Since when were we only permitted to be upset about one thing at a time? Lack of heart disease research == bad. Invading iraq == also bad. I am not going to try to pick one based on which is causing more deaths, I am going to pick both.
And, right at this minute, I'm going to yell louder about Iraq, because unlike heart disease research right now a lot of people are also yelling and there seems like there's a good chance of stopping the problem cold, and soon.
Heart disease research I can support over time as usual, the issue of the moment is Iraq and so I will talk about Iraq. This does not mean I've given up on heart disease research or any other topic, but merely that/right now/ the most useful thing to be protesting is the travesty in Iraq.
The president always gets the blame for everything, unless he can find a scapegoat. People are just bitching about lost jobs because it's easier than trying to make treason stick.
"MIDI could be re-invented to include wavelets which are a base representation of a voice (instrument or human) then define the mathmatical operations. You'd get a 99% facimilie that would probably pass as good as a low-quality MP3 at 1/0th the size."
Better yet, just do midi-style music with custom wav "instruments" rolled into the file. Oh wait, that's a tracker format!
So what you really want is a tracker format with some extra sparkly bits.
Event Horizon only has two things in common with a potential Doom movie of the sort I was imagining: It's dark and people die. That's not very close at all.
Where are the loads of freakish monsters the audience feels no remorse seing destroyed? Where are the massive number of guns which one intrepid and monumentally lucky action hero uses to blast his way to safety?
And then there's the ship: It's dark, but not dank, the lights don't flicker enough, there are not enough twisty passageways and (oh yeah!) monsters don't jump out from around every corner and attack you.
What's more, there are way too many people in Event Horizon. By the time any Doom movie is 10 minutes in, there should be basically one guy alive, and the entire movie from then on would be him shooting stuff.
I know the general outline, but specifics are harder./Who/ is the hero?/Why/ does what goes wrong go wrong?/Where/ is this facility and what are they doing?/What/ kind of monsters are there?/How/ is it that only Our Hero survives whatever got the rest of the people?
I don't imagine these things matter much to the concept, but it's essential that one makes up something good and believable, otehrwise the movie is just crap.
I'd seriously like to see a Doom movie. It would feature:
* No girl, no romance
* lots of guns, lots of gore
* only one human alive after the first 10 minutes
The plot would be Doomish: Silent-type hero, in high-tech/secret/hidden facility (scientific? military? Maybe some of both!) when Something Goes Horribly Wrong. Men become zombies, forces of hell are unleashed. WHATEVER. Insert B-plot device here! Hero grabs some guns and ammo (and you KNOW they're just lying around... it's that sort of facility). He then proceeds to try and get out, mostly by shooting everything that moves. There would be lots of sweating, lots of dark rooms and flickery lights. There would also be no small amount of freaky monsters/mutations/etc.
I can picture the setting, the direction... all of it. The only part I can't decide on is the plot, but that would not need to be much more than the actual Doom plot.
With all of the games that are becoming films these days, it might even get backing. if it were taken seriously and done as a straight action flick, it might even be good.
What parent poster says is of course true. How can one argue otherwise? It also sounds a/lot/ like arguments by GUI-simplification people. Let me quote and edit:
"Regular people (many of whom couldn't give a flying nutsack what speed the processor is, or what kind of architecture it is, or whether they can fiddle with the bits and recompile the kernel) just want their computers so they can GET WORK DONE without having to deal with mediocre user interfaces. If I want to burn a CD, I don't want to have to mess with SCSI configuration or know that bus 2 LUN 1 is my RW device."
"People want computers for convenience, not because they see geeks running 200GHz seti@home cliusters."
All of that is true, too. But the point I believe parent's parent was making was: That's all complete bunk.
Maybe people just want cars to get places. and maybe people just want computers to get work done, but without the car nut segment and without the geek segment the industry would collapse. If you welded all car hoods shut, the vast array of car nuts who push things forward, or recommand this or that car or part to a friend, or repair such-and-so problem get screwed. These people may not buy the majority of cars, but their presence and enthusiasm makes the car industry what it is when someone totally disinterested in cars sees it.
