You just don't get it. I DO NOT WANT TO SCREW AROUND WITH A COMMAND LINE. Of course it's insanely powerful, etc.. I still don't want to use it. I have no need for solving problems, no need to manipulate large bodies of data, no need to automate same. I just want a gui that allows me to easily install the OS and configure the hardware, then do some routine stuff - run office apps, web stuff, etc., nothing exotic. Also please understand that I am not a programming type but I understand the benefits of FOSS.
The continuing problems with wifi and printers perfectly illustrate my point. If your wiwi adapter is unsupported you can try ndiswrapper. With, for instance, ubuntu you also need to go through a fairly complex bit of command line gibberish only to discover that indeed your adapter will not work. The only distro I found that had a gui for this was puppy, but even that had it's difficulties. It does work but it isn't perfect. Of course the root of the wifi and printer problem is lack of vendor support for native linux drivers, but the windows xp hardware driver interface is GOOD. You can view, install, uninstall, update and roll back your drivers as needed ALL WITH A GUI.
Let me put it another way; why would I, an end user, WANT to bother learning the CLI? Ok, I could get some uber user to do the install it but then I'm at the mercy of the uber user if something goes wrong.
There are benefits to standardization, even forced standardization. I found a few linux distros that I liked (puppy & pclinuxos) but stopped short of switching because I didn't want to learn another command line. Sure CLI is powerful, but it's also a frickin pain in the butt to learn. The DOS skills I learned back in the '80's are still occasionally useful, but not often enough to warrant learning it again.
Sure linux is powerful, stable, customizable and even fun. That doesn't make it any less of an inconvenience to switch.
Gray goo FTW!!! At least they aren't screwing around with the genome. Those guys really scare me: there was a recent news item about how all the supposed "junk dna" in the human genome in fact codes for all kinds of stuff.
I have no faith that the bright boys really know what they are doing.
Every day I look up on the telephone pole at verizon's FIOS hookup, yearning for when it goes active. The guy who was working on it said it wouldn't go live until late april.
The only problem is that I hate verizon as much as I hate comcast.
$14 million? A whole $14 MILLION? Gosh, I didn't think that much money existed in the whole world! Wow! All our problems are solved! Thank goodness the government is stepping in to save us! FOURTEEN MILLION DOLLARS!!!!!
You know, I've tried to be objective when evaluating Bush and his aid to africa package did not escape my notice. Unfortunately the TRILLIONS that will be spent on the iraq war make everything else pale in comparison. Especially when toilet paper is worth more than the dollar. My kids will be paying for this and I happen to love my kids. Right now I'm fucking pissed off. Thanks, George! And I'm a conservative!
Heh. How true. The reality probably has more to do with the relatively small market shares and the cost of porting to alternate platforms. Linux based OS's have a way to go before they can claim more market share. Once that gets to a respectable level vs. windows you should see more games.
Wikipedia has become the gold standard in spite of all its flaws. All they need to do to retain credibility is come up with some way to differentiate information that has been vetted. The changes could be really simple, like color coding the text.
Open editing has proved itself to be flawed. The reason/. continues to thrive while digg and reddit wallow in irrelevancy is due to the methods used for article selection. The phrase "wisdom of the crowds" is misleading since the crowd is composed of idiots.
On a tangential note, I wrote most of this before the morning caffeine kicked in. The result was a mish mash of sentence fragments that looked ok but made no sense taken as a whole. Heavy editing was required to make it coherent. Is there an analogy here?
Yup, and one case is anecdotal, not definitive. After years of publicity about pollution, why do people get surprised to find out there are things in the water that shouldn't be there? Slap a filter on your faucet and stop worrying. When I installed one of the commonly available filters, it was astounding how much different the water smelled and tasted, especially when boiling. Sure the filters aren't perfect, but anything is better than nothing.
