What I found with DSL Reports is that people are much more likely to focus upon the negative aspects of a service - those who are happy with their providers tend not to post positive reviews.
For example, I read the reviews of my provider, Telocity, after I'd ordered the service, and thought to myself, "Oh, shit, I guess I'll have to cancel the order."
As it turned out, my modem arrived two weeks early, the service was impeccable, and I haven't had a single problem with them in the five months that I've used their service.
DSL Reports certainly has value, and in concept it's fantastic. In practice, though, it's not all that it's cracked up to be. You'd be much better off asking a friend - or, if there's a Linux User Group in your area, ask them -- the Philadelphia user group has been exceedingly helpful for lots of people.
What I like most about Sonique is the UI. It can be simple and uncluttered, or it can be baroque and hellishly complex, depending on what skin you select. It's got nice vis plugins, and a pretty average mp3 decoder.
I've noticed a lot of people here complaining about eye candy, and to each their own, I suppose -- personally, I think that Linux is currently somewhat short of nice-looking apps, and that it could stand to gain a few. Not a judgement on Linux itself, just on Linux UI design.
OK - I worked managing the computers at a library for two years, so I speak from experience here:
Yes. You really, really do need some kind of usage policy. My library had a no-email policy, which I never enforced, but I think that certain of the policies were perfectly reasonable.
The "no porn" one, for example. You'd be really amazed by how many middle-aged men come into the library and look up porn, on a public computer, in full view, in the middle of the day, and then actually get _indignant_ when you ask them to leave. Kiddies are just as into it, but they're mostly (in my experience at least) just doing it on a dare or whatever.
There are other ones that aren't quite as obvious, too. The afterschool crowds at my library were really staggering, and since a lot of the kids needed to use the computers for reports, we had do have a policy to give them preference over kiddies who wanted to check out Pokemon and DragonballZ sites.
Certainly, some policies aren't reasonable (ie "no email, no Deja"), but a lot of them are. Don't get into some kind of knee-jerk reaction about how bad it is for libraries to regulate the use of their computers. Think it through before you post.
Besides the vagueness, the idea of having the AI built solely to handle yes-or-no questions seems kind of limiting to me. I mean, just amassing an assload of facts is kind of trivial.
The user moderation system on Mindpixel is an interesting idea, but again, I don't think that it works very well either. There are too many cases where users either don't know the answer to the question that they're trying to moderate or they don't care enough to actually answer correctly.
The idea behind Forum 2000 - which I think we all know was fake - isn't a bad one: learn language usage from Usenet feeds, then dissect the messages in Usenet posts themselves. Has anyone done anything like that?
OK, look, I'll probably get moderated as a troll for saying this, but here goes:
I've written code. Not a whole lot, but enough to know that a lot of work goes into things. I'm all for free software, but I also think that if the programmer of something wants to make money from his work, then he should be perfectly entitled to. If I ever wrote something original and cool, I'd want to be reimbursed in some way for the time that I put into it. I don't know that I'd patent it, especially under the current system, but it'd be really nice to see that my work is recognised, at some official level, as my own.
Just my two cents. Moderate away, but please, don't do the usual "Slashdot says it's bad, so I'll moderate down all posts saying otherwise."
For one thing, I'd love to see a Linux port of Internet Explorer. Slag on MS all you want; MSIE is faster than Netscape, more stable than Netscape, and (for now at least) a hell of a lot more stable than Mozilla.
So as something to hold us 'till Mozilla makes a final release, I think it oculd actually be a good thing...
I suppose I'll get flamed or modreated as "Troll" for saying this....well, whatever.
My understanding of the reason that Looking Glass shut its doors is that Eidos didn't give them sufficient funding. (Thanks in large part to Ion Storm, but that's a different rant).
Thief 1 and 2 were comparatively successful - the demise of Looking Glass was due to business matters, rather than a flaw in the game design.
Of course, I could easily be wrong about these things, too.
