Rioting? That is so last generation. These days, we blog. Get a blog about this issue in the first 10 results of a Google search for UTA, University Texas Arlington, etc., and see how long it takes for the Registrar's office to start raising hell when 1 of every 2 or 3 potential new students wants to know what has been done about the recent privacy breach.
How much thrust would a rocket need to zip you through those sections if you waited to fire it until reaching, say, 500 - 800km? Surely by then you'd be far enough away from Earth that a little bit of push would go a long ways, compared to firing a rocket from the ground?
Let me see if I have this down right: With the progress of multi-core CPU's, especially looking at the AMD / ATI deal, PC's are moving towards a single 'super chip' that will do everything while phasing out the use of a truly separate graphics system. Meanwhile, supercomputers are moving towards using GPU's as the main workhorse. Doesn't that strike anybody else as a little odd?
active molton core? by joe 155 (937621) on Thursday November 09, @10:26AM (#16787197)
I'm not sure what you mean by 'ambient temperature of space', because temperature is a property of matter, and space is kinda empty, so there's nothing to compare it to, unless you want to call it absolute zero, in which case the moon will be quite a bit hotter than that no matter what. The next nearest approach I would think would be to figure roughly what temp. an otherwise 'dead' object of the moon's size would reach just through the ambient radiation in space, plus collisions (probably insignificant, but maybe not), etc. This has to be tougher than it seems at first glance, though, or I would expect they would have already figured it out.
The problem with this is that if you get the government involved instead of voting with your dollar, what will happen will have nothing to do with actually helping the disabled and everything to do with the government and greedy handicapped people using this as a way to lay huge fines (good for the government) and settlements (good for the greedy)...and don't forget that this is ALL good for the lawyers...against online business which are unprepared for the ruling and will almost certainly have vague and unreasonable guidelines. You talk tough because all you're thinking about is huge corporate monoliths like Target, but a ruling against Target here would cripple small business / non-profit-but-we-accept-donations websites who don't know how to fix their sites on their own and can't possibly afford to pay someone else to do it. At best, all that will come of this is a bunch of rich lawyers, a few rich blind people, and a metric ass ton of sites making an absolute bare minimum effort to comply just enough not to get sued, but almost surely not enough to actually benefit anyone (think of tobacco / alcohol / porn sites that make you 'verify your age' by 'entering your date of birth' (i.e., picking 01/01/1900 and clicking 'submit')).
Not sure if this counts as a 'level', per se, but the final puzzle in Myst III: Exile (with the tapestries and symbols based on words in the Journal) is definitely an all-time fav. It's sort of 'aha!', but it's still a very beautiful puzzle. I'm also shocked that Dust or Dust2 didn't make it in from CS. I'm not really into that kind of game, but I've played enough to know how wildly popular those two levels are.
I would have put FF-VII above Half Life, but otherwise a pretty good list. One of the commenters nailed it right on the head for FF-VII: When a particular series of tones on a dialed-in phone number immediately cause me to think of a video game half a decade after I last picked it up, that's a helluvva good story.
As I've said to other replies in this thread, I understand and agree with you...to the extent that you acknowledge that it is, in fact, a problem. I don't want to fix it, you don't want to fix it, so you go do your thing on Linux and I'll stay here and do mine on Windows and we can all just STFU and get on with life. I have used, and continue to use from time to time when certain needs arise (such as putting up a temporary FTP server, for instance), Linux and BSD. I have gone beyond simple hobby and into actual college courses in CoSci. I'm an IT professional (in administration / technician faculties, not development.) I have the technical ability to use Linux, and I have proven it to myself many times. It's just way more effort than I'm willing to invest when all I really want to do the vast majority of the time is email, IRC, and Counter Strike, and Windows already does that quite nicely. What I take issue with is people like GGP poster who try to imply that Linux is difficult because the people who say it's difficult are stupid (instead of fessing up to the fact that it's because developers aren't focusing on usability) and try to refute anybody who says that Linux is ready for the consumer desktop market by simply repeating, "No, you're just stupid, that's all." On zealots like that, I call bullshit, as I did in GP, but I mean no offense to developers and users who actually see Linux for what it is instead of calling it what it might be in 5 or 10 years.
