After reading though these comments, all I can think is - yeah, here's an issue where default Linux should do a better job - one on par, at least, with the latest Windows/Mac OS.
Optimize your default distros so us average schmucks don't need to fiddle around under the hood. I have tried repeatedly to use Linux on my netbook - and even setting battery life aside it's always a colossal hassle - ending up (after many steps) with advice about recompiling the kernel, etc.
You really believe competition is good, right? And I'm sure you're fair minded enough to admit that you are not going to win every usability feature just kinda because, right?
Get power usage nailed down tight. It will payoff HUGE in the brave new mobile world.
All of the snipers are wrong here, and very used to the cynical default stance of Slashdot types, evaluating the latest new thing in terms of what was known before...
Eventually somebody, somebody very much like this dude will use the mash-up format so prodigiously well that they will transform everything. What keeps being forgotten is that they have a library of the worlds media at their fingertips.
When that breakthrough artist happens, we will be forced to throw out the rules, and even the copyright lawyers will simply give up in amazement over the sheer awe of what has been created.
This is a format ripe for a bonafide precedent-shattering innovator. A Mozart or Picasso or pick-your-genius will turn the rules on their ass, and nothing will be the same afterward.
The rest of you can snark and quibble along until that happens (which will be soon) -- and then you will claim that you were in on it, that you expected it.
Apple isn't after the business market by design, and Microsoft knows this. But it's likely MS has conducted research, and they can see that the iPhone has even attracted the attention of the high-end market that uses MS mobile applications on "smart" phones - a market that isn't as locked in as the desktop users. They likely don't want any of that base to defect, and this is done by jumping up and down about the importance of Office (even though it isn't as important in a mobile setting).
Those darkish rivers and that ocean may prove to be rich in hydrocarbons. This little probe may fire up the debate over abiogenic petroleum. Unless, of course, they had a lot of dinosaurs stomping around up there at some point.
I think this an intriguing, and maybe impossible idea. When I visited WikiNews, the first page I looked for was a story about the Alberto Gonzales confirmation hearing. It was not a surprise to see the page was requested, but hadn't been written yet.
This is the perfect example of a story where people of divergent political views are going to have an impossible time trying to agree on what makes up bias-free journalism. Lefties are going to see the Democrats questions as upholding some important principles about rights and democracy over the issue of torture. Whereas the Republicans see the hearings as an exercise in political theater designed to discredit a good candidate.
Even news institutions that are filled with supposedly trained (or educated) professionals on the art of "objective" journalism have an impossible time. How can the public do any better? In the best-case scenario there will be some stories where it's possible. But others (like the A.G. confirmation) -- and I mean this honestly -- good luck.
That picture looks like something out of a Warner Brother's cartoon. Either a Wlie E. Coyote experiment gone wrong, or Marvin the Martian crashed his saucer.
Maybe for most people it's nice to have one component that just works as advertised, and doesn't necessarily need to be replaced with an expensive upgrade every 2 years. Not to cast aspersions on the geek's need to endlessly tinker, but don't we have our hands full already with graphic cards, processors, memory, etc.?
Can anyone on Earth explain to me how any of the four "pillar" technologies will benefit the average user? I'm talking about the suburban lady in her 50s, not the alpha-geek. Is there anything that can reasonably be translated through the MS marketing machine into a compelling reason for anyone to upgrade? Because...
When they say "better searching" all I hear is "retrain Grandma" -- if that's even necessary, because they will likely support the legacy way of doing it.
When they say "better security" all I hear is "our previous OS was awful" -- and besides, they will need to patch the older OS.
When they say "better interface" I hear "confusing visuals" and showing Grandma where to click all over again.(Now we'll be able to start a program by clicking on either the start menu, the quick launch, the systems tray OR the new FastBar-Zip-Wham-Clicker!!)
WinFS, whenever and however it is released, seems to be completely untranslatable into average-user speak. Although like everything else I'm sure the MS marketing machine will be able to turn it into bland hype that has consumers vaguely worried about not buying the upgrade.
