It is amazing to me that a country that is so adamant about bringing down monopolies in the free market does not mind doing business with a cartel.
It's a "cartel" that sells us oil for less than it costs to drill for it on our own land. We might as well keep buying from them until they run out or wise up.
Another factor is the Not-In-My-Back-Yard attitude of some environmental groups. Ruin a mile of wilderness in Alaska and there are howls of rage. Ruin a mile of wilderness in Saudi Arabia and nobody here cares. The message is that the planet can handle oil wells as long as we can't see them.
But he needs a villain with the word "corporate" as its root, because people who think like him find the word "corporation" to be really scary. It invokes images of large skyscrapers where men in suits sit under florescent lights and discuss their eeeeevil plans for world domination.
He's not writing to inform, but to persuade. Doing so requires choosing his words according to emotional impact, rather than accuracy.
...but then, you probably knew that, and are just pointing out his "errors" to jerk his chain a little. If so, keep it up. Your comment was a lot of fun to read.
Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately, depending on your point of view), the following statement is false.
"Corporations are now the primary contributors to the American election system. They fund the overwhelming majority of lobbyists who prey on Washington."
Corporations do lobby for their interests in Washington (for example, insurance companies are fighting like hell to stop W from repealing the estate tax), but corporations are really small potatoes compared to many rival PAC's, such as the trial lawyers, the National Education Association, the Christian Coalition, the Rainbow Coalition, NARAL, the AFL-CIO, etc.
When a lobbyist from Ford Motors calls, a Senator will take the message, but when a lobbyist from a core PAC for that Senator's party calls, that Senator picks up the phone.
As a side note, did the tone of this particular Katz column remind anybody else of the Unibomber Manifesto?
Pardon me if you already know this, but "Alan Smithee" is not a person. It is a pseodonym that is frequently used when a director asks that their name be removed from the credits.
In other words, an "Alan Smithee" film is one that is so horrible that the director was ashamed that he was involved, and would not want anybody to know it.
Ethanol is more expensive to produce than gasoline.
10% Ethanol gas, required by the Federal EPA in many major cities, is only cheap because of huge subsidies from the Federal Government.
This is one of the best examples available of corporate welfare in American politics. Nearly all of the Ethanol in America is produced by one company, the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation. (The same "ADM: Supermarket to the world!" that sponsors NBC's "Meet the Press").
Since ADM is one of the single largest corporate campaign supporters (mostly for Democrats, but also for a lot of Republicans, including former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as former presidential hopefuls Al Gore AND Bob Dole, and dozens of prominent Senators), it should come as a surprise to nobody that ADM is enjoying the benifits of these subsidies, and that these sam politicians (and some members of the press) cheerlead for the advancement of Ethanol over the eeeevil oil companies.
The truth about Ethanol is that while it does slightly reduce CO and CO2 emissions (yay!), it also emits higher levels of other toxins, such as O3.
For the moment, electric cars are also a poor alternative to gasoline. For several reasons:
1. Battery technology has a long way to go before I can use an electric pickup truck to tow my boat 400 miles to the lake. 2. Most of America's electricity (the source for charging these battery cars) is still generated by burning coal, which is far dirtier than burning gasoline. 3. The batteries themselves are difficult to dispose of safely 4. $35,000 gets you a car that is smaller than most $13,000 cars, with limited range, a very light (re; dangerous) frame, and expensive maintenence.
Hydrogen induction is another popular choice to root for. The problem is, where are you going to get enough hydrogen? You can mine for methane deposits, but the process to convert methane to H2 also produces a shitload of CO2, which is one of the things we are trying to avoid. You can also seperate hydrogen from H2O using electricity... but then you are spending power to get hydrogen to get power, meaning you need another power source or you are talking about a good-old-fashioned perpetual motion scam.
There's solar... if you only want to drive in southern states on sunny days.
Obviously, as oil reserves start to run out (making it prohibitively expensive to get at the oil), probably sometime late in this Century, we will need to switch to another transportation power source. I suspect that if none of these alternate technologies are ready for prime time by then (and it looks like they won't be), we will burn propane and/or natural gas.