I can operate an ATM, bank website, self-checkout aisle, etc., without digging through forums, documentation, source code, or dealing with platform zealots. I can also install and operate Windows XP just as easily. *buntu, slackware, red hat, suse, freebsd, etc....not so much. Somehow, those UNIX guys managed to make security and accessibility play nice together. Linux has, thus far, failed. I should clarify, as well, that the types I am aiming this post at are the zealots. The quiet, satisfied *nix geeks leave me alone and I return the favor. But the zealots that jump up and argue every time a story like this is posted, the ones that try to say that, for those people who are turned off by the Linux user experience, it is their own fault and try to make that out to be a bad thing...those people need a clue-by-four to the head. Linux does not satisfy the needs of the average consumer. Put it this way: Race cars are -awesome-...lots of power, lots of safety features. But they require a LOT of maintenance and technical know-how to operate properly. If there was a way to take a stock vehicle and turn it into a race-car for free, but it still required as much maintenance, do you think that most people would do it? I don't. I think most people want to take their car in for an oil change once ever 3k - 5k miles, change the tires when they blow, keep it full of gas, and otherwise not worry. Same goes for computers: You have to pay the electricity and internet bills, defrag once in a while, and run an antivirus / spyware remover if something nasty gets on your computer, and otherwise just -use- it.
Linux is really powerful and secure, sure. But for most people, the maintenance and know-how required to use it just are not worth the benefit, and I'm tired of hearing *nix zealots act like it's the fault of users that, for the majority of them, Linux has a poor investment:benefit ratio.
I suppose I worded that poorly. What I was getting at was, "Why is it that in order for me to do my normal, non-power-user day-to-day tasks, I have to access files in root-access-only folders?" I think this mostly goes back to complaints about Linux not having a good directory layout, which results in programs and their various pieces being spread all over hell in a way that users and all too often app designers don't understand, so you end up with a situation where you need root access to alter the config file so you can change the difficulty setting on a minesweeper clone (note: that example came straight out of thin air, but it's of the type that makes me want to reach out and choke so many developers every time I try Linux, and more and more often every time, to boot. Last time I tried Kubuntu (Breezy Badger), I got so sick of typing in the root pass, having it fail, bringing up a console, trying it with sudo, having it succeed, etc., for the tiniest, most insignificant tasks, I almost had an aneurysm (and yes, there have been similar incidents on different distros as well)).
Your entire post misses one of the main facts that Linux zealots regularly overlook: [Typical User]: "I do not have the time, nor the inclination, to figure out how to set the clock on my VCR. I don't care. What I do care about is watching this movie. That's it. I just want to watch a goddamned movie. Why do I have to (set my clock / install and configure WINE / use the console / download dependencies / switch to root) in order to (watch my movie / play my video game / change the way a program behaves when it starts / get this stupid thing to execute at all / look at the files in directory XYZ)." You're right, it -is- a matter of laziness, but most of the time, it is -not- on the part of the user. There are ways of solving these problems in Linux. I've seen it done. But *nix geeks don't want to solve them; they want to continue to lazily assume that everybody is a Linux expert so that they can say that the usability failures in their software are the user's fault.
Granted, there's a ton of stuff available for Linux as long as you know where to look, but for your average user that's not enough.
