Good point... Also, how come noone has discovered the missing link that shows how we came by all those extra chromosomes so quickly. Read "THe Evolutionists", because there is alot more to evolution than you thought.
Geeee, and to think they just shipped me 20 free copies of their latest distro. SCO linux 4.0. (Hmmm, I missed 1-3....) I haven't installed it, but I do notice it is free from the Glint and Lizard references, and I also don't see a bunch of small text talking about per seat licenses.
I must say, I wonder what SuSE saw in this partnership.... They were the strongest distro in the group. Hanging with vermin like Caldera will only make you itchy.
Actually, It's funny. I have been toying with Linux since Kernel 0.7, and I'm shocked as hell. For the record, I have also played with many other small OS projects, and none of them have taken off like this.
"It is `registry like' in that there is a unified place where you can make changes, and there is a notification system, but unlike the Windows registry the data is not stored in a single binary file, but in a set of separate XML files"
Ummm, so the configuration options are hidden and difficult to use - they don't show in the standard configuration options "dialog boxes" - but the underlying structure is sooo much better because it's stored in separate XML files?? You respond to UI issues by pointing out that the UI may not be up to par, but the underlying architecture is better... Than Windows.... Than what is widely regarded as the biggest PIA in Windows.
The word I always get about Gnome is A) Licensing, and B) it's easier to code in. A only affects coders for the most part, (they're the only ones who need to worry about the licensing) and B is soley devoted to coders. I was not aware that C++ gurus made up such a large percentage of computer users.
I personally find the Gnome interface clunky. The default panel is enormous, if it can be made smaller it is not in the configuration dialog, and is not nearly as functional as even the Windows task bar. Add the chunky menu bar at the top, and gnome seems crowded on first login. I'm running the desktop here at 1024x768, and working in Gnome always feels like I'm running out of space.
The UI is a bad mismatch of *nix WM's and Windows oddities. The start button is, has been, and will continue to be a disaster, and this is magnified tenfold on a Linux system because of the large amount of software involved. I know that this is an issue that affects the "Slashdot crowd" that y'all think so little of, but it is a usability issue on any system fully laden. Also, should an admin be forced to go through his distro's installer and deselect package after package because he doesn't want the Gnome menu cluttered??
You can't just explain away UI issues. Even if you don't think it's an issue. For every person who complains about a confusing, incomplete, ambiguous, or clunky element of the UI you have to assume that there are another 100 people who feel that same way and have said nothing.
If the true triumph of Gnome is that it is so well organized and the backend is so much better than poor old KDE, shouldn't you be tromping KDE. Beyond the point where you're debating who's ahead?? Are those backend qualities resulting in increased efficency allowing you to pull ahead of them?? You have more backing from the Vendors...
I am just amazed that in 4 years a reasonably decent UI on par with Windows cannot be achieved. (FYI, competing with KDE is silly. This is like the Men's college basketball team worrying about whether it can beat the same school's girls team. It doesn't matter, they should worry about beating the other men's teams in their conference.) Quite frankly the entire Gnome/KDE nonsense has made me switch back to WindowsXP. The XP environment is somewhat intuitive, faster, smoother, and better looking than either KDE or Gnome. Getting it set up doesn't take reading documentation for a month either.
I'm just ranting at this point, but I find all of this so very idiotic. And when I read the developers basically saying "The UI is ok, but it's got a great backend... Well if you think the UI sucks it's because you're stupid. Those slashdot idiots with their 'usability' and 'eye candy'... Hunh, were designing this for our enterprise users who can shove it down their employee's throaths no matter how clunky and unintuitive it is. P.S. Don't post to slashdot...." I fell like I should apologize for going off here, but I've read what you think of people like us.... and you don't think much.
BTW, Sun used to talk about how much their customers appreciated CDE and OW, until they moved everything to Windows 2000 servers because the better and more familiar UI made administrators out of Chimps. If they won't use it at home, they have to learn it for work. The reason Windows is so popular as a workstation... users don't have to be trained on the UI. Havoc Pennington is an idiot.
Generally, people who have "amazing" talents are quite inadequate socially. This is true of authors, musicians, reasearch scientists, etc... The reason for this is that they needed an incredible amount of time and dedication to hone those amazing skills. A two-three hour daily grooming ritual does not fit in. I assume that if this jackass met Leonardo DaVinci he'd be complaining about his smellyness.
The flip side is that you can pretty much relegate people who obsess over hygene to the untalented, washed masses. Seriously, read his book if you don't believe me.
Most of the symphony musicians I have met have the same goofy love of puns, say things that are socially inappropriate, and bathe on concert days. Leo Kottke has a personality like stucco. But hey, if they'd been popular, they would have had something better to do than practice 3-4 hours a day.
Next week on/., Ann Coulter says, "Who would have thought that being a good programmer and being able to run a mile in under 4 minutes were so mutually exclusive??" "I mean, the guy could write Emacs and can't shoot a 3 pointer..."
