"Recycled" in this case is not an indication that this was intended to be an environmentally friendly house.
Recycling in general is not necessarily environmentally friendly. Recycling takes energy, sometimes more energy than you save. Sometimes there's a lot of toxic chemicals used in the process.
This seems like a good place to point out DOS32/a. It's a drop in replacement for DOS/4GW. It was independently developed from Dosbox as a modern alternative to the old dos extenders, but it works quite well with Dosbox. It works with just about everything, and it makes most games better. I pre-emptively swap DOS32/a in when I install anything on dosbox.
Computers are only getting faster. Eventually they'll offload that emulation onto another core and you won't even notice the speed hit. This is much preferable to a shim that will break every time the underlying hardware or OS changes.
Since Dosbox does everything in software, it works the same no matter what platform you're on. i386, x86-64, ARM, PowerPC, Sparc, etc. Since everything is in software, and we have the source, we can be confident that it what Dosbox can do today it will be able to do indefinitely into the future.
Net Neutrality is a free speech issue, and so is TV Neutrality. That we cannot all get a spot on TV to make our case just shows that we haven't really had free speech so far. And this is borne out by observation. Free speech is intended to facilitate the free exchange of ideas. Yet the messages we see on TV all conform to one narrative. By controlling the discourse, they control our collective thoughts and fears, even our minds.
The lack of TV and Newspaper neutrality is a major reason why the country is in such an awful state. Even when a message appears that has lots of popular support all they have to do is ignore it and it goes away. Look at how many Nader rallies drew 10,000 people in 2000 and were ignored by the media. Or how in the build up to the war in Iraq, we had some of the largest protests since the Vietnam war. Yet dissenters were constantly marginalized in the media. Of course, when the message of the protest is that we shouldn't tax the rich, all of a sudden dissent is patriotic.
The control of the media by a powerful elite is the greatest threat to Democracy we face today. We cannot let the internet go the same way. It is our last, best hope.
Developers are not compelled to invest in creating any specific game, and they are not entitled to profit if they choose to. I am however entitled, if not by law by any reasonable sense of justice, to full and complete control over my own property. My right to actual property that I own is not trumped by their desire to profit. If that means no more mega million dollar blockbuster games, that's OK. Securing a little extra profit for some developers today is not worth destroying the meaning of the property rights we've enjoyed for centuries.
Don't you think Sony has seen what happens to a platform when it gets broken open like happened on the PSP?
Like more people buying PSPs than would have otherwise?
They've found that if you let people have access to a moderate level of "Home Brew" creation ability, some assholes will use that ability to enable massive piracy, just because they can.
If you don't let people have access to a moderate level of home brew creation ability, some assholes will enable massive piracy just because they can. Since piracy is going to happen either way, might as well let people use the devices they own the way they choose.
What about all that stuff you can't get on Netflix? All those episodes of MST3K and Doctor Who will likely never see a DVD release. It's important to have them mirrored on as many hard drives as possible, or we'll lose more than we already have.
The issue of prisoner abuse ("torture" to most folks, "enhanced interrogation" to certain folks) will surely compel a judge to set the detainee free.
Which is exactly the right and just result. If you have a problem with this, prosecute the people responsible for the torture. But, like I said, Obama's too big of a pussy to do that.
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs
on
WD Launches 3 Terabyte HD
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think Ken Thompson said, "The steady state of disks is full". No matter how big drives get, you'll eventually fill it up. At which point you'll need a bigger one, or you'll be spending an inordinate amount of time (any really) moving shit around and deciding what to delete.
Boy, this is rich. If the idea that a graphical program might have a command line interface causes you this much distress, you need to relax. As with most things in life interfaces don't necessarily fall into two distinct categories, but there's a continuum. Yes, even the most graphical of programs will have some command line elements. If anything that speaks to the power of the command line.
The video game industry is to be considered different than the computer game industry as far as the video game crash is concerned. Home computers becoming affordable and powerful alternatives to consoles is one big reason the video game crash happened.
