So after my last bit of flamebait in this thread, I finally went and read TFA, and the nature of the problem immediately flew out and hit me in the face.
I'm sure Mr Poettering has extremely positive intentions, fundamentally; however the single thing he is guilty of here, is a violation of McIlroy's Law.
"Do one thing, and do it well."
The article mentions how Poetter has included multitudes of magical features which, on the face of it, sound absolutely wonderful. Everything including the kitchen sink has seemingly been added.
However, there's just one little problem.
Not all of us are audiophiles. Not all of us (in fact hardly any of us) need to be able to swap sound devices mid stream. Very few of us need client/server sound playback over a network, either.
All most of us really want, is something which will play our wav files, mp3s, and the soundtracks of our movies, in such a way that we can hear them well, without crackles, hisses, pops, or latency issues.
This apparently doesn't exist for Linux at the moment, so if the love and adulation of thousands of Linux users is what Mr. Poetter seeks, he doesn't need to give people all these extra features.
All he really needs to give us, is smooth sound playback on the single, local sound card we have in our machines. That's all.
Unbelievably, after that entire post full of insults and put-downs, you haven't even made a single technical point.
Sorry, I forgot those this time. I've gone through them plenty of times before, though.
In the case of GNOME:- Horrible bloat and complexity pretty much everywhere, a dep list as long as your arm, replication of the single worst design blunder made in Windows, (GConf, a clone of the Windows Registry) the fact that gdm is an opaque monstrosity that is impossible to configure, XML-RPC, making everything as non-configurable as possible, and for the things that are configurable, insisting that only GConf should be used, rather than dotfiles.
Then there's the simple fact that the whole thing is butt ugly, as well.
Interesting. I didn't know about the suicides; wow. That's really bad.
On a slightly different topic, while you're here...I know I've trolled you mightily in the past, but for what it (probably isn't;)) worth, I suspect you and I probably have fairly similar attitudes on the Mono issue.
To me, anyone who doesn't think Mono/Codeplex is an attempt at embrace and extend is wearing blinders.
I'm not overly worried, however. As insane as this might sound, I actually think this is a good thing. Why, I hear you ask? Simple. When Microsoft get caught for this, everyone will finally have a completely legitimate basis for never, ever trusting them again. People talk about how everyone deserves a second chance. After Halloween, I suspect this was Microsoft's second chance.
They blow this, and they have lost trust for good.
I've looked at GNOME, I've looked at ALSA, (indeed, Ubuntu in particular in general terms) I've looked at the bloated instability of Compiz, I've looked at FreeBSD by comparison, (which I use on a daily basis) and at some of OpenBSD's source...and I've come to an important realisation.
When it comes to both design philosophy and code quality, Linux developers suck; and I'm talking black hole level, here. The BSDs leave Linux so far behind that it isn't funny.
What is even worse than the poor code quality, is the level of denial. The GNOME developers in particular have been told on numerous occasions what an abomination their baby is, yet they continue to insist on defending it, rather than actually listening to the feedback they are given, and trying to improve.
The single main problem is what I called the Starbucks generation; self-righteous, latte-sipping yuppie CS graduates, who as said in another post, worship C++ and various hell-spawned forms of RPC, and use such to code bloated monoliths of a magnitude that would give Microsoft nightmares.
They think they know better than the 30 years of UNIX experience that has come before them, including the very authors of the initial operating system itself.
Although I haven't used Pulse, I have used ALSA, and I've used enough other Linux software to know that the Pulse author most likely shouldn't be defending himself; but should be humbly acknowledging that his software is terrible, and appealing to the community for help and insight into how he can do better.
He can start by reading this, and gaining a real appreciation of the system he is writing for.
There are a lot of programmers in the Linux community who badly need some humility. They need to study the designers and authors of early UNIX; they need to learn how those people thought, and they need to emulate said designers' thinking and behaviour.
