Given the history of American governments, which become steadily more despotic and corrupt as they reduce in jurisdiction, I'd argue we need to do the exact opposite.
I'd prefer a Federal Government that has control over my HOA, not the opposite.
Correct (other than the inflation thing, where you meant deflation). Essentially Bitcoin's "Growth" is (a) engineered to slow down to a standstill in a few years and (b) cannot in any way be related to the growth of the underlying economy. If the economy tries to grow 10% in a year, and would under normal circumstances, assuming there's not already slack in the monetary base, there will not be enough Bitcoins to cover the increased commerce.
About the best you can say about it is that if we had a problem where people are doing too much work, Bitcoins would fix that...
Now, in fairness, I should point out that Bitcoin's defenders here normally argue that it's all OK because what can happen is banks can issue tokens equal in value to a single Bitcoin, backed by a smaller number they'd have in reserve combined with themselves (because they're effectively loans of one bitcoin to the person who takes one.) This is called Fractional Reserve Banking, is used in the real world, works well, and has the itty-bitty problem that virtually all the people who seem to be obsessed with Bitcoins really, really, really, don't like FSB, considering it a form of fraud. It isn't, it's a quirk of accounting, but it's hard for many people to get their heads around as is the fiat money system, so they get upset and start saying "What we need is something backed by something real", "Oh, I know, what about a whole load of computational power that's lost when making the coins", "Yes, great idea, even though it doesn't make sense because you can't turn the coin back into that computational power so it isn't, actually, backed by anything after all", and then this happens.
That's what I use mine for, but the 8MHz 68008 takes ages anyway, and the one time it found one the copy saved to the microdrive got corrupted and wouldn't load back.
Akin didn't say that getting pregnances due to rape were uncommon. He said that rapes rarely result in pregnancy, because the female body has a way to "shut down" pregnancies in such circumstances.
So no, there was never a germ of truth in what he said, especially as, for reasons yet to be explained, there is actually statistically a higher chance of getting pregnant if you've been raped than if you've had normal sex.
Funny thing is that most USB, microUSB, etc, cables I've used have lasted considerably longer (that is, I think I've had one break - and that was due to abuse - in my entire lifetime of using them) than any of the 3.5mm jack cables I've used in the last few years.
It'd be nice if MHD took off to a degree that people started selling MHD headphones and put MHD sockets on car stereos for you to plug your phone into.
They're not mandating a standard, they're mandating use of a standard. It's up to the industry to pick one.
FWIW, while I think MicroUSB sucks (as do all USB connectors), this isn't because their connectors break easily - they don't. I'm not entirely sure why you've had such bad luck, but it's pretty uncommon.
MicroUSB sucks because, as with the full size USB connectors, they're four dimensional objects, which is why you generally have to turn them around at least twice before they'll slide into the socket. It remains a mystery why the use of four dimensional physics, which is a groundbreaking advance in technology, was used for USB connectors in a way that'd make them harder to use, and not for anything useful like teleportation or making washing machines that don't lose socks.
Well, a number of reasons spring to mind. The most obvious is that GNOME felt it necessary to create GNOME Classic in the first place, which was introduced as soon as it became clear that the end of GNOME Fallback was a major problem that was forcing people to leave GNOME.
There is a reason GNOME Classic exists. It wasn't created in isolation, it wasn't created as a third party project by some developer with an itch, it addresses a very real problem that the direction GNOME was heading in is simply unsustainable and virtually nobody likes it.
What good does it do to the GNOME project to spend time developing GNOME Classic and then throw it away afterwards?
Right now it's clear that no post-desktop UI is viable for PCs running GNU/Linux. Virtually nobody is using GNOME Shell. Ubuntu is actually losing users because Unity just doesn't cut it. Other DEs such as KDE have, after flirting with the concept of post-desktopism, though not actually making major steps to implement it, have steered clear.
And now, to the extent to which GNOME 3 is used, it's by the remaining Ubuntu users who use it with Unity instead of GNOME Shell, or who use it in fallback mode.
GNOME's developers have shown that they understand this by developing GNOME Classic. They'd have to suddenly forget they know this to then throw it out.
So no, to you, and to the AC who keeps insisting that RedHat demanded it for RHEL 7 but will suddenly switch to GNOME Shell for RHEL 8 because look over there pretty colors, I just don't buy the "It's a trap" argument. At this stage, it seems infinitely more likely that GNOME Shell will slowly (not immediately, it'd be too humiliating to suddenly drop years of work that so much has ridden on) lose GNOME's focus. If it survives as GNOME's primary focus, it'll be purely because the tablet-PC convergance that Microsoft is currently pushing becomes a thing. And maybe that'll happen, but even Microsoft wasn't stupid enough to ditch the desktop entirely.
