WTF is going on with Slashpoop today? No one seems to be allowed to moderate... that, or anyone with mod points quit reading/. all of the sudden and forgot to invite me to the party!
You over-generalize... Microsoft won't pass the Acid2 test when it FIRST RELEASES IE7! There's a big difference between not doing it EVER as you imply in your post, and not doing it NOW because it would waste resources that are better spent making IE7 stable and secure. I call bullshit on your/. groupthink! (And in this case that's pretty funny because I DESPISE everything Internet Explorer, but your post was just too much of a troll to go unanswered.)
You would have a point if a PC was for entertainment purposes only, as TV's for the most part are. (Yes, yes, you can learn some crap from watching TV too, but it's mainly a passive interface - you don't "do" anything with it) But a PC contains people's financial records now. PC's are used to communicate with one another. PC's are used to store and maintain data! They are not strictly an entertainment device.
Besides, you may be able to come up with a way to transfer all those Gig's of mp3's and ogg's over to your brand-spanking-new Dell laptop within 3 seconds, but grandma, grandpa, and a million small business owners don't have the time (nor the inclination) to figure out how to do that - not to mention how to buy the right new computer that will still run all the programs they've become accustomed to for everyday use. Your opinion on this matter is sadly WRONG according to plenty of statistical measures stating the the Geek Squad (and other like businesses) are growing by leaps and bounds.
I agree with previous poster on VirtualDub, and I would add that you just need to give The Gimp a while to get used to its interface. I finally have, and it does everything I ever needed Photoshop for in the past. Unfortunately, I also play lots of video games like HL2/CS:S and Civ3 which are only available on Windows right now. Unfortunately, maintaining a video gaming machine on Linux is tricky at best - video drivers and other hardware stuff just isn't as easy to use in Linux as it is in Windows.
Hey garcia, what the hell do you do all day? What's your real-world job? 'Cause as far as I can tell, it's posting to Slashdot all day long in every story... usually more than once. So anyways, I want your job, because it must be cake! (I'm not being completely sarcastic here, you realize that, right?)
Yeah, what's the deal? He keeps posting his own blog stories to Slashdot and the "editors" keep accepting the submissions! For goodness sake, I'm sure that someone ELSE already sent this story in, but why oh why does Roland get his stories accepted over others?
Oh yeah, it's because his English grammar skills are on par with the pathetic skills of our esteemed Slashdot "editors."
"You can beat a cop to death, but for Jebus' sake don't show animated boobs! Oh the humanity!"
All the uproar on Slashdot over this game pushed me to go d/l it off of Shareaza and see if some of the comments were hyperbole, or factually accurate. And yep! They were all factually accurate! Here is a list of the wonderful times I have had in GTA3 (the original mind you, not San Andreas):
fled from custody during a failed transfer of my character to a different prison facility
jacked an innocent person's car, ran over a dude dressed as a pimp, and then got a job from a mob man to pick up his prostitute from "the clinic"
got into a fist fight with a random woman walking down the sidewalk dressed like a prostitute. After knocking her on the ground and repeatedly stomping on her groin (literally), blood flowed all around her body as other innocent bystanders passed by on their merry way.
murdered a local thug
murdered a few cops in broad daylight, picked up some power ups and the cops quit chasing me
blew up a few delivery trucks by lobbing grenades at them. During the final grenade bombing I had about 4 cop cars all after me, and with one well timed and well placed 'nade I took out all of 'em at once!
But having simulated, virtual video game sex is apparently very evil in the USA.
Oh yes, I also frequently shoot counter-terrorist players in CounterStrike:Source who are controlled by Real Live People! right between the eyes with my high-powered long-range rifle, but again, simulated sex is very very bad for me.
And the game God Of War actually PROMOTES watching two women doin' it - but doesn't get in trouble for it. Go figure!
Oh wait, then there's pr0n on the Internet... oh who cares, the politician rhetoric will never end...
I have heard of Inkscape but not tried it out until this story appeared on Slashdot. I am quite fond of The Gimp, and Inkscape finally fills the void of trying to design a quality looking webpage using just the Gimp. The Gimp does image graphics and photo editing really well, but Inkscape will DEFINITELY do marketroid style print and web graphics well for me in the future.
