And for those who are going to ask: But does it run Linux? The answer is: Linux == communism; Systems run by large powerhungry pigs == communism --> Smithfield will be Linux only. Or maybe it will come bundled with GNU Hurd and Duke Nukem Forever.
(And for large powerhungry pigs with modpoints: This comment is meant as an attempt at humour)
Jeezuz, it's bad enough that the Slashdot editors repost old stories, now the readers start doing the same. What's the world coming to?
(Only kidding, Ogman; I just don't want the editors to make a story out of your comment, in case they should bother reading the comment section. And it's quite likely that they read the comments, since they rarely seem to read the frontpage.)
Sorry, only old people in Korea-jokes are not on my repertoire. Neither are Beowulf-jokes, unless you count my collection of clichés above as a Beowulf-cluster of tired old jokes. And maybe it is. As you know:
Of course not. I was thinking up imaginative +5, funnies like:
Sun now more evil than Microsoft.
NASA proves it. Sun is dieing.
WTF? Is Sun switching to Pentium 4?
Yet another product from Sun that noone wants.
But none of these are funny enough. And the weather is almost as bad as it's been since the start of November. Oh, well, I could see the moon. That's quite extraordinary around here.
This is pure nonsense. Interpretation is active; you have to decide how to interprete each word in a sentence to form a coherent (or incoherent) whole. The reader does the transportation to this "other time and place", not the book. As a reader, you form meaning from words and sentences by trial and error, and what you learn from it is far more important than what any game can teach you: Language. (Yes, you can learn language from gaming as well, but that's usually in some combination with reading, and language-learning games are usually quite simplistic.)
a Pentium 560 will produce liquid plasma and/or a fusion reaction if operated without a fan.
Now there's an idea: Power up Pentium 4 560 to start fusion reaction, and use fusion reactor to power Pentium 4 560. Voila! First self-powering CPU. I think Apple will switch to Intel to use these in their laptops: Good battery time (without battery! yay!), and so hot that you have to use asbestos gloves to touch the keyboard.
I am always recommending people to switch to Linux yet I never do. I installed Open Office and export my documents to word format yet at college they end up in a mess.
I have a feeling you don't use your word processor properly. I've written lots of documents in OO Writer, and never had significant problems with Word.doc export or import. But you're not alone -- I've seen several people ending each line by pressing the enter key, and that would certainly mess up formatting between office suites. I recommend this article as an introduction to proper use of a word processor.
Of course, if you don't need anyone editing you documents, you can export to PDF instead.
Yes, what would Darwin say about television, radio and newspapers? Let's see... Darwin was a biologist, and none of these are biological. They don't reproduce, so they're not susceptible to natural selection, and they don't need to mate, so sexual selection is also irrelevant. I guess evolution happens through other means in the media business.
Re:License confusion does not inspire confidence.
on
Xfce 4.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I can't find that anywhere on the page you link to, but maybe they've removed it. Anyway, it doesn't have to mean the licenses are unknown, just that they are too numerous to list on the web page. And since it seems to be based on Debian, they probably used Debian's packages, and you'll find the licenses and the names of copyright holders under/usr/share/doc/$packagename/copyright.
Re:Anti-aliased fonts
on
KDE 3.4 goes Beta
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Are you sure this has much to do with CPU power? I use xrender AA on my Powerbook G3 266 MHz (running Debian Sid), and it's far from shockingly slow. If I have to guess, I'd say it's because the ATI graphics chipset (Mach64, i think) is moderately well supported.
And of course, if you haven't tried xrender on the machines lately, you could test it again. Xrender has improved a bit since it was introdused some years ago.
Redhat server and workstation are about as stable as debian and alot more cutting edge. Reason being is that Debian wants to make sure a package or kernel is stable on all 12 platforms. If all 32 of the amiga folks find a bug in the 2.6 kernel, the millions who use x86 must wait until the bug is fixed.
