So... rather than being created by a bunch of engineers rising up to overthrow their corporate masters and sending the CEO to the guillotine, the PS4 will be created by introducing random errors into the PS3 manufacturing process, copying the errors that lead to better performance, and then waiting millions of years for the effect to be noticable?
Why assume his PC runs Windows? Linux still has a small enough desktop market share to be largely unthreatened by this kind of malware, and by the same principle OpenBSD is 100% safe, guaranteed.
in one breath people say say that there should be more competition and that competition is good, and in the next breath reject format wars
Er, yes?
Competition is good when I am choosing between a Sony or Panasonic Blu-Ray player. I can easily compare their price and features and make a personal decision. The existence of competition between implementations guarantees me lower prices and more features.
Format wars are bad when I am trying to decide whether to buy a Blu-Ray player or an HD-DVD player. I am forced to guess which decision a majority of other people will make -- if I choose wrong, I might get a superior product at a lower price and still lose out! The existence of competition between formats guarantees me a headache.
If anything, I am hoping Microsoft will actually work well on it and improve on it greatly.
Microsoft is very likely to work on Skype and improve it greatly.
Microsoft is very unlikely to make the versions they have worked on and greatly improved available for any platforms other than Microsoft Windows, and possibly OS X if you're really lucky.
Got an Android phone? You'd better stop depending on Skype, as quickly as you can, because you can bet your bottom dollar one of the first things that will happen is that "chat with all your friends on Skype!" will become a unique selling point of the Microsoft Windows Phone platform.
On mileage, CVT kinda throws a kink in the 'manuals are more efficient' argument.
You might have a point if the switch had been from manual to CVT, rather than the real world situation where the vast majority of automatics have terrible 4-speed gearboxes.
Something like 720p is probably more than adequate for a monitor that is a mere 15 inches.
This is a joke, right? 1366x768 is a decent resolution on a 10" screen. It is a low resolution on a 13" screen. On a 15" screen it is blocky as hell.
Past a certain point, there's simply diminishing returns from jacking up the resolution
This is very true. That certain point, however, is closer to 300ppi than the pathetic ~100ppi you apparently consider "adequate". There's a reason why we haven't used even 150dpi printers since about 1992.
No, their aim is Ubuntu on the desktop. They would ditch the Linux kernel in a flash if they thought switching to something else would better match their vision.
synaptic is definitely better than yumex, but not that much better.
That's because they both suck. Yumex sucks more, though. The only good package management UI I've ever found is aptitude, and it is the only thing I miss since moving to Fedora. All the Yum frontends I've found share the same fundamental problem: they don't even think about performing dependency resolution until you've finished choosing packages and hit "Go". Aptitude is constantly resolving dependencies as you go, warning about conflicts and alerting you when that one innocuous-looking package is going to pull in an entire desktop environment you don't use.
(As for PackageKit, the less said about that the better. Adding yet another layer with even fewer features and a whole load of questionable design decisions of its own does not make Linux better.)
There's no relevant analogy here, even the most coherent slashdot analogy wouldn't be able to ascribe to the bizarre concept of selling an entertainment product with parts loped off and sold along side it.
Well, it would be kind of like a car, if the manufacturer advertised a "base spec" and then forced you to pay extra if you wanted cruise control or alloy wheels or leather seats or a sunroof. Sounds crazy, huh?
Or like a phone, where you don't get the complete phone, you have to pay separately if you actually want to make calls or text, and then you have to pay again for data, and then you still don't have all the apps you want and you have to pay a few bucks for each of those as well. Maybe they would get so greedy that they would even charge for cosmetic things like ringtones! Such a bizarre concept.
As any indie developer can tell you, charging $10 for a game doesn't reduce piracy noticably.
Android developers will point out that there are apparently millions of people who aren't even willing to part with one single dollar if they can get the game for free illegally.
Most of us don't mind paying something, but if we are college students or struggling to find a job we simply cannot afford $50-60 a game.
Then play fewer games, or cheaper games, or free games, or buy used games, or wait for them to be on sale.
I didn't have a job in college, and yet somehow I had no problem buying enough games to stay entertained. And they weren't much cheaper back then.
Sounds good to me. If someone is harrassing you to get a few bucks for themselves, they probably aren't the sort of person you want to be friends with in the first place.
What I don't understand is why we're not allowed (at least in the US) to carry guns on planes, especially now that pilots are locked behind a strong door.
