At the Slashdot presidental poll, 23% (last I looked) of those "liberals" votesh for Bush. So it's not as one sided as you make it out to be, there are plenty of moro^H^H^H^Hright-wing folks on Slashdot, too.
The Apple Macintosh LC ("low cost") series were also pizza boxes, released in 1990, 92 and 93 (LC, LC II and LC III respectively). The first Apple we had, I think.
From the source NewScientist article: "The water quality index scores countries according to the cleanliness of their rivers and underground water, the amount of treatment that they give to sewage and the way they enforce anti-pollution laws."
So this is unpleasent, but unrelated. Germany scores terribly, too - 57 out of 122 - and the tap water here is excellent. The US are 12th, and the tap water I've had there is not so excellent (unless you like chlorine), although it's been a while and I am sure quality varies from state to state. General water quality of course depends on many factors, and I doubt it's a coincidence that the top three countries ("Finland, Canada and New Zealand") all have a fairly low population density: it's not too hard to keep your water clean-ish if every resident has the equivalent of an own lake! Of course that doesn't mean that Belgium and Germany shouldn't try and increase water quality.
PS: Oh well, I checked again and I noticed I was wrong, the article does, in fact, link to the relevant UNESCO pages. But now it's too late and I can't be assed to rewrite my post. If you want to find out whether my guess is right or not, you're welcome to do so!
Those are not the major criticisms levelled at Windows, nor are those the key strengths of either Macs or Linux. In fact, I don't know what that list is supposed to be, and I will leave it at that.
But few people seriously claim Mac and Linux systems are prime gaming platforms, and encourage switching because of it. The opposite is common, ie. people saying they would switch if it weren't for gaming. And some people recommend switching in spite of gaming not being as viable.
No, it's something fans of the game have been demanding for 10 years. If you don't like it, fine by me, but I'm looking forward to it tremendously. And I know a lot of people who do the same. If anything, I worry that the things they decided to add are detrimental - the dancing or the sneaking sub-games, for instance.
I'm not eating poison, I'm ignoring it. They can call it murder for all I care. I mean, it's an issue - but only as long as you're not aware of it. Of course I never use the term stealing to refer to copyright violation, expecially not when talking to non-geeks who might not be aware of the difference. But again, in the future, stealing as a broad term might well include copyright violation. What you, or I, or for that matter the copyright-profiteering industry thinks about it is fairly irrelevant.
Also for future reference, please explain to me what you mean by "semantically parse". I'm studying linguistics and I've never seen it in that context. It really doesn't make a lot of sense, unless it's just an important-sounding synonym of "make sense".:P
Re:A prime example of spin-off technology
on
Hibernating to Mars
·
· Score: 1
This misses the point, IMO; we could do the research, but without an obvious need such as space flight creates, we generally wouldn't.
You could use that argument to support mostly any otherwise pointless exercise. Like, instead of space exploration, we could try to re-build the Tower of Babel. I'm sure a lot of useful technology could potentially result from this. Or we could just dig huge holes and refill them really fast. Or design and build new fighter airplanes. All perfectly reasonable ways to subsidize high tech research and development.
In any event, I tend to disagree, I think most of the research that applies to the "real world" would be done in any event, and I don't think you present a convincing argument otherwise. You don't really need to convince me, though: I'm not sure about the merits with respects to the "real world", but I'm still not opposed to space exploration. In the end, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the world is one of the highest goals in itself.
Re:Does hibernation slow or stop aging?
on
Hibernating to Mars
·
· Score: 5, Funny
But it would also suck to fall asleep and wake up three years later -- and three years older, with absolutely nothing to show for it.
The industry lobby's definition of stealing does "semantically parse", it's just different from yours. There's no easy way to determine which is the right definition, because the mere definition of what's right is argued about, not to mention the empirical data necessary to decide the matter once you've agreed on one definition. The fact is that languages change all the time, and while the original meaning of stealing was very much focused on removing physical property, present and future definitions might very well include copyright infringement at least as secondary or tertiary meanings. (The actual meaning of words is, of course, another hotly debated topic and is usually extremely hard to put your finger on - e.g. stealing has dozens of common figurative meanings.)