Meanwhile, I am off to fire up the V6 3.3L engine of my truck to go fishing up north for Memorial Day weekend. It will cost me at least a good sixty bucks for gas to get to the lake and back... and it will be worth it. Later, all!
Is this the same Peter Jackson who brought us Meet the Feebles and Brain Dead?
Yes, it is.
On the bright side, I saw Liv Tyler on one of the late-night talk shows the other day. She gave us a little sample of what the Elvish language sounds like when spoken. (Apparently, she memorized her Elvish lines, and could still remember a couple.) It sounded kind of cool.
Re:remember the dead of Pearl Harbor this Memorial
on
Lord of the Trailers
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· Score: 1
That was a pretty entertaining troll, actually. I'm glad I read it before it got shot down to -1.
I liked the part about selling both Ayn Rand books and Bibles from the same source. (For those who don't know, Ms. Rand was not simply an athiest, but actually had a strong hatred for organized religion. She also disaproved of charity in general, so buying her books to be given away to the needy, with Bibles, would probably have her turning in her grave.)
Well done, AC. I don't think anybody would have been fooled into thinking you were serious (although the ease with which people are trolled on/. never fails to astonish me), but it was kind of funny.
Just out of curiousity, how do they dub the guy who wears the bee costume for the Spanish TV station on The Simpsons. In the original version, he usually speaks a humorous combination of mostly Spanish with some pidgin English. It seems to me that leaving him untranslated would be the best solution.
You are overstating it a little bit. While the original FOX line-up consisted of Simpsons+Crap, it has gotten better.
They were the station that gave us the X-Files. (Sure, it's crappy now, but it was pretty good for a few years.)
For people who like David E. Kelly shows (not me, but they are out there) there's Ally McBeal and Boston Public.
Malcom In the Middle is one of the funniest shows on TV right now, and Titus is gaining a cult following.
As for WB... They show mostly crap, although my absolute favorite show ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") was one of the few reasons for tuning in. However, "Buffy" is moving to UPN this fall, leaving the WB with only the spin-off "Angel".
UPN offered 2.3 million per episode to secure "Buffy", and have said that they will also buy "Angel" if and when WB drops it. UPN has been another one of those stations (like WB and FOX before it) which was in real danger of being nothing more than a "minstrel show" netowork. (Remember when they tried showing "Homeboys from Outer Space"? Ewww.) However, with a new (hopefully less sucky) Star Trek show, the addition of Buffy and Roswell, and Bill Shatner hosing The Iron Chef... it looks like they are on the verge of being worth watching for the first time since they cancelled "Nowhere Man".
There's also a review of a 15-year old book which speculates about the future of technology, which just became available at Thinkgeek.com.
There's a link to a story over at Ars Technica about the latest Apple Computer press release. The story is generally favorable, other than a brief lament about the astonishing lack of extra mouse buttons.
Finally, there's news about a handheld computer that you can't buy anywhere, which might be able to run Linux. No shipping date has been announced yet, but several Slashdot editors claim to have one on order. Somewhere in the comments, we are told to imagine a Beowolf Cluster of those "puppies".
Nah, for those who don't know already, here is everything you really need to know about Diablo I, II, and the expansion:
It is a game where you scroll around clicking on things. You don't have to click on them particularilly fast or skillfully, because they come at you fairly slowly most of the time. Just take your time and click on them. Sometimes you need to scroll away from them to avoid being overwhelmed, but then you just go back and start clicking again. Do this until they die or you die. If you die, come back and get your stuff, then go back to clicking on things. If they die, take the stuff they drop. Over time, your character gains equipment, skills, and abilities, which create the illusion that you are getting better. However, to advance deeper into the game you need to click on more powerful things, so the difficulty level never really changes very much. The story takes about a week to get through, and is pretty cool, but once you are done with that there is nothing left to do but go through the entire story over again, this time with prettier-looking equipment and clicking on monsters that are "harder" to kill. In the end, you will really like it if you like looking at the eye candy of very small cartoon people moving through a cartoon dungeon killing very small cartoon monsters. Once the thrill of seeing the neat cartoons wears off, it is one of the most boring fucking games in the entire universe. Once you reach that conclusion, you will delete it from your system, and go back to playing "Lemmings" or something.
