Yes, it was terrible that they were so inept as to replace a fragile crackly hissy medium with one that the vast, vast majority of people are literally physically incapable of distinguishing from a live performance.
Without free speech, there can be no democratic society, and without a democracy, there can be no legitimate government.
Hahahaha, how adorable. He has learned a talking point!
Seriously though, by your standards there has never once in the entire history of the world been a legitimate government, because no society has ever been in the situation where all speech is free and equal. There has always either been censorship, or a concentration of ownership of information dissemination channels in the hands of a few people whose editorial power has effectively controlled what the public see. Even today, where the internet is finally lowering the barriers that have historically prevented the vast majority of people from having any meaningful voice, the majority of information is still controlled by a minority.
Indeed, it may still be even less democratic than government censorship would be. At least we get to vote for the government. I don't recall seeing Rupert Murdoch's name on any ballot papers.
Get MakeMKV. That costs money too, but not much more than a couple of Blu-rays. Now you can stream your movies straight to any damn player software you like, bypassing all the no-skip no-whatever bullshit completely. Also bypassing HDMI, HDCP, etc. so you will actually get the resolution you paid for without any hassle.
That was easy.
(You lose any menus, but who wants menus anyway? I can't be the only person who just wants to watch the damn movie without having all the best bits spoiled for me in the background while I try to find the hidden play button.)
That's because that's not the main trap that Mono represents.
Microsoft tolerates Mono because it's a clone of a Microsoft technology. They haven't tried to stop Wine, either. Microsoft knows what most of the useful idiots who support the use of Mono appear not to have realized: if your business is in any way, shape, or form built on Microsoft technologies, you will face extreme pressure from all sides to move to a full Microsoft stack.
The patent angle will only ever be used if it looks like Mono is causing important customers to migrate away from Windows. But that isn't happening.
China doesn't criticize others countries for restriciting "internet freedoms" and hence that they do so themselves isn't hyprocritical.
Likewise, the USA does not criticize other countires for arresting people who leak state secrets or for seizing domain names allegedly associated with large-scale copyright infringement, which are the only two things I can think of that the federal government has done that involve any restriction of people's online activities.
What the USA criticizes other countries --such as China -- for doing, is completely blocking access to vast swathes of online content, including political dissent, religious expression, and foreign media, and even interfering with web searches to conceal historical facts. The USA does not do any of that. So how, exactly, is the USA being hypocritical?
Or you could use MakeMKV instead of AnyDVD HD, if you want a program that does not require MS Windows. I have had no problems ripping or playing directly with it in Linux. It's a point and click GUI; hard to see how it could get much easier without being built into the player software.
I will not consider buying a game that I cannot get a nocd crack for. Why would I want to have to put a DVD in every time I play? As for having to play while online, there is no way I would pay for something that I cannot play when I want, and I do not always have an internet connection.
Use Steam, then. All games are playable without a DVD, you do not have to be online to play them, and you can achieve this desirable state of affairs without doing anything risky or illegal.
Apparently there's still DRM there somewhere. I can't say I've ever noticed it.
I worked in industry for many years, and I can tell you that no workers were more highly valued than those who were unable to do even the simplest things by themselves. "Let's collaborate!" they would say, and our hearts warmed instantly and we leapt into action, "helping" our valued coworkers, doing their work for them.
You do realize that management genuinely loves this kind of thing, don't you? It's even better if you call it "mentoring". Finding a poorly-performing colleague and doing their work for them is an excellent way of enhancing your own career.
Yes, the world sucks and society is broken. Let's exploit it for fun and profit!
And the boss who hires you based on your degree, only to discover that you lack the proper understanding of the underlying principles that is necessary to do a real-world job.
Well, briefly, anyway. Then you get to go and use your incredible calculator skills to model the trajectory of burgers, and you will indeed never again need to be able to construct a mathematical proof. Self-fulfilling prophecy, that one.
Most bosses would not be happy to learn that the programmer they hired is cheating by copying code from GPL projects, opening them up to damaging lawsuits and public embarrassment. Or that the programmer they just hired doesn't know the language or library at all and is cheating by spending all their time asking trivial questions on Stack Overflow and then copying and pasting the answers.
In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of a type of cheating that many bosses would like at all. If you're spending a lot of time looking things up on Google, you are not a good employee, period. You may be kinda sorta getting the job done, but you are not doing it as well, as quickly, or as reliably as someone who actually had detailed in-depth knowledge of the problem domain.
The Declaration of Independence says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It doesn't say "citizens", it says "men".
And the man who wrote it owned hundreds of slaves. He held it to be self-evident that they were created inferior, and he personally continued to deprive them of Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness for the rest of his life. I don't think we should read too much into his choice of language.
I don't think anything short of a Constitutional amendment is going to protect our property against unreasonable searches and seizures
Great idea!
