Wait, you're color-blind, but you could distinguish more colors than other people?
Think of it more this way, in a graphics application you could do RGB separation. If your image is vastly dominated by one color, say green, it might be a lot easier to see differences in the red/blue color spectrum if green is zeroed out. Now the eye is a bit more complicated than that but it's the same principle.
It reminds of a blind test I saw of the mp3 format - the winner who could distinguish mp3s the best had an ear injury. The result was that the tone masking mp3 uses didn't work for him because he couldn't hear all frequencies as well as a normal person, so he heard sounds that would have been drowned out for others.
So yes, even though you see or hear less in total, you might actually see or hear more in the given situation. But I'd call that an annoyance most of the time since most illusions are entertainment, not soldiers hiding to kill you.
I've only been running Linux on x86 hardware... so would Linux on ARM:
a) Run a typical distro only recompiled or is a lot of software x86-specific? b) Run wine? c) Run virtualbox w/windows? d) Be able to use w32codecs so everything plays?
I'm sure there's a few that's removed all traces of Windows, but I'm not one of them...
It depresses me that since I got cable almost 10years ago my speed and capacity has dropped, reliability has dropped massively and is going to take another hit.
Did you sometime in the last ten years move from a very high-tech country to some third world country? Ten years ago I was on 64kbps ISDN. Now I'm on 20Mbit cable and yes, I do hit 2.2 MB/s in actual downloads. In another ten years I expect to be on fiber or next gen cable with 100-1000Mbit somewhere.
It works both ways though - the harder it is to make it happen, the bigger are usually the payoffs when you make it because competitors can't copy you easily. It's after all a big cost/benefit decision under uncertainty.
A hack that has been disabled at AT&T's request, just like it would be on any other phone that has updates. Apple didn't "remove a feature" - the iPhone can still tether just fine - as long as your carrier supports it.
No, it disables tethering on all ISPs worldwide except those blessed by Apple, including those that have no problem with it.
From what I've understood it's more about social security, let's face it not that long ago being old and childless was rather nasty. In practice you depended on your children for economic support, caring for you and if you didn't have anyone there was really noone to take care of you. With more children you split the burden, of course higher survival rates lowers the risk but I don't think that's the main driver. These days it can still be lonely and I'm not saying the minimum pension is great, but most people live decent sunset years regardless of how many children they have. Sure most people want a family and children, but not that need that drives you into having ten kids.
Exactly. Most other data types standardized on one or a handful of formats long ago, it was the Microsoft monopoly that distorted things with formatted text and spreadsheets. Think about it, far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats that a multitude of programs all process and exchange data through. Look at sound, still images, vector graphics, even video! All interoperable.z/quote>
I think you're comparing apples to oranges here, with sound or still images or video I don't really care how it's stored as such only that it decodes to uncompressed audio/video frames. It is the decoded version, the simplest of structures, that is the universal intermediary. With documents the whole point is in preserving and manipulating the markup, what it renders to as a screenshot is completely irrelevant. That means to convert from say MS Office to OpenOffice you have to map the content, layout, every setting, every function, every formula, everything. You need to have exact specifications on both formats and things must mean the same, That is completely and utterly the opposite of the examples you make.
P.S. You're horribly, horribly wrong about vector graphics.
Competition lowers prices by having another company turn a profit for less, either by having slimmer margins and by lowering their cost of production. The Pirate Bay doesn't produce music, it has no talent scouts, studios, sound engineers, royalty model for artist or anything of the sort. It's either the big labels or the artist covering for those from his own pocket. So if you got the same fixed cost and less unit sales, well the math is easy, either you need to make more money per copy or if the price/quantity curve doesn't swing that way then pack up and find a new job.
Even if you take the most optimistic estimates of "I wouldn't have bought it anyway", though you did manage to spend two hours of your life to watch the movie, and the most ridiculous overestimates on the advertising income of TPB there is no doubt that TPB is cheap. Very cheap. If we just killed off CD/DVD sales, TV subscriptions, movie rentals and all that and just said "download it all from TPB" the ad revenue wouldn't pay people minimum wage. Sure, for four operators of TPB is might be decent cash but four people that's one music band. It's going to be amateur night all night every night if there's nothing better than that.
And there you go, the problem in a nutshell. Expecting end users to do stuff like this is bullshit.
