However, I am afraid that without a Madonna song playing in the background and a video of someone flying around, I have failed to convince you.
I'm sure that was a crushing blow to his argument.
Oh, well . . . I can't say I cared much to begin with. Linux is definitely ready for the desktop as far as I am concerned, regardless of what you think.
Are you arguing that Linux can function as a desktop or that it is currently ready for mainstream desktops?
If the former, of course. Lots of people use it for their desktops. After years of using different distros and fighting through the hell of setting up Linux, I am now comfortable doing so.
If the latter, come back and talk when X isn't a bitch to set up for non-techies, i.e., most of the population, who have better things to do than make time for playing with an OS as a hobby. Come back when the so-called "desktop environments" aren't slow as hell and feel hacked together on top of X. Or when fonts aren't ugly as hell (and I don't have to add some hack to get them to work). Or when there aren't tons of different windowing libraries all doing their own inconsistencies. And there aren't poorly programmed interfaces for everything (to open a file in Xine, you have to click the "://" button with the tooltip of "MRL Browser"...okay...). Come back when someone can rightly criticize all these things without being told that it's "insane" to criticize the work of volunteers or that they don't care anyway and do their own thing (why bother pretending to care about making a desktop environment for the users then?). I could go on, as I'm sure you well know.
It's been my experience that current Linux offereings are sub-par as a slick, easy-to-use, everyday desktop. If anybody points it out, they get flamed for some reason (or the ever-popular and inneffective-as-ever rebuttal: "If you don't like it, make it yourself.")
When I have time to play around with an OS and do technical things, and spend time in my life looking for library packages to set up some arcane thing that is depended on by something else, and hack together an X config file, and run a bunch of poorly-made apps that either all start with "K" or "G", only to have no professional and useful programs or games to run on my system anyway, I fire up Linux (I've tried Red Hat, Slackware, Mandrake, and LFS over the years).
When I want to actually get things done, I fire up Windows XP. And everything just works. Things are much simpler and I'm more productive instead of spending all my time setting things up to be productive.
I have high standards for my GUI/OS, like the rest of the population does, believe it or not. I wonder when Linux developers will begin to realize that if they want their stuff to be adopted by everyone, they have to strive for those high standards as well instead of settling for what they've got and hiding behind "volunteer work" as an excuse. If that's all you're in it for instead of the goal of actually supplanting the top contenders on the desktop, your work will always remain for hobbyists and niche users, second-best to Windows XP or OS X.
I would love for Linux to topple them all and be the ultimate desktop system, but there's no way in hell it's ready for that right now. Not one bit. It has the potential to, but the software isn't there yet.
Of course, I'm sure there are others who feel differently!
By "politically-oriented," I meant, of course, that the ACLU seems to be politically grounded on the left side of the pendulum. Just so you know, I'm not particularly swayed either way, left or right. I just think that an organization that's supposed to be around to protect citizens from the government should be doing that instead of throwing out legal threats for ridiculous things that aren't all that important or requiring of protection.
1. too political? the protection of the rights of a citizenry from the power of the state is nothing if not political. it can't be anything but political!
My point is that I feel the ACLU is too left-wing and takes cases based on political positioning rather than whether or not any rights are actually being trampled.
2. if you aren't willing to defend the civil liberties of those who you disagree with (or disagree with you) then you're probably not committed to the concept in the first place.
Forgive me for thinking the ACLU's efforts could be better spent on more important matters than chasing after Christmas references or protecting the pro-molestation literature of NAMBLA. There are limits to everything.
3. state sponsorship of christmas is an explicit support for one religion by the u.s. government. "congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and so on. if you are an american citizen you should read jefferson's treatise on this issue (the letter to the danbury baptists [loc.gov]) to get the full grok on the seperation of church and state.
I'm fully aware of the issue. When the ACLU goes after elementary schools legally threatening them if they don't chance their little calendars to mention "Winter Break" instead of "Christmas Break," I wonder what the ACLU's priorities really are. Not only is it ridiculous to start with, but everybody knows the break is for Christmas anyway. Whose rights were being stomped because they got school days off for Christmas break? Surely there are much more important issues the ACLU needs to be spending its money and effort on than something so silly that children don't even regard it as a problem--only their uptight ACLU parents do. I dislike the overdone victimization mindset organizations like the ACLU endorse. Just my opinion.
