Yeah, the problem is that everybody has their own interpretation.
Just look at the US. Supposedly the vast majority of the people there are christian. But it's so litigious of a place that clearly nobody cares what the bible has to say on that matter.
Patriotism is devotion to your country because it's your country. I think it's stupid and harmful. Family relations can be done in the same way, assuming the position that some special deference is required just because somebody is related to you.
I feel proud of my parents not because they're my parents, but because they're good people. If they were awful I'd feel entirely justified in hating them.
The same goes for countries. You shouldn't be proud to be born in the glorious $COUNTRY. You should honestly evaluate what it's doing without bias. Good actions should be promoted as an example to others of what a decent place ought to be like, but bad actions should be mercilessly analyzed, criticized and corrected.
A decent person should do that wherever they happen to be, whether it's in their country or another one, without arbitrarily favouring one just because that's where they happened to be born.
Sorry that we're feeding your starving nation and keeping the price of food so low that anyone can afford it.
No, I don't live in one of those nations. The one I live in is perfectly capable of growing plenty food for itself.
If we pulled out, you would be unable to turn a profit still anyway, because the unfed violent masses would simply kill you for over-charging and take what little food you have to begin with. And then they'd starve to death, because your country has no sustainable infrastructure to feed its population.
Bullshit. Those nations can't sell food because:
1. The US will apply a large tariff to it. 2. The US will dump huge amounts of food in those countries to the point that production makes no sense.
This is what we get for saving the world by developing thousand-fold increases in crop yields.
Absolutely not. If you really wanted to "save the world", you'd buy their production instead of sabotaging it. That'd create a lot of jobs and help their economy.
By dumping all that food on those countries you create an apperance of charitability while completely screwing them. Once their domestic production is dead, they're dependent on US charity.
Which funny enough is what China did here. They sold rare earth production cheap enough that it didn't make economical sense for the US to mine their own reserves. The US has plenty, but China drove them all out of business. Now that the US has no domestic production and can't quickly restart it, China has the US by the balls. Welcome to the same situation you created in the agricultural market, except now you get to feel what's it like to be on the wrong side of it.
Don't reward those assholes by paying for one of their products.
If you really want to annoy them, do something to publicise the existence, and improve the distribution of things like PSBreak. Having something like it fully documented so that anybody can assemble it from components and then posted everywhere would annoy Sony quite a bit more than a couple of photos on a website.
The reason to follow my moral code is that if its basis is correct, there are long term negative consequences to not following it.
Pascal's Wager, in other words? It's been discredited long ago.
But if you think that long term, you must have an excellent reason to make this choice. After all, if you get it wrong not only you make your life less fun than it could be for no benefit, but you practically ensure getting sent into a hell of some kind.
So, which specific version did you go with, and why? Why do you reject all the alternatives? And how are you so sure that it's the right one?
If your moral code is correct, if I don't follow it, in 100 years it won't make any difference to me anyway (and in a couple of million years it won't make any difference to anyone)
For me, afterlife is inexistent, and a million years after I live isn't relevant. The only thing that is relevant is my, my children's and my friends' lifetimes, and only things that make that more pleasant matter.
So, basically, you practice what you consider to be moral behavior because it makes you feel good.
No, not exactly.
I don't give money to people in the underground because it feels good. In fact for me specifically it feels very neutral, unless I do it for some other reason, like somebody playing good music.
I give money out of the realization that if my life goes wrong I might end up some day in their place, and it would suck if nobody helped. I also give it out of the realization that putting people in desperate situations they can't get out of on their own leads to them doing desperate things like robbing people at knife point, and it's in my interest to try to reduce the amount of such people.
If someone would prefer some other lifestyle, there is no particular reason why they should follow your moral code.
I don't see your explanation why your is any better.
IMO the reason to follow it is that there is a lot of research that indicates that it works very well. Many cultures came to the same conclusion. Even many religions include it.
That is if someone is not concerned about the suffering of others, there is nothing in your moral code that offers a compelling reason as to why they should care.
Such people are very rare. They're called "sociopaths" and generally don't do all that well because most people don't think that way. Of course, no matter what moral system you come up with somebody isn't going to subscribe to it.
