Mmm, okay... tho it's not obvious from a single post, you've gotta backtrack to the article. Really, how much extra space would be "wasted" by adding the year to the date given with each post?
Sure wish slashdot would include the year... can't tell when that old thread was posted. Kinda interesting, tho. And funny thing, I was just talking to someone else about how those legacy CPUs are still in use in appliances and suchlike. Doesn't take much brains to be a microwave.:)
See my sig? That's cuz back in my day, sonny, we had a lot of people trying to spoof being some bigshot here on slashdot. If two nyms look the same, frex as 111 and lll (or 000 and OOO) do in some fonts, the userID number would still let you tell them apart with certainty.
If it weren't for that, some dick could sign up as "Mi11ionthMonkey" (ones instead of L's) and make shit posts *apparently* under your name, and too many people would not know the difference NOR be able to determine there IS a difference even if they suspect it's so (especially with a clever spoofer). And with active posters like yourself, many regulars do get to know the number (or at least what range it's in) as well as the handle.
Anyway, some of us like having the numbers, and not just cuz we're braggin' on being the hoary old grandpops here:)
Back in the dark ages before WinAmp, I used a DOS music player (XTCplay) that displayed percent of CPU cycles in use, so I have good benchmarks:
My 486DX2-66 could not play MP3s; the CPU was pegged solid at 100% usage, and at best they still skipped and stalled.
My P90 could play MP3s, but it took 80%-100% of the CPU cycles, so would sometimes skip.
On my P233, it took about 30%-40% of CPU cycles.
On my P3-550 (Win98), it takes about 3%, for either the old DOS player or for WinAmp. Its twin brother (WinXPPro) also uses about 3% in WinAmp. These systems are 8 years old.
On a modern P4, I'd expect playing MP3s would need only a fraction of a percent of CPU cycles. So even if very poorly scheduled, how could the sound subsystem use them all up??
I'm wondering if a crappy network driver might be the actual culprit. I've seen a shit driver bring a P2 to a near-halt, when the only app in use was DOOM (which will run on a 386, so you know it doesn't eat much by current standards).
BTW Photoshop is no barrier for me, I hate the nasty thing and only use it when I have to... I use the vastly more user-friendly Corel PhotoPaint instead (v8 by preference). THAT is the killer app for me, that I can't live without.:)
Welcome. And I see you've had your own complaints... http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=248153&cid=198 20137:) Same thing here, I'd LOVE to see linux, and various related apps, become viable competition for the average desktop, but I don't see it happening until way more of these *little* frustrations are addressed -- the ones that disturb power users a lot more than they do newbies, who have no expectations.
Another comment you made (hey, you're good for all sorts of things!:) about Vista as it happens, but..
2. Retarded Explorer UI - each explorer window has about 50% of it's real-estate wasted through useless "information bars" etc. And you can't remove most of it.... that's one of my pet peeves whenever I see it!! And I've seen it often enough in linux apps too; I guess "wasting my precious screen space" isn't exclusive to Windows, tho it seems to be getting worse everywhere (thanks so much, WWWeb). Do all developers use 35" screens at 8000x6000 resolution, or what??:(
=======
In my ideal world, this would happen: -- Linux would be able to natively use Windows drivers, thus eliminating that issue. -- Linux would be able to natively install Windows software, thus eliminating that issue. (And I mean throw CD at drawer, click OK a few times, with no WINE or VMs needed.) -- And I want a config tool that can *simultaneously* display both the raw config textfiles, AND a nice checkbox-style GUI, so I can learn the damned config stuff on the fly, and SEE what my choices are and exactly what changes are made to the actual config file. I no longer have the time or patience to read up on all that stuff, yet I hate having it hidden from me (I can actually see more of what's going on in Windows than I can in linux!!) -- but if I can SEE the changes as they're made, I can learn 'em without doing extra work, just as I learned HTML from an editor that does both WYSIWYG and raw modes.
I've suggested that last numerous times, as I think it would be a terrific bridge for users who are kindof stuck in the middle -- neither developers nor newbies. Unfortunately, I think one of the big problems with linux is that it assumes you are either an ubergeek or a n00b, and makes NO provision for the experienced-but-impatient or time-strapped (a very large subset of users, and the ones who *could* be linux's best advocates, if only its usability were more attractive to us as an everyday OS).
=====
As it happens I just ordered a fresh set of Ubuntu CDs... I tried 5.x but it was too restricting (what do you mean, the OS gets to pick the resolution and it can't be changed?!) and not for me; 6.x was better and more flexible (ran faster too) tho still presented too many of those chronic little frustrations. But I keep hoping.:/ I have a number of spare machines, in fact one has no job other than to try linux disties, so that's not an issue!
