"Canadian's don't carry cash. Period. At least not Canadians under 30. This is one area in which the US and Canada are vastly different... cash is now hardly used for any transactions in Canada anymore, at all."
That's horseshit. Maybe the tiny fragment of the population that you deal with doesn't carry cash, but cash is alive and well from my vantage point. Go into any food court in a shopping mall to see cash in action over many transactions.
Besides, I can tell you one thing that negates your whole claim. Lots of Canadians under 30 smoke pot, and I'm damn certain they aren't buying it with interac withdrawals.
Now if you said, "Canadians use debit a lot" I would have agreed. But you said, "Canadian's don't carry cash. Period. At least not Canadians under 30."
I read a bunch of posts in this thread where people want to draw a line between casual folks and "gamers". The intent is to belittle the more casual player. The problem is that "gamer" is a meaningless title.
Who's a gamer? Is the guy who plays WoW once a week a gamer? Probably not if you ask somebody who plays every night and has 100 days on his main character. Is THAT guy a gamer? Probably not if you ask an asian Starcraft master who practices 10 hours a day and competes in arena matches.
I contend that anybody who plays ANY game is a "gamer".
Does the Wii provide a "Watered-Down" game experience? Doubtful, unless you're hung up on making sure that your hardware is the latest and greatest, that every pixel is too small to see, and that each surround speaker is perfectly adjusted relative to the seat position... in which case it's possible you're enjoying your PS3/Xbox360/PC games LESS than my uncritical nephew who is perfectly happy playing Rock Band on his Wii through TV speakers.
Certainly his experience isn't watered down. He's having a grand time. He doesn't need techno-pricks coming along to explain to him why he should be dissatisfied.
Slashdotium is a terrible idea. Most scientists studying it won't even bother to take measurements. They'll just assume they know what the results will be and they'll write pages and pages of opinions on it.
A ticket scalper is nothing more than another form of mugger. They don't add value by helping people who are willing to pay the higher price, they subtract value by screwing over people who just want to pay face value. If they stood at the ticket window and stole cash from the people waiting to buy tickets the same end state would be reached.
Being half an hour too late to buy tickets to a popular concert is annoying. Finding a bunch of tickets being sold online by these jackasses ten minutes after that is more annoying.
I guess that's for people who find it's just too creepy to have actual porn actresses in their downloaded mpg's... watching them... laughing at them... judging them...
With CGI porn, the disconnect is complete! It has become a truly solitary masturbatory experience, the last vestiges of shared sexuality banished.
I have dismal luck with Firefox no matter which platform I run it on. It's slow to start, grows massive in memory, and aborts more often than any other piece of software I use.
Opera, on the other hand, works just fine for me. I don't ever remember it aborting, at least in the last two years. I love the implementation of the "Transfers" window.
I've given up on Firefox completely, but Opera has a home on my system.
Of course my opinion can be discarded by all of the cognoscenti here because for day-to-day browsing I use IE.
Microsoft has posted a quarterly loss in its online advertising business, compared to Google's sales, $4.7 billion in the first quarter. br.
Yeah, whoever wrote the summary screwed it up. Might as well compare Microsoft's loss to the cost of my auto insurance, or maybe the inflation rate of the cost of a handjob at Sapphire in Vegas over the past two years. That statistical comparison would be equally useless.
"A patch that dumps an entire DIB engine somewhere in the Wine tree is unlikely to be accepted (that has already happened!). It needs to be added in an incremental manner, without breaking working functionality."
I flashed back to evolution arguments when I read that.
"Hey, here's an eye!"
... "That's far too complicated to put in all at once."
"Well, okay. Here's a single photosensitive cell."
"Also, to answer your actual question from before, you prefix whatever you want to ask for elevation with "gksudo" in their shortcuts; that's how you get the graphical elevation password prompt."
Thanks. Now ask me why I don't recommend linux to friends.
This problem didn't stop in the 80's. I serviced Apple products from 1992 to 1997 and we would frequently take in machines whose SCSI hard drives had stopped running. The solution was a good swift kick, followed by data transfer to another drive.
"WinXP has issues connecting to Win98 SMB printers via TCP or NetBEUI when connected to a DOS6 network running LANtastic. It would take about 15 minutes to find the printer and about 10 minutes to send a small document. There was no problem browsing the network, though."
So what, in the end, did the one person to ever have this problem do about it?
Sorry! Couldn't help myself.
"Funny, my nVidia panel asks me for my root login automatically (as with most [all?] items in the Administration menu)."
See, that's the behaviour I would expect and appreciate. Unfortunately it just set the resolution as requested but didn't save the state. Next reboot it was back to single monitor mode.
