If I make a web page and make a personalized link to an ad image, hosted on my server, named as I see fit, ad blockers won't catch it. If I use a banner ad from some generic, random ad-server the blocker probably will.
In one case, the author of the web page is carefully choosing an appropriate accompanying ad. In the other they're allowing whatever random crap happens to pop up.
How do you get to those pages in the first place? I'd say 80% of the time it's through a search engine. When the search engine says "Here's a site that I think satisfies your search", does it say "The user of this site wishes to show you ads in exchange for their information"? No, they just give you a link.
The idea that there's an implied social contract for using a page before you even know if the page contains anything remotely useful is stupid. If the link you click on happens to be an ad-farm that fooled Google, is it your obligation to "fall for it", to look at this whole pile of crap ads?
The only time you could try to argue there's some kind of social contract is when someone says "I'm providing X for free, please donate some money to keep this service available". At that point, you have the option to evaluate the service before you make a decision.
I suppose you could stretch that to pretend that the ads are an unstated form of that plea, so if you visit a site regularly you should make sure their ads are enabled... but that's a real stretch.
The reality is, if you choose not to view ads, all you're doing is choosing to not conform to the business model that the creator intended. If I get a free "CueCat", that doesn't mean I have any societal obligation to support their stupid business model. If I buy a cheap printer, it doesn't mean I have a societal obligation to buy their overpriced ink. Similarly, if someone puts up a freely accessibl web site, I'm under no obligation to render the HTML in the way they hoped.
If you want to make sure someone sees the ads, make all the pages images. What? That's not pleasant for most people to use? It makes it hard to randomly rotate ads? Tough! It's a trade-off. Either use HTML and ad services and accept people might choose not to view the ads, or find another business model.
Drive slowly in Burnout 3? Isn't that kinda defeating the purpose of playing the game?
But seriously. The more I see ads like that in games, the more comfortable I feel not paying for them.
All I know is that the vast majority of ads in the future will be delivered over the network, not included in in-game texture files, and I'll either be using or developing software that blocks and/or modifies the data so that I don't see the ads.
There's also a matter of how the images are presented.
If the character would have a reason to be drinking a "cola" and happened to drink a Pepsi, fine. If the cola-drinking had no place in the plot, and suddenly the character grabbed a can, rotated it so the label faced out, drank a big gulp, made a satisfying "aaaah" sound, while the camera zoomed in on the label... that's whoring.
ABC's "Alias" is sponsored by Ford, and they only use Ford vehicles in the show. Most of the time you don't even notice, but every once in a while in a car chase the camera will linger a little too long on a logo, or on a shot that's more about the product being promoted than about the show.
Ooooooh... they put a big bulletin board on the wall in front of his door. How innovative!
Puleeeez. Aren't these guys supposed to be engineers?
On April 1, 1997 Sci'97 successfully staged one of the
funniest and most memorable Year Pranks on
record. The preparations for this event had begun two years
earlier. However, the plans were not executed until the wee
hours that night at the end of fourth year when elite
battalions of Sci'97s dispersed across campus. By dawn,
everything was in place. Among the most visible pranks were:
A 5-foot high digital clock, blinking
"12:00", placed on the picturesque Grant
Hall clock tower. At regular intervals an
extraordinarily loud alarm would ring across campus.
Unless the "snooze" button attached at the
bottom of Grant Hall was pressed the alarm would
continue.
Closure of the Faculty of Applied Science in Ellis
Hall. The office was boarded up and a note was
attached to the new "wall" stating that the
Queen's engineering program had been terminated due
to financial cutbacks. Only Sci'97 would be allowed
to graduate.
A letter to all the engineering frosh advising them
that the Faculty of Applied Science had lost its
accreditation, and they must transfer into Arts and
Science.
A much needed obstacle in the JDUC. The vital passage
between the Info Bank and copy centre was completely
sealed.
A new "tree" on campus. Last year, a tree
in front of the JDUC was removed so a new electronic
billboard display could be built. Sci'97 covered the
sign in paper mache to make it look like a tree.
Purple snow on University Avenue.
Banners in Stauffer Library that remembered patrons
that all library fines were payable to Sci'97.
I can't find pictures of the Grant Hall alarm clock, but here's Grant Hall to give you some idea of the scale of the alarm clock.
