As Windows gets gamier and gamier (, I love the British expression,) it is perceived as less and less of a serious OS. Face it, its broken adn it can't be fixed. Its not a "serious" OS.
Before I begin my rant, let's make sure we're talking about the same OS. There are actually two OSs called "Windows." One is just MS-DOS with a GUI layer, and is now in legacy mode. (And was never really a true OS, so good riddance.) The other is the NT release stream, which include Windows 2000 and Windows XP. We are both talking about the second one, right?
Well maybe not. I don't see how you can say that NT is not a "serious" OS. The DOS/Windows kludge, sure, but NT isn't based on that. It's a completely new OS, architected by one of the industry's leading OS engineers.
I know what you're saying: "OK, NT is a real OS, but Microsoft has screwed it up so much it's beyond saving." Well, if you think of Windows as that bloated bundle you buy at CompUSA, you're right. But that's because you're forced to deal with a huge pile of crappy software -- IIS, IE, etc., etc, etc -- that Microsoft won't let you not buy and install. If you could install just the basic (and actually rather well-designed) OS and build on that, life could be a lot saner.
Indeed, there are people who do this. There's a componentized version of Windows that's specifically designed to be integrated on a "pick and choose" basis. Only problem: you can't buy a copy. You can only license it for use in embedded applications.
If I were in charge of the DoJ anti-trust departments, that's something I'd work very hard to change. There's no reason people shouldn't be able to get access to all this stuff just by paying Bill some reasonable licensing fees. You'd see a competing OS that was still NT at its core, but used non-Microsoft stuff for most GUI components. (Probably a lot of the GUI would be taken from open source projects like KDE and GNOME.) And compatibility would be much less an issue, because the competitors would be offering the same fundamental platform.
Magazines that called their content "Science Fiction" started to appear in the 30s. But Hugo Gernsback was publishing stuff we'd call "Science Fiction" long before that. (Gernsback coined the word "Scientifiction", which I suppose must have become "Science Fiction".) And there were magazines publishing "scientific romances" and "future adventure" long before that, though I think they mostly lumped it in with other adventure genres.
Science fiction, under whatever name, goes back centuries. Cyrano de Bergerac wrote a story about a rocketship to the moon in 1657!
I think the crucial thing that happened in the 30s is that the English-speaking world started to be dominated by an industrial, rather than an agricultural, economy. As the population became more technical, so did its taste in adventure stories.
Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
"You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair."
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and buttons, and turns out his toes.
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.
I passed by his garden, and marked with one eye,
How the Owl and Panther were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy and meat,
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet by--
I used to own this transmeta-based subnotebook and I was really unimpressed with its battery life. I think it had a lot of other fancy hardware that more than made up for any power saved by the fancy processor.
When I bought that system, I was wowed by the transmeta mystique. Kind of ironic: I'm always correcting people who assume that faster processors mean faster systems, but then I went and assumed that a energy-frugal processor means an energy-frugal system.
Bottom line: always evaluate the system as a whole, and don't focus on one particular bit of tech that happens to be kewl.
Your analogy is almost a good one. Just ditch the slot machines. You should have said, "It was like playing poker and they didn't know when to drop back to a low-stakes game."
Isn't the challenge... to get game publishers to release linux versions of their games?
Which they won't do until there are more Linux users. Which won't happen until there are more Linux games. Which won't happen... well, you get the idea.
I really don't see how a game-oriented distro does much to persuade people to switch to Linux. It's just a way of saying, "Hey, there are more good Linux games than you thought!" To which, gamers will respond, "That's cool, but there are still more games on Windows, right? And I still can't play X or Y on Linux, right? And even if it runs under Wine, I can't call the publisher and ask for tech support, right?" Until you can find good answers to those questions, forget it.
If you treat poker purely as a gambling game, sure you'll lose less money playing slots. But you will lose, because slots is a purely random game where you can't control the outcome -- an outcome that is weighted with house odds.
There are three kinds of players of purely random games (though they probably overlap a bit): people who enjoy random games, and know that can't win; people who are addicted to gambling in any form; and people who think they've found a loophole in the laws of probability. None of these is based on any kind of logical strategy, and "dropping back" implies switching to a logical strategy you can afford to maintain. At least it does to me.
It was like playing poker and they didn't know when to drop back to the nickle slot machines.
OK, that's clear enough, but I just can't let such a half-mixed metaphor pass. I mean, you do know that slots is a game of pure chance? Whereas poker is, well, more than that...
...it's annoying that although recent polls show that more than 50% of the country support full legalisation of pot possession and use, the government is only willing to take push a decriminalisation bill. So technically police could still issue you the legal equivalent of a parking fine for smoking marijuana.
"Vice" laws always have a vocal constituency that has a disproportinate say in them staying on the books. That's why both the U.S. and Canada went through a long period banning alcohol -- a law most people didn't even obey, much less support.
