Yes, but IMHO I think that having Linux-native versions / workalikes (and I mean _exactly_ alike) of Windows programs would be better, both for the users of the programs and for the Linux community in general.
Actually, I sent a piece of pottery (weighing several pounds) via Fedex's Express Saver (3 day) service. It cost $7.60, and was tracked and insured. To send a *LETTER* (weighing about one ounce) via the USPS's Priority Mail service (2 to 4 day delivery time, not tracked, not insured), cost me $3.50. The pottery arrived on time and without a scratch. The letter, which was sent TO THE SAME ADDRESS was bent and the envelope had slightly torn.
So exactly which do YOU think is a better postal/shipping service?
I used to work in a mom-and-pop mail annex store (sort of like Mailboxes Etc.), and I *ALWAYS* told people that, if they have any desire whatsoever for whatever it is they're sending to arrive on time and in good condition, they should send it through Fedex.
The USPS's quality-of-service and delivery time is horrid, and if they actually had to fend for themselves and compete, they'd be run into the ground by Fedex and UPS _very_ quickly, IMO.
Sorry, Star Wars had a budget of $11 million US dollars.
Boy George directed American Grifiti before that just so that he could do Star Wars (it was part of his deal with Fox).
But George Lucas has never been that great of a director to begin with, and he has always been, and will always be, stuck in the whole 1950's sci-fi thing. Attack of the Clones! The Empire Strikes Back! Revenge of the Jedi! (renamed to Return of the Jedi when George Lucas found out that Star Trek II was going to be called Revenge of Kahn) Although Star Trek II's title was changed to Wrath of Khan, Georgie boy kept Return of the Jedi as the title for Episode VI.
It is no surprise that Episode V, while not directed by George Lucas and certainly not the most successful of the first 3 films (due to its depressing end; Han Solo captured, Luke Skywalker -1 hand, the Rebellion shattered), is generally regarded as being the best of the first 3. It has the best cinematography, the best story, is the best directed, and has the least "cheese" of the first 3.
Or maybe George Lucas is out of Kurosawa films to copy (A New Hope is very similar to Akira Kurosawa's film The Hidden Fortress);-P
Each strand of Aki Ross' "hair," for example, reportedly contained hundreds of polygons, and each movie frame took 90 minutes to render on a Sun workstation farm.
Sorry, no. Aki Ross' har wasn't made up of polygons. Polygons may be popular in the game world, but in the pro CG and SFX world, they're about as popular as that math-nerd girl you sat next to in class, whereas NURBS et al would be the sexy cheerleader by comparison.
And no Sun Microsystems computers were used. SGI machines, because of their monstrous memory bandwidth, were used as workstations for the modelling, animating, compositing, and editing, and also as servers for setting up the batch renders and divying up render jobs among the render farm. The render farm itself was 900+ Pentium III powered PCs w/768MB RAM each, all running Linux.
I hardly need to mention that the SGI machines were most likely running IRIX.
The GeForce3 offers programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware. This means that you can write your own shaders, just like you would if you were using RenderMan.
Nintendo has deliberately underpowered the GameCube to keep its cost down, enabling them to sell it for $100 less than the other consoles, thusly allowing them to remain in the child-oriented market that they're known for.
So then you must (at least) be in your fifties. With the introduction of the transistor in the 1950's, computers became reliable enough to be manufactured and sold to paying customers. And with Digital Equipment Corporation's introduction of the minicomputer in the 1960's, computers became small enough and cheap enough to begin to come into widespread use.
Being born before the introduction of the IBM PC doesn't make one part of the "pre-computer generation".
Another point: the general purpose desktop computer will never go away. Too many people and companies have a stake in it's continued existance for this to happen. For example, how could all these wonderful console games be written if all that existed were consoles? Or how could graphics manufacturers test out new designs when they have to design a whole new system in addition to the GPU every time, instead of just designing a new card? Or what about the people who use their PCs and other general purpose desktop systems for more than playing games, browsing webpages on the internet, and writing documents in MS Word?
I for one, despise consoles. The Linux kit for the PS2 increased my interest in that system for a short while, since it would make the PS2 a general purpose computer instead of just a gaming console, until I realized something: I have 256MB of RAM in my PC, and my motherboard has room for up to 2GB. The PS2 has a mere 32MB of RAM. The XBOX has 64, and from what it looks like the GameCube has a paltry 24. This isn't nearly enough for my needs. Or what about the fact that, since I edit movies and create effects for them on my PC, I need all the hard disk space I can get? With a PC I can start with several tens of gigabytes, then add hundreds more if I need them.