The very definition of a writer is someone who spends way too much time on the computer and still can't learn to program in Basic.
I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
The amazing thing is that the White House has been vehemently denying these charges. "Iraq is not the lynchpin of a broader assault on the middle east." says Ari Fleischer...
Are they afraid that if we understand their own true motives and the motives of Arab leaders we might start seeing this war as something bad??
recapture the glory days of 12-13th C Islam. That means finding tolerance and building great education institutions and places of learning. The King was passionate on the subject. It also means freedom of movement and speech within and among the Islamic nations.
Yep, pure evil. I guess the US placed puppets in Afghanistan and Iraq are our last line of defense against free-speech and higher learning.
So, you freely admit that Windows Update collects more than is specified on their privacy page. (Denoted by the legal "information includes") "Windows Update also collects the Product ID and Product Key to confirm that you are running a validly licensed copy of Windows." - This is an admission that they don't really let you know what they're collecting, as it does not appear in the "information includes" section.
"To provide you with the appropriate list of updates, Windows Update must collect" Must?? Read on up the list. They choose to have that information sent to them for processing rather than send their informatioon to you for processing. There is no "must" involved. Unless this is another admission that The Windows dev team is not bright enough to have figured out how to do it any other way.
The HCL is huge, but if there was a copy loaded on install, with the versions, etc. current up to pressing, then simple diffs could be downloaded upon each connect. Even without this mechanism, a download of possible updates would not be prohibitively huge.
They want the titles of any file played in Media Player why??? They don't have to let you know that they do that why?? As Bush and Cheney will tell you, this is a pattern of behaviour. Another episode of a bad soap opera, and we know how it will end. XP phones home 18 ways out of the box. That doesn't bother you?? look here, and here.
Live in darkness if you must...
Hammy
"The person you have reached has been connected and is unavailable at this time."
Another poster mentioned you can turn off animations. Minute resources.... Unlike the real world?? I thought that the minute resources were the crowning achievement of Civ III. Civ II you beat up on people at your own pace, when you have 150 Marine units, and for no other reason than pure expansionism. Pick off smaller empires while keeping the next biggest empire in check.
The resources in Civ III actually require you to look for land that has more than trees and a river. It requires that you sometimes have to leave your fort and fight the enemy to protect your mines. It improves trade... no more walk your camel halfway around the world to trade something you can't really use, just a money bonus. (side effect, trading raw resources for money is a biggol loser.)
In combat, the resources lead to some interesting strategy. Cut off a countries supply of steel, oil, etc... And watch what happens to their army. I had one opponent go from making Marines to making Archers. Does he commit all of his Marines to recapturing mines, or to defending towns?
For Civ 4, I reccomend a new tech: World Bank. As soon as it is discovered, everybody has it. You can borrow from the world bank, ideally every CIV is going to be in debt within 20 years of it's founding, and can go wildly into debt. (World Bank should extend credit equal to the cost to subvert your entire society.) Percentage of credit used is proportional to chance that World Bank A) Gets you into a war with another country, B) Changes production in one of your cities, C) "Disappears" one of your citizens (either silencing the dissenters or hiring away your scientists) creating a temporary extra unhappy citizen. (5 turns??) If you use up all of your credit the World Bank causes all Civs that owe them money to declare war on your CIV. (You have to get down to a reasonable amount of debt and then chill everybody out and get some truces called.)
Another Tech would be "Supreme Court" - You no longer need a majority to be elected president and win via diplomatic victory. The supreme court will grant you victory with %45 of the votes.
Hammy
"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product - if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them.
"It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."
Ummm, having freeware hosted by "some guy" with packages that are out of date compared to their Linux brethren is not my Idea of good freeware support. This is like saying that WindowsNT supports Shareware because of Download.com. Sunfreeware offers an important service to the community because Sun doesn't.
Yes, Sun has recently been offering a CD with freeware, and I consider this to be like the NT resource kit. It is a marked improvement. But perl winds up in the "wrong" (hard to frikkin' find) place. etc., etc., etc....
Their package system is still stone age. Yes, their patches are the quality you would expect from any big iron vendor, but the package management system is still arcane and tempremental. I manage one Debian system and 40+ Solaris systems, and apt-get never confuses, I don't struggle to remember syntax, and it's easy to find out what is on the system.
Right.... Disliking CDE means I want to rip out the entire XServer. Thanks. I do remove CDE and run most of my boxes on OpenWindows, but it would be nice if they had a streamlined WM for production boxes.
None of the above were new to me, just none of them are solutions I consider acceptible. Not for the big money we pay for the privelage of using Sun. Everbody trashes MSFT for not being able to make a stable OS with billions, why can't we jump on Sun for failing to make a usable OS with billions. I understand all about commercial Unices, but AIX does a much better job of being "Industrial Strength - No Fluff" while Sun hides behind a marketing logo and pretty puce CDE.
