Why would any sane person expect two different machines to run the same software ? I'd much prefer for each platform to identify a niche and stick to it. In the North American market, there is no tangible difference between an Xbox and a Playstation (any generation). They all play the same types of games, have different-sized controllers but essentially the same features. The main advantage for the Playstation is all the Japanese content, which the Xbox lacks, but how many people really care about those quirky J titles ?
I'd like it if game publishers would stick to a single console, plus the PC. That's it! There are always porting issues, meaning the same game will run poorly on any system for which it wasn't natively designed. If you hire some 3rd rate developer to port Halo it to the PS3, it's going to suck 9 times out of 10, because of time constraints and tight budgets. The problem lies in the fact that the 1st rate developer doesn't have time to port their own games, because they've got better things to do, like designing next year's best-seller. The industry is messed up, and having multiple interchangeable consoles only compounds those problems.
I restrained myself from mentioning the ThinkPad X series in my earlier comment. It is the one laptop that satisfies all of my wants, but as you said it is outrageously expensive.
The "price" of quality is a little out of whack, methinks.
That's one specific problem, but the GLOBAL problem with vigilante justice is it has no defined endpoint.
If the vigilante response exceeds what is considered "fair", and it usually does, the instinctive reaction by the accused is to retaliate. It's not a criminal mind type thing, it's human nature. If I call you names and you punch me in the balls, I will knock you with a baseball bat, and you will shoot me in the ass, and I will burn down your house with your family trapped inside, etc etc etc... the rage continues to snowball without any sort of control.
A little bit of heart, a little bit of cash, a TON of free advertising. This lawyer hasn't even won anything yet, and already they're being praised in the net media. Win or lose, this person's name will remain famous for some time to come.
gifted people are sideswiped by the fact that even though logically and by all reason they should succeed they don't
That is not a fact, it is a false truth. We assume smart people should succeed, because schools still promote "smart" even though they're selling mere indoctrination. Those who consistently succeed in this world are the Average Joes with strong social connections, because one genius is no match for a mob of angry norms.
Right, but how do you factor in places like Saudi Arabia ?
Rape = 0 Murdered wife/daughters = over 9000
The biggest problem with rape statistic lies in the sad fact that most of the data is self-reported. Often times it's underreported, and sometimes it is actually overreported (western teens). The data itself is garbage.
For all we know, the sale of these "deviant" games may well have contributed to reduce the number of rape victims, but that is 100% speculation since the numbers cannot be trusted. It could have gone the other way and encouraged rape, but again we have no way of knowing. The only fair, sane thing to do is to remain neutral, but that is the one stance American leaders consistently fail to acknowledge, so they act upon dubious data and mess with things they do not even begin to understand.
You want a good laptop, and that's the problem. The industry has always moved toward pretty, flashy or buzzy devices, at the expense of usability and performance.
That's why today's laptops still get only 1.5 to 2 hours on a charge. That's why 15" and 17" models are cheaper than travel-friendly sizes. That's why they can barely survive traveling in a padded bag. People would much rather pay for a shiny useless gadget, than an ugly functional one. The netbook is only the most recent cristallization of this attitude, users think of them as "cute toys". Some brands do offer a workable laptop, and they're all too happy to charge $3000+ for the "luxury" of a machine that cost maybe 10% more in parts and labor.
At $199 they can shove these things where the sun don't shine, considering the current crop of PC-based nettops start at $249. As much as we hate to say it, a laptop that runs Windows is more valuable that one that does not. It's true in the mid-range laptop market, it's even truer in the nettop scene which taps into a tremendous small-budget market that was previously untouched, and thus is largely populated with untrained users.
Say what you will about community support, but I've had much better luck troubleshooting Windows problems over the phone, than trying to find answers in Ubuntu support forums where 9/10 questions go unanswered and every other answer is prefaced with "This worked for me, but I have no idea what it does". Deaf leading the blind, that's never a good thing.
It blows my mind that they could use language like "homosexuality could be a security issue" in this day and age. And since when is sodomy "irresponsible" ? Is Fred Phelps a federal consultant on security matters now ?
