That's a legitimate question though. The previous comment was all about free market, and how if he wants to buy it, he can just pay the money.
But, the problem which Linus is trying to deal with, is that in the free market, the thing that people want practically doesn't exist. The industry could make it happen, but they haven't yet.
It's not contrarian, it's the heart of the matter.
Considering how incredibly rarely i've ever needed to do a clean boot since even Windows XP (2 year uptime on a desktop I used on a daily basis) I really don't see why this is a bad thing.
I understand where he's coming from though. I don't mind donating $25 cuz it's cool, but if I ever have enough cash to throw $100 or $200 or $500 or $950 towards the project, it would be cool to get a t-shirt or a pen or even just some random piece of scrap wood or plastic with laser burn marks all over it.
It's the principle of the thing... even if the reward is physically worthless, it's still nice to have something to show for it. A conversation piece.
I feel like even if you're not going to be doing any hardcore programming, at least having the mindset to be able to reason out the functional blocks that make something in the computer happen is a huge benefit.
If you know that to do X, you need to do something along the lines of A,B, and C, even if you don't know exactly what A, B and C are , or you don't know how to actually implement it, you're still miles ahead of someone who just doesn't get it.
That was my experience in programming classes in college too... some people just got it and could make things work relatively efficiently within the boundaries of their knowledge, but others just had no idea at all and were always so far of the mark that it was almost a waste of time for them to even try anymore.
Agreed, i've been using OSX and Windows 7 side by side for a couple years now... I used to be a major knee-jerk OSX hater so this is quite a big step for me.
In the end, I still prefer windows 7. OSX has some things it does better; certain user interactions using the trackpad, spaces, and so on are pretty sweet. But, finder feels like it's stuck in the stone age compared to Windows 7 Explorer.
Windows 7 is anything but a festering pile. Even since the Windows XP days, people who ran around screaming about how unstable or virus-ridden or slow or bloated it is were either doing something wrong, or had never actually used it and were just repeating some bullshit they heard somewhere else.
The problem with that is that customers are often really stupid.
Venture capitalists are certainly not flawless, but in many cases I'd trust a visionary and some open minded backers to make good choices, rather than a bunch of "customers" who think they know what they want.
My last two smartphones have been 4.3" and 4.8" screen models, and they still fit in my pockets just fine. The on-screen keyboards are actually usable, browsing the web is comfortable, etc etc etc.
Picking up and trying to use my friend's iphone 4s, the damn thing feels like a toy to me. A heavy, solid toy. The screen is just so small, it hurts to browse the web or use the onscreen keyboard or anything like that. I've got no problem with iOS or any of that, it's just so small.
I don't need some blogger or magazine writer telling me what size my phone should be, because chances are, they're wrong.
Since scientology (and, indeed, any large organization) probably has at least 1 person in its member pool who is crazy enough to shoot someone if they were convinced to...
I'm sure they're more than capable, as, again, is pretty much any large organization, but somehow I doubt even with all the paranoia around scientology that they're really killing people.
I don't feel threatened by surveillance cameras in public places at all, indeed, I feel safer knowing that if someone does pull some shit, there's at least a possibility that there'll be some footage of it...
Once the surveillance gets into our homes and private work spaces and whatnot, then that's a problem, and a serious one...
The problem there is that if there was ubiquitous monitoring of internet and email, how would you get in touch with the person on craigslist to arrange the purchase?
(somewhat pedantic paranoia, but it is a somewhat legit question!)
That's exactly what I thought when I started reading this... If $25 worth of the content from a $50 game is stripped out and offered as an expansion, no gaming company is going to charge $25, they're still going to charge $40-50, and then charge $25 a pop for the expansions. In a perfect world it would work fairly and it would be nice, but that's not how it is.
Plus, what about the millions of people with poor or no internet? DLC is all well and good but if it takes a month to download 2gb of data for your game, what good is that? I know most/all of us here have nice internet, but for example a good friend of mine lives in a relatively remote area and he actually has to use a crappy microwave link to get internet, and if he had to download gigabytes of game expansion data, that would suuuuuuuuuck...
Agreed, I have a relatively ancient Pentium M based Dell laptop that's actually snappier, more responsive, and more fun to use than the brand new netbook I have as well. The netbook has a much brighter and clearer screen, and the intel graphics accelerator does make the UI look nicer, but in terms of overall performance, the dell absolutely smokes it, no contest, which is pretty frightening considering the relative age and generation level of each cpu...
I always wonder how many of these failed space missions would have gone better if there was a little man or a robot or something that could crawl around on the probe and press the reset button or hit the solar panel unfolding motor with a hammer a few times to get it to finish opening up...
