Yeah back during the halcyon days of creativity when they churned out such classics as Ms. Pac Man and Jr. Pac Man, and who could forget ET? And then there all those Great Games like Tapper, LED Storm, Cupfinal, and Chase HQ. Wait, you mean you don't remember them? That's because they sucked. They had horrible gameplay. Hell, try going back and playing Dig Dug or Pac Man or Paperboy and tell me the gameplay on those things doesn't suck ass.
Pac Man and Dig Dug certainly don't "suck ass". I play them often even today, thanks to (x)mame. Now ET, I grant you, was pretty bad.
The problem with nostalgia is you only remember the best of the past and you're comparing it against the average from the present. How is Diablo's gameplay any worse than the original Gauntlet's?
That point isn't that it isn't worse, the point is that it is hardly better. With all the resources available to us today, games should be awesome. Instead, the best they can do is remakes. Just like Hollywood. I hear that they are going to remake the 1970's SF classic "Rollerball" (minus the anti-corporate overtones -- can't have that today, now can we?). Why? Can't they come up with something original?
Wrong. Economically, libertarians are right-wing, but socially, they're left-wing.
Libertarians like to repeat this but it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. I can name quite a few left-wing social programs (such as affirmative action) which libertarians reject.
Even though Phil Dick was certainly all that (eg, Valis), and excellent with it, I wonder how much of his mass popularity here is due to the continuing thing with films being made of his stories.
I think that Phil Dick is rather like Lovecraft in that he is more important for the themes suggested in his work rather than the literary merits of anything he actually wrote. And as with Lovecraft, the best films based on Phil Dick's work (for example Blade Runner) tend to be those that take the most liberties with the source material but preserve the feeling.
How much of the voting will in hindsight show ephermeral trends (eg, the loathsome Hubbard).
Only if Scientology collapses. Remember that 100 years ago Mormonism was considered as wacky as Scientology is today, and yet today it is a mainstream religion.
In the interview there is a comparison between Gates and Torvalds where Torvalds is compared to Edison and Gates to Rockefeller. I'm not sure that either is very much like Torvalds. Edison was quite into marketing his ideas and wasn't beneath slandering his competitors (such as Tesla). Torvalds isn't at all like that. I'd say Torvalds is more like Bill Thompson (a.k.a Lord Kelvin after the Brits honored him). Thompson contributed a lot to the public knowledge of physics but at the same time supported himself through engineering contracts, much like Torvalds works on Linux for the public but supports himself by working at Transmeta.
Computers are no different than anything else: Cars, VCRs, whatever...The simple fact of the matter is many people don't WANT to learn the in-depth operation of a computer just like most don't want to learn the exact details of how a car, tv, vcr or whatever works.
And yet to learn to drive a car, which is a far simpler device in theory than a computer, it is considered perfectly normal to have to take a course lasting several months. Nobody claims that cars have to be "intuitive". Additionally, in one of the last holdovers of sexism, males at least are expected to know enough about the inner workings of cars to know how to change oil, flat tires, and to recognize weird noises that indicate mechanical problems.
Re:Educated people don't need spelling checkers.
on
Mozilla Bug Week
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· Score: 2
When I began learning English I was delighted to see how words are actually, mostly spelled as they are. In French (and I guess in many other languages) you have so much exceptions, due to mainly to historic reasons.
Actually, French is probably the only Western language with *worse* spelling problems than English. Most languages like Spanish, Italian, or German have far more regular spelling than either English or French.
That really sounds like a hardware problem. Probably a heat issue, or RAM. You should try running a diagnostic program continuously.. stress the CPU, RAM, etc.
Ah, but by Win 2K box also has Linux on it (as all machines I use do). If hardware had anything to do with the crashing, it should also happen in Linux, but it just doesn't. This isn't just Microsoft bashing, by the way -- a long time ago on a box far away I dual booted OS/2 Warp and Linux. OS/2 would also crash, and the Team OS/2 people would claim that bad hardware was at fault even though my box was perfectly stable under Linux.
My laptop running Win2k has gone for up to a week without rebooting - that's going between multiple network environments, hardware configurations, and going in and out of suspend and hibernate.
