Violence and sexuality are important parts of the human experience, and they have a place in art, but only in art that is actually trying to comment on those aspects of the human experience.
Violence and sexuality in art are tools which can be used for whatever ends the artist wants.
(no argument about games from me -- I think a lot of violence etc in games is essentially for marketing purposes, not for any "artistic" purpose)
It's really quite bizarre -- every time there's a story on google, there's a flurry of posts decrying how awful google's results have become, claiming that the SEO guys have completely gamed them, blah blah blah.
But these claims seem to have utterly no relationship to reality as I can see it.
The results I get from google are if anything more accurate now than they've ever been, and the exceptions to that trend are almost always searches I already know are questionable (e.g. because I can only think of extremely generic terms). Moreover, the speed with which data shows up in google has become almost bizarrely fast (posts I make to mailing lists typically show up in google after a few hours [on the list's archive site]).
When the complainer gives a specific example (this is rare -- the claims are usually very vague), and I try it myself, the results I get are usually great.
I figure that at least a portion of these complainers are (1) MS astroturfers, (2) desperate SEO marketers, or (3) people searching for vague and highly gamed subjects (e.g. pr0n), and/or (4) people that simply suck so much at constructing search queries that they're doomed regardless of the engine they use.
However, given the number of such complaints, I often wonder if there's something else going on, that somehow strongly messes with google results for some searchers, but not others (if so, luckily I seem to be in the "not messed up" group)...
You've got to be kidding... the DS has like 7 billion games available, covering pretty much every imaginable genre in great depth.
Sure there are vast quantities of "brain age" and "kanji master 10" type games, but there are vast quantities of every type of game on the DS....
Yes but the main problem with the DS as well is the overpresence of kids games on the store shelves, for every adult game are 10 pony games and 20 disney movie tie ins.
I don't get that impression at all -- while there are certainly are lots of games aimed at kids, there doesn't seem to be any really dominant genre on the DS; it covers most of them pretty well. Given that it's a portable system, of course, there probably are more quick pick-up-and-go type of games than on TV consoles.
Granted, game stores near you may be different than game stores near me; maybe near you, there are simply lots of kids with DSes, and the stores stock accordingly. [I live in Japan, which probably has a more widely entrenched gaming culture than the U.S.]
Actually, the vast majority of people I've seen using DSes in public are young adults, as are the majority of people browsing in the DS section in games stores (in that sense, the DS is noticeably different than e.g., the gameboy and the GBA -- the majority of gameboy owners did seem to be kids in my experience; the GBA was a bit less so, and the DS much less so). Oddly enough, the majority of people I see playing the PSP in public seem to be kids!
Hardcore gaming is not their market anymore. Look at the DS and its sales. Then look at the number of sales of games considered high learning curve and games like brain age and nintendogs.
They are competing... on a diferent market. If you are like me and those "casual" type games dont amuse you then Nintendo is no longer for you.
You've got to be kidding... the DS has like 7 billion games available, covering pretty much every imaginable genre in great depth.
Sure there are vast quantities of "brain age" and "kanji master 10" type games, but there are vast quantities of every type of game on the DS....
While alternating between zero and two G every two minutes? Doesn't sound like a good idea to me. More like a continuous car crash than a quiet evening.
Like a lot of bad ideas, it'll probably make for great stories though....
"Grandpa, is it true you got married while covered in vomit?"
You know, it's all fine and nice to be anti-religion, but I am so sick of people involving Christianity whenever Scientology comes up. There is a difference between religion and cult
Perhaps, but it seems more like a continuum than a hard division. Some cults/religions are obviously nuttier and more corrupt than others, of course.
You don't actually think Canonical does any of the work which goes into Ubuntu do ya? They're a distro.. they do packaging, packaging and, occasionally, net manager.
... and of course in Ubuntu's case, a huge proportion of the packaging/infrastructure work actually comes from Debian!
The era of movie theatres is gone. People play games because they're convenient.
Is this really any surprise? Movie theatres are inconvenient, relatively expensive, and you have to take pot luck when it comes to movie goers you might have to put up with. Most people have a TV and a DVD player.
That's certainly true for some people, in some situations, but it's hardly true universally.