If GNOME is a slave to Red Hat, and Red Hat doesn't believe GNOME Shell is viable, why, exactly, would GNOME Classic go away after RHEL 7? Wouldn't it be more likely that GNOME Shell would go away after RHEL 7?
Of all the things you can accuse Canonical of, Hubris is the least of their issues, if not the exact opposite.
Canonical believes, with some justification, that the GNU/Linux desktop cannot stand still, that what they've done so far is not good enough. Their problem is that they've taken this principle too far. In what feels like a blind panic they've taken the Mac UI and dumbed it down considerably.
Why the blind panic? Well, two reasons: first, tablets. That's something on the mind of every desktop OS developer at the moment.
The other: GNOME. Canonical wasn't going to be able to just merge in upstream updates from GNOME any more, with GNOME 3 everything was changing, from revamped APIs, to the GNOME 3 UI itself. The available options to Canonical were simply this: maintain, alone, an obsolete branch of GNOME, use GNOME 3 with the deeply unpopular UI updates, or attempt a hybrid approach and merge in the core of GNOME 3 but with a UI that Canonical would be able to maintain and that would suit the rest of Canonical's agenda.
In a sense, they've done the same thing as Microsoft. They've ignored the fact they had an excellent UI that nobody was complaining about seriously, believing what they have to be not good enough for the future. Microsoft didn't develop Metro because they thought they were awesome, they developed it because they thought they weren't. And Canonical's done the same thing.
And unlike Microsoft, third parties - the GNOME developers - were pushing Canonical into a corner and had the power to do so.
And, you know, I'm not going to be like every Slashdot whiner and condemn Canonical for this. They're far sighted. They're trying to push things forward. It's just, ultimately, Unity (and, in all seriousness, there are no other serious problems with current versions of Ubuntu, all of the complaints are about Unity) is just not quite what's needed.
The hope, I guess, is that GNOME Classic will finally give Canonical an out, something they can use to bring back the friendly, familiar, and powerful UI of Ubuntu past.
FWIW, when I was in my very early twenties, I played a game on my Amiga called "Hired Guns". It was awesome. Recommended to anyone with UAE and access to an abandonware copy.
It also, literally, gave me nightmares. Over several nights. I'd stop playing it, pick it up a few weeks later, and the nightmares would start again. And yeah, they were images related directly to what was in the game, it wasn't some weird coincidence where I'd have a dream about scary ponies or something.
That was in my early twenties. And Slashdot's legion of child rearing experts are now telling you that you're a terrible censor for being careful about what games your kid plays because it might have effects they're too young to handle.
(FWIW, one of the issues that lead our dear friend and Slashdotter role model Hans Reiser to kill his wife was that she wasn't entirely happy about his insistance that his kids play violent computer games with him. Even though said kids were effected enough that Nina was able to argue, successfully to a court deciding custody issues, that they had PTSD.)
My wife and I have different views about what's harmful for our child, with strong differences of opinion on when to have the birds and the bees talk, for example: but I'm pretty confident we see eye to eye on video games. Any zombies more realistic than "Plants vs Zombies" are going to have to wait until my daughter's old enough to seek out that content. The only pill popping she'll see will be in PacMan. GTA V? Or VI, X, or M? That'll have to wait.
Excel is a selling point. It's that thing people have on their office computers that lets them program in an accessable way.
Self described computer experts hate Excel because they don't understand it. They see non-experts using it to build databases "the wrong way" and shopping lists and diagrams and recipes etc "the wrong way" and all kinds of things "the wrong way" where "the right way" means do it in PostgreSQL or Python or Word/HTML5 or whatever.
Meanwhile, people who haven't actively avoided spreadsheets get shit done.
If it wasn't for the fact Microsoft sees Excel still as some kind of additional revenue stream, something to upsell to a person buying Windows, I think they'd have gone in an entirely different direction than Metro designing their tablet UI. And I suspect a Windows operating system built around an Excel-based shell (perhaps with some "modern" improvements along the lines that Improv was trying to do) would be one of the few things Microsoft could do that would genuinely slay the competition. Apple snobs would sniff snootily at it, then be shocked that Windows ends up with 95% of the market again.
Unfortunately, for Microsoft, that'd be a radical innovation I think they'd have difficultly believing would work, despite the overwhelming evidence it would.
