I know that the DC is advertised as 128-bit, but I don't know much more than that. But the P3 is 128-bit'ish'? Its x86! Has the x86 line secretly gone from 32-bit to 128-bit? So where can I find a 128-bit operating system to take advantage of this? Or a project that's trying? Or are we talking here about a few instructions that store their parameters in enough registers to add up to 128-bit?
And which bit of my US car industry story was inaccurate?
Dammit, this thing might be 600MHz or whatever, but its only a 32-bit CISC chip. Its some x86 piece of shit with like 15-years of legacy support built in to it, designed from day one to run general applications. Step back a moment, consider that Nintendo and Sony are using 128-bit RISC chips with modern designs and NO BAGGAGE. Isn't this like the US car market? I read somewhere that a few years ago the Japanese entered the US car market with their super-efficient, highly engineered cars, which have moderately sized engines, and started wuppin' the ass of the US car companies, whose only response (at that time) was to put out cars with even larger capacity engines. As a Englishman, I have alway wondered just what the point is of a 4.5 litre engine when the speed limit is 55?
Sega continued to support the Saturn in the Japanese market quite intensely well after the console had gone cold in the US and Europe.
Sega are a different kind of games company from Sony and Nintendo. Specifically, they make a lot of arcade machines, and then they produce consoles to run home versions. If you like arcade-like games with their immediate access but limited depth, you can't get a better console than a Sega. I suspect that many people who bash Sega simply don't dig the arcade thing. That's a matter of taste, not the fault of the company. The number of people who want arcade-style games might be comparatively small, but that doesn't mean that they should not be served. Just because the mass market doesn't want this stuff, doesn't mean nobody should produce it.
OK, Sega try to sell their console to the largest number of people they can. Consumers decide to buy it, based on what they know of it. If they see the titles available, spot that they are arcade games, and then buy it anyway despite not liking that genre, is that Sega's fault?
Its not just the consumers that MS wants to influence here. Influencing the developers is arguably more important. This could be an effective weapon to stall developers who traditionally do Windows games from making console ports at this point where PC and PS2 are relatively close in specs. 'Hey, that PS2 is much harder to develop for than our X-Box, why not use what you know already to build launch titles for our product instead?'. Double whammy!
Does anyone know if wine has reached the point of running the majority of InstallShield-type installation programs? I used wine for a year or so to run apps installed in a Windows partition, but never managed to get it to run a new installation. Now I have erradicated Windows from my computer, wine appears to be useless because there doesn't seem to be a way to bootstrap the thing (figuratively).
First, does the Australian judicial system have jury selection? Certainly the US doesn't, but the US system isn't the pattern used in most of the world. A lot of countries base their judicial system on the Britsh judiciary, which (thankfully) doesn't have jury selection. And as Australia is a member of the Commonwealth and former part of the British empire...
Secondly, it is not 'a precedent'. A precedent is a legal decision reached at the end of a trial for a legal appeal. This is just a very stupid decision, which may (as someone else in this thread insightfully points out) may be politically motivated in the current situation where the Australian government is trying to gain popular support for Internet censorship.
In this week's Computer Weekly (British IT trade newspaper) an IBM spokesman, Rich Lechner (Vice-President of e-business at IBM's enterprise systems group), is quoted as saying 'Linux opens the S/390 to a new generation of programming talent'. The tone of the article is that IBM is bringing software like Linux and Java to the S/390 because it is getting very difficult for S/390 users to recruit new programmers. This is an angle I haven't seen covered in all the articles that have tracked the progress of this on/.
As a programmer out of college for only a couple of years, I have always been interested in the big iron, but not enough to get skills that seem to be widely considered dead-end. I wouldn't mind writing Java to run on an S/390!
Re:My wife never heard of boo.com
on
Boo No More
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· Score: 2
Apparently this thing was running in England, and was the biggest on-line shop of its kind in the world. Well, as an Englishman, I have to say that the first time I have ever heard of it was this morning on the radio news, where they are trying to pursue the angle that becaue this one ill-conceived venture has failed, the whole Internet must be a flop. Its pretty unlikely that I would have bought anything off them, but then I don't have any interest in the products of hypsters LastMinute.com, but at least I know who they are.
Boo sold sportswear, right? I hate the whole sportswear for casualwear thing. I run and play squash (in real sportswear), but I don't wear Nikes to go to the pub. Its is always taken to the extreme by fat people and teenagers who smoke cigarettes and have bad acne. Why do the obese always wear clothing that tries to suggest they are the most out of shape long-distance runner in the world or something?
