Oh, wonderful. It was bad enough when we all thought humanity was inevitably going to be taken over by evil, malicious robots. But now we have an even worse possibility--the world could be taken over and dominated by [b]Christian fundamentalist robots[/b]!
The reviewer is making an assumption; he really has absolutely no idea why Libranet didn't work on that particular computer. It's likely that it had absolutely nothing to do with the processor speed and amount of RAM.
And (to add a point, not to disagree with you) the important thing about reading critics isn't accepting the critic's judgment about the movie, but using the critic's description of the movie to figure out whether it's the type of movie _you_ would like--regardless of whether or not the critic enjoyed it.
I've often read critics and thought "Yeah, it wasn't what _you_ were looking for, but I can enjoy that for what it is instead of wishing they did it your way," or "You might have appreciated the artistic value of that, but it would probably bore me to tears."
Sure, but sometimes movies are inexplicably, perplexingly overrated, which is really my only beef with the Matrix. I enjoyed The Matrix for the action movie with good special effects that it was. It really wasn't much more than that. The premise was cool, but only really seemed to exist as a shallow excuse for the special effects.
Thirteenth Floor took the same premise and gave me characters I actually cared about and a deeper plot, which made it a more enjoyable movie for me. Thus, I find it a little strange that so many supposedly deep-thinking intellectual geeks drool over the Matrix but completely overlook the Thirteenth Floor.
Am I the only one who enjoyed the The Thirteenth Floor more than The Matrix? They used the same humans-living-in-a-computer concept, but while Matrix turned into a pure action movie, Thirteenth Floor continued to have a plot.
Right. This wouldn't stop spam; it would only--in the eyes of the government--legitimize it.
Such an idea obviously isn't really about getting rid of spam. If you could implement the things that would be required for a tax--like some way of knowing the sender of every E-mail that is sent--then the actual taxation wouldn't even be necessary.
And that non-expert users will abandon emacs and vi in favour of GUI editing environmnts with intelligent paperclips that assist with more complex editing tasks.
Hey, there's no need to abandon vi to get the paperclip. Just use vigor and get the best of both worlds!
Bah. I got all intrigued, downloaded the source, looked at the readme.txt, and saw:
How to compile
--------------
To compile sources you need Visual C++ 6.0.
For compiling some files you also need
new Platform SDK from Microsoft' Site.
Well, it's nice that it's LGPL'd, but it would be nicer if it wasn't Windows-only anyway. At least porting to other platforms is in the todo list....
vim is all about those wierd keystrokes you learn that funnily enough grow on you and multiply your productivity.
Well yeah, that's the point. With the kvim kpart (when it's more developed and working with more than just konqueror), people will be able to use their weird little keystrokes in just about any KDE program that uses an editor.
In particular, I bet there are many programmers out there who don't want to edit in anything other than vim but would like to use kdevelop.
This is exactly why I never gave OS/2 a chance. The commercials just showed a bunch of computer geeks going "Wow that's so cool!" and didn't show the actual OS or even say WHY it was so cool. Stupid commercials that insult my intelligence will bias me against a product pretty quick.
Well, I certainly agree to that. I was responding mainly to the idea that a violent revolution would be as appropiate a means of change in the U.S. now as it was a couple hundred years ago--your post just happened to be the second or third time I read it, and when I finally decided to refute it.
There are certainly changes that need to be made, but they need to be made by informing and persuading the majority, rather than trying to just violently replace the government we/they are choosing.
I do feel unique, based on my personality rather than any delusions about my intelligence, but I don't feel important (at least not to the general population outside of the people who care about me).
but historically and factually it was democrats who relied on ignorant masses to vote people like Gore into office
Both parties rely on the ignorant masses to vote them into office, just different segments of the ignorant masses. It sounds like you're assuming I'm a Democrat; I'm not.
Are you actually suggesting that intelligence can measured by such naive test as who does one vote in the presidential election ?
No. I see what you're misunderstanding, so let me clarify: I said that the ignorant masses love guys like George W. Bush, and I could have just as easily said Bill Clinton, or JFK--the point is not that the voters of a certain party are ignorant, it is that a large mass of people are ignorant of real, important issues, and base their votes on charisma. I did not say, or mean to imply, that _everyone_ who likes George W. (and others like him, from both major parties) likes him out of ignorance, just that there are a large portion of people who do.
Do you really think there would be no leaders? Anarchy could be created temporarily, but there are always people who naturally want to lead, and even more people who naturally look to someone else for leadership. The only way anarchists could stop some sort of dictatorial or feudal system from naturally developing would be if either:
1) The entire human species becomes enlightened (yeah... right), or
2) the anarchists have a huge army to strike down any leader whom people start following... which would make the anarchists tyrants rather than anarchists.