Of course. But try doing the same in Windows to see whether it's a firewall, your router, client using wrong address, server not listening or whatever that is causing the problem. It's not easy there either.
The problem here is that the end user is running into it in the first place, not that network debugging is arcane magic. I honestly don't think most users either on Linux or Windows would be able to debug it.
You're still redefining "lock-in" to mean everything else than that the vendor has in fact actively done something to lock you in. By your definition I'm locked in to Linux because there's a snowflake's chance in hell I could make a successful fork of it. Lock-in means the product only works with the product itself, that the data is trapped and that you're being forced to pay large sums for upgrades because things run out of support and you can't fix things yourself.
You're redefining the scale to not only say "Can we take what we have, and go off with that in any direction or no direction at all only with bugfixes?" but also "Can we take off in any direction, and get all the benefits of every other company going in every other direction (and a free pony too)?". That's nonsense, you're not locked in by a future product because the future product is better. You can only be locked in by an existing product because you can not leave. When you assume both that future versions will have features you need and no forks will have them you paint yourself into a corner that has nothing to do with lock-in.
So if you want the most modern free office application, you are "locked-in" to Open Office.
When you want "the most [adjective] [type] application", there's implicitly only one vendor. By your criteria anything but lock-in is impossible.
The question is how you're making it for. I've made things for myself that have UIs that are incredibly cryptic but work for doing what I want to do. If I just throw it out there because it's better than sitting on my hard drive, well... You really only start caring about the UI when you code for others.
Yeah, but I'm not usually trying to multitask while wearing swimming goggles, and eyeglasses don't get in the way of doing other things. Like most people, if I'm watching TV, I'm also doing other activities: cooking, browsing the Internet on my laptop, etc. So long as these 3D glasses interfere with my normal vision, they won't be a part of my entertainment system.
Here's a tip. It's possible to follow this incredibly complex procedure: Take glasses, put on forehead. To restore 3D vision, return glasses to cover your eyes. If you're doing this too often, you're not actually paying any attention to the TV anyway, so why bother with quality at all? Anyway we'll see but 3D has been rather underwhelming in my experience, yes it's been at park rides and whatever and it's a nice trick but not much mroe than that so far. It's pretty far from virtual reality...
I don't know where the idea that glasses make you ugly comes from. Maybe the contact lens manufacturers.
If you're forced to wear glasses, you hate them. They fog up, scratch, fall off, cost real money to break and take up plenty real estate on your face that you never asked for. Not to mention that it's like walking around with a neon sign saying my eyes aren't that great, it's not like people want to show off their flaws. And many people never get comfortable with contacts, so they have to use glasses.
Glasses for sight correction are usually not nearly as pretty as fun novelty/fashion/whatever glasses, because part of the point is that you need to see through them to see, and you need them all the time. If you just have them for style and can look all around anyway and take them off if you want, it's a whole different game. Plus they can be made of 1.99$ plastic.
5. A plethora of linux distributions makes it difficult to choose.
Kinda at the book store, how you were confused by all the books there and couldn't find Harry Potter? I'm tired of this point, it's not in any practical sense true. There's the huge Gnome/KDE split but that's about it for end users. If somebody asks you "I've heard about this 'Linux' thing, where's a good place to start?" and you're not deliberately trying to confuse them or scare them away, there's a handful of options tops. Actually I think 50%+ in a poll would answer the same.
This I deeply disagree with. While there's many open source applications I've found to be lacking, I've rarely ever see them go crap with featuritis while I've seen it many times with Windows software. It works great in it's niche but to sell more we pile on a ton of crap. At best you can say that some open source continues to push features while they're still crap, but I've never seen them go bad in the way closed source software has.
Security fixes are a lot harder if every application depending on a library must push their own security fix. If someone fixes a bug in the PNG library, all applications that deal with PNGs has the bug fixed. There's a download size penalty and memory penalty of dealing with all these versions. Somehow, I've never found this to be much of a problem. The problem has typically been the big 6 month distro upgrades when they're doing something new and funny with sound or networking or whatever else.
There's nothing really keeping you from installing a completely self-contained application, but there doesn't seem to be any popular support for it. At least for me I feel this is way down on the priority list.
Very much disagree. Are you expecting people to work outside of the working hours?