Besides, we should not be all that offended if our favorite shows and movies are exploited to advertise products to us... That is what they were created for in the first place. What, you people didn't know that?
Re:Linux advocacy: VR3 framework for the Desktop?
on
Agenda, Not Hidden
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· Score: 1
This is a big limiting factor in trying to put Linux on the desktop.
Well, it's a limiting factor of putting Linux on my grandmother's desktop, anyway.
The question the Linux community should be asking itself is: Would mass market acceptance be a Good Thing?
If so, is it Important?
I'm sure it is absolutely urgent to any part-owner of Red Hat... but how much does the typical Linux user really benifit by AOL'ers using Linux?
Should the goal of every GNU contributer to dominate the desktop market, or should it be to simply work towards designing a user environment that suits the unique desired of GNU contrubuters. If the goal of Linux is "Free Speech" and/or "Free Beer", is there really an economic goal that ever needs to be realized?
I'm not asking these questions rhetorically, I really would like to know why some people think that market share is really all that important.
Note: while your comment inspired the following rant, it is not neccessarilly directed specifically at you...
I work forty hours a week, and spend another 30 hours online building chairs, how much sense does this make? Yet, somehow manual labor at the click of a mouse is fun, who knew?
Any Psych 101 student knows (or should know, if they passed the class) that the best way to reinforce a behavior is by rewarding it some of the time. Just as slot machines gobble up the retirement funds of old folks in Reno, killing a monster in an online game sometimes rewards you with "treasure", and sometimes you see your skill go up incrementally. The warm fuzzy feeling you occationally get keeps you going back and pulling the lever again, hoping for the food pellet.
While the rewards of gratification seem to come at a slow-ish pace in online RPG's, they are still much faster than in real life. To learn how to play the trumpet well enough that anybody really wants to listen to you takes a solid five years for most people, but you can create a Bard in EQ and be tooting away in a matter of days.
The problem is, the hours and hours you spend waiting for the chance to score that coveted pair of magic boots may give you the feeling of having accomplished something, but the truth is that you were just playing a game. You perhaps could have written three chapters of a novel in the time that it took, a task which would be no less tedious for most people, and you would have something to show for it when you were done. Those magic boots might impress your "friends" in the game (who are people you don't actually know from places you might never be), but your real friends will start to avoid talking to you at parties when they find that you keep steering the conversation back to the exploits of your 43rd-level Necromancer, because that's all you have going on in your life to talk about anymore.
I don't want to sound too critical of UO and EQ addicts... Everybody who gets into these games goes through a phase of getting too much into them (I got it out of my system back in college, when MUD's were all the rage), but some people really need to take a look at what they are doing. Are you really enjoying the time you spend making virtual jewelry or camping a spawns-once-every-two-weeks monster, or are you just telling yourself "once I accomplish goal 'x', this game will be soooo much fun!"
Here is what I reccomend to anybody who plays one of these games more that five or six hours a week: Take a month off. Don't even cancel the account, it's only 10 bucks anyway, just stop playing for a month. Among those who have, the vast majority came back and found that the game was not really as much fun as they remember thinking it was.
Virtual living can be kind of amusing, but it is no substitute for real life.
Now what could possibly have warrented that comment to be moderated down as a "Troll".
It's not like I called the Linux desktop "dead" or something. Now that would be a troll.
(Actually, that was my main point. Saying that Linux is dead on the desktop is a troll. It's one of the oldest trolls in the book: Attack somebody's favorite OS with a false statement. It's right up there with political and/or religious flames.)
Perhaps the moderator simply failed to spot that the first line was meant to be humorous. (It was an oblique reference to an old story about the chairs in the original US Congress, which had an image of a sun on them that could be rising or setting, depending on how you looked at it. If you are not familiar with the story, you might not have quite understood the context I was speaking in.)
Perhaps you meant Linux needs more configuration tools and such with GUIs, which would reduce the amount of time spent at the command line.
Personally, I've found that the Linux GUI's have lots of configuration options... it's just a royal pain in the ass to find them.
It is a common site to see a rookie Linux admin sifting through menus looking for one config app or another, only to give up after 10 minutes and run the CLI version of it.