Consider that paragon of social tolerance, the Netherlands. People there smoke pot there openly and it's easy to buy. Some marijuana markets are even run by police units, the better to keep out purveyers of hard drugs. One police official credited widespread use of pot with preventing soccer hooliganism during the 2002 world cup!
But, except for medical uses, pot is still very much illegal in the Netherlands. The tolerant attitude prevents the law from being enforced, but the bluenoses are still able to keep it on the books!
Drek is something of no value. For example, a person who has access to the Internet, the greatest reference tool in human history, and yet cannot answer the simplest questions for himself unassisted.
Longer than that on Slashdot. It takes nearly a week for all the clueless "that can't be true" posts, the complaints, the me-too jokes, and all the other content-free posts to stop dominating the discussion. I usually stop metamoderating for a couple weeks!
You can view NYTimes content without registering by going to www.akamai.net/3af3ffa34d/nysucks/beetlejuice/beet lejuice/beetlejuice/4score7/freeasinfreedom.html. For best results, use a text-only browser such as Lynx and avoid accessing the site when it's 12:17 to 1:03 (except on Tuesdays) in Mumbai, India.
That sort of rote memorization is stupid anyway. Sometimes you have to do it (like when you're learning the grammar or vocabulary of a foreign language). But making small kids memori8ze arbitrary, meaningless facts about a subject is a sure way to destroy their interest.
I've never had trouble remembering the names of the planets, and I totally suck at rote memorization. I just read some interesting stuff about them at an early age and it stuck.
In Sixth Grade, the teacher decided we all had to memorize the names of the presidents and recite them in class. I just couldn't do it. Interesting thing: the current president had just gotten re-elected, and everybody insisted on saying his name twice. I tried to point out that this didn't make sense, since nobody said "Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt". But I wasn't allowed to have an opinion, since I hadn't even done the assignment!
...even if they should overrun them by a factor of 2, 5, or 10...
What about 1,000? From what I've read about previous space elevator proposals, such an underestimate is not at all unlikely. Before you're going to get me to take this proposal seriously, you're going to have to show me some credible third-party analysis that claims this proposal even works, never mind being doable for less than a trillion.
So if I rob a liquor store because I'm too lazy to go out and get a job, my laziness is not an issue? And if a President scuttles several useful programs to feather his own political nest, his cynicism is not an issue? Whatever you say.
It's totally beyond my competence to critique this report. I do find it hard to swallow that such a major project could be done for such a tiny (by space exploration standards) sum. It's easy to claim in a paper that something can be done for X billion. Rather too easy -- the whole "Strategic Defense" boondoggle was based on silly claims that they could build it all with "off the shelf" tech.
All we lack is a reliable source of power, damn anti-nuclear lobby..
If you think the use of Orion Spacecraft is held back by a "lobby", think again. People get very nervous about nuclear explosions in the atmosphere.
Chemical-powered launch vehicles are perfectly feasible. But whatever motive power you use, developing a serious heavy launcher would cost a lot of money. Alas, the motivation was never there.
Come on, let's take it one step at a time. We can't even think about building a space elevator with our current resources. The first step is to capture an asteroid to ballast the high end of the cable -- something we currently have no hope of doing.
If you're having any kind of eye problem, you really need to do this. You might well have some physical problem that needs serious action.
In any case, you'll get some good advice. Mine told me a bunch of stuff to try. The most suprising was the suggestion that I lower my monitor so that it was about 25 degrees below eye level. This sounded odd to me, because computer furniture mostly seems designed to raise the monitor.
Glasses might also be an option. I have a friend who wears them only when she's online. (And on certain, uhm, other occasions, because her husband thinks they're sexy.) Or if you already wear glasses, you might find it worthwhile to have a separate set of "task" glasses just for working with the computer.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's the only good part.
Well maybe not. I don't see how you can say that NT is not a "serious" OS. The DOS/Windows kludge, sure, but NT isn't based on that. It's a completely new OS, architected by one of the industry's leading OS engineers.
I know what you're saying: "OK, NT is a real OS, but Microsoft has screwed it up so much it's beyond saving." Well, if you think of Windows as that bloated bundle you buy at CompUSA, you're right. But that's because you're forced to deal with a huge pile of crappy software -- IIS, IE, etc., etc, etc -- that Microsoft won't let you not buy and install. If you could install just the basic (and actually rather well-designed) OS and build on that, life could be a lot saner.
Indeed, there are people who do this. There's a componentized version of Windows that's specifically designed to be integrated on a "pick and choose" basis. Only problem: you can't buy a copy. You can only license it for use in embedded applications.