Seeing a movie in a theater is a social experience. I find that in a nice theater with a good audience, there's a vibe and energy, and a sense of being immersed in the experience that simply isn't there with a bigscreen TV and a few friends. It's not a subtle difference, the two experiences simply aren't even close. I've watched movies in both settings, and sometimes a film which seemed kinda blah and boring on DVD springs to life in the theater.
Maybe you value privacy and the underwear thing more than the energy of the crowd, and maybe moviegoers in your area are all jerks, so in your case, perhaps watching a DVD is usually better.
I, on the other hand, far prefer seeing something in the theater if at all possible. Watching DVDs with friends is a fun thing too, but it's really a different activity, not a replacement for the theater experience.
$10 says he isn't Obama's running mate next election.
I don't see why not -- Biden's actually been a pretty good vice president, and if anything is more respected and valued now than he was when he was selected as Obama's running mate.
Silly Fox News non-stories and bizarro Republican whinging are not a very good basis on which to judge someone...
hint: Offending a security guard's sensitivities isn't against the law.
Seriously, and this kind of stupid crap happens in even far more innocuous circumstances ("it's illegal to take photos here sir <in public place where it most certainly isn't illegal>, you'll have to delete those pictures")... these days it's kind of like some kind of bizarro security-guard meme.
[Well, presumably it's the guards' idiot managers who are actually at fault; the guards probably don't actually come up with this shit spontaneously.]
Google seems to think elsevier is OK too (despite google's rules).
AFAIK Google has a rule where a website is not allowed to give Google's spiders a different page from what normal users would get.
I often see google search results linking to elsevier (or other journal) pages, with relevant keywords and text in them, however if you click on the link you get a page that doesn't have the same info. Such search results are not useful to me - in fact they get in the way of more useful results.
Even if they are breaking google's rules, that obviously doesn't imply that google somehow approves of them, merely that they've (so far) escaped detection.
There's also now an "Official White House Photostream" user on flickr, which has some excellent photos, with many interesting shots of life and work inside the whitehouse.
Many of the pictures are unexpectedly candid as well. The white house photographers (there are several, but most of the photos in the stream seem to be from Pete Souza) are apparently given a lot of freedom to lurk around waiting for a good opportunity!
I dunno about ZFS, but I've recently been playing with a freebsd install (7.1 I think), and ports, while a cool idea, seems pretty creaky in practice.
My main beefs were not with the infrastructure, which seemed OK, but that the package maintenance seemed pretty spotty: many many packages (even fairly "major" ones) were pretty out-of-date, even compared to e.g. debian stable, and in many cases they were installed as monolithic chunks where a bit of judicious splitting would have been very helpful -- for example, an otherwise fairly dependency-free library that happens to come with some demo apps that drag in all of OpenGL and X (it would have been better to put the apps with their heavy dependencies in a separate package, or make their inclusion easily configurable)!
Sadly, the ports collection felt kind of like a 2nd-class add-on (and I gather, that's essentially what it is). Even though there are many packages in debian where the maintainer should probably be doing a better job, on average debian's package collection feels a lot more solid to me that what freebsd has in ports...
Yup, like everywhere, the U.S. has bad teachers and brilliant teachers, and the majority are at least competent. Most seem to be very hard-working as well. In my experience, truly awful teachers are quite rare (but of course everybody has their own story to tell...).
In any case, teachers really aren't the problem with American education -- the problem is American culture.
If you look at a place like Korea, while its education system of course has its own problems, academic success is admired (at all levels, not just in higher education), both by students and parents. It's a lot easier to get students to study harder if both peer-pressure and parental pressure is pushing them (hard!) in that direction...
Yup, one machine I often use is maintained by someone else, and they switched to xfs (from ext3) when rebuilding the system after a big hardware-loss incident. From my perspective, the experience is clearly worse. In particular the whole "deleting lots of little files" thing (which I seem to do quite often) -- in ext3 I never noticed any delay, but xfs seems to take forever to do the same operation.
I get the impression that xfs was designed with a particual usage in mind -- big media servers, IIRC -- and shines there, but is maybe not the best choice for a general-purpose machine.
Yup, me too -- exact same search terms, and the first link on google is precisely what the grandparent says he wanted.
