I modded this down Troll. don't post mirror as your user... use AC.
Don't mod and post in the same article! You're worse than the guy posting with his own account! (not that I think the guy was wrong for doing that, and he certainly wasn't trolling)
I don't imagine why anybody would metamod your mod as fair.
Re:But you miss the point...
on
Gentoo Games
·
· Score: 1
My home computer uses simpsons quotes! Just keep hitting refresh, it will get you through a slow afternoon. Or a slow morning. Or a whole Friday, actually.
(E-mail me if you want the fortune file. I forget where I got it from, but I remember it took a while to find it)
But apparently, even with all those wonderful features, even companies like BMW, usually known for a commitment to quality, have a hard time developing good software.
BMW is not a software shop. I don't know if they hired in programmers for the apps their cars use, but I wouldn't take their difficulty writing software for platform X as an indication of how crappy platform X is.
In light of this discussion, I think I would have to blame BMW for this, and not Microsoft. Even if MS designed a flawed OS for the car, BMW let it slip past their QA people and is selling it to consumers now, even though it occasionally traps government officials inside. This sounds like the sort of "In the Future There Will Be Robots" sci-fi horror stories from not too long ago - in the future, our cars will be able to drive themselves, yadda yadda yadda, until one day a car turns on its owner!
BMW sold a product made up of inferior stuff. MS may have created some of the inferior stuff (and maybe not, it's irrelevant) but I blame BMW for telling consumers that everything works as it should.
Wow, I hadn't heard of that spam going around, but I'm not surprised. And it's probably going to catch a lot of people, because to a lot of people, computers are still this mysterious box (or maybe they think it's the monitor) that is way too complex for them to ever understand. We will never have an anti-virus product out there that works for these people, because they refuse to learn anything about their computer. Education is a better anti-virus tool than anything Norton or McAfee will make. It's also a better security tool than anything else out there. The downside is, it's probably also a better cracking tool.
(Before anybody counters the statements above, let me make clear that without education, people aren't going to install antivirus tools or firewalls or IDS's. If you drop an idiot in front of a hardened linux box, then that box will be more secure than a fresh-off-the-installation Windows XP box with a smart user but no tools available.)
Go download bittorrent and use that link. I just downloaded it for this movie and probably got everything (including the download) in under ten minutes. There's nothing to learn, I didn't even restart mozilla - it's so easy you don't have to even think about it. Sorry if I sound like a slashvertisement, but it's a great way to download a file.
I don't know if you have any affiliation with the site, but I don't think it's very well-known. And as for "most people agree with Dave Winer," the exact numbers are 18 vs. 8. The numbers are too small to spot any sort of trend.
You can pimp out the site if you want, but I wouldn't call it well-known when there is so little visible participation on the site. Despite some high-profile names appearing on the site, it doesn't appear to get a lot of traffic. I don't know if most of the visitors to the site don't vote or comment, but typically a "well-known" site that allows that level of visitor participation should have more than 26 voters since the bet was posted (April 24, 2002 - over a year ago).
Still, it is an interesting page and probably deserves more traffic than it appears to be getting.
Cartoon network shows an hour-long block of Tom & Jerry on Saturday mornings. With a few exceptions, none of the currently-in-production cartoons can compare to T&J. I mean, these cartoons were what started the debates about violent cartoons!
There are also the "salute to WB legends" shows, like the Tex Avery and Chuck Jones shows. Those are fun to watch because they address the cartoons from an academic standpoint and you get to appreciate what was groundbreaking in particular episodes.
One problem I've seen with cartoons these days are the music. Look at cartoons from the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's and the music is all classical, or even somtimes jazz. The animation is made to work with the music, too. If you watch the current crop of cartoons, it all sounds like an afterthought - a cheap, uninspired afterthought. Oh, the cast is going to a tropical island? Let's play the show's crappy theme song with steel drums! The end result is a cartoon that hyperactive kids can tolerate, but the shows will be completely unwatchable in ten years. Do you think anybody in ten years is going to want to watch old episodes of 'Ed, Edd, and Eddy?' Old Disney, Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons can still make you laugh. Seems like everything today is just Hanna-Barbera - one or two good shows if you dig around, but it's probably not worth all that work.
Offtopic, but helpful maybe...
Web site font sizes can be defined in several different ways, the most popular being pixels or points. Points are preferred, because if you use a high resolution display, the fonts will be the appropriate size. Most browsers can also resize fonts if the given style calls for points, but not pixels. Opera, I believe, can resize pixel-set fonts, but I'm not sure.
