To a lot of us geeks out in the real world, $1200 is (quite literally) pocket change
While I agree with the sentiment ($1200 is about the limit, but I could blow $1200 on an impulse purchase and not worry about it), I'm surprised that a geek would literally carry that amount around in his pocket. Ever heard of cards? Unlike Grandpa Technophobe, we geeks don't have to keep gold reserves stuffed in a mattress...
Why didn't they give the users multiple flavors of the most colorful operating systems they never tried (Vista, OSX, Kubuntu, etc) and ask them which one they liked best?
Because that question is irrelevant. This isn't about trying to convince people who don't use Windows to use Windows, or about trying to convince people that Windows is the best OS ever. The message Microsoft is going for is simple: "If you like XP, you'll like Vista too."
(And I happen to agree with them: I'm not particularly fond of Windows, but having used Vista, I can't see where all the hate is coming from. My personal ranking is Linux > OS X > Vista > XP.)
Why should FOSS projects have to be restricted in what they can do because some people insist on hardware with poor support?
Who said they had to do anything? Obviously they're free to do whatever they like -- that's why it's called Free Software.
However, they do have to interact with a real world in which a very large number of people use NVidia hardware, in part because (until recently) it was actually the best-supported on Linux. If they want those people to use their software, then they need to write software that works well with that hardware. If they don't care about user figures, then they are of course welcome to write whatever they like and then sit back as NVidia users ditch their software in favour of something that performs well.
How's Nouveau getting along? Maybe that will become a viable choice for NVidia users who want to use KDE4.
Hell, stop talking even about KDE3. What about OS X?
Remember 10.0? The one that was so slow, so unstable, and so lacking in features that Apple eventually had to give a free 10.1 upgrade to everyone who got suckered into buying it?
Yet despite that disastrous start, OS X is now recognised as a mature and stable OS, even among those of us who don't particularly like using it. KDE4 will almost certainly go the same way. At least you didn't have to pay over $100 for your copy of KDE 4.0, like those poor suckers did for OS X 10.0!
(And don't mistake me for a KDE fanboy, either. I use Xfce, and look on the KDE/GNOME flamewars as a disinterested observer.)
Linux is a unix-clone and therefore, limited in the amount of (software) invention it will allow.
OS X is not just a Unix clone, but an actual certified UNIX implementation. But you don't hear many people claiming that Apple is lacking in the area of software invention.
Being based on Unix doesn't affect innovation at all in the areas where it's visible. For example, GNOME is not constrained by the design of CDE.
I use the command line on my Linux boxes far more than I edit the registry on my Windows boxes.
That's fascinating, but I don't see how it's relevant. The command line is a feature, not a flaw. I use the command line on my Mac far more than I edit the registry on my Windows boxes, but you don't see many people claiming OS X isn't ready for the mainstream.
By Rover because Ford make cars, just like Rover do!
Congratulations, you win today's prize for Worst Bad Car Analogy.
There's a trademark on SCRABBLE.
This is called SCRABULOUS.
Can you see the difference?
May I suggest you read up on trademark law, with particular reference to the question of whether a mark has to be identical to be considered infringing?
So, for example, you need some way of putting both the point value and letter on each tile. With a small number of ways of doing so, I suspect that the tiles themselves are not protected.
I can think of five strategies off the top of my head, each of which has many possible implementations. Yet Scrabulous not only chooses the same strategy (large letter, small number in corner), not only chooses the same corner, but has the letter and number in the same relative positions and sizes as Scrabble.
In other words, they didn't even try to do it differently. It's a slavish copy.
I have no idea whether it infringes copyright or not, but if any aspect of Scrabble is copyrightable, then Scrabulous is toast.
RTFA if you want to know. They list three registered copyrights that they allege are being infringed (including one on the "Gameboard"), and they list several ways in which they allege Scrabulous infringes their trademark.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't really judge how strong their case is. Are you a lawyer?