Because it would be a terrible idea.
I'm pretty sure potential terrorists would have a hard time hijacking a plane, if half the people on it had guns.
Why the fixation on hijacking? You don't need to hijack a plane to terrify people. There's a reason why basically all the attempted attacks on airplanes since 9/11 have involved bombs, not hijackings.
Making it trivial to take a gun onto a plane would make it trivial for terrorist attacks to succeed.
Picture the scene. It's a crowded plane. It's late at night, so everyone's also sleepy. Now a bunch of guys all suddenly pull out the guns you deliberately allowed them to take on the plane, and start murdering people! (Sure, they're doomed, but they don't care about that. They're suicide attackers. That's what terrorists use these days.)
What exactly do your armed passengers do? How do they figure out, half asleep, which of the other people holding guns are the terrorists? Whoops, turbulence! Johnny missed the terrorist he was aiming at and killed a young mother who was trying to shield her baby from the fighting. Whoops, Grandpa got up to shoot just as the guy behind him pulled the trigger. It's a bloodbath, with most of the killing being done by patriotic Americans who are geniunely trying to help.
And that's why you don't get to take a gun onto a plane. A bunch of random, uncoordinated passengers with no plan and no situational awareness do not constitute a well-regulated militia.
The ability to half-screen maximize by dragging a window to the left or right side of the screen helps quite a bit -- this is in Windows 7 and newer builds of Ubuntu (IIRC).
So now you can see two things at once. Big fucking deal.
I generally want to be able to see the documentation, AND the code, AND the other related code, all at once. And not in tiny little windows. I want a decent amount of context, in a readable font size. And I want the layout to be spatial: the code is there, the other code is there. Switching windows or even virtual desktops doesn't cut it. When you're doing a bunch of complex paperwork, like a tax form or something, you don't keep everything in a stack and keep flipping through it to find the sheet you need -- you spread it out so you can lay your hands on anything. Same principle.
Having two monitors makes me more productive, period. Having three would probably be even better. Beyond that I'd probably hit limits on the number of windows I could keep track of spatially, but it's a simple fact that one monitor is not enough. Unless maybe it's at least 30", but in a corporate context most people are lucky to get more than 22", and I know a lot of places rolling out horrible cramped 19" widescreens. That is NOT enough for anyonw who does more than basic Word and Outlook. Not nearly enough.
"Popular" distros like Ubuntu are not even relevant in Microsoft's world. Windows already won on the desktop. The battle is over. Ubuntu is the handful of Japanese soldiers in remote jungles who are still fighting WW2 in the 1960s. Red Hat, on the other hand? That's relevant. Red Hat gets used by real companies who have real IT budgets that they spend on real support contracts.
Supporting CentOS encourages people to stop buying those support contracts from Red Hat. That directly reduces a vital source of funding for a lot of core Linux development.
Also, it means that in a year or so Microsoft can start nudging shareholders to complain about the risk of using unsupported software since they terminated the Red Hat contracts, and why aren't they just consolidating on Windows since they already rely on Microsoft virtualization infrastructure? And then Windows gains market share from Linux.
And it does all this in a way that will also convince useful idiots that Microsoft has changed, honest, and they love OSS now! It's a brilliant move.
Re:Perl - the COBOL of scripting languages
on
Perl 5.14 Released
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· Score: 2
superior (e.g. python)
Python has some advantages over Perl -- cleaner syntax, a better REPL, none of the legacy shell-script-derived cruft that makes it so easy to write terrible code in Perl. It also has quite a few disadvantages that make it harder to write robust code, such as its lack of any equivalent to Perl's extremely useful "use strict" and its poorly designed scoping rules.
I see a lot of new development taking place in both languages. I don't see much PHP, but that's a niche language restricted to web development, which isn't something I'm involved with.
Where would you get enough money for (Perl or PHP or Python) + SQL + SSL hosting if you found that nobody would hire you due to lack of a portfolio?
Flipping burgers? Serving coffee? Waiting tables? Operating a cash register?
Your first job doesn't have to be your dream job. Having done some crappy job for a while isn't going to blight your career. It certainly looks better than saying "I spent three years in mom's basement trying to find a free web host that offered a full LAMP stack".
Why not? The religion classes at my school -- in a country where Christianity is the official religion -- also covered at least Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Judaism, Shinto, various Native American belief systems, and some of the pre-Christian European religions. I don't recall Mormonism, Pastafarianism, or Satanism being covered, nor was any time devoted to invisible pink unicorns or the followers of Eris, but there was only so much room on the syllabus.
