modded as funny, but as an example.. I grew up using really nothing but MS software (I think Wordperfect instead of Word, but it was just as unstable and just as inclined to do things you never asked it to). Nobody taught me to use linux/unix (shit, it would have been a task:), nobody even told me there were alternatives to the MS software.
So why do I use linux? It was mentioned somewhere, found out about it, and every time I had an MS program crash on me (several times a day, nobody's joking about what the programmers were smoking at work) I made a note to try out linux. I think originally I tried it in 1998, but thanks to several reasons (it hated my monitor, it did kind a suck back in 1998, and I was like 11 years old at the time:) I went back to windows. But no matter how many upgrades people went through (and I was never the one paying for the software, so price wasn't a selling point) it was still assfucked. to cut a long story.. kind of less long, some time I tried linux again. the point is, no matter the fact I was taught exclusively on MS systems (in fact, probably because I was always using them and they were always wanging themselves up), I now would rather die (or at least, write the paper by hand) than use MS Office and all that junk. this doesn't worry me much, as long as people are still aware that there's alternative software out there.. sure, it's not perfect, but there's no way it's inferior to MS's crud.
If he's at "Inquirer Labs US," why does he call them "$!#£@*rs?" Wouldn't that require a £ on his keyboard? Why the hell did I notice that or even begin to care?
Problem #1: it won't work because they're a bunch of incompetant clowns.
Sorry, but MS have proved themselves again and again to be incapable of making something that works. I don't trust them with a £1,000 computer, let alone a £150,000 house. I'm sure everyone here has had Windows crash for them at least once. Losing a letter to the bank is a pain in the ass, but imagine losing a letter from the bank because your mail server's disk crashed (okay, not a MS-specific problem, but it's a valid concern), or not being able to eat because your oven got a broken barcode and decided it was a fridge? And just *think* of the potential for viruses.
Sure, you can simulate a table with four corners and a wood texture, but what if you try to set fire to it? What if you spill hot water on it, what if you stump out a fag end on it? What if you go at it with a saw? What if you drop a hippo on it? What if you wire it up to the mains, what if you bang a nail into it, what if you drive a bus over it? Can you even *imagine* trying to make your fake table react to all these things in the proper way? You've *got* to get down to the lowest level, because otherwise the simulation simply won't be complete.
Do we have to go through basic grammar again? "It's" is a contraction of "it is." The correct possessive from is "its." I knew this when I was eight years old.
I find Python syntax just looks crazy.. it's like a book with no punctuation. You can see the meaning if you look hard enough, but without any seperators it's much more difficult to read. In any good language you'll spend more time reading it than writing it (solving problems vs. implementing the solutions), so the time gained by only having to tab is lost by constantly having to work out what the fuck is happening.
Seriously, there must be some kind of organic way to kill the weeds, if you can get this huge robot to identify them. Just replace the weedkiller with flames!
Consult with the Britts and the Aussies. The three of us can decide what benefits us most and we go from there.
No consideration need be made for Europe.
I'll remind you Britain is *in* Europe. As is Spain, who have come out in support of the war. While you're there, why not consult the rest of the "Coalition of the Willing" - wait, do they even *have* mobile phone networks?
Usually, specs aren't newsworther - but these particular specs *have* been subject to a hell of a lot of controversy, and concern a topic most people here are interested in filesharing (free porn/music/movies). The fact that it's taken so long to get these released has pissed off a number of people already.
I buy most hardware low-cost at computer fairs, as I'm sure most people here do. There will always be shops and places that sell non-crippled hardware, same as there are shops that sell non-chart music. Hardware which isn't somehow crippled isn't illegal, and I doubt it would ever become law (except maybe in the States, with their current administration of clowns).
Not at all
on
RMS Turns 50
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That'd be like, Home Depot start building an entire house from the top down, but before they reach the foundations, they find another guy building a house from the ground up. If they put their house on his foundations, it's hardly "mostly his house".