Amen brother. It's hard to believe they keep electing him, although the nuts and bolts politics involved probably make it impossible for the local party to field any other candidate. He gets oodles of money funneled to his causes through various third parties (the big media corporations), neatly bypassing campaign funding laws.
If it's a district in which electing a republican candidate is basically impossible then we do indeed have only ourselves to blame. Or the pavlov-trained monkeys living in his district.
This is the only explaination that makes sense. If the loan terms actually are what is reported here, there is no way they can really afford to make any more trouble. It would give the brass a way to cash in on this disaster and make it worth their while. Unfortunately IIRC SCO has been delisted. Hmmm.
Who's faulting the eee? It's a great little machine, if limited. I object a bit to their marketing is all. Besides, how hard would it have been to include an ide interface? I'd buy one, faults and all if I had $400 to blow. The Cloudbook looks better if only so I can fiddle with it.
I never said it was founded by non religious people. They were indeed religious people. They also understood the problems associated with state religions and specifically separated church and state.
Besides, I'm pretty certain I'm better educated than you; when I go to work everone calls me "Doctor". Who's stoned?
Interesting. It's a bit less than I thought it would be but if it's more than they got from the record companies then more power to them. The point is, this method of distribution cuts out the middleman and primarily benefits the artist. It seems to me that artists will increasingly rely on freely distributed music files for advertising and performances for income. I dont see a problem with that. If they can persuade people to pay for some sort of recorded product that's fine by me. You should note that for decades if we wanted to listen to music on demand we were *forced* to pay for a recording. That's fine when there is a significant production and distribution cost involved, but when those costs are essentially zero it's impossible to justify dollar a song downloads.
The funny thing is, musicians used to make money by *performing*. Then along came radio, records, movies and tv. All of a sudden you could capture one performance and sell it over and over again, making scads of money in the process. This was thought to be normal. The rest of us worked for a living.
I think it's great that the music "industry" is dying a slow, painful death.
Seriously, I wouldnt blame NiN. As much of a pain in the ass as this is, look at the bright side; it's the beginning of a new era in music that doesn't include the corporations. There is bound to be some hiccups and you can bet that the people in charge of the website sales are overwhelmed. Patience.
On the other hand, I still think they got the pricing wrong even at about 14 cents per track. Everyone knows that all of the tracks will be up on torrents immediately. The price is really a reflection of how badly you want to support the artist. All the tracks should be available for free, or at least with flexible pricing like radiohead. I'd be willing to guess they would make about the same amount of money since the folks that dont want to pay will simply download torrents, whereas the ones that want to show support will pay.
Yep, we are going to hell in a handbasket. The religious factions have acquired far too much political power period. For a country founded upon secular principles it continually amazes me to see how far we have fallen.
The way the discussion is being framed is a big part of the problem - that it's an either/or situation. I've seen quotes from a number of scientists that see no conflict between faith and science; they all boil down to how you choose to define them. The sad fact is that religious zealots tend not to be persuadable.
Knucklewit. I want what I want-personal preference is a valid reason. I want a tiny, self contained portable that will replace my "laptop" in which I can store content files like pictures music and movies for when I DON'T have a network connection (read airplanes). Hence I need a large amount of storage and the eee is deliberately engineered to make this difficult.
The annoying thing about the EEE is that they hard wire the storage to make it virtually impossible to upgrade. Then they charge premium prices for versions with more memory, storage, etc.. It's essentially a closed system. It was also originally supposed to cost $200. Clever marketing.
Yes, yes, of COURSE it's a good idea. Just don't tell anybody! Right now it's cheaper just to use the chinese, but once they get uppity I'm investing in darkies!
I was drooling over the eee until I read about the cloudbook. Both machines have issues, but the cloudbook has a regular, easy to upgrade hdd whereas the eee requires hacking skills to graft in more storage. The eee is too limited in terms of storage, although with a little effort it could look a lot like the cool mini laptop used in the "hitman" games.
