Or they just think that they really understand nothing about computers and that they'd better call their friend who seems to talk with them as if they were human or something.
I mean, nowadays most people who use computers at home really don't understand the slighest thing about them. If they have to use it without help, they'd really be better off with a mac.
(And i've nearly never used a mac in my life, but they're clearly ok for people won't know nothing about computers. They don't suppose that you know alot of things about them, and even grandpa can use them without having to call for help every week...)
You have to understand the concepts, not memorize them. If you understand them, you do not forget them. It's hard to fudge the results; this is physics, not philosophy
My philosophy professors said that about philosophy too, and they didn't dismiss physics or mathematics while doing so, because they fully understood how they worked. Philosophy is more about logic than mathematics or physics are. If you don't undertand that, you didn't understood anything about philosophy. In fact, mathematics and physics are a concequence of philosphy, like C and lisp are concequence of computer science, but i won't even try to argue about that because you damn 'scientists' guys are so entranched in your way of thinking that you wouldn't be able to admit it anyway. And that's what's so ironic: you can have a philosophy guy admit anything if you can proove it, even things like "you don't exist". Why ? because if the logic behind the argument is irrefutable, it is by all means true unless you can proove otherwise. But scientists, who believe they have the finest logics that exists, can't be bothered with all this stuff because because you can't measure it, look at it, or quantify it. They're a subset of philosophy which deals whith tangible things, but they forgot it, and believe the science which gave them birth is crap because they don't understand it anymore. Total nonsense...
What the "classic editor/compile" people are complaining about is the code you can have generated by vs, i think, not the editor itself. I mean you can start a new project and have a tab oriented gui two secs after, without understanding one bit about what's really going on in all the code that drives the gui. Then you can run a wizard to... add a wizard, things like that (didn't use vs since version 6 so it probably does a lot more now). Myself i don't find it that bad, after all if all your program has to do is x, and having multiple tabs is a good way to represent the problem, having to understand how all the code that makes the gui work isn't stricly necesary. It's really useful if you need to modify it to achieve your goal (and you'll often have to unless your program is really simple), but for simple programs you can just fill the blanks in (pseudocode) createWindow(), createTab(), closeTab(), etc...
look at The post just above you, he's right.
It's a friggin kid we're talking about. What did you do when you were programming as a kid, if you did ? I know i tried to have the computer display fancy stuff, in stupid ways. I wrote some sort of "demos" consisting of loops like
for i=1 to 100 box (i, i, i, i) cls next i
or composed some sort of animations in an ascii 8x8 grid because i didn't know of sprites and all the stuff. That was probably stupid, utterly useless, and definitely not the good tool for the job. I should have been using assembly at the time, and some sort of backbuffer instead of calling cls... But what the heck, that's what made me love programming. At the time i remember i tried to join some computer clubs, but they all were doing some things i thought were utterly boring, like learning how to use spreadsheets, or having programs "behave in an intelligent way" (that is, validating input...). They were right, validating input is more than necessary in even the most stupid program, and using a spreadsheet instead of making a custom program yourself for each formula is certainly a good idea. But it wasn't fancy, and was very boring to do... Let this kid alone, he'll understand soon enough that you can certainly make nice looking programs with vs, but you have to learn programming to have them do anything usefull. And if he's really interested, he'll learn that too. And i'll congrat him because frankly, when i was a kid learning to program 8 bit computers was certainly a fun thing to do, but now with all the stuff you have to know, the fact that you can only access the computer via stupid apis that you have to learn, you have to be really interested by it to find it amusing. Computers are boring nowadays, seriously...
I don't really remember the exact content of Katz's articles, but I clearly remember the readers responses. People expressed their deep feelings, and it was like suddently all the people there realized that they really were a community, with much more common traits and similarities in their past experiences than they thought. I know that for me it's those posts who really got me into slashdot, because I felt I understood the people and really had my place here.
