Going on my experience of the costs and reliability of public transport, this game will take three weeks and will cost about fifty quid per participant. That's if the drivers aren't on strike. And you don't get murdered at the bus stop.
Bruce Campbell is a guy who actively does Q&A with audience memebers. When's the last time you've heard of any multi-million dollar actor do that?
Multi-million dollar actors already have fame and attention, they don't need to pander to the fans. The same with Will Wheaton, they don't get any attention so they have to actively seek it.
Not really. No-one cares about the underlying technology, the results are just the same (i.e. awful) as any other search engine. The reason people use Google is out of habit, and because it's an easy address and non-cluttered page. That's it.
That page ranking algorithm is no better than any others, you still get a load of commercial crap up first, with the decent results buried several pages in.
Once Google are punished for click-fraud, and the advertisers realise they're not getting much for their money, the bubble collapses.
Google hasn't made any money from 'amazing' software. Google's business plan is very simple:
1. They dominate the search engine market to get a load of hits. 2. Other people then buy advertising space to advertise on those hits. 3. Profit.
That's it. Nothing about innovation, nothing to do with all their half-baked web services. Alarming rate? They've done nothing for ages, their mail client has stagnated for months, the search engine results are getting worse, and the only new thing is some map service, which will probably just be another place to serve adverts.
Stock market valuations are largely arbitrary, it's a glorified bookmakers. Google isn't worth that much money, the P/E will tell you that. It's on a bubble of hype, like the dot-com. People will keep putting money in as long as Google's fashionable, then when they realise the profits aren't going up and the company's going absolutely nowhere, it all comes crashing down.
It's so trivial to switch to another search engine that Google's revenue could dry up tomorrow. If the next version of Windows comes with built-in search functionality which renders third-party search engines obsolete, then what? All those PHDs have done nothing for the company, other than taking money.
Pile of shit? What are you talking about. I've bought plenty of DVDs from there and they've been top quality. No faults, no mistakes, what on earth are you talking abuot?
What price do I pay? Are they going to come round asking for more money?
You conspiracy theorists and scare-mongers are hilarious. Get a life.
In that case, why did they market and sell it as a game? Surely that's fraud? I know I'd be pissed off if I paid a huge amount for a game just find out it's merely a demo for an engine.
They should have said on the box: "Warning: this game is less fun than tetris, and only has nice graphics that get old in 5 minutes."
Personally, I think if a game's good enough, it's immersive no matter how crap the graphics are. Eventually you get used to them, and when you're really involved in the game you don't notice the framerates or shoddy lighting. With a shallow game like Doom 3 all there is to think about is the graphics, and then you're going to notice all the imperfections because that's what you're playing for. And once the novelty of the graphics wears off, you've nothing left.
I disagree. I'm thinking all the tech speak is comfusing you.
It doesn't confuse me at all, I understand it, except the words he's made up. But just because I understand it doesn't make it any good. I could mention some piece of technology in every sentence but it wouldn't make it enjoyable to read. 99% of it doesn't contribute to the story, it gets in the way of it.
First person, I didn't mean that, I meant 'present tense'. It's not first person at all, I do that sometimes, write something completely unrelated that I'm subconciously thinking rather than what I'm actually writing about. But yeah it's a gimmick. There's a reason books are nearly always written in past tense. This present tense gets old fast, and once the novelty wears off it's just irritating.
Sounds like you're trying to imitate a professional critic who thinks the way to seem professional is to hate everything.
No, the way to be a professional critic is to criticise things that are bad and to praise things that are good. This book is not good. It seems that these electronically-distributed books aren't all that up to scratch, and it's nothing to do with being a snob.
Face the facts: if this book wasn't sci-fi, no-one would be interested in it. Good books transcend the genre, bad books don't, they're only of interest to fans of the genre, and they'll read it even if it's a shit book just because they like the subject-matter.
Imagine if someone wrote a book about a computer programmer, who spent all his days downloading MP3s and configuring Linux. It could be the most boring book in the world, with nothing happening, terrible writing, full of typos, stilted unnatural dialogue, no interesting characters, the main character a self-indulgent potrayal of what the author wishes he was like, pretty much the worst book in the world, but all the geeks would love it because it's about Linux and programming. That's the sort of thing we're dealing with here.
