What you're saying is the same argument used by people to pay men more than women ("they're more likely to be the sole bread winners" etc).
What? That's not the same at all. This isn't some philosphical argument about who deserves to be paid more. The fact is that married heterosexual couples get a tax credit that homosexual domestic partners do not because the state has decided not to recognize homosexual marriages. Google is attempting to ensure that the actual amount of money homosexual employees take home is equal to what heterosexuals take home by compensating for the government's discrimination.
Normal ('straight') employees are now penalized for not acting unnaturally. (For the obtuse: for doing the same work & hours & etc, the normal employee will get less income).
I haven't done the exact math, but it seems like the intent here is to make up for the extra tax that unmarried couples have to pay, so in the end, heterosexual and homosexual employees should be taking home the same amount of money. Why do you believe the straight employee will get less income?
For what matter, what do you mean by "unnatural"? Is that in the same sense that your polyester clothing or the computer you're sitting at are unnatural, or in the sense of the genetically modified corn that's used as a binding agent in practically everything you can buy at the supermarket...?
Why would people grant him mercy when they've shown none to their victims?
Because "an eye for an eye" is not our law of justice, and we're better than he is.
I'm not saying the guy doesn't deserve to be executed because I'm not familiar with the case at all. But refusing to show somebody mercy just because they haven't shown any is petty and vindictive.
Even worse is being like this judge and trying to exonerate yourself by saying that you won't show any mercy, but maybe your imaginary supernatural deity will. No, this person is not going to get any mercy after he's dead. He's going to cease existing, period. It's shameful that this judge isn't willing to accept that he's the person who is handing down the final judgment.
Every OS reaches an end point, not necessarily driven by only one thing.
Apple reached the end with the Apple II, Mac OS9, and moved to UNIX.
How is Microsoft going to break the legacy trail?
Do you mean like when they ditched the 9x kernel and switched to the NT kernel? And I suppose there are still some legacy remnants of the original NT kernel, but Windows 7 is vastly different from Windows NT4 or even 2000.
Way to go, Amarok. I spent years singing your praises, converting people(not many, but a good handful) from the mundane. Now I've pretty much lost interest in you for the forseeable future...
Oh, I hear you there. Amarok 1 had a decent interface, but 2 is just awful. I don't see how anybody can actually like that.
Fortunately, there are some other pretty good music playing programs out there -- try Exaile or Banshee.
No one will be able to prove that the AC wasn't you.
Actually, the Slashdot admins could prove it, but I'm sure they don't care whether you suspect two people are the same or not. But if it wasn't me, then why would I bother posting anonymously earlier but logged in now?
No one knows.
So what's the functional difference between you and any anonymous coward?
Nope, I agree with him. Who are you, by the way, and what makes your posts any more credible than those written by somebody who isn't bothering to use a pseudonym?
I found it not to suit my needs. What's the attraction?
Most people don't have very complex needs. They want to do their banking online, then check Gmail and Facebook and watch a few videos on Youtube. Chrome does all of that, and it does it much, much faster than Firefox does. That's the appeal: it's really fast. Even a typical "power" user doesn't need much more than Adblock, a Javascript debugger, and a Privacy mode, and Chrome has all of those, too.
Is it really worth the 72174 bytes? Or are people just lazy?
56kbps = 56000 bits per second = 7000 bytes per second. You're adding 10 seconds to the download time of people on 56kbps modems.
Actually, jQuery is about 24k after it's been minified and gzipped (and any modern browser will gzip text over the wire), so that's slightly over 3 seconds for a 56k modem, and that's only once for your entire site. That's practically nothing if your site is more than one or two static pages, especially if you have anything crazy like JPG images in your page.
Here's the official page with EVERY Tyrian version.
Official? The page you linked to says specifically, in red text, that the guy who made the page is just a fan and was not associated with the development of the game. The legality of the page itself is questionable, because I'm sure that the GBA version of Tyrian has not been given an official free release. Of course, I'm sure there's also nobody who holds the copyright on the game that is in a position to sue over it...