Uh, you do realize there are more distros out there than Ubuntu-based ones, right?
Which matters how?
There only needs to be one GNU/Linux distro that works out of the box and doesn't require use of a CLI to counter the claim that GNU/Linux isn't ready for the desktop because you're forced to use the CLI. Ubuntu is one of many (albeit most are Ubuntu based) that satisfies the requirements and thus renders the claim ridiculous.
In fairness, on virtually every platform updates are frequently only superficially voluntary. Support ends. Third party support ends. Third party support for Third Party support ends (eg. that app you run has a security hole in it? It's fixed in the latest version, but that only runs on ${YOUR PLATFORM VERSION+2}
In the early 2000s I got myself a Mac and switched to Mac OS X. I liked it. I really did.
But having not really jumped on the "mainstream platform" thing, well, pretty much ever, I suddenly found the whole upgrades thing was more of a problem than I thought. My toe-in-the-water Mac turned out to be too old to run 10.3 without nasty hacks. The laptop I bought that seemed relatively up to date after I bought it and did run 10.3 was too old to run 10.4. And 10.3 and 10.4 had features I liked, and many, many, I didn't.
To run a recent version of Java, I had to have a recent version of Mac OS X. To have a recent version of Mac OS X, I had to upgrade my hardware. Regardless of that, running a recent version of Mac OS X would not necessarily be an "upgrade", in that I didn't like a lot of the changes. And at that time a new version of Mac OS X seemed to be coming out every 1-2 years, costing $130 a pop - if I didn't buy a new Mac with it pre-installed for a small fortune. (To add insult to injury I didn't even like Apple's hardware!)
So, relunctantly, I switched back to GNU/Linux, eventually settling on Ubuntu which, at least, was "mainstream" but the updates are free and Ubuntu's attitude to hardware support is more liberal.
This isn't a dig at Apple specifically, especially as immediately after I switched back to Linux they seemed to get better and software update prices went down, and became less frequent. But it is "how it works", generally in the proprietary software world. You might like Mac OS X Jaguar, you might like Windows 2000, you might love AmigaOS 2.1 or 3.0. But you have no choice, ultimately, you do end up having to move to something else, no matter how much you might convince yourself otherwise.
I thought all software updates were supposed to include a "snappier" thing, that all iFans can be pleased about? That makes this story newsworthy by itself!
More seriously, I was under the impression they'd moved back from the composited transparency layered shadowed Mac OS X style interface to something more minimalist, modelled on the UIs that started coming out in the late 1990s when 3D outlines for buttons became considered passe (Android went in the same direction with ICS & Jelly Bean.) So I'm genuinely surprised this update would actually cause the UI to become slower.
That, perhaps, might be Will Smith's interpretation of Asimov's novels, but it's not any sane reader's interpretation.
Asimov's novels are pretty clear, the three laws do, in fact, restrict the robots from being OUT OF CONTROL KILLING MACHINES!!1!. There are only two appearances of such robots (and then, they're hardly described by such a term) - one short story, whose name I forget, has a deliberately weakened set of laws in it. The other is, of course, Giskard and Daneel's formulation of the zeroth law, where, again, the robots are no longer obeying, exactly, the three laws.
What Asimov does do is describe the consequences of the three laws, showing them to be imperfect in terms of creating universal machines, but effective at preventing the robots from going out and killing everyone.
Asimov's motivation for creating the three laws was to deal with the plethora of inane "Scientist builds perfect universal machine, doesn't realize that a perfect machine will kill maker until it's too late" stories that started entirely legitimately with Frankenstein but then descended into cliche hell, as story teller after story teller thought it was wildly original to pretend that scientists are dumb and would build destroyers of the universe to prove how clever they were. Annoyed, he wrote a set of rules and then wrote story after story explaining them. The stories didn't debunk the rules, or show they wouldn't work. The stories usually showed that they did, and worked in unexpected ways.
You look at the hardware listed on the Steam hardware survey, which is where any dev frankly should be looking to find out what PC gamers are packing? A good 70%+ of the PC gamers out there are running hardware that would just slaughter either current gen console by a pretty large margin
Well, yeah, but that's filtered by the fact that most PC gamers who use Steam have had to upgrade their PCs or choose PCs that aren't ordinary by a long stretch of the imagination.
Most PCs out there are using Intel integrated graphics and have 2-4G of RAM and an i3 or even an Atom. They're usually hooked up to laptop-standard 1360x768 screens. They frequently don't have a proper mouse or trackpoint, using the suprememly gamer-unfriendly trackpad instead, and frequently don't even have numeric keypads.
