"List" usually implies more than a singular item. I agree with the OP as I won't visit anywhere that takes fingerprints, sexually assaults and then scans through any available hard drives of potential tourists, all apparently with zero legal recourse or independent oversight. Any other countries that do the same thing would similarly be off my work and holiday itineraries.
people finally realize security "professionals" are actually NEEDED!
Or, if you know some of the people I've worked with, it'll be more a "as soon as the authorities have caught up with these LulzSec people, there won't be any more haXx0ring vectors, so what's the point in patching the servers? It's not like WE'D be a target anyway!". IME most companies won't give a shit about easily enforced and executed pre-emptive security until there's a thousand trojans running around the network and the entire company is fucked, and by then its too late.
If you're working for a company that doesn't think security is important enough to employ someone to be responsible for it, the actions of people like LulzSec aren't going to convince them otherwise. This coming from a sysadmin who's finally overcome a decade-old "don't patch ANYTHING once it enters production, not even the clients" mindset and now has the fun task of installing an average of 120 patches and three service packs on 300 servers. It took two branch offices getting their computers totalled by malware coming in on USB sticks before management got that particular message.
Wish I had mod points for you. But you also forgot to mention the people who say "Shut up dumb ass, you've clearly got a shitty system and/or are incompetent!" or the "Shut up dumb ass, you're obviously using the wrong/too many extensions!" as well as the "Shut up dumb ass, you've got too many tabs open" and the "Shut up dumb ass, you're not meant to keep it running for days!" crowd.
To those of you who can manage to open a hojillion tabs and keep them open for months at a time, congratulations, we're happy for you. But as a user whose firefox at work will routinely gobble 350MB just with my opening set of tabs, then go up to 700MB after a few hours usage, and then at some point in the next few days will start chomping like there's no tomorrow and eventually crawls the OS and then crashes when it hits 1.8GB (32bit limit), please take our word for it when we see Firefox having a problem. I can close up a whole bunch of tabs and only regain a few megabytes, I can close every tab and only regain a hundred or so megabytes... on machines with "only" 2GB of RAM you *need* FF to relinquish that memory. I've got nothing against apps using the memory that's there, but FF often behaves like it owns the OS, mallocing away whilst pushing other running apps out to swap.
It's nice to finally see what appears to be the beginnings of a concerted effort to address whatever combination of factors there are that contribute to the issue... but I do fear it's too little too late for a lot of people who've already jumped to chrome. (Personally, opera's been my primary browser since well before firefox was phoenix but it doesn't play well with the work proxy... it too can eat up vast chunks of memory if you throw enough gunk at it but I can always reclaim that memory by closing down a few tabs)
Not intended as a troll or a dig against FF itself, it's just frustrating sticking your hand up and saying "Hey! Got a memory problem here!" and be met with a barrage of assertions from people you've never met who insist that you must somehow be stupid, blind, mentally retarded or some combination of the above just because the same circumstances have never happened to them.
XFCE's the DE I use on most of my remaining linux desktops, with one running fluxbox for better performance. It's definitely a nice, lightweight but full featured environment that doesn't foist itself upon you. It's definitely come into its own over the last 18 months or so.
Never got my head around transparency though, but I rarely move things around (I'm a spatial + muscle memory type so I navigate faster when things stay in the same place) and I usually find a quick minimise -> maximise from the taskbar is the quickest way of finding an errant window, transparency is too visually busy for me.
Thanks, I was kinda hoping for a response like that (and thanks for yours too wolfemi!).
I had no hope for Matt Smith at the beginning of the last series, being a big fan of Tenant's swagger, but over the course of a fair few episodes he'd managed to create a classic Who persona - just the right combination of whimsical kindly grandfather and genocidal maniac:). Still not got my mind made up on Karen Gillian yet. And yes, RTD's endings were, as you say, too cheap... not that they were bad per se, just not enough variation; there's an explosion, bad guys dead, cue credits, whereas Moffat's the kinda guy to use that ending as a jumping board both back and forwards into last and next season. Timey wimey calvinball indeed!
Whenever I've seen anything from Moffat that had a "Right... this is all getting a bit hectic...", genius has always followed and I've always been amazed by his awesome plot-crafting, so I don't doubt the plot will live up to the hype - more complicated than Inception (loved the spectacle of the film but felt they could have done much more with the concept... hopefully there'll be more films like it now that are more willing to trust the audience to pay attention) is good, on a par with Moffat's other work will be scintillating.
I was amazed by the other comments I saw saying they thought Who was now too scary for kids - seeing it in order to get terrified was half the point as a kid, no? Being from a Welsh mining town I remember being terrified of the old slag heaps after I saw a repeat of The Green Death, but that didn't stop me loving it.
Personally, I'm glad the daleks are getting a rest - the formula of "daleks appear/they are the ultimate indestructible evil!/oh wait I just killed them all" was getting old real fast, and seemed to be there for little more than spectacle. As you say, the horrors you can't quite see are both far scarier and can be done on a much lower budget:D Having a writer like Moffat at the helm can capitalise on that in a way I don't think RTD could (which was a shame given his promising start with deeply creepy no-budget gubbins like Dark Season and Century Falls).
Classic Who indeed. Looking forward to my marathon now. This missus will probably like it too if she can poke her head around the sofa for long enough.