When I hear the word 'Security,' I reach for my shotgun. Robyn Hitchcock
I represent one of the minority of adult Western gamers that actually enjoys Japanese games, such as Final Fantasy, because of their exotic settings and lush attention to detail. They are entertaining in a cultural way. I don't particularly enjoy running around trying to shoot things at the highest possible frame rate.
But at the same time, the simplistic one-directional storytelling gets tiresome with Japanese games. I know it may be a stereotype, but maybe it's a Western characteristic to want more choices, non-linearity, a way to go off-script or explore other parts of the map.
As a result I have stopped gaming as much, because it's not easy to have both -- an immersive and fantastical world that allows for freedom of action, but one with a little more maturity, which doesn't involve constant carnage and blowing crap up (or playing dolls, like the Sims). Maybe the gaming market doesn't exist for this middle ground, I don't know.
When this article mentioned "motivation", I couldn't help but harken back to that old saw-horse of behavioral theory -- Maslow's Hierarchy of Need.
People work on Open Source because the gratification that comes as a result of their labor to produce robust, functional software will actually satisfy a "higher" need than material comfort and economic security (such as MS provides in salary). It's pretty hokey, when you boil it down -- but people want to do something useful with their energy and talent, something that appeals to our better nature.
While this _can_ be done while making a buck at the same time, it's just harder to balance. Plus -- not to sound like Newsweek, but -- with the ever-increasing impact of technology on society, it's reassuring to know that what we are building isn't strictly the result of the motiation towards commercial profit.
There's an article by James Oberg, space expert, on the spacecraft hardware design decisions the Chinese have made. To sum it up -- they are indeed very serious about being in this game for the long haul (or Long March, whatever).
They took their sweet time for a very good reason, and have every intention of leapfrogging past the mistakes of the US and Russians. Slow and steady wins the race.
This may be off-topic, but I am wondering aloud... If I OWN a physical copy of the albums that I am sharing -- every last one of them -- how can they sue me? Is the mere act of digitizing music and sharing it illegal, or is it the notion of actually downloading something you haven't bought?
(I'd love to bait the RIAA by putting a huge directory of legally owned music online.)
The soundcard was a VIA AC97 / KT82XX. Search for compatibility issues if you are skeptical. This information wasn't relevant to the point of my original post.
Mindless? Please explain. Was it the fact that my experience wasn't universally positive, or was it the fact that I'm not extremely technical? The cascade of snide responses to my comment suggests that some portions of the Linux community aren't exactly filled with friendly, welcoming people. I have put a lot of thought into making the transition, spend many hours on this installation, and written about it extensively here and elsewhere. I'm trying to figure where the 'mindless' part comes in...
I have to wonder -- do you guys REALLY want broad-based adoption of this technology, or would it ruin the allure?
As "Joe User" with moderate technical acumen, I recently made the jump and set up dual-boot SUSE. The install went very well, and I was very pleased with the KDE GUI.
But very quickly I had to spend a couple of hours doing things like learning how to set up header files in order to re-compile my kernal to support NVIDIA drivers.
I figured it out. But it took a while.
And still -- after a lot of careful study and research on linuxquestions.org -- I can't get my sound card to work. The best I have gotten for folks with the exact same configuration is "buy a new soundcard and save yourself the trouble".
My point is not to complain, but to indicate that there is still "geek time" and knowledge that must be "paid" to support free software. For many people it becomes like changing the oil on the car -- it's something that *can* be accomplished with enough time and patience. But how much do you want to fritz around with it, when all you want to do is play an MP3 ?
God forbid I want to hook up my digital camera.
Pay the dude $30 for an oil change.
For Linux, the last piece of non-geek usability may be the hardest to attain.
"A person's life is a succession of fortuitous situations, and even if none of them is exactly the same as another the immense majority of them are so undifferentiated and so dull that they give a perfect impression of sameness. As a result, the rare intensely engaging situations found in life only serve to strictly confine and limit that life. We must try to construct situations, that is to say, collective ambiances, ensembles of impressions determining the quality of a moment. If we take the simple example of a gathering of a group of individuals for a given time, it would be desirable, while taking into account the knowledge and material means we have at our disposal, to study what organization of the place, what selection of participants and what provocation of events are suitable for producing the desired ambiance. The powers of a situation will certainly expand considerably in both time and space with the realizations of unitary urbanism or the education of a situationist generation.