It's a bit mystifying really; I regularly see claims in slashdot comments about how awful google is these days, and yet this bears absolutely no resemblance to my own experience -- for me, google's results are extremely good, perhaps even better now than in the past (and certainly leagues ahead of crap like MSN live search).
I'm not sure how to reconcile this... some possibilities come to mind:
I'm simply better at picking search terms than these other people (but what about cases like the current one, where I get perfect results using exactly the same search terms?)
Google's great for what I search for (mostly technical subjects), but not so much for what these other people search for (perhaps more... "contested" subjects like pr0n?) -- but again, that doesn't apply to the current example
Google tracks what I search for and somehow adapts better for me (I dunno if this is true, and anyway, I seem to see equally good performance when searching in internet cafes etc)
Google does geolocation and somehow gives better results for my location than theirs (they probably do know where I am, but it seems a bit far-fetched to explain the differences)
The people claiming google sucks are just MS/spam-king shills trying to spread a bit of FUD...
I work as a programmer in a Japanese company, and while most of the other (Japanese) programmers on my team are roughly "conversant" in English, most of them are not really fluent or particularly comfortable with it.
So what seems to happen is that, as you mention, all the class names and variable names are English (though they often make technically-correct-but-slightly-odd choices of words), but write all their comments and commit logs etc in Japanese.
It makes sense really --
A large part of the code base was already in English, so the new names fit better if they're similar
The actual code needs to be in ASCII, and transliterated-into-ASCII Japanese isn't particularly readable
Because of the significance of English in programming literature, programmers have exposure to many English programming names and idioms, even if their education wasn't in English
Comments etc, can be written using a fuller character-set, and are much more difficult to write well and understandably using simple English
I'd guess that most people have a slightly more nuanced position. Mine is roughly: "sure I'll pay a reasonable fee for your service -- but then you need to not suck."
Last.fm, of course, fails with flying colors.
I think that becoming a paid service inevitably results in hugely increased expectations from your customers, even if the fee is relatively small.
[I sometimes use last.fm -- but mostly because it's free, not because it's any good.]
Yeah, as you point out, some benchmarks on phoronix have been pretty sloppy.
I think it's a great site for some purposes (where else can you find headlines on X development?), but I doubt many take their benchmarking seriously.
While bad benchmarking is hardly rare, it's kind of disappointing in the case of phoronix, which is obviously aiming at a more technically savvy audience than most sites are, and often does benchmarks (such as this one) that are much more interesting to the FOSS crowd than the typical mouth-breather "win7 vs. xp" stuff you see elsewhere.
I was slightly disappointed when looking for the amount of drivers added for desktop users. Looking through the release log, I can only find one driver added for the home desktop user.
...
I know, but what I meant was new hardware. Linux often can't keep up with the rapid rate of new hardware flooding the market.
If a new device uses a standard protocol or an already-supported chipset, there usually doesn't need to be a new driver for it. With more and more hardware using standard interfaces these days (usb, etc), there's less and less need for new drivers.
So the concept of "counting new drivers" (as you claim to have done) is meaningless.
If there's a device you want to use, and you find it isn't supported (and by "find" I mean, you try it, and it doesn't work), that's the time to complain.
Did you do that? Or are you just complaining for the sake of complaining?
And honestly, is it really a good idea to enable more people to buy cars?
Of course not. But it's a sad cycle -- people in very poor countries like this see cars as being status symbols, a sign of wealth. Society (and the government) often treat increase car ownership the same way, as some indicator that they've "made it," and try to emphasize car-oriented development.
By the time they come to the realization that having every poor schmuck in the city driving to work is a really dumb idea, and not very scalable, it may be too late...
ZFS can do it: it writes the whole transaction to disk or rolls back in case of a crash, so why not ext4? These lame excuses that this is totally "expected" behavior is a shame!
I read the FA, and it actually really does look like the applications are simply using stupidly risky practices:
These applications are truncating the file before writing (i.e., opening with O_TRUNC), and then assuming that the truncation and any following write are atomic. That's obviously not true -- what happens if your system is very busy (not surprising in the startup flurry which is apparently where this stuff happens), the process doesn't get scheduled for a while after the truncate (but before the write), and the system happens to crash in that interval?
