Slashdot Mirror


User: foobar104

foobar104's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,662
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,662

  1. Re:Does anyone else find it interesting... on Attack of the Clones Cut in UK · · Score: 2

    There's a big difference between "accurately portrays war" and "shows the horror of war." There was zero horror in Black Hawk Down, because I didn't really give a rat's ass about any of the characters. Saving Private Ryan, whether it was strictly accurate or not, really invoked the horror of war. It was involving, and personal for me.

    So take your "entertain me, I'm a consumer" attitude and shove it down through your "make love not war" sign.

    Asshole.

  2. Re:Does anyone else find it interesting... on Attack of the Clones Cut in UK · · Score: 2

    IMHO one of the best war films of recent years has to be Blackhawk Down. If anything could be said to show the horror of war, that film does.

    Oh, please. It's been a long time since I've seen any more self-serving piece of crud. There were no characters in that movie; just a dozen or so similar looking, similar acting "hoo-ah" types. While that may be fairly realistic, it's dull, dull, dull. By the end of the movie, I didn't care who lived or who died. I just wanted to get out of the theater.

    No, for "horror of war," I have to agree with everybody who said Saving Private Ryan. It's more melodramatic, certainly, but the melodrama is really effective in advancing the story.

  3. Re:Free as in upgrade or free is in not-free? on Jaguar Reviewed · · Score: 2

    What? I thought my post was clear: you could get 10.1 in one of three ways, including getting it for free at an Apple Store. I imagine 10.2 will be available through the same channels.

  4. Re:Free as in upgrade or free is in not-free? on Jaguar Reviewed · · Score: 2

    I wouldn't be surprised if 10.2 was handled just like 10.1: buy the whole OS including the developer tools on CD and stuff for over $100, or buy just the upgrade on CD for $30 or so.

    Or, if you prefer, go to an Apple retail store, where they were quietly and without any announcement handing them out to everybody for free. Which was pretty damn cool, if you ask me.

  5. Re:Is it just me... on TLD Registrar Wants To Charge $300 For .Pro Names · · Score: 2

    Gosh, it sounds like you were lucky to escape with your lives.

    Apart from telling you that you're a jerk, I'm just going to refer you to this guy's post, in which he said most of what I was going to say, only way better.

    Then there's your other post in which you said, "Gated communities are nothing but economic discrimination at its worst." What does "economic discrimination" mean, exactly? The house next door to mine costs (made-up number here) $800,000. What's that? You don't have $800,000? Well, then you can't buy that house. This has nothing to do with what kind of person you are. It has to do with your ability-- or lack thereof-- to pay for the house. Period.

    Throwing around loaded phrases like "economic discrimination" just betrays your entrenchment in the pervasive culture of victimhood. And don't get me started on that rant.

    (No, I don't live in an $800,000 house. But it's a more expensive house than some people-- including myself, until a few years ago-- could afford, so the analogy still holds.)

  6. Re:Is it just me... on TLD Registrar Wants To Charge $300 For .Pro Names · · Score: 3, Offtopic

    does "gated community" have nothing but negative connotations?

    My girlfriend and I used to think that, too. We live in a fairly big city-- one of the top 10 in the US, although that's as specific as I want to get-- with its share of upper class and lower class neighborhoods. While we were students we lived in some pretty cruddy parts of town because that's all we could afford, and we laughed at those idiots in their snobby gated communities. Every day we talked about how much we loved the character of our neighborhood, and how sterile those other places are.

    Then some things happened. A car got broken into on our street. We noticed the police coming at all hours of the day and night to break up the domestic fights at our neighbor's house. And, most importantly, we got out of school and got real jobs.

    Next month we're closing on a house in an expensive, gated community. Last year it was cold and sterile; today it's clean and pleasant. I can't describe how nice it is not to overhear anybody else's screaming in the middle of the afternoon, and to see clean sidewalks instead of uncollected trash and cars up on blocks in various states of disassembly.

    Does that make me an elitist? Maybe. If so, I can live with that.

    All I'm saying is, your opinion may change before you realize it.

  7. Re:Hardware will work for Apple on Steve Jobs and the History of Cocoa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Perhaps the most important is to accept standards: USB, IEEE1394, DVI, etc.

    Yeah, and if there isn't a suitable standard, invent one!

    (If you don't know the story, Apple invented Firewire about seven years ago. It later became an IEEE standard interface. Earlier this year, Apple won a technical Emmy for Firewire.)

