Mod up. I agree - ipad is in a horserace with the ereaders. They have a shot at expanding this market into a e-magazine tool. I wouldn't count them out because it fails to meet the needs of netbook users.
Bullshit. I remember very clearly the 1.8.x AND the 2.2.x upgrade issues. Both these updates broke my app - not the gems, the core application. I was using features they removed or changed without deprecation warnings. It took me only about 2 hours to figure out the issues and repair them in both cases, but core libs were broken silently by the Rails core in both those version releases.
I run a production rails app with pluralization turned off. I turned this feature off in 2006 and it worked fine then - it works fine now. I agree with you that this is a dumb feature.
I agree with your comments - but the merb community has been awesome. Now that the merb dudes are core contributors to Rails 3.0 there is some hope that they will "unsuck" the elitist/cult-of-personality mania in the core Rails community. In the end the guy running the community makes a big impact - get cool people like Brian Behelendorf evangelizing Apache, Linus Torvalds for Linux and you get open, interesting communities. DHH has turned RoR into a Steve Jobs look-a-like. Ezra Z (original author of merb) is a much better community leader, and I have some hope that his crew will create some big improvements in what it's like hanging around Rails. Time will tell.
Wow - it's been a long time, but my recollection is that strafe keys were supported by default and were used heavily by almost everyone I knew who played the game. I remember some players who also used mouselook in Doom, but they were fringe, as opposed to when Quake arrived and everyone could see that mouselookers had a huge multiplayer advantage (since looking up was so much easier - something not possible in doom).
Is your recollection that doom didn't provide strafe keys mapped by default?
mod up tomhudson. This whole idea is dumb. Buy a second HDD and get raid 1 performance - twice as fast for most activity - not fault tolerant but neither is this solution. This is a new solution to a problem that already has a cheaper more performant solution.
Hear hear. That site stands on the backs of its forgiving user base (can you say lock-in any louder without using an iphone?). Only twitter is worse for reliability. Well said!
Some folks said that about Amazon too way back when. "WTF? They sell books? I'd rather buy a company that sells pet food with sock puppets - much more solid model!"
Just b/c a business model isn't obvious doesn't mean there isn't one. They could be smoke and mirrors, but I wouldn't bet on a short being profitable within any reasonable time frame.
They have minor outages daily - their UI is one of the most unreliable of the big sites I've ever used. I was just trying to upload a picture - major ajax wait followed by timeout. Finally got it to work. Then tried to look up a friend via friend search - down. They're second only to twitter in terms of the minute by minute unreliability of a major website, imo.
I've run across quite a few ignorant Ruby libraries that leak memory like sieves. Most Ruby on Rails applications have to reboot once a day if they are well written and way more often than that if they aren't. High level languages can leak like crazy, same like low level languages - this whole topic is wack.
Low level languages like C and ASM are vulnerable to executing data instead of code -- cf. Microsoft windows from day 1.
I can't figure out why people are comparing memory leaks from one language to another. Everything leaks as soon as you put it in the hands of an average joe programmer. Move along, nothing to see here.
I think GP was saying "no companies capable of putting humans in LEO." I still don't know if that's true or false, but I haven't heard of any commercial enterprise that has done it - only gov'ts? XPrize was the closest I've heard and that was not LEO of course.
What about the horrendous noise of the packbot? It's so loud on the videos as to be almost unbelievable. I guess it's probably powered by a lawnmower engine with all the exhaust removed so maybe adding that back would help (at the cost of horsepower). I'm pretty sure that robots of this kind are going to be pretty vulnerable to small arms fire as well, but who knows - the research seems interesting, even if it's just swords to ploughshares kind of work.
Yes - reliability is a big concern in meatbots vs metalbots - but have you read the earlier poster's comment about this metalbot sounding like a storm of chainsaws? Seems like there are some problems here: doesn't it seem like where soliders want to cover rough terrain on foot (i.e. where they can't airlift by helo or parachute, and can't drive in w/4x4's) that silence is probably real important? Granted donkeys make noise too, but I'm pretty sure it's cheaper to surgically silence a donkey than to engineer a quieter packbot.
I actually have no idea, so that's a real, not rhetorical, question..
There are few practical problems with your approach:
1. Robots are 10 zillion times cooler than mules 2. Robots cost a lot more than mules, stimulating jobs for workers. 3. Robots breakdown more and when they breakdown they are much more expensive to fix thereby stimulating more jobs for workers. 4. Robots are just way way cooler than mules, what general wants to spearhead the US military's advanced mule airlift program in the 21st century?
I'm sure there are other reasons why your idea won't work, but that's off the top of my head. In other words: your idea makes too much damn sense, would be too cost effective and just might actually work.
I've read that the US dropped more munitions on North Vietnam in tonnage, than were dropped in the entire European theater of WWII by all sides. If that's the case, your scorched earth theory doesn't seem like it would work, since NVA came out on top of that one (meaning they survived until the American political machine couldn't handle the expense and bad PR).
