Hey you could even make a bit of cash by renting out the back seat to homeless people (they do usually have some money, just not much)! Don't give the keys of course. Unless they pay more.
I must admit I'm a bit confused by the assertion that commuting in roller-blades is "unprofessional." This isn't the '60s -- it's quite common these days to see young professionals in expensive suits showing up to work using whatever wacky transportation is fashionable and freshening up once they arrive (well at least in big cities; maybe Podunk, Iowa is a bit more staid).
Manhattan is a "real" urban area, but it's 100% unlivable unless you're making north of $150k, IMHO.
I think where you like to live is about 90% down to individual taste; it's bizarre seeing people post these long screeds on all the advantages of living in one place or another, because if your tastes run counter to a particular lifestyle, you're going to be miserable there no matter how many amenities on a checklist.
Personally I'm a city guy, and that basically means Manhattan in the U.S. -- even other major U.S. cities are pretty anemic by comparison (both because they simply aren't big or dense enough to support the things Manhattan does, and because they've suffered from the long U.S. flirtation with automobile-centered development).
[btw, Manhattan is certainly quite livable under $150K, but you obviously have to adjust your housing expectations accordingly. Many people accept that because they value the advantages of living in Manhattan more than dislike a cramped apartment/flatmates/etc.]
There is a growing feeling that Google is over-hyped and nowhere near as good as they think they are.
Not in my experience.
Certainly in the "real world" google isn't worshipped to the same extent it is on slashdot, but the typical bitter "google is starting to suck!" crowd also seems to be pretty much restricted to slashdot.
The BSA definitely operates outside the USA; I've BSA adverts on the trains and before movies.
Insanely stupid adverts too -- the movie one has a girl crying black tears, and I think she later morphs into a skull; they give a phone number/website and imply that if you don't report everyone, the pirates will destroy western society, especially your children[*].
[*] Ok, I'm paraphrasing a lot; I don't remember the actual wording, but was jaw-droppingly over-the-top.
My favorite is the, um, theory, posited by a friend of mine, that the 9/11 attacks were committed by the U.S. military, who he says were obviously remotely controlling the planes and guided them into their targets from afar.
My attempts to argue ("that's completely insane") generally result in him screaming at me, and I really can't deal with all that spittle...
Nothing wrong with the comma usage in that sentence.
Commas reflect pauses in the sentence. If you're a native speaker, just speak the sentence; if it doesn't sound weird, then it's correct. This particular sentence sounds exactly right, like the beginning of a fairy tale.
I slowed down on reading sci-fi books when the realism became too big a factor in the stories.
Yeah, spot on!
I think of it as "Suburban SF" -- in the early 90s or so, more and more stories (especially in magazines) seemed to be about near-future very slight variants on our own society, with characters that are basically the same boring white-bread SUV-driving bozos we see around us in real life.
Frankly when I read SF, I want to read about something different than what I can see out the window. I don't necessarily want optimism (evil alien despots in the 29th century, with all the good guys dying in the end, are fine), but it should show a bit of imagination and dash.
A simple rule: If a story could conceivably be adapted for an After-School Special ("it's a nuanced story of an average suburban high-school student who discovers he has mild telepathy, and how he deals with the effects on his peer group"), REJECT.
Well actually, it doesn't, since consumers over here would also like to purchase things from this virtual store. Since there are no shipping or supply constraints it seems to me that they are in fact losing potential money.
Er, the plutocratic shitbags still think it's the '50s... or rather, they think if they stick their fingers in their ears and hold their breath hard enough, they can make things be like the '50s.
I dunno; one of the things I've always found annoying about Apple marketing is the Ronco(tm)-style "But wait... there's more! It also comes with this fantastic potato dicer!"
The most noticeable place they do it is in Jobs' glitzy new product intros, but you also see it elsewhere; e.g. on the Apple web page for the Mighty Mouse there's a sidebar (for upgrading to OS-X Tiger) which says "Enjoy 200+ new features". Great. Over 200 features.
When textbooks are 100-300 USD a piece and PDAs are 100-700 USD I can see where it might be preferrable to go with an inexpensive PDA if you have a good way of getting the material to put on it.
Um, it's the last bit that's the kicker though.