Religious education in schools is a good thing, given the important condition that it does not teach that any one religion is actually true. Knowing what other people believe is of vital importance if you're going to share a planet with them.
Yes, clearly anyone who finds ubiquitous internet access extremely useful is "brainwashed".
If it was the "stupid cell phone, texting, and photos" we cared about, we wouldn't have gone for Android devices with expensive data plans in the first place.
I think the problem si that we are stuck using the hardware we have been used to, while these UI designers are preparing for the hardware that is fast approaching. We're at a crossroads, and that's tough on everyone.
The paradigm we are used to is a keyboard and mouse. The paradigm that's coming is no more mouse, and keyboard and UI are all part of one unified bit of hardware - "point" with your finger to drag sliders, click buttons and such.
And the solution is to have more than one UI.
If touch is the future, why isn't Apple rushing to make the iOS interface be the default on Macs? Oh, right, because the thing about the future is that it isn't here yet.
So vote with your feet. Ubuntu users can very easily switch to Kubuntu or Xubuntu, for example, both of which provide all the things you mention without requiring OpenGL. Xubuntu in particular is a very similar experience to the old Gnome, while Kubuntu provides all the bells and whistles of Unity or Gnome3 without completely throwing out the familiar interface design.
Last time I compared the 11" Air to Dell's popular 10" netbooks (a few months ago), it was actually lighter and smaller in most dimensions (just a bit wider, significantly thinner, and a bit less deep), plus it was more powerful, had better battery life, a full-size keyboard, and a larger screen.
I guess Dell's netbooks are crap, then. My 10" HP netbook has longer battery life than the 11" Air, is smaller in both interesting dimensions (1.5" narrower, 0.5" less deep), and is only slightly thicker. The screen has the same resolution. The keyboard is scarcely any smaller because it goes up to the edge of the case, while the Air seems to waste 0.5" on either side.
(All that said, the Air is definitely lighter and would be tempting if there was an option for a matte screen. I don't buy computers in order to stare at my own face.)
If there are caps they should be higher. I'm leasing a place right now and I don't have much a choice on what the landlord is offering on Internet. I'm on 15 GB right now
Yeah, 15GB is not enough. If AT&T were saying 15GB then that would be a problem.
150 GB is gone in no time with You-Tube, iTunes, etc.
Seriously, no, it isn't. I watch plenty of streaming video, download plenty of stuff, and I've never come near 150GB. Most months I barely exceed 30 or 40GB.
What the hell are all these people who think 150GB isn't enough actually doing? Downloading HD porn 24/7? Running a Netflix competitor from their home PC? Attempting to engage in so much piracy that when the RIAA finally sues them they'll cause an integer overflow and end up demanding negative damages?
Instead of that bullshit flame wars between distros, why not just concentrate on making the whole system better for user
That's what the multiple distro approach does. It's called "competition" in a "free market". I realise this kind of concept is difficult for people to grasp when their minds have been poisoned by the Microsoft/Apple dictatorial/hegemonic approach, but Linux is about freedom and choice, not about being told what OS to use by a single all-powerful organisation that wants to control every aspect of your computing.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I was going to go with "a traitor leaked ..."
Much shorter and to the point.
So ... rather than being created by a bunch of engineers rising up to overthrow their corporate masters and sending the CEO to the guillotine, the PS4 will be created by introducing random errors into the PS3 manufacturing process, copying the errors that lead to better performance, and then waiting millions of years for the effect to be noticable?
Sounds effective.
Why assume his PC runs Windows? Linux still has a small enough desktop market share to be largely unthreatened by this kind of malware, and by the same principle OpenBSD is 100% safe, guaranteed.
Er, yes?
Competition is good when I am choosing between a Sony or Panasonic Blu-Ray player. I can easily compare their price and features and make a personal decision. The existence of competition between implementations guarantees me lower prices and more features.
Format wars are bad when I am trying to decide whether to buy a Blu-Ray player or an HD-DVD player. I am forced to guess which decision a majority of other people will make -- if I choose wrong, I might get a superior product at a lower price and still lose out! The existence of competition between formats guarantees me a headache.
Microsoft is very likely to work on Skype and improve it greatly.
Microsoft is very unlikely to make the versions they have worked on and greatly improved available for any platforms other than Microsoft Windows, and possibly OS X if you're really lucky.