The right of the people to overthrow their government when it fails to meet their needs is written in the Declaration of Independence
and..
Its important not to forget the freedoms that make this country worth fighting for.
One of those important freedoms is the right to vote for who will represent us in the government. One of the most important causes of the American Revolution is that the American colonies had no representation in Parliament. We can't make that claim about the current American government.
As bad as our government might be, it is still composed of people who are chosen by a majority of Americans. Sure, we might be given some shitty options to choose from, and those of us who are intellectual might be outnumbered by the ignorant masses who fall in love with guys like George W. Bush, but the fact remains: The members of our government are there because a majority of the country chose them to be.
But who voted for all these militia groups and anarchist groups who want to violently overthrow the government? How many people want them to succeed? Which one should succeed, if any? How free would the country be if they succeeded? Would the leaders of these groups let the country vote on a new leader every few years? And what happens after the revolution, anyway? It's not like all the wannabe-revolutionary groups agree with each other, so there would just be more revolutions--and they'd all be justified, by your argument--as each group takes it's turn trying to establish its own ideology.
How free are people under that situation?
Anyway, I'm not even going to touch on the craziness of expecting a government to say "Yeah, people have the right to overthrow us. Go ahead.";)
Re:Boy this is really surprising!
on
Adcritic Shuts Down
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Thanks, that's one of the funnier examples of "I'm saying something completely stupid because I didn't click the link and read what was going on for myself" I've seen in a while.
Why doesn't anyone ship a cd that boots linux,X11 4.01, and then runs their 3D game?
I stopped buying Windows games very soon after I started using Linux, because I really don't like rebooting my system into a different OS just to play a game--it's at least not something I want to pay money for. I also like to easily switch back and forth between a game I'm playing and my E-mail, someone I'm chatting with, etc., and I like to be doing those things with the software I like, the software I usually use--Linux software.
I imagine that Windows users probably feel the same way, and wouldn't appreciate booting into an unfamiliar OS, and separating themselves from the software they're used to, just to play a game. The people who would benefit from your idea are probably outnumbered by the Windows users who wouldn't buy such a game, thus making the idea a little uneconomical for the developers.
I've been following the development of this, and it's nice to see a game being developed simultaneously for Linux and Windows, rather than being released on Linux a year or more after the Windows counterpart.
I would certainly hope that a game starring Tux, the Official Linux Penguin, and originally developed on Linux, would not be available for Windows before it's available for Linux.
I also like the fact that the binaries for all platforms will be on one CD. I'm tired of buying two copies of games if I want to run them on both Linux and Windoze.
Yes, it's certainly nice when the game is developed, and originally released, as cross-platform. (Like Terminus.) Unfortunately, that's not really an option when a separate company like Loki does the porting after the game has been released, and it's kind of unfair to blame Loki for that. If gaming under Linux is important to you, then send a message by not buying Windows-only games; that way, you'll certainly not pay for the same game twice.
If you don't allow all speech, then someone has to decide which speech is allowed and which speech isn't.
Do you trust that decision to our governments?
Inevitably, what almost always happens in non-free-speech societies is that the people in power use it to suppress dissenters. You can say they're just suppressing hate speech here, but who gets to define hate speech?
Is a webpage advocating killing all the Jews/gays/whatever hate speech? Sure it is.
But what about a webpage sharply criticizing the government or a dominant religion, though? Or how about biting satire making fun of the aforementioned institutions? A no-hate-speech law would be easy to extend to something like that; after all, it could incite hatred toward the government/religion, right?
People should be punished for/prevented from _actions_, specifically actions that harm others. Controlling what people can say doesn't protect anyone from anything, except for powerful people from criticism.
well then, why not just use windows? It's like saying I want a pepsi that looks and tastes like Coke;)
While I don't disagree with your overall point (that Linux programs shouldn't aim to look just like Windows programs), I don't agree with that particular analogy. It assumes that the look and feel is the only thing important about the system--what about stability, security, price, software license issues (e.g. GPL vs. proprietary), etc.? Wanting to use Linux with a Windows look and feel is not the same as wanting to use Windows, because look and feel is not the only trait people are basing their decisions on.
If you want to use a Pepsi and Coke analogy, it would be more analogous to say that people want Pepsi, with the taste of Pepsi, but packaged in a can that is the same size and shape of a Coke can, and opens the same way as a Coke can. That way, they can get the slightly-sweeter taste of Pepsi without having to deal with learning how to use a different can (not that that would be difficult, but hey, it's just an analogy:) ).
