While I recognize the U.S. is totally fucked, economically, this is a mistake. Throwing a minor budget item with huge potential like this under the bus in the name of pretending to become fiscally responsible is beyond short-sighted.
"For years I have been planning to get a PS3, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna give a penny to a company that is going to use the money to sue me and my peers... Guess I'll just have to buy used."
Shouldn't you have moved beyond the planning stage by now?
In any case, the complications arising from moving to the more complex used market combined with your historical performance record mean hopefully you'll get one some time in the 2020's - but I wouldn't count on it.
Will one shot be sufficient to turn me completely autistic? Or do I need booster shots? I'd better consult the best source possible: Jenny McCarthy. I hear she's, like, awesome with autism.
"Despite their mammoth influence on the current gaming landscape, their insular communities were rarely explored by a nascent games journalist crowd.... "
I think we're vastly overstating the impact of MUDs on the "current gaming landscape". They were just a link in the chain, like Zork, or Baldur's Gate. Every step that brought us to "here" could be said to have a "mammoth" influence. Singling out MUDs for glorification seems silly. I mean, I like to point out that I ran a 300bps BBS on my Commodore 64 back in 1983, but it didn't have a mammoth influence on the Internet.
"This comes conveniently after the suspect in the Tucson shooting has widely been reported as an online gamer."
According to the linked NYT article, Loughner was posting in the discussion boards of Earth Empires...
"The Earth Empires discussion boards are an integral part of the game, which is more primitive than later online games because game play, which challenges players to govern a country and make decisions about economic and military tactics, is largely based on typing in commands. Mr. Loughner’s exchanges on the site seem to be a crucial component of his daily social interactions, not uncommon for any member of an online community."
The submitter might want to conflate this to the media broadcasting him as a gamer, but this article is the first I've heard of it, and it doesn't really do that either.
It was 1983, my Commodore Vic 20 (bought delivering newspapers) was soon to be replaced by a Commodore 64 (bought the same way), and nobody understood my fascination.
Except, apparently, for Richard Mansfield, whose book I devoured. I remember trying to figure out how the heck to get the opcodes into memory. I had nobody to teach me what peek and poker were about, so it took a while.
It's also possible to say that the 6502 and 6510 were perhaps the very last processors that I understood in real, intricate detail. Once I hit the 286 it might as well have run on magic pixie dust. I can't remember ever masking interrupts on an x86. I've only written in languages at the level of C or higher ever since., and I've never embedded assembler to fine-tune performance.
"Mr. Petersko, we have a record of you receiving this bill at 5:00 p.m. from the ATM. At 5:40 p.m. a marijuana dealer was arrested and he had possession of that bill. Can you explain that?"
"No, sir, I cannot. From 5:00 p.m. until 5:58 p.m. I was fucking your mother in the alley by the ATM. I can't count it as an alibi because she'll deny it, but if you'll examine her anus you'll find some compelling evidence. Alternatively, take your suspicion and go away."
And then I'll pray the L.A.-style cop beating will be caught on cell phone.
"It seems to me that ordinary users are bumping up against the walls of the garden more and more often now."
I know a lot of people with iPhones. While anecdotal evidence is one step away from worthless, I can tell you nobody I know bitches about their iPhone. If I want to find people droning on and on about walled gardens and app approval standards, I have to come here. Most ordinary users are content. Those that aren't jailbreak them and move on with their lives.
Interesting to note that my more technical friends who bought Android phones (Galaxy S mostly), well - their experience has been less serene.
"But we should shout a bit every time Apple rejects a significant app, just so that the people buying iPhones/iPads are reminded what it is they've bought."
What was that? Can't hear you. Rocking out on my guitar using Amplitube on my 3gs.
"One of the things Microsoft has done well for many years now (since they got called on the carpet about Windows 95) is providing compatibility with assistive technology used by the blind... The news that Microsoft is now backtracking is disappointing, but hardly surprising."
Which is it? If they've been doing it well for many years, what's with the "hardly surprising" jab? One would think that 16 years of excellent support would make the backtracking "very surprising".
"Yes, that's right, because looking for the Higgs is not like looking for your keys in the drawer, but like looking for a "shooting star". You can say "Oh, my keys are not in the drawer, I looked twice", but you can't say "Oh there are not shooting stars (well, meteorites to be precise), I looked at the sky twice". In particle colliders you get bazillions of events, you register a tiny fraction of them and by analyzing a fraction of the ones you registered you try to build the big picture, so the more experiments the better your chance of "seeing" exotic events.
The trick to making humour appropriate on slashdot is to reduce the subtlety by 10% before submitting.
Or maybe I just failed to make it funny at all. Happens from time to time.
