The last several times I've set up windows boxes, there have been several hours of googling for drivers (on a couple of occasions, googling from an ubuntu livecd since windows had no networking support...), before eventually clicking "next" several times. Same hardware with ubuntu has had 90% work fully out of the box, 10% work in a limited fashion and then pop up a message saying "The driver for your video card isn't installed, shall I get that for you?", to which I click "yes" and it is done. Yay anecdoal evidence \o/
This is where the "many eyes" comes into play for open source...
Can you name "many" people who have a complete in-depth understanding of the mozilla codebase? Can you even name one?
Many eyes is excellent for small simple projects, but for something the size of the mozilla suite I doubt that *anybody* really understands 100% of it, and so, even with many people looking at their own parts, there is still room to sneak in bugs where the parts join.
I prefer Firefox's way of offering a basic browser and moving extended or niche features to optional extensions to monolithic blocks like Opera
Theoretically, I prefer that too; but somehow opera with more features than the entire mozilla suite is still smaller, faster, and more stable than a barebones firefox:/
Because sometimes people act on their beliefs, and even if your philosophy is "live and let live", that won't stop *them* from going out of their way to affect you
A quiet PC with HDMI for output, usb gamepads for input, and a ton of emulators is already the perfect console; simple & reliable, yet flexible and upgradable, no rats nest of cables, no CDs to get damaged (no moving parts at all, if you can afford the latest stuff). Add XBMC and you have all the living room technology you need in a single box:)
On a tangent, I ponder the possibility of having a standard virtual machine designed for games -- having a ton of emulators to convert from consoles to the PC environment is a lot of duplication of effort, and it's not like it's great for the manufacturers either (last I checked xbox hardware was sold at a loss, PS3 was selling at a loss for the past several years), so it there could be benefits all round if the console manufacturers stop making limited hardware, and start making generic living-room processing units (ie, what I have in the first paragraph, but designed for it, rather than cobbled together by the end user)
Not just cables; new graphics cards, new monitor, new KVM switch, adapters for various bits of legacy equipment, and while I was at it, hacking up the building to add elegant cable management (thankfully that bit's cable-agnostic though)
I've only just finished spending ~$600 refitting my flat from a rat's nest of VGA / component / coax / SCART cables to all-HDMI in the hopes that it would last ~25 years like VGA has:(
Dear audio / video companies, can you please stop raping us with new "standards" several times per year?
Thank you for usefully spending the time to post this comment to a slashdot discussion, I'm sure your life has been enriched immeasurably, as mine was by sitting here reading it!
If you asked a trucker, s/he'd tell you that it's actually truckers that make the world go 'round.
Given Newton's third law of motion, and the respective size of a truck compared to an engineer, I suspect that they do contribute a larger effect upon the earth's rotational velocity...
Because users who want to know what their browser is doing want to see it, that's why.
That's a pretty small minority -- I've actually seen more people at the other end of the scale, where they don't know what the URL display is at all. If they want to eg check their yahoo mail, they don't go to the URL box and type "mail.yahoo.com", they go to the search box, type "google", search (using google) to find google, click on the first result to get to the google home page, then type "yahoo mail" into that box, search, and click the first result there...
(This is what happens when we train people to follow patterns with no understanding of how it actually works:( )
Eric Schmidt, who famously said this not too long ago: 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.'
Less famous than the quote was the context: "All online services hold some amount of data, and the Patriot Act allows the government to access this data, so it's best for you to keep it offline"; but of course reasonable and helpful suggestions don't make good headlines...
Vast portions of our art and history had NO Patent or Copyright "protection" to speak of and yet they were done
They did have copy protection; but back then it was the laws of physics (it was impossible to take a video of a performance and give it to thousands of people around the world in a matter of minutes), rather than the laws of man. What we're doing now is artificially recreating the difficulty of copying that has been real for the last few thousand years.
To get past 100KB advances were needed. To get past 100MB advances were needed. To get past 100GB advances were needed. What makes you think that we've reached the limit?
I guess that the past advances all look like simple linear progressions and the future looks completely unknown and impossible by comparison, but the past *always* looks like that and the future *always* looks like that and it hasn't stopped us so far.
With all these multi-purpose applications, how can anyone be offended when you use the word.
The more uses a word has, the more useless it becomes, as the context around the word needs to grow to figure out what it means. Consider the case where *every* word in the English language was replaced with fuck, then you would need an infinite amount of context to understand anything.