That said though, I personally have little desire to use programs that look exactly like Windows. And I don't have trouble figuring out how to use new types of drink containers, either.;)
if Joe Public loads the new ultra-stable XP on his Compaq-saved-$2.50-on-cheap-parts motherboard, he's not going to care that it's the nonconformant APM hardware crashing, he's going to blame Microsoft.
Working as a computer lab assistant at a community college for a couple years, I found the case to be exactly the opposite. Sure, the computer literate people who populate on-line discussion forums like Slashdot know how unstable Windows has been, but "Joe Public" just sees "the computer".
The computers in the computer lab ran Windows 95, and, as you might guess, were extremely slow and very, very crashy. They were Dell machines with Pentium II 300 CPUs and 64MB of RAM, and with Win95 they ran much slower than my home computer (which at the time had a K6-200 CPU and 48MB of RAM).
But guess what the students said when they complained: "These computers suck!" "These computers are so slow!" "Why don't these computers work?"
Have you seen this thing, it looks like its for the kids.
And somehow that look will still be thought of as standard, because it's from MS, and people will make window managers (or at least themes) that emulate it.
And before you tell me to use patches, let me tell you that I've never gotten a single patch to work. I don't know if they're drunk when they create those patches, but each one of them complains about missing files when I try to apply them.
Obviously you're doing something wrong; maybe you should ask for help with that sort of thing instead of just downloading the 20MB and blaming the kernel developers.
if this spreads. I like to ogg everything on my CDs so I can listen to them on my computer, without having to stick to songs from one CD at a time and keep switching them. That enhances the usefulness of CDs I pay for, and thus makes buying CDs more appealing, at no cost to the musician or publisher.
But if CDs I want come with this copy protection, or if I have no easy way of knowing if they're "protected", then I will simply stop buying CDs. Period.
And I hope others will do the same. Maybe we should even write to our favorite artists and say "I was going to buy your latest CD, but I won't because I can't listen to it in the way I prefer." Maybe they will stand up to the publishers and say "My fans aren't listening to my music anymore, stop the copy protection!"
Or maybe not. Maybe enough of you really did just use mp3s/oggs for pirating music, and will go back to buying CDs when they're all copy protected, and thereby justify this BS. And because of that, the rest of us are screwed. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Christian fundamentalist robots, even. Damn BBCode habits....
Oh, wonderful. It was bad enough when we all thought humanity was inevitably going to be taken over by evil, malicious robots. But now we have an even worse possibility--the world could be taken over and dominated by [b]Christian fundamentalist robots[/b]!
The reviewer is making an assumption; he really has absolutely no idea why Libranet didn't work on that particular computer. It's likely that it had absolutely nothing to do with the processor speed and amount of RAM.
And (to add a point, not to disagree with you) the important thing about reading critics isn't accepting the critic's judgment about the movie, but using the critic's description of the movie to figure out whether it's the type of movie _you_ would like--regardless of whether or not the critic enjoyed it.
I've often read critics and thought "Yeah, it wasn't what _you_ were looking for, but I can enjoy that for what it is instead of wishing they did it your way," or "You might have appreciated the artistic value of that, but it would probably bore me to tears."
I'm usually right.
Sure, but sometimes movies are inexplicably, perplexingly overrated, which is really my only beef with the Matrix. I enjoyed The Matrix for the action movie with good special effects that it was. It really wasn't much more than that. The premise was cool, but only really seemed to exist as a shallow excuse for the special effects.
Thirteenth Floor took the same premise and gave me characters I actually cared about and a deeper plot, which made it a more enjoyable movie for me. Thus, I find it a little strange that so many supposedly deep-thinking intellectual geeks drool over the Matrix but completely overlook the Thirteenth Floor.
Am I the only one who enjoyed the The Thirteenth Floor more than The Matrix? They used the same humans-living-in-a-computer concept, but while Matrix turned into a pure action movie, Thirteenth Floor continued to have a plot.
Right. This wouldn't stop spam; it would only--in the eyes of the government--legitimize it.
Such an idea obviously isn't really about getting rid of spam. If you could implement the things that would be required for a tax--like some way of knowing the sender of every E-mail that is sent--then the actual taxation wouldn't even be necessary.
Hey, there's no need to abandon vi to get the paperclip. Just use vigor and get the best of both worlds!
Bah. I got all intrigued, downloaded the source, looked at the readme.txt, and saw:
Well, it's nice that it's LGPL'd, but it would be nicer if it wasn't Windows-only anyway. At least porting to other platforms is in the todo list....
vim is all about those wierd keystrokes you learn that funnily enough grow on you and multiply your productivity.
