Still useless if your video card doesn't work (and I speak from experience of having used both GeForce and Radeon cards with no success - and there's no fricking way I'm buying a Matrox either).
Damn right on the healthcare. If everyone who wants socialisd healthcare could come and have a look at our healthcare system in Britain and tell me that it's an improvement. I can't keep a straight face when someone praises our health care system, simply because I can't imagine taht they are talking about the same thing.
Look. It's called MORAL VALUES not ETHICS. Ethics is a discipline of philosophy concerned with how and why moral values exist. The actual determination of whether something is good or bad is morality.
Equivalents: legal rules and jurisprudence, music and musicology, that picture hanging on your wall and art criticism.
If something goes wrong, instead of logging on to a cheap parts site and getting a generic replacement and installing it yourself, you've got to call AppleCare and pay them hundreds of pounds to sort it out. The reason I switched back to x86/Linux was because my iBook screwed up and Apple wanted to charge me five hundred quid to fix the trackpad. Screw that. Two hundred and fifty can buy me everything I need to build my own.
The other thing I've found is that OS X is a memory hog. KDE, GNOME or XP are far less memory-intensive. Get the best Mac you can get for £500, then build an equivalent PC. Do a complicated filter in Gimp and compare.
Of course, this is all my opinion. Your mileage my vary. I'm not Steve Jobs, though I have impersonated him on IRC.
And, suprise suprise, I've got a cheap home-built PC that has Ethernet, stereo and USB built on the board. And for not much more money I could have bought a mainboard like my brothers which has Gigabit and FireWire built in. Price difference? About £15 - £20 ($30 - $40).
Re:I think a lot of you are missing the point.
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Mac mini Dissection
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I've got exactly the opposite deal. I've got an old iBook sitting on my desk and a homebuilt Linux/XP dual boot machine (for some reason I'm in XP at the moment). I spend most of my tube-time in Linux, just because there's so much more I can do in MDL, and so much easier. Give me KDE rather than OS X any day...
Linux has been, for me, the most non-technical operating system to install. I put together a computer recently, and have two hard drives. One I put Mandrake Linux 10.1 on, and on the other I am still trying to install MSFT Windows XP. Having downloaded the ISO's, it took me about an hour or so to set up Linux. Admittedly, I had a crap wifi card, and it took me a day or so to install that. But the system was useable (other than for 3D graphics) by the end of 48 hours.
I have been trying to install XP and have been getting nowhere. XP is as complicated as Linux, but isn't so easy to hack around with and fix problems with.
I've also used a Mac (typing this comment on an iBook as XP (slowly and unceremoniously) installs on my PC), and have found Mandrake 10.1 to be as easy to install as OS X.
I can only speak hypothetically, but considering that the BitTorrent client, GUI and TheShad0w's experimental client (BitTornado) are all written in Python, writing Kenosis in Python makes sense, since if it becomes popular, plonking it straight in to the main client could be achieved far easier than if you'd written it in any other language. (Of course, I haven't really researched this - it's an unproved hypothesis...)
Tell me about it. I've found Dreamweaver to be completely unusable for anything beyond a 1999-era website in HTML 4. The CSS tools on there are completely useless.
Yep. I moved an XP-using relatively-nooby person over to Firefox recently. Although they were sceptical at first, they have found it to be not only a seamless replacement, but a big improvement.
Now, if only I persuade people to use The Gimp rather than PS, and Thunderbird rather than OE. Or even Linux instead of Windows. (I mean, having moved to Mandrake from OS X, I've got to say the waters good!)
Hypothetical. Two politicians are being interviewed, and asked the question "What does two plus two equal?". One says "five" and the other "ten".
They are both flat out wrong, and no amount of "bias-balancing" is going to change that. (Outside of humour) If the broadcaster does not put these people straight, they are basically complacently consenting to the whole con.
Unlike politicians, I'll tell you that the answer is "four". If someone flames me for it or revert-wars me over it, so be it. The truth is still the same - the answer is four.
As for the "he will go far!" thing, I see it more as a descriptive statement (probably because he, whoever he is, is probably shagging the daughters of half the board of directors and greasing his way up the chain of command) than a normative statement (that is, that I want it to be the case or find that to be anything but morally repulsive).
Yes. It is amazing how people criticise blogs when all they are is a method for posting material on the Internet in an easy manner. On the same logic, you can criticise the static HTML/webspace/FTP since it is possible to put exactly the same content as a blog up, but you have to do it in a different manner. The content is the problem, not the technology.
Plus, a lot of people working on blogs are geeks, and are coming up with lots of cool ways of creating interactive "stuff" that will solve the problems of actually finding interesting content among the many, many thousands of weblogs.
Why bother? Weblogs are just a series of HTML pages containing content. Just because you don't like the content doesn't change the fact that they contain it.
Tell that to my Radeon. I fucking adore Linux, but having spent the past few weeks busting my balls trying to get a wifi card and a graphics card to work, the many, many benefits of Linux are spoilt by the fact that much of the hardware market (in these two areas, anyway) is comprised of incompatible products that you don't know are incompatible until you are fooling around at two AM with an unusable driver.