Likewise with computers and their interfaces. Maybe people just want to get work done, but if you close all apps and simplify into uselessness all interfaces then the geeks get screwed. And without a vast array of geeks who push things forward, or recommand this or that hardware or software to a friend, or fix such-and-so problem the industry gets screwed. These people may not buy the majority of computers by volume, but their presence and enthusiasm and contribution makes the computer industry what it is when someone totally disinterested in the nuts-and-bolts of computers sees it.
DON'T simplify for "everybody"; target the low-end enthusiast, and everybody else will just deal with it. Most of them will fancy themselves a bit of an expert about this or that, and be pleased to know one tiny bit about their car/computer.
XMMS, the Linux WinAMP clone, seems to be primarily static -- I don't see a lot of development on it these days.
The GTK2 port is a fork named Goom. Look for Goom Media Player to start showing up this year. Right now lots of rewriting seems to be going on. They're breaking some plugin stuff while they're switching, so expect big things.
There's also a project to make a more Winamp3-style XMMS, but I forget its name.
WRT gnumeric: Last I knew it was more compatible with Excel than OO.o. It's sure as hell faster and more feature rich. The OO.o spreadsheets only advantage is being part of the package, and everything that goes with that.
I think the idea is that devices teach each other of their existence. It would be like if I bought a USB device (say a camera) that Windows didn't support, the camera would be able to bootstrap Windows with some drivers from its own firmware. The only thing that has to be prearanged is a protocol for this transaction. I don't need to maintain an extensive driver library for this to work.
OpenfirmWare+BIOS-level networking+maybe some little addons.
Key word: "optionally". Why would people pay money for a subscription if they can just hop on to another P2P network and get everything for free?
Why switch networks at all?
You don't get it: Everything would be exactly and precisely as it is now, where you can use any software to download any song any time any where as much or as little as you like. If YOU so desire, you can pay $5 per month. You don't pay the P2P network provider, they don't make sure you've paid. You pay the collection agency and in return get some kind of receipt. This receipt says "For the month of (say) February 2004 Your Full Name Here with social security number WHA-TE-ERITIS has the right to download any music by any artist who has joined the cooperative collection agency." Meaning that if sommeone sees you sharing the latest Eminem song and says "You sir are a dirty filthy pirate!" all you need do is hold up your license and say "See this? It gives me the right to download and share that song up through the end of February."
At the end of the month I'd guess your redistribution rights are terminated unless you pay again (read: you are now sue-able) while your listen rights remain. As long as the songs you have were obtained during a month when your download license was paid up, they're legal copies. To prove you a pirate a lawsuit would have to prove that you definitely didn't download a given song during such a paid-up period.
The difference between this situation and the way it is now minimal. If you don't pay it's still illegal and you can still be sued. But now you have the option TO pay, which legalizes the downloading you'd do anyway.
Why would people pay? A lot of them wouldn't. But I'll bet you most middle-class parents would much rather spend $60 a year to let their kids get legal music then have to worry about lawsuits. I'm not too worried about being sued and I have almost no money, but I'D pay it. A lot of people wouldn't, and they can be sued into poverty for all I care. The reason suing fans right now is such a horrible thing is that we really have no good options: iTunes or similar, which suck, or no music downloading. We/I choose downloading from wherever, and we rightly complain when we're sued for it. If there were an easy and cheap way to make what download legal, I and everyone I know wuld use it. Maybe some people wouldn't, but a lot would.
Say only 10 million people pay the fee, which does not seem unlikely. That's 600 million bucks. Not a bad supplemental income. And think of the money saved on lawsuits and DRM research!
I know the linux printing situation is screwed up, having been bitten by it many times myself. The reason I have and still will nod at the Windows problem and go back to my Debian box with a new anecdote is this: Under Linux the printing may be convoluted, complex, hard, unusable, and the worst thing to learn since neurosurgury, but problems/can be fixed/. There may be 3000 annoying things which might be causing any given printing problem which I'll have to sift through to isolate it and fix it, but/I can fix it/ and/there is an answer/.