Not really. The kernel packages for i386 doesn't include drivers only used by SGI MIPS or PPC or vice versa. So yes, Debian can include a RAID driver that's broken on Atari.
One of the reasons why NetBSD seems so much more portable than Debian is that it does the same, just a bit more extreme. For instance, the fact that NetBSD didn't support the graphics console on an SGI Indigo2 (last time I checked) didn't hold back the release for that computer. You just had to use serial console instead. That's what Debian calls unsupported or experimental.
Er, a 2.8 GHz P4 is significantly faster than a G4 at less than half the clockspeed. In terms of raw computing power, the Mini isn't such a great deal. OTOH, you're not going to buy the mini for its raw computing power; you want it because of its form factor and, well, because it's cheap and probably reliable, and because it also runs an easy to use OS not plagued with viruses.
As an office/websurfing machine, the Mini is Good Enough, and that's great. But fast and powerful? No.
Re:Will someone please think of the parents?
on
The Law as a Parent
·
· Score: 1
Good comment, and I share many of your experiences (I had a paper route myself). The point of disagreement still remains, though: You prefer a panopticon model of behavioural control -- the kids can do whatever they want, but at the risk of getting caught -- and I prefer to control their behaviour more directly, by making an agreement (law) that adults should not let children play certain games.
There are several reasons why my model is better: 1) The panopticon doesn't encourage moral behaviour. In a panopticon, you can always be caught, but in the real world, there is no panopticon, and you can learn to avoid getting caught. And that's what you learn when the rules of the panopticon are applied to the real world. I'm sure you learned how to hide things from your parents too; if not, well, you suck.
2) The panopticon-model-in-the-real-world works better for the kids that are likely to behave anyway. The children that need to be kept away from games like GTA are the same as those who will do most to get their hands on it -- children that are attracted to high risk behaviour (which GTA strongly encourages). These kids are often more self-reliant and difficult to control than kids like yourself, and the panopticon will be even less of a consern for them. Believe me, if you didn't learn how to keep things from your parents, these kids could have taught you.
3) Behaviour is easier controlled when there's little to encourage high risk behaviour. GTA:SA is a fantastic game. If you're a kid, and a gamer, the incentive for getting your hands on the game will be much bigger than the incentive for a store to sell the it to you. To the store, it's just another game, and they'll gladly sell the Sims or Lego Racer instead. So why should the store break the law, if there were such a law?
And a couple more, but I've run out of time. Of course, there's nothing in this that says the parents no longer have the right to check what their children are up to. And most parents will do that, because they care. And there's no legislation that can stop that, or even encourage it.
Re:Will someone please think of the parents?
on
The Law as a Parent
·
· Score: 1
Of course. But that doesn't contradict my point. If kids can buy the game without parent consent, no parents need to buy the game, and still everyone will be able to play it.
I agree that parents are responsible for the upbringing of their children (duh!), I just don't think a parent should work as a Benthamite Panopticon. Children need some slack. They can buy comics and books, but not pornographic magazines, and they should be able to buy Sims, but not GTA.
And parents should know that if they buy GTA to their kids, they could just as well buy them pornography.
Re:Will someone please think of the parents?
on
The Law as a Parent
·
· Score: 1
Sure, but that's a different market. Toddlers.
Will someone please think of the parents?
on
The Law as a Parent
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
How does passing laws to restrict the sale of violent games and put tight restrictions on the industry's labeling systems help parents raise their children?
Well, parents can let their kids control their own money without fear of them spending it all on booze, cigarettes and GTA: San Andreas. That's one compelling reason. Parents have greater freedom, and kids can have greater freedom, since parents can let them keep their own money. And if parents really want their children to learn how to survive in the ghetto, they can buy the game for them.
Why the fuck should stores have the right to sell potentially harmful things to children? Parents can't -- and shouldn't -- look after their children all day long. It's better for children if they have some time without adult supervision, and I'm all for passing laws that make this possible. It's not like anyone is defending childrens' right to drink alchohol and smoke pot, so why do we need to defend their right to buy computer games behind their parents' back?