The funny thing is that Sun thinks of themselves as a Microsoft competitor... Ummm, not since 1991. MSFT ate their lunch on the desktop, with Windows95 of all things (shame), and is now gloating over their last few remaining soldiers in the server room. What MS doesn't do Linux will.
Case in point: MS releases.NET, to great fanfare and controversy, an OSS clone is slated for Linux, books are written, countless articles about what it is and what it isn't. Sun.ONE, Sun's "Really, we're a Microsoft competitor" offering, is ignored. Where is the Sun.ONE client for Gnome?? That same Gnome that will someday ship with Solaris....
So MSFT goes from NT3.51 to.NET server and we get SOS... Same old Solaris. At least it reigns in the need to upgrade....
"The blades will start at $4,800 and range up to $20,000." Umm, at an entry price of $4,800 they're not competing with Intel. Add to that their $200 keyboards, $100 mice, and $2,000 video cards, and they are still priced way the hell out there.
We recently replaced the video cards, mice, and keyboards for 2 E450's, and the video card was an ATI rage 128 card ($295). We spent almost $1,000 outfitting our machines with peripherals. The next step up in video cards was $2,000.
I would say that these exorbidant prices are worth it for Sun HW, but their $3,000 monitors have the life expectancy of a fruit fly. But hey, buy our pricey support agreement and we'll replace it free*! (*Free: n. How much Sun will charge you to replace a $3,000 monitor after they get $20,000 for their support contract.)
There are darn few things which Sun is cost effective for anymore. Running a big DB, etc... But the word is Intel for file and print servers and smaller app servers as well. Choose a Linux box with commodity hardware and you could have that entry level blade for about $1,000. If you are worried about the reliability of commodity hardware, get a back up. You still saved half your money.
Does Sun really think anyone is going to shell out for this hardware to run Apache?? If they can't get their foot in the webserver door, what hope is there for Sun ONE?? (Like there was ever hope, but still....) Starts to make you wonder if Sun even knows what they're trying to accomplish anymore.
My SUN wish list: 1) Better volume management without needing to buy Veritas. This is just another way Sun is too expensive. Having their Volume management on Par with AIX would be a start. 2) Die CDE, Die! (Side note - Noone ever sees the desktop of our Sun boxes, noone cares, why not run a default TWM that consumes as little resources as possible.) 3) Better Package management - Take a lesson from Debian. 4) Better freeware access. Pre-compiled binaries are rareish, and downloading and installing gcc so you can use top (if it compiles) is just silly. Add to this my complaint about package management and you have a serious problem as far as I'm concerned. 5) Stop being Microsofty about naming OS releases. I am tired of explaining to my boss that there were not 6 major upgrades to Solaris between 2.7 and 8. I am tired of explaining that the SunOS 3.5 we run downstairs is much, much older than Solaris 2.6. Bastards!
(Boss, we need to upgrade from 2.6 to 8. - What, how do we know it will work! That's like upgrading WFW 3.11 to Win2000! The world will end! Can't we just upgrade to 3.5?? I hear we have that on one of our servers...)
Then complain about the underlying code. If your UI is so complex that you couldn't dive into in a weekend, there's something wrong with your code. This isn't KDE, this is a 100x50 player bar...
Some of his complaints were on the extremely petty, and were fixes that would have taken a weekend. After that weekend he would have enough grounding in the code to make more improvements. If he spent 40 hours doing it it is still cheaper than buying all of the software in the Windows or Mac world.
I talk of all of this from my own experiences, and I am certantly not as skilled a coder as jwz... But it took me a week to write SCSI support for my Linux 0.71 kernel. That is the history and legacy of Linux, guys who knew going in there would be coding needed just to make it work. Now you asswipes complain that it doesn't work like a Mac or WinXP.
I am just tired of seeing all of these "blessed coders" from the ex-Mac world bitchin when they should pitch in. Anyone can complain, it takes no skill or even thought.
My point about XEmacs still stands. He can't even get a UI right in his own program. So who the fudge cares what he thinks of Linux video players??
That doesn't stop you from getting calls, the real way to stop is to make sure your "Demographic" sucks. I personally fill out very warranty card, answer every survey as a 44 year old woman who rents a trailer and makes less than $15,000 per year. I enjoy smoking my pipe, reading Maxim, Playboy, and Hustler. Nobody, and I mean nobody calls me except a few credit card companies. The Police Athletic League has even stopped calling since I refused to buy tickets to the policeman's ball unless there was a swimsuit competition.
But the worst thing you can do is have a kid. We have had two children in two years, and we are on every baby and telemarketer list. I'm going to try the cell phone route from now on.
Well, I for one could go for some single-string effects. Imagine setting up various delays for each string and playing with the textures offered. Imagine being able to put some crunchy distortion on EA and Overdrive with an echo for DGBE. Works for 12 bar blues.