Sometimes even knowing exactly where to look is useless if you aren't an expert and / or don't have time (and it -does- take a commitment of sometimes hours or days or more) to find what you want. *buntu, for instance, has a really convenient, comprehensive, built-in means of acquiring software. Unfortunately, especially from the eyes of a Windows convert, every single piece of software in there is a no-name brand, which in their experience almost always translates to total crap software. An often overlooked benefit of actually paying for your software off the shelf is that Big Box Mart only carries tried-and-true good software (in the sense that good means 'does what the average user wants with minimal effort', not good as in 'world-class professional software that requires a 2-year study program to use') because only good software will sell like hotcakes, and in a teeny margin market like they run, they make nearly nothing if something doesn't sell by the boatload. When I go to Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart, etc., I can grab just about any random CD-Burner, Audio Player, DVD Video Player, Office Productivity Suite, Classic Arcade Pack, and whatever else right off the shelf without spending much time comparing features with the at most one or two other similar products on the shelf because I know that those two or three are probably the two or three best and, far more importantly, most user-friendly. If it's on the shelf, it means that the average Wal-Mart customer has been able to rub enough brain cells together to get it to work to their satisfaction. That's a guarantee of user-friendliness beyond compare, and pretty much non-existent in the *nix world. Compare to the repositories on *buntu: Page upon page of weird name after weird name for all things that for some reason or other happened to generate a 'hit' on keyword search for 'media player'. I do not have time to go through this list and figure out which one to use. Let's not even discuss the way that most distros, *buntu included, will give you several different programs to do the same damned thing. Pick ONE that works very well with minimal issue and ship that. I can't be bothered to screw with this stuff (and I have tried on average one or two distros, for about a month each, every year for the last five or so), so heck knows that my non-technical friends and family can't even consider it.
The best was when you go down that ladder and as your POV swivels around you see that creepy little b**** coming towards you. You -know- you're on a ladder and have no chance of defending or evading in time...best 'jump' I think I've had from a game in a long time.
Admittedly, the box itself would have probably not suited your friend's aesthetic sensibilities
Sys makes some beautiful single- and dual-processor graphics workstations with plenty of room to customize without breaking the budget.
I realize that my case is so unusual as to be negligible and so it doesn't really justify it, but...I live 100 miles from Wal Mart (or any other place that would carry these games), so driving to get it, having it shipped next day air, or downloading it for $30 are my options for getting it quickly, and honestly the download would probably be the best balance of time and money. As it happens, I already own (and don't really like) Civ III, so I won't be getting either, though.
I live in Wyoming. I'm not sure what you mean by 'middle of nowhere', but I'm confident I have you beat. I know of only two radio stations in my county: Wyoming Public Radio, and a station that plays 'Top 40' type stuff (but only those songs that were extremely popular AND almost totally unoffensive to anybody) from about 1981 through 1 year ago or so (the upper bound continually advances, but rarely has songs until 6 months after the album comes out and it's status as a 'hit' is thoroughly confirmed by the rest of America). Occasionally I can pick up a country station and a classic rock station, but both come from a city approx. 100 miles away, so needless to say the reception is flakey.
"I'm just going to continue to listen to the albums published years ago that were great, and are still great. As for the new stuff, I'm going to listen to it on the radio, and in the unlikely event that some great music appears, I will buy it."
Keyword there is 'appears'. If you don't live in a 250k+ population city and you don't have satellite radio, it is -very- difficult to find out about new bands that don't fall into the categories of "Rap / Hip-Hop" or "Emo", and even for that you have to stay up until Insomniac Music Theater comes on, because that's just about the only plain music video programming left on earth that doesn't cater to a specific genre. It's probably been 4 or 5 years since I bought an album based on learning about a band through TV or Radio, and unfortunately for the RIAA, what that basically means is that I listen to a LOT more indie music.
This will allow for more variety in TV Dinner desserts, because they can just shield it so only the stuff that needs to get nuked will get nuked. w00t!
Hopefully, it will be weird enough for users to call and ask about it, thus allowing me to weed out the few who are still using IE when they know they're supposed to be using Firefox.
Slashdot Mirror
Rioting? That is so last generation. These days, we blog. Get a blog about this issue in the first 10 results of a Google search for UTA, University Texas Arlington, etc., and see how long it takes for the Registrar's office to start raising hell when 1 of every 2 or 3 potential new students wants to know what has been done about the recent privacy breach.