The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle."
For hard science fiction mixed with thought-provoking social ideas and a ass-wholloping good storyline (at least in the first two books) -- you can't miss Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy -- Red Gren and Blue.
I may be out on limb -- but I'll even venture to think these books have had a quasi-inspirational effect on the poeple who are paid to plan and think about actual Mars exploration. What plays out in the next 50-100 years on Mars -- assuming we make it there to stay (big assumption) -- might bear some tangental similarity to what KSR has imagined... similar in social effect to that of America in comparison with The Old World.
hard yet fluid black no eyes has seen it falling time denies the Way
MMORPG + AI + Email = Management 101
on
Keep Playing With AI
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I'm waiting for the day I can deploy my MMORPG character using an AI, head off to work, and once and a while repond to his thoughtful emails when he encounters trouble in the game.
I'll send him back a response telling him what to do, and if he screws it up, and doesn't get iced by some goblins or whatever, you can be sure it will come up at his next performance review.
For those of us that are stuck in a chair for working hours, using our free time to sit on our asses for the hours at a stretch associated with online gaming isn't the greatest idea.
Well said. And it needs to be said.
I love games. And I have a tech job. I suspect a significant portion of Slashdot readership is in the same boat. But I have to remind myself, frequently, that it's a nice day outside, get out of the house. Staring at a PC all day and all night can really detatch you from the best things about being a human being.
Some freakishly fanatic first-person shooter and MMORPG players need to be clubbed on the head with their own GeForce cards -- or taken on a camping trip.
But, of course, freedom guarantees you can rot away for as long as you want. I'm just saying --the best framerate and texture mapping is available in the real fscking world.
Slashdot Mirror
After reading though these comments, all I can think is - yeah, here's an issue where default Linux should do a better job - one on par, at least, with the latest Windows/Mac OS.
Optimize your default distros so us average schmucks don't need to fiddle around under the hood. I have tried repeatedly to use Linux on my netbook - and even setting battery life aside it's always a colossal hassle - ending up (after many steps) with advice about recompiling the kernel, etc.
You really believe competition is good, right? And I'm sure you're fair minded enough to admit that you are not going to win every usability feature just kinda because, right?
Get power usage nailed down tight. It will payoff HUGE in the brave new mobile world.
All of the snipers are wrong here, and very used to the cynical default stance of Slashdot types, evaluating the latest new thing in terms of what was known before ...
Eventually somebody, somebody very much like this dude will use the mash-up format so prodigiously well that they will transform everything. What keeps being forgotten is that they have a library of the worlds media at their fingertips.
When that breakthrough artist happens, we will be forced to throw out the rules, and even the copyright lawyers will simply give up in amazement over the sheer awe of what has been created.
This is a format ripe for a bonafide precedent-shattering innovator. A Mozart or Picasso or pick-your-genius will turn the rules on their ass, and nothing will be the same afterward.
The rest of you can snark and quibble along until that happens (which will be soon) -- and then you will claim that you were in on it, that you expected it.
Apple isn't after the business market by design, and Microsoft knows this. But it's likely MS has conducted research, and they can see that the iPhone has even attracted the attention of the high-end market that uses MS mobile applications on "smart" phones - a market that isn't as locked in as the desktop users. They likely don't want any of that base to defect, and this is done by jumping up and down about the importance of Office (even though it isn't as important in a mobile setting).
It's a preemptive move to hold what they've got.
Those darkish rivers and that ocean may prove to be rich in hydrocarbons. This little probe may fire up the debate over abiogenic petroleum. Unless, of course, they had a lot of dinosaurs stomping around up there at some point.
I think this an intriguing, and maybe impossible idea. When I visited WikiNews, the first page I looked for was a story about the Alberto Gonzales confirmation hearing. It was not a surprise to see the page was requested, but hadn't been written yet.