Out of all those I've tried, my fave so far was Mandrake v7.2; I liked its version of KDE too, but am not thrilled with where either has gone since. (And in the newer disties, I miss that old version of Konq, so much like my beloved NS3!)
(And I liked BSD as a CLI OS, cuz hot damn, this thing acts just like DOS, no rude surprises!)
Here's an article about one type of problem (not this exactly, but the same failure of interface behaving as expected -- even as seen by a very experienced user) that I've seen repeatedly in linux:
"The thing that marketers are best at selling is...advertising."
I've been saying that for a while now. Indeed, America has offshored so much industry, that the only industry LEFT to us is... marketing. Which is to say, advertising. What happens when the only product left to sell is advertising itself?? Or when the ad industry itself gets offshored?
All that aside, ISTM that Google buying Doubleclick marks the END of their corporate history as a *search engine*, and completes their transition into an *advertising* company first and foremost. Which so long as they continue to be a search engine too, strikes me as a conflict of interest.
Freeing the slaves had nothing to do with human rights, and everything to do with economically crippling the South, which still relied heavily on cheap labour. The biggest backers of emancipation were the northern industrialists, who saw slaves as unfair competition.
Rather like the situation between U.S. IT workers and cheap H1B or offshored labour.
The day has already arrived when some businesses will not hire anyone who ISN'T an H1B (ie. who doesn't come with a certificate of ownership).
=====
"Womens right to vote? It can be closely linked to the modern two party system taking complete control of our elections."
That's an interesting insight, and I think you may have something there. Women tend to band together in radical groups that men and mixed-gender folk don't quite know how to oppose -- frex, Prohibition was largely driven by women's political groups, and no sane voice dared speak against that juggernaut. (Much as MADD can do today.) So you wind up with US vs THEM across a political line that didn't exist before women got the vote.
(Why am I thinking of Carly and HP?? Because I think some of the "cut-costs-at-all-costs, including loss of customers" mentality has coincided with women, who as a group are FAR more ruthless than men, becoming a force in business management.)
It's not usually a big obvious "what won't run". It's little things like accessing help, only to find "coming soon" for the specific function whose help link I just clicked (even tho the rest of the app's help is there). Or that context menus only work in SOME apps. Or click a control and nothing happens, because the visual part is there but the working guts haven't been coded yet. Or like going through all the motions of playing a CD, but no sound comes out (even tho it claims the sound card works). The list of such small annoyances is endless, and they bother me a lot more than do the "big drawbacks".
Well-known and major deficiencies (like WINE failing to run some games) I could live with -- because that's exactly like how I don't expect a nice GUI out of DOS, cuz DOS isn't for that sort of thing in the first place; similarly I don't expect linux to do entirely non-linuxy things, like run DirectX games.
Maybe that's the whole problem... because linux presents a pretty desktop, and purports to be a complete desktop solution, I expect it to BEHAVE like that way, with all the consistency and completeness of a mature desktop -- where IF A FUNCTION IS PRESENT AT ALL, IT WORKS COMPLETELY, without odd gaps that the user runs into when they least expect it.
And I see the mods who think linux is perfect are out in force again... that's exactly WHY linux remains unviable on the desktop, because instead of recognising issues and fixing them, they'd rather punch out anyone who speaks of such issues.
Precisely. "Think of the children" is just the knee-jerk stimulus, applied much like a cattle prod -- shock 'em with a dead kid, and watch 'em jump away from those nasty second amendment rights!!
Well, there is that -- once the ISPs start seeing =themselves= as *victims* of the RIAA lawsuits, they're far more likely to resist on their own behalf what they would never resist on a mere customer's behalf.
Your remarks generated this thought: What if all the states opposed to RealID were to secede at once, and rejoin into a new nation? (One state, they could stop by force of arms. Many, scattered across the continent -- I doubt it.)
ISTM that where a few states might fail to influence federal policy, all of these states in unison would be another matter entirely.
That's a nasty insight if I ever heard one... and I think there's some truth in it. We the People are not to be trusted with such a broad spectrum of Unalienable Rights, because after all, Some Of Us Might Be Enemies Of The State. So let's reduce all such Rights to the point where they can no longer threaten the State, whether by the actions of foreign terrorists or by those of our own well-meaning citizens.
I had exactly the same thoughts. We are becoming exactly that nation which our generation was taught to fear.