And it's not that these configurations can't play games. Hell, I'm still blown away by what Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 looked like on my 800MHz (or was it 600?) Mac with a Radeon 7500. I held off putting a decent graphics card in what became my "games PC" for a long time (it has one now) and found that while UT4 looked like crap with the default settings, with the right settings it was smooth and had high quality video... on the default IIG system.
But at the same time, it's a hell of a lot easier to produce quality games for two game-optimized platforms than to deal with the above. Sure, Steam users have good graphics. But nobody else does. And as I said, Steam has the users who decided they had to upgrade their PCs or choose "the right" laptop; the users who decided it wasn't worth it left Steam because they couldn't get games to run decently without a lot of work.
All of which said: I'm looking forward to GTA V coming out for PCs, preferably on Steam, preferably at a decent price. I'm just wary of yelling at developers for not considering my wants first. Hey, they might surprise us, and produce the first 201x generation sandbox 3D FPS/etc game that runs well on an Atom with a 1360x768 screen and an Intel graphics chip...
X was so "ahead of its time" that its entire architecture was dumped in version 10 to give way to X11
That's... a bizarre statement and completely meaningless. In fact, it's intellectually dishonest.
The X11 was developed purely because X10 wasn't generic enough in its hardware requirements. That was it.
But even you could legitimately describe that as dumping the entire architecture (which, I think, we can legitimately call an outright lie), that would still have nothing to do with whether the X Window System is ahead of its time. X11 and its predecessors feature a network transparency system that were uncommon at the time of X11's development.
and then it remained so far ahead of its time that to this day NextOS, MacOS, Android and Windows have yet to adopt a single thing from it, contrary to the rest of Unix most of which has made its way into those operating
This is exceedingly dubious. A "single thing"? Really? In fact, pretty early on Windows started to adopt various incompatible network display protocols to counter the fact it didn't have native network transparency. Did it do it exactly the same way as X? Of course not, architecturally X11 was completely incompatible. But it did make the effort. Did Android? No, Android post-dates X11/Unix by decades, and is intentionally stripped down. Android also doesn't require network transparency in a fucking phone screen. "NextOS"? NextStep used Display Postscript early on, one of whose advertised features was... yes, it's a shame Apple dumped the technology in favor of something inspired by PDF, but the world changes.
AmigaOS was also ahead of its time. You could legitimately argue that operating systems since bear no resemblance to AmigaOS, whose shared-memory space message-passing multitasking environment had its flaws as well as its advantages. But to argue that AmigaOS can't be described as ahead of its time when it was doing in the 1980s what many operating systems are still doing poorly today would get you laughed at.
But X11, unlike AmigaOS, never went away. And so we're familiar with its flaws, and we focus on its flaws and not its strengths. And its strengths are, absolutely, huge.
Wayland is a tragedy. It should not exist as a project. It's taking the jewel from Unix's crown and throwing it away in favor of a candy wrapper because the jewel has gotten a lot of gunk on it over the years and nobody's thought to just polish it.
Wayland is an effort to remove those layers of cruft that nobody uses (Xtoolkit?)
No, it's not. Wayland is an effort to replace X11. It will end up, after a few years of people hacking around its flaws, with just as much cruft as X11, but unlike X11, it'll never have the promise. It'll never be able to do in 25 years from now what X11 can do today.
Nobody doubts they are. But both have one saving grace - they're in charge of forkable projects. That means there's a safety valve.
SkyOS was a terrible system - I don't mean technically, it could have been the best technologically, who knows? But organizationally/legally, it was a disaster. Combine the forced reliance upon third party support of a proprietary operating system like Windows, with the lack of a stable corporate-sized support system of a lower-interest operating system like AROS or AtheOS and you have the worst of all worlds. Nobody in their right mind would ever develop for a system with that winning combination, and few did.
AROS and AtheOS survive (the latter a positive cautionally tale, as it proved the point) because there's no single point of failure. If the development leader disappears (which happened with AtheOS) then others - including the users - have the ability to step in and take over. Windows and Mac OS X survive because the single point of failure is unlikely to fail, it's too big, and too much rides upon it, to disappear without a lot of warning.
SkyOS had a single point of failure that was fragile. A single person. And now this, a binary-only release that still can't be supported by anyone other than the original person. What a waste.
I didn't ignore anything. If you think either of these points is remotely relevant to the point I made, then you didn't understand the point (or else you have a very warped understanding of business economics!)