As the almighty MC Frontalot often says, "You shouldn't ought to be intolerant about who queers like to fuck"
The fundamental problem with voting is the requirement of anonymity. That blows away any hope of accountability. Your bank knows who you are, every time you swipe your card or key in your account number. The voting system does not.
Either we do away with voter anonymity, or we quit bitching and get used to our current unfixable system. There is no middle-ground, because you either apply absolute trust, or no trust at all.
Frankly, I think we should stop voting for a while, and let things be decided by coin toss. Statistically speaking, it's mathematically equal to the current voting system.
A simple iptables rule could drop all packets coming from the port-scanning host, and it sounds like the kind of thing a Linux enthusiast would do just to spite the network admin...
It's bad because the entire philosophy behind Firefox addons is freedom of choice. How hard would it have been for Microsoft to prompt the user whether they want this thing or not ?
The problem of course is that a domain name is not a piece of land.
In meatspace, if a business sets up in a poor location, it affects their traffic because it is a PHYSICAL business. More importantly, no land = no business. On the internet, very few people even type URLs anymore, they google everything. All that domain registration does is place a few letters in the address bar of people's browsers. We could probably go back to publishing dotted IP addresses and the common imbecile would not notice nor care, as long as google can find it.
For those mental midgets who require an analogy, you're not squatting a piece of land, it's more like an unlit signpost.
I tend to over-generalize, but if you're the only kid in school with a laptop, I see two possible solutions:
1. Leave your laptop at home. If no one else needs one, why should you ?
2. Tell the others to go @$#% themselves, er... I mean get their own damned laptops
I'm all for tech-savvy people, but if you're in art school and you're not in a classroom full of computers, chances are the prof is teaching you non-computer stuff and you should perhaps be paying attention to what the old welfare case is yapping about.
That's still about 100 times more memory than is required to edit a text file. How do you think people got by in the 286 days when 640 Kb was standard ? Does vim allocate ridiculously oversized buffers just to show a blank screen ?
I don't mean to pick on vim specifically, all software is guilty of this pointless bloat. Instead of having tiny apps that load and run at lightning speed, we continue to build these sloppy behemoths that can't accomplish the simplest things without triggering a dozen page faults and diddling some redundant spinlocks. It's fine to add media to make things esthetically pleasing, but code bloat benefits no one.
With today's hardware and its ludicrous speed, we should be adding intentional delays to our code, because it should be running so damned fast that usability would suffer. The user should be the bottleneck, not the software. We have machines that are literally a thousand times faster than that heavy old 286, yet the load times for today's software are longer than booting Wordperfect 5.1 from a 360k floppy.
You give developers far too much credit. They don't code to previous-gen and current-gen hardware, they let the compiler worry about making it run fast. New compilers = new optimizations. New processors = new compiler flags to enable. I don't think the average Mac developer actually tunes his/her code for any specific hardware generation. If it runs on their development machine, it gets shipped an hour later.
This sort of extreme panic reaction to minor harmless incidents is how we wound up with things like the PATRIOT act. The kid is safe, school staff are stupid, film at 11. None of us had GPS locators when we were kids, and we turned out just fine. The world is not bursting at the seams with child predators and random faceless boogeymen.
If anything, getting your kid accustomed to 24/7 monitoring will only make them more dependent upon it, and less apprehensive when such invasive surveillance is employed by not-so-benevolent actors. Kids have an amazing ability to adapt to their environment, give them a hard time and they grow up stronger and smarter, make it too easy and you'll wind up with Paris Hilton knockoffs. They're your kids, but they will be society's burden if you screw up.
I frankly think the WoW achievement system is entirely done wrong, because it is neither social nor rewarding. You get absolutely nothing for all your troubles, save for a few near-impossible meta-achievements that give you a mount or shiny underwear or something equally useless. A challenge needs a reward to make things interesting, and warm fuzzies don't count in most cases.
I much preferred LoTRO's achievements, which offered minor improvements to your stats for experience-related things like killing N spiders or completing M quests in a city, while being separate from the singular XP total. That gives struggling players other avenues to improve and customize their characters, and high-level players something to appease their OCD. They made the game-within-a-game worth playing.
Kaspersky releases "news" article about their virus scanner saving the day, while casting doubt on all PC vendors. Solution: Buy our shit!