The real problem I see here is hubs and the like. Consider the 48 point patch bay, a standard for any studio. Now, think of 24 Cat5 ins with 36 discreet channels... They talk about being able to plug dirctly into your PC, but are we going to have dual ethernet?? No, you will probably have/need a Magic card with a Cat 5 plug.
Controlling amps from the guitar... Umm, I like foot pedals for that.... Besides, it is already more than possible. In the commercial world, I think all of the Line 6 amps support MIDI and amp switching from there. Danny Gatton had the "Magic Dingus Box" on his LP that allowed him to control the rate of his Leslies as well as controlling other effects.
"The guitar pickups, as far as I can tell, will still be analog." Really?? They won't be traditional Mag Field pickups and be usable. Single string isolation is just not feasible. The GK-2A's from roland use a hexaphonic magnet arrangement, but require that they be very close to the strings, and there are problems keeping good tone when bending. So, they are either going to have 1 piezo per saddle or something totally new. Piezo's don't sound great anyway, so plan on a lot of post-processing.
Now, could these be equipped with an Livewire ?? That would be nifty...
Final summation?? It has some appeal, and those who went out and got a "Roland Ready Strat" will probably get a "Magic Les Paul". I still won't see either of them when I'm gigging. Actually, if any of you Musicians out there are seeing Roland Ready strats used by other bands please give me some band names. I haven't seen one played here in VA in over 10 years.
Ummm, did he miss the point of Linux?? If you don't like it, fix it. I'm sure for someone of his skill, he could have fixed many of these horrific UI examples in the time it took him to rant about it. Someone else has done the hard work, making the movie playback work, he can't do a little interface work??
Honestly, how will linux ever achieve usability when the people who are angry about it would rather criticize that construct. There are three type of people: those who complain somethings broken and those who fix things when they're broken.
P.S. If this joker wrote XEmacs, he has no room to criticize anyone. Talk about crappy UI's....
Gee, if an accurate term becomes an insult, what is an accurate view of your profession?? Next, whores will be complaining that the term "Whore" is negative, and makes it seem like they sleep with lots of guys. Hello Boffins! You really are funny little men in lab coats.
I am a geek. I can write volumes about how to win at Civ. I program fractals in Perl. Calling me "Technically Adept" is just a polite way of saying "Programs fractals in Perl". Perhaps instead of Boffins we could call them "Logrolling patent whores". OOOH! I like the sound of that...
Besides, this is from Australia. They haven't had a big scientific breakthrough since Yahoo Serious put the bubbles into beer.
In
related news, certain Quarks have objected to being labelled "Strange" by Austrailian scientists. "It's demeaning," said an unidentified quark, "How do you look at your kids and say, 'We're strange quarks honey.' Last thing I need is some funny guy in a lab coat imposing his own view of normalcy on my existence."
~Hammy
I've got a brand new release of PGP
You've got a brand new key...
I too have been considering leaving America for freedom. Is Wales nice this time of year??
As an American, I have to look long and hard at Canada... They (mostly) speak English, seem roughly American sans the carpet bombing, and it leaves us close to friends and family. On the Con side, it's cold, their economy is tied to the US economy, and they are known for bowing to US pressure too often.
The UK on the other hand, it's cold, their economy has not been vibrant since the empire collapsed, and I understand that unemployment is still rampant. (No job = No visa)
Finally, I thought they dropped our tax money out of
Helicopters over the desert.
Maybe we should have an ask slashdot: New coutries for expatriates??
Um, I could just set the SLIMP3 and not have to reverse engineer everything..... Hmmm....
No offense dude, and I'm sure the other owners out there appreciate it, but doing all of this work for a company that won't even disclose the API's because they think so little of non-windows users is not my idea of a good time.
Course, it's not nearly as crazy as reverse engineering your own OSS.NET implementation.
I've read their site and I am suprised they're still around.
This article was poor. The jokes weren't funny to geeks, incomprehensible to non-geeks. Is this MCSE humor?? The Pets for Food section would have been poor humor on Joe Nobody's Blog, and just plain insulting when the writer was paid by the word for it.
Linking to "wierd" websites and then making lame jokes about them is what Bloggers do best. Let the Bloggers keep on doing it. Seriously, if this had been posted somewhere other than Salon would it even bear mentioning??
Slashdot Mirror
Good point... Also, how come noone has discovered the missing link that shows how we came by all those extra chromosomes so quickly. Read "THe Evolutionists", because there is alot more to evolution than you thought.
Geeee, and to think they just shipped me 20 free copies of their latest distro. SCO linux 4.0. (Hmmm, I missed 1-3....) I haven't installed it, but I do notice it is free from the Glint and Lizard references, and I also don't see a bunch of small text talking about per seat licenses.