At any rate, the moral of the story is that the slashdot css monkey specified the font size in points, whereas Animation World Magazine set their font sizer in pixels, naively assuming that everybody else's computers must look the same as their computers.
I'll take the karma hit to spread useful info. That's why they call me webmasterjoe!
Here in South Africa we have a (cough) performance artist called steven Cohen who's 'art' consists of walking around without pants on , a dildo up his butt irritating the narrow minded and being laughed off by the rest. Seems like as pointless a pursuit as fighting over sex.com.
Good guess, but this is not the same Steven Cohen. You see, the Steven Cohen referenced in this article prefers to fuck other people in the ass.
It's been established that you can use the same chord structure, but the melody on top of those chords can't be the same. A lot of songs use the 1-4-5 pattern (G, C & D) or the 1-6-2-5/1-6-4-5 (think Heart and Soul), but they have to have a different melody. You'll notice that a lot of recent cartoons have songs that sound almost the same as well-known tunes. Same chords, same instrumentation is fine, but the melody has to be different.
As a musician, I wouldn't consider sampling somebody else's music without setting up some sort of contract for royalties. But I'm much more apt to use live musicians, and come up with my own stuff. I guess that's the jazz talking.
Yes! It would be nice if they could figure out how to implement alpha blending. I had to create two versions of an image with a drop shadow recently, one with the shadow done appropriately with some alpha blending, and the other was a.gif with a semi-dithered shadow (and looked horrible compared to the.png). I had to use user-agent magic with PHP to determine which to display.
Insurance deals with unknown forces, though. You're paying somebody to be there for you just in case your house burns down, or you get into a car accident. In this case, Microsoft would be the one burning down your house, the day after your policy ends.
All those poor people who bought the Licensing 6.0 crap sure will be disappointed. Anybody who paid for that 3 year license back in 2001 (up to July of 2002 actually) will be entitled to all upgrades until, um, 2004. Or July of 2005. Nice to see that MS won't be releasing their next desktop OS until after the 3-year license expires.
Congratulations! You just paid MS for three years of nothing! (Well, the servers are entitled to Windows Server 2003, but that still doesn't justify the cost of the licenses for all the desktops.)
Nice images, but it would have been fun to see them while it was happening. by 9:00AM EST, it's already 1PM in England (just past the "transit at sunrise" area) and the sun has already set in India, smack dab in the middle of the "full transit visible" area. So it looks like we missed the whole thing by about five hours. I know the pictures are the same, but there's something nice about seeing the pictures when it's really happening.
But then again, the slashdot crowd would have pummeled the webcams. I'd rather let the people who are really interested in this stuff get to the site for the live webcasts. Those people certainly don't want a large group of mildly interested people drowning the servers.
Or we could just seal a map and calendar in a box for 500 years, then when the future-people open the box they can just stop by with their time machine and record it onto space-cartridges! 790 Pedagigabytes per quadratic decameter! w00t!
Seriously, why hasn't anybody else thought of this yet??
Just to add that little extra insult to injury, it's nice to see the RIAA bullying a college kid during finals week. I have friends who are still in school (including one at RPI) and I can't get them to answer their phones during finals week, let alone defend against an attack from the pack of lawyers dispatched by the RIAA.
Sadly, I bet they deliberately chose this time of year to do this.
Now, I can sorta understand Robertson's opinion about root users, but I think Linux vendors have a certain responsibility, as do their potential customers.
If you want to use a Linux system, you should invest a small amount of time in learning about it. This could cover things like logging in, the file system (/ instead of C:), users and groups, basic shell commands, and "emergency" keyboard shortcuts (like ctrl-alt-backspace). Perhaps the installation screen can show this information, along with a hard-copy included in the box in cheat-sheet style.
Granted, there are a lot of things that should be handled by well-designed tools, instead of forcing the user to type in strange looking commands that start with dots and slashes. But some things should be prerequisite knowledge.
Microsoft avoided that idea, and while their software sells, their users are generally not very knowledgeable. Had they given users a better crash-course, the computing landscape might be much more powerful today. Same thing with America Online - they made connecting to the internet very, very easy. But that ease-of-use has produced a widespread stereotype that AOL'ers are idiots.
The question is, do we want a bigger user base, or a better user base? The Dept of Motor Vehicles makes their users take two tests to get a license, why can't computer vendors ask users to learn just a little bit of info?