The point I argued recently here on Slashdot is that whether or not the typical semantics associated with stealing include copyright violation or not is fairly irrelevant; the fact is that apart from linguistics, copyright violation is not the same thing as removal of physical property, it might be very similar in many regards or it might not, but it cleary is not totally equal. In fact, the question how equal it is is typically the whole point of the discussions on that topic. And since those two things are the central ideas discussed, it makes a lot of sense to keep them apart linguistically to avoid misunderstandings - much as you would refer to both cars and bicycles as vehicles in a discussion of the merits of one vs the other.
Actually, I'm somewhat certain companies in the Netherlands will have a mandatory 2 year warranty, with the exception of certain parts which can't be expected to work that long. E.g. my laptop generally has a warranty of 2 years, with the exception of the battery which only has 6 months on it. I'm not sure what kinds of parts they're allowed to reduce the warranty on, but it's probably defined clearer in the respective laws, and anyway it's fairly rare, the laptop battery was the first computing equipment with that restriction.
Now, I'm German and not Dutch - just half an hour ride away, though:) - so different laws apply, however the original German minimum warranty of 12 months was extended to 24 due to EU legislation, so I assume something very similar will apply to NL.
Opera has a "Refresh display" option that just re-renders the page without reloading it. Maybe a plugin could add that functionality to Firefox. Of course, that kind of function really shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
Marathon's story line and telling is right up there with Deus Ex and System Shock 2. Of course, it was up there years before they were. And it was years ahead of the PC fare in technical terms, too. I keep thinking it actually had voice communication integrated into the game that changed volume depending on whether you were in the same room as the other person, although in retrospect I can't really imagine that to be true. It was also the first game I played in multiplayer using dial-up, only a couple of times though, since the only other person I could find was a long distance call away.
Slightly condensed version of the article summary: "An article on Mozillanews.org is reporting on [old news]. The article provides [rumours] along with [speculation]."
Does that mean X11/Xaw has a better user interface?
No. Never in my original post did I make any kind of implication that more buttons are always better. What I said can be summarized with the first two lines of your post. Now, I do think that the context menu is awesome, and that the second mouse button is a great way to reach it, but I really don't want to start a debate about the optimal number of mouse buttons. It seems that just stating the notion that the concept of a context menu is supported more broadly on Windows than on the Mac is revolting to many Slashdot users, I doubt that a reasonable discussion of an optimal button-count is possible. Such are the confines of this site.
Both Mac and Win contextual menus are highly customizable as is... use a 3rd party "power-tool" to take it to extreme. This bit of your troll just opinion and is unfounded bunk.
It's my experience. I've been using both platforms for about 10 years. Obviously there are Mac programs with really good and Windows apps with terrible context menus, but that does not seem to me to be the general trend. I don't know why you think the existence of "power tools" to customize anything is relevant, I'm talking about out-of-the-box user interfaces here, and a difference in mentality in the two developer communities. Furthmore, my post is not a troll, I think I made a fairly reasonable point in reply to another poster. You decided to flame me for, but that wasn't a reaction I hoped for, although in any discussion like this it's obviously to be expected.
So does the Mac (Have you ever actually used one?).
Yes, my first Mac was an LC II, and although I've personally settled for the PC for the time being, like I said, my GF uses an Apple and so do parts of my family. And as you pointed out in your friendly manner, my Microsoft 5-button + scroll wheel USB mouse works happily with her laptop. A mouse by Creative Labs didn't though, but I blame Creative Labs and not Apple for that. But that is all beside the point. Supporting 3-button mice is not the same as embracing them, the admittedly vague word I used.
Exactly the point... your GF doesnt know there is a contextual menu... is she happy with her mac? does it do exactly what she wants it to? does she have to learn to do things in a way that is not immediately apparent?
Kind of/kind of/sometimes are the answers to your questions. She manages her way around in both Windows and Mac OS environments, but obviously the Apple looks a lot nicer.