And that wall built in the JDUC (John Deutsch University Centre) was a full-scale drywall wall, painted to match the surroundings, hung with posters and other things, and generally made to look exactly like the walls next to it.
This is on top of individual departments doing their own thing. The physics department (i.e. me and some buds) made the physics lounge (a little sitting room) into a real lounge. We "borrowed" all kinds of fun things from the labs upstairs, physics labs and dance clubs having so much in common: lasers, strobe lights, clouds of liquid nitrogen vapours, etc.
Other years did similar fun things, like taking apart a car and rebuilding it around a light post, or rebuilding it inside a building on a second floor balcony.
Compared to that, putting a bulletin board in front of a guy's office is rather lame.
Case 1: CherryOS violates the license to some open source software by taking it, adding some slight functionality, and renaming it, claiming it's 100% original code.
Case 2: Tridge reverse-engineers the bitkeeper protocol / binary format, intending to release an open-source version.
Case 1: Violates source code license, used to do something illegal, taking open software and making it closed.
Case 2: Adheres to all laws and licenses, takes something closed and makes it open.
Tridge didn't use proprietary code, and he wasn't reverse engineering an open-source project. (What open-source project did you think he was reverse-engineering? Linux? Why would you need to reverse-engineer an open source project anyhow, rather than reading the source and chatting with the original developers?)
"companie seeis it... released there speces"? Please. Learn to write and spell.
What makes you think there will be "hundreds" of companies releasing copies of the product? Where do you get the 10% loss in sales figure from? Are you just pulling these figures out of your anus?
It's true of course that one fear of hardware manufacturers is that by releasing drivers that are too open, they will give competitors an insight into their hardware, and will lose a competitive advantage. How true is this? I don't know, I haven't studied the market like I assume they must have. Obviously, nVidia thinks that there is some competitive advantage to be gained in making their drivers somewhat easy to use under Linux. Both they and ATI provide some support for Linux users, it just pales in comparison to what they offer to Windows users.
Name me a modern graphics card that has really good Linux drivers. nVidia's binary drivers are marginally better behaving than ATI's binary drivers, but neither really works well. ATI and nVidia have essentially split the graphics card market in two. Would it be a competitive advantage for them to make sure their drivers worked better under Linux? I would think so, but I assume they've done their research and think it's not worth it.
For devices where the products offer exactly the same features, the competition is on price and ease-of-use. In that case, it makes sense for the hardware manufacturers to focus on ease-of-use for Linux, but since Linux is only a small percentage of the possible user base, it's not really worth more than a small percentage of the overall effort.
The biggest problem I see is that there's nothing to show the manufacturs that you're voting with your dollars based on linux compatibility. If I buy an nVidia card instead of an ATI card, nothing tells nVidia that I did it because their drivers are marginally better. They may think it's their flashy commercials that got me, or the bundles, or heck, even the box art.
The sad thing about linux hardware compatibility is the chicken and egg thing. Linux users are a small fraction of the market, so they're not worth the effort. Linux doesn't support the latest hardware easily, so Linux isn't worth the effort.
What I'd love to see is a "system builder" for Linux desktops. I've been using Linux on the desktop for hmm... 10 years? I still have problems figuring out what the optimal components to choose are. What I'd love to do would be to go to some random website and pick-and-choose components to create a Linux machine, making sure along the way that each piece I chose was as compatible as possible.
Hmm... maybe that's a good Rails project for me to play with.
Cartridges are fast and battery-efficient. Discs are slow and inefficient. If they're going to use something proprietary, why use something slow and battery draining?
There's also the reported problems with the square button. If they couldn't get that right, it makes me wonder what else they got wrong. I'm tempted to get one, but I think I'll wait for a hardware respin, assuming there's enough demand for that.
I also wonder if some enterprising person will manage to put games on the memory sticks. The proprietary-CD-thingy seems like an awful mistake to me.
Uh... your father in law didn't lose most of his crop because the University was slow to get back to him. He lost most of his crop because something was eating them. He was lucky enough not to lose all of it because the University helped him out.
I personally don't see the value of voice-to-search features. I think image searching is good, but really, really hard. AI to better understand what people want to find would be a killer feature (but is also really, really hard).
Armored vehicles don't all look the same. APCs look different than tanks, which look different than tank-killers which look different from mobile artillery.
