Oh, god. You just about gave me a geek-gasm there. The only two series I've ever fanboy'd out over (well, at least since I got over the Ninja Turtles, about the time I turned 7), coming together? I know it'll never happen, but dang, it'd be amazing.
Presumably, they'd make money by attracting people who would otherwise possibly buy from another company, because they're offering something other companies can't offer.
So, when Vista came out, I decided to try out Linux again, just for that eventuality that the only supported OS over in Windows-land was too crappy to bother with. I'd tried Linux before, and while I really like certain things about it, there were just enough annoyances that using it was just not worth it. Now, I will say this: it's gotten much better. In fact, after a bit of tweaking, I've actually gotten it to the point where I can use it and only occasionally complain - and having a full-on, nicely-supported cli is really, really cool. Nonetheless, here are just a few things I've had to deal with:
1. Figuring out where, scattered throughout the OS, various settings I really wanted to set were. Yes, the OS is amazingly configurable, but most of that possibility is hidden in plain view, until you know exactly what you're looking for, and what to do with it.
2. Keys on the keyboard that aren't mapped to anything, without a fair amount of work. Or, keys such as the start menu key, that are mapped, but require a bit of jiggling to do anything useful. Or, like
3. Support for things like wireless cards. Well-known fact, linux doesn't know what to do with them most of the time.
4. The fact that if you ask for help, you're frustrated by the issue that each distro does things just a bit differently. So someone'll say, well, you'll need to fix [x], maybe. There might be a config file here, or here, or maybe over there... or it might be called something different. You might want to do this to it, or maybe that instead.
And of course, then there's all the programs (say... any game ever) that people will want to run, that don't. Of course, that's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, since if a large number of people do start using linux, more ports will be made. And I recognize that a lot of the problems are just at the window manager level, that linux *itself* is fully complete, not buggy at all, and really quite powerful. But people, even geeks like myself, like having a gui sometimes, and like it intuitive and not buggy.
And yes - I am, in fact, posting from linux right now. It's still good to get in the habit of using it.
I have a much better idea: how about we, as a society, simply agree not to judge a 30 year old for comments he might have said 15 years ago, because that would be stupid. Or, at the least, after discovering something awkward that your applicant wrote, instead of assuming he still agrees with it, ask him about it. Ask when he wrote it, and what he would say about it now.
Just because a technology can be used for all kinds of nasty purposes, doesn't mean we have to use it for them. I, for one, am wholeheartedly in favor of keeping as much information around, for as long as possible...
Nah, I still buy music all the time. Just not anything the RIAA owns - mostly cds recorded and distributed personally by actual individual musicians. When the RIAA controls that, that will be the day I get scared.
But... I actually like google's ads. No, really. They're unobtrusive, they're as out of the way as you could want, and really, I only even notice them when I get the suspicion that an email might provide amusing responses from its filtering system. I've gotten some pretty great ones.
Reminds me of Rusto. A number of years before I got here, Harvey Mudd apparently was the recipient of a fancy-schmancy piece of modern art, which the artist bragged was "completely unrustable". The administration then, stupidly, went and bragged about this to its student body. The result: some students proved them wrong, and ever since, the piece has been sitting in the main courtyard, looking stupid and rusty.:D
Has anyone had a positive experience with customer service in any corporation? Yes, yes I have. I've bought several Fujitsu laptops, and not all of them have been perfect. One model, a couple months in, the screen broke. I called them, they said ship it and they'll fix it. So I did. Broke again a few weeks later. I complained. They said, alright, ship it back, they'll fix it again, and if it continues to break, they'll send me a whole new laptop. So I did, they did, and it did. Got a new laptop, the same model. That one lasted about 6 months before breaking - in the exact same way as the last one. Guess what they did? That's right - they sent me a new laptop again, a different model this time. This was most of a year later, too, so it means something when I say that they sent me a laptop worth the price I paid for the one that kept breaking, at the time.