  8. Re:One rather ballsy note from Jobs on Apple Drops Mac OS 9 · · Score: 3, Informative

    So the real question is: can you pluck tracks out of the iTunes db, or do you re-rip stuff and serve it using (what, exactly)? Can you use iTunes as a client for this in any way?

    Hmm. Evidently dingos ate my post.

    My response went basically something like this: I'm using QuickTime Streaming Server, which is available for download from Apple's site. It's free, and it runs just fine under OS X, although Apple will only give you tech support if you're running it under OS X Server. (Support is one of those things your server license pays for.)

    QTSS is also open source, via APSL, and it's available in binary form for Sun and FreeBSD and a few other things. Linux, maybe? I forget.

    The QTSS MP3 streamer requires practically no CPU once it gets going-- although starting it up for the first time and having it go through 2500+ MP3s took about half a minute of serious crunching. It caches the info, though, so that's no problem. I just tell it to randomly walk through my entire MP3 collection, and I can tune in to it from any computer on the LAN, using iTunes or any similar HTTP-savvy streaming client. Easy-peasy.

  9. Re:One rather ballsy note from Jobs on Apple Drops Mac OS 9 · · Score: 2

    I just use NFS to mount my mp3s :) It works great with iTunes, it's the UNIX way of doing things I think :)

    I was doing that for a while, but OS X's NFS isn't the most forgiving. If you've got an NFS mount going and you close your laptop and go to (say) the office, there's a fair chance the mount will wedge. I don't think that's an OS X problem as much as it is an NFS problem.

  10. Re:One rather ballsy note from Jobs on Apple Drops Mac OS 9 · · Score: 2

    I'm assuming iTunes will also support automatic discovery of iTunes libraries on other computers on the LAN and will transparently integrate that library into the library of the local computer.

    Why would you assume that? That's assuming a lot. First, Apple would have to incorporate a streaming server into iTunes; not impossible, and a pretty cool idea, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that this is more than just speculation on our part.

  11. Re:Gutsy move on Apple Drops Mac OS 9 · · Score: 2

    My hat off to Apple Enginerring.

    Was that a Freudian slip? ;-)

  12. Re:Jaguar on Apple Drops Mac OS 9 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now [A]pple rips off the name of an old Atari product, Jaguar.

    First of all, this is just a code-name. But, on that subject, did you ever hear the story of Carl Sagan's lawsuit against Apple? The Power Mac 7100 was developed under the code name "Carl Sagan," and when that worthy found out, he sent his lawyers a-calling. The Apple engineering team obligingly changed the code-name... to "butt-head astronomer."

  13. Re:One rather ballsy note from Jobs on Apple Drops Mac OS 9 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Jobs spoke about including peer-to-peer networking in the next full release of MacOS X and even included sharing MP3 as an example of how it could be used.

    Um... I don't think so. I'm not there or anything, but I don't believe that's what happened.

    Steve was talking about a home environment with several Macs using iTunes on one of them to stream MP3s over AirPort to the others. Rendezvous would make it easier to get something like that going, because the Macs would all be able to automatically discover one another without anybody having to manually set up IP stuff. Similar to DHCP, but without the server.

    This is really different from peer-to-peer file sharing over the internet.

    Incidentally, what Steve described is exactly how I'm set up right now. I've got about 12 GB of MP3s on my iMac (most of 'em ripped by me from my collection of 200+ CDs) and I stream 'em over AirPort to my other Macs, including the iBook I'm using to write this. The only difference is that I'm not using iTunes to serve streams, obviously, because it doesn't do that yet.

  14. Re:Two years ahead of the "other guys" on Apple Drops Mac OS 9 · · Score: 4, Informative

    however this is going to force some people to either buy new hardware or just never upgrade... If I'm worng... please set me straight.

    You're worng. ;-)

    Think of OpenGL: if your graphics card can do OpenGL stuff, then the libgl on your computer will hand off the OpenGL processing straight to the graphics hardware. If it can't, your libgl will do the OpenGL stuff in software.

    (At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Seems like in PC-land it doesn't much of the time.)

    If your Mac has support for Quartz Extreme, it'll use it. If it doesn't, it'll continue to use software-based Quartz rendering.

    Steve never said you had to have hardware accelerated graphics to run Jaguar, or anything that would imply that.