I don't care whether it's malware, weapons of mass destruction, or kiddie porn. It's all baseless fear-mongering to push corporate or political influence, in the end it's all just money.
What they of course fail to highlight is the fact that the solution is neither effective nor guaranteed to work. Kaspersky's scanner, like any scanner, cannot catch all malware, just like Bush couldn't (wouldn't?) catch OBL. Perhaps worse is the high rate of false positives, such as when your virus scanner mistakenly recognizes a Linux ISO as a boot sector virus, or your republican mistakenly recognizes a Linux hacker as an islamic terrorist. Bullshit all around!
For those of you just tuning in, while I do not personally know Eric Spiegel, I have been exposed to a number of his articles and it's pretty damned obvious that this kid's not a "Real Programmer (tm)". He comes off like every other brown-nosing no-talent assclown, always quick to criticize the people and things his boxed mind cannot encompass. Maybe he's jealous, as he consistently advocates the use of "corporate discipline" to combat "dangerous elements" in the workplace, with dangerous meaning "smarter/geekier than me" in his vocabulary.
My favorite tidbit is this:
"There were times when they were the only ones who could solve a problem that could have cost the company millions of dollars. Of course, most of those times were the result of code they designed or influenced in the first place"
Am I reading this wrong, or is he basically accusing genius programming of planting bugs in their code, to be fixed later with great fanfare ? We all know someone who does that, and to any coder worth his salt, those posers stick out like a sore thumb. HR may be blind to their charades, but anyone with a brain can see right through them. I'll posit that if Mr. Spiegel cannot distinguish brilliance from fraud, he probably isn't qualified to make bold statements about programmers in the first place, and we here at Slashdot should refrain from distributing his libelous monologues.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would any sane person expect two different machines to run the same software ? I'd much prefer for each platform to identify a niche and stick to it. In the North American market, there is no tangible difference between an Xbox and a Playstation (any generation). They all play the same types of games, have different-sized controllers but essentially the same features. The main advantage for the Playstation is all the Japanese content, which the Xbox lacks, but how many people really care about those quirky J titles ?
I'd like it if game publishers would stick to a single console, plus the PC. That's it! There are always porting issues, meaning the same game will run poorly on any system for which it wasn't natively designed. If you hire some 3rd rate developer to port Halo it to the PS3, it's going to suck 9 times out of 10, because of time constraints and tight budgets. The problem lies in the fact that the 1st rate developer doesn't have time to port their own games, because they've got better things to do, like designing next year's best-seller. The industry is messed up, and having multiple interchangeable consoles only compounds those problems.
That's not a problem with homosexuality, that's a problem with American social tension.
Hint: Pretending the problem doesn't exist is not going to make it go away.
I restrained myself from mentioning the ThinkPad X series in my earlier comment. It is the one laptop that satisfies all of my wants, but as you said it is outrageously expensive.
The "price" of quality is a little out of whack, methinks.
That's one specific problem, but the GLOBAL problem with vigilante justice is it has no defined endpoint.
If the vigilante response exceeds what is considered "fair", and it usually does, the instinctive reaction by the accused is to retaliate. It's not a criminal mind type thing, it's human nature. If I call you names and you punch me in the balls, I will knock you with a baseball bat, and you will shoot me in the ass, and I will burn down your house with your family trapped inside, etc etc etc... the rage continues to snowball without any sort of control.
A little bit of heart, a little bit of cash, a TON of free advertising. This lawyer hasn't even won anything yet, and already they're being praised in the net media. Win or lose, this person's name will remain famous for some time to come.
gifted people are sideswiped by the fact that even though logically and by all reason they should succeed they don't
That is not a fact, it is a false truth. We assume smart people should succeed, because schools still promote "smart" even though they're selling mere indoctrination. Those who consistently succeed in this world are the Average Joes with strong social connections, because one genius is no match for a mob of angry norms.
A whole pile of degrees, and zero real-life experience.
School ain't the be-all end-all of a person's career.
Right, but how do you factor in places like Saudi Arabia ?