But my original point is, even if you could download them for free, those games would not be playable if they had Ubisoft-style DRM on them. (at least, assuming you didn't illegally crack the DRM)
Nothing stops them from resurrecting old titles as a "Vintage Special" and offering you the privilege of playing them for a fee.
Uh, except for going out of business. Assuming they had the proposed sort of DRM, if I wanted to play Pool of Radiance again, who would offer that? How about Tyrian or Jazz Jackrabbit...?
For what it's worth, I'm from Texas and I think this is cool. I would much rather politicians spend their time honoring microbes than telling me who I have to give my money to or who I'm allowed to marry or what I'm allowed to do with my electronic devices.
And maybe if politicians start spending enough of their time honoring microbes, people will start to realize that maybe we don't need so many politicians in the first place...
I believe you are what is commonly called a "rich fool." You look at something's feature list and assume that thing is better regardless of the comparable prices.
Yep, OS X is nice. I like it more than Windows 7. Windows 7 is also a nice OS, though. Is having OS X on a computer worth paying almost $1000 more for, though? Hell no.
I say this as somebody who has an older 15" Mac Book Pro and loves it, and I have several Windows and Linux-based computers to compare it to. I hope this laptop lasts a long time, because the Mac Tax seems like it's only been getting worse recently, and I just can't justify paying that much more for a decent laptop, regardless of the OS. I think to myself at least a few times a year how nice it would be to have a Mac Pro, but then I look at the price tag compared to equivalent Windows workstations, and the difference is just absurd...
Re:My experience with Apple...
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 1
"Cool", I thought, "I can play mp3's in my car without hauling around my laptop." So I plug the thing into my computer, and it shows up as a block device. Welp, it's an mp3 player, I'm supposed to copy mp3's to it, right?
So let me make sure I have this right. You got a new device and just assumed you knew how it worked without reading any sort of documentation, and you're surprised when it didn't work like you expected? Do you treat power tools the same way?
After some Googling I discover that you can't just copy mp3's to the iStick -- you have to fire up Apple's software, which is labyrinthine and ridiculous, and jump through hoops to transfer them.
I think you are the first person I have ever seen describe iTunes as "labyrinthine." Far more often I've seen people insult it for being too simple.
By the way, you do not have to use Apple's software. In fact, most of the music library manipulation programs I'm familiar with can write to an iPod's database.
if they can't make a device that works in the easiest way possible, but involves doing things the hard way since they're just trying to pimp their other iShit
Ok, let's pretend I've got a library of 10,000 MP3s. Please describe to me how a device with a flat-directory layout could quickly divide them all up into categories based on genre, artists, publication year, album name, and so forth. Note that I don't want to wait 20 seconds for the device to catalog and index files every time I add some more or rearrange things on it. After you've got that figured out, tell me how to do smart playlists on it -- that is, let's say I want a playlist that is defined as "The 50 newest songs I've rated as four stars or higher that are in the Jazz genre." And I want that playlist to automatically update as soon as I add anything to my library that fits those qualifications.
All that means you're going to need to have some sort of internal database, and you're going to need some software to control it -- the interface on a portable device is a nightmare for that sort of thing with the tiny LCD display and only a couple of buttons, so it makes sense to have a PC application for controlling the database.
By this point you basically have iTunes. Oh, and if for some reason you don't need any of those fancy features... ok, drag and drop your files into iTunes and hit the Sync button, and there you go.
We, as a people, believe that beating your wife is objectively wrong, and we throw you in jail for doing it. Nothing to do with religion. I, as an American, believe it's wrong to murder unborn children, and that people should be jailed for doing it. Nothing to do with my religion.
It's good that you object to that on non-religious grounds, but there are many more issues than just that.
How do you feel about "in God we trust" being printed on our money, or "under God" in the pledge of allegiance? How about the ten commandments being listed outside courtrooms? How about being required to swear on a bible in court, or how many government positions require you say an oath containing "to God" somewhere in it? Ok, those are small issues -- how do you feel about "marriage" being a political status defined by religious standards, so that it can only be between one man and one woman? Is it ok that being married in a religious sense grants a variety of legal privileges that are otherwise unobtainable? How about churches being tax-exempt? How about clergymen not being required to have any sort of professional training to act as counselors or psychiatrists to their followers? How about parents being allowed to deny medical treatment to their children because they think their prayers will heal them?