Hmmf. I use Win 2K part of the time mostly for work purposes and sometimes play Unreal Tournament on it (yeah, I *know* there is a Linux port). After about an hour of UT, the machine generally locks up solid. Perhaps UT is a badly written program, but a stable OS isn't brought down by bad software. Windows has a rep of being unstable because it *is* unstable.
It isn't a feature for consumers, but it is a very important feature for potential investors. I've met with venture capitalists on two occassions and the first words out of their mouths were "Is your technology patented?"
Umm, easy access cases were available for PC's long before Apple ever incorporated them. I remember buying a case for a 486DX-33 that had a hinged door built into the side.
Really? Apple has incorporated them since 1987, with the Mac II.
Of course the Apple ][ I used in 1981 had a pop out plastic cover and no stupid screws. Never been a Mac person, but the Apple ]['s had such cases since before the IBM PC even existed.
Maybe Microsoft claims that open source is unamerican, but clearly they don't really believe it. I know someone personally who works on MS Office, and according to him, perl (which is open source last time I checked) is used at Microsoft to write the equivilent of a "makefile" to build Office -- Visual Studio just can't handle such a large project.
If you think 1984 is a love story, you have missed Orwell's point. Read "Animal Farm" or my favorite, the non-fictional "Homage to Catalonia" to get Orwell's true point.
Not really. 1984 postulated a particular dystopia -- namely that Stalinism circa 1948 (oh, wasn't Orwell *so* clever in reversing the last two digits of the year in which he wrote the novel?) would become global. Today the problem isn't anti-capitalistic dictatorships -- the problem is that large corporations can subvert democracy. If you want a fictional precedent, William Gibson comes much closer to today's reality than George Orwell.
Absolutely. Some people maybe think Cygwin is not so good because they tried it a couple of years ago when it was slow and didn't have Xfree support. Those people should try it again. Performance is so much better and having an local X desktop is very cool indeed.
Frankly, I doubt this claim. Can you substantiate it?
Certainly, in the sense of giving you quotes from various sources, such as the well respected Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. But probably you'll just dismiss it as biased, so what's the use? How many civillian causulties do *you* think occurred anyhow?
Some of the Mujahadin have joined the Taliban, but many more are with the Northern Alliance.
All the more reason not to support the Northern Alliance. Bin Laden was once one of the Mujahadin himself. The US has a habit of supporting people like Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, that end up becoming the next enemy.
Huh?? Only time will tell, I suppose, but if you'd bother to take the time to research our military actions over the last ten years, I think you would find that we work pretty hard to avoid civilian casualties.
Despite all the fuss about "smart bombs" and the like, the US still managed to kill about 10,000 Iraqi civillians in the Gulf War. Oh well, it was in the name of democra...,er, corrupt ruling family of Kuwait.
I suspect that we, as Americans, probably place more value on the lives of Afghan civilians than the Taliban does.
Perhaps, but where did this nasty Taliban come from? The US trained and funded the thugs that later became the Taliban (and Bin Laden, I might add) when they were fighting Soviet troops. Reminds one of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" doesn't it?
Cute. Except that the error in that analogy is that both sides in your fistfight can hit equally hard. In reality, the events of September 11th, as tragic as they were, were an insignificant blow to the US. The US is far more powerful than Bin Laden and his supporters, and I'm sure more Afghani civillians will be killed than were killed in the WTC. Will this cause anything close to the media circus that occurred over the the WTC deaths? Heck no.
Sounds like your schools suffered a cheap conversion from that insane "open" concept that was popular in the 1960's. But the school the article is about doesn't just have cardboard internal walls -- the whole thing is mostly cardboard.
Larry says
`Let me ask you. There are two different airlines. Airline A says before you board that airplane you prove you are who you say you are. Airline B, no problem. Anyone who wants the price of a ticket, they can go on that airline. Which airplane do you get on?''
I know Larry thinks this is a rhetorical question to which A is the obvious answer, but personally, if it would make things faster and less bureaucratic, I'd go with B myself. The simple fact is that hijacking is a really, really, really, infrequent occassion. There are far more probable ways to get yourself killed that merit more worry.
What's the story with LinDVD? If it's not vapor, why doesn't Intervideo sell it to consumers (as they do in fact for WinDVD)? Xine and Videolan work quite well for watching movies, but it would be nice to have a player that can interpret the menus, special features, etc.