How much thrust would a rocket need to zip you through those sections if you waited to fire it until reaching, say, 500 - 800km? Surely by then you'd be far enough away from Earth that a little bit of push would go a long ways, compared to firing a rocket from the ground?
Let me see if I have this down right: With the progress of multi-core CPU's, especially looking at the AMD / ATI deal, PC's are moving towards a single 'super chip' that will do everything while phasing out the use of a truly separate graphics system. Meanwhile, supercomputers are moving towards using GPU's as the main workhorse. Doesn't that strike anybody else as a little odd?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'ambient temperature of space', because temperature is a property of matter, and space is kinda empty, so there's nothing to compare it to, unless you want to call it absolute zero, in which case the moon will be quite a bit hotter than that no matter what.
The next nearest approach I would think would be to figure roughly what temp. an otherwise 'dead' object of the moon's size would reach just through the ambient radiation in space, plus collisions (probably insignificant, but maybe not), etc. This has to be tougher than it seems at first glance, though, or I would expect they would have already figured it out.
The problem with this is that if you get the government involved instead of voting with your dollar, what will happen will have nothing to do with actually helping the disabled and everything to do with the government and greedy handicapped people using this as a way to lay huge fines (good for the government) and settlements (good for the greedy)...and don't forget that this is ALL good for the lawyers...against online business which are unprepared for the ruling and will almost certainly have vague and unreasonable guidelines. You talk tough because all you're thinking about is huge corporate monoliths like Target, but a ruling against Target here would cripple small business / non-profit-but-we-accept-donations websites who don't know how to fix their sites on their own and can't possibly afford to pay someone else to do it. At best, all that will come of this is a bunch of rich lawyers, a few rich blind people, and a metric ass ton of sites making an absolute bare minimum effort to comply just enough not to get sued, but almost surely not enough to actually benefit anyone (think of tobacco / alcohol / porn sites that make you 'verify your age' by 'entering your date of birth' (i.e., picking 01/01/1900 and clicking 'submit')).
Not sure if this counts as a 'level', per se, but the final puzzle in Myst III: Exile (with the tapestries and symbols based on words in the Journal) is definitely an all-time fav. It's sort of 'aha!', but it's still a very beautiful puzzle. I'm also shocked that Dust or Dust2 didn't make it in from CS. I'm not really into that kind of game, but I've played enough to know how wildly popular those two levels are.
I would have put FF-VII above Half Life, but otherwise a pretty good list. One of the commenters nailed it right on the head for FF-VII: When a particular series of tones on a dialed-in phone number immediately cause me to think of a video game half a decade after I last picked it up, that's a helluvva good story.
As I've said to other replies in this thread, I understand and agree with you...to the extent that you acknowledge that it is, in fact, a problem. I don't want to fix it, you don't want to fix it, so you go do your thing on Linux and I'll stay here and do mine on Windows and we can all just STFU and get on with life.
I have used, and continue to use from time to time when certain needs arise (such as putting up a temporary FTP server, for instance), Linux and BSD. I have gone beyond simple hobby and into actual college courses in CoSci. I'm an IT professional (in administration / technician faculties, not development.) I have the technical ability to use Linux, and I have proven it to myself many times. It's just way more effort than I'm willing to invest when all I really want to do the vast majority of the time is email, IRC, and Counter Strike, and Windows already does that quite nicely.
What I take issue with is people like GGP poster who try to imply that Linux is difficult because the people who say it's difficult are stupid (instead of fessing up to the fact that it's because developers aren't focusing on usability) and try to refute anybody who says that Linux is ready for the consumer desktop market by simply repeating, "No, you're just stupid, that's all." On zealots like that, I call bullshit, as I did in GP, but I mean no offense to developers and users who actually see Linux for what it is instead of calling it what it might be in 5 or 10 years.
