Have you ever sat in a class where someone's drumming their fingers constantly on their desk? Believe me, it's more distracting than using a good old-fashioned pen...
You're getting pedantic. "Artificial intelligence" doesn't mean a thinking computer, despite what "singularity" believers may say; it means a computer doing something which seems intelligent. The baddies in any computer game you care to mention are controlled by what most people would term "artificial intelligence".
What they mean here is that the wrist-pads work out which keys you're "pressing". They choose to call this AI, partly for the buzzword value, partly because that's simply what it is - as the word is generally used.
Er, would the moderator care to point out the insight in the parent? (HIBT?)
The one is a measure of quality, the other of time.
Not that I ever saw a 286 boosted more than 4 MHz, but that was still a 33% increase. Testing? Who needs testing?:)
Overclocking was never so fun after you started being able to do it all with jumpers (or, God forbid, in the BIOS). And once the Celeron 300A came along... well, it just lost all its mystique. Remember, geeks lose interest in popular things. I haven't overclocked since a brief stint with an old K5-100 at 150. (Very brief.) You mark my words, Linux will lose friends quickly if it ever sits on more than 10% of the world's PCs...
Fortunately modern criticism has essentially discredited the idea of a divinely ordained canon of classics, in which Homer stands at the top and Shakespeare is the greatest English author whom no man can ever hope to match; and the virtues of what used to be dismissed as "genre fiction" are being recognised.
It'll take a long time for any of that to filter down into the lower levels of schooling, but don't worry - your views are shared by most modern academics.
In the broader sense, in which "classic" does simply mean "has stood the test of time/is recognised to be really rather good", there's nothing wrong with the term at all. Have a look in the "modern classics" section of your local bookshop - you'll be pleasantly surprised at what's in there these days. And I look forward to the day when Pratchett et al are also found on those shelves.
What about pageup/pagedown to skip one screen (mouse equivalent: move over to scrollbar, find dragbox, position mouse above or below dragbox as required, click), and control+arrow keys to move one word/one paragraph at a time?
Admittedly on this point the mouse probably is faster, for someone with good hand/eye coordination. That was, of course, one of the major points of Tog's article: for copy/paste operations, the ideal method uses both keyboard shortcuts _and_ the mouse.
Even if it were proven conclusively that "souls", and all the other things that religions talk about, did not exist, I don't believe that would destroy religion. If the concepts are complex enough, as they almost have to be, that the non-specialist could never understand the proof, then the majority of people would have a simple choice: believe the scientists, who say that they're just machines, or believe the priests, who say that they're more than machines.
In other words, the situation would be just like it is now (Dawkins anyone?), except that the scientists would have a sacred book of their own.
Right now, even when one chooses Linux from all the flavours of *nix, one then has to choose a distribution. Is Redhat the same OS as Debian? They don't feel the same to me.
At the moment we have too much choice if anything. Maybe the wide variety gives more options, makes it easier for people to find an OS that suits them - maybe - but it creates far too much confusion. You can't really tell a business to "try several distributions and pick the one you like best", when they can just pluck a Microsoft box from the shelf and have an adequate system within hours.
Diversity is good, but fragmentation is bad. It should be obvious which way I think the Linux world is tending, let alone the wider field of *nix.
Surely it's still illegal under DMCA to circumvent security devices on software? In which case DeCSS remains "illegal" whether the DVD is hardware or software.
Besides, CSS is encryption. You can make a straight copy of a disk without decrypting it, so it doesn't stop you making a backup.
(Consider the usual IANAL comments to have been made. Why we don't just insist that lawyers put IAAL I don't know, it'd save a lot of bandwidth.)
There was a device on the market a while back which used VHS tapes for computer backups. They managed to get a pretty impressive amount of data on - the device got some good reviews at the time. I can't remember who made it, though, so no details.:(
Microsoft and others have spread a lot of bad impressions of the GPL. Most people outside the GPL-using community don't really know much about it - except that it's "viral", and - critically - that "it means that if you use GPL'd code, you have to release your source code to the public". True... sort of.
Fine distinctions about in-house use are going to be lost on people who're as concerned as Hollywood about IP rights. If they hear that the GPL threatens IP, they'll be anti-GPL, and it's as simple as that.
I write this wearing a pair of nice bright yellow ear protectors. Seriously. I find the constant noise of a PC's fans actually becomes physically painful after an hour or so. (Plus I have a desk fan to cool my monitor - my room gets very hot.)
It's like anything, really - different people have different tolerances. Not everyone wears sunglasses for a fashion statement. And a lot of people are wearing wooly jumpers and thick coats right now, while I've only just switched to long sleeves.
Personally I find the article very interesting - not least because I now know where to look for quieter fans. Definitely a Good Idea. Ear protectors and glasses don't mix.
Similar problems have plagued console systems. An entire software library consisting only of endlessly pirated simple buggy arcade games - no wonder the Playstation was so unpopular!
Well... you're right about the drivers, I'll give you that.
You have, of course, had to pay a little extra for this privilege. The advantage of a console is that it's much cheaper than either a PC or a Mac, and you know for a fact that any game will work perfectly. (Except for the ones with bugs in. Or for the ones which don't work with newer revisions of a console.)