But besides, the software industry is quite unlike the contruction industry (ever try to burn a house onto a CD and give it to a friend?), so the whole analogy is flawed. Put it this way: the GNU project started about 1985 (86? 84? sometime around then), while Linux originally began in 1991. It's hardly the same as your analogy, where Linus did most of the work building GNU/Linux, and the FSF just stood their handing him the occasional compiler and driver. Look at code size, look at the amount of time taken, look at the number of people involved, there's far more GNU code in GNU/Linux than there is kernel code.
You can't really use a service provided free by a company that wants to make money, and expect to not see a single advert. Spam happens, and it's obviously profitable because it's still happening. Advertising *pays* for Hotmail - while it's certainly not right to spam registered, paying users of their software (I've got no idea if this happens, but it wouldn't surprise me), anyone who sees the words "FREE STUFF!!! ENTER EMAIL ADDRESS" and expects not to be spammed is.. you know, a little slow in the realisation department.
I'd prefer to talk to the me in year 2 or year 3, so aged about 7 or 8. I'd like to say, "Okay, you're clever, don't stop being clever, but you know fuck all about the world. Don't learn it the hard way. Sure, in eight years you'll be able to stand up to the bullies, but now they're twice your size, and you'll never really fight them off. Don't be too different from everyone else, and don't be too blind or trusting."
But would this actually make a difference? Sure, it'd have made year 4 a whole lot less painful, but that was eight years ago. Would I be a better person if I hadn't gone through that?
I mean, I'd like the me from a week from now to pop back and tell me if I'll be successful with this chick on Monday. But, hey, is missing out on some wholesome rejection going to hurt me?
I'd like the me from six years from now to advise me on career choices, to tell me if I end up failing the rest of my GCSE's through laziness and working as a meat packer for the rest of my life. But if I knew I was going to do well, would I put in enough effort? Without going into a bunch of theories on time travel, would I fail because I was too sure I would succeed?
In my case, being picked on in primary school has made just enjoy taking the piss out of the even geekier kids (you know, the D table) - rejection never fails to get me moping around uselessly, and I've so far proved myself excellent at judging how much laziness I can get away with without actually getting low grades. So I guess, it probably would be good if I could travel back in time and tell myself all these things. Curse this stupid non-time travel age!
This is a complete load of shite. A completely useless program, though of course it makes smart business sense - what's the most effective way to make people buy a product? Make their children want it. Microsoft wants to get into yet another market, and they're doing it by introducing a completely useless product. What's next, a little image of a paperclip that displays error messages in little speech bubbles and searches through help files? Oh, wait.
"...creates a peer-to-peer social group in which people can chat, share photos, listen to music and meet friends"
Most of my friends don't have 'net access at all, but I also know a bunch of people who I've only ever spoken with over the internet. In fact, there's only one person who I see on a regular basis and chat with over IM. But even if all my friends were geeks, I can do all those things already. I run an OpenBSD system, and a combination of Gaim, FTP, gtk-gnutella, and some webspace courtesy of Webslum, I can share music, share photographs, talk to people and meet other people. With my other friends, I share music via the ancient technique of "CD burning" and chat via "spoken word" and occasionally "telephone".
"The ability to form personal, ad hoc communities and perform shared tasks means this product will have a lot of appeal in the 13- to-24-year-old market"
I can do that already. It's called my "contact list".
"Another feature, known as Winks, lets one customer send animation to everyone in the group. "Winks is an activity where they can basically 'wink' at someone across the room, but (you) do it virtually--flirt with them," Savage said."
What the fuck? I can't even begin to make sense of this passage. Why on earth would I want to send something to every person I know at once? Especially not some kind of "animation". I have no desire to "flirt" to a bunch of people I can't see.
"Group members also can share photos and, more importantly, listen to music available in a common playlist."