Almost every aspect of Gnome or KDE can be tweaked to your taste, which is a good thing I guess, but the default layout of all the menus and tools is so bizzare and byzantine that it boggles the mind. It almost looks like it was designed by a huge assortment of different programmers... oh wait... it was, wasn't it? [ducks under the rotten cabbages]
I don't think the Linux GUI is a lost cause. I'm sure that more logical structures will fall into place once the dust begins to settle. Besides, some people actually like it, just the way it is. Not me, but some people.
Then there is the famous third-button pasting... Some geeks would die before giving that up.
Personally, on the rare occations when I am actually sitting in front of a Linux box (instead of hitting it remotely), I tend to go to the command line and stay there.
I can relate. I work with 4 different Linux boxes at work, and I operate all of them via SSH using my Mac.
While the multiple virtual displays of Gnome & KDE are big favorites of Linux Desktop cheerleaders, I'll take a bash prompt over either GUI any day.
YMMV, of course. If you like Gnome, use it and be happy. It's got a lot of spiffy features, once you get used to it, and it does have the potential to get better, if developers stick with it.
Enough already. Religious wars about operating systems are sooooo 90's. Let's all get with the 00's
A rising sun, a setting sun... either way, it's still dusk right now.
This clown was utterly wrong to pronounce Linux on the desktop to be "dead", but he was clearly just trolling to sell more magazines and/or web hits. Let's move on, shall we?
So you bought into the Apple lie, huh?
Yeah, the G4 is TWICE AS FAST as the Pentium 3.
It's not a matter of buying into marketing lies (and that was indeed a marketing lie), it is a matter of real-world experiece. I have a Celeron-based laptop (The HP Pavilion N5150, 600 MHz). It is slower, in almost every task, than my friend's old 300 MHz iBook. We've run them side-by-side for enough tasks to be sure.
The G4 may not be twice as fast as the Pentium 3, but MHz-to-MHz, the G3 is clearly more than twice as fast as the typical Celeron chip which is put into most PC laptops.
Games drive the PC market, but not the Macintosh market.
Most Mac users that like games have a second system to play games on.
Being a Mac-only gamer is almost as frustrating as being a Linux-only gamer. Game programmers usually don't get around to you until they collect the profits from the Windows version of their game.
For that reason, the vast majority of Macs are not used for games. I have a respectable Mac tower, but all my games are loaded on the PC, which sits on the desk next to it. The Mac is just there for getting work done.
Of course, this is one of the reasons why Apple has done so poorly in the home market for so long, but there you have it.
Thanks for the correction. It was, in fact, just the tubes that they outsourced for... (Although I was under the impression that they went with third parties for a lot of the electronics... that still makes their monitors unique in that they combine certain tubes with certain guts that you could not get elsewhere).
For my own part, I used to use a Sony 17" with my Mac tower... until the lines from the comb filters started to drive me nuts. Now the Sony is hooked up to my game PC, and a Mitsubishi 21" is now my Apple monitor. Sure, the Sony is a better quality, but I'm not really doing a lot of photo editing, so it works out fine this way.
Slashdot Mirror
Another factor is the Not-In-My-Back-Yard attitude of some environmental groups. Ruin a mile of wilderness in Alaska and there are howls of rage. Ruin a mile of wilderness in Saudi Arabia and nobody here cares. The message is that the planet can handle oil wells as long as we can't see them.
He's not writing to inform, but to persuade. Doing so requires choosing his words according to emotional impact, rather than accuracy.
You say making people believe, I say persuade people by demonstration.
Tomato (long "a"), tomato (short "a").
"Corporations are now the primary contributors to the American election system. They fund the overwhelming majority of lobbyists who prey on Washington."
Corporations do lobby for their interests in Washington (for example, insurance companies are fighting like hell to stop W from repealing the estate tax), but corporations are really small potatoes compared to many rival PAC's, such as the trial lawyers, the National Education Association, the Christian Coalition, the Rainbow Coalition, NARAL, the AFL-CIO, etc.
When a lobbyist from Ford Motors calls, a Senator will take the message, but when a lobbyist from a core PAC for that Senator's party calls, that Senator picks up the phone.