My job is to maintain and enhance an industrial scheduling system. The G2-based platform is single threaded, as is the simulation engine (written in C++). It's grown from 3 concurrent users in 1999 to 31 today, and from 50 simulations per day to nearly 300. We've moved from SPARC to SPARC when new chips offered better prformance. The engine was written for, and so far can only be compiled with, Sun's compiler.
I'm sure we're not alone in having significant investment in single-threaded computational software. We've decided to ditch Sun, and a project is currently under way to port the engine.
It's a shame. I really quite like the stability we get on SPARC. But they've been too stagnant, and we've grown tired of waiting. Throw in the risk of losing support for hardware running a critical system, and there's no way we can stay on Sun.
So very many otherwise brainy people in this thread equating the posture and disconnection of a cat with "being disdainful" and "knowing what you want but not caring". That argument is practically religious in that it can't be proven.
A complete lack of understanding looks exactly like not caring.
When I'm done doing it the programmer's way, and I'm not going to invest any more time getting "better", I should have a control to just dumb the whole thing down. The idea that the content has to be honestly earned is ridiculous. I paid for it.
Bring back the cheat codes, but put them right in the menus. You can even insult me by making the menu option say, "I suck. Pander to me."
"Am I the only person who hates these allegation-disguised-as-a-question headlines? Please can we stop posting them? If you're going to make an allegation, make an allegation, don't try to pretend that you're asking the audience for their opinions. If you can't back them up, don't make the allegations, and if you can then don't hide behind weasel words in the headline."
Might as well ask a duck not to quack, or a horse not to trot. If you removed all of the "have you stopped beating your wife" questions, you'd kill the essence of slashdot. I, for one, embrace the ridiculous, blind antagonism and shortsightedness. It warms the cockles of my heart, it does.
"I think you'll find that's the beauty of open source, everyone can do it the way they want to. If you can persuade people that your way is the best way then some may join you."
This is exactly what's wrong. Normal people - end users - don't want to search for the magic combination and then evangelize it. They just... don't... care.
"Or are you trying on that old argument that the very concept of a distro is confusing to people who just want the linux on their computers?"
Again, they just... don't... care. And if you ask them to wade that sea of ridiculousness they'll swiftly be lured back to the comort of the tried and true.
Talk all you want about the beauty of being able to do it each in our own way but linux is still stuck in the single digits for desktop acceptance, and it's not all application lock. Lots of people jumped ship to Mac. Why not linux? Why not indeed.
I had to run a control panel from the command line using sudo in order to make it keep my dual monitor preferences as recently as last year. Of course it didn't tell me that... it just reset to single monitor mode each reboot.
I'd say more (lots of fun with that distro - gave up after 6 weeks), but that's enough. It's working as designed, and broken for end users.
"The only place to expand into it the desktop, where the market share is at most 5%. So, why not?"
Because it requires linux development to embrace the following:
- Interface design that specifically and completely bars programmers from participating
- Abandonment of 99% of the distros
- Acceptance of proprietary drivers when offered (normal people don't give a damn about open source philosophy)
- Provision of real, available, phone-based technical support
- Real, complete documentation
I have seen someone mocked for buying one package when some pinhead thought another would be more appropriate for the application. It was something like, "Well, what did you expect picking that? It's like you wanted to fail." Most people here have seen PLENTY of derision of new users.
Why not? Because a lot of the community is poison for end users. That's why not.
Consolidate, standardize, and corporatize. Staff and support. Advertise. Court developers. In other words, build a better Microsoft.
Or, remain "pure", disjointed, and niche on the desktop. Rule the world from the server. Personally I think linux should abandon the desktop. By the time they get there, technology will have made the point moot.
Who are these mythical registry-hating end users? Nobody in my family has ever run regedit. If I asked my mom to tell me what the registry is she'd tell me that's where she renews her license.
Normal end users don't hate the registry. Half-wits who think they're power users and screw things up tweaking shit are usually the ones that hate the registry.
Slashdot Mirror
The budget cuts announced by Obama include cutting $64 million from the James Webb Telescope program, "which an indendent group of experts "found to have a fundamentally broken estimate of cost and schedule".
While I recognize the U.S. is totally fucked, economically, this is a mistake. Throwing a minor budget item with huge potential like this under the bus in the name of pretending to become fiscally responsible is beyond short-sighted.
"For years I have been planning to get a PS3, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna give a penny to a company that is going to use the money to sue me and my peers... Guess I'll just have to buy used."
Shouldn't you have moved beyond the planning stage by now?
In any case, the complications arising from moving to the more complex used market combined with your historical performance record mean hopefully you'll get one some time in the 2020's - but I wouldn't count on it.