I think that most reasonable adults would read "Scrabulous" as meaning "Scrabble(TM)-like, but not Scrabble(TM)".
Google "scrabble". Scrabulous is the second link. Try "scrabble online", and it's the first link. Do you really think there's no chance that reasonable adults will think "hmm, maybe Scrabulous is what Hasbro calls their online Scrabble"?
Hasbro hasn't exactly tried hard to defend their patent until now
Oh, please.
I know Slashbots traditionally have a hard time distinguishing between trademarks, copyrights, and patents. But when the complaint begins with the words "This is an action for trademark and copyright infringement", you might hope that people might just about be able to figure out which of the three are involved.
Please provide a link to where the Scrabulous creators are infringing the Hasbro trademark.
According to Hasbro, the very name "Scrabulous" infringes the Hasbro trademark, since (they say) it's confusingly similar.
That one might be debatable, but they also claim that scrabulous.com used to have META tags saying things like "free online scrabble". If that's true, then I'd think the case is pretty open-and-shut. I tried to check at archive.org, but it seems the Scrabulous people blocked archive.org from their site. (Hmm, that doesn't exactly reek of good faith, does it?)
And note that they live in India.
Yeah, I doubt Hasbro will get any money out of them. However, Facebook isn't based in India, so the Facebook app will certainly be taken down if Hasbro wins this case, and that's the main thing they appear to want.
I hope that we're not alone. The idea that this is the only planet with sentient life anywhere in the Universe isn't just a waste of space. It chills me to the core to think that there's no Others out there.
Right, but this is just religion, with aliens standing in for gods.
Currently, the number of planets we know have ever sustained life is one. We can disprove the theory that Earth is unique by finding evidence of life on e.g. Mars, but that would just shift the goalposts -- we still wouldn't have any evidence from which to argue that life has ever existed outside our solar system, and we still wouldn't have any evidence from which to argue that sentient life has ever existed other than on Earth.
Face it: we have no meaningful data at all on how widespread life is in the universe, and there is no realistic prospect that we will get it any time in the foreseeable future. What this means is that speculation on the existence of intelligent alien life can only be just that: speculation. You can make personal arguments about how unlikely you think it is that life is unique to Earth, and you can make emotive arguments about how silly you think it is to assume that humans are "special" or "unique", but the fact remains that we have no evidence either for or against this position.
the whole point of LaTeX is that WYSIWYG is clumsy when doing the most detailed work.
No, the whole point of LaTeX is that WYSIWYG is a pointless distraction when you can trust a computer to handle the appearance of your work for you. (Why worry about page breaks, when the computer can automatically find the best places to put them? Why waste ten minutes scouring a character pallette for the right mathematical symbol, when you can just type the name of it and let the computer worry about what shape it should be?)
That is, LaTeX is optimised for cases where the appearance of your document wants to be clean and predictable -- exactly the opposite of detailed layout work!
When you have detailed layout requirements, it's actually LaTeX that becomes clumsy. If you need to move a word 1.5mm to the left, then it's much more efficient to use a WYSIWYG tool than to waste hours fiddling with code to try to make LaTeX's layout routines place the word where you want it.
Many of the things people use WYSIWYG tools for do actually fall into the large category of things for which the LaTeX approach would be a much better choice. But not all of them, not by a long shot.
Operating Systems using extended attributes for file types (like OS/2 and Mac OS X) have no problems when all extension are the same. In fact they work perfectly well with no extensions at all.
O RLY? Let's try a little experiment right here on my Mac. I have a JPEG file called "foo.jpg". Let's rename it to "foo.txt".
Hmm, what's this dialog box? It says, and I quote:
Are you sure you want to change the extension from ".jpg" to ".txt"? If you make this change, your document may open in a different application.
That doesn't look to me like it's using extended attributes for file types, or like it can cope with all the extensions being the same...
LaTeX is very good within its niche, which is typesetting books and journal articles (and it's particularly good for mathematical and scientific texts).