If you want it easy for the user, why are they looking at the file system layout? Most X-based user apps (especially in KDE and GNOME) default, when the user opens or saves a file, to the user's home directory. GMC, KFM and Konqueror all open (via their default launch icon/applet) in the user's home directory. They don't need to see any higher up the tree if they are really users (I mean application users) rather than (aspiring) hackers.
You were probably looking around the system because you wanted to learn. That's a good thing. And you were not met with a void - in *nix there is always something more to learn if you want to.
What is this about the writing on the wall for consoles, just because some PC games companies develop using D3D? How does that affect the console market? I am guessing that lbrlove is a PC gaming, non-console-owner.
Go take a look at the PC and then the console sections of your local games shop. How much cross-over do you see? Quake 2, and the Tomb Raider series, anything else? Final Fantasy games have been ported in the opposite direction. Not much cross-over at all.
The console games market is very healthy indeed, and is in no way dependant upon the PC games industry for its success. When a title makes it really big in one sector, it usually gets to cross-over, just to milk the license as far as possible.
But N64 vs PlayStation vs Dreamcast makes a lot more sense than PlayStation vs PC. I have the mis-fortune of owning a PC rather than a decent computer such as an Alpha or UltraSPARC. I don't use it for games at all, because I don't find the PC games genre appealing. RTS and FPS don't get me going at all. PC RPGs tend to be very much in the TSR style, which I don't like. And I would much rather sit on the sofa with my nice big TV and a very well designed controller, and play something really accessible and original than sit at my desk looking at my piddly little 17inch monitor, torturing my wrists with a mouse, and trying to contort my other hand in such a way as to reach all of the most important control keys, in useful combinations.
I'll be buying PS2 and Dolphin, but its pretty unlikely that I will buy any games that do get ported from the PC to them. I'm just not interested.
There is one cross-over from PC to console that does appear to be coming whether people want it or not. On-line gaming. I personally find this disturbing. I have played several PC games over LANs, but only once each. Each time I approach it with an open mind, and each time I come away with the impression that it is just a tedious void. But now Final Fantasy X and Phantasy Star On-line are apparently only going to open up the majority of their content to people who play on-line. I want an accessible videogaming experience with polish, that I can play when it suits me. I don't want to only be able to play if and when three other people that I trust happen to have the same gaming tastes as me, and are available at the same moment in time to play. And be at the mercy of one or more of them deciding half way through the game that they can't be bothered to finish it. And I don't want to meet complete strangers on the Internet, just because some games company marketing department thinks I might. And there is a reason that their script writers earn top dollar, rather than being someone who walked in off the street. They provide top quality content. I don't want my game to have the quality of some amateur, sub-fan-art creation. And how about getting into role? How is that going to work when the people you play with talk about the game mechanically and call you by your real name because they find it easier? Or they ask about something in the real world. Aeris wasn't about to break the spell in that way.
Yes, we hope to be able to make a distribution under a license complying with the Open Source guidelines sometime in the future. For now this is as close as to Open Source as we could get. ---- Doesn't that sound a lot like negotiations to get around some of those 'intellectual property rights' problems? It sounds to me like they are trying to do what the Open Source community would term The Right Thing, but having to sort out a whole lot of sticky legal problems along the way.
Perhaps the idea is to push things as far as possible, and hope that the result is lots of media coverage and a solid growth in sales for the various commercial offerings (such a X-Designer), which in turn will provide solid evidence to those less convinced contributors that going Open Source is The Right Thing for them too?
our OS doesn't have a central, consistent, configuration database, for apps and system resources alike
Thankfully.
No central configuration database for apps and system == no single point of failure
You say you have been using Linux for seven years. Perhaps you have had the luxury of not running MS Windows for seven years? I have been using Linux on my own machine for four years, but at work I have to use MS Windows. The only advantage of the Windows registry is convenience for programmers. The disadvantage is that if its structure gets corrupted, your system is fscked. Its a brain dead idea, full stop.
Or is my judgement clouded by experience with this particular implementation? Are there other OSes that implement such a configuration database without getting it so badly wrong?
If it is true that people teach maths to aid the development of abstract thinking, I wish someone had told this to my high school maths teachers. Unless they were actually trying to stifle such thought... At my high school, maths was taught with only reference to the real world (like geometry was 'how many square metres of carpet do you need for this odd shaped room'). As a result, I did very well in high school, and failed completely when I approached real maths at a higher level.