How about restoring hearing to a deaf person (or simply the ability to hear about 20KHz again)?
You joke, but there's actually a very sizable deaf community that is proud of the fact that they're "differently abled" and would be quiet upset if you insisted on "curing" them.
I was doing all of these on my 386 4MB machine, windows 3.1 and aol+realplayer (I know, I know...)
No you weren't. A single uncompressed frame of 1080p video is slightly under 6 MB in size. You couldn't even fit that into your RAM, let alone replace it 29.97 times per second while your computer is running other tasks in the background. I'd believe that maybe you were watching 160x120 RM videos at 10 frames per second that had compression artifacts the size of my thumb.
Now I can barely run firefox alone on 4GB ofRAM.
Which is, of course, extreme hyperbole. I've got an open Firefox process that's been running for at least a day and has had over a dozen tabs open and it's at around 160 MB. The machine I'm on has 4 GB of RAM, about 2 GB of which is in use, and I've got Firefox, Opera, Chrome (doing web development at the moment), Eclipse, a dozen terminals, two remote desktop displays, Pidgin, an e-mail client, a SQL client, a music player, and our VCS program open. I suppose I've also got a local Apache HTTP server running. I can't remember the last time I hit the swap disk.
If Visual Studio 6, ICQ, and Netscape all did everything that your current programs do, why aren't you still using them?
Slashdot Mirror
What you're saying is the same argument used by people to pay men more than women ("they're more likely to be the sole bread winners" etc).
What? That's not the same at all. This isn't some philosphical argument about who deserves to be paid more. The fact is that married heterosexual couples get a tax credit that homosexual domestic partners do not because the state has decided not to recognize homosexual marriages. Google is attempting to ensure that the actual amount of money homosexual employees take home is equal to what heterosexuals take home by compensating for the government's discrimination.
Normal ('straight') employees are now penalized for not acting unnaturally. (For the obtuse: for doing the same work & hours & etc, the normal employee will get less income).
I haven't done the exact math, but it seems like the intent here is to make up for the extra tax that unmarried couples have to pay, so in the end, heterosexual and homosexual employees should be taking home the same amount of money. Why do you believe the straight employee will get less income?
For what matter, what do you mean by "unnatural"? Is that in the same sense that your polyester clothing or the computer you're sitting at are unnatural, or in the sense of the genetically modified corn that's used as a binding agent in practically everything you can buy at the supermarket...?
Did you read the post I replied to? We're not talking about whether this particular person deserved to be executed or not.
Why would people grant him mercy when they've shown none to their victims?
Because "an eye for an eye" is not our law of justice, and we're better than he is.
I'm not saying the guy doesn't deserve to be executed because I'm not familiar with the case at all. But refusing to show somebody mercy just because they haven't shown any is petty and vindictive.
Even worse is being like this judge and trying to exonerate yourself by saying that you won't show any mercy, but maybe your imaginary supernatural deity will. No, this person is not going to get any mercy after he's dead. He's going to cease existing, period. It's shameful that this judge isn't willing to accept that he's the person who is handing down the final judgment.
Every OS reaches an end point, not necessarily driven by only one thing.
Apple reached the end with the Apple II, Mac OS9, and moved to UNIX.
How is Microsoft going to break the legacy trail?
Do you mean like when they ditched the 9x kernel and switched to the NT kernel? And I suppose there are still some legacy remnants of the original NT kernel, but Windows 7 is vastly different from Windows NT4 or even 2000.
Because the removal of LAN play had nothing to do with preventing piracy or limiting their users with restrictive DRM.
How do you remove something that was never there in the first place? Or do you have a build of StarCraft II that has LAN play built into it?
Way to go, Amarok. I spent years singing your praises, converting people(not many, but a good handful) from the mundane. Now I've pretty much lost interest in you for the forseeable future...
