Heh. I'm already never buying anything HP again, as of a few years ago. The laptop I got was actually perfectly respectable, and didn't break any more frequently than laptops from any other manufacturer (when you use such a complicated piece of technology constantly, you do expect things will break occasionally). When something did break, though, they basically completely refused to honor my valid extended warranty. Spent several hours on the phone before they agreed to, then a year later something else broke and I had to go through the same insanity *again*. HP clearly just doesn't want my money.
The backend will likely continue to have bugfixes to it (either that or they'll scrap everything and make another unuseable mess, like Vista, but assuming they don't). The UI will continue to get uglier and less useable, and once the OS is forced upon us... I'll continue to not use basically any part of it, the same way I run 7 at home now and don't ever have to see 95% of its UI. It's a sad day when I have to work to remove as much of the UI of an OS as possible because it stinks, but... that day has already arrived. So if their next release makes it even worse, who cares? I'm not using it anyway.
Sometimes, for the more obscure stuff (which happens to also be the sort of music whose creators I would want to have money be given to), it isn't actually easy to find a torrent or anything. Sometimes, that same obscure stuff is either on itunes or (better) available directly from the creator's web site. Sometimes I don't want the whole cd, just one song; sometimes, the music is *only* available digitally, because pressing cds is work and costs money.
Meanwhile, I buy cds over vinyl because I care more about the convenience of listening to music on non-archaic instruments and the convenience of them being like a third the size, than I do about the extremely minute difference in sound quality?
But yes, I do believe in a code of morals, which may be strange for this place, called "buy good music if the creator of the music will get the money I spent".
> "Just because something is called a "rock" does not meant that is has any relationship to anything that has to do with a real rock."
Well... I've certainly heard quite a lot of "rock" that does not, on cursory inspection, actually rock in any sense. So I would have to agree with you on that. (As well as also agreeing that the study of AI quite frequently has little to do with actual artificial intelligence, in much the same way that cheeze products frequently have little, if any, actual cheese.)
I'm a bit late to this one, but you might appreciate the suggestions, at least: get Classic Shell, it fixes the start menu. Get Taskbar Tweaker, it fixes the taskbar (except for the removal of the quick launch area, but there's an easy way to enable it again, you can google that). Get a replacement file manager - I'm partial to explorer++, being the most XP-like, though he really needs to release a new stable version; 1.2 is old and missing a bunch of important bugfixes, and the current nightly build is kind of buggy. I'm still running a rather more stable build from a couple months ago. But it's not the only such program, anyway. Others are probably more stable, they just aren't open source and tended to have extra features I'd rather do without.
So, there *are* fixes to most of the bass-ackwardness of the Win7 UI... they just generally don't come from Microsoft. (At least the backend doesn't also suck, like Vista's did.)
In other news, I fail at setting the right text mode. Go me. (Though if you're like me, you'd read tags as italics without thinking about it *anyway*. But still.)
I certainly wouldn't take a pay cut, as I rather like the money I make... but I wouldn't even really want to always telecommute if I could do it for free. We have a developer on our team who for other reasons has to live in another city. He's great as his job, the team is glad to have him, and sometimes I have to ask him for help on something, but I'm always happier when I can ask someone else instead - it's far easier to explain things in person than over IM. I can't even imagine that being me off by myself, having to only talk to coworkers via IM. Not to mention, I'd be distracted like crazy by the internet and stuff, working on the same computer I goof off with at home.
I could imagine doing it maybe a couple times a month if I had the option, but not every day.
Yeah. As someone who had never been properly introduced to the Doctor until the new series started, and who since went back and found a large quantity of the old stuff... the new stuff is much better, in general. (Other than season 5. No offense to Matt Smith, who I like fine; just whatever braindead monkeys are writing his scripts.)
You can. Assuming you haven't already, just google it. Or I could do it for you, because I don't feel like doing work:p. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1954619&start=15
Of the handful of annoyances when I decided to try the beta a few months ago, that was one of the easiest to find a solution for.
Win7 is actually way nicer than XP... once you replace its file manager with a better one. And its start menu, and its taskbar, and its file search... so really, the whole UI blew. But the backend's much better! (This isn't sarcasm, I actually do have a computer running Win7 on which I replaced like 95% of all the UI with various programs/UI tweakers, most of which were based on the look-and-feel of XP, and now consider it a much better OS than actual-XP was.)