Although nothing like Known Space/Ringworld, the writing reminds me of Larry Niven in his prime.
In which case, I don't look forward to reading books by Larry Niven.
I've read it and I'm not really impressed. For a start it's in first-person, which strikes me as being a gimmick, and gimmicks are usually a sign of a lack of ideas, or a lack of confidence in the material by the author. A good book doesn't need gimmicks.
Secondly, the style of writing is really bad. It reminds me of that book which was mentioned in a Slashdot article the other week, that 'The Escapist' thing. The same school-boy level of writing. Over-describing everything, throwing in adjectives and technical jargon in every other word just to appeal to geeks, without any of it actually contributing to the story. In fact there's so much jargon, by the time you've got to the next sentence you've forgotten what was in the last one. Something about neurons or patents or heads-up displays or something.
It pisses me off when people write stuff that's full of buzzwords rather than filling it with any actual content. It's like management speak, but in a novel. The author thinks that if he mentions enough technology, all the geeks will like it, even if it's not very well written.
We should encourage people who can write, not just mindlessly buy books because it's 'sci fi' or whatever.
Although I approve of the distribution model, even though ebooks are crap. It's a much more democratic process than going entirely through print.
I wouldn't want to take $200 worth of fragile electronics to places where I read. Like at work, or in the garden, or wherever. Things like that get stolen, I can leave a book outside whilst I go inside to get something and if it's robbed (which it won't because people don't steal books, at least the ones I read), then it's only a few quid to replace it.
And it only takes one scratch or spillage or dropping to ruin that $200. A book can take all sorts of abuse, like months in the bottom of my bag. Yeah it'll be ragged but the writing will still be there, in nice high-dpi text, rather than jagged letters on a shitty LCD screen.
Books are much easier to read, in far more conditions, than even the best e-book reader. Also you're in complete control of the pages, rather than just pressing buttons, which psychologically is an important factor.
I for one don't trust computers, they're unreliable, bulky, expensive and over-engineered.
I'm sure that all the millions of dollars they lost due to your boycott are more than offset by the sales gained through all these useful things like reminders and one-click buying.
And I find it really hilarious how you can boycott Amazon for their shady practices, then recommend Ebay as an alternative. Ebay make Amazon look like Jesus and his disciples.
Amazon are a good company, and should be supported. They provide a quality service and good prices. I couldn't care less about the patent business, I'm not interested in the legal and technical background to the places I shop. I'm a customer not a lawyer.
Do you thoroughly investigate the business practices of everyone you do business with? If you don't shop at places where they don't do everything completely ethically and above board, you're going to have to be self sufficient.
The only reason Amazon gets so much flack is because on Slashdot it's fashionable to bash big corporations, unless it's the flavour of the month (i.e. Google, Apple, BBC)
He's got a point about the apps. Just look in the typical KDE menu. It's be quicker to read War and Peace.
I've got eight text editors, fourteen media players, nineteen development environments and tools, fourteen image viewers, seven graphic editing programs (the Gimp appears twice in the same menu), the Internet section has thirty-four entries, seventeen in the office section, thirty in the system section and FORTY-SIX in the utilities section.
And with all those menu entries, they didn't have room for open office, so I had to manually make an icon for it.
Someone really needs to think about what the hell is going on here. But they'll probably work on some transparency features instead.
That OK/Cancel thing might not be so bad if it was consistent across Linux. But it only happens on a very small subset of programmes, meaning if you get used to it, as soon as you run another programme, it's all reversed again.
Linux needs more consistency, not less. But just as CSS is all about profit, OSS is all about ego.
KDE is far from user-friendly. Yeah, most of the ingredients are there, they're just all over the place. Dialog boxes and windows are bloated and disorganised. The menus are cluttered and messy. Even the smallest things take up the entire screen, it's as if the developers are on 2000x1500 monitors and think everyone else is.
And even if you set up some nice colour scheme that's easy on the eyes, it's all for nothing if when you run gnumeric or open office or gv it comes up with a completely different theme, for no apparent reason.
Instead of adding more bloat and worthless features like transparency and all that crap, why don't they clean up and sort out what they've already done.