As a side note, did the tone of this particular Katz column remind anybody else of the Unibomber Manifesto?
In other words, an "Alan Smithee" film is one that is so horrible that the director was ashamed that he was involved, and would not want anybody to know it.
10% Ethanol gas, required by the Federal EPA in many major cities, is only cheap because of huge subsidies from the Federal Government.
This is one of the best examples available of corporate welfare in American politics. Nearly all of the Ethanol in America is produced by one company, the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation. (The same "ADM: Supermarket to the world!" that sponsors NBC's "Meet the Press").
Since ADM is one of the single largest corporate campaign supporters (mostly for Democrats, but also for a lot of Republicans, including former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as former presidential hopefuls Al Gore AND Bob Dole, and dozens of prominent Senators), it should come as a surprise to nobody that ADM is enjoying the benifits of these subsidies, and that these sam politicians (and some members of the press) cheerlead for the advancement of Ethanol over the eeeevil oil companies.
The truth about Ethanol is that while it does slightly reduce CO and CO2 emissions (yay!), it also emits higher levels of other toxins, such as O3.
For the moment, electric cars are also a poor alternative to gasoline. For several reasons:
1. Battery technology has a long way to go before I can use an electric pickup truck to tow my boat 400 miles to the lake.
2. Most of America's electricity (the source for charging these battery cars) is still generated by burning coal, which is far dirtier than burning gasoline.
3. The batteries themselves are difficult to dispose of safely
4. $35,000 gets you a car that is smaller than most $13,000 cars, with limited range, a very light (re; dangerous) frame, and expensive maintenence.
Hydrogen induction is another popular choice to root for. The problem is, where are you going to get enough hydrogen? You can mine for methane deposits, but the process to convert methane to H2 also produces a shitload of CO2, which is one of the things we are trying to avoid. You can also seperate hydrogen from H2O using electricity... but then you are spending power to get hydrogen to get power, meaning you need another power source or you are talking about a good-old-fashioned perpetual motion scam.
There's solar... if you only want to drive in southern states on sunny days.
Obviously, as oil reserves start to run out (making it prohibitively expensive to get at the oil), probably sometime late in this Century, we will need to switch to another transportation power source. I suspect that if none of these alternate technologies are ready for prime time by then (and it looks like they won't be), we will burn propane and/or natural gas.
Meanwhile, I am off to fire up the V6 3.3L engine of my truck to go fishing up north for Memorial Day weekend. It will cost me at least a good sixty bucks for gas to get to the lake and back... and it will be worth it. Later, all!
I like Tolkien's books, but there is no question who is nicer to see and hear... Being a straight male, I'll take Liv Tyler, thank you.
Yes, it is.
On the bright side, I saw Liv Tyler on one of the late-night talk shows the other day. She gave us a little sample of what the Elvish language sounds like when spoken. (Apparently, she memorized her Elvish lines, and could still remember a couple.) It sounded kind of cool.
I liked the part about selling both Ayn Rand books and Bibles from the same source. (For those who don't know, Ms. Rand was not simply an athiest, but actually had a strong hatred for organized religion. She also disaproved of charity in general, so buying her books to be given away to the needy, with Bibles, would probably have her turning in her grave.)
Well done, AC. I don't think anybody would have been fooled into thinking you were serious (although the ease with which people are trolled on /. never fails to astonish me), but it was kind of funny.
Just out of curiousity, how do they dub the guy who wears the bee costume for the Spanish TV station on The Simpsons. In the original version, he usually speaks a humorous combination of mostly Spanish with some pidgin English. It seems to me that leaving him untranslated would be the best solution.
They were the station that gave us the X-Files. (Sure, it's crappy now, but it was pretty good for a few years.)
For people who like David E. Kelly shows (not me, but they are out there) there's Ally McBeal and Boston Public.
Malcom In the Middle is one of the funniest shows on TV right now, and Titus is gaining a cult following.
As for WB... They show mostly crap, although my absolute favorite show ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") was one of the few reasons for tuning in. However, "Buffy" is moving to UPN this fall, leaving the WB with only the spin-off "Angel".