After using Mandrake since about Christmas-time, I'm going to have to grab another IDE drive and put Windows on it so that I can actually use 3D games.
Excessive rant mode off. I still like Linux, but considering that huge swathes of stuff doesn't work, it really is not desktop ready. It's ready for my desktop (having been a crypto-geek for most of my life thus far), but most people's desktops it is not ready for.
Indeed. I've got a great book here that is assigned on many "new media for morons" courses. It's got a great little anecdote (reference at the end), plus some bullshit to justify it. Here's the first paragraph of bullshit:
The Screen Play researchers argue that the dominant discursive construction of young computer users as 'future workers' in the knowledge economy leaves little space for them to articulate their pleasure in using computers in non-authorised ways - primarily, though not exclusively, gameplaying. The following excahnge, in which parents discussing their agenda for encouraging computer use at home are interrupted by their 'earwigging' teenage son, captures something of the ways in which these broader discourses and policies (and their contradictions are struggled over in everyday family relationships:
Then here is the anecdote itself:
Dad: But we did get stuff for the kids to use on it.
Mum: We got some educational software for the kids, at that point we were determined they weren't going to play games. [Laughter] I would like Steven to get involved in other things. I've tried a few times to interest him in various things and it's the games, definitely, that dominate his computer usage.
Q: Right. And so that's a...
Mum: Steven, what's the problem?
Steven: I'm just saying that I'm going to bed now. And games rule! Visual Basic sucks!
Then the researchers have some more justification at the end:
Steven's outburst, like the immediate pleasures of computer gameplaying he refers to, disrupt the discourses of future rewards for 'educational' computer use.
To which any sane person who has actually used a computer would respond: bull. "Edutainment" software is generally an enormous pile of patronising horseshit. Not that VB is 'edutainment', though it's about as functional and useful as edutainment.
The researchers who write about all this stuff (and I've read a number of tomes written by them) do talk so much crap, it's unbelievable.
There are a few people in various disciplines who do get the whole point about the Internet and computers in general. Larry Lessig gets it. David Weinberger gets it. Quite a lot of the academics who run blogs and post on USENET (etc.) get it. Most of the academic nerds who go to things like Etcon, Notcon etc. get it. But there are so many people in the humanities, notably media studies, who really don't understand that Marxist historical materialism or physicalist determinism really have no place in talking about computers.
That said, in comparison to what I've read, the paper linked by the grandparent post is not too bad. They are actually talking about the technology and the software.
Slashdot Mirror
And Thatcher was one of the only prime ministers to have a science degree (she studied Chemistry at Oxford). Biography.
Unless of course, your video card isn't supported...
Still useless if your video card doesn't work (and I speak from experience of having used both GeForce and Radeon cards with no success - and there's no fricking way I'm buying a Matrox either).
Damn right on the healthcare. If everyone who wants socialisd healthcare could come and have a look at our healthcare system in Britain and tell me that it's an improvement. I can't keep a straight face when someone praises our health care system, simply because I can't imagine taht they are talking about the same thing.
I'm using Simply.com. They are fairly cheap, and seem reliable. I've probably registered around five .co.uk's and a .com on there.
Look. It's called MORAL VALUES not ETHICS. Ethics is a discipline of philosophy concerned with how and why moral values exist. The actual determination of whether something is good or bad is morality.
Equivalents: legal rules and jurisprudence, music and musicology, that picture hanging on your wall and art criticism.
On the software front, I think the Linux nerds win. OpenOffice, Kontact/Evolution, Firefox, Amarok and Gimp cover everything that I used my Mac for.
The case against...
If something goes wrong, instead of logging on to a cheap parts site and getting a generic replacement and installing it yourself, you've got to call AppleCare and pay them hundreds of pounds to sort it out. The reason I switched back to x86/Linux was because my iBook screwed up and Apple wanted to charge me five hundred quid to fix the trackpad. Screw that. Two hundred and fifty can buy me everything I need to build my own.
The other thing I've found is that OS X is a memory hog. KDE, GNOME or XP are far less memory-intensive. Get the best Mac you can get for £500, then build an equivalent PC. Do a complicated filter in Gimp and compare.
Of course, this is all my opinion. Your mileage my vary. I'm not Steve Jobs, though I have impersonated him on IRC.
And, suprise suprise, I've got a cheap home-built PC that has Ethernet, stereo and USB built on the board. And for not much more money I could have bought a mainboard like my brothers which has Gigabit and FireWire built in. Price difference? About £15 - £20 ($30 - $40).
I've got exactly the opposite deal. I've got an old iBook sitting on my desk and a homebuilt Linux/XP dual boot machine (for some reason I'm in XP at the moment). I spend most of my tube-time in Linux, just because there's so much more I can do in MDL, and so much easier. Give me KDE rather than OS X any day...