Above all, more than anything else, there needs to be a return to implementation, rather than interface, simplicity. As priorities, faddishness, popularity, and most of all, the end user, need to die.
Programmers are actually becoming very normal and conventional.
I like using awk and shell for doing a lot of different things, and I also use ed at times as well. (Although I'd never use it full time, and it sucks for starting new files in particular)
I also prefer using flat text to XML, and enormously value late 70s to late 80s vintage, UNIX thinking in general.
I get derided by other programmers who insist on using languages and methods which to me, are horrible. C++ is a great example; I can find any number of rants written (some of them by fairly high profile people) on how thoroughly evil and what a mess generally it is, and yet anyone I talk to on forums insist that it is what all the cool kids use, and there must be something wrong with me if I don't like it.
XML, same. I've never seen a single application for XML, where it actually justifiably needed to be used. Do you people honestly find parsing it easier than you would plain text? Or let me guess, you've fallen for the suit-spawned "richness," argument. WTF does richness mean, anywayz? It sounds like a subjective attempt to justify complexity, to me.
Another thing I don't get; why do flat text databases get crapped on so much? Sure, I know SQL can be nice, especially when you need things like hard concurrency locking, arithmetic functions and such, but I find delimited flatfiles to be an absolute joy to work with, with awk. Writing awk parsers for my own flatfile formats is actually fun. Maybe I'm just diseased in the head.;)
(Anonymous Cowards, I have left you the perfect opening with that last sentence. I expect you to make abundant use of it.;))
There needs to be a renaissance of real programming, according to the older UNIX philosophy. We need a scenario again where people appreciate using awk, and systems programming, and actually writing your own code. The reason why I often disagree with the concept of code re-use, is because with the kids these days, generally speaking it was written badly to begin with. So someone writes crap initially, and then we're all expected to re-use it, rather than rewriting it like we should.
That was the definition of true weirdness, though, and we're losing it. The genuine UNIX way is dying.:(
Premise 1) Most hackish types are either probably or definitely autistic.
Premise 2) Most autistic individuals genuinely *are* basement dwelling freaks, on a level that would make the Joker or the Addams Family look normal. Before you call me a bigot for saying that, realise that I'm an autistic person myself. My Quasimodo/Frankenstein/Joseph Merrick complex is both strong, and fully justified. Most of us genuinely are the sort of person who was interviewed in the documentary, "Trekkies."
I don't have a girlfriend, I've only had one sexual partner, and I lost my virginity very late. (at 26) Part of my current celibacy is by choice; female psychology simply doesn't have what it takes to be able to tolerate an autistic male. Women just aren't strong enough to be able to handle us. I realised that, and so I made a decision to never put another woman through what I put my ex through again.
In that film "Adam," the guy who tried to tell the woman not to get into a relationship with Adam was right.
My father was a misogynist, but I honestly am not. I loved my ex, despite what I put her through; and I left her because I loved her. I wanted her to find someone who she could be truly happy with.
If you're an autistic person, you have a moral responsibility to stay away from neurotypicals, particularly from women. They need to be protected from us.
slashdot is owned and opreated by SourceForge Inc., a business. if you really think the net would be better off without any businesses, stop posting here or any other websites that aren't run by non-profits or government departments.
There were forums and bulletin boards of all kinds before business arrived online. What do you think Usenet was? That was run as much by universities as anyone else. Most pre-net bulletin boards were run by individuals, not business.
I'm sick of this, as well. Seeing brainless, mind controlled American white males perpetuating the myth that the corporate world is a good thing, despite the amount of harm it continues to do them and everyone else.
India is in the process of recovering from what Britain did to it; the fact that the country is apparently becoming the IT capital of the planet would be helping, I imagine.
I'd already been planning on learning Hindi at some point, for other reasons, but to the proverbial American white male, at least in IT, I'd also recommend brushing up. India is on the ascendant, in spades.;)
Come to think of it, that's probably why the bashings have been happening in Melbourne. Resentment over offshorings.