We need to start inventing more intelligent or easy to control microrobots that can do that grunt work that a person could do to keep the systems running good;)
I'm moving to Korea soon and I'd love to be able to keep up with Family Guy and House and some of those shows, and if I could pay $9.99 a month to be able to get nice easy access to that, that would be awesome.
the question is then, can I? if my billing address is still in the USA, will it work, or will it block me due to the fact that i'll be connecting through a foreign ISP?
I didn't see anything on the initial post on hulu about that...
I for one am not really at all afraid of someone launching ballistic missiles at us. The fact that it hasn't happened yet gives me some comfort that chances are, humans aren't quite that suicidal as a whole.
What does scare me is some lone crazy group getting ahold of a nuke and sneaking it into a city. Missile defense systems aren't going to do anything to protect us from that.
You spend all the time and effort bringing them back, only to have them all die again because of a lack of biodiversity caused by them being based on one parent..
Cold war era paranoia is worth it's weight in gold. I'm sure every satellite launched back then with anything remotely resembling a secret on it, had a device perfectly capable of destroying it all!
It depends on where the previous poster lives... I grew up drinking well water, which was as cool and pure as you can get pretty much, so I find myself being fairly sensitive to what's in city water. Some places I've been, the city water tastes fine, other places the water has a distinct smell and taste, which if you're used to how water "should" taste, is really hard to miss.
I guess in the end I fail to see what the big deal is.
As long as Google isn't selling my financial data to unscrupulous persons and having me get billed all kinds of money for things I don't want, or creating a dossier on all the weird shit I've searched for and forwarding it to my boss, what's the big deal?
So what if some marketers know everything about what I like to buy or look for? How, in the end, does that really affect my life? Yes, it's a bit creepy sometimes, but it makes no impact on my quality of life.
What *does* freak me out is how my credit card company can ask me to confirm my height and weight when I talk to them on the phone, and when I ask them how the f**k they found out how much I weigh, they tell me that by law they're allowed to download all the information from the Department of Transit and so they know everything that's on my drivers license. THAT's the kind of stuff that I find extremely scary, and that's the kind of thing you can't do anything at all to prevent other than living in a shack in the mountains somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a legitimate question though. The previous comment was all about free market, and how if he wants to buy it, he can just pay the money.
But, the problem which Linus is trying to deal with, is that in the free market, the thing that people want practically doesn't exist. The industry could make it happen, but they haven't yet.
It's not contrarian, it's the heart of the matter.
Considering how incredibly rarely i've ever needed to do a clean boot since even Windows XP (2 year uptime on a desktop I used on a daily basis) I really don't see why this is a bad thing.
I understand where he's coming from though. I don't mind donating $25 cuz it's cool, but if I ever have enough cash to throw $100 or $200 or $500 or $950 towards the project, it would be cool to get a t-shirt or a pen or even just some random piece of scrap wood or plastic with laser burn marks all over it.
It's the principle of the thing... even if the reward is physically worthless, it's still nice to have something to show for it. A conversation piece.
I feel like even if you're not going to be doing any hardcore programming, at least having the mindset to be able to reason out the functional blocks that make something in the computer happen is a huge benefit.
If you know that to do X, you need to do something along the lines of A,B, and C, even if you don't know exactly what A, B and C are , or you don't know how to actually implement it, you're still miles ahead of someone who just doesn't get it.
That was my experience in programming classes in college too... some people just got it and could make things work relatively efficiently within the boundaries of their knowledge, but others just had no idea at all and were always so far of the mark that it was almost a waste of time for them to even try anymore.
XBill!
That game is killer for hand-eye coordination, and it's fun and cute and free...
You might want to modify it or change the difficult settings though, because it does ramp up from wicked easy to insanely difficult fairly rapidly.
Agreed, i've been using OSX and Windows 7 side by side for a couple years now... I used to be a major knee-jerk OSX hater so this is quite a big step for me.
In the end, I still prefer windows 7. OSX has some things it does better; certain user interactions using the trackpad, spaces, and so on are pretty sweet. But, finder feels like it's stuck in the stone age compared to Windows 7 Explorer.
Windows 7 is anything but a festering pile. Even since the Windows XP days, people who ran around screaming about how unstable or virus-ridden or slow or bloated it is were either doing something wrong, or had never actually used it and were just repeating some bullshit they heard somewhere else.
That's my take on it at least!
The problem with that is that customers are often really stupid.
Venture capitalists are certainly not flawless, but in many cases I'd trust a visionary and some open minded backers to make good choices, rather than a bunch of "customers" who think they know what they want.
Yes, absolutely...
My last two smartphones have been 4.3" and 4.8" screen models, and they still fit in my pockets just fine. The on-screen keyboards are actually usable, browsing the web is comfortable, etc etc etc.
Picking up and trying to use my friend's iphone 4s, the damn thing feels like a toy to me. A heavy, solid toy. The screen is just so small, it hurts to browse the web or use the onscreen keyboard or anything like that. I've got no problem with iOS or any of that, it's just so small.