If only teachers thought it through before they adopt fashionable new techniques. Or you could look at it as a left-wing way to teach - who cares if you lower the standard of the more able students if you can raise the standard of the less able - after all, all good socialist members of society should be the same... I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in England most teachers are socialists.
No, its not pointless or inane - those words (probably) describe the film. I have been playing this game since the run up to the film's release, and I haven't succombed to anybody's pressure to see the damned film yet, and I hope never to have to. I try to play this game with all films that are hyped beyond what anybody would consider reasonable - I haven't seen Star Wars - Cashin One yet either. Why waste my time and money becoming a box office statistic? I highly recommend this game to anyone that might enjoy the challenge of overcoming popular pressure.
The point of probation is that it is supposed to ensure the criminal doesn't go back to their evil ways by monitoring their behaviour and keeping them away from some temptation. Therefore, the limits set by parole boards are NOT set for punitive reasons. Neither is prison supposed to be punitive, it is supposed to rehabilitate. Commonly prison is also considered to be a deterrent to others, though it doesn't seem to work. (But then neither does the rehabilitaton). What I am saying is that although detention and parole are in practice punitive, that is not the direct intention.
Political correctness is newspeak. To not be politically correct is thoughtcrime. You will be vapourised if you hold non-politically correct views. Don't forget that disagreeing with the politically correct is a _very_ serious crime for which all perpetrators must be eliminated.
In years gone by, I was one of the group that you would describe as 'homophobic'. I am completely chilled about homosexuals now. But from having that perspective, I have to say that homophobia is a term used to subvert the truth, to make the politically correct feel better about the situation. There must be some people out there who have a fear of homosexuals, but the majority of the people that the politically correct label as homophobic do not feel fear, they feel hatred.
Alright all you politically correct, keep on censoring your own words and thoughts, and report on others who violate your code. The inner party will reward you.
As an ex-Windows user I have been running Forte Agent with wine for some time. But Pan has just about reached the point now where it replicates almost every feature of Agent that I liked, and introduces some new ones I like even more (such as very easy filtered display of news items). Bye bye Agent... just as I was getting out of Usenet.
Just bear in mind that you need to have GNOME installed to build and run it. However, you don't need to be running GNOME as your 'desktop' in order to run Pan.
Whilst I think it is an excellent idea that parents should use censorware that logs visits rather than restricts them, then assume parental responsibility, how likely is it that the parents of children that use public libraries for Inet access have actually got email addresses? Surely the majority of children that would use the library terminals would be doing so because they don't have access at home?
Whilst there would be some children that were using the library for convenience or some other reason, if the solution doesn't cover everyone, its not going to fly.
Enabling the filter won't do you _any_ good, because the last four Katz articles have been posted in such a way to ensure that the Katz filter doesn't catch them. Presumably this is a commercially driven decision to derive more banner impressions and possibly sell more of Katz's book on geeks, though the result has actually been to bring hordes of people that don't mind flaming Katz into this thread and making a nuisance of our selves.
Lots of people have said that people like me that have posted messages like this one shouldn't bother to read the article. We are just trying to get through that this failure has been noted. I'm not here to flame Katz, and I don't go into Katz stories that get caught by the filter and flame them. If the filter was being respected, my posts wouldn't be here in the faces of the Katz fans. Katz fans, support the anti-Katz people in this, it will lower the amount of anti-Katz postings in here and make your day better.
For the third time this week, and the fourth time this year already, a Katz article has been posted in such a way to circumvent the Katz filter used by the enormous number of/. readers that find even an article blurb on the front page to be beyond mere annoyance.
If you don't want us to be able to filter out Katz, why do you give us the false hope of the option? To some/. readers, the Katz filter alone is enough reason to get a user account. Is it in Katz's contract that you have to do everything, ethical or otherwise, to get his stuff before the largest number of eyeballs?
Are any other filters being circumvented? Katz is the only thing I filter. Is anyone annoyed about this kind of thing elsewhere in the site?
The plays and films are just less talented people trying to cash in on the Pratchett magic. Like the plays, which are written by someone else. I just get the feeling that the guy smelt the money, wrote the play and then asked Pratchett if he could produce it for a license fee or something. He is the same guy that 'co-authors' all those stupid cash-in encyclopedias and of the Discworld, maps and recipe books. A bit like the Tolkien franchise as successfully managed by Christopher Tolkein - oh look I have just found the 14th 'lost manuscript' that no one knew existed!