Under what Laws of Time and Space is using that *not* using a GUI?
The one where commands to the browser are given textually, line by line. It's not that hard to figure out. I've admitted from the very beginning that there's a set of visually oriented tasks for which a GUI is the natural choice. It is in no way hypocritical of me to use them where appropriate. Nice try though.
I love these crazy examples. How often do you have to do that? Once a day? Once a week? Once every 10 years? Maybe?
I usually have a GUI user come ask me to do something that I can do with a one or two liner every week or so.
So you know for sure CLIs are more powerful than GUIs, but you don't know how to fucking USE ONE?! Tell us again why you're qualified to have an opinion on this point?
Ok, so how would you do this graphically?
It's also only a few lines of AppleScript, or JScript or VBScript.
Which are also command line environments.
But the second part (in quotes) was a more generalized example lampooning your method of arbitrarily discarding aspects of the product you didn't like in order to make it more competitive. In this second part, I used passenger capacity, speed, and safety as the criteria I was ignoring, *not* ease-of-use. It wasn't intended to clarify the preceding sentence, but to expand on it.
Hm, I sort of see that now. It's not a very natural analogy, because "ease of use" isn't really a function. If I give you a widget and you ask "what does it do?", "It's easy to use!" isn't really the answer you're looking for.
So you open it up in Vimperator (which appears to be Firefox), but keep a CLI handy in another window (or another computer entirely-- after all windows are a nasty GUI concept you hate!) with Lynx to fill-in forms? One GUI browser to look at the pretty pictures, and another CLI browser to interact with the document?
Vimperator puts a command line at the bottom of the firefox window (and removes the menu/toolbar) so I can view a document graphically and manipulate it textually within the same window. It's a pretty wonderful fusion.
What TASKS do you do with a CLI that you can't with a GUI?
Ok, ok fair enough. Here's one I encountered not too long ago. We have a folder full of image files, either TIFF or JPG, but they were saved without extensions. Add the proper extension to each file, and convert every TIFF that doesn't have a JPG counterpart to JPG, saving the TIFF original.
The GUI user who brought me this task had no clue how to do it with a GUI. I have no clue how to do it with a GUI. It was only a couple lines in Bash though. You could, I suppose, write a custom batch rename GUI for such a task. But in order to do so, you'd have to use a command language anyway, so why not cut out the middle man?
The average GUI user would right click and open every file and manually convert each one with "save as". That gets exceedingly tedious after the first couple dozen. If they invested that time in learning Bash (or PowerShell, or even VB), they'd save time in the long run.
The example didn't use learning curve as a parameter. Congratulations! Not only did you fail to understand it, you failed to even COMPREHEND it! The rare Double-Fail.
Really? Because I'm pretty sure you said:
Being easier-to-learn *makes* it superior. Way to miss the point. "If you ignore the fact that it can transport 200+ people in comfort, safety at 550 MPH, the 777 is far inferior to the Wright Flyer."
If "being easier to learn" doesn't refer to the learning curve, then I don't know wtf it's supposed to mean. If the analogy in quotes isn't intended to clarify the point immediately preceding it that I allegedly missed, then I don't know what it was for. Clearly I did not comprehend it, but the fail is not mine.
You mean Lynx? Or are you saying to run the browser in a *gasp* GUI? (Because the latter I count as cheating: you're using a GUI for the task! Cheater.)
Vimperator actually. Viewing documents, like images and videos, is a visual task for which a GUI is useful. For actually interacting with the document, I still prefer a command environment.
Not if you're writing the code in a IDE
Not sure why you'd do that.
What more can you do? What can you do with a CLI that you can't with a GUI?
Loops, variables, pipes, etc.