Slashdot Mirror
Kinda makes you wonder if anyone has tried to pass off hydrogen as helium selling canisters for balloon inflation purposes.
Given the history of American governments, which become steadily more despotic and corrupt as they reduce in jurisdiction, I'd argue we need to do the exact opposite.
I'd prefer a Federal Government that has control over my HOA, not the opposite.
I know, at least Yahoo! didn't insult them by offering them a job at Yahoo! or something...
Correct (other than the inflation thing, where you meant deflation). Essentially Bitcoin's "Growth" is (a) engineered to slow down to a standstill in a few years and (b) cannot in any way be related to the growth of the underlying economy. If the economy tries to grow 10% in a year, and would under normal circumstances, assuming there's not already slack in the monetary base, there will not be enough Bitcoins to cover the increased commerce.
About the best you can say about it is that if we had a problem where people are doing too much work, Bitcoins would fix that...
Now, in fairness, I should point out that Bitcoin's defenders here normally argue that it's all OK because what can happen is banks can issue tokens equal in value to a single Bitcoin, backed by a smaller number they'd have in reserve combined with themselves (because they're effectively loans of one bitcoin to the person who takes one.) This is called Fractional Reserve Banking, is used in the real world, works well, and has the itty-bitty problem that virtually all the people who seem to be obsessed with Bitcoins really, really, really, don't like FSB, considering it a form of fraud. It isn't, it's a quirk of accounting, but it's hard for many people to get their heads around as is the fiat money system, so they get upset and start saying "What we need is something backed by something real", "Oh, I know, what about a whole load of computational power that's lost when making the coins", "Yes, great idea, even though it doesn't make sense because you can't turn the coin back into that computational power so it isn't, actually, backed by anything after all", and then this happens.
That's what I use mine for, but the 8MHz 68008 takes ages anyway, and the one time it found one the copy saved to the microdrive got corrupted and wouldn't load back.
Uh, whut?
Akin didn't say that getting pregnances due to rape were uncommon. He said that rapes rarely result in pregnancy, because the female body has a way to "shut down" pregnancies in such circumstances.
So no, there was never a germ of truth in what he said, especially as, for reasons yet to be explained, there is actually statistically a higher chance of getting pregnant if you've been raped than if you've had normal sex.
Funny thing is that most USB, microUSB, etc, cables I've used have lasted considerably longer (that is, I think I've had one break - and that was due to abuse - in my entire lifetime of using them) than any of the 3.5mm jack cables I've used in the last few years.
It'd be nice if MHD took off to a degree that people started selling MHD headphones and put MHD sockets on car stereos for you to plug your phone into.
They're not mandating a standard, they're mandating use of a standard. It's up to the industry to pick one.
FWIW, while I think MicroUSB sucks (as do all USB connectors), this isn't because their connectors break easily - they don't. I'm not entirely sure why you've had such bad luck, but it's pretty uncommon.
MicroUSB sucks because, as with the full size USB connectors, they're four dimensional objects, which is why you generally have to turn them around at least twice before they'll slide into the socket. It remains a mystery why the use of four dimensional physics, which is a groundbreaking advance in technology, was used for USB connectors in a way that'd make them harder to use, and not for anything useful like teleportation or making washing machines that don't lose socks.
Well, a number of reasons spring to mind. The most obvious is that GNOME felt it necessary to create GNOME Classic in the first place, which was introduced as soon as it became clear that the end of GNOME Fallback was a major problem that was forcing people to leave GNOME.
There is a reason GNOME Classic exists. It wasn't created in isolation, it wasn't created as a third party project by some developer with an itch, it addresses a very real problem that the direction GNOME was heading in is simply unsustainable and virtually nobody likes it.
What good does it do to the GNOME project to spend time developing GNOME Classic and then throw it away afterwards?
Right now it's clear that no post-desktop UI is viable for PCs running GNU/Linux. Virtually nobody is using GNOME Shell. Ubuntu is actually losing users because Unity just doesn't cut it. Other DEs such as KDE have, after flirting with the concept of post-desktopism, though not actually making major steps to implement it, have steered clear.
And now, to the extent to which GNOME 3 is used, it's by the remaining Ubuntu users who use it with Unity instead of GNOME Shell, or who use it in fallback mode.
GNOME's developers have shown that they understand this by developing GNOME Classic. They'd have to suddenly forget they know this to then throw it out.