Does it suck for the end user who isn't me and can't fix it? Yes. It sucks worse than Windows' problems, sometimes.
But I still point to the Windows problems as anecdotal evidence as to the superiority of my admittedly _broken_ system because under Windows my options are:
Reinstall driver. Reboot. Repeat.
If something is wrong this ritual will either fix it or not. If it fixes it, I shake my head and mumble about Windows, and get on with work. If it does not, I can repeat ad nauseum until I go mad, but there really is nothing else I can do. The error emerges from Windows, the 'fix' dissapears into Windows. What is going on? No one I know can tell me.
This scenario/also/ sucks for the end user.
I'll take uber-broken and screwed Linux half-assed attempts any day over that kind of black box shit.
I know people will say this makes me somehow "elitist", but I don't see that. What's more elitist, to treat users like idiots, or to treat them like reasonable beings? I would like a better Linux printing situation and would help fix it if I even remotely began to grok printers. I sympathize with the plight of those who can't geek their problems into submission, and I wish it weren't that way. But just because WE suck doesn't let Microsoft off the hook: they suck too! In fact, from my perspective they suck MORE.
In the Windows case all people can do is say "Well that's Windows for you, and we all knew it sucked anyway," whereas here we can say, "That's because the user didn't try do..." It's not that we're trying to justify anything, it's that ANSWERS EXIST to nearly every problem. The ultimate answer may be some UI redesign. But in Windows, the answers just aren't there, so all you can do is nod sagely about the problem, and ignore it.
I just threw away a printer, which in its lifetime probably printed 3x more postscript-as-text than actual rendered output, because CUPS is unreliable: try to print, get postscript gibberish, reboot, it keeps on printing gibberish, turn off printer, shut down cupsd, reboot, turn on printer, repeat 3ish times, and I'd occassionally get lucky and it would print non-gibberish for me. I expect that without this added wear, the printer would still work fine.
I hate to bash the user when they have problems, but... if rebooting and restarting cups is your troubleshooting method, there's no way you're going to fix your problem.
Fact: You don't need to reboot a Linux system. I don't want to give you the false impression that I'm exaggerating or something. I mean EVER.
Okay, if you are upgrading/recompiling a kernel it's a good idea, but you probably don't need to do that if you use a modern distro.
Restarting daemons only needs to happen after you change something which they do not automatically reload (some config files). This is quick and reasonable.
Once more for the Windows converts who are about to say "but what about if it...?" or similar: You just do not ever need to reboot. On some few very rare occasions it can be the simplest solution to some very few unusual kinds of lockups, but these are so rare that they do not register as even a fraction of a percent.
Next time you feel like rebooting, take my advice and don't do it.
To the quotee: sounds like you don't have a driver. I know it sucks, but right now the answer is linuxprinting.org, hitting the docs heavily, and a bit of luck.
There hasn't been a good SF series since Star Trek DS9
Are you fucking kdding me? What about Firefly? Or, if you don't count shows that didn;t make it the full season, try Farscape. Farscape blows away DS9, and a lot of TNG too.
I grabbed the patch, applied it, reconfigured, recompiled, and set up grub. I've been waiting and waiting but still have not suffered a single crash, so I have been unable to justify rebooting.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when were we only permitted to be upset about one thing at a time? Lack of heart disease research == bad. Invading iraq == also bad. I am not going to try to pick one based on which is causing more deaths, I am going to pick both.
/right now/ the most useful thing to be protesting is the travesty in Iraq.
And, right at this minute, I'm going to yell louder about Iraq, because unlike heart disease research right now a lot of people are also yelling and there seems like there's a good chance of stopping the problem cold, and soon.
Heart disease research I can support over time as usual, the issue of the moment is Iraq and so I will talk about Iraq. This does not mean I've given up on heart disease research or any other topic, but merely that
The president always gets the blame for everything, unless he can find a scapegoat. People are just bitching about lost jobs because it's easier than trying to make treason stick.