No; that makes it a trade off. If I'm Hatta, and I completely discount learning curve as a factor in judging something,
The learning curve is irrelevant when you're comparing capabilities. What matters is how much can be done, not how much can be done by a naive user within 10 minutes. I dunno if you've ever taken chemistry, but think of it like kinetics vs thermodynamics. The rate of a reaction (kinetically favored) has nothing to do with the state at equilibrium (thermodynamically favored). A reaction might be very fast, but over the long term not favored thermodynamically. Similarly an OS might be easy to use, but over the long term less useful than one that takes longer to learn but can do more. It's not the slope of the learning curve that matters, but the height at the top of the curve.
Look at my 777 vs. Wright Flyer example, that's exactly what you're doing!
Your example is bogus. The 777 is easier to learn to fly, but it's also more capable than the Wright Flyer. The CLI is more like an SR-71. Harder to pilot, but it can fly longer, faster, and higher than anything else.
It's not even worth trying to discuss this with you.
But it's entertaining and we're bored at work, right?
That's rather obtuse of you. Nobody says that he can't close the camp. The issue is now that the camp is theoretically closed, what happens to the people who are currently there. He doesn't have the power to actually fix that
There's no issue there. We have a civilian justice system. Try them or let them go. He's just too big of a pussy to do the right thing.
So you edit films in a CLI? Play video games in a CLI?
Those are a few more of the tasks that are fundamentally visual for which you'll want a GUI.
Write your documents in a CLI, even though you don't get WYSIWYG that way?
LaTeX is superior to any GUI typesetting program out there.
Create websites in a CLI?
Use Vim and reload the browser when you write out the file.
Hell, for that matter, write computer code in a CLI? Even *writing code* has been supplanted by the GUI solution....
Writing code itself is a CLI. There's a reason computer languages are textual and not graphical. Figure that out and you'll understand why the CLI is superior.
Being easier-to-learn *makes* it superior. Way to miss the point.
All things identical, being easier to learn would make it superior. But all things aren't equal. The GUI is easier to learn, but it's also less capable. The CLI is harder to learn, but you can do a lot more with it. That makes it superior.
Wrong: it's not superior when my goal is to drive while eating french fries. So you're factually wrong off the bat.
Fair enough. I guess the GUI is superior if you want to compute while eating french fries too. So I'll give you that much.
But let's assume you're correct. If a manual transmission is superior *in every way* (your words) than an automatic, why are millions of automatic transmissions sold each year? What's your explanation for your phenomenon? Do you honestly believe millions of people are going out of their way to use the inferior product? Do you think everybody in the world except you is insane?
Yes, millions of people go out of their way to use inferior products all the time. What is popular is often quite different from what is good. McDonalds sells billions of hamburgers a year, while the cafe down the street only sells thousands. Does that mean McDonalds makes the better hamburger? Hardly.
Look, it's really retarded to even have this conversation, because the last 20 years of computer sales have already proven beyond a doubt that the GUI is the superior interface.
The last 20 years have only proven that the GUI is the most popular interface. That's not the same as being the best.
My last remaining question is, do you literally and genuinely believe this ridiculous position?
Absolutely. Do you literally and genuinely believe the ridiculous position that market success is equivalent to quality? How can you ignore the innumerable counter examples?
For some small subset of tasks, it's superior to the GUI. For the majority of tasks, it is not. This seems pretty obvious to me; if that wasn't the case, why would the GUI even have been invented and widely deployed?
It's the other way around. The GUI is superior for a few tasks (random access file picking, image manipulation), and inferior for everything else. The reason the GUI was adopted so widely is because it's easier to learn, not because it's superior in general. And that makes sense, a tool that is less powerful is generally easier to use.
Let's look at your argument through the traditional car analogy. That the automatic transmission is so widely used must mean that it's superior to the manual transmission right? No. For someone who knows what they are doing, the manual transmission is superior in every way. Same goes for the CLI.
Slashdot Mirror
"Recycled" in this case is not an indication that this was intended to be an environmentally friendly house.
Recycling in general is not necessarily environmentally friendly. Recycling takes energy, sometimes more energy than you save. Sometimes there's a lot of toxic chemicals used in the process.
