Well I don't know I was kind of thinking the same thing earlier today, but in a good way. I don't know about Israeli technological research, but I'm an ecologist, and I've got to say that some of the greatest ecological and botanical papers have come from Israel - innovative, intelligent stuff. Whenever find a paper from an Israeli researcher/university, I look forward to reading it, knowing it's going to be a great piece of research (as opposed to a lot of British research which still seems to be stuck in the 1960s).
I don't know why it is that Israel is a little bastion of great scientific thinking; but I think it's legit. Certainly their ecology research is fantastic, and these technological advancements in the field of computing certainly haven't been debunked by anyone, have they?
And another example - say a plugin exists for XMMS that, through Wine, allows you to use Winamp.DLL plugins? Are you going to go around filing lawsuits against the people releasing Winamp plugins, on the basis that their binary-only plugins violate the GPL when used with XMMS?
Pfft - what if you look it as the code is just being code that happens to work with the XMMS plug-in API?
For instance - say I create a media player, under, say, a BSD licence, that happens to use an identical plug-in architecture as XMMS - written from scratch so no GPL code is involved. "XMMS plugins" will work on my player - why should people be prevented from releasing binary-only plugins that work with the XMMS api when they may be intended for use on my media player?
I think the author wants to set up a public server, not a private server. Network shares (whether NTFS, Samba, NFS, whatever) are great on a local network, but you'd never give open access to them on the internet, would you? I've certainly never browsed to a site, clicked on a download link, and seen a network share directory window pop up!
True that - I believe the same thing about Lycoris Desktop/LX. I don't have it installed now, mainly because I like having a distro I can muddle around with and compile new software on, and I couldn't be bothered downloading the additional development ISO for Lycoris. However, when I tried it, I was so impressed.
It just worked.
Mozilla came with plugins installed for Java, Flash, even Adobe Acrobat. Compare and contrast with Mandrake (and most other Linux distros) where Mozilla comes with NO PLUGINS WHAT SO EVER and is therefore about as useful as a bicycle to a fish for any new Linux convert. I have to admit Lycoris's blatent rip of off WinXP was a bit off putting, but it does all look very unified.
So Lycoris decided to step away from holier-than-thou GPL obsessiveness and include some binaries. The result? The first Linux distro I've ever seen that I would honestly install for my aunty, and know that she could use it for every task she would need to. Bye bye Windows for ever. Isn't that the ultimate aim?
Yawn. Every single point you have raised - about the developers changing character stats, about lack of "sysops", about MOBs and high-level characters, and of course, most fundamental of all, about the addictive and time consuming nature of the game, has all been played out years ago on the classic BBS game Major Mud. These are rare games where the developers found the perfect balance between effort and reward. It IS difficult to get to the next level, but you get rewards for getting there. Once you've gone to all that effort, however, you feel stupid to ever give up the game. That's how the addiction happens.
True dat. So many people who are obsessed about audio quality, just don't understand the electronics and physics behind it. I think bitrate-nazis are the obvious candidates. I've seen tracks which are mono encoded in stereo format. I've seen dodgy, spoken-word recordings which are full of static anyway recorded at 320kbps. Raise your fists high and proclaim 128kbps is fine for me!.
Absolutely; platform games, and horizontal or vertical shoot-em-ups are just so fun and addictive. Sonic the Hedgehog is still my favourite game of all time, closely followed by the likes of Ghosts and Goblins, Wonderboy and Jet Set Willy.
I'd like to see all this funky, new Open GL accellerated hardware put to good use in developing eye-candy saturated 2d platform games. Imagine how sweet they could look! The majority of 3D games these days look..well...ugly. Dull, poorly-modelled 3D characters with bruised looking skins. Give me a cartoonish pixellated 2D character any day.