But yes my slashdot UID is probably higher that what it should be not because i forgot my password but because i read/. for years before creating an account. Is this excuse any better ?:-)
<totallyOT> And you know what ? I couldn't really post before creating the account anyway because i didn't know enough english. I knew it from school but wouldn't have been able to converse with somebody fluently at all. And the funny thing is that slashdot has been my english teacher:). After some years of reading all those posts and stories I realized that i was reading almost fluently, most of the words i didn't know or bother to learn made sense after enough in-topic examples of use. And not only that but i could really *think* in english. I mean i understand the sense of what i am writing but can't really give a good french transcription on the fly because basically it's two different ways of thinkings and you need to think about for a minutes to come up with a translation that really has the same meaning.
Now if i could lose that bad habit of starting all my sentences with "I'm not a lawyer but..." and ending them with "You insensitive clod", maybe i wouldn't end up looking so ridiculous when speaking to native speakers outside of/. huh</totallyOT>
I think everyone outlooks something very important: if i understood correctly, the shell (explorer.exe) was totally remade from the ground up. That was looooong onverdue, this thing has basically not changed since w95, and the NT branche uses it too. It has a tendency to go crazy far too easily and eat all the cpu until you stop it, among other things. They really need to throw the code away and start from scratch. I know i'd down^H^H^H^Hbuy it if this is the case. That is, if they make it enough configurable so i don't have to support their probably hugly and unusable look and feel.
I agree, that's why if you need a media library but don't want the shit that goes with them generally, remember that winamp5 has a media library, and a pretty good at that.
Also musikcube looks very promising, i bet you'd like it. (It goes without all the skin / custom widgets everywhere madness, it uses standard controls and try to keep the interface out of the way). It's still young and i found it very slow on big libraries (~9000 files) though.
Bzzt, you don't understand how modern media player applications work and why they're useful.
I have around 700 albums in my collection, dispersed maybe 10 folders on several disks , and computers. (That's because i don't have a big enough disk to fit my own collection into one big directory, plus there are other people collections on network shares, etc)
Now, when people ask me if i can burn some albums for them, i'm not going to go into each directory, look if it's here, no let's try another, oh wait maybe it's on bob's computer, etc etc... Because that's exactly the purpose of the media library... It's an abstraction of how the files are stored physically. I just go into search, type "whatever", the album appears and i burn it. Don't need to know where it is... Plus a lot of time the people don't exactly know what they want to burn. So they can browse by genre/year/recently played if they know they heard it yesterday night for example, and again just burn it, wherever it is...
Actually I read a story once (don't remember where) about a guy who got he's box cracked, and did just that...
IIRC the cracker had put a trojan on the machine, which was decompiled by the victim once he found out, and revealed the adress of a hidden irc channel or something (was probably a botnet client). So the "victim" goes to the channel and starts talking with the cracker, telling him how he was impressed by his skillz and all the stuff, and that he was working in the security field... Then he proceeds to propose the cracker a very nice job because he's so impressed. Cracker agrees, flies to the victim's town... and is welcomed by the smiling victim and a bunch of feds...
Never thought of this but it's kinda cool...
With several elevators we could make a huge planetoid banjo and play the song from the mission on it, which would probably attract aliens from all around the galaxy and transform the solar system in a huge fiesta zone ! Or maybe not, but the banjo part would be fun anyway.
note: Please refrain from making such broad statements when talking about Europe.
It's probably difficult to grasp from the exterior, but
things like what you're taking about are totally different in each countries. Basically
everything is different except the few things which have been laid out by the EU government,
which is really not much. (We didn't even agree on things like "you must not kill" yet
since the european treaty was rejected...).
The number you speak about could have been given by a EU official comitee and not by an individual country,
but it wouldn't change the fact that it would have been built by asking each country its own unemployment rate,
which is probably not calculated in the same way at all in each countries.
Knock knock, can i enter ?
I'm sorry sir, but i've been charged to disallow any bad guy to enter this particular port 25.