However, that doesn't mean it's perfect for every situation. Things can start getting complicated very quickly if you are doing anything other than typesetting a book or journal article, particularly if you have very particular layout desires. For example, flowing text round images can be incredibly difficult to get right.
In fact, some layouts -- even deceptively simple ones are essentially impossible to produce automatically, so you have to fall back on manual tweaking. At which point you're no longer using LaTeX for its automatic layout capabilities, which are its strong point: you're just using it as a slow and non-visual tool for manual layout, which is the one thing WYSIWYG word processors are better for.
Semantics is a fun game, but being realistic, if you don't consider the market leader to be a "modern browser" then the concept is pretty useless, because pretty much anyone writing a modern web site is likely to want to cater for IE users -- however much you might wish they'd upgrade to a better product like Firefox, Opera, or Safari.
Systems which detect the way your eyes are pointing might be good for controlling input focus.
I half agree, half disagree.
Certainly, I frequently have that annoying problem where I start typing and have a nasty surprise when the text appears in a different window from the one I was looking at. (Potentially disastrous if the focus happened to be in an IM window when I was trying to draft a confidential email!)
The problem is that I don't always look at the window I'm typing in. As I've been typing this, my eyes have flickered over into at least three other windows that could accept input focus (not least the subject line right above this text box!). It's not obvious how the computer could guess which eye movements were accompanied by an expectation that the input focus would move, unless it was also capable of reading my subconscious mind!
I always use my laptop screen at about 45 degrees off the horizontal (ie as low as it will go)
How do you bear it? One of the fundamental characteristics of the particular technology used in laptop displays is that they suffer from severe vertical colour shifting problems -- viewed from one vertical direction the colours will actually invert, while from the other direction they lose contrast until nearly everything but pure white appears black. Have you got so used to this that you just don't notice it any more?
Now it's clear to me. You are some combination of an idiot or a troll.
Right, because everyone who is not a college student in the United States is an idiot or a troll.
Hint: "facebook" is not a standard English word. Look it up -- you won't find it in Merriam-Webster, for example. It may well be a North American college-student slang term; I shall take your word for this. In Europe, however, it does not exist at all, except as the name of a specific website.
That's true -- at least China doesn't have 5 million security cameras.
They're working on it. And they're openly trying to go a heck of a lot further than anyone in the West.
Which is the free country again?
Given just the two choices, I think I'll go for the democratic surveillance society with strongly protected freedoms, rather than the one-party surveillance society where citizens don't even have basic rights like freedom of speech, assembly, and religion.
You will put the constant on the left for comparisons. This one isn't bad in and of itself
Yes it is. It encourages a false sense of security, but totally fails to help in all those cases where the things being compared are both variables.
Better by far to write things for human comprehension (constant goes on right, like in every equation you saw in school), and let the compiler warn you if it sees an = where it's expecting an ==.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree with the sentiment ($1200 is about the limit, but I could blow $1200 on an impulse purchase and not worry about it), I'm surprised that a geek would literally carry that amount around in his pocket. Ever heard of cards? Unlike Grandpa Technophobe, we geeks don't have to keep gold reserves stuffed in a mattress...
Because that question is irrelevant. This isn't about trying to convince people who don't use Windows to use Windows, or about trying to convince people that Windows is the best OS ever. The message Microsoft is going for is simple: "If you like XP, you'll like Vista too."
(And I happen to agree with them: I'm not particularly fond of Windows, but having used Vista, I can't see where all the hate is coming from. My personal ranking is Linux > OS X > Vista > XP.)
This is actually bullshit, but let's not let the truth get in the way of a good Slashdot meme.
Who said they had to do anything? Obviously they're free to do whatever they like -- that's why it's called Free Software.
However, they do have to interact with a real world in which a very large number of people use NVidia hardware, in part because (until recently) it was actually the best-supported on Linux. If they want those people to use their software, then they need to write software that works well with that hardware. If they don't care about user figures, then they are of course welcome to write whatever they like and then sit back as NVidia users ditch their software in favour of something that performs well.