For what it's worth, VS is pretty decent, and C# is a great language. So they aren't *all* bad.
Re:If I wanted something that looked ugly like Chr
on
Firefox 4 RC1 Released
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· Score: 1
Which is better than when it was missing entirely (it was displayed in a halfassed fashion in the url bar), but still pretty bad. It clips *less*, but it still clips, plus it's always black text, regardless of whether, say, you're viewing a page with a black background.
Every beta release, I turn off Status-4-Evar, determine that FF is unusable without it, and turn it back on. It's sort of sad, but whatever, I can live with having to run one tiny addon to make the browser usable. I've been mostly happy with it except for that.
At least to Disney musical-listeners: One jump ahead of the breadline One swing ahead of the sword I steal only what I can't afford (That's Everything!)
I read the title, I clicked the link, I fully expected it to be about some weird dude in Denmark, doing some strange AI-research-related thing in an Android app. After reading the first sentence of the summary, I thought maybe it was someone running Android on their new robot? It took me *way* too long to remember that, in fact, the word "android" predates Google by rather a lot (it didn't help that the word in the title, as required, got capitalized). Great example of linguistic backtracking, though.
Agreed. I once thought I hated the whole epic fantasy genre - no, I just hate it when done badly. Rothfuss is an excellent example of it being done right. Martin... not so much. I made it all the way through A Game of Thrones, but didn't really have any desire to continue; I'm really tempted to buy the second book of the Kingkiller trilogy in hardcover right now, and I hate hardcovers.
Also, you can tell Rothfuss is awesome just by looking at his picture on wikipedia - he's wearing a "Joss Whedon is my master now" tshirt. Which, apparently he made a promise recently that if he happens to make an absurd amount of money, he will give it all to Fillion to buy back the rights to Firefly with. That decided me: I'm buying the hardcover.
Really? You learn how to not go to jail from school? I hear there are much better places to learn that sort of thing - for instance... I'm reminded of a great song:
They locked us away for three years and a day Completing our alienation But we learned from those men how to not get caught again California finally paid our education
Amusingly enough, I *did* once meet in person one of the biggest trolls on a forum I spent, at the time, way too much time on. He was a super-nice guy in person. Just thought it was amusing to play a troll on the forum. Actually, I can think of a couple people from forums I've met in person, who fit that description.
And I had no desire to read the clearly-selling-something linked article, but as a moderator of a (different) forum now, I still don't see what's wrong with the recommended course of action for trolls being ignoring them. That or, in extreme cases, banning them, removing their posts, and repeating until they get bored of nobody responding to them (unless you count mod response of deleting their posts). I've never actually seen a case extreme enough to warrant that, though.
In this particular case, we allow it because when things get too draconian, those of us who care just torrent them instead. I like to think of it as a particularly convenient form of passive resistance (I *do* spend money on media. Just not media that's DRM'd to kingdom come, and where the creators of the media get crap-all in return.)
I'm not arguing that we as a country tend to be kind of major pushovers, but in this case, the alternatives are just obvious.
As someone entirely addicted to KoL (seriously, it's an amazing game), I will comment that this is true, but somewhat misleading. At a very casual level, you could certainly spend all your turns each day in little time, just goofing off. If you're trying to play well, though, you're managing a bunch of n-times-per-day items (where n is frequently, but not always, 1), loads of familiars, loads of skills, and loads of goals. This is what makes the game interesting, but it can certainly suck up gobs of time in thinking about your next move repeatedly, even though the number of moves is fixed.
Still way more limited-time-per-day than your typical MMO, though. (Unless you go make a bunch of alts. But don't do that; they aren't allowed to interact with each other, so there isn't really much point, generally.)
Once again, I wish I had mod points right now. This might well be the first time I've ever seen "literally" followed immediately by "millions of years", where the "literally" was *actually* used literally. You win!
I'm neminem here, there and everywhere (unless that name contains capitalization in a location where capitalization isn't forced, in which case I'm not. I'm not, for instance, NemineM.) Marketers: go ahead and do what you like, I'm ignoring you anyway. Why should I care?
Dang, I had to look midway down the second page of comments to find someone who thought this article, from the title, was about software drivers being blamed. I hadn't heard of any previous instance where a software driver caused a car to spin out of control; that would have been somewhat scary.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. I'm already never buying anything HP again, as of a few years ago. The laptop I got was actually perfectly respectable, and didn't break any more frequently than laptops from any other manufacturer (when you use such a complicated piece of technology constantly, you do expect things will break occasionally). When something did break, though, they basically completely refused to honor my valid extended warranty. Spent several hours on the phone before they agreed to, then a year later something else broke and I had to go through the same insanity *again*. HP clearly just doesn't want my money.
