You're totally missing my point, because despite your blasting off on your own tangent, this is exactly what I'm talking about. It's quality of communication that matters, not linguistic purity. That's exactly what I was arguing for, if you'd bothered to read my post.
I *live* in an area other than my own, me old china. Communications problems are old hat to me, which is why I feel confident spouting about them on Slashdot.
You, on the other hand, are failing to see the importance of communication and you're falling in to the trap (typical of "intelligent" people) of assuming that good communication equals speaking the Queen's English.
And that, my friend, is complete arrogance. Our native language is dying, and in its place is rising a new globalized version. You and your linguist friends can toss off over the ramifications of this all night, if you like.
There you go, jumping to conclusions. I'm running KDE/Gnome on my Voodoo3 which Linux has accelerated drivers for; the machine is a 700MHz PIII and the display flickers like fuck
X sucks. Everyone who knows anything about X agrees it sucks. Even real Linux zealots. Microsoft put the GDI in the kernel for speed, they have working acceleration on every card under the sun, and they have a streamlined API designed for workstations, rather than for network rendering. And that's the difference.
The Linux community should discard X and start again. Fuck compatibility, there aren't any good X programs anyways.
Yeah, but the whole point of using Windows over Linux is that you don't have to use this incomprehensible archaic psuedo-standard for the files on your own machine.
Language is about communicating thoughts, not about "correct usage". Correct usage is irrelevant. Who decides correct usage anyway? I'll tell you who - linguists. They examine the language, simplify it so they can understand it, and then have the cheek to call us incorrect for using language not according to their simplified rules! It's like chastising the mountain because it's taller than the map says it should be.
Or, as the Swiss Army puts it: if the map and the terrain differ, trust the terrain.
Dumping my arse. When Microsoft puts MediaPlayer and IE on Linux it might actually be usable for something other than developing for Linux. And the Linux zealots think that's a bad thing?
Firstly, it's OK to look at GPL code and see how it works, and then reimplement it... isn't it?
Secondly, you can police code, because you can compile your code under MSVC and then run a binary diff between that and their executables. The binary diff will spot areas which are significantly the same as your code.
Mind you, in some cases there is only one right way to write the code, so you can't prove they didn't recode the same thing from scratch using the same, logically necessary, structure.
Anyway this is moot - Microsoft don't tend to steal code; they have plenty enough resources to write some lame themes manager themselves, and it work work with WIN32 GDI, rather than with X (as do the Linux ones).
Yeah, the Palpatine Moment was the best for me, too... even though we all knew damned well who he was. (I want to know how he gets so gnarly, though!)
Films where you're thinking "what the hell is going on" are extremely rare - 2001 and Total Recall spring to mind. But these are masterpieces of illusion (notably, Total Recall is based on a Philip K. Dick story and he's known for making you wonder what the hell is going on;)
Even as a five-year-old watching A New Hope I wasn't wondering what was going on. I had a totally different emotion then - the same emotion I had when watching The Matrix for the first time - which is, "THIS IS FUCKING COOL".
or expert people who like things to Just Work(tm).
I'm glad I'm not the only one of those. I bought my wife an iMac so it would Just Work. Best decision I ever made - it was so EASY to set up. Buying a PC last week, it took me 3 days to even get a working system (from components), then another 3 days to install all the stuff to make it a *usable* working system.
I installed Debian on said PC and found the installation pretty easy. Not as easy as Windows Me, but easier than Microsoft Office. The "basic configuration" is just about 10 clicks away. No network setup was required. No package selection required either, unless (like me) you want all the development tools and kernel source code.
What sucks about Debian though is that - as a relative newcomer to Open Source - I expected that when I paid $50 for Linux I'd get a CD of the installation and a CD of the source code. No such luck. You get a flyer, though. You can either pay another $10 for the source CD or download hundreds of megabytes over your 56K modem. Great. If I wanted to download hundreds of megabytes, I wouldn't have paid money for a distro. Sending off a check is just so old fashioned;)
I agree. Seems most people lose their imagination when they go through college. That's why Star Wars was great, not because it had an original plot (it didn't) but because it really fired a young kid's imagination.
The popularity of The Matrix - an *incredibly* tired old plot about virtual reality, when you get down to it - proves this. Tech heads don't need to *use* their imagination to understand a VR plot.
