But some people do play to collect all the stars. Now, I never played Mario 64, but in most games there are stars or flags or some other widget scattered all over the place, and collecting them is completely tangential to the plot. A normal play through might have you find 20% of them. But some people then go back to find every last one. Those are the sort of people being discussed here.
Are you joking? Let me fill you in... Obama doesn't give a rat's ass about copyright legislation. He has a nuclear-armed Korea threatening war, a nuclear-armed Pakistan fighting for its life against the Taliban, extreme tensions between Israel and Iran (one of which has nukes, and the other's probably working on it), two wars of our own to deal with, a collapsed global economy, and on top of that, he still probably wants to get his universal health care plan rolling.
He's not in bed with the **AA the way a lot of Slashdotters like to think. He's not out to get them either. He's simply got bigger things to worry about. This decision was undoubtedly made at a lower level. If anything, he glanced over it quickly and agreed to the arguments put forth by his lawyers.
Netscape failed because it was poorly engineered. People who hate MS like to attribute it to monopolistic practices, but that really wasn't it. Netscape Communicator was a great browser with tons of features, but it didn't follow any software engineering best-practices, which made it a beast to update. The releases became slower and slower, until the code was such a mess that it was simply unworkable. At that point, they had to scrap everything at start over in the late 90s. They never recovered from that.
That's what killed Netscape. Microsoft had already been giving them some rough competition, and were ready to charge in and take over the market as soon as Netscape imploded.
Netscape really is the ultimate cautionary tale for would be software engineers.
Who gets to decide on the list? Why browsers, but not other basic programs? Won't people look at the screen, confused for a moment, and then click the familiar blue e? Why even bother doing this, since the people who care can easily get a new browser?
This is poorly thought out, pointless, and a waste of money.
So IE would be at the very top, where everyone can click the familiar blue e? This is absolutely moronic. Doesn't the EU have better shit to be doing, what with the complete collapse of the world economy and all?
So you don't want to give people the choice... you want to outright ban IE. That's the only thing that would fix your problem, after all. Just be honest and admit that you want IE to disappear, and stop hiding behind the guise of giving consumers more choice (that they didn't want to begin with).
Um, no. I'm saying doing it with wirewrap TTL is more interesting than doing it by programming an FPGA. It's more interesting and requires more skill. If I was suitably motivated I could learn enough Verilog to build a simple 8bit CPU on an FPGA, but it would take me significantly longer to learn the EE required to do it with TTL.
It really isn't much harder. I guarantee that you could learn to wire up some TTL chips just as easily as you could learn Verilog. Is "assign x = y" really so much easier than connecting pin X to pin Y with a wire?
The tricky parts in digital electronics are always the various hazards (race conditions, glitching, metastability, etc...), and they will happen regardless of whether you're using wired discrete components or an FPGA. That's where the real electrical engineering work is.
In fact, I'd say that starting on an FPGA without understanding those hazards would actually be more difficult, because you won't understand what is causing them. You'll say that x = (~a && ~b) || (a && c), and you won't understand why x glitches when moving from ABC = 001 to ABC = 101.
Not at all, I believe they put out a hollowed out RC version without all the bloatware to try and convince people that it was a different beast than Vista and they should hold out for it rather than acting on an impulse to switch away from Windows. I believe they knew it'd never be released as it was but wanted people to think it would be and not notice the added bloat.
Don't you realize how nonsensical this is? Let's break it down in traditional Slashdot style:
1) MS knows people don't want bloat 2) MS makes a version without bloat, so that people will think the OS is good 3) People think the OS is good without the bloat, and want to buy it 4) MS adds back in the bloat at the last moment! 5) ??? 6) Profit!
Seriously... why, upon reaching step 3, would they not just release it as is? They are not villains or sociopaths. They're just greedy. And in this case their greed would drive them to release the product that people want to pay money for.
Not as though this is something up for debate. I have W7 on my laptop in the other room. It runs fine. It's only using ~8 gigs of harddrive space, and that's including all the programs I've installed. For comparison, the "Windows" directory of my rarely used Vista install is about double that at 15 gigs. Seems like they must have cut some serious cruft.
And, lest I come across as advocating for this (or any) OS, let me state that the best I can say about W7 is that, if required to do so, I'd be okay with using it. I'm just tired of this childish notion that Microsoft is some sort of den of evil, when it's really just another business.
Was Vista really that bad that Microsoft has to attempt to manipulate the press and websites to this extent in order to give the illusion that Windows 7 is better?
Now whatever gave you the impression that a company needs a reason to overhype their newest product?
How can you really believe that? Do you really think that Microsoft released a great version that everyone liked, just to trick people before giving them a shittier version?? What possible motivation could they have to do that?