I'm as lazy as they get, but even I know enough not to do that kind of crap...
There's probably some way the FS could finesse this issue -- e.g., don't actually schedule truncation until you see the first write or close -- but it would be a workaround for buggy applications, not a FS bugfix.
Slashdot Mirror
Violence and sexuality are important parts of the human experience, and they have a place in art, but only in art that is actually trying to comment on those aspects of the human experience.
Violence and sexuality in art are tools which can be used for whatever ends the artist wants.
(no argument about games from me -- I think a lot of violence etc in games is essentially for marketing purposes, not for any "artistic" purpose)
I played Cooking Mama lite on the iPhone and couldn't really tell a difference between it and the DS version. Same for the "My Little Pony" ports.
I guess it's Cooking Mama Xtreme that's famous for pushing hardware to the limit...
It's really quite bizarre -- every time there's a story on google, there's a flurry of posts decrying how awful google's results have become, claiming that the SEO guys have completely gamed them, blah blah blah.
But these claims seem to have utterly no relationship to reality as I can see it.
The results I get from google are if anything more accurate now than they've ever been, and the exceptions to that trend are almost always searches I already know are questionable (e.g. because I can only think of extremely generic terms). Moreover, the speed with which data shows up in google has become almost bizarrely fast (posts I make to mailing lists typically show up in google after a few hours [on the list's archive site]).
When the complainer gives a specific example (this is rare -- the claims are usually very vague), and I try it myself, the results I get are usually great.
I figure that at least a portion of these complainers are (1) MS astroturfers, (2) desperate SEO marketers, or (3) people searching for vague and highly gamed subjects (e.g. pr0n), and/or (4) people that simply suck so much at constructing search queries that they're doomed regardless of the engine they use.
However, given the number of such complaints, I often wonder if there's something else going on, that somehow strongly messes with google results for some searchers, but not others (if so, luckily I seem to be in the "not messed up" group)...
You've got to be kidding ... the DS has like 7 billion games available, covering pretty much every imaginable genre in great depth.
Sure there are vast quantities of "brain age" and "kanji master 10" type games, but there are vast quantities of every type of game on the DS....
Yes but the main problem with the DS as well is the overpresence of kids games on the store shelves, for every adult game are 10 pony games and 20 disney movie tie ins.
I don't get that impression at all -- while there are certainly are lots of games aimed at kids, there doesn't seem to be any really dominant genre on the DS; it covers most of them pretty well. Given that it's a portable system, of course, there probably are more quick pick-up-and-go type of games than on TV consoles.
Granted, game stores near you may be different than game stores near me; maybe near you, there are simply lots of kids with DSes, and the stores stock accordingly. [I live in Japan, which probably has a more widely entrenched gaming culture than the U.S.]
Actually, the vast majority of people I've seen using DSes in public are young adults, as are the majority of people browsing in the DS section in games stores (in that sense, the DS is noticeably different than e.g., the gameboy and the GBA -- the majority of gameboy owners did seem to be kids in my experience; the GBA was a bit less so, and the DS much less so). Oddly enough, the majority of people I see playing the PSP in public seem to be kids!
Hardcore gaming is not their market anymore. Look at the DS and its sales. Then look at the number of sales of games considered high learning curve and games like brain age and nintendogs.
They are competing... on a diferent market. If you are like me and those "casual" type games dont amuse you then Nintendo is no longer for you.
You've got to be kidding ... the DS has like 7 billion games available, covering pretty much every imaginable genre in great depth.
Sure there are vast quantities of "brain age" and "kanji master 10" type games, but there are vast quantities of every type of game on the DS....
while drinking
While alternating between zero and two G every two minutes? Doesn't sound like a good idea to me. More like a continuous car crash than a quiet evening.
Like a lot of bad ideas, it'll probably make for great stories though....
"Grandpa, is it true you got married while covered in vomit?"
Gee that actually sounds like a pretty cool location to work...
(what city is this building in?)
You know, it's all fine and nice to be anti-religion, but I am so sick of people involving Christianity whenever Scientology comes up. There is a difference between religion and cult
Perhaps, but it seems more like a continuum than a hard division. Some cults/religions are obviously nuttier and more corrupt than others, of course.