You could almost put the core WinXP on this thing WITH a swap partition and then use your HDD's exclusively for storing external programs and data. WinXP breaks? Wipe Solid State Drive and reinstall. Drivers and the kernel all get really fast access to the CPU without involving moving parts while less used programs and data files reside on big HDD's. For a gaming PC I can see this as a definitely viable tech. I would buy it myself if 4GB of DDR RAM came with it... but alas that adds another $400 to the purchase price.
It's to prove that the younger you are, the truly more 'hip' you are. For instance, my younger brother by 4 years is a *little* more popular than I am, while my sister who is 10 years younger (18yrs old and on her way to college) ranked in the top 5% of AIM users! Yikes! She blew me out of the water. But c'mon, we all had more friends during high school and/or college than we do as we grow older. Grandma and grandpa's all over the US would score in the bottom 0.1% of AIM users simply because a bunch of people from their generation are dead now.
Still, it's a fun use of an interesting algorithm.
Yes, but the cost of storing and upkeeping a "duplicated" car (or money, or houses, or gold bullion(sp?) ) far out-expends resources than the duplication of hundreds or even millions of "virtual" items in a video game. Not only that, the ability to store a real-world item costs in actual materials (gold is scarce), whereas in the virtual world "materials" all desolve eventually into a bunch of 1's and 0's as defined by the electronic components storing them. There is no scarcity of materials, or the scarcity (of hard drives) is so infinitesimally insignificant that it becomes a non-issue. Parent poster got it right.
My high school calculus teacher liked to tell the story of how a speed trap setup tagged a former student of his right after he had taken this teacher's calculus course in high school. If I remember correctly, the student basically used some basic calculus to prove that he would have had to accelerate from 65mph to 100+mph and back down to 65mph within a pretty short distance (too short for an average car to achieve) in order to have actually been going as fast as the two cop cars at each end of the speed trap had said he was going when they clocked him. Don't know if that was a true story or if he was just trying to get us to learn our maths, but it could certainly work.
In a related, albeit less positive story: My sophmore year in college one of my friends was majoring in astrophysics, and was finishing up a course involving thermodynamics and friction or some crap like that. Anyways, we were attending ERAU in Daytona Beach, and the cops there were pretty much clueless morons. My friend was driving at the approved speed limit (35mph I think it was) and was going through an intersection where it was basically like driving over a hill. Some moron pulled in front of him and he had to quickly, but safely, apply his brakes. Unfortunately, due to his velocity over the hump of the intersection he squealed the tires as his car did not have enough down-force to keep the tires from locking up as he went over the hill of the intersection. The way he tells it, after about 30 seconds of trying to explain this to the cop who had just pulled him over for squealing his tires, the cop's eyes glazed over, he got perturbed, and wrote my friend a ticket - just for squealing his tires. (which of course proved nothing of my friend's ability or inability to yield to the traffic laws at that moment) I think he ended up just paying the ticket, figuring that any other government official in Volusia County, Florida would be no better at understanding the physics involved in his traffic incident than the cop that pulled him over.
My frickin' MythTV box isn't up and running yet!!! I've still got to recompile the kernel three times, reinstall lirc drivers twice, and then wipe the drive and reinstall Gentoo all over again before I can successfully record BG for my Saturday morning viewing pleasure!!
It's not going to work for me, and I'd consider myself quite conservative on a lot of issues! Siding with James Dobson and pals will in no way engender her to the millions of middle-of-the-road Americans like myself who would gladly see an end to the current Big Brother White House we have now. No, I didn't vote for Bush the second time around (I honestly didn't vote this time on purpose), but I did the first time - and what a mistake that has turned out to have been!
Unfortunately, Hillary *might* be more appealing to me if she wasn't acting like a no-talent-assclown of a politician, as in this case. Just as the grandparent poster mentioned, I'm the 947,125th person on Slashdot to point out that getting everyone's panties in a bunch over GTA's "hack it to get raw sex scenes" software code comes no where close to the real-life bestiality and carnal sex scenes, movies, and writings available WIDELY on the Internet. Search Google for yourself, it's EASY to find this stuff! Besides, what's worse?: A 3d-animated sex scene in a video game, or a movie depicting the actual beheading of an actual innocent hostage in Iraq? I'm sure there are thousands of "children" falling into depraved behavior this very minute all because of GTA. Please. It used to be that evil evil "Doom" game where there are *actual* *demons*! Oh my! Doom is responsible for Columbine!!! Fuck that! Other asswipe children being cruel to one another are responsible for Columbine, not some video game.