Uh bad news, but i have a very important message to send my grandma, and couldn't find any open relay to send it to her. it's a matter of life and death.
mmmmmm i see, since i'm not in a bad mood i'll let you pass this time but %@dùù%ù^$ Broadcast message from root (pts/6): The system is going down for system halt NOW!
Or if you use a modern card in a home theater environment, you can probably just unplug the fan...
The card probably doens't need it at all if all it has to do is 2d work.
I know i've been doing that with a gf3 for 1 year without a problem.
Seriously ?
And do you apply the same principle to every object you have to physically interact with when you're in public places ?
Do you promptly wear your gloves when you have to shake someone's hand ? The contact with the hand is even more direct than with a keyboard, after all. Yes, everything everywhere is full of germs, and totally disgusting when you think about it at the microscopic level. You just need not to think about it and relax, because you have to live with it. And anyway, your body is designed to combat those germs, at least for now. But with this type of comportment one day humans will die if they ever talk each other without wearing filters.
6. PSU went crazy and killed all the drive in the array and the spares instantly.
Happened to us... It didn't stop at the hard drives either.
But yes, it was cheap hardware.
Ok, so you've been waiting for an invention like this to get your stapler and your pencils back from your backpack ?
Here's a trick my mom taught me: You can put a backpack upside down, and the things in it will nicely fall on the ground so you can sort them and find the beloved object ! This backpack feature was invented a guy named Newton, who could never find his apples in his bag, or something like that...
Worst thing is, we all know that's exactly what will happen, after some time.
I'm really sick of this industry, when you look at its history it's clearly
going *backward* most of the time. And more often than not, the worst technologies
are the most workshipped, simply because they were better marketed.
When you sit back and look at the way IT advances, it makes no sense whatsoever.
I mean, there were better programming tools that what we've got today 35 years ago, and
this whole client/server -> microcomputer -> microcomputer/server migration is totally crazy.
Of course in professional environment having a microcomputer with its own system and applications
for each user is totally crazy, how is it even possible that such a silly idea has been so widely accepted ?
Bah, IIRC Xandros doesn't update it's distro, at all. They just release a version and you have to wait for the next release (and buy it) for bug fixes (and of course the release will bring new bugs since they'll add features). I don't know if they have the same policy concerning security fixes, but i wouldn't trust them at all...
Huh yep I forgot gentoo and probably lots of others:) Sorry about that. But those distros don't play in the same park, they're more like niche distros.
Now let's hope they won't stop there, and make a revamp of the whole Debian process. Debian needs to react to what's happening around it, and into it. Because we NEED Debian, much more than any other distro. If Debian happened to die, what choices would we have ? commercial distros, or distros based on commercial ones. That would suck big time. I don't even use Linux on the destop personally, I mostly use it at work on servers now. But i know i sleep better at night knowing that a thing such as Debian exists. It makes the world a better place.
Yep but it doesn't apply here. Debian can be secure, convenient and cheap. It could probably be more secure and less convenient but still it is generally a very secure distro... and it's certainly cheap and convenient too
The problem is not that you can't mix those three in debian particular setting, it's that the debian team seems to serverely lack redundancy. Read: one person has obligations somewhere else and the whole stable security updates process hangs ! I really hope that Debian is going to make something about it fast, and in a definitive way. I don't want to run something else than debian, really. But this is really embarassing, especially if you have production servers running sarge. And this situation ain't new, Slashdot was very slow to catch it but i read about it last week. Things haven't moved a lot since (well 1 security update was released, but some major exploits have been found in iirc at least two other packages, and nothing coming yet... Other distros had everything fixed by the end of last month)
I think Debian should clarify the issue, and call for help if it's necessary. And maybe simplify the whole debian democratic process if as it seems from the outside every decision has to go through days and days of pointless discussion.
You realize this is consoles we are talking about, and that developpers restrain themselves to put too much strain on them because unlike with pcs, they can't take the excuse that you just need a better system ?