I was simply highlighting the depth of feeling that those of us with the Katz Repellent (in case you don't know what I'm talking about, this is an 'exclude if author is Jon Katz' option in user preferences) enabled truly feel. We really don't like him. OK, I wouldn't like to hear that he was dead. If he died, I would rather that the item got filtered out by the Katz Repellent. Clear?
My voice is one of a multitude raising the same complaint in this story and the interview Katz story today. I wouldn't normally bother to raise a point someone else had made, but the point is that the Katz lovers don't believe that many people dislike Katz. We are flaming to bring attention to our plight. This is/. civil disobedience!
You say that we don't have to read him, but that is not entirely true. When we switched on the Katz Repellent, we were under the impression it meant we wouldn't have to see his writings ever again. The only reason that we have had to see his writing three times in the last few weeks is because the stories are being submitted under other peoples' names. The first time this happened, we could believe it was a genuinely one off situation where the poster hadn't considered this angle. Now it is starting to look like a media whore conspiracy.
The reason I dislike him is because he is the ultimate media whore. When he wrote for HotWired, that was OK, because he was a media whore writing articles for people who were interested in media whoring. He used to right articles about 'nu media' and how he had noticed this and how he understood this thing and could help everyone else get it. He had a dream of being Jon Katz, Nu Media Guru, who everyone would admire and say nice things about, and include in the history books, and quote in all other media. Over on HotWired, you could read his column a couple of times and decide whether you thought he was enacting a plan to ellevate himself within the media and never read his stuff again, or (if you were an aspiring media whore) he was saying all the things you wanted to hear, and could become a devotee. HotWired died, and Katz had to find a Nu base from which to continue his plan./. was where he washed up.
When he arrived here, I read his articles. I was interested to see if he would mend his ways now he was speaking to a new audience, a group of people that knew a thing or two about the possibilities of the future (and would cringe at the pathetic respelling of words so as to appear in the know). I switched on the Katz Repellent when he was writing article after article about the Columbine masacre. These articles showed Katz up to his old tricks - writing exactly what they wanted to hear. Plenty of people who read/. and have strong 'geek' credentials managed to go through school without being bullied. Plenty of people that are in no way related to 'geekdom' get bullied mercilessly at school. Being a target of bullying is more to do with exhibiting a lack of social skills, even fluanting it by dressing in a way to make sure everyone knows you want to stay apart from that you can't understand - normal human interaction. I speak from experience. I had a bad time at school, but I don't put it down to everyone else's fault, some great conspiracy against geeks. I know that it was caused by my inappropriate social behaviour, which was socialised into me by lack of contact with people with strong social skills.
Katz just plays up to peoples' preconceptions. People who are being bullied feel paranoid, and rarely see any cause for it in themselves (I didn't understand for years). So Katz writes about how terrible it is, and how it is everybody else's evil fault. And he comes up with a ludicrously over the top title for his articles, and then starts trying to turn that title into a brand name. Essentially, he exploits the weak and the vain, in order to promote himself. Just like the leaders of pseudo-religious cults.
Katz's agenda appears to be the furtherance of Katz. Now it appears that someone on his side has spotted the popularity of the Katz Repellent, and decided to do something about this. Knowing that a lot of people don't want to see some material but using a method of transmission that will ensure they see it anyway is a lot like spam email. Some porn site (Katz, to a Katz lover, is a lot like mutual masturbation) knows that if they send an indesciminate piece of spam, 99% of recipients will be offended, but 1% might respond, and they don't care about the 99% because 1% is a lot of eyeballs and the 99% would never visit their site anyway. OK, the interview Katz article is just a cult of Katz piece, but this book exert is clearly being provided to try to drive book sales. Its as though someone has thought 'Well if even a few people that filter Katz see this and just for once like it, that's still a few extra sales.'
Why give us the chance to express our preference, and then just ignore it?
I have the Katz filter on, but there are two Katz stories on the front page today. So I feel I must add my voice to the cacophony of shouts that this be fixed once and for all
Just to make that clear, here is the question I would like to ask Katz:
Jon Katz, why don't you just fuck off and die? Does it give you a great deal of pleasure annoying/. readers and doing your media whore routine in an unfriendly environment?