How's Nouveau getting along? Maybe that will become a viable choice for NVidia users who want to use KDE4.
I think the point is that they could have chosen a name that made this clearer. "KDE 4 For Application Developers", for example.
Hell, stop talking even about KDE3. What about OS X?
Remember 10.0? The one that was so slow, so unstable, and so lacking in features that Apple eventually had to give a free 10.1 upgrade to everyone who got suckered into buying it?
Yet despite that disastrous start, OS X is now recognised as a mature and stable OS, even among those of us who don't particularly like using it. KDE4 will almost certainly go the same way. At least you didn't have to pay over $100 for your copy of KDE 4.0, like those poor suckers did for OS X 10.0!
(And don't mistake me for a KDE fanboy, either. I use Xfce, and look on the KDE/GNOME flamewars as a disinterested observer.)
OS X is not just a Unix clone, but an actual certified UNIX implementation. But you don't hear many people claiming that Apple is lacking in the area of software invention.
Being based on Unix doesn't affect innovation at all in the areas where it's visible. For example, GNOME is not constrained by the design of CDE.
That's fascinating, but I don't see how it's relevant. The command line is a feature, not a flaw. I use the command line on my Mac far more than I edit the registry on my Windows boxes, but you don't see many people claiming OS X isn't ready for the mainstream.
Congratulations, you win today's prize for Worst Bad Car Analogy.
May I suggest you read up on trademark law, with particular reference to the question of whether a mark has to be identical to be considered infringing?
I can think of five strategies off the top of my head, each of which has many possible implementations. Yet Scrabulous not only chooses the same strategy (large letter, small number in corner), not only chooses the same corner, but has the letter and number in the same relative positions and sizes as Scrabble.
In other words, they didn't even try to do it differently. It's a slavish copy.
I have no idea whether it infringes copyright or not, but if any aspect of Scrabble is copyrightable, then Scrabulous is toast.
RTFA if you want to know. They list three registered copyrights that they allege are being infringed (including one on the "Gameboard"), and they list several ways in which they allege Scrabulous infringes their trademark.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't really judge how strong their case is. Are you a lawyer?
Google "scrabble". Scrabulous is the second link. Try "scrabble online", and it's the first link. Do you really think there's no chance that reasonable adults will think "hmm, maybe Scrabulous is what Hasbro calls their online Scrabble"?
Oh, please.
I know Slashbots traditionally have a hard time distinguishing between trademarks, copyrights, and patents. But when the complaint begins with the words "This is an action for trademark and copyright infringement", you might hope that people might just about be able to figure out which of the three are involved.
According to Hasbro, the very name "Scrabulous" infringes the Hasbro trademark, since (they say) it's confusingly similar.
That one might be debatable, but they also claim that scrabulous.com used to have META tags saying things like "free online scrabble". If that's true, then I'd think the case is pretty open-and-shut. I tried to check at archive.org, but it seems the Scrabulous people blocked archive.org from their site. (Hmm, that doesn't exactly reek of good faith, does it?)
Yeah, I doubt Hasbro will get any money out of them. However, Facebook isn't based in India, so the Facebook app will certainly be taken down if Hasbro wins this case, and that's the main thing they appear to want.
Right, but this is just religion, with aliens standing in for gods.
Currently, the number of planets we know have ever sustained life is one. We can disprove the theory that Earth is unique by finding evidence of life on e.g. Mars, but that would just shift the goalposts -- we still wouldn't have any evidence from which to argue that life has ever existed outside our solar system, and we still wouldn't have any evidence from which to argue that sentient life has ever existed other than on Earth.
Face it: we have no meaningful data at all on how widespread life is in the universe, and there is no realistic prospect that we will get it any time in the foreseeable future. What this means is that speculation on the existence of intelligent alien life can only be just that: speculation. You can make personal arguments about how unlikely you think it is that life is unique to Earth, and you can make emotive arguments about how silly you think it is to assume that humans are "special" or "unique", but the fact remains that we have no evidence either for or against this position.