Disclaimer: not a Moffat fangirl, honest guv, but I did squeee slightly when I heard he was taking over.
Sad as it is for me to admit, I'm in complete agreement. I used to have just one windows machine for games, I now have two more windows machines and two less linux ones simply because I also want shit to just work. I still keep linux on my HTPC's (using a light debian/XFCE or fluxbox/XBMC combo) and servers because it's so low maintenance, but for the most part the desktop swiftly started to vanish up it's own arse a few years ago.
When I started with linux back on mandrake 8, you had the utterly awesome sawfish/sawmill built into Gnome - I played with that for weeks just because it was fun, but when doing Real Work I found that some of those esoteric window functions really did make a huge difference to my workflow. Then metacity was brought in to the exclusion of everything else and I switched to KDE, which had broadly similar WM capabilities. So far so froody until everyone decided that desktops needed to be 3D accelerated because apple had done so (and everyone loved the swooshing dock), so both KDE and Gnome throw the baby out with the bathwater and redesign their WM's from scratch, losing a lot of the functionality along the way (or almost all of it in the case of Gnome 3), because apparently "most people don't use feature X" means the same as "no-one uses feature X". Granted, KDE4 is still pretty configurable and IMHO orders of magnitude better than Gnome 2 or 3 but I still feel like I'm fighting it for attention all the time, when it should really be getting the hell out of the way.
Windows 7 may try very hard to make you fit into it's "the user is stupid" mould, but with the right reg hacks I can customise it almost as much as I could on my KDE setup; heck, focus-follows-mouse support (an utter deal breaker for me) is waaaay better in 7 than it was in 2000/XP and doesn't cause half the glitchiness in some apps like it used to do. Overall, it's not perfect, but good enough and once the initial pain of configuration was done with (and then exported to a reg file which makes it a 2s change on every other machine) I no longer have to fight it. Throw cygwin + mintty and a few other choice apps into the mix and all of a sudden I've got me the best of both worlds (cue Borg joke).
My main problem is usability "experts" and neophiliacs who keep telling me that I'm doing things the wrong way, or that "clicking on a launcher is so old hat, that's why we removed launchers! Just open the X menu, start typing what you want to run, and then click one of the programs that show up!" or other such counter-intuitive bullcrapshitturds which for some inexplicable reason have become the default in all the major DE's. Not interested, and yes I have tried it. Not against new ways of doing things by any means, but devs shouldn't expect users to re-learn every paradigm at the drop of a hat because some self-appointed expert says "this new way I just invented is the best for me, therefore it's the best for everyone!" and then someone else sees that as a great way to do away with the old "inferior" method, making it painful to add back. A bit like Wikipedia deletionists actually; "shading the window of type X is not notable enough, and therefore will be removed!".
Not that I'm singling out Gnome here, almost every non-niche DE/WM I've used in the last few years is guilty of the above, MS and Apple included.
Amen, I'm not sure why people don't see the connection. At times I feel like the only guy on the planet who immediately disables all this compositor nonsense the second I get a new machine/profile - and it's got nothing to do with gaming (although it causing video playback failure under linux is simply inexcusable). Apart from everyone else in my house who saw my laptop and said "how did you get it to stop doing all that stupid swooshing stuff?" and duly went through a customisation binge, swiftly followed by a "wow, it's so much faster now!".
3D accelerated desktops seem to create more problems than they solve IMHO, and I'm not quite sure what problems there were meant to solve in the first place (other than "We don't have as much eye candy as apple yet"). All this talk of freeing up the CPU seems bogus as well, as long as 2D acceleration works fine I've never seen any WM/DE chew significant cycles drawing widgets. Composited desktops however result in higher aggregate power usage for me at least (tried on both an intel 4500 and a low-end nVidia under linux), seemingly all for the sake of squidging up a window when it's minimised and giving me a rotating cube instead of alt tab. I guess I'm just old an inherently old fashioned in that I even use win7 in a theme as close to windows 2000 as I can get (except it's greyer). All that fast-moving whizz bang stuff is just horribly distracting to me. Perhaps someone can explain what I'm missing?
Maybe in a CPU generation or two when we get an on-CPU framebuffer and decent drivers across all OS's and WM/DE designers will show a bit more restraint and tact, but the trend certainly seems to be to spend more and more resources on making Joe Sixpack's netbook resemble something from Hackers. I'm not against giving people a choice, by all means keep your flashy bling if you love it so much, but making it the default and impossible to turn off? Stupid. I think Gnome must have had a frontal lobotomy to think that mandating composition, and hence wholly bug-free drivers for 3D graphics cards in linux, was a good idea - in all my ten years of using it on the desktop I've never encountered a wholly bug-free driver. Same goes for windows for that matter.
Disclaimer: I haven't watched any of the current series yet (despite living in the UK), I prefer to save them up and watch them all in a big lump. I also didn't have any points to mod you up, hence the reply.
I'm also much more of a fan of Moffat's style, and I'm actually surprised people are comparing his style to that of "Lost"; Moffat has always loved elaborate lead-ups that make little sense until the denouement (if any of you haven't seen the sublime Brit Com "Coupling" I can highly recommend it; lots of realistically filthy humour and meticulously constructed plots in a Fawlty Towers-esque pantomime). I got tired of Lost and its ilk very quickly because they never seemed to progress, at all, either on a plot or sub-plot basis; Moffat is frequently labyrinthine but I've never felt disappointed by any of his it-won't-make-sense-until-the-end scripts. YMMV I guess.
