If you can rationalize that as an evolutionary advantage then so too can you with humans. As hunters and gatherers I'm sure it was a huge advantage to keep in practice even when you didn't need food. Growing up, human children needed to hone their skills for when they had to provide for themselves and for others.
Even today, our hunters are better prepared should our highly technological civilization ever fail. If we should ever be thrust back into the stone age, so to speak, who do you think will survive? Geeks? Not likely. It'll be the hunters and outdoorsmen who already know how to live that way.
How is it a miracle when this is exactly what's been happening with consoles for many years?
NES looked better than nearly any computer of its day. Ditto Genesis and SNES. Playstation and N64 packed an incredible amount of power into a cheap bundle. Remember the hype about PS2's Emotion Engine? There were rumors that exporting it would be restricted because it was going to be classified as a super computer. People were saying Iraq was going to use it to guide missiles. Xbox literally was a cheap PC, but gave more bang for the buck than your average beige box.
Consoles do this by taking the right shortcuts. They have a very focused performance target for very specific tasks. No need to add anything more than the minimum. Plus, they sell more than nearly any OEM PC maker so they get good prices on the parts.
"The muscular guy is there to keep male geeks interested (in an escapist "I'm-a-muscle-clad-jock-now" sort of way) just the same as the female form is there as a sexual icon."
Why can't the reverse be true? Why can't a woman gamer "escape" into the life of a gaming heroine, complete with incredible curves and wavey hair? Why can't a woman gamer look at a muscular hero and see him as a sex object?
The difference here hasn't to do with games, only, if anything, the social views of the player him/herself.
Now that I've taken a closer look at Thunderbird's tabs I will offer my opinion: they are doing it wrong. Tabs should replace all windows, but Thunderbird's tabs seem to only allow tabbing through the small email preview box.
What I'd like to see is a fully tabbed interface where the address book would open in a tab, an integrated Sunbird calendar would open in another tab (if Sunbird is installed), each email would open in their own tabs, etc.
Simply tabbing through previews seems like a half-assed way to do it. It still looks moderately useful at the expense of having an inconsistent interface.
There are only two comments above my threshold right now and both are negative, however, if you've tried the Opera email client you will know that tabs are a good thing. Email tabs are not quite as useful as web browser tabs, but they are equally as good as file manager tabs (Konqueror, anyone?).
Since I've switched from Opera to Kmail for my email it's the one thing I've missed. Don't knock it until you try it. With any luck, Thunderbird tabs will be implemented as well as Opera tabs.
This, were it to pass, would effectively shut out France and French OSS developers while not changing a damn thing anywhere else. OSS will still be available to anyone in France who wishes to download it, but France will have been cut out of a large and quickly growing segment of the tech industry. The most popular server OS, most popular web server, Internet DNS, and most popular MTA, among other software, will no longer be legal in France. How will they even route their Internet traffic?
"knowing Gentoo this will be in the tree in the next 5 minutes"
Kubuntu already has it, just as they've released the beta and RC releases the same day as release.
Re:Google Maps and Blogger
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"Now email google to fix both of them so we don't have to do these silly workarounds."
I did email Google about that issue (I emailed Google Local because that's where I was at the time. Same problem there). I simply asked that they add Konqueror's user agent to the supported browsers after stating that the browser did work when I switched the user agent. This is their response.
-------------- local-help@google.com to me Nov 17
Thank you for your note. It appears that you're having trouble using Google Local because you're using a browser that is not fully supported. In order to obtain full functionality of Google Local, please use one of the supported browsers listed in our Help Center at http://local.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answ er=16532&topic=1499
We appreciate your taking the time to send us your feedback regarding the use of Konqueror with Google Local. We'll keep your comments in mind as we continue to make improvements to this service.
Regards, The Google Team ---------------------
Utterly frustrating. Sounds like a bot may have wrote that:(
"Anyone here using KOffice in a "real world" environment? The last time I attempted using it, I found it had tonnes of bugs!"
I primarily use OpenOffice.org 2.0, but keep KOffice around because it's very fast and seems to work well. I may be able to replace OOo with KOffice if I bothered trying to figure out how to do the same things. OOo has an excellent dialog for parsing fixed-width delimited files in Calc and their Save as CSV dialog is second to none.