Hmm -- In SF "psionic powers" are rather common. That's just another name for magic, if you think about it. If someone did a search and replace on a Harry Potter book and called every example of magic "psionics", nobody would disagree with the SF label, now would they?
Jonathan
Disclaimer: I'm not an HP fan, although I've only read the first book, and according to some here they do get better.
Perhaps I'm being thick here, but isn't it kind of obvious that any available bandwidth will be used up eventually? How can we have "too much" fiber?
Well, the question is not whether it will be used up eventually, but whether it it will be used up before technological innovation makes the current infrastructure obsolete.
It's not fair to compare a great CLI with a crappy GUI. Assuming they're both good examples of their kind, then the GUI wins.
For you, maybe. I consider myself open-minded and have tried lots of different GUI IDEs on many platforms. I generally try to live with using them for about a week and then get frustrated by their limitations and return to Emacs and make, which fortunately have been ported to nearly every OS.
Add it through the scripting interface. You did know that good GUI applications are scriptable, right?
The set of good GUI apps by your definition must be pretty small then. Most GUI apps aren't very customizable at all. And even the ones that are generally have their own programming language, and who has the time to learn some proprietory language for every app?
A "Remove Objects" menu item is a lot easier to use for either the novice or expert user than "find . -name '*.o' -exec rm {} \;". Common operations should be built in to the system
I agree -- common takes should have shortcuts in any system, whether GUI or CLI. But it is just a fact that everyone works in different ways. What is common for you may be uncommon for me and vice versa. It is hardly any wonder that UNIX and its CLI remain popular among researchers, who by definition perform tasks nobody before has done.
BTW, I was under the impression the actual way to do this is "make clean"....)
That's how I would do it normally in my own projects -- but that only works if I've written a command line to run for the clean option in the makefile -- a makefile is really just a script of sorts.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah back during the halcyon days of creativity when they churned out such classics as Ms. Pac Man and Jr. Pac Man, and who could forget ET? And then there all those Great Games like Tapper, LED Storm, Cupfinal, and Chase HQ. Wait, you mean you don't remember them? That's because they sucked. They had horrible gameplay. Hell, try going back and playing Dig Dug or Pac Man or Paperboy and tell me the gameplay on those things doesn't suck ass.
Pac Man and Dig Dug certainly don't "suck ass". I play them often even today, thanks to (x)mame. Now ET, I grant you, was pretty bad.
The problem with nostalgia is you only remember the best of the past and you're comparing it against the average from the present. How is Diablo's gameplay any worse than the original Gauntlet's?
That point isn't that it isn't worse, the point is that it is hardly better. With all the resources available to us today, games should be awesome. Instead, the best they can do is remakes. Just like Hollywood. I hear that they are going to remake the 1970's SF classic "Rollerball" (minus the anti-corporate overtones -- can't have that today, now can we?). Why? Can't they come up with something original?
Wrong. Economically, libertarians are right-wing, but socially, they're left-wing.
Libertarians like to repeat this but it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. I can name quite a few left-wing social programs (such as affirmative action) which libertarians reject.
Even though Phil Dick was certainly all that (eg, Valis), and excellent with it, I wonder how much of his mass popularity here is due to the continuing thing with films being made of his stories.
I think that Phil Dick is rather like Lovecraft in that he is more important for the themes suggested in his work rather than the literary merits of anything he actually wrote. And as with Lovecraft, the best films based on Phil Dick's work (for example Blade Runner) tend to be those that take the most liberties with the source material but preserve the feeling.
How much of the voting will in hindsight show ephermeral trends (eg, the loathsome Hubbard).
Only if Scientology collapses. Remember that 100 years ago Mormonism was considered as wacky as Scientology is today, and yet today it is a mainstream religion.
In the interview there is a comparison between Gates and Torvalds where Torvalds is compared to Edison and Gates to Rockefeller. I'm not sure that either is very much like Torvalds. Edison was quite into marketing his ideas and wasn't beneath slandering his competitors (such as Tesla). Torvalds isn't at all like that. I'd say Torvalds is more like Bill Thompson (a.k.a Lord Kelvin after the Brits honored him). Thompson contributed a lot to the public knowledge of physics but at the same time supported himself through engineering contracts, much like Torvalds works on Linux for the public but supports himself by working at Transmeta.
