It's not up to the linux 'groups', it's up to the distribution maintainers and packagers. Just compare and contrast the kde menu in mandrake and suse, then look at debian's kde menu structure. Also pay close attention to tweaked mime types in konqueror and kde.
The distro maintainers are ultimately responsible for making choices for users. Choice brings freedom, but freedom brings confusion for newbies. When you look at Networking>IRC> and you have 2 or 3 apps to choose from by default, you aren't sure which one to use. Same goes for any other app group. One of the most frequently asked questions on IRC or web-based forums, from newbies, is 'which app do you guys use for foo'. Users will eventually figure out one way or another what the best apps are, through independent popularity polls or experimentation.
I think distro maintainers should do surveys of their users online, and have some special codes for people that purchased the boxed sets to use in an online questionnaire. With a year or two of gleaning user data, you could easily make popular choices default for the majority of your users.
Another option would be to have default 'sets' of mime types. For one group you could have, for example, the default burn app set to k3b, the default browser set to konqueror and the default chat program Kopete. Another set could be gtoaster, galeon and gaim. You get the idea.
I imagine they did it to cut costs. If you would have done a little research on it before you plunked down the money, you could've found out about the missing agp port.
It does suck to get ahold of a machine with no agp port though, I feel your pain.:)
Yeah I was about to say..I just finished Frankensteining a working Emachines tower from 2 bad ones. One had a dead power supply, the other had a bad motherboard. After swapping parts back and forth I came up with one that works just fine.
The power supplies and fans are the biggest liability on the older ones, and sometimes the newest ones. Google Emachines power supply just for fun.
1. Don't open emails unless you are certain it is from a trusted source.
That's the big problem here. When your email client, by default, displays HTML and executes macros and scripts, you're extra vulnerable. Even if it's from your pal Bob that you've known for 40 years, his computer may have been owned by a worm and just emailed all his friends seeking to propagate. You say 'hey it's from Bob, I trust him' and open it. Boom, you're owned too, and may never know it.
Bad design is bad design, there's no two ways about it.
Don't forget all the people that lost out by getting strictly DVD+R drives. More expensive media, less compatible with hardware players...I lucked out by getting a DVD-R drive just because I'm cheap.
Replacing a dvd player with another new format is a little too early in my opinion. I think DVD players reached critical mass last year for the general public (at least in the US). Old people are usually the slowest to adopt new tech and when you see a dvd player at your grandparent's house, you know it's reached a peak.
Then again the new format may end up orphaned just like digital VCRs.
If you daydream all the time, you need to do or read something more in line with your own interests. Boredom is what causes borderline ADHD people to 'wander'. At least that's my personal experience. My mind used to have a tendency to flip channels constantly with or without provocation. However, when presented with a good challenge or something fascinating, I would zero in and ignore everything else.
I'm not gonna argue with stomach staples. There are wayyyy too many overweight people with health problems in the US. Don't know about other parts of the world but it has reached epidemic proportions in the youngsters here.
Sedentary lifestyle, cheaper unhealthy food, bad eating habits, genetics to some degree...we're facing a serious issue.
First off, fitting in is overrated. Many of the luminaries, great scientists and great leaders stuck out from the herd based on their own merits. Many of them never fit in anywhere, and thus took paths that branched from the average person.
Believe it or not, we're not all created equal. Some people are more 'gifted' than others in many different ways. What society and hack psychologists perceive to be a sickness or disease can be a great asset with the right application.
Unless you kids are autistic, don't fuck with them. If they can't pay attention in class, put them in private schools where the curriculum is more challenging. Nine times out of ten kids who screw around, draw and doodle, clown around instead of getting work done probably aren't being challenged. I know, I was one of these kids. When they finally did some standardized testing the school system discovered that kids like myself were 'bright' and were bored with average work. Once you get into something more advanced and difficult, you pay attention and do work.
I have issues with the current American school system still, because it aims to average the students out. Rather than having some dim and some bright bulbs, they all glow with the same intensity. Also most public schools promote regurgitative learning rather than comprehensive skill sets. Hence you get students that cram before the test, pass it, but don't understand what they've learned. School becomes trivia, and trivia is rarely interesting or engaging.