Root access by default might be easier, but I think just about everybody out there capable of buying a computer can manage to learn this very important -yet simple- lesson. If this distro were to bring Linux "to the masses" (which I don't think will happen), it will set a bad precedent about user logins.
I just happened to be in the studio (and have one more trip there on Saturday) and we recorded with ProTools. Now I'm not an expert on audio recording, and much of the credit for the recording quality goes to the engineer (and my band), but ProTools seems like an amazingly capable program. Not only could the engineer apply get a rich, warm sound in all the right places, but he could do this quickly!
We were sitting in the engineering room, listening to a recording and thinking aloud what doesn't sound quite right, and the engineer kept up with our train of thought. By the time the song was done, he had applied most of our ideas to the song and we listened to it a second time, with everything as it should be.
I suppose I should provide a link to the song, even though I'm not sure if I'm pimping or backing up my opinion: Flipside - it's where your secrets went to hide!
If a tool like this can make such a great sound, the super-high-end systems may be answering a question nobody has asked in ten years.
It's about having navigation links on all the pages of a site that don't change, but part of the page does change. For an example of this, see slashdot.org where there's a list of links on the left side, but the rest of the content changes. CNN does the same thing.
I think books do that too. Ever notice that the page number shows up in the same spot on each page (well facing pages usually mirror, but still)? And the navigational elements along the headers and footers, things like the the name of the book, chapter, section, or author?
The idea of having elements of a document stay the same while others change has been around for a lot longer than SBC. The decision to do this with web pages was just a natural evolution, and really does not deserve a patent. What the hell does SBC make, anyway? Whatever it is, I'm not going to buy it:)
I thought frames weren't part of the browser until 3.0 came out. If I remember correctly, Netscape 2 had the ultra-ugly 'N' that had the "push in, push out" appearance, and the browser didn't support colored backgrounds or frames. I think I remember when frames came into existance, and I think it was with version 3.
Also, most folks complain the internet is slow already, now they have to wait an additional 15 seconds to get where they are going?
15 seconds? I think that 56k modem connections are going to have to wait longer than that just to download 300K. Even if dialup users are able to get a 6KB/sec connection to the site, it will take 50 seconds just to download the ad, let alone view it. In reality, users will be stuck connecting at 1.5-3KB/sec, and then the wait turns into 1:40 to 3:20 just to load the ad!
I know that broadband is getting more popular, but do these idiots think that any home user is going to wait that long for an advertisement? People usually give up if the page doesn't load in 30 seconds! Unless you use Mozilla, and load the page in another tab in the background, of course.
Advertisers have no respect for people. To them, people are all consumers, and we will purchase whatever products they feed us, and they have to make sure that their verbiage is proactive enough, and that they have actionable items and all that other buzzword crap. I wish they'd just go back to using sex to sell. That still works, and I like looking at those ads.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't imagine why anybody would metamod your mod as fair.
What are you, super-liminal? Hey! Join the Army!
My home computer uses simpsons quotes! Just keep hitting refresh, it will get you through a slow afternoon. Or a slow morning. Or a whole Friday, actually.
(E-mail me if you want the fortune file. I forget where I got it from, but I remember it took a while to find it)
In light of this discussion, I think I would have to blame BMW for this, and not Microsoft. Even if MS designed a flawed OS for the car, BMW let it slip past their QA people and is selling it to consumers now, even though it occasionally traps government officials inside. This sounds like the sort of "In the Future There Will Be Robots" sci-fi horror stories from not too long ago - in the future, our cars will be able to drive themselves, yadda yadda yadda, until one day a car turns on its owner!
BMW sold a product made up of inferior stuff. MS may have created some of the inferior stuff (and maybe not, it's irrelevant) but I blame BMW for telling consumers that everything works as it should.
Wow, I hadn't heard of that spam going around, but I'm not surprised. And it's probably going to catch a lot of people, because to a lot of people, computers are still this mysterious box (or maybe they think it's the monitor) that is way too complex for them to ever understand. We will never have an anti-virus product out there that works for these people, because they refuse to learn anything about their computer. Education is a better anti-virus tool than anything Norton or McAfee will make. It's also a better security tool than anything else out there. The downside is, it's probably also a better cracking tool.
(Before anybody counters the statements above, let me make clear that without education, people aren't going to install antivirus tools or firewalls or IDS's. If you drop an idiot in front of a hardened linux box, then that box will be more secure than a fresh-off-the-installation Windows XP box with a smart user but no tools available.)