Never heard of them. Wake me up when significant sites like YouTube start doing things like this...
No, the whole point of LaTeX is that WYSIWYG is a pointless distraction when you can trust a computer to handle the appearance of your work for you. (Why worry about page breaks, when the computer can automatically find the best places to put them? Why waste ten minutes scouring a character pallette for the right mathematical symbol, when you can just type the name of it and let the computer worry about what shape it should be?)
That is, LaTeX is optimised for cases where the appearance of your document wants to be clean and predictable -- exactly the opposite of detailed layout work!
When you have detailed layout requirements, it's actually LaTeX that becomes clumsy. If you need to move a word 1.5mm to the left, then it's much more efficient to use a WYSIWYG tool than to waste hours fiddling with code to try to make LaTeX's layout routines place the word where you want it.
Many of the things people use WYSIWYG tools for do actually fall into the large category of things for which the LaTeX approach would be a much better choice. But not all of them, not by a long shot.
O RLY? Let's try a little experiment right here on my Mac. I have a JPEG file called "foo.jpg". Let's rename it to "foo.txt".
Hmm, what's this dialog box? It says, and I quote:
That doesn't look to me like it's using extended attributes for file types, or like it can cope with all the extensions being the same...
LaTeX is very good within its niche, which is typesetting books and journal articles (and it's particularly good for mathematical and scientific texts).
However, that doesn't mean it's perfect for every situation. Things can start getting complicated very quickly if you are doing anything other than typesetting a book or journal article, particularly if you have very particular layout desires. For example, flowing text round images can be incredibly difficult to get right.
In fact, some layouts -- even deceptively simple ones are essentially impossible to produce automatically, so you have to fall back on manual tweaking. At which point you're no longer using LaTeX for its automatic layout capabilities, which are its strong point: you're just using it as a slow and non-visual tool for manual layout, which is the one thing WYSIWYG word processors are better for.
Semantics is a fun game, but being realistic, if you don't consider the market leader to be a "modern browser" then the concept is pretty useless, because pretty much anyone writing a modern web site is likely to want to cater for IE users -- however much you might wish they'd upgrade to a better product like Firefox, Opera, or Safari.
And whatever happened to New Here? :D
I half agree, half disagree.
Certainly, I frequently have that annoying problem where I start typing and have a nasty surprise when the text appears in a different window from the one I was looking at. (Potentially disastrous if the focus happened to be in an IM window when I was trying to draft a confidential email!)
The problem is that I don't always look at the window I'm typing in. As I've been typing this, my eyes have flickered over into at least three other windows that could accept input focus (not least the subject line right above this text box!). It's not obvious how the computer could guess which eye movements were accompanied by an expectation that the input focus would move, unless it was also capable of reading my subconscious mind!
How do you bear it? One of the fundamental characteristics of the particular technology used in laptop displays is that they suffer from severe vertical colour shifting problems -- viewed from one vertical direction the colours will actually invert, while from the other direction they lose contrast until nearly everything but pure white appears black. Have you got so used to this that you just don't notice it any more?
Right, because everyone who is not a college student in the United States is an idiot or a troll.
Hint: "facebook" is not a standard English word. Look it up -- you won't find it in Merriam-Webster, for example. It may well be a North American college-student slang term; I shall take your word for this. In Europe, however, it does not exist at all, except as the name of a specific website.
(Second hint: Germany is not in North America.)
They're working on it. And they're openly trying to go a heck of a lot further than anyone in the West.
Given just the two choices, I think I'll go for the democratic surveillance society with strongly protected freedoms, rather than the one-party surveillance society where citizens don't even have basic rights like freedom of speech, assembly, and religion.
Yes it is. It encourages a false sense of security, but totally fails to help in all those cases where the things being compared are both variables.
Better by far to write things for human comprehension (constant goes on right, like in every equation you saw in school), and let the compiler warn you if it sees an = where it's expecting an ==.