Got an Android phone? You'd better stop depending on Skype, as quickly as you can, because you can bet your bottom dollar one of the first things that will happen is that "chat with all your friends on Skype!" will become a unique selling point of the Microsoft Windows Phone platform.
You might have a point if the switch had been from manual to CVT, rather than the real world situation where the vast majority of automatics have terrible 4-speed gearboxes.
This is a joke, right? 1366x768 is a decent resolution on a 10" screen. It is a low resolution on a 13" screen. On a 15" screen it is blocky as hell.
This is very true. That certain point, however, is closer to 300ppi than the pathetic ~100ppi you apparently consider "adequate". There's a reason why we haven't used even 150dpi printers since about 1992.
No, their aim is Ubuntu on the desktop. They would ditch the Linux kernel in a flash if they thought switching to something else would better match their vision.
That's because they both suck. Yumex sucks more, though. The only good package management UI I've ever found is aptitude, and it is the only thing I miss since moving to Fedora. All the Yum frontends I've found share the same fundamental problem: they don't even think about performing dependency resolution until you've finished choosing packages and hit "Go". Aptitude is constantly resolving dependencies as you go, warning about conflicts and alerting you when that one innocuous-looking package is going to pull in an entire desktop environment you don't use.
(As for PackageKit, the less said about that the better. Adding yet another layer with even fewer features and a whole load of questionable design decisions of its own does not make Linux better.)
Well, it would be kind of like a car, if the manufacturer advertised a "base spec" and then forced you to pay extra if you wanted cruise control or alloy wheels or leather seats or a sunroof. Sounds crazy, huh?
Or like a phone, where you don't get the complete phone, you have to pay separately if you actually want to make calls or text, and then you have to pay again for data, and then you still don't have all the apps you want and you have to pay a few bucks for each of those as well. Maybe they would get so greedy that they would even charge for cosmetic things like ringtones! Such a bizarre concept.
I'm sure glad we don't live in a world like that.
As any indie developer can tell you, charging $10 for a game doesn't reduce piracy noticably.
Android developers will point out that there are apparently millions of people who aren't even willing to part with one single dollar if they can get the game for free illegally.
Then play fewer games, or cheaper games, or free games, or buy used games, or wait for them to be on sale.
I didn't have a job in college, and yet somehow I had no problem buying enough games to stay entertained. And they weren't much cheaper back then.
Sounds good to me. If someone is harrassing you to get a few bucks for themselves, they probably aren't the sort of person you want to be friends with in the first place.
Because it would be a terrible idea.
Why the fixation on hijacking? You don't need to hijack a plane to terrify people. There's a reason why basically all the attempted attacks on airplanes since 9/11 have involved bombs, not hijackings.
Making it trivial to take a gun onto a plane would make it trivial for terrorist attacks to succeed.
Picture the scene. It's a crowded plane. It's late at night, so everyone's also sleepy. Now a bunch of guys all suddenly pull out the guns you deliberately allowed them to take on the plane, and start murdering people! (Sure, they're doomed, but they don't care about that. They're suicide attackers. That's what terrorists use these days.)
What exactly do your armed passengers do? How do they figure out, half asleep, which of the other people holding guns are the terrorists? Whoops, turbulence! Johnny missed the terrorist he was aiming at and killed a young mother who was trying to shield her baby from the fighting. Whoops, Grandpa got up to shoot just as the guy behind him pulled the trigger. It's a bloodbath, with most of the killing being done by patriotic Americans who are geniunely trying to help.
And that's why you don't get to take a gun onto a plane. A bunch of random, uncoordinated passengers with no plan and no situational awareness do not constitute a well-regulated militia.
So now you can see two things at once. Big fucking deal.
I generally want to be able to see the documentation, AND the code, AND the other related code, all at once. And not in tiny little windows. I want a decent amount of context, in a readable font size. And I want the layout to be spatial: the code is there, the other code is there. Switching windows or even virtual desktops doesn't cut it. When you're doing a bunch of complex paperwork, like a tax form or something, you don't keep everything in a stack and keep flipping through it to find the sheet you need -- you spread it out so you can lay your hands on anything. Same principle.
Having two monitors makes me more productive, period. Having three would probably be even better. Beyond that I'd probably hit limits on the number of windows I could keep track of spatially, but it's a simple fact that one monitor is not enough. Unless maybe it's at least 30", but in a corporate context most people are lucky to get more than 22", and I know a lot of places rolling out horrible cramped 19" widescreens. That is NOT enough for anyonw who does more than basic Word and Outlook. Not nearly enough.