We can't reach a perfect system that absolutely everybody agrees with, but we can strive towards it and achieve something that works for most people.
What basis do you have for telling someone else what constitutes right behavior?
My morality is based on a long line of well tested ideas. Even christianity recognizes the Golden Rule (and no, it didn't invent it).
That said, they of course have the right to arguing back. I may change my position if they have a good argument.
After all, the point of my morality is to minimize suffering. If they can successfully convince me that their way is more pleasant for them, me, and bystanders, then it's the way to go.
Now your turn. What basis do you? If it's because it's a commandment from God, how are you so sure you got the right one? After all people born in different places believe in different deities and have a different morality. Had you been born in some islamic place your morality would have been extremely mysoginistic. What are your thoughts on that?
What reason does your moral code give for someone to care about someone else's suffering?
"Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself" -- if somebody else is suffering, and I have some ability to affect that, according to this rule I ought to try to help them.
Trivial example: If I see a hungry person in the street, I wouldn't like to be in the same position. Therefore if I have the ability to improve their situation (eg, I have money or food) then I ought to help them at least a bit.
If you imagine this being done globally, you can see that feeding the ocassional hungry person is quite cheap, and that people who aren't driven to desperation to survive are less likely to commit crime to feed themselves. So overall in this scheme suffering is minimized. Less people go hungry, and less people get held at knife point. Therefore it's a good way to do things.
Why should I follow this "moral code"? Why is that moral code superior to one that says do whatever you want to someone not of your "tribe"?
A moral code's objective is maximizing happiness. In the religious case that's achieved by getting into heaven. In my code's case, it's achieved by minimizing suffering.
I believe my code is better because it minimizes suffering a lot better the christian one. The christian one imposes a lot of suffering on the assumption it'll lead to heaven. Mine can dispense with all of that because it concentrates uniquely on the "earthly" life and as such doesn't need to make any concessions or tradeoffs for any afterlife.
For instance, with homosexuality the christian morality imposes a lot of suffering on homosexuals. Since I don't believe in the christian reason for this rule, this means for me that a rule punishes people, causing a lot of suffering, for no good reason. Therefore a morality like mine that doesn't include such a rule causes less suffering is better. In both moralities there's no victim, so the victim's suffering in both cases is zero.
Resuming:
Christian: actor's suffering >0, victim's suffering is 0 (because there isn't one) Mine: actor's suffering is 0, victim's suffering is 0 (because there isn't one)
Mine has less suffering in total (0), therefore mine is better. QED.
Further your moral code falls down because homosexual describes a behavior: having sex with someone of the same sex. Therefore it is an act of will
I don't think you read my post very well. There are two parts to homosexuality:
The first is the orientation itself. It's something that just is, just like my eyes happen to be brown, of no decision of my own. Whether you have sex or not you still have a sexual orientation, so this must be mentioned. I believe things like these are not within morality's reach at all.
The part you speak of is the second one. Acting on your sexual orientation and actually having sex is indeed an act of will. This indeed can be morally right or wrong. However when it occurs between two consenting people, there's no victim, and in my moral code, if there's no victim, there's no moral wrong.
Christian condemnation of homosexuality is condemnation of an act. According to Christian morality, self-destructive behavior is morally wrong whether it victimizes someone else or not.
I don't agree it's a self destructive act. You'll have to demonstrate why you believe it is.
However, I also don't think self destructive acts are morally wrong. They're simply self destructive. Morality is about group behavior and should only concern itself with self-destructive behavior when it ends up affecting other people.
For instance suicide is a self destructive behavior which IMO is neither intrinsically right or wrong. I think that if somebody really wishes to end their life they should be able to. Morality only enters the picture if other people are affected.
For instance. A suffering paraplegic/terminally ill person who wishes to end their life and whose friends and familiars understand the reasoning behind that decision is not morally wrong. A person who commits suicide as a "screw you" to society/family harms other people with the action and is therefore morally wrong.
1. Things can only be wrong when they happen as an act of will. Being born with a given color, sexual orientation, handicap or any such things can't be morally wrong because it's just how one happened to be. 2. Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.