don't homeschool (no parent can possibly become an expert on a multitude of topics, not to mention the social isolation of homeschooling)
Sadly, that comment assumes that the teacher is better educated and more capable of teaching your young ones than you are as a parent with simply 'general knowledge' about math, reading, writing, etc. It has been my experience (and I went to a very expensive private school for K-12th grades) that this is not always true. Listening to my wife's and other's experiences in grade school only confirms to me that the public school system can be even worse than my private school was at times.
When you find yourself correcting your high-school history teacher on such major times and key events as WW2, Vietnam, or other such things you quickly learn to slack off in the class as I did, knowing you'll be able to pass it without even thinking because you're more informed than your own "teacher" on the subject. Or even worse, your teacher screams at you (in the case of others I know) because you just "don't get it" when it comes to doing your math homework, even though you can outread, both in speed and comprehension, every kid in your entire grade school class.
Besides, EVERYONE uses that tired argument about homeschooling, and I can tell you for a fact that it's not true. I have several cousins who were homeschooled prior to high school and they have basically excelled throughout their high school, college, and post-college lives. In fact, I wish I had been home-schooled prior to high school because I have no doubt that I would have graduated with a better class standing, and probably would have gone on to be more successful in college and later life than I feel I currently have achieved.
Great point. Also, how many people have died from car bombings versus airplane hijackings? (I honestly don't know, but I would guess that the numbers are pretty close.) Every week in Iraq a couple dozen more people are killed or seriously maimed for life by idiots with bombs in their car trunks. Yes, the airline hijacking's make a bigger "Boom!" but it's still far safer to fly than to drive your car across town.
I mean, surely any person who would go through the trouble it takes to get to this easter egg would be able to find far more graphic things on the web.
And this is obvious to everyone but the politicians and super-conservatives.
I agree, but sadly I've heard now of too many sob stories of those "in the know" with computers who have to work for the biggest idiots in the world - i.e. "we" know that changing the Windows XP destop look from "blue bubbly" back to "classic view" has absolutely nothing to do with getting a virus, but "the boss" thinks that's really the reason why the entire computer system got a virus the last time.
NOTE: I thankfully don't work for anyone nearly as stupid, but I know people who have. Therefore, the parent poster is probably just your average BOFH trying to make a living in less than optimal circumstances, and KNOWS that trying to explain the details about why they're deploying Firefox instead of IE would only confuse "the bosses" and most likely get them in trouble for doing the right thing to try and protect the company from more computer problems. So yes, communication and information in any successful company are key, but sadly not all companies are that successful.
That reminds me of how J.R.R. Tolkien presents the same type of language dilemma in his seminal work, The Lord of the Rings. "Westron" or the common speech is pretty widely recognized as the defacto language to use between the peoples of Middle-Earth, but often-times the adventurers in the story will come across a more elegant or richer written or spoken language during their travels that is difficult to translate, or even impossible to understand. I equate Tolkien's "Westron" language with English, as "English" has become the defacto world standard of communication in many parts of the world. Unfortunately for us Americans, we're only required to learn English since our public school system thinks English is the shiznit.
What I wouldn't give to have been required to learn my own native tongue in Germany, France, India, Japan, etc. and then be required to also learn English as well, knowing that my educational, financial, and social future would rest on being able to communicate in more than one language for the rest of my life. As it stands, I only know English pretty well and wish that I knew German and/or French so that I could travel abroad and communicate with ease with those who spoke such languages.
He's so very right about what he talks about in the ad because as all of us have seen the advent of free software is quickly bringing about the downright crash of Microsoft, IBM, HP, and many many other companies that produce software that costs money!
P.S. Maybe someone should clue him in to the fact that my blog, and Microsoft's website are two entirely different sites that MAKE UP THE INTERNET, and are run completely ad-free. In the one case, Microsoft is paying to put up there much more widely used, larger, and more useful part of the Internet to support the millions of customers they have, while my site just exists because I want it to exist. The Internet, unlike BSD, is not dying.