Slashdot Mirror
I know that the DC is advertised as 128-bit, but I don't know much more than that. But the P3 is 128-bit'ish'? Its x86! Has the x86 line secretly gone from 32-bit to 128-bit? So where can I find a 128-bit operating system to take advantage of this? Or a project that's trying? Or are we talking here about a few instructions that store their parameters in enough registers to add up to 128-bit?
And which bit of my US car industry story was inaccurate?
Dammit, this thing might be 600MHz or whatever, but its only a 32-bit CISC chip. Its some x86 piece of shit with like 15-years of legacy support built in to it, designed from day one to run general applications. Step back a moment, consider that Nintendo and Sony are using 128-bit RISC chips with modern designs and NO BAGGAGE. Isn't this like the US car market? I read somewhere that a few years ago the Japanese entered the US car market with their super-efficient, highly engineered cars, which have moderately sized engines, and started wuppin' the ass of the US car companies, whose only response (at that time) was to put out cars with even larger capacity engines. As a Englishman, I have alway wondered just what the point is of a 4.5 litre engine when the speed limit is 55?
Sega continued to support the Saturn in the Japanese market quite intensely well after the console had gone cold in the US and Europe.
Sega are a different kind of games company from Sony and Nintendo. Specifically, they make a lot of arcade machines, and then they produce consoles to run home versions. If you like arcade-like games with their immediate access but limited depth, you can't get a better console than a Sega. I suspect that many people who bash Sega simply don't dig the arcade thing. That's a matter of taste, not the fault of the company. The number of people who want arcade-style games might be comparatively small, but that doesn't mean that they should not be served. Just because the mass market doesn't want this stuff, doesn't mean nobody should produce it.
OK, Sega try to sell their console to the largest number of people they can. Consumers decide to buy it, based on what they know of it. If they see the titles available, spot that they are arcade games, and then buy it anyway despite not liking that genre, is that Sega's fault?
Its not just the consumers that MS wants to influence here. Influencing the developers is arguably more important. This could be an effective weapon to stall developers who traditionally do Windows games from making console ports at this point where PC and PS2 are relatively close in specs. 'Hey, that PS2 is much harder to develop for than our X-Box, why not use what you know already to build launch titles for our product instead?'. Double whammy!
Does anyone know if wine has reached the point of running the majority of InstallShield-type installation programs? I used wine for a year or so to run apps installed in a Windows partition, but never managed to get it to run a new installation. Now I have erradicated Windows from my computer, wine appears to be useless because there doesn't seem to be a way to bootstrap the thing (figuratively).
Two things.
First, does the Australian judicial system have jury selection? Certainly the US doesn't, but the US system isn't the pattern used in most of the world. A lot of countries base their judicial system on the Britsh judiciary, which (thankfully) doesn't have jury selection. And as Australia is a member of the Commonwealth and former part of the British empire...
Secondly, it is not 'a precedent'. A precedent is a legal decision reached at the end of a trial for a legal appeal. This is just a very stupid decision, which may (as someone else in this thread insightfully points out) may be politically motivated in the current situation where the Australian government is trying to gain popular support for Internet censorship.
In this week's Computer Weekly (British IT trade newspaper) an IBM spokesman, Rich Lechner (Vice-President of e-business at IBM's enterprise systems group), is quoted as saying 'Linux opens the S/390 to a new generation of programming talent'. The tone of the article is that IBM is bringing software like Linux and Java to the S/390 because it is getting very difficult for S/390 users to recruit new programmers. This is an angle I haven't seen covered in all the articles that have tracked the progress of this on /.
As a programmer out of college for only a couple of years, I have always been interested in the big iron, but not enough to get skills that seem to be widely considered dead-end. I wouldn't mind writing Java to run on an S/390!
Apparently this thing was running in England, and was the biggest on-line shop of its kind in the world. Well, as an Englishman, I have to say that the first time I have ever heard of it was this morning on the radio news, where they are trying to pursue the angle that becaue this one ill-conceived venture has failed, the whole Internet must be a flop. Its pretty unlikely that I would have bought anything off them, but then I don't have any interest in the products of hypsters LastMinute.com, but at least I know who they are.
Boo sold sportswear, right? I hate the whole sportswear for casualwear thing. I run and play squash (in real sportswear), but I don't wear Nikes to go to the pub. Its is always taken to the extreme by fat people and teenagers who smoke cigarettes and have bad acne. Why do the obese always wear clothing that tries to suggest they are the most out of shape long-distance runner in the world or something?