I swear, the die-hard MS haters make that company out to be some sort of cartoon villain.
For the record, my 6 year old laptop runs the latest version of W7 just fine. I doubt I'll put it on my desktop any time soon, but if/when my employer rolls it out, I won't mind.
These "czars" aren't new super-powerful positions being created by facists. They consist of pre-existing positions that have been given a catchy new title (drug czar instead of "head of the drug enforcement agency") and advisory roles (terrorism czar).
The former already existed. You can't complain about there being a drug czar unless you believe that the DEA has too much power. Of course, they probably do... but that predates the nomenclature used for their leader. The so-called "war on drugs" (which Obama's drug czar want to stop) began a couple decades before that term came into use.
The latter is simply an advisor to the president. They have no powers that the office of the president does not, nor can they overrule the president in any instance. The president would be taking advice from them anyway. All the title does is recognize that he's taking their advice.
I know there are a lot of libertarians/anarchists on/., and that's why the "czar" thing always gets pointed at as proof that the *insert currently leading political party here* are a bunch of fascists. But when you actually look at what the "czars" do, you quickly realize that it's entirely in keeping with our democratic republic.
How come only 1% of Japan is Christian? Can really 99% of the population of a country be wrong?
Yes. Obviously. There was a time when 99% of any given country believed in a God of some sort. They can't all have been right, since their beliefs were contradictory. Therefore, yes, 99% of a population can be wrong.
A well-written meme, to be sure. But stating something eloquently does not make it true. Nor does repeating it a thousand times.
Cults require there members to be unwavering in their faith and loyalty, to the point of brainwashing. Religions do not.
Scoff all you want, but the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of all religious persons do not strictly follow the tenets of their faith. There is no punishment for this, because the religious leaders (if indeed there are any) know that not all of their followers will adhere to every rule.
This is not the case in cults, and that is a very important difference. It's a difference which leads to people feeling trapped, or worse, not even realizing how entangled they've become.
Fundamentalists, in any group, can be cult-like. But to say that Christianity or Islam or Hinduism is just a large cult is simply absurd. It's the sort of arrogant atheism that drives people away, and we'd be better off without it.
Um... yes? The skin tone and hair color are similar enough that random variations from person to person would make it impossible to tell the difference. It would be like trying to tell an American from a Russian at a glance, or a Jamaican from a Liberian. Sure, there are some general differences, but nothing that would allow to differentiate with high accuracy.
Obviously, as soon as they say something, you'd be able to tell, but visually, we're not all that different.
Of course not. It's called dividing up the market (I'm sure there's a technical term for it), and it's completely legitimate. If someone can't afford your top product, you make a scaled down version for them. You can't just give them the top product for a lower price, because then no one would pay that higher price. But at the same time, there's no reason to waste development money purposefully making a worse design. So you just modify the existing design to be worse.
Consider TV or internet services. There are tiered plans, not because the Cable company runs out of premium packages to sell, but because they know that not everyone wants to fork over the dough to 2000 channels.
Ah, but you're not spending $800 on a toy. You're taking a purchase that you would have made anyway, and upgrading it to also act as a toy. Those upgrades (graphics card and maybe a better CPU than you'd otherwise get) cost around $300.
I upgraded my old college desktop to a gaming rig 4 years ago, at a price of $350, and still have no problem playing modern games. I'd say it's about even with consoles in terms of bang for your buck.
On the other hand, there are those who always have to have the latest hardware and the best framerates, and end up dropping $2 grand on a PC every year or two. I could never justify that sort of cost, but then, I don't see the allure in collecting model ships or fine tuning my car either.
For the record, I also own an Xbox 360, and I greatly enjoy it as well (when it's not blinking those three accursed lights at me).
Yeah, the free market has worked out so well over the past several months. It certainly hasn't had an adverse affect on the entire population of the first world. No-sir-ee.
Newsflash: All society is linked. If someone over there fucks up bad enough, it'll hurt you over here. Shutting you eyes and praying for the invisible hand of the free market won't save you.
Regulation is essential. The ethanol subsidies are idiotic and should end, but making the free market out to be some sort of panacea is childish.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that every student will be able to browse the web and chat with their friends in class, I'm sure fewer will cut.
Email was too slow, and being on the phone with multiple people all over the world simultaneously was too impossible.
But some people do play to collect all the stars. Now, I never played Mario 64, but in most games there are stars or flags or some other widget scattered all over the place, and collecting them is completely tangential to the plot. A normal play through might have you find 20% of them. But some people then go back to find every last one. Those are the sort of people being discussed here.