In that climate, we look to software makers to make reliable products. We want them to be able to withstand the efforts of the rest of the world doing what it is that's natural for them to do. It is not an impossible task. It has been shown through the virtue of patches that it can be done and since it can be patched it could also have been done right the first time had they only taken the time and effort to write it correctly to begin with.
Your original argument completely invalidates this insertion that it's "not an impossible task." Yes it is! Software developers are human too!!!
Yeah, me too, although I initially had a pretty much blank screen with TONS of "Adblock" tabs for all the flash images... which was fittingly funny for what webpages probably will look like... IN THE FUTURE!
Slashdot Mirror
WTF is going on with Slashpoop today? No one seems to be allowed to moderate... that, or anyone with mod points quit reading /. all of the sudden and forgot to invite me to the party!
You over-generalize... Microsoft won't pass the Acid2 test when it FIRST RELEASES IE7! There's a big difference between not doing it EVER as you imply in your post, and not doing it NOW because it would waste resources that are better spent making IE7 stable and secure. I call bullshit on your /. groupthink! (And in this case that's pretty funny because I DESPISE everything Internet Explorer, but your post was just too much of a troll to go unanswered.)
You would have a point if a PC was for entertainment purposes only, as TV's for the most part are. (Yes, yes, you can learn some crap from watching TV too, but it's mainly a passive interface - you don't "do" anything with it) But a PC contains people's financial records now. PC's are used to communicate with one another. PC's are used to store and maintain data! They are not strictly an entertainment device.
Besides, you may be able to come up with a way to transfer all those Gig's of mp3's and ogg's over to your brand-spanking-new Dell laptop within 3 seconds, but grandma, grandpa, and a million small business owners don't have the time (nor the inclination) to figure out how to do that - not to mention how to buy the right new computer that will still run all the programs they've become accustomed to for everyday use. Your opinion on this matter is sadly WRONG according to plenty of statistical measures stating the the Geek Squad (and other like businesses) are growing by leaps and bounds.
I agree with previous poster on VirtualDub, and I would add that you just need to give The Gimp a while to get used to its interface. I finally have, and it does everything I ever needed Photoshop for in the past. Unfortunately, I also play lots of video games like HL2/CS:S and Civ3 which are only available on Windows right now. Unfortunately, maintaining a video gaming machine on Linux is tricky at best - video drivers and other hardware stuff just isn't as easy to use in Linux as it is in Windows.
Hey garcia, what the hell do you do all day? What's your real-world job? 'Cause as far as I can tell, it's posting to Slashdot all day long in every story... usually more than once. So anyways, I want your job, because it must be cake! (I'm not being completely sarcastic here, you realize that, right?)
Yeah, what's the deal? He keeps posting his own blog stories to Slashdot and the "editors" keep accepting the submissions! For goodness sake, I'm sure that someone ELSE already sent this story in, but why oh why does Roland get his stories accepted over others?
Oh yeah, it's because his English grammar skills are on par with the pathetic skills of our esteemed Slashdot "editors."
All the uproar on Slashdot over this game pushed me to go d/l it off of Shareaza and see if some of the comments were hyperbole, or factually accurate. And yep! They were all factually accurate! Here is a list of the wonderful times I have had in GTA3 (the original mind you, not San Andreas):
But having simulated, virtual video game sex is apparently very evil in the USA.
Oh yes, I also frequently shoot counter-terrorist players in CounterStrike:Source who are controlled by Real Live People! right between the eyes with my high-powered long-range rifle, but again, simulated sex is very very bad for me.
And the game God Of War actually PROMOTES watching two women doin' it - but doesn't get in trouble for it. Go figure!
Oh wait, then there's pr0n on the Internet... oh who cares, the politician rhetoric will never end...
I have heard of Inkscape but not tried it out until this story appeared on Slashdot. I am quite fond of The Gimp, and Inkscape finally fills the void of trying to design a quality looking webpage using just the Gimp. The Gimp does image graphics and photo editing really well, but Inkscape will DEFINITELY do marketroid style print and web graphics well for me in the future.
You could almost put the core WinXP on this thing WITH a swap partition and then use your HDD's exclusively for storing external programs and data. WinXP breaks? Wipe Solid State Drive and reinstall. Drivers and the kernel all get really fast access to the CPU without involving moving parts while less used programs and data files reside on big HDD's. For a gaming PC I can see this as a definitely viable tech. I would buy it myself if 4GB of DDR RAM came with it... but alas that adds another $400 to the purchase price.
