Many more than 90% of mac users will have two or more drives in or attached to their machine. Most of my Mac customers are in the advertising or design business, and most have G4 or G3 towers. Generally, even if they don't have a second disk in the tower, they have a RAID array or other external storage plugged into at least one of their machines...usually ones where a journaling filesystem would be the most appropriate.
It's life, whatever it is
on
Generation Wrecked
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As with every generalization, they tend to be grossy overexagerated, but have some grains of truth tucked in there. Most GenXers I know have some things in common with this gestalt picture that the article provides. On the grand scale, I do believe the article is pretty insightful. No one knows what exactly is going to be happening, but they give good reasons and examples and it seems to hold together. What they don't have any opinion on is where this will lead the national economy, and I personally can only think it will be a pretty grim thing...close to the Great Depression if not as bad, though I would love to be proven wrong. =) Though I don't believe all is lost. The article stops short at offering any kind of ideas as to where we go from here, and that's not very constructive in the least. Alot depends on how the GenXer in question sees their situation.
Me? I'm a dot bomb casualty. I went from ISP tech support, to roving infosec software installer/trainer, to high-end VPN design in the space of three years, then was summarily kicked to the curb with about enough money to keep myself around comfortably through 6 months of unemployment. I've got zero credit card debt (mostly because I've never liked borrowing money in the first place) and no student loan debt (thankfully, my mother works for a school). I look at it as if I got taken on a 3 year ride with people who paid for my crap, and the ride came to an end, time to find something else to do. =)
I don't save alot, because I don't make alot. I do consulting work with my father, because he's too busy to do it all himself. I live in the nice apartment that's attatched to my father's office (he used to live here until he got remarried, and the rent is VERY inexpensive), and the rent and utilities get paid with a few hundred bucks every couple-few weeks depending on the vagaries of the small-scale consulting biz. I don't live large because I've never really lived large. My one real vice, video games, gets some money, with plenty left over for food and the like. My gf is a grad student finishing up her doctorate, so she's got more than a few loans, and that's made us consider any wedding plans alot more carefully, but it isn't going to be overwhelming. No, it certainly won't be a walk in the park, but I've got plenty of reason to believe that things are going to be better. =)
Forget TextEdit, I use BBEdit for all my word processing. I have no need in the least for the fancy formatting crap that you get in most office applications. It'd be nice to get some free regular office software (I don't use AppleWorks, you think only MS Office uses proprietary formats?) for those rare occasions when I need something more than BBEdit, but not having it is more a nuisance than a problem.
As it appears that his bandwidth has been so demolished that traffic is being denied or just bouncing off the pained gateway router that can't do any more, I don't think any hit counter software is getting anything close to the actual number of hits the website got before it was taken down.
And in any case, while he MAY be making money, hardly any company can survive off ads alone. Any ad money he may get from page views is miniscule compared to what I imagine he expects to get from sales.
...though I've nothing personally, religiously, or otherwise against mouse gestures, I personally have no interest in using them. I try to keep my hands as far away from the mouse as possible, while still within a graphical environment, and making the computer even more dependent on the mouse just isn't going to swing me.
What I really wish more people would do is allow for greater user configuration of keyboard shortcuts. I'm not talking about a macro tool like the old Tempo II Plus for the old MacOS (which my father still runs on his MacOS 9 partition and is very very sorry to see go away in 10). I'm talking about being able to rebind any command to whatever key combination you want, within the OS, like rebinding keys under Q3. I don't see why this stuff has to be hard coded all the damn time. I remember MS Word used to let you (if I recall correctly) but the last time I used Word often enough to need to worry about changing the keybindings was a very long time ago, and I don't know if the feature is still there.
I haven't found many pieces of software aside from game software that lets you do it. Default configurations are fine, but I want to be able to reassign useful key combinations that are assigned to commands I'll never use, to ones I will, without having to edit the source code to do it.