Your comment is interesting because it touches on several important issues. The theory is that adjusting the level of a particular neurotransmitter will result in positive change in perceived mood. The problem is, serotonin isn't the only one. Norepinephrine and dopamine play a big role and it's the balance of all three (and probably other stuff) that is important. Most of the newer meds focus primarily on serotonin, but if serotonin isn't the problem (or the whole problem) you can't expect these medications to have a significant long lasting effect and changing from one SSRI to another may not work. The second problem is actually measuring what you think you are measuring. How can a clinician measure neurotransmitter levels? Besides, what's important is that the patient *feels* better. Measuring this sort of thing is difficult. Third, if the patient has a really poor way of dealing with life, all the drugs in the world won't make a real change. Personality characteristics matter.
The bottom line is that it's still as much an art as a science and many general practitioners just aren't able to manage the nuances even though they are the ones writing the majority of the prescriptions.
Re:Micro-Transactions and game balance
on
The Future of MMOs
·
· Score: 1
Guilds are indispensible for managing your online experience. It's simply too hard to randomly find good people to play with.
Allowing purchase of levels and items would bypass a lot of boring crap, eliminate the farmers and streamline things, especially if you require an account to have one toon levelled normally. Part of the reason I burned out was getting stuck at level 56 (pre expansion) on an alt and just being sick of doing the same stuff over and over.
Re:Micro-Transactions and game balance
on
The Future of MMOs
·
· Score: 1
The booming grey market for wow gold and levelling services is proof positive that there is plenty of interest in micro transactions. They ought to set up online vendors allowing purchase of in-game items and character levels. This would undercut the farmers and allow people that really want it to skip levels and get a new character up to speed. When I played wow I hated levelling. I was bored with the content and my main character - all I wanted was to change classes. They could put limits on what items you could buy so it would be possible to purchase a top level character after you already levelled one. Purchased items could be slightly gimped to allow a basic level of funtioning without really pissing off the folks that worked for the good stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
You just don't get it. I DO NOT WANT TO SCREW AROUND WITH A COMMAND LINE. Of course it's insanely powerful, etc.. I still don't want to use it. I have no need for solving problems, no need to manipulate large bodies of data, no need to automate same. I just want a gui that allows me to easily install the OS and configure the hardware, then do some routine stuff - run office apps, web stuff, etc., nothing exotic. Also please understand that I am not a programming type but I understand the benefits of FOSS.
The continuing problems with wifi and printers perfectly illustrate my point. If your wiwi adapter is unsupported you can try ndiswrapper. With, for instance, ubuntu you also need to go through a fairly complex bit of command line gibberish only to discover that indeed your adapter will not work. The only distro I found that had a gui for this was puppy, but even that had it's difficulties. It does work but it isn't perfect. Of course the root of the wifi and printer problem is lack of vendor support for native linux drivers, but the windows xp hardware driver interface is GOOD. You can view, install, uninstall, update and roll back your drivers as needed ALL WITH A GUI.
Let me put it another way; why would I, an end user, WANT to bother learning the CLI? Ok, I could get some uber user to do the install it but then I'm at the mercy of the uber user if something goes wrong.
There are benefits to standardization, even forced standardization. I found a few linux distros that I liked (puppy & pclinuxos) but stopped short of switching because I didn't want to learn another command line. Sure CLI is powerful, but it's also a frickin pain in the butt to learn. The DOS skills I learned back in the '80's are still occasionally useful, but not often enough to warrant learning it again.
Sure linux is powerful, stable, customizable and even fun. That doesn't make it any less of an inconvenience to switch.
Gray goo FTW!!! At least they aren't screwing around with the genome. Those guys really scare me: there was a recent news item about how all the supposed "junk dna" in the human genome in fact codes for all kinds of stuff.
I have no faith that the bright boys really know what they are doing.
Every day I look up on the telephone pole at verizon's FIOS hookup, yearning for when it goes active. The guy who was working on it said it wouldn't go live until late april.
The only problem is that I hate verizon as much as I hate comcast.