This is the perfect example of a story where people of divergent political views are going to have an impossible time trying to agree on what makes up bias-free journalism. Lefties are going to see the Democrats questions as upholding some important principles about rights and democracy over the issue of torture. Whereas the Republicans see the hearings as an exercise in political theater designed to discredit a good candidate.
Even news institutions that are filled with supposedly trained (or educated) professionals on the art of "objective" journalism have an impossible time. How can the public do any better? In the best-case scenario there will be some stories where it's possible. But others (like the A.G. confirmation) -- and I mean this honestly -- good luck.
That picture looks like something out of a Warner Brother's cartoon. Either a Wlie E. Coyote experiment gone wrong, or Marvin the Martian crashed his saucer.
Let's hope something can be salvaged...
Maybe for most people it's nice to have one component that just works as advertised, and doesn't necessarily need to be replaced with an expensive upgrade every 2 years. Not to cast aspersions on the geek's need to endlessly tinker, but don't we have our hands full already with graphic cards, processors, memory, etc.?
When they say "better searching" all I hear is "retrain Grandma" -- if that's even necessary, because they will likely support the legacy way of doing it.
When they say "better security" all I hear is "our previous OS was awful" -- and besides, they will need to patch the older OS.
When they say "better interface" I hear "confusing visuals" and showing Grandma where to click all over again.(Now we'll be able to start a program by clicking on either the start menu, the quick launch, the systems tray OR the new FastBar-Zip-Wham-Clicker!!)
WinFS, whenever and however it is released, seems to be completely untranslatable into average-user speak. Although like everything else I'm sure the MS marketing machine will be able to turn it into bland hype that has consumers vaguely worried about not buying the upgrade.
When I hear the word 'Security,' I reach for my shotgun. Robyn Hitchcock
I represent one of the minority of adult Western gamers that actually enjoys Japanese games, such as Final Fantasy, because of their exotic settings and lush attention to detail. They are entertaining in a cultural way. I don't particularly enjoy running around trying to shoot things at the highest possible frame rate.
But at the same time, the simplistic one-directional storytelling gets tiresome with Japanese games. I know it may be a stereotype, but maybe it's a Western characteristic to want more choices, non-linearity, a way to go off-script or explore other parts of the map.
As a result I have stopped gaming as much, because it's not easy to have both -- an immersive and fantastical world that allows for freedom of action, but one with a little more maturity, which doesn't involve constant carnage and blowing crap up (or playing dolls, like the Sims). Maybe the gaming market doesn't exist for this middle ground, I don't know.
When this article mentioned "motivation", I couldn't help but harken back to that old saw-horse of behavioral theory -- Maslow's Hierarchy of Need.
...
People work on Open Source because the gratification that comes as a result of their labor to produce robust, functional software will actually satisfy a "higher" need than material comfort and economic security (such as MS provides in salary). It's pretty hokey, when you boil it down -- but people want to do something useful with their energy and talent, something that appeals to our better nature.
While this _can_ be done while making a buck at the same time, it's just harder to balance. Plus -- not to sound like Newsweek, but -- with the ever-increasing impact of technology on society, it's reassuring to know that what we are building isn't strictly the result of the motiation towards commercial profit.
Restating the obvious, maybe
There's an article by James Oberg, space expert, on the spacecraft hardware design decisions the Chinese have made. To sum it up -- they are indeed very serious about being in this game for the long haul (or Long March, whatever).
They took their sweet time for a very good reason, and have every intention of leapfrogging past the mistakes of the US and Russians. Slow and steady wins the race.
This may be off-topic, but I am wondering aloud ... If I OWN a physical copy of the albums that I am sharing -- every last one of them -- how can they sue me? Is the mere act of digitizing music and sharing it illegal, or is it the notion of actually downloading something you haven't bought?
(I'd love to bait the RIAA by putting a huge directory of legally owned music online.)
The soundcard was a VIA AC97 / KT82XX. Search for compatibility issues if you are skeptical. This information wasn't relevant to the point of my original post.