Being a Who veteran of some years, I also *much* prefer his sense of fear and foreboding to that of RTD's. He's been a Who geek since he was a kid, and despite retaining the campy charm that's always been quintessentially Who he's turned the creeping sense of horror up quite a bit from what I thought was the rather more po-faced stuff in RTD's run, but then he's also a guy who also spent a lot of time behind the sofa as a kid so maybe we're both just creeped out by similar things - the things you can't see/hear being a major theme in a lot of his monsters.
That said, The Girl in the Fireplace and Blink are still by far the best Who I've seen from Moffat (or, indeed, at all in the new series).
You're mostly right, but SSD's have been outstripping platter HDD's in sequential performance for at least a couple of years now; my comparatively ancient and pedestrian OCZ agility could do sequential reads and writes faster than the 150GB raptor it replaced (across the whole "surface"), and random access patterns were already a couple of orders of magnitudes faster. There are still very few SATA discs that can saturate a single 150MB/s connection on a sequential read, whilst SSD's were bandwidth limited to ~270MB/s until 6Gbps SATA arrived earlier this year in the form of new AMD and Intel chipsets (I don't count the 6Gbps marvell SATA controllers cos they're crap).
I picked up a 256GB crucial C300 last year that's currently used as scratch space for video editing - reads at 350MB/s, writes at 270MB/s, to get anywhere near that with platter based hard drives you're already talking spending comparable amounts on just a decent RAID card. Newer drives out this year are already pushing 500MB/s, to say nothing of the PCIe based SSD's.
If you need the space, use platters and a RAID card. If you need the speed, use an SSD. If you need both...
Back OT, this OCZ thing is nothing terribly new, and I suspect its thunder is going to be stolen in the consumer space by Intel's "SRT" (essentially software/driver based use of an SSD as either a read-through or a write-through cache) with a plan jane HDD (doesn't have to be a comparatively weedy 2.5" either) on the backend. Sadly it's windows-only and (stupidly) restricted to only the Z68 chipset at present. Enterprises are already using things like ZFS-with-an-SSD-cache (or some other SAN/NAS with built in flash cache) or, like ourselves, Fusion-IO in between the SAN and our blades.
Anand did a fairly thorough comparison of intel's caching technology here http://www.anandtech.com/print/4337 and I suspect the OCZ card won't be any better performance wise (and don't get me started on OCZ's QA...!). Well worth a read if you're thinking about building a computer in the next six months.
It's even gotten to the stage where I'm seeing adverts that say "Find us on facebook!" without even giving an honest to god URL. This is, I imagine, because it's much cheaper to rent an end-to-end user-tracking marketing framework from facebook than it is to set up your own on www.hotnewlatestproduct.com and ask all the visitors to supply you with their name, age and a ballpark figure for you annual income. Like another poster said, the sole purpose of facebook is marketing, either of yourself or everyone else.
But then again, advertising-hostile thirtysomethings like me aren't the focus of marketeers just yet. If a company sends me unsolicited marketing more than twice, I add them to my black list and never buy anything from them ever again (after a phone call and a letter explaining precisely why, of course).
Disclaimer: I have a facebook account, but under a false name (incidentally the porn star name of a friend at college) with false information, and only viewable by friends of friends. I also block facebook content from loading on any non-facebook page.
Users above have posted solutions to getting rid of the bloody things, but the one I use in FF is a simple rule in adblock plus:
||facebook.*$domain=~facebook.com|~127.0.0.1
This effectively blocks the loading of facebook.com content from any site that isn't actually facebook.com. I've just remembered I set this up ages ago so it should probably also include all the other facebook domains like fbcdn.net and the like.
I wish someone has modded you up for this. I assume the only reason why MS haven't transitioned to UNIX-like files is for backwards compatibility reasons, but I still don't see why they couldn't provide a means for applications to use the old you-can't-do-anything-to-this-file API whilst using a non-blocking API for the rest of the OS. This in itself would shoot windows right into the current linux strongholds - it'd be able to do decent clustering for a start, not this failover rubbish.
I know linux currently needs a reboot for kernel/glibc updates, but our linux patch cycles still rarely result in a reboot. Even with 2008 R2 we're rebooting at least once a month for patches.
It goes even further than that - back when I was first getting into and understanding computers, I saw a bunch of warez on WinMX labelled as "packaged with Wrapster", stating you needed to go and download wrapster (which, I'm sure you're surprised, was 90% malware, 9% GUI and 1% features) to unpack them.
All wrapster did was chop off the.zip or whatever file extension and append.mp3 instead (since apparently you could only share MP3 files on napster), simply because default windows settings remove your ability to see, and thus change, the file extension... because that might "render the file unusable" in microsoft's words.
I keep cygwin + filemagic on my windows computer at work and even fellow team members are astonished when I "recover" files that have had their extensions lopped off. In my first job I astonished my boss by "recovering" about 3 million TIFF files across hundreds of directories that had had all their file extensions chopped off (his beloved "mass file renamer" wouldn't work on files without an extension). As the saying goes, linux makes the easy things hard, the hard things easy and the impossible things possible. As the other saying goes, those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. Both of these are tear-inducingly true on such simple operations.
