I wish more hardware/software sites were as rigorous in their reviews and articles as Ars Technica. It's so much better than the average OS release or Linux distro review from many other sites.
To me, "The installer is cool, look at these spiffy screenshots" and nothing else is not a review. 21 pages of detailed technical and UI examination and discussion - now that's a review.
The USB storage device auto-detect thing is what happens with most distros isn't it? Certainly with Ubuntu, FC3 and SuSE it automatically pops up an icon on the desktop whenever you insert a storage device.
I've seen the same on UK DTV. If everything on screen is mostly stationary, the picture is fantastic, probably better than the best analogue reception I've seen.
Switch to something rapid moving or with a lot of information on screen and it starts to go seriously blocky. Images of something like a flowing, turbulent river surface look terrible, with clearly visible block boundaries every couple of centimetres.
I hope that as the digital switch continues, more bandwidth is available to improve the picture quality.
I'm not an Mac owner, but Tiger's search doesn't sound anything like locate. Locate has no knowledge of file type, file contents or metadata. It couldn't show you "all Openoffice files written by John Smith last tuesday", for example. It wouldn't index you emails etc.
It also requires a complete database scan to update AFAIK, whereas spotlight updates its database in the background as it is integrated into the OS, so Spotlight will generally be up to date.
Free software that will be quite similar to Spotlight is Beagle, which looks pretty impressive.
Didn't Rare used to be Ultimate: Play the Game? IIRC, that means they were writing truly great games while most of today's game developers were wearing nappies.
Jet-pac, Pssst, Tranz-am, Knightlore are the stuff of gaming legend.
Science is based on the *assumption* that the universe is predictable: proof by induction. It seems to be working out pretty well for us so far, but if it stopped being true tomorrow, science wouldn't be wrong.
As is inevitable in threads like these, I should mention Karl Popper.
Therefore, the fact that you can disprove the point doesn't matter. The tall-tree thing is from some Dawkins book, a belief held by a tribe with no access to space travel, telescopes etc so they couldn't disprove the point, anyway.
Faith, as the original poster puts it, is the belief in something without evidence. It is logically inconsistent: if somebody believes one thing without evidence, why not everything? How does one decide which is a 'right' faith? Is there actually some evidence required? At what point does it stop, then, being something you believe through faith and something you know through evidence?
Physics is not a belief system, it cannot be used to justify anything. It's just a collection of theories which appear, given the evidence we have, to describe our universe reasonably well. As such, you can't judge physics: it just is. E may stop equaling mc2 tomorrow, that doesn't mean physics stops.
Faith, on the other hand, as a construct of human thought, can be judged as good or bad.
Cost per mile in a car is generally around 20p. London to Brighton is ~60 miles, so that's 120 miles/day. Say 225 days a year, that's about £5400/year.
That analysis ignores the cost of not having the capital cost of the car to invest elsewhere but includes depreciation, but sounds reasonable to me otherwise.
It's generally best not to have employees whose first words to many customers are how crap the company is. I'm just going on the five or so inspectors I've talked to about it all, really.
I imagine rail miles are going up because travelling miles in general are going up and because of the increasing cost of road travel (petrol's ~90p/litre, isn't it?). I don't have any figures to back that up.
It's not all that bad down that way. I went to school near there (Brighton College, Eastern road) and pupils did used to get beaten up occasionally on the way to the sports ground, but generally it wasn't too bad. Just don't get lost and end up in Whitehawk.
British rail companies get something like £3 billion/year in subsidy. The current system was set up in a hurry by a departing Conservative (right wing) administration and has led to years of disruption and rail crashes.
The government subsidy to the railways has just about trebled since privatisation, IIRC. Private enterprise efficiency my arse.
If you're ever bored on a British train, find a ticket inspector who looks old enough to have been working since before privatisation and ask them if they prefer working for the privatised company.
The purpose of a desktop Linux distro is to take a bunch of separate, unpolished, applications and make a complete desktop out of them. I would have thought that was obvious.
Adams wrote a final draft version of the screenplay, it was then given to Karey Kirkpatrick who I think did a fair bit of rewriting and editing.
However, the brilliance of Douglas Adams' writing is really in his attention to detail. I've read interviews with people who worked with him who say that he would obsessively rewrite things until they were perfect: he would take ten pages of script, go away for a few days and come back with 7 pages, because he had pared it down to its absolute funniest. He IIRC spent a long time deciding on which number would be funniest as "the Answer" before deciding on 42: the number of times 42 jokes have been made suggests he was right.
My point is, much of what would have made it an Adams screenplay would likely have been done in the final weeks of work, which we appear to have lost.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish more hardware/software sites were as rigorous in their reviews and articles as Ars Technica. It's so much better than the average OS release or Linux distro review from many other sites.
To me, "The installer is cool, look at these spiffy screenshots" and nothing else is not a review. 21 pages of detailed technical and UI examination and discussion - now that's a review.
The USB storage device auto-detect thing is what happens with most distros isn't it? Certainly with Ubuntu, FC3 and SuSE it automatically pops up an icon on the desktop whenever you insert a storage device.
Because this one goes to eleven, see?
A petition to make the OS OS2 OSS?