To even be defined as a "tank", something would have to look pretty similar: tracks and a main gun. But there's a lot of variety there. How many crew members? How big? How high off the ground?
The main problem with Robot Wars (and the like) is the rules. They essentially define an ecosystem where "survival of the fittest" plays out. Some of the constraints that define this ecosystem are:
A flat floor
Hard walls surrounding the play surface
Most matches are 1 on 1
A 5 minute or so time limit
No explosives, projectiles etc allowed
What I'd do to make these shows more entertaining is this. First, dump the "flat floor". That results in all these low-slung wedge bots winning everything. That's boring. Make the floor uneven and rough. Maybe even add thigns like puddles, potholes, sand, gravel, etc. Hey, take a typical street in the north east and you'd be set. Secondly, have a variety of different ways of completely destroying the robots. Third, have classes of matches that are 2 on 2, or other mix-ups. That way you could have one robot that specialized in trapping other bots, and then another one that specialized in destroying them. The trapper bot could be fast, but with almost no offensive capabilities other than trapping the other bots, the destructive one could be slow, but really heavy-hitting. Finally, do something to actively encourage the use of nasty things, like guns, explosives, etc.
Consider this environment. The theme is a city street. The bots start on the sidewalks on opposite sides of the street. The street is filled with potholes, puddles, and gravel, and every once in a while a car comes barreling down the street, smoking any robot in its path. A successful robot in that arena would have to be able to maneuver out of the way of oncoming vehicles, would have to have the clearance to get up onto the opposite sidewalk, and to avoid the potholes, and would need a way to destroy the opponent. This could be done by pushing it in front of a car, by shooting it, or who knows what else.
A second battlefield could be "trench warfare in a thunderstorm". The robots would have to fight eachother across rough terrain that is occasionally raked by machine gun fire. Occasional lightning bolts would fire down from the sky, hitting the best path to ground.
A third battlefield could be "D Day" where the bots fight on a sandy beach with mines scattered on it, maybe with some occasional shore bombardment if something doesn't move often enough. Robots would have to cope with driving over sand, would have to avoid being pushed into the ocean, and would have to
I think the keys to making it interesting is to mix up the battlefields. Don't allow the robot makers to become super specialized in one particular battlefield, because that gets boring quickly. Make some battlefields advantageous for nimble robots with proximity weapons, and others advantageous for stationary robots with attached machine guns.
Well, the flash demo shows exactly that for Autopackage.
What I want is similar, but also radically different. I want to be able to install system packages without using the root password. I want these GUI installers to know about "sudo" not just "su".
If I'm in the 'wheel' group, and sudoers is set up properly, I should be able to do all sysadmin tasks as me, knowing only my password, not the root password. That mostly works on my system now, until I use a GUI program, which insists on knowing my *root* password. Why!?
There are a few exceptions to that rule of thumb, but not many. Take cars though. My all-time favourite car game is Interstate 76. They had all fake cars with names suggestive of the real thing. That just added to the fun. Same thing with the Grand Theft Auto games. Using non-licensed things is better because you don't have to make it fully realistic, and because you don't have to treat the licensed things with "respect".
Sure, and you can modify permissions and users and all that in Linux from the GUI. I was just rewriting what the guy said using Linux instead of Windows.
Really, the complaint was that "Linux isn't like Windows", which is true, but doesn't mean Linux is worse. I just wanted to illustrate that by writing what he wrote almost word-for-word.
I was just rewriting what the other guy said word-for-word about Windows. Sure, many people who are used to GUIs want to use GUIs. Many people who are used to consoles hate having to use GUIs.
As for "setup.exe" working without an internet connection, the same is true for Linux software you buy on a CD. The difference is, most people download Linux software because it's free. Oh yeah -- and try installing and using Half-Life 2 sometime without having an internet connection.
Installing software has changed a fair amount over the years. It used to be "copy the files over", then it became "run install.exe", then it became "run setup.exe", then it became "stick in the CD and it will (mostly) automatically work". These are fairly slow and minor changes though, but the same could be said for any given Linux distro.
As for install GUIs, the last time I installed RedHat it was actually easier than installing Windows. Windows had problems with my video card, and gave me all kinds of headaches. RedHat just worked. But, that was a long time ago. Maybe Windows has gotten better since then.