Of course, of course! I never meant to equate slavery and offshore labour. Far from. I just wanted to point out that European and US corporations prefer having other people doing the dirty work of treating people like shit. Outsourcing can be like a glove that keeps their hands clean, but exploitation is still there.
The bloggers are the editorial page and response to the editorial pages, and we're the response to the front page. We'll synthesize what's being reported in a variety of sources.
Brilliant! That's exactly what WikiNews should be, and what it would excel at.
I'm not so sure. One of the things that has caused mainstream news to fail spectacularly is exactly that they all use each other as sources, and every article is just a 'synthesis' of what a bunch of the others said. This causes errors, falsehoods and blatant propaganda to be repeated through the networks for ever if they first get in there.
That said, I'll wait and see what comes out of the wikinews project.
I dunno, Europeans were the first people to renounce slavery, and demand universal human rights. They're still among the only people who live without the former, and with the latter.
Slavery? I think they call it out-sourcing these days.
What you say is true only in a completely free market. This doesn't exist. The seller usually has much more economic power than the buyer (at least when buyers aren't organized, and they rarely are, unless they are corporations), and can use that power to for instance make the market standardize on proprietary standards. This is why Microsoft's.doc format has been problematic, and this is why it has taken so long to develop DVD players for Linux, and this is also the function of the system that Microsoft wants to strengthen.
If the market worked otherwise (freely), the cheapest and/or best solution would be preferred to a more expensive solution backed by more capital. This would lead to Ogg Vorbis being preferred to wma, which it isn't. Empirical evidence suggests the corporation has more power than the consumer.
To paraphrase the NRA member logic: Governments don't kill people, people kill people. The communist form of government had little to do with killing people. It ultimately fell victim to a human trait called greed. The people in power in the former soviet states felt that they were more equal than others.
Yes, but there seems to be a problem with some specific forms of marxist-leninist thinking that (inevitably?) leads to totalitarianism: They don't think it's such a great idea to have proper separation of powers, since everyone is equal and all. This could also be a problem with utopianism in general.
But I don't really see that problem with free software (and other 'intellectual property'), no matter what licence. Software isn't a governmental power, as far as i can see -- rather, it empowers the user. And free software empowers the user more than proprietary software does; it even takes away much of the power the distributor/developer has over the user.
And it isn't hard to find totalitarianism in capitalism these days. A system that demands ever-increasing intellectual property laws is nothing but corporate fascism, where all power is passed over to those with the patent portfolios, and the user is only allowed to use software for specific purposes. Did I say user? Sorry, I meant the consumer.
Sounds interesting, but I've got no idea of what you're talking about. Alright, I know about Kuhn, but who is this Taylor guy and where does he rant, and what about? Links, please!
(Yeah, I googled, and found a couple of books -- The Buried Soul and The Prehistory of Sex -- and it's obviously the same person. Looks to me like a new Freud.)
Damn. That's not a Pismo. The Pismo has a white apple over the screen, and the Powerbook logo below. So does the Lombard. No, that laptop has to be a 14" Wallstreet. And I'm typing this on a 14" Wallstreet. I feel so dirty.
Slashdot Mirror
And for those who are going to ask: But does it run Linux? The answer is: Linux == communism; Systems run by large powerhungry pigs == communism --> Smithfield will be Linux only. Or maybe it will come bundled with GNU Hurd and Duke Nukem Forever.
(And for large powerhungry pigs with modpoints: This comment is meant as an attempt at humour)
Jeezuz, it's bad enough that the Slashdot editors repost old stories, now the readers start doing the same. What's the world coming to?
(Only kidding, Ogman; I just don't want the editors to make a story out of your comment, in case they should bother reading the comment section. And it's quite likely that they read the comments, since they rarely seem to read the frontpage.)