Oh, I hear you there. Amarok 1 had a decent interface, but 2 is just awful. I don't see how anybody can actually like that.
Fortunately, there are some other pretty good music playing programs out there -- try Exaile or Banshee.
Printer ink is made from unicorn blood.
I'm guessing you're not much of a roleplayer, because XP has been "Experience Points" ever since the original Dungeons & Dragons.
No one will be able to prove that the AC wasn't you.
Actually, the Slashdot admins could prove it, but I'm sure they don't care whether you suspect two people are the same or not. But if it wasn't me, then why would I bother posting anonymously earlier but logged in now?
No one knows.
So what's the functional difference between you and any anonymous coward?
No one will agree with you on that.
Nope, I agree with him. Who are you, by the way, and what makes your posts any more credible than those written by somebody who isn't bothering to use a pseudonym?
I found it not to suit my needs. What's the attraction?
Most people don't have very complex needs. They want to do their banking online, then check Gmail and Facebook and watch a few videos on Youtube. Chrome does all of that, and it does it much, much faster than Firefox does. That's the appeal: it's really fast. Even a typical "power" user doesn't need much more than Adblock, a Javascript debugger, and a Privacy mode, and Chrome has all of those, too.
Is it really worth the 72174 bytes? Or are people just lazy?
56kbps = 56000 bits per second = 7000 bytes per second. You're adding 10 seconds to the download time of people on 56kbps modems.
Actually, jQuery is about 24k after it's been minified and gzipped (and any modern browser will gzip text over the wire), so that's slightly over 3 seconds for a 56k modem, and that's only once for your entire site. That's practically nothing if your site is more than one or two static pages, especially if you have anything crazy like JPG images in your page.
Here's the official page with EVERY Tyrian version.
Official? The page you linked to says specifically, in red text, that the guy who made the page is just a fan and was not associated with the development of the game. The legality of the page itself is questionable, because I'm sure that the GBA version of Tyrian has not been given an official free release. Of course, I'm sure there's also nobody who holds the copyright on the game that is in a position to sue over it...
But my original point is, even if you could download them for free, those games would not be playable if they had Ubisoft-style DRM on them. (at least, assuming you didn't illegally crack the DRM)
Tyrian was released as freeware AGES AGO.
But do you (and the other people who replied) really think that would have happened if the original game had this sort of DRM on it?
Nothing stops them from resurrecting old titles as a "Vintage Special" and offering you the privilege of playing them for a fee.
Uh, except for going out of business. Assuming they had the proposed sort of DRM, if I wanted to play Pool of Radiance again, who would offer that? How about Tyrian or Jazz Jackrabbit...?
For what it's worth, I'm from Texas and I think this is cool. I would much rather politicians spend their time honoring microbes than telling me who I have to give my money to or who I'm allowed to marry or what I'm allowed to do with my electronic devices.
And maybe if politicians start spending enough of their time honoring microbes, people will start to realize that maybe we don't need so many politicians in the first place...
I believe you are what is commonly called a "rich fool." You look at something's feature list and assume that thing is better regardless of the comparable prices.
Yep, OS X is nice. I like it more than Windows 7. Windows 7 is also a nice OS, though. Is having OS X on a computer worth paying almost $1000 more for, though? Hell no.
I say this as somebody who has an older 15" Mac Book Pro and loves it, and I have several Windows and Linux-based computers to compare it to. I hope this laptop lasts a long time, because the Mac Tax seems like it's only been getting worse recently, and I just can't justify paying that much more for a decent laptop, regardless of the OS. I think to myself at least a few times a year how nice it would be to have a Mac Pro, but then I look at the price tag compared to equivalent Windows workstations, and the difference is just absurd...
Oh, he took it into account. He's using 2nd edition AC rules, you see.
Technically, zombies unlive without oxygen.
"Cool", I thought, "I can play mp3's in my car without hauling around my laptop." So I plug the thing into my computer, and it shows up as a block device. Welp, it's an mp3 player, I'm supposed to copy mp3's to it, right?
So let me make sure I have this right. You got a new device and just assumed you knew how it worked without reading any sort of documentation, and you're surprised when it didn't work like you expected? Do you treat power tools the same way?