They're not owned by Disney, they just have a contract to release movies only through Disney that AFAIK expires after the next movie they release. (5 movies was it? So that's Toy Story 1 & 2, A Bug's Life, Monster's Inc, and whatever the next one is). Not everyone working for Pixar is thrilled about their deal with the Mouse, and I'm sure Disney is looking hard for some other up-and-coming animation studio to take over so they can get Jobs out of their hair, as Eisner REALLY doesn't like him. However, Pixar will be sitting pretty and probably be deluged with offers for their next contract from every studio with the cash to get in the bidding. Hell, even Disney may feel forced to try and keep them around, as much success as Pixar's movies have had.
Well, I'm a Slackware user that likes what they've done, but it's really not for me. I'm running Slackware because it makes me learn more of the guts of the OS, whereas RedHat/Mandrake/SuSE have tools that let me get off easier than I want to. However, if I had a second x86 machine, I'd be putting RedHat 8.0 on it to at least try it out. Anyone who takes a risk to standardize the Linux desktop deserves support. Red Hat won't ever be the only Linux distribution, so I've got no problem with it. If it gets a few more people using Linux, it's all good.
From the article: It's encouraging, however, to see such quality in development - I suspect that this time next year the Xbox will have a considerable lead over its competitors in terms of the numbers of top quality titles.
What drugs is this guy on? Does this person seriously believe that Sony and Nintendo are sitting on their hands, and aren't going to be bringing anything out through next year? This is probably the most idiotic statement I've heard from the Xbox fanboys. I'm sure they're very happy that development for their console is starting to get rolling, but none of this convinces me in the least that they're going to get anywhere near the volume of the PS2's lineup, nor do any of these games look like they'll do anything to drive people away from Nintendo's licensing juggernaut.
That's a RESTRICTION, which you GNU zealots don't seem to be able to get through your thick heads. It's not an immoral restriction, but it IS a restriction. The GPL gives people some freedoms not given through normal copyright law, but it does not give all freedoms. Stop deluding yourselves and others.
The problem is that the GNU GPL is itself an "embrace and extend" project. Everything that uses code that is licensed under the GPL must, according to the terms of the GPL, be licensed under the GPL itself. Anyone who might want to use code under the GPL in a closed source product is not given the freedom to under the GPL.
It is a viral license. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it reflects a certain philosophy which not everyone holds. I personally believe that there is room in the world for both proprietary, GPLed, and unrestricted code (ala BSD-style licenses). Makes the world go 'round. GPL-only, proprietary-only, or BSD only are all bad ideas.
It's this little thing called "choice". The more well worded, legally defensible open source licensing choices out there, the more choice software developers have when releasing their software. Choice is good for the community.
While I completely agree (and am already following my own boycott) the problem is that any drop in earnings is immediately pointed to by the record labels and held up as ample evidence that file sharing is killing them, and their paid-for politicians believe them.
Boycotts rarely serve anything aside from addressing people's own moral qualms about whatever they are boycotting. The fact is that most people in America don't believe that file sharing should be legal for anyone but themselves. They have no concept of the implications of copyright law down the road, they just want themselves to get music/movies/whatever without having to pay for it. Simple as that. There are some who have reasoned arguments about why the laws are asinine, but we are in the minority.
I have nothing against boycotts, but people seem to believe that they are more powerful tools than they really are in most cases. You're not going to get enough people to sign on to this to make it effective.
What will really help is to spend your time seeking out the non-RIAA labels and small artists releasing their own works. Places like ampcast.com, where the artists make more of the rules for themselves. Look for indie filmmakers in your area and go to a showing at the local arthouse theater. See some foreign movies. That will move your dollars in a visible way away from a distribution method you are opposed to, to one you believe in, and help out your struggling artist for the day.
There's been a bit more than "criticising". Trying to think up ways that the book could be thrown at Red Hat through the GPL because of this is downright dirty. Wondering if there was a way to keep Red Hat from incorporating KDE at all in some kind of pointless "revenge".
The rhetoric being levelled at Red Hat from the KDE zealots goes way beyond mere criticism.
He most certainly would like people to think he's a martyr. Why else post publicly about it, on a KDE mailing list, where those of like mind will be sure to praise him for sacrificing his job for his principles.