Not sure at what you're getting at here, maybe you got caught up too much in the word "work". Many coders code outside their working hours, few technical writers write documentation. Apart from some high-profile projects like the Linux kernel, also at work time is spent making stuff work, not making comprehensive technical write-ups about things. The result is that the code-to-documentation ratio is much higher, and unlike closed source they don't have the cash to hire someone to do all those boring parts nobody's volunteering for. Usually the documentation ends up being what someone wrote after messing around with it in order to make it work, but usually that refers only to what he was trying to do and he's not assigned to keep that documentation current.
Please stop saying "[just|merely|only|nothing but] semantics" in common language, as they are anything but insignificant, by definition.
I've always taken the expression to mean that in context, you're busy pointing out linguistic inaccuracies that are not actually relevant to the point being made. To make an example and invoke Godwin at the same time, imagine you started a sentence with "After Hitler grabbed power, he..." only to be broken off by a 15 minute discussion on whether "grabbed" is the right word. Then you could say something like "Stop bickering over semantics, what I was trying to say was that after that..."
I'd say it's a perfectly natural reaction to the way society has evolved. We are continuously improving medicine and safety so that less and less people die early of injury and illness. The average life expectancy has gone somewhat up too, but the outliers have gotten a lot smaller. If you survive your first year there's a 90% probability you'll be 55+ years old and 70% probability of becoming 70+ and that is total figures including all Darwin award winners, suicides, drug overdoses and whatnot. Normal healthy people are probably way higher than that again, so you kinda come to expect it.
Even those doing extreme sports are fairly non-extreme when it comes to dying. It's more the thrill of bungee jumping, skydiving and mountain climbing than the reality that you're using extremely tested equipment with lots of procedures to ensure you actually don't die even though you're hanging off a cliff edge. Of course there's the really, really extreme but they're few enough to be statistical noise. I guess those are the people we should use for space exploration, but don't expect people to understand them. Even the thrillseekers don't seem to understand those that are really careless with their lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, you're color-blind, but you could distinguish more colors than other people?
Think of it more this way, in a graphics application you could do RGB separation. If your image is vastly dominated by one color, say green, it might be a lot easier to see differences in the red/blue color spectrum if green is zeroed out. Now the eye is a bit more complicated than that but it's the same principle.
It reminds of a blind test I saw of the mp3 format - the winner who could distinguish mp3s the best had an ear injury. The result was that the tone masking mp3 uses didn't work for him because he couldn't hear all frequencies as well as a normal person, so he heard sounds that would have been drowned out for others.
So yes, even though you see or hear less in total, you might actually see or hear more in the given situation. But I'd call that an annoyance most of the time since most illusions are entertainment, not soldiers hiding to kill you.
[3 months later]:
<admin@uni> OMG we lost the server... 0 seeds!? somebody seed plz!
Stop this now, BBC. Is it silly season with legislation all of a sudden?
Nope, looks like third millennium will be all silly season.
I've only been running Linux on x86 hardware... so would Linux on ARM:
a) Run a typical distro only recompiled or is a lot of software x86-specific?
b) Run wine?
c) Run virtualbox w/windows?
d) Be able to use w32codecs so everything plays?
I'm sure there's a few that's removed all traces of Windows, but I'm not one of them...
It depresses me that since I got cable almost 10years ago my speed and capacity has dropped, reliability has dropped massively and is going to take another hit.
Did you sometime in the last ten years move from a very high-tech country to some third world country? Ten years ago I was on 64kbps ISDN. Now I'm on 20Mbit cable and yes, I do hit 2.2 MB/s in actual downloads. In another ten years I expect to be on fiber or next gen cable with 100-1000Mbit somewhere.
It works both ways though - the harder it is to make it happen, the bigger are usually the payoffs when you make it because competitors can't copy you easily. It's after all a big cost/benefit decision under uncertainty.
A hack that has been disabled at AT&T's request, just like it would be on any other phone that has updates. Apple didn't "remove a feature" - the iPhone can still tether just fine - as long as your carrier supports it.
No, it disables tethering on all ISPs worldwide except those blessed by Apple, including those that have no problem with it.
From what I've understood it's more about social security, let's face it not that long ago being old and childless was rather nasty. In practice you depended on your children for economic support, caring for you and if you didn't have anyone there was really noone to take care of you. With more children you split the burden, of course higher survival rates lowers the risk but I don't think that's the main driver. These days it can still be lonely and I'm not saying the minimum pension is great, but most people live decent sunset years regardless of how many children they have. Sure most people want a family and children, but not that need that drives you into having ten kids.