You don't actually think Canonical does any of the work which goes into Ubuntu do ya? They're a distro.. they do packaging, packaging and, occasionally, net manager.
They are good at polishing things up though.
I wonder if Dick Cheney is going to flip out and start foaming at the mouth about this too?
The era of movie theatres is gone. People play games because they're convenient.
Is this really any surprise? Movie theatres are inconvenient, relatively expensive, and you have to take pot luck when it comes to movie goers you might have to put up with. Most people have a TV and a DVD player.
That's certainly true for some people, in some situations, but it's hardly true universally.
Seeing a movie in a theater is a social experience. I find that in a nice theater with a good audience, there's a vibe and energy, and a sense of being immersed in the experience that simply isn't there with a bigscreen TV and a few friends. It's not a subtle difference, the two experiences simply aren't even close. I've watched movies in both settings, and sometimes a film which seemed kinda blah and boring on DVD springs to life in the theater.
Maybe you value privacy and the underwear thing more than the energy of the crowd, and maybe moviegoers in your area are all jerks, so in your case, perhaps watching a DVD is usually better.
I, on the other hand, far prefer seeing something in the theater if at all possible. Watching DVDs with friends is a fun thing too, but it's really a different activity, not a replacement for the theater experience.
$10 says he isn't Obama's running mate next election.
I don't see why not -- Biden's actually been a pretty good vice president, and if anything is more respected and valued now than he was when he was selected as Obama's running mate.
Silly Fox News non-stories and bizarro Republican whinging are not a very good basis on which to judge someone...
hint: Offending a security guard's sensitivities isn't against the law.
Seriously, and this kind of stupid crap happens in even far more innocuous circumstances ("it's illegal to take photos here sir <in public place where it most certainly isn't illegal>, you'll have to delete those pictures")... these days it's kind of like some kind of bizarro security-guard meme.
[Well, presumably it's the guards' idiot managers who are actually at fault; the guards probably don't actually come up with this shit spontaneously.]
Google seems to think elsevier is OK too (despite google's rules).
AFAIK Google has a rule where a website is not allowed to give Google's spiders a different page from what normal users would get.
I often see google search results linking to elsevier (or other journal) pages, with relevant keywords and text in them, however if you click on the link you get a page that doesn't have the same info. Such search results are not useful to me - in fact they get in the way of more useful results.
Even if they are breaking google's rules, that obviously doesn't imply that google somehow approves of them, merely that they've (so far) escaped detection.
There's also now an "Official White House Photostream" user on flickr, which has some excellent photos, with many interesting shots of life and work inside the whitehouse.
Many of the pictures are unexpectedly candid as well. The white house photographers (there are several, but most of the photos in the stream seem to be from Pete Souza) are apparently given a lot of freedom to lurk around waiting for a good opportunity!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse
ZFS + Ports, take that Ubuntu!
I dunno about ZFS, but I've recently been playing with a freebsd install (7.1 I think), and ports, while a cool idea, seems pretty creaky in practice.
My main beefs were not with the infrastructure, which seemed OK, but that the package maintenance seemed pretty spotty: many many packages (even fairly "major" ones) were pretty out-of-date, even compared to e.g. debian stable, and in many cases they were installed as monolithic chunks where a bit of judicious splitting would have been very helpful -- for example, an otherwise fairly dependency-free library that happens to come with some demo apps that drag in all of OpenGL and X (it would have been better to put the apps with their heavy dependencies in a separate package, or make their inclusion easily configurable)!
Sadly, the ports collection felt kind of like a 2nd-class add-on (and I gather, that's essentially what it is). Even though there are many packages in debian where the maintainer should probably be doing a better job, on average debian's package collection feels a lot more solid to me that what freebsd has in ports...
Yup, like everywhere, the U.S. has bad teachers and brilliant teachers, and the majority are at least competent. Most seem to be very hard-working as well. In my experience, truly awful teachers are quite rare (but of course everybody has their own story to tell...).
In any case, teachers really aren't the problem with American education -- the problem is American culture.
If you look at a place like Korea, while its education system of course has its own problems, academic success is admired (at all levels, not just in higher education), both by students and parents. It's a lot easier to get students to study harder if both peer-pressure and parental pressure is pushing them (hard!) in that direction...
