Another nasty variation is that they come with some religion that has a series of logical arguments that can pretty much convince anyone who doesn't have a PhD in rhetoric. So they come along drop off their book of faith and leave.
How is that a bad result? If they arrive, drop off a set of supremely-convincing beliefs, and leave, the only result is that everyone now has the same religion. Everyone having the same religion means no more religious conflicts. As long as the religion isn't "sacrifice your lives for your alien overlords", I'd say it'd be a positive outcome.
You missed the point. He knows where things are running and how to fix them if they break, but the other group knows nothing but "use the IDE" and they haven't bothered to learn what the IDE is actually doing behind the scenes.
I don't understand what the programmers of all these crypto libraries were thinking here. Even for the most basic and unimportant program, the rule is "if the data comes from outside, verify!" This is vastly more important when cryptography is involved, so why is it that all these crypto libraries seem to blindly trust whatever the Internet is sending them?!
Hopefully Toshiba will work to fix OCZ's infamously poor SSD reliability. 1.8GB/sec transfers mean nothing if the drive is so spotty you may as well be moving your files to/dev/null
Be careful. Advocating a from-scratch rewrite, instead of fixing the broken parts of a mostly-working system, is the hallmark of a CADT development model.
If I were in their shoes, I'd simply change course, post a public apology, announce Gnome 4 and bring back everything that users are missing. That should give them enough support to stay alive. I'm sure there is still time for them. But as I said before, I don't think they even care so let them die.
Or, hell, just add back most of the configuration options they removed from the system. I know a blank screen is trendy nowadays but sometimes I just want to look at a screensaver, y'know?
From his question, it sounds like the Unity interface would be too much for their low-end PCs, so plain Ubuntu is out of the question. Heck, even on my mid-range PC the Unity menu is a bit sluggish. I've never actually used Mint, but it looks like it's a good way to go.
XFCE, last I used it, was good but just slightly too different in its behavior to be a good first step into Linux for traditional Windows XP users.
Tell that to my dad, who used to be perfectly happy playing Freecell, and writing things down in a spreadsheet while crunching numbers with the calculator program (yes, you can do calculations in Excel, but no, he doesn't trust it). He also had a backup scheduled to run once a week.
In Windows 8.1, the godawful Calculator app takes up the entire screen, so good luck copying numbers back and forth. I tried to help him schedule a backup like before, but the only solution I found was a 3-freaking-lines-long powershell command. To top it off, Windows 8 is unable to read the backup files made by Windows XP (what the hell, Microsoft?!). And Freecell and Solitaire are nowhere to be found!
Vast improvement to home users my ass. It's harder to do things that used to be easy, and downright impossible to do things that used to be merely complicated.
Bullshit? Not likely. My parents were just forced to buy a new version of Word, because the WORD documents they were getting sent looked like crap in older version of WORD they had.
We can look at a microcosm of the Internet - YouTube and its ContentID system - to see what happens when people can trivially take down other peoples' content via bogus claims (or, worse, take control of the content and all its profit). In summary: it's not a fun place to be, unless you're a big company or someone who lives off misappropriated ad income.
Give it time, not everything can change extremely fast, especially on PC where things have pretty much been the same for almost 20 years now.
Coughsputter- What?! Are you seriously saying that the PC as a gaming platform is roughly the same as in 1994?
Here's a quick example of the sort of change that's happened:
In 1994, most PC gaming was still done in DOS, on computers without a dedicated graphics card. Games drew to a framebuffer. There was only a single processor, and there was only a single application running (ignoring Win3.1's cooperative multitasking, but most games required that Windows be shut off first anyway). The application had unfettered access to memory, and when it crashed it usually took the entire system along with it. CD drives were a novelty, and 14.4k modems were all there was in the way of "networked multiplayer", but they tied up the phone line so you couldn't stay on too long.
The NSA is a spy agency by charter. Spies can and do go beyond the letter of the law in order to fulfill their mission of protecting their country from its enemies... it would be shocking if they didn't.
This is America. Nobody is supposed to be above the law, especially the government.
Congress may not be concerned with the NSA's actions, but they've already proven themselves willing to trade away our freedoms wholesale so that they can claim to be "tough on terror" during the next election cycle. We need to hold their feet to the fire and make them reign in the NSA.
I like Clementine, mostly because it seems to be the only music player in existence which displays the image embedded in a song's MP3 file. All the others I've tried insist on displaying the same single image (which they found in the first song they happened to scan) for every song in my entire playlist.
Also, If anyone knows of a music player for Android which can do the same, I'd love to hear of it.
Phoenix 0.2 was amazing for its day, but what we should really be celebrating is how the web was freed from the curse of "this site works in IE only". And that happened after Phoenix became Firefox.
I should note that I had to google how to change some of these back to original settings, as not all of these are changed from control panel. and the actual
setting I was looking for is hiding behind a GUI element that doesn't look clickable. That annoyed me more than anything else.