Well yeah, that's the point. With the kvim kpart (when it's more developed and working with more than just konqueror), people will be able to use their weird little keystrokes in just about any KDE program that uses an editor.
In particular, I bet there are many programmers out there who don't want to edit in anything other than vim but would like to use kdevelop.
This is exactly why I never gave OS/2 a chance. The commercials just showed a bunch of computer geeks going "Wow that's so cool!" and didn't show the actual OS or even say WHY it was so cool. Stupid commercials that insult my intelligence will bias me against a product pretty quick.
Well, I certainly agree to that. I was responding mainly to the idea that a violent revolution would be as appropiate a means of change in the U.S. now as it was a couple hundred years ago--your post just happened to be the second or third time I read it, and when I finally decided to refute it.
There are certainly changes that need to be made, but they need to be made by informing and persuading the majority, rather than trying to just violently replace the government we/they are choosing.
I know you want to feel important and unique
I do feel unique, based on my personality rather than any delusions about my intelligence, but I don't feel important (at least not to the general population outside of the people who care about me).
but historically and factually it was democrats who relied on ignorant masses to vote people like Gore into office
Both parties rely on the ignorant masses to vote them into office, just different segments of the ignorant masses. It sounds like you're assuming I'm a Democrat; I'm not.
Are you actually suggesting that intelligence can measured by such naive test as who does one vote in the presidential election ?
No. I see what you're misunderstanding, so let me clarify: I said that the ignorant masses love guys like George W. Bush, and I could have just as easily said Bill Clinton, or JFK--the point is not that the voters of a certain party are ignorant, it is that a large mass of people are ignorant of real, important issues, and base their votes on charisma. I did not say, or mean to imply, that _everyone_ who likes George W. (and others like him, from both major parties) likes him out of ignorance, just that there are a large portion of people who do.
Do you really think there would be no leaders? Anarchy could be created temporarily, but there are always people who naturally want to lead, and even more people who naturally look to someone else for leadership. The only way anarchists could stop some sort of dictatorial or feudal system from naturally developing would be if either:
1) The entire human species becomes enlightened (yeah... right), or
2) the anarchists have a huge army to strike down any leader whom people start following... which would make the anarchists tyrants rather than anarchists.
The right of the people to overthrow their government when it fails to meet their needs is written in the Declaration of Independence
and..
Its important not to forget the freedoms that make this country worth fighting for.
One of those important freedoms is the right to vote for who will represent us in the government. One of the most important causes of the American Revolution is that the American colonies had no representation in Parliament. We can't make that claim about the current American government.
As bad as our government might be, it is still composed of people who are chosen by a majority of Americans. Sure, we might be given some shitty options to choose from, and those of us who are intellectual might be outnumbered by the ignorant masses who fall in love with guys like George W. Bush, but the fact remains: The members of our government are there because a majority of the country chose them to be.
But who voted for all these militia groups and anarchist groups who want to violently overthrow the government? How many people want them to succeed? Which one should succeed, if any? How free would the country be if they succeeded? Would the leaders of these groups let the country vote on a new leader every few years? And what happens after the revolution, anyway? It's not like all the wannabe-revolutionary groups agree with each other, so there would just be more revolutions--and they'd all be justified, by your argument--as each group takes it's turn trying to establish its own ideology.
How free are people under that situation?
Anyway, I'm not even going to touch on the craziness of expecting a government to say "Yeah, people have the right to overthrow us. Go ahead." ;)
Thanks, that's one of the funnier examples of "I'm saying something completely stupid because I didn't click the link and read what was going on for myself" I've seen in a while.
Am I insane, or did Email already kill the fax machine? I get about 20 emails a day, and not one fax.
Not insane, just (apparently) self-centered.
Why doesn't anyone ship a cd that boots linux,X11 4.01, and then runs their 3D game?
I stopped buying Windows games very soon after I started using Linux, because I really don't like rebooting my system into a different OS just to play a game--it's at least not something I want to pay money for. I also like to easily switch back and forth between a game I'm playing and my E-mail, someone I'm chatting with, etc., and I like to be doing those things with the software I like, the software I usually use--Linux software.
I imagine that Windows users probably feel the same way, and wouldn't appreciate booting into an unfamiliar OS, and separating themselves from the software they're used to, just to play a game. The people who would benefit from your idea are probably outnumbered by the Windows users who wouldn't buy such a game, thus making the idea a little uneconomical for the developers.
I've been following the development of this, and it's nice to see a game being developed simultaneously for Linux and Windows, rather than being released on Linux a year or more after the Windows counterpart.