Sasami2k. I don't quite see the point of transparent video, but the option to use a video for your wallpaper is quite neat.
That's the whole point, of course. Linux users want to be able to do fun things on the OS they use for their work - rebooting to Windows is an icky solution, and Mac OS X is no solution at all for most of us (at least while it remains hardware-specific).
EA _have_ sold the old Ultima games.
on
Ultima Revived
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· Score: 1
Have a look at "http://www.origin.ea.com/ultima/uc/". I have a copy, and they did a pretty good job getting everything to run on modern PCs. I don't think they're selling it any more, but it's unfair to claim EA don't care about Ultima at all.
Press F1 in a MS app. Chances are you'll see a big "help" screen pop up. That's documentation.
There's a lot of OS documentation out there, of course, but how useful it is is another matter. MS documentation is generally aimed at the basic user, while OS docs are aimed at programmers, sysadmins, and l337 h4x0r5. The average computer user falls into the former category.
Note that this isn't quite the usual "ease of use" argument. It doesn't matter how easy an app is to use, if you can't find out how to go about it...
GNU GRUB != GRUB. I don't know which version this is, but RMS will be annoyed if they've left off a GNU...:D
From the GNU GRUB Faq:
1. How does GNU GRUB differ from Erich's original GRUB?
GNU GRUB is the successor of Erich's great GRUB. He couldn't work on GRUB because of some other tasks, so the current maintainer Gordon Matzigkeit took over the maintainership, and opened the development in order for everybody to participate it.
Technically speaking, GNU GRUB has many features that are not seen in the original GRUB. For example, GNU GRUB can be installed on UNIX-like operating system (i.e. GNU/Linux) via the grub shell/sbin/grub, it supports Logical Block Address (LBA) mode that solves the 1024 cylinders problem, and TAB completes a filename when it's unique. Of course, many bug fixes are done as well, so it is recommended to use GNU GRUB.
There I was thinking that Mesa was a slow software implementation of OpenGL, which I had to spend hours picking out of my system before I could get my NVidia hardware OpenGL drivers to work properly.
Maybe that was a different Mesa. Maybe I'm just plain wrong. My memory isn't what it used to be...
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Have you ever sat in a class where someone's drumming their fingers constantly on their desk? Believe me, it's more distracting than using a good old-fashioned pen...
You're getting pedantic. "Artificial intelligence" doesn't mean a thinking computer, despite what "singularity" believers may say; it means a computer doing something which seems intelligent. The baddies in any computer game you care to mention are controlled by what most people would term "artificial intelligence".
What they mean here is that the wrist-pads work out which keys you're "pressing". They choose to call this AI, partly for the buzzword value, partly because that's simply what it is - as the word is generally used.
Er, would the moderator care to point out the insight in the parent? (HIBT?)
The one is a measure of quality, the other of time.
:)
Not that I ever saw a 286 boosted more than 4 MHz, but that was still a 33% increase. Testing? Who needs testing?
Overclocking was never so fun after you started being able to do it all with jumpers (or, God forbid, in the BIOS). And once the Celeron 300A came along... well, it just lost all its mystique. Remember, geeks lose interest in popular things. I haven't overclocked since a brief stint with an old K5-100 at 150. (Very brief.) You mark my words, Linux will lose friends quickly if it ever sits on more than 10% of the world's PCs...
Silly - that's a mistake for "pheromones"! I'm not sure what a "spoken pheromone" might be, but it sure sounds sexy.
Fortunately modern criticism has essentially discredited the idea of a divinely ordained canon of classics, in which Homer stands at the top and Shakespeare is the greatest English author whom no man can ever hope to match; and the virtues of what used to be dismissed as "genre fiction" are being recognised.
It'll take a long time for any of that to filter down into the lower levels of schooling, but don't worry - your views are shared by most modern academics.
In the broader sense, in which "classic" does simply mean "has stood the test of time/is recognised to be really rather good", there's nothing wrong with the term at all. Have a look in the "modern classics" section of your local bookshop - you'll be pleasantly surprised at what's in there these days. And I look forward to the day when Pratchett et al are also found on those shelves.
What about pageup/pagedown to skip one screen (mouse equivalent: move over to scrollbar, find dragbox, position mouse above or below dragbox as required, click), and control+arrow keys to move one word/one paragraph at a time?
Admittedly on this point the mouse probably is faster, for someone with good hand/eye coordination. That was, of course, one of the major points of Tog's article: for copy/paste operations, the ideal method uses both keyboard shortcuts _and_ the mouse.
That looks like a demo of Monkey 4, which has nothing to do with the copy protection in Monkeys 1 and 2.
Even if it were proven conclusively that "souls", and all the other things that religions talk about, did not exist, I don't believe that would destroy religion. If the concepts are complex enough, as they almost have to be, that the non-specialist could never understand the proof, then the majority of people would have a simple choice: believe the scientists, who say that they're just machines, or believe the priests, who say that they're more than machines.