Here ya go!
My sister scored over 85000, ranked herself 90000+ amongst ALL AIM users, and completely blew my measly score out of the water.
It's to prove that the younger you are, the truly more 'hip' you are. For instance, my younger brother by 4 years is a *little* more popular than I am, while my sister who is 10 years younger (18yrs old and on her way to college) ranked in the top 5% of AIM users! Yikes! She blew me out of the water. But c'mon, we all had more friends during high school and/or college than we do as we grow older. Grandma and grandpa's all over the US would score in the bottom 0.1% of AIM users simply because a bunch of people from their generation are dead now.
Still, it's a fun use of an interesting algorithm.
Yes, but the cost of storing and upkeeping a "duplicated" car (or money, or houses, or gold bullion(sp?) ) far out-expends resources than the duplication of hundreds or even millions of "virtual" items in a video game. Not only that, the ability to store a real-world item costs in actual materials (gold is scarce), whereas in the virtual world "materials" all desolve eventually into a bunch of 1's and 0's as defined by the electronic components storing them. There is no scarcity of materials, or the scarcity (of hard drives) is so infinitesimally insignificant that it becomes a non-issue. Parent poster got it right.
My high school calculus teacher liked to tell the story of how a speed trap setup tagged a former student of his right after he had taken this teacher's calculus course in high school. If I remember correctly, the student basically used some basic calculus to prove that he would have had to accelerate from 65mph to 100+mph and back down to 65mph within a pretty short distance (too short for an average car to achieve) in order to have actually been going as fast as the two cop cars at each end of the speed trap had said he was going when they clocked him. Don't know if that was a true story or if he was just trying to get us to learn our maths, but it could certainly work.
In a related, albeit less positive story:
My sophmore year in college one of my friends was majoring in astrophysics, and was finishing up a course involving thermodynamics and friction or some crap like that. Anyways, we were attending ERAU in Daytona Beach, and the cops there were pretty much clueless morons. My friend was driving at the approved speed limit (35mph I think it was) and was going through an intersection where it was basically like driving over a hill. Some moron pulled in front of him and he had to quickly, but safely, apply his brakes. Unfortunately, due to his velocity over the hump of the intersection he squealed the tires as his car did not have enough down-force to keep the tires from locking up as he went over the hill of the intersection. The way he tells it, after about 30 seconds of trying to explain this to the cop who had just pulled him over for squealing his tires, the cop's eyes glazed over, he got perturbed, and wrote my friend a ticket - just for squealing his tires. (which of course proved nothing of my friend's ability or inability to yield to the traffic laws at that moment) I think he ended up just paying the ticket, figuring that any other government official in Volusia County, Florida would be no better at understanding the physics involved in his traffic incident than the cop that pulled him over.
My frickin' MythTV box isn't up and running yet!!! I've still got to recompile the kernel three times, reinstall lirc drivers twice, and then wipe the drive and reinstall Gentoo all over again before I can successfully record BG for my Saturday morning viewing pleasure!!
It's not going to work for me, and I'd consider myself quite conservative on a lot of issues! Siding with James Dobson and pals will in no way engender her to the millions of middle-of-the-road Americans like myself who would gladly see an end to the current Big Brother White House we have now. No, I didn't vote for Bush the second time around (I honestly didn't vote this time on purpose), but I did the first time - and what a mistake that has turned out to have been!
Unfortunately, Hillary *might* be more appealing to me if she wasn't acting like a no-talent-assclown of a politician, as in this case. Just as the grandparent poster mentioned, I'm the 947,125th person on Slashdot to point out that getting everyone's panties in a bunch over GTA's "hack it to get raw sex scenes" software code comes no where close to the real-life bestiality and carnal sex scenes, movies, and writings available WIDELY on the Internet. Search Google for yourself, it's EASY to find this stuff! Besides, what's worse?: A 3d-animated sex scene in a video game, or a movie depicting the actual beheading of an actual innocent hostage in Iraq? I'm sure there are thousands of "children" falling into depraved behavior this very minute all because of GTA. Please. It used to be that evil evil "Doom" game where there are *actual* *demons*! Oh my! Doom is responsible for Columbine!!! Fuck that! Other asswipe children being cruel to one another are responsible for Columbine, not some video game.