I have found the ACLU too left-wing and downright zany to support. Their obsession with removing any and all references to Christmas last season, for instance, as well as their defense of NAMBLA in the past, alienate me. They are a needed organization, but, to me, they have gotten too politically-oriented.
Did you know they had 4-lane roads originally in SimCity 4 before release (there were screenshots)? Also, notice you can't edit region sizes in-game? And so on and so on...obviously, EA is holding out for an expansion pack, like they overdid with The Sims. I am so sick of expansion packs, to be honest. They were neat and exciting in the 90s; for instance, the one put out for WarCraft II where you went to the Orc homeworld. But it's become too much of a routine now to use expansion packs as a way to IMPROVE the game as it should have been instead of simply adding on to it.
I remember loving WarCraft II so much when it first came out, but in retrospect, I miss the simple storyline of the original WarCraft. It was just Orcs trying to take over the kingdom of Azeroth. Not all this weird mythology, Tolkien rip-offs (Treants??), reformed Orcs, and quest-based gameplay. Oh, well.
You're right--nobody should ever criticize anything. We should halt all critical progress because the ego-strokers can't bear to have the truth of their lazy interfaces and bad coding pointed out.
This is why Linux is still where it's at on the meter of progress. The strange mindset that because somebody put a lot of work into something and decided to give it away, nobody can point out its flaws and decide not to use it because of those flaws. Sorry, but people will criticize things even more if Linux gains more ground, so you'd better get a grip and learn to deal with it.
People love to bitch about the "current state of gaming."
You think there weren't shit games when Doom came out? I know; I was there. Crappy puzzle games, endless side-scrollers, bad shooters, and mediocre RTS games.
Have you not played Deus Ex? Or Black and White? How about taken a look at the next SimCity? Do you remember Half-Life? Or, as mentioned before, the Sims?
There have always been good games and bad games. Don't fall into the trap of "things were better back when..."
"My wife, who is the real Tolkien fan of the family and had just finished re-reading the book, was left literally in tears."
Good lord.
I've read all the books and am a huge fan. But even I understand that changes have to be made for a 3-hour visual medium. Not to sound harsh, but I won't be shedding tears over it. That would scare me if I did.
Isn't it ironic that he doesn't want to be bothered by people driving by, leaving crap at his door, calling his phone all day, and so forth...yet it's perfectly alright for him to do the virtual equivalent via e-mail.
I sometimes wonder if they know the copy-protection is useless, but implement it anyway just to please shareholders, etc. while they think of a better solution.
Well, compare the two. Clones' CG really was fake, cold, and overkill. LOTR used it as a necessary enhancement to the story.
So many scenes in Clones were obviously shot in front of blue screens. The directing was bland, and the whole movie felt farted out on an assembly line to me. "Stand the actors up like paper dolls in front of a screen; we'll finish the movie later on our computers."
Here's the Visual Style, ripped from the beta: http://plex.ike.bz/10.24.02.PlexXP.v.0.7.1.zip
There's even a movie of Longhorn being used...the #winbeta guys have it if you want to see it. Basically, it's WinXP with a new theme ("Plex") and a new filesystem ("WinFS," which everyone turns off because apparently it eats the CPU).
By the way: "c) This is a BIG giveaway all over the place... The current user settings have font smoothing set to anti-alias, not cleartype or none. Anti-alias text does not come into play for small fonts including 8pt (as can be seen on dektop icons, start bar, etc). However, the new bar on the right IS anti-aliasing these fonts and not only that, but it's not using font hinting (aligning the text to the nearest pixel) which is standard for cleartype or anti-aliasing... it's fake text drawn in a graphics package."
Wrong--I'm running Sideshow, and it always smooths the fonts like that, whether Cleartype is on or not. I can't get to the site/. is linking to; however, the screenshots from Winbeta are REAL.
Major changes I noticed, besides the new theme and Sideshow, is the new Display Properties dialog and a My Hardware dialog. Other than that, this look like what it is--a really early alpha leak for something not due out for another couple of years.
This is actually somewhat old news...I've been running Sideshow on my XP box with the ripped Plex theme for a week now. Visit #winbeta sometime. Sideshow's neat once you figure out how to add new tickets.
