"why? because you're afraid of the price. what do i say to this? get used to it. you're going to have to buy a car and your own house someday. $600 is nothing compared to these purchases. if you've got disposable income, flaunt it."
I bought a home this year and I'm on my fourth new car. My "disposable" income isn't huge, but it's a comfortable $3000 per month. But part of being responsible with money is knowing when you're wasting it. Apparently you haven't learned that how you spend smaller amounts of money is very indicative of how you spend larger amounts. Good luck in your future role as debt-laden house-poor guy.
"At the time we are able to produce systems (robots and/or software) that can become self-aware, we will very likely need to consider "rights" of such. Think about it (no pun intended). At the time a machine realizes it's not aware, it becomes aware. Soon, such a machine will begin to re-design itself, and easily surpass human intelligence.What then?;-) Food for thought"
I guess it's food for thought. But then you'd have to have completely missed the last seventy years of science fiction in order for it to be a new idea.
Quit complaining about price--the reason you complain is that you want one badly but don't have the cash to pony up and buy the device.
Hardly. I can easily afford one, but that doesn't mean I check my brain at the door. It's still too much for a game console.
I'd guess that the average income on slashdot is high enough that a PS3 is well within the means of most of us. I impulse-bought a set of software tools last week that came to more than that.
I was considering waiting for the PS3 but the price put me way off the idea. Then boxing day came around and I picked up the full XBox360 (Hard drive, etc.) with a Ghost Recon game and the XBOX Live Arcade pack for $360US.
Value is about how much you spend versus what you perceive to be the quality/usefulness of the product. Only a fool disregards that evaluation simply because he can "afford it".
If the target audience for the program is people who have no personal desire to change their screens for aesthetic reasons then bravo. Well done. But how far out of touch do you have to be to not know that skins are desirable? They should be available and easily installed.
Fine. It's free. They can do as they choose. But there are a few free clients, and this one looks dreary. Boring. Sterile.
It's efficient and seems fast, but I've got plenty of CPU power, and video cards aren't a roadblock anymore. I'll pass.
I was punished for using a Linux LiveCD to login to their computers without using a password, even after I told the admins how to disable booting from CD-ROMs. They refused to update any of the computers and as such I was using the same tactic till the day I graduated.
So the policy was clearly communicated to you and you continued to reoffend.
Shouldn't the school district be liable for their own insecurity?
Actually, no. If they dictate a policy, and you choose to not go along with it, you should be responsible for that decision. Simply being able to do something doesn't make it appropriate to actually do it.
"The problem is that some of these students are being suspended from school for up to 3 months at a time.
Three months is certainly very excessive. And, frankly, I DON'T BELIEVE YOU. How about a link to verify?
This is the slashdot way. Some idiot wakes up one morning to the stunning realization that if he substitutes "Windoze" for "Windows" scores of jackasses across the land will find him amazingly funny and smart. Tens of thousands follow in his footsteps, because original humour is more difficult, while derivation is relatively easy.
"You could just get a real guitar, and a copy of Guitar Pro, and enjoy thousands of free tabbed songs on the web. You would also have the advantage of being able to actually play the songs on a real guitar! Am I missing something?"
Getting good at the guitar takes years of dedicated practice. I've played for over a quarter century. People who buy Guitar Hero are looking to play a game. That means they want something that makes them happy immediately - and it does.
Plus, Guitar Hero is what... $70 or so? Add up a guitar and lessons for a few years, and perhaps you'll see why Guitar Hero is the better bargain for gamers.
The most secure computer is turned off, unplugged, buried a mile deep in an asteroid somewhere in the Kuiper belt, ringed by defensive lasers, orbited by a swarm of nuclear smart mines and guarded by a whole company of battlemechs.
That's far too much technology that needs to be trused. What if the protective equipment is compromise, and the battlemechs dig the computer up using the mines and the lasers, and then install a Sony rootkit on it?
No, the most secure computer would be one unharmed while everything else in the universe gets turned into space dust.
"I suggest that anyone having hardware issues with a computer running Linux do the same: explain to the tech support people that the issue has nothing to do with software, and that you've diagnosed the specific hardware failure."
It's been a long time since I did my time on the front lines, but some things never change. You can't trust somebody who says they have diagnosed the specific hardware failure, because most of these people have about 80% less of a clue than they think they do.
Far too many times they were just wrong. And naturally they want others to pay for their misdiagnosis.
"Apparently, this activity is something that ancient computer-scientists used to do, according to some archeologists, but the ancient art of optimization was abandoned sometime during the Microsoft dark-ages. Apparently, this activity is something that ancient computer-scientists used to do, according to some archeologists, but the ancient art of optimization was abandoned sometime during the Microsoft dark-ages."
