You know what's the most interesting thing about your linked Slashdot article? It appears that in 2000, Slashdot didn't have Interesting/Insightful/Funny moderations, just numerical scores
Boom. There. Right there. There's your problem. If you're a fellow American, if you're a fellow member of Western Civilization, how does that not offend you to your core? "Their lives exist solely for someone else's profit" is the working definition of slavery. How can you possibly find this to be an acceptable situation?
Well I'm a fellow Australia actually, but that's still western so it's all good. Anyway, yet it does offend me (the bit about people being slaves, not the bit about being Australian). Now I don't possibly think this is an acceptable situation. But on my own, I am completely powerless to do anything about it because I simply don't have the power or leverage to make things better on a grand scale.
All I can do is follow my moral code, try to be consistent and not hypocritical with my actions, and encourage others (without being an annoying zealot) when asked why I think the way I do. It's all any of us can do really.
Yes, it all sounds very crap to work there. But what are the alternatives?
1) The human workers are replaced by robots - this is unlikely to happen since human labor in China is so plentiful and desperate as to make it actually cheaper to "run" humans than robots. But even if it did eventually happen, you'd end up with a whole lot of people without work (and all the associated problems this creates). Menial factory work at least gives them something to do, even if their lives exist solely for someone else's profit.
2) Improve conditions, reasonable work hours, etc - sounds great, except that if one factory does this, another factory will advertise how they haven't, and so businesses will go to the other factory as they wouldn't have to deal with the reduced output and increased costs of having to treat humans like... well, humans.
3) Improvement of conditions, reasonable work hours via Government mandate - so the factories don't have any choice now and are forced to treat people like they should (more or less). Great, except that this will rise the cost of the products created and the costs will naturally be passed onto consumers in first-world countries. The electronics we buy are as cheap as they are precisely in a large part due to the slave work done in countries far away from us. Would people complain if prices went up as conditions in said countries improved? Damn right they would, unfortunately.
So what do you do? You could buy local, or at least try to. Sometimes that works, but in most cases it's not even possible, and odds are you'll find components that were sourced from the less desirable factories anyway. You can't win, short of abandoning almost all forms of modern electronic equipment. There simply isn't enough pressure to change the statue quo.
Maybe a combination carrot and stick approach is required? Have a bounty for the worst bugs, were people donate to get them fixed, and at the same time have a set schedule, say 5 years, per software release when it comes to things that the system counts on. That way the devs can't just keep putting out new versions willy nilly because the distros won't add them to the repo and would have an incentive to actually work on what they have instead of through the baby out with the bathwater like they did with the DEs and sound subsystem.
Occasionally I will donate to open source projects (particularly if they have an easy method of donating like PayPal) if I use the software often and feel it's worth a bit of cash if it will help with future development. Although I haven't done it yet I'm likely to donate to Linux Mint as they seem to be doing the best job (in my opinion of course) in making an easy-to-use Linux distro with sane defaults and decisions. But I know I cannot use that money as a method of enforcing improvements - it's a donation; you can only hope it will help provide incentive/resources to continue development.
Take it from me: if you time things right you can afford all sorts of games that you'll never have time to actually play.
Isn't that a bad thing though? Why buy stuff you won't have time to play? To be fair, I used to do this as well, but then I noticed that given the backlog of games I was becoming impatient when playing certain games if they were taking longer than expected to finish. So I'd rush them, or simply abandon them for the next unplayed game. This doesn't sit well with me, as it seems like a waste and more about quantity rather than quality.
But hey, Valve know how to get gamers to open their wallets for games they don't even play. It's a good strategy actually - until you realize how much money is wasted (cumulatively of course - games on Steam generally aren't that costly on their own, but added together...)
FWIW I don't have problems with sound drivers on Ubuntu and I doubt there are issues in any other modern Linux distribution either.
On my system (Linux Mint 13, but I've also seen this with Ubuntu), the sound will often (but not always) default to using the HDMI output instead of analog output. Problem is, I'm not using the HDMI port at all on this computer - video is using DVI, audio is the analog output. If this happens in Windows 7, I can just just open up the list of playback devices, right click on my desired output device and tell it to be the default, but NO! Apparently this new-fangled mixer application in Ubuntu/Mint doesn't have any functionality to set the default output device. Supposedly it can be done by creating an alsa.conf file and putting in the correct sett... Oh why the fuck must I resort to this shit in 2012?