When anonymity is outlawed... Anonymous will be outlaws.
Not all of us see that as being a bad thing. There is a very, very ugly side to the Internet, and it is almost entirely made possible by anonymity. Having a band of invisible vigilantes around (especially given the degree of sociopathic immaturity that is generally associated with the group we're talking about here) means that they can attack whoever they want, and if they can attack whoever they want, that also potentially means you or me, as much as it means governments.
The argument that Anonymous should be allowed to continue to exist because they might potentially be able to fight governments or corporations for us, is a dangerous one. All we're really doing, potentially, is trading one tyrant for another.
The very fact that I feel at least mildly afraid while posting this, proves that to me. I've been told about what they can do to people. They *are* terrorists, in the truest sense of the word. Just because they might be on our side in one particular case, doesn't for any reason necessarily mean that they're going to be next time.
As far as I'm concerned, business shouldn't rightfully have anything to do with the Internet at all.
I remember the net before business came here. I also remember that when business came, government came after it. Then came spam.
The corporate world destroys everything it touches, one way or another. The profit motive leads ultimately to nothing but corruption and death.
It cannot be allowed to dictate the Internet. It's bad enough that the fucking suits exist; there must be some places where their rule is not recognised.
I notice that the FSF cowards are abusing the moderation system again, using their favourite, "Overrated," which is of course shorthand for, "expressing an opinion contrary to our mind control." That particular tag needs to be removed from the list, methinks.
Do your very worst, FSF. Be tireless in attempting to suppress the opinions of those who believe counter to the monster that leads you. You will ultimately accomplish nothing other than your own continued humiliation.
Richard Stallman's is not the first brand of tyranny that has needed to be overthrown; it will not be the last.
petrus4, while I deeply appreciate your unyielding commitment to integrity in moderation
I just don't want to be a hypocrite, is all. I wouldn't know how many times I've had comments modded down by Debian/FSF people, simply because they disagreed with what I was saying.
It annoyed me, and I considered it cowardly; so I'm not going to moderate based on whether or not I agree with the poster.
Thanks goodness for the GPL, or we might never have convinced Apple to release its code so that FreeBSD could use it!
Wait... what is that? Oh, nevermind then...
I have mod points, and I could have just modded this up; however, I am committed to moderation with integrity, however much I might agree with the statement being expressed.
I will, however, simply say this.
BSD was here before you, Richard Stallman. It will be here after you.
Seems that/. slowly becomes one of that paid Windows fans site.
No, this isn't a new thing. It was around 2004 that Slashdot became inundated with rednecks who thought they were intellectuals because they'd managed to land a job as admin of their local Wal-Mart's XP boxes. It was about that time that CmdrTaco also saw fit to start including political news here as well, in order to make sure the new Republican demographic felt at home.
The reason why the site is degenerating even further these days, is because now we've got the ex-WoW demographic, as well; and a more rabidly anti-intellectual group than them, you will never find. They consciously, deliberately celebrated their apathy and titanic stupidity.
So, if 'society' decides that we should no longer speak freely, that right disappears?
Read Judge Dredd. Society does not cease to exist outright when the right to freedom of speech is lost. That does not, mind you, mean that I am advocating fascism.
What I am saying is that by my own definition, while certainly highly desirable, freedom of speech is an indirect rather than direct right, in the sense that removal of said right, in and of itself, does not automatically guarantee the loss of human life, but it could be said subsequent loss of human life will generally (but not always) occur when freedom of speech is removed.
According to what Jefferson laid out in the Declaration of Independence, rights are inborn into the nature of each person. They are endowed to everyone by their Creator. The distinction here is critical. Rights are inherent in the nature of the human being and an integral part of human dignity -- they are not given by a government.
Rights are not inborn. The definition of a right is, ideally, something without which, human society cannot exist at all. Under that definition, life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness certainly apply.
Education doesn't. Healthcare arguably does. If we get to the point of removing scarcity, food ideally does.