Development should have two stages:
1. Implementation. 2. Refinement.
You make something, then smooth the edges and perfect it. A lot of open source programmers only seem to do the first stage, and instead of moving onto the second, they go back to the first stage and implement even more stuff, so you end up with thousands of half-decent apps that just about get the job done but it's like they were rushed out as soon as they got it to compile.
I suppose coding new fancy features is more enjoyable than thinking about making the interface more congruent and consistent, and optimising code. But then they're not paid for it so they'll do what's more enjoyable rather than what needs doing.
What operating system has a gigabyte when it starts up, with no applications running? It's going to be a lot less than that.
As for hardware changes, well you can do a 'full' boot for that, but 99 times out of 100, a resume from hibernation makes the most sense.
This paradigm of detecting and setting up everything from scratch every time the computer is loaded is a throwback to the days of sluggish servers, not fast modern desktop computers.
Classic formulation: if you're not interested in adopting the Unix mindset (text-based text processing, pipes, small well-defined tools, a de-emphasis on graphical user interfaces, non-data-processing devices, etc.) then why choose a Unix operating system?
Classic formulation: If Linux is about text-based tools, and a de-emphasis on a graphical interface and user-friendliness, why push it as an alternative to Windows?
I can honestly tell you that for any number of large jobs in my workplace, two or three commands at a Linux command line replace either dozens of labor hours, dozens of development hours
Which part of 'Linux isn't Ready for the Desktop' have you misunderstood? A home user wanting to play some games or to write an essay doesn't care about command lines or hardcore processing or development hours...
What I don't understand is why desktop users who have no need of the "Unix philosophy" of data processing insist on complaining about an operating system that was designed to move DATA (not icons or mouse pointers) around efficiently.
In which case, why are people saying that Linux is a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop, if it's one those old text-based data processing systems?
As a Linux user, I can definitely tell it's still somewhat stuck in the past. The underlying system is based on outdated concepts. My modem is connected on/dev/ttyS0. Guess what tty means? Anything to do with a modern desktop computer? Not even close. Poking around in the Linux configuration is like going back in time twenty years. I suppose/dev/com2 or/dev/serial2 would have been too obvious for the elite hackers who use Linux. And good luck finding your USB stick (hint: it's not/dev/usb, it's actually/dev/sda1. Of course that makes perfect sense.)
A lot of the programs and tools assume you're proficient with the command line. Therefore a lot of documentation talks about commands, and there aren't always enough graphical configuration tools to get things done. For a server this might be acceptable, but for a system with ambitions of replacing Windows, it's not.
And as for X windows, that's another can of worms in itself. It's a technology which has barely progressed from the days when people ran programs by putting command lines in the.xinitrc. So when X started the xterms and a clock would open up at different spaces on the screen, with no window manager. It's progressed, but all that ancient crap is still there. When you boot X you get a lovely grey static background. And when it crashes it dumps you at the command line.
Resolution changes don't work. The much-heralded 'Ctrl+Alt+plus' messes things up completely. It doesn't actually resize the windows appropriately, it gives you a small viewport on a larger screen, so when you move the mouse to the sides of the screen it shifts along. This is beyond incompetent. I don't think there's a way to change colour-depth on the fly either.
Installing the nvidia driver is a pain in the arse. You need the Linux kernel source installed, for some reason. Then you need to close X and use the command line. Yet, that's right, in the 21st century, on a supposedly 'desktop' operating system, you need to use the command line to install a graphics driver. Then you get to unzip it with tar and gzip, and run scripts. And when it's installed, make sure you don't install any kernel modules, as they wipe out the nvidia driver, so you get to install it all over again.
Linux is usable for people like me who are willing to fuck about with it, but it's a million miles away from being ready for prime time. It's just too entrenched in the ancient Unix mindset, with none of the developers willing to make a clean break in case it upsets the dinosaurs.
I think by customisation, he means useful things, not graphical fluff. Everyone knows that enlightenment is a barely-usable eye-candy demonstration.
Yeah, Linux is configurable, but people want to configure things without playing with obscure files and commands. People want obvious things to work by default rather than having to fuck about to get it to work.
Whether you can change desktops with the scrollwheel is so insignificant it doesn't matter at all.
1. How much freedom have you sacrificed by installing a driver? I mean, compare a computer without a driver, and a computer with a closed-source driver. How does the former give you more freedom than the latter. Installing a driver doesn't take anything away. You can still read 'ls.c' if you want.