UPN offered 2.3 million per episode to secure "Buffy", and have said that they will also buy "Angel" if and when WB drops it. UPN has been another one of those stations (like WB and FOX before it) which was in real danger of being nothing more than a "minstrel show" netowork. (Remember when they tried showing "Homeboys from Outer Space"? Ewww.) However, with a new (hopefully less sucky) Star Trek show, the addition of Buffy and Roswell, and Bill Shatner hosing The Iron Chef... it looks like they are on the verge of being worth watching for the first time since they cancelled "Nowhere Man".
There's also a review of a 15-year old book which speculates about the future of technology, which just became available at Thinkgeek.com.
There's a link to a story over at Ars Technica about the latest Apple Computer press release. The story is generally favorable, other than a brief lament about the astonishing lack of extra mouse buttons.
Finally, there's news about a handheld computer that you can't buy anywhere, which might be able to run Linux. No shipping date has been announced yet, but several Slashdot editors claim to have one on order. Somewhere in the comments, we are told to imagine a Beowolf Cluster of those "puppies".
It is a game where you scroll around clicking on things. You don't have to click on them particularilly fast or skillfully, because they come at you fairly slowly most of the time. Just take your time and click on them. Sometimes you need to scroll away from them to avoid being overwhelmed, but then you just go back and start clicking again. Do this until they die or you die. If you die, come back and get your stuff, then go back to clicking on things. If they die, take the stuff they drop. Over time, your character gains equipment, skills, and abilities, which create the illusion that you are getting better. However, to advance deeper into the game you need to click on more powerful things, so the difficulty level never really changes very much. The story takes about a week to get through, and is pretty cool, but once you are done with that there is nothing left to do but go through the entire story over again, this time with prettier-looking equipment and clicking on monsters that are "harder" to kill. In the end, you will really like it if you like looking at the eye candy of very small cartoon people moving through a cartoon dungeon killing very small cartoon monsters. Once the thrill of seeing the neat cartoons wears off, it is one of the most boring fucking games in the entire universe. Once you reach that conclusion, you will delete it from your system, and go back to playing "Lemmings" or something.
Besides, we should not be all that offended if our favorite shows and movies are exploited to advertise products to us... That is what they were created for in the first place. What, you people didn't know that?
Well, it's a limiting factor of putting Linux on my grandmother's desktop, anyway.
The question the Linux community should be asking itself is: Would mass market acceptance be a Good Thing?
If so, is it Important?
I'm sure it is absolutely urgent to any part-owner of Red Hat... but how much does the typical Linux user really benifit by AOL'ers using Linux?
Should the goal of every GNU contributer to dominate the desktop market, or should it be to simply work towards designing a user environment that suits the unique desired of GNU contrubuters. If the goal of Linux is "Free Speech" and/or "Free Beer", is there really an economic goal that ever needs to be realized?
I'm not asking these questions rhetorically, I really would like to know why some people think that market share is really all that important.
Note: while your comment inspired the following rant, it is not neccessarilly directed specifically at you...
I work forty hours a week, and spend another 30 hours online building chairs, how much sense does this make? Yet, somehow manual labor at the click of a mouse is fun, who knew?
Any Psych 101 student knows (or should know, if they passed the class) that the best way to reinforce a behavior is by rewarding it some of the time. Just as slot machines gobble up the retirement funds of old folks in Reno, killing a monster in an online game sometimes rewards you with "treasure", and sometimes you see your skill go up incrementally. The warm fuzzy feeling you occationally get keeps you going back and pulling the lever again, hoping for the food pellet.
While the rewards of gratification seem to come at a slow-ish pace in online RPG's, they are still much faster than in real life. To learn how to play the trumpet well enough that anybody really wants to listen to you takes a solid five years for most people, but you can create a Bard in EQ and be tooting away in a matter of days.
The problem is, the hours and hours you spend waiting for the chance to score that coveted pair of magic boots may give you the feeling of having accomplished something, but the truth is that you were just playing a game. You perhaps could have written three chapters of a novel in the time that it took, a task which would be no less tedious for most people, and you would have something to show for it when you were done. Those magic boots might impress your "friends" in the game (who are people you don't actually know from places you might never be), but your real friends will start to avoid talking to you at parties when they find that you keep steering the conversation back to the exploits of your 43rd-level Necromancer, because that's all you have going on in your life to talk about anymore.