I hear it's trivial but then I tried it: I had a T43 Thinkpad that supports an external monitor. I installed Ubuntu on it (and tried Kubuntu also). I tried versions 8.x and 9.x of Ubuntu. Double heading the display was a nightmare. The monitors had differing resolutions and it seemed like I basically got the choice between one resolution or the other for both monitors. Forum advice basically consisted of people telling me to hand edit some crazy display config file that looked like the video version a sendmail config file. I spent about 4 hours on this, and gave up, and that laptop is still running Windows XP. I really want to switch to Linux (and I'm fairly technical) but everytime I try - I run into some show stopping issue like this.
By the way, Canonical said they would get it working for me if I subscribed to their support service which (iirc) was $250/year. Which is about what my laptop is worth (and probably not all that different from a Microsoft OS license?).
I don't see a big fuss either - but why doesn't apple just put a checkbox in the OS to let me opt-out of the apple store? Answer: Money. They make more money if they force you to buy apps from within their store. User experience quality is a focus for apps within the store of course, but mainly to ensure that users will buy more apps.
I think the complaint is more at the level of market analysis. The argument is that the market would be better if Apple let you click a little check box that said "permit install of non-Apple store apps" -- like Android has for their OS/market place. The choice problem is that if I want to buy an Apple product b/c I like the features, I can't install the features I want on it.
Classic example: my partner has an iphone. I have an android phone. She used to be able to use Google voice search on the iphone and in fact taunted me with it, when I still had a winmo device. Then apple decided to eliminate that app, so she's stuck without it. The switching cost for her to move to android is relatively high, so this one feature doesn't make her buy a new phone, but it still sucks for her and all the people like her.
Why is it good for the general public if Apple runs their business this way? They may be entitled to make these choices, but I think all the complainers/haters are voicing a larger concern, that Apple's behavior is creating less value for the public (and perhaps more value for Apple). Classic business dichotomy, and certainly a complaint voiced on/. about Microsoft Word and Windows a bijillion times as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod up. I agree - ipad is in a horserace with the ereaders. They have a shot at expanding this market into a e-magazine tool. I wouldn't count them out because it fails to meet the needs of netbook users.
Bullshit. I remember very clearly the 1.8.x AND the 2.2.x upgrade issues. Both these updates broke my app - not the gems, the core application. I was using features they removed or changed without deprecation warnings. It took me only about 2 hours to figure out the issues and repair them in both cases, but core libs were broken silently by the Rails core in both those version releases.
I run a production rails app with pluralization turned off. I turned this feature off in 2006 and it worked fine then - it works fine now. I agree with you that this is a dumb feature.
I agree with your comments - but the merb community has been awesome. Now that the merb dudes are core contributors to Rails 3.0 there is some hope that they will "unsuck" the elitist/cult-of-personality mania in the core Rails community. In the end the guy running the community makes a big impact - get cool people like Brian Behelendorf evangelizing Apache, Linus Torvalds for Linux and you get open, interesting communities. DHH has turned RoR into a Steve Jobs look-a-like. Ezra Z (original author of merb) is a much better community leader, and I have some hope that his crew will create some big improvements in what it's like hanging around Rails. Time will tell.
How is my post getting rated informative? Slashdot, wtf? It was a joke and at worse trolling. I'm never going to figure this place out.
Wow - it's been a long time, but my recollection is that strafe keys were supported by default and were used heavily by almost everyone I knew who played the game. I remember some players who also used mouselook in Doom, but they were fringe, as opposed to when Quake arrived and everyone could see that mouselookers had a huge multiplayer advantage (since looking up was so much easier - something not possible in doom).
Is your recollection that doom didn't provide strafe keys mapped by default?
Doom supported keyboard strafing left/right, iirc.
Of course - Raid 0 is what I should have said, as another CP correctly pointed out.
mod up tomhudson. This whole idea is dumb. Buy a second HDD and get raid 1 performance - twice as fast for most activity - not fault tolerant but neither is this solution. This is a new solution to a problem that already has a cheaper more performant solution.
Linux is perfect. You just don't know how to configure it.
Hear hear. That site stands on the backs of its forgiving user base (can you say lock-in any louder without using an iphone?). Only twitter is worse for reliability. Well said!
Some folks said that about Amazon too way back when. "WTF? They sell books? I'd rather buy a company that sells pet food with sock puppets - much more solid model!"
Just b/c a business model isn't obvious doesn't mean there isn't one. They could be smoke and mirrors, but I wouldn't bet on a short being profitable within any reasonable time frame.
They have minor outages daily - their UI is one of the most unreliable of the big sites I've ever used. I was just trying to upload a picture - major ajax wait followed by timeout. Finally got it to work. Then tried to look up a friend via friend search - down. They're second only to twitter in terms of the minute by minute unreliability of a major website, imo.
This reminds of @echo off from DOS. Hmm.