  15. Re:Will classic apps still run in classic environm on Apple Drops Mac OS 9 · · Score: 2

    How long until the classic compatibility layer is no longer functional?

    Presumably the Classic environment will always be functional, until it goes away forever. See, this is a developer's conference. When Apple announces that they're EOL'ing OS 9 to developers that means they're stopping development on OS 9. No future development on OS 9 means no need for future development on the Classic environment.

  16. Re:To vocalize what's on everyone's mind... on Fewer Jobs, Less Pay In The IT Industry · · Score: 2

    Having a resident (making around $20K/year mind you) work 36 hours straight (12 + 12 hours on call overnight + another 12 their normal shift) is not only dangerous but stupid.

    First of all, the average intern (i.e., first-year resident) makes about $35,000 these days. The salary goes up a little each year. So while they're not paid a fortune, they're not working for slave's wages, either. You can live off of $35,000 a year just fine. Supporting a family is a different story, of course.

    The residency system that has been in use since the 20's really serves two purposes: first, it tests young doctors under conditions far more stressful than are reasonably anticipated. This contributes to the forging of better, more experienced, more capable surgeons.

    Second, and most importantly, the residency system allows hospitals to provide care to as many patients as possible given the limited number of doctors that are available. Somebody has to be at the hospital at 3 a.m. every day. If it were for the residents, nobody would be available to do the job.

    The media in recent years has overhyped the "dangerous" aspect of the surgical residency system. It's true, of course, that mistakes happen in hospitals, just like they do anywhere else. But they are rare. Every action performed by an intern is overseen by a more senior resident, and usually by an attending physician. The risk of harm is a small as it can be given the circumstances.

    Finally, the residency system has survived for upwards of 80 years because it works. If patients were really dying left, right, and center, the system wouldn't have lasted as long as it has.

    How much of a drone a doc is really depends on their specialty, talk to an ER doc after they treat their 4000th runny nose/sore throat during the winter or a dermatologist after they've removed their 1 millionth wart.

    Sounds like the famous Chuck Yeager quote about being a test pilot: "hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror." The fact that a doctor does the same basic set of evaluations and procedures most of the time doesn't negate the fact that they all have to be highly trained experts. Depending on your specialty, you may only encounter one true emergency in your whole career. But it'll come up eventually, and you'll have to know what the do when it does.

    To me, that doesn't exactly fit the model of a "drone."

  17. Re:of course on HP/Compaq Merger Official Today · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Are you willing to explore what this twisted version of "free" is, which you claim that others purport?

    Yup. It's not very complicated, and it's also not a new argument.

    The BSD license is a good example of a free license, in the traditional sense of free: "Exempt from subjection to the will of others; not under restraint, control, or compulsion; able to follow one's own impulses, desires, or inclinations; determining one's own course of action; not dependent; at liberty." Webster's, 1913.

    The GPL, on the other hand, doesn't meet that definition of "free." GPL-licensed software is rife with restrictions. If I want to use GPL'd software in my own project, and not release the source to my own project, I am prohibited from doing this. That, to me, doesn't meet the definition of "free," sense 1, as given by Webster's. Whether the GPL is a good thing or not is a point for another debate. My objection-- at the moment-- is to what I perceive to be the misuse of the word "free" in characterizing that particular license.

    Are you also willing to explain your use of what seems like an arbitrary appeal to authority (ie, Plato's Laws), and why it lends support to your argument?

    Yeah, but Google does a better job than I could. Finding more information is left as an exercise for the reader.

    Plato's Republic contains a dialogue on forms of government, one of which is democracy. The problem with democracy, as defined by and discussed in this dialogue, is that political power rests with individuals who have no responsibility. Democracy, therefore, is fundamentally unstable and rapidly descends into tyranny.

    Contrast Socrates's definition of "democracy" with the modern definition of "democracy." Modern democracy is more like what Socrates would have called a republic, although we have long since abandoned the idea of the philosopher-king. Alas.

    Slashdot is similar, by analogy. Instead of political power, we're talking about editorial power. In a pure democracy, a charismatic individual could accumulate power by giving the masses what they want to hear, because democracy is based on the idea of positive feedback: you vote for, not against.

    On Slashdot, it's possible to accumulate karma (the Slashdot equivalent of political power, although karma carries with it no actual privileges) by giving the masses what they want to hear. Moderators are more likely to moderate comments up than down, so some ideas and patterns become highly moderated regularly.