Both The Matrix and Star Wars: Episode 1 had fantastic special effects, and at the end of the day, that's where the kick comes from. Plot is irrelevant, you just need to get into that space where you're so engrossed in the film you don't sit there thinking "woah, that wasn't very accurate".
In that zone, you can even enjoy Battlefield Earth for what it is;)
I don't think Lucasfilm just do the work and then sit back for 3 months waiting for it to render. They probably parallelize these tasks somewhat, so faster rendering boxes wouldn't make a huge difference - it's the man-hours, not the compute-hours.
If you want email access, uncensored web browsing, and all your other "rights" online then you need to go to a CyberCafe and pay a few quid. I'm sure even Stockton has cybercafes.
So did anyone else get confused when they said it did 1,000,000,000 operations per second, but 140 GFLOPS? WTF? If it does 140 GGLOPS, that's 140,000,000,000 operations per second; if it does 1,000,000,000 operations per second, it's pulling 1 GFLOP.
Don't tell me they're counting the blending multipliers.
Yeah, that's exactly what everyone knows. So next time people here are going on about how Linux is going to rule the desktop, I'll gently remind them of this.
The really nice thing about DOS was that, because it was so simple, it was very, very fast. The V2_OS guys are trying to regain those magic days (although writing the whole OS in assembler is just insane). This Inferno might be fast on an embedded processor, but it sounds like it needs hosting inside another OS on a PC, which is a shame.
I looked up AtheOS the other day. It does look interesting. Nothing revolutionary though - just seems like a slimmer Linux to me.
A Snickers is peanuts & caramel wrapped in chocolate. It used to be called a Marathon in the UK until the early 90s.
A Milky Way in the UK (and Australia) is just that fluffy stuff wrapped in chocolate. In the USA, a Milky Way also has a layer of caramel over the fluffy stuff. NO peanuts.
I have this on good authority, as an Englishman working in the states - I just asked the guys in the office.
Is it better than Windows, though? If you install Windows Me with everything selected, I don't think it installs a webserver, FTP server, news server, DHCP server, etc. etc. etc. Which actually sort of sucks if you want those things, but if you just want to "try Linux" and you're on DSL and you can't be bothered to scour the internet for information, you're screwed.
I myself installed Debian for the first time ever 2 weeks ago, and I couldn't really be fscked to check everything - I'm not linked to the internet on the box, even through a modem, so it doesn't matter. But I was shocked to find that I could open a default website on that box from the LAN.
Even if a newbie does install Apache, should it really auto-configure itself too? [Same goes for ftpd, etc. etc.] For Joe Average, it's painful enough finding CDs that he might just install everything so it's there when he needs it... but until he needs it (and reads the README at the very least) it really shouldn't autoconfigure.
Slashdot Mirror
I *live* in an area other than my own, me old china. Communications problems are old hat to me, which is why I feel confident spouting about them on Slashdot.
You, on the other hand, are failing to see the importance of communication and you're falling in to the trap (typical of "intelligent" people) of assuming that good communication equals speaking the Queen's English.
And that, my friend, is complete arrogance. Our native language is dying, and in its place is rising a new globalized version. You and your linguist friends can toss off over the ramifications of this all night, if you like.
It was called "Storm Linux" but it says it's the Debian distribution. I guess the Storm installer != the Debian installer.
Paying taxes isn't quite the same as paying for a service.
X sucks. Everyone who knows anything about X agrees it sucks. Even real Linux zealots. Microsoft put the GDI in the kernel for speed, they have working acceleration on every card under the sun, and they have a streamlined API designed for workstations, rather than for network rendering. And that's the difference.
The Linux community should discard X and start again. Fuck compatibility, there aren't any good X programs anyways.
Yay! The voice of reason has at last appeared on Slashdot. Amen, brother!
Yeah, but the whole point of using Windows over Linux is that you don't have to use this incomprehensible archaic psuedo-standard for the files on your own machine.
Or, as the Swiss Army puts it: if the map and the terrain differ, trust the terrain.
Dumping my arse. When Microsoft puts MediaPlayer and IE on Linux it might actually be usable for something other than developing for Linux. And the Linux zealots think that's a bad thing?
Anyway, there's a couple of points here:
Firstly, it's OK to look at GPL code and see how it works, and then reimplement it ... isn't it?