"Besides, every American knows that Jimmy Carter was the worst President ever."
I hope you're kidding.
http://nvu.com/
"MIDI could be re-invented to include wavelets which are a base representation of a voice (instrument or human) then define the mathmatical operations. You'd get a 99% facimilie that would probably pass as good as a low-quality MP3 at 1/0th the size."
Better yet, just do midi-style music with custom wav "instruments" rolled into the file. Oh wait, that's a tracker format!
So what you really want is a tracker format with some extra sparkly bits.
Event Horizon only has two things in common with a potential Doom movie of the sort I was imagining: It's dark and people die. That's not very close at all.
Where are the loads of freakish monsters the audience feels no remorse seing destroyed? Where are the massive number of guns which one intrepid and monumentally lucky action hero uses to blast his way to safety?
And then there's the ship: It's dark, but not dank, the lights don't flicker enough, there are not enough twisty passageways and (oh yeah!) monsters don't jump out from around every corner and attack you.
What's more, there are way too many people in Event Horizon. By the time any Doom movie is 10 minutes in, there should be basically one guy alive, and the entire movie from then on would be him shooting stuff.
No, it's really nothing alike.
I know the general outline, but specifics are harder. /Who/ is the hero? /Why/ does what goes wrong go wrong? /Where/ is this facility and what are they doing? /What/ kind of monsters are there? /How/ is it that only Our Hero survives whatever got the rest of the people?
I don't imagine these things matter much to the concept, but it's essential that one makes up something good and believable, otehrwise the movie is just crap.
Pfft, I'll bet you just didn't notice. That's how 0wnz0rd you are.
I'd seriously like to see a Doom movie. It would feature:
* No girl, no romance
* lots of guns, lots of gore
* only one human alive after the first 10 minutes
The plot would be Doomish: Silent-type hero, in high-tech/secret/hidden facility (scientific? military? Maybe some of both!) when Something Goes Horribly Wrong. Men become zombies, forces of hell are unleashed. WHATEVER. Insert B-plot device here! Hero grabs some guns and ammo (and you KNOW they're just lying around... it's that sort of facility). He then proceeds to try and get out, mostly by shooting everything that moves. There would be lots of sweating, lots of dark rooms and flickery lights. There would also be no small amount of freaky monsters/mutations/etc.
I can picture the setting, the direction... all of it. The only part I can't decide on is the plot, but that would not need to be much more than the actual Doom plot.
With all of the games that are becoming films these days, it might even get backing. if it were taken seriously and done as a straight action flick, it might even be good.
There's still a thriving alternate shell community out there. Using litestep can be much lighter than Explorer, and much more useful than cmd.exe.
Once more into the car/computer analogy.
/lot/ like arguments by GUI-simplification people. Let me quote and edit:
What parent poster says is of course true. How can one argue otherwise? It also sounds a
"Regular people (many of whom couldn't give a flying nutsack what speed the processor is, or what kind of architecture it is, or whether they can fiddle with the bits and recompile the kernel) just want their computers so they can GET WORK DONE without having to deal with mediocre user interfaces. If I want to burn a CD, I don't want to have to mess with SCSI configuration or know that bus 2 LUN 1 is my RW device."
"People want computers for convenience, not because they see geeks running 200GHz seti@home cliusters."
All of that is true, too. But the point I believe parent's parent was making was: That's all complete bunk.
Maybe people just want cars to get places. and maybe people just want computers to get work done, but without the car nut segment and without the geek segment the industry would collapse. If you welded all car hoods shut, the vast array of car nuts who push things forward, or recommand this or that car or part to a friend, or repair such-and-so problem get screwed. These people may not buy the majority of cars, but their presence and enthusiasm makes the car industry what it is when someone totally disinterested in cars sees it.