So for instance, murder is wrong because 99.9% of the people on the planet agree that they wouldn't want to be murdered, and theft is wrong because even thieves would object to being deprived of their posessions.
Another way to test it is to imagine how things would be like if the behavior was universal.
Homosexuality is not wrong for two reasons: The first one is that having a particular orientation is something some people happen to be. It's not good or bad, it just is. The second one is that in consensual sex between two people there's no party that was victimized, and if there's no victim, it's not morally wrong.
If you are the guy that goes to 3d movies, stop it. You are just making it worse for everyone.
No. I will go to watch whatever I want because I like it. Your opinion is irrelevant. You go whatever you like, though.
I I dont wear regular glasses....So I am not bitching about headaches. I just want to see an nice big screen with a nice bright picture. Not a bunch of bullshit gimmicks "flying" out of the screen because I am too lazy to go to another theatre with cheaper tickets or too stupid to care.
Actually, I agree stuff flying out of the screen is stupid. It's more interesting when used in a more subtle way like in Avatar and UP.
But it's like with video and then sound itself. At first it was "Look, I filmed a person sneezing!" (one of the first video recordings, seriously) and "Hey, there's SOUND!!!". Then some years later people finally got tired of that and came up with something really interesting to do with the tech.
I agree with the grandparent, and from my part, there won't be an apology if it dies again. For two reasons:
1. I happen to like 3D, and will watch 3D content. If it dies it won't be because I didn't support it, so I won't have to apologize for that.
2. 3D content trivially translates to the old 2D, by simply watching either the left or right image. So it's not like anybody loses the ability to watch the movie just because the 3D hardware can't be found anymore. Since the movie will be just as available to people to watch as any normal one, my support for 3D won't deny anything to anybody, so I won't have to apologize for that either.
So what could there possibly have to be an apology for, if the 3D tech goes away?
Last time I went shopping there wasn't enough variety. I checked more than 200 laptops. My requirement was: 13", decent battery time, nvidia graphics card, decent CPU, no TPM. I ended up with about 3 to choose from. That's way too few.
The "no TPM" requirement eliminated a huge chunk of Asus' product line, the 13" eliminated a huge amount of laptops made by about everybody, and 13" with decent power seems to be a very, very rare thing.
With phones it's even worse, the thing that fits me the best is the Nokia N900 and I'd like to have several variations on that to choose from (more RAM and capacitative touch screen for instance). I hope they don't screw up the next model.
I'm very selective and look for fairly unusual things. Give me a selection of 1000 models and I'm quite sure that there won't be more than 10 of them that will match my requirements.
I wasn't referring to Apple actually. Apple is big enough to defend itself, and it's near 100% certain they'll reach a deal, because they have more than enough money to pay lucrative fees to the others.
The companies I want to enter are much smaller and can't afford that kind of thing. I want many more players here. Not 5 or 10 huge companies, but hundreds or thousands of them.
The explanation I heard it's that it's just everything getting bumped in price due to going over budget.
There's a project with a full list of per-item prices. For instance, there is a $10 hammer, a $50000 engine, and so on, and this adds up to some big number like $5M. At some point they figure out that's not enough money, and need $500K extra. The list can't be extended because nothing new will be delivered, which means that something on the list was listed too cheaply.
Now, there can be a problem with figuring out what was listed too cheaply. If for instance an additional janitor was needed, how do you figure out which piece of military hardware was their wage going to come from? To avoid thinking too much about it, they take the extra money needed, divide by the number of items, and bump the price for everything. So you end up with a $510 hammer and a $50500 engine.
It's $500K extra regardless of how you slice it, but sometimes somebody looks at the price list and sees a $510 hammer in there. If that was changed to a $10 hammer and a $51000 engine, nobody would find much to protest about, although both ways amount to the same amount of money.
It's unfortunate because after they figure out a deal, cross-licensing will happen between the big industry players. They'll arrange a deal with each other and form a patent pool that will prevent anybody else from entering the market, and ensuring anything groundbreaking has a hard time appearing. And in a few years the same thing will happen again. And so on.