$14 million? A whole $14 MILLION? Gosh, I didn't think that much money existed in the whole world! Wow! All our problems are solved! Thank goodness the government is stepping in to save us! FOURTEEN MILLION DOLLARS!!!!!
You know, I've tried to be objective when evaluating Bush and his aid to africa package did not escape my notice. Unfortunately the TRILLIONS that will be spent on the iraq war make everything else pale in comparison. Especially when toilet paper is worth more than the dollar. My kids will be paying for this and I happen to love my kids. Right now I'm fucking pissed off. Thanks, George! And I'm a conservative!
$14 Million my ass.
Heh. How true. The reality probably has more to do with the relatively small market shares and the cost of porting to alternate platforms. Linux based OS's have a way to go before they can claim more market share. Once that gets to a respectable level vs. windows you should see more games.
Wikipedia has become the gold standard in spite of all its flaws. All they need to do to retain credibility is come up with some way to differentiate information that has been vetted. The changes could be really simple, like color coding the text.
/. continues to thrive while digg and reddit wallow in irrelevancy is due to the methods used for article selection. The phrase "wisdom of the crowds" is misleading since the crowd is composed of idiots.
Open editing has proved itself to be flawed. The reason
On a tangential note, I wrote most of this before the morning caffeine kicked in. The result was a mish mash of sentence fragments that looked ok but made no sense taken as a whole. Heavy editing was required to make it coherent. Is there an analogy here?
Yup, and one case is anecdotal, not definitive. After years of publicity about pollution, why do people get surprised to find out there are things in the water that shouldn't be there? Slap a filter on your faucet and stop worrying. When I installed one of the commonly available filters, it was astounding how much different the water smelled and tasted, especially when boiling. Sure the filters aren't perfect, but anything is better than nothing.
You sure it isn't the other way around?
Amen brother. It's hard to believe they keep electing him, although the nuts and bolts politics involved probably make it impossible for the local party to field any other candidate. He gets oodles of money funneled to his causes through various third parties (the big media corporations), neatly bypassing campaign funding laws.
If it's a district in which electing a republican candidate is basically impossible then we do indeed have only ourselves to blame. Or the pavlov-trained monkeys living in his district.
This is the only explaination that makes sense. If the loan terms actually are what is reported here, there is no way they can really afford to make any more trouble. It would give the brass a way to cash in on this disaster and make it worth their while. Unfortunately IIRC SCO has been delisted. Hmmm.
Who's faulting the eee? It's a great little machine, if limited. I object a bit to their marketing is all. Besides, how hard would it have been to include an ide interface? I'd buy one, faults and all if I had $400 to blow. The Cloudbook looks better if only so I can fiddle with it.
I never said it was founded by non religious people. They were indeed religious people. They also understood the problems associated with state religions and specifically separated church and state.
Besides, I'm pretty certain I'm better educated than you; when I go to work everone calls me "Doctor". Who's stoned?
Interesting. It's a bit less than I thought it would be but if it's more than they got from the record companies then more power to them. The point is, this method of distribution cuts out the middleman and primarily benefits the artist. It seems to me that artists will increasingly rely on freely distributed music files for advertising and performances for income. I dont see a problem with that. If they can persuade people to pay for some sort of recorded product that's fine by me. You should note that for decades if we wanted to listen to music on demand we were *forced* to pay for a recording. That's fine when there is a significant production and distribution cost involved, but when those costs are essentially zero it's impossible to justify dollar a song downloads.
The funny thing is, musicians used to make money by *performing*. Then along came radio, records, movies and tv. All of a sudden you could capture one performance and sell it over and over again, making scads of money in the process. This was thought to be normal. The rest of us worked for a living.
I think it's great that the music "industry" is dying a slow, painful death.
The pipes were clogged!
Seriously, I wouldnt blame NiN. As much of a pain in the ass as this is, look at the bright side; it's the beginning of a new era in music that doesn't include the corporations. There is bound to be some hiccups and you can bet that the people in charge of the website sales are overwhelmed. Patience.