He obviously wants people to get angry at Red Hat over this, hence the flames he lights around his own feet so everyone can see. Leaving his job because his personal principles is fine, I don't have a problem with that. His manner, however, leaves much to question in my mind.
"Whether or not KDE is "cripplewear" in RH is besides the point;"
It is EXACTLY the point. He's getting up on a stump, accusing Red Hat of crippling KDE, and lighing his bridge on fire behind him so people will come and see what the fire is about.
I've yet to see anything tat Red Hat has done to their distribution of KDE that would classify it as "crippleware". Removing the "about KDE" box is rude, and obnoxious, but none of it cripples KDE in the least. Unless someone can show me different, all of the changes can be reversed easily by anyone with a clue. That doesn't cripple a damn thing.
All this kvetching and martyrdom bullshit from the KDE developers is just that. Pissed off that someone is using your code in ways that offend, insult, or annoy you? Fork the codebase and develop under a more restrictive license. These pointless martyrdom gestures and venom-laden rants only make you look dumb and childish.
Re:that doesn't mean they'll produce good games
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
·
· Score: 2
Consoles don't get a version 2. Designing, building, advertising, and getting to market a game console is an infinitely more complex and costly endeavor than doing the same for a piece of software. With earlier versions of Internet Explorer, if you decided you didn't like Internet Explorer, you could just delete it away and try the next version for free when it comes out.
You can't do that with a console. If your console flops, then who aside from the hardcore of the hardcore is going to buy the thing after you screwed it up the last time? Now you've got hardware with no new software coming out for it. Joe Gamer going to take a chance on that? It's a whole different world from the software industry, as Microsoft will eventually figure out. There are no second chances. Ask NEC with the TurboGrafx 16. 3DO. Sega threw everything they had at their second chance Dreamcast after the Saturn flopped over here, and it still didn't work. Sony and Nintendo understand this. Microsoft doesn't yet, I don't believe.
Who cares if the US "falls behind on the mobile-telecoms front"? US citizens just don't care as much about wireless doodads as Europeans. Land lines aren't prohibitively expensive here, and people just don't about streaming video, or even simple stuff like SMS messaging. I don't think I've ever sent an SMS message in the entire 3 years I've owned a modern digital mobile phone. I know plenty of people who have Interent access through their phones, but in the end it's just a toy, on a piddly little screen, that they talk alot about, but never ever use except to show off to their friends about. I couldn't care less about being able to do high-speed data transfers to my phone. IT'S A PHONE, for goodness sake. You make phone calls on it. No one here cares to have it be more than that. If people in other countries do that kind of thing, more power to 'em. Though I hear that most of the 3G crazed telecoms in Europe are going belly-up thanks to all they spent for spectrum that they haven't even begun to implement. Yeah, sounds like a GREAT model for us.
Yes, and the person who misconfigured the wireless access point.
Merely connecting isn't theft. Using that connection to access bandwidth resources paid for by the company IS theft, without the company's permission.
If a delivery driver drops some computers off outside a company, and they both go in to get help moving it inside, and you swipe one while no one is looking, they were pretty idiotic to leave their stuff unguarded, but doesn't make you any less a thief.
Mythic is apparently working on a PvE-only server for DAoC, which may solve some of your problems, unless RvR is what turns you on about it in the first place. No time frame that I've heard regarding when it is coming out, but it is in the works.
I know how you're feeling with the time. After I was laid off, DAoC came out, and I was looking for something to do, and there it was. Now that I'm employed again, I can't play nearly as much as I used to (unemployed, after I did my morning resume e-mails/faxes/mailings I jumped on the cable modem and played). These days I try to limit myself to just the evenings, though my girlfriend plays, and she's going to grad school on the other side of the country, so it's a nice to have it as something we can do together more than just spend gobs of money on phone time and sending IMs.
Slashdot Mirror
The next time I read someone in all seriousness using the term "blazingly fast" the baby seal gets it.
Chimera's great, I use it, but it has zero speed advantage over OmniWeb. Nil. Goosegg. And in my opinion, OmniWeb looks better.
Many more than 90% of mac users will have two or more drives in or attached to their machine. Most of my Mac customers are in the advertising or design business, and most have G4 or G3 towers. Generally, even if they don't have a second disk in the tower, they have a RAID array or other external storage plugged into at least one of their machines...usually ones where a journaling filesystem would be the most appropriate.
As with every generalization, they tend to be grossy overexagerated, but have some grains of truth tucked in there. Most GenXers I know have some things in common with this gestalt picture that the article provides. On the grand scale, I do believe the article is pretty insightful. No one knows what exactly is going to be happening, but they give good reasons and examples and it seems to hold together. What they don't have any opinion on is where this will lead the national economy, and I personally can only think it will be a pretty grim thing...close to the Great Depression if not as bad, though I would love to be proven wrong. =) Though I don't believe all is lost. The article stops short at offering any kind of ideas as to where we go from here, and that's not very constructive in the least. Alot depends on how the GenXer in question sees their situation.
Me? I'm a dot bomb casualty. I went from ISP tech support, to roving infosec software installer/trainer, to high-end VPN design in the space of three years, then was summarily kicked to the curb with about enough money to keep myself around comfortably through 6 months of unemployment. I've got zero credit card debt (mostly because I've never liked borrowing money in the first place) and no student loan debt (thankfully, my mother works for a school). I look at it as if I got taken on a 3 year ride with people who paid for my crap, and the ride came to an end, time to find something else to do. =)
I don't save alot, because I don't make alot. I do consulting work with my father, because he's too busy to do it all himself. I live in the nice apartment that's attatched to my father's office (he used to live here until he got remarried, and the rent is VERY inexpensive), and the rent and utilities get paid with a few hundred bucks every couple-few weeks depending on the vagaries of the small-scale consulting biz. I don't live large because I've never really lived large. My one real vice, video games, gets some money, with plenty left over for food and the like. My gf is a grad student finishing up her doctorate, so she's got more than a few loans, and that's made us consider any wedding plans alot more carefully, but it isn't going to be overwhelming. No, it certainly won't be a walk in the park, but I've got plenty of reason to believe that things are going to be better. =)
Forget TextEdit, I use BBEdit for all my word processing. I have no need in the least for the fancy formatting crap that you get in most office applications. It'd be nice to get some free regular office software (I don't use AppleWorks, you think only MS Office uses proprietary formats?) for those rare occasions when I need something more than BBEdit, but not having it is more a nuisance than a problem.
As it appears that his bandwidth has been so demolished that traffic is being denied or just bouncing off the pained gateway router that can't do any more, I don't think any hit counter software is getting anything close to the actual number of hits the website got before it was taken down.
And in any case, while he MAY be making money, hardly any company can survive off ads alone. Any ad money he may get from page views is miniscule compared to what I imagine he expects to get from sales.
...though I've nothing personally, religiously, or otherwise against mouse gestures, I personally have no interest in using them. I try to keep my hands as far away from the mouse as possible, while still within a graphical environment, and making the computer even more dependent on the mouse just isn't going to swing me.
What I really wish more people would do is allow for greater user configuration of keyboard shortcuts. I'm not talking about a macro tool like the old Tempo II Plus for the old MacOS (which my father still runs on his MacOS 9 partition and is very very sorry to see go away in 10). I'm talking about being able to rebind any command to whatever key combination you want, within the OS, like rebinding keys under Q3. I don't see why this stuff has to be hard coded all the damn time. I remember MS Word used to let you (if I recall correctly) but the last time I used Word often enough to need to worry about changing the keybindings was a very long time ago, and I don't know if the feature is still there.
I haven't found many pieces of software aside from game software that lets you do it. Default configurations are fine, but I want to be able to reassign useful key combinations that are assigned to commands I'll never use, to ones I will, without having to edit the source code to do it.
They're not owned by Disney, they just have a contract to release movies only through Disney that AFAIK expires after the next movie they release. (5 movies was it? So that's Toy Story 1 & 2, A Bug's Life, Monster's Inc, and whatever the next one is). Not everyone working for Pixar is thrilled about their deal with the Mouse, and I'm sure Disney is looking hard for some other up-and-coming animation studio to take over so they can get Jobs out of their hair, as Eisner REALLY doesn't like him. However, Pixar will be sitting pretty and probably be deluged with offers for their next contract from every studio with the cash to get in the bidding. Hell, even Disney may feel forced to try and keep them around, as much success as Pixar's movies have had.
Well, I'm a Slackware user that likes what they've done, but it's really not for me. I'm running Slackware because it makes me learn more of the guts of the OS, whereas RedHat/Mandrake/SuSE have tools that let me get off easier than I want to. However, if I had a second x86 machine, I'd be putting RedHat 8.0 on it to at least try it out. Anyone who takes a risk to standardize the Linux desktop deserves support. Red Hat won't ever be the only Linux distribution, so I've got no problem with it. If it gets a few more people using Linux, it's all good.
Don't forget that you still can get all the football/hockey/basketball/whatever games on the GameCube as well.
What the hell do you think the Resident Evil games are targeted at? Kids? Have you even seen the GameCube version?
From the article: It's encouraging, however, to see such quality in development - I suspect that this time next year the Xbox will have a considerable lead over its competitors in terms of the numbers of top quality titles.
What drugs is this guy on? Does this person seriously believe that Sony and Nintendo are sitting on their hands, and aren't going to be bringing anything out through next year? This is probably the most idiotic statement I've heard from the Xbox fanboys. I'm sure they're very happy that development for their console is starting to get rolling, but none of this convinces me in the least that they're going to get anywhere near the volume of the PS2's lineup, nor do any of these games look like they'll do anything to drive people away from Nintendo's licensing juggernaut.
No shit, Sherlock.
That's a RESTRICTION, which you GNU zealots don't seem to be able to get through your thick heads. It's not an immoral restriction, but it IS a restriction. The GPL gives people some freedoms not given through normal copyright law, but it does not give all freedoms. Stop deluding yourselves and others.
But I wont get disconnected at their discression unless I don't pay my bill.
If you believe that, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'll let go cheap.
The problem is that the GNU GPL is itself an "embrace and extend" project. Everything that uses code that is licensed under the GPL must, according to the terms of the GPL, be licensed under the GPL itself. Anyone who might want to use code under the GPL in a closed source product is not given the freedom to under the GPL.
It is a viral license. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it reflects a certain philosophy which not everyone holds. I personally believe that there is room in the world for both proprietary, GPLed, and unrestricted code (ala BSD-style licenses). Makes the world go 'round. GPL-only, proprietary-only, or BSD only are all bad ideas.
It's this little thing called "choice". The more well worded, legally defensible open source licensing choices out there, the more choice software developers have when releasing their software. Choice is good for the community.
While I completely agree (and am already following my own boycott) the problem is that any drop in earnings is immediately pointed to by the record labels and held up as ample evidence that file sharing is killing them, and their paid-for politicians believe them.
Boycotts rarely serve anything aside from addressing people's own moral qualms about whatever they are boycotting. The fact is that most people in America don't believe that file sharing should be legal for anyone but themselves. They have no concept of the implications of copyright law down the road, they just want themselves to get music/movies/whatever without having to pay for it. Simple as that. There are some who have reasoned arguments about why the laws are asinine, but we are in the minority.
I have nothing against boycotts, but people seem to believe that they are more powerful tools than they really are in most cases. You're not going to get enough people to sign on to this to make it effective.
What will really help is to spend your time seeking out the non-RIAA labels and small artists releasing their own works. Places like ampcast.com, where the artists make more of the rules for themselves. Look for indie filmmakers in your area and go to a showing at the local arthouse theater. See some foreign movies. That will move your dollars in a visible way away from a distribution method you are opposed to, to one you believe in, and help out your struggling artist for the day.
http://dot.kde.org/1030073479/
The discussion on KDE's slashcode discussion site.
There's been a bit more than "criticising". Trying to think up ways that the book could be thrown at Red Hat through the GPL because of this is downright dirty. Wondering if there was a way to keep Red Hat from incorporating KDE at all in some kind of pointless "revenge".
The rhetoric being levelled at Red Hat from the KDE zealots goes way beyond mere criticism.
He most certainly would like people to think he's a martyr. Why else post publicly about it, on a KDE mailing list, where those of like mind will be sure to praise him for sacrificing his job for his principles.
He obviously wants people to get angry at Red Hat over this, hence the flames he lights around his own feet so everyone can see. Leaving his job because his personal principles is fine, I don't have a problem with that. His manner, however, leaves much to question in my mind.
"Whether or not KDE is "cripplewear" in RH is besides the point;"
It is EXACTLY the point. He's getting up on a stump, accusing Red Hat of crippling KDE, and lighing his bridge on fire behind him so people will come and see what the fire is about.
I've yet to see anything tat Red Hat has done to their distribution of KDE that would classify it as "crippleware". Removing the "about KDE" box is rude, and obnoxious, but none of it cripples KDE in the least. Unless someone can show me different, all of the changes can be reversed easily by anyone with a clue. That doesn't cripple a damn thing.
All this kvetching and martyrdom bullshit from the KDE developers is just that. Pissed off that someone is using your code in ways that offend, insult, or annoy you? Fork the codebase and develop under a more restrictive license. These pointless martyrdom gestures and venom-laden rants only make you look dumb and childish.
Consoles don't get a version 2. Designing, building, advertising, and getting to market a game console is an infinitely more complex and costly endeavor than doing the same for a piece of software. With earlier versions of Internet Explorer, if you decided you didn't like Internet Explorer, you could just delete it away and try the next version for free when it comes out.
You can't do that with a console. If your console flops, then who aside from the hardcore of the hardcore is going to buy the thing after you screwed it up the last time? Now you've got hardware with no new software coming out for it. Joe Gamer going to take a chance on that? It's a whole different world from the software industry, as Microsoft will eventually figure out. There are no second chances. Ask NEC with the TurboGrafx 16. 3DO. Sega threw everything they had at their second chance Dreamcast after the Saturn flopped over here, and it still didn't work. Sony and Nintendo understand this. Microsoft doesn't yet, I don't believe.
Who cares if the US "falls behind on the mobile-telecoms front"? US citizens just don't care as much about wireless doodads as Europeans. Land lines aren't prohibitively expensive here, and people just don't about streaming video, or even simple stuff like SMS messaging. I don't think I've ever sent an SMS message in the entire 3 years I've owned a modern digital mobile phone. I know plenty of people who have Interent access through their phones, but in the end it's just a toy, on a piddly little screen, that they talk alot about, but never ever use except to show off to their friends about. I couldn't care less about being able to do high-speed data transfers to my phone. IT'S A PHONE, for goodness sake. You make phone calls on it. No one here cares to have it be more than that. If people in other countries do that kind of thing, more power to 'em. Though I hear that most of the 3G crazed telecoms in Europe are going belly-up thanks to all they spent for spectrum that they haven't even begun to implement. Yeah, sounds like a GREAT model for us.
Yes, and the person who misconfigured the wireless access point.
Merely connecting isn't theft. Using that connection to access bandwidth resources paid for by the company IS theft, without the company's permission.
If a delivery driver drops some computers off outside a company, and they both go in to get help moving it inside, and you swipe one while no one is looking, they were pretty idiotic to leave their stuff unguarded, but doesn't make you any less a thief.
Mythic is apparently working on a PvE-only server for DAoC, which may solve some of your problems, unless RvR is what turns you on about it in the first place. No time frame that I've heard regarding when it is coming out, but it is in the works.
I know how you're feeling with the time. After I was laid off, DAoC came out, and I was looking for something to do, and there it was. Now that I'm employed again, I can't play nearly as much as I used to (unemployed, after I did my morning resume e-mails/faxes/mailings I jumped on the cable modem and played). These days I try to limit myself to just the evenings, though my girlfriend plays, and she's going to grad school on the other side of the country, so it's a nice to have it as something we can do together more than just spend gobs of money on phone time and sending IMs.
I believe you're also, truly, a coward for posting this anonymously.
Grow up, and take some responsibility for your opinions, if you're so all-fired proud of them.