Jefferson, however, was an elitist, a racist, and a homophobe, who primarily got his material from the ancient Romans and Greeks. He upheld some ideas which are worth keeping, and said ideas might be worth reverence. The man himself, however, fairly certainly isn't.
Screw those stupid slashes; you don't need to write those out anyway. What I want to know is who the hell came up with prefixing web addresses with www.
That is a convention for when people have more than one protocol installed on the same machine, but bound to different ports.
So you used to have, as one example:- ftp.funet.fi, www.funet.fi, irc.funet.fi, news.funet.fi, etc.
Doesn't happen so much now, of course, because people tend to use seperate machines for different things these days; but it still worked well.
Although of course "http:" would be considered the protocol indicator, IMHO "http://" is more effective visually as a seperator/prefix. That particular slash is also the one used in directory names on UNIX systems as well, so it is consistent with any other slashes which you're likely to put, later in a URL.
It's only really annoying because of its' location on most people's keyboards, I suspect; although some Windows users hate typing URLs of any length, I'm aware.
"Make it easier, and keep the emphasis purely on rewards."
Don't make it so we have to use our brains. Don't make it so that we have to do anything remotely challenging. Just make everything utterly superficial, and over in 5 seconds flat. We don't want to have to spend more than a minute on any single thing we do; our TV reared attention spans can't take it. We also don't want anything that requires more than a 50+ IQ, because we don't have one. For anyone who might want something minutely more interesting than Minesweeper, that's just too damn bad, because we want our cookie and bear and potty, and we want them RIGHT NOW, damn it; and if we don't get them, we're going to hold our breath until we turn blue.
Seriously, when did the human race degenerate into such perpetual, mindless infants? How old are you people? I get the feeling that what you'd probably consider the single greatest reward for getting through a game, (or anything else, for that matter) would be to find someone next to your chair with a clean nappy and a warm bottle fresh out of the microwave when you'd finished. Either that or a pacifier.
It honestly looks as though the corporate goal has been entirely achieved, looking at this thread. The only thing I'm seeing here is post after post written by servile, utterly dependent consumers.
I'm ashamed to be human, sometimes. I don't want to be associated with this type of mentality, at all.
The mentioned cross-server LFG tool looks interesting, but I'm just wondering if it will make people act even worse in instances than before because there would be no worry about bad reputation with people not on the same realm.
Agreed. Add to that, that instability for the instance servers is often bad enough as it is.
It's one of the bad ideas that Chilton/Ghostcrawler have been able to implement, now that WoW is essentially their own feifdom which is more or less entirely seperate from Blizzard's upper management.
I'm also getting tired of the fact the white male is the only legally discriminated against portion of the population now. The universal scape goat - it sucks, and I've been denied jobs based on my race and sex because other quotas were not met yet.
Sadly, there's two problems with this.
a) A large percentage of our demographic genuinely *are* racist, materialistic, generally evil individuals with superiority complexes, a la Dick Cheney. It really sucks for those of us who aren't, but unfortunately, the stereotype genuinely isn't entirely baseless. If we're really lucky, we might even get one of them responding to this post.;)
b) Because of the above, whenever anyone discriminates against us, it's not seen as discrimination, but actually a form of social justice, to the same extent that it's considered social justice to *not* be discriminatory towards other demographics. Hence, discrimination against us has complete social sanction. If we try and protest it, we're accused of being able to dish it out, but not being able to take it; or are simply told that payback's a bitch.
The third one is bad, yes. I don't understand the female reference in the first one, if there even is one.
The second one is stereotyping, but I've got to ask; if that only mentioned your printer, and your father's printer, and your grandfather's printer...would that then draw fire as well, for only talking about guys' printers?;)
Slashdot Mirror
So after my last bit of flamebait in this thread, I finally went and read TFA, and the nature of the problem immediately flew out and hit me in the face.
I'm sure Mr Poettering has extremely positive intentions, fundamentally; however the single thing he is guilty of here, is a violation of McIlroy's Law.