KOffice is good, but with OOo 2.0 around it always seems like my second choice. I have actually been able to use it to open a few XLS files that Calc wouldn't open.
Now, if there was just an easy way to get rid of that 65536 row limit, I'd be all set.
"Mac OSX and Windows may be proprietary DRM infected piles of shit... but they are damned sight more stable, integrated and complete than KDE... so is GNOME for that matter."
For one thing, they said it was the most stable, integrated and complete *free* desktop, so Windows and OS X don't count. However, I use KDE by choice at work even though I was encouraged to use Windows, could have used OS X and did try Gnome. I think KDE is more integrated than Windows or Gnome and is on par with OS X. Its features are second to none (Windows and OS X don't even compete with the features I use a lot, such as working with remote servers).
I think it's important to remember that everybody uses their computer in different ways. KDE is great for me and a lot of other people and it pisses us off when a condescending jerk like you tries to blow it off as crap just because you heard it was bloated (but can't provide proof) and think it may be buggy (but can't list any more bugs in KDE than any other DE) and say it's poorly organized (even though it's all customizable).
If you just want to run DNS for your own domains try everydns.net. It's free, but I always donate just to keep them running. They run an great service and have excellent support.
It basically means that Canadian politicians are persuaded by conspiracy theories while American politicans are bought by corporations.
Americans must be jealous.
Re:What was wrong with Azureus?
on
GCC 4.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
"Sun does provide the source code."
It's the restrictions on the Java source code that prevent it from being Free. Also, do they provide the JVM sources? If they did and it was a suitably free license then I'm sure running Java apps on weird architectures and OSes would be made much easier, but I'm pretty sure that lack of Free JVM sources is what's kept Java off these platforms.
The worst part is that some of these platforms are entrenched in enterprises because they run legacy apps that can't be replaced.
Re:What was wrong with Azureus?
on
GCC 4.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think they meant that it's integrated with itself, meaning the apps work together seamlessly to present the user with a nice desktop work environment.
I also haven't experienced your problems with network printers or Samba, but I use Kubuntu so maybe that makes a difference.
Western Digital SE drives are consumer-level drives not known for having high quality.
WD also sells IDE and SATA RE and RE2 enterprise drives with MTBFs of 1 - 1.2 million hours. Why would anybody want to halve the MTBF of their drive by getting an SE drive just to save $30?
Their RE and RE2 drives (or Raptor if you don't need huge capacity) are very high quality. These drives really kick ass and come in 8 MB (RE) and 16 MB (RE2) cache models. I bought four of the REs for a server and they've been performing flawlessly.
No, this is just some lame tech that's been around for a couple of years on some yellow pages-type sites. Almost nobody uses it. I'm not sure which companies offer this, but I do know it's available. Vonage's Click 2 Call is the exact same technology, although I'm not sure if it's available for this use or not (http://www.vonage.com/features.php?feature=click_ 2_call).
Quit heaping the praise on Google when they don't deserve it. They've done enough cool things that they don't need to get credit when they don't do anything.
The biggest innovation here is that this can be used for a generic web ad, while AFAIK all implementations have been for paid business listings on business directory sites or on corporate sites to make it easier to call.
Let's say over the next two weeks there are 100 posts of people having problems. Out of the total number of people who are having these problems, how many will post online about it? Maybe 1%, but probably more like 0.1% - 0.5% if the complaint to problem ratio is similar to other industries. And that's with only 100 complaints... I bet there may be a lot more.
There could easily be ten thousand or more faulty XBoxes. We could be talking about a hardware, firmware or OS problem that may or may not occur in a high percentage of XBoxes over the next few months. It's an unknown, but it's good that these problems are being called out early so MS can figure out if it's just a few bad hardware components or something more serious. Seeing as the HDD is optional I doubt a bad one would cause many in-game crashes except while saving. Any crash would likely be when the system booted and tried to mount the partition.
MP3 format... this is stuff people who care about music distribution should be supporting. You can bet if every band did this the price would drop as the USB drives would be much cheaper at that volume.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can rationalize that as an evolutionary advantage then so too can you with humans. As hunters and gatherers I'm sure it was a huge advantage to keep in practice even when you didn't need food. Growing up, human children needed to hone their skills for when they had to provide for themselves and for others.