Of course one could argue that Apple released a terribly inefficient product at the start, making it easy to get better performance later on. That's good PR. Give them crap, and make it slightly less crappy each time out.
"This is why any company worth its salt will employ a professional designer to design their documents, just like most people buy professionally-designed clothes, instead of stitching their own together from random bits of cloth without regard to style or consistency"
Most people buy their own clothes because making them is difficult, time-consuming, and beyond their skills. If making amateur clothes were as easy as using clipart you'd see LOTS of people wearing their own designs.
While I agree that larger companies benefit from decent graphic art, I would suggest it's beside the point for many small ones. Does it bother me that Angela's Daycare or Bob's Drycleaning used clipart on some of their documents? Not at all. In fact, I'd rather Angela spent the money on things that benefit my kid rather than waste it hiring somebody to design letterhead for her.
My best friend is a graphic artist, and my ex-roommate was one (laying out books, the most recent on killer whales if I recall correctly). They view things a little more pragmatically than you do. Graphic artists are fine if you can afford them, but lots of people don't need to spend the cash.
I can assure you that "trashy" is exactly the word we apply to anything that is recognisably clipart.
You know, your elitist snobbery doesn't make the perceived need go away. Lots of people don't have your delicate sensibilities, and are perfectly happy when their clipart immediately conveys their message.
"Analogy: When you go to an art museum to see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit, you don't dwell on his lesser known works, you head right to the Mona Lisa. Most people don't care about his sketches, just like most people don't care about crappy artists songs on CDs."
As an "enlightened music listener" you should be MORE likely to examine the lesser known works. Otherwise you're not enlightened - you're a sheep, just like the masses, going wherever you're pointed. Enlightened appreciators will look at the sketches because art is progression.
I've been a musician for 25 years (guitar primarily, with classical training and jazz aspirations), and I, too, would consider myself an enlightened listener. It's a matter of looking for the gems. I've ordered 36 albums this past calendar year from overseas (I'm in Canada) because the stuff typically on the shelves here doesn't draw me strongly. If you put in the time, you'll find PLENTY of great albums.
"Anyone who has bought CDs knows each CD is engineered to have 2-3 good tracks and the rest as mediocre filler songs."
Perhaps that has been your experience. Mine has been considerably different. I've currently got about 600 "real" CD's (I did a purge about 10 years ago, otherwise it'd be about 1000), and I'm willing to wager that, on at least three quarters of these albums, more than half of the tracks are much better than mediocre.
Then again, I don't buy CD's willy-nilly just because I heard one song I liked on the radio. Look hard enough and you find thirty second clips for nearly all albums somewhere online.
You might buy crap albums, but just because you do doesn't mean all albums are "engineered" that way. Like there's a group out there that tells bands, "Okay, now, we're up to three good songs - radio engineering standards dictate that you half-ass it for the rest of the tracks."
"...and I want to be able to play all of my old games..."
Yeah, I hear you! Whenever I want to play an XBox game I think back to the day I got my XBox360 and the representative from Microsoft came to my apartment with a baseball bat and destroyed my old console.
Oh, wait. That didn't happen.
When I want to play my XBox games I just turn on my XBox.
What would prevent you from playing on your old console?
"And there are many more title for this year too. So before you go rattling off that there are no titles for the PS3, get some perspective on what the XBox360 launch looked like first."
The launch title list for the XBOX360 is irrelevant, because at the time nobody had a choice. If you wanted the next generation, you got a 360.
That's the beauty of being first to market by a wide margin. As long as the PS3 suffers from crappy-lineup syndrome, more and more people who were on the fence will opt for the 360.
I'd rather see Sony do well. I want to see companies able to make expensive cross-platform games knowing that the installed bases together are massive. The more the merrier!
But I was waiting for the PS3 launch, and then on boxing day I picked up a full XBOX360 package (wireless/HD package) on sale for about $399C ($340US). Haven't regretted it for a second.
"Welcome to the new online gaming sensation, "Subjugation!" As leader of a team of unsullied white merchants, you will work to maintain the status quo on your plantations. By utilizing tools as whippings and the occasional draw-and-quarter, you will strive to keep your cotton production up, and your workers underfoot. Be the first in your virtual area to stomp down on the evil menace of literacy! Design your transit system with appropriate "back-of-the-bus" rules! And how will you respond when you catch your daughter with a worker? Only you will know!"