Will one shot be sufficient to turn me completely autistic? Or do I need booster shots? I'd better consult the best source possible: Jenny McCarthy. I hear she's, like, awesome with autism.
It was on a Commodore 64, connected to a local BBS.
"What were the last words spoken on the shuttle? Okay, fine. Let the bitch drive."
Followed closely by:
"You hear Christa McAuliffe had dandruff? Yeah - they found her head and shoulders on the beach."
"Despite their mammoth influence on the current gaming landscape, their insular communities were rarely explored by a nascent games journalist crowd. ... "
I think we're vastly overstating the impact of MUDs on the "current gaming landscape". They were just a link in the chain, like Zork, or Baldur's Gate. Every step that brought us to "here" could be said to have a "mammoth" influence. Singling out MUDs for glorification seems silly. I mean, I like to point out that I ran a 300bps BBS on my Commodore 64 back in 1983, but it didn't have a mammoth influence on the Internet.
It's damned hard to masturbate while trying to trying to balance a netbook. The iPad is the right tool for the job.
"This comes conveniently after the suspect in the Tucson shooting has widely been reported as an online gamer."
According to the linked NYT article, Loughner was posting in the discussion boards of Earth Empires... "The Earth Empires discussion boards are an integral part of the game, which is more primitive than later online games because game play, which challenges players to govern a country and make decisions about economic and military tactics, is largely based on typing in commands. Mr. Loughner’s exchanges on the site seem to be a crucial component of his daily social interactions, not uncommon for any member of an online community."
The submitter might want to conflate this to the media broadcasting him as a gamer, but this article is the first I've heard of it, and it doesn't really do that either.
It was 1983, my Commodore Vic 20 (bought delivering newspapers) was soon to be replaced by a Commodore 64 (bought the same way), and nobody understood my fascination.
Except, apparently, for Richard Mansfield, whose book I devoured. I remember trying to figure out how the heck to get the opcodes into memory. I had nobody to teach me what peek and poker were about, so it took a while.
It's also possible to say that the 6502 and 6510 were perhaps the very last processors that I understood in real, intricate detail. Once I hit the 286 it might as well have run on magic pixie dust. I can't remember ever masking interrupts on an x86. I've only written in languages at the level of C or higher ever since., and I've never embedded assembler to fine-tune performance.
My geek level has diminished.
"Mr. Petersko, we have a record of you receiving this bill at 5:00 p.m. from the ATM. At 5:40 p.m. a marijuana dealer was arrested and he had possession of that bill. Can you explain that?"
"No, sir, I cannot. From 5:00 p.m. until 5:58 p.m. I was fucking your mother in the alley by the ATM. I can't count it as an alibi because she'll deny it, but if you'll examine her anus you'll find some compelling evidence. Alternatively, take your suspicion and go away."
And then I'll pray the L.A.-style cop beating will be caught on cell phone.
"It seems to me that ordinary users are bumping up against the walls of the garden more and more often now."
I know a lot of people with iPhones. While anecdotal evidence is one step away from worthless, I can tell you nobody I know bitches about their iPhone. If I want to find people droning on and on about walled gardens and app approval standards, I have to come here. Most ordinary users are content. Those that aren't jailbreak them and move on with their lives.
Interesting to note that my more technical friends who bought Android phones (Galaxy S mostly), well - their experience has been less serene.
"But we should shout a bit every time Apple rejects a significant app, just so that the people buying iPhones/iPads are reminded what it is they've bought."
What was that? Can't hear you. Rocking out on my guitar using Amplitube on my 3gs.
"Fuck."
Michael Moore lies. He lies big, small, directly, and by omission. Michael Moore and the truth aren't even in the same zip code.
"One of the things Microsoft has done well for many years now (since they got called on the carpet about Windows 95) is providing compatibility with assistive technology used by the blind... The news that Microsoft is now backtracking is disappointing, but hardly surprising."
Which is it? If they've been doing it well for many years, what's with the "hardly surprising" jab? One would think that 16 years of excellent support would make the backtracking "very surprising".
"Yes, that's right, because looking for the Higgs is not like looking for your keys in the drawer, but like looking for a "shooting star". You can say "Oh, my keys are not in the drawer, I looked twice", but you can't say "Oh there are not shooting stars (well, meteorites to be precise), I looked at the sky twice". In particle colliders you get bazillions of events, you register a tiny fraction of them and by analyzing a fraction of the ones you registered you try to build the big picture, so the more experiments the better your chance of "seeing" exotic events.
The trick to making humour appropriate on slashdot is to reduce the subtlety by 10% before submitting.
Or maybe I just failed to make it funny at all. Happens from time to time.