If you want it easy for the user, why are they looking at the file system layout? Most X-based user apps (especially in KDE and GNOME) default, when the user opens or saves a file, to the user's home directory. GMC, KFM and Konqueror all open (via their default launch icon/applet) in the user's home directory. They don't need to see any higher up the tree if they are really users (I mean application users) rather than (aspiring) hackers.
You were probably looking around the system because you wanted to learn. That's a good thing. And you were not met with a void - in *nix there is always something more to learn if you want to.
What is this about the writing on the wall for consoles, just because some PC games companies develop using D3D? How does that affect the console market? I am guessing that lbrlove is a PC gaming, non-console-owner.
Go take a look at the PC and then the console sections of your local games shop. How much cross-over do you see? Quake 2, and the Tomb Raider series, anything else? Final Fantasy games have been ported in the opposite direction. Not much cross-over at all.
The console games market is very healthy indeed, and is in no way dependant upon the PC games industry for its success. When a title makes it really big in one sector, it usually gets to cross-over, just to milk the license as far as possible.
But N64 vs PlayStation vs Dreamcast makes a lot more sense than PlayStation vs PC. I have the mis-fortune of owning a PC rather than a decent computer such as an Alpha or UltraSPARC. I don't use it for games at all, because I don't find the PC games genre appealing. RTS and FPS don't get me going at all. PC RPGs tend to be very much in the TSR style, which I don't like. And I would much rather sit on the sofa with my nice big TV and a very well designed controller, and play something really accessible and original than sit at my desk looking at my piddly little 17inch monitor, torturing my wrists with a mouse, and trying to contort my other hand in such a way as to reach all of the most important control keys, in useful combinations.
I'll be buying PS2 and Dolphin, but its pretty unlikely that I will buy any games that do get ported from the PC to them. I'm just not interested.
There is one cross-over from PC to console that does appear to be coming whether people want it or not. On-line gaming. I personally find this disturbing. I have played several PC games over LANs, but only once each. Each time I approach it with an open mind, and each time I come away with the impression that it is just a tedious void. But now Final Fantasy X and Phantasy Star On-line are apparently only going to open up the majority of their content to people who play on-line. I want an accessible videogaming experience with polish, that I can play when it suits me. I don't want to only be able to play if and when three other people that I trust happen to have the same gaming tastes as me, and are available at the same moment in time to play. And be at the mercy of one or more of them deciding half way through the game that they can't be bothered to finish it. And I don't want to meet complete strangers on the Internet, just because some games company marketing department thinks I might. And there is a reason that their script writers earn top dollar, rather than being someone who walked in off the street. They provide top quality content. I don't want my game to have the quality of some amateur, sub-fan-art creation. And how about getting into role? How is that going to work when the people you play with talk about the game mechanically and call you by your real name because they find it easier? Or they ask about something in the real world. Aeris wasn't about to break the spell in that way.
PC gaming, please stay away from my consoles!
From the FAQ:
----
QUESTION:
Will Motif be made Open Source in the future?
ANSWER:
Yes, we hope to be able to make a distribution under a license complying with the Open Source guidelines sometime in the future. For now this is as close as to Open Source as we could get.
----
Doesn't that sound a lot like negotiations to get around some of those 'intellectual property rights' problems? It sounds to me like they are trying to do what the Open Source community would term The Right Thing, but having to sort out a whole lot of sticky legal problems along the way.
Perhaps the idea is to push things as far as possible, and hope that the result is lots of media coverage and a solid growth in sales for the various commercial offerings (such a X-Designer), which in turn will provide solid evidence to those less convinced contributors that going Open Source is The Right Thing for them too?
our OS doesn't have a central, consistent, configuration database, for apps and system resources alike
Thankfully.
No central configuration database for apps and system == no single point of failure
You say you have been using Linux for seven years. Perhaps you have had the luxury of not running MS Windows for seven years? I have been using Linux on my own machine for four years, but at work I have to use MS Windows. The only advantage of the Windows registry is convenience for programmers. The disadvantage is that if its structure gets corrupted, your system is fscked. Its a brain dead idea, full stop.
Or is my judgement clouded by experience with this particular implementation? Are there other OSes that implement such a configuration database without getting it so badly wrong?
If it is true that people teach maths to aid the development of abstract thinking, I wish someone had told this to my high school maths teachers. Unless they were actually trying to stifle such thought... At my high school, maths was taught with only reference to the real world (like geometry was 'how many square metres of carpet do you need for this odd shaped room'). As a result, I did very well in high school, and failed completely when I approached real maths at a higher level.