Me too! I have several CD's copied off my friends, and they have more of mine. I've also put together a bunch of compilations from MP3's I've got off the internet (usually bands that are scared of releasing stuff in England or where there's just no hope of buying it out here in the countryside, and have been recomended to me by friends in other countries, or that I've recorded off late-night radio shows, or whatever). Friends of mine have copies of them. We listen to them in school, which would be kind of difficult if they were on my computer at home.
Over the internet, I don't need some special program to tell me what they're listening to - they can use an instant messanger to say to me "Today I am listening to Half Man Half Biscuit" and I can say "That's funny, so am I! Fred Titmus!", or whatever.
I could go on. This is essentially a completely useless program - especially to me, a person who lives in the middle of nowhere on a
There seem to be a bunch of pointless arbitrary limits. Why 10 people? While I can imagine it useful as a tool for bullying ("sorry, we'd love to speak to you, but we're up to our limit of ten people! Isn't life a bitch?"), is there a rational reason I can't have, say, 11 friends?
Why a playlist of 60 songs? I have three compilation CDR's with more than that on, and that's just scraping the surface of my music collection (and of course, ignoring the hundreds of pounds-worth of music I've paid for legally and my friends have also paid for legally).
You'd think I was some grumbling old man who remembers when music sharing was done by gathering around the gramophone, but I'm a 16-year old who uses the internet for many social purposes. And I, one of the so-called "NetGen" (okay, so probably the average "NetGen" person doesn't spend most of their free time coding computer games, but it's their definition, not mine) can recognise this for the pointless bullshit it is.
Slashdot Mirror
--Ever heard of "text comes out unreadable because it munges like 16 pixels into one letter and doesn't take text into account?"
modded as funny, but as an example.. I grew up using really nothing but MS software (I think Wordperfect instead of Word, but it was just as unstable and just as inclined to do things you never asked it to). Nobody taught me to use linux/unix (shit, it would have been a task :), nobody even told me there were alternatives to the MS software.
:) I went back to windows. But no matter how many upgrades people went through (and I was never the one paying for the software, so price wasn't a selling point) it was still assfucked. to cut a long story.. kind of less long, some time I tried linux again. the point is, no matter the fact I was taught exclusively on MS systems (in fact, probably because I was always using them and they were always wanging themselves up), I now would rather die (or at least, write the paper by hand) than use MS Office and all that junk. this doesn't worry me much, as long as people are still aware that there's alternative software out there.. sure, it's not perfect, but there's no way it's inferior to MS's crud.
So why do I use linux? It was mentioned somewhere, found out about it, and every time I had an MS program crash on me (several times a day, nobody's joking about what the programmers were smoking at work) I made a note to try out linux. I think originally I tried it in 1998, but thanks to several reasons (it hated my monitor, it did kind a suck back in 1998, and I was like 11 years old at the time
id did "action" buttons to begin with. They were the first to just have you bump into stuff though, IIRC
That's less secure than the Slashdot poll system!
If he's at "Inquirer Labs US," why does he call them "$!#£@*rs?" Wouldn't that require a £ on his keyboard? Why the hell did I notice that or even begin to care?
Problem #1: it won't work because they're a bunch of incompetant clowns. Sorry, but MS have proved themselves again and again to be incapable of making something that works. I don't trust them with a £1,000 computer, let alone a £150,000 house. I'm sure everyone here has had Windows crash for them at least once. Losing a letter to the bank is a pain in the ass, but imagine losing a letter from the bank because your mail server's disk crashed (okay, not a MS-specific problem, but it's a valid concern), or not being able to eat because your oven got a broken barcode and decided it was a fridge? And just *think* of the potential for viruses.
One of these.
Sure, you can simulate a table with four corners and a wood texture, but what if you try to set fire to it? What if you spill hot water on it, what if you stump out a fag end on it? What if you go at it with a saw? What if you drop a hippo on it? What if you wire it up to the mains, what if you bang a nail into it, what if you drive a bus over it? Can you even *imagine* trying to make your fake table react to all these things in the proper way? You've *got* to get down to the lowest level, because otherwise the simulation simply won't be complete.