Computers are no different than anything else: Cars, VCRs, whatever...The simple fact of the matter is many people don't WANT to learn the in-depth operation of a computer just like most don't want to learn the exact details of how a car, tv, vcr or whatever works.
And yet to learn to drive a car, which is a far simpler device in theory than a computer, it is considered perfectly normal to have to take a course lasting several months. Nobody claims that cars have to be "intuitive". Additionally, in one of the last holdovers of sexism, males at least are expected to know enough about the inner workings of cars to know how to change oil, flat tires, and to recognize weird noises that indicate mechanical problems.
When I began learning English I was delighted to see how words are actually, mostly spelled as they are. In French (and I guess in many other languages) you have so much exceptions, due to mainly to historic reasons.
Actually, French is probably the only Western language with *worse* spelling problems than English. Most languages like Spanish, Italian, or German have far more regular spelling than either English or French.
That really sounds like a hardware problem. Probably a heat issue, or RAM. You should try running a diagnostic program continuously.. stress the CPU, RAM, etc.
Ah, but by Win 2K box also has Linux on it (as all machines I use do). If hardware had anything to do with the crashing, it should also happen in Linux, but it just doesn't. This isn't just Microsoft bashing, by the way -- a long time ago on a box far away I dual booted OS/2 Warp and Linux. OS/2 would also crash, and the Team OS/2 people would claim that bad hardware was at fault even though my box was perfectly stable under Linux.
My laptop running Win2k has gone for up to a week without rebooting - that's going between multiple network environments, hardware configurations, and going in and out of suspend and hibernate.
Hmmf. I use Win 2K part of the time mostly for work purposes and sometimes play Unreal Tournament on it (yeah, I *know* there is a Linux port). After about an hour of UT, the machine generally locks up solid. Perhaps UT is a badly written program, but a stable OS isn't brought down by bad software. Windows has a rep of being unstable because it *is* unstable.
Why is being proprietary a feature?
It isn't a feature for consumers, but it is a very important feature for potential investors. I've met with venture capitalists on two occassions and the first words out of their mouths were "Is your technology patented?"
Umm, easy access cases were available for PC's long before Apple ever incorporated them. I remember buying a case for a 486DX-33 that had a hinged door built into the side.
Really? Apple has incorporated them since 1987, with the Mac II.
Of course the Apple ][ I used in 1981 had a pop out plastic cover and no stupid screws. Never been a Mac person, but the Apple ]['s had such cases since before the IBM PC even existed.
Maybe Microsoft claims that open source is unamerican, but clearly they don't really believe it. I know someone personally who works on MS Office, and according to him, perl (which is open source last time I checked) is used at Microsoft to write the equivilent of a "makefile" to build Office -- Visual Studio just can't handle such a large project.
If you think 1984 is a love story, you have missed Orwell's point. Read "Animal Farm" or my favorite, the non-fictional "Homage to Catalonia" to get Orwell's true point.
Does it sounds like 1984
Not really. 1984 postulated a particular dystopia -- namely that Stalinism circa 1948 (oh, wasn't Orwell *so* clever in reversing the last two digits of the year in which he wrote the novel?) would become global. Today the problem isn't anti-capitalistic dictatorships -- the problem is that large corporations can subvert democracy. If you want a fictional precedent, William Gibson comes much closer to today's reality than George Orwell.
Absolutely. Some people maybe think Cygwin is not so good because they tried it a couple of years ago when it was slow and didn't have Xfree support. Those people should try it again. Performance is so much better and having an local X desktop is very cool indeed.
Does anyone remember ?Girders and Panels [ultranet.com]??
I had totally forgotten about those. Yeah, I had got the "Bridge and Highway" set for Christmas in 1977.
Hey remember Micronauts
Yep, far more interesting than Star Wars figs, but without a movie tie-in, they were doomed.
Frankly, I doubt this claim. Can you substantiate it?
Certainly, in the sense of giving you quotes from various sources, such as the well respected Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. But probably you'll just dismiss it as biased, so what's the use? How many civillian causulties do *you* think occurred anyhow?