...but when I buy things from Steam I get the option to buy chunks of £25 or the option to put in the exact amount of money for the current transaction; there's nothing forcing me to put in any more money than I need to like the summary and TFA appear to imply.
Never used the MS or Sony game store things, but I've got a veto on buying anything on a "gift card" basis anyway.
Not a train buff by any means, but this made me think of when our Great Western Railway in the UK was switched from Brunel's 7ft broad gauge to standard gauge (I can remember as a kid my dad showing me sections of track that still had the broad gauge sleepers); it being one of the busiest railways in the world at the time I wondered how they actually got it all done. Turns out they managed to replace 177 miles of track *in a single weekend*.
At daybreak on Saturday 21 May 1892 over 4,200 platelayers and gangers were assembled along the line ready for the task. All broad gauge rolling stock and non-essential engines had been worked to Swindon, whereby at mid-day on Saturday 15 miles of specially prepared temporary sidings were filled with such a collection of rolling stock and locomotives as will never be seen again.
The conversion was planned to be completed by 4.4 am. on Monday 23 May and it was! This is shown by the fact that the Night Mail from Paddington to Plymouth on the Sunday had been booked, in the instruction issued on 30 April, to proceed from Plymouth North Road to Penzance at that time, which it duly did.
Thus in less than two days 177 route miles of main line were converted from broad to narrow gauge with the minimum of interruption to traffic.
I wasn't aware of the gauge shift in the US but reading about it now... utterly staggering amounts of planning and manpower for a tiny 2 day window. It's the sort of project that just wouldn't happen any more, and certainly a testament to what was perhaps the high point in an era of "big engineering". Especially laughable when you consider the frequently lamentable services the UK trains offer today where rail replacement or upgrades will frequently run on for months or years.
I picked up the orange box about a year ago (yup, just like the XKCD cartoon), played through portal a few times and loved it and have recently returned to it to try my hand at the challenges. A couple of those views may well be from me:)
Echoing the parent comment, the orange box I picked up for a fiver must have netted Vavle at least £100 by now, mostly on their awesome selection of indie games. First hit is almost free...!
I have exactly the same problem as you and the GP - I can't see stereoscopic 3D, trying to see it makes me feel ill, and what I can see only the screen is muddied to shit. It's a problem shared by at least 10% of brits as well.
It essentially means that any group outing to the cinema has a "no 3D anything" veto on it, because our usual gang has two other people who have the same side effects as me. I live in zone 2 London, so there's no shortage of cinemas - we have a local "arthouse" one five minutes walk from my house with a very nicely stocked bar - and so far they've yet to show any 2D versions of 3D films. The one cinema that *does* show 2D versions on a semi-regular basis is four miles away (meaning an extra 90 minutes spent getting there and back) and costs more money. As you say, everyone's riding the hype wave (and trying to recoup their costs of expensive 3D systems).
Thankfully there's enough good films being shown at our local cinema that haven't been through the 3D mangle (they show a *lot* of indie films), but I pity the poor people who have to put up with 3D-only version of the latest schlockbusters.
On a side note - are most foreign language films in Switzerland shown with subtitles, or are they dubbed? The only films I've seen in Europe were in Germany, and were all dubbed... but I've tried watching stereoscopic 3D with overlaid subtitles (my preferred way to watch anything foreign - can't stand dubbing) and it made me queasy within minutes.
The point is that desktop environments often forget the point:) The user is there to run applications, not to gawp at the eye candy. Any DE that gets in the way of people using their apps in the way to which they're accustomed will be shouted at repeatedly. To most people, the computer is for clicking the blue E or the swirly orange/blue thingy and facebooking their twitterspherespacetube recreationally, or words docs and outlook at work.
No innocent parties here, pretty much every DE has put themselves before the applications at some point in their history. I've never come across a default configuration I liked or that suited my way of working. Similarly, some DE's make customising the interface to suit you harder than others (case in point - stupid obscure reg hacks needed in win7 to turn off libraries and enable X-mouse) but there's no such thing as The One True Way.
Disclaimer: I use KDE and Win 7. My fave ever DE was GNOME 1.4 with the awesome sawfish/sawmill that I could configure to get the hell out of my way in the way I wanted. They're all still just about the applications though.
There's an old joke the gf told me that her colleagues are fond of - they work for MORI, a survey company.
A man is doing a study into lifetime health. He sees that Brits have lower life expectancy than the French, who smoke just as much but have a much higher fat diet. So, he reasons, smoking is what kills you. Then he went over to America, and found out that they ate as much fat as the French but smoked a lot less, yet had even lower life expectancy than the Brits.
So he concluded that what kills you... is speaking English.
Personally, I'm of the belief there's no such thing as a singularly "unhealthy" foodstuff (apart from, say, arsenic pasties or cyanide scones), but it's easy to have an unhealthy diet just by not having a balanced diet, and/or doing no exercise. Measuring fitness by things like BMI is a crock of shit as well, as anyone with higher-than-average muscle mass will tell you. Will everyone's tax returns now come with a treadmill and heart rate monitor too? Presumably this proposed legislation is either crowd-pleasing idiotic pseudoscience (complete with stone throwing at unpopular sectors of society) or he's getting backhanders from an insurance company that has a sideline in "I want to track everyone's food purchases!" technology.