It's crap like this that pisses me off. OK, maybe Linux can't work out which output to use by default (obviously a race condition on boot-up), but if I can't even force a default without having to resort to the command line, then obviously Microsoft knows what they're doing.
OK, you're not gonna like this and will probably dismiss me as a Linux fanboy who's deliberately ignoring your problems (which wouldn't' be fair since I predominately run Windows 7), but...
Installation (RHEL 6) was very smooth, no problems.
RHEL is great for a stable, enterprise-level workstation distro but it kinda sucks for a desktop. There's a reason Red Hat doesn't focus much on the mainstream users side of things, and it shows in their desktops. Try using something like Linux Mint (MATE edition for a more classic GNOME experience). The fonts will be already fixed and Compiz won't be enabled unless you know what you're doing. So none of that hot-corner stuff you encountered.
Having said that, it (like all Linux distros) has weaknesses of a different sort you may encounter. Ultimately it was enough to make me go back to Windows (for the billionth time)... but maybe the next release will be better. I keep using and learning cross-platform programs like Inkscape, GIMP and Eclipse as a way of future-proofing my ability to move to Linux should the annoyances be reduced sufficiently at some point.
Totally against the UNIX philosophy - why is bash still the same after so many years?
Heh. It isn't!
Most distros don't use Bash anymore, they use Dash. It's similar but due to subtle differences it has caused hell for me when trying to run older scripts (particularly old GTK installers, not that they'll work anyway since GTK 1.2 isn't part of many repositories anymore). Backwards compatibility just isn't a high priority when it comes to Linux.
True, and it's the same with achievements/trophies.
Some achievements can be so damn hard to get, or require a certain exhausting type of play to persist throughout the entire game. And what do you get for all that work and effort? Some Boolean flag is changed on your account from FALSE to TRUE.
Now if you enjoy obtaining achievements then more power to you. But if it becomes a form of work and the amount of energy expended to achievement it isn't well... fun, then you haven't really achieved much of anything. In many cases achievements are there specifically so you can show them off to others - but I have no-one in my life who gives a shit about achievements that occur in a computer game, so that's basically what made me forget about them. Achievements in life have a lot more value.
Family members won't let family members use windows.../blockquote My wife is a teacher. The assessment and reporting software a lot of schools use (MarkBook) is Windows only. You really think it's worth the stress of trying to get a critical tool to work in Wine? Furthermore, she uses Word - a lot. She's doing a Masters and her assignments are submitted in.doc format because that's what is asked. She could use LibreOffice - 3.6 is pretty good in terms of terms of Office format compatibility, but again it's not worth the added stress of worrying if LibreOffice's implementation of the format doesn't match what the assessor at the Uni sees.
The software - it's always about the software. I'd rather teach her good computing sense and practices than just change the whole damn operating system.
So... ultimately your just a failure. You never amounted to your goals.
Three things:
(1) That kind of talk is not something a genuinely successful person says. They know it doesn't help and it's certainly not constructive.
(2) If your business is really a success, why are you posting as an AC? Give us your handle/website so that we can perform research about you to see if you're bullshitting or not.
(2) Surely a successful businessman such as yourself knows the difference between your and you're.
The bullshit the press is spewing of "Tablets are gonna replace the desktop ZOMFG! Look at the numbers ZOMFG!" is a classic example of "correlation doesn't equal causation"
Maybe, but if I saw a news article which literally had the headline
Tablets are gonna replace the desktop ZOMFG! Look at the numbers ZOMFG!... then I'd probably be more interested in reading it than I normally would be.
I admit that after spending about 30 seconds staring at all the FedEx logos I could find on Google Images, it took your post before I realized what I was supposed to be seeing.:)
Then again I don't live in the US so I'm not used to seeing the logo anyway, and as such any subliminal symbolism was probably going to take longer to notice
If there's one thing I learned, it's that companies will do whatever the hell they want and as customers we can suck it up or do something about it. Unfortunately, like spam, they make enough money from people that they see no reason to change.
Depends on the size of the company. Actually, it's a general rule of thumb that applies to virtually anything, not just computer games - the larger the company, the less likely they are to listen to the concerns of customers. The smaller companies NEED to keep people happy because a single lost customer hurts a lot more than than a single lost customer from a megacorp. This also means that once you have a reasonably large number of people who've got a beef with a company, the smaller company MUST listen or run the risk of seriously hurting businesses, whereas you need a significantly larger group of dissatisfied customers to even attempt to reach the same level of reaction from the megacorp.