    The old joke goes, "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" This comment, or one like it, appears with virtually every article. Because this particular idea was so over-used, it became a joke. Comments that were once moderated "insightful" are now left unmoderated-- unless they're funny.

    Similarly, every story about some software product seems to include at least one comment either applauding the vendor for releasing source code, or deriding the vendor for opposite of same. These comments carry an implied converse, and they get moderated up often enough that an outside observer might conclude that the prevailing opinion on Slashdot is that keeping source code secret is unacceptable. I don't believe that's the most commonly held opinion by Slashdot readers. It just appears that way because of the way moderation works.

    The same principle applies to this particular story. Every time an article appears about a corporation, it seems that there appears one or more highly moderated comments on the subject of the "inherent" evils of commercialism or corporations. Again, I don't believe this is the majority opinion among Slashdot readers. It just appears to be because comments that have been moderated up are less likely to be moderated down.

    These situations all basically reflect the principles that were laid out thousands of years ago in the Republic: pure democracy, be it political or editorial, is unstable, and leads to tyranny, either social or intellectual.

    That's why I said that I would have spent a moderator point-- had I had any at the time-- to support the poster of the comment to which I replied. Contrary opinions are a good thing, and should be encouraged.

    In closing, I'd like to let you know that the fact that your post challenged the structure of my post, and not its content, is not lost on me.

  18. Re:To vocalize what's on everyone's mind... on Fewer Jobs, Less Pay In The IT Industry · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Doctors (in America at least) are already factory workers. Medical school wouldn't have saved you from the drone farm.

    I'd like to know what you based this comment on, exactly. While I'm in technology, obviously, my girlfriend is a resident at a major hospital. She's got a Ph.D. and an M.D., and she's in training to be a surgical specialist.

    I don't know all doctors, of course, but most of my circle of friends is made of doctors, med students, medical scientists, and health-care pros; people my girlfriend works with. I don't know anybody who would agree with your assertion that doctors are (merely) factory workers.

    Docs train for between seven and twelve years after college. They work ten times harder than you or I do, and their work matters. If I screw up, somebody in QA will catch my bugs and no harm will be done. If my girlfriend screws up, a five-year-old girl will go permanently deaf. And, of course, docs get compensated in proportion, although maybe not as much as you might think.

    So, as you can tell, I'm just wondering where your comment came from.

  19. Re:of course on HP/Compaq Merger Official Today · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You know, the parent post was a little light on content and heavy on ire, but if I had any points today I would have been willing to spend one just to encourage unpopular opinions. I, too, get frustrated with the vocal "Slashdot hippies" who spend all of their time advocating "free" software-- which carries a pretty twisted definition of "free," by the way-- and complaining endlessly about the "evil" actions of any and every corporation, big or small, good or bad, right or wrong.

    While the Slashcode moderation system is inherently a good thing, I think, it also serves as a pretty darn good object lesson in Plato's critique of pure democracy.

  20. Re:Why i have to log in as root. on Root as Primary Login: Why Not? · · Score: 3, Informative

    You don't see anyone trying to eradicate the usage of "boxen" (even though "boxes" is the proper plural of "box").

    There are two big differences between "boxen" and "virii."

    First of all, "boxen" is almost always tongue-in-cheek. It's an old joke, but it's just a joke.

    Secondly, "boxen" would be correct, if it weren't for the simple fact that it isn't. It's just one of those quirks of the language: one box plus one box is boxes, and one fox plus one fox is foxes, but one ox plus one ox is oxen. Like a friend of mine said, about fifteen years ago, in my high school English class. "Drive, drove, have driven. Dive, dove, have diven?" "Boxen" is funny because its use points out the arbitrary and inconsistent nature of English pluralization.

    As I said, though, "virii" isn't just technically wrong, it's completely wrong. Latin had either no plural at all for "virus," or only a very rarely used and easily confused plural, depending on whose interpretation you accept. "Virii" has zero basis in any kind of fact.

    If the correct Latin plural of "virus" had been "virii," and if the use were intended to be sarcastic or humorous, I wouldn't mind so much. But the fact is, people often use "virii" in utter seriousness, as if it were correct and acceptable.

    It isn't. It's wrong, wrong, wrong.