I must say, I wonder what SuSE saw in this partnership.... They were the strongest distro in the group. Hanging with vermin like Caldera will only make you itchy.
I thought XHTML was only for use on porn sites....
Go figgure.....
Actually, It's funny. I have been toying with Linux since Kernel 0.7, and I'm shocked as hell. For the record, I have also played with many other small OS projects, and none of them have taken off like this.
BTW, My fav?? QNX. http://get.qnx.com
"It is `registry like' in that there is a unified place where you can make changes, and there is a notification system, but unlike the Windows registry the data is not stored in a single binary file, but in a set of separate XML files"
Ummm, so the configuration options are hidden and difficult to use - they don't show in the standard configuration options "dialog boxes" - but the underlying structure is sooo much better because it's stored in separate XML files?? You respond to UI issues by pointing out that the UI may not be up to par, but the underlying architecture is better... Than Windows.... Than what is widely regarded as the biggest PIA in Windows.
The word I always get about Gnome is A) Licensing, and B) it's easier to code in. A only affects coders for the most part, (they're the only ones who need to worry about the licensing) and B is soley devoted to coders. I was not aware that C++ gurus made up such a large percentage of computer users.
I personally find the Gnome interface clunky. The default panel is enormous, if it can be made smaller it is not in the configuration dialog, and is not nearly as functional as even the Windows task bar. Add the chunky menu bar at the top, and gnome seems crowded on first login. I'm running the desktop here at 1024x768, and working in Gnome always feels like I'm running out of space.
The UI is a bad mismatch of *nix WM's and Windows oddities. The start button is, has been, and will continue to be a disaster, and this is magnified tenfold on a Linux system because of the large amount of software involved. I know that this is an issue that affects the "Slashdot crowd" that y'all think so little of, but it is a usability issue on any system fully laden. Also, should an admin be forced to go through his distro's installer and deselect package after package because he doesn't want the Gnome menu cluttered??
You can't just explain away UI issues. Even if you don't think it's an issue. For every person who complains about a confusing, incomplete, ambiguous, or clunky element of the UI you have to assume that there are another 100 people who feel that same way and have said nothing.
If the true triumph of Gnome is that it is so well organized and the backend is so much better than poor old KDE, shouldn't you be tromping KDE. Beyond the point where you're debating who's ahead?? Are those backend qualities resulting in increased efficency allowing you to pull ahead of them?? You have more backing from the Vendors...
I am just amazed that in 4 years a reasonably decent UI on par with Windows cannot be achieved. (FYI, competing with KDE is silly. This is like the Men's college basketball team worrying about whether it can beat the same school's girls team. It doesn't matter, they should worry about beating the other men's teams in their conference.) Quite frankly the entire Gnome/KDE nonsense has made me switch back to WindowsXP. The XP environment is somewhat intuitive, faster, smoother, and better looking than either KDE or Gnome. Getting it set up doesn't take reading documentation for a month either.
I'm just ranting at this point, but I find all of this so very idiotic. And when I read the developers basically saying "The UI is ok, but it's got a great backend... Well if you think the UI sucks it's because you're stupid. Those slashdot idiots with their 'usability' and 'eye candy'... Hunh, were designing this for our enterprise users who can shove it down their employee's throaths no matter how clunky and unintuitive it is. P.S. Don't post to slashdot...." I fell like I should apologize for going off here, but I've read what you think of people like us.... and you don't think much.
BTW, Sun used to talk about how much their customers appreciated CDE and OW, until they moved everything to Windows 2000 servers because the better and more familiar UI made administrators out of Chimps. If they won't use it at home, they have to learn it for work. The reason Windows is so popular as a workstation... users don't have to be trained on the UI. Havoc Pennington is an idiot.
Hammy
Generally, people who have "amazing" talents are quite inadequate socially. This is true of authors, musicians, reasearch scientists, etc... The reason for this is that they needed an incredible amount of time and dedication to hone those amazing skills. A two-three hour daily grooming ritual does not fit in. I assume that if this jackass met Leonardo DaVinci he'd be complaining about his smellyness.
/., Ann Coulter says, "Who would have thought that being a good programmer and being able to run a mile in under 4 minutes were so mutually exclusive??" "I mean, the guy could write Emacs and can't shoot a 3 pointer..."
The flip side is that you can pretty much relegate people who obsess over hygene to the untalented, washed masses. Seriously, read his book if you don't believe me.
Most of the symphony musicians I have met have the same goofy love of puns, say things that are socially inappropriate, and bathe on concert days. Leo Kottke has a personality like stucco. But hey, if they'd been popular, they would have had something better to do than practice 3-4 hours a day.
Next week on
The very definition of a writer is someone who spends way too much time on the computer and still can't learn to program in Basic.
Hammy
The most interesting part:
I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need
to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but
preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a
campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
The amazing thing is that the White House has been vehemently denying these charges. "Iraq is not the lynchpin of a broader assault on the middle east." says Ari Fleischer...
