Well, my Gmail account is reporting 1,000 MB of total storage space right now. Either I'm not one of the chosen granted the magic 1TB, it hasn't been rolled out to everyone yet or, more likely, it was just a mistake that's been corrected.
I'm sorry, the default interface doesn't exactly match your idea of perfection: how remiss of the guys at Opera to not have read your mind in designing the out-of-the-box configuration of what's an extremely flexible piece of software.
Look, if you can't spend two minutes customising the interface of an application that you'll likely use several times a day then that's your problem. The default interface works fine for lots of people, and I've yet to come across an Opera user who hasn't figured how to right-click on an unwanted part of the UI and select the "Remove from Toolbar" option.
I'm guessing that if you couldn't manage that much that your word processor of choice has the same default page margins that it shipped with, that your multimedia player has had no additional codecs added to it and that your desktop has remained the same since your OS was installed. Heck, I bet your car has the same seat and mirror positions that it rolled off the factory floor with too.
Without wanting to be more sarcastic than I've already been, can you please tell me how you'd improve Opera's default interface? I appreciate that your answer might take more than the two minutes it would take a monkey to customise Opera to suit their own tastes but I'd be interested to see just what you'd expect to find (or not to find) the first time you ran the application.
The buttons might be too close together for you, but remember that a large proportion of mobile phone users are teenage (and pre-teen) kids: buttons too close together for you are probably perfect for them. Besides, there are limits to how far apart you can space buttons on a small form factor device such as a mobile phone.
Dude, if you can't tell the difference between a sport, where a contestant, even a boxer, can throw in the towel and call it a day at any time, and a street brawl, where a guy who's taken several blows from a baseball bat and is about to get his skull crushed, then you need help.
Also, in organised sports, the health of the participants comes first, and there is normally a medical kit, if not a trained medical team, on the sidelines. When a player is injured, he can leave the field, etc to get immediate medical treatment. I don't see people in street fights respecting timeouts, etc and, until they do, don't expect a street fight to get treated like a game of three on three.
Re:Stock up on untainted books now
on
H2G2 Film Website
·
· Score: 1
The phrase "Never judge a book by its cover" springs to mind.
What difference does the picture on the front have to do with the quality of the words inside? Is your enjoyment of them related to the image on the front somehow?
And this would be called free trade? Just like the free trade in steel, lumber, etc that the US repects?
Even setting aside the hypocrisy of preaching free trade then not practicing it, your custom duty may be impractical: you're forgetting that a great deal of software code written in India is written by programmers employed by American companies, so how you'd levy a custom duty on, say, a product that was coded by Indian employees of a company based in California would be interesting.
As someone who's partner is a planner, and who's learned to appreciate all kinds of architecture as a result, I have to say that I find your thinking rather blinkered.
And those are just modern examples. Virtually every noteworthy building in history has been on the receiving end of flak for being an eyesore at one time or another, yet today they are regarded as classic examples of their time.
What would you rather have architects do? Design drab, uninteresting buildings? Isn't physical architecture a valid artform? Why not? Because you say so? Why is the building "pretty ugly"? Because you say so? Ah, so you've studied architecture at length, have you? You're an expert on the aesthetics of the built environment? No? I didn't think so.
How would you feel about a world where everyone was required to dress the same way as people have always dressed, like the same art and music that people have always liked, and enjoy only the things that have been enjoyed for ages? Would you really want to live in a world that stood culturally still? Well, you might, but I don't.
Try and appreciate that things change, and that, just because you don't like it, that doesn't mean everyone agrees with you. I guarantee you that, in twenty years time, 90 percent of the people who feel that the building is "pretty ugly" now will be looking at the same building and calling it fantastic.
In fact, the building is beautiful right now. Anyone with a trained eye would rattle off a whole lot of reasons why, just as a good art student could tell you why Picasso's work is genius.
What you call an eyesore is actually anything but. That you don't see it is a real pity.
1. If we're being honest, the reason why this topic made the/. frontpage and why we're having this debate is because of the mistreatment of POWs. We're not talking about combat here, we're talking about how the victor treats the vanquished after combat has ceased.
2. There are other military philosophies apart from the US "overwhelming force" one. For example, the British military philosophy is radically different from the US one in that it calls for minimum force. That's not to say that you should attack a tank division with a pea shooter, only that you should avoid unnecessary confrontation in non-battlefield situations whenever possible.