Linux has been, for me, the most non-technical operating system to install. I put together a computer recently, and have two hard drives. One I put Mandrake Linux 10.1 on, and on the other I am still trying to install MSFT Windows XP. Having downloaded the ISO's, it took me about an hour or so to set up Linux. Admittedly, I had a crap wifi card, and it took me a day or so to install that. But the system was useable (other than for 3D graphics) by the end of 48 hours.
I have been trying to install XP and have been getting nowhere. XP is as complicated as Linux, but isn't so easy to hack around with and fix problems with.
I've also used a Mac (typing this comment on an iBook as XP (slowly and unceremoniously) installs on my PC), and have found Mandrake 10.1 to be as easy to install as OS X.
Plus, it isn't the distribution of the .torrent's that is the problem Kenosis is trying to solve, but the role of the trackers.
I can only speak hypothetically, but considering that the BitTorrent client, GUI and TheShad0w's experimental client (BitTornado) are all written in Python, writing Kenosis in Python makes sense, since if it becomes popular, plonking it straight in to the main client could be achieved far easier than if you'd written it in any other language. (Of course, I haven't really researched this - it's an unproved hypothesis...)
Share the secret then. The only one I've seen is Movable Type (and other blogging type applications - hardly scalable).
Tell me about it. I've found Dreamweaver to be completely unusable for anything beyond a 1999-era website in HTML 4. The CSS tools on there are completely useless.
Yep. I moved an XP-using relatively-nooby person over to Firefox recently. Although they were sceptical at first, they have found it to be not only a seamless replacement, but a big improvement.
Now, if only I persuade people to use The Gimp rather than PS, and Thunderbird rather than OE. Or even Linux instead of Windows. (I mean, having moved to Mandrake from OS X, I've got to say the waters good!)
Hypothetical. Two politicians are being interviewed, and asked the question "What does two plus two equal?". One says "five" and the other "ten".
They are both flat out wrong, and no amount of "bias-balancing" is going to change that. (Outside of humour) If the broadcaster does not put these people straight, they are basically complacently consenting to the whole con.
Unlike politicians, I'll tell you that the answer is "four". If someone flames me for it or revert-wars me over it, so be it. The truth is still the same - the answer is four.
As for the "he will go far!" thing, I see it more as a descriptive statement (probably because he, whoever he is, is probably shagging the daughters of half the board of directors and greasing his way up the chain of command) than a normative statement (that is, that I want it to be the case or find that to be anything but morally repulsive).
I'm surprised that you didn't put "#3 Profit!!!" on the end, since this is actually a case where that is appropriate.
Yes. It is amazing how people criticise blogs when all they are is a method for posting material on the Internet in an easy manner. On the same logic, you can criticise the static HTML/webspace/FTP since it is possible to put exactly the same content as a blog up, but you have to do it in a different manner. The content is the problem, not the technology.
Plus, a lot of people working on blogs are geeks, and are coming up with lots of cool ways of creating interactive "stuff" that will solve the problems of actually finding interesting content among the many, many thousands of weblogs.
Why bother? Weblogs are just a series of HTML pages containing content. Just because you don't like the content doesn't change the fact that they contain it.
Tell that to my Radeon. I fucking adore Linux, but having spent the past few weeks busting my balls trying to get a wifi card and a graphics card to work, the many, many benefits of Linux are spoilt by the fact that much of the hardware market (in these two areas, anyway) is comprised of incompatible products that you don't know are incompatible until you are fooling around at two AM with an unusable driver.
After using Mandrake since about Christmas-time, I'm going to have to grab another IDE drive and put Windows on it so that I can actually use 3D games.
Excessive rant mode off. I still like Linux, but considering that huge swathes of stuff doesn't work, it really is not desktop ready. It's ready for my desktop (having been a crypto-geek for most of my life thus far), but most people's desktops it is not ready for.
Indeed. I've got a great book here that is assigned on many "new media for morons" courses. It's got a great little anecdote (reference at the end), plus some bullshit to justify it. Here's the first paragraph of bullshit:
Then here is the anecdote itself:
Then the researchers have some more justification at the end:
(The whole thing is from Lister et al. (2003) "New Media: A Critical Introduction", London: Routledge, p. 244)
To which any sane person who has actually used a computer would respond: bull. "Edutainment" software is generally an enormous pile of patronising horseshit. Not that VB is 'edutainment', though it's about as functional and useful as edutainment.
The researchers who write about all this stuff (and I've read a number of tomes written by them) do talk so much crap, it's unbelievable.
There are a few people in various disciplines who do get the whole point about the Internet and computers in general. Larry Lessig gets it. David Weinberger gets it. Quite a lot of the academics who run blogs and post on USENET (etc.) get it. Most of the academic nerds who go to things like Etcon, Notcon etc. get it. But there are so many people in the humanities, notably media studies, who really don't understand that Marxist historical materialism or physicalist determinism really have no place in talking about computers.
That said, in comparison to what I've read, the paper linked by the grandparent post is not too bad. They are actually talking about the technology and the software.
Which Venezuelan BitTorrent sites are they, then?
Personally, I'd quite like a toolbar featuring Natalie Portman putting hot grits in her pants.