I hope I have 'gifted' children, because I'll understand them and hopefully will be able to challenge them in ways they'll later appreciate. They won't get hours of television; they'll get books, technical manuals, things to build. I'm not anti-television or anti-entertainment, I just believe that the way I taught myself was valuable and want to give my offspring the same opportunities.
It's possible the martian terrain has been disturbed by images of the goatse man. Nasa has it plastered on the surface of the rover to deter thiefs and martian ghosts.
No, if that was the case, this story would be a dupe referring to the Beagle2.
Re:Is Apple or Microsoft forcing HP to do this?
on
No WMA for HP iPod
·
· Score: 1
The problem is, and pardon my ignorance if I'm wrong, is that Apple rolls the bugfixes and the new features together. Is it possible to obtain or download bugfixes for free, or are you forced into swallowing an upgrade tax if all you need is the bugfixes?
Yeah, you HAD to make your own double sided ones, because all of us kids that really, really needed one just couldn't buy one.
I guess alot of us had the same problem. Hell, anybody playing with legos for more than a day could find a use for it, or get stuck and figure a double sided lego would be useful.
I had a nice erector set with the motors, nuts and bolts, dangerous metal beams, etc. The most fun I had with the set is when my brother and I figured out how to wire the motor up to our slot car racing set tracks. You could gun the cars and speed up the erector set motor. We created a death race 5000, where you would race the cars ever faster towards the deadly windmill centimeters above the track. Fun indeed.
Not to mention your parents 'finding' the lost Legos in the middle of the night walking through your house. You'd definitely hear about it in the morning.
It's surprising how painful a little brick of plastic can be when it's jamming into your foot at 3am.
When I was really young, around 9 or 10, I actually wrote a letter to Lego, begging them for a double-sided Lego brick. Either double-male or double-female, I drew pictures and everything. Lego, in their infinite wisdom, wrote back a few months later with some legalese bullshit about how they can't accept idea submissions from outside sources, particularly not children.
This was nearly 20 years ago. I think they should've taken my advice instead of doing Star Wars co-marketing.
I'd consider that insightful if drugs is all Walgreens sold. Walgreens is the new Eckerd's. You can get everything from foot powder to lipstick, soda to shaving cream, paper to halloween costumes (depending on the season) from Walgreens. Americans value convenience, and having one in or near your neighborhood is very convenient.
From where I sit, it's not half as bad as Starbucks. Within a mile of where I live in Dallas, I can go to 3 different Starbucks locations. 2 are stripmall storefronts, 1 is inside a grocery store. If you want to expand the radius to 2 miles, there are at least 4 more.
Now if you say that there are too many Starbucks, reason being Americans are addicted to coffee, you might be onto something.
Re:Phantom sounds like the right name for this box
on
More ApeXtreme Info
·
· Score: 1
There have been many capable consoles released in the past that just haven't made it for one reason or another. You can release a substandard piece of hardware (compared to other consoles currently on the market) like the Xbox and people will still buy it if the marketing is strong and the market can support it. It seems there's always been a triad of consoles but a fourth seems unlikely. In the old days it was the Nintendo, the Sega Master System, and the Turbografx-16. Neo-Geo was also a bit player for those spoiled enough to own one. As time went on, Sony became the new leader. The PS1 was a showcase of engineering magic and good decisions. The ps1 controller raised the bar for controller design, the CD format proved undisputably that disc-based media was the way to go, both for Sony and for developers. People were used to seeing "Loading..." on their home PCs and the PS1 was no different. Some things are worth the wait.
At any rate, I totally agree with your point that regardless of the actual hardware itself, it takes alot more than hardware to produce a winner in the console market. It's very, very complicated to win in such a tough market.
I think it's just representative of the total number of times you had fun playing one. If, in fact, you ever did play one.
Kinda like that elusive Atari Jaguar.
Re:Phantom sounds like the right name for this box
on
More ApeXtreme Info
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
While you may be one of the sad, sad fans of the Dreamcast, you have forgotten a major reason for Sega exiting the hardware business.