In Ubuntu 8, installed late last year, I had to execute the display control panel as root in order for my video settings to be permanent.
I did this by executing it from a command line. What was my other option?
I'm not saying there wasn't one. I'm just saying it was neither clear, nor easily google-able at the time. The command line solution was easier to find.
I'm not running Ubuntu anymore. I couldn't solve a 10 minute shutdown problem so I gave up, as I pretty much always do (many installs over many years, not one ever went perfectly smooth, no matter how many HCL's I consulted).
"It would be foolish to count downloads for this purpose. However, Canonical could surely count update requests to repositories, for example."
I wonder how many desktops I would count for?
- Approximately 12 installations since 1996, most recently Ubuntu 8.10
- Each one updated where appropriate until dropped
- NO current installations (removed 8.10 one week ago)
It's not that I don't try... I really do. I just always end up trying to fight my way through some ridiculous little problem. I live with it for a while, then I come to realize I've just stopped using it (I triple boot), so I reclaim the drive space. This time it was ten minute shutdowns.
Now that I've ceased getting updates, how long would I remain on the roster?
In another eight to ten months I'll probably have another linux desktop running briefly.
"Blizzard should wake up to this and work with their player base (although I bet most of the "players" are nothing more than gold farmers), instead of against it."
Oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. There's a small base of legitimate players paying the salaries of millions of gold farmers.
Let's guess 30 cents an hour per worker (just a guess), and the account is used 24 hours a day in shifts, so... $7.20 in wages per day. I'll assume by "most", that you meant 75% of the players are gold farmers, and by players I assume you mean accounts.
75% of 11 million is 8,250,000 accounts. So daily wages will run you $59,400,000.
That means that the remaining 2,750,000 accounts have to pay $21.60 to the gold farmers each and every day.
Naturally that can't be true. So you begin to peel back your variables until you admit the math doesn't work.
Most of the players cannot be gold farmers. Most of them have to be legitimate players.
"Windows is indeed a lot like an Escalade. An overpriced, bloated, and inefficient showcase of false beauty.
And linux is like an inelegant car built out of parts from many disjointed suppliers. The paint on the panels doesn't match. You may or may not be able to get it serviced if anything goes wrong, and chances are you'll have to get real familiar with a collection of wrenches and screwdrivers. And of course if you want to change the tail lights you'll have to rebuild the engine.
So long as you never change anything it'll probably run okay, though.
I installed Ubuntu a month ago. When it installed the nVidia driver (at my request), it gave me a status bar that never updated, and then the bar just vanished. It gave no indication anything at all had happened, and no message to restart my X session. Of course it was done - it just never told me.
Then I used the control panel to adjust my settings. Next time I logged in, it was back to defaults. Found out I had to execute the control panel with sudo in order for the change to be permanent, rather than from the menu.
"Profoundly wrong. You can apply that logic to weather, which can behave very capriciously even on very short timescales, and is a well known deterministic classical system for which exact predictions cannot be made. I suspect you've been reading too much Chopra.'
If you had read my whole post, rather than just the first line, you might have found I don't like the idea of quantum-based free will. I only said that if it exists at all, it has to have its root somewhere past the deterministic level. The first level of scale where we have non-deterministic individual events is at the quantum level.
If you had read a bit more of the thread instead of jumping in to tell me how profoundly wrong I am, you might have seen this:
"Not currently being able to draw lines from mass, charge, etc. to mental states does NOT imply non-determinism. It can be completely deterministic. You just have to completely understand the entire current state of the brain in order to "prove" it to be so. It reminds me of meteorology. We can't make decent forecasts more than a few days out because the system is very complex. It is, however, deterministic. If we understood all the variables, and the complete current state, we could make perfectly accurate predictions."
"I suspect you've been reading too much Chopra. Hint: that's Star Trek physics; quantum mechanics really has nothing to do with consciousness unless a few too many semilegal weeds are involved."
I don't watch Star Trek, I don't read Chopra, and I don't much care for condescending people. And how, exactly, is it that you know consciousness (which isn't free will, by the way) has nothing to do with quantum mechanics? That's an amazing thing to know with certainty.
Slashdot Mirror
"Canadian's don't carry cash. Period. At least not Canadians under 30. This is one area in which the US and Canada are vastly different... cash is now hardly used for any transactions in Canada anymore, at all."
That's horseshit. Maybe the tiny fragment of the population that you deal with doesn't carry cash, but cash is alive and well from my vantage point. Go into any food court in a shopping mall to see cash in action over many transactions.
Besides, I can tell you one thing that negates your whole claim. Lots of Canadians under 30 smoke pot, and I'm damn certain they aren't buying it with interac withdrawals.