I don't want to sound too critical of UO and EQ addicts... Everybody who gets into these games goes through a phase of getting too much into them (I got it out of my system back in college, when MUD's were all the rage), but some people really need to take a look at what they are doing. Are you really enjoying the time you spend making virtual jewelry or camping a spawns-once-every-two-weeks monster, or are you just telling yourself "once I accomplish goal 'x', this game will be soooo much fun!"
Here is what I reccomend to anybody who plays one of these games more that five or six hours a week: Take a month off. Don't even cancel the account, it's only 10 bucks anyway, just stop playing for a month. Among those who have, the vast majority came back and found that the game was not really as much fun as they remember thinking it was.
Virtual living can be kind of amusing, but it is no substitute for real life.
It's not like I called the Linux desktop "dead" or something. Now that would be a troll.
(Actually, that was my main point. Saying that Linux is dead on the desktop is a troll. It's one of the oldest trolls in the book: Attack somebody's favorite OS with a false statement. It's right up there with political and/or religious flames.)
Perhaps the moderator simply failed to spot that the first line was meant to be humorous. (It was an oblique reference to an old story about the chairs in the original US Congress, which had an image of a sun on them that could be rising or setting, depending on how you looked at it. If you are not familiar with the story, you might not have quite understood the context I was speaking in.)
Personally, I've found that the Linux GUI's have lots of configuration options... it's just a royal pain in the ass to find them.
It is a common site to see a rookie Linux admin sifting through menus looking for one config app or another, only to give up after 10 minutes and run the CLI version of it.
Almost every aspect of Gnome or KDE can be tweaked to your taste, which is a good thing I guess, but the default layout of all the menus and tools is so bizzare and byzantine that it boggles the mind. It almost looks like it was designed by a huge assortment of different programmers... oh wait... it was, wasn't it? [ducks under the rotten cabbages]
I don't think the Linux GUI is a lost cause. I'm sure that more logical structures will fall into place once the dust begins to settle. Besides, some people actually like it, just the way it is. Not me, but some people.
Then there is the famous third-button pasting... Some geeks would die before giving that up.
Personally, on the rare occations when I am actually sitting in front of a Linux box (instead of hitting it remotely), I tend to go to the command line and stay there.
While the multiple virtual displays of Gnome & KDE are big favorites of Linux Desktop cheerleaders, I'll take a bash prompt over either GUI any day.
YMMV, of course. If you like Gnome, use it and be happy. It's got a lot of spiffy features, once you get used to it, and it does have the potential to get better, if developers stick with it.
Enough already. Religious wars about operating systems are sooooo 90's. Let's all get with the 00's
This clown was utterly wrong to pronounce Linux on the desktop to be "dead", but he was clearly just trolling to sell more magazines and/or web hits. Let's move on, shall we?
In a word, laziness.
The G4 may not be twice as fast as the Pentium 3, but MHz-to-MHz, the G3 is clearly more than twice as fast as the typical Celeron chip which is put into most PC laptops.
Games drive the PC market, but not the Macintosh market.
Most Mac users that like games have a second system to play games on.
Being a Mac-only gamer is almost as frustrating as being a Linux-only gamer. Game programmers usually don't get around to you until they collect the profits from the Windows version of their game.
For that reason, the vast majority of Macs are not used for games. I have a respectable Mac tower, but all my games are loaded on the PC, which sits on the desk next to it. The Mac is just there for getting work done.
Of course, this is one of the reasons why Apple has done so poorly in the home market for so long, but there you have it.
Bzzt. Wrong.
It weighs 4.9 pounds.
The old 7 pound laptop has been out of production for over a month.
See for yourself.
For my own part, I used to use a Sony 17" with my Mac tower... until the lines from the comb filters started to drive me nuts. Now the Sony is hooked up to my game PC, and a Mitsubishi 21" is now my Apple monitor. Sure, the Sony is a better quality, but I'm not really doing a lot of photo editing, so it works out fine this way.