Installing a Printer in one OS may be a little different than in another OS, but in reality is more like 4 on the floor vs on the console. It's not hard, just DIFFERENT.
Actually, as a linux user, I must say that if you're trying to say installing a printer under Linux isn't way harder than it is under Mac or Windows, you are too far removed from reality for anything else you say to be worth anything.
Sure it's different. It's different, in that it is hard. The difficulty of installing hardware drivers is the one thing that prevents me from installing Linux on the computers of people who aren't obsessed with computers.
If you could duplicate at no cost any product you saw on the shelf at Wal-Mart, then yes, that makes Wal-Mart's buisness model outdated. Universal matter duplication being not yet available to the public, Wal-Mart should be just fine.
I don't think it's shareholders vs. customers--it's just a matter of Apple selling hardware, while Microsoft sells software. Apple doesn't care whether everyone runs out to buy their newest $100 OS, they want everyone to run out to buy their newest $2000 computer.
It appears obvious to me that people claiming the MacOS X GUI is intuitive have either not really tried it themselves, or never tried anything else.
As someone who uses Mac OS X extensively after much Windows and X experience, it appears obvious to me that anyone complaining about OS X's GUI was too attached to the horror that was OS 9. The animations can be turned off, later versions of the OS will be faster, and you're simply speaking nonsense about it being obstructive or non-intuitive.
The windows cd would still be required (as it should be) - I'm not trying to circumvent that at all - I just wonmder what's involved in unpacking the files from cd and "installing" (copying) to disk...
Heh Heh, I installed NN for windows, yet the darn thing wouldn't work at all--it installed fine, but when I went to play the game, the logo would appear, and then I would get kicked back to Windows. I tried everything to get it to work, hours later I finally installed the no-CD crack, and now it works perfectly (though I haven't tried to play online, maybe now I'm totally screwed as far as that goes.)
So I guess I'll have to wait until someone cracks the Linux version to play under Linux;).
They can make any other color in the visible light spectum as described by humans. If our eyes detected red, green, and infrared instead, the spectrum we call "visible light" would be different. And we'd need different televisions.
Searching the internet, I found a computer graphics lecture about color spaces that explains what I'm talking about, sort of. Combing low and high frequency waves does not give you a medium frequency wave, but it might give you light with the same color as medium frequency light. No doubt we knew of the primary colors before we knew of rods and cones, but those colors merely appear to be primary because they are the ones are rods and cones are sensitive to.
The part of the lecture that applies to my question is the part where different spectral energy distributions produce the same color--which opens the possibility that non-human could percieve two lights that humans believe are the same color as two different colors.
I recall sometime ago an article linked to from slashdot suggesting it may be possible some women have a fourth primary color in their eyes. Certainly it's not difficult to imagine some animals are more sensitive to infra-red ultra-violet lights than humans--in which case the light shown by our visible light tv's would certainly look different than the light an animal would see in the real world.
Wait a minute, I'm an idiot. Obviously color has nothing to do with animals and humans detecting black vs. white things. AND PANDAS ARE BLACK AND WHITE!! Therefore, of course color is not needed in these sex education films...
Then again, if Panda color perception is different from human color perception, maybe pandas don't see themselves as black and white...
Hmm. I would have thought that animals might have problems seeing human TV. We've selected Red, Green, and Blue as ideal TV colors because those are the three kinds of, um, eye-thingies we have. In our eyes. You know.
I would have expected animals to see the colors of TV screens as completely different from the ways we see them. Do pandas have the same color perception humans do, or do they just have the ability to perceive mis-colored pandas as still being panda (and therefore sexy...)
If you are silly and regard privacy as all or nothing, than no, of course not. You could never be 100% sure that someone wasn't hiding in the shadows of your cave...
But if you use your head, you'll realize privacy, like most everything else, is a matter of degree. How likely is it that people you don't want to know something about yourself will in fact know it in the future? The answer to this question is how much privacy you have. A likelyhood of either 0% or 100% is not desirable--society has some need to prevent its members from destroying each other, but, as human beings are judgmental creatures, they are better off not knowing too much about each other.