Slashdot Mirror
"List" usually implies more than a singular item. I agree with the OP as I won't visit anywhere that takes fingerprints, sexually assaults and then scans through any available hard drives of potential tourists, all apparently with zero legal recourse or independent oversight. Any other countries that do the same thing would similarly be off my work and holiday itineraries.
Or, if you know some of the people I've worked with, it'll be more a "as soon as the authorities have caught up with these LulzSec people, there won't be any more haXx0ring vectors, so what's the point in patching the servers? It's not like WE'D be a target anyway!". IME most companies won't give a shit about easily enforced and executed pre-emptive security until there's a thousand trojans running around the network and the entire company is fucked, and by then its too late.
If you're working for a company that doesn't think security is important enough to employ someone to be responsible for it, the actions of people like LulzSec aren't going to convince them otherwise. This coming from a sysadmin who's finally overcome a decade-old "don't patch ANYTHING once it enters production, not even the clients" mindset and now has the fun task of installing an average of 120 patches and three service packs on 300 servers. It took two branch offices getting their computers totalled by malware coming in on USB sticks before management got that particular message.
Wish I had mod points for you. But you also forgot to mention the people who say "Shut up dumb ass, you've clearly got a shitty system and/or are incompetent!" or the "Shut up dumb ass, you're obviously using the wrong/too many extensions!" as well as the "Shut up dumb ass, you've got too many tabs open" and the "Shut up dumb ass, you're not meant to keep it running for days!" crowd.
To those of you who can manage to open a hojillion tabs and keep them open for months at a time, congratulations, we're happy for you. But as a user whose firefox at work will routinely gobble 350MB just with my opening set of tabs, then go up to 700MB after a few hours usage, and then at some point in the next few days will start chomping like there's no tomorrow and eventually crawls the OS and then crashes when it hits 1.8GB (32bit limit), please take our word for it when we see Firefox having a problem. I can close up a whole bunch of tabs and only regain a few megabytes, I can close every tab and only regain a hundred or so megabytes... on machines with "only" 2GB of RAM you *need* FF to relinquish that memory. I've got nothing against apps using the memory that's there, but FF often behaves like it owns the OS, mallocing away whilst pushing other running apps out to swap.
It's nice to finally see what appears to be the beginnings of a concerted effort to address whatever combination of factors there are that contribute to the issue... but I do fear it's too little too late for a lot of people who've already jumped to chrome. (Personally, opera's been my primary browser since well before firefox was phoenix but it doesn't play well with the work proxy... it too can eat up vast chunks of memory if you throw enough gunk at it but I can always reclaim that memory by closing down a few tabs)
Not intended as a troll or a dig against FF itself, it's just frustrating sticking your hand up and saying "Hey! Got a memory problem here!" and be met with a barrage of assertions from people you've never met who insist that you must somehow be stupid, blind, mentally retarded or some combination of the above just because the same circumstances have never happened to them.
XFCE's the DE I use on most of my remaining linux desktops, with one running fluxbox for better performance. It's definitely a nice, lightweight but full featured environment that doesn't foist itself upon you. It's definitely come into its own over the last 18 months or so.
Never got my head around transparency though, but I rarely move things around (I'm a spatial + muscle memory type so I navigate faster when things stay in the same place) and I usually find a quick minimise -> maximise from the taskbar is the quickest way of finding an errant window, transparency is too visually busy for me.
Thanks, I was kinda hoping for a response like that (and thanks for yours too wolfemi!).
I had no hope for Matt Smith at the beginning of the last series, being a big fan of Tenant's swagger, but over the course of a fair few episodes he'd managed to create a classic Who persona - just the right combination of whimsical kindly grandfather and genocidal maniac :). Still not got my mind made up on Karen Gillian yet. And yes, RTD's endings were, as you say, too cheap... not that they were bad per se, just not enough variation; there's an explosion, bad guys dead, cue credits, whereas Moffat's the kinda guy to use that ending as a jumping board both back and forwards into last and next season. Timey wimey calvinball indeed!
Whenever I've seen anything from Moffat that had a "Right... this is all getting a bit hectic...", genius has always followed and I've always been amazed by his awesome plot-crafting, so I don't doubt the plot will live up to the hype - more complicated than Inception (loved the spectacle of the film but felt they could have done much more with the concept... hopefully there'll be more films like it now that are more willing to trust the audience to pay attention) is good, on a par with Moffat's other work will be scintillating.
I was amazed by the other comments I saw saying they thought Who was now too scary for kids - seeing it in order to get terrified was half the point as a kid, no? Being from a Welsh mining town I remember being terrified of the old slag heaps after I saw a repeat of The Green Death, but that didn't stop me loving it.
Personally, I'm glad the daleks are getting a rest - the formula of "daleks appear/they are the ultimate indestructible evil!/oh wait I just killed them all" was getting old real fast, and seemed to be there for little more than spectacle. As you say, the horrors you can't quite see are both far scarier and can be done on a much lower budget :D Having a writer like Moffat at the helm can capitalise on that in a way I don't think RTD could (which was a shame given his promising start with deeply creepy no-budget gubbins like Dark Season and Century Falls).
Classic Who indeed. Looking forward to my marathon now. This missus will probably like it too if she can poke her head around the sofa for long enough.