The problem with consoles can be summed up as this: they are underpowered systems whose manufacturers deliberately lose money on, with the intention of making the money back through developer license fees and royalities from each game sold. This is how it has been since the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, and isn't going to change.
You say that consoles are easy while Windows and OS X are complicated, difficult, and scary. So then
a)how are you visiting this site?
b)why are you visiting this site?
c)how do you manage to run a website?
d)why don't you just take the 2 or 3 hours it takes to learn Windows? I'm not even going to mention Linux, since it'd most likely take you a half hour to type "startx" so you could have your pretty GUI.
The reason that wireless keyboards are being pushed so much is so that the gov't can "listen in" on what you're typing, thus getting passwords, PGP keys, etc., without risking the user finding out about some keytrap software installed on their machine, especially now that makers of anti-virus software are stating that they will not ignore the FBI's keytrap software (and will alert the user to it's presence if it is detected, just like any other virus).
</conspiracy>
Could it be possible that the reason you consider English to be such a brutish language is because you only hear it spoken brutishly? I have a hard time imagining that everyone in Brazil speaks English as well as even an American who comes from "The South" (someone from south-eastern America).
Or perhaps it is because you are not a native English speaker. You may have learned English at age 10, but the fact that you claim to have learned English on only six months demonstrates that you probably do not speak English as well as you let on, *especially* when one considers that it takes people *years* to learn their native language well.
The cost depends on how it is shipped. AFAIK most US-based online purchasing shipment is done via UPS. Depending on what is shipped and how it is shipped (UPS ground, Next Day Air, 2nd Day Air, etc.) it can cost more or less than what it would cost to ship the same item via the US Post Office or Fedex.
Many places only offer shipment to the continental US because dealing with UPS for international/overseas shipping is a huge pain in the ass in my experience, and AFAIK you need special authorization (so that customs doesn't have to open every box and see what's inside).
shutdown -r now to reboot shutdown -h now to shutdown
Sounds like somebody hasn't been reading the man pages. Also, I hate to tell you this (well, ok, actually I don't), but Linux's main squeeze is the PC. Yellow Dog is just a port to Apple hardware, and since it's just a port (not the original, the Real McCoy, whatever) things aren't guaranteed to work as well as in the PC version.
Actually, it would make it both: the oceans are beneath the surface of Europa, making them subterranean, and at the same time, and life would be below the surface of said oceans, making it submarine.
Re:Unions are not really a good thing
on
Dial U for Union
·
· Score: 1
In case you don't know this, in order to direct a movie for a major Hollywood studio, you have to either already be in the Director's Guild or become a member within 30 days. So even if the most brilliant director in history were hired on by a major Hollywood studio to direct a film, he would have to join the untion within 30 days or the studio would fire him. The studios all signed agreements with the Director's Guild of America decades ago prohibiting non-guild members from directing movies with those studios.
As for Steven Spielberg being a talentless hack, yes, I'm sure that had he been stupid and dirt-poor like Kevin Smith you'd be calling him one of the visionary directors of our time. You can't slam a guy for doing well and being successful at something that he loves to do.
As a film student, people's ignorance of the movie industry often astounds me. So, for those of you who can't quite comprehend it any other way:
DreamWorks && PDI != MPAA
The MPAA is an organization that rates movies and represents the major studios and major distributors.
DreamWorks, on the other hand, is a production company. Yes, they're a very large and successful production company, but a production company nonetheless. That is why Warner Bros. got involved in the making of Steven Spielberg's latest movie, AI: the studio provides the money for the negative (though I doubt that AI was done on a negative pickup), the equipment, the sets, and most major studios have their own distribution arm. Production companies, on the other hand, don't have any of that (well, ok, DreamWorks has the money). The only time that I have _EVER_ seen a production company distribute a film themselves is when the money for the negative came from independent investors (read: not Hollywood studios) and the producer(s) weren't smart enough to realize the risk.
If you want to hate the MPAA, fine. But to have an attitude of, "Everyone company that is involved in making movies is an evil agent of the MPAA!" is just plain ignorant.