"Do one thing, and do it well."
The article mentions how Poetter has included multitudes of magical features which, on the face of it, sound absolutely wonderful. Everything including the kitchen sink has seemingly been added.
However, there's just one little problem.
Not all of us are audiophiles. Not all of us (in fact hardly any of us) need to be able to swap sound devices mid stream. Very few of us need client/server sound playback over a network, either.
All most of us really want, is something which will play our wav files, mp3s, and the soundtracks of our movies, in such a way that we can hear them well, without crackles, hisses, pops, or latency issues.
This apparently doesn't exist for Linux at the moment, so if the love and adulation of thousands of Linux users is what Mr. Poetter seeks, he doesn't need to give people all these extra features.
All he really needs to give us, is smooth sound playback on the single, local sound card we have in our machines. That's all.
Unbelievably, after that entire post full of insults and put-downs, you haven't even made a single technical point.
Sorry, I forgot those this time. I've gone through them plenty of times before, though.
In the case of GNOME:- Horrible bloat and complexity pretty much everywhere, a dep list as long as your arm, replication of the single worst design blunder made in Windows, (GConf, a clone of the Windows Registry) the fact that gdm is an opaque monstrosity that is impossible to configure, XML-RPC, making everything as non-configurable as possible, and for the things that are configurable, insisting that only GConf should be used, rather than dotfiles.
Then there's the simple fact that the whole thing is butt ugly, as well.
Interesting. I didn't know about the suicides; wow. That's really bad.
On a slightly different topic, while you're here...I know I've trolled you mightily in the past, but for what it (probably isn't ;)) worth, I suspect you and I probably have fairly similar attitudes on the Mono issue.
To me, anyone who doesn't think Mono/Codeplex is an attempt at embrace and extend is wearing blinders.
I'm not overly worried, however. As insane as this might sound, I actually think this is a good thing. Why, I hear you ask? Simple. When Microsoft get caught for this, everyone will finally have a completely legitimate basis for never, ever trusting them again. People talk about how everyone deserves a second chance. After Halloween, I suspect this was Microsoft's second chance.
They blow this, and they have lost trust for good.
I've looked at GNOME, I've looked at ALSA, (indeed, Ubuntu in particular in general terms) I've looked at the bloated instability of Compiz, I've looked at FreeBSD by comparison, (which I use on a daily basis) and at some of OpenBSD's source...and I've come to an important realisation.
When it comes to both design philosophy and code quality, Linux developers suck; and I'm talking black hole level, here. The BSDs leave Linux so far behind that it isn't funny.
What is even worse than the poor code quality, is the level of denial. The GNOME developers in particular have been told on numerous occasions what an abomination their baby is, yet they continue to insist on defending it, rather than actually listening to the feedback they are given, and trying to improve.
The single main problem is what I called the Starbucks generation; self-righteous, latte-sipping yuppie CS graduates, who as said in another post, worship C++ and various hell-spawned forms of RPC, and use such to code bloated monoliths of a magnitude that would give Microsoft nightmares.
They think they know better than the 30 years of UNIX experience that has come before them, including the very authors of the initial operating system itself.
Although I haven't used Pulse, I have used ALSA, and I've used enough other Linux software to know that the Pulse author most likely shouldn't be defending himself; but should be humbly acknowledging that his software is terrible, and appealing to the community for help and insight into how he can do better.
He can start by reading this, and gaining a real appreciation of the system he is writing for.
There are a lot of programmers in the Linux community who badly need some humility. They need to study the designers and authors of early UNIX; they need to learn how those people thought, and they need to emulate said designers' thinking and behaviour.
Above all, more than anything else, there needs to be a return to implementation, rather than interface, simplicity. As priorities, faddishness, popularity, and most of all, the end user, need to die.
Yes, that is correct.
Programmers are actually becoming very normal and conventional.