Actually looking at the examples, each sentence seems to imply a tone of voice, then the word fuck means "listen to my tone of voice and fill in the gap". If you pick a different tone when reading then the sentences are still grammatically correct, but the implied meaning changes completely.
Also anecdotal, I've found that after years where 99% of my communication being online, now that I sometimes go out and talk in person people are shocked at how straightforward and clear I am -- I do wonder, why isn't everyone like that all the time? Sure saying "I disagree, I think it should be three inches to the left" might take two seconds longer than saying "hmm" and wiggling your eyebrows, but it saves a hell of a lot of time later when you don't have any misunderstandings to clear up...
Relatedly, does anyone know/how/ it costs $600,000 to run the site? Since it's been offline and collecting donations for as long as I've known it, I'm not sure what it does, but the name implies "a wiki where people can upload leaked stuff", for which I would imagine $2000 in hardware and $2000/year in bandwidth would be generous...
A-levels are high school, where very few kids know what they want to do as a career, probably one or two of them out of a year group of 300 would be able to explain what a programming language is -- currently nobody teaches C anyway since it'd only scare 99% of them, and the 1% who could handle it are already teaching themselves, so the removal of C is no real loss. On the other hand, the addition of python finally means that there's a viable alternative to VBA which is what everyone I know is currently teaching.
I only hope that the teaching materials aimed at this age / education range (ie, children who struggle to operate a word processor, let alone an IDE) become available soon -- hell, if someone can tell me where to submit things to, I'll look at the current VB / pascal materials and come up with a python equivalent myself:)
Slashdot Mirror
Must a man seek alternatives with a reason other than a head full of curiosity?
People being curious is not a problem; the complaint is people having no idea, and then being angry at other people for their own decision
Of course, a big chunk of the problem is hardware vendors refusing to open the source for their drivers.
If having the source is such a big benefit, then why do so many official drivers on windows still suck? :P
The last several times I've set up windows boxes, there have been several hours of googling for drivers (on a couple of occasions, googling from an ubuntu livecd since windows had no networking support...), before eventually clicking "next" several times. Same hardware with ubuntu has had 90% work fully out of the box, 10% work in a limited fashion and then pop up a message saying "The driver for your video card isn't installed, shall I get that for you?", to which I click "yes" and it is done. Yay anecdoal evidence \o/
This is where the "many eyes" comes into play for open source...
Can you name "many" people who have a complete in-depth understanding of the mozilla codebase? Can you even name one?
Many eyes is excellent for small simple projects, but for something the size of the mozilla suite I doubt that *anybody* really understands 100% of it, and so, even with many people looking at their own parts, there is still room to sneak in bugs where the parts join.
I prefer Firefox's way of offering a basic browser and moving extended or niche features to optional extensions to monolithic blocks like Opera
Theoretically, I prefer that too; but somehow opera with more features than the entire mozilla suite is still smaller, faster, and more stable than a barebones firefox :/
Why should I care about it?
Because sometimes people act on their beliefs, and even if your philosophy is "live and let live", that won't stop *them* from going out of their way to affect you
Copyright is a "right" only because the Constitution created it, unlike actual rights
I'm pretty sure that the entire concept of rights is a human invention, so they're all equally valid by that measure...
Every so often, a 300-pound manhole cover blows sky high in Gotham, followed sometimes by a column of flame and smoke.
Video or it didn't happen.
Nope...just slashdotted. It's responding again now.
And now down again :( (Responding, but with a "site is experiencing difficulties at this time" notice)
A quiet PC with HDMI for output, usb gamepads for input, and a ton of emulators is already the perfect console; simple & reliable, yet flexible and upgradable, no rats nest of cables, no CDs to get damaged (no moving parts at all, if you can afford the latest stuff). Add XBMC and you have all the living room technology you need in a single box :)
On a tangent, I ponder the possibility of having a standard virtual machine designed for games -- having a ton of emulators to convert from consoles to the PC environment is a lot of duplication of effort, and it's not like it's great for the manufacturers either (last I checked xbox hardware was sold at a loss, PS3 was selling at a loss for the past several years), so it there could be benefits all round if the console manufacturers stop making limited hardware, and start making generic living-room processing units (ie, what I have in the first paragraph, but designed for it, rather than cobbled together by the end user)
Not just cables; new graphics cards, new monitor, new KVM switch, adapters for various bits of legacy equipment, and while I was at it, hacking up the building to add elegant cable management (thankfully that bit's cable-agnostic though)
I've only just finished spending ~$600 refitting my flat from a rat's nest of VGA / component / coax / SCART cables to all-HDMI in the hopes that it would last ~25 years like VGA has :(
Dear audio / video companies, can you please stop raping us with new "standards" several times per year?