And I can't spell "form" :)
Do we have to go through basic grammar again? "It's" is a contraction of "it is." The correct possessive from is "its." I knew this when I was eight years old.
I find Python syntax just looks crazy.. it's like a book with no punctuation. You can see the meaning if you look hard enough, but without any seperators it's much more difficult to read. In any good language you'll spend more time reading it than writing it (solving problems vs. implementing the solutions), so the time gained by only having to tab is lost by constantly having to work out what the fuck is happening.
Seriously, there must be some kind of organic way to kill the weeds, if you can get this huge robot to identify them. Just replace the weedkiller with flames!
Seriously, use your common sense here.
Something like.. Fresco.
Consult with the Britts and the Aussies. The three of us can decide what benefits us most and we go from there. No consideration need be made for Europe.
I'll remind you Britain is *in* Europe. As is Spain, who have come out in support of the war. While you're there, why not consult the rest of the "Coalition of the Willing" - wait, do they even *have* mobile phone networks?
Usually, specs aren't newsworther - but these particular specs *have* been subject to a hell of a lot of controversy, and concern a topic most people here are interested in filesharing (free porn/music/movies). The fact that it's taken so long to get these released has pissed off a number of people already.
I buy most hardware low-cost at computer fairs, as I'm sure most people here do. There will always be shops and places that sell non-crippled hardware, same as there are shops that sell non-chart music. Hardware which isn't somehow crippled isn't illegal, and I doubt it would ever become law (except maybe in the States, with their current administration of clowns).
vudujava writes "c|net is reporting that a new free, web based email service is opening it's doors today.
it's -> its
Hell, are the editors good for *anything* these days? If you can't write properly, don't bloody write at all.
Ken Silverman has a program that will render a globe, albiet a little more primitive than Keyhole's. In fact, its use is more for stargazing than earthgazing, but there you go.
That'd be like, Home Depot start building an entire house from the top down, but before they reach the foundations, they find another guy building a house from the ground up. If they put their house on his foundations, it's hardly "mostly his house".
But besides, the software industry is quite unlike the contruction industry (ever try to burn a house onto a CD and give it to a friend?), so the whole analogy is flawed. Put it this way: the GNU project started about 1985 (86? 84? sometime around then), while Linux originally began in 1991. It's hardly the same as your analogy, where Linus did most of the work building GNU/Linux, and the FSF just stood their handing him the occasional compiler and driver. Look at code size, look at the amount of time taken, look at the number of people involved, there's far more GNU code in GNU/Linux than there is kernel code.
"why are people so opposed to Flash on the net?" Because it doesn't run on my operating system, while any good open source package will.
You can't really use a service provided free by a company that wants to make money, and expect to not see a single advert. Spam happens, and it's obviously profitable because it's still happening. Advertising *pays* for Hotmail - while it's certainly not right to spam registered, paying users of their software (I've got no idea if this happens, but it wouldn't surprise me), anyone who sees the words "FREE STUFF!!! ENTER EMAIL ADDRESS" and expects not to be spammed is.. you know, a little slow in the realisation department.
I knew that there were plenty of good bands that go indie, but I never thought they actually earned more than the commercial guys.
I'd prefer to talk to the me in year 2 or year 3, so aged about 7 or 8. I'd like to say, "Okay, you're clever, don't stop being clever, but you know fuck all about the world. Don't learn it the hard way. Sure, in eight years you'll be able to stand up to the bullies, but now they're twice your size, and you'll never really fight them off. Don't be too different from everyone else, and don't be too blind or trusting."
But would this actually make a difference? Sure, it'd have made year 4 a whole lot less painful, but that was eight years ago. Would I be a better person if I hadn't gone through that?
