move other pieces.
People not knowing what "discovered check" means in the game of chess.
People thinking it's possible to reach chess stalemate in 5 moves! Sheesh.
And I'm not even going to begin counting the number of people who can't even count up to 5, as they're posting answers involving 6 moves.
I'm hoping everybody had a bit too much wine with dinner, because if this is the quality of the "Linux Geek" then I'm scared. Very scared.
Perhaps it's people thinking along these lines:
"I know computers, you have to be smart to be good with computers, chess people are very smart, so I must be really good at chess too!"
I can't otherwise explain the number of plain dumb responses on this article.
PS: Thank you to the guy who posted the solution, I was going nuts and I knew I didn't have a hope of solving this problem. I'd not even thought of using the white queen to release the black queen. Very imaginative!
Slashdot Mirror
This is the inevitable car analogy, but I think that there's
a similarity to car buyers that needs to be said.
Given $40k to spend on a car there is one sort of person who
will buy the sports car with a huge engine and sunroof. The
Imprezza or an M2 attracts this sort of person like a fly to
honey. They want the horsepower, the bucket seats, the mags
and sports tyres, etc.
Then there's another sort of person who thinks the Imprezza
or M2 is impractical. You can't seat four people in comfort,
the bucket seats are small and restrictive, the big engine
is a waste of petrol for city driving, and the boot is just
too small. These people prefer a nice roomy sedan.
My opinion on this is that some people want a car they can
show off to their friends. They want to tell everyone how
big the engine is, how fast it goes, how much it cost. The
sedan owner just wants a car they can use every day, that
is practical and useful, and is good value for money.
My Palm Pilot 3 is practical and useful. I also think I'd
in all honesty prefer a sedan to a sports car.
Please read the entire thread. I don't agree with the previous person's argument, which is why I began with the devil's advocate position "if this were true...". Not A -> Not B, B, therefore A.
It was non-sensical of the previous person to say that Sony had sued Bleem because Bleem prevents Sony from losing money on each console sale. Sony would have to be stupid to do that.
It's clear that Sony sued Bleem for other reasons than the one the previous person suggested. I'm not willing to delve into pet theories though: it is pure conjecture on the theorists part.
If this were true then Sony would actually be encouraging sales of Bleem because it means there is another person out there with reason to buy the overpriced games and Sony wouldn't have to sell a loss leader console in the first place.
Bleem is effectively a free console for Sony, no loss, and still many money-making license fees from all the games the Bleem user purchases.
Because that explains the scene. That is the point of the exercise isn't it.
If you corner hard enough, yes. Think about the situation where you slam the brakes really hard. If you're not wearing a seat belt then you fly through the windshield. If you corner hard then you feel yourself being pressed against the side of the car facing away from the turning corner. A fly does smack against the windshield if you slam the brakes hard (try it, it's fun).
That's because the fly has the ability to fly away from the window which is coming towards it. An M&M doesn't have the muscle power.
I believe you're thinking of "momentum" and not "inertia".
My devil's advocate theory is that the spacecraft is rotating. The spacecraft causes the occupants to rotate also either by butt friction on seats or by applied force through seatbelts. The M&Ms would only be "attached" to the spacecraft via frictional forces with the air in the craft. This tiny force would certainly allow them to remain stationary while the craft rotates, giving the illusion of rotating M&Ms to all occupants of the craft.
I haven't seen the movie (I don't intend to now either), and I haven't seen the scene, but... Surely the helix of M&Ms could have had zero angular momentum and the craft could have been rotating about the helix. If you were attached to the craft it would then look like the helix was rotating when in fact it was stationary and you were moving around it.
And Kung Fu!
And cute chicks in tight black leather!
And cool flashing computer lights!
And tonnes of awesome special effects!
The Matrix was easily the best movie of the 90s for the action/scifi/kungfu genre.
Kernel support is needed for DRI, AGP and MTRR. I believe kernel modules exist for all of these features already.
Maybe because he needs a symbolic answer, not the discrete solution that a graphing calculator is going to provider. There are plenty of cases when the discrete integral is useless.
And even if the discrete integral was sufficient, often it's the case that the dataset is simply too large for a calculator to deal with. I'm thinking in particular of some scientists I know who work with 2gigabyte datasets which they integrate. They use 600mhz pentium-3 farms and a typical integral still takes a few hours. The integral is obviously a lot more complicated than Int(sin(x))!
You're not wrong, but you're not 100% right either. Sure, the Baby Boomers are responsible for the nuts and bolts of the Internet. They got the infrastructure running and working.
But the things which people associate with the success of the Internet today or yesterday are Yahoo, Netscape, etc. These were things built by 20-30 year olds with enthusiasm.
And the really interesting developments in the Internet today are server side languages, trusted transactions, online applications, etc. These are things done by the 20-30 year olds of today.
Generation-X were teenagers in the early 90s. Guess what, we're all 20-30 years old now.
This often quoted "fact" is never ever backed up by evidence or experiment. The simple fact is that people who do profile such things (including people from XFree86) find that X isn't a problem as far as speed is concerned.