Writing a good installer is hard, and if MS can't do it well with their billions of dollars, it's amazing that you can get even close with free software. It doesn't help that all the device manufacturers consider Windows as their primary platform and only consider Linux as an afterthought, if at all.
In the end, I think Knoppix is the way to go. You don't have to install anything at all, and for the most part, it "just works".
Linux is easier to use. I can't use any version of Windows and install programs the same ways. Under gentoo, most programs are just "emerge foo" and the program installs for you. Sure Windows has its setup.exe and install.exe. However, in no way will this carry over to new Windows versions. Windows is still very user-hostile overall. There's no easy way to setup users and permissions or anything like that unless you UTFG (use the f*cking gui). Most experienced users don't want to UTFG =\
...
Oh yeah, and what's with *paying* for things? When I want a program I just "emerge foo". In windows you have to drive to a store and *buy a box*. How crazy and user-unfriendly is that?? And then there's that whole EULA wizard install garbage. I just want to use the program! I don't want to have to hand over my firstborn son. (Yeah, I'm talking to you Macromedia! I read your license agreement!)
Yeah, I don't think this "Windows" thing will ever take off.
Thanks, but you kinda missed the point. At least you were a bit closer than the other people who replied.
I know you can have make be silent. I know you can log its output. I know you can split its stdout from its stderr. I know all that. There's a reason I mentioned a GUI.
--silent doesn't cut it. If there's an error, then I don't have the context of that error. What I need is some way to have it be quiet when things are going well, but verbose when they fail. I don't just need the stderr when they fail either. I need to know things like "Entering directory foo"
I know all the info is available, but if the error occurs on directory 543 of a 858 directory process, I don't want to have to sift through the first 543 lines of output to find the context. That's why said I wanted it silent by default, but verbose when there's an error.
When showing the commandline, the problem isn't knowing what to see, it's trying to understand and parse all that data. If things were nice and GUI, I could imagine that it would be able to tell me it ran gcc, with include paths X, Y, Z, with commandline defines M, N, O, with language options P, Q, R, with machine options S, T, U.
As for which tool's responsibility it is to colorize the output -- um, the GUI tool I'm imagining.:)
Most of this sort of thing is already done, at least to some extent, in GUI IDEs like kdevelop. The thing is, sometimes you don't want, or can't easily use a full IDE. For instance, when compiling a kernel, the makefiles and procedures are already in place for you. You don't want to create a new project, you just want to build the kernel. On the other hand, if something blows up while you're compiling the kernel, you want to know, and you don't want information overload.
I don't think you can do what I want with existing make / GCC options. I really think to do it right you'd need a wrapper. You could pipe the output of make/gcc to the wrapper, and then it could format the output all pretty-like.
Funny, but it does highlight something that annoys me. Make/gcc output.
For the last few weeks I've been compiling a set of apps that's about 5x bigger than just the Linux kernel (it includes the kernel too). Watching the make/gcc output scroll by I've decided one thing: I *hate* it.
GCC itself is fine. It only does something when there are errors. Make, on the other hand, spits out every command it runs and all kinds of things that I really don't care about.
Without the bloat of a full-fledged IDE, is there such a thing as a make-wrapper GUI? Here's what I'd want:
Don't show me what commands are being run by default. 95% of the time, I don't care what commands make is running, I just want to know what went wrong. On the other hand, don't just throw out the output. If something goes wrong, I might need that output.
Show me errors, but give me context. It's great to know that there's an "undefined reference to 'ide_xlate_1024'", but what's the context leading up to that? What directory was it in? What command caused that error? What was the first error in a series? What was the environment? What were the commandline args?
If I *do* want to see the output of a command, don't just give me the raw commandline. When the commandline is 800 characters long, parsing all the switches with a Mark 1 eyeball is too damn difficult.
Syntax highlighting! -I/dir could look different from -DEMBED which could look different from -Wall. Errors could be highlighted too: "Undefined reference" should look different from "warning foo redefined", which could look different from "conditional is always true due to limited range of operands" (or however it's phrased)
I'm sure I could come up with some more enhancements, but that would really make me happy. I know the 2.6 kernel has gone a few steps in this direction but it is far from enough.
The commandline itself isn't bad... but I hate how debian handles packages.