I like using awk and shell for doing a lot of different things, and I also use ed at times as well. (Although I'd never use it full time, and it sucks for starting new files in particular)
I also prefer using flat text to XML, and enormously value late 70s to late 80s vintage, UNIX thinking in general.
I get derided by other programmers who insist on using languages and methods which to me, are horrible. C++ is a great example; I can find any number of rants written (some of them by fairly high profile people) on how thoroughly evil and what a mess generally it is, and yet anyone I talk to on forums insist that it is what all the cool kids use, and there must be something wrong with me if I don't like it.
XML, same. I've never seen a single application for XML, where it actually justifiably needed to be used. Do you people honestly find parsing it easier than you would plain text? Or let me guess, you've fallen for the suit-spawned "richness," argument. WTF does richness mean, anywayz? It sounds like a subjective attempt to justify complexity, to me.
Another thing I don't get; why do flat text databases get crapped on so much? Sure, I know SQL can be nice, especially when you need things like hard concurrency locking, arithmetic functions and such, but I find delimited flatfiles to be an absolute joy to work with, with awk. Writing awk parsers for my own flatfile formats is actually fun. Maybe I'm just diseased in the head. ;)
(Anonymous Cowards, I have left you the perfect opening with that last sentence. I expect you to make abundant use of it. ;))
There needs to be a renaissance of real programming, according to the older UNIX philosophy. We need a scenario again where people appreciate using awk, and systems programming, and actually writing your own code. The reason why I often disagree with the concept of code re-use, is because with the kids these days, generally speaking it was written badly to begin with. So someone writes crap initially, and then we're all expected to re-use it, rather than rewriting it like we should.
That was the definition of true weirdness, though, and we're losing it. The genuine UNIX way is dying. :(
Not necessarily.
There are things I can do; I'm just aware that a relationship the opposite sex isn't one of them. ;)
Premise 1) Most hackish types are either probably or definitely autistic.
Premise 2) Most autistic individuals genuinely *are* basement dwelling freaks, on a level that would make the Joker or the Addams Family look normal. Before you call me a bigot for saying that, realise that I'm an autistic person myself. My Quasimodo/Frankenstein/Joseph Merrick complex is both strong, and fully justified. Most of us genuinely are the sort of person who was interviewed in the documentary, "Trekkies."
I don't have a girlfriend, I've only had one sexual partner, and I lost my virginity very late. (at 26) Part of my current celibacy is by choice; female psychology simply doesn't have what it takes to be able to tolerate an autistic male. Women just aren't strong enough to be able to handle us. I realised that, and so I made a decision to never put another woman through what I put my ex through again.
In that film "Adam," the guy who tried to tell the woman not to get into a relationship with Adam was right.
My father was a misogynist, but I honestly am not. I loved my ex, despite what I put her through; and I left her because I loved her. I wanted her to find someone who she could be truly happy with.
If you're an autistic person, you have a moral responsibility to stay away from neurotypicals, particularly from women. They need to be protected from us.
slashdot is owned and opreated by SourceForge Inc., a business. if you really think the net would be better off without any businesses, stop posting here or any other websites that aren't run by non-profits or government departments.
There were forums and bulletin boards of all kinds before business arrived online. What do you think Usenet was? That was run as much by universities as anyone else. Most pre-net bulletin boards were run by individuals, not business.
I'm sick of this, as well. Seeing brainless, mind controlled American white males perpetuating the myth that the corporate world is a good thing, despite the amount of harm it continues to do them and everyone else.
But then you'd have to live in _India_
India is in the process of recovering from what Britain did to it; the fact that the country is apparently becoming the IT capital of the planet would be helping, I imagine.
I'd already been planning on learning Hindi at some point, for other reasons, but to the proverbial American white male, at least in IT, I'd also recommend brushing up. India is on the ascendant, in spades. ;)
Come to think of it, that's probably why the bashings have been happening in Melbourne. Resentment over offshorings.
When anonymity is outlawed... Anonymous will be outlaws.