The other option is to head to the Outback Eclipse Festival at Lyndhurst, in the even more stunning Flinders Ranges. This point is further east than Ceduna, so the eclipse should happen even closer to sunset, and the even comprises a chill-out music festival over several days. I live in Adelaide, and I would be heading here rather than Ceduna (although unfortunately I'm saving for a DIFFERENT holiday so I can't afford to make an appearance!)
Well to be honest, I use 50% windows, 50% linux. I really WANT to use Linux more, but there are just some basic reasons why I need to keep windows on my machine.
a) Applications - windows apps are easier to install, don't have major compatibility issues (you never have to download and compile three different shared libraries to get Windows software to run, do you? You don't have to download a specific.exe file to match a specific build version of windows!) and generally are of a higher quality. I have yet to find ANY decent, truly stable and useable music creation and audio editing software for Linux. Audacity is pityful compared to CoolEdit, and there's nothing even close to FruityLoops.
2. The construction of the OS makes software installation a pain - this point is touched on above. Yes, I know it's open source, and all that, but if Linux was constructed more intelligently, it should be possible for users to just download a single binary file and run it. There is too much dependancy on tiny little libraries all over the place, and too much dependancy on things like (a) Exact library version (b) C-compiler version (c) Kernel version (d) How the distribuion organises its file locations. You simply don't get ANY of these problems in Windows. Occasionally you'll have to download a newer version of a DLL to get software to work, but when you do, it doesn't break software that relied on the previous version of the DLL.
Why is this happening? I call on Linux developers to start programming for the USERS, not for themselves. Aim to design software that is easy to install, that is configurable from within the program, that relies on only MAJOR libraries, and MAJOR stable version numbers. It is possible, you know. "Big" software releases for Linux (OpenOffice, Mozilla, Opera, many games) just install themselves simply and easily, and work, so why don't the smaller software projects work the same way?
In the end, I use Linux when I just want to quickly boot up, get on the net, have a fiddle around. I boot Windows if I want to use actual specific, important pieces of software for which there is no equivalent available for Linux.
Gawd, I've been trying to tell Americans this for years; if you had a preferential system like we do in Australia you would have eliminated most of the problems that plagued the last presidential elections.
1) Writing NUMBERS instead of the overly complex punch-card system. We generally get our parlimentary election results on the same day as the poll when people write numbers, so I don't see that using punch-cards increases your efficiency at all. 2) The preferential system will stop all the whinging about 3rd party candidates and lets true democracy take it's course. As this article says, people would vote [1] Nader, [2] Gore; when Nader doesn't get enough votes to make it "past the post", he gets knocked out and all the [2] Gore votes turn into [1] Gore votes.
Too true. My boss at the ISP I sysadmin at started insisting 6 months ago that we use FreeBSD on every machine instead of Linux. And I recently switched my own web server over to FreeBSD and haven't looked back. While Linux is making in-roads on the desktop with distros like Lycoris, FreeBSD is where it's at if you want a plain, powerful unix server environment. But then, now that software like Opera is available, FreeBSD is becoming more usable on the desktop as well!
I'm not an American but I've got the right to say whatever the hell I want about the US - whatcha gonna do about it?
Following your logic, Americans have no right to comment on any other country, so would your please tell your government to stop labelling various places as "Axis of Evil", to stop threatening Canada over their proposed drug laws, yadda yadda yadda.
Why blame the end users? After all, they didn't CREATE the insecure software. Why not punish every programmer who ever released software with any exploitable security hole in it? They should have known better![/sarcasm]
Seems like you're still designing web pages AS IF netscape was a beta. Why are you so angry at software that alters your page layout? Would you be angry at me if I configured Opera to use a custom stylesheet of my own design for viewing your sites rather than your stylesheet? If you care so much about content, then make it your focus, instead of getting anal about how many columns you chose to fit on a page. Once a site is in my user agent, I can view it how I please, just I've got every right to clip out newspaper articles, or photocopy journal articles so they fit on one page.