I can operate an ATM, bank website, self-checkout aisle, etc., without digging through forums, documentation, source code, or dealing with platform zealots. I can also install and operate Windows XP just as easily. *buntu, slackware, red hat, suse, freebsd, etc....not so much. Somehow, those UNIX guys managed to make security and accessibility play nice together. Linux has, thus far, failed.
I should clarify, as well, that the types I am aiming this post at are the zealots. The quiet, satisfied *nix geeks leave me alone and I return the favor. But the zealots that jump up and argue every time a story like this is posted, the ones that try to say that, for those people who are turned off by the Linux user experience, it is their own fault and try to make that out to be a bad thing...those people need a clue-by-four to the head. Linux does not satisfy the needs of the average consumer. Put it this way: Race cars are -awesome-...lots of power, lots of safety features. But they require a LOT of maintenance and technical know-how to operate properly. If there was a way to take a stock vehicle and turn it into a race-car for free, but it still required as much maintenance, do you think that most people would do it? I don't. I think most people want to take their car in for an oil change once ever 3k - 5k miles, change the tires when they blow, keep it full of gas, and otherwise not worry. Same goes for computers: You have to pay the electricity and internet bills, defrag once in a while, and run an antivirus / spyware remover if something nasty gets on your computer, and otherwise just -use- it.
Linux is really powerful and secure, sure. But for most people, the maintenance and know-how required to use it just are not worth the benefit, and I'm tired of hearing *nix zealots act like it's the fault of users that, for the majority of them, Linux has a poor investment:benefit ratio.
I suppose I worded that poorly. What I was getting at was, "Why is it that in order for me to do my normal, non-power-user day-to-day tasks, I have to access files in root-access-only folders?" I think this mostly goes back to complaints about Linux not having a good directory layout, which results in programs and their various pieces being spread all over hell in a way that users and all too often app designers don't understand, so you end up with a situation where you need root access to alter the config file so you can change the difficulty setting on a minesweeper clone (note: that example came straight out of thin air, but it's of the type that makes me want to reach out and choke so many developers every time I try Linux, and more and more often every time, to boot. Last time I tried Kubuntu (Breezy Badger), I got so sick of typing in the root pass, having it fail, bringing up a console, trying it with sudo, having it succeed, etc., for the tiniest, most insignificant tasks, I almost had an aneurysm (and yes, there have been similar incidents on different distros as well)).
"oh noes how do I set my VCR clock" syndrome
Your entire post misses one of the main facts that Linux zealots regularly overlook: [Typical User]: "I do not have the time, nor the inclination, to figure out how to set the clock on my VCR. I don't care. What I do care about is watching this movie. That's it. I just want to watch a goddamned movie. Why do I have to (set my clock / install and configure WINE / use the console / download dependencies / switch to root) in order to (watch my movie / play my video game / change the way a program behaves when it starts / get this stupid thing to execute at all / look at the files in directory XYZ)."
You're right, it -is- a matter of laziness, but most of the time, it is -not- on the part of the user. There are ways of solving these problems in Linux. I've seen it done. But *nix geeks don't want to solve them; they want to continue to lazily assume that everybody is a Linux expert so that they can say that the usability failures in their software are the user's fault.
Granted, there's a ton of stuff available for Linux as long as you know where to look, but for your average user that's not enough.
Sometimes even knowing exactly where to look is useless if you aren't an expert and / or don't have time (and it -does- take a commitment of sometimes hours or days or more) to find what you want. *buntu, for instance, has a really convenient, comprehensive, built-in means of acquiring software. Unfortunately, especially from the eyes of a Windows convert, every single piece of software in there is a no-name brand, which in their experience almost always translates to total crap software.