So no, to you, and to the AC who keeps insisting that RedHat demanded it for RHEL 7 but will suddenly switch to GNOME Shell for RHEL 8 because look over there pretty colors, I just don't buy the "It's a trap" argument. At this stage, it seems infinitely more likely that GNOME Shell will slowly (not immediately, it'd be too humiliating to suddenly drop years of work that so much has ridden on) lose GNOME's focus. If it survives as GNOME's primary focus, it'll be purely because the tablet-PC convergance that Microsoft is currently pushing becomes a thing. And maybe that'll happen, but even Microsoft wasn't stupid enough to ditch the desktop entirely.
If GNOME is a slave to Red Hat, and Red Hat doesn't believe GNOME Shell is viable, why, exactly, would GNOME Classic go away after RHEL 7? Wouldn't it be more likely that GNOME Shell would go away after RHEL 7?
Curious to know people's thoughts on this: how necessary are projects like MATE now that GNOME 3 has a supported-in-the-long-term "Classic" mode?
Of all the things you can accuse Canonical of, Hubris is the least of their issues, if not the exact opposite.
Canonical believes, with some justification, that the GNU/Linux desktop cannot stand still, that what they've done so far is not good enough. Their problem is that they've taken this principle too far. In what feels like a blind panic they've taken the Mac UI and dumbed it down considerably.
Why the blind panic? Well, two reasons: first, tablets. That's something on the mind of every desktop OS developer at the moment.
The other: GNOME. Canonical wasn't going to be able to just merge in upstream updates from GNOME any more, with GNOME 3 everything was changing, from revamped APIs, to the GNOME 3 UI itself. The available options to Canonical were simply this: maintain, alone, an obsolete branch of GNOME, use GNOME 3 with the deeply unpopular UI updates, or attempt a hybrid approach and merge in the core of GNOME 3 but with a UI that Canonical would be able to maintain and that would suit the rest of Canonical's agenda.
In a sense, they've done the same thing as Microsoft. They've ignored the fact they had an excellent UI that nobody was complaining about seriously, believing what they have to be not good enough for the future. Microsoft didn't develop Metro because they thought they were awesome, they developed it because they thought they weren't. And Canonical's done the same thing.
And unlike Microsoft, third parties - the GNOME developers - were pushing Canonical into a corner and had the power to do so.
And, you know, I'm not going to be like every Slashdot whiner and condemn Canonical for this. They're far sighted. They're trying to push things forward. It's just, ultimately, Unity (and, in all seriousness, there are no other serious problems with current versions of Ubuntu, all of the complaints are about Unity) is just not quite what's needed.
The hope, I guess, is that GNOME Classic will finally give Canonical an out, something they can use to bring back the friendly, familiar, and powerful UI of Ubuntu past.
Completely agree.
FWIW, when I was in my very early twenties, I played a game on my Amiga called "Hired Guns". It was awesome. Recommended to anyone with UAE and access to an abandonware copy.
It also, literally, gave me nightmares. Over several nights. I'd stop playing it, pick it up a few weeks later, and the nightmares would start again. And yeah, they were images related directly to what was in the game, it wasn't some weird coincidence where I'd have a dream about scary ponies or something.
That was in my early twenties. And Slashdot's legion of child rearing experts are now telling you that you're a terrible censor for being careful about what games your kid plays because it might have effects they're too young to handle.
(FWIW, one of the issues that lead our dear friend and Slashdotter role model Hans Reiser to kill his wife was that she wasn't entirely happy about his insistance that his kids play violent computer games with him. Even though said kids were effected enough that Nina was able to argue, successfully to a court deciding custody issues, that they had PTSD.)
My wife and I have different views about what's harmful for our child, with strong differences of opinion on when to have the birds and the bees talk, for example: but I'm pretty confident we see eye to eye on video games. Any zombies more realistic than "Plants vs Zombies" are going to have to wait until my daughter's old enough to seek out that content. The only pill popping she'll see will be in PacMan. GTA V? Or VI, X, or M? That'll have to wait.
Yes.
Excel is a selling point. It's that thing people have on their office computers that lets them program in an accessable way.
Self described computer experts hate Excel because they don't understand it. They see non-experts using it to build databases "the wrong way" and shopping lists and diagrams and recipes etc "the wrong way" and all kinds of things "the wrong way" where "the right way" means do it in PostgreSQL or Python or Word/HTML5 or whatever.
Meanwhile, people who haven't actively avoided spreadsheets get shit done.