Last time I checked, if you apt-get installed a network application, it would be started right away, even before it was configured. How ridiculous is that? It also mangles the configuration files for applications. Exim is an example of this. I have to edit/etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template, being careful to avoid breaking the domainlist local_domains = DEBCONFlocal_domainsDEBCONF lines.
I guess it's not apt itself that I don't like, it's everything else about debian's packages and package management.
And of course, the reason the tax code is so messed up is that so many people have a stake in keeping it complicated -- you know, people like the ones who sell Tax Cut.
I suspect because so many apps and OS bits have hard-coded font sizes and squinting is un-cool.
I suspect you're right... but what makes that even more stupid is that OS X in theory should be resolution-independent. Wasn't that part of the goal of the whole Quartz thing? You really aught to be able to change resolution from 800x600 to 1600x1200 and just have the sharpness of the on-screen images change. OS/2 did it 10 years ago! Besides, there are a whole lot of people who wouldn't have to squint when looking at a 1600x1200 15" screen.
I hear the Pentium Ms can get between 3 and 11 hours of battery life, depending on what you have turned on (wireless, display brightness, CD drives spinning) and what you're using it for (editing text vs. compiling kernels). I get about 3ish hours on my iBook, which is enough unless I'm on a plane, and if my 600MHz G3 iBook weren't so old, I'd just keep it. I just wish the display was as big an upgrade as the rest of the machine will be.
Slashdot Mirror
If I make a web page and make a personalized link to an ad image, hosted on my server, named as I see fit, ad blockers won't catch it. If I use a banner ad from some generic, random ad-server the blocker probably will.
In one case, the author of the web page is carefully choosing an appropriate accompanying ad. In the other they're allowing whatever random crap happens to pop up.
How do you get to those pages in the first place? I'd say 80% of the time it's through a search engine. When the search engine says "Here's a site that I think satisfies your search", does it say "The user of this site wishes to show you ads in exchange for their information"? No, they just give you a link.
The idea that there's an implied social contract for using a page before you even know if the page contains anything remotely useful is stupid. If the link you click on happens to be an ad-farm that fooled Google, is it your obligation to "fall for it", to look at this whole pile of crap ads?
The only time you could try to argue there's some kind of social contract is when someone says "I'm providing X for free, please donate some money to keep this service available". At that point, you have the option to evaluate the service before you make a decision.
I suppose you could stretch that to pretend that the ads are an unstated form of that plea, so if you visit a site regularly you should make sure their ads are enabled... but that's a real stretch.
The reality is, if you choose not to view ads, all you're doing is choosing to not conform to the business model that the creator intended. If I get a free "CueCat", that doesn't mean I have any societal obligation to support their stupid business model. If I buy a cheap printer, it doesn't mean I have a societal obligation to buy their overpriced ink. Similarly, if someone puts up a freely accessibl web site, I'm under no obligation to render the HTML in the way they hoped.
If you want to make sure someone sees the ads, make all the pages images. What? That's not pleasant for most people to use? It makes it hard to randomly rotate ads? Tough! It's a trade-off. Either use HTML and ad services and accept people might choose not to view the ads, or find another business model.
Drive slowly in Burnout 3? Isn't that kinda defeating the purpose of playing the game?
But seriously. The more I see ads like that in games, the more comfortable I feel not paying for them.
All I know is that the vast majority of ads in the future will be delivered over the network, not included in in-game texture files, and I'll either be using or developing software that blocks and/or modifies the data so that I don't see the ads.
My game machine, my eyeballs, my ads.
There's also a matter of how the images are presented.
If the character would have a reason to be drinking a "cola" and happened to drink a Pepsi, fine. If the cola-drinking had no place in the plot, and suddenly the character grabbed a can, rotated it so the label faced out, drank a big gulp, made a satisfying "aaaah" sound, while the camera zoomed in on the label... that's whoring.
ABC's "Alias" is sponsored by Ford, and they only use Ford vehicles in the show. Most of the time you don't even notice, but every once in a while in a car chase the camera will linger a little too long on a logo, or on a shot that's more about the product being promoted than about the show.
That sucks.
Reminds me of the theft of the U of T goalposts by Queen's University engineers.
Ooooooh... they put a big bulletin board on the wall in front of his door. How innovative!
Puleeeez. Aren't these guys supposed to be engineers?