After some Googling I discover that you can't just copy mp3's to the iStick -- you have to fire up Apple's software, which is labyrinthine and ridiculous, and jump through hoops to transfer them.
I think you are the first person I have ever seen describe iTunes as "labyrinthine." Far more often I've seen people insult it for being too simple.
By the way, you do not have to use Apple's software. In fact, most of the music library manipulation programs I'm familiar with can write to an iPod's database.
if they can't make a device that works in the easiest way possible, but involves doing things the hard way since they're just trying to pimp their other iShit
Ok, let's pretend I've got a library of 10,000 MP3s. Please describe to me how a device with a flat-directory layout could quickly divide them all up into categories based on genre, artists, publication year, album name, and so forth. Note that I don't want to wait 20 seconds for the device to catalog and index files every time I add some more or rearrange things on it. After you've got that figured out, tell me how to do smart playlists on it -- that is, let's say I want a playlist that is defined as "The 50 newest songs I've rated as four stars or higher that are in the Jazz genre." And I want that playlist to automatically update as soon as I add anything to my library that fits those qualifications.
All that means you're going to need to have some sort of internal database, and you're going to need some software to control it -- the interface on a portable device is a nightmare for that sort of thing with the tiny LCD display and only a couple of buttons, so it makes sense to have a PC application for controlling the database.
By this point you basically have iTunes. Oh, and if for some reason you don't need any of those fancy features... ok, drag and drop your files into iTunes and hit the Sync button, and there you go.
We, as a people, believe that beating your wife is objectively wrong, and we throw you in jail for doing it. Nothing to do with religion. I, as an American, believe it's wrong to murder unborn children, and that people should be jailed for doing it. Nothing to do with my religion.
It's good that you object to that on non-religious grounds, but there are many more issues than just that.
How do you feel about "in God we trust" being printed on our money, or "under God" in the pledge of allegiance? How about the ten commandments being listed outside courtrooms? How about being required to swear on a bible in court, or how many government positions require you say an oath containing "to God" somewhere in it? Ok, those are small issues -- how do you feel about "marriage" being a political status defined by religious standards, so that it can only be between one man and one woman? Is it ok that being married in a religious sense grants a variety of legal privileges that are otherwise unobtainable? How about churches being tax-exempt? How about clergymen not being required to have any sort of professional training to act as counselors or psychiatrists to their followers? How about parents being allowed to deny medical treatment to their children because they think their prayers will heal them?
I could go on all day...
For example, I can watch Blu-ray under XP. No such luck with Vista or Windows 7 thanks to the extra DRM and my non-hdcp monitor.
Blu-ray is Sony's format. You can thank them for all of the DRM integral to it.
How about restoring hearing to a deaf person (or simply the ability to hear about 20KHz again)?
You joke, but there's actually a very sizable deaf community that is proud of the fact that they're "differently abled" and would be quiet upset if you insisted on "curing" them.
I was doing all of these on my 386 4MB machine, windows 3.1 and aol+realplayer (I know, I know...)
No you weren't. A single uncompressed frame of 1080p video is slightly under 6 MB in size. You couldn't even fit that into your RAM, let alone replace it 29.97 times per second while your computer is running other tasks in the background. I'd believe that maybe you were watching 160x120 RM videos at 10 frames per second that had compression artifacts the size of my thumb.
Now I can barely run firefox alone on 4GB ofRAM.
Which is, of course, extreme hyperbole. I've got an open Firefox process that's been running for at least a day and has had over a dozen tabs open and it's at around 160 MB. The machine I'm on has 4 GB of RAM, about 2 GB of which is in use, and I've got Firefox, Opera, Chrome (doing web development at the moment), Eclipse, a dozen terminals, two remote desktop displays, Pidgin, an e-mail client, a SQL client, a music player, and our VCS program open. I suppose I've also got a local Apache HTTP server running. I can't remember the last time I hit the swap disk.
If Visual Studio 6, ICQ, and Netscape all did everything that your current programs do, why aren't you still using them?