"Say your thoughts are not the property of others."
Fair enough. They're not. On the other hand, Stephen King's novel is the property of Stephen King. He wrote it. I read it, I enjoyed it. It's fair to pay him for that.
It's fine with me if you want to download mp3's and warez. But don't try to say that it's revolutionary and world-changing, because it isn't.
The same thing seems to be going on with kung-fu DVD's; the Jet Li movies My Father is a Hero (the title was changed to The Enforcer for some reason in the US DVD release) and Fist of Legend were released here on DVD with no Chinese.
The dubbing was pretty good in them -- and it was excellent for the Disney release of Mononoke Hime, but the fact is still that dubbing just plain sucks. Alas.
Also, I believe there's a fan-subbed version of Mononoke Hime in RM format floating around the net somewhere.
In one paragraph, you're talking about loving others, and spreading the Good Word, and so on.
And in the next you refer to Roman Catholics as "heathen sinners" who "worship the virgin whore". What's wrong with this picture?
I'm not a Christian, but I come from a strongly Irish Catholic family, and the kind of hatred that you're spouting in this post is shocking, to say the least. It's amazing that someone professing to be a follower of Christianity's precepts (loving one's brother as one loves oneself, in particular) can even think something along those lines, let along post it.
Have you ever written anything in DirectX? It's every bit as fucked up as MS's other API's. Besides that, it's tied to Wintel only, while OpenGL works on pretty much every platform worth a damn.
Besides that, OpenGL has a much more active and rabid community around it. There are OpenGL tutorials all over the web, and books on it, and a hall of a lot more games with OpenGL support.
It's entirely possible that DirectX will someday be able to do more than OpenGL can. But it will always be a pain in the ass to code in.
The debate over free vs. mostly-free is so irrelevant and suicidal that I could just laugh. It's certainly important to be principled, and all that, but the fact is that at the moment, Linux needs to focus on *usability*, not on principle. GNOME is nowhere near as polished/usable for newcomers as KDE, at the moment. In six months, it may be, but meanwhile, the only Linux desktop that is familiar to Windoze/Mac users is KDE. By not including KDE, Debian is dooming themselves to the "hardcore geek" nice of Linux distros. In order to "spread the good word", so to speak, it's necessary, for now at least, to use the mostly-free KDE, and spread the joy of Linux to people who want to use it.
Actually, my understanding of this law is that it's intentionally spreading a virus that's illegal. Thus, if you've got an infected word document, you're safe unless it was you that created the virus.
This is a totally worthy charity -- we all knew that Metallica are hard up for money, and yet we shamelessly traded their "art"...I don't know about you guys, but I'm weeping tears of shame as I write this.
Actually, (I think) Beam-It protects against that by only allowing one IP per login at any given time. Sure, people could share an account and take turns, but it kind of limits the usability of it, especially if you've got an assload of people using the one account.
Well yeah, but pretty much every movie - and every story - contains these elements; that was the whole point of Joseph Campbell's work. Star Wars had a lot of elements from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, which in turn had elements from countless folk tales in it. You're absolutely right when you say that there's nothing new under the sun.
I mean, I think that ergo keyboards are crap, but I really don't see how they're liberal. They're keyboards, and not even good ones.
Also, having fucked up my wrists this summer, I really dispute your assertion that people who've written about similar injuries are "shills" and that their injuries are nonexistent. I'm assuming that you've never damaged your wrists while coding; it isn't fun.
I could well be wrong (hell, I usually am) but it seems to me that this would make creating the CD's a lot more of a pain in the ass than it is with regular discs, since it's so much more complex.
It also seems that this wouldn't allow for CD-burners because of the same intricacy, or at the very least, that this will make burning even more drawn-out than it is today...
Slashdot Mirror
What I found with DSL Reports is that people are much more likely to focus upon the negative aspects of a service - those who are happy with their providers tend not to post positive reviews.