Likewise with computers and their interfaces. Maybe people just want to get work done, but if you close all apps and simplify into uselessness all interfaces then the geeks get screwed. And without a vast array of geeks who push things forward, or recommand this or that hardware or software to a friend, or fix such-and-so problem the industry gets screwed. These people may not buy the majority of computers by volume, but their presence and enthusiasm and contribution makes the computer industry what it is when someone totally disinterested in the nuts-and-bolts of computers sees it.
DON'T simplify for "everybody"; target the low-end enthusiast, and everybody else will just deal with it. Most of them will fancy themselves a bit of an expert about this or that, and be pleased to know one tiny bit about their car/computer.
Google for Oeone.
XMMS, the Linux WinAMP clone, seems to be primarily static -- I don't see a lot of development on it these days.
The GTK2 port is a fork named Goom. Look for Goom Media Player to start showing up this year. Right now lots of rewriting seems to be going on. They're breaking some plugin stuff while they're switching, so expect big things.
There's also a project to make a more Winamp3-style XMMS, but I forget its name.
WRT gnumeric: Last I knew it was more compatible with Excel than OO.o. It's sure as hell faster and more feature rich. The OO.o spreadsheets only advantage is being part of the package, and everything that goes with that.
Anyone interested in Audacity should pay
Pay? Why the fuck should I pay? Yet another open source project begging for money 'cause it's so-oo cool.
their Audacity Wiki! homepage a visit. Audacity is open source, cross platform and it actually works. If you haven't tried it yet, now is the time.
Er. Oops.
I think the idea is that devices teach each other of their existence. It would be like if I bought a USB device (say a camera) that Windows didn't support, the camera would be able to bootstrap Windows with some drivers from its own firmware. The only thing that has to be prearanged is a protocol for this transaction. I don't need to maintain an extensive driver library for this to work.
OpenfirmWare+BIOS-level networking+maybe some little addons.
Yawn.
Key word: "optionally". Why would people pay money for a subscription if they can just hop on to another P2P network and get everything for free?
Why switch networks at all?
You don't get it: Everything would be exactly and precisely as it is now, where you can use any software to download any song any time any where as much or as little as you like. If YOU so desire, you can pay $5 per month. You don't pay the P2P network provider, they don't make sure you've paid. You pay the collection agency and in return get some kind of receipt. This receipt says "For the month of (say) February 2004 Your Full Name Here with social security number WHA-TE-ERITIS has the right to download any music by any artist who has joined the cooperative collection agency." Meaning that if sommeone sees you sharing the latest Eminem song and says "You sir are a dirty filthy pirate!" all you need do is hold up your license and say "See this? It gives me the right to download and share that song up through the end of February."
At the end of the month I'd guess your redistribution rights are terminated unless you pay again (read: you are now sue-able) while your listen rights remain. As long as the songs you have were obtained during a month when your download license was paid up, they're legal copies. To prove you a pirate a lawsuit would have to prove that you definitely didn't download a given song during such a paid-up period.
The difference between this situation and the way it is now minimal. If you don't pay it's still illegal and you can still be sued. But now you have the option TO pay, which legalizes the downloading you'd do anyway.
Why would people pay? A lot of them wouldn't. But I'll bet you most middle-class parents would much rather spend $60 a year to let their kids get legal music then have to worry about lawsuits. I'm not too worried about being sued and I have almost no money, but I'D pay it. A lot of people wouldn't, and they can be sued into poverty for all I care. The reason suing fans right now is such a horrible thing is that we really have no good options: iTunes or similar, which suck, or no music downloading. We/I choose downloading from wherever, and we rightly complain when we're sued for it. If there were an easy and cheap way to make what download legal, I and everyone I know wuld use it. Maybe some people wouldn't, but a lot would.
Say only 10 million people pay the fee, which does not seem unlikely. That's 600 million bucks. Not a bad supplemental income. And think of the money saved on lawsuits and DRM research!
I know the linux printing situation is screwed up, having been bitten by it many times myself. The reason I have and still will nod at the Windows problem and go back to my Debian box with a new anecdote is this: Under Linux the printing may be convoluted, complex, hard, unusable, and the worst thing to learn since neurosurgury, but problems /can be fixed/. There may be 3000 annoying things which might be causing any given printing problem which I'll have to sift through to isolate it and fix it, but /I can fix it/ and /there is an answer/.