Rape = 0
Murdered wife/daughters = over 9000
The biggest problem with rape statistic lies in the sad fact that most of the data is self-reported. Often times it's underreported, and sometimes it is actually overreported (western teens). The data itself is garbage.
For all we know, the sale of these "deviant" games may well have contributed to reduce the number of rape victims, but that is 100% speculation since the numbers cannot be trusted. It could have gone the other way and encouraged rape, but again we have no way of knowing. The only fair, sane thing to do is to remain neutral, but that is the one stance American leaders consistently fail to acknowledge, so they act upon dubious data and mess with things they do not even begin to understand.
You want a good laptop, and that's the problem. The industry has always moved toward pretty, flashy or buzzy devices, at the expense of usability and performance.
That's why today's laptops still get only 1.5 to 2 hours on a charge. That's why 15" and 17" models are cheaper than travel-friendly sizes. That's why they can barely survive traveling in a padded bag. People would much rather pay for a shiny useless gadget, than an ugly functional one. The netbook is only the most recent cristallization of this attitude, users think of them as "cute toys". Some brands do offer a workable laptop, and they're all too happy to charge $3000+ for the "luxury" of a machine that cost maybe 10% more in parts and labor.
At $199 they can shove these things where the sun don't shine, considering the current crop of PC-based nettops start at $249. As much as we hate to say it, a laptop that runs Windows is more valuable that one that does not. It's true in the mid-range laptop market, it's even truer in the nettop scene which taps into a tremendous small-budget market that was previously untouched, and thus is largely populated with untrained users.
Say what you will about community support, but I've had much better luck troubleshooting Windows problems over the phone, than trying to find answers in Ubuntu support forums where 9/10 questions go unanswered and every other answer is prefaced with "This worked for me, but I have no idea what it does". Deaf leading the blind, that's never a good thing.
It blows my mind that they could use language like "homosexuality could be a security issue" in this day and age. And since when is sodomy "irresponsible" ? Is Fred Phelps a federal consultant on security matters now ?
As the almighty MC Frontalot often says, "You shouldn't ought to be intolerant about who queers like to fuck"
The fundamental problem with voting is the requirement of anonymity. That blows away any hope of accountability. Your bank knows who you are, every time you swipe your card or key in your account number. The voting system does not.
Either we do away with voter anonymity, or we quit bitching and get used to our current unfixable system. There is no middle-ground, because you either apply absolute trust, or no trust at all.
Frankly, I think we should stop voting for a while, and let things be decided by coin toss. Statistically speaking, it's mathematically equal to the current voting system.
A simple iptables rule could drop all packets coming from the port-scanning host, and it sounds like the kind of thing a Linux enthusiast would do just to spite the network admin...
It's bad because the entire philosophy behind Firefox addons is freedom of choice. How hard would it have been for Microsoft to prompt the user whether they want this thing or not ?
In simpler words: My computer, my decision.
The problem of course is that a domain name is not a piece of land.
In meatspace, if a business sets up in a poor location, it affects their traffic because it is a PHYSICAL business. More importantly, no land = no business. On the internet, very few people even type URLs anymore, they google everything. All that domain registration does is place a few letters in the address bar of people's browsers. We could probably go back to publishing dotted IP addresses and the common imbecile would not notice nor care, as long as google can find it.
For those mental midgets who require an analogy, you're not squatting a piece of land, it's more like an unlit signpost.
I believe it is Karma-based. The lower your Karma, the more /. garbles your HTML :)
I tend to over-generalize, but if you're the only kid in school with a laptop, I see two possible solutions:
1. Leave your laptop at home. If no one else needs one, why should you ?
2. Tell the others to go @$#% themselves, er... I mean get their own damned laptops
I'm all for tech-savvy people, but if you're in art school and you're not in a classroom full of computers, chances are the prof is teaching you non-computer stuff and you should perhaps be paying attention to what the old welfare case is yapping about.
That's still about 100 times more memory than is required to edit a text file. How do you think people got by in the 286 days when 640 Kb was standard ? Does vim allocate ridiculously oversized buffers just to show a blank screen ?