A few years later, with a newer, better laptop, the hard drive broke. That time, it was totally not the result of a defect, just the result of heavy use of the drive over a long period of time. Nonetheless, it was still under extended warrantee, barely, so I called in. I told the guy my hard drive was busted, expecting that we'd probably have to go over the whole are-you-sure-it-wasn't-x-or-y process, but nope - he just accepted that I knew what I was talking about. In fact, he didn't even make me ship it across the country: he said I could drop it by a local distributor, and gave me a couple names to look up.
I was really rather sad, after all the great service Fujitsu had given me, that a year ago when I was once again in the market for a new laptop, I looked to Fujitsu first and discovered that they didn't actually have what I was looking for. So I had to buy an HP, and while I've been universally satisfied with the system's performance, and its price, their customer service does leave a bit to be desired.
How about possibly because Nintendo and Sony both end up creating consistently decent-at-worst stuff, while Microsoft and Adobe both frequently generate utter crap?
"This is like saying "Nobody would want to SUBSCRIBE to cable television. You don't want to RENT your shows, you want to OWN them, JUST LIKE A HOUSE"...what? that makes no sense? well, either does your post."
It's a little bit off-topic, but I feel the need to mention that there are people, myself included, who would say exactly that. I don't want to rent my shows, I want to own them, just like a house, just like my music, just like my games. I might also subscribe to a music or games or movies rental scheme, if it were cheap, but generally speaking, I'd much rather own a small collection of [x] than rent a larger collection.
Libraries, of course, are different, in that they're free. I wouldn't pay for library use, either.
Wait, so, what? You can use this software to impregnate other computers? That sounds a bit virus-like... even M$, I didn't think would be that low (Sony, on the other hand)...
Entirely off-topic, but you do realize that "orthogonal" means "never going to intersect", right? I agree with your sentiment entirely, just not your wording - because morality and legality certainly do intersect. Frequently, even. I'm very glad there are laws against murder, burglary, assault, fraud, and so on. On the other hand, the drinking age could use some tuning... laws against prostitution and various recreational drugs could use some tuning... all kinds of laws deserve tuning, copywrite certainly among them, but no more or less than any number of other things.
It's great, though - I have a friend who believes, or at least pretends to believe for the sake of a joke (though if he's joking, he's really good at pretending otherwise), that legality is always equal to morality. He has stated very explicitly, when I asked him, that if I were to hand him booze and he were to drink it, he would be doing something immoral (he's 18), but that if I were to take him to Europe and do the same thing, it'd be fine. I don't understand him.
No, the *nix way is the correct one. As the poster above me pointed out: crashing, while generating gobs and gobs of debug output, is useful if you're running open-source code, the point being that debug output can then be sent off to whoever is responsible for getting the bug fixed, and a little while later, you'll be able to download a new version in which the bug has been fixed. I'm fine with MS's assertion that a controlled crash is better than an uncontrolled crash - but it's still a crash, which is a bug, and should be fixed, now that it's been pointed out. That's the *nix way.
Of course, you could then hide a camera somewhere, and put the receiver for the camera inside the person's cloak. You might not be able to see with your unaided vision, but that doesn't stop you from being able to see with aided vision - and a small camera is much easier to hide than a person.
You don't know how happy that would make me. I'm currently the proud owner of a complete no-name brand mp3 player, which suffers from a rather mediocre interface, but has the honor of being the only player currently capable of supporting 100 gig drives. I bought it for that exact reason.
"Besides that in countries like The Netherlands where porn is not blocked from children, they have a lower crime rate, and lower occurances of rape and incest. Hmmm, seems like censorship does more harm than good."
You know, correlation != causation is still true even when we don't want it to be... I think it probably is true that censorship does more harm than good, but providing an example of a single country that has less censorship and less crime doesn't really tell you much.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you beat up on chickens, the chickens'll get mad eventually and pwn you.
Same. All I know of Habbo is having looked up "desudesudesudesudesu", after hearing people quote it out of context for so long.
Oh, god. You just about gave me a geek-gasm there. The only two series I've ever fanboy'd out over (well, at least since I got over the Ninja Turtles, about the time I turned 7), coming together? I know it'll never happen, but dang, it'd be amazing.