This sounds curiously like my stepfather: he has worked as Maintenance Supervisor in a factory for years (fixing manufacturing machines, not computers). He is tired of doing it, and so one day he gets the idea that he wants to be an MCSE. He takes a class, and has a very hard time understanding the material. At first, he was going to build his own PC, which his instructor recommended, but now he seems more compelled to buy some prefab system (prefab==boring IMHO) from Dell/Compaq/Whoever. He doesn't visit any technology/PC/IT websites (including Slashdot, which is why I'm not too worried about making this post). He once said to me, "Yeah, we use Win2K sometimes in class. I don't really like it..." (I start to think that my openly pro-Linux and anti-MS attitudes are getting to him) "...I like Windows95 a lot better."
He has almost no passion for computers at all. Hell, the system that he uses is a P133 (he actually wasted money buying an extra 64MB of RAM for this unholy beast, bringing it up to 96MB; it only figures that he bought RAM that his mboard wouldn't accept the first time out, and he had to go back to Fry's Electronics and ask them what type he needed) running Windows95. Ughhh...
The thing that really gets me is this: he finally passed the A+ Certification class, and yet he is no rush to go take (and pass) his A+ Certification exams so that he can go on to the Win2K classes (networking and such).
...but am I the only C programmer who didn't move on to C++, despite the fact that I had more than one oportunity?
Let's see:
-In C, I can be assured of minimal compiler overhead/bloat
-In C, I can use modules/libraries that were written in assembly language without having to worry about name-mangling or things like that
-C has none of this namespace nonsense
-With C, I don't have to search through a class-browser to find a function that I need
-C has no function (sorry, method:/) overloading, and thus no name-mangling
-I can actually use C to write an operating system
I could go on all night, but I think I've made my point as far as that goes.
People often tell me of C++'s advantages over C, but all those "advantages" make me think of is code bloat and unwanted speed reductions.
Umm... sticks and stones?
C may be an old language, but it is still useful:
-C statements translate directly into assembly language
-Generated code is fast and efficient
-No OO crap getting in the way of C
-If you need/want OO, use C++ instead
-If you're writing an OS, C and assembly are the only realistic options
C'mon guys, it may not be the newest, flashiest language, but C is still a viable programming language (especially for OS kernel programming). Hell, the Linux kernel is written in C (like there's somebody on Slashdot who didn't know that)
You could always try Pair Networks (http://www.pair.com). They offer fairly decent prices (<$60 per month).
If I remember correctly, Blues News (http://www.bluesnews.com) was hosted by them until Blues News became a UGO affiliate.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but IMHO I think that having Linux-native versions / workalikes (and I mean _exactly_ alike) of Windows programs would be better, both for the users of the programs and for the Linux community in general.
Exactly. I could not agree more.
;)
The business plans of most of the dot-com companies reminds me of the underpants gnomes from South Park:
"Phase 1: Steal underpants. Phase 3: Profit!"
And, of course, most dot-coms spent money like it was going out of style
Actually, I sent a piece of pottery (weighing several pounds) via Fedex's Express Saver (3 day) service. It cost $7.60, and was tracked and insured. To send a *LETTER* (weighing about one ounce) via the USPS's Priority Mail service (2 to 4 day delivery time, not tracked, not insured), cost me $3.50. The pottery arrived on time and without a scratch. The letter, which was sent TO THE SAME ADDRESS was bent and the envelope had slightly torn.
So exactly which do YOU think is a better postal/shipping service?
I used to work in a mom-and-pop mail annex store (sort of like Mailboxes Etc.), and I *ALWAYS* told people that, if they have any desire whatsoever for whatever it is they're sending to arrive on time and in good condition, they should send it through Fedex.
The USPS's quality-of-service and delivery time is horrid, and if they actually had to fend for themselves and compete, they'd be run into the ground by Fedex and UPS _very_ quickly, IMO.
See?
Actually, the correct spelling is "elitist". Note the "ist" at the end. "Elitest" means "the most elite."
Sorry, Star Wars had a budget of $11 million US dollars.
;-P
Boy George directed American Grifiti before that just so that he could do Star Wars (it was part of his deal with Fox).
But George Lucas has never been that great of a director to begin with, and he has always been, and will always be, stuck in the whole 1950's sci-fi thing. Attack of the Clones! The Empire Strikes Back! Revenge of the Jedi! (renamed to Return of the Jedi when George Lucas found out that Star Trek II was going to be called Revenge of Kahn) Although Star Trek II's title was changed to Wrath of Khan, Georgie boy kept Return of the Jedi as the title for Episode VI.