2. Having your computer actually work is more than a 'little convenience'. Unless you think that using your hardware is a luxury, a mere trifle which isn't as important as peering through source code of software you don't understand anyway. For people in the real world, the whole point of a computer is that it works, and we can use it to get our work done, not to read source code for the hell of it. A computer without working hardware is useful only as a doorstop.
3. It's not a learning curve. Having your hardware not working is a learning WALL. You can't learn anything when your computer doesn't do anything.
4. There's no benefit to learning something which should be automatic. Do you still mill your own wheat between rocks? There's nothing to be gained by spending hours searching documentation just to make your computer sleep when it's supposed to.
In fact, you could say that Google is the equivalent of the record industry:
They have a stranglehold on the market, they don't produce anything, but they control the means of distribution and marketing, therefore they can put themselves in the middle taking profits.
They also only believe in copyright when it suits them.
I wonder what will happen when Google's click-fraud and trademark infringement becomes their downfall, will they follow in the footsteps of their predecessors and start suing people?
That might be a point if they actually worked. I've bought brand new floppy drives and they just don't work. And the disks last about 5 seconds before they're unusable. What a worthless technology. The only reason to keep them around is old driver disks.
Yeah, I meant laid off. I used to say that, but after so much exposure to Slashdot, I've incorporated the American expression 'fired' to mean all sorts of termination of employment.
Fired means termination where someone else will fill the job (UK = sacked), whereas laid off means the position has been removed, i.e. redundancy.
But it's no surprise that this site leads to dumming down. I don't know if I spelt dumming right cos I'm so drunk.
It sounds a lot more like she had done everything he'd asked for and told him that she had nothing more to do. He had the option of finding something else for her to do or laying her off in a professional manner...but instead, he was a total bastard.
Maybe he is a bastard, but then, who isn't? I know I'm a bastard.
Slashdot Mirror
Another reason it will suck:
Going on my experience of the costs and reliability of public transport, this game will take three weeks and will cost about fifty quid per participant. That's if the drivers aren't on strike. And you don't get murdered at the bus stop.
Bruce Campbell is a guy who actively does Q&A with audience memebers. When's the last time you've heard of any multi-million dollar actor do that?
Multi-million dollar actors already have fame and attention, they don't need to pander to the fans. The same with Will Wheaton, they don't get any attention so they have to actively seek it.
So what the hell is Tatooine? I'm afraid I don't know much about planets/suns.
What the fuck does 'Tatooine-like' mean? And what does that have to do with planets and suns? This article is rubbish.
Not really. No-one cares about the underlying technology, the results are just the same (i.e. awful) as any other search engine. The reason people use Google is out of habit, and because it's an easy address and non-cluttered page. That's it.
That page ranking algorithm is no better than any others, you still get a load of commercial crap up first, with the decent results buried several pages in.
Once Google are punished for click-fraud, and the advertisers realise they're not getting much for their money, the bubble collapses.
Google hasn't made any money from 'amazing' software. Google's business plan is very simple:
1. They dominate the search engine market to get a load of hits.
2. Other people then buy advertising space to advertise on those hits.
3. Profit.
That's it. Nothing about innovation, nothing to do with all their half-baked web services. Alarming rate? They've done nothing for ages, their mail client has stagnated for months, the search engine results are getting worse, and the only new thing is some map service, which will probably just be another place to serve adverts.
Stock market valuations are largely arbitrary, it's a glorified bookmakers. Google isn't worth that much money, the P/E will tell you that. It's on a bubble of hype, like the dot-com. People will keep putting money in as long as Google's fashionable, then when they realise the profits aren't going up and the company's going absolutely nowhere, it all comes crashing down.
It's so trivial to switch to another search engine that Google's revenue could dry up tomorrow. If the next version of Windows comes with built-in search functionality which renders third-party search engines obsolete, then what? All those PHDs have done nothing for the company, other than taking money.
Pile of shit? What are you talking about. I've bought plenty of DVDs from there and they've been top quality. No faults, no mistakes, what on earth are you talking abuot?
What price do I pay? Are they going to come round asking for more money?
You conspiracy theorists and scare-mongers are hilarious. Get a life.