Secondly, you can police code, because you can compile your code under MSVC and then run a binary diff between that and their executables. The binary diff will spot areas which are significantly the same as your code.
Mind you, in some cases there is only one right way to write the code, so you can't prove they didn't recode the same thing from scratch using the same, logically necessary, structure.
Anyway this is moot - Microsoft don't tend to steal code; they have plenty enough resources to write some lame themes manager themselves, and it work work with WIN32 GDI, rather than with X (as do the Linux ones).
Films where you're thinking "what the hell is going on" are extremely rare - 2001 and Total Recall spring to mind. But these are masterpieces of illusion (notably, Total Recall is based on a Philip K. Dick story and he's known for making you wonder what the hell is going on ;)
Even as a five-year-old watching A New Hope I wasn't wondering what was going on. I had a totally different emotion then - the same emotion I had when watching The Matrix for the first time - which is, "THIS IS FUCKING COOL".
I'm glad I'm not the only one of those. I bought my wife an iMac so it would Just Work. Best decision I ever made - it was so EASY to set up. Buying a PC last week, it took me 3 days to even get a working system (from components), then another 3 days to install all the stuff to make it a *usable* working system.
I installed Debian on said PC and found the installation pretty easy. Not as easy as Windows Me, but easier than Microsoft Office. The "basic configuration" is just about 10 clicks away. No network setup was required. No package selection required either, unless (like me) you want all the development tools and kernel source code.
What sucks about Debian though is that - as a relative newcomer to Open Source - I expected that when I paid $50 for Linux I'd get a CD of the installation and a CD of the source code. No such luck. You get a flyer, though. You can either pay another $10 for the source CD or download hundreds of megabytes over your 56K modem. Great. If I wanted to download hundreds of megabytes, I wouldn't have paid money for a distro. Sending off a check is just so old fashioned ;)
Er ... that was a ramble, wasn't it? ;)
The popularity of The Matrix - an *incredibly* tired old plot about virtual reality, when you get down to it - proves this. Tech heads don't need to *use* their imagination to understand a VR plot.
Both The Matrix and Star Wars: Episode 1 had fantastic special effects, and at the end of the day, that's where the kick comes from. Plot is irrelevant, you just need to get into that space where you're so engrossed in the film you don't sit there thinking "woah, that wasn't very accurate".
In that zone, you can even enjoy Battlefield Earth for what it is ;)
I don't think Lucasfilm just do the work and then sit back for 3 months waiting for it to render. They probably parallelize these tasks somewhat, so faster rendering boxes wouldn't make a huge difference - it's the man-hours, not the compute-hours.
If you want email access, uncensored web browsing, and all your other "rights" online then you need to go to a CyberCafe and pay a few quid. I'm sure even Stockton has cybercafes.
DOS worked fine.
Don't tell me they're counting the blending multipliers.
Sorry, yeah, I meant that AtheOS is nothing revolutionary.
Yeah, that's exactly what everyone knows. So next time people here are going on about how Linux is going to rule the desktop, I'll gently remind them of this.
I looked up AtheOS the other day. It does look interesting. Nothing revolutionary though - just seems like a slimmer Linux to me.
PS: Surely that deserves a +1: Informative? ;)
A Snickers is peanuts & caramel wrapped in chocolate. It used to be called a Marathon in the UK until the early 90s.
A Milky Way in the UK (and Australia) is just that fluffy stuff wrapped in chocolate. In the USA, a Milky Way also has a layer of caramel over the fluffy stuff. NO peanuts.
I have this on good authority, as an Englishman working in the states - I just asked the guys in the office.
And the answer's none ... none more dark.
I myself installed Debian for the first time ever 2 weeks ago, and I couldn't really be fscked to check everything - I'm not linked to the internet on the box, even through a modem, so it doesn't matter. But I was shocked to find that I could open a default website on that box from the LAN.
Even if a newbie does install Apache, should it really auto-configure itself too? [Same goes for ftpd, etc. etc.] For Joe Average, it's painful enough finding CDs that he might just install everything so it's there when he needs it ... but until he needs it (and reads the README at the very least) it really shouldn't autoconfigure.
Just my $0.02
Since when do Milky Ways contain peanuts? Are you sure you don't mean a Snickers?
What I mean though is that it shouldn't take much time to unzip AIM - AOL must have written really shoddy decompression code.