"Popular" distros like Ubuntu are not even relevant in Microsoft's world. Windows already won on the desktop. The battle is over. Ubuntu is the handful of Japanese soldiers in remote jungles who are still fighting WW2 in the 1960s. Red Hat, on the other hand? That's relevant. Red Hat gets used by real companies who have real IT budgets that they spend on real support contracts.
Supporting CentOS encourages people to stop buying those support contracts from Red Hat. That directly reduces a vital source of funding for a lot of core Linux development.
Also, it means that in a year or so Microsoft can start nudging shareholders to complain about the risk of using unsupported software since they terminated the Red Hat contracts, and why aren't they just consolidating on Windows since they already rely on Microsoft virtualization infrastructure? And then Windows gains market share from Linux.
And it does all this in a way that will also convince useful idiots that Microsoft has changed, honest, and they love OSS now! It's a brilliant move.
Python has some advantages over Perl -- cleaner syntax, a better REPL, none of the legacy shell-script-derived cruft that makes it so easy to write terrible code in Perl. It also has quite a few disadvantages that make it harder to write robust code, such as its lack of any equivalent to Perl's extremely useful "use strict" and its poorly designed scoping rules.
I see a lot of new development taking place in both languages. I don't see much PHP, but that's a niche language restricted to web development, which isn't something I'm involved with.
Flipping burgers? Serving coffee? Waiting tables? Operating a cash register?
Your first job doesn't have to be your dream job. Having done some crappy job for a while isn't going to blight your career. It certainly looks better than saying "I spent three years in mom's basement trying to find a free web host that offered a full LAMP stack".
Why not? The religion classes at my school -- in a country where Christianity is the official religion -- also covered at least Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Judaism, Shinto, various Native American belief systems, and some of the pre-Christian European religions. I don't recall Mormonism, Pastafarianism, or Satanism being covered, nor was any time devoted to invisible pink unicorns or the followers of Eris, but there was only so much room on the syllabus.
Religious education in schools is a good thing, given the important condition that it does not teach that any one religion is actually true. Knowing what other people believe is of vital importance if you're going to share a planet with them.
Yes, clearly anyone who finds ubiquitous internet access extremely useful is "brainwashed".
If it was the "stupid cell phone, texting, and photos" we cared about, we wouldn't have gone for Android devices with expensive data plans in the first place.
And the solution is to have more than one UI.
If touch is the future, why isn't Apple rushing to make the iOS interface be the default on Macs? Oh, right, because the thing about the future is that it isn't here yet.
There's nothing stopping you using Compiz with Xfce, you know. I did it very happily for years and never had any problems.
So vote with your feet. Ubuntu users can very easily switch to Kubuntu or Xubuntu, for example, both of which provide all the things you mention without requiring OpenGL. Xubuntu in particular is a very similar experience to the old Gnome, while Kubuntu provides all the bells and whistles of Unity or Gnome3 without completely throwing out the familiar interface design.
I guess Dell's netbooks are crap, then. My 10" HP netbook has longer battery life than the 11" Air, is smaller in both interesting dimensions (1.5" narrower, 0.5" less deep), and is only slightly thicker. The screen has the same resolution. The keyboard is scarcely any smaller because it goes up to the edge of the case, while the Air seems to waste 0.5" on either side.
(All that said, the Air is definitely lighter and would be tempting if there was an option for a matte screen. I don't buy computers in order to stare at my own face.)
Yeah, 15GB is not enough. If AT&T were saying 15GB then that would be a problem.
Seriously, no, it isn't. I watch plenty of streaming video, download plenty of stuff, and I've never come near 150GB. Most months I barely exceed 30 or 40GB.
What the hell are all these people who think 150GB isn't enough actually doing? Downloading HD porn 24/7? Running a Netflix competitor from their home PC? Attempting to engage in so much piracy that when the RIAA finally sues them they'll cause an integer overflow and end up demanding negative damages?
That's what the multiple distro approach does. It's called "competition" in a "free market". I realise this kind of concept is difficult for people to grasp when their minds have been poisoned by the Microsoft/Apple dictatorial/hegemonic approach, but Linux is about freedom and choice, not about being told what OS to use by a single all-powerful organisation that wants to control every aspect of your computing.