I've seen the same on UK DTV. If everything on screen is mostly stationary, the picture is fantastic, probably better than the best analogue reception I've seen.
Switch to something rapid moving or with a lot of information on screen and it starts to go seriously blocky. Images of something like a flowing, turbulent river surface look terrible, with clearly visible block boundaries every couple of centimetres.
I hope that as the digital switch continues, more bandwidth is available to improve the picture quality.
In the UK, basic digital boxes are around £40-50 inc. VAT. If they follow the usual UK->US price conversion, that would make them around $50.
I'm not an Mac owner, but Tiger's search doesn't sound anything like locate. Locate has no knowledge of file type, file contents or metadata. It couldn't show you "all Openoffice files written by John Smith last tuesday", for example. It wouldn't index you emails etc.
It also requires a complete database scan to update AFAIK, whereas spotlight updates its database in the background as it is integrated into the OS, so Spotlight will generally be up to date.
Free software that will be quite similar to Spotlight is Beagle, which looks pretty impressive.
I should really clean up a bit.
Still using Americanisms as well: "Take the ramp to Stansted/London" for example. Ramp? What is this, a BMX stunt course?
Didn't Rare used to be Ultimate: Play the Game? IIRC, that means they were writing truly great games while most of today's game developers were wearing nappies.
Jet-pac, Pssst, Tranz-am, Knightlore are the stuff of gaming legend.
The Simpsons had at least 9 or so excellent seasons, too. I agree in general, though.
IMHO, Buffy should have been cancelled two seasons before it was: quality was seriously down.
Science is based on the *assumption* that the universe is predictable: proof by induction. It seems to be working out pretty well for us so far, but if it stopped being true tomorrow, science wouldn't be wrong.
As is inevitable in threads like these, I should mention Karl Popper.
Ah, but there might be another, taller, tree which *would* let you touch the moon. It's just that you haven't found one yet.
From the original comment:
> Evidence doesn't matter.
Therefore, the fact that you can disprove the point doesn't matter. The tall-tree thing is from some Dawkins book, a belief held by a tribe with no access to space travel, telescopes etc so they couldn't disprove the point, anyway.
Faith, as the original poster puts it, is the belief in something without evidence. It is logically inconsistent: if somebody believes one thing without evidence, why not everything? How does one decide which is a 'right' faith? Is there actually some evidence required? At what point does it stop, then, being something you believe through faith and something you know through evidence?
Physics is not a belief system, it cannot be used to justify anything. It's just a collection of theories which appear, given the evidence we have, to describe our universe reasonably well. As such, you can't judge physics: it just is. E may stop equaling mc2 tomorrow, that doesn't mean physics stops.
Faith, on the other hand, as a construct of human thought, can be judged as good or bad.
It's not open to debate. It's a personal choice and should be respected.
A few counter-examples:Faith can be used to justify appaling acts and discrimination or can limit development of society, and is not something to be respected.
Cost per mile in a car is generally around 20p. London to Brighton is ~60 miles, so that's 120 miles/day. Say 225 days a year, that's about £5400/year.
That analysis ignores the cost of not having the capital cost of the car to invest elsewhere but includes depreciation, but sounds reasonable to me otherwise.
Hm, thick grey tweedy blazers. Enough to make anybody jealous ;)
At least it's better than being at Lewes Old Grammar: they have gangs of up to 50 local state school kids hanging around trying to beat them up.
It's generally best not to have employees whose first words to many customers are how crap the company is. I'm just going on the five or so inspectors I've talked to about it all, really.
I imagine rail miles are going up because travelling miles in general are going up and because of the increasing cost of road travel (petrol's ~90p/litre, isn't it?). I don't have any figures to back that up.
Maybe so. It's hardly Roedean though. I do remember groups of local residents used to stand and gawp while we did drill in the main quad, though.
It's not all that bad down that way. I went to school near there (Brighton College, Eastern road) and pupils did used to get beaten up occasionally on the way to the sports ground, but generally it wasn't too bad. Just don't get lost and end up in Whitehawk.
British rail companies get something like £3 billion/year in subsidy. The current system was set up in a hurry by a departing Conservative (right wing) administration and has led to years of disruption and rail crashes.
My sarcasm detector is off the scale...
The government subsidy to the railways has just about trebled since privatisation, IIRC. Private enterprise efficiency my arse.
If you're ever bored on a British train, find a ticket inspector who looks old enough to have been working since before privatisation and ask them if they prefer working for the privatised company.
The purpose of a desktop Linux distro is to take a bunch of separate, unpolished, applications and make a complete desktop out of them. I would have thought that was obvious.
Adams wrote a final draft version of the screenplay, it was then given to Karey Kirkpatrick who I think did a fair bit of rewriting and editing.
However, the brilliance of Douglas Adams' writing is really in his attention to detail. I've read interviews with people who worked with him who say that he would obsessively rewrite things until they were perfect: he would take ten pages of script, go away for a few days and come back with 7 pages, because he had pared it down to its absolute funniest. He IIRC spent a long time deciding on which number would be funniest as "the Answer" before deciding on 42: the number of times 42 jokes have been made suggests he was right.
My point is, much of what would have made it an Adams screenplay would likely have been done in the final weeks of work, which we appear to have lost.