Perhaps you're unaware, but thanks to deployments in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, etc, the average British soldier has far more experience dealing with potentially hostile and deadly civilian populations than his US counterpart. I've no doubt that this is one of the reasons why fewer British troops have had fewer fatal confrontations with Iraqi militia/resistors/whatever than their American allies during the post-combat policing phase of this current war.
In other words, sometimes the best way of dealing with an untamed beast is not to poke it in the eye but to let it lie in peace. The recent crisis in Fallujah is an textbook example of how not to do it.
I'm not trying to play a game of "my war was more brutal than your war".
I'm simply trying to point out that, in less than a century, we've gone from a situation where men sent to war to kill each other were still able to act honourably and in a mutually respectful manner to one another to a situation where they are taught to regard their enemies as little more than faceless targets to be killed as efficiently as possible.
It seems to me that, as the 20th century progressed, serving your country in a war gradually became less and less about fulfilling a duty honourably and more and more about dehumanising and destroying the enemy as effectively as possible.
In 1914, during World War One, troops from both sides celebrated Christmas together by leaving their trenches and walking out into No Man's Land to exchange cigarettes and other luxuries and play friendly, gentlemanly games of football (soccer if you must).
Of course, commanders on both sides soon outlawed the practice, but the mutual respect and honour shown by men sent to kill each other was clear. I don't see that sort of respect nowadays.
One of the most enduring memories I have of the Gulf War were pictures of the "Road of Death", showing literally hundreds of Iraqi tanks, APCs and other vehicles that had been reduced to smoking piles of metal by Allied air power. I thought of all those thousands of Iraqi conscripts, sitting ducks in their retreat from Kuwait, who were roasted alive in their vehicles by Apaches and Warthogs who used them for target practice. Even on the news or in the papers, barely a thought was given to those killed: that's how far we had dehumanised those Iraqi young men.
Just in this last month, the US Army has reduced large portions of Fallujah to rubble in order to defeat a handful of resistors. What started when a protest by a few people was treated heavy-handedly has ended with hundreds of Iraqi dead, many of them innocent civilians (yes, innocent civilians; I don't see infants wielding RPGs), heavy US casualties and, eventually, US withdrawal from the area and a "peace" enforced by one of Saddam Hussein's Generals. Yet how many pictures of the widescale destruction caused by US airstrikes or reports of civilian casualties do we see in the majority of our news media? Virtually none.
Honourable combat to faceless destruction in less than a century. Ain't progress grand?
Bottom line is this: if you train people to kill, you preach the use of "overwhelming force", and you channel all their aggression into smashing any resistance into smithereens, should you really be surprised when your dehumanisation of the enemy is so effective that POWs abuse comes back to bite you on the ass?
That's one way of looking at it. In fact, as I said in my original post, I hate the fact that the EU is following the US's lead in this area, so my own position isn't far different from yours.
However, of the two of us, I seem to be the one who's far more aware of the real world pressures put on politicians and lawmakers: these people didn't suddenly wake up one day and say "Hey, software patents are a good thing!" of their own accord, someone led them to believe that, and that someone (clearly) were businesses and their lobbyists.
The fact that software patents (such as Amazon's one-click shopping patent) stifle competition is "obvious" to you and me, but it clearly isn't "obvious" to everyone. The difference between us and the businesses that support software patents (and, clearly, there are some) is that they can afford to throw a lot of money wooing others to hear their side of the story.
It's not a perfect world, but it's the world that we live in.
So, in the future please, I'd be greatful if you didn't make a knee-jerk reaction and bite my head off just because I try to explain why something has happened - especially when I've made it abundantly clear that I disagree with what's happened in my original post. Or, in your terms, I'm not smoking anything, but perhaps you should stop toking whatever's in your pipe and actually read my post before venting your spleen in my direction next time.
Yeah, well before you start you xenophobic EU-bashing, remember that if it wasn't for the USPTO's stance of letting people patent everything and the kitchen sink then the EU legislators wouldn't have taken such a step.
In the real world, where companies and countries have to compete against one another in business, not recognising software patents in the EU whilst they are being handed out like hot cakes in the US is the quickest way to destroy software development within the EU. I don't like it - in fact, I hate it - but those are the reasons behind it.
So, before you start EU-bashing, on software patents and rights in general (perhaps you should check out the EU Human Rights Act as well) perhaps you should learn to appreciate that it's only following the rather poor precedent set by the US.