I would propose maybe the following wording:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
No, theyre moving to a "ship more major versions" model, since major version releases are where features are added.
This is untrue.
Firefox 3.5 added features. The major version number did not change.
Firefox 3.6 added features. The major version number did not change.
Firefox 4.0 made fundamental changes to the entire interface.
There is no reason why this new version could not be called 4.1, or 4.5 if they think the new features are really big changes. Switching to a completely different numbering model is just a marketing move. Indeed, it is a step backwards, since we can no longer distinguish versions that add a few features from versions that involve fundamental changes to the way the entire interface works.
federal employees and contractors are substantially better paid than the national average.
This could possibly be something to do with the fact that the national average includes fruit pickers and burger flippers.
Also, the lowest-paid federal workers are the most likely to be furloughed. These are not people who are earning substantially more than the national average. They are ordinary people with children to feed, payments to make, etc. Yeah, there are loads of other people out there who are suffering even more -- people who have already lost their jobs in the private sector, say -- but that doesn't mean that the potential for hundreds of thousands more ordinary people to face similar misery is something we should write off with a smug "meh, they were overpaid anyway".
Re:What problem does Gnome 3 solve?
on
GNOME 3 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
the Windows 95 mould (which I think most linux users, given the popularity of mint and pclinuxos, would grudgingly admit is a sensible way of organising a desktop).
No, it's a dreadful way of organising a desktop. The "start button" design buries applications deep in menus miles away from wherever your mouse is. The task bar view of running programs manages to display minimal information while also lacking any spatial element that might help you find the window you're looking for. The icons-on-desktop design puts all your files and shortcuts in the single least accessible place on your screen. Etc.
In all honesty, Windows 95's interface was terrible. It managed to be a step back from Windows 3 in many respects. It caught on because Windows 95 was so much better in every other way. It has stuck around because Windows acquired a monopoly and the entire business world would scream blue murder if Microsoft tried anything radical. And Linux distributions that copy it are only popular because it is familiar. People really do prefer the devil they know.
I'm not claiming GNOME 3 is the solution. I haven't tried it yet, and what I've read has not sounded very appealing. But I will give them credit for trying, just like I gave KDE credit for trying even though I'm not a great fan of their interface either.
Shakeups like this are essential. If you only ever go for incremental improvements, you will at best find a local maximum. Your chance of finding the best solution increases if you try radically new ideas. And putting them out as concepts that nobody every really uses won't get us anywhere either -- interfaces can only be evaluated properly if they are forced into mainstream distributions and real people actually make an effort to use them for real things. It has to be this way. This is a good thing. Honest.
Yes, a magical desktop that only allowed the most efficient ways to do things would be a truly wonderful thing.
Unfortunately we live in the real world, where perfection is not quite so simple to attain. There's a reason why societies tend to propsper when they encourage diversity, and to stagnate when they enforce conformity -- and it's not because any committee has ever been able to identify the most efficient way to do everything.
If GNOME 3 happens to coincide with the ways of working that you find most efficient, then congratulations: you are a very lucky person. Enjoy the productivity while it lasts -- you have about three years before they start the next ground-up rewrite that will replace the interface you love with something you will almost certainly consider an unwieldy abomination, and you will suddenly find yourself begging for that bunch of configuration options.
And a good used-car salesman will sell you a great vehicle at a fair price. Both are, sadly, in rather short supply in the real world.
Frankly I rather like modern configuration files, which tend to come with detailed comments explaining all the options. This compares very favourably with the average configuration GUI, with its billions of tabs covered in obscure checkboxes with documentation along the lines of "Don't not frobnicate blarghs: turn off not frobnicating blarghs."
I'll grant you that IDEs are nice for the programming languages they support, though I often find myself opening files in emacs too; the likes of VS are great for code completion and refactoring, but programs are also text and most IDEs suck at editing text.
Apples, oranges. Yes, GUIs are nice for one-offs. But they suck when you want to perform the operation more than once.
I cry every time I see an office which performs routine tasks by having a human manually follow a list of instructions: open this program, click on this, this, and this, edit, copy, go to this other program, paste, click...
People have practically wept tears of joy when I've shown them the magic of scripts. An hour spent wrestling with obtuse documentation is time well spent if it's going to save someone five minutes of error-prone clicking every day.
I've found Gnome to be configurable enough on low-end laptops with limited resolution, where KDE to really shine requires some decent real estate.
Really? I would say exactly the opposite. KDE works very nicely on this 10" netbook, whereas I found GNOME to be very unsatisfactory, largely because of its poor support for vertical panels.