Or you could be Microsoft - sees an extremely widespread negative reaction to the way you're taking the Windows platform and your response is "Fuck you, here's the final release with that remaining boot-to-desktop tweak removed that you ungrateful pricks were hoping would slip into the RTM. Enjoy!" Maybe at that level you're right - companies will do whatever the hell they want. But customers are starting to realize that they do have options...
There's some extra steps they don't tell you about in setting up Ubuntu 12.04:
After logging in to Unity press ctrl-alt-F1 Log in to the command prompt Run: sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback gnome-panel gnome-shell Run: sudo/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults -s gnome-classic Reboot your computer
Think you made a few typos there. Here, let me fix that:
Install Linux Mint 13 (MATE or Cinnamon) Reboot your computer
Personal preference: MATE. Looks kinda boring and somewhat aged, but it also has a shit-ton of flexibility and has a version of Nautilus (renamed Caja) which retains its functionality, compared to that abomination in GNOME 3 (and hence Cinnamon) which continues to be pruned of features.
This is the third time I've seen in recent history where Linux has the potential to provide an alternative to corporate and consumer use.
The first was when Vista came out - I was hearing people clamor that this disaster of an operating system was going to be the catalyst that would result in the rise of Linux on the business/mainstream desktop. But in the end people stuck with XP and Microsoft neutered any sitting-on-the-fence debate with Windows 7. So we failed.
Then netbooks started to become popular, and I was hearing people clamor that this was a perfect case for Linux on these low-powered devices, and once again it would rise the profile of Linux on user-facing systems. But initial netbooks were released with really shitty distros that were often half-broken and given first impressions matter, these distros did a really poor job of selling Linux. Microsoft was forced to extend XP though as Vista wouldn't work suitably on netbooks, but as far as users were concerned this was great news compared to regular preinstalled Linux distros, and now modern netbooks run Windows 7 just fine. So we failed again.
Now Windows 8 is out, and we have an opportunity to push the best desktop-focused distros that are out there. A third window of opportunity - will the various Linux interest groups fumble again? If history has shown us anything - probably. I'd like to be optimistic, but if Linux market share doesn't increase noticeably within the next year or two then I think it's obvious that there will NEVER be a Linux on the desktop moment.
"BOO!!! HAHAH! THIS IS ADVERTISEMENT! YOU WILL BUY NOW LOLZ!"
To be fair, if I actually saw an advertisement which literally said (or had someone saying) "YOU WILL BUY NOW LOLZ!" I'd probably become intrigued enough to give the ad further attention.
What are you talking about? Modern advertising is nothing more sophisticated than [SMOKE!] the use of techniques that have existed for yes. The only difference [SMMOOOOKKKEE!] is that they're somewhat more refined and widespread now thanks to technology [ARE YOU SMOKING YET?]
Goddamn you. You pissed me off majorly before with your pro-Steam comments and attacking my viewpoint a bit too personally for me, but your Windows 8 comments are just too good to ignore.
Fine, you've been un-foed. Hope you're happy schmuck.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what's the most interesting thing about your linked Slashdot article? It appears that in 2000, Slashdot didn't have Interesting/Insightful/Funny moderations, just numerical scores
Well I'm a fellow Australia actually, but that's still western so it's all good. Anyway, yet it does offend me (the bit about people being slaves, not the bit about being Australian). Now I don't possibly think this is an acceptable situation. But on my own, I am completely powerless to do anything about it because I simply don't have the power or leverage to make things better on a grand scale.
All I can do is follow my moral code, try to be consistent and not hypocritical with my actions, and encourage others (without being an annoying zealot) when asked why I think the way I do. It's all any of us can do really.
Yes, it all sounds very crap to work there. But what are the alternatives?
1) The human workers are replaced by robots - this is unlikely to happen since human labor in China is so plentiful and desperate as to make it actually cheaper to "run" humans than robots. But even if it did eventually happen, you'd end up with a whole lot of people without work (and all the associated problems this creates). Menial factory work at least gives them something to do, even if their lives exist solely for someone else's profit.
2) Improve conditions, reasonable work hours, etc - sounds great, except that if one factory does this, another factory will advertise how they haven't, and so businesses will go to the other factory as they wouldn't have to deal with the reduced output and increased costs of having to treat humans like... well, humans.