Okay, we all know Mozilla can do anti-alised fonts if you stuff around with it and make it run with Xft - I downloaded a binary of Moz1.0 with anti-alised fonts last week and it runs beautifully (although the binary was a cut down, no-thrills browser-only Mozilla).
So WHEN oh WHEN are Gecko-based browsers going to start compiling for anti-aliased fonts as standard?! Pheonix should do this; it would certainly be the clincher for me. It CAN be done, it WORKS, so why is "ugly" still the default?
Different programs have different needs from their config files
XML should be able to do this (if it lives up to the hype) - the nested-tags design means that I can't think of a single kind of configuration data that couldn't be stored in it somehow. XML also means you've got very definate, well defined standards on exactly how a configuration file should be constructed. Editing by hand should be easy, and it would hopefully also mean we can finally get some graphical configuration tools that WORK well.
I have been a fan of Mandrake, but it's been a love-hate relationship. I have always found 7.2 to be the most complete, stable release, and have constantly been annoyed with every release afterwards feeling fundamentally incomplete. Here's a list of "first day" impressions of Mandrake 8.2. The idea was great; the execution wasn't. Bugs were everywhere, the configuration utilities didn't do their job properly, there was poor interface design in places. It just felt like they were pushed to release it before they had done any REAL indepth testing. Or, more likely, that they were so obsessed with being on the bleeding edge and releasing early, that they forgot about quality control.
I have experienced this with pretty much every Mandrake version I've tried. You can see the distribution SHOULD be good, just just end up wishing the damn thing would work like it's supposed to. And on the issue of version numbers; I can understand them moving major version numbers quickly; I think the problem is more with the minor version numbers. So, I had problems with 8.0 - I try 8.1 and I just get a pile of new features (and mistakes) instead of bug fixes and increased stability. I try version 8.2, same thing happened. Surely minor versions should focus on perfecting the suite of software included with the major version?
So, I'm worried about 9.0. Will I be dissapointed again? I've switched to FreeBSD on my server box because, despite it's minimalist slant, it just WORKS well, without frustrating bugs (also...I couldn't upgrade to Mandrake because my server only has 32mb of RAM. Why would you need more than 32mb to do a FTP install??)
I'd support this; the one thing that annoys me more than any other thing about my 1ghz/PIII is the amount of noise it makes, with a cooling fan for the CPU and the GPU on my NVidia card. I like to leave it on in my room playing chill out mp3s at night, but I gotta crank the stereo to get over the noise it makes! Silent PCs (and power-saving PCs) would be a step in the right direction.
I was pondering this the other day; why browsers are based on a language I hate (Javascript) rather than more relevant, simpler, cleaner languages (like python). I don't touch Javascript code myself; I can't abide it. But the answer's pretty obvious, really, isn't it? In order to be able to program in Python, you'd have to include the python interpreter with the browser package. In order to be able to use Ruby, you'd have to include the Ruby interpreter. It shouldn't really be the responsibility of the browser developers to package every available scripting language with their browser download (keeping in mind that while most Linux distributions come with a swag of programming languages, Windows does not). It would be ideal to be able to client-side code in a variety of languages, but suddenly that means every end user has to install a pile of languages. Remember client-side VB Script? If only, back in web prehistory, they had decided to give us a real language to use instead of the mess that is Javascript.
I've been following this discussion since it was posted because it interests me greatly (I'm an ecologist, and intrested in evolution both biological and otherwise). At first I thought this was fantastic; but lots of posts here have changed my mind, pointing out two important points.
1) The scientists appear to not have controlled the experiment very well at all. 2) It wasn't really acting as a RADIO; more just a power amplifier picking up electrical interference. 3) Radio includes the capacity to demodulate signals from the carrier frequency, not just pick up interference.
Slashdot Mirror
Why did Mozilla create another web browser? PCs have had the third party Mosaic since around 1993.
Get the point?
Never debase people for trying to build a better mouse trap.