Textbooks are not expensive because the raw materials are expensive, they're expensive because the publishers know they can charge a lot, as they have a captive audience.
If the people in charge of textbooks in Kenya can come up with the material, the cost of printing it up would almost certainly be far less than the silly high cost of textbooks in the U.S., especially if they use lower-quality paper etc.
As textbooks don't really need to be changed every year, and are about a zillion times more reliable than a typical PDA, I expect that paper ends up being a lot cheaper.
But of course it doesn't have the "gosh wow" factor -- or the opportunity for kickbacks -- which usually seem to be true reasons for projects like this.
Man, I was all revved up for some online cheese ordering action (the more obscure and malodorous the better), and all this site seems to have is a bunch of software packages. Besides the opening quote (which we've all heard before anyway) there's nary a hint of cheese anywhere.
He advocates governmental persecution of non-Mormon homosexuals. There is an important distinction between being a member of an anti-gay religion and advocating governmental "discouragement" of homosexuality. He is an antagonist in this matter.
How about government persecution of Mormon asshats? I could go for that one! I'm sure many would agree.
Not Mormons generally, mind you, that's probably unconstitutional, and I've known many nice Mormons. Just the asshats.
Ok, maybe an airstrike or two against the tabernacle, just to drive the point home, but beyond that, asshats only.
IMHO the problem with the sidescrollers you mentioned is that they're designed for hard-core 2D gamers, that is, they're extremely long, and generally involve some sort of annoying, counterintuitive puzzle which for players who don't want to look it up online or in a hint book becomes a brick wall.
Um, have you actually played them?
I'm a totally crap game player, but all the GBA castlevania and metroid games were fairly straight-forward -- no mad skillz required -- had very well tuned difficulty curves, and certainly had no obscure puzzles. They were massively, incredibly, fun as well.
Well, OK, I'm a bit less sure about metroid fusion -- there's one boss there I never could get past there (aptly titled "nightmare").
What I really want to see is an infusion of shorter, more casual side scrollers, or the longer ones made a lot easier.
I quite agree, but I'd suggest checking the above games out again -- they simply aren't very hard really; sometimes a new enemy can leave you gasping a bit, but in my experience you quickly learn to deal with them (and remember, I'm horribly clumsy at video games -- I always play on "kids mode" if a game has one...:-).
Today, your 500MHz+ CPUs don't really hiccup that much from stack inefficiencies.
People's expectations have risen as well -- if you read a kernel mailing list, you'll see people posting things like "My machine has 5 gigabit ethernet cards installed and I can't saturate all the links simultaneously while routing the packets and encrypting them! OMG!!!"
I completely disagree with your trashing of all 3d games. Mario 64 and the two Zelda games on the N64 stand as three of the best games of all time, an opinion I share with a great majority of the gaming community. To claim that these games are all just clones of Tomb Raider is... just inconcievable.
Same thing for Metroid Prime. I'm a huge fan of the original 2d metroid games, and MP completely and utterly nails the feel of those games. It's an incredible game (MP2 is great as well), and more than worthy as the current bearer of the metroid standard.
To claim that it's "just another FPS" is simply bizarre.
Every single font smoothing method I've looked at his its issues.
This is no doubt true, but freetype generally does seem to do a better job these days than Apple or MS's font-smoothing, when configured correctly. If you last ran linux two years ago, you should check it out, things have really changed (freetype in particular is far better now than two years ago).
The biggest difference I see is that freetype is better at perturbing stems to exactly fit pixel boundaries -- and can do a good job of it even for unhinted fonts. Freetype does this so well that there's no reason to turn off smoothing for certain sizes (which seems to way people used to deal with the "smoothing makes things blurry at typical reading text sizes" problem).
You're absolutely right -- it's the third sentence.
Here, I'll quote it for you:
In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been.
Flamebait, pure and simple (and no, the vague qualification doesn't change that).
Anyway, it answers your question -- you asked:
Why is it everytime someone mentions FreeBSD, all the Linux advocates have to start posting about Linux? This story isn't about Linux, but you had to bring it up a comparison to it anyway.
Well, gee, because the story itself brought up the comparison.
I didn't say "second sentence of the article", I said "second sentence of the story". You know, the very first paragraph on the slashdot page, what everybody usually reads even if they don't bother to read the article the story references?