Nobody's going to release a game that will crawl on a gamecube, even if we're still waiting for the revolution in 2 years. Either they won't release the game on the gc because it can't compete, or they'll trim everything down until the required fluidity is there.
Slashdot Mirror
Or they just think that they really understand nothing about computers and that they'd better call their friend who seems to talk with them as if they were human or something.
I mean, nowadays most people who use computers at home really don't understand the slighest thing about them. If they have to use it without help, they'd really be better off with a mac. (And i've nearly never used a mac in my life, but they're clearly ok for people won't know nothing about computers. They don't suppose that you know alot of things about them, and even grandpa can use them without having to call for help every week...)
My philosophy professors said that about philosophy too, and they didn't dismiss physics or mathematics while doing so, because they fully understood how they worked. Philosophy is more about logic than mathematics or physics are. If you don't undertand that, you didn't understood anything about philosophy. In fact, mathematics and physics are a concequence of philosphy, like C and lisp are concequence of computer science, but i won't even try to argue about that because you damn 'scientists' guys are so entranched in your way of thinking that you wouldn't be able to admit it anyway. ...
And that's what's so ironic: you can have a philosophy guy admit anything if you can proove it, even things like "you don't exist". Why ? because if the logic behind the argument is irrefutable, it is by all means true unless you can proove otherwise. But scientists, who believe they have the finest logics that exists, can't be bothered with all this stuff because because you can't measure it, look at it, or quantify it. They're a subset of philosophy which deals whith tangible things, but they forgot it, and believe the science which gave them birth is crap because they don't understand it anymore. Total nonsense
Yep, it's totally platform independant as it will run on 9x and NT !
Sooo redundant, i mean even in this context it has been done a thousand times.
What the "classic editor/compile" people are complaining about is the code you can have generated by vs, i think, not the editor itself. I mean you can start a new project and have a tab oriented gui two secs after, without understanding one bit about what's really going on in all the code that drives the gui. Then you can run a wizard to... add a wizard, things like that (didn't use vs since version 6 so it probably does a lot more now).
Myself i don't find it that bad, after all if all your program has to do is x, and having multiple tabs is a good way to represent the problem, having to understand how all the code that makes the gui work isn't stricly necesary. It's really useful if you need to modify it to achieve your goal (and you'll often have to unless your program is really simple), but for simple programs you can just fill the blanks in (pseudocode) createWindow(), createTab(), closeTab(), etc...
It's a friggin kid we're talking about. What did you do when you were programming as a kid, if you did ? I know i tried to have the computer display fancy stuff, in stupid ways. I wrote some sort of "demos" consisting of loops likeor composed some sort of animations in an ascii 8x8 grid because i didn't know of sprites and all the stuff. That was probably stupid, utterly useless, and definitely not the good tool for the job. I should have been using assembly at the time, and some sort of backbuffer instead of calling cls... But what the heck, that's what made me love programming. At the time i remember i tried to join some computer clubs, but they all were doing some things i thought were utterly boring, like learning how to use spreadsheets, or having programs "behave in an intelligent way" (that is, validating input...).
They were right, validating input is more than necessary in even the most stupid program, and using a spreadsheet instead of making a custom program yourself for each formula is certainly a good idea. But it wasn't fancy, and was very boring to do... Let this kid alone, he'll understand soon enough that you can certainly make nice looking programs with vs, but you have to learn programming to have them do anything usefull. And if he's really interested, he'll learn that too. And i'll congrat him because frankly, when i was a kid learning to program 8 bit computers was certainly a fun thing to do, but now with all the stuff you have to know, the fact that you can only access the computer via stupid apis that you have to learn, you have to be really interested by it to find it amusing. Computers are boring nowadays, seriously...