A Lot of wasted time...
Thank you for usefully spending the time to post this comment to a slashdot discussion, I'm sure your life has been enriched immeasurably, as mine was by sitting here reading it!
Engineers make the world go around . . .
If you asked a trucker, s/he'd tell you that it's actually truckers that make the world go 'round.
Given Newton's third law of motion, and the respective size of a truck compared to an engineer, I suspect that they do contribute a larger effect upon the earth's rotational velocity...
Because users who want to know what their browser is doing want to see it, that's why.
That's a pretty small minority -- I've actually seen more people at the other end of the scale, where they don't know what the URL display is at all. If they want to eg check their yahoo mail, they don't go to the URL box and type "mail.yahoo.com", they go to the search box, type "google", search (using google) to find google, click on the first result to get to the google home page, then type "yahoo mail" into that box, search, and click the first result there...
(This is what happens when we train people to follow patterns with no understanding of how it actually works :( )
Eric Schmidt, who famously said this not too long ago: 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.'
Less famous than the quote was the context: "All online services hold some amount of data, and the Patriot Act allows the government to access this data, so it's best for you to keep it offline"; but of course reasonable and helpful suggestions don't make good headlines...
Vast portions of our art and history had NO Patent or Copyright "protection" to speak of and yet they were done
They did have copy protection; but back then it was the laws of physics (it was impossible to take a video of a performance and give it to thousands of people around the world in a matter of minutes), rather than the laws of man. What we're doing now is artificially recreating the difficulty of copying that has been real for the last few thousand years.
to make it much smaller will need some advances
To get past 100KB advances were needed. To get past 100MB advances were needed. To get past 100GB advances were needed. What makes you think that we've reached the limit?
I guess that the past advances all look like simple linear progressions and the future looks completely unknown and impossible by comparison, but the past *always* looks like that and the future *always* looks like that and it hasn't stopped us so far.
With all these multi-purpose applications, how can anyone be offended when you use the word.
The more uses a word has, the more useless it becomes, as the context around the word needs to grow to figure out what it means. Consider the case where *every* word in the English language was replaced with fuck, then you would need an infinite amount of context to understand anything.
Actually looking at the examples, each sentence seems to imply a tone of voice, then the word fuck means "listen to my tone of voice and fill in the gap". If you pick a different tone when reading then the sentences are still grammatically correct, but the implied meaning changes completely.
Also anecdotal, I've found that after years where 99% of my communication being online, now that I sometimes go out and talk in person people are shocked at how straightforward and clear I am -- I do wonder, why isn't everyone like that all the time? Sure saying "I disagree, I think it should be three inches to the left" might take two seconds longer than saying "hmm" and wiggling your eyebrows, but it saves a hell of a lot of time later when you don't have any misunderstandings to clear up...
Relatedly, does anyone know /how/ it costs $600,000 to run the site? Since it's been offline and collecting donations for as long as I've known it, I'm not sure what it does, but the name implies "a wiki where people can upload leaked stuff", for which I would imagine $2000 in hardware and $2000/year in bandwidth would be generous...
Why are all the replies to this comment seeming to take it seriously? :-|
if you are [buying] a certain [product] just to show how different you are, doesn't that make you a moron?
Welcome to the world outside geekdom?
A-levels are high school, where very few kids know what they want to do as a career, probably one or two of them out of a year group of 300 would be able to explain what a programming language is -- currently nobody teaches C anyway since it'd only scare 99% of them, and the 1% who could handle it are already teaching themselves, so the removal of C is no real loss. On the other hand, the addition of python finally means that there's a viable alternative to VBA which is what everyone I know is currently teaching.
I only hope that the teaching materials aimed at this age / education range (ie, children who struggle to operate a word processor, let alone an IDE) become available soon -- hell, if someone can tell me where to submit things to, I'll look at the current VB / pascal materials and come up with a python equivalent myself :)
An executive at EA just blew his nose on $1,030,536. They are not interested.
How much did each indie programmer make, compared to the disposable code-grunts at EA?