Did you really miss the prime grade-A trollage in this story (which the slashdot editor never should have accepted, but well we all know about editorial standards here...)?
Why is it everytime someone mentions FreeBSD, all the Linux advocates have to start posting about Linux?
Um, because the story contained a childish troll aimed against linux? Why is it that freebsd advocates submitting slashdot stories feel it necessary to do that? Granted, it would be good to just ignore such a silly troll, but you can hardly blame people for responding.
[My god, I know it's hard to read the article, but you could have at least read until the second sentence of the story!!!]
I have a feeling it's more like "those craven tools at the ratings board who will bend over and scream `harder!' before any politician who is trying to boost his sagging popularity ratings among the drooling mouth-breathers that form his electorate".
Many places probably does do that, but it is rather short-sighted. The minute somebody uses another computer and sees a cheaper price, they'll probably never shop with you again.
Indeed, it's just as likely they'll do the opposite -- retailers really like repeat customers.
In the non-internet world it certainly happens; there are shops I've patronized where after I had bought a number of (relatively expensive) items there, they started giving me great discounts without prompting. Certainly it's possible that a stranger could bargain for a while and get the same price (their margin is the same after all), but it seems clear they like repeat customers and will reward you for being one.
Of course in the non-internet case, it's some salesguy saying to himself "hey I remember that dude, he's a good customer; I'll give him a bit of a break". Perhaps software -- who's rules are more firmly dictated by stingier management -- might be less generous. Still, at a basic level, the incentives seem the same, so I'd think they'd tend to yield similar results in the end.
I dabble in embedded linux development and often run a stock 2.6 kernel on a (non-x86) processor running at 20MHz, with 3MB RAM (kernel and disk image share this ram BTW, though I know many embedded people will consider 3MB profligate:-); no MMU. Works just dandy.
The range of architectures and platforms that 2.6 runs well on is vast, from insanely slow tiny little embedded systems to massive multiprocessor systems...
Slashdot Mirror
Hey you could even make a bit of cash by renting out the back seat to homeless people (they do usually have some money, just not much)! Don't give the keys of course. Unless they pay more.
I must admit I'm a bit confused by the assertion that commuting in roller-blades is "unprofessional." This isn't the '60s -- it's quite common these days to see young professionals in expensive suits showing up to work using whatever wacky transportation is fashionable and freshening up once they arrive (well at least in big cities; maybe Podunk, Iowa is a bit more staid).
Manhattan is a "real" urban area, but it's 100% unlivable unless you're making north of $150k, IMHO.
I think where you like to live is about 90% down to individual taste; it's bizarre seeing people post these long screeds on all the advantages of living in one place or another, because if your tastes run counter to a particular lifestyle, you're going to be miserable there no matter how many amenities on a checklist.
Personally I'm a city guy, and that basically means Manhattan in the U.S. -- even other major U.S. cities are pretty anemic by comparison (both because they simply aren't big or dense enough to support the things Manhattan does, and because they've suffered from the long U.S. flirtation with automobile-centered development).
[btw, Manhattan is certainly quite livable under $150K, but you obviously have to adjust your housing expectations accordingly. Many people accept that because they value the advantages of living in Manhattan more than dislike a cramped apartment/flatmates/etc.]
There is a growing feeling that Google is over-hyped and nowhere near as good as they think they are.
Not in my experience.
Certainly in the "real world" google isn't worshipped to the same extent it is on slashdot, but the typical bitter "google is starting to suck!" crowd also seems to be pretty much restricted to slashdot.
Even if (what is very likely) you gain much more than the drinks cost you? Why?
Presumably because they (the venture capitalists) are often dumb, just like many companies. There's quite bit of stupidity to go around...
Unfortunately dumb venture capitalists are even worse, as they influence companies to be dumb too.
The BSA definitely operates outside the USA; I've BSA adverts on the trains and before movies.
Insanely stupid adverts too -- the movie one has a girl crying black tears, and I think she later morphs into a skull; they give a phone number/website and imply that if you don't report everyone, the pirates will destroy western society, especially your children[*].
[*] Ok, I'm paraphrasing a lot; I don't remember the actual wording, but was jaw-droppingly over-the-top.