An often overlooked benefit of actually paying for your software off the shelf is that Big Box Mart only carries tried-and-true good software (in the sense that good means 'does what the average user wants with minimal effort', not good as in 'world-class professional software that requires a 2-year study program to use') because only good software will sell like hotcakes, and in a teeny margin market like they run, they make nearly nothing if something doesn't sell by the boatload. When I go to Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart, etc., I can grab just about any random CD-Burner, Audio Player, DVD Video Player, Office Productivity Suite, Classic Arcade Pack, and whatever else right off the shelf without spending much time comparing features with the at most one or two other similar products on the shelf because I know that those two or three are probably the two or three best and, far more importantly, most user-friendly. If it's on the shelf, it means that the average Wal-Mart customer has been able to rub enough brain cells together to get it to work to their satisfaction. That's a guarantee of user-friendliness beyond compare, and pretty much non-existent in the *nix world.
Compare to the repositories on *buntu: Page upon page of weird name after weird name for all things that for some reason or other happened to generate a 'hit' on keyword search for 'media player'. I do not have time to go through this list and figure out which one to use. Let's not even discuss the way that most distros, *buntu included, will give you several different programs to do the same damned thing. Pick ONE that works very well with minimal issue and ship that. I can't be bothered to screw with this stuff (and I have tried on average one or two distros, for about a month each, every year for the last five or so), so heck knows that my non-technical friends and family can't even consider it.
Clicked the checkbox off and told it not to remind me about it again.
Never seen that actually work in my experience.
The best was when you go down that ladder and as your POV swivels around you see that creepy little b**** coming towards you. You -know- you're on a ladder and have no chance of defending or evading in time...best 'jump' I think I've had from a game in a long time.
Admittedly, the box itself would have probably not suited your friend's aesthetic sensibilities
Sys makes some beautiful single- and dual-processor graphics workstations with plenty of room to customize without breaking the budget.
10.100.110.10, perhaps...
3Mbps up/down cable, so yeah, downloading is fine.
I realize that my case is so unusual as to be negligible and so it doesn't really justify it, but...I live 100 miles from Wal Mart (or any other place that would carry these games), so driving to get it, having it shipped next day air, or downloading it for $30 are my options for getting it quickly, and honestly the download would probably be the best balance of time and money. As it happens, I already own (and don't really like) Civ III, so I won't be getting either, though.
I live in Wyoming. I'm not sure what you mean by 'middle of nowhere', but I'm confident I have you beat. I know of only two radio stations in my county: Wyoming Public Radio, and a station that plays 'Top 40' type stuff (but only those songs that were extremely popular AND almost totally unoffensive to anybody) from about 1981 through 1 year ago or so (the upper bound continually advances, but rarely has songs until 6 months after the album comes out and it's status as a 'hit' is thoroughly confirmed by the rest of America). Occasionally I can pick up a country station and a classic rock station, but both come from a city approx. 100 miles away, so needless to say the reception is flakey.
"I'm just going to continue to listen to the albums published years ago that were great, and are still great. As for the new stuff, I'm going to listen to it on the radio, and in the unlikely event that some great music appears, I will buy it."
Keyword there is 'appears'. If you don't live in a 250k+ population city and you don't have satellite radio, it is -very- difficult to find out about new bands that don't fall into the categories of "Rap / Hip-Hop" or "Emo", and even for that you have to stay up until Insomniac Music Theater comes on, because that's just about the only plain music video programming left on earth that doesn't cater to a specific genre. It's probably been 4 or 5 years since I bought an album based on learning about a band through TV or Radio, and unfortunately for the RIAA, what that basically means is that I listen to a LOT more indie music.
This will allow for more variety in TV Dinner desserts, because they can just shield it so only the stuff that needs to get nuked will get nuked. w00t!
Actually, that trash can looks like the kind that are usually used for recycling in my area (and that's about the -only- place they're used).
Aren't you worried that, in light of your personal life issues, this thesis might come across a little...I dunno...biased? Just a tad?
I think by 'one planet down' they meant one fewer, as in, Pluto no longer being a planet. ;)
Hopefully, it will be weird enough for users to call and ask about it, thus allowing me to weed out the few who are still using IE when they know they're supposed to be using Firefox.