If only teachers thought it through before they adopt fashionable new techniques. Or you could look at it as a left-wing way to teach - who cares if you lower the standard of the more able students if you can raise the standard of the less able - after all, all good socialist members of society should be the same... I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in England most teachers are socialists.
No, its not pointless or inane - those words (probably) describe the film. I have been playing this game since the run up to the film's release, and I haven't succombed to anybody's pressure to see the damned film yet, and I hope never to have to. I try to play this game with all films that are hyped beyond what anybody would consider reasonable - I haven't seen Star Wars - Cashin One yet either. Why waste my time and money becoming a box office statistic? I highly recommend this game to anyone that might enjoy the challenge of overcoming popular pressure.
The point of probation is that it is supposed to ensure the criminal doesn't go back to their evil ways by monitoring their behaviour and keeping them away from some temptation. Therefore, the limits set by parole boards are NOT set for punitive reasons. Neither is prison supposed to be punitive, it is supposed to rehabilitate. Commonly prison is also considered to be a deterrent to others, though it doesn't seem to work. (But then neither does the rehabilitaton). What I am saying is that although detention and parole are in practice punitive, that is not the direct intention.
Doesn't lwall work for O'Reilly? New features drive customer demand for edition++
Political correctness is newspeak. To not be politically correct is thoughtcrime. You will be vapourised if you hold non-politically correct views. Don't forget that disagreeing with the politically correct is a _very_ serious crime for which all perpetrators must be eliminated.
In years gone by, I was one of the group that you would describe as 'homophobic'. I am completely chilled about homosexuals now. But from having that perspective, I have to say that homophobia is a term used to subvert the truth, to make the politically correct feel better about the situation. There must be some people out there who have a fear of homosexuals, but the majority of the people that the politically correct label as homophobic do not feel fear, they feel hatred.
Alright all you politically correct, keep on censoring your own words and thoughts, and report on others who violate your code. The inner party will reward you.
Pan
As an ex-Windows user I have been running Forte Agent with wine for some time. But Pan has just about reached the point now where it replicates almost every feature of Agent that I liked, and introduces some new ones I like even more (such as very easy filtered display of news items). Bye bye Agent... just as I was getting out of Usenet.
Just bear in mind that you need to have GNOME installed to build and run it. However, you don't need to be running GNOME as your 'desktop' in order to run Pan.
Whilst I think it is an excellent idea that parents should use censorware that logs visits rather than restricts them, then assume parental responsibility, how likely is it that the parents of children that use public libraries for Inet access have actually got email addresses? Surely the majority of children that would use the library terminals would be doing so because they don't have access at home?
Whilst there would be some children that were using the library for convenience or some other reason, if the solution doesn't cover everyone, its not going to fly.
Enabling the filter won't do you _any_ good, because the last four Katz articles have been posted in such a way to ensure that the Katz filter doesn't catch them. Presumably this is a commercially driven decision to derive more banner impressions and possibly sell more of Katz's book on geeks, though the result has actually been to bring hordes of people that don't mind flaming Katz into this thread and making a nuisance of our selves.
Lots of people have said that people like me that have posted messages like this one shouldn't bother to read the article. We are just trying to get through that this failure has been noted. I'm not here to flame Katz, and I don't go into Katz stories that get caught by the filter and flame them. If the filter was being respected, my posts wouldn't be here in the faces of the Katz fans. Katz fans, support the anti-Katz people in this, it will lower the amount of anti-Katz postings in here and make your day better.
See, its got me so annoyed, I've started missing out closing s!
For the third time this week, and the fourth time this year already, a Katz article has been posted in such a way to circumvent the Katz filter used by the enormous number of /. readers that find even an article blurb on the front page to be beyond mere annoyance.
If you don't want us to be able to filter out Katz, why do you give us the false hope of the option? To some /. readers, the Katz filter alone is enough reason to get a user account. Is it in Katz's contract that you have to do everything, ethical or otherwise, to get his stuff before the largest number of eyeballs?
Are any other filters being circumvented? Katz is the only thing I filter. Is anyone annoyed about this kind of thing elsewhere in the site?
The plays and films are just less talented people trying to cash in on the Pratchett magic. Like the plays, which are written by someone else. I just get the feeling that the guy smelt the money, wrote the play and then asked Pratchett if he could produce it for a license fee or something. He is the same guy that 'co-authors' all those stupid cash-in encyclopedias and of the Discworld, maps and recipe books. A bit like the Tolkien franchise as successfully managed by Christopher Tolkein - oh look I have just found the 14th 'lost manuscript' that no one knew existed!