My favorite is the, um, theory, posited by a friend of mine, that the 9/11 attacks were committed by the U.S. military, who he says were obviously remotely controlling the planes and guided them into their targets from afar.
My attempts to argue ("that's completely insane") generally result in him screaming at me, and I really can't deal with all that spittle...
Pauses in speech have nothing to do with it beyond that fact that they SOMETIMES correlate with the above correct placement.
What can I say? You're quite wrong.
Nothing wrong with the comma usage in that sentence.
Commas reflect pauses in the sentence. If you're a native speaker, just speak the sentence; if it doesn't sound weird, then it's correct. This particular sentence sounds exactly right, like the beginning of a fairy tale.
I slowed down on reading sci-fi books when the realism became too big a factor in the stories.
Yeah, spot on!
I think of it as "Suburban SF" -- in the early 90s or so, more and more stories (especially in magazines) seemed to be about near-future very slight variants on our own society, with characters that are basically the same boring white-bread SUV-driving bozos we see around us in real life.
Frankly when I read SF, I want to read about something different than what I can see out the window. I don't necessarily want optimism (evil alien despots in the 29th century, with all the good guys dying in the end, are fine), but it should show a bit of imagination and dash.
A simple rule: If a story could conceivably be adapted for an After-School Special ("it's a nuanced story of an average suburban high-school student who discovers he has mild telepathy, and how he deals with the effects on his peer group"), REJECT.
Well actually, it doesn't, since consumers over here would also like to purchase things from this virtual store. Since there are no shipping or supply constraints it seems to me that they are in fact losing potential money.
Er, the plutocratic shitbags still think it's the '50s... or rather, they think if they stick their fingers in their ears and hold their breath hard enough, they can make things be like the '50s.
I dunno; one of the things I've always found annoying about Apple marketing is the Ronco(tm)-style "But wait... there's more! It also comes with this fantastic potato dicer!"
The most noticeable place they do it is in Jobs' glitzy new product intros, but you also see it elsewhere; e.g. on the Apple web page for the Mighty Mouse there's a sidebar (for upgrading to OS-X Tiger) which says "Enjoy 200+ new features". Great. Over 200 features.
When textbooks are 100-300 USD a piece and PDAs are 100-700 USD I can see where it might be preferrable to go with an inexpensive PDA if you have a good way of getting the material to put on it.
Um, it's the last bit that's the kicker though.
Textbooks are not expensive because the raw materials are expensive, they're expensive because the publishers know they can charge a lot, as they have a captive audience.
If the people in charge of textbooks in Kenya can come up with the material, the cost of printing it up would almost certainly be far less than the silly high cost of textbooks in the U.S., especially if they use lower-quality paper etc.
As textbooks don't really need to be changed every year, and are about a zillion times more reliable than a typical PDA, I expect that paper ends up being a lot cheaper.
But of course it doesn't have the "gosh wow" factor -- or the opportunity for kickbacks -- which usually seem to be true reasons for projects like this.
Man, I was all revved up for some online cheese ordering action (the more obscure and malodorous the better), and all this site seems to have is a bunch of software packages. Besides the opening quote (which we've all heard before anyway) there's nary a hint of cheese anywhere.
He advocates governmental persecution of non-Mormon homosexuals. There is an important distinction between being a member of an anti-gay religion and advocating governmental "discouragement" of homosexuality. He is an antagonist in this matter.
How about government persecution of Mormon asshats? I could go for that one! I'm sure many would agree.
Not Mormons generally, mind you, that's probably unconstitutional, and I've known many nice Mormons. Just the asshats.
Ok, maybe an airstrike or two against the tabernacle, just to drive the point home, but beyond that, asshats only.
IMHO the problem with the sidescrollers you mentioned is that they're designed for hard-core 2D gamers, that is, they're extremely long, and generally involve some sort of annoying, counterintuitive puzzle which for players who don't want to look it up online or in a hint book becomes a brick wall.
:-).
Um, have you actually played them?
I'm a totally crap game player, but all the GBA castlevania and metroid games were fairly straight-forward -- no mad skillz required -- had very well tuned difficulty curves, and certainly had no obscure puzzles. They were massively, incredibly, fun as well.