The backend will likely continue to have bugfixes to it (either that or they'll scrap everything and make another unuseable mess, like Vista, but assuming they don't). The UI will continue to get uglier and less useable, and once the OS is forced upon us... I'll continue to not use basically any part of it, the same way I run 7 at home now and don't ever have to see 95% of its UI. It's a sad day when I have to work to remove as much of the UI of an OS as possible because it stinks, but... that day has already arrived. So if their next release makes it even worse, who cares? I'm not using it anyway.
Sometimes, for the more obscure stuff (which happens to also be the sort of music whose creators I would want to have money be given to), it isn't actually easy to find a torrent or anything. Sometimes, that same obscure stuff is either on itunes or (better) available directly from the creator's web site. Sometimes I don't want the whole cd, just one song; sometimes, the music is *only* available digitally, because pressing cds is work and costs money.
Meanwhile, I buy cds over vinyl because I care more about the convenience of listening to music on non-archaic instruments and the convenience of them being like a third the size, than I do about the extremely minute difference in sound quality?
But yes, I do believe in a code of morals, which may be strange for this place, called "buy good music if the creator of the music will get the money I spent".
> "Just because something is called a "rock" does not meant that is has any relationship to anything that has to do with a real rock."
Well... I've certainly heard quite a lot of "rock" that does not, on cursory inspection, actually rock in any sense. So I would have to agree with you on that. (As well as also agreeing that the study of AI quite frequently has little to do with actual artificial intelligence, in much the same way that cheeze products frequently have little, if any, actual cheese.)
I'm a bit late to this one, but you might appreciate the suggestions, at least: get Classic Shell, it fixes the start menu. Get Taskbar Tweaker, it fixes the taskbar (except for the removal of the quick launch area, but there's an easy way to enable it again, you can google that). Get a replacement file manager - I'm partial to explorer++, being the most XP-like, though he really needs to release a new stable version; 1.2 is old and missing a bunch of important bugfixes, and the current nightly build is kind of buggy. I'm still running a rather more stable build from a couple months ago. But it's not the only such program, anyway. Others are probably more stable, they just aren't open source and tended to have extra features I'd rather do without.
So, there *are* fixes to most of the bass-ackwardness of the Win7 UI... they just generally don't come from Microsoft. (At least the backend doesn't also suck, like Vista's did.)
In other news, I fail at setting the right text mode. Go me. (Though if you're like me, you'd read tags as italics without thinking about it *anyway*. But still.)
I certainly wouldn't take a pay cut, as I rather like the money I make... but I wouldn't even really want to always telecommute if I could do it for free. We have a developer on our team who for other reasons has to live in another city. He's great as his job, the team is glad to have him, and sometimes I have to ask him for help on something, but I'm always happier when I can ask someone else instead - it's far easier to explain things in person than over IM. I can't even imagine that being me off by myself, having to only talk to coworkers via IM. Not to mention, I'd be distracted like crazy by the internet and stuff, working on the same computer I goof off with at home.
I could imagine doing it maybe a couple times a month if I had the option, but not every day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_tank/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dummy/
The specific implementation presented by whatever magazine you were reminded of may not have been an implementation that's ever been used, but the concept itself has been around a while, and is not limited to jokes in satire magazines.
Yeah. As someone who had never been properly introduced to the Doctor until the new series started, and who since went back and found a large quantity of the old stuff... the new stuff is much better, in general. (Other than season 5. No offense to Matt Smith, who I like fine; just whatever braindead monkeys are writing his scripts.)
You can. Assuming you haven't already, just google it. Or I could do it for you, because I don't feel like doing work :p. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1954619&start=15
Of the handful of annoyances when I decided to try the beta a few months ago, that was one of the easiest to find a solution for.
Win7 is actually way nicer than XP... once you replace its file manager with a better one. And its start menu, and its taskbar, and its file search... so really, the whole UI blew. But the backend's much better! (This isn't sarcasm, I actually do have a computer running Win7 on which I replaced like 95% of all the UI with various programs/UI tweakers, most of which were based on the look-and-feel of XP, and now consider it a much better OS than actual-XP was.)