I was simply highlighting the depth of feeling that those of us with the Katz Repellent (in case you don't know what I'm talking about, this is an 'exclude if author is Jon Katz' option in user preferences) enabled truly feel. We really don't like him. OK, I wouldn't like to hear that he was dead. If he died, I would rather that the item got filtered out by the Katz Repellent. Clear?
My voice is one of a multitude raising the same complaint in this story and the interview Katz story today. I wouldn't normally bother to raise a point someone else had made, but the point is that the Katz lovers don't believe that many people dislike Katz. We are flaming to bring attention to our plight. This is /. civil disobedience!
You say that we don't have to read him, but that is not entirely true. When we switched on the Katz Repellent, we were under the impression it meant we wouldn't have to see his writings ever again. The only reason that we have had to see his writing three times in the last few weeks is because the stories are being submitted under other peoples' names. The first time this happened, we could believe it was a genuinely one off situation where the poster hadn't considered this angle. Now it is starting to look like a media whore conspiracy.
The reason I dislike him is because he is the ultimate media whore. When he wrote for HotWired, that was OK, because he was a media whore writing articles for people who were interested in media whoring. He used to right articles about 'nu media' and how he had noticed this and how he understood this thing and could help everyone else get it. He had a dream of being Jon Katz, Nu Media Guru, who everyone would admire and say nice things about, and include in the history books, and quote in all other media. Over on HotWired, you could read his column a couple of times and decide whether you thought he was enacting a plan to ellevate himself within the media and never read his stuff again, or (if you were an aspiring media whore) he was saying all the things you wanted to hear, and could become a devotee. HotWired died, and Katz had to find a Nu base from which to continue his plan. /. was where he washed up.
When he arrived here, I read his articles. I was interested to see if he would mend his ways now he was speaking to a new audience, a group of people that knew a thing or two about the possibilities of the future (and would cringe at the pathetic respelling of words so as to appear in the know). I switched on the Katz Repellent when he was writing article after article about the Columbine masacre. These articles showed Katz up to his old tricks - writing exactly what they wanted to hear. Plenty of people who read /. and have strong 'geek' credentials managed to go through school without being bullied. Plenty of people that are in no way related to 'geekdom' get bullied mercilessly at school. Being a target of bullying is more to do with exhibiting a lack of social skills, even fluanting it by dressing in a way to make sure everyone knows you want to stay apart from that you can't understand - normal human interaction. I speak from experience. I had a bad time at school, but I don't put it down to everyone else's fault, some great conspiracy against geeks. I know that it was caused by my inappropriate social behaviour, which was socialised into me by lack of contact with people with strong social skills.
Katz just plays up to peoples' preconceptions. People who are being bullied feel paranoid, and rarely see any cause for it in themselves (I didn't understand for years). So Katz writes about how terrible it is, and how it is everybody else's evil fault. And he comes up with a ludicrously over the top title for his articles, and then starts trying to turn that title into a brand name. Essentially, he exploits the weak and the vain, in order to promote himself. Just like the leaders of pseudo-religious cults.
Katz's agenda appears to be the furtherance of Katz. Now it appears that someone on his side has spotted the popularity of the Katz Repellent, and decided to do something about this. Knowing that a lot of people don't want to see some material but using a method of transmission that will ensure they see it anyway is a lot like spam email. Some porn site (Katz, to a Katz lover, is a lot like mutual masturbation) knows that if they send an indesciminate piece of spam, 99% of recipients will be offended, but 1% might respond, and they don't care about the 99% because 1% is a lot of eyeballs and the 99% would never visit their site anyway. OK, the interview Katz article is just a cult of Katz piece, but this book exert is clearly being provided to try to drive book sales. Its as though someone has thought 'Well if even a few people that filter Katz see this and just for once like it, that's still a few extra sales.'
Why give us the chance to express our preference, and then just ignore it?
I have the Katz filter on, but there are two Katz stories on the front page today. So I feel I must add my voice to the cacophony of shouts that this be fixed once and for all
Just to make that clear, here is the question I would like to ask Katz:
Jon Katz, why don't you just fuck off and die? Does it give you a great deal of pleasure annoying /. readers and doing your media whore routine in an unfriendly environment?