Well, OK, I'm a bit less sure about metroid fusion -- there's one boss there I never could get past there (aptly titled "nightmare").
What I really want to see is an infusion of shorter, more casual side scrollers, or the longer ones made a lot easier.
I quite agree, but I'd suggest checking the above games out again -- they simply aren't very hard really; sometimes a new enemy can leave you gasping a bit, but in my experience you quickly learn to deal with them (and remember, I'm horribly clumsy at video games -- I always play on "kids mode" if a game has one...
Today, your 500MHz+ CPUs don't really hiccup that much from stack inefficiencies.
People's expectations have risen as well -- if you read a kernel mailing list, you'll see people posting things like "My machine has 5 gigabit ethernet cards installed and I can't saturate all the links simultaneously while routing the packets and encrypting them! OMG!!!"
I completely disagree with your trashing of all 3d games. Mario 64 and the two Zelda games on the N64 stand as three of the best games of all time, an opinion I share with a great majority of the gaming community. To claim that these games are all just clones of Tomb Raider is... just inconcievable.
Same thing for Metroid Prime. I'm a huge fan of the original 2d metroid games, and MP completely and utterly nails the feel of those games. It's an incredible game (MP2 is great as well), and more than worthy as the current bearer of the metroid standard.
To claim that it's "just another FPS" is simply bizarre.
Every single font smoothing method I've looked at his its issues.
This is no doubt true, but freetype generally does seem to do a better job these days than Apple or MS's font-smoothing, when configured correctly. If you last ran linux two years ago, you should check it out, things have really changed (freetype in particular is far better now than two years ago).
The biggest difference I see is that freetype is better at perturbing stems to exactly fit pixel boundaries -- and can do a good job of it even for unhinted fonts. Freetype does this so well that there's no reason to turn off smoothing for certain sizes (which seems to way people used to deal with the "smoothing makes things blurry at typical reading text sizes" problem).
Here, I'll quote it for you:
Flamebait, pure and simple (and no, the vague qualification doesn't change that).
Anyway, it answers your question -- you asked:
Well, gee, because the story itself brought up the comparison.
I didn't say "second sentence of the article", I said "second sentence of the story". You know, the very first paragraph on the slashdot page, what everybody usually reads even if they don't bother to read the article the story references?
Did you really miss the prime grade-A trollage in this story (which the slashdot editor never should have accepted, but well we all know about editorial standards here...)?
Why is it everytime someone mentions FreeBSD, all the Linux advocates have to start posting about Linux?
Um, because the story contained a childish troll aimed against linux? Why is it that freebsd advocates submitting slashdot stories feel it necessary to do that? Granted, it would be good to just ignore such a silly troll, but you can hardly blame people for responding.
[My god, I know it's hard to read the article, but you could have at least read until the second sentence of the story!!!]
So, is this the future?
I have a feeling it's more like "those craven tools at the ratings board who will bend over and scream `harder!' before any politician who is trying to boost his sagging popularity ratings among the drooling mouth-breathers that form his electorate".
I'm moving to neptune.
Many places probably does do that, but it is rather short-sighted. The minute somebody uses another computer and sees a cheaper price, they'll probably never shop with you again.
Indeed, it's just as likely they'll do the opposite -- retailers really like repeat customers.
In the non-internet world it certainly happens; there are shops I've patronized where after I had bought a number of (relatively expensive) items there, they started giving me great discounts without prompting. Certainly it's possible that a stranger could bargain for a while and get the same price (their margin is the same after all), but it seems clear they like repeat customers and will reward you for being one.
Of course in the non-internet case, it's some salesguy saying to himself "hey I remember that dude, he's a good customer; I'll give him a bit of a break". Perhaps software -- who's rules are more firmly dictated by stingier management -- might be less generous. Still, at a basic level, the incentives seem the same, so I'd think they'd tend to yield similar results in the end.
I dabble in embedded linux development and often run a stock 2.6 kernel on a (non-x86) processor running at 20MHz, with 3MB RAM (kernel and disk image share this ram BTW, though I know many embedded people will consider 3MB profligate :-); no MMU. Works just dandy.
The range of architectures and platforms that 2.6 runs well on is vast, from insanely slow tiny little embedded systems to massive multiprocessor systems...