Seeing privacy as all or nothing puts us in one of the two undesirable extremes--most likely the Orwellian one.
2: Matrox has NEVER promoted their current cards as 3D cards, who told you to buy one for gaming? Give them shit, not matrox.
There post-G200 cards were certainly promoted as 3d cards. They came with lots of 3d games in their boxes. I'm not saying they were bad cards, but they were certainly sold as 3d cards.
3: From PERSONAL experience, Matrox has traditionally supplied the most stable drivers with the most features RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX!!! You can go pull an old G400 card off the shelf of some store room, plug it in, install the drivers and it'll be as stable as if you went and downloaded their latest (Obviously you'd have to to get support for the newer OS's but the point is valid)
Speaking of ancient cards, it's worth noting that the nvidia detonator drivers are the very same for everything from TNT to Geforce 4, despite the very radical differences between them. No, the ones out of the box may not have been so great--but for likely all eternity you'll be able to download new, great ones, with lots of new features, which brings me to...
4: THERE IS ABSULUTELY NOTHING DRIVERS CAN DO TO ADD FUNCTIONALITY THAT DOESN'T ALREADY EXIST IN THE HARDWARE ITSELF!!!
Man, how could you have a "great big stack" of video cards and honestly say something so contrary to reality? There's a whole lot of software in between your game and your graphics card. Obviously, by upgrading this software, you can get improvements in frame rate, quality, and yes, features. Like the time I downloaded the new nvidia driver and, suddenly, I had anti-aliasing. Like every time you I download a new DirectX SDK and look at all the demos--they do stuff previous versions could not do. Software and hardware have to work together to give you a good user experience.
60 hz only appears strobe-like because of interferance effects, most likely--whether it's lights in the room or something more obscure. I like refresh rates above 60 for normal work too, but I've never had a problem with games (and their constantly changing graphics) at that frequency.
There's a big difference between refresh rate and frame rate--if you truly meant you can tell the difference between 60 frames and 75 frames per second, you are far more perceptive than I.
What we really need is either a practical book on how to *fix* those problems, or a book on how to *tolerate* and live comfortably with bureaucracies and PHB mentality so that we don't keep having urges to rage against the machine and end up getting fired or demoted.
The problem with all bureaucracies is their necessary assumption that all human activity can be regulated with a narrow set of rules that could fit in a book. Providing a book claiming to fix that set of rules only makes the problem all the worse.
What's truly needed is a practical book on eliminating all bureaucracy, all formal social order, without replacing it with a new one. Lacking that, no solution to leading a tolerable existance within organized society can be published--the Machine is really adaptive when it comes to crushing people's dreams. We're all on our own, and your fellow geek getting upset and disturbing the social order can only help.
Whoops, no, didn't mean to imply that. But perl has it's own set of strange gotchas that compromise your system, and in general, while it makes code easy to write, also makes it difficult to read--which of course means more debugging time required.
I will totally fucking guarantee that given X times as much time as X people of equal skill to solve any computer problem, the single person is definitely the way to go, everytime. Stated this way it should be completely obvious.
No matter how much damn review, extreme programming, or any other crap software engineering types come up with, once you need more than X lines of C/C++ to solve your problem, you are fucked. You will NOT catch every last memory leak, buffer overflow, type error, no matter how many fallible human beings you add to your project, no matter how much certification they all wasted their time getting.
like creating a programming language that forces good code"? I doubt it. It's my impression that even where languages do enforce various checks - perl in taint mode, for example - there are always ways around it or issues that the code can't check. After all, a significant proportion of "bugs" aren't faulty code per se, but correct code that is based upon incomplete or incorect assumptions and design.
Don't look at it as an all or nothing thing--if you've got a programming language that catches catagory X, Y, but no Z and programming error, and another language that catches none of those, the former language is still going to be more useful. The more bugs the programming language finds, the more time developers have to find bugs that programming languages can't find.