But yes my slashdot UID is probably higher that what it should be not because i forgot my password but because i read /. for years before creating an account. Is this excuse any better ? :-)
<totallyOT> :). /. huh</totallyOT>
And you know what ? I couldn't really post before creating the account anyway because i didn't know enough english. I knew it from school but wouldn't have been able to converse with somebody fluently at all. And the funny thing is that slashdot has been my english teacher
After some years of reading all those posts and stories I realized that i was reading almost fluently, most of the words i didn't know or bother to learn made sense after enough in-topic examples of use. And not only that but i could really *think* in english.
I mean i understand the sense of what i am writing but can't really give a good french transcription on the fly because basically it's two different ways of thinkings and you need to think about for a minutes to come up with a translation that really has the same meaning.
Now if i could lose that bad habit of starting all my sentences with "I'm not a lawyer but..." and ending them with "You insensitive clod", maybe i wouldn't end up looking so ridiculous when speaking to native speakers outside of
I think everyone outlooks something very important: if i understood correctly, the shell (explorer.exe) was totally remade from the ground up. That was looooong onverdue, this thing has basically not changed since w95, and the NT branche uses it too.
It has a tendency to go crazy far too easily and eat all the cpu until you stop it, among other things. They really need to throw the code away and start from scratch. I know i'd down^H^H^H^Hbuy it if this is the case. That is, if they make it enough configurable so i don't have to support their probably hugly and unusable look and feel.
I agree, that's why if you need a media library but don't want the shit that goes with them generally, remember that winamp5 has a media library, and a pretty good at that.
Also musikcube looks very promising, i bet you'd like it. (It goes without all the skin / custom widgets everywhere madness, it uses standard controls and try to keep the interface out of the way). It's still young and i found it very slow on big libraries (~9000 files) though.
I have around 700 albums in my collection, dispersed maybe 10 folders on several disks , and computers. (That's because i don't have a big enough disk to fit my own collection into one big directory, plus there are other people collections on network shares, etc)
Now, when people ask me if i can burn some albums for them, i'm not going to go into each directory, look if it's here, no let's try another, oh wait maybe it's on bob's computer, etc etc... Because that's exactly the purpose of the media library... It's an abstraction of how the files are stored physically.
I just go into search, type "whatever", the album appears and i burn it. Don't need to know where it is... Plus a lot of time the people don't exactly know what they want to burn. So they can browse by genre/year/recently played if they know they heard it yesterday night for example, and again just burn it, wherever it is...
IIRC the cracker had put a trojan on the machine, which was decompiled by the victim once he found out, and revealed the adress of a hidden irc channel or something (was probably a botnet client).
So the "victim" goes to the channel and starts talking with the cracker, telling him how he was impressed by his skillz and all the stuff, and that he was working in the security field...
Then he proceeds to propose the cracker a very nice job because he's so impressed. Cracker agrees, flies to the victim's town... and is welcomed by the smiling victim and a bunch of feds...
What a friggin' bastard, seriously :-)
Never thought of this but it's kinda cool...
With several elevators we could make a huge planetoid banjo and play the song from the mission on it, which would probably attract aliens from all around the galaxy and transform the solar system in a huge fiesta zone ! Or maybe not, but the banjo part would be fun anyway.
note: Please refrain from making such broad statements when talking about Europe.
It's probably difficult to grasp from the exterior, but things like what you're taking about are totally different in each countries.
Basically everything is different except the few things which have been laid out by the EU government, which is really not much. (We didn't even agree on things like "you must not kill" yet since the european treaty was rejected...).
The number you speak about could have been given by a EU official comitee and not by an individual country, but it wouldn't change the fact that it would have been built by asking each country its own unemployment rate, which is probably not calculated in the same way at all in each countries.
Knock knock, can i enter ? :
I'm sorry sir, but i've been charged to disallow any bad guy to enter this particular port 25.
Uh bad news, but i have a very important message to send my grandma, and couldn't find any open relay to send it to her. it's a matter of life and death.
mmmmmm i see, since i'm not in a bad mood i'll let you pass this time but %@dùù%ù^$
Broadcast message from root (pts/6)
The system is going down for system halt NOW!