And I have no idea where your claim that the X event model (of all things) should be the major factor in the "speed grounds".
Far from proving your point, you instead do a fine job of disproving it. X is highly extensible, thus the vast number of extensions in even the most normal X installations (Shape, MITSHM, DGA, DPS, GLX, vidmode, XInput).
As a person who had the displeasure to use a NeXt cUbE, I must say that you're speaking crap. NeXT died because it was so goddamn slow compared to X: this should be proof enough that X was the superior design of the two.
QNX's MicroGUI I cannot comment on, but if it is anything like QNX then I'm not going to be at all impressed. QNX is like SYS7 only without all the usability (SYS7 users will note the sarcasm).
C as a user interface is foul, but then again C is a programming language not a user interface.
X, like C, is a tool for creating user interfaces, not a user interface unto itself.
Several posts to the livid mailing list have made the claim that you weren't responsible for writing decss, that you weren't involved in the cryptoanalysis of the encryption algorithm, and that you are otherwise totally unrelated to the LiViD project.
My questions are:
Are you a fraud? Are you simply enjoying the prestige of being the "guy who broke the billion dollar CSS algorithm" too much to admit you don't know the first thing about cryptoanalysis?
Do people who fawn all over you, asking where your "legendary skills" came from and wanting to grow up and become just as cool as you, make you sick to the stomach and/or nauseas?
Do you think the release by MoRE of a product which (arguably) was intended for nefarious purposes has harmed the perfectly legal and well intentioned LiViD project? Do you feel ashamed?
Are you in fact using the LiViD project as a shield to hide the reality that you are in fact a lowlife copyright violator? Aren't you disgusted with yourself for ruining LiViD's name like this?
Normal X operations go over a pipe (usually a fifo or socket). There is one copy from the client into the pipe, one copy out of the pipe into the server, and then the X server decodes the request and does the operation. Note that though this may sound inefficient, in practise you have to do similar copies in any windowing system (ie systems using message passing).
MIT-SHM uses a shared memory (shm) pixmap between the client and the server. The client draws into this pixmap and then XPutImage(3) copies the pixmap onto the screen. This avoids the X pipe and thus saves several copies of the (often large) pixmap data. This is as efficient as you're going to get without some additional knowledge of how the framebuffer memory is laid out.
DGA uses mmap() to map the framebuffer VRAM into your client's memory space. This naturally only works on some cards, and mmap() is a root privileged operation. The client then draws the data directly into the framebuffer. This means it avoids 1 copy over MIT-SHM and avoids X pipe encoding/decoding code. This is as efficient as it gets (without hardware assistance).
There is the possibility of making DGA not require root privileges by using Capability Flags but nobody has actually written any code yet. Note that X isn't any worse than MacOS or Windows in how it handles these things. X may appear to be inefficient but in fact it has similar performance and API complexity to the more media-oriented windowing systems.
Write the code. If you get it to work then I think the XFree86 team would happily accept your submission. I think you'll find it is not quite as simple as you outline here, though.
OK, it's not 100% positive, the injunction did go through afterall.
Fortunately it does seem the judge isn't a clueless gumby. He makes point on the sixth page that a website's owner isn't responsible for information on sites that you've just linked to. This shows an understanding of the Internet's workings and delineation of responsibility.
He also explicitly permits continued analysis and discussion of the CSS algorithm, even under the injunction, as long as the algorithm and keys aren't distributed. This is mildly positive, as it may mean the other CSS defeater (the 18 second brute force technique) would be legal.
He refutes the claim that the encryption was unusually weak, citing the three year period when it wasn't cracked as being proof. Fortunately it should be easy to bolster the "weakness" claim by getting some expert witnesses in cryptography. I have heard there are only 2^16 unique tests!
He agrees that reverse engineering is "proper means", but only if the DeCSS author didn't agree to the click license. He says that the DVDCCA's argument here is "problematic" as they (1) cannot prove Johansen wrote the code or (2) that he'd agreed to a shrinkwrap license.
Finally he strongly emphasises that the real reason that he's granting the injunction is because the harm to DVDCCA by not granting the injunction is far greater than the harm to everyday users by granting the injunction. This strikes me as being fair enough.
My overall impression is that the judge does understand the issues here and that the judge is intelligent and thoughtful. Also the decision to grant the injunction is the fairest decision that could be made: it minimises harm to all parties given that the judge doesn't know what the truth of the matter is.
I would think the 6 page statement also says quite clearly to the EFF how they should proceed. The EFF needs to prove that 40-bit encyption is weak, that the reverse engineering was undertaken for "proper means", and that Johansen could not have been held under the "click license". If the EFF can prove these points then they answer all of the open-ended questions in the judges report.
yes, you wrote the software all by yourself
(but we'll say you stole trade secrets)
yes, you did it without signing an NDA
(but we'll say the shrinkwrap license counted)
yes, you did it without stealing code
(but we'll say you illegally reverse engineered it)
yes, you did all this solely for the purpose of viewing dvds
(but we'll say you did all this solely for piracy)
yes, you purchased your dvd discs and drive legally
(but we'll say that your fair-use rights don't count)
yes, you have never created an illegal copy of any of our titles
(but we'll say that you are a thief and a pirate)
we are above the law because we have more money than you
we control your courts and we write your laws
democracy, freedom, liberty... not for you...