Now if you said, "Canadians use debit a lot" I would have agreed. But you said, "Canadian's don't carry cash. Period. At least not Canadians under 30."
Now my joke will get moderated into "Off-topic" because it doesn't make sense anymore.
What... you thought "February" was too easy to pronounce correctly?
I read a bunch of posts in this thread where people want to draw a line between casual folks and "gamers". The intent is to belittle the more casual player. The problem is that "gamer" is a meaningless title.
Who's a gamer? Is the guy who plays WoW once a week a gamer? Probably not if you ask somebody who plays every night and has 100 days on his main character. Is THAT guy a gamer? Probably not if you ask an asian Starcraft master who practices 10 hours a day and competes in arena matches.
I contend that anybody who plays ANY game is a "gamer".
Does the Wii provide a "Watered-Down" game experience? Doubtful, unless you're hung up on making sure that your hardware is the latest and greatest, that every pixel is too small to see, and that each surround speaker is perfectly adjusted relative to the seat position... in which case it's possible you're enjoying your PS3/Xbox360/PC games LESS than my uncritical nephew who is perfectly happy playing Rock Band on his Wii through TV speakers.
Certainly his experience isn't watered down. He's having a grand time. He doesn't need techno-pricks coming along to explain to him why he should be dissatisfied.
Slashdotium is a terrible idea. Most scientists studying it won't even bother to take measurements. They'll just assume they know what the results will be and they'll write pages and pages of opinions on it.
".Gov/.Mil...qualities/values...data/content...Yahoo/Google...purchase/use...low/no...project/product...proprietary/share/free-ware...crap/BS...GNU/BSD...and/or...share/freeware...companies/foundations...personal/cultural...commerce/innovation...competition/share...products/businesses"
Not sure if this post is a joke/jest, but it's definitely obtuse/hard-to-follow.
"blah...blah...blah...SCALPER GOOD!...blag...blah...blah"
A ticket scalper is nothing more than another form of mugger. They don't add value by helping people who are willing to pay the higher price, they subtract value by screwing over people who just want to pay face value. If they stood at the ticket window and stole cash from the people waiting to buy tickets the same end state would be reached.
Being half an hour too late to buy tickets to a popular concert is annoying. Finding a bunch of tickets being sold online by these jackasses ten minutes after that is more annoying.
"Realistic 3D CGI porn. Of course."
I guess that's for people who find it's just too creepy to have actual porn actresses in their downloaded mpg's... watching them... laughing at them... judging them...
With CGI porn, the disconnect is complete! It has become a truly solitary masturbatory experience, the last vestiges of shared sexuality banished.
WOO.... hoo?
I have dismal luck with Firefox no matter which platform I run it on. It's slow to start, grows massive in memory, and aborts more often than any other piece of software I use.
Opera, on the other hand, works just fine for me. I don't ever remember it aborting, at least in the last two years. I love the implementation of the "Transfers" window.
I've given up on Firefox completely, but Opera has a home on my system.
Of course my opinion can be discarded by all of the cognoscenti here because for day-to-day browsing I use IE.
"Meh. I'll just install linux over the windows install as usual."
+5 Insightful. I feel sad for what this says about slashdot moderation.
Microsoft has posted a quarterly loss in its online advertising business, compared to Google's sales, $4.7 billion in the first quarter.
br. Yeah, whoever wrote the summary screwed it up. Might as well compare Microsoft's loss to the cost of my auto insurance, or maybe the inflation rate of the cost of a handjob at Sapphire in Vegas over the past two years. That statistical comparison would be equally useless.
It's been a dozen years since then, but I think Quantum drives also had the problem.
"A patch that dumps an entire DIB engine somewhere in the Wine tree is unlikely to be accepted (that has already happened!). It needs to be added in an incremental manner, without breaking working functionality."
... "That's far too complicated to put in all at once."
... "What am I gonna do with that?"
I flashed back to evolution arguments when I read that.
"Hey, here's an eye!"
"Well, okay. Here's a single photosensitive cell."
"Also, to answer your actual question from before, you prefix whatever you want to ask for elevation with "gksudo" in their shortcuts; that's how you get the graphical elevation password prompt."
Thanks. Now ask me why I don't recommend linux to friends.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction
This problem didn't stop in the 80's. I serviced Apple products from 1992 to 1997 and we would frequently take in machines whose SCSI hard drives had stopped running. The solution was a good swift kick, followed by data transfer to another drive.
"WinXP has issues connecting to Win98 SMB printers via TCP or NetBEUI when connected to a DOS6 network running LANtastic. It would take about 15 minutes to find the printer and about 10 minutes to send a small document. There was no problem browsing the network, though."
So what, in the end, did the one person to ever have this problem do about it? Sorry! Couldn't help myself.