Deleting directory trees is horribly slow in XFS.
Yup, one machine I often use is maintained by someone else, and they switched to xfs (from ext3) when rebuilding the system after a big hardware-loss incident. From my perspective, the experience is clearly worse. In particular the whole "deleting lots of little files" thing (which I seem to do quite often) -- in ext3 I never noticed any delay, but xfs seems to take forever to do the same operation.
I get the impression that xfs was designed with a particual usage in mind -- big media servers, IIRC -- and shines there, but is maybe not the best choice for a general-purpose machine.
Yup, me too -- exact same search terms, and the first link on google is precisely what the grandparent says he wanted.
It's a bit mystifying really; I regularly see claims in slashdot comments about how awful google is these days, and yet this bears absolutely no resemblance to my own experience -- for me, google's results are extremely good, perhaps even better now than in the past (and certainly leagues ahead of crap like MSN live search).
I'm not sure how to reconcile this ... some possibilities come to mind:
[Anyone have better ideas?]
I work as a programmer in a Japanese company, and while most of the other (Japanese) programmers on my team are roughly "conversant" in English, most of them are not really fluent or particularly comfortable with it.
So what seems to happen is that, as you mention, all the class names and variable names are English (though they often make technically-correct-but-slightly-odd choices of words), but write all their comments and commit logs etc in Japanese.
It makes sense really --
I'd guess that most people have a slightly more nuanced position. Mine is roughly: "sure I'll pay a reasonable fee for your service -- but then you need to not suck."
Last.fm, of course, fails with flying colors.
I think that becoming a paid service inevitably results in hugely increased expectations from your customers, even if the fee is relatively small.
[I sometimes use last.fm -- but mostly because it's free, not because it's any good.]
Yeah, as you point out, some benchmarks on phoronix have been pretty sloppy.
I think it's a great site for some purposes (where else can you find headlines on X development?), but I doubt many take their benchmarking seriously.
While bad benchmarking is hardly rare, it's kind of disappointing in the case of phoronix, which is obviously aiming at a more technically savvy audience than most sites are, and often does benchmarks (such as this one) that are much more interesting to the FOSS crowd than the typical mouth-breather "win7 vs. xp" stuff you see elsewhere.
I was slightly disappointed when looking for the amount of drivers added for desktop users. Looking through the release log, I can only find one driver added for the home desktop user.
...
I know, but what I meant was new hardware. Linux often can't keep up with the rapid rate of new hardware flooding the market.
If a new device uses a standard protocol or an already-supported chipset, there usually doesn't need to be a new driver for it. With more and more hardware using standard interfaces these days (usb, etc), there's less and less need for new drivers.
So the concept of "counting new drivers" (as you claim to have done) is meaningless.
If there's a device you want to use, and you find it isn't supported (and by "find" I mean, you try it, and it doesn't work), that's the time to complain.
Did you do that? Or are you just complaining for the sake of complaining?
And honestly, is it really a good idea to enable more people to buy cars?
Of course not. But it's a sad cycle -- people in very poor countries like this see cars as being status symbols, a sign of wealth. Society (and the government) often treat increase car ownership the same way, as some indicator that they've "made it," and try to emphasize car-oriented development.
By the time they come to the realization that having every poor schmuck in the city driving to work is a really dumb idea, and not very scalable, it may be too late...
ZFS can do it: it writes the whole transaction to disk or rolls back in case of a crash, so why not ext4? These lame excuses that this is totally "expected" behavior is a shame!
I read the FA, and it actually really does look like the applications are simply using stupidly risky practices:
These applications are truncating the file before writing (i.e., opening with O_TRUNC), and then assuming that the truncation and any following write are atomic. That's obviously not true -- what happens if your system is very busy (not surprising in the startup flurry which is apparently where this stuff happens), the process doesn't get scheduled for a while after the truncate (but before the write), and the system happens to crash in that interval?
I'm as lazy as they get, but even I know enough not to do that kind of crap...
There's probably some way the FS could finesse this issue -- e.g., don't actually schedule truncation until you see the first write or close -- but it would be a workaround for buggy applications, not a FS bugfix.