Uhhh, I also use Photoshop and Illustrator, but I use them on Macintosh. I'm pretty sure MacOS is not an "M$ operating system".
... on my Thinkpad 760E. The XFree86/SVGALIB support is perfect (full use of all modes). Both PCMCIA slots work fine. The IBM EtherJet card works (in a fashion). With a little mucking about IrDA works (for syncing to PalmPilot). Floppy drive works fine. APM seems to work sometimes.
In fact the only damn thing which doesn't work is the MWave modem and sound. Using the "DOS Hack" you can upload soundblaster 1.5 emulation code to the MWave DSP, then the standard Linux soundblaster driver works. But you can imagine that booting through DOS/loadlin isn't a lot fun.
One incredibly simple fix that only IBM can provide would be to release the source code to MWD. IBM already provides a good collection of precompiled MWave/DSP code for the benefit of DOS users. With MWD/Linux you could upload these DSP binaries and then use existing Linux drivers with the emulated soundblaster 1.5.
At least then us Linux/MWave users would have sound, and I can personally live without the builtin MWave modem, but IBM doesn't even bother to reply when you politely ask for assistance (customer support, yeah right).
Why is it that such a huge proportion of slashdot readers are amateur (quack) psychologists?
Here's my own opinion: not all criticism is caused by deep-rooted resentment and bitterness and jealousy.
One day I'd like to see a critique on slashdot that isn't immediately followed by a half dozen "you are jealous" knee-jerk reactions.
Whether he retired or not is beside the point. It doesn't have to be new to the world to be predictable, it just has to be new to me.
/. posting where you express an opinion you are guaranteed one banal reply of "Don't Try And Force Your Opinions On Me! What Gives You The Right To Oppress Me! I Have The Right To Free Speech!".
In fact, I can make another prediction. I predict that in any
Very predictable.
Oh yeah, I distinctly remember writing in my post "Oh By The Way, I'm Telling You To Not Like User Friendly, This Is My Command".
/., you are definitely a geek.
Get off your soapbox. I didn't tell you the time of day, let alone what you should find funny.
As for you not being a geek, you're reading
User Friendly isn't funny. But I don't think this is because it makes fun of clueless users: I mean, the BOFH is piss funny and it also makes fun of the clueless.
No, unlike Dilbert or the BOFH, User Friendly is simply predictable. The jokes aren't funny because of clever wit, but instead rely on you thinking "yeah I've been there".
Predictability is what destroys good humour, and is one of the reasons why Far Side and Dilbert are getting pretty dull these days, and why South Park started to suck after the first season.
There's an easy litmus test. Normal non-geeks laugh heartily at Dilbert. Go find a single User Friendly strip that anybody except a full-time-I-live-for-Linux geek would laugh at.
My question is of similar nature to that asked of Ken...
Q: With the benefit of hindsight, is there any aspect of the original Apple, either hardware or software, that you'd now design differently?
PS: I have a small shrine to Woz sitting next to my electronics bench. I pray to the Spirit of Woz to bless my ratnest circuits before power-on. If the magic smoke escapes, I know that I've angered the Spirit of Woz. When the circuit works, I can be certain that Woz has blessed me. Is this weird?
The true loser decision was made by the Ford executive who was on the witness stand, happily explaining this reasoning to the judge. The judge got fairly angry.
It has nothing to do with being "expert level", but understanding the basics should be a given, such as how pieces move and what the rules are, before blithering away.
You can hardly "explore" a chess puzzle if you don't know chess. This would be like trying to find a syntax bug in your code without knowing the language or how to invoke the compiler.
People would rightly complain if some ninny came onto comp.lang.c and tried to fix someone's bug with "have you tried putting line numbers in? I think that might help". Same thing here.
FYI, my post had nothing to do with my own chess skills (which are pitiful). This is nothing more than an underhanded personal attack: equivalent to crying "communist" to avoid the real argument.
Do you think so? I don't see how that explains the god-awful chess skills being shown here then.
And I'm not even going to begin counting the number of people who can't even count up to 5, as they're posting answers involving 6 moves.
I'm hoping everybody had a bit too much wine with dinner, because if this is the quality of the "Linux Geek" then I'm scared. Very scared.
Perhaps it's people thinking along these lines:
"I know computers, you have to be smart to be good with computers, chess people are very smart, so I must be really good at chess too!"
I can't otherwise explain the number of plain dumb responses on this article.
PS: Thank you to the guy who posted the solution, I was going nuts and I knew I didn't have a hope of solving this problem. I'd not even thought of using the white queen to release the black queen. Very imaginative!