If it wasn't for the fact Microsoft sees Excel still as some kind of additional revenue stream, something to upsell to a person buying Windows, I think they'd have gone in an entirely different direction than Metro designing their tablet UI. And I suspect a Windows operating system built around an Excel-based shell (perhaps with some "modern" improvements along the lines that Improv was trying to do) would be one of the few things Microsoft could do that would genuinely slay the competition. Apple snobs would sniff snootily at it, then be shocked that Windows ends up with 95% of the market again.
Unfortunately, for Microsoft, that'd be a radical innovation I think they'd have difficultly believing would work, despite the overwhelming evidence it would.
Which matters how?
There only needs to be one GNU/Linux distro that works out of the box and doesn't require use of a CLI to counter the claim that GNU/Linux isn't ready for the desktop because you're forced to use the CLI. Ubuntu is one of many (albeit most are Ubuntu based) that satisfies the requirements and thus renders the claim ridiculous.
In fairness, on virtually every platform updates are frequently only superficially voluntary. Support ends. Third party support ends. Third party support for Third Party support ends (eg. that app you run has a security hole in it? It's fixed in the latest version, but that only runs on ${YOUR PLATFORM VERSION+2}
In the early 2000s I got myself a Mac and switched to Mac OS X. I liked it. I really did.
But having not really jumped on the "mainstream platform" thing, well, pretty much ever, I suddenly found the whole upgrades thing was more of a problem than I thought. My toe-in-the-water Mac turned out to be too old to run 10.3 without nasty hacks. The laptop I bought that seemed relatively up to date after I bought it and did run 10.3 was too old to run 10.4. And 10.3 and 10.4 had features I liked, and many, many, I didn't.
To run a recent version of Java, I had to have a recent version of Mac OS X. To have a recent version of Mac OS X, I had to upgrade my hardware. Regardless of that, running a recent version of Mac OS X would not necessarily be an "upgrade", in that I didn't like a lot of the changes. And at that time a new version of Mac OS X seemed to be coming out every 1-2 years, costing $130 a pop - if I didn't buy a new Mac with it pre-installed for a small fortune. (To add insult to injury I didn't even like Apple's hardware!)
So, relunctantly, I switched back to GNU/Linux, eventually settling on Ubuntu which, at least, was "mainstream" but the updates are free and Ubuntu's attitude to hardware support is more liberal.
This isn't a dig at Apple specifically, especially as immediately after I switched back to Linux they seemed to get better and software update prices went down, and became less frequent. But it is "how it works", generally in the proprietary software world. You might like Mac OS X Jaguar, you might like Windows 2000, you might love AmigaOS 2.1 or 3.0. But you have no choice, ultimately, you do end up having to move to something else, no matter how much you might convince yourself otherwise.
I thought all software updates were supposed to include a "snappier" thing, that all iFans can be pleased about? That makes this story newsworthy by itself!
More seriously, I was under the impression they'd moved back from the composited transparency layered shadowed Mac OS X style interface to something more minimalist, modelled on the UIs that started coming out in the late 1990s when 3D outlines for buttons became considered passe (Android went in the same direction with ICS & Jelly Bean.) So I'm genuinely surprised this update would actually cause the UI to become slower.
That, perhaps, might be Will Smith's interpretation of Asimov's novels, but it's not any sane reader's interpretation.
Asimov's novels are pretty clear, the three laws do, in fact, restrict the robots from being OUT OF CONTROL KILLING MACHINES!!1!. There are only two appearances of such robots (and then, they're hardly described by such a term) - one short story, whose name I forget, has a deliberately weakened set of laws in it. The other is, of course, Giskard and Daneel's formulation of the zeroth law, where, again, the robots are no longer obeying, exactly, the three laws.
What Asimov does do is describe the consequences of the three laws, showing them to be imperfect in terms of creating universal machines, but effective at preventing the robots from going out and killing everyone.
Asimov's motivation for creating the three laws was to deal with the plethora of inane "Scientist builds perfect universal machine, doesn't realize that a perfect machine will kill maker until it's too late" stories that started entirely legitimately with Frankenstein but then descended into cliche hell, as story teller after story teller thought it was wildly original to pretend that scientists are dumb and would build destroyers of the universe to prove how clever they were. Annoyed, he wrote a set of rules and then wrote story after story explaining them. The stories didn't debunk the rules, or show they wouldn't work. The stories usually showed that they did, and worked in unexpected ways.
Well, yeah, but that's filtered by the fact that most PC gamers who use Steam have had to upgrade their PCs or choose PCs that aren't ordinary by a long stretch of the imagination.