Are they afraid that if we understand their own true motives and the motives of Arab leaders we might start seeing this war as something bad??
recapture the glory days of 12-13th C Islam. That means
finding tolerance and building great education institutions and places
of learning. The King was passionate on the subject. It also means
freedom of movement and speech within and among the Islamic nations.
Yep, pure evil. I guess the US placed puppets in Afghanistan and Iraq are our last line of defense against free-speech and higher learning.
~Hammy
So, you freely admit that Windows Update collects more than is specified on their privacy page. (Denoted by the legal "information includes") "Windows Update also collects the Product ID and Product Key to confirm that you are running a validly licensed copy of Windows." - This is an admission that they don't really let you know what they're collecting, as it does not appear in the "information includes" section.
"To provide you with the appropriate list of updates, Windows Update must collect" Must?? Read on up the list. They choose to have that information sent to them for processing rather than send their informatioon to you for processing. There is no "must" involved. Unless this is another admission that The Windows dev team is not bright enough to have figured out how to do it any other way.
The HCL is huge, but if there was a copy loaded on install, with the versions, etc. current up to pressing, then simple diffs could be downloaded upon each connect. Even without this mechanism, a download of possible updates would not be prohibitively huge.
They want the titles of any file played in Media Player why??? They don't have to let you know that they do that why?? As Bush and Cheney will tell you, this is a pattern of behaviour. Another episode of a bad soap opera, and we know how it will end. XP phones home 18 ways out of the box. That doesn't bother you?? look here, and here.
Live in darkness if you must...
Hammy
"The person you have reached has been connected and is unavailable at this time."
port 28801 is used for the MS game Crimson Skies. (Never heard of it myself either.) From what I understand, it is on the MSN Zone.
You paid for XP??? Amazing.
Did you notice that the game only runs on LInux due to wineX??
Another poster mentioned you can turn off animations. Minute resources.... Unlike the real world?? I thought that the minute resources were the crowning achievement of Civ III. Civ II you beat up on people at your own pace, when you have 150 Marine units, and for no other reason than pure expansionism. Pick off smaller empires while keeping the next biggest empire in check.
The resources in Civ III actually require you to look for land that has more than trees and a river. It requires that you sometimes have to leave your fort and fight the enemy to protect your mines. It improves trade... no more walk your camel halfway around the world to trade something you can't really use, just a money bonus. (side effect, trading raw resources for money is a biggol loser.)
In combat, the resources lead to some interesting strategy. Cut off a countries supply of steel, oil, etc... And watch what happens to their army. I had one opponent go from making Marines to making Archers. Does he commit all of his Marines to recapturing mines, or to defending towns?
For Civ 4, I reccomend a new tech: World Bank. As soon as it is discovered, everybody has it. You can borrow from the world bank, ideally every CIV is going to be in debt within 20 years of it's founding, and can go wildly into debt. (World Bank should extend credit equal to the cost to subvert your entire society.) Percentage of credit used is proportional to chance that World Bank A) Gets you into a war with another country, B) Changes production in one of your cities, C) "Disappears" one of your citizens (either silencing the dissenters or hiring away your scientists) creating a temporary extra unhappy citizen. (5 turns??) If you use up all of your credit the World Bank causes all Civs that owe them money to declare war on your CIV. (You have to get down to a reasonable amount of debt and then chill everybody out and get some truces called.)
Another Tech would be "Supreme Court" - You no longer need a majority to be elected president and win via diplomatic victory. The supreme court will grant you victory with %45 of the votes.
Hammy
"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product - if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them.
"It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."
Bobby Kennedy - June 6,1968
Keep your fingerprints off their files! Blow HS and learn Hydroponics. Learn Spanish. Your history teacher is lying.
P.S. All that stuff you think about when you're high, patent it.
Ummm, having freeware hosted by "some guy" with packages that are out of date compared to their Linux brethren is not my Idea of good freeware support. This is like saying that WindowsNT supports Shareware because of Download.com. Sunfreeware offers an important service to the community because Sun doesn't.
.NET, to great fanfare and controversy, an OSS clone is slated for Linux, books are written, countless articles about what it is and what it isn't. Sun.ONE, Sun's "Really, we're a Microsoft competitor" offering, is ignored. Where is the Sun.ONE client for Gnome?? That same Gnome that will someday ship with Solaris....
.NET server and we get SOS... Same old Solaris. At least it reigns in the need to upgrade....
Yes, Sun has recently been offering a CD with freeware, and I consider this to be like the NT resource kit. It is a marked improvement. But perl winds up in the "wrong" (hard to frikkin' find) place. etc., etc., etc....
Their package system is still stone age. Yes, their patches are the quality you would expect from any big iron vendor, but the package management system is still arcane and tempremental. I manage one Debian system and 40+ Solaris systems, and apt-get never confuses, I don't struggle to remember syntax, and it's easy to find out what is on the system.