Well I don't know I was kind of thinking the same thing earlier today, but in a good way. I don't know about Israeli technological research, but I'm an ecologist, and I've got to say that some of the greatest ecological and botanical papers have come from Israel - innovative, intelligent stuff. Whenever find a paper from an Israeli researcher/university, I look forward to reading it, knowing it's going to be a great piece of research (as opposed to a lot of British research which still seems to be stuck in the 1960s).
I don't know why it is that Israel is a little bastion of great scientific thinking; but I think it's legit. Certainly their ecology research is fantastic, and these technological advancements in the field of computing certainly haven't been debunked by anyone, have they?
And another example - say a plugin exists for XMMS that, through Wine, allows you to use Winamp .DLL plugins? Are you going to go around filing lawsuits against the people releasing Winamp plugins, on the basis that their binary-only plugins violate the GPL when used with XMMS?
Pfft - what if you look it as the code is just being code that happens to work with the XMMS plug-in API?
For instance - say I create a media player, under, say, a BSD licence, that happens to use an identical plug-in architecture as XMMS - written from scratch so no GPL code is involved. "XMMS plugins" will work on my player - why should people be prevented from releasing binary-only plugins that work with the XMMS api when they may be intended for use on my media player?
I think the author wants to set up a public server, not a private server. Network shares (whether NTFS, Samba, NFS, whatever) are great on a local network, but you'd never give open access to them on the internet, would you? I've certainly never browsed to a site, clicked on a download link, and seen a network share directory window pop up!
True that - I believe the same thing about Lycoris Desktop/LX. I don't have it installed now, mainly because I like having a distro I can muddle around with and compile new software on, and I couldn't be bothered downloading the additional development ISO for Lycoris. However, when I tried it, I was so impressed.
It just worked.
Mozilla came with plugins installed for Java, Flash, even Adobe Acrobat. Compare and contrast with Mandrake (and most other Linux distros) where Mozilla comes with NO PLUGINS WHAT SO EVER and is therefore about as useful as a bicycle to a fish for any new Linux convert. I have to admit Lycoris's blatent rip of off WinXP was a bit off putting, but it does all look very unified.
So Lycoris decided to step away from holier-than-thou GPL obsessiveness and include some binaries. The result? The first Linux distro I've ever seen that I would honestly install for my aunty, and know that she could use it for every task she would need to. Bye bye Windows for ever. Isn't that the ultimate aim?
Yawn. Every single point you have raised - about the developers changing character stats, about lack of "sysops", about MOBs and high-level characters, and of course, most fundamental of all, about the addictive and time consuming nature of the game, has all been played out years ago on the classic BBS game Major Mud. These are rare games where the developers found the perfect balance between effort and reward. It IS difficult to get to the next level, but you get rewards for getting there. Once you've gone to all that effort, however, you feel stupid to ever give up the game. That's how the addiction happens.
True dat. So many people who are obsessed about audio quality, just don't understand the electronics and physics behind it. I think bitrate-nazis are the obvious candidates. I've seen tracks which are mono encoded in stereo format. I've seen dodgy, spoken-word recordings which are full of static anyway recorded at 320kbps. Raise your fists high and proclaim 128kbps is fine for me!.
Absolutely; platform games, and horizontal or vertical shoot-em-ups are just so fun and addictive. Sonic the Hedgehog is still my favourite game of all time, closely followed by the likes of Ghosts and Goblins, Wonderboy and Jet Set Willy.
I'd like to see all this funky, new Open GL accellerated hardware put to good use in developing eye-candy saturated 2d platform games. Imagine how sweet they could look! The majority of 3D games these days look..well...ugly. Dull, poorly-modelled 3D characters with bruised looking skins. Give me a cartoonish pixellated 2D character any day.
The other option is to head to the Outback Eclipse Festival at Lyndhurst, in the even more stunning Flinders Ranges. This point is further east than Ceduna, so the eclipse should happen even closer to sunset, and the even comprises a chill-out music festival over several days. I live in Adelaide, and I would be heading here rather than Ceduna (although unfortunately I'm saving for a DIFFERENT holiday so I can't afford to make an appearance!)