Disclaimer: not a Moffat fangirl, honest guv, but I did squeee slightly when I heard he was taking over.
Sad as it is for me to admit, I'm in complete agreement. I used to have just one windows machine for games, I now have two more windows machines and two less linux ones simply because I also want shit to just work. I still keep linux on my HTPC's (using a light debian/XFCE or fluxbox/XBMC combo) and servers because it's so low maintenance, but for the most part the desktop swiftly started to vanish up it's own arse a few years ago.
When I started with linux back on mandrake 8, you had the utterly awesome sawfish/sawmill built into Gnome - I played with that for weeks just because it was fun, but when doing Real Work I found that some of those esoteric window functions really did make a huge difference to my workflow. Then metacity was brought in to the exclusion of everything else and I switched to KDE, which had broadly similar WM capabilities. So far so froody until everyone decided that desktops needed to be 3D accelerated because apple had done so (and everyone loved the swooshing dock), so both KDE and Gnome throw the baby out with the bathwater and redesign their WM's from scratch, losing a lot of the functionality along the way (or almost all of it in the case of Gnome 3), because apparently "most people don't use feature X" means the same as "no-one uses feature X". Granted, KDE4 is still pretty configurable and IMHO orders of magnitude better than Gnome 2 or 3 but I still feel like I'm fighting it for attention all the time, when it should really be getting the hell out of the way.
Windows 7 may try very hard to make you fit into it's "the user is stupid" mould, but with the right reg hacks I can customise it almost as much as I could on my KDE setup; heck, focus-follows-mouse support (an utter deal breaker for me) is waaaay better in 7 than it was in 2000/XP and doesn't cause half the glitchiness in some apps like it used to do. Overall, it's not perfect, but good enough and once the initial pain of configuration was done with (and then exported to a reg file which makes it a 2s change on every other machine) I no longer have to fight it. Throw cygwin + mintty and a few other choice apps into the mix and all of a sudden I've got me the best of both worlds (cue Borg joke).
My main problem is usability "experts" and neophiliacs who keep telling me that I'm doing things the wrong way, or that "clicking on a launcher is so old hat, that's why we removed launchers! Just open the X menu, start typing what you want to run, and then click one of the programs that show up!" or other such counter-intuitive bullcrapshitturds which for some inexplicable reason have become the default in all the major DE's. Not interested, and yes I have tried it. Not against new ways of doing things by any means, but devs shouldn't expect users to re-learn every paradigm at the drop of a hat because some self-appointed expert says "this new way I just invented is the best for me, therefore it's the best for everyone!" and then someone else sees that as a great way to do away with the old "inferior" method, making it painful to add back. A bit like Wikipedia deletionists actually; "shading the window of type X is not notable enough, and therefore will be removed!".
Not that I'm singling out Gnome here, almost every non-niche DE/WM I've used in the last few years is guilty of the above, MS and Apple included.
</second rant of the thread>
Amen, I'm not sure why people don't see the connection. At times I feel like the only guy on the planet who immediately disables all this compositor nonsense the second I get a new machine/profile - and it's got nothing to do with gaming (although it causing video playback failure under linux is simply inexcusable). Apart from everyone else in my house who saw my laptop and said "how did you get it to stop doing all that stupid swooshing stuff?" and duly went through a customisation binge, swiftly followed by a "wow, it's so much faster now!".
3D accelerated desktops seem to create more problems than they solve IMHO, and I'm not quite sure what problems there were meant to solve in the first place (other than "We don't have as much eye candy as apple yet"). All this talk of freeing up the CPU seems bogus as well, as long as 2D acceleration works fine I've never seen any WM/DE chew significant cycles drawing widgets. Composited desktops however result in higher aggregate power usage for me at least (tried on both an intel 4500 and a low-end nVidia under linux), seemingly all for the sake of squidging up a window when it's minimised and giving me a rotating cube instead of alt tab. I guess I'm just old an inherently old fashioned in that I even use win7 in a theme as close to windows 2000 as I can get (except it's greyer). All that fast-moving whizz bang stuff is just horribly distracting to me. Perhaps someone can explain what I'm missing?
Maybe in a CPU generation or two when we get an on-CPU framebuffer and decent drivers across all OS's and WM/DE designers will show a bit more restraint and tact, but the trend certainly seems to be to spend more and more resources on making Joe Sixpack's netbook resemble something from Hackers. I'm not against giving people a choice, by all means keep your flashy bling if you love it so much, but making it the default and impossible to turn off? Stupid. I think Gnome must have had a frontal lobotomy to think that mandating composition, and hence wholly bug-free drivers for 3D graphics cards in linux, was a good idea - in all my ten years of using it on the desktop I've never encountered a wholly bug-free driver. Same goes for windows for that matter.
</rant>
Disclaimer: I haven't watched any of the current series yet (despite living in the UK), I prefer to save them up and watch them all in a big lump. I also didn't have any points to mod you up, hence the reply.
I'm also much more of a fan of Moffat's style, and I'm actually surprised people are comparing his style to that of "Lost"; Moffat has always loved elaborate lead-ups that make little sense until the denouement (if any of you haven't seen the sublime Brit Com "Coupling" I can highly recommend it; lots of realistically filthy humour and meticulously constructed plots in a Fawlty Towers-esque pantomime). I got tired of Lost and its ilk very quickly because they never seemed to progress, at all, either on a plot or sub-plot basis; Moffat is frequently labyrinthine but I've never felt disappointed by any of his it-won't-make-sense-until-the-end scripts. YMMV I guess.