Remember, everytime you see a security bug due to a buffer overflow, remember that this bug, and all bugs like it, can be completely eliminated with a better choice of programming language, but will continue to plague you no matter how thorough your testing, debugging, documentation, or anything else they tell you in a software engineering class--human beings are totally fallible, and given enough code to write, they WILL fail. It's just a matter of time.
Not to mention that a newer programming language can greatly simplify the task at hand--which reduces the number of bugs (less code == fewer bugs) and leaves more time to find those bugs.
As long as people think it's okay to use C, C++, or perl in code were bugs matter, software WILL keep sucking, forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Workers of the world unite ... and work for my company!
Well, I have to say, I trust most machines more than I trust any doctor who acts like you.
Maybe he was just thinking that spamming everyone taints a person for life.
Actually, as a linux user, I must say that if you're trying to say installing a printer under Linux isn't way harder than it is under Mac or Windows, you are too far removed from reality for anything else you say to be worth anything.
Sure it's different. It's different, in that it is hard. The difficulty of installing hardware drivers is the one thing that prevents me from installing Linux on the computers of people who aren't obsessed with computers.
Anxiously awaiting the heat death of the Universe, are we?
If you could duplicate at no cost any product you saw on the shelf at Wal-Mart, then yes, that makes Wal-Mart's buisness model outdated. Universal matter duplication being not yet available to the public, Wal-Mart should be just fine.
I don't think it's shareholders vs. customers--it's just a matter of Apple selling hardware, while Microsoft sells software. Apple doesn't care whether everyone runs out to buy their newest $100 OS, they want everyone to run out to buy their newest $2000 computer.
Sorry the first paragraph was supposed to be a quote of the parent post.
It appears obvious to me that people claiming the MacOS X GUI is intuitive have either not really tried it themselves, or never tried anything else.
As someone who uses Mac OS X extensively after much Windows and X experience, it appears obvious to me that anyone complaining about OS X's GUI was too attached to the horror that was OS 9. The animations can be turned off, later versions of the OS will be faster, and you're simply speaking nonsense about it being obstructive or non-intuitive.
Heh Heh, I installed NN for windows, yet the darn thing wouldn't work at all--it installed fine, but when I went to play the game, the logo would appear, and then I would get kicked back to Windows. I tried everything to get it to work, hours later I finally installed the no-CD crack, and now it works perfectly (though I haven't tried to play online, maybe now I'm totally screwed as far as that goes.)
So I guess I'll have to wait until someone cracks the Linux version to play under Linux ;).
They can make any other color in the visible light spectum as described by humans. If our eyes detected red, green, and infrared instead, the spectrum we call "visible light" would be different. And we'd need different televisions.
The part of the lecture that applies to my question is the part where different spectral energy distributions produce the same color--which opens the possibility that non-human could percieve two lights that humans believe are the same color as two different colors.
I recall sometime ago an article linked to from slashdot suggesting it may be possible some women have a fourth primary color in their eyes. Certainly it's not difficult to imagine some animals are more sensitive to infra-red ultra-violet lights than humans--in which case the light shown by our visible light tv's would certainly look different than the light an animal would see in the real world.
Wait a minute, I'm an idiot. Obviously color has nothing to do with animals and humans detecting black vs. white things. AND PANDAS ARE BLACK AND WHITE!! Therefore, of course color is not needed in these sex education films...
Then again, if Panda color perception is different from human color perception, maybe pandas don't see themselves as black and white...
Amusing and cute, but could you cat still recognize it if it were in black and white? Or if you mess up the hue/color settings?
I would have expected animals to see the colors of TV screens as completely different from the ways we see them. Do pandas have the same color perception humans do, or do they just have the ability to perceive mis-colored pandas as still being panda (and therefore sexy...)
Whoops, you're right, I was confused, it wasn't at Tom's Hardware.
If you are silly and regard privacy as all or nothing, than no, of course not. You could never be 100% sure that someone wasn't hiding in the shadows of your cave...
But if you use your head, you'll realize privacy, like most everything else, is a matter of degree. How likely is it that people you don't want to know something about yourself will in fact know it in the future? The answer to this question is how much privacy you have. A likelyhood of either 0% or 100% is not desirable--society has some need to prevent its members from destroying each other, but, as human beings are judgmental creatures, they are better off not knowing too much about each other.