Sorry, only old people in Korea-jokes are not on my repertoire. Neither are Beowulf-jokes, unless you count my collection of clichés above as a Beowulf-cluster of tired old jokes. And maybe it is. As you know:
1. Beowulf-cluster
2. ???
3. +5, funny
I'll get my coat.
Sun now more evil than Microsoft.
NASA proves it. Sun is dieing.
WTF? Is Sun switching to Pentium 4?
Yet another product from Sun that noone wants.
But none of these are funny enough. And the weather is almost as bad as it's been since the start of November. Oh, well, I could see the moon. That's quite extraordinary around here.
This is pure nonsense. Interpretation is active; you have to decide how to interprete each word in a sentence to form a coherent (or incoherent) whole. The reader does the transportation to this "other time and place", not the book. As a reader, you form meaning from words and sentences by trial and error, and what you learn from it is far more important than what any game can teach you: Language. (Yes, you can learn language from gaming as well, but that's usually in some combination with reading, and language-learning games are usually quite simplistic.)
a Pentium 560 will produce liquid plasma and/or a fusion reaction if operated without a fan.
Now there's an idea: Power up Pentium 4 560 to start fusion reaction, and use fusion reactor to power Pentium 4 560. Voila! First self-powering CPU. I think Apple will switch to Intel to use these in their laptops: Good battery time (without battery! yay!), and so hot that you have to use asbestos gloves to touch the keyboard.
Of course, if you don't need anyone editing you documents, you can export to PDF instead.
Yes, what would Darwin say about television, radio and newspapers? Let's see... Darwin was a biologist, and none of these are biological. They don't reproduce, so they're not susceptible to natural selection, and they don't need to mate, so sexual selection is also irrelevant. I guess evolution happens through other means in the media business.
I can't find that anywhere on the page you link to, but maybe they've removed it. Anyway, it doesn't have to mean the licenses are unknown, just that they are too numerous to list on the web page. And since it seems to be based on Debian, they probably used Debian's packages, and you'll find the licenses and the names of copyright holders under /usr/share/doc/$packagename/copyright.
What? Are you smoking krakk?
Are you sure this has much to do with CPU power? I use xrender AA on my Powerbook G3 266 MHz (running Debian Sid), and it's far from shockingly slow. If I have to guess, I'd say it's because the ATI graphics chipset (Mach64, i think) is moderately well supported.
And of course, if you haven't tried xrender on the machines lately, you could test it again. Xrender has improved a bit since it was introdused some years ago.
One of the reasons why NetBSD seems so much more portable than Debian is that it does the same, just a bit more extreme. For instance, the fact that NetBSD didn't support the graphics console on an SGI Indigo2 (last time I checked) didn't hold back the release for that computer. You just had to use serial console instead. That's what Debian calls unsupported or experimental.
Er, a 2.8 GHz P4 is significantly faster than a G4 at less than half the clockspeed. In terms of raw computing power, the Mini isn't such a great deal. OTOH, you're not going to buy the mini for its raw computing power; you want it because of its form factor and, well, because it's cheap and probably reliable, and because it also runs an easy to use OS not plagued with viruses.
As an office/websurfing machine, the Mini is Good Enough, and that's great. But fast and powerful? No.
Good comment, and I share many of your experiences (I had a paper route myself). The point of disagreement still remains, though: You prefer a panopticon model of behavioural control -- the kids can do whatever they want, but at the risk of getting caught -- and I prefer to control their behaviour more directly, by making an agreement (law) that adults should not let children play certain games.
There are several reasons why my model is better:
1) The panopticon doesn't encourage moral behaviour.
In a panopticon, you can always be caught, but in the real world, there is no panopticon, and you can learn to avoid getting caught. And that's what you learn when the rules of the panopticon are applied to the real world. I'm sure you learned how to hide things from your parents too; if not, well, you suck.