Are you joking? Let me fill you in... Obama doesn't give a rat's ass about copyright legislation. He has a nuclear-armed Korea threatening war, a nuclear-armed Pakistan fighting for its life against the Taliban, extreme tensions between Israel and Iran (one of which has nukes, and the other's probably working on it), two wars of our own to deal with, a collapsed global economy, and on top of that, he still probably wants to get his universal health care plan rolling.
He's not in bed with the **AA the way a lot of Slashdotters like to think. He's not out to get them either. He's simply got bigger things to worry about. This decision was undoubtedly made at a lower level. If anything, he glanced over it quickly and agreed to the arguments put forth by his lawyers.
Netscape failed because it was poorly engineered. People who hate MS like to attribute it to monopolistic practices, but that really wasn't it. Netscape Communicator was a great browser with tons of features, but it didn't follow any software engineering best-practices, which made it a beast to update. The releases became slower and slower, until the code was such a mess that it was simply unworkable. At that point, they had to scrap everything at start over in the late 90s. They never recovered from that.
That's what killed Netscape. Microsoft had already been giving them some rough competition, and were ready to charge in and take over the market as soon as Netscape imploded.
Netscape really is the ultimate cautionary tale for would be software engineers.
Who gets to decide on the list?
Why browsers, but not other basic programs?
Won't people look at the screen, confused for a moment, and then click the familiar blue e?
Why even bother doing this, since the people who care can easily get a new browser?
This is poorly thought out, pointless, and a waste of money.
So IE would be at the very top, where everyone can click the familiar blue e? This is absolutely moronic. Doesn't the EU have better shit to be doing, what with the complete collapse of the world economy and all?
So you don't want to give people the choice... you want to outright ban IE. That's the only thing that would fix your problem, after all. Just be honest and admit that you want IE to disappear, and stop hiding behind the guise of giving consumers more choice (that they didn't want to begin with).
People do have a choice. Stop pretending they don't.
If people really hated IE, they could switch. They just don't care enough to bother. That's not Microsoft's fault.
Um, no. I'm saying doing it with wirewrap TTL is more interesting than doing it by programming an FPGA. It's more interesting and requires more skill. If I was suitably motivated I could learn enough Verilog to build a simple 8bit CPU on an FPGA, but it would take me significantly longer to learn the EE required to do it with TTL.
It really isn't much harder. I guarantee that you could learn to wire up some TTL chips just as easily as you could learn Verilog. Is "assign x = y" really so much easier than connecting pin X to pin Y with a wire?
The tricky parts in digital electronics are always the various hazards (race conditions, glitching, metastability, etc...), and they will happen regardless of whether you're using wired discrete components or an FPGA. That's where the real electrical engineering work is.
In fact, I'd say that starting on an FPGA without understanding those hazards would actually be more difficult, because you won't understand what is causing them. You'll say that x = (~a && ~b) || (a && c), and you won't understand why x glitches when moving from ABC = 001 to ABC = 101.
Not at all, I believe they put out a hollowed out RC version without all the bloatware to try and convince people that it was a different beast than Vista and they should hold out for it rather than acting on an impulse to switch away from Windows. I believe they knew it'd never be released as it was but wanted people to think it would be and not notice the added bloat.
Don't you realize how nonsensical this is? Let's break it down in traditional Slashdot style:
1) MS knows people don't want bloat
2) MS makes a version without bloat, so that people will think the OS is good
3) People think the OS is good without the bloat, and want to buy it
4) MS adds back in the bloat at the last moment!
5) ???
6) Profit!
Seriously... why, upon reaching step 3, would they not just release it as is? They are not villains or sociopaths. They're just greedy. And in this case their greed would drive them to release the product that people want to pay money for.
Not as though this is something up for debate. I have W7 on my laptop in the other room. It runs fine. It's only using ~8 gigs of harddrive space, and that's including all the programs I've installed. For comparison, the "Windows" directory of my rarely used Vista install is about double that at 15 gigs. Seems like they must have cut some serious cruft.
And, lest I come across as advocating for this (or any) OS, let me state that the best I can say about W7 is that, if required to do so, I'd be okay with using it. I'm just tired of this childish notion that Microsoft is some sort of den of evil, when it's really just another business.
Perhaps, but The Secret of MPIEA just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Thanks, I was going to ask that. I was thought it was weird that they were making one final attempt to give their most loyal players Carpal Tunnel.
Was Vista really that bad that Microsoft has to attempt to manipulate the press and websites to this extent in order to give the illusion that Windows 7 is better?
Now whatever gave you the impression that a company needs a reason to overhype their newest product?