If I were in charge of the DoJ anti-trust departments, that's something I'd work very hard to change. There's no reason people shouldn't be able to get access to all this stuff just by paying Bill some reasonable licensing fees. You'd see a competing OS that was still NT at its core, but used non-Microsoft stuff for most GUI components. (Probably a lot of the GUI would be taken from open source projects like KDE and GNOME.) And compatibility would be much less an issue, because the competitors would be offering the same fundamental platform.
That is serious competition.
Science fiction, under whatever name, goes back centuries. Cyrano de Bergerac wrote a story about a rocketship to the moon in 1657!
I think the crucial thing that happened in the 30s is that the English-speaking world started to be dominated by an industrial, rather than an agricultural, economy. As the population became more technical, so did its taste in adventure stories.
by Lewis Caroll
Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
"You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair."
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and buttons, and turns out his toes.
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.
I passed by his garden, and marked with one eye,
How the Owl and Panther were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy and meat,
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet by--
When I bought that system, I was wowed by the transmeta mystique. Kind of ironic: I'm always correcting people who assume that faster processors mean faster systems, but then I went and assumed that a energy-frugal processor means an energy-frugal system.
Bottom line: always evaluate the system as a whole, and don't focus on one particular bit of tech that happens to be kewl.
Your analogy is almost a good one. Just ditch the slot machines. You should have said, "It was like playing poker and they didn't know when to drop back to a low-stakes game."
I really don't see how a game-oriented distro does much to persuade people to switch to Linux. It's just a way of saying, "Hey, there are more good Linux games than you thought!" To which, gamers will respond, "That's cool, but there are still more games on Windows, right? And I still can't play X or Y on Linux, right? And even if it runs under Wine, I can't call the publisher and ask for tech support, right?" Until you can find good answers to those questions, forget it.
There are three kinds of players of purely random games (though they probably overlap a bit): people who enjoy random games, and know that can't win; people who are addicted to gambling in any form; and people who think they've found a loophole in the laws of probability. None of these is based on any kind of logical strategy, and "dropping back" implies switching to a logical strategy you can afford to maintain. At least it does to me.
Jerry Pournelle (who else?) actually wrote a story along these lines. Naturally, he rather liked to idea...
Consider that paragon of social tolerance, the Netherlands. People there smoke pot there openly and it's easy to buy. Some marijuana markets are even run by police units, the better to keep out purveyers of hard drugs. One police official credited widespread use of pot with preventing soccer hooliganism during the 2002 world cup!
But, except for medical uses, pot is still very much illegal in the Netherlands. The tolerant attitude prevents the law from being enforced, but the bluenoses are still able to keep it on the books!
Drek is something of no value. For example, a person who has access to the Internet, the greatest reference tool in human history, and yet cannot answer the simplest questions for himself unassisted.
Longer than that on Slashdot. It takes nearly a week for all the clueless "that can't be true" posts, the complaints, the me-too jokes, and all the other content-free posts to stop dominating the discussion. I usually stop metamoderating for a couple weeks!
If you have to ask the question, you couldn't understand the answer!
But then we can't nitpick bad TV science fiction that doesn't know the difference between "interplanetary" and "intergalactice"!
I've never had trouble remembering the names of the planets, and I totally suck at rote memorization. I just read some interesting stuff about them at an early age and it stuck.
In Sixth Grade, the teacher decided we all had to memorize the names of the presidents and recite them in class. I just couldn't do it. Interesting thing: the current president had just gotten re-elected, and everybody insisted on saying his name twice. I tried to point out that this didn't make sense, since nobody said "Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt". But I wasn't allowed to have an opinion, since I hadn't even done the assignment!
Alphaville
So if I rob a liquor store because I'm too lazy to go out and get a job, my laziness is not an issue? And if a President scuttles several useful programs to feather his own political nest, his cynicism is not an issue? Whatever you say.
It's totally beyond my competence to critique this report. I do find it hard to swallow that such a major project could be done for such a tiny (by space exploration standards) sum. It's easy to claim in a paper that something can be done for X billion. Rather too easy -- the whole "Strategic Defense" boondoggle was based on silly claims that they could build it all with "off the shelf" tech.
Chemical-powered launch vehicles are perfectly feasible. But whatever motive power you use, developing a serious heavy launcher would cost a lot of money. Alas, the motivation was never there.
Come on, let's take it one step at a time. We can't even think about building a space elevator with our current resources. The first step is to capture an asteroid to ballast the high end of the cable -- something we currently have no hope of doing.
In any case, you'll get some good advice. Mine told me a bunch of stuff to try. The most suprising was the suggestion that I lower my monitor so that it was about 25 degrees below eye level. This sounded odd to me, because computer furniture mostly seems designed to raise the monitor.
Glasses might also be an option. I have a friend who wears them only when she's online. (And on certain, uhm, other occasions, because her husband thinks they're sexy.) Or if you already wear glasses, you might find it worthwhile to have a separate set of "task" glasses just for working with the computer.