[Link]
I can't find pictures of the Grant Hall alarm clock, but here's Grant Hall to give you some idea of the scale of the alarm clock.
And that wall built in the JDUC (John Deutsch University Centre) was a full-scale drywall wall, painted to match the surroundings, hung with posters and other things, and generally made to look exactly like the walls next to it.
This is on top of individual departments doing their own thing. The physics department (i.e. me and some buds) made the physics lounge (a little sitting room) into a real lounge. We "borrowed" all kinds of fun things from the labs upstairs, physics labs and dance clubs having so much in common: lasers, strobe lights, clouds of liquid nitrogen vapours, etc.
Other years did similar fun things, like taking apart a car and rebuilding it around a light post, or rebuilding it inside a building on a second floor balcony.
Compared to that, putting a bulletin board in front of a guy's office is rather lame.
Case 1: CherryOS violates the license to some open source software by taking it, adding some slight functionality, and renaming it, claiming it's 100% original code.
Case 2: Tridge reverse-engineers the bitkeeper protocol / binary format, intending to release an open-source version.
Case 1: Violates source code license, used to do something illegal, taking open software and making it closed.
Case 2: Adheres to all laws and licenses, takes something closed and makes it open.
Tridge didn't use proprietary code, and he wasn't reverse engineering an open-source project. (What open-source project did you think he was reverse-engineering? Linux? Why would you need to reverse-engineer an open source project anyhow, rather than reading the source and chatting with the original developers?)
"companie seeis it ... released there speces"? Please. Learn to write and spell.
What makes you think there will be "hundreds" of companies releasing copies of the product? Where do you get the 10% loss in sales figure from? Are you just pulling these figures out of your anus?
It's true of course that one fear of hardware manufacturers is that by releasing drivers that are too open, they will give competitors an insight into their hardware, and will lose a competitive advantage. How true is this? I don't know, I haven't studied the market like I assume they must have. Obviously, nVidia thinks that there is some competitive advantage to be gained in making their drivers somewhat easy to use under Linux. Both they and ATI provide some support for Linux users, it just pales in comparison to what they offer to Windows users.
Well, no, there aren't. That's the whole point.
Name me a modern graphics card that has really good Linux drivers. nVidia's binary drivers are marginally better behaving than ATI's binary drivers, but neither really works well. ATI and nVidia have essentially split the graphics card market in two. Would it be a competitive advantage for them to make sure their drivers worked better under Linux? I would think so, but I assume they've done their research and think it's not worth it.
For devices where the products offer exactly the same features, the competition is on price and ease-of-use. In that case, it makes sense for the hardware manufacturers to focus on ease-of-use for Linux, but since Linux is only a small percentage of the possible user base, it's not really worth more than a small percentage of the overall effort.
The biggest problem I see is that there's nothing to show the manufacturs that you're voting with your dollars based on linux compatibility. If I buy an nVidia card instead of an ATI card, nothing tells nVidia that I did it because their drivers are marginally better. They may think it's their flashy commercials that got me, or the bundles, or heck, even the box art.
The sad thing about linux hardware compatibility is the chicken and egg thing. Linux users are a small fraction of the market, so they're not worth the effort. Linux doesn't support the latest hardware easily, so Linux isn't worth the effort.
What I'd love to see is a "system builder" for Linux desktops. I've been using Linux on the desktop for hmm... 10 years? I still have problems figuring out what the optimal components to choose are. What I'd love to do would be to go to some random website and pick-and-choose components to create a Linux machine, making sure along the way that each piece I chose was as compatible as possible.
Hmm... maybe that's a good Rails project for me to play with.
Cartridges are fast and battery-efficient. Discs are slow and inefficient. If they're going to use something proprietary, why use something slow and battery draining?
There's also the reported problems with the square button. If they couldn't get that right, it makes me wonder what else they got wrong. I'm tempted to get one, but I think I'll wait for a hardware respin, assuming there's enough demand for that.
I also wonder if some enterprising person will manage to put games on the memory sticks. The proprietary-CD-thingy seems like an awful mistake to me.
Uh... your father in law didn't lose most of his crop because the University was slow to get back to him. He lost most of his crop because something was eating them. He was lucky enough not to lose all of it because the University helped him out.
I personally don't see the value of voice-to-search features. I think image searching is good, but really, really hard. AI to better understand what people want to find would be a killer feature (but is also really, really hard).