What I want to know is, who exactly are these new interfaces (Gnome Shell, Unity) supposed to be aimed at? They seem to have been designed to be optimal on 7" netbooks. You know, those things that don't exist any more. Most everything these days is either a phone (and therefore not running X11 at all) or has a 10"+ screen that is just fine running a regular desktop environment, as is demonstrated by the fact that Windows managed to extend its monopoly into the netbook market with such ease. Where is the demand?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it was terrible that they were so inept as to replace a fragile crackly hissy medium with one that the vast, vast majority of people are literally physically incapable of distinguishing from a live performance.
Hahahaha, how adorable. He has learned a talking point!
Seriously though, by your standards there has never once in the entire history of the world been a legitimate government, because no society has ever been in the situation where all speech is free and equal. There has always either been censorship, or a concentration of ownership of information dissemination channels in the hands of a few people whose editorial power has effectively controlled what the public see. Even today, where the internet is finally lowering the barriers that have historically prevented the vast majority of people from having any meaningful voice, the majority of information is still controlled by a minority.
Indeed, it may still be even less democratic than government censorship would be. At least we get to vote for the government. I don't recall seeing Rupert Murdoch's name on any ballot papers.
Get MakeMKV. That costs money too, but not much more than a couple of Blu-rays. Now you can stream your movies straight to any damn player software you like, bypassing all the no-skip no-whatever bullshit completely. Also bypassing HDMI, HDCP, etc. so you will actually get the resolution you paid for without any hassle.
That was easy.
(You lose any menus, but who wants menus anyway? I can't be the only person who just wants to watch the damn movie without having all the best bits spoiled for me in the background while I try to find the hidden play button.)
"Good" customers buy media made for the region they live in. Wanting to watch media from a different region makes you a bad customer.
Think of it in terms of fences, grass, and sheep, and it'll all make sense.
That's because that's not the main trap that Mono represents.
Microsoft tolerates Mono because it's a clone of a Microsoft technology. They haven't tried to stop Wine, either. Microsoft knows what most of the useful idiots who support the use of Mono appear not to have realized: if your business is in any way, shape, or form built on Microsoft technologies, you will face extreme pressure from all sides to move to a full Microsoft stack.
The patent angle will only ever be used if it looks like Mono is causing important customers to migrate away from Windows. But that isn't happening.
Likewise, the USA does not criticize other countires for arresting people who leak state secrets or for seizing domain names allegedly associated with large-scale copyright infringement, which are the only two things I can think of that the federal government has done that involve any restriction of people's online activities.
What the USA criticizes other countries --such as China -- for doing, is completely blocking access to vast swathes of online content, including political dissent, religious expression, and foreign media, and even interfering with web searches to conceal historical facts. The USA does not do any of that. So how, exactly, is the USA being hypocritical?
Or you could use MakeMKV instead of AnyDVD HD, if you want a program that does not require MS Windows. I have had no problems ripping or playing directly with it in Linux. It's a point and click GUI; hard to see how it could get much easier without being built into the player software.
Insert disc. Run MakeMKV GUI. Press "rip" button. Wait less time than it would take to download someone else's rip. Enjoy movie.
Yeah, I don't know how anyone can be expected to put up with difficult and error-prone processes like that.
The majority of people above the age of 15 never bothered trying to resell a game in the first place. This is really a non-issue for most people.
Use Steam, then. All games are playable without a DVD, you do not have to be online to play them, and you can achieve this desirable state of affairs without doing anything risky or illegal.
Apparently there's still DRM there somewhere. I can't say I've ever noticed it.
You do realize that management genuinely loves this kind of thing, don't you? It's even better if you call it "mentoring". Finding a poorly-performing colleague and doing their work for them is an excellent way of enhancing your own career.
Yes, the world sucks and society is broken. Let's exploit it for fun and profit!
You were lucky. We had to make do with the Daily Mail.
And the boss who hires you based on your degree, only to discover that you lack the proper understanding of the underlying principles that is necessary to do a real-world job.
Well, briefly, anyway. Then you get to go and use your incredible calculator skills to model the trajectory of burgers, and you will indeed never again need to be able to construct a mathematical proof. Self-fulfilling prophecy, that one.
Most bosses would not be happy to learn that the programmer they hired is cheating by copying code from GPL projects, opening them up to damaging lawsuits and public embarrassment. Or that the programmer they just hired doesn't know the language or library at all and is cheating by spending all their time asking trivial questions on Stack Overflow and then copying and pasting the answers.
In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of a type of cheating that many bosses would like at all. If you're spending a lot of time looking things up on Google, you are not a good employee, period. You may be kinda sorta getting the job done, but you are not doing it as well, as quickly, or as reliably as someone who actually had detailed in-depth knowledge of the problem domain.
And the man who wrote it owned hundreds of slaves. He held it to be self-evident that they were created inferior, and he personally continued to deprive them of Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness for the rest of his life. I don't think we should read too much into his choice of language.