It is no surprise that Episode V, while not directed by George Lucas and certainly not the most successful of the first 3 films (due to its depressing end; Han Solo captured, Luke Skywalker -1 hand, the Rebellion shattered), is generally regarded as being the best of the first 3. It has the best cinematography, the best story, is the best directed, and has the least "cheese" of the first 3.
Or maybe George Lucas is out of Kurosawa films to copy (A New Hope is very similar to Akira Kurosawa's film The Hidden Fortress)
Each strand of Aki Ross' "hair," for example, reportedly contained hundreds of polygons, and each movie frame took 90 minutes to render on a Sun workstation farm.
Sorry, no. Aki Ross' har wasn't made up of polygons. Polygons may be popular in the game world, but in the pro CG and SFX world, they're about as popular as that math-nerd girl you sat next to in class, whereas NURBS et al would be the sexy cheerleader by comparison.
And no Sun Microsystems computers were used. SGI machines, because of their monstrous memory bandwidth, were used as workstations for the modelling, animating, compositing, and editing, and also as servers for setting up the batch renders and divying up render jobs among the render farm. The render farm itself was 900+ Pentium III powered PCs w/768MB RAM each, all running Linux.
I hardly need to mention that the SGI machines were most likely running IRIX.
The GeForce3 offers programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware. This means that you can write your own shaders, just like you would if you were using RenderMan.
Nintendo has deliberately underpowered the GameCube to keep its cost down, enabling them to sell it for $100 less than the other consoles, thusly allowing them to remain in the child-oriented market that they're known for.
"I am from a pre-computer generation"
So then you must (at least) be in your fifties. With the introduction of the transistor in the 1950's, computers became reliable enough to be manufactured and sold to paying customers. And with Digital Equipment Corporation's introduction of the minicomputer in the 1960's, computers became small enough and cheap enough to begin to come into widespread use.
Being born before the introduction of the IBM PC doesn't make one part of the "pre-computer generation".
Another point: the general purpose desktop computer will never go away. Too many people and companies have a stake in it's continued existance for this to happen. For example, how could all these wonderful console games be written if all that existed were consoles? Or how could graphics manufacturers test out new designs when they have to design a whole new system in addition to the GPU every time, instead of just designing a new card? Or what about the people who use their PCs and other general purpose desktop systems for more than playing games, browsing webpages on the internet, and writing documents in MS Word?
I for one, despise consoles. The Linux kit for the PS2 increased my interest in that system for a short while, since it would make the PS2 a general purpose computer instead of just a gaming console, until I realized something: I have 256MB of RAM in my PC, and my motherboard has room for up to 2GB. The PS2 has a mere 32MB of RAM. The XBOX has 64, and from what it looks like the GameCube has a paltry 24. This isn't nearly enough for my needs. Or what about the fact that, since I edit movies and create effects for them on my PC, I need all the hard disk space I can get? With a PC I can start with several tens of gigabytes, then add hundreds more if I need them.
The problem with consoles can be summed up as this: they are underpowered systems whose manufacturers deliberately lose money on, with the intention of making the money back through developer license fees and royalities from each game sold. This is how it has been since the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, and isn't going to change.
You say that consoles are easy while Windows and OS X are complicated, difficult, and scary. So then
a)how are you visiting this site?
b)why are you visiting this site?
c)how do you manage to run a website?
d)why don't you just take the 2 or 3 hours it takes to learn Windows? I'm not even going to mention Linux, since it'd most likely take you a half hour to type "startx" so you could have your pretty GUI.
The reason that wireless keyboards are being pushed so much is so that the gov't can "listen in" on what you're typing, thus getting passwords, PGP keys, etc., without risking the user finding out about some keytrap software installed on their machine, especially now that makers of anti-virus software are stating that they will not ignore the FBI's keytrap software (and will alert the user to it's presence if it is detected, just like any other virus).
</conspiracy>
Or maybe I'm just really paranoid ;-)
Could it be possible that the reason you consider English to be such a brutish language is because you only hear it spoken brutishly? I have a hard time imagining that everyone in Brazil speaks English as well as even an American who comes from "The South" (someone from south-eastern America).
Or perhaps it is because you are not a native English speaker. You may have learned English at age 10, but the fact that you claim to have learned English on only six months demonstrates that you probably do not speak English as well as you let on, *especially* when one considers that it takes people *years* to learn their native language well.