The hardware business is expensive, and Sega ran out of money. That's all there is to it, no 'sony lied about sega' or 'sony slept with segas wife' or any other crap. After the horrible debacle that started with the 32X and SegaCD, they never really got their footing back. The 32X was a financial disaster, probably second only to the ET cartridges made by Atari. The Sega Saturn never really took hold and the 3d hardware was inadequate (not to mention seriously lacking in developer support). I mean, come on, it couldn't even do transparencies. That's sad. Even the 2d games on the Saturn had to use horrible cross-hatching from the 8 bit nintendo days (since the snes could do hardware transparencies and blending).
After the low sales of the Saturn and waning developer support, the Dreamcast was a last-ditch effort to stay in the market. It sold well in Japan but it was hard to find games for. Release dates kept getting pushed further back every week. Meanwhile Sony had a viable alternative with a growing library of hits. Namco and other big hitters were in Sony's pocket. The rest, as they say, was history. Sega's wisest decision was to get out of the hardware business and stick with what they've always done best: making games.
Now, you can get Sega games for multiple platforms. Sega just has to develop games and not worry about who wins or who loses the hardware wars. Their fate was probably ultimately unavoidable, and I'm glad they're still making fun games.
Super obvious troll, but I'll bite. The original playstation had thousands of good games, and at least 20 GREAT titles. You may remember Warhawk, one of the greatest flying battle games ever. And then there was the Ace Combat series. Then there were all the Final Fantasy games including Final Fantasy Tactics. Then there was the revolutionary Gran Turismo series. Ridge Racer. There were so many games I can't even scratch the surface with naming them in one paragraph.
You are indeed missing something. Either it's age, memory, or experience.
First off, stop using the word orientated. It's ORIENTED. There's no taters involved. Secondly, while I agree with the confusing labels, that's not Knoppix's fault, nor is the super awful menu structure. I was criticizing this stuff myself in freenode's #knoppix, and guess what, the mess is debian's fault. Phlak suffers the same fate but they attempted to clean it up a little.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not up to the linux 'groups', it's up to the distribution maintainers and packagers. Just compare and contrast the kde menu in mandrake and suse, then look at debian's kde menu structure. Also pay close attention to tweaked mime types in konqueror and kde.
The distro maintainers are ultimately responsible for making choices for users. Choice brings freedom, but freedom brings confusion for newbies. When you look at Networking>IRC> and you have 2 or 3 apps to choose from by default, you aren't sure which one to use. Same goes for any other app group. One of the most frequently asked questions on IRC or web-based forums, from newbies, is 'which app do you guys use for foo'. Users will eventually figure out one way or another what the best apps are, through independent popularity polls or experimentation.
I think distro maintainers should do surveys of their users online, and have some special codes for people that purchased the boxed sets to use in an online questionnaire. With a year or two of gleaning user data, you could easily make popular choices default for the majority of your users.
Another option would be to have default 'sets' of mime types. For one group you could have, for example, the default burn app set to k3b, the default browser set to konqueror and the default chat program Kopete. Another set could be gtoaster, galeon and gaim. You get the idea.
There was a French chick that was pretty hot, and she kept on grabbing me...
;P
Sorry man, that wasn't a chick. Neither was the Brazilian. You should know by now Brazil and Thailand are the transsexual capitals of the world.
Then again, you might swing that way, who knows?
I imagine they did it to cut costs. If you would have done a little research on it before you plunked down the money, you could've found out about the missing agp port.
:)
It does suck to get ahold of a machine with no agp port though, I feel your pain.
Yeah I was about to say..I just finished Frankensteining a working Emachines tower from 2 bad ones. One had a dead power supply, the other had a bad motherboard. After swapping parts back and forth I came up with one that works just fine.
The power supplies and fans are the biggest liability on the older ones, and sometimes the newest ones. Google Emachines power supply just for fun.
FreeBSD or OpenBSD? But we're talking about stuff that's still alive right? ;0
1. Don't open emails unless you are certain it is from a trusted source.
That's the big problem here. When your email client, by default, displays HTML and executes macros and scripts, you're extra vulnerable. Even if it's from your pal Bob that you've known for 40 years, his computer may have been owned by a worm and just emailed all his friends seeking to propagate. You say 'hey it's from Bob, I trust him' and open it. Boom, you're owned too, and may never know it.