For example, I read the reviews of my provider, Telocity, after I'd ordered the service, and thought to myself, "Oh, shit, I guess I'll have to cancel the order."
As it turned out, my modem arrived two weeks early, the service was impeccable, and I haven't had a single problem with them in the five months that I've used their service.
DSL Reports certainly has value, and in concept it's fantastic. In practice, though, it's not all that it's cracked up to be. You'd be much better off asking a friend - or, if there's a Linux User Group in your area, ask them -- the Philadelphia user group has been exceedingly helpful for lots of people.
Freeamp = Windows and Linux.
Sonique2 = Windows, Linux, BeOS, and Mac.
What I like most about Sonique is the UI. It can be simple and uncluttered, or it can be baroque and hellishly complex, depending on what skin you select. It's got nice vis plugins, and a pretty average mp3 decoder.
I've noticed a lot of people here complaining about eye candy, and to each their own, I suppose -- personally, I think that Linux is currently somewhat short of nice-looking apps, and that it could stand to gain a few. Not a judgement on Linux itself, just on Linux UI design.
Does this mean that I can talk to my dead father over a ham radio through the magic of plot convenience?
OK - I worked managing the computers at a library for two years, so I speak from experience here:
Yes. You really, really do need some kind of usage policy. My library had a no-email policy, which I never enforced, but I think that certain of the policies were perfectly reasonable.
The "no porn" one, for example. You'd be really amazed by how many middle-aged men come into the library and look up porn, on a public computer, in full view, in the middle of the day, and then actually get _indignant_ when you ask them to leave. Kiddies are just as into it, but they're mostly (in my experience at least) just doing it on a dare or whatever.
There are other ones that aren't quite as obvious, too. The afterschool crowds at my library were really staggering, and since a lot of the kids needed to use the computers for reports, we had do have a policy to give them preference over kiddies who wanted to check out Pokemon and DragonballZ sites.
Certainly, some policies aren't reasonable (ie "no email, no Deja"), but a lot of them are. Don't get into some kind of knee-jerk reaction about how bad it is for libraries to regulate the use of their computers. Think it through before you post.
Besides the vagueness, the idea of having the AI built solely to handle yes-or-no questions seems kind of limiting to me. I mean, just amassing an assload of facts is kind of trivial.
The user moderation system on Mindpixel is an interesting idea, but again, I don't think that it works very well either. There are too many cases where users either don't know the answer to the question that they're trying to moderate or they don't care enough to actually answer correctly.
The idea behind Forum 2000 - which I think we all know was fake - isn't a bad one: learn language usage from Usenet feeds, then dissect the messages in Usenet posts themselves. Has anyone done anything like that?
OK, look, I'll probably get moderated as a troll for saying this, but here goes:
I've written code. Not a whole lot, but enough to know that a lot of work goes into things. I'm all for free software, but I also think that if the programmer of something wants to make money from his work, then he should be perfectly entitled to. If I ever wrote something original and cool, I'd want to be reimbursed in some way for the time that I put into it. I don't know that I'd patent it, especially under the current system, but it'd be really nice to see that my work is recognised, at some official level, as my own.
Just my two cents. Moderate away, but please, don't do the usual "Slashdot says it's bad, so I'll moderate down all posts saying otherwise."
...see subject, pretty much. Olsen Twins...Leo...(shudder)
I don't know - I guess it could work if it's a full-length cartoon, or something...but I can't see a live-action Simpsons.
Also, I hope they get back some of their old writers for it - because the show's quality has been seriously dropping the last couple of seasons.
Just my $0.02.
For one thing, I'd love to see a Linux port of Internet Explorer. Slag on MS all you want; MSIE is faster than Netscape, more stable than Netscape, and (for now at least) a hell of a lot more stable than Mozilla.
So as something to hold us 'till Mozilla makes a final release, I think it oculd actually be a good thing...
I suppose I'll get flamed or modreated as "Troll" for saying this....well, whatever.
