"Windows only UNIX code so you have to run Windows to get the "full experience of UNIX","
You mean like those evil linusfollowing monopolists that depends on glibc extensions not in the bsd c library? And those assholes that don't test their c ode on various versions of solaris, aix, hpux, and all the other operating systems the auther really doesnt care about?
If you write it, you're under no obligation to make it portable. Most stuff just isnt worth the effort of even testing let alone fixing for other operating systems.
EULA violations are a civil matter, and havn't been tested in court. This is about the DMCA. There could have been no EULA and they'd still be able to take them to court under the anti-copyprotection stuff.
You mean as simple as right clicking on a zip file and clicking extract here? Or selecting a few files and clicking add to archive? Complaining about WinZip not being 'deadly simple' is like complaining about making tarballs by throwing files on a tape drive. Just because it supports additional bells and whistles doesn't mean you need to use them.
FTR, I use winrar and 7zip on windows, depending on what I'm doing.
Lest we not forget to use the right tool for the right job. Rars are great for moving large files across unstable mediums and patching them up with pars to deal with any quality loss. The compression ratio on rar is really great too, but at the same time its just impossible[*] to stream. Thats why we use gzip or deflate for webservers. Now if only we can teach people to stop zipping their 300mb movies. Its fine if you're including your source material in it (demos/maps/textures for game movies f.e), but most of the time its just so they can include a readme.
[*]It's technically possible to stream content inside of rar files if the medium allows jumping around in the file. For example you can play a movie from inside a rar with mplayer if you have it all locally, or are on a network mount that can deal with seeking
This is pretty horrible. Spamisp will trash an ip's reputation, get it blacklisted everywhere, then just reassign it. Not to mention what happens with temp abuse of service (say, run a shell server and have someone spam from it for a day before you notice and catch them)
1) I don't care if someone was touched with divine intervention and learned the OneTrueWay of copy/pasting, as long as there are seperate apps that do things seperate ways, it's inferior. I don't care if its middleclicking or hitting a random keysequence, as long as its the same. None of this highlight some text in moz, paste in url bar with ^V fine, then switch to xterm, ^V and get nothing, middleclick and paste something from a seperate buffer.
2) A sound server works fine, but done in userspace leads to timing issues. Okay for mp3s+notification from apps, but bad for games, and barely acceptable for movies depending on your machine. My old setup was asd on/dev/dsp1, quakes on/dev/dsp0. Dont even try to wine over a sound server, at the time that blew everything up.
3) Tried gaim, talked to mark a few times in the 0.9x days, wrote some scripts for it(gaim->xmms integration in 1.x), got some feature requests implemented (I'm the one that got them to not hardcode font color on tab lables as it resulted on black on black in my theme), etc. It chokes bad on any advanced features, like cams or voice chat, and tends to crash often on direct connections when someone sends bitmap data, or will only display one frame of an animated gif, or completely choke if someone inserts a non-image. Yahoos official client is the same as Aol's official linux client-- Stripped of all the features that make it worth using over something like irc.
4) Chicken and the egg. Nobody uses it for gaming because windows is better at it, thats not going to change just because a few people play ut2k4. Maybe if HalfLife(1) is ported, but thats not happening. See http://gamespy.com/stats/ for the severity of HL being important. Add up all the UT/ET/D3/ players and you're still not even half the way there. Not to mention the huge userbase of the MMORPGS, Try getting a WOW player to do anything that conflicts with them playing WOW. its not easy.
5) No software is stable. I've gotten everything I've used to break at some point, and frankly a modern XP install is no more or less fragile than an average linux install. Freedoms nice on a theoretical level, but on a practical level it really doesnt make much difference. It's not that Linux isn't right for me, just that nothing is, and I don't have the time or motivation to change that. Maybe if I had clones or minions and a lot of money, but until then I just use the path of least resistance.
1) Inconsistant copy/paste behavior between apps. Self explanitory really.