"Funny, my nVidia panel asks me for my root login automatically (as with most [all?] items in the Administration menu)."
See, that's the behaviour I would expect and appreciate. Unfortunately it just set the resolution as requested but didn't save the state. Next reboot it was back to single monitor mode.
In Ubuntu 8, installed late last year, I had to execute the display control panel as root in order for my video settings to be permanent.
I did this by executing it from a command line. What was my other option?
I'm not saying there wasn't one. I'm just saying it was neither clear, nor easily google-able at the time. The command line solution was easier to find.
I'm not running Ubuntu anymore. I couldn't solve a 10 minute shutdown problem so I gave up, as I pretty much always do (many installs over many years, not one ever went perfectly smooth, no matter how many HCL's I consulted).
......that the poster not link to another bloody slashdot page when they can just link to the freaking document itself?
...that the poster not link to another bloody slashdot page when they can just link to the freaking document itself?
"It would be foolish to count downloads for this purpose. However, Canonical could surely count update requests to repositories, for example."
I wonder how many desktops I would count for?
- Approximately 12 installations since 1996, most recently Ubuntu 8.10
- Each one updated where appropriate until dropped
- NO current installations (removed 8.10 one week ago)
It's not that I don't try... I really do. I just always end up trying to fight my way through some ridiculous little problem. I live with it for a while, then I come to realize I've just stopped using it (I triple boot), so I reclaim the drive space. This time it was ten minute shutdowns.
Now that I've ceased getting updates, how long would I remain on the roster?
In another eight to ten months I'll probably have another linux desktop running briefly.
It's a hard picture to nail down.
"Blizzard should wake up to this and work with their player base (although I bet most of the "players" are nothing more than gold farmers), instead of against it."
Oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. There's a small base of legitimate players paying the salaries of millions of gold farmers.
Let's guess 30 cents an hour per worker (just a guess), and the account is used 24 hours a day in shifts, so... $7.20 in wages per day. I'll assume by "most", that you meant 75% of the players are gold farmers, and by players I assume you mean accounts.
75% of 11 million is 8,250,000 accounts. So daily wages will run you $59,400,000.
That means that the remaining 2,750,000 accounts have to pay $21.60 to the gold farmers each and every day.
Naturally that can't be true. So you begin to peel back your variables until you admit the math doesn't work.
Most of the players cannot be gold farmers. Most of them have to be legitimate players.
"Windows is indeed a lot like an Escalade. An overpriced, bloated, and inefficient showcase of false beauty.
And linux is like an inelegant car built out of parts from many disjointed suppliers. The paint on the panels doesn't match. You may or may not be able to get it serviced if anything goes wrong, and chances are you'll have to get real familiar with a collection of wrenches and screwdrivers. And of course if you want to change the tail lights you'll have to rebuild the engine.
So long as you never change anything it'll probably run okay, though.
Seriously, car analogies have got to go.
From a January 19 post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1094419&cid=26483331
I installed Ubuntu a month ago. When it installed the nVidia driver (at my request), it gave me a status bar that never updated, and then the bar just vanished. It gave no indication anything at all had happened, and no message to restart my X session. Of course it was done - it just never told me.
Then I used the control panel to adjust my settings. Next time I logged in, it was back to defaults. Found out I had to execute the control panel with sudo in order for the change to be permanent, rather than from the menu.
Has this been improved?
"Profoundly wrong. You can apply that logic to weather, which can behave very capriciously even on very short timescales, and is a well known deterministic classical system for which exact predictions cannot be made. I suspect you've been reading too much Chopra.'
If you had read my whole post, rather than just the first line, you might have found I don't like the idea of quantum-based free will. I only said that if it exists at all, it has to have its root somewhere past the deterministic level. The first level of scale where we have non-deterministic individual events is at the quantum level.
If you had read a bit more of the thread instead of jumping in to tell me how profoundly wrong I am, you might have seen this:
"Not currently being able to draw lines from mass, charge, etc. to mental states does NOT imply non-determinism. It can be completely deterministic. You just have to completely understand the entire current state of the brain in order to "prove" it to be so. It reminds me of meteorology. We can't make decent forecasts more than a few days out because the system is very complex. It is, however, deterministic. If we understood all the variables, and the complete current state, we could make perfectly accurate predictions."
"I suspect you've been reading too much Chopra. Hint: that's Star Trek physics; quantum mechanics really has nothing to do with consciousness unless a few too many semilegal weeds are involved."
I don't watch Star Trek, I don't read Chopra, and I don't much care for condescending people. And how, exactly, is it that you know consciousness (which isn't free will, by the way) has nothing to do with quantum mechanics? That's an amazing thing to know with certainty.