I'm waiting for enough unreasonable companies to come along that the entire industry implodes on itself due to litigation that leaves everybody screwed, finally realizes that this sucks, throws out the entire patent system, and sanity is finally established.
As a programmer, IMO ReactOS sounds like an uninteresting, often frustrating, and potentially dangerous project to contribute to.
Uninteresting because it's a reimplementation of something that already exists. There's little room for doing something exciting there. The end result of it would be that it'd do what Windows already does, and that's something few people will be able to appreciate. In Open Source programming this is unusual. Generally when somebody reimplements something it's to do something differently. For instance, busybox reimplements a lot of boring stuff but does it for a very good reason. Fitting a Linux system into 4MB of flash is an excellent motivation for working on it, because the standard GNU tools are too big.
Frustrating because it consists in reimplementing something that has no official spec and is not open. That includes things like: figuring exactly how a given system call works including any bugs and edge cases and implementing that, figuring out which officially internal functions are nevertheless used by applications and implementing those. Spending days or weeks figuring out why a closed source application fails to work. In most Open Source coding there's no spec, or the spec is easily available (eg, TCP, POSIX), and the applications that run over that are also pretty much all open, which makes debugging a lot easier.
Potentially dangerous due to issues with software patents and contributors with prior exposure to Microsoft code that could endanger the project. There's no guarantee you won't end as a party in a lawsuit at some point, or that your hard work won't end up being useless if MS manages to shut it all down. ReactOS already ran into trouble with contributions from people who worked at MS in the past (they claim to have done an audit, but how do you tell for sure?), and IMO the only reason MS is not working on shutting it down yet is because it's not yet a viable Windows replacement.
People like thinking things are easy. "We're good, they're evil" is very simple to think about. Pondering about generations worth of wrongdoing in the past, and a lot of shady actions in the present on both sides is complicated and unpleasant, and means you have to spend a lot of time on figuring out which side is better. And that might be you.
Also, pretty much everybody thinks they're good, so their faults if they admit they exist at all are all justifiable for excellent reasons, while whoever is on the other side is of course evil.
But which one is easier to remember? The graphical ones. If I want to follow this procedure again in a year, what are the chances I'm going to remember those two lines exactly? Even a single character off could have bad results, ore more likely not work at all. Sure, most of us on/. have memorized simple commands like rm, ln, and their common parameters, but the average user is NOT going to memorize that, nor should they have to.
That's why you make a script. Or copy/paste again from the original source, which could be a website or an email.
The graphical procedure is visual and self-correcting. You need to make a link, so even if you don't remember exactly what kind of link, or how to do it, you see a simple "make link" option when you right-click on a folder.
That's because you already understand what you want to do, and know perhaps 90% of what's required and are only missing minor details like what you mentioned.
But in my experience, newbies don't want that. They want rigid commands. They laboriously take notes and make lists like: 1. Click Start 2. Click "Program files" 3. Click Microsoft Word
However that fails horribly the second something unexpected happens. For instance, "Start" is not called "Start" because they're using a french OS, the taskbar has been accidentally moved to the top or a side of the screen, or they moved from XP to Vista, or the menu has "helpfully" hidden the infrequently used items, and Word doesn't appear at first sight in it anymore.
It's really hard to give instructions that account for all the possible trivial but confusing variations in a GUI. It's maddening over the phone because you have to describe something without being able to show it, and only slightly less so online.
Command lines have much less variability to them. "ls" is still "ls", and "cp" is still "cp", and so are many other things. So quite a few scripts from 10 years ago will work perfectly fine. GUI instructions need to be constantly updated to keep up with different languages, and minor OS revisions, and are much more time consuming to test to make sure they still apply.
If I have to look up the command line syntax every time I want to make a link, it's a lot slower than just using the GUI method. I have to figure out what to type in the search engine, and sort through for something that tells me how to do exactly what I want to do.
Where do you get the knowledge where to click in a GUI? You always have that problem
Another problem is long paths to directories. Sure, typing ~/Pictures is easy enough, but what if it's ~/Desktop/android-sdk-mac_86/tools (random example), or something worse. It is hard to accurately remember and type long paths in the command line, but with the GUI there is no chance for mistakes assuming you don't have multiple files with very similar names.