Bad design is bad design, there's no two ways about it.
Don't forget all the people that lost out by getting strictly DVD+R drives. More expensive media, less compatible with hardware players...I lucked out by getting a DVD-R drive just because I'm cheap.
Replacing a dvd player with another new format is a little too early in my opinion. I think DVD players reached critical mass last year for the general public (at least in the US). Old people are usually the slowest to adopt new tech and when you see a dvd player at your grandparent's house, you know it's reached a peak.
Then again the new format may end up orphaned just like digital VCRs.
If you daydream all the time, you need to do or read something more in line with your own interests. Boredom is what causes borderline ADHD people to 'wander'. At least that's my personal experience. My mind used to have a tendency to flip channels constantly with or without provocation. However, when presented with a good challenge or something fascinating, I would zero in and ignore everything else.
...when we're still giving countries like Israel 6 billion dollars (75 percent of which is earmarked for military spending) yearly.
I say cut the fat, that includes first world buddy countries that can do just fine on their own.
I'm not gonna argue with stomach staples. There are wayyyy too many overweight people with health problems in the US. Don't know about other parts of the world but it has reached epidemic proportions in the youngsters here.
Sedentary lifestyle, cheaper unhealthy food, bad eating habits, genetics to some degree...we're facing a serious issue.
First off, fitting in is overrated. Many of the luminaries, great scientists and great leaders stuck out from the herd based on their own merits. Many of them never fit in anywhere, and thus took paths that branched from the average person.
Believe it or not, we're not all created equal. Some people are more 'gifted' than others in many different ways. What society and hack psychologists perceive to be a sickness or disease can be a great asset with the right application.
Unless you kids are autistic, don't fuck with them. If they can't pay attention in class, put them in private schools where the curriculum is more challenging. Nine times out of ten kids who screw around, draw and doodle, clown around instead of getting work done probably aren't being challenged. I know, I was one of these kids. When they finally did some standardized testing the school system discovered that kids like myself were 'bright' and were bored with average work. Once you get into something more advanced and difficult, you pay attention and do work.
I have issues with the current American school system still, because it aims to average the students out. Rather than having some dim and some bright bulbs, they all glow with the same intensity. Also most public schools promote regurgitative learning rather than comprehensive skill sets. Hence you get students that cram before the test, pass it, but don't understand what they've learned. School becomes trivia, and trivia is rarely interesting or engaging.
I hope I have 'gifted' children, because I'll understand them and hopefully will be able to challenge them in ways they'll later appreciate. They won't get hours of television; they'll get books, technical manuals, things to build. I'm not anti-television or anti-entertainment, I just believe that the way I taught myself was valuable and want to give my offspring the same opportunities.
It's possible the martian terrain has been disturbed by images of the goatse man. Nasa has it plastered on the surface of the rover to deter thiefs and martian ghosts.
So disgusting, even dirt crawls away.
No, if that was the case, this story would be a dupe referring to the Beagle2.
The problem is, and pardon my ignorance if I'm wrong, is that Apple rolls the bugfixes and the new features together. Is it possible to obtain or download bugfixes for free, or are you forced into swallowing an upgrade tax if all you need is the bugfixes?
Yeah, you HAD to make your own double sided ones, because all of us kids that really, really needed one just couldn't buy one.
I guess alot of us had the same problem. Hell, anybody playing with legos for more than a day could find a use for it, or get stuck and figure a double sided lego would be useful.
I had a nice erector set with the motors, nuts and bolts, dangerous metal beams, etc. The most fun I had with the set is when my brother and I figured out how to wire the motor up to our slot car racing set tracks. You could gun the cars and speed up the erector set motor. We created a death race 5000, where you would race the cars ever faster towards the deadly windmill centimeters above the track. Fun indeed.
Not to mention your parents 'finding' the lost Legos in the middle of the night walking through your house. You'd definitely hear about it in the morning.
It's surprising how painful a little brick of plastic can be when it's jamming into your foot at 3am.
When I was really young, around 9 or 10, I actually wrote a letter to Lego, begging them for a double-sided Lego brick. Either double-male or double-female, I drew pictures and everything. Lego, in their infinite wisdom, wrote back a few months later with some legalese bullshit about how they can't accept idea submissions from outside sources, particularly not children.