The only difference is that we don't have enough economic hardship to eventually generate the collapse of the government -- not that it's done the former USSR that much good (by many reports, they are sliding back into the same system they had before). So once our transformation into our own worst enemy is complete, it may well be permanent.
Yeah, we have a LUG here but it's small (sometimes only 3-4 people show up), and all the people who can come to meetings regularly are new at linux themselves! so it's the blind leading the blind.
Yeah, we've got a small linux UG here now (and I do mean small... sometimes the meetings are 3 or 4 people) but so far we really haven't accomplished much -- I mean, how much can you do, sitting around a table at some local yuppie luncheon place?? I'd like to get the linux UG to merge with the PC UG, which has a regular meeting place and a bunch of PCs to play with (which I maintain, so I know what's available), but so far it hasn't happened. I think it would benefit everyone -- give the linux side more of a reason to be doing and helping, and give the regular UG something more to experiment with and learn about (which no one there is averse to).
We'd like to get the remains of the Mac UG to merge with us too, but gods forbid they go slumming with PC users!!
User groups are shrinking, and if we want to survive we need to help each other, even if we can't stand the other guy's computing choices.
I know what you mean. I've been looking for a Windows alternative for some time now, but I detest the whole Mac way of doing things, so that's not an option. When I've tried linux, my primary complaint boils down to "What do you mean I can't do [long list of stuff] in linux, or can't do it without jumping through various hoops, even tho these things are so easy to do in Windows??!"
So, yes, after a long history with Windows (and DOS), linux does feel "cramped" -- that's a very good description (kinda like going from driving an SUV to driving a Yugo). I wish this were not the case, I wish that linux would make me feel =more= free to do what I want with my computer, but sad to say this has not been the case.
I think a lot of it is that even to a very savvy DOS/Windows user, linux puts you back at square one, where you don't know anything at all, even tho it LOOKS familiar enough. This may be a lot of why linux is MORE frustrating to experienced DOS/Win users than to newbies, who don't yet have any firm expectations about their desktop OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Prolly ought to adapt it to use corn squeezins, too ;)
That too, pops :)
:)
[goes off, reads user info] Hey! another redneck geek!! Must be what they fed our generation or something.
Mmm, okay... tho it's not obvious from a single post, you've gotta backtrack to the article. Really, how much extra space would be "wasted" by adding the year to the date given with each post?
Sure wish slashdot would include the year... can't tell when that old thread was posted. Kinda interesting, tho. And funny thing, I was just talking to someone else about how those legacy CPUs are still in use in appliances and suchlike. Doesn't take much brains to be a microwave. :)
See my sig? That's cuz back in my day, sonny, we had a lot of people trying to spoof being some bigshot here on slashdot. If two nyms look the same, frex as 111 and lll (or 000 and OOO) do in some fonts, the userID number would still let you tell them apart with certainty.
:)
If it weren't for that, some dick could sign up as "Mi11ionthMonkey" (ones instead of L's) and make shit posts *apparently* under your name, and too many people would not know the difference NOR be able to determine there IS a difference even if they suspect it's so (especially with a clever spoofer). And with active posters like yourself, many regulars do get to know the number (or at least what range it's in) as well as the handle.
Anyway, some of us like having the numbers, and not just cuz we're braggin' on being the hoary old grandpops here
Mom!! Grandpa LWATCDR is hitting the search engine again!!!
Back in the dark ages before WinAmp, I used a DOS music player (XTCplay) that displayed percent of CPU cycles in use, so I have good benchmarks:
My 486DX2-66 could not play MP3s; the CPU was pegged solid at 100% usage, and at best they still skipped and stalled.
My P90 could play MP3s, but it took 80%-100% of the CPU cycles, so would sometimes skip.
On my P233, it took about 30%-40% of CPU cycles.
On my P3-550 (Win98), it takes about 3%, for either the old DOS player or for WinAmp. Its twin brother (WinXPPro) also uses about 3% in WinAmp. These systems are 8 years old.
On a modern P4, I'd expect playing MP3s would need only a fraction of a percent of CPU cycles. So even if very poorly scheduled, how could the sound subsystem use them all up??
I'm wondering if a crappy network driver might be the actual culprit. I've seen a shit driver bring a P2 to a near-halt, when the only app in use was DOOM (which will run on a 386, so you know it doesn't eat much by current standards).
BTW Photoshop is no barrier for me, I hate the nasty thing and only use it when I have to... I use the vastly more user-friendly Corel PhotoPaint instead (v8 by preference). THAT is the killer app for me, that I can't live without. :)
Welcome. And I see you've had your own complaints... http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=248153&cid=198 20137 :) Same thing here, I'd LOVE to see linux, and various related apps, become viable competition for the average desktop, but I don't see it happening until way more of these *little* frustrations are addressed -- the ones that disturb power users a lot more than they do newbies, who have no expectations.