Seeing privacy as all or nothing puts us in one of the two undesirable extremes--most likely the Orwellian one.
They also included the Nvidia Chameleon demo, in which the gf4 only defeated the matrox by a slight margin, with inferior quality.
There post-G200 cards were certainly promoted as 3d cards. They came with lots of 3d games in their boxes. I'm not saying they were bad cards, but they were certainly sold as 3d cards.
3: From PERSONAL experience, Matrox has traditionally supplied the most stable drivers with the most features RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX!!! You can go pull an old G400 card off the shelf of some store room, plug it in, install the drivers and it'll be as stable as if you went and downloaded their latest (Obviously you'd have to to get support for the newer OS's but the point is valid)
Speaking of ancient cards, it's worth noting that the nvidia detonator drivers are the very same for everything from TNT to Geforce 4, despite the very radical differences between them. No, the ones out of the box may not have been so great--but for likely all eternity you'll be able to download new, great ones, with lots of new features, which brings me to...
4: THERE IS ABSULUTELY NOTHING DRIVERS CAN DO TO ADD FUNCTIONALITY THAT DOESN'T ALREADY EXIST IN THE HARDWARE ITSELF!!!
Man, how could you have a "great big stack" of video cards and honestly say something so contrary to reality? There's a whole lot of software in between your game and your graphics card. Obviously, by upgrading this software, you can get improvements in frame rate, quality, and yes, features. Like the time I downloaded the new nvidia driver and, suddenly, I had anti-aliasing. Like every time you I download a new DirectX SDK and look at all the demos--they do stuff previous versions could not do. Software and hardware have to work together to give you a good user experience.
There's a big difference between refresh rate and frame rate--if you truly meant you can tell the difference between 60 frames and 75 frames per second, you are far more perceptive than I.
Try looking up Nyquist frequency for the problem in this thinking--basically, you'll need 64 fps to convince a human that they're seeing 32fps...
I don't know too much about it, so if I say more I'll embarass myself, as I probably already have...
IANAAstroPhysicist, but wouldn't the pull of Earth's gravity increase the probability somewhat?
The problem with all bureaucracies is their necessary assumption that all human activity can be regulated with a narrow set of rules that could fit in a book. Providing a book claiming to fix that set of rules only makes the problem all the worse.
What's truly needed is a practical book on eliminating all bureaucracy, all formal social order, without replacing it with a new one. Lacking that, no solution to leading a tolerable existance within organized society can be published--the Machine is really adaptive when it comes to crushing people's dreams. We're all on our own, and your fellow geek getting upset and disturbing the social order can only help.
Whoops, no, didn't mean to imply that. But perl has it's own set of strange gotchas that compromise your system, and in general, while it makes code easy to write, also makes it difficult to read--which of course means more debugging time required.
No matter how much damn review, extreme programming, or any other crap software engineering types come up with, once you need more than X lines of C/C++ to solve your problem, you are fucked. You will NOT catch every last memory leak, buffer overflow, type error, no matter how many fallible human beings you add to your project, no matter how much certification they all wasted their time getting.
Don't look at it as an all or nothing thing--if you've got a programming language that catches catagory X, Y, but no Z and programming error, and another language that catches none of those, the former language is still going to be more useful. The more bugs the programming language finds, the more time developers have to find bugs that programming languages can't find.
Remember, everytime you see a security bug due to a buffer overflow, remember that this bug, and all bugs like it, can be completely eliminated with a better choice of programming language, but will continue to plague you no matter how thorough your testing, debugging, documentation, or anything else they tell you in a software engineering class--human beings are totally fallible, and given enough code to write, they WILL fail. It's just a matter of time.
Not to mention that a newer programming language can greatly simplify the task at hand--which reduces the number of bugs (less code == fewer bugs) and leaves more time to find those bugs.
As long as people think it's okay to use C, C++, or perl in code were bugs matter, software WILL keep sucking, forever.