Then you use tab completion, or simply take advantage of that somebody already figured the path out for you, and copy/paste it from a forum. If you need to do it multiple times, bookmark or make a script.
Of course it's great that the CLI is there, but usability is a lot better if a GUI option is available too.
Usability is best with neither, really.
The best usability belongs to the TUI: The single tasked full screen (normally text) application. A good one has a very linear workflow, lacks hot keys that cause unexpected results, and can very reliably used by the "follow a list" method because everything is always done the same way, is in the same place, is done in the same order and looks the same as yesterday, and there's no way for the user to change that.
The command line ones. They often can be copy-pasted, and are much more language neutral (though not so much in this particular case)
Language is a pretty big barrier for giving GUI explanations. For instance, I don't have my GUI in English, so if I were to try to explain this to somebody here, I'd have the problem of not knowing the exact name of the "Make Link" option. It could be "Make Symlink" or "Create Link" for all I know. But in the commandline, "ln" is always "ln", and the name of the Pictures folder is one of the very few deviations from that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the problem is that everybody has their own interpretation.
Just look at the US. Supposedly the vast majority of the people there are christian. But it's so litigious of a place that clearly nobody cares what the bible has to say on that matter.
All you need to make a camel pass through a needle's eye is to grind it very finely.
Patriotism is devotion to your country because it's your country. I think it's stupid and harmful. Family relations can be done in the same way, assuming the position that some special deference is required just because somebody is related to you.
I feel proud of my parents not because they're my parents, but because they're good people. If they were awful I'd feel entirely justified in hating them.
The same goes for countries. You shouldn't be proud to be born in the glorious $COUNTRY. You should honestly evaluate what it's doing without bias. Good actions should be promoted as an example to others of what a decent place ought to be like, but bad actions should be mercilessly analyzed, criticized and corrected.
A decent person should do that wherever they happen to be, whether it's in their country or another one, without arbitrarily favouring one just because that's where they happened to be born.
No, I don't live in one of those nations. The one I live in is perfectly capable of growing plenty food for itself.
Bullshit. Those nations can't sell food because:
1. The US will apply a large tariff to it.
2. The US will dump huge amounts of food in those countries to the point that production makes no sense.
Absolutely not. If you really wanted to "save the world", you'd buy their production instead of sabotaging it. That'd create a lot of jobs and help their economy.
By dumping all that food on those countries you create an apperance of charitability while completely screwing them. Once their domestic production is dead, they're dependent on US charity.
Which funny enough is what China did here. They sold rare earth production cheap enough that it didn't make economical sense for the US to mine their own reserves. The US has plenty, but China drove them all out of business. Now that the US has no domestic production and can't quickly restart it, China has the US by the balls. Welcome to the same situation you created in the agricultural market, except now you get to feel what's it like to be on the wrong side of it.
Don't reward those assholes by paying for one of their products.
If you really want to annoy them, do something to publicise the existence, and improve the distribution of things like PSBreak. Having something like it fully documented so that anybody can assemble it from components and then posted everywhere would annoy Sony quite a bit more than a couple of photos on a website.
The US does exactly the same thing in the agriculture sector.
So I entirely agree, so long the US gets kicked out as well.
If he's going to file a lawsuit, he can get the IP address from slashdot and figure it out from there.
Pascal's Wager, in other words? It's been discredited long ago.
But if you think that long term, you must have an excellent reason to make this choice. After all, if you get it wrong not only you make your life less fun than it could be for no benefit, but you practically ensure getting sent into a hell of some kind.
So, which specific version did you go with, and why? Why do you reject all the alternatives? And how are you so sure that it's the right one?
For me, afterlife is inexistent, and a million years after I live isn't relevant. The only thing that is relevant is my, my children's and my friends' lifetimes, and only things that make that more pleasant matter.
No, not exactly.
I don't give money to people in the underground because it feels good. In fact for me specifically it feels very neutral, unless I do it for some other reason, like somebody playing good music.
I give money out of the realization that if my life goes wrong I might end up some day in their place, and it would suck if nobody helped. I also give it out of the realization that putting people in desperate situations they can't get out of on their own leads to them doing desperate things like robbing people at knife point, and it's in my interest to try to reduce the amount of such people.