Well to be honest, I use 50% windows, 50% linux. I really WANT to use Linux more, but there are just some basic reasons why I need to keep windows on my machine.
.exe file to match a specific build version of windows!) and generally are of a higher quality. I have yet to find ANY decent, truly stable and useable music creation and audio editing software for Linux. Audacity is pityful compared to CoolEdit, and there's nothing even close to FruityLoops.
a) Applications - windows apps are easier to install, don't have major compatibility issues (you never have to download and compile three different shared libraries to get Windows software to run, do you? You don't have to download a specific
2. The construction of the OS makes software installation a pain - this point is touched on above. Yes, I know it's open source, and all that, but if Linux was constructed more intelligently, it should be possible for users to just download a single binary file and run it. There is too much dependancy on tiny little libraries all over the place, and too much dependancy on things like (a) Exact library version (b) C-compiler version (c) Kernel version (d) How the distribuion organises its file locations. You simply don't get ANY of these problems in Windows. Occasionally you'll have to download a newer version of a DLL to get software to work, but when you do, it doesn't break software that relied on the previous version of the DLL.
Why is this happening? I call on Linux developers to start programming for the USERS, not for themselves. Aim to design software that is easy to install, that is configurable from within the program, that relies on only MAJOR libraries, and MAJOR stable version numbers. It is possible, you know. "Big" software releases for Linux (OpenOffice, Mozilla, Opera, many games) just install themselves simply and easily, and work, so why don't the smaller software projects work the same way?
In the end, I use Linux when I just want to quickly boot up, get on the net, have a fiddle around. I boot Windows if I want to use actual specific, important pieces of software for which there is no equivalent available for Linux.
Gawd, I've been trying to tell Americans this for years; if you had a preferential system like we do in Australia you would have eliminated most of the problems that plagued the last presidential elections.
1) Writing NUMBERS instead of the overly complex punch-card system. We generally get our parlimentary election results on the same day as the poll when people write numbers, so I don't see that using punch-cards increases your efficiency at all.
2) The preferential system will stop all the whinging about 3rd party candidates and lets true democracy take it's course. As this article says, people would vote [1] Nader, [2] Gore; when Nader doesn't get enough votes to make it "past the post", he gets knocked out and all the [2] Gore votes turn into [1] Gore votes.
Too true. My boss at the ISP I sysadmin at started insisting 6 months ago that we use FreeBSD on every machine instead of Linux. And I recently switched my own web server over to FreeBSD and haven't looked back. While Linux is making in-roads on the desktop with distros like Lycoris, FreeBSD is where it's at if you want a plain, powerful unix server environment. But then, now that software like Opera is available, FreeBSD is becoming more usable on the desktop as well!
I'm not an American but I've got the right to say whatever the hell I want about the US - whatcha gonna do about it?
Following your logic, Americans have no right to comment on any other country, so would your please tell your government to stop labelling various places as "Axis of Evil", to stop threatening Canada over their proposed drug laws, yadda yadda yadda.
Why blame the end users? After all, they didn't CREATE the insecure software. Why not punish every programmer who ever released software with any exploitable security hole in it? They should have known better![/sarcasm]
Seems like you're still designing web pages AS IF netscape was a beta. Why are you so angry at software that alters your page layout? Would you be angry at me if I configured Opera to use a custom stylesheet of my own design for viewing your sites rather than your stylesheet? If you care so much about content, then make it your focus, instead of getting anal about how many columns you chose to fit on a page. Once a site is in my user agent, I can view it how I please, just I've got every right to clip out newspaper articles, or photocopy journal articles so they fit on one page.
And this works on any version of Mozilla?
Like, if I download the latest straight binary RPM and install it, all I have to do is this and it works?
If so, good call, looks like I complained before I had reason to.