I don't mean to pick on vim specifically, all software is guilty of this pointless bloat. Instead of having tiny apps that load and run at lightning speed, we continue to build these sloppy behemoths that can't accomplish the simplest things without triggering a dozen page faults and diddling some redundant spinlocks. It's fine to add media to make things esthetically pleasing, but code bloat benefits no one.
With today's hardware and its ludicrous speed, we should be adding intentional delays to our code, because it should be running so damned fast that usability would suffer. The user should be the bottleneck, not the software. We have machines that are literally a thousand times faster than that heavy old 286, yet the load times for today's software are longer than booting Wordperfect 5.1 from a 360k floppy.
You give developers far too much credit. They don't code to previous-gen and current-gen hardware, they let the compiler worry about making it run fast. New compilers = new optimizations. New processors = new compiler flags to enable. I don't think the average Mac developer actually tunes his/her code for any specific hardware generation. If it runs on their development machine, it gets shipped an hour later.
This sort of extreme panic reaction to minor harmless incidents is how we wound up with things like the PATRIOT act. The kid is safe, school staff are stupid, film at 11. None of us had GPS locators when we were kids, and we turned out just fine. The world is not bursting at the seams with child predators and random faceless boogeymen.
If anything, getting your kid accustomed to 24/7 monitoring will only make them more dependent upon it, and less apprehensive when such invasive surveillance is employed by not-so-benevolent actors. Kids have an amazing ability to adapt to their environment, give them a hard time and they grow up stronger and smarter, make it too easy and you'll wind up with Paris Hilton knockoffs. They're your kids, but they will be society's burden if you screw up.
It's mathematically "better" than the PRNGs used in almost all computers, but really the main reasons why this machine was built are:
1. Why the hell not, it's geek cool!
-and-
2. The guy was being hounded by a bunch of witless nigglers (note the 'L' in that word)
Myself, I would have built a full-auto dice-gun and shot the whiners in the groin. What's your testicular THAC0, smartass ?
I frankly think the WoW achievement system is entirely done wrong, because it is neither social nor rewarding. You get absolutely nothing for all your troubles, save for a few near-impossible meta-achievements that give you a mount or shiny underwear or something equally useless. A challenge needs a reward to make things interesting, and warm fuzzies don't count in most cases.
I much preferred LoTRO's achievements, which offered minor improvements to your stats for experience-related things like killing N spiders or completing M quests in a city, while being separate from the singular XP total. That gives struggling players other avenues to improve and customize their characters, and high-level players something to appease their OCD. They made the game-within-a-game worth playing.
Kaspersky releases "news" article about their virus scanner saving the day, while casting doubt on all PC vendors. Solution: Buy our shit!
I don't care whether it's malware, weapons of mass destruction, or kiddie porn. It's all baseless fear-mongering to push corporate or political influence, in the end it's all just money.
What they of course fail to highlight is the fact that the solution is neither effective nor guaranteed to work. Kaspersky's scanner, like any scanner, cannot catch all malware, just like Bush couldn't (wouldn't?) catch OBL. Perhaps worse is the high rate of false positives, such as when your virus scanner mistakenly recognizes a Linux ISO as a boot sector virus, or your republican mistakenly recognizes a Linux hacker as an islamic terrorist. Bullshit all around!
So we'll just pee beside the urinal, like real (drunk) men.
For those of you just tuning in, while I do not personally know Eric Spiegel, I have been exposed to a number of his articles and it's pretty damned obvious that this kid's not a "Real Programmer (tm)". He comes off like every other brown-nosing no-talent assclown, always quick to criticize the people and things his boxed mind cannot encompass. Maybe he's jealous, as he consistently advocates the use of "corporate discipline" to combat "dangerous elements" in the workplace, with dangerous meaning "smarter/geekier than me" in his vocabulary.
My favorite tidbit is this:
Am I reading this wrong, or is he basically accusing genius programming of planting bugs in their code, to be fixed later with great fanfare ? We all know someone who does that, and to any coder worth his salt, those posers stick out like a sore thumb. HR may be blind to their charades, but anyone with a brain can see right through them. I'll posit that if Mr. Spiegel cannot distinguish brilliance from fraud, he probably isn't qualified to make bold statements about programmers in the first place, and we here at Slashdot should refrain from distributing his libelous monologues.