Most PCs out there are using Intel integrated graphics and have 2-4G of RAM and an i3 or even an Atom. They're usually hooked up to laptop-standard 1360x768 screens. They frequently don't have a proper mouse or trackpoint, using the suprememly gamer-unfriendly trackpad instead, and frequently don't even have numeric keypads.
And it's not that these configurations can't play games. Hell, I'm still blown away by what Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 looked like on my 800MHz (or was it 600?) Mac with a Radeon 7500. I held off putting a decent graphics card in what became my "games PC" for a long time (it has one now) and found that while UT4 looked like crap with the default settings, with the right settings it was smooth and had high quality video... on the default IIG system.
But at the same time, it's a hell of a lot easier to produce quality games for two game-optimized platforms than to deal with the above. Sure, Steam users have good graphics. But nobody else does. And as I said, Steam has the users who decided they had to upgrade their PCs or choose "the right" laptop; the users who decided it wasn't worth it left Steam because they couldn't get games to run decently without a lot of work.
All of which said: I'm looking forward to GTA V coming out for PCs, preferably on Steam, preferably at a decent price. I'm just wary of yelling at developers for not considering my wants first. Hey, they might surprise us, and produce the first 201x generation sandbox 3D FPS/etc game that runs well on an Atom with a 1360x768 screen and an Intel graphics chip...
That's... a bizarre statement and completely meaningless. In fact, it's intellectually dishonest.
The X11 was developed purely because X10 wasn't generic enough in its hardware requirements. That was it.
But even you could legitimately describe that as dumping the entire architecture (which, I think, we can legitimately call an outright lie), that would still have nothing to do with whether the X Window System is ahead of its time. X11 and its predecessors feature a network transparency system that were uncommon at the time of X11's development.
This is exceedingly dubious. A "single thing"? Really? In fact, pretty early on Windows started to adopt various incompatible network display protocols to counter the fact it didn't have native network transparency. Did it do it exactly the same way as X? Of course not, architecturally X11 was completely incompatible. But it did make the effort. Did Android? No, Android post-dates X11/Unix by decades, and is intentionally stripped down. Android also doesn't require network transparency in a fucking phone screen. "NextOS"? NextStep used Display Postscript early on, one of whose advertised features was... yes, it's a shame Apple dumped the technology in favor of something inspired by PDF, but the world changes.
AmigaOS was also ahead of its time. You could legitimately argue that operating systems since bear no resemblance to AmigaOS, whose shared-memory space message-passing multitasking environment had its flaws as well as its advantages. But to argue that AmigaOS can't be described as ahead of its time when it was doing in the 1980s what many operating systems are still doing poorly today would get you laughed at.
But X11, unlike AmigaOS, never went away. And so we're familiar with its flaws, and we focus on its flaws and not its strengths. And its strengths are, absolutely, huge.
Wayland is a tragedy. It should not exist as a project. It's taking the jewel from Unix's crown and throwing it away in favor of a candy wrapper because the jewel has gotten a lot of gunk on it over the years and nobody's thought to just polish it.
No, it's not. Wayland is an effort to replace X11. It will end up, after a few years of people hacking around its flaws, with just as much cruft as X11, but unlike X11, it'll never have the promise. It'll never be able to do in 25 years from now what X11 can do today.
Yes! Also it should modify each Windows program so it works well on a touchscreen.
Nobody doubts they are. But both have one saving grace - they're in charge of forkable projects. That means there's a safety valve.
SkyOS was a terrible system - I don't mean technically, it could have been the best technologically, who knows? But organizationally/legally, it was a disaster. Combine the forced reliance upon third party support of a proprietary operating system like Windows, with the lack of a stable corporate-sized support system of a lower-interest operating system like AROS or AtheOS and you have the worst of all worlds. Nobody in their right mind would ever develop for a system with that winning combination, and few did.
AROS and AtheOS survive (the latter a positive cautionally tale, as it proved the point) because there's no single point of failure. If the development leader disappears (which happened with AtheOS) then others - including the users - have the ability to step in and take over. Windows and Mac OS X survive because the single point of failure is unlikely to fail, it's too big, and too much rides upon it, to disappear without a lot of warning.
SkyOS had a single point of failure that was fragile. A single person. And now this, a binary-only release that still can't be supported by anyone other than the original person. What a waste.
I didn't ignore anything. If you think either of these points is remotely relevant to the point I made, then you didn't understand the point (or else you have a very warped understanding of business economics!)
Don't be silly, they have to migrate to the next version of whatever it is they were running, right now it's 90% Windows Vista ;-)
Hooray! Zero tolerance works! ;-)