And if it doesn't? I should be able to disable it right?
This seems like a good place to point out DOS32/a. It's a drop in replacement for DOS/4GW. It was independently developed from Dosbox as a modern alternative to the old dos extenders, but it works quite well with Dosbox. It works with just about everything, and it makes most games better. I pre-emptively swap DOS32/a in when I install anything on dosbox.
Computers are only getting faster. Eventually they'll offload that emulation onto another core and you won't even notice the speed hit. This is much preferable to a shim that will break every time the underlying hardware or OS changes.
Since Dosbox does everything in software, it works the same no matter what platform you're on. i386, x86-64, ARM, PowerPC, Sparc, etc. Since everything is in software, and we have the source, we can be confident that it what Dosbox can do today it will be able to do indefinitely into the future.
Net Neutrality is a free speech issue, and so is TV Neutrality. That we cannot all get a spot on TV to make our case just shows that we haven't really had free speech so far. And this is borne out by observation. Free speech is intended to facilitate the free exchange of ideas. Yet the messages we see on TV all conform to one narrative. By controlling the discourse, they control our collective thoughts and fears, even our minds.
The lack of TV and Newspaper neutrality is a major reason why the country is in such an awful state. Even when a message appears that has lots of popular support all they have to do is ignore it and it goes away. Look at how many Nader rallies drew 10,000 people in 2000 and were ignored by the media. Or how in the build up to the war in Iraq, we had some of the largest protests since the Vietnam war. Yet dissenters were constantly marginalized in the media. Of course, when the message of the protest is that we shouldn't tax the rich, all of a sudden dissent is patriotic.
The control of the media by a powerful elite is the greatest threat to Democracy we face today. We cannot let the internet go the same way. It is our last, best hope.
Developers are not compelled to invest in creating any specific game, and they are not entitled to profit if they choose to. I am however entitled, if not by law by any reasonable sense of justice, to full and complete control over my own property. My right to actual property that I own is not trumped by their desire to profit. If that means no more mega million dollar blockbuster games, that's OK. Securing a little extra profit for some developers today is not worth destroying the meaning of the property rights we've enjoyed for centuries.
Don't you think Sony has seen what happens to a platform when it gets broken open like happened on the PSP?
Like more people buying PSPs than would have otherwise?
They've found that if you let people have access to a moderate level of "Home Brew" creation ability, some assholes will use that ability to enable massive piracy, just because they can.
If you don't let people have access to a moderate level of home brew creation ability, some assholes will enable massive piracy just because they can. Since piracy is going to happen either way, might as well let people use the devices they own the way they choose.
Live with it.
Exactly what Sony should be doing.
Apple has. Certification is all there is to UNIX(TM) by definition. What practical value UNIX certification has is a valid question though.
A platform is not really "open" if it's only open in a way that 1%ers (1% most technical users) can do anything with it that benefits from openness.
That's nonsense. How many Linux users do you think actually use the source provided? Probably close to 1%. Does that make Linux not open?
So, how can I use phased array antennas to improve my OTA DTV reception?
iStuff just works until you want to do something Steve hasn't pre-approved. At which point it just doesn't work.
Will society been that worse off missing some MST3K 30 years from now?
Yes. Yes it would.
When Apple started selling certified UNIX, that's when.
What about all that stuff you can't get on Netflix? All those episodes of MST3K and Doctor Who will likely never see a DVD release. It's important to have them mirrored on as many hard drives as possible, or we'll lose more than we already have.
The issue of prisoner abuse ("torture" to most folks, "enhanced interrogation" to certain folks) will surely compel a judge to set the detainee free.
Which is exactly the right and just result. If you have a problem with this, prosecute the people responsible for the torture. But, like I said, Obama's too big of a pussy to do that.
It's still weird to use real names on websites.
I think Ken Thompson said, "The steady state of disks is full". No matter how big drives get, you'll eventually fill it up. At which point you'll need a bigger one, or you'll be spending an inordinate amount of time (any really) moving shit around and deciding what to delete.