I'd like to add my voice to this: What the hell are UI designers smoking these days? There used to be a time when user interfaces were very direct and to-the-point about what the user could and could not click to make things happen. Now we're seeing all these awful "flat" interfaces where it's nearly impossible to tell what can be interacted with and what's just there as part of the background!
The fact that Apple - who claim to be #1 in user interface design - seems to be leading this charge is mind-boggling to me. Why Windows and Ubuntu are following along is unfathomable.
Ugh, Mikulski. She supported letting the phone companies get away with warrantless wiretapping, but God forbid anyone get away with exposing government wrongdoing. She makes me ashamed to be from Maryland, and it'll be a happy day when she's finally given the boot. Doubly so if she's replaced by someone who actually cares about personal liberty and privacy.
And the attack setup is feasible - consider a public WiFi access point that requires you to keep a frame open in order to use their WiFi. This gives them both the MITM and JavaScript access needed to perform this attack.
Not trying to blame the victim, but going online without NoScript these days is simply foolish.
The Left is much more chummy with Iran than the Right. True to form, with the communist totalitarians in the dustbin of history, Islamic totalitarianism is the new darling of the left. Back to the Cave theocratic totalitarianism - now that's Progress!
True, the left is more chummy with Iran than the right, but only because anything is more chummy than declaring "they're part of an axis of eeeeeevil!"
By the by, blanket statements comdenming groups of people as "evil" come most frequently from the mouths of those favoring theocratic totalitarianism.
I don't know that the media has changed that much. The media, along with the universities, is an arm of our progressive theocracy. They will hold people on the right accountable, but not the left. Rage against Nixon. Rage against Pinochet. But praise and fawning over Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. The left has no standard of justice beyond power - that which furthers their power is good.
Greetings, being from a bizarre parallel universe! Before you interact with anyone else, I must be quick to point out that nobody in the media or universities of this dimension praises Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. In fact, asserting something so ridiculous will get you nothing but strange looks, scorn, or sarcastic responses!
Slashdot Mirror
Another nasty variation is that they come with some religion that has a series of logical arguments that can pretty much convince anyone who doesn't have a PhD in rhetoric. So they come along drop off their book of faith and leave.
How is that a bad result? If they arrive, drop off a set of supremely-convincing beliefs, and leave, the only result is that everyone now has the same religion. Everyone having the same religion means no more religious conflicts. As long as the religion isn't "sacrifice your lives for your alien overlords", I'd say it'd be a positive outcome.
You missed the point. He knows where things are running and how to fix them if they break, but the other group knows nothing but "use the IDE" and they haven't bothered to learn what the IDE is actually doing behind the scenes.
When are modern TVs ever truly "off", though? The screen may be off, but the rest of the internals are still working away...
I don't understand what the programmers of all these crypto libraries were thinking here. Even for the most basic and unimportant program, the rule is "if the data comes from outside, verify!" This is vastly more important when cryptography is involved, so why is it that all these crypto libraries seem to blindly trust whatever the Internet is sending them?!
Hopefully Toshiba will work to fix OCZ's infamously poor SSD reliability. 1.8GB/sec transfers mean nothing if the drive is so spotty you may as well be moving your files to /dev/null
Be careful. Advocating a from-scratch rewrite, instead of fixing the broken parts of a mostly-working system, is the hallmark of a CADT development model.
If I were in their shoes, I'd simply change course, post a public apology, announce Gnome 4 and bring back everything that users are missing. That should give them enough support to stay alive. I'm sure there is still time for them. But as I said before, I don't think they even care so let them die.
Or, hell, just add back most of the configuration options they removed from the system. I know a blank screen is trendy nowadays but sometimes I just want to look at a screensaver, y'know?
From his question, it sounds like the Unity interface would be too much for their low-end PCs, so plain Ubuntu is out of the question. Heck, even on my mid-range PC the Unity menu is a bit sluggish. I've never actually used Mint, but it looks like it's a good way to go.
XFCE, last I used it, was good but just slightly too different in its behavior to be a good first step into Linux for traditional Windows XP users.
A menu that's actually usable, that doesn't throw you into the awful metro interface, is considered by Microsoft to be "exciting near-future stuff".
...That's just goddamn depressing.
Tell that to my dad, who used to be perfectly happy playing Freecell, and writing things down in a spreadsheet while crunching numbers with the calculator program (yes, you can do calculations in Excel, but no, he doesn't trust it). He also had a backup scheduled to run once a week.
In Windows 8.1, the godawful Calculator app takes up the entire screen, so good luck copying numbers back and forth. I tried to help him schedule a backup like before, but the only solution I found was a 3-freaking-lines-long powershell command. To top it off, Windows 8 is unable to read the backup files made by Windows XP (what the hell, Microsoft?!). And Freecell and Solitaire are nowhere to be found!