"No Higgs So Far..."
"Repeat the experiment!"
"Okay... there. Nothing.
"Repeat the experiment!"
"Okay... Still nothing.
"Do it for a year!"
"Okay..."
My job is to maintain and enhance an industrial scheduling system. The G2-based platform is single threaded, as is the simulation engine (written in C++). It's grown from 3 concurrent users in 1999 to 31 today, and from 50 simulations per day to nearly 300. We've moved from SPARC to SPARC when new chips offered better prformance. The engine was written for, and so far can only be compiled with, Sun's compiler.
I'm sure we're not alone in having significant investment in single-threaded computational software. We've decided to ditch Sun, and a project is currently under way to port the engine.
It's a shame. I really quite like the stability we get on SPARC. But they've been too stagnant, and we've grown tired of waiting. Throw in the risk of losing support for hardware running a critical system, and there's no way we can stay on Sun.
So very many otherwise brainy people in this thread equating the posture and disconnection of a cat with "being disdainful" and "knowing what you want but not caring". That argument is practically religious in that it can't be proven.
A complete lack of understanding looks exactly like not caring.
When I'm done doing it the programmer's way, and I'm not going to invest any more time getting "better", I should have a control to just dumb the whole thing down. The idea that the content has to be honestly earned is ridiculous. I paid for it.
Bring back the cheat codes, but put them right in the menus. You can even insult me by making the menu option say, "I suck. Pander to me."
"Am I the only person who hates these allegation-disguised-as-a-question headlines? Please can we stop posting them? If you're going to make an allegation, make an allegation, don't try to pretend that you're asking the audience for their opinions. If you can't back them up, don't make the allegations, and if you can then don't hide behind weasel words in the headline."
Might as well ask a duck not to quack, or a horse not to trot. If you removed all of the "have you stopped beating your wife" questions, you'd kill the essence of slashdot. I, for one, embrace the ridiculous, blind antagonism and shortsightedness. It warms the cockles of my heart, it does.
"Apart from some comments, eg: 'martas` and linuxwrangler, the rest are a waste of electricity. Tacho,"
And how, exactly, was the electricity required to transmit YOUR post, of better use?
"I can't remember the last time I read any comment on slashdot that advanced my understanding of technology."
Don't blame slashdot for your learning disorder.
I see that Ubuntu offers "installation, application and desktop configuration support" for Ubuntu Desktop Edition at £88.42 / year.
I concede that point.
"I think you'll find that's the beauty of open source, everyone can do it the way they want to. If you can persuade people that your way is the best way then some may join you."
This is exactly what's wrong. Normal people - end users - don't want to search for the magic combination and then evangelize it. They just... don't... care.
"Or are you trying on that old argument that the very concept of a distro is confusing to people who just want the linux on their computers?"
Again, they just... don't... care. And if you ask them to wade that sea of ridiculousness they'll swiftly be lured back to the comort of the tried and true.
Talk all you want about the beauty of being able to do it each in our own way but linux is still stuck in the single digits for desktop acceptance, and it's not all application lock. Lots of people jumped ship to Mac. Why not linux? Why not indeed.
"It sounds like you're looking for Ubuntu"
I had to run a control panel from the command line using sudo in order to make it keep my dual monitor preferences as recently as last year. Of course it didn't tell me that... it just reset to single monitor mode each reboot.
I'd say more (lots of fun with that distro - gave up after 6 weeks), but that's enough. It's working as designed, and broken for end users.
"The only place to expand into it the desktop, where the market share is at most 5%. So, why not?"
Because it requires linux development to embrace the following:
- Interface design that specifically and completely bars programmers from participating
- Abandonment of 99% of the distros
- Acceptance of proprietary drivers when offered (normal people don't give a damn about open source philosophy)
- Provision of real, available, phone-based technical support
- Real, complete documentation
I have seen someone mocked for buying one package when some pinhead thought another would be more appropriate for the application. It was something like, "Well, what did you expect picking that? It's like you wanted to fail." Most people here have seen PLENTY of derision of new users.
Why not? Because a lot of the community is poison for end users. That's why not.
Consolidate, standardize, and corporatize. Staff and support. Advertise. Court developers. In other words, build a better Microsoft.
Or, remain "pure", disjointed, and niche on the desktop. Rule the world from the server. Personally I think linux should abandon the desktop. By the time they get there, technology will have made the point moot.
Who are these mythical registry-hating end users? Nobody in my family has ever run regedit. If I asked my mom to tell me what the registry is she'd tell me that's where she renews her license.
Normal end users don't hate the registry. Half-wits who think they're power users and screw things up tweaking shit are usually the ones that hate the registry.