I mean, I'd like the me from a week from now to pop back and tell me if I'll be successful with this chick on Monday. But, hey, is missing out on some wholesome rejection going to hurt me?
I'd like the me from six years from now to advise me on career choices, to tell me if I end up failing the rest of my GCSE's through laziness and working as a meat packer for the rest of my life. But if I knew I was going to do well, would I put in enough effort? Without going into a bunch of theories on time travel, would I fail because I was too sure I would succeed?
In my case, being picked on in primary school has made just enjoy taking the piss out of the even geekier kids (you know, the D table) - rejection never fails to get me moping around uselessly, and I've so far proved myself excellent at judging how much laziness I can get away with without actually getting low grades. So I guess, it probably would be good if I could travel back in time and tell myself all these things. Curse this stupid non-time travel age!
This is a complete load of shite. A completely useless program, though of course it makes smart business sense - what's the most effective way to make people buy a product? Make their children want it. Microsoft wants to get into yet another market, and they're doing it by introducing a completely useless product. What's next, a little image of a paperclip that displays error messages in little speech bubbles and searches through help files? Oh, wait.
"...creates a peer-to-peer social group in which people can chat, share photos, listen to music and meet friends"
Most of my friends don't have 'net access at all, but I also know a bunch of people who I've only ever spoken with over the internet. In fact, there's only one person who I see on a regular basis and chat with over IM. But even if all my friends were geeks, I can do all those things already. I run an OpenBSD system, and a combination of Gaim, FTP, gtk-gnutella, and some webspace courtesy of Webslum, I can share music, share photographs, talk to people and meet other people. With my other friends, I share music via the ancient technique of "CD burning" and chat via "spoken word" and occasionally "telephone".
"The ability to form personal, ad hoc communities and perform shared tasks means this product will have a lot of appeal in the 13- to-24-year-old market"
I can do that already. It's called my "contact list".
"Another feature, known as Winks, lets one customer send animation to everyone in the group. "Winks is an activity where they can basically 'wink' at someone across the room, but (you) do it virtually--flirt with them," Savage said."
What the fuck? I can't even begin to make sense of this passage. Why on earth would I want to send something to every person I know at once? Especially not some kind of "animation". I have no desire to "flirt" to a bunch of people I can't see.
"Group members also can share photos and, more importantly, listen to music available in a common playlist."
Me too! I have several CD's copied off my friends, and they have more of mine. I've also put together a bunch of compilations from MP3's I've got off the internet (usually bands that are scared of releasing stuff in England or where there's just no hope of buying it out here in the countryside, and have been recomended to me by friends in other countries, or that I've recorded off late-night radio shows, or whatever). Friends of mine have copies of them. We listen to them in school, which would be kind of difficult if they were on my computer at home.
Over the internet, I don't need some special program to tell me what they're listening to - they can use an instant messanger to say to me "Today I am listening to Half Man Half Biscuit" and I can say "That's funny, so am I! Fred Titmus!", or whatever.
I could go on. This is essentially a completely useless program - especially to me, a person who lives in the middle of nowhere on a
There seem to be a bunch of pointless arbitrary limits. Why 10 people? While I can imagine it useful as a tool for bullying ("sorry, we'd love to speak to you, but we're up to our limit of ten people! Isn't life a bitch?"), is there a rational reason I can't have, say, 11 friends?
Why a playlist of 60 songs? I have three compilation CDR's with more than that on, and that's just scraping the surface of my music collection (and of course, ignoring the hundreds of pounds-worth of music I've paid for legally and my friends have also paid for legally).
You'd think I was some grumbling old man who remembers when music sharing was done by gathering around the gramophone, but I'm a 16-year old who uses the internet for many social purposes. And I, one of the so-called "NetGen" (okay, so probably the average "NetGen" person doesn't spend most of their free time coding computer games, but it's their definition, not mine) can recognise this for the pointless bullshit it is.