This was nearly 20 years ago. I think they should've taken my advice instead of doing Star Wars co-marketing.
I'd consider that insightful if drugs is all Walgreens sold. Walgreens is the new Eckerd's. You can get everything from foot powder to lipstick, soda to shaving cream, paper to halloween costumes (depending on the season) from Walgreens. Americans value convenience, and having one in or near your neighborhood is very convenient.
From where I sit, it's not half as bad as Starbucks. Within a mile of where I live in Dallas, I can go to 3 different Starbucks locations. 2 are stripmall storefronts, 1 is inside a grocery store. If you want to expand the radius to 2 miles, there are at least 4 more.
Now if you say that there are too many Starbucks, reason being Americans are addicted to coffee, you might be onto something.
There have been many capable consoles released in the past that just haven't made it for one reason or another. You can release a substandard piece of hardware (compared to other consoles currently on the market) like the Xbox and people will still buy it if the marketing is strong and the market can support it. It seems there's always been a triad of consoles but a fourth seems unlikely. In the old days it was the Nintendo, the Sega Master System, and the Turbografx-16. Neo-Geo was also a bit player for those spoiled enough to own one. As time went on, Sony became the new leader. The PS1 was a showcase of engineering magic and good decisions. The ps1 controller raised the bar for controller design, the CD format proved undisputably that disc-based media was the way to go, both for Sony and for developers. People were used to seeing "Loading..." on their home PCs and the PS1 was no different. Some things are worth the wait.
At any rate, I totally agree with your point that regardless of the actual hardware itself, it takes alot more than hardware to produce a winner in the console market. It's very, very complicated to win in such a tough market.
I think it's just representative of the total number of times you had fun playing one. If, in fact, you ever did play one.
Kinda like that elusive Atari Jaguar.
While you may be one of the sad, sad fans of the Dreamcast, you have forgotten a major reason for Sega exiting the hardware business.
The hardware business is expensive, and Sega ran out of money. That's all there is to it, no 'sony lied about sega' or 'sony slept with segas wife' or any other crap. After the horrible debacle that started with the 32X and SegaCD, they never really got their footing back. The 32X was a financial disaster, probably second only to the ET cartridges made by Atari. The Sega Saturn never really took hold and the 3d hardware was inadequate (not to mention seriously lacking in developer support). I mean, come on, it couldn't even do transparencies. That's sad. Even the 2d games on the Saturn had to use horrible cross-hatching from the 8 bit nintendo days (since the snes could do hardware transparencies and blending).
After the low sales of the Saturn and waning developer support, the Dreamcast was a last-ditch effort to stay in the market. It sold well in Japan but it was hard to find games for. Release dates kept getting pushed further back every week. Meanwhile Sony had a viable alternative with a growing library of hits. Namco and other big hitters were in Sony's pocket. The rest, as they say, was history. Sega's wisest decision was to get out of the hardware business and stick with what they've always done best: making games.
Now, you can get Sega games for multiple platforms. Sega just has to develop games and not worry about who wins or who loses the hardware wars. Their fate was probably ultimately unavoidable, and I'm glad they're still making fun games.
PS1 didn't even HAVE good games.
Super obvious troll, but I'll bite. The original playstation had thousands of good games, and at least 20 GREAT titles. You may remember Warhawk, one of the greatest flying battle games ever. And then there was the Ace Combat series. Then there were all the Final Fantasy games including Final Fantasy Tactics. Then there was the revolutionary Gran Turismo series. Ridge Racer. There were so many games I can't even scratch the surface with naming them in one paragraph.
You are indeed missing something. Either it's age, memory, or experience.
If his watch is usb, I severely doubt his laptop even has a port to match it. Jesus...a p1 233 with 64mb of ram? What are you, an antiques dealer?
First off, stop using the word orientated. It's ORIENTED. There's no taters involved. Secondly, while I agree with the confusing labels, that's not Knoppix's fault, nor is the super awful menu structure. I was criticizing this stuff myself in freenode's #knoppix, and guess what, the mess is debian's fault. Phlak suffers the same fate but they attempted to clean it up a little.