Bah. I don't know why I bothered to reply point by point. You totally and probably deliberately misunderstood my original post. I have no grudge against Apple - I recommended the Apple laptop to my gf -, although whether or not that is the case is obviously totally irrelevant. I personally think that the context menu is an enormous boon to productivity - it has been, for me - and it has been my experience that the context menus in Windows applications are superior to those of Apple applications. I gave reasons why I think that is the case. But if you think that having two buttons instead of one is part of "the complexities of the OS" then be my guest.
No, it means that you're using a mouse where 4 out of 5 buttons are not used to their fullest extend. The primary application of the second mouse button on both platforms seems to be the activation of a context menu. However, from my experience it seems that the context menu of Windows applications is a lot better than that of Mac OS apps. Probably due to the fact that MS has embraces more than one mouse button from the start and has pushed for context menus, while Apple decided to stick with single mouse button mice and a fairly hidden context menu. My GF has an Apple laptop, I'm sure she doesn't even know there is such a thing as a context menu.
The drive draws 5.31W during reading. The whole system, that is including optical drive, CPU, display and everything, draws 19W when playing an Audio CD. It uses 30W in a graphics benchmark. It's reasonable to assume that DVD or MPEG4 playback would fall somewhere in between,
And incidently: a CD-ROM does not, or should not, spin at the same speed regardless of what's being read. Audio CD players (used to?) maintain constant linear velocity, spinning the disk at different speeds depending on what point was being read. CD-ROMs typically use constant angular velocty, spinning the drive at a constant speed no matter what is read. But when I'm streaming some media from the drive, it really should run at the lowest speed that sustains the bitrate, and not at it's maximum. The reason being that if I'm watching a video clip that would run fine at 10X speed I wouldn't want to endure the sounds of a drive at 40X speed. I used to set this manually, but I think some drives do it automatically these days.
Slashdot Mirror
At the Slashdot presidental poll, 23% (last I looked) of those "liberals" votesh for Bush. So it's not as one sided as you make it out to be, there are plenty of moro^H^H^H^Hright-wing folks on Slashdot, too.
You're totally right, that Miguel fellow should just try to come with his own VM implementation - hah, like that's going to happen! What a leech!
Yep... Something like deep space radar analysis in a base in Cheyenne Mountain springs to mind.
The Apple Macintosh LC ("low cost") series were also pizza boxes, released in 1990, 92 and 93 (LC, LC II and LC III respectively). The first Apple we had, I think.
From the source NewScientist article: "The water quality index scores countries according to the cleanliness of their rivers and underground water, the amount of treatment that they give to sewage and the way they enforce anti-pollution laws."
So this is unpleasent, but unrelated. Germany scores terribly, too - 57 out of 122 - and the tap water here is excellent. The US are 12th, and the tap water I've had there is not so excellent (unless you like chlorine), although it's been a while and I am sure quality varies from state to state. General water quality of course depends on many factors, and I doubt it's a coincidence that the top three countries ("Finland, Canada and New Zealand") all have a fairly low population density: it's not too hard to keep your water clean-ish if every resident has the equivalent of an own lake! Of course that doesn't mean that Belgium and Germany shouldn't try and increase water quality.
PS: Oh well, I checked again and I noticed I was wrong, the article does, in fact, link to the relevant UNESCO pages. But now it's too late and I can't be assed to rewrite my post. If you want to find out whether my guess is right or not, you're welcome to do so!
Those are not the major criticisms levelled at Windows, nor are those the key strengths of either Macs or Linux. In fact, I don't know what that list is supposed to be, and I will leave it at that.
But few people seriously claim Mac and Linux systems are prime gaming platforms, and encourage switching because of it. The opposite is common, ie. people saying they would switch if it weren't for gaming. And some people recommend switching in spite of gaming not being as viable.
ls after being deleted doesn't work!
Incidently, if you delete ls (or don't have access to it for some other reason), you can always do "echo *" in bash (and assumedly other shells).
Bah.
No, it's something fans of the game have been demanding for 10 years. If you don't like it, fine by me, but I'm looking forward to it tremendously. And I know a lot of people who do the same. If anything, I worry that the things they decided to add are detrimental - the dancing or the sneaking sub-games, for instance.