Now I could claim that such a game is "art", but is it really? Maybe, maybe not. Personally I think shock for its own sake isn't enough. Would the game be a success if it didn't have the name Columbine stuffed in the title? If not, then I would submit it's riding shock value alone.
I've yet to find a Linux help web site where people say "RTFM n00b."
I've gone through the linux "process" at least seven times in the past. For a while THE source seemed to be the linux usenet news groups. I would search and search and find hundreds of other people with the same problem I was experiencing. I'd find three or four suggestions, none of which worked. And when I finally asked online I found the responses to be downright rude.
It's better today, with so much support coming from other places, but if you've never heard "RTFM n00b", or some variation thereof, I'm VERY surprised.
For a long time I really think the greatest barriers to the mass adoption of linux were the shitheads who advocated it.
"I just hope they get it sorted out before I'm ready to file. I don't want to fill out a paper form. This is the 21st Century after all. Besides, I wouldn't even know where to get a paper form."
If you don't want to download it from here, then pick up a package at any post office. They've been there every year for at least twenty one years (and probably much longer). You must be very young, new to Canada, or both.
"Several times I've had to manually modify the hosts file on both Linux and Windows systems, I've never had a problem finding it on Linux, but every time I try to find it on Windows I generally have to use Google (WHY IN DRIVERS?!?!?!)."
I replied a bit higher up as to why it's not completely unreasonable. But if you have had to look it up more than once then you're just not paying attention.
Besides, if you know it's under..\Windows (and you should at least know that) then searching for files or folders named "hosts" under there using the standard search tool will bring up a grand total of two files, one of which happily is called "hosts".
"I can understand putting it in the Windows/WinNT directory. I can understand putting it in the System or System32 directory in there. But the drivers directory?!? Does that make any sense?"
Well on linux the/etc directory contains all sorts of configuration information, a lot of which contains information that configures your drivers, such as the XF86Config file and soundconf. HOSTS can be considered an input into your network drivers, so it's not completely illogical to create the/etc directory under the drivers directory. The fact they put it somewhere other than the registry should make the *nix lover in you happier.
Slashdot Mirror
"why? because you're afraid of the price. what do i say to this? get used to it. you're going to have to buy a car and your own house someday. $600 is nothing compared to these purchases. if you've got disposable income, flaunt it."
I bought a home this year and I'm on my fourth new car. My "disposable" income isn't huge, but it's a comfortable $3000 per month. But part of being responsible with money is knowing when you're wasting it. Apparently you haven't learned that how you spend smaller amounts of money is very indicative of how you spend larger amounts. Good luck in your future role as debt-laden house-poor guy.
"At the time we are able to produce systems (robots and/or software) that can become self-aware, we will very likely need to consider "rights" of such. Think about it (no pun intended). At the time a machine realizes it's not aware, it becomes aware. Soon, such a machine will begin to re-design itself, and easily surpass human intelligence.What then? ;-) Food for thought"
I guess it's food for thought. But then you'd have to have completely missed the last seventy years of science fiction in order for it to be a new idea.
Quit complaining about price--the reason you complain is that you want one badly but don't have the cash to pony up and buy the device.
Hardly. I can easily afford one, but that doesn't mean I check my brain at the door. It's still too much for a game console.
I'd guess that the average income on slashdot is high enough that a PS3 is well within the means of most of us. I impulse-bought a set of software tools last week that came to more than that.
I was considering waiting for the PS3 but the price put me way off the idea. Then boxing day came around and I picked up the full XBox360 (Hard drive, etc.) with a Ghost Recon game and the XBOX Live Arcade pack for $360US.
Value is about how much you spend versus what you perceive to be the quality/usefulness of the product. Only a fool disregards that evaluation simply because he can "afford it".
If the target audience for the program is people who have no personal desire to change their screens for aesthetic reasons then bravo. Well done. But how far out of touch do you have to be to not know that skins are desirable? They should be available and easily installed.
Fine. It's free. They can do as they choose. But there are a few free clients, and this one looks dreary. Boring. Sterile.
It's efficient and seems fast, but I've got plenty of CPU power, and video cards aren't a roadblock anymore. I'll pass.
I was punished for using a Linux LiveCD to login to their computers without using a password, even after I told the admins how to disable booting from CD-ROMs. They refused to update any of the computers and as such I was using the same tactic till the day I graduated.
So the policy was clearly communicated to you and you continued to reoffend.
Shouldn't the school district be liable for their own insecurity?
Actually, no. If they dictate a policy, and you choose to not go along with it, you should be responsible for that decision. Simply being able to do something doesn't make it appropriate to actually do it.