:) about Vista as it happens, but..
... that's one of my pet peeves whenever I see it!! And I've seen it often enough in linux apps too; I guess "wasting my precious screen space" isn't exclusive to Windows, tho it seems to be getting worse everywhere (thanks so much, WWWeb). Do all developers use 35" screens at 8000x6000 resolution, or what?? :(
:/ I have a number of spare machines, in fact one has no job other than to try linux disties, so that's not an issue!
Another comment you made (hey, you're good for all sorts of things!
2. Retarded Explorer UI - each explorer window has about 50% of it's real-estate wasted through useless "information bars" etc. And you can't remove most of it.
=======
In my ideal world, this would happen:
-- Linux would be able to natively use Windows drivers, thus eliminating that issue.
-- Linux would be able to natively install Windows software, thus eliminating that issue. (And I mean throw CD at drawer, click OK a few times, with no WINE or VMs needed.)
-- And I want a config tool that can *simultaneously* display both the raw config textfiles, AND a nice checkbox-style GUI, so I can learn the damned config stuff on the fly, and SEE what my choices are and exactly what changes are made to the actual config file. I no longer have the time or patience to read up on all that stuff, yet I hate having it hidden from me (I can actually see more of what's going on in Windows than I can in linux!!) -- but if I can SEE the changes as they're made, I can learn 'em without doing extra work, just as I learned HTML from an editor that does both WYSIWYG and raw modes.
I've suggested that last numerous times, as I think it would be a terrific bridge for users who are kindof stuck in the middle -- neither developers nor newbies. Unfortunately, I think one of the big problems with linux is that it assumes you are either an ubergeek or a n00b, and makes NO provision for the experienced-but-impatient or time-strapped (a very large subset of users, and the ones who *could* be linux's best advocates, if only its usability were more attractive to us as an everyday OS).
=====
As it happens I just ordered a fresh set of Ubuntu CDs... I tried 5.x but it was too restricting (what do you mean, the OS gets to pick the resolution and it can't be changed?!) and not for me; 6.x was better and more flexible (ran faster too) tho still presented too many of those chronic little frustrations. But I keep hoping.
Out of all those I've tried, my fave so far was Mandrake v7.2; I liked its version of KDE too, but am not thrilled with where either has gone since. (And in the newer disties, I miss that old version of Konq, so much like my beloved NS3!)
(And I liked BSD as a CLI OS, cuz hot damn, this thing acts just like DOS, no rude surprises!)
Here's an article about one type of problem (not this exactly, but the same failure of interface behaving as expected -- even as seen by a very experienced user) that I've seen repeatedly in linux:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/dialog-box.html
"The thing that marketers are best at selling is...advertising."
I've been saying that for a while now. Indeed, America has offshored so much industry, that the only industry LEFT to us is... marketing. Which is to say, advertising. What happens when the only product left to sell is advertising itself?? Or when the ad industry itself gets offshored?
All that aside, ISTM that Google buying Doubleclick marks the END of their corporate history as a *search engine*, and completes their transition into an *advertising* company first and foremost. Which so long as they continue to be a search engine too, strikes me as a conflict of interest.
Freeing the slaves had nothing to do with human rights, and everything to do with economically crippling the South, which still relied heavily on cheap labour. The biggest backers of emancipation were the northern industrialists, who saw slaves as unfair competition.
Rather like the situation between U.S. IT workers and cheap H1B or offshored labour.
The day has already arrived when some businesses will not hire anyone who ISN'T an H1B (ie. who doesn't come with a certificate of ownership).
=====
"Womens right to vote? It can be closely linked to the modern two party system taking complete control of our elections."
That's an interesting insight, and I think you may have something there. Women tend to band together in radical groups that men and mixed-gender folk don't quite know how to oppose -- frex, Prohibition was largely driven by women's political groups, and no sane voice dared speak against that juggernaut. (Much as MADD can do today.) So you wind up with US vs THEM across a political line that didn't exist before women got the vote.
(Why am I thinking of Carly and HP?? Because I think some of the "cut-costs-at-all-costs, including loss of customers" mentality has coincided with women, who as a group are FAR more ruthless than men, becoming a force in business management.)