Not all of us see that as being a bad thing. There is a very, very ugly side to the Internet, and it is almost entirely made possible by anonymity. Having a band of invisible vigilantes around (especially given the degree of sociopathic immaturity that is generally associated with the group we're talking about here) means that they can attack whoever they want, and if they can attack whoever they want, that also potentially means you or me, as much as it means governments.
The argument that Anonymous should be allowed to continue to exist because they might potentially be able to fight governments or corporations for us, is a dangerous one. All we're really doing, potentially, is trading one tyrant for another.
The very fact that I feel at least mildly afraid while posting this, proves that to me. I've been told about what they can do to people. They *are* terrorists, in the truest sense of the word. Just because they might be on our side in one particular case, doesn't for any reason necessarily mean that they're going to be next time.
As far as I'm concerned, business shouldn't rightfully have anything to do with the Internet at all.
I remember the net before business came here. I also remember that when business came, government came after it. Then came spam.
The corporate world destroys everything it touches, one way or another. The profit motive leads ultimately to nothing but corruption and death.
It cannot be allowed to dictate the Internet. It's bad enough that the fucking suits exist; there must be some places where their rule is not recognised.
I notice that the FSF cowards are abusing the moderation system again, using their favourite, "Overrated," which is of course shorthand for, "expressing an opinion contrary to our mind control." That particular tag needs to be removed from the list, methinks.
Do your very worst, FSF. Be tireless in attempting to suppress the opinions of those who believe counter to the monster that leads you. You will ultimately accomplish nothing other than your own continued humiliation.
Richard Stallman's is not the first brand of tyranny that has needed to be overthrown; it will not be the last.
petrus4, while I deeply appreciate your unyielding commitment to integrity in moderation
I just don't want to be a hypocrite, is all. I wouldn't know how many times I've had comments modded down by Debian/FSF people, simply because they disagreed with what I was saying.
It annoyed me, and I considered it cowardly; so I'm not going to moderate based on whether or not I agree with the poster.
Thanks goodness for the GPL, or we might never have convinced Apple to release its code so that FreeBSD could use it!
Wait... what is that? Oh, nevermind then...
I have mod points, and I could have just modded this up; however, I am committed to moderation with integrity, however much I might agree with the statement being expressed.
I will, however, simply say this.
BSD was here before you, Richard Stallman. It will be here after you.
... the first Black Hole for emotions. I know. I dated her back in high school.
No. According to legend, the first of those was discovered around 6,000 years ago, depending on who you ask. ;)
("MOAR SEXISM IN FOSS! SEXISM IN FOSS! OH NOES!!!")
Seems that /. slowly becomes one of that paid Windows fans site.
No, this isn't a new thing. It was around 2004 that Slashdot became inundated with rednecks who thought they were intellectuals because they'd managed to land a job as admin of their local Wal-Mart's XP boxes. It was about that time that CmdrTaco also saw fit to start including political news here as well, in order to make sure the new Republican demographic felt at home.
The reason why the site is degenerating even further these days, is because now we've got the ex-WoW demographic, as well; and a more rabidly anti-intellectual group than them, you will never find. They consciously, deliberately celebrated their apathy and titanic stupidity.
So, if 'society' decides that we should no longer speak freely, that right disappears?
Read Judge Dredd. Society does not cease to exist outright when the right to freedom of speech is lost. That does not, mind you, mean that I am advocating fascism.
What I am saying is that by my own definition, while certainly highly desirable, freedom of speech is an indirect rather than direct right, in the sense that removal of said right, in and of itself, does not automatically guarantee the loss of human life, but it could be said subsequent loss of human life will generally (but not always) occur when freedom of speech is removed.
According to what Jefferson laid out in the Declaration of Independence, rights are inborn into the nature of each person. They are endowed to everyone by their Creator. The distinction here is critical. Rights are inherent in the nature of the human being and an integral part of human dignity -- they are not given by a government.