In that case, why did they market and sell it as a game? Surely that's fraud? I know I'd be pissed off if I paid a huge amount for a game just find out it's merely a demo for an engine.
They should have said on the box: "Warning: this game is less fun than tetris, and only has nice graphics that get old in 5 minutes."
Personally, I think if a game's good enough, it's immersive no matter how crap the graphics are. Eventually you get used to them, and when you're really involved in the game you don't notice the framerates or shoddy lighting. With a shallow game like Doom 3 all there is to think about is the graphics, and then you're going to notice all the imperfections because that's what you're playing for. And once the novelty of the graphics wears off, you've nothing left.
I disagree. I'm thinking all the tech speak is comfusing you.
It doesn't confuse me at all, I understand it, except the words he's made up. But just because I understand it doesn't make it any good. I could mention some piece of technology in every sentence but it wouldn't make it enjoyable to read. 99% of it doesn't contribute to the story, it gets in the way of it.
First person, I didn't mean that, I meant 'present tense'. It's not first person at all, I do that sometimes, write something completely unrelated that I'm subconciously thinking rather than what I'm actually writing about. But yeah it's a gimmick. There's a reason books are nearly always written in past tense. This present tense gets old fast, and once the novelty wears off it's just irritating.
Sounds like you're trying to imitate a professional critic who thinks the way to seem professional is to hate everything.
No, the way to be a professional critic is to criticise things that are bad and to praise things that are good. This book is not good. It seems that these electronically-distributed books aren't all that up to scratch, and it's nothing to do with being a snob.
Face the facts: if this book wasn't sci-fi, no-one would be interested in it. Good books transcend the genre, bad books don't, they're only of interest to fans of the genre, and they'll read it even if it's a shit book just because they like the subject-matter.
Imagine if someone wrote a book about a computer programmer, who spent all his days downloading MP3s and configuring Linux. It could be the most boring book in the world, with nothing happening, terrible writing, full of typos, stilted unnatural dialogue, no interesting characters, the main character a self-indulgent potrayal of what the author wishes he was like, pretty much the worst book in the world, but all the geeks would love it because it's about Linux and programming. That's the sort of thing we're dealing with here.
Although nothing like Known Space/Ringworld, the writing reminds me of Larry Niven in his prime.
In which case, I don't look forward to reading books by Larry Niven.
I've read it and I'm not really impressed. For a start it's in first-person, which strikes me as being a gimmick, and gimmicks are usually a sign of a lack of ideas, or a lack of confidence in the material by the author. A good book doesn't need gimmicks.
Secondly, the style of writing is really bad. It reminds me of that book which was mentioned in a Slashdot article the other week, that 'The Escapist' thing. The same school-boy level of writing. Over-describing everything, throwing in adjectives and technical jargon in every other word just to appeal to geeks, without any of it actually contributing to the story. In fact there's so much jargon, by the time you've got to the next sentence you've forgotten what was in the last one. Something about neurons or patents or heads-up displays or something.
It pisses me off when people write stuff that's full of buzzwords rather than filling it with any actual content. It's like management speak, but in a novel. The author thinks that if he mentions enough technology, all the geeks will like it, even if it's not very well written.
We should encourage people who can write, not just mindlessly buy books because it's 'sci fi' or whatever.
Although I approve of the distribution model, even though ebooks are crap. It's a much more democratic process than going entirely through print.
I wouldn't want to take $200 worth of fragile electronics to places where I read. Like at work, or in the garden, or wherever. Things like that get stolen, I can leave a book outside whilst I go inside to get something and if it's robbed (which it won't because people don't steal books, at least the ones I read), then it's only a few quid to replace it.
And it only takes one scratch or spillage or dropping to ruin that $200. A book can take all sorts of abuse, like months in the bottom of my bag. Yeah it'll be ragged but the writing will still be there, in nice high-dpi text, rather than jagged letters on a shitty LCD screen.
Books are much easier to read, in far more conditions, than even the best e-book reader. Also you're in complete control of the pages, rather than just pressing buttons, which psychologically is an important factor.
I for one don't trust computers, they're unreliable, bulky, expensive and over-engineered.
I'm sure that all the millions of dollars they lost due to your boycott are more than offset by the sales gained through all these useful things like reminders and one-click buying.