Well, if you consider it an achievement for Lucas to have filmed a badly acted romance with poor dialogue and no chemistry, then by all means, give him that crown.
Claiming that he purposely made it corny and bland is one of the more inane arguments I've heard. What is Lucas showing about any "very real inanity of 'romance'"? I didn't see any romance in the film I saw. Nothing "so real, so vibrant, so powerufl." I didn't even get the message of how "foolish" Lucas was supposed to have been making it all seem.
The romance wasn't unpleasant because it was acted that way; it was unpleasant because it was trying to be good but failed.
One of the differences between science and religion is that science is typically open to accepting that it is wrong and modifies accordingly. Religion, on the other hand, has to be conked over the head a few times, and even then it lags behind science in accepting certain things, sometimes by centuries.
Do you think a viewer in the theater will sit and think through such explanations as they watch the poor dialogue on the screen? Or would a viewer rather just see a good emotional performance that conveys to them all of those explanations in the first place? It's called acting.
For someone who is "all of a sudden getting this rush of feelings" and another someone who "has never loved before either since her life has been spent in the political spotlight," you'd think their performances would better reflect those emotions. Instead, I had to come to Slashdot for trb001 to describe it out to me because the dialogue and acting was so poor.
From what you describe, I should have been seeing incredible passionate romance in the AOTC I saw. But I didn't.
You're saying Google doesn't return relevant results?
Re:Trying to get on Google
on
Mr Anti-Google
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I think of Google like a mirror; it just reflects what it sees. If your site is good enough, people will link to it, regardless if it's listed on Google or not. You don't need Google to get your site viewed. How did we ever get popular websites before Google? Such things as word-of-mouth, IRC, etc. are ways people can spread their URLs. Google isn't the only medium out there to get your site seen, and my point is that you shouldn't be relying on Google, because it's just a mirror.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I am afraid that without a Madonna song playing in the background and a video of someone flying around, I have failed to convince you.
I'm sure that was a crushing blow to his argument.
Oh, well . . . I can't say I cared much to begin with. Linux is definitely ready for the desktop as far as I am concerned, regardless of what you think.
Are you arguing that Linux can function as a desktop or that it is currently ready for mainstream desktops?
If the former, of course. Lots of people use it for their desktops. After years of using different distros and fighting through the hell of setting up Linux, I am now comfortable doing so.
If the latter, come back and talk when X isn't a bitch to set up for non-techies, i.e., most of the population, who have better things to do than make time for playing with an OS as a hobby. Come back when the so-called "desktop environments" aren't slow as hell and feel hacked together on top of X. Or when fonts aren't ugly as hell (and I don't have to add some hack to get them to work). Or when there aren't tons of different windowing libraries all doing their own inconsistencies. And there aren't poorly programmed interfaces for everything (to open a file in Xine, you have to click the "://" button with the tooltip of "MRL Browser"...okay...). Come back when someone can rightly criticize all these things without being told that it's "insane" to criticize the work of volunteers or that they don't care anyway and do their own thing (why bother pretending to care about making a desktop environment for the users then?). I could go on, as I'm sure you well know.
It's been my experience that current Linux offereings are sub-par as a slick, easy-to-use, everyday desktop. If anybody points it out, they get flamed for some reason (or the ever-popular and inneffective-as-ever rebuttal: "If you don't like it, make it yourself.")
When I have time to play around with an OS and do technical things, and spend time in my life looking for library packages to set up some arcane thing that is depended on by something else, and hack together an X config file, and run a bunch of poorly-made apps that either all start with "K" or "G", only to have no professional and useful programs or games to run on my system anyway, I fire up Linux (I've tried Red Hat, Slackware, Mandrake, and LFS over the years).
When I want to actually get things done, I fire up Windows XP. And everything just works. Things are much simpler and I'm more productive instead of spending all my time setting things up to be productive.
I have high standards for my GUI/OS, like the rest of the population does, believe it or not. I wonder when Linux developers will begin to realize that if they want their stuff to be adopted by everyone, they have to strive for those high standards as well instead of settling for what they've got and hiding behind "volunteer work" as an excuse. If that's all you're in it for instead of the goal of actually supplanting the top contenders on the desktop, your work will always remain for hobbyists and niche users, second-best to Windows XP or OS X.