2) Horrible audio support
(Every card I've used on windows has done multi-open fine, but none do it on linux. at best I can get two DSP interfaces on one card which means hard configuring apps. Don't get me started on surround sound.) 3) Major lack of applications/stuck with bad ports or buggy emulation
(Port of AIM completely lacks features, and no third party client supports direct ims with the same content types as the official client. eg, no animated gifs, bitmaps, or just inserting a file-- No official yahoo client, stuck with third party clients that dont do webcams. No IDE comparible to visual studio, or debuggers/disassemblers that can compare to whats common on windows (IDA, w32dsm, olly, softice), etc. 4) More of an extension on #3, but lack of games. I don't care how many different toolkits you can put on tetris, its never going to compare to a game like HL or WOW 5) No reason TO switch
Really, this is the reason why I started dual booting and ended up never bothering to boot out of windows. Theres nothing I can do in linux that can't be done in windows. Task wise, all I do is chat, game, browse the web, program, listen to music/watch movies, aquire them, and general remote administrative stuff.
On linux: firefox, mplayer, openssh, gaim On windows: firefox, mplayer, putty, winaim.
That point goes even further-- Anything worth running is worth someone porting to windows, off the top of my head: The entire cygwin project (which includes about as much stuff as your standard distro), firefox, mplayer, gaim, nmap, netcat, ettercap, etherreal, vim, and im probably missing a few.
--Sorry for the bad formatting, HTML inside a tiny slashdot comment box is a pain to write.
And exemplifies just how evil it really is. What if we couldn't read Einsteins papers because our key is no longer valid? Or if all copies of 1984 suddenly have their keys revoked? DRM in libraries is a horrible thought. I don't care if the terms are fair so far, the concept is bad enough on its own to warrant boycott. You can't accept this stuff in your life if you want society to be an acceptable place in 20 years.
Why is the registry any easier than/etc/ config files? Joe user won't understand or use either, he'll use the frontends like YaST or tweakui or whatever.
But at the end of the day I'm glad app developers don't care about this stuff and instead focus on making a better app. If some RedHat devel wanted to come along and make easy to use forks of apps, they're free to. I won't use them unless theyre honestly better.
As it is I've been running windows XP for a few years now just because it runs everything I ran on linux(perl/vim/firefox/gaim/gnu binutils/eclipse/mplayer. anything worth running is worth porting), and has much better audio support (Try getting reliable surround sound on linux with multiple sources). Not to mention being able to game. Only thing I'm lacking in windows is a good desktop environment, but linux lacks one
too.
Other random stuff you can do: 3 USD / gallon * radius of the earth / 10 miles per gallon in GBP
G *mass of earth / radius of earth^2
5 gigabytes / 3 megabits / second (good for download ETAs) or just "the answer to the life the universe and everything".
Pretty much anything you can throw at it it can figure out. Would be really nice if they'd add it to google desktop search so that I wouldn't have to load firefox just to do my math.
Yahoo supports voicecomm. And webcams. And offline messaging.
I wont be impressed until they add AIM-style direct connections at least. Then theyre comparable to aim, but really no better client wise. Now, if you could convert/resize images inside (especially pasting screenshots), then it would set it ahead in my book. (And as mentioned before, webcam support).
They also don't allow customizing of fonts, which I'm glad of but will mean they'll never capture the IM crowd. They should do it gaim style, and allow it but have an option to strip it all for people that dont like others assuming they know how to style text to match/your/ desktop. Speaking of which, gtalk is yet another app on my list of things that assume you want to use their skinning engine instead of the native settings. Why do developers do this? Do you really want to get/make 15 different skins just so all of your apps look right together?
Not yet, this just shows that they're playing with jabber. Soon they'll most likely release their IM app that is just a prettied up jabber client. Heres hoping they do it right.
"I will be paying for something that I cannot use."
And thats your choice, much as I can buy a copy of doom3 even though it wont run on my gf2mx400 pci. You don't have the hardware for it, don't buy the software.
They arn't trying to find your password, just find something that has the same MD5. If kf9fqufccqhtqrthcferhwughw has the same hash as slashdot.orgbaadgerlolhy, I can login with either and slashdot wont care. Granted, it will stop a dictonary attack, but your password shouldnt be that weak anyways.
" Both of those words you mentioned apply to phenomena that never existed before. " Not really. Blogging: The only thing relatively new about blogging is the content being stuff we don't care about. It's no different than what most