...
Mindless? Please explain. Was it the fact that my experience wasn't universally positive, or was it the fact that I'm not extremely technical? The cascade of snide responses to my comment suggests that some portions of the Linux community aren't exactly filled with friendly, welcoming people. I have put a lot of thought into making the transition, spend many hours on this installation, and written about it extensively here and elsewhere. I'm trying to figure where the 'mindless' part comes in
I have to wonder -- do you guys REALLY want broad-based adoption of this technology, or would it ruin the allure?
This may be off-topic, but ...
...)
As "Joe User" with moderate technical acumen, I recently made the jump and set up dual-boot SUSE. The install went very well, and I was very pleased with the KDE GUI.
But very quickly I had to spend a couple of hours doing things like learning how to set up header files in order to re-compile my kernal to support NVIDIA drivers.
I figured it out. But it took a while.
And still -- after a lot of careful study and research on linuxquestions.org -- I can't get my sound card to work. The best I have gotten for folks with the exact same configuration is "buy a new soundcard and save yourself the trouble".
My point is not to complain, but to indicate that there is still "geek time" and knowledge that must be "paid" to support free software. For many people it becomes like changing the oil on the car -- it's something that *can* be accomplished with enough time and patience. But how much do you want to fritz around with it, when all you want to do is play an MP3 ?
God forbid I want to hook up my digital camera.
Pay the dude $30 for an oil change.
For Linux, the last piece of non-geek usability may be the hardest to attain.
(It's not like I WANT to use MS XP
Guy Debord:
"A person's life is a succession of fortuitous situations, and even if none of them is exactly the same as another the immense majority of them are so undifferentiated and so dull that they give a perfect impression of sameness. As a result, the rare intensely engaging situations found in life only serve to strictly confine and limit that life. We must try to construct situations, that is to say, collective ambiances, ensembles of impressions determining the quality of a moment. If we take the simple example of a gathering of a group of individuals for a given time, it would be desirable, while taking into account the knowledge and material means we have at our disposal, to study what organization of the place, what selection of participants and what provocation of events are suitable for producing the desired ambiance. The powers of a situation will certainly expand considerably in both time and space with the realizations of unitary urbanism or the education of a situationist generation.
The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle."
Distributed Computing: If you have enough monkeys with typewriters you still can't write Hamlet, but you might be able to find a needle in a haystack.
For hard science fiction mixed with thought-provoking social ideas and a ass-wholloping good storyline (at least in the first two books) -- you can't miss Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy -- Red Gren and Blue.
... similar in social effect to that of America in comparison with The Old World.
I may be out on limb -- but I'll even venture to think these books have had a quasi-inspirational effect on the poeple who are paid to plan and think about actual Mars exploration. What plays out in the next 50-100 years on Mars -- assuming we make it there to stay (big assumption) -- might bear some tangental similarity to what KSR has imagined
hard yet fluid black
no eyes has seen it falling
time denies the Way
I'm waiting for the day I can deploy my MMORPG character using an AI, head off to work, and once and a while repond to his thoughtful emails when he encounters trouble in the game.
I'll send him back a response telling him what to do, and if he screws it up, and doesn't get iced by some goblins or whatever, you can be sure it will come up at his next performance review.
For those of us that are stuck in a chair for working hours, using our free time to sit on our asses for the hours at a stretch associated with online gaming isn't the greatest idea.
Well said. And it needs to be said.
I love games. And I have a tech job. I suspect a significant portion of Slashdot readership is in the same boat. But I have to remind myself, frequently, that it's a nice day outside, get out of the house. Staring at a PC all day and all night can really detatch you from the best things about being a human being.
Some freakishly fanatic first-person shooter and MMORPG players need to be clubbed on the head with their own GeForce cards -- or taken on a camping trip.
But, of course, freedom guarantees you can rot away for as long as you want. I'm just saying --the best framerate and texture mapping is available in the real fscking world.
Needless to say, the copy protection scheme didn't prevent the files from getting out there.
A quick search on some of the popular P2P services reveals all of the songs from this album are available to download.