Even today, our hunters are better prepared should our highly technological civilization ever fail. If we should ever be thrust back into the stone age, so to speak, who do you think will survive? Geeks? Not likely. It'll be the hunters and outdoorsmen who already know how to live that way.
How is it a miracle when this is exactly what's been happening with consoles for many years?
NES looked better than nearly any computer of its day. Ditto Genesis and SNES. Playstation and N64 packed an incredible amount of power into a cheap bundle. Remember the hype about PS2's Emotion Engine? There were rumors that exporting it would be restricted because it was going to be classified as a super computer. People were saying Iraq was going to use it to guide missiles. Xbox literally was a cheap PC, but gave more bang for the buck than your average beige box.
Consoles do this by taking the right shortcuts. They have a very focused performance target for very specific tasks. No need to add anything more than the minimum. Plus, they sell more than nearly any OEM PC maker so they get good prices on the parts.
"The muscular guy is there to keep male geeks interested (in an escapist "I'm-a-muscle-clad-jock-now" sort of way) just the same as the female form is there as a sexual icon."
Why can't the reverse be true? Why can't a woman gamer "escape" into the life of a gaming heroine, complete with incredible curves and wavey hair? Why can't a woman gamer look at a muscular hero and see him as a sex object?
The difference here hasn't to do with games, only, if anything, the social views of the player him/herself.
Now that I've taken a closer look at Thunderbird's tabs I will offer my opinion: they are doing it wrong. Tabs should replace all windows, but Thunderbird's tabs seem to only allow tabbing through the small email preview box.
What I'd like to see is a fully tabbed interface where the address book would open in a tab, an integrated Sunbird calendar would open in another tab (if Sunbird is installed), each email would open in their own tabs, etc.
Simply tabbing through previews seems like a half-assed way to do it. It still looks moderately useful at the expense of having an inconsistent interface.
There are only two comments above my threshold right now and both are negative, however, if you've tried the Opera email client you will know that tabs are a good thing. Email tabs are not quite as useful as web browser tabs, but they are equally as good as file manager tabs (Konqueror, anyone?).
Since I've switched from Opera to Kmail for my email it's the one thing I've missed. Don't knock it until you try it. With any luck, Thunderbird tabs will be implemented as well as Opera tabs.
This, were it to pass, would effectively shut out France and French OSS developers while not changing a damn thing anywhere else. OSS will still be available to anyone in France who wishes to download it, but France will have been cut out of a large and quickly growing segment of the tech industry. The most popular server OS, most popular web server, Internet DNS, and most popular MTA, among other software, will no longer be legal in France. How will they even route their Internet traffic?
Have they thought about this at all?
I know some journalists and they compete with each other to see who can make the worst puns.
"knowing Gentoo this will be in the tree in the next 5 minutes"
Kubuntu already has it, just as they've released the beta and RC releases the same day as release.
"Now email google to fix both of them so we don't have to do these silly workarounds."
w er=16532&topic=1499
:(
I did email Google about that issue (I emailed Google Local because that's where I was at the time. Same problem there). I simply asked that they add Konqueror's user agent to the supported browsers after stating that the browser did work when I switched the user agent. This is their response.
--------------
local-help@google.com to me
Nov 17
Thank you for your note. It appears that you're having trouble using
Google Local because you're using a browser that is not fully supported.
In order to obtain full functionality of Google Local, please use one of
the supported browsers listed in our Help Center at
http://local.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ans
We appreciate your taking the time to send us your feedback regarding the
use of Konqueror with Google Local. We'll keep your comments in mind as we
continue to make improvements to this service.
Regards,
The Google Team
---------------------
Utterly frustrating. Sounds like a bot may have wrote that
"Anyone here using KOffice in a "real world" environment? The last time I attempted using it, I found it had tonnes of bugs!"
I primarily use OpenOffice.org 2.0, but keep KOffice around because it's very fast and seems to work well. I may be able to replace OOo with KOffice if I bothered trying to figure out how to do the same things. OOo has an excellent dialog for parsing fixed-width delimited files in Calc and their Save as CSV dialog is second to none.
KOffice is good, but with OOo 2.0 around it always seems like my second choice. I have actually been able to use it to open a few XLS files that Calc wouldn't open.