Hitler Hitler Nazis Nazis Hitler Nazis Hitler Hitler Nazis Nazis Nazis Hitler.
Presumably, they'd make money by attracting people who would otherwise possibly buy from another company, because they're offering something other companies can't offer.
So, when Vista came out, I decided to try out Linux again, just for that eventuality that the only supported OS over in Windows-land was too crappy to bother with. I'd tried Linux before, and while I really like certain things about it, there were just enough annoyances that using it was just not worth it. Now, I will say this: it's gotten much better. In fact, after a bit of tweaking, I've actually gotten it to the point where I can use it and only occasionally complain - and having a full-on, nicely-supported cli is really, really cool. Nonetheless, here are just a few things I've had to deal with:
1. Figuring out where, scattered throughout the OS, various settings I really wanted to set were. Yes, the OS is amazingly configurable, but most of that possibility is hidden in plain view, until you know exactly what you're looking for, and what to do with it. 2. Keys on the keyboard that aren't mapped to anything, without a fair amount of work. Or, keys such as the start menu key, that are mapped, but require a bit of jiggling to do anything useful. Or, like
3. Support for things like wireless cards. Well-known fact, linux doesn't know what to do with them most of the time.
4. The fact that if you ask for help, you're frustrated by the issue that each distro does things just a bit differently. So someone'll say, well, you'll need to fix [x], maybe. There might be a config file here, or here, or maybe over there... or it might be called something different. You might want to do this to it, or maybe that instead.
And of course, then there's all the programs (say... any game ever) that people will want to run, that don't. Of course, that's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, since if a large number of people do start using linux, more ports will be made. And I recognize that a lot of the problems are just at the window manager level, that linux *itself* is fully complete, not buggy at all, and really quite powerful. But people, even geeks like myself, like having a gui sometimes, and like it intuitive and not buggy.
And yes - I am, in fact, posting from linux right now. It's still good to get in the habit of using it.
Nope, that's what I was thinking, as well.
I have a much better idea: how about we, as a society, simply agree not to judge a 30 year old for comments he might have said 15 years ago, because that would be stupid. Or, at the least, after discovering something awkward that your applicant wrote, instead of assuming he still agrees with it, ask him about it. Ask when he wrote it, and what he would say about it now.
Just because a technology can be used for all kinds of nasty purposes, doesn't mean we have to use it for them. I, for one, am wholeheartedly in favor of keeping as much information around, for as long as possible...
You should take him up on that threat. I think, after all, this guy needs the shrink more than you do.
Nah, I still buy music all the time. Just not anything the RIAA owns - mostly cds recorded and distributed personally by actual individual musicians. When the RIAA controls that, that will be the day I get scared.
But... I actually like google's ads. No, really. They're unobtrusive, they're as out of the way as you could want, and really, I only even notice them when I get the suspicion that an email might provide amusing responses from its filtering system. I've gotten some pretty great ones.
Reminds me of Rusto. A number of years before I got here, Harvey Mudd apparently was the recipient of a fancy-schmancy piece of modern art, which the artist bragged was "completely unrustable". The administration then, stupidly, went and bragged about this to its student body. The result: some students proved them wrong, and ever since, the piece has been sitting in the main courtyard, looking stupid and rusty. :D
Has anyone had a positive experience with customer service in any corporation? Yes, yes I have. I've bought several Fujitsu laptops, and not all of them have been perfect. One model, a couple months in, the screen broke. I called them, they said ship it and they'll fix it. So I did. Broke again a few weeks later. I complained. They said, alright, ship it back, they'll fix it again, and if it continues to break, they'll send me a whole new laptop. So I did, they did, and it did. Got a new laptop, the same model. That one lasted about 6 months before breaking - in the exact same way as the last one. Guess what they did? That's right - they sent me a new laptop again, a different model this time. This was most of a year later, too, so it means something when I say that they sent me a laptop worth the price I paid for the one that kept breaking, at the time.