Great idea!
I would propose maybe the following wording:
This is untrue.
Firefox 3.5 added features. The major version number did not change.
Firefox 3.6 added features. The major version number did not change.
Firefox 4.0 made fundamental changes to the entire interface.
There is no reason why this new version could not be called 4.1, or 4.5 if they think the new features are really big changes. Switching to a completely different numbering model is just a marketing move. Indeed, it is a step backwards, since we can no longer distinguish versions that add a few features from versions that involve fundamental changes to the way the entire interface works.
This could possibly be something to do with the fact that the national average includes fruit pickers and burger flippers.
Also, the lowest-paid federal workers are the most likely to be furloughed. These are not people who are earning substantially more than the national average. They are ordinary people with children to feed, payments to make, etc. Yeah, there are loads of other people out there who are suffering even more -- people who have already lost their jobs in the private sector, say -- but that doesn't mean that the potential for hundreds of thousands more ordinary people to face similar misery is something we should write off with a smug "meh, they were overpaid anyway".
No, it's a dreadful way of organising a desktop. The "start button" design buries applications deep in menus miles away from wherever your mouse is. The task bar view of running programs manages to display minimal information while also lacking any spatial element that might help you find the window you're looking for. The icons-on-desktop design puts all your files and shortcuts in the single least accessible place on your screen. Etc.
In all honesty, Windows 95's interface was terrible. It managed to be a step back from Windows 3 in many respects. It caught on because Windows 95 was so much better in every other way. It has stuck around because Windows acquired a monopoly and the entire business world would scream blue murder if Microsoft tried anything radical. And Linux distributions that copy it are only popular because it is familiar. People really do prefer the devil they know.
I'm not claiming GNOME 3 is the solution. I haven't tried it yet, and what I've read has not sounded very appealing. But I will give them credit for trying, just like I gave KDE credit for trying even though I'm not a great fan of their interface either.
Shakeups like this are essential. If you only ever go for incremental improvements, you will at best find a local maximum. Your chance of finding the best solution increases if you try radically new ideas. And putting them out as concepts that nobody every really uses won't get us anywhere either -- interfaces can only be evaluated properly if they are forced into mainstream distributions and real people actually make an effort to use them for real things. It has to be this way. This is a good thing. Honest.
Yes, a magical desktop that only allowed the most efficient ways to do things would be a truly wonderful thing.
Unfortunately we live in the real world, where perfection is not quite so simple to attain. There's a reason why societies tend to propsper when they encourage diversity, and to stagnate when they enforce conformity -- and it's not because any committee has ever been able to identify the most efficient way to do everything.
If GNOME 3 happens to coincide with the ways of working that you find most efficient, then congratulations: you are a very lucky person. Enjoy the productivity while it lasts -- you have about three years before they start the next ground-up rewrite that will replace the interface you love with something you will almost certainly consider an unwieldy abomination, and you will suddenly find yourself begging for that bunch of configuration options.
And a good used-car salesman will sell you a great vehicle at a fair price. Both are, sadly, in rather short supply in the real world.
Frankly I rather like modern configuration files, which tend to come with detailed comments explaining all the options. This compares very favourably with the average configuration GUI, with its billions of tabs covered in obscure checkboxes with documentation along the lines of "Don't not frobnicate blarghs: turn off not frobnicating blarghs."
I'll grant you that IDEs are nice for the programming languages they support, though I often find myself opening files in emacs too; the likes of VS are great for code completion and refactoring, but programs are also text and most IDEs suck at editing text.
Save yourself a keypress - just C-u or C-1 is fine, C-u 1 is redundant.
Apples, oranges. Yes, GUIs are nice for one-offs. But they suck when you want to perform the operation more than once.
I cry every time I see an office which performs routine tasks by having a human manually follow a list of instructions: open this program, click on this, this, and this, edit, copy, go to this other program, paste, click ...
People have practically wept tears of joy when I've shown them the magic of scripts. An hour spent wrestling with obtuse documentation is time well spent if it's going to save someone five minutes of error-prone clicking every day.
Really? I would say exactly the opposite. KDE works very nicely on this 10" netbook, whereas I found GNOME to be very unsatisfactory, largely because of its poor support for vertical panels.
What I want to know is, who exactly are these new interfaces (Gnome Shell, Unity) supposed to be aimed at? They seem to have been designed to be optimal on 7" netbooks. You know, those things that don't exist any more. Most everything these days is either a phone (and therefore not running X11 at all) or has a 10"+ screen that is just fine running a regular desktop environment, as is demonstrated by the fact that Windows managed to extend its monopoly into the netbook market with such ease. Where is the demand?
Maybe you should choose your phone more carefully then. Mine has plenty of real buttons, including a fairly usable D-pad.