And I find it really hilarious how you can boycott Amazon for their shady practices, then recommend Ebay as an alternative. Ebay make Amazon look like Jesus and his disciples.
Amazon are a good company, and should be supported. They provide a quality service and good prices. I couldn't care less about the patent business, I'm not interested in the legal and technical background to the places I shop. I'm a customer not a lawyer.
Do you thoroughly investigate the business practices of everyone you do business with? If you don't shop at places where they don't do everything completely ethically and above board, you're going to have to be self sufficient.
The only reason Amazon gets so much flack is because on Slashdot it's fashionable to bash big corporations, unless it's the flavour of the month (i.e. Google, Apple, BBC)
He's got a point about the apps. Just look in the typical KDE menu. It's be quicker to read War and Peace.
I've got eight text editors, fourteen media players, nineteen development environments and tools, fourteen image viewers, seven graphic editing programs (the Gimp appears twice in the same menu), the Internet section has thirty-four entries, seventeen in the office section, thirty in the system section and FORTY-SIX in the utilities section.
And with all those menu entries, they didn't have room for open office, so I had to manually make an icon for it.
Someone really needs to think about what the hell is going on here. But they'll probably work on some transparency features instead.
That OK/Cancel thing might not be so bad if it was consistent across Linux. But it only happens on a very small subset of programmes, meaning if you get used to it, as soon as you run another programme, it's all reversed again.
Linux needs more consistency, not less. But just as CSS is all about profit, OSS is all about ego.
KDE is far from user-friendly. Yeah, most of the ingredients are there, they're just all over the place. Dialog boxes and windows are bloated and disorganised. The menus are cluttered and messy. Even the smallest things take up the entire screen, it's as if the developers are on 2000x1500 monitors and think everyone else is.
And even if you set up some nice colour scheme that's easy on the eyes, it's all for nothing if when you run gnumeric or open office or gv it comes up with a completely different theme, for no apparent reason.
Instead of adding more bloat and worthless features like transparency and all that crap, why don't they clean up and sort out what they've already done.
Development should have two stages:
1. Implementation.
2. Refinement.
You make something, then smooth the edges and perfect it. A lot of open source programmers only seem to do the first stage, and instead of moving onto the second, they go back to the first stage and implement even more stuff, so you end up with thousands of half-decent apps that just about get the job done but it's like they were rushed out as soon as they got it to compile.
I suppose coding new fancy features is more enjoyable than thinking about making the interface more congruent and consistent, and optimising code. But then they're not paid for it so they'll do what's more enjoyable rather than what needs doing.
What operating system has a gigabyte when it starts up, with no applications running? It's going to be a lot less than that.
As for hardware changes, well you can do a 'full' boot for that, but 99 times out of 100, a resume from hibernation makes the most sense.
This paradigm of detecting and setting up everything from scratch every time the computer is loaded is a throwback to the days of sluggish servers, not fast modern desktop computers.
Classic formulation: if you're not interested in adopting the Unix mindset (text-based text processing, pipes, small well-defined tools, a de-emphasis on graphical user interfaces, non-data-processing devices, etc.) then why choose a Unix operating system?
/dev/ttyS0. Guess what tty means? Anything to do with a modern desktop computer? Not even close. Poking around in the Linux configuration is like going back in time twenty years. I suppose /dev/com2 or /dev/serial2 would have been too obvious for the elite hackers who use Linux. And good luck finding your USB stick (hint: it's not /dev/usb, it's actually /dev/sda1. Of course that makes perfect sense.)
.xinitrc. So when X started the xterms and a clock would open up at different spaces on the screen, with no window manager. It's progressed, but all that ancient crap is still there. When you boot X you get a lovely grey static background. And when it crashes it dumps you at the command line.
Classic formulation: If Linux is about text-based tools, and a de-emphasis on a graphical interface and user-friendliness, why push it as an alternative to Windows?
I can honestly tell you that for any number of large jobs in my workplace, two or three commands at a Linux command line replace either dozens of labor hours, dozens of development hours
Which part of 'Linux isn't Ready for the Desktop' have you misunderstood? A home user wanting to play some games or to write an essay doesn't care about command lines or hardcore processing or development hours...
What I don't understand is why desktop users who have no need of the "Unix philosophy" of data processing insist on complaining about an operating system that was designed to move DATA (not icons or mouse pointers) around efficiently.