I don't see your explanation why your is any better.
IMO the reason to follow it is that there is a lot of research that indicates that it works very well. Many cultures came to the same conclusion. Even many religions include it.
Such people are very rare. They're called "sociopaths" and generally don't do all that well because most people don't think that way. Of course, no matter what moral system you come up with somebody isn't going to subscribe to it.
We can't reach a perfect system that absolutely everybody agrees with, but we can strive towards it and achieve something that works for most people.
My morality is based on a long line of well tested ideas. Even christianity recognizes the Golden Rule (and no, it didn't invent it).
That said, they of course have the right to arguing back. I may change my position if they have a good argument.
After all, the point of my morality is to minimize suffering. If they can successfully convince me that their way is more pleasant for them, me, and bystanders, then it's the way to go.
Now your turn. What basis do you? If it's because it's a commandment from God, how are you so sure you got the right one? After all people born in different places believe in different deities and have a different morality. Had you been born in some islamic place your morality would have been extremely mysoginistic. What are your thoughts on that?
"Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself" -- if somebody else is suffering, and I have some ability to affect that, according to this rule I ought to try to help them.
Trivial example: If I see a hungry person in the street, I wouldn't like to be in the same position. Therefore if I have the ability to improve their situation (eg, I have money or food) then I ought to help them at least a bit.
If you imagine this being done globally, you can see that feeding the ocassional hungry person is quite cheap, and that people who aren't driven to desperation to survive are less likely to commit crime to feed themselves. So overall in this scheme suffering is minimized. Less people go hungry, and less people get held at knife point. Therefore it's a good way to do things.
A moral code's objective is maximizing happiness. In the religious case that's achieved by getting into heaven. In my code's case, it's achieved by minimizing suffering.
I believe my code is better because it minimizes suffering a lot better the christian one. The christian one imposes a lot of suffering on the assumption it'll lead to heaven. Mine can dispense with all of that because it concentrates uniquely on the "earthly" life and as such doesn't need to make any concessions or tradeoffs for any afterlife.
For instance, with homosexuality the christian morality imposes a lot of suffering on homosexuals. Since I don't believe in the christian reason for this rule, this means for me that a rule punishes people, causing a lot of suffering, for no good reason. Therefore a morality like mine that doesn't include such a rule causes less suffering is better. In both moralities there's no victim, so the victim's suffering in both cases is zero.
Resuming:
Christian: actor's suffering >0, victim's suffering is 0 (because there isn't one)
Mine: actor's suffering is 0, victim's suffering is 0 (because there isn't one)
Mine has less suffering in total (0), therefore mine is better. QED.
I don't think you read my post very well. There are two parts to homosexuality:
The first is the orientation itself. It's something that just is, just like my eyes happen to be brown, of no decision of my own. Whether you have sex or not you still have a sexual orientation, so this must be mentioned. I believe things like these are not within morality's reach at all.
The part you speak of is the second one. Acting on your sexual orientation and actually having sex is indeed an act of will. This indeed can be morally right or wrong. However when it occurs between two consenting people, there's no victim, and in my moral code, if there's no victim, there's no moral wrong.
I don't agree it's a self destructive act. You'll have to demonstrate why you believe it is.
However, I also don't think self destructive acts are morally wrong. They're simply self destructive. Morality is about group behavior and should only concern itself with self-destructive behavior when it ends up affecting other people.
For instance suicide is a self destructive behavior which IMO is neither intrinsically right or wrong. I think that if somebody really wishes to end their life they should be able to. Morality only enters the picture if other people are affected.
For instance. A suffering paraplegic/terminally ill person who wishes to end their life and whose friends and familiars understand the reasoning behind that decision is not morally wrong. A person who commits suicide as a "screw you" to society/family harms other people with the action and is therefore morally wrong.
1. Things can only be wrong when they happen as an act of will. Being born with a given color, sexual orientation, handicap or any such things can't be morally wrong because it's just how one happened to be.
2. Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.