I would love for Linux to topple them all and be the ultimate desktop system, but there's no way in hell it's ready for that right now. Not one bit. It has the potential to, but the software isn't there yet.
Of course, I'm sure there are others who feel differently!
The EFF is much more to my liking.
By "politically-oriented," I meant, of course, that the ACLU seems to be politically grounded on the left side of the pendulum. Just so you know, I'm not particularly swayed either way, left or right. I just think that an organization that's supposed to be around to protect citizens from the government should be doing that instead of throwing out legal threats for ridiculous things that aren't all that important or requiring of protection.
That's how I see it, anyway.
1. too political? the protection of the rights of a citizenry from the power of the state is nothing if not political. it can't be anything but political!
My point is that I feel the ACLU is too left-wing and takes cases based on political positioning rather than whether or not any rights are actually being trampled.
2. if you aren't willing to defend the civil liberties of those who you disagree with (or disagree with you) then you're probably not committed to the concept in the first place.
Forgive me for thinking the ACLU's efforts could be better spent on more important matters than chasing after Christmas references or protecting the pro-molestation literature of NAMBLA. There are limits to everything.
3. state sponsorship of christmas is an explicit support for one religion by the u.s. government. "congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and so on. if you are an american citizen you should read jefferson's treatise on this issue (the letter to the danbury baptists [loc.gov]) to get the full grok on the seperation of church and state.
I'm fully aware of the issue. When the ACLU goes after elementary schools legally threatening them if they don't chance their little calendars to mention "Winter Break" instead of "Christmas Break," I wonder what the ACLU's priorities really are. Not only is it ridiculous to start with, but everybody knows the break is for Christmas anyway. Whose rights were being stomped because they got school days off for Christmas break? Surely there are much more important issues the ACLU needs to be spending its money and effort on than something so silly that children don't even regard it as a problem--only their uptight ACLU parents do. I dislike the overdone victimization mindset organizations like the ACLU endorse. Just my opinion.
I have found the ACLU too left-wing and downright zany to support. Their obsession with removing any and all references to Christmas last season, for instance, as well as their defense of NAMBLA in the past, alienate me. They are a needed organization, but, to me, they have gotten too politically-oriented.
Did you know they had 4-lane roads originally in SimCity 4 before release (there were screenshots)? Also, notice you can't edit region sizes in-game? And so on and so on...obviously, EA is holding out for an expansion pack, like they overdid with The Sims. I am so sick of expansion packs, to be honest. They were neat and exciting in the 90s; for instance, the one put out for WarCraft II where you went to the Orc homeworld. But it's become too much of a routine now to use expansion packs as a way to IMPROVE the game as it should have been instead of simply adding on to it.
I remember loving WarCraft II so much when it first came out, but in retrospect, I miss the simple storyline of the original WarCraft. It was just Orcs trying to take over the kingdom of Azeroth. Not all this weird mythology, Tolkien rip-offs (Treants??), reformed Orcs, and quest-based gameplay. Oh, well.
You're right--nobody should ever criticize anything. We should halt all critical progress because the ego-strokers can't bear to have the truth of their lazy interfaces and bad coding pointed out.
This is why Linux is still where it's at on the meter of progress. The strange mindset that because somebody put a lot of work into something and decided to give it away, nobody can point out its flaws and decide not to use it because of those flaws. Sorry, but people will criticize things even more if Linux gains more ground, so you'd better get a grip and learn to deal with it.
A beautiful chorus line of wannabe-comedians and wisecrackers fit for a king await us all!
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html
People love to bitch about the "current state of gaming."
You think there weren't shit games when Doom came out? I know; I was there. Crappy puzzle games, endless side-scrollers, bad shooters, and mediocre RTS games.
Have you not played Deus Ex? Or Black and White? How about taken a look at the next SimCity? Do you remember Half-Life? Or, as mentioned before, the Sims?
There have always been good games and bad games. Don't fall into the trap of "things were better back when..."
"My wife, who is the real Tolkien fan of the family and had just finished re-reading the book, was left literally in tears."
Good lord.
I've read all the books and am a huge fan. But even I understand that changes have to be made for a 3-hour visual medium. Not to sound harsh, but I won't be shedding tears over it. That would scare me if I did.