In which case, why are people saying that Linux is a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop, if it's one those old text-based data processing systems?
As a Linux user, I can definitely tell it's still somewhat stuck in the past. The underlying system is based on outdated concepts. My modem is connected on
A lot of the programs and tools assume you're proficient with the command line. Therefore a lot of documentation talks about commands, and there aren't always enough graphical configuration tools to get things done. For a server this might be acceptable, but for a system with ambitions of replacing Windows, it's not.
And as for X windows, that's another can of worms in itself. It's a technology which has barely progressed from the days when people ran programs by putting command lines in the
Resolution changes don't work. The much-heralded 'Ctrl+Alt+plus' messes things up completely. It doesn't actually resize the windows appropriately, it gives you a small viewport on a larger screen, so when you move the mouse to the sides of the screen it shifts along. This is beyond incompetent. I don't think there's a way to change colour-depth on the fly either.
Installing the nvidia driver is a pain in the arse. You need the Linux kernel source installed, for some reason. Then you need to close X and use the command line. Yet, that's right, in the 21st century, on a supposedly 'desktop' operating system, you need to use the command line to install a graphics driver. Then you get to unzip it with tar and gzip, and run scripts. And when it's installed, make sure you don't install any kernel modules, as they wipe out the nvidia driver, so you get to install it all over again.
Linux is usable for people like me who are willing to fuck about with it, but it's a million miles away from being ready for prime time. It's just too entrenched in the ancient Unix mindset, with none of the developers willing to make a clean break in case it upsets the dinosaurs.
I think by customisation, he means useful things, not graphical fluff. Everyone knows that enlightenment is a barely-usable eye-candy demonstration.
Yeah, Linux is configurable, but people want to configure things without playing with obscure files and commands. People want obvious things to work by default rather than having to fuck about to get it to work.
Whether you can change desktops with the scrollwheel is so insignificant it doesn't matter at all.
1. How much freedom have you sacrificed by installing a driver? I mean, compare a computer without a driver, and a computer with a closed-source driver. How does the former give you more freedom than the latter. Installing a driver doesn't take anything away. You can still read 'ls.c' if you want.
2. Having your computer actually work is more than a 'little convenience'. Unless you think that using your hardware is a luxury, a mere trifle which isn't as important as peering through source code of software you don't understand anyway. For people in the real world, the whole point of a computer is that it works, and we can use it to get our work done, not to read source code for the hell of it. A computer without working hardware is useful only as a doorstop.
3. It's not a learning curve. Having your hardware not working is a learning WALL. You can't learn anything when your computer doesn't do anything.
4. There's no benefit to learning something which should be automatic. Do you still mill your own wheat between rocks? There's nothing to be gained by spending hours searching documentation just to make your computer sleep when it's supposed to.
In fact, you could say that Google is the equivalent of the record industry:
They have a stranglehold on the market, they don't produce anything, but they control the means of distribution and marketing, therefore they can put themselves in the middle taking profits.
They also only believe in copyright when it suits them.
I wonder what will happen when Google's click-fraud and trademark infringement becomes their downfall, will they follow in the footsteps of their predecessors and start suing people?
As far as I'm aware, the shuttle has a seven-man crew. Did you think it was just one spaceman piloting it?
That might be a point if they actually worked. I've bought brand new floppy drives and they just don't work. And the disks last about 5 seconds before they're unusable. What a worthless technology. The only reason to keep them around is old driver disks.
USB sticks are where it's at.
That's the American copyright office, what the hell does that have to do with the BBC? Next you'll be talking about the first amendment...
Yeah, I meant laid off. I used to say that, but after so much exposure to Slashdot, I've incorporated the American expression 'fired' to mean all sorts of termination of employment.
Fired means termination where someone else will fill the job (UK = sacked), whereas laid off means the position has been removed, i.e. redundancy.
But it's no surprise that this site leads to dumming down. I don't know if I spelt dumming right cos I'm so drunk.
It sounds a lot more like she had done everything he'd asked for and told him that she had nothing more to do. He had the option of finding something else for her to do or laying her off in a professional manner...but instead, he was a total bastard.
Maybe he is a bastard, but then, who isn't? I know I'm a bastard.