Exactly. Most other data types standardized on one or a handful of formats long ago, it was the Microsoft monopoly that distorted things with formatted text and spreadsheets. Think about it, far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats that a multitude of programs all process and exchange data through. Look at sound, still images, vector graphics, even video! All interoperable.z/quote>
I think you're comparing apples to oranges here, with sound or still images or video I don't really care how it's stored as such only that it decodes to uncompressed audio/video frames. It is the decoded version, the simplest of structures, that is the universal intermediary. With documents the whole point is in preserving and manipulating the markup, what it renders to as a screenshot is completely irrelevant. That means to convert from say MS Office to OpenOffice you have to map the content, layout, every setting, every function, every formula, everything. You need to have exact specifications on both formats and things must mean the same, That is completely and utterly the opposite of the examples you make.
P.S. You're horribly, horribly wrong about vector graphics.
Competition lowers prices by having another company turn a profit for less, either by having slimmer margins and by lowering their cost of production. The Pirate Bay doesn't produce music, it has no talent scouts, studios, sound engineers, royalty model for artist or anything of the sort. It's either the big labels or the artist covering for those from his own pocket. So if you got the same fixed cost and less unit sales, well the math is easy, either you need to make more money per copy or if the price/quantity curve doesn't swing that way then pack up and find a new job.
Even if you take the most optimistic estimates of "I wouldn't have bought it anyway", though you did manage to spend two hours of your life to watch the movie, and the most ridiculous overestimates on the advertising income of TPB there is no doubt that TPB is cheap. Very cheap. If we just killed off CD/DVD sales, TV subscriptions, movie rentals and all that and just said "download it all from TPB" the ad revenue wouldn't pay people minimum wage. Sure, for four operators of TPB is might be decent cash but four people that's one music band. It's going to be amateur night all night every night if there's nothing better than that.
Rather than the point-and-click convenience you'd expect on windows.
Actually, they found Amazon had patented that so they had to go with the no-click experience. Got to respect corporate IP, you know.
And there you go, the problem in a nutshell. Expecting end users to do stuff like this is bullshit.
Of course. But try doing the same in Windows to see whether it's a firewall, your router, client using wrong address, server not listening or whatever that is causing the problem. It's not easy there either.
The problem here is that the end user is running into it in the first place, not that network debugging is arcane magic. I honestly don't think most users either on Linux or Windows would be able to debug it.
Just waiting for the flamefest here of Linux vs Windows botnets.
You're still redefining "lock-in" to mean everything else than that the vendor has in fact actively done something to lock you in. By your definition I'm locked in to Linux because there's a snowflake's chance in hell I could make a successful fork of it. Lock-in means the product only works with the product itself, that the data is trapped and that you're being forced to pay large sums for upgrades because things run out of support and you can't fix things yourself.
You're redefining the scale to not only say "Can we take what we have, and go off with that in any direction or no direction at all only with bugfixes?" but also "Can we take off in any direction, and get all the benefits of every other company going in every other direction (and a free pony too)?". That's nonsense, you're not locked in by a future product because the future product is better. You can only be locked in by an existing product because you can not leave. When you assume both that future versions will have features you need and no forks will have them you paint yourself into a corner that has nothing to do with lock-in.
So if you want the most modern free office application, you are "locked-in" to Open Office.
When you want "the most [adjective] [type] application", there's implicitly only one vendor. By your criteria anything but lock-in is impossible.
The question is how you're making it for. I've made things for myself that have UIs that are incredibly cryptic but work for doing what I want to do. If I just throw it out there because it's better than sitting on my hard drive, well... You really only start caring about the UI when you code for others.
Yeah, but I'm not usually trying to multitask while wearing swimming goggles, and eyeglasses don't get in the way of doing other things. Like most people, if I'm watching TV, I'm also doing other activities: cooking, browsing the Internet on my laptop, etc. So long as these 3D glasses interfere with my normal vision, they won't be a part of my entertainment system.
Here's a tip. It's possible to follow this incredibly complex procedure: Take glasses, put on forehead. To restore 3D vision, return glasses to cover your eyes. If you're doing this too often, you're not actually paying any attention to the TV anyway, so why bother with quality at all? Anyway we'll see but 3D has been rather underwhelming in my experience, yes it's been at park rides and whatever and it's a nice trick but not much mroe than that so far. It's pretty far from virtual reality...