The day that companies start worrying about needing a stepping stone to help migrate users from Unix/Linux to Windows is a day most people here will look forward to. For one thing, it will mean that the usability and ease-of-use of Unix/Linux will have surpased that of Windows.
It is both. You have no idea what you are talking about. Do you want the exact quote from the BBC that tells how its ministers are overseen by the Queen?
The BBC doesn't have ministers and it certainly isn't overseen by the Queen. Perhaps you could come back to reality.
Look, if you think you've got something important to say then why not say it whilst logged into your account? Else, stop being a petty little child and quit your moaning about semantics.
One thing that the grandparent post missed was that the BBC is ad-free. When you watch an hour of TV on BBC1, you're watching an hour's worth of programming, as opposed to 40-45 minutes of programming and up to 20 minutes of advertising.
Watching programmes like Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Seinfeld, etc* on the BBC is far preferable to watching them on a commercial broadcaster. You can watch a programme from start to finish without any interruptions (no constant stopping and starting for ad breaks) and, if nothing else, once the programme is over you've got time to go do something else with the time saved not watching commercials.
I don't know about you but I'm a mere mortal. The amount of time I have on this planet is finite. Not having to watch 20 minutes of advertising every time I want to watch a 40 minute programme is a good thing.
(*Not that I watch all the programmes that I mentioned.)
Gentoo isn't for businesses right now...
on
Gentoo Linux Musings
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Businesses want support, stability and a minimum of fuss, not exactly areas where Gentoo enjoys advantages over other Linux distributions such as, say, Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake and Debian.
At the moment, it's not positioned to compete against the major distributions for a share of the business market. It may be so at some point down the line, but it certainly isn't so right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Time for Brand Marketers bye-bye...
Well, my Gmail account is reporting 1,000 MB of total storage space right now. Either I'm not one of the chosen granted the magic 1TB, it hasn't been rolled out to everyone yet or, more likely, it was just a mistake that's been corrected.
I'm sorry, the default interface doesn't exactly match your idea of perfection: how remiss of the guys at Opera to not have read your mind in designing the out-of-the-box configuration of what's an extremely flexible piece of software.
Look, if you can't spend two minutes customising the interface of an application that you'll likely use several times a day then that's your problem. The default interface works fine for lots of people, and I've yet to come across an Opera user who hasn't figured how to right-click on an unwanted part of the UI and select the "Remove from Toolbar" option.
I'm guessing that if you couldn't manage that much that your word processor of choice has the same default page margins that it shipped with, that your multimedia player has had no additional codecs added to it and that your desktop has remained the same since your OS was installed. Heck, I bet your car has the same seat and mirror positions that it rolled off the factory floor with too.
Without wanting to be more sarcastic than I've already been, can you please tell me how you'd improve Opera's default interface? I appreciate that your answer might take more than the two minutes it would take a monkey to customise Opera to suit their own tastes but I'd be interested to see just what you'd expect to find (or not to find) the first time you ran the application.
The buttons might be too close together for you, but remember that a large proportion of mobile phone users are teenage (and pre-teen) kids: buttons too close together for you are probably perfect for them. Besides, there are limits to how far apart you can space buttons on a small form factor device such as a mobile phone.
Yeah, over there alright, right next to that big pile of hidden Iraqi WMDs...
Dude, if you can't tell the difference between a sport, where a contestant, even a boxer, can throw in the towel and call it a day at any time, and a street brawl, where a guy who's taken several blows from a baseball bat and is about to get his skull crushed, then you need help.
Also, in organised sports, the health of the participants comes first, and there is normally a medical kit, if not a trained medical team, on the sidelines. When a player is injured, he can leave the field, etc to get immediate medical treatment. I don't see people in street fights respecting timeouts, etc and, until they do, don't expect a street fight to get treated like a game of three on three.
The phrase "Never judge a book by its cover" springs to mind.
What difference does the picture on the front have to do with the quality of the words inside? Is your enjoyment of them related to the image on the front somehow?
Hey, Taco, I see you found the "post anonymously" option.
Ah, I think this is what's called blissful ignorance.
And this would be called free trade? Just like the free trade in steel, lumber, etc that the US repects?
Even setting aside the hypocrisy of preaching free trade then not practicing it, your custom duty may be impractical: you're forgetting that a great deal of software code written in India is written by programmers employed by American companies, so how you'd levy a custom duty on, say, a product that was coded by Indian employees of a company based in California would be interesting.