I've run across quite a few ignorant Ruby libraries that leak memory like sieves. Most Ruby on Rails applications have to reboot once a day if they are well written and way more often than that if they aren't. High level languages can leak like crazy, same like low level languages - this whole topic is wack.
Low level languages like C and ASM are vulnerable to executing data instead of code -- cf. Microsoft windows from day 1.
I can't figure out why people are comparing memory leaks from one language to another. Everything leaks as soon as you put it in the hands of an average joe programmer. Move along, nothing to see here.
I think GP was saying "no companies capable of putting humans in LEO." I still don't know if that's true or false, but I haven't heard of any commercial enterprise that has done it - only gov'ts? XPrize was the closest I've heard and that was not LEO of course.
What about the horrendous noise of the packbot? It's so loud on the videos as to be almost unbelievable. I guess it's probably powered by a lawnmower engine with all the exhaust removed so maybe adding that back would help (at the cost of horsepower). I'm pretty sure that robots of this kind are going to be pretty vulnerable to small arms fire as well, but who knows - the research seems interesting, even if it's just swords to ploughshares kind of work.
Yes - reliability is a big concern in meatbots vs metalbots - but have you read the earlier poster's comment about this metalbot sounding like a storm of chainsaws? Seems like there are some problems here: doesn't it seem like where soliders want to cover rough terrain on foot (i.e. where they can't airlift by helo or parachute, and can't drive in w/4x4's) that silence is probably real important? Granted donkeys make noise too, but I'm pretty sure it's cheaper to surgically silence a donkey than to engineer a quieter packbot.
I actually have no idea, so that's a real, not rhetorical, question..
There are few practical problems with your approach:
1. Robots are 10 zillion times cooler than mules
2. Robots cost a lot more than mules, stimulating jobs for workers.
3. Robots breakdown more and when they breakdown they are much more expensive to fix thereby stimulating more jobs for workers.
4. Robots are just way way cooler than mules, what general wants to spearhead the US military's advanced mule airlift program in the 21st century?
I'm sure there are other reasons why your idea won't work, but that's off the top of my head. In other words: your idea makes too much damn sense, would be too cost effective and just might actually work.
I've read that the US dropped more munitions on North Vietnam in tonnage, than were dropped in the entire European theater of WWII by all sides. If that's the case, your scorched earth theory doesn't seem like it would work, since NVA came out on top of that one (meaning they survived until the American political machine couldn't handle the expense and bad PR).
I hear it's trivial but then I tried it: I had a T43 Thinkpad that supports an external monitor. I installed Ubuntu on it (and tried Kubuntu also). I tried versions 8.x and 9.x of Ubuntu. Double heading the display was a nightmare. The monitors had differing resolutions and it seemed like I basically got the choice between one resolution or the other for both monitors. Forum advice basically consisted of people telling me to hand edit some crazy display config file that looked like the video version a sendmail config file. I spent about 4 hours on this, and gave up, and that laptop is still running Windows XP. I really want to switch to Linux (and I'm fairly technical) but everytime I try - I run into some show stopping issue like this.
By the way, Canonical said they would get it working for me if I subscribed to their support service which (iirc) was $250/year. Which is about what my laptop is worth (and probably not all that different from a Microsoft OS license?).
I hope I don't get modded troll on this..
I used this virtual desktop for years on Windows - it worked flawlessly for me:
http://www.xdesksoftware.com/
So I think there are tools out there to do at least that part of what OP wants in Windows. Now whether Windows is the right answer - who knows.
I don't see a big fuss either - but why doesn't apple just put a checkbox in the OS to let me opt-out of the apple store? Answer: Money. They make more money if they force you to buy apps from within their store. User experience quality is a focus for apps within the store of course, but mainly to ensure that users will buy more apps.
I think the complaint is more at the level of market analysis. The argument is that the market would be better if Apple let you click a little check box that said "permit install of non-Apple store apps" -- like Android has for their OS/market place. The choice problem is that if I want to buy an Apple product b/c I like the features, I can't install the features I want on it.
Classic example: my partner has an iphone. I have an android phone. She used to be able to use Google voice search on the iphone and in fact taunted me with it, when I still had a winmo device. Then apple decided to eliminate that app, so she's stuck without it. The switching cost for her to move to android is relatively high, so this one feature doesn't make her buy a new phone, but it still sucks for her and all the people like her.
Why is it good for the general public if Apple runs their business this way? They may be entitled to make these choices, but I think all the complainers/haters are voicing a larger concern, that Apple's behavior is creating less value for the public (and perhaps more value for Apple). Classic business dichotomy, and certainly a complaint voiced on /. about Microsoft Word and Windows a bijillion times as well.
Here's a more detailed write up - I couldn't find the actual study itself: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/latestnewsandevents/a/5695
It might seem laughable on its face, but it's a controlled study and seems to indicate something counter-intuitive. Science is nice that way.