Now, if there was just an easy way to get rid of that 65536 row limit, I'd be all set.
"Mac OSX and Windows may be proprietary DRM infected piles of shit... but they are damned sight more stable, integrated and complete than KDE... so is GNOME for that matter."
For one thing, they said it was the most stable, integrated and complete *free* desktop, so Windows and OS X don't count. However, I use KDE by choice at work even though I was encouraged to use Windows, could have used OS X and did try Gnome. I think KDE is more integrated than Windows or Gnome and is on par with OS X. Its features are second to none (Windows and OS X don't even compete with the features I use a lot, such as working with remote servers).
I think it's important to remember that everybody uses their computer in different ways. KDE is great for me and a lot of other people and it pisses us off when a condescending jerk like you tries to blow it off as crap just because you heard it was bloated (but can't provide proof) and think it may be buggy (but can't list any more bugs in KDE than any other DE) and say it's poorly organized (even though it's all customizable).
I have found Putty on Linux to be quite buggy. However, SecPanel does pretty much the same thing in a slightly uglier GUI.
If you just want to run DNS for your own domains try everydns.net. It's free, but I always donate just to keep them running. They run an great service and have excellent support.
It basically means that Canadian politicians are persuaded by conspiracy theories while American politicans are bought by corporations.
Americans must be jealous.
"Sun does provide the source code."
It's the restrictions on the Java source code that prevent it from being Free. Also, do they provide the JVM sources? If they did and it was a suitably free license then I'm sure running Java apps on weird architectures and OSes would be made much easier, but I'm pretty sure that lack of Free JVM sources is what's kept Java off these platforms.
The worst part is that some of these platforms are entrenched in enterprises because they run legacy apps that can't be replaced.
Not free as in beer, Free as in speech.
"But I just finished compiling 4.0"
You should have compiled it using 4.1. It's *much* faster.
I think they meant that it's integrated with itself, meaning the apps work together seamlessly to present the user with a nice desktop work environment.
I also haven't experienced your problems with network printers or Samba, but I use Kubuntu so maybe that makes a difference.
Canonical provides paid support for Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntulinux.org/support/supportoptions /paidsupport/)
Western Digital SE drives are consumer-level drives not known for having high quality.
WD also sells IDE and SATA RE and RE2 enterprise drives with MTBFs of 1 - 1.2 million hours. Why would anybody want to halve the MTBF of their drive by getting an SE drive just to save $30?
Their RE and RE2 drives (or Raptor if you don't need huge capacity) are very high quality. These drives really kick ass and come in 8 MB (RE) and 16 MB (RE2) cache models. I bought four of the REs for a server and they've been performing flawlessly.
No, this is just some lame tech that's been around for a couple of years on some yellow pages-type sites. Almost nobody uses it. I'm not sure which companies offer this, but I do know it's available. Vonage's Click 2 Call is the exact same technology, although I'm not sure if it's available for this use or not (http://www.vonage.com/features.php?feature=click_ 2_call).
Quit heaping the praise on Google when they don't deserve it. They've done enough cool things that they don't need to get credit when they don't do anything.
The biggest innovation here is that this can be used for a generic web ad, while AFAIK all implementations have been for paid business listings on business directory sites or on corporate sites to make it easier to call.
"As of Notes 7, you can use DB2 as the underlying data store"
That sounds cheap and efficient.
Let's say over the next two weeks there are 100 posts of people having problems. Out of the total number of people who are having these problems, how many will post online about it? Maybe 1%, but probably more like 0.1% - 0.5% if the complaint to problem ratio is similar to other industries. And that's with only 100 complaints... I bet there may be a lot more.
There could easily be ten thousand or more faulty XBoxes. We could be talking about a hardware, firmware or OS problem that may or may not occur in a high percentage of XBoxes over the next few months. It's an unknown, but it's good that these problems are being called out early so MS can figure out if it's just a few bad hardware components or something more serious. Seeing as the HDD is optional I doubt a bad one would cause many in-game crashes except while saving. Any crash would likely be when the system booted and tried to mount the partition.
MP3 format... this is stuff people who care about music distribution should be supporting. You can bet if every band did this the price would drop as the USB drives would be much cheaper at that volume.
First, Paris Hilton moves to Open Source and now MS is opening its most precious format! What's becoming of the world?