Armored vehicles don't all look the same. APCs look different than tanks, which look different than tank-killers which look different from mobile artillery.
To even be defined as a "tank", something would have to look pretty similar: tracks and a main gun. But there's a lot of variety there. How many crew members? How big? How high off the ground?
The main problem with Robot Wars (and the like) is the rules. They essentially define an ecosystem where "survival of the fittest" plays out. Some of the constraints that define this ecosystem are:
What I'd do to make these shows more entertaining is this. First, dump the "flat floor". That results in all these low-slung wedge bots winning everything. That's boring. Make the floor uneven and rough. Maybe even add thigns like puddles, potholes, sand, gravel, etc. Hey, take a typical street in the north east and you'd be set. Secondly, have a variety of different ways of completely destroying the robots. Third, have classes of matches that are 2 on 2, or other mix-ups. That way you could have one robot that specialized in trapping other bots, and then another one that specialized in destroying them. The trapper bot could be fast, but with almost no offensive capabilities other than trapping the other bots, the destructive one could be slow, but really heavy-hitting. Finally, do something to actively encourage the use of nasty things, like guns, explosives, etc.
Consider this environment. The theme is a city street. The bots start on the sidewalks on opposite sides of the street. The street is filled with potholes, puddles, and gravel, and every once in a while a car comes barreling down the street, smoking any robot in its path. A successful robot in that arena would have to be able to maneuver out of the way of oncoming vehicles, would have to have the clearance to get up onto the opposite sidewalk, and to avoid the potholes, and would need a way to destroy the opponent. This could be done by pushing it in front of a car, by shooting it, or who knows what else.
A second battlefield could be "trench warfare in a thunderstorm". The robots would have to fight eachother across rough terrain that is occasionally raked by machine gun fire. Occasional lightning bolts would fire down from the sky, hitting the best path to ground.
A third battlefield could be "D Day" where the bots fight on a sandy beach with mines scattered on it, maybe with some occasional shore bombardment if something doesn't move often enough. Robots would have to cope with driving over sand, would have to avoid being pushed into the ocean, and would have to
I think the keys to making it interesting is to mix up the battlefields. Don't allow the robot makers to become super specialized in one particular battlefield, because that gets boring quickly. Make some battlefields advantageous for nimble robots with proximity weapons, and others advantageous for stationary robots with attached machine guns.
Well, the flash demo shows exactly that for Autopackage.
What I want is similar, but also radically different. I want to be able to install system packages without using the root password. I want these GUI installers to know about "sudo" not just "su".
If I'm in the 'wheel' group, and sudoers is set up properly, I should be able to do all sysadmin tasks as me, knowing only my password, not the root password. That mostly works on my system now, until I use a GUI program, which insists on knowing my *root* password. Why!?
Yay. Advice on how to avoid advertising in a post containing an obtrusive link to an e-commerce site.
Even with .sigs turned off, people insist on plugging their pages at the bottom of their posts.
How about a "good info, annoying post" moderation?
There are a few exceptions to that rule of thumb, but not many. Take cars though. My all-time favourite car game is Interstate 76. They had all fake cars with names suggestive of the real thing. That just added to the fun. Same thing with the Grand Theft Auto games. Using non-licensed things is better because you don't have to make it fully realistic, and because you don't have to treat the licensed things with "respect".
Sure, and you can modify permissions and users and all that in Linux from the GUI. I was just rewriting what the guy said using Linux instead of Windows.
Really, the complaint was that "Linux isn't like Windows", which is true, but doesn't mean Linux is worse. I just wanted to illustrate that by writing what he wrote almost word-for-word.
I was just rewriting what the other guy said word-for-word about Windows. Sure, many people who are used to GUIs want to use GUIs. Many people who are used to consoles hate having to use GUIs.
As for "setup.exe" working without an internet connection, the same is true for Linux software you buy on a CD. The difference is, most people download Linux software because it's free. Oh yeah -- and try installing and using Half-Life 2 sometime without having an internet connection.
Installing software has changed a fair amount over the years. It used to be "copy the files over", then it became "run install.exe", then it became "run setup.exe", then it became "stick in the CD and it will (mostly) automatically work". These are fairly slow and minor changes though, but the same could be said for any given Linux distro.