Go download bittorrent and use that link. I just downloaded it for this movie and probably got everything (including the download) in under ten minutes. There's nothing to learn, I didn't even restart mozilla - it's so easy you don't have to even think about it. Sorry if I sound like a slashvertisement, but it's a great way to download a file.
- I wanted to get a good grep while I took a core dump.
- It's the perfect place to play with your tarballs!
- We'd all be happy until RMS came around and told us we have to call it GNU/iLoo.
- And of course, the preferred process would be to gunzip,
./configure, make, and then make clean.
I will not apologize for that.I don't know if you have any affiliation with the site, but I don't think it's very well-known. And as for "most people agree with Dave Winer," the exact numbers are 18 vs. 8. The numbers are too small to spot any sort of trend.
You can pimp out the site if you want, but I wouldn't call it well-known when there is so little visible participation on the site. Despite some high-profile names appearing on the site, it doesn't appear to get a lot of traffic. I don't know if most of the visitors to the site don't vote or comment, but typically a "well-known" site that allows that level of visitor participation should have more than 26 voters since the bet was posted (April 24, 2002 - over a year ago).
Still, it is an interesting page and probably deserves more traffic than it appears to be getting.
Cartoon network shows an hour-long block of Tom & Jerry on Saturday mornings. With a few exceptions, none of the currently-in-production cartoons can compare to T&J. I mean, these cartoons were what started the debates about violent cartoons!
There are also the "salute to WB legends" shows, like the Tex Avery and Chuck Jones shows. Those are fun to watch because they address the cartoons from an academic standpoint and you get to appreciate what was groundbreaking in particular episodes.
One problem I've seen with cartoons these days are the music. Look at cartoons from the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's and the music is all classical, or even somtimes jazz. The animation is made to work with the music, too. If you watch the current crop of cartoons, it all sounds like an afterthought - a cheap, uninspired afterthought. Oh, the cast is going to a tropical island? Let's play the show's crappy theme song with steel drums! The end result is a cartoon that hyperactive kids can tolerate, but the shows will be completely unwatchable in ten years. Do you think anybody in ten years is going to want to watch old episodes of 'Ed, Edd, and Eddy?' Old Disney, Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons can still make you laugh. Seems like everything today is just Hanna-Barbera - one or two good shows if you dig around, but it's probably not worth all that work.
Offtopic, but helpful maybe...
Web site font sizes can be defined in several different ways, the most popular being pixels or points. Points are preferred, because if you use a high resolution display, the fonts will be the appropriate size. Most browsers can also resize fonts if the given style calls for points, but not pixels. Opera, I believe, can resize pixel-set fonts, but I'm not sure.
At any rate, the moral of the story is that the slashdot css monkey specified the font size in points, whereas Animation World Magazine set their font sizer in pixels, naively assuming that everybody else's computers must look the same as their computers.
I'll take the karma hit to spread useful info. That's why they call me webmasterjoe!
It's been established that you can use the same chord structure, but the melody on top of those chords can't be the same. A lot of songs use the 1-4-5 pattern (G, C & D) or the 1-6-2-5/1-6-4-5 (think Heart and Soul), but they have to have a different melody. You'll notice that a lot of recent cartoons have songs that sound almost the same as well-known tunes. Same chords, same instrumentation is fine, but the melody has to be different.
As a musician, I wouldn't consider sampling somebody else's music without setting up some sort of contract for royalties. But I'm much more apt to use live musicians, and come up with my own stuff. I guess that's the jazz talking.
Yes! It would be nice if they could figure out how to implement alpha blending. I had to create two versions of an image with a drop shadow recently, one with the shadow done appropriately with some alpha blending, and the other was a .gif with a semi-dithered shadow (and looked horrible compared to the .png). I had to use user-agent magic with PHP to determine which to display.
Insurance deals with unknown forces, though. You're paying somebody to be there for you just in case your house burns down, or you get into a car accident. In this case, Microsoft would be the one burning down your house, the day after your policy ends.
All those poor people who bought the Licensing 6.0 crap sure will be disappointed. Anybody who paid for that 3 year license back in 2001 (up to July of 2002 actually) will be entitled to all upgrades until, um, 2004. Or July of 2005. Nice to see that MS won't be releasing their next desktop OS until after the 3-year license expires.