I'm not eating poison, I'm ignoring it. They can call it murder for all I care. I mean, it's an issue - but only as long as you're not aware of it. Of course I never use the term stealing to refer to copyright violation, expecially not when talking to non-geeks who might not be aware of the difference. But again, in the future, stealing as a broad term might well include copyright violation. What you, or I, or for that matter the copyright-profiteering industry thinks about it is fairly irrelevant.
:P
Also for future reference, please explain to me what you mean by "semantically parse". I'm studying linguistics and I've never seen it in that context. It really doesn't make a lot of sense, unless it's just an important-sounding synonym of "make sense".
This misses the point, IMO; we could do the research, but without an obvious need such as space flight creates, we generally wouldn't.
You could use that argument to support mostly any otherwise pointless exercise. Like, instead of space exploration, we could try to re-build the Tower of Babel. I'm sure a lot of useful technology could potentially result from this. Or we could just dig huge holes and refill them really fast. Or design and build new fighter airplanes. All perfectly reasonable ways to subsidize high tech research and development.
In any event, I tend to disagree, I think most of the research that applies to the "real world" would be done in any event, and I don't think you present a convincing argument otherwise. You don't really need to convince me, though: I'm not sure about the merits with respects to the "real world", but I'm still not opposed to space exploration. In the end, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the world is one of the highest goals in itself.
But it would also suck to fall asleep and wake up three years later -- and three years older, with absolutely nothing to show for it.
;)
Kind of like studying computer science...
Plus Midi Maze II had the coolest title theme ever. I've got the first 30 seconds or so somewhere, converted to MP3. :P
The industry lobby's definition of stealing does "semantically parse", it's just different from yours. There's no easy way to determine which is the right definition, because the mere definition of what's right is argued about, not to mention the empirical data necessary to decide the matter once you've agreed on one definition.
The fact is that languages change all the time, and while the original meaning of stealing was very much focused on removing physical property, present and future definitions might very well include copyright infringement at least as secondary or tertiary meanings. (The actual meaning of words is, of course, another hotly debated topic and is usually extremely hard to put your finger on - e.g. stealing has dozens of common figurative meanings.)
The point I argued recently here on Slashdot is that whether or not the typical semantics associated with stealing include copyright violation or not is fairly irrelevant; the fact is that apart from linguistics, copyright violation is not the same thing as removal of physical property, it might be very similar in many regards or it might not, but it cleary is not totally equal. In fact, the question how equal it is is typically the whole point of the discussions on that topic. And since those two things are the central ideas discussed, it makes a lot of sense to keep them apart linguistically to avoid misunderstandings - much as you would refer to both cars and bicycles as vehicles in a discussion of the merits of one vs the other.
I guess they weren't kidding when they said it's still in beta...
Actually, I'm somewhat certain companies in the Netherlands will have a mandatory 2 year warranty, with the exception of certain parts which can't be expected to work that long. E.g. my laptop generally has a warranty of 2 years, with the exception of the battery which only has 6 months on it. I'm not sure what kinds of parts they're allowed to reduce the warranty on, but it's probably defined clearer in the respective laws, and anyway it's fairly rare, the laptop battery was the first computing equipment with that restriction.
:) - so different laws apply, however the original German minimum warranty of 12 months was extended to 24 due to EU legislation, so I assume something very similar will apply to NL.
Now, I'm German and not Dutch - just half an hour ride away, though
Opera has a "Refresh display" option that just re-renders the page without reloading it. Maybe a plugin could add that functionality to Firefox. Of course, that kind of function really shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
Marathon's story line and telling is right up there with Deus Ex and System Shock 2. Of course, it was up there years before they were. And it was years ahead of the PC fare in technical terms, too. I keep thinking it actually had voice communication integrated into the game that changed volume depending on whether you were in the same room as the other person, although in retrospect I can't really imagine that to be true. It was also the first game I played in multiplayer using dial-up, only a couple of times though, since the only other person I could find was a long distance call away.
Slightly condensed version of the article summary: "An article on Mozillanews.org is reporting on [old news]. The article provides [rumours] along with [speculation]."