It's not usually a big obvious "what won't run". It's little things like accessing help, only to find "coming soon" for the specific function whose help link I just clicked (even tho the rest of the app's help is there). Or that context menus only work in SOME apps. Or click a control and nothing happens, because the visual part is there but the working guts haven't been coded yet. Or like going through all the motions of playing a CD, but no sound comes out (even tho it claims the sound card works). The list of such small annoyances is endless, and they bother me a lot more than do the "big drawbacks".
Well-known and major deficiencies (like WINE failing to run some games) I could live with -- because that's exactly like how I don't expect a nice GUI out of DOS, cuz DOS isn't for that sort of thing in the first place; similarly I don't expect linux to do entirely non-linuxy things, like run DirectX games.
Maybe that's the whole problem... because linux presents a pretty desktop, and purports to be a complete desktop solution, I expect it to BEHAVE like that way, with all the consistency and completeness of a mature desktop -- where IF A FUNCTION IS PRESENT AT ALL, IT WORKS COMPLETELY, without odd gaps that the user runs into when they least expect it.
And I see the mods who think linux is perfect are out in force again... that's exactly WHY linux remains unviable on the desktop, because instead of recognising issues and fixing them, they'd rather punch out anyone who speaks of such issues.
Precisely. "Think of the children" is just the knee-jerk stimulus, applied much like a cattle prod -- shock 'em with a dead kid, and watch 'em jump away from those nasty second amendment rights!!
Well, there is that -- once the ISPs start seeing =themselves= as *victims* of the RIAA lawsuits, they're far more likely to resist on their own behalf what they would never resist on a mere customer's behalf.
:)
What we need is bigger, meaner victims!!
"...most of which no longer speak English suitably..."
There's some serious irony in that....
Why do you list North Dakota on both sides??
"...traditional Texan independence."
Your remarks generated this thought: What if all the states opposed to RealID were to secede at once, and rejoin into a new nation? (One state, they could stop by force of arms. Many, scattered across the continent -- I doubt it.)
ISTM that where a few states might fail to influence federal policy, all of these states in unison would be another matter entirely.
"Travel documents". Good gods. Welcome to the backside of the new Iron Curtain.
That's a nasty insight if I ever heard one... and I think there's some truth in it. We the People are not to be trusted with such a broad spectrum of Unalienable Rights, because after all, Some Of Us Might Be Enemies Of The State. So let's reduce all such Rights to the point where they can no longer threaten the State, whether by the actions of foreign terrorists or by those of our own well-meaning citizens.
I had exactly the same thoughts. We are becoming exactly that nation which our generation was taught to fear.
The only difference is that we don't have enough economic hardship to eventually generate the collapse of the government -- not that it's done the former USSR that much good (by many reports, they are sliding back into the same system they had before). So once our transformation into our own worst enemy is complete, it may well be permanent.
Yeah, we have a LUG here but it's small (sometimes only 3-4 people show up), and all the people who can come to meetings regularly are new at linux themselves! so it's the blind leading the blind.
[laughing] Oh, man, someone mod up this AC, that's the funniest thing I've read all day!!
Yeah, we've got a small linux UG here now (and I do mean small... sometimes the meetings are 3 or 4 people) but so far we really haven't accomplished much -- I mean, how much can you do, sitting around a table at some local yuppie luncheon place?? I'd like to get the linux UG to merge with the PC UG, which has a regular meeting place and a bunch of PCs to play with (which I maintain, so I know what's available), but so far it hasn't happened. I think it would benefit everyone -- give the linux side more of a reason to be doing and helping, and give the regular UG something more to experiment with and learn about (which no one there is averse to).
We'd like to get the remains of the Mac UG to merge with us too, but gods forbid they go slumming with PC users!!
User groups are shrinking, and if we want to survive we need to help each other, even if we can't stand the other guy's computing choices.
I know what you mean. I've been looking for a Windows alternative for some time now, but I detest the whole Mac way of doing things, so that's not an option. When I've tried linux, my primary complaint boils down to "What do you mean I can't do [long list of stuff] in linux, or can't do it without jumping through various hoops, even tho these things are so easy to do in Windows??!"
So, yes, after a long history with Windows (and DOS), linux does feel "cramped" -- that's a very good description (kinda like going from driving an SUV to driving a Yugo). I wish this were not the case, I wish that linux would make me feel =more= free to do what I want with my computer, but sad to say this has not been the case.
I think a lot of it is that even to a very savvy DOS/Windows user, linux puts you back at square one, where you don't know anything at all, even tho it LOOKS familiar enough. This may be a lot of why linux is MORE frustrating to experienced DOS/Win users than to newbies, who don't yet have any firm expectations about their desktop OS.