Some of the Mujahadin have joined the Taliban, but many more are with the Northern Alliance.
All the more reason not to support the Northern Alliance. Bin Laden was once one of the Mujahadin himself. The US has a habit of supporting people like Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, that end up becoming the next enemy.
Huh?? Only time will tell, I suppose, but if you'd bother to take the time to research our military actions over the last ten years, I think you would find that we work pretty hard to avoid civilian casualties.
Despite all the fuss about "smart bombs" and the like, the US still managed to kill about 10,000 Iraqi civillians in the Gulf War. Oh well, it was in the name of democra...,er, corrupt ruling family of Kuwait.
I suspect that we, as Americans, probably place more value on the lives of Afghan civilians than the Taliban does.
Perhaps, but where did this nasty Taliban come from? The US trained and funded the thugs that later became the Taliban (and Bin Laden, I might add) when they were fighting Soviet troops. Reminds one of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" doesn't it?
Cute. Except that the error in that analogy is that both sides in your fistfight can hit equally hard. In reality, the events of September 11th, as tragic as they were, were an insignificant blow to the US. The US is far more powerful than Bin Laden and his supporters, and I'm sure more Afghani civillians will be killed than were killed in the WTC. Will this cause anything close to the media circus that occurred over the the WTC deaths? Heck no.
Sounds like your schools suffered a cheap conversion from that insane "open" concept that was popular in the 1960's. But the school the article is about doesn't just have cardboard internal walls -- the whole thing is mostly cardboard.
Emacs has had a vi-emulation mode for ages. Has anyone done an emacs emulation mode for vim?
Larry says
`Let me ask you. There are two different airlines. Airline A says before you board that airplane you prove you are who you say you are. Airline B, no problem. Anyone who wants the price of a ticket, they can go on that airline. Which airplane do you get on?''
I know Larry thinks this is a rhetorical question to which A is the obvious answer, but personally, if it would make things faster and less bureaucratic, I'd go with B myself. The simple fact is that hijacking is a really, really, really, infrequent occassion. There are far more probable ways to get yourself killed that merit more worry.
What's the story with LinDVD? If it's not vapor, why doesn't Intervideo sell it to consumers (as they do in fact for WinDVD)? Xine and Videolan work quite well for watching movies, but it would be nice to have a player that can interpret the menus, special features, etc.
Hmm -- In SF "psionic powers" are rather common. That's just another name for magic, if you think about it. If someone did a search and replace on a Harry Potter book and called every example of magic "psionics", nobody would disagree with the SF label, now would they?
Jonathan
Disclaimer: I'm not an HP fan, although I've only read the first book, and according to some here they do get better.
Perhaps I'm being thick here, but isn't it kind of obvious that any available bandwidth will be used up eventually? How can we have "too much" fiber?
Well, the question is not whether it will be used up eventually, but whether it it will be used up before technological innovation makes the current infrastructure obsolete.
It's not fair to compare a great CLI with a crappy GUI. Assuming they're both good examples of their kind, then the GUI wins.
For you, maybe. I consider myself open-minded and have tried lots of different GUI IDEs on many platforms. I generally try to live with using them for about a week and then get frustrated by their limitations and return to Emacs and make, which fortunately have been ported to nearly every OS.
Add it through the scripting interface. You did know that good GUI applications are scriptable, right?
The set of good GUI apps by your definition must be pretty small then. Most GUI apps aren't very customizable at all. And even the ones that are generally have their own programming language, and who has the time to learn some proprietory language for every app?
A "Remove Objects" menu item is a lot easier to use for either the novice or expert user than "find . -name '*.o' -exec rm {} \;". Common operations should be built in to the system
I agree -- common takes should have shortcuts in any system, whether GUI or CLI. But it is just a fact that everyone works in different ways. What is common for you may be uncommon for me and vice versa. It is hardly any wonder that UNIX and its CLI remain popular among researchers, who by definition perform tasks nobody before has done.
BTW, I was under the impression the actual way to do this is "make clean"....)
That's how I would do it normally in my own projects -- but that only works if I've written a command line to run for the clean option in the makefile -- a makefile is really just a script of sorts.