Hey, well the incumbent is quite happy to screw it over royally, so it's hard to see how replacing him with Kerry wouldn't be an improvement.
As someone who's partner is a planner, and who's learned to appreciate all kinds of architecture as a result, I have to say that I find your thinking rather blinkered.
Yes, you may not like it, and yes, it might not be a clone of every other building in the area but that doesn't make it a bad thing. If everyone thought as you do then we wouldn't have the Gugenheim Museums of New York and Bilbao, The Sydney Opera House, La Defense (in Paris), Swiss Re (in London) or the planned "Shard of Glass" (also in London).
And those are just modern examples. Virtually every noteworthy building in history has been on the receiving end of flak for being an eyesore at one time or another, yet today they are regarded as classic examples of their time.
What would you rather have architects do? Design drab, uninteresting buildings? Isn't physical architecture a valid artform? Why not? Because you say so? Why is the building "pretty ugly"? Because you say so? Ah, so you've studied architecture at length, have you? You're an expert on the aesthetics of the built environment? No? I didn't think so.
How would you feel about a world where everyone was required to dress the same way as people have always dressed, like the same art and music that people have always liked, and enjoy only the things that have been enjoyed for ages? Would you really want to live in a world that stood culturally still? Well, you might, but I don't.
Try and appreciate that things change, and that, just because you don't like it, that doesn't mean everyone agrees with you. I guarantee you that, in twenty years time, 90 percent of the people who feel that the building is "pretty ugly" now will be looking at the same building and calling it fantastic.
In fact, the building is beautiful right now. Anyone with a trained eye would rattle off a whole lot of reasons why, just as a good art student could tell you why Picasso's work is genius.
What you call an eyesore is actually anything but. That you don't see it is a real pity.
1. If we're being honest, the reason why this topic made the /. frontpage and why we're having this debate is because of the mistreatment of POWs. We're not talking about combat here, we're talking about how the victor treats the vanquished after combat has ceased.
2. There are other military philosophies apart from the US "overwhelming force" one. For example, the British military philosophy is radically different from the US one in that it calls for minimum force. That's not to say that you should attack a tank division with a pea shooter, only that you should avoid unnecessary confrontation in non-battlefield situations whenever possible.
Perhaps you're unaware, but thanks to deployments in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, etc, the average British soldier has far more experience dealing with potentially hostile and deadly civilian populations than his US counterpart. I've no doubt that this is one of the reasons why fewer British troops have had fewer fatal confrontations with Iraqi militia/resistors/whatever than their American allies during the post-combat policing phase of this current war.
In other words, sometimes the best way of dealing with an untamed beast is not to poke it in the eye but to let it lie in peace. The recent crisis in Fallujah is an textbook example of how not to do it.
I'm not trying to play a game of "my war was more brutal than your war".
I'm simply trying to point out that, in less than a century, we've gone from a situation where men sent to war to kill each other were still able to act honourably and in a mutually respectful manner to one another to a situation where they are taught to regard their enemies as little more than faceless targets to be killed as efficiently as possible.
It seems to me that, as the 20th century progressed, serving your country in a war gradually became less and less about fulfilling a duty honourably and more and more about dehumanising and destroying the enemy as effectively as possible.
In 1914, during World War One, troops from both sides celebrated Christmas together by leaving their trenches and walking out into No Man's Land to exchange cigarettes and other luxuries and play friendly, gentlemanly games of football (soccer if you must).
Of course, commanders on both sides soon outlawed the practice, but the mutual respect and honour shown by men sent to kill each other was clear. I don't see that sort of respect nowadays.
One of the most enduring memories I have of the Gulf War were pictures of the "Road of Death", showing literally hundreds of Iraqi tanks, APCs and other vehicles that had been reduced to smoking piles of metal by Allied air power. I thought of all those thousands of Iraqi conscripts, sitting ducks in their retreat from Kuwait, who were roasted alive in their vehicles by Apaches and Warthogs who used them for target practice. Even on the news or in the papers, barely a thought was given to those killed: that's how far we had dehumanised those Iraqi young men.
Just in this last month, the US Army has reduced large portions of Fallujah to rubble in order to defeat a handful of resistors. What started when a protest by a few people was treated heavy-handedly has ended with hundreds of Iraqi dead, many of them innocent civilians (yes, innocent civilians; I don't see infants wielding RPGs), heavy US casualties and, eventually, US withdrawal from the area and a "peace" enforced by one of Saddam Hussein's Generals. Yet how many pictures of the widescale destruction caused by US airstrikes or reports of civilian casualties do we see in the majority of our news media? Virtually none.