3) Improvement of conditions, reasonable work hours via Government mandate - so the factories don't have any choice now and are forced to treat people like they should (more or less). Great, except that this will rise the cost of the products created and the costs will naturally be passed onto consumers in first-world countries. The electronics we buy are as cheap as they are precisely in a large part due to the slave work done in countries far away from us. Would people complain if prices went up as conditions in said countries improved? Damn right they would, unfortunately.
So what do you do? You could buy local, or at least try to. Sometimes that works, but in most cases it's not even possible, and odds are you'll find components that were sourced from the less desirable factories anyway. You can't win, short of abandoning almost all forms of modern electronic equipment. There simply isn't enough pressure to change the statue quo.
I know how to use the command line. I do it a lot at work 0 I'm quite skilled with it. You really think I enjoy debugging this shit when I get home?
As usual the Daily Mail's full of shit:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/03/bruce-willis-itunes-music-library/
Occasionally I will donate to open source projects (particularly if they have an easy method of donating like PayPal) if I use the software often and feel it's worth a bit of cash if it will help with future development. Although I haven't done it yet I'm likely to donate to Linux Mint as they seem to be doing the best job (in my opinion of course) in making an easy-to-use Linux distro with sane defaults and decisions. But I know I cannot use that money as a method of enforcing improvements - it's a donation; you can only hope it will help provide incentive/resources to continue development.
Isn't that a bad thing though? Why buy stuff you won't have time to play? To be fair, I used to do this as well, but then I noticed that given the backlog of games I was becoming impatient when playing certain games if they were taking longer than expected to finish. So I'd rush them, or simply abandon them for the next unplayed game. This doesn't sit well with me, as it seems like a waste and more about quantity rather than quality.
But hey, Valve know how to get gamers to open their wallets for games they don't even play. It's a good strategy actually - until you realize how much money is wasted (cumulatively of course - games on Steam generally aren't that costly on their own, but added together...)
On my system (Linux Mint 13, but I've also seen this with Ubuntu), the sound will often (but not always) default to using the HDMI output instead of analog output. Problem is, I'm not using the HDMI port at all on this computer - video is using DVI, audio is the analog output. If this happens in Windows 7, I can just just open up the list of playback devices, right click on my desired output device and tell it to be the default, but NO! Apparently this new-fangled mixer application in Ubuntu/Mint doesn't have any functionality to set the default output device. Supposedly it can be done by creating an alsa.conf file and putting in the correct sett... Oh why the fuck must I resort to this shit in 2012?
It's crap like this that pisses me off. OK, maybe Linux can't work out which output to use by default (obviously a race condition on boot-up), but if I can't even force a default without having to resort to the command line, then obviously Microsoft knows what they're doing.
Dead.
No, seriously. Google "jessi slaughter dad".
OK, you're not gonna like this and will probably dismiss me as a Linux fanboy who's deliberately ignoring your problems (which wouldn't' be fair since I predominately run Windows 7), but...
RHEL is great for a stable, enterprise-level workstation distro but it kinda sucks for a desktop. There's a reason Red Hat doesn't focus much on the mainstream users side of things, and it shows in their desktops. Try using something like Linux Mint (MATE edition for a more classic GNOME experience). The fonts will be already fixed and Compiz won't be enabled unless you know what you're doing. So none of that hot-corner stuff you encountered.
Having said that, it (like all Linux distros) has weaknesses of a different sort you may encounter. Ultimately it was enough to make me go back to Windows (for the billionth time)... but maybe the next release will be better. I keep using and learning cross-platform programs like Inkscape, GIMP and Eclipse as a way of future-proofing my ability to move to Linux should the annoyances be reduced sufficiently at some point.
Heh. It isn't!
Most distros don't use Bash anymore, they use Dash. It's similar but due to subtle differences it has caused hell for me when trying to run older scripts (particularly old GTK installers, not that they'll work anyway since GTK 1.2 isn't part of many repositories anymore). Backwards compatibility just isn't a high priority when it comes to Linux.
True, and it's the same with achievements/trophies.
Some achievements can be so damn hard to get, or require a certain exhausting type of play to persist throughout the entire game. And what do you get for all that work and effort? Some Boolean flag is changed on your account from FALSE to TRUE.
Now if you enjoy obtaining achievements then more power to you. But if it becomes a form of work and the amount of energy expended to achievement it isn't well... fun, then you haven't really achieved much of anything. In many cases achievements are there specifically so you can show them off to others - but I have no-one in my life who gives a shit about achievements that occur in a computer game, so that's basically what made me forget about them. Achievements in life have a lot more value.