/also/ sucks for the end user.
Does it suck for the end user who isn't me and can't fix it? Yes. It sucks worse than Windows' problems, sometimes.
But I still point to the Windows problems as anecdotal evidence as to the superiority of my admittedly _broken_ system because under Windows my options are:
Reinstall driver.
Reboot.
Repeat.
If something is wrong this ritual will either fix it or not. If it fixes it, I shake my head and mumble about Windows, and get on with work. If it does not, I can repeat ad nauseum until I go mad, but there really is nothing else I can do. The error emerges from Windows, the 'fix' dissapears into Windows. What is going on? No one I know can tell me.
This scenario
I'll take uber-broken and screwed Linux half-assed attempts any day over that kind of black box shit.
I know people will say this makes me somehow "elitist", but I don't see that. What's more elitist, to treat users like idiots, or to treat them like reasonable beings? I would like a better Linux printing situation and would help fix it if I even remotely began to grok printers. I sympathize with the plight of those who can't geek their problems into submission, and I wish it weren't that way. But just because WE suck doesn't let Microsoft off the hook: they suck too! In fact, from my perspective they suck MORE.
In the Windows case all people can do is say "Well that's Windows for you, and we all knew it sucked anyway," whereas here we can say, "That's because the user didn't try do..." It's not that we're trying to justify anything, it's that ANSWERS EXIST to nearly every problem. The ultimate answer may be some UI redesign. But in Windows, the answers just aren't there, so all you can do is nod sagely about the problem, and ignore it.
I just threw away a printer, which in its lifetime probably printed 3x more postscript-as-text than actual rendered output, because CUPS is unreliable: try to print, get postscript gibberish, reboot, it keeps on printing gibberish, turn off printer, shut down cupsd, reboot, turn on printer, repeat 3ish times, and I'd occassionally get lucky and it would print non-gibberish for me. I expect that without this added wear, the printer would still work fine.
I hate to bash the user when they have problems, but... if rebooting and restarting cups is your troubleshooting method, there's no way you're going to fix your problem.
Fact: You don't need to reboot a Linux system. I don't want to give you the false impression that I'm exaggerating or something. I mean EVER.
Okay, if you are upgrading/recompiling a kernel it's a good idea, but you probably don't need to do that if you use a modern distro.
Restarting daemons only needs to happen after you change something which they do not automatically reload (some config files). This is quick and reasonable.
Once more for the Windows converts who are about to say "but what about if it...?" or similar: You just do not ever need to reboot. On some few very rare occasions it can be the simplest solution to some very few unusual kinds of lockups, but these are so rare that they do not register as even a fraction of a percent.
Next time you feel like rebooting, take my advice and don't do it.
To the quotee: sounds like you don't have a driver. I know it sucks, but right now the answer is linuxprinting.org, hitting the docs heavily, and a bit of luck.
The movie was also excellent, but should be watched before you finish the series....I think early 20's is where you're supposed to watch it.
The movie is chronologically between episodes 22 and 23.
There hasn't been a good SF series since Star Trek DS9
Are you fucking kdding me? What about Firefly? Or, if you don't count shows that didn;t make it the full season, try Farscape. Farscape blows away DS9, and a lot of TNG too.
WIMP stands for "Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer." 'Mouse' would be redundant, given that it's the same idea as 'pointer'.
I wonder who exactly isn't giving credit where credit is due.
Apple.
I still haven't upgraded to 2.6.2!
I grabbed the patch, applied it, reconfigured, recompiled, and set up grub. I've been waiting and waiting but still have not suffered a single crash, so I have been unable to justify rebooting.
No NFS? What are you smoking? Linux has had NFS for years.
Upon further investigation, thoughttracker seems somewhat abandoned, so it may not be too easy to find. The Debian package still exists.
First CDBakeOven, the coolest burner ever, and now this. I've got to stop getting attached to programs...