Way to go!
Yes, I'm aware of it. And my name isn't Dick.
Does that mean X11/Xaw has a better user interface?
No. Never in my original post did I make any kind of implication that more buttons are always better. What I said can be summarized with the first two lines of your post.
Now, I do think that the context menu is awesome, and that the second mouse button is a great way to reach it, but I really don't want to start a debate about the optimal number of mouse buttons. It seems that just stating the notion that the concept of a context menu is supported more broadly on Windows than on the Mac is revolting to many Slashdot users, I doubt that a reasonable discussion of an optimal button-count is possible. Such are the confines of this site.
Both Mac and Win contextual menus are highly customizable as is... use a 3rd party "power-tool" to take it to extreme. This bit of your troll just opinion and is unfounded bunk.
It's my experience. I've been using both platforms for about 10 years. Obviously there are Mac programs with really good and Windows apps with terrible context menus, but that does not seem to me to be the general trend.
I don't know why you think the existence of "power tools" to customize anything is relevant, I'm talking about out-of-the-box user interfaces here, and a difference in mentality in the two developer communities.
Furthmore, my post is not a troll, I think I made a fairly reasonable point in reply to another poster. You decided to flame me for, but that wasn't a reaction I hoped for, although in any discussion like this it's obviously to be expected.
So does the Mac (Have you ever actually used one?).
Yes, my first Mac was an LC II, and although I've personally settled for the PC for the time being, like I said, my GF uses an Apple and so do parts of my family. And as you pointed out in your friendly manner, my Microsoft 5-button + scroll wheel USB mouse works happily with her laptop. A mouse by Creative Labs didn't though, but I blame Creative Labs and not Apple for that.
But that is all beside the point. Supporting 3-button mice is not the same as embracing them, the admittedly vague word I used.
Exactly the point... your GF doesnt know there is a contextual menu... is she happy with her mac? does it do exactly what she wants it to? does she have to learn to do things in a way that is not immediately apparent?
Kind of/kind of/sometimes are the answers to your questions. She manages her way around in both Windows and Mac OS environments, but obviously the Apple looks a lot nicer.
Bah. I don't know why I bothered to reply point by point. You totally and probably deliberately misunderstood my original post. I have no grudge against Apple - I recommended the Apple laptop to my gf -, although whether or not that is the case is obviously totally irrelevant. I personally think that the context menu is an enormous boon to productivity - it has been, for me - and it has been my experience that the context menus in Windows applications are superior to those of Apple applications. I gave reasons why I think that is the case. But if you think that having two buttons instead of one is part of "the complexities of the OS" then be my guest.
No, it means that you're using a mouse where 4 out of 5 buttons are not used to their fullest extend.
The primary application of the second mouse button on both platforms seems to be the activation of a context menu. However, from my experience it seems that the context menu of Windows applications is a lot better than that of Mac OS apps. Probably due to the fact that MS has embraces more than one mouse button from the start and has pushed for context menus, while Apple decided to stick with single mouse button mice and a fairly hidden context menu. My GF has an Apple laptop, I'm sure she doesn't even know there is such a thing as a context menu.
The drive draws 5.31W during reading. The whole system, that is including optical drive, CPU, display and everything, draws 19W when playing an Audio CD. It uses 30W in a graphics benchmark. It's reasonable to assume that DVD or MPEG4 playback would fall somewhere in between,
And incidently: a CD-ROM does not, or should not, spin at the same speed regardless of what's being read. Audio CD players (used to?) maintain constant linear velocity, spinning the disk at different speeds depending on what point was being read. CD-ROMs typically use constant angular velocty, spinning the drive at a constant speed no matter what is read.
But when I'm streaming some media from the drive, it really should run at the lowest speed that sustains the bitrate, and not at it's maximum. The reason being that if I'm watching a video clip that would run fine at 10X speed I wouldn't want to endure the sounds of a drive at 40X speed. I used to set this manually, but I think some drives do it automatically these days.
It holds a fair bit of heat in itself that won't get distributed for a long time.
Isn't the purpose of the many fans in a typicaly computer to accomplish the opposite?