Or if you use a modern card in a home theater environment, you can probably just unplug the fan...
The card probably doens't need it at all if all it has to do is 2d work.
I know i've been doing that with a gf3 for 1 year without a problem.
Seriously ?
And do you apply the same principle to every object you have to physically interact with when you're in public places ?
Do you promptly wear your gloves when you have to shake someone's hand ? The contact with the hand is even more direct than with a keyboard, after all. Yes, everything everywhere is full of germs, and totally disgusting when you think about it at the microscopic level. You just need not to think about it and relax, because you have to live with it. And anyway, your body is designed to combat those germs, at least for now. But with this type of comportment one day humans will die if they ever talk each other without wearing filters.
6. PSU went crazy and killed all the drive in the array and the spares instantly.
Happened to us... It didn't stop at the hard drives either.
But yes, it was cheap hardware.
Ok, so you've been waiting for an invention like this to get your stapler and your pencils back from your backpack ?
Here's a trick my mom taught me: You can put a backpack upside down, and the things in it will nicely fall on the ground so you can sort them and find the beloved object !
This backpack feature was invented a guy named Newton, who could never find his apples in his bag, or something like that...
Worst thing is, we all know that's exactly what will happen, after some time.
I'm really sick of this industry, when you look at its history it's clearly going *backward* most of the time. And more often than not, the worst technologies are the most workshipped, simply because they were better marketed.
When you sit back and look at the way IT advances, it makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, there were better programming tools that what we've got today 35 years ago, and this whole client/server -> microcomputer -> microcomputer/server migration is totally crazy.
Of course in professional environment having a microcomputer with its own system and applications for each user is totally crazy, how is it even possible that such a silly idea has been so widely accepted ?
Bah, IIRC Xandros doesn't update it's distro, at all.
They just release a version and you have to wait for the next release (and buy it) for bug fixes (and of course the release will bring new bugs since they'll add features). I don't know if they have the same policy concerning security fixes, but i wouldn't trust them at all...
Huh yep I forgot gentoo and probably lots of others :) Sorry about that. But those distros don't play in the same park, they're more like niche distros.
Now let's hope they won't stop there, and make a revamp of the whole Debian process.
Debian needs to react to what's happening around it, and into it. Because we NEED Debian, much more than any other distro.
If Debian happened to die, what choices would we have ? commercial distros, or distros based on commercial ones. That would suck big time. I don't even use Linux on the destop personally, I mostly use it at work on servers now. But i know i sleep better at night knowing that a thing such as Debian exists. It makes the world a better place.
Yep but it doesn't apply here. Debian can be secure, convenient and cheap. It could probably be more secure and less convenient but still it is generally a very secure distro... and it's certainly cheap and convenient too
The problem is not that you can't mix those three in debian particular setting, it's that the debian team seems to serverely lack redundancy. Read: one person has obligations somewhere else and the whole stable security updates process hangs !
I really hope that Debian is going to make something about it fast, and in a definitive way. I don't want to run something else than debian, really. But this is really embarassing, especially if you have production servers running sarge. And this situation ain't new, Slashdot was very slow to catch it but i read about it last week. Things haven't moved a lot since (well 1 security update was released, but some major exploits have been found in iirc at least two other packages, and nothing coming yet... Other distros had everything fixed by the end of last month)
I think Debian should clarify the issue, and call for help if it's necessary. And maybe simplify the whole debian democratic process if as it seems from the outside every decision has to go through days and days of pointless discussion.
You realize this is consoles we are talking about, and that developpers restrain themselves to put too much strain on them because unlike with pcs, they can't take the excuse that you just need a better system ?
Nobody's going to release a game that will crawl on a gamecube, even if we're still waiting for the revolution in 2 years. Either they won't release the game on the gc because it can't compete, or they'll trim everything down until the required fluidity is there.