There's only one good use for a "modern" floppy disk drive - MUSIC!
Doom's E1M1 soundtrack on eight floppy drives:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a7-5WYOKxE
Guy also has plenty more tracks. Makes me want to break out the Arduino again...
Three things:
(1) That kind of talk is not something a genuinely successful person says. They know it doesn't help and it's certainly not constructive.
(2) If your business is really a success, why are you posting as an AC? Give us your handle/website so that we can perform research about you to see if you're bullshitting or not.
(2) Surely a successful businessman such as yourself knows the difference between your and you're.
What a fucktard.
Maybe, but if I saw a news article which literally had the headline
Tablets are gonna replace the desktop ZOMFG! Look at the numbers ZOMFG! ... then I'd probably be more interested in reading it than I normally would be.
KGB Bot un-friends you!
I admit that after spending about 30 seconds staring at all the FedEx logos I could find on Google Images, it took your post before I realized what I was supposed to be seeing. :)
Then again I don't live in the US so I'm not used to seeing the logo anyway, and as such any subliminal symbolism was probably going to take longer to notice
Depends on the size of the company. Actually, it's a general rule of thumb that applies to virtually anything, not just computer games - the larger the company, the less likely they are to listen to the concerns of customers. The smaller companies NEED to keep people happy because a single lost customer hurts a lot more than than a single lost customer from a megacorp. This also means that once you have a reasonably large number of people who've got a beef with a company, the smaller company MUST listen or run the risk of seriously hurting businesses, whereas you need a significantly larger group of dissatisfied customers to even attempt to reach the same level of reaction from the megacorp.
Or you could be Microsoft - sees an extremely widespread negative reaction to the way you're taking the Windows platform and your response is "Fuck you, here's the final release with that remaining boot-to-desktop tweak removed that you ungrateful pricks were hoping would slip into the RTM. Enjoy!" Maybe at that level you're right - companies will do whatever the hell they want. But customers are starting to realize that they do have options...
Think you made a few typos there. Here, let me fix that:
Install Linux Mint 13 (MATE or Cinnamon)
Reboot your computer
Personal preference: MATE. Looks kinda boring and somewhat aged, but it also has a shit-ton of flexibility and has a version of Nautilus (renamed Caja) which retains its functionality, compared to that abomination in GNOME 3 (and hence Cinnamon) which continues to be pruned of features.
Heh, amusing. "Windows Previews" is one of the plugins I turn ON in Compiz, mostly because it makes life seems less foreign when I'm in Linux.
This is the third time I've seen in recent history where Linux has the potential to provide an alternative to corporate and consumer use.
The first was when Vista came out - I was hearing people clamor that this disaster of an operating system was going to be the catalyst that would result in the rise of Linux on the business/mainstream desktop. But in the end people stuck with XP and Microsoft neutered any sitting-on-the-fence debate with Windows 7. So we failed.
Then netbooks started to become popular, and I was hearing people clamor that this was a perfect case for Linux on these low-powered devices, and once again it would rise the profile of Linux on user-facing systems. But initial netbooks were released with really shitty distros that were often half-broken and given first impressions matter, these distros did a really poor job of selling Linux. Microsoft was forced to extend XP though as Vista wouldn't work suitably on netbooks, but as far as users were concerned this was great news compared to regular preinstalled Linux distros, and now modern netbooks run Windows 7 just fine. So we failed again.
Now Windows 8 is out, and we have an opportunity to push the best desktop-focused distros that are out there. A third window of opportunity - will the various Linux interest groups fumble again? If history has shown us anything - probably. I'd like to be optimistic, but if Linux market share doesn't increase noticeably within the next year or two then I think it's obvious that there will NEVER be a Linux on the desktop moment.
To be fair, if I actually saw an advertisement which literally said (or had someone saying) "YOU WILL BUY NOW LOLZ!" I'd probably become intrigued enough to give the ad further attention.
What are you talking about? Modern advertising is nothing more sophisticated than [SMOKE!] the use of techniques that have existed for yes. The only difference [SMMOOOOKKKEE!] is that they're somewhat more refined and widespread now thanks to technology [ARE YOU SMOKING YET?]
Goddamn you. You pissed me off majorly before with your pro-Steam comments and attacking my viewpoint a bit too personally for me, but your Windows 8 comments are just too good to ignore.
Fine, you've been un-foed. Hope you're happy schmuck.