So for instance, murder is wrong because 99.9% of the people on the planet agree that they wouldn't want to be murdered, and theft is wrong because even thieves would object to being deprived of their posessions.
Another way to test it is to imagine how things would be like if the behavior was universal.
Homosexuality is not wrong for two reasons: The first one is that having a particular orientation is something some people happen to be. It's not good or bad, it just is. The second one is that in consensual sex between two people there's no party that was victimized, and if there's no victim, it's not morally wrong.
It's not a bug in the implementation, if it's coded according to spec. However, most people would say that it's a bug in the specification.
I'm also pretty sure it violates some sort of Windows Logo or similar requirement.
Looks like you didn't actually read my comment. I'll quote myself because you seem to have missed it:
No. I will go to watch whatever I want because I like it. Your opinion is irrelevant. You go whatever you like, though.
Actually, I agree stuff flying out of the screen is stupid. It's more interesting when used in a more subtle way like in Avatar and UP.
But it's like with video and then sound itself. At first it was "Look, I filmed a person sneezing!" (one of the first video recordings, seriously) and "Hey, there's SOUND!!!". Then some years later people finally got tired of that and came up with something really interesting to do with the tech.
I agree with the grandparent, and from my part, there won't be an apology if it dies again. For two reasons:
1. I happen to like 3D, and will watch 3D content. If it dies it won't be because I didn't support it, so I won't have to apologize for that.
2. 3D content trivially translates to the old 2D, by simply watching either the left or right image. So it's not like anybody loses the ability to watch the movie just because the 3D hardware can't be found anymore. Since the movie will be just as available to people to watch as any normal one, my support for 3D won't deny anything to anybody, so I won't have to apologize for that either.
So what could there possibly have to be an apology for, if the 3D tech goes away?
What do you mean by "supported" and by who?
Generally I don't care for any kind of support besides warranty replacements, and those must be offered by law, so I'm not worried.
Yes, the more the better.
Last time I went shopping there wasn't enough variety. I checked more than 200 laptops. My requirement was: 13", decent battery time, nvidia graphics card, decent CPU, no TPM. I ended up with about 3 to choose from. That's way too few.
The "no TPM" requirement eliminated a huge chunk of Asus' product line, the 13" eliminated a huge amount of laptops made by about everybody, and 13" with decent power seems to be a very, very rare thing.
With phones it's even worse, the thing that fits me the best is the Nokia N900 and I'd like to have several variations on that to choose from (more RAM and capacitative touch screen for instance). I hope they don't screw up the next model.
I'm very selective and look for fairly unusual things. Give me a selection of 1000 models and I'm quite sure that there won't be more than 10 of them that will match my requirements.
I wasn't referring to Apple actually. Apple is big enough to defend itself, and it's near 100% certain they'll reach a deal, because they have more than enough money to pay lucrative fees to the others.
The companies I want to enter are much smaller and can't afford that kind of thing. I want many more players here. Not 5 or 10 huge companies, but hundreds or thousands of them.
The explanation I heard it's that it's just everything getting bumped in price due to going over budget.
There's a project with a full list of per-item prices. For instance, there is a $10 hammer, a $50000 engine, and so on, and this adds up to some big number like $5M. At some point they figure out that's not enough money, and need $500K extra. The list can't be extended because nothing new will be delivered, which means that something on the list was listed too cheaply.
Now, there can be a problem with figuring out what was listed too cheaply. If for instance an additional janitor was needed, how do you figure out which piece of military hardware was their wage going to come from? To avoid thinking too much about it, they take the extra money needed, divide by the number of items, and bump the price for everything. So you end up with a $510 hammer and a $50500 engine.
It's $500K extra regardless of how you slice it, but sometimes somebody looks at the price list and sees a $510 hammer in there. If that was changed to a $10 hammer and a $51000 engine, nobody would find much to protest about, although both ways amount to the same amount of money.
It's unfortunate because after they figure out a deal, cross-licensing will happen between the big industry players. They'll arrange a deal with each other and form a patent pool that will prevent anybody else from entering the market, and ensuring anything groundbreaking has a hard time appearing. And in a few years the same thing will happen again. And so on.