For what it's worth, VS is pretty decent, and C# is a great language. So they aren't *all* bad.
Which is better than when it was missing entirely (it was displayed in a halfassed fashion in the url bar), but still pretty bad. It clips *less*, but it still clips, plus it's always black text, regardless of whether, say, you're viewing a page with a black background.
Every beta release, I turn off Status-4-Evar, determine that FF is unusable without it, and turn it back on. It's sort of sad, but whatever, I can live with having to run one tiny addon to make the browser usable. I've been mostly happy with it except for that.
At least to Disney musical-listeners:
One jump ahead of the breadline
One swing ahead of the sword
I steal only what I can't afford (That's Everything!)
I read the title, I clicked the link, I fully expected it to be about some weird dude in Denmark, doing some strange AI-research-related thing in an Android app. After reading the first sentence of the summary, I thought maybe it was someone running Android on their new robot? It took me *way* too long to remember that, in fact, the word "android" predates Google by rather a lot (it didn't help that the word in the title, as required, got capitalized). Great example of linguistic backtracking, though.
Agreed. I once thought I hated the whole epic fantasy genre - no, I just hate it when done badly. Rothfuss is an excellent example of it being done right. Martin... not so much. I made it all the way through A Game of Thrones, but didn't really have any desire to continue; I'm really tempted to buy the second book of the Kingkiller trilogy in hardcover right now, and I hate hardcovers.
Also, you can tell Rothfuss is awesome just by looking at his picture on wikipedia - he's wearing a "Joss Whedon is my master now" tshirt. Which, apparently he made a promise recently that if he happens to make an absurd amount of money, he will give it all to Fillion to buy back the rights to Firefly with. That decided me: I'm buying the hardcover.
Really? You learn how to not go to jail from school? I hear there are much better places to learn that sort of thing - for instance... I'm reminded of a great song:
They locked us away for three years and a day
Completing our alienation
But we learned from those men how to not get caught again
California finally paid our education
Nano!
Amusingly enough, I *did* once meet in person one of the biggest trolls on a forum I spent, at the time, way too much time on. He was a super-nice guy in person. Just thought it was amusing to play a troll on the forum. Actually, I can think of a couple people from forums I've met in person, who fit that description.
And I had no desire to read the clearly-selling-something linked article, but as a moderator of a (different) forum now, I still don't see what's wrong with the recommended course of action for trolls being ignoring them. That or, in extreme cases, banning them, removing their posts, and repeating until they get bored of nobody responding to them (unless you count mod response of deleting their posts). I've never actually seen a case extreme enough to warrant that, though.
I just lost the game. (Seriously, look at the "Article milestones" listing near the top of that page. It is... remarkable.)
In this particular case, we allow it because when things get too draconian, those of us who care just torrent them instead. I like to think of it as a particularly convenient form of passive resistance (I *do* spend money on media. Just not media that's DRM'd to kingdom come, and where the creators of the media get crap-all in return.)
I'm not arguing that we as a country tend to be kind of major pushovers, but in this case, the alternatives are just obvious.
As someone entirely addicted to KoL (seriously, it's an amazing game), I will comment that this is true, but somewhat misleading. At a very casual level, you could certainly spend all your turns each day in little time, just goofing off. If you're trying to play well, though, you're managing a bunch of n-times-per-day items (where n is frequently, but not always, 1), loads of familiars, loads of skills, and loads of goals. This is what makes the game interesting, but it can certainly suck up gobs of time in thinking about your next move repeatedly, even though the number of moves is fixed.
Still way more limited-time-per-day than your typical MMO, though. (Unless you go make a bunch of alts. But don't do that; they aren't allowed to interact with each other, so there isn't really much point, generally.)
Once again, I wish I had mod points right now. This might well be the first time I've ever seen "literally" followed immediately by "millions of years", where the "literally" was *actually* used literally. You win!
Oh, how I wish I had mod points right now. That would be pretty amazingly hilarious.
I'm neminem here, there and everywhere (unless that name contains capitalization in a location where capitalization isn't forced, in which case I'm not. I'm not, for instance, NemineM.) Marketers: go ahead and do what you like, I'm ignoring you anyway. Why should I care?
Dang, I had to look midway down the second page of comments to find someone who thought this article, from the title, was about software drivers being blamed. I hadn't heard of any previous instance where a software driver caused a car to spin out of control; that would have been somewhat scary.