Many places only offer shipment to the continental US because dealing with UPS for international/overseas shipping is a huge pain in the ass in my experience, and AFAIK you need special authorization (so that customs doesn't have to open every box and see what's inside).
shutdown -h now to shutdown
Sounds like somebody hasn't been reading the man pages. Also, I hate to tell you this (well, ok, actually I don't), but Linux's main squeeze is the PC. Yellow Dog is just a port to Apple hardware, and since it's just a port (not the original, the Real McCoy, whatever) things aren't guaranteed to work as well as in the PC version.
Actually, it would make it both: the oceans are beneath the surface of Europa, making them subterranean, and at the same time, and life would be below the surface of said oceans, making it submarine.
As for Steven Spielberg being a talentless hack, yes, I'm sure that had he been stupid and dirt-poor like Kevin Smith you'd be calling him one of the visionary directors of our time. You can't slam a guy for doing well and being successful at something that he loves to do.
As a film student, people's ignorance of the movie industry often astounds me. So, for those of you who can't quite comprehend it any other way:
DreamWorks && PDI != MPAA
The MPAA is an organization that rates movies and represents the major studios and major distributors.
DreamWorks, on the other hand, is a production company. Yes, they're a very large and successful production company, but a production company nonetheless. That is why Warner Bros. got involved in the making of Steven Spielberg's latest movie, AI: the studio provides the money for the negative (though I doubt that AI was done on a negative pickup), the equipment, the sets, and most major studios have their own distribution arm. Production companies, on the other hand, don't have any of that (well, ok, DreamWorks has the money). The only time that I have _EVER_ seen a production company distribute a film themselves is when the money for the negative came from independent investors (read: not Hollywood studios) and the producer(s) weren't smart enough to realize the risk.
If you want to hate the MPAA, fine. But to have an attitude of, "Everyone company that is involved in making movies is an evil agent of the MPAA!" is just plain ignorant.
This sounds curiously like my stepfather: he has worked as Maintenance Supervisor in a factory for years (fixing manufacturing machines, not computers). He is tired of doing it, and so one day he gets the idea that he wants to be an MCSE. He takes a class, and has a very hard time understanding the material. At first, he was going to build his own PC, which his instructor recommended, but now he seems more compelled to buy some prefab system (prefab==boring IMHO) from Dell/Compaq/Whoever. He doesn't visit any technology/PC/IT websites (including Slashdot, which is why I'm not too worried about making this post). He once said to me, "Yeah, we use Win2K sometimes in class. I don't really like it..." (I start to think that my openly pro-Linux and anti-MS attitudes are getting to him) "...I like Windows95 a lot better."
He has almost no passion for computers at all. Hell, the system that he uses is a P133 (he actually wasted money buying an extra 64MB of RAM for this unholy beast, bringing it up to 96MB; it only figures that he bought RAM that his mboard wouldn't accept the first time out, and he had to go back to Fry's Electronics and ask them what type he needed) running Windows95. Ughhh...
The thing that really gets me is this: he finally passed the A+ Certification class, and yet he is no rush to go take (and pass) his A+ Certification exams so that he can go on to the Win2K classes (networking and such).
Let's see: :/) overloading, and thus no name-mangling
-In C, I can be assured of minimal compiler overhead/bloat
-In C, I can use modules/libraries that were written in assembly language without having to worry about name-mangling or things like that
-C has none of this namespace nonsense
-With C, I don't have to search through a class-browser to find a function that I need
-C has no function (sorry, method
-I can actually use C to write an operating system
I could go on all night, but I think I've made my point as far as that goes.
People often tell me of C++'s advantages over C, but all those "advantages" make me think of is code bloat and unwanted speed reductions.
Umm... sticks and stones?
C may be an old language, but it is still useful:
-C statements translate directly into assembly language
-Generated code is fast and efficient
-No OO crap getting in the way of C
-If you need/want OO, use C++ instead
-If you're writing an OS, C and assembly are the only realistic options
C'mon guys, it may not be the newest, flashiest language, but C is still a viable programming language (especially for OS kernel programming). Hell, the Linux kernel is written in C (like there's somebody on Slashdot who didn't know that)
You could always try Pair Networks (http://www.pair.com). They offer fairly decent prices (<$60 per month).
If I remember correctly, Blues News (http://www.bluesnews.com) was hosted by them until Blues News became a UGO affiliate.