"The problem is that some of these students are being suspended from school for up to 3 months at a time.
Three months is certainly very excessive. And, frankly, I DON'T BELIEVE YOU. How about a link to verify?
Seriously, what's the point? There isn't enough evil in here to make it interesting.
This is the slashdot way. Some idiot wakes up one morning to the stunning realization that if he substitutes "Windoze" for "Windows" scores of jackasses across the land will find him amazingly funny and smart. Tens of thousands follow in his footsteps, because original humour is more difficult, while derivation is relatively easy.
"You could just get a real guitar, and a copy of Guitar Pro, and enjoy thousands of free tabbed songs on the web. You would also have the advantage of being able to actually play the songs on a real guitar! Am I missing something?"
Getting good at the guitar takes years of dedicated practice. I've played for over a quarter century. People who buy Guitar Hero are looking to play a game. That means they want something that makes them happy immediately - and it does.
Plus, Guitar Hero is what... $70 or so? Add up a guitar and lessons for a few years, and perhaps you'll see why Guitar Hero is the better bargain for gamers.
trused? compromise? Mornigs suk as.
The most secure computer is turned off, unplugged, buried a mile deep in an asteroid somewhere in the Kuiper belt, ringed by defensive lasers, orbited by a swarm of nuclear smart mines and guarded by a whole company of battlemechs.
That's far too much technology that needs to be trused. What if the protective equipment is compromise, and the battlemechs dig the computer up using the mines and the lasers, and then install a Sony rootkit on it?
No, the most secure computer would be one unharmed while everything else in the universe gets turned into space dust.
"I suggest that anyone having hardware issues with a computer running Linux do the same: explain to the tech support people that the issue has nothing to do with software, and that you've diagnosed the specific hardware failure."
It's been a long time since I did my time on the front lines, but some things never change. You can't trust somebody who says they have diagnosed the specific hardware failure, because most of these people have about 80% less of a clue than they think they do.
Far too many times they were just wrong. And naturally they want others to pay for their misdiagnosis.
this is what you get with outsourced call centers.
You're SO right. No American call centre operators would EVER fall for such ruses. It's those darned gullible Indians.
"Apparently, this activity is something that ancient computer-scientists used to do, according to some archeologists, but the ancient art of optimization was abandoned sometime during the Microsoft dark-ages. Apparently, this activity is something that ancient computer-scientists used to do, according to some archeologists, but the ancient art of optimization was abandoned sometime during the Microsoft dark-ages."
Of course one could argue that Apple released a terribly inefficient product at the start, making it easy to get better performance later on. That's good PR. Give them crap, and make it slightly less crappy each time out.
"This is why any company worth its salt will employ a professional designer to design their documents, just like most people buy professionally-designed clothes, instead of stitching their own together from random bits of cloth without regard to style or consistency"
Most people buy their own clothes because making them is difficult, time-consuming, and beyond their skills. If making amateur clothes were as easy as using clipart you'd see LOTS of people wearing their own designs.
While I agree that larger companies benefit from decent graphic art, I would suggest it's beside the point for many small ones. Does it bother me that Angela's Daycare or Bob's Drycleaning used clipart on some of their documents? Not at all. In fact, I'd rather Angela spent the money on things that benefit my kid rather than waste it hiring somebody to design letterhead for her. My best friend is a graphic artist, and my ex-roommate was one (laying out books, the most recent on killer whales if I recall correctly). They view things a little more pragmatically than you do. Graphic artists are fine if you can afford them, but lots of people don't need to spend the cash.
I am a trained, professional graphic designer.
Wow - your mother must be proud.
I can assure you that "trashy" is exactly the word we apply to anything that is recognisably clipart.
You know, your elitist snobbery doesn't make the perceived need go away. Lots of people don't have your delicate sensibilities, and are perfectly happy when their clipart immediately conveys their message.
I bike to work *and* I own a Prius. What does that make me?
...never invited to parties?
(ba-dum-chi!)
"Analogy: When you go to an art museum to see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit, you don't dwell on his lesser known works, you head right to the Mona Lisa. Most people don't care about his sketches, just like most people don't care about crappy artists songs on CDs."
As an "enlightened music listener" you should be MORE likely to examine the lesser known works. Otherwise you're not enlightened - you're a sheep, just like the masses, going wherever you're pointed. Enlightened appreciators will look at the sketches because art is progression.