A few years later, with a newer, better laptop, the hard drive broke. That time, it was totally not the result of a defect, just the result of heavy use of the drive over a long period of time. Nonetheless, it was still under extended warrantee, barely, so I called in. I told the guy my hard drive was busted, expecting that we'd probably have to go over the whole are-you-sure-it-wasn't-x-or-y process, but nope - he just accepted that I knew what I was talking about. In fact, he didn't even make me ship it across the country: he said I could drop it by a local distributor, and gave me a couple names to look up.
I was really rather sad, after all the great service Fujitsu had given me, that a year ago when I was once again in the market for a new laptop, I looked to Fujitsu first and discovered that they didn't actually have what I was looking for. So I had to buy an HP, and while I've been universally satisfied with the system's performance, and its price, their customer service does leave a bit to be desired.
How about possibly because Nintendo and Sony both end up creating consistently decent-at-worst stuff, while Microsoft and Adobe both frequently generate utter crap?
Or, more likely, they do think it's a big deal, but are not allowed to say or write that opinion, or they'll be thrown in jail.
"This is like saying "Nobody would want to SUBSCRIBE to cable television. You don't want to RENT your shows, you want to OWN them, JUST LIKE A HOUSE" ...what? that makes no sense? well, either does your post."
It's a little bit off-topic, but I feel the need to mention that there are people, myself included, who would say exactly that. I don't want to rent my shows, I want to own them, just like a house, just like my music, just like my games. I might also subscribe to a music or games or movies rental scheme, if it were cheap, but generally speaking, I'd much rather own a small collection of [x] than rent a larger collection.
Libraries, of course, are different, in that they're free. I wouldn't pay for library use, either.
Wait, so, what? You can use this software to impregnate other computers? That sounds a bit virus-like... even M$, I didn't think would be that low (Sony, on the other hand)...
Entirely off-topic, but you do realize that "orthogonal" means "never going to intersect", right? I agree with your sentiment entirely, just not your wording - because morality and legality certainly do intersect. Frequently, even. I'm very glad there are laws against murder, burglary, assault, fraud, and so on. On the other hand, the drinking age could use some tuning... laws against prostitution and various recreational drugs could use some tuning... all kinds of laws deserve tuning, copywrite certainly among them, but no more or less than any number of other things. It's great, though - I have a friend who believes, or at least pretends to believe for the sake of a joke (though if he's joking, he's really good at pretending otherwise), that legality is always equal to morality. He has stated very explicitly, when I asked him, that if I were to hand him booze and he were to drink it, he would be doing something immoral (he's 18), but that if I were to take him to Europe and do the same thing, it'd be fine. I don't understand him.
I think you mean: "Vista sucks... if I want to run Windows, I will run XP Pro."
No, the *nix way is the correct one. As the poster above me pointed out: crashing, while generating gobs and gobs of debug output, is useful if you're running open-source code, the point being that debug output can then be sent off to whoever is responsible for getting the bug fixed, and a little while later, you'll be able to download a new version in which the bug has been fixed. I'm fine with MS's assertion that a controlled crash is better than an uncontrolled crash - but it's still a crash, which is a bug, and should be fixed, now that it's been pointed out. That's the *nix way.
Of course, you could then hide a camera somewhere, and put the receiver for the camera inside the person's cloak. You might not be able to see with your unaided vision, but that doesn't stop you from being able to see with aided vision - and a small camera is much easier to hide than a person.
I have seen games of Diplomacy that lasted over a month, however. Years would only be a slight exaggeration.
Nobody's mentioned Haar wavelets yet? Weird.
Look them up - they're part of OpenCV, and I'm pretty sure it's the same basic principles in action.
You don't know how happy that would make me. I'm currently the proud owner of a complete no-name brand mp3 player, which suffers from a rather mediocre interface, but has the honor of being the only player currently capable of supporting 100 gig drives. I bought it for that exact reason.
"Besides that in countries like The Netherlands where porn is not blocked from children, they have a lower crime rate, and lower occurances of rape and incest. Hmmm, seems like censorship does more harm than good."
You know, correlation != causation is still true even when we don't want it to be... I think it probably is true that censorship does more harm than good, but providing an example of a single country that has less censorship and less crime doesn't really tell you much.