I don't need some blogger or magazine writer telling me what size my phone should be, because chances are, they're wrong.
If all the phones supported the same docking station standard, and the docking stations were available everywhere, then it would be badass.
Since scientology (and, indeed, any large organization) probably has at least 1 person in its member pool who is crazy enough to shoot someone if they were convinced to...
I'm sure they're more than capable, as, again, is pretty much any large organization, but somehow I doubt even with all the paranoia around scientology that they're really killing people.
I don't feel threatened by surveillance cameras in public places at all, indeed, I feel safer knowing that if someone does pull some shit, there's at least a possibility that there'll be some footage of it...
Once the surveillance gets into our homes and private work spaces and whatnot, then that's a problem, and a serious one...
The problem there is that if there was ubiquitous monitoring of internet and email, how would you get in touch with the person on craigslist to arrange the purchase?
(somewhat pedantic paranoia, but it is a somewhat legit question!)
Yeah, honestly, for a video billed as being 100 cats loose in a store, I was expecting, you know, more cats being loose in a store....
That's exactly what I thought when I started reading this ... If $25 worth of the content from a $50 game is stripped out and offered as an expansion, no gaming company is going to charge $25, they're still going to charge $40-50, and then charge $25 a pop for the expansions. In a perfect world it would work fairly and it would be nice, but that's not how it is.
Plus, what about the millions of people with poor or no internet? DLC is all well and good but if it takes a month to download 2gb of data for your game, what good is that? I know most/all of us here have nice internet, but for example a good friend of mine lives in a relatively remote area and he actually has to use a crappy microwave link to get internet, and if he had to download gigabytes of game expansion data, that would suuuuuuuuuck...
Agreed, I have a relatively ancient Pentium M based Dell laptop that's actually snappier, more responsive, and more fun to use than the brand new netbook I have as well. The netbook has a much brighter and clearer screen, and the intel graphics accelerator does make the UI look nicer, but in terms of overall performance, the dell absolutely smokes it, no contest, which is pretty frightening considering the relative age and generation level of each cpu...
I always wonder how many of these failed space missions would have gone better if there was a little man or a robot or something that could crawl around on the probe and press the reset button or hit the solar panel unfolding motor with a hammer a few times to get it to finish opening up...
We need to start inventing more intelligent or easy to control microrobots that can do that grunt work that a person could do to keep the systems running good ;)
I'm moving to Korea soon and I'd love to be able to keep up with Family Guy and House and some of those shows, and if I could pay $9.99 a month to be able to get nice easy access to that, that would be awesome.
the question is then, can I? if my billing address is still in the USA, will it work, or will it block me due to the fact that i'll be connecting through a foreign ISP?
I didn't see anything on the initial post on hulu about that...
I for one am not really at all afraid of someone launching ballistic missiles at us. The fact that it hasn't happened yet gives me some comfort that chances are, humans aren't quite that suicidal as a whole.
What does scare me is some lone crazy group getting ahold of a nuke and sneaking it into a city. Missile defense systems aren't going to do anything to protect us from that.
You spend all the time and effort bringing them back, only to have them all die again because of a lack of biodiversity caused by them being based on one parent..
Cold war era paranoia is worth it's weight in gold. I'm sure every satellite launched back then with anything remotely resembling a secret on it, had a device perfectly capable of destroying it all!
It depends on where the previous poster lives... I grew up drinking well water, which was as cool and pure as you can get pretty much, so I find myself being fairly sensitive to what's in city water. Some places I've been, the city water tastes fine, other places the water has a distinct smell and taste, which if you're used to how water "should" taste, is really hard to miss.
For less than $10 I'd buy a lot more cd's than I do now. $9 to download an album, or $8-10 to get the better quality hard copy, it's a no-brainer.
With regards to the Japanese and Korean conglomerates; money doesn't care about history.
I was always under the impression that taking paracetamol and other similar drugs along with alcohol was rather unhealthy to the liver and whatnot...
Drinking lots of water is always good though!
I guess in the end I fail to see what the big deal is.
As long as Google isn't selling my financial data to unscrupulous persons and having me get billed all kinds of money for things I don't want, or creating a dossier on all the weird shit I've searched for and forwarding it to my boss, what's the big deal?
So what if some marketers know everything about what I like to buy or look for? How, in the end, does that really affect my life? Yes, it's a bit creepy sometimes, but it makes no impact on my quality of life.
What *does* freak me out is how my credit card company can ask me to confirm my height and weight when I talk to them on the phone, and when I ask them how the f**k they found out how much I weigh, they tell me that by law they're allowed to download all the information from the Department of Transit and so they know everything that's on my drivers license. THAT's the kind of stuff that I find extremely scary, and that's the kind of thing you can't do anything at all to prevent other than living in a shack in the mountains somewhere.