Congratulations! You just paid MS for three years of nothing! (Well, the servers are entitled to Windows Server 2003, but that still doesn't justify the cost of the licenses for all the desktops.)
Nice images, but it would have been fun to see them while it was happening. by 9:00AM EST, it's already 1PM in England (just past the "transit at sunrise" area) and the sun has already set in India, smack dab in the middle of the "full transit visible" area. So it looks like we missed the whole thing by about five hours. I know the pictures are the same, but there's something nice about seeing the pictures when it's really happening.
But then again, the slashdot crowd would have pummeled the webcams. I'd rather let the people who are really interested in this stuff get to the site for the live webcasts. Those people certainly don't want a large group of mildly interested people drowning the servers.
Or we could just seal a map and calendar in a box for 500 years, then when the future-people open the box they can just stop by with their time machine and record it onto space-cartridges! 790 Pedagigabytes per quadratic decameter! w00t!
Seriously, why hasn't anybody else thought of this yet??
Just to add that little extra insult to injury, it's nice to see the RIAA bullying a college kid during finals week. I have friends who are still in school (including one at RPI) and I can't get them to answer their phones during finals week, let alone defend against an attack from the pack of lawyers dispatched by the RIAA.
Sadly, I bet they deliberately chose this time of year to do this.
Now, I can sorta understand Robertson's opinion about root users, but I think Linux vendors have a certain responsibility, as do their potential customers.
If you want to use a Linux system, you should invest a small amount of time in learning about it. This could cover things like logging in, the file system (/ instead of C:), users and groups, basic shell commands, and "emergency" keyboard shortcuts (like ctrl-alt-backspace). Perhaps the installation screen can show this information, along with a hard-copy included in the box in cheat-sheet style.
Granted, there are a lot of things that should be handled by well-designed tools, instead of forcing the user to type in strange looking commands that start with dots and slashes. But some things should be prerequisite knowledge.
Microsoft avoided that idea, and while their software sells, their users are generally not very knowledgeable. Had they given users a better crash-course, the computing landscape might be much more powerful today. Same thing with America Online - they made connecting to the internet very, very easy. But that ease-of-use has produced a widespread stereotype that AOL'ers are idiots.
The question is, do we want a bigger user base, or a better user base? The Dept of Motor Vehicles makes their users take two tests to get a license, why can't computer vendors ask users to learn just a little bit of info?
Root access by default might be easier, but I think just about everybody out there capable of buying a computer can manage to learn this very important -yet simple- lesson. If this distro were to bring Linux "to the masses" (which I don't think will happen), it will set a bad precedent about user logins.
"What a piece of shit!"
That's what I'm going to say the first time I see one.
I just happened to be in the studio (and have one more trip there on Saturday) and we recorded with ProTools. Now I'm not an expert on audio recording, and much of the credit for the recording quality goes to the engineer (and my band), but ProTools seems like an amazingly capable program. Not only could the engineer apply get a rich, warm sound in all the right places, but he could do this quickly!
We were sitting in the engineering room, listening to a recording and thinking aloud what doesn't sound quite right, and the engineer kept up with our train of thought. By the time the song was done, he had applied most of our ideas to the song and we listened to it a second time, with everything as it should be.
I suppose I should provide a link to the song, even though I'm not sure if I'm pimping or backing up my opinion: Flipside - it's where your secrets went to hide!
If a tool like this can make such a great sound, the super-high-end systems may be answering a question nobody has asked in ten years.
The idea of having elements of a document stay the same while others change has been around for a lot longer than SBC. The decision to do this with web pages was just a natural evolution, and really does not deserve a patent. What the hell does SBC make, anyway? Whatever it is, I'm not going to buy it
I thought frames weren't part of the browser until 3.0 came out. If I remember correctly, Netscape 2 had the ultra-ugly 'N' that had the "push in, push out" appearance, and the browser didn't support colored backgrounds or frames. I think I remember when frames came into existance, and I think it was with version 3.
But I could be wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.
I know that broadband is getting more popular, but do these idiots think that any home user is going to wait that long for an advertisement? People usually give up if the page doesn't load in 30 seconds! Unless you use Mozilla, and load the page in another tab in the background, of course.
Advertisers have no respect for people. To them, people are all consumers, and we will purchase whatever products they feed us, and they have to make sure that their verbiage is proactive enough, and that they have actionable items and all that other buzzword crap. I wish they'd just go back to using sex to sell. That still works, and I like looking at those ads.