As for install GUIs, the last time I installed RedHat it was actually easier than installing Windows. Windows had problems with my video card, and gave me all kinds of headaches. RedHat just worked. But, that was a long time ago. Maybe Windows has gotten better since then.
Writing a good installer is hard, and if MS can't do it well with their billions of dollars, it's amazing that you can get even close with free software. It doesn't help that all the device manufacturers consider Windows as their primary platform and only consider Linux as an afterthought, if at all.
In the end, I think Knoppix is the way to go. You don't have to install anything at all, and for the most part, it "just works".
Linux is easier to use. I can't use any version of Windows and install programs the same ways. Under gentoo, most programs are just "emerge foo" and the program installs for you. Sure Windows has its setup.exe and install.exe. However, in no way will this carry over to new Windows versions. Windows is still very user-hostile overall. There's no easy way to setup users and permissions or anything like that unless you UTFG (use the f*cking gui). Most experienced users don't want to UTFG =\
Oh yeah, and what's with *paying* for things? When I want a program I just "emerge foo". In windows you have to drive to a store and *buy a box*. How crazy and user-unfriendly is that?? And then there's that whole EULA wizard install garbage. I just want to use the program! I don't want to have to hand over my firstborn son. (Yeah, I'm talking to you Macromedia! I read your license agreement!)
Yeah, I don't think this "Windows" thing will ever take off.
Thanks, but you kinda missed the point. At least you were a bit closer than the other people who replied.
I know you can have make be silent. I know you can log its output. I know you can split its stdout from its stderr. I know all that. There's a reason I mentioned a GUI.
Most of this sort of thing is already done, at least to some extent, in GUI IDEs like kdevelop. The thing is, sometimes you don't want, or can't easily use a full IDE. For instance, when compiling a kernel, the makefiles and procedures are already in place for you. You don't want to create a new project, you just want to build the kernel. On the other hand, if something blows up while you're compiling the kernel, you want to know, and you don't want information overload.
I don't think you can do what I want with existing make / GCC options. I really think to do it right you'd need a wrapper. You could pipe the output of make/gcc to the wrapper, and then it could format the output all pretty-like.
Funny, but it does highlight something that annoys me. Make/gcc output.
For the last few weeks I've been compiling a set of apps that's about 5x bigger than just the Linux kernel (it includes the kernel too). Watching the make/gcc output scroll by I've decided one thing: I *hate* it.
GCC itself is fine. It only does something when there are errors. Make, on the other hand, spits out every command it runs and all kinds of things that I really don't care about.
Without the bloat of a full-fledged IDE, is there such a thing as a make-wrapper GUI? Here's what I'd want:
I'm sure I could come up with some more enhancements, but that would really make me happy. I know the 2.6 kernel has gone a few steps in this direction but it is far from enough.
Ugh. Apt.
The commandline itself isn't bad... but I hate how debian handles packages.
Last time I checked, if you apt-get installed a network application, it would be started right away, even before it was configured. How ridiculous is that? It also mangles the configuration files for applications. Exim is an example of this. I have to edit /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template, being careful to avoid breaking the domainlist local_domains = DEBCONFlocal_domainsDEBCONF lines.
I guess it's not apt itself that I don't like, it's everything else about debian's packages and package management.
And of course, the reason the tax code is so messed up is that so many people have a stake in keeping it complicated -- you know, people like the ones who sell Tax Cut.
Yeah, states where homosexuality is considered more threatening than firearms. Ah, smart those flyover state denizens are.
Ever thought that maybe crime-per-capita is more a function of population density?
I suspect you're right... but what makes that even more stupid is that OS X in theory should be resolution-independent. Wasn't that part of the goal of the whole Quartz thing? You really aught to be able to change resolution from 800x600 to 1600x1200 and just have the sharpness of the on-screen images change. OS/2 did it 10 years ago! Besides, there are a whole lot of people who wouldn't have to squint when looking at a 1600x1200 15" screen.
I hear the Pentium Ms can get between 3 and 11 hours of battery life, depending on what you have turned on (wireless, display brightness, CD drives spinning) and what you're using it for (editing text vs. compiling kernels). I get about 3ish hours on my iBook, which is enough unless I'm on a plane, and if my 600MHz G3 iBook weren't so old, I'd just keep it. I just wish the display was as big an upgrade as the rest of the machine will be.