I don't know where the idea that glasses make you ugly comes from. Maybe the contact lens manufacturers.
If you're forced to wear glasses, you hate them. They fog up, scratch, fall off, cost real money to break and take up plenty real estate on your face that you never asked for. Not to mention that it's like walking around with a neon sign saying my eyes aren't that great, it's not like people want to show off their flaws. And many people never get comfortable with contacts, so they have to use glasses.
Glasses for sight correction are usually not nearly as pretty as fun novelty/fashion/whatever glasses, because part of the point is that you need to see through them to see, and you need them all the time. If you just have them for style and can look all around anyway and take them off if you want, it's a whole different game. Plus they can be made of 1.99$ plastic.
5. A plethora of linux distributions makes it difficult to choose.
Kinda at the book store, how you were confused by all the books there and couldn't find Harry Potter? I'm tired of this point, it's not in any practical sense true. There's the huge Gnome/KDE split but that's about it for end users. If somebody asks you "I've heard about this 'Linux' thing, where's a good place to start?" and you're not deliberately trying to confuse them or scare them away, there's a handful of options tops. Actually I think 50%+ in a poll would answer the same.
10. Featuritis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep)
This I deeply disagree with. While there's many open source applications I've found to be lacking, I've rarely ever see them go crap with featuritis while I've seen it many times with Windows software. It works great in it's niche but to sell more we pile on a ton of crap. At best you can say that some open source continues to push features while they're still crap, but I've never seen them go bad in the way closed source software has.
It has pros and cons.
Security fixes are a lot harder if every application depending on a library must push their own security fix. If someone fixes a bug in the PNG library, all applications that deal with PNGs has the bug fixed. There's a download size penalty and memory penalty of dealing with all these versions. Somehow, I've never found this to be much of a problem. The problem has typically been the big 6 month distro upgrades when they're doing something new and funny with sound or networking or whatever else.
There's nothing really keeping you from installing a completely self-contained application, but there doesn't seem to be any popular support for it. At least for me I feel this is way down on the priority list.
Very much disagree. Are you expecting people to work outside of the working hours?
Not sure at what you're getting at here, maybe you got caught up too much in the word "work". Many coders code outside their working hours, few technical writers write documentation. Apart from some high-profile projects like the Linux kernel, also at work time is spent making stuff work, not making comprehensive technical write-ups about things. The result is that the code-to-documentation ratio is much higher, and unlike closed source they don't have the cash to hire someone to do all those boring parts nobody's volunteering for. Usually the documentation ends up being what someone wrote after messing around with it in order to make it work, but usually that refers only to what he was trying to do and he's not assigned to keep that documentation current.
Wow, I didn't know the "LHC will collapse the universe" physicists also did biology!
I can taste the Slashdotters' stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
You got it all backwards, it's when you don't feel it anymore you should worry. Natural immunity, you see.
Please stop saying "[just|merely|only|nothing but] semantics" in common language, as they are anything but insignificant, by definition.
I've always taken the expression to mean that in context, you're busy pointing out linguistic inaccuracies that are not actually relevant to the point being made. To make an example and invoke Godwin at the same time, imagine you started a sentence with "After Hitler grabbed power, he..." only to be broken off by a 15 minute discussion on whether "grabbed" is the right word. Then you could say something like "Stop bickering over semantics, what I was trying to say was that after that..."
Probably, but so will the magnetic field. It says the mouse weighs 10 grams, so a ~10000x increase in the magnetic field might get rather nasty.
I'd say it's a perfectly natural reaction to the way society has evolved. We are continuously improving medicine and safety so that less and less people die early of injury and illness. The average life expectancy has gone somewhat up too, but the outliers have gotten a lot smaller. If you survive your first year there's a 90% probability you'll be 55+ years old and 70% probability of becoming 70+ and that is total figures including all Darwin award winners, suicides, drug overdoses and whatnot. Normal healthy people are probably way higher than that again, so you kinda come to expect it.
Even those doing extreme sports are fairly non-extreme when it comes to dying. It's more the thrill of bungee jumping, skydiving and mountain climbing than the reality that you're using extremely tested equipment with lots of procedures to ensure you actually don't die even though you're hanging off a cliff edge. Of course there's the really, really extreme but they're few enough to be statistical noise. I guess those are the people we should use for space exploration, but don't expect people to understand them. Even the thrillseekers don't seem to understand those that are really careless with their lives.