Well, when you consider that all Apple really sells is packaging -- their products sure as hell aren't anything to write home about.
My understanding of the reason that Looking Glass shut its doors is that Eidos didn't give them sufficient funding. (Thanks in large part to Ion Storm, but that's a different rant).
Thief 1 and 2 were comparatively successful - the demise of Looking Glass was due to business matters, rather than a flaw in the game design.
Of course, I could easily be wrong about these things, too.
"Say your thoughts are not the property of others."
Fair enough. They're not. On the other hand, Stephen King's novel is the property of Stephen King. He wrote it. I read it, I enjoyed it. It's fair to pay him for that.
It's fine with me if you want to download mp3's and warez. But don't try to say that it's revolutionary and world-changing, because it isn't.
The dubbing was pretty good in them -- and it was excellent for the Disney release of Mononoke Hime, but the fact is still that dubbing just plain sucks. Alas.
Also, I believe there's a fan-subbed version of Mononoke Hime in RM format floating around the net somewhere.
In one paragraph, you're talking about loving others, and spreading the Good Word, and so on.
And in the next you refer to Roman Catholics as "heathen sinners" who "worship the virgin whore". What's wrong with this picture?
I'm not a Christian, but I come from a strongly Irish Catholic family, and the kind of hatred that you're spouting in this post is shocking, to say the least. It's amazing that someone professing to be a follower of Christianity's precepts (loving one's brother as one loves oneself, in particular) can even think something along those lines, let along post it.
Have you ever written anything in DirectX? It's every bit as fucked up as MS's other API's. Besides that, it's tied to Wintel only, while OpenGL works on pretty much every platform worth a damn.
Besides that, OpenGL has a much more active and rabid community around it. There are OpenGL tutorials all over the web, and books on it, and a hall of a lot more games with OpenGL support.
It's entirely possible that DirectX will someday be able to do more than OpenGL can. But it will always be a pain in the ass to code in.
The debate over free vs. mostly-free is so irrelevant and suicidal that I could just laugh. It's certainly important to be principled, and all that, but the fact is that at the moment, Linux needs to focus on *usability*, not on principle. GNOME is nowhere near as polished/usable for newcomers as KDE, at the moment. In six months, it may be, but meanwhile, the only Linux desktop that is familiar to Windoze/Mac users is KDE. By not including KDE, Debian is dooming themselves to the "hardcore geek" nice of Linux distros. In order to "spread the good word", so to speak, it's necessary, for now at least, to use the mostly-free KDE, and spread the joy of Linux to people who want to use it.
Actually, my understanding of this law is that it's intentionally spreading a virus that's illegal. Thus, if you've got an infected word document, you're safe unless it was you that created the virus.
Actually, (I think) Beam-It protects against that by only allowing one IP per login at any given time. Sure, people could share an account and take turns, but it kind of limits the usability of it, especially if you've got an assload of people using the one account.
Well yeah, but pretty much every movie - and every story - contains these elements; that was the whole point of Joseph Campbell's work. Star Wars had a lot of elements from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, which in turn had elements from countless folk tales in it. You're absolutely right when you say that there's nothing new under the sun.
The movie is set a bit over 2000 years after Confucius' time; he lived during the Zhou dynasty, the movie is set during the Qing dynasty.
I mean, I think that ergo keyboards are crap, but I really don't see how they're liberal. They're keyboards, and not even good ones.
Also, having fucked up my wrists this summer, I really dispute your assertion that people who've written about similar injuries are "shills" and that their injuries are nonexistent. I'm assuming that you've never damaged your wrists while coding; it isn't fun.
I could well be wrong (hell, I usually am) but it seems to me that this would make creating the CD's a lot more of a pain in the ass than it is with regular discs, since it's so much more complex.
It also seems that this wouldn't allow for CD-burners because of the same intricacy, or at the very least, that this will make burning even more drawn-out than it is today...