Boy, this is rich. If the idea that a graphical program might have a command line interface causes you this much distress, you need to relax. As with most things in life interfaces don't necessarily fall into two distinct categories, but there's a continuum. Yes, even the most graphical of programs will have some command line elements. If anything that speaks to the power of the command line.
The video game industry is to be considered different than the computer game industry as far as the video game crash is concerned. Home computers becoming affordable and powerful alternatives to consoles is one big reason the video game crash happened.
Under what Laws of Time and Space is using that *not* using a GUI?
The one where commands to the browser are given textually, line by line. It's not that hard to figure out. I've admitted from the very beginning that there's a set of visually oriented tasks for which a GUI is the natural choice. It is in no way hypocritical of me to use them where appropriate. Nice try though.
I love these crazy examples. How often do you have to do that? Once a day? Once a week? Once every 10 years? Maybe?
I usually have a GUI user come ask me to do something that I can do with a one or two liner every week or so.
So you know for sure CLIs are more powerful than GUIs, but you don't know how to fucking USE ONE?! Tell us again why you're qualified to have an opinion on this point?
Ok, so how would you do this graphically?
It's also only a few lines of AppleScript, or JScript or VBScript.
Which are also command line environments.
But the second part (in quotes) was a more generalized example lampooning your method of arbitrarily discarding aspects of the product you didn't like in order to make it more competitive. In this second part, I used passenger capacity, speed, and safety as the criteria I was ignoring, *not* ease-of-use. It wasn't intended to clarify the preceding sentence, but to expand on it.
Hm, I sort of see that now. It's not a very natural analogy, because "ease of use" isn't really a function. If I give you a widget and you ask "what does it do?", "It's easy to use!" isn't really the answer you're looking for.
So you open it up in Vimperator (which appears to be Firefox), but keep a CLI handy in another window (or another computer entirely-- after all windows are a nasty GUI concept you hate!) with Lynx to fill-in forms? One GUI browser to look at the pretty pictures, and another CLI browser to interact with the document?
Vimperator puts a command line at the bottom of the firefox window (and removes the menu/toolbar) so I can view a document graphically and manipulate it textually within the same window. It's a pretty wonderful fusion.
What TASKS do you do with a CLI that you can't with a GUI?
Ok, ok fair enough. Here's one I encountered not too long ago. We have a folder full of image files, either TIFF or JPG, but they were saved without extensions. Add the proper extension to each file, and convert every TIFF that doesn't have a JPG counterpart to JPG, saving the TIFF original.
The GUI user who brought me this task had no clue how to do it with a GUI. I have no clue how to do it with a GUI. It was only a couple lines in Bash though. You could, I suppose, write a custom batch rename GUI for such a task. But in order to do so, you'd have to use a command language anyway, so why not cut out the middle man?
The average GUI user would right click and open every file and manually convert each one with "save as". That gets exceedingly tedious after the first couple dozen. If they invested that time in learning Bash (or PowerShell, or even VB), they'd save time in the long run.
The example didn't use learning curve as a parameter. Congratulations! Not only did you fail to understand it, you failed to even COMPREHEND it! The rare Double-Fail.
Really? Because I'm pretty sure you said:
If "being easier to learn" doesn't refer to the learning curve, then I don't know wtf it's supposed to mean. If the analogy in quotes isn't intended to clarify the point immediately preceding it that I allegedly missed, then I don't know what it was for. Clearly I did not comprehend it, but the fail is not mine.
You mean Lynx? Or are you saying to run the browser in a *gasp* GUI? (Because the latter I count as cheating: you're using a GUI for the task! Cheater.)
Vimperator actually. Viewing documents, like images and videos, is a visual task for which a GUI is useful. For actually interacting with the document, I still prefer a command environment.
Not if you're writing the code in a IDE
Not sure why you'd do that.
What more can you do? What can you do with a CLI that you can't with a GUI?