Being a Who veteran of some years, I also *much* prefer his sense of fear and foreboding to that of RTD's. He's been a Who geek since he was a kid, and despite retaining the campy charm that's always been quintessentially Who he's turned the creeping sense of horror up quite a bit from what I thought was the rather more po-faced stuff in RTD's run, but then he's also a guy who also spent a lot of time behind the sofa as a kid so maybe we're both just creeped out by similar things - the things you can't see/hear being a major theme in a lot of his monsters.
That said, The Girl in the Fireplace and Blink are still by far the best Who I've seen from Moffat (or, indeed, at all in the new series).
You're mostly right, but SSD's have been outstripping platter HDD's in sequential performance for at least a couple of years now; my comparatively ancient and pedestrian OCZ agility could do sequential reads and writes faster than the 150GB raptor it replaced (across the whole "surface"), and random access patterns were already a couple of orders of magnitudes faster. There are still very few SATA discs that can saturate a single 150MB/s connection on a sequential read, whilst SSD's were bandwidth limited to ~270MB/s until 6Gbps SATA arrived earlier this year in the form of new AMD and Intel chipsets (I don't count the 6Gbps marvell SATA controllers cos they're crap).
I picked up a 256GB crucial C300 last year that's currently used as scratch space for video editing - reads at 350MB/s, writes at 270MB/s, to get anywhere near that with platter based hard drives you're already talking spending comparable amounts on just a decent RAID card. Newer drives out this year are already pushing 500MB/s, to say nothing of the PCIe based SSD's.
If you need the space, use platters and a RAID card. If you need the speed, use an SSD. If you need both...
Back OT, this OCZ thing is nothing terribly new, and I suspect its thunder is going to be stolen in the consumer space by Intel's "SRT" (essentially software/driver based use of an SSD as either a read-through or a write-through cache) with a plan jane HDD (doesn't have to be a comparatively weedy 2.5" either) on the backend. Sadly it's windows-only and (stupidly) restricted to only the Z68 chipset at present. Enterprises are already using things like ZFS-with-an-SSD-cache (or some other SAN/NAS with built in flash cache) or, like ourselves, Fusion-IO in between the SAN and our blades.
Anand did a fairly thorough comparison of intel's caching technology here http://www.anandtech.com/print/4337 and I suspect the OCZ card won't be any better performance wise (and don't get me started on OCZ's QA...!). Well worth a read if you're thinking about building a computer in the next six months.
It's even gotten to the stage where I'm seeing adverts that say "Find us on facebook!" without even giving an honest to god URL. This is, I imagine, because it's much cheaper to rent an end-to-end user-tracking marketing framework from facebook than it is to set up your own on www.hotnewlatestproduct.com and ask all the visitors to supply you with their name, age and a ballpark figure for you annual income. Like another poster said, the sole purpose of facebook is marketing, either of yourself or everyone else.
But then again, advertising-hostile thirtysomethings like me aren't the focus of marketeers just yet. If a company sends me unsolicited marketing more than twice, I add them to my black list and never buy anything from them ever again (after a phone call and a letter explaining precisely why, of course).
Disclaimer: I have a facebook account, but under a false name (incidentally the porn star name of a friend at college) with false information, and only viewable by friends of friends. I also block facebook content from loading on any non-facebook page.
Oh how I wish that were possible.
Users above have posted solutions to getting rid of the bloody things, but the one I use in FF is a simple rule in adblock plus:
||facebook.*$domain=~facebook.com|~127.0.0.1
This effectively blocks the loading of facebook.com content from any site that isn't actually facebook.com. I've just remembered I set this up ages ago so it should probably also include all the other facebook domains like fbcdn.net and the like.
I wish someone has modded you up for this. I assume the only reason why MS haven't transitioned to UNIX-like files is for backwards compatibility reasons, but I still don't see why they couldn't provide a means for applications to use the old you-can't-do-anything-to-this-file API whilst using a non-blocking API for the rest of the OS. This in itself would shoot windows right into the current linux strongholds - it'd be able to do decent clustering for a start, not this failover rubbish.
I know linux currently needs a reboot for kernel/glibc updates, but our linux patch cycles still rarely result in a reboot. Even with 2008 R2 we're rebooting at least once a month for patches.
And of course the following corollary:
If you can't beat them, beat them; they'll be expecting you to join them at this point.
- The League Against Tedium
Any sufficiently advanced bash one-line for-loop is indistinguishable from magic :)
It goes even further than that - back when I was first getting into and understanding computers, I saw a bunch of warez on WinMX labelled as "packaged with Wrapster", stating you needed to go and download wrapster (which, I'm sure you're surprised, was 90% malware, 9% GUI and 1% features) to unpack them.
All wrapster did was chop off the .zip or whatever file extension and append .mp3 instead (since apparently you could only share MP3 files on napster), simply because default windows settings remove your ability to see, and thus change, the file extension... because that might "render the file unusable" in microsoft's words.