I would certainly hope that a game starring Tux, the Official Linux Penguin, and originally developed on Linux, would not be available for Windows before it's available for Linux.
I also like the fact that the binaries for all platforms will be on one CD. I'm tired of buying two copies of games if I want to run them on both Linux and Windoze.
Yes, it's certainly nice when the game is developed, and originally released, as cross-platform. (Like Terminus.) Unfortunately, that's not really an option when a separate company like Loki does the porting after the game has been released, and it's kind of unfair to blame Loki for that. If gaming under Linux is important to you, then send a message by not buying Windows-only games; that way, you'll certainly not pay for the same game twice.
If you don't allow all speech, then someone has to decide which speech is allowed and which speech isn't.
Do you trust that decision to our governments?
Inevitably, what almost always happens in non-free-speech societies is that the people in power use it to suppress dissenters. You can say they're just suppressing hate speech here, but who gets to define hate speech?
Is a webpage advocating killing all the Jews/gays/whatever hate speech? Sure it is.
But what about a webpage sharply criticizing the government or a dominant religion, though? Or how about biting satire making fun of the aforementioned institutions? A no-hate-speech law would be easy to extend to something like that; after all, it could incite hatred toward the government/religion, right?
People should be punished for/prevented from _actions_, specifically actions that harm others. Controlling what people can say doesn't protect anyone from anything, except for powerful people from criticism.
well then, why not just use windows? It's like saying I want a pepsi that looks and tastes like Coke ;)
While I don't disagree with your overall point (that Linux programs shouldn't aim to look just like Windows programs), I don't agree with that particular analogy. It assumes that the look and feel is the only thing important about the system--what about stability, security, price, software license issues (e.g. GPL vs. proprietary), etc.? Wanting to use Linux with a Windows look and feel is not the same as wanting to use Windows, because look and feel is not the only trait people are basing their decisions on.
If you want to use a Pepsi and Coke analogy, it would be more analogous to say that people want Pepsi, with the taste of Pepsi, but packaged in a can that is the same size and shape of a Coke can, and opens the same way as a Coke can. That way, they can get the slightly-sweeter taste of Pepsi without having to deal with learning how to use a different can (not that that would be difficult, but hey, it's just an analogy :) ).
That said though, I personally have little desire to use programs that look exactly like Windows. And I don't have trouble figuring out how to use new types of drink containers, either. ;)
if Joe Public loads the new ultra-stable XP on his Compaq-saved-$2.50-on-cheap-parts motherboard, he's not going to care that it's the nonconformant APM hardware crashing, he's going to blame Microsoft.
Working as a computer lab assistant at a community college for a couple years, I found the case to be exactly the opposite. Sure, the computer literate people who populate on-line discussion forums like Slashdot know how unstable Windows has been, but "Joe Public" just sees "the computer".
The computers in the computer lab ran Windows 95, and, as you might guess, were extremely slow and very, very crashy. They were Dell machines with Pentium II 300 CPUs and 64MB of RAM, and with Win95 they ran much slower than my home computer (which at the time had a K6-200 CPU and 48MB of RAM).
But guess what the students said when they complained: "These computers suck!" "These computers are so slow!" "Why don't these computers work?"
Have you seen this thing, it looks like its for the kids.
And somehow that look will still be thought of as standard, because it's from MS, and people will make window managers (or at least themes) that emulate it.
And before you tell me to use patches, let me tell you that I've never gotten a single patch to work. I don't know if they're drunk when they create those patches, but each one of them complains about missing files when I try to apply them.
Obviously you're doing something wrong; maybe you should ask for help with that sort of thing instead of just downloading the 20MB and blaming the kernel developers.
if this spreads. I like to ogg everything on my CDs so I can listen to them on my computer, without having to stick to songs from one CD at a time and keep switching them. That enhances the usefulness of CDs I pay for, and thus makes buying CDs more appealing, at no cost to the musician or publisher.
But if CDs I want come with this copy protection, or if I have no easy way of knowing if they're "protected", then I will simply stop buying CDs. Period.
And I hope others will do the same. Maybe we should even write to our favorite artists and say "I was going to buy your latest CD, but I won't because I can't listen to it in the way I prefer." Maybe they will stand up to the publishers and say "My fans aren't listening to my music anymore, stop the copy protection!"
Or maybe not. Maybe enough of you really did just use mp3s/oggs for pirating music, and will go back to buying CDs when they're all copy protected, and thereby justify this BS. And because of that, the rest of us are screwed. Thanks.
But I'll stop buying the damned CDs anyway.