Honourable combat to faceless destruction in less than a century. Ain't progress grand?
Bottom line is this: if you train people to kill, you preach the use of "overwhelming force", and you channel all their aggression into smashing any resistance into smithereens, should you really be surprised when your dehumanisation of the enemy is so effective that POWs abuse comes back to bite you on the ass?
That's one way of looking at it. In fact, as I said in my original post, I hate the fact that the EU is following the US's lead in this area, so my own position isn't far different from yours.
However, of the two of us, I seem to be the one who's far more aware of the real world pressures put on politicians and lawmakers: these people didn't suddenly wake up one day and say "Hey, software patents are a good thing!" of their own accord, someone led them to believe that, and that someone (clearly) were businesses and their lobbyists.
The fact that software patents (such as Amazon's one-click shopping patent) stifle competition is "obvious" to you and me, but it clearly isn't "obvious" to everyone. The difference between us and the businesses that support software patents (and, clearly, there are some) is that they can afford to throw a lot of money wooing others to hear their side of the story.
It's not a perfect world, but it's the world that we live in.
So, in the future please, I'd be greatful if you didn't make a knee-jerk reaction and bite my head off just because I try to explain why something has happened - especially when I've made it abundantly clear that I disagree with what's happened in my original post. Or, in your terms, I'm not smoking anything, but perhaps you should stop toking whatever's in your pipe and actually read my post before venting your spleen in my direction next time.
Yeah, well before you start you xenophobic EU-bashing, remember that if it wasn't for the USPTO's stance of letting people patent everything and the kitchen sink then the EU legislators wouldn't have taken such a step.
In the real world, where companies and countries have to compete against one another in business, not recognising software patents in the EU whilst they are being handed out like hot cakes in the US is the quickest way to destroy software development within the EU. I don't like it - in fact, I hate it - but those are the reasons behind it.
So, before you start EU-bashing, on software patents and rights in general (perhaps you should check out the EU Human Rights Act as well) perhaps you should learn to appreciate that it's only following the rather poor precedent set by the US.
The day that companies start worrying about needing a stepping stone to help migrate users from Unix/Linux to Windows is a day most people here will look forward to. For one thing, it will mean that the usability and ease-of-use of Unix/Linux will have surpased that of Windows.
CmdrTaco isn't even the most powerful taco in technology journalism.
See, it's just this sort of comment that has my girlfriend thinking that Slashdot isn't for regular nerds, it's for 10th dan nerds.
It's amazing how many people on Slashdot can't spot irony even when it's smacking them in the face.
Presumably, the person who modded the parent post as "redundant" and the two ACs who added useless replies fall into this category.
It is both. You have no idea what you are talking about. Do you want the exact quote from the BBC that tells how its ministers are overseen by the Queen?
The BBC doesn't have ministers and it certainly isn't overseen by the Queen. Perhaps you could come back to reality.
Look, you silly little man, the worst you can say is that it is government funded, and even that's stretching the truth a bit.
It's not a branch of the government, neither is it government run. If it were then we wouldn't have had the need for the Hutton Report, would we?
Now go and grow a brain, you fool.
Look, if you think you've got something important to say then why not say it whilst logged into your account? Else, stop being a petty little child and quit your moaning about semantics.
One thing that the grandparent post missed was that the BBC is ad-free. When you watch an hour of TV on BBC1, you're watching an hour's worth of programming, as opposed to 40-45 minutes of programming and up to 20 minutes of advertising.
Watching programmes like Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Seinfeld, etc* on the BBC is far preferable to watching them on a commercial broadcaster. You can watch a programme from start to finish without any interruptions (no constant stopping and starting for ad breaks) and, if nothing else, once the programme is over you've got time to go do something else with the time saved not watching commercials.
I don't know about you but I'm a mere mortal. The amount of time I have on this planet is finite. Not having to watch 20 minutes of advertising every time I want to watch a 40 minute programme is a good thing.
(*Not that I watch all the programmes that I mentioned.)
Businesses want support, stability and a minimum of fuss, not exactly areas where Gentoo enjoys advantages over other Linux distributions such as, say, Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake and Debian.
At the moment, it's not positioned to compete against the major distributions for a share of the business market. It may be so at some point down the line, but it certainly isn't so right now.