Rights are not inborn. The definition of a right is, ideally, something without which, human society cannot exist at all. Under that definition, life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness certainly apply.
Education doesn't. Healthcare arguably does. If we get to the point of removing scarcity, food ideally does.
Jefferson, however, was an elitist, a racist, and a homophobe, who primarily got his material from the ancient Romans and Greeks. He upheld some ideas which are worth keeping, and said ideas might be worth reverence. The man himself, however, fairly certainly isn't.
Screw those stupid slashes; you don't need to write those out anyway. What I want to know is who the hell came up with prefixing web addresses with www.
That is a convention for when people have more than one protocol installed on the same machine, but bound to different ports.
So you used to have, as one example:- ftp.funet.fi, www.funet.fi, irc.funet.fi, news.funet.fi, etc.
Doesn't happen so much now, of course, because people tend to use seperate machines for different things these days; but it still worked well.
Although of course "http:" would be considered the protocol indicator, IMHO "http://" is more effective visually as a seperator/prefix. That particular slash is also the one used in directory names on UNIX systems as well, so it is consistent with any other slashes which you're likely to put, later in a URL.
It's only really annoying because of its' location on most people's keyboards, I suspect; although some Windows users hate typing URLs of any length, I'm aware.
"Make it easier, and keep the emphasis purely on rewards."
Don't make it so we have to use our brains. Don't make it so that we have to do anything remotely challenging. Just make everything utterly superficial, and over in 5 seconds flat. We don't want to have to spend more than a minute on any single thing we do; our TV reared attention spans can't take it. We also don't want anything that requires more than a 50+ IQ, because we don't have one. For anyone who might want something minutely more interesting than Minesweeper, that's just too damn bad, because we want our cookie and bear and potty, and we want them RIGHT NOW, damn it; and if we don't get them, we're going to hold our breath until we turn blue.
Seriously, when did the human race degenerate into such perpetual, mindless infants? How old are you people? I get the feeling that what you'd probably consider the single greatest reward for getting through a game, (or anything else, for that matter) would be to find someone next to your chair with a clean nappy and a warm bottle fresh out of the microwave when you'd finished. Either that or a pacifier.
It honestly looks as though the corporate goal has been entirely achieved, looking at this thread. The only thing I'm seeing here is post after post written by servile, utterly dependent consumers.
I'm ashamed to be human, sometimes. I don't want to be associated with this type of mentality, at all.
The mentioned cross-server LFG tool looks interesting, but I'm just wondering if it will make people act even worse in instances than before because there would be no worry about bad reputation with people not on the same realm.
Agreed. Add to that, that instability for the instance servers is often bad enough as it is.
It's one of the bad ideas that Chilton/Ghostcrawler have been able to implement, now that WoW is essentially their own feifdom which is more or less entirely seperate from Blizzard's upper management.
I'm also getting tired of the fact the white male is the only legally discriminated against portion of the population now. The universal scape goat - it sucks, and I've been denied jobs based on my race and sex because other quotas were not met yet.
Sadly, there's two problems with this.
a) A large percentage of our demographic genuinely *are* racist, materialistic, generally evil individuals with superiority complexes, a la Dick Cheney. It really sucks for those of us who aren't, but unfortunately, the stereotype genuinely isn't entirely baseless. If we're really lucky, we might even get one of them responding to this post. ;)
b) Because of the above, whenever anyone discriminates against us, it's not seen as discrimination, but actually a form of social justice, to the same extent that it's considered social justice to *not* be discriminatory towards other demographics. Hence, discrimination against us has complete social sanction. If we try and protest it, we're accused of being able to dish it out, but not being able to take it; or are simply told that payback's a bitch.
The third one is bad, yes. I don't understand the female reference in the first one, if there even is one.
The second one is stereotyping, but I've got to ask; if that only mentioned your printer, and your father's printer, and your grandfather's printer...would that then draw fire as well, for only talking about guys' printers? ;)