Vast improvement to home users my ass. It's harder to do things that used to be easy, and downright impossible to do things that used to be merely complicated.
Bullshit? Not likely. My parents were just forced to buy a new version of Word, because the WORD documents they were getting sent looked like crap in older version of WORD they had.
We can look at a microcosm of the Internet - YouTube and its ContentID system - to see what happens when people can trivially take down other peoples' content via bogus claims (or, worse, take control of the content and all its profit). In summary: it's not a fun place to be, unless you're a big company or someone who lives off misappropriated ad income.
Oh, and also: USB didn't exist. God help you if you were trying to get a serial gamepad to be recognized by a game.
Give it time, not everything can change extremely fast, especially on PC where things have pretty much been the same for almost 20 years now.
Cough sputter- What?! Are you seriously saying that the PC as a gaming platform is roughly the same as in 1994?
Here's a quick example of the sort of change that's happened:
In 1994, most PC gaming was still done in DOS, on computers without a dedicated graphics card. Games drew to a framebuffer. There was only a single processor, and there was only a single application running (ignoring Win3.1's cooperative multitasking, but most games required that Windows be shut off first anyway). The application had unfettered access to memory, and when it crashed it usually took the entire system along with it. CD drives were a novelty, and 14.4k modems were all there was in the way of "networked multiplayer", but they tied up the phone line so you couldn't stay on too long.
The NSA is a spy agency by charter. Spies can and do go beyond the letter of the law in order to fulfill their mission of protecting their country from its enemies... it would be shocking if they didn't.
This is America. Nobody is supposed to be above the law, especially the government.
Congress may not be concerned with the NSA's actions, but they've already proven themselves willing to trade away our freedoms wholesale so that they can claim to be "tough on terror" during the next election cycle. We need to hold their feet to the fire and make them reign in the NSA.
I thought that, since it wasn't made up of sub-particles, an electron was a point particle. Since when does it have a defined size, let alone shape?
I like Clementine, mostly because it seems to be the only music player in existence which displays the image embedded in a song's MP3 file. All the others I've tried insist on displaying the same single image (which they found in the first song they happened to scan) for every song in my entire playlist.
Also, If anyone knows of a music player for Android which can do the same, I'd love to hear of it.
Worth nothing to statistics, sure. But when it comes to people's purchasing habits, emotion is huge.
Phoenix 0.2 was amazing for its day, but what we should really be celebrating is how the web was freed from the curse of "this site works in IE only". And that happened after Phoenix became Firefox.
I should note that I had to google how to change some of these back to original settings, as not all of these are changed from control panel. and the actual setting I was looking for is hiding behind a GUI element that doesn't look clickable. That annoyed me more than anything else.
I'd like to add my voice to this: What the hell are UI designers smoking these days? There used to be a time when user interfaces were very direct and to-the-point about what the user could and could not click to make things happen. Now we're seeing all these awful "flat" interfaces where it's nearly impossible to tell what can be interacted with and what's just there as part of the background!
The fact that Apple - who claim to be #1 in user interface design - seems to be leading this charge is mind-boggling to me. Why Windows and Ubuntu are following along is unfathomable.
Ugh, Mikulski. She supported letting the phone companies get away with warrantless wiretapping, but God forbid anyone get away with exposing government wrongdoing. She makes me ashamed to be from Maryland, and it'll be a happy day when she's finally given the boot. Doubly so if she's replaced by someone who actually cares about personal liberty and privacy.
And the attack setup is feasible - consider a public WiFi access point that requires you to keep a frame open in order to use their WiFi. This gives them both the MITM and JavaScript access needed to perform this attack.
Not trying to blame the victim, but going online without NoScript these days is simply foolish.
Concerning this entire console generation, I believe Yahtzee said it best in his buyer's guide: "Don't."
The Left is much more chummy with Iran than the Right. True to form, with the communist totalitarians in the dustbin of history, Islamic totalitarianism is the new darling of the left. Back to the Cave theocratic totalitarianism - now that's Progress!
True, the left is more chummy with Iran than the right, but only because anything is more chummy than declaring "they're part of an axis of eeeeeevil!"
By the by, blanket statements comdenming groups of people as "evil" come most frequently from the mouths of those favoring theocratic totalitarianism.
I don't know that the media has changed that much. The media, along with the universities, is an arm of our progressive theocracy. They will hold people on the right accountable, but not the left. Rage against Nixon. Rage against Pinochet. But praise and fawning over Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. The left has no standard of justice beyond power - that which furthers their power is good.
Greetings, being from a bizarre parallel universe! Before you interact with anyone else, I must be quick to point out that nobody in the media or universities of this dimension praises Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. In fact, asserting something so ridiculous will get you nothing but strange looks, scorn, or sarcastic responses!