Right.... Disliking CDE means I want to rip out the entire XServer. Thanks. I do remove CDE and run most of my boxes on OpenWindows, but it would be nice if they had a streamlined WM for production boxes.
None of the above were new to me, just none of them are solutions I consider acceptible. Not for the big money we pay for the privelage of using Sun. Everbody trashes MSFT for not being able to make a stable OS with billions, why can't we jump on Sun for failing to make a usable OS with billions. I understand all about commercial Unices, but AIX does a much better job of being "Industrial Strength - No Fluff" while Sun hides behind a marketing logo and pretty puce CDE.
The funny thing is that Sun thinks of themselves as a Microsoft competitor... Ummm, not since 1991. MSFT ate their lunch on the desktop, with Windows95 of all things (shame), and is now gloating over their last few remaining soldiers in the server room. What MS doesn't do Linux will.
Case in point: MS releases
So MSFT goes from NT3.51 to
~Hammy
"The blades will start at $4,800 and range up to $20,000." Umm, at an entry price of $4,800 they're not competing with Intel. Add to that their $200 keyboards, $100 mice, and $2,000 video cards, and they are still priced way the hell out there.
We recently replaced the video cards, mice, and keyboards for 2 E450's, and the video card was an ATI rage 128 card ($295). We spent almost $1,000 outfitting our machines with peripherals. The next step up in video cards was $2,000.
I would say that these exorbidant prices are worth it for Sun HW, but their $3,000 monitors have the life expectancy of a fruit fly. But hey, buy our pricey support agreement and we'll replace it free*! (*Free: n. How much Sun will charge you to replace a $3,000 monitor after they get $20,000 for their support contract.)
There are darn few things which Sun is cost effective for anymore. Running a big DB, etc... But the word is Intel for file and print servers and smaller app servers as well. Choose a Linux box with commodity hardware and you could have that entry level blade for about $1,000. If you are worried about the reliability of commodity hardware, get a back up. You still saved half your money.
Does Sun really think anyone is going to shell out for this hardware to run Apache?? If they can't get their foot in the webserver door, what hope is there for Sun ONE?? (Like there was ever hope, but still....) Starts to make you wonder if Sun even knows what they're trying to accomplish anymore.
My SUN wish list:
1) Better volume management without needing to buy Veritas. This is just another way Sun is too expensive. Having their Volume management on Par with AIX would be a start.
2) Die CDE, Die! (Side note - Noone ever sees the desktop of our Sun boxes, noone cares, why not run a default TWM that consumes as little resources as possible.)
3) Better Package management - Take a lesson from Debian.
4) Better freeware access. Pre-compiled binaries are rareish, and downloading and installing gcc so you can use top (if it compiles) is just silly. Add to this my complaint about package management and you have a serious problem as far as I'm concerned.
5) Stop being Microsofty about naming OS releases. I am tired of explaining to my boss that there were not 6 major upgrades to Solaris between 2.7 and 8. I am tired of explaining that the SunOS 3.5 we run downstairs is much, much older than Solaris 2.6. Bastards!
(Boss, we need to upgrade from 2.6 to 8. - What, how do we know it will work! That's like upgrading WFW 3.11 to Win2000! The world will end! Can't we just upgrade to 3.5?? I hear we have that on one of our servers...)
~Jason
Then complain about the underlying code. If your UI is so complex that you couldn't dive into in a weekend, there's something wrong with your code. This isn't KDE, this is a 100x50 player bar...
Some of his complaints were on the extremely petty, and were fixes that would have taken a weekend. After that weekend he would have enough grounding in the code to make more improvements. If he spent 40 hours doing it it is still cheaper than buying all of the software in the Windows or Mac world.
I talk of all of this from my own experiences, and I am certantly not as skilled a coder as jwz... But it took me a week to write SCSI support for my Linux 0.71 kernel. That is the history and legacy of Linux, guys who knew going in there would be coding needed just to make it work. Now you asswipes complain that it doesn't work like a Mac or WinXP.
I am just tired of seeing all of these "blessed coders" from the ex-Mac world bitchin when they should pitch in. Anyone can complain, it takes no skill or even thought.
My point about XEmacs still stands. He can't even get a UI right in his own program. So who the fudge cares what he thinks of Linux video players??
That doesn't stop you from getting calls, the real way to stop is to make sure your "Demographic" sucks. I personally fill out very warranty card, answer every survey as a 44 year old woman who rents a trailer and makes less than $15,000 per year. I enjoy smoking my pipe, reading Maxim, Playboy, and Hustler. Nobody, and I mean nobody calls me except a few credit card companies. The Police Athletic League has even stopped calling since I refused to buy tickets to the policeman's ball unless there was a swimsuit competition.