I'm waiting for enough unreasonable companies to come along that the entire industry implodes on itself due to litigation that leaves everybody screwed, finally realizes that this sucks, throws out the entire patent system, and sanity is finally established.
As a programmer, IMO ReactOS sounds like an uninteresting, often frustrating, and potentially dangerous project to contribute to.
Uninteresting because it's a reimplementation of something that already exists. There's little room for doing something exciting there. The end result of it would be that it'd do what Windows already does, and that's something few people will be able to appreciate. In Open Source programming this is unusual. Generally when somebody reimplements something it's to do something differently. For instance, busybox reimplements a lot of boring stuff but does it for a very good reason. Fitting a Linux system into 4MB of flash is an excellent motivation for working on it, because the standard GNU tools are too big.
Frustrating because it consists in reimplementing something that has no official spec and is not open. That includes things like: figuring exactly how a given system call works including any bugs and edge cases and implementing that, figuring out which officially internal functions are nevertheless used by applications and implementing those. Spending days or weeks figuring out why a closed source application fails to work. In most Open Source coding there's no spec, or the spec is easily available (eg, TCP, POSIX), and the applications that run over that are also pretty much all open, which makes debugging a lot easier.
Potentially dangerous due to issues with software patents and contributors with prior exposure to Microsoft code that could endanger the project. There's no guarantee you won't end as a party in a lawsuit at some point, or that your hard work won't end up being useless if MS manages to shut it all down. ReactOS already ran into trouble with contributions from people who worked at MS in the past (they claim to have done an audit, but how do you tell for sure?), and IMO the only reason MS is not working on shutting it down yet is because it's not yet a viable Windows replacement.
People like thinking things are easy. "We're good, they're evil" is very simple to think about. Pondering about generations worth of wrongdoing in the past, and a lot of shady actions in the present on both sides is complicated and unpleasant, and means you have to spend a lot of time on figuring out which side is better. And that might be you.
Also, pretty much everybody thinks they're good, so their faults if they admit they exist at all are all justifiable for excellent reasons, while whoever is on the other side is of course evil.
That's why you make a script. Or copy/paste again from the original source, which could be a website or an email.
That's because you already understand what you want to do, and know perhaps 90% of what's required and are only missing minor details like what you mentioned.
But in my experience, newbies don't want that. They want rigid commands. They laboriously take notes and make lists like:
1. Click Start
2. Click "Program files"
3. Click Microsoft Word
However that fails horribly the second something unexpected happens. For instance, "Start" is not called "Start" because they're using a french OS, the taskbar has been accidentally moved to the top or a side of the screen, or they moved from XP to Vista, or the menu has "helpfully" hidden the infrequently used items, and Word doesn't appear at first sight in it anymore.
It's really hard to give instructions that account for all the possible trivial but confusing variations in a GUI. It's maddening over the phone because you have to describe something without being able to show it, and only slightly less so online.
Command lines have much less variability to them. "ls" is still "ls", and "cp" is still "cp", and so are many other things. So quite a few scripts from 10 years ago will work perfectly fine. GUI instructions need to be constantly updated to keep up with different languages, and minor OS revisions, and are much more time consuming to test to make sure they still apply.
Where do you get the knowledge where to click in a GUI? You always have that problem
Then you use tab completion, or simply take advantage of that somebody already figured the path out for you, and copy/paste it from a forum. If you need to do it multiple times, bookmark or make a script.
Usability is best with neither, really.
The best usability belongs to the TUI: The single tasked full screen (normally text) application. A good one has a very linear workflow, lacks hot keys that cause unexpected results, and can very reliably used by the "follow a list" method because everything is always done the same way, is in the same place, is done in the same order and looks the same as yesterday, and there's no way for the user to change that.
The command line ones. They often can be copy-pasted, and are much more language neutral (though not so much in this particular case)
Language is a pretty big barrier for giving GUI explanations. For instance, I don't have my GUI in English, so if I were to try to explain this to somebody here, I'd have the problem of not knowing the exact name of the "Make Link" option. It could be "Make Symlink" or "Create Link" for all I know. But in the commandline, "ln" is always "ln", and the name of the Pictures folder is one of the very few deviations from that.