Okay, we all know Mozilla can do anti-alised fonts if you stuff around with it and make it run with Xft - I downloaded a binary of Moz1.0 with anti-alised fonts last week and it runs beautifully (although the binary was a cut down, no-thrills browser-only Mozilla).
So WHEN oh WHEN are Gecko-based browsers going to start compiling for anti-aliased fonts as standard?! Pheonix should do this; it would certainly be the clincher for me. It CAN be done, it WORKS, so why is "ugly" still the default?
Different programs have different needs from their config files
XML should be able to do this (if it lives up to the hype) - the nested-tags design means that I can't think of a single kind of configuration data that couldn't be stored in it somehow. XML also means you've got very definate, well defined standards on exactly how a configuration file should be constructed. Editing by hand should be easy, and it would hopefully also mean we can finally get some graphical configuration tools that WORK well.
The best diss to a raving free-market capitalist I've heard this year. Props to you, anon.cow., whoever you are.
I have been a fan of Mandrake, but it's been a love-hate relationship. I have always found 7.2 to be the most complete, stable release, and have constantly been annoyed with every release afterwards feeling fundamentally incomplete. Here's a list of "first day" impressions of Mandrake 8.2. The idea was great; the execution wasn't. Bugs were everywhere, the configuration utilities didn't do their job properly, there was poor interface design in places. It just felt like they were pushed to release it before they had done any REAL indepth testing. Or, more likely, that they were so obsessed with being on the bleeding edge and releasing early, that they forgot about quality control.
I have experienced this with pretty much every Mandrake version I've tried. You can see the distribution SHOULD be good, just just end up wishing the damn thing would work like it's supposed to. And on the issue of version numbers; I can understand them moving major version numbers quickly; I think the problem is more with the minor version numbers. So, I had problems with 8.0 - I try 8.1 and I just get a pile of new features (and mistakes) instead of bug fixes and increased stability. I try version 8.2, same thing happened. Surely minor versions should focus on perfecting the suite of software included with the major version?
So, I'm worried about 9.0. Will I be dissapointed again? I've switched to FreeBSD on my server box because, despite it's minimalist slant, it just WORKS well, without frustrating bugs (also...I couldn't upgrade to Mandrake because my server only has 32mb of RAM. Why would you need more than 32mb to do a FTP install??)
I'd support this; the one thing that annoys me more than any other thing about my 1ghz/PIII is the amount of noise it makes, with a cooling fan for the CPU and the GPU on my NVidia card. I like to leave it on in my room playing chill out mp3s at night, but I gotta crank the stereo to get over the noise it makes! Silent PCs (and power-saving PCs) would be a step in the right direction.
I was pondering this the other day; why browsers are based on a language I hate (Javascript) rather than more relevant, simpler, cleaner languages (like python). I don't touch Javascript code myself; I can't abide it. But the answer's pretty obvious, really, isn't it? In order to be able to program in Python, you'd have to include the python interpreter with the browser package. In order to be able to use Ruby, you'd have to include the Ruby interpreter. It shouldn't really be the responsibility of the browser developers to package every available scripting language with their browser download (keeping in mind that while most Linux distributions come with a swag of programming languages, Windows does not). It would be ideal to be able to client-side code in a variety of languages, but suddenly that means every end user has to install a pile of languages. Remember client-side VB Script? If only, back in web prehistory, they had decided to give us a real language to use instead of the mess that is Javascript.
I've been following this discussion since it was posted because it interests me greatly (I'm an ecologist, and intrested in evolution both biological and otherwise). At first I thought this was fantastic; but lots of posts here have changed my mind, pointing out two important points.
1) The scientists appear to not have controlled the experiment very well at all.
2) It wasn't really acting as a RADIO; more just a power amplifier picking up electrical interference.
3) Radio includes the capacity to demodulate signals from the carrier frequency, not just pick up interference.
But, it was a good try. Keep on evolving!
Wake up and smell the coffee - evolution isn't "directed" - that's the whole idea, it's random, not "driven".