On the other hand, I still think they got the pricing wrong even at about 14 cents per track. Everyone knows that all of the tracks will be up on torrents immediately. The price is really a reflection of how badly you want to support the artist. All the tracks should be available for free, or at least with flexible pricing like radiohead. I'd be willing to guess they would make about the same amount of money since the folks that dont want to pay will simply download torrents, whereas the ones that want to show support will pay.
Yep, we are going to hell in a handbasket. The religious factions have acquired far too much political power period. For a country founded upon secular principles it continually amazes me to see how far we have fallen.
The way the discussion is being framed is a big part of the problem - that it's an either/or situation. I've seen quotes from a number of scientists that see no conflict between faith and science; they all boil down to how you choose to define them. The sad fact is that religious zealots tend not to be persuadable.
Knucklewit. I want what I want-personal preference is a valid reason. I want a tiny, self contained portable that will replace my "laptop" in which I can store content files like pictures music and movies for when I DON'T have a network connection (read airplanes). Hence I need a large amount of storage and the eee is deliberately engineered to make this difficult.
The annoying thing about the EEE is that they hard wire the storage to make it virtually impossible to upgrade. Then they charge premium prices for versions with more memory, storage, etc.. It's essentially a closed system. It was also originally supposed to cost $200. Clever marketing.
Doesn't anyone object to being manipulated?
Yes, yes, of COURSE it's a good idea. Just don't tell anybody! Right now it's cheaper just to use the chinese, but once they get uppity I'm investing in darkies!
go compare prices on an 80gb 2.5" hdd and a comparable flash card..oops, sorry they don't exist yet.
Get back to me when you have a clue.
I was drooling over the eee until I read about the cloudbook. Both machines have issues, but the cloudbook has a regular, easy to upgrade hdd whereas the eee requires hacking skills to graft in more storage. The eee is too limited in terms of storage, although with a little effort it could look a lot like the cool mini laptop used in the "hitman" games.
I thought the galaxy was going to be engulfed by a hydrogen cloud in 40 million years?
Your comment is interesting because it touches on several important issues. The theory is that adjusting the level of a particular neurotransmitter will result in positive change in perceived mood. The problem is, serotonin isn't the only one. Norepinephrine and dopamine play a big role and it's the balance of all three (and probably other stuff) that is important. Most of the newer meds focus primarily on serotonin, but if serotonin isn't the problem (or the whole problem) you can't expect these medications to have a significant long lasting effect and changing from one SSRI to another may not work. The second problem is actually measuring what you think you are measuring. How can a clinician measure neurotransmitter levels? Besides, what's important is that the patient *feels* better. Measuring this sort of thing is difficult. Third, if the patient has a really poor way of dealing with life, all the drugs in the world won't make a real change. Personality characteristics matter.
The bottom line is that it's still as much an art as a science and many general practitioners just aren't able to manage the nuances even though they are the ones writing the majority of the prescriptions.
Guilds are indispensible for managing your online experience. It's simply too hard to randomly find good people to play with.
Allowing purchase of levels and items would bypass a lot of boring crap, eliminate the farmers and streamline things, especially if you require an account to have one toon levelled normally. Part of the reason I burned out was getting stuck at level 56 (pre expansion) on an alt and just being sick of doing the same stuff over and over.
The booming grey market for wow gold and levelling services is proof positive that there is plenty of interest in micro transactions. They ought to set up online vendors allowing purchase of in-game items and character levels. This would undercut the farmers and allow people that really want it to skip levels and get a new character up to speed. When I played wow I hated levelling. I was bored with the content and my main character - all I wanted was to change classes. They could put limits on what items you could buy so it would be possible to purchase a top level character after you already levelled one. Purchased items could be slightly gimped to allow a basic level of funtioning without really pissing off the folks that worked for the good stuff.