In other words, the situation would be just like it is now (Dawkins anyone?), except that the scientists would have a sacred book of their own.
Right now, even when one chooses Linux from all the flavours of *nix, one then has to choose a distribution. Is Redhat the same OS as Debian? They don't feel the same to me.
At the moment we have too much choice if anything. Maybe the wide variety gives more options, makes it easier for people to find an OS that suits them - maybe - but it creates far too much confusion. You can't really tell a business to "try several distributions and pick the one you like best", when they can just pluck a Microsoft box from the shelf and have an adequate system within hours.
Diversity is good, but fragmentation is bad. It should be obvious which way I think the Linux world is tending, let alone the wider field of *nix.
Surely it's still illegal under DMCA to circumvent security devices on software? In which case DeCSS remains "illegal" whether the DVD is hardware or software.
Besides, CSS is encryption. You can make a straight copy of a disk without decrypting it, so it doesn't stop you making a backup.
(Consider the usual IANAL comments to have been made. Why we don't just insist that lawyers put IAAL I don't know, it'd save a lot of bandwidth.)
There was a device on the market a while back which used VHS tapes for computer backups. They managed to get a pretty impressive amount of data on - the device got some good reviews at the time. I can't remember who made it, though, so no details. :(
Microsoft and others have spread a lot of bad impressions of the GPL. Most people outside the GPL-using community don't really know much about it - except that it's "viral", and - critically - that "it means that if you use GPL'd code, you have to release your source code to the public". True... sort of.
Fine distinctions about in-house use are going to be lost on people who're as concerned as Hollywood about IP rights. If they hear that the GPL threatens IP, they'll be anti-GPL, and it's as simple as that.
I write this wearing a pair of nice bright yellow ear protectors. Seriously. I find the constant noise of a PC's fans actually becomes physically painful after an hour or so. (Plus I have a desk fan to cool my monitor - my room gets very hot.)
It's like anything, really - different people have different tolerances. Not everyone wears sunglasses for a fashion statement. And a lot of people are wearing wooly jumpers and thick coats right now, while I've only just switched to long sleeves.
Personally I find the article very interesting - not least because I now know where to look for quieter fans. Definitely a Good Idea. Ear protectors and glasses don't mix.
VA XP.
Similar problems have plagued console systems. An entire software library consisting only of endlessly pirated simple buggy arcade games - no wonder the Playstation was so unpopular!
Well... you're right about the drivers, I'll give you that.
Publishing.
You have, of course, had to pay a little extra for this privilege. The advantage of a console is that it's much cheaper than either a PC or a Mac, and you know for a fact that any game will work perfectly. (Except for the ones with bugs in. Or for the ones which don't work with newer revisions of a console.)
32k of shadow RAM helped a lot.
<i>Or did it?</i> Maybe it was just encouraging me to code sloppily...
Not on Windows XP. Or on Windows 2000. Or on Windows ME.
Microsoft REALLY don't like command lines any more.
Sasami2k. I don't quite see the point of transparent video, but the option to use a video for your wallpaper is quite neat.
That's the whole point, of course. Linux users want to be able to do fun things on the OS they use for their work - rebooting to Windows is an icky solution, and Mac OS X is no solution at all for most of us (at least while it remains hardware-specific).
Have a look at "http://www.origin.ea.com/ultima/uc/". I have a copy, and they did a pretty good job getting everything to run on modern PCs. I don't think they're selling it any more, but it's unfair to claim EA don't care about Ultima at all.
According to Microsoft, viruses are terrorism.
According to Microsoft, the GPL is viral.
Doesn't that make releasing software under the GPL a terrorist act?
Press F1 in a MS app. Chances are you'll see a big "help" screen pop up. That's documentation.
There's a lot of OS documentation out there, of course, but how useful it is is another matter. MS documentation is generally aimed at the basic user, while OS docs are aimed at programmers, sysadmins, and l337 h4x0r5. The average computer user falls into the former category.
Note that this isn't quite the usual "ease of use" argument. It doesn't matter how easy an app is to use, if you can't find out how to go about it...
GNU GRUB != GRUB. I don't know which version this is, but RMS will be annoyed if they've left off a GNU... :D
/sbin/grub, it supports Logical Block Address (LBA) mode that solves the 1024 cylinders problem, and TAB completes a filename when it's unique. Of course, many bug fixes are done as well, so it is recommended to use GNU GRUB.
From the GNU GRUB Faq:
1. How does GNU GRUB differ from Erich's original GRUB?
GNU GRUB is the successor of Erich's great GRUB. He couldn't work on GRUB because of some other tasks, so the current maintainer Gordon Matzigkeit took over the maintainership, and opened the development in order for everybody to participate it.
Technically speaking, GNU GRUB has many features that are not seen in the original GRUB. For example, GNU GRUB can be installed on UNIX-like operating system (i.e. GNU/Linux) via the grub shell
There I was thinking that Mesa was a slow software implementation of OpenGL, which I had to spend hours picking out of my system before I could get my NVidia hardware OpenGL drivers to work properly.
Maybe that was a different Mesa. Maybe I'm just plain wrong. My memory isn't what it used to be...