I keep cygwin + filemagic on my windows computer at work and even fellow team members are astonished when I "recover" files that have had their extensions lopped off. In my first job I astonished my boss by "recovering" about 3 million TIFF files across hundreds of directories that had had all their file extensions chopped off (his beloved "mass file renamer" wouldn't work on files without an extension). As the saying goes, linux makes the easy things hard, the hard things easy and the impossible things possible. As the other saying goes, those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. Both of these are tear-inducingly true on such simple operations.
...but when I buy things from Steam I get the option to buy chunks of £25 or the option to put in the exact amount of money for the current transaction; there's nothing forcing me to put in any more money than I need to like the summary and TFA appear to imply.
Never used the MS or Sony game store things, but I've got a veto on buying anything on a "gift card" basis anyway.
Not a train buff by any means, but this made me think of when our Great Western Railway in the UK was switched from Brunel's 7ft broad gauge to standard gauge (I can remember as a kid my dad showing me sections of track that still had the broad gauge sleepers); it being one of the busiest railways in the world at the time I wondered how they actually got it all done. Turns out they managed to replace 177 miles of track *in a single weekend*.
http://lionels.orpheusweb.co.uk/RailSteam/GWRBroadG/BGHist.html
I wasn't aware of the gauge shift in the US but reading about it now... utterly staggering amounts of planning and manpower for a tiny 2 day window. It's the sort of project that just wouldn't happen any more, and certainly a testament to what was perhaps the high point in an era of "big engineering". Especially laughable when you consider the frequently lamentable services the UK trains offer today where rail replacement or upgrades will frequently run on for months or years.
I imagine facebook's idea of two-factor authentication is your DNA sequence hashed with your pre-tax income, and your signature on a legal disclaimer.
Handy infographic:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling
It's now only 40% hard to use.
I picked up the orange box about a year ago (yup, just like the XKCD cartoon), played through portal a few times and loved it and have recently returned to it to try my hand at the challenges. A couple of those views may well be from me :)
Echoing the parent comment, the orange box I picked up for a fiver must have netted Vavle at least £100 by now, mostly on their awesome selection of indie games. First hit is almost free...!
Damn, used all my mod points already.
I have exactly the same problem as you and the GP - I can't see stereoscopic 3D, trying to see it makes me feel ill, and what I can see only the screen is muddied to shit. It's a problem shared by at least 10% of brits as well.
It essentially means that any group outing to the cinema has a "no 3D anything" veto on it, because our usual gang has two other people who have the same side effects as me. I live in zone 2 London, so there's no shortage of cinemas - we have a local "arthouse" one five minutes walk from my house with a very nicely stocked bar - and so far they've yet to show any 2D versions of 3D films. The one cinema that *does* show 2D versions on a semi-regular basis is four miles away (meaning an extra 90 minutes spent getting there and back) and costs more money. As you say, everyone's riding the hype wave (and trying to recoup their costs of expensive 3D systems).
Thankfully there's enough good films being shown at our local cinema that haven't been through the 3D mangle (they show a *lot* of indie films), but I pity the poor people who have to put up with 3D-only version of the latest schlockbusters.
On a side note - are most foreign language films in Switzerland shown with subtitles, or are they dubbed? The only films I've seen in Europe were in Germany, and were all dubbed... but I've tried watching stereoscopic 3D with overlaid subtitles (my preferred way to watch anything foreign - can't stand dubbing) and it made me queasy within minutes.
This legal disclaimer soon coming to the bottom of a restaurant menu near you! :)
The point is that desktop environments often forget the point :) The user is there to run applications, not to gawp at the eye candy. Any DE that gets in the way of people using their apps in the way to which they're accustomed will be shouted at repeatedly. To most people, the computer is for clicking the blue E or the swirly orange/blue thingy and facebooking their twitterspherespacetube recreationally, or words docs and outlook at work.
No innocent parties here, pretty much every DE has put themselves before the applications at some point in their history. I've never come across a default configuration I liked or that suited my way of working. Similarly, some DE's make customising the interface to suit you harder than others (case in point - stupid obscure reg hacks needed in win7 to turn off libraries and enable X-mouse) but there's no such thing as The One True Way.
Disclaimer: I use KDE and Win 7. My fave ever DE was GNOME 1.4 with the awesome sawfish/sawmill that I could configure to get the hell out of my way in the way I wanted. They're all still just about the applications though.
There's an old joke the gf told me that her colleagues are fond of - they work for MORI, a survey company.
A man is doing a study into lifetime health. He sees that Brits have lower life expectancy than the French, who smoke just as much but have a much higher fat diet. So, he reasons, smoking is what kills you. Then he went over to America, and found out that they ate as much fat as the French but smoked a lot less, yet had even lower life expectancy than the Brits.
So he concluded that what kills you... is speaking English.
Personally, I'm of the belief there's no such thing as a singularly "unhealthy" foodstuff (apart from, say, arsenic pasties or cyanide scones), but it's easy to have an unhealthy diet just by not having a balanced diet, and/or doing no exercise. Measuring fitness by things like BMI is a crock of shit as well, as anyone with higher-than-average muscle mass will tell you. Will everyone's tax returns now come with a treadmill and heart rate monitor too? Presumably this proposed legislation is either crowd-pleasing idiotic pseudoscience (complete with stone throwing at unpopular sectors of society) or he's getting backhanders from an insurance company that has a sideline in "I want to track everyone's food purchases!" technology.