Loops, variables, pipes, etc.
No; that makes it a trade off. If I'm Hatta, and I completely discount learning curve as a factor in judging something,
The learning curve is irrelevant when you're comparing capabilities. What matters is how much can be done, not how much can be done by a naive user within 10 minutes. I dunno if you've ever taken chemistry, but think of it like kinetics vs thermodynamics. The rate of a reaction (kinetically favored) has nothing to do with the state at equilibrium (thermodynamically favored). A reaction might be very fast, but over the long term not favored thermodynamically. Similarly an OS might be easy to use, but over the long term less useful than one that takes longer to learn but can do more. It's not the slope of the learning curve that matters, but the height at the top of the curve.
Look at my 777 vs. Wright Flyer example, that's exactly what you're doing!
Your example is bogus. The 777 is easier to learn to fly, but it's also more capable than the Wright Flyer. The CLI is more like an SR-71. Harder to pilot, but it can fly longer, faster, and higher than anything else.
It's not even worth trying to discuss this with you.
But it's entertaining and we're bored at work, right?
That's rather obtuse of you. Nobody says that he can't close the camp. The issue is now that the camp is theoretically closed, what happens to the people who are currently there. He doesn't have the power to actually fix that
There's no issue there. We have a civilian justice system. Try them or let them go. He's just too big of a pussy to do the right thing.
So you edit films in a CLI? Play video games in a CLI?
Those are a few more of the tasks that are fundamentally visual for which you'll want a GUI.
Write your documents in a CLI, even though you don't get WYSIWYG that way?
LaTeX is superior to any GUI typesetting program out there.
Create websites in a CLI?
Use Vim and reload the browser when you write out the file.
Hell, for that matter, write computer code in a CLI? Even *writing code* has been supplanted by the GUI solution....
Writing code itself is a CLI. There's a reason computer languages are textual and not graphical. Figure that out and you'll understand why the CLI is superior.
Being easier-to-learn *makes* it superior. Way to miss the point.
All things identical, being easier to learn would make it superior. But all things aren't equal. The GUI is easier to learn, but it's also less capable. The CLI is harder to learn, but you can do a lot more with it. That makes it superior.
Wrong: it's not superior when my goal is to drive while eating french fries. So you're factually wrong off the bat.
Fair enough. I guess the GUI is superior if you want to compute while eating french fries too. So I'll give you that much.
But let's assume you're correct. If a manual transmission is superior *in every way* (your words) than an automatic, why are millions of automatic transmissions sold each year? What's your explanation for your phenomenon? Do you honestly believe millions of people are going out of their way to use the inferior product? Do you think everybody in the world except you is insane?
Yes, millions of people go out of their way to use inferior products all the time. What is popular is often quite different from what is good. McDonalds sells billions of hamburgers a year, while the cafe down the street only sells thousands. Does that mean McDonalds makes the better hamburger? Hardly.
Look, it's really retarded to even have this conversation, because the last 20 years of computer sales have already proven beyond a doubt that the GUI is the superior interface.
The last 20 years have only proven that the GUI is the most popular interface. That's not the same as being the best.
My last remaining question is, do you literally and genuinely believe this ridiculous position?
Absolutely. Do you literally and genuinely believe the ridiculous position that market success is equivalent to quality? How can you ignore the innumerable counter examples?
For some small subset of tasks, it's superior to the GUI. For the majority of tasks, it is not. This seems pretty obvious to me; if that wasn't the case, why would the GUI even have been invented and widely deployed?
It's the other way around. The GUI is superior for a few tasks (random access file picking, image manipulation), and inferior for everything else. The reason the GUI was adopted so widely is because it's easier to learn, not because it's superior in general. And that makes sense, a tool that is less powerful is generally easier to use.
Let's look at your argument through the traditional car analogy. That the automatic transmission is so widely used must mean that it's superior to the manual transmission right? No. For someone who knows what they are doing, the manual transmission is superior in every way. Same goes for the CLI.