2) The panopticon-model-in-the-real-world works better for the kids that are likely to behave anyway.
The children that need to be kept away from games like GTA are the same as those who will do most to get their hands on it -- children that are attracted to high risk behaviour (which GTA strongly encourages). These kids are often more self-reliant and difficult to control than kids like yourself, and the panopticon will be even less of a consern for them. Believe me, if you didn't learn how to keep things from your parents, these kids could have taught you.
3) Behaviour is easier controlled when there's little to encourage high risk behaviour.
GTA:SA is a fantastic game. If you're a kid, and a gamer, the incentive for getting your hands on the game will be much bigger than the incentive for a store to sell the it to you. To the store, it's just another game, and they'll gladly sell the Sims or Lego Racer instead. So why should the store break the law, if there were such a law?
And a couple more, but I've run out of time.
Of course, there's nothing in this that says the parents no longer have the right to check what their children are up to. And most parents will do that, because they care. And there's no legislation that can stop that, or even encourage it.
Of course. But that doesn't contradict my point. If kids can buy the game without parent consent, no parents need to buy the game, and still everyone will be able to play it.
I agree that parents are responsible for the upbringing of their children (duh!), I just don't think a parent should work as a Benthamite Panopticon. Children need some slack. They can buy comics and books, but not pornographic magazines, and they should be able to buy Sims, but not GTA.
And parents should know that if they buy GTA to their kids, they could just as well buy them pornography.
Sure, but that's a different market. Toddlers.
Why the fuck should stores have the right to sell potentially harmful things to children? Parents can't -- and shouldn't -- look after their children all day long. It's better for children if they have some time without adult supervision, and I'm all for passing laws that make this possible. It's not like anyone is defending childrens' right to drink alchohol and smoke pot, so why do we need to defend their right to buy computer games behind their parents' back?
Of course, of course! I never meant to equate slavery and offshore labour. Far from. I just wanted to point out that European and US corporations prefer having other people doing the dirty work of treating people like shit. Outsourcing can be like a glove that keeps their hands clean, but exploitation is still there.
That said, I'll wait and see what comes out of the wikinews project.
What you say is true only in a completely free market. This doesn't exist. The seller usually has much more economic power than the buyer (at least when buyers aren't organized, and they rarely are, unless they are corporations), and can use that power to for instance make the market standardize on proprietary standards. This is why Microsoft's .doc format has been problematic, and this is why it has taken so long to develop DVD players for Linux, and this is also the function of the system that Microsoft wants to strengthen.
If the market worked otherwise (freely), the cheapest and/or best solution would be preferred to a more expensive solution backed by more capital. This would lead to Ogg Vorbis being preferred to wma, which it isn't. Empirical evidence suggests the corporation has more power than the consumer.
But I don't really see that problem with free software (and other 'intellectual property'), no matter what licence. Software isn't a governmental power, as far as i can see -- rather, it empowers the user. And free software empowers the user more than proprietary software does; it even takes away much of the power the distributor/developer has over the user.
And it isn't hard to find totalitarianism in capitalism these days. A system that demands ever-increasing intellectual property laws is nothing but corporate fascism, where all power is passed over to those with the patent portfolios, and the user is only allowed to use software for specific purposes. Did I say user? Sorry, I meant the consumer.
Sounds interesting, but I've got no idea of what you're talking about. Alright, I know about Kuhn, but who is this Taylor guy and where does he rant, and what about? Links, please!
(Yeah, I googled, and found a couple of books -- The Buried Soul and The Prehistory of Sex -- and it's obviously the same person. Looks to me like a new Freud.)
Oh, come on! And what about the platypus? Is that a deliberate mistake?
Damn. That's not a Pismo. The Pismo has a white apple over the screen, and the Powerbook logo below. So does the Lombard. No, that laptop has to be a 14" Wallstreet. And I'm typing this on a 14" Wallstreet. I feel so dirty.