How can you really believe that? Do you really think that Microsoft released a great version that everyone liked, just to trick people before giving them a shittier version?? What possible motivation could they have to do that?
I swear, the die-hard MS haters make that company out to be some sort of cartoon villain.
For the record, my 6 year old laptop runs the latest version of W7 just fine. I doubt I'll put it on my desktop any time soon, but if/when my employer rolls it out, I won't mind.
They've been studying at the Coca-Cola school of marketing, apparently.
These "czars" aren't new super-powerful positions being created by facists. They consist of pre-existing positions that have been given a catchy new title (drug czar instead of "head of the drug enforcement agency") and advisory roles (terrorism czar).
The former already existed. You can't complain about there being a drug czar unless you believe that the DEA has too much power. Of course, they probably do... but that predates the nomenclature used for their leader. The so-called "war on drugs" (which Obama's drug czar want to stop) began a couple decades before that term came into use.
The latter is simply an advisor to the president. They have no powers that the office of the president does not, nor can they overrule the president in any instance. The president would be taking advice from them anyway. All the title does is recognize that he's taking their advice.
I know there are a lot of libertarians/anarchists on /., and that's why the "czar" thing always gets pointed at as proof that the *insert currently leading political party here* are a bunch of fascists. But when you actually look at what the "czars" do, you quickly realize that it's entirely in keeping with our democratic republic.
How come only 1% of Japan is Christian? Can really 99% of the population of a country be wrong?
Yes. Obviously. There was a time when 99% of any given country believed in a God of some sort. They can't all have been right, since their beliefs were contradictory. Therefore, yes, 99% of a population can be wrong.
A well-written meme, to be sure. But stating something eloquently does not make it true. Nor does repeating it a thousand times.
Cults require there members to be unwavering in their faith and loyalty, to the point of brainwashing. Religions do not.
Scoff all you want, but the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of all religious persons do not strictly follow the tenets of their faith. There is no punishment for this, because the religious leaders (if indeed there are any) know that not all of their followers will adhere to every rule.
This is not the case in cults, and that is a very important difference. It's a difference which leads to people feeling trapped, or worse, not even realizing how entangled they've become.
Fundamentalists, in any group, can be cult-like. But to say that Christianity or Islam or Hinduism is just a large cult is simply absurd. It's the sort of arrogant atheism that drives people away, and we'd be better off without it.
Um... yes? The skin tone and hair color are similar enough that random variations from person to person would make it impossible to tell the difference. It would be like trying to tell an American from a Russian at a glance, or a Jamaican from a Liberian. Sure, there are some general differences, but nothing that would allow to differentiate with high accuracy.
Obviously, as soon as they say something, you'd be able to tell, but visually, we're not all that different.
Weren't Linux users arguing a little while back that Windows ought to ship without a web browser?
(I kid, I kid... I'm pretty sure the majority saw how stupid that would've been)
You find plenty to do on Earth. Now lock yourself in a small room with a few other people for a few weeks, and see if you never get bored.
Oh, wait, Slashdot... being locked in a small room with a few people is probably more stimulating than normal.
Of course not. It's called dividing up the market (I'm sure there's a technical term for it), and it's completely legitimate. If someone can't afford your top product, you make a scaled down version for them. You can't just give them the top product for a lower price, because then no one would pay that higher price. But at the same time, there's no reason to waste development money purposefully making a worse design. So you just modify the existing design to be worse.
Consider TV or internet services. There are tiered plans, not because the Cable company runs out of premium packages to sell, but because they know that not everyone wants to fork over the dough to 2000 channels.
Ah, but you're not spending $800 on a toy. You're taking a purchase that you would have made anyway, and upgrading it to also act as a toy. Those upgrades (graphics card and maybe a better CPU than you'd otherwise get) cost around $300.
I upgraded my old college desktop to a gaming rig 4 years ago, at a price of $350, and still have no problem playing modern games. I'd say it's about even with consoles in terms of bang for your buck.
On the other hand, there are those who always have to have the latest hardware and the best framerates, and end up dropping $2 grand on a PC every year or two. I could never justify that sort of cost, but then, I don't see the allure in collecting model ships or fine tuning my car either.
For the record, I also own an Xbox 360, and I greatly enjoy it as well (when it's not blinking those three accursed lights at me).
Yeah, the free market has worked out so well over the past several months. It certainly hasn't had an adverse affect on the entire population of the first world. No-sir-ee.
Newsflash: All society is linked. If someone over there fucks up bad enough, it'll hurt you over here. Shutting you eyes and praying for the invisible hand of the free market won't save you.
Regulation is essential. The ethanol subsidies are idiotic and should end, but making the free market out to be some sort of panacea is childish.