Sadly, that comment assumes that the teacher is better educated and more capable of teaching your young ones than you are as a parent with simply 'general knowledge' about math, reading, writing, etc. It has been my experience (and I went to a very expensive private school for K-12th grades) that this is not always true. Listening to my wife's and other's experiences in grade school only confirms to me that the public school system can be even worse than my private school was at times.
When you find yourself correcting your high-school history teacher on such major times and key events as WW2, Vietnam, or other such things you quickly learn to slack off in the class as I did, knowing you'll be able to pass it without even thinking because you're more informed than your own "teacher" on the subject. Or even worse, your teacher screams at you (in the case of others I know) because you just "don't get it" when it comes to doing your math homework, even though you can outread, both in speed and comprehension, every kid in your entire grade school class.
Besides, EVERYONE uses that tired argument about homeschooling, and I can tell you for a fact that it's not true. I have several cousins who were homeschooled prior to high school and they have basically excelled throughout their high school, college, and post-college lives. In fact, I wish I had been home-schooled prior to high school because I have no doubt that I would have graduated with a better class standing, and probably would have gone on to be more successful in college and later life than I feel I currently have achieved.
Great point. Also, how many people have died from car bombings versus airplane hijackings? (I honestly don't know, but I would guess that the numbers are pretty close.) Every week in Iraq a couple dozen more people are killed or seriously maimed for life by idiots with bombs in their car trunks. Yes, the airline hijacking's make a bigger "Boom!" but it's still far safer to fly than to drive your car across town.
And this is obvious to everyone but the politicians and super-conservatives.
I agree, but sadly I've heard now of too many sob stories of those "in the know" with computers who have to work for the biggest idiots in the world - i.e. "we" know that changing the Windows XP destop look from "blue bubbly" back to "classic view" has absolutely nothing to do with getting a virus, but "the boss" thinks that's really the reason why the entire computer system got a virus the last time.
NOTE: I thankfully don't work for anyone nearly as stupid, but I know people who have. Therefore, the parent poster is probably just your average BOFH trying to make a living in less than optimal circumstances, and KNOWS that trying to explain the details about why they're deploying Firefox instead of IE would only confuse "the bosses" and most likely get them in trouble for doing the right thing to try and protect the company from more computer problems. So yes, communication and information in any successful company are key, but sadly not all companies are that successful.
That reminds me of how J.R.R. Tolkien presents the same type of language dilemma in his seminal work, The Lord of the Rings. "Westron" or the common speech is pretty widely recognized as the defacto language to use between the peoples of Middle-Earth, but often-times the adventurers in the story will come across a more elegant or richer written or spoken language during their travels that is difficult to translate, or even impossible to understand. I equate Tolkien's "Westron" language with English, as "English" has become the defacto world standard of communication in many parts of the world. Unfortunately for us Americans, we're only required to learn English since our public school system thinks English is the shiznit.
What I wouldn't give to have been required to learn my own native tongue in Germany, France, India, Japan, etc. and then be required to also learn English as well, knowing that my educational, financial, and social future would rest on being able to communicate in more than one language for the rest of my life. As it stands, I only know English pretty well and wish that I knew German and/or French so that I could travel abroad and communicate with ease with those who spoke such languages.
He's so very right about what he talks about in the ad because as all of us have seen the advent of free software is quickly bringing about the downright crash of Microsoft, IBM, HP, and many many other companies that produce software that costs money!
P.S. Maybe someone should clue him in to the fact that my blog, and Microsoft's website are two entirely different sites that MAKE UP THE INTERNET, and are run completely ad-free. In the one case, Microsoft is paying to put up there much more widely used, larger, and more useful part of the Internet to support the millions of customers they have, while my site just exists because I want it to exist. The Internet, unlike BSD, is not dying.
Sorry, I meant "assertion", not "insertion". LOL! (Hint: I'm human TOO!!)
Your original argument completely invalidates this insertion that it's "not an impossible task." Yes it is! Software developers are human too!!!
Yeah, me too, although I initially had a pretty much blank screen with TONS of "Adblock" tabs for all the flash images... which was fittingly funny for what webpages probably will look like... IN THE FUTURE!