But the worst thing you can do is have a kid. We have had two children in two years, and we are on every baby and telemarketer list. I'm going to try the cell phone route from now on.
Well, I for one could go for some single-string effects. Imagine setting up various delays for each string and playing with the textures offered. Imagine being able to put some crunchy distortion on EA and Overdrive with an echo for DGBE. Works for 12 bar blues.
The real problem I see here is hubs and the like. Consider the 48 point patch bay, a standard for any studio. Now, think of 24 Cat5 ins with 36 discreet channels... They talk about being able to plug dirctly into your PC, but are we going to have dual ethernet?? No, you will probably have/need a Magic card with a Cat 5 plug.
Controlling amps from the guitar... Umm, I like foot pedals for that.... Besides, it is already more than possible. In the commercial world, I think all of the Line 6 amps support MIDI and amp switching from there. Danny Gatton had the "Magic Dingus Box" on his LP that allowed him to control the rate of his Leslies as well as controlling other effects.
"The guitar pickups, as far as I can tell, will still be analog." Really?? They won't be traditional Mag Field pickups and be usable. Single string isolation is just not feasible. The GK-2A's from roland use a hexaphonic magnet arrangement, but require that they be very close to the strings, and there are problems keeping good tone when bending. So, they are either going to have 1 piezo per saddle or something totally new. Piezo's don't sound great anyway, so plan on a lot of post-processing.
Now, could these be equipped with an Livewire ?? That would be nifty...
Final summation?? It has some appeal, and those who went out and got a "Roland Ready Strat" will probably get a "Magic Les Paul". I still won't see either of them when I'm gigging. Actually, if any of you Musicians out there are seeing Roland Ready strats used by other bands please give me some band names. I haven't seen one played here in VA in over 10 years.
JM
EEEK! Brain fart.... I meant Direct Connect.... Bad monkey....
And when they do that we get smaller P2P networks that have join and ban lists.... Oh, WinMX anybody??
Ummm, did he miss the point of Linux?? If you don't like it, fix it. I'm sure for someone of his skill, he could have fixed many of these horrific UI examples in the time it took him to rant about it. Someone else has done the hard work, making the movie playback work, he can't do a little interface work??
Honestly, how will linux ever achieve usability when the people who are angry about it would rather criticize that construct. There are three type of people: those who complain somethings broken and those who fix things when they're broken.
P.S. If this joker wrote XEmacs, he has no room to criticize anyone. Talk about crappy UI's....
Gee, if an accurate term becomes an insult, what is an accurate view of your profession?? Next, whores will be complaining that the term "Whore" is negative, and makes it seem like they sleep with lots of guys. Hello Boffins! You really are funny little men in lab coats.
I am a geek. I can write volumes about how to win at Civ. I program fractals in Perl. Calling me "Technically Adept" is just a polite way of saying "Programs fractals in Perl". Perhaps instead of Boffins we could call them "Logrolling patent whores". OOOH! I like the sound of that...
Besides, this is from Australia. They haven't had a big scientific breakthrough since Yahoo Serious put the bubbles into beer.
In related news, certain Quarks have objected to being labelled "Strange" by Austrailian scientists. "It's demeaning," said an unidentified quark, "How do you look at your kids and say, 'We're strange quarks honey.' Last thing I need is some funny guy in a lab coat imposing his own view of normalcy on my existence."
~Hammy
I've got a brand new release of PGP
You've got a brand new key...
I too have been considering leaving America for freedom. Is Wales nice this time of year??
As an American, I have to look long and hard at Canada... They (mostly) speak English, seem roughly American sans the carpet bombing, and it leaves us close to friends and family. On the Con side, it's cold, their economy is tied to the US economy, and they are known for bowing to US pressure too often.
The UK on the other hand, it's cold, their economy has not been vibrant since the empire collapsed, and I understand that unemployment is still rampant. (No job = No visa)
Finally, I thought they dropped our tax money out of Helicopters over the desert.
Maybe we should have an ask slashdot: New coutries for expatriates??
~Hammy
Nothing4sale.org ~Hammy
Um, I could just set the SLIMP3 and not have to reverse engineer everything..... Hmmm....
.NET implementation.
No offense dude, and I'm sure the other owners out there appreciate it, but doing all of this work for a company that won't even disclose the API's because they think so little of non-windows users is not my idea of a good time.
Course, it's not nearly as crazy as reverse engineering your own OSS
~Hammy
I've read their site and I am suprised they're still around.
This article was poor. The jokes weren't funny to geeks, incomprehensible to non-geeks. Is this MCSE humor?? The Pets for Food section would have been poor humor on Joe Nobody's Blog, and just plain insulting when the writer was paid by the word for it.
Linking to "wierd" websites and then making lame jokes about them is what Bloggers do best. Let the Bloggers keep on doing it. Seriously, if this had been posted somewhere other than Salon would it even bear mentioning??
~Hammy
Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun.