Don't forget the X dimension desert in FF5, or at least the rom version. If you don't have the proper jobs, and the proper levels its a complete bitch, since you really can't go back, resupply, and the encounters are 10x harder than in the regular overland map.
I've known geeks who have played NH for longer than me, and never beat it.
Seriously. I'm at the wall in "Twilight Princess", I got sick of the "save the caravan" one, previous to that was the first time (early on) where you had to follow the Orc guy, and beat off his armor, on horse back... I through my Nunchuck, and stopped playing for a week. Now I'm on another week without playing, its not hard, its just tedious. Everytime I get ready for some hot Zelda lovin', I put in Warioware or Wii Sports instead. Not that I'm complaining, I enjoy the challenge of the impossible. If it is anything like Diablo 2, some night I'll get smashed, pull an all-nighter, wake up and realize I beat the game.
Oddly, I did this in WoW all the time, beating critical quests and raids at 3am while hammered on Jim Beam. I think my guild must have thought I was permanently sauced.
I see it like the Linux or OS X "root prompt" (by whatever name). Meaning it isn't that big of an inconvenience. Its like a prompt asking you to authorize potentially destructive actions are a new thing in the OS world.
I'm not even a MS fanboy, and I have a hard time taking offense at an OS asking me "are you sure" anymore. And I can't even turn it off in Linux (short of running SU), or OS X. Basically, its still too weak.
Er... Your wrong. Completely. Leopard is coming out, and I can run it on my Mini that came with Tiger. Actually, I could run EVERY Mac OS on my 2003 iBook, even the upcoming one, with less than 1Ghz. The one problem coming up AFTER Leopard is going to be based on switching architectures, a problem that Window's hasn't run into yet. I don't think 10.6 will work with G3 and G4 PPCs, but windows has stuck with x86 its whole lifespan.
My older windows box (1.6 Ghz) will have a problem running Vista, my 1.00 Ghz (.99 Ghz or so, actually) iBook will not have too hard a time with Leopard. My 1.8something Mini will run Leopard like a dream with 1 gig of ram, and it seems 1 gig of ram is the minimum for Vista, fancy graphics aside.
Amusingly enough, I DO have restless leg syndrome. But still when I saw the commercial for the drug I laughed, since it seems to be using a howitzer to kill a mosquito. Sure, some night my legs get twitchy, but the cure is rather simple, go for a short walk before bed. Which actually kills two birds, since I'm getting a nice relaxing evening stroll, AND getting rid of the twitchies. I really can't see the point in wasting the time and expense to go see a GP, get pills, suffer side effects, all for something that doing something already good for you will fix, free.
But then again I am the only person I know, now, that is completely drug free, nothing illegal, nothing OTC, nothing prescription. I don't like scrips since they usually have rather noticable side-effects (like a muzzy head, and drowsiness) that I can't stand. I don't even take cold meds, since they just mask the symptoms, and don't fix anything, I generally stay away from painkillers too, though I'm prone to migraines.
I'm a doctors nightmare, I only go when I have a serious problem, not some imaginary problem that I can't fix on my own. I guess doctors are like tech support, only when needed. Pills are like running Windows, likely to cause more problems, and hardly ever really needed (did I mention 90% hype?). The worse is psychopharms, we got to cover some SERIOUS (as in eventually fatal) side effects for the heavy hitters back in college, and the rest treat mainly rare and imaginary conditions for most of the scrips given out, or remedy social problems. "I have a hard time concentrating at my job!" "Must be adult ADD!", and not "Your job must be boring! Learn a skill you enjoy, and live dangerously!"/rant
Foresr? You mean? Perhaps fosr? Why do they hate e so? Its like Apple's annoying i-philia. ephobia. Perhaps it just means we need to run it on an eMachine, to get the complete package. Damn capitalists, and their... er... something.
And good for you, you are a member of a very very small minority. Regardless, not being able to delete a silly file, in a silly (optional) operating system still isn't a right, or even something very important in the grand scheme of things. Don't like it, move to something else, or find a work around.
And if you look at the comments above you, you'll notice that no one was talking about YOU, we were talking about your hypothetical computer illiterate grandma. I'm glad you enjoy coding, I'm glad you found a job doing what you enjoy. Thats very nice for you. But its kind of sad that you would find arbitrary computer code the meaning of your life.
I grew up with computers, and being elbows deep in their guts, etc... But computers are not my life, just a mere part. At best a hobby I can live off of, at worst an obsession that distracts me for more real aspects of life. But this is neither here or there. You should relax, no ones attacking you.
But, I think this is an emerging situation, recently I know many people switching to OS X for the day-to-day simplicity, but long-term Mac people (with exceptions, I'm sure) are generally doing their best to live up to the "clueless n00b" stereotype. Most of the long-time Mac users I know act shocked when I open up terminal.app, or even get all glazy eyed when I open up a mundane util like disk utility. Most of them grew up on Apple, and have no computer knowledge beyond the "just works" facade of the various Mac OSs.
More and more people are moving to OS X from other platforms, though, and bringing more and more geeks to the Mac community, so this is changing.
Also Apple is inflicted with as many trolls and fanboys as Linux, meaning any discussion is dominated by "OS X is teh r0xx0r" comments, and Apple apologists, and other mindless supporters, which does not help the image.
That said, it is sad that people automatically think your computer illiterate because you run OS X. I get this not only from/., but from the average Windows user (nongeek) on the streets. Windows is "hardcore", and OS X is for "n00bs, old ladies, and art fags", and this group, mind, has never even SEEN a CLI.
In the end, I don't get it. What does your choice of OS have to do with anything? If it works for you, good. That should be the whole debate, so we can save energy and actually talk about REAL problems.
I've had some rather serious freezes on OS X (10.3 and 10.4, PPC and X86), mostly due to accidentally moving large amounts of files (200-1,000) to the desktop, it causes Finder to bog to the point where force quit / restart is impossible, meaning you need a hard reboot. When I first got my iBook, I killed it in a week, somehow some vital folder permissions set themselves to where no one could access, not even the OS.
That said, OS X has been rock solid. But then again XP was also rock solid, and most big Linux distros are also rock solid. I think my max uptime on OS X was 2 months before I had to reboot for an update, on XP it was something like 3.5 months, and then only because I had to rip out some hardware, on linux I have no clue, since I'm still tinkering with it.
The real issue between these are maintenance. I see Linux as the most active, followed by Windows, followed by OS X. Linux seems to need constant tweaking to keep it optimal, and to do somewhat power tasks (it is getting better, it seems, but the end user experience is still not novice friendly). Windows needs about a day a week for virus scanning, adaware/spybot, defrag, regcleaner. OS X pretty much runs on its own, you can (for the most part) just forget about the internals, granted this is in part due to the lack of 3rd party hardware.
Each OS also, of course, has its benefits, Linux is more adaptable and expandable, and thanks to OSS has a more diverse feature set. Windows is... well... the gold standard, with the most compatibility, most support, etc... OS X is easier to use, and generally does "just work", plus it has the best, and most efficient UI (though it seems that KDE is coming close, with much tweaking), Apple's tech support has generally been the best too, in my experience.
I don't think Windows will be fading anytime soon. Linux, as stated, is not a viable option to 90% of the computing population. And OS X has some problems with image, and price, as well. People still think of OS9 when you talk about Apple, my parents refuse to get an Apple because of the amount of time I bitched about OS9 and OS8 through the 90's, either that or people think Apple is "teh ghey", and only for "hip creative art fags". Plus a decent Mac (meaning pro series) is not at a competitive price point for a comparable Windows box. And, of course, the aforementioned lack of 3rd party support.
That and the huge amount of (now) legacy boxes out there running Windows 98/2000/ME/XP/etc...
- resizing the window from ANY part of the window area
I always found this obnoxious, it requires me to actually slow down and think about my mouse position before moving a window by its title, but I still invariably end up changing its size instead. I rather like having only one corner (or perhaps the sides, and one corner) used for size, and the top ONLY for moving.
- all the same keyboard shortcuts for managing a window are the same in KDE as they are in windows (alt+space+pick_a_letter)
A matter of personal preference, I wouldn't throw this under "More than OS X". I rather prefer OS X's shortcuts, but it is just my preference, and not some grand principle.
From 10.2 to 10.3 was quite a leap, not a mere upgrade, as was from 10.3 to 10.4, which added metadata, better internal databases, more core functions, spotlight, dashboard, etc... By all intents and purposes a major release. Yes, the GUI is pretty much the same (albeit slightly more schizophrenic), and the actual user experience is pretty much the same, but that is somewhat the point, not having to relearn an OS every new version, keep it similar. And no, 10.3->10.4 does not equal an upgrade, its just how Apple's branding works (yes, I do think its idiotic). Think of 10.4 as OS 14, if you want.
10.5, on the other hand, seems mightily like an upgrade, adding software features, and not decent internal features. Sure versioning is nice, yes virtual desktops are good to finally have native on a non-KDE/Gnome desktop. But there is nothing as big as, say, Spotlight.
I doubt my grandmother (or the general novice users we're using her as a symbol for) would even notice, much less get angry that her valuable right to hose her OS out of ignorance is gone. I for one LIKE this, since I am the family tech, and still can't sell my parents (uncles, grandfolk, etc) to move on to OS . There is nothing more fun than a lazy Sunday afternoon with the family, sitting in a dark room trying to find what version of "thisfilewillhoseyouros.exe" someone deleted, all while having 2 or three people in the background yelling "stop doing things so fast! you'll break it!".
Perhaps its like school, once your out of it you see that more restrictive measures are good, for the students own good. Being that Windows doesn't effect me (except something I get the joy of doing free support on), I really don't really have a stake. Geeks can turn this crap off, and have unfettered access to delete *.*, format C:/, and open email attachments with impetus, though why a geek would be running Vista as their primary OS is a little beyond me, but these operations are not things someone who has no clue what their doing should be permitted to do. Yes, they still CAN, but think of knowing how to turn of protection as a certificate of half-assed competence that Grandma needs to get before being able to hose her OS and call me.
Yes, I understand that "DRM" is something very nice to rant about, but in this case I think you over step, and wax a bit overecstatic, this is not Grandmothers the world apart losing their valuable rights, this is a silly bunch of over priced computer code with some protections built in. Yes, code is not life, contrary to/., and accordingly deleting Vista's "vitalfile_001.exe" is not a right. Your free to install Linux on it, then Grandma can muck up as much as she pleases, or give her OS X, where she can do likewise.
Out of curiosity, is
chown
and permissions also DRM? Everytime I get flagged with "you must be root to do this operation" am I loosing some freedom? To me it is an aggravation, even if I do know I'm not running as root for my own good.
Thats exactly what I did. Back when Vista was announced ("longhorn"), I made a vow that XP was going to be the last Microsoft product I would ever buy, I would never own another Windows PC again and would stick only with *Nix derivatives. And my computer broke not long after that (fried PSU, w/ CPU death), bought a Mac. Lately the iBook fried, and I bought a Mini, and am trying to coax Linux into working on the iBook (whoever recommended Yellow Dog, thanks, btw, still no Airport or Modem, but seems more compatible than Ubuntu).
But then again I know I can't generalize this. The lay public doesn't care about DRM or restrictive EULAs, nor do they care about the bad practices of MS as a whole, or the potential harm these practices can cause to development and progress. Nor would they care much if they did know. All geeks have the Casandra complex on this front. We can warn and proselytize, but their eyes will glaze over while they reach for that shiny new Vista box.
Good point, but this isn't how things work anymore. For some reason companies have eschewed things such as the concept of brand loyalty, for the idea of shoving their image down your throat until you gag.
Go watch some sports, especially NASCAR, and notice that you've somehow been conned into watching a 2 hour commercial for Redbull, Oil, and Viagra, with the added joy of some commercials in between. All sports are like this now, I caught part of ESPN2's recap of the winter "X" Games, pardon, the JEEP winter "x" games, and found myself marveling at how EVERYONE had a commercial stuck on them, for things that they don't (probably) use, and that has nothing to do with snow boarding (Visa? Monster Energy Drink?). It all would be so much more convincing if these competitors advertised things that they used. Then your product would actually speak for itself.
Sorry for the rant, I'm getting rather feed up with the whole thing. I'm wondering how long it will be until all Americans are legally forced to tattoo some product to themselves in a visible area.
If KFC wants more business, then they should make better food, and change their original recipe back to the original recipe, the one that didn't make me camp in a bathroom for an hour after eating it. No amount of advertisement can ever match a quality product.
I generally did use Wikipedia on my papers, but only for the general definition of the topic, and then delved into specifics from primary sources. Such as:
According to Wikipedia Social Constuction Theory is blah blah blah.
But I would generally use a specialty, reviewed, encyclopedia within the topic, as opposed to Wikipedia. Such as the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or such.
Funny, the other night I was toying with the idea of creating a purely fictitious person on Wikipedia, with full links to fictitious events he participated in, make a fully coherent web of information on this one fake datum, then loosely link it into the proper content of Wikipedia, perhaps only through dates and years, and perhaps locations, though it would be interesting to have it completely disconnected, like a little fake wiki within the greater Wikipedia.
Like an entry of the fictitious "John Johnson", from the fictitious "Humming, Az", who participated in some further fictitious thing...
Mostly to see if it would ever be caught. And second to see if it would ever spread. Think of it as an exercise in the potential of Wikipedia to be used for history creation or revisionism.
here is no 'correct' answer. Its a matter of personal opinion.
Wrong, well right but to simplistic. When talking about issues (say in history, or some other nonscientific domain), whose opinion would matter more, your local plummer or someone with a Ph'D is history? We're not talking about merely a consensus of opinion, but a consensus of INFORMED opinion, there are leagues of difference.
I wouldn't say being stuck on the same old franchises makes them uninnovative, look at how much the franchises have changed, morphed, etc... Yes, Twilight Princess was pretty much like playing OoT with updated graphics, but I'm not complaining. Compare Metroid Prime to the earlier Metroid games, it basically is the same franchise in name only. Like compare Wario Ware to the original Mario games (yes, its part of the same franchise), are there any similarities besides one character?
Compare this to other franchises on other platforms, such as the much beloved Halo. Halo 2 was Halo 1 plus some extra crap. Halo 3 will be Halo 2 with some extra crap. These games are all just incremental change from the same theme, where with Nintendo each change can be a complete change (UI scheme, plot, format, graphics) but with the same character. I think they keep the same characters for both marketing (we all know who Link is, or Yoshi), and for familiarity. I KNOW Mario, I know (generally) what to expect from him, be it in an RPG, a platformer, or even a fighting game.
I'm generally okay with this, as long as they don't redo the same game over and over again, like most franchises, and as long as their are games that don't feature the Nintendo characters.
(I see the "Global Worming" crowd has attacked...nice.)
First off, I'm not who you want to mindlessly categorize me as, I am rather skeptical about aspects of the current global warming theory. I realize how hard it is to know a damn thing about climate trends and aberrations in the grand scheme of things (meaning the last 2 or 3 billion years), meaning it is hard to tell if warming is a normal process, or a man made one being that we are a flash in the eye, such a minor moment of the history of the biosphere.
Science is about the provable and repeatable. If I can formulate some experiment that proves some hypothesis, hand it over to J. Random Scientist and a few hundred of his closest friends, and they all get the same results (within some narrow margin of error), that's science.
Yes and no. It isn't quite that simple, you know. In the idealized method, you are correct, of course, but it rarely is that simple. Even experiments that have been repeated ad nauseum are not cut and dry, since empirical data is only 50% of the theory, the rest is logical linkages and interpretation of results, soft and rather fuzzy things after the actual poking and prodding. With nothing but repeated experiments you might be able to see (with some degree of certainty) that A=>B, but that will leave open the "WHY" of it. The why is solved by fitting it into the general framework of what science thinks at the moment, with much much argument. Meaning when enough people accept it (after the experimental phase, not willy nilly), and debate its fit within the context of what is known, we may call it an actual, bona fide, scientific theory. 50% of science is indeed communal.
To make things more fuzzy, we are using two words for what we mean by "science", science can be either the method, OR the body of knowledge discovered by the method. This body of knowledge is communal, but as we saw based on empirical tests. Most of these scientists agreeing, btw, did not test and repeat the experiment, but agree with the data's fit to theory. Science, in its second definition, is very much consensus based. Things that 90% of the community think is more believable than things that a minority think, this is a good quick-and-dirty way to check the general validity of theory, if you are a member of the lay public, and lacking a couple million dollars of equipment. And it is a good general reflection of "science-fact" most of the time.
Why do all of the temperature charts used by the "Global Wormers" start in the mid-19th century? Why do they never go back earlier than that, even when there are records that go further back that indicate that conditions were a fair bit warmer than they are today?
Probably because man-recorded climate data only goes back that far, before that we enter a time where most of the data is inferred from ice-cores, dendrochronlogy and the like, meaning largely indirect. Our accuracy degrades after the 1900s. But there are long term charts and graphs available in the readings if you look around which show the same modern warming spike. The striking thing about it is not the fact that the Earth is warming (we do live, after all in a rather rare mild climate, in the long historical sense), but the rate of change, and the timing of the spike (with our movement towards fossil fuels).
My stance, which I'm sure will be repellent to you for some reason I can't quite grasp, is that global warming is happening, unequivocally, and there is way to really doubt this without ignoring empirical evidence, the main debate is about the CAUSE of this rise in global temperatures. I figure it is somewhat like Pascal's Wager; Saying that we are causing it, if we do nothing the price is very high, if we try to fix it we have a decent reward (Florida). If it is false: and we did nothing there is no price, if we tried to fix it there is no harm (and still some good, since our dependence on fossil fuels are causing many other problems, even if global wa
I'm still out on upgrading to Leopard, there isn't much that really sells me on it. Yes, a nonbuggy desktop manager might be nice, but not for $130, a graphical versioning system is nice, but not a killer app. Bootcamp comes close to being a a selling point, but it really ins' necessary since I'm planning on getting my XP box back up and running, and my Mac lacks the gaming power to compete with it. 64bit is rather overhyped, and thus not really a selling point either.
Tiger (10.4), though, was well worth the money, with some real improvements in the kernel and actual OS.
What of these extra features can be found on XP, if you don't mind me asking?
My friend, it's not you being pedantic. It's you using a straw man argument.
Point taken, I misread the last bit after the comma as "there is" and not "there it is", I'll go sit in the corner and munch on some humble pie for an hour or too. I wouldn't quite call it a strawman, though, since that requires some though, is their a fallacy made for plain old misreading? I must have missed that in my rhetoric and informal arguments classes in college.
So have STDs. So has murder. So has theft. Need I go on? Prevelence, even universality, has nothing to do with the moral or pragmatic worth of something. The connection is utterly fallacious.
I guess I stated that rather weakly, then. Okay, lets say 90% of men on/. (meaning 89% of slashdot), look at, and have porn. How many of them, in the real world, confronted seriously, would show diminished treatment towards women? How much of this perceived diminished treatment, too, is cultural and has nothing to do with porn? Again, if you are so influenced by media there is a deeper problem, you have a shaky self to begin with. Quick tangential question, do you think violent games/movies translates into violence?
The APA might not approve it for several reasons, their ethics policy is rather restrictive or things most of us wouldn't actually take as unethical, so that isn't really damning. To be honest, I've never heard of a lack of empirical evidence used as proof of truth before.
The hardware is pretty much already here. In OS X, with Spotlight and Saved Searches I can pretty much do this, if I really wanted to go around and add metadata comments to all my files. Your right though, arbitrary tags are problematic, there still needs to be a concrete, non-arbitrary system for assigning metadata, AND still the ability to add user defined tags to data, and probably still some underlying directory structure for finding in a pinch.
A pure hierarchy is rather flawed though, I generally am forced to use many links in a rational folder structure. I might have a document in documents/working, documents/technology/category, and in documents/todo, for example. It would be easier to tag it with "working" and "todo", while keeping the actual document in the "category" folder, and have dynamic folders for the tags "working" and "todo". Having a solid location is still necessary, since it would be rather nasty just having a general "documents" folder with 1000+ unorganized files.
I don't think porn is really a "article of faith", I haven't heard anyone seriously proselytise porn, its more a running joke, like how many/.ers REALLY live in their mother's basement? Nor have I heard any confusion between porn and actual sex, they are rather hard to confuse, after all. And to be honest, this is the first time I've even seen someone question porn, mostly because rarely are moral issues the topic of/. By all means question it, in its place, there are real social problems associated with it, but generally/. is not the place for it being mostly a science and technology site. To be honest, most of the opinions I've heard against porn are religious moral arguments, which in my opinion are pointless to people who don't buy into a specific moral dogma, it would be nice to see an actual rational (and empirical) discussion on it, though I still doubt whether/. is the place for it (being generally off topic, average maturity level, etc).
And to be pedantic, please excuse me this pleasure, your third from last paragraph:
Pron isn't exploitation, it's a "career choice" (quoted from another reply). Personally I've noticed two things. First of all, the most promiscuos people I know also have the lowest self-esteem. Correlation or causation - I don't know, but it certainly seems as though there's a definite negative connection between pron and mental/emotional/psychological health. Anecdotal, I know, but there it is.
...is fallacious. You use the word "seems", then admit your "seeming" connection as anecdotal, and then say you know the connection "is true". How can you get truth from something that "seems" and is anecdotal? You can get, perhaps, an informed opinion from this chain, but not certainty or knowledge. Yes, this is me being pedantic.
Personally I enjoy both sex and porn, though if given an exclusive choice I would always accept the former. Some people even enjoy watching porn before or during sex. I don't see the implied mutual exclusivity between liking porn, and liking sex. I think that this irrelevant towards potential real issues on porn. Though, we must realize that porn has been around as long as men, and society still hasn't ended. Porn is a universal. I think porn might be like violent video games/media, the people affected adversely by it have a previous issue that increases their susceptibility to fantasy situations. The average porn viewer is probably not a rapist, or in any other way abnormal, but there will always be a minority of outliers where it becomes a problem, but porn (or your stimulus oif choice) will just be a trigger for a deeper problem. Porn is not a cause.
As for workers in the porn/sex industry, I have anecdotal evidence to the contrary. In college I was friends with several strippers, or exotic dancers, none of whom had "self-esteem" issues. It was an easy way to pay tuition for them, and they felt flattered by the attention. I accept that this is not a universal, only an observation like yours.
Hmm.. Thanks, I'll look into it, hopefully it supports Airport and the Mac modem. That it one thing that annoys me about Apple Hardware, it doesn't lend itself to geekish recycling. Its strange, my boot sector died somehow on the iBook, and Ubuntu was a last ditch effort to repair it. It couldn't repair it, but it runs flawlessly, even if OS X freezes on boot still.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the X dimension desert in FF5, or at least the rom version. If you don't have the proper jobs, and the proper levels its a complete bitch, since you really can't go back, resupply, and the encounters are 10x harder than in the regular overland map.
Years. And years... and... years...
I've known geeks who have played NH for longer than me, and never beat it.
Seriously. I'm at the wall in "Twilight Princess", I got sick of the "save the caravan" one, previous to that was the first time (early on) where you had to follow the Orc guy, and beat off his armor, on horse back... I through my Nunchuck, and stopped playing for a week. Now I'm on another week without playing, its not hard, its just tedious. Everytime I get ready for some hot Zelda lovin', I put in Warioware or Wii Sports instead. Not that I'm complaining, I enjoy the challenge of the impossible. If it is anything like Diablo 2, some night I'll get smashed, pull an all-nighter, wake up and realize I beat the game.
Oddly, I did this in WoW all the time, beating critical quests and raids at 3am while hammered on Jim Beam. I think my guild must have thought I was permanently sauced.
I see it like the Linux or OS X "root prompt" (by whatever name). Meaning it isn't that big of an inconvenience. Its like a prompt asking you to authorize potentially destructive actions are a new thing in the OS world.
I'm not even a MS fanboy, and I have a hard time taking offense at an OS asking me "are you sure" anymore. And I can't even turn it off in Linux (short of running SU), or OS X. Basically, its still too weak.
Er... Your wrong. Completely. Leopard is coming out, and I can run it on my Mini that came with Tiger. Actually, I could run EVERY Mac OS on my 2003 iBook, even the upcoming one, with less than 1Ghz. The one problem coming up AFTER Leopard is going to be based on switching architectures, a problem that Window's hasn't run into yet. I don't think 10.6 will work with G3 and G4 PPCs, but windows has stuck with x86 its whole lifespan.
My older windows box (1.6 Ghz) will have a problem running Vista, my 1.00 Ghz (.99 Ghz or so, actually) iBook will not have too hard a time with Leopard. My 1.8something Mini will run Leopard like a dream with 1 gig of ram, and it seems 1 gig of ram is the minimum for Vista, fancy graphics aside.
Amusingly enough, I DO have restless leg syndrome. But still when I saw the commercial for the drug I laughed, since it seems to be using a howitzer to kill a mosquito. Sure, some night my legs get twitchy, but the cure is rather simple, go for a short walk before bed. Which actually kills two birds, since I'm getting a nice relaxing evening stroll, AND getting rid of the twitchies. I really can't see the point in wasting the time and expense to go see a GP, get pills, suffer side effects, all for something that doing something already good for you will fix, free.
/rant
But then again I am the only person I know, now, that is completely drug free, nothing illegal, nothing OTC, nothing prescription. I don't like scrips since they usually have rather noticable side-effects (like a muzzy head, and drowsiness) that I can't stand. I don't even take cold meds, since they just mask the symptoms, and don't fix anything, I generally stay away from painkillers too, though I'm prone to migraines.
I'm a doctors nightmare, I only go when I have a serious problem, not some imaginary problem that I can't fix on my own. I guess doctors are like tech support, only when needed. Pills are like running Windows, likely to cause more problems, and hardly ever really needed (did I mention 90% hype?). The worse is psychopharms, we got to cover some SERIOUS (as in eventually fatal) side effects for the heavy hitters back in college, and the rest treat mainly rare and imaginary conditions for most of the scrips given out, or remedy social problems. "I have a hard time concentrating at my job!" "Must be adult ADD!", and not "Your job must be boring! Learn a skill you enjoy, and live dangerously!"
I always thought of it as the green absynthe fairy.
Foresr? You mean? Perhaps fosr? Why do they hate e so? Its like Apple's annoying i-philia. ephobia. Perhaps it just means we need to run it on an eMachine, to get the complete package. Damn capitalists, and their... er... something.
And good for you, you are a member of a very very small minority. Regardless, not being able to delete a silly file, in a silly (optional) operating system still isn't a right, or even something very important in the grand scheme of things. Don't like it, move to something else, or find a work around.
And if you look at the comments above you, you'll notice that no one was talking about YOU, we were talking about your hypothetical computer illiterate grandma. I'm glad you enjoy coding, I'm glad you found a job doing what you enjoy. Thats very nice for you. But its kind of sad that you would find arbitrary computer code the meaning of your life.
I grew up with computers, and being elbows deep in their guts, etc... But computers are not my life, just a mere part. At best a hobby I can live off of, at worst an obsession that distracts me for more real aspects of life. But this is neither here or there. You should relax, no ones attacking you.
Thank you.
/., but from the average Windows user (nongeek) on the streets. Windows is "hardcore", and OS X is for "n00bs, old ladies, and art fags", and this group, mind, has never even SEEN a CLI.
But, I think this is an emerging situation, recently I know many people switching to OS X for the day-to-day simplicity, but long-term Mac people (with exceptions, I'm sure) are generally doing their best to live up to the "clueless n00b" stereotype. Most of the long-time Mac users I know act shocked when I open up terminal.app, or even get all glazy eyed when I open up a mundane util like disk utility. Most of them grew up on Apple, and have no computer knowledge beyond the "just works" facade of the various Mac OSs.
More and more people are moving to OS X from other platforms, though, and bringing more and more geeks to the Mac community, so this is changing.
Also Apple is inflicted with as many trolls and fanboys as Linux, meaning any discussion is dominated by "OS X is teh r0xx0r" comments, and Apple apologists, and other mindless supporters, which does not help the image.
That said, it is sad that people automatically think your computer illiterate because you run OS X. I get this not only from
In the end, I don't get it. What does your choice of OS have to do with anything? If it works for you, good. That should be the whole debate, so we can save energy and actually talk about REAL problems.
I've had some rather serious freezes on OS X (10.3 and 10.4, PPC and X86), mostly due to accidentally moving large amounts of files (200-1,000) to the desktop, it causes Finder to bog to the point where force quit / restart is impossible, meaning you need a hard reboot. When I first got my iBook, I killed it in a week, somehow some vital folder permissions set themselves to where no one could access, not even the OS.
That said, OS X has been rock solid. But then again XP was also rock solid, and most big Linux distros are also rock solid. I think my max uptime on OS X was 2 months before I had to reboot for an update, on XP it was something like 3.5 months, and then only because I had to rip out some hardware, on linux I have no clue, since I'm still tinkering with it.
The real issue between these are maintenance. I see Linux as the most active, followed by Windows, followed by OS X. Linux seems to need constant tweaking to keep it optimal, and to do somewhat power tasks (it is getting better, it seems, but the end user experience is still not novice friendly). Windows needs about a day a week for virus scanning, adaware/spybot, defrag, regcleaner. OS X pretty much runs on its own, you can (for the most part) just forget about the internals, granted this is in part due to the lack of 3rd party hardware.
Each OS also, of course, has its benefits, Linux is more adaptable and expandable, and thanks to OSS has a more diverse feature set. Windows is... well... the gold standard, with the most compatibility, most support, etc... OS X is easier to use, and generally does "just work", plus it has the best, and most efficient UI (though it seems that KDE is coming close, with much tweaking), Apple's tech support has generally been the best too, in my experience.
I don't think Windows will be fading anytime soon. Linux, as stated, is not a viable option to 90% of the computing population. And OS X has some problems with image, and price, as well. People still think of OS9 when you talk about Apple, my parents refuse to get an Apple because of the amount of time I bitched about OS9 and OS8 through the 90's, either that or people think Apple is "teh ghey", and only for "hip creative art fags". Plus a decent Mac (meaning pro series) is not at a competitive price point for a comparable Windows box. And, of course, the aforementioned lack of 3rd party support.
That and the huge amount of (now) legacy boxes out there running Windows 98/2000/ME/XP/etc...
- resizing the window from ANY part of the window area
I always found this obnoxious, it requires me to actually slow down and think about my mouse position before moving a window by its title, but I still invariably end up changing its size instead. I rather like having only one corner (or perhaps the sides, and one corner) used for size, and the top ONLY for moving.
- all the same keyboard shortcuts for managing a window are the same in KDE as they are in windows (alt+space+pick_a_letter)
A matter of personal preference, I wouldn't throw this under "More than OS X". I rather prefer OS X's shortcuts, but it is just my preference, and not some grand principle.
Hooray troll feeding:
From 10.2 to 10.3 was quite a leap, not a mere upgrade, as was from 10.3 to 10.4, which added metadata, better internal databases, more core functions, spotlight, dashboard, etc... By all intents and purposes a major release. Yes, the GUI is pretty much the same (albeit slightly more schizophrenic), and the actual user experience is pretty much the same, but that is somewhat the point, not having to relearn an OS every new version, keep it similar. And no, 10.3->10.4 does not equal an upgrade, its just how Apple's branding works (yes, I do think its idiotic). Think of 10.4 as OS 14, if you want.
10.5, on the other hand, seems mightily like an upgrade, adding software features, and not decent internal features. Sure versioning is nice, yes virtual desktops are good to finally have native on a non-KDE/Gnome desktop. But there is nothing as big as, say, Spotlight.
Perhaps its like school, once your out of it you see that more restrictive measures are good, for the students own good. Being that Windows doesn't effect me (except something I get the joy of doing free support on), I really don't really have a stake. Geeks can turn this crap off, and have unfettered access to delete *.*, format C:/, and open email attachments with impetus, though why a geek would be running Vista as their primary OS is a little beyond me, but these operations are not things someone who has no clue what their doing should be permitted to do. Yes, they still CAN, but think of knowing how to turn of protection as a certificate of half-assed competence that Grandma needs to get before being able to hose her OS and call me.
Yes, I understand that "DRM" is something very nice to rant about, but in this case I think you over step, and wax a bit overecstatic, this is not Grandmothers the world apart losing their valuable rights, this is a silly bunch of over priced computer code with some protections built in. Yes, code is not life, contrary to
Out of curiosity, is and permissions also DRM? Everytime I get flagged with "you must be root to do this operation" am I loosing some freedom? To me it is an aggravation, even if I do know I'm not running as root for my own good.
Thats exactly what I did. Back when Vista was announced ("longhorn"), I made a vow that XP was going to be the last Microsoft product I would ever buy, I would never own another Windows PC again and would stick only with *Nix derivatives. And my computer broke not long after that (fried PSU, w/ CPU death), bought a Mac. Lately the iBook fried, and I bought a Mini, and am trying to coax Linux into working on the iBook (whoever recommended Yellow Dog, thanks, btw, still no Airport or Modem, but seems more compatible than Ubuntu).
But then again I know I can't generalize this. The lay public doesn't care about DRM or restrictive EULAs, nor do they care about the bad practices of MS as a whole, or the potential harm these practices can cause to development and progress. Nor would they care much if they did know. All geeks have the Casandra complex on this front. We can warn and proselytize, but their eyes will glaze over while they reach for that shiny new Vista box.
Good point, but this isn't how things work anymore. For some reason companies have eschewed things such as the concept of brand loyalty, for the idea of shoving their image down your throat until you gag.
Go watch some sports, especially NASCAR, and notice that you've somehow been conned into watching a 2 hour commercial for Redbull, Oil, and Viagra, with the added joy of some commercials in between. All sports are like this now, I caught part of ESPN2's recap of the winter "X" Games, pardon, the JEEP winter "x" games, and found myself marveling at how EVERYONE had a commercial stuck on them, for things that they don't (probably) use, and that has nothing to do with snow boarding (Visa? Monster Energy Drink?). It all would be so much more convincing if these competitors advertised things that they used. Then your product would actually speak for itself.
Sorry for the rant, I'm getting rather feed up with the whole thing. I'm wondering how long it will be until all Americans are legally forced to tattoo some product to themselves in a visible area.
If KFC wants more business, then they should make better food, and change their original recipe back to the original recipe, the one that didn't make me camp in a bathroom for an hour after eating it. No amount of advertisement can ever match a quality product.
Funny, the other night I was toying with the idea of creating a purely fictitious person on Wikipedia, with full links to fictitious events he participated in, make a fully coherent web of information on this one fake datum, then loosely link it into the proper content of Wikipedia, perhaps only through dates and years, and perhaps locations, though it would be interesting to have it completely disconnected, like a little fake wiki within the greater Wikipedia.
Like an entry of the fictitious "John Johnson", from the fictitious "Humming, Az", who participated in some further fictitious thing...
Mostly to see if it would ever be caught. And second to see if it would ever spread. Think of it as an exercise in the potential of Wikipedia to be used for history creation or revisionism.
here is no 'correct' answer. Its a matter of personal opinion.
Wrong, well right but to simplistic. When talking about issues (say in history, or some other nonscientific domain), whose opinion would matter more, your local plummer or someone with a Ph'D is history? We're not talking about merely a consensus of opinion, but a consensus of INFORMED opinion, there are leagues of difference.
I wouldn't say being stuck on the same old franchises makes them uninnovative, look at how much the franchises have changed, morphed, etc... Yes, Twilight Princess was pretty much like playing OoT with updated graphics, but I'm not complaining. Compare Metroid Prime to the earlier Metroid games, it basically is the same franchise in name only. Like compare Wario Ware to the original Mario games (yes, its part of the same franchise), are there any similarities besides one character?
Compare this to other franchises on other platforms, such as the much beloved Halo. Halo 2 was Halo 1 plus some extra crap. Halo 3 will be Halo 2 with some extra crap. These games are all just incremental change from the same theme, where with Nintendo each change can be a complete change (UI scheme, plot, format, graphics) but with the same character. I think they keep the same characters for both marketing (we all know who Link is, or Yoshi), and for familiarity. I KNOW Mario, I know (generally) what to expect from him, be it in an RPG, a platformer, or even a fighting game.
I'm generally okay with this, as long as they don't redo the same game over and over again, like most franchises, and as long as their are games that don't feature the Nintendo characters.
(I see the "Global Worming" crowd has attacked...nice.)
First off, I'm not who you want to mindlessly categorize me as, I am rather skeptical about aspects of the current global warming theory. I realize how hard it is to know a damn thing about climate trends and aberrations in the grand scheme of things (meaning the last 2 or 3 billion years), meaning it is hard to tell if warming is a normal process, or a man made one being that we are a flash in the eye, such a minor moment of the history of the biosphere.
Science is about the provable and repeatable. If I can formulate some experiment that proves some hypothesis, hand it over to J. Random Scientist and a few hundred of his closest friends, and they all get the same results (within some narrow margin of error), that's science.
Yes and no. It isn't quite that simple, you know. In the idealized method, you are correct, of course, but it rarely is that simple. Even experiments that have been repeated ad nauseum are not cut and dry, since empirical data is only 50% of the theory, the rest is logical linkages and interpretation of results, soft and rather fuzzy things after the actual poking and prodding. With nothing but repeated experiments you might be able to see (with some degree of certainty) that A=>B, but that will leave open the "WHY" of it. The why is solved by fitting it into the general framework of what science thinks at the moment, with much much argument. Meaning when enough people accept it (after the experimental phase, not willy nilly), and debate its fit within the context of what is known, we may call it an actual, bona fide, scientific theory. 50% of science is indeed communal.
To make things more fuzzy, we are using two words for what we mean by "science", science can be either the method, OR the body of knowledge discovered by the method. This body of knowledge is communal, but as we saw based on empirical tests. Most of these scientists agreeing, btw, did not test and repeat the experiment, but agree with the data's fit to theory. Science, in its second definition, is very much consensus based. Things that 90% of the community think is more believable than things that a minority think, this is a good quick-and-dirty way to check the general validity of theory, if you are a member of the lay public, and lacking a couple million dollars of equipment. And it is a good general reflection of "science-fact" most of the time.
Why do all of the temperature charts used by the "Global Wormers" start in the mid-19th century? Why do they never go back earlier than that, even when there are records that go further back that indicate that conditions were a fair bit warmer than they are today?
Probably because man-recorded climate data only goes back that far, before that we enter a time where most of the data is inferred from ice-cores, dendrochronlogy and the like, meaning largely indirect. Our accuracy degrades after the 1900s. But there are long term charts and graphs available in the readings if you look around which show the same modern warming spike. The striking thing about it is not the fact that the Earth is warming (we do live, after all in a rather rare mild climate, in the long historical sense), but the rate of change, and the timing of the spike (with our movement towards fossil fuels).
My stance, which I'm sure will be repellent to you for some reason I can't quite grasp, is that global warming is happening, unequivocally, and there is way to really doubt this without ignoring empirical evidence, the main debate is about the CAUSE of this rise in global temperatures. I figure it is somewhat like Pascal's Wager; Saying that we are causing it, if we do nothing the price is very high, if we try to fix it we have a decent reward (Florida). If it is false: and we did nothing there is no price, if we tried to fix it there is no harm (and still some good, since our dependence on fossil fuels are causing many other problems, even if global wa
I'm still out on upgrading to Leopard, there isn't much that really sells me on it. Yes, a nonbuggy desktop manager might be nice, but not for $130, a graphical versioning system is nice, but not a killer app. Bootcamp comes close to being a a selling point, but it really ins' necessary since I'm planning on getting my XP box back up and running, and my Mac lacks the gaming power to compete with it. 64bit is rather overhyped, and thus not really a selling point either.
Tiger (10.4), though, was well worth the money, with some real improvements in the kernel and actual OS.
What of these extra features can be found on XP, if you don't mind me asking?
My friend, it's not you being pedantic. It's you using a straw man argument.
/. (meaning 89% of slashdot), look at, and have porn. How many of them, in the real world, confronted seriously, would show diminished treatment towards women? How much of this perceived diminished treatment, too, is cultural and has nothing to do with porn? Again, if you are so influenced by media there is a deeper problem, you have a shaky self to begin with. Quick tangential question, do you think violent games/movies translates into violence?
Point taken, I misread the last bit after the comma as "there is" and not "there it is", I'll go sit in the corner and munch on some humble pie for an hour or too. I wouldn't quite call it a strawman, though, since that requires some though, is their a fallacy made for plain old misreading? I must have missed that in my rhetoric and informal arguments classes in college.
So have STDs. So has murder. So has theft. Need I go on? Prevelence, even universality, has nothing to do with the moral or pragmatic worth of something. The connection is utterly fallacious.
I guess I stated that rather weakly, then. Okay, lets say 90% of men on
The APA might not approve it for several reasons, their ethics policy is rather restrictive or things most of us wouldn't actually take as unethical, so that isn't really damning. To be honest, I've never heard of a lack of empirical evidence used as proof of truth before.
The hardware is pretty much already here. In OS X, with Spotlight and Saved Searches I can pretty much do this, if I really wanted to go around and add metadata comments to all my files. Your right though, arbitrary tags are problematic, there still needs to be a concrete, non-arbitrary system for assigning metadata, AND still the ability to add user defined tags to data, and probably still some underlying directory structure for finding in a pinch.
A pure hierarchy is rather flawed though, I generally am forced to use many links in a rational folder structure. I might have a document in documents/working, documents/technology/category, and in documents/todo, for example. It would be easier to tag it with "working" and "todo", while keeping the actual document in the "category" folder, and have dynamic folders for the tags "working" and "todo". Having a solid location is still necessary, since it would be rather nasty just having a general "documents" folder with 1000+ unorganized files.
And to be pedantic, please excuse me this pleasure, your third from last paragraph:
Personally I enjoy both sex and porn, though if given an exclusive choice I would always accept the former. Some people even enjoy watching porn before or during sex. I don't see the implied mutual exclusivity between liking porn, and liking sex. I think that this irrelevant towards potential real issues on porn. Though, we must realize that porn has been around as long as men, and society still hasn't ended. Porn is a universal. I think porn might be like violent video games/media, the people affected adversely by it have a previous issue that increases their susceptibility to fantasy situations. The average porn viewer is probably not a rapist, or in any other way abnormal, but there will always be a minority of outliers where it becomes a problem, but porn (or your stimulus oif choice) will just be a trigger for a deeper problem. Porn is not a cause.
As for workers in the porn/sex industry, I have anecdotal evidence to the contrary. In college I was friends with several strippers, or exotic dancers, none of whom had "self-esteem" issues. It was an easy way to pay tuition for them, and they felt flattered by the attention. I accept that this is not a universal, only an observation like yours.
Hmm.. Thanks, I'll look into it, hopefully it supports Airport and the Mac modem. That it one thing that annoys me about Apple Hardware, it doesn't lend itself to geekish recycling. Its strange, my boot sector died somehow on the iBook, and Ubuntu was a last ditch effort to repair it. It couldn't repair it, but it runs flawlessly, even if OS X freezes on boot still.