  21. Re:Here's one. on Root as Primary Login: Why Not? · · Score: 4, Informative

    chmod go-rwx ~ /*

    I just want to second this. I did the same thing once, but on an SGI O2 rather than a Mac. My variation: chown -R foo / when I meant to type chown -R foo .. The dot and the slash are just too damn close together for comfort.

    That was when I learned that you can't boot an SGI if files like /bin/sh and /sbin/init aren't owned by root.

    And yeah, it was easier and faster to just reinstall the OS than it was to try to fix the ownerships.

  22. Re:Why i have to log in as root. on Root as Primary Login: Why Not? · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    I'm on a crusade. I intend to post a comment like this one whenever I see anybody use "virii." Please don't interpret this comment as either endorsement of or disagreement with the parent post. Moderators: with your help, we can wipe out "virii" in our lifetime!

    The plural of "virus" isn't "virii." There is no such word. The plural of "virus" is "viruses."

    Here's a good explanation from cdknow.com, quoted here in its entirety because the people who most need to read this won't click on a link.

    The correct English plural of virus is viruses. Please consult any good dictionary before making up words.

    For the purists, in Latin, there is a rarely-used plural form:

    virus, viri (neuter)

    (Forms: almost always restricted to nominative and accusative singular; generally singular in Lucretius, ablative singular in Lucretius)

    The point of this is that even in Latin the form "viri" is rarely used. The singular form is used in most every instance. (This is from the Oxford Latin Dictionary.)

    So, when considering the Latin: "virii" is incorrect and "viri" was almost never used.

    Despite the fact there was little use for the plural form, there is another reason why "viri" was rarely used. The most common Latin word for "man" is "vir" with "viri" being its plural in the form used as the subject of a sentence. Thus, since "men" as the subject of a sentence would be used far more often than "venoms" (virus means venom) the "viri" word was most commonly seen as the plural of "man."

    Bottom line: Don't try to make up words using a false Latin plural form. Since the word virus in its English form is now used then the English plural (viruses) should be used.

    More plural-of-virus resources:

    perl.com, the canonical and exhaustive source
    The alt.comp.virus FAQ
    Jonathan de Boyne Pollard's Frequently Given Answer
    Merriam-Webster's "Word for the Wise," January 20, 2000.

  23. Re:Why i have to log in as root. on Root as Primary Login: Why Not? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Also, sudo is a great utility for doing things as root, does it come installed by default?

    Yup, sure does. As far as I know, it's been there since forever. At least since 10.0.3, which was the earliest version that I used regularly.

  24. Re:Heisen-Haiku on An Improvement Upon Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theorem · · Score: 2

    Heisenberg pondering
    Somebody comes up with an equation
    Werner looks like fool.


    EBADHAIKU

  25. Re:Apple this apple that on Apple Announces the Fate of Shake · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sorry for going off on you man, but you have no idea what it's like being a Mac-using slashdotter. No idea.

    Amen, brother. For instance, I can't understand why some people don't get the fact that OS X is a full-fledged, no-shit Unix operating system that makes the combination of Linux and KDE or Gnome look pretty damn pale in comparison. And then, inevitably, somebody trots out the PowerPC-versus-Pentium thing, as if it mattered which CPU were faster! Don't they get it?

    I don't care how fast my computer is. I care how productive and happy I am when I use my computer. And I get more done on my Macs-- from graphic design to video editing to (what I was doing this week) writing Java servlet code-- than I could on any other platform. If I had a n.m GHz Pentium on my desk, it would just spend more time waiting on me.

    You know what I think the problem is? I know I'm headed for flame (or flame-bait) country here, but I think it all revolves around territorial alpha-geeks not wanting to admit that they don't understand something.

    If I had spent the past five years learning all about Linux-- by reading the source code itself, I guess, 'cause there ain't that much in the way of documentation-- I'd feel pretty good about myself. Pretty cool.

    If I then started using OS X-- because it's a better desktop, or because somebody gave me a free Mac, or whatever-- I would have to put myself in a situation where I didn't know more than everybody else. I'd have to do things like reading again, and asking questions. It'd be a severe insult to my pride to have to admit, publicly and openly, that I am not the smartest guy in the world.

    Therefore, I would actively avoid OS X, even to the point of publicly ridiculing it. I would continue to advocate using the stuff that I understand to do things that OS X can clearly do better. Because it's just too damaging to my self-esteem to swallow my pride and learn something new.