I sense a disturbance in the force...millions of Slashdot "comedians" all crying out with bad jokes and ill puns and then silenced.
Care to share? *cough* I want to make sure it's not the same girl.
Er.
Isn't it ironic that he doesn't want to be bothered by people driving by, leaving crap at his door, calling his phone all day, and so forth...yet it's perfectly alright for him to do the virtual equivalent via e-mail.
http://www.filmthreat.com/GoreyDetails.asp?Id=221
I sometimes wonder if they know the copy-protection is useless, but implement it anyway just to please shareholders, etc. while they think of a better solution.
Well, compare the two. Clones' CG really was fake, cold, and overkill. LOTR used it as a necessary enhancement to the story.
So many scenes in Clones were obviously shot in front of blue screens. The directing was bland, and the whole movie felt farted out on an assembly line to me. "Stand the actors up like paper dolls in front of a screen; we'll finish the movie later on our computers."
Just my opinion.
http://www.wininformant.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Art icleID=27038
/. is linking to; however, the screenshots from Winbeta are REAL.
Here's the Visual Style, ripped from the beta: http://plex.ike.bz/10.24.02.PlexXP.v.0.7.1.zip
There's even a movie of Longhorn being used...the #winbeta guys have it if you want to see it. Basically, it's WinXP with a new theme ("Plex") and a new filesystem ("WinFS," which everyone turns off because apparently it eats the CPU).
By the way:
"c) This is a BIG giveaway all over the place... The current user settings have font smoothing set to anti-alias, not cleartype or none. Anti-alias text does not come into play for small fonts including 8pt (as can be seen on dektop icons, start bar, etc). However, the new bar on the right IS anti-aliasing these fonts and not only that, but it's not using font hinting (aligning the text to the nearest pixel) which is standard for cleartype or anti-aliasing... it's fake text drawn in a graphics package."
Wrong--I'm running Sideshow, and it always smooths the fonts like that, whether Cleartype is on or not. I can't get to the site
Major changes I noticed, besides the new theme and Sideshow, is the new Display Properties dialog and a My Hardware dialog. Other than that, this look like what it is--a really early alpha leak for something not due out for another couple of years.
This is actually somewhat old news...I've been running Sideshow on my XP box with the ripped Plex theme for a week now. Visit #winbeta sometime. Sideshow's neat once you figure out how to add new tickets.
Well, if you consider it an achievement for Lucas to have filmed a badly acted romance with poor dialogue and no chemistry, then by all means, give him that crown.
Claiming that he purposely made it corny and bland is one of the more inane arguments I've heard. What is Lucas showing about any "very real inanity of 'romance'"? I didn't see any romance in the film I saw. Nothing "so real, so vibrant, so powerufl." I didn't even get the message of how "foolish" Lucas was supposed to have been making it all seem.
The romance wasn't unpleasant because it was acted that way; it was unpleasant because it was trying to be good but failed.
One of the differences between science and religion is that science is typically open to accepting that it is wrong and modifies accordingly. Religion, on the other hand, has to be conked over the head a few times, and even then it lags behind science in accepting certain things, sometimes by centuries.
Do you think a viewer in the theater will sit and think through such explanations as they watch the poor dialogue on the screen? Or would a viewer rather just see a good emotional performance that conveys to them all of those explanations in the first place? It's called acting.
For someone who is "all of a sudden getting this rush of feelings" and another someone who "has never loved before either since her life has been spent in the political spotlight," you'd think their performances would better reflect those emotions. Instead, I had to come to Slashdot for trb001 to describe it out to me because the dialogue and acting was so poor.
From what you describe, I should have been seeing incredible passionate romance in the AOTC I saw. But I didn't.
You're saying Google doesn't return relevant results?
I think of Google like a mirror; it just reflects what it sees. If your site is good enough, people will link to it, regardless if it's listed on Google or not. You don't need Google to get your site viewed. How did we ever get popular websites before Google? Such things as word-of-mouth, IRC, etc. are ways people can spread their URLs. Google isn't the only medium out there to get your site seen, and my point is that you shouldn't be relying on Google, because it's just a mirror.
How can anything improve if people with perspective and objectivity can't comment on it? I don't have to be a mechanic to tell you my car sucks.
As brought to you by FilmThreat, an interview with Martin Koerber about "Metropolis."