I've been a musician for 25 years (guitar primarily, with classical training and jazz aspirations), and I, too, would consider myself an enlightened listener. It's a matter of looking for the gems. I've ordered 36 albums this past calendar year from overseas (I'm in Canada) because the stuff typically on the shelves here doesn't draw me strongly. If you put in the time, you'll find PLENTY of great albums.
"Anyone who has bought CDs knows each CD is engineered to have 2-3 good tracks and the rest as mediocre filler songs."
Perhaps that has been your experience. Mine has been considerably different. I've currently got about 600 "real" CD's (I did a purge about 10 years ago, otherwise it'd be about 1000), and I'm willing to wager that, on at least three quarters of these albums, more than half of the tracks are much better than mediocre.
Then again, I don't buy CD's willy-nilly just because I heard one song I liked on the radio. Look hard enough and you find thirty second clips for nearly all albums somewhere online.
You might buy crap albums, but just because you do doesn't mean all albums are "engineered" that way. Like there's a group out there that tells bands, "Okay, now, we're up to three good songs - radio engineering standards dictate that you half-ass it for the rest of the tracks."
"...and I want to be able to play all of my old games..."
Yeah, I hear you! Whenever I want to play an XBox game I think back to the day I got my XBox360 and the representative from Microsoft came to my apartment with a baseball bat and destroyed my old console.
Oh, wait. That didn't happen.
When I want to play my XBox games I just turn on my XBox.
What would prevent you from playing on your old console?
"And there are many more title for this year too. So before you go rattling off that there are no titles for the PS3, get some perspective on what the XBox360 launch looked like first."
The launch title list for the XBOX360 is irrelevant, because at the time nobody had a choice. If you wanted the next generation, you got a 360.
That's the beauty of being first to market by a wide margin. As long as the PS3 suffers from crappy-lineup syndrome, more and more people who were on the fence will opt for the 360.
I'd rather see Sony do well. I want to see companies able to make expensive cross-platform games knowing that the installed bases together are massive. The more the merrier!
But I was waiting for the PS3 launch, and then on boxing day I picked up a full XBOX360 package (wireless/HD package) on sale for about $399C ($340US). Haven't regretted it for a second.
"Welcome to the new online gaming sensation, "Subjugation!" As leader of a team of unsullied white merchants, you will work to maintain the status quo on your plantations. By utilizing tools as whippings and the occasional draw-and-quarter, you will strive to keep your cotton production up, and your workers underfoot. Be the first in your virtual area to stomp down on the evil menace of literacy! Design your transit system with appropriate "back-of-the-bus" rules! And how will you respond when you catch your daughter with a worker? Only you will know!"
Now I could claim that such a game is "art", but is it really? Maybe, maybe not. Personally I think shock for its own sake isn't enough. Would the game be a success if it didn't have the name Columbine stuffed in the title? If not, then I would submit it's riding shock value alone.
I've yet to find a Linux help web site where people say "RTFM n00b."
I've gone through the linux "process" at least seven times in the past. For a while THE source seemed to be the linux usenet news groups. I would search and search and find hundreds of other people with the same problem I was experiencing. I'd find three or four suggestions, none of which worked. And when I finally asked online I found the responses to be downright rude.
It's better today, with so much support coming from other places, but if you've never heard "RTFM n00b", or some variation thereof, I'm VERY surprised.
For a long time I really think the greatest barriers to the mass adoption of linux were the shitheads who advocated it.
"I just hope they get it sorted out before I'm ready to file. I don't want to fill out a paper form. This is the 21st Century after all. Besides, I wouldn't even know where to get a paper form."
If you don't want to download it from here, then pick up a package at any post office. They've been there every year for at least twenty one years (and probably much longer). You must be very young, new to Canada, or both.
"Several times I've had to manually modify the hosts file on both Linux and Windows systems, I've never had a problem finding it on Linux, but every time I try to find it on Windows I generally have to use Google (WHY IN DRIVERS?!?!?!)."
..\Windows (and you should at least know that) then searching for files or folders named "hosts" under there using the standard search tool will bring up a grand total of two files, one of which happily is called "hosts".
I replied a bit higher up as to why it's not completely unreasonable. But if you have had to look it up more than once then you're just not paying attention.
Besides, if you know it's under
"I can understand putting it in the Windows/WinNT directory. I can understand putting it in the System or System32 directory in there. But the drivers directory?!? Does that make any sense?"
/etc directory contains all sorts of configuration information, a lot of which contains information that configures your drivers, such as the XF86Config file and soundconf. HOSTS can be considered an input into your network drivers, so it's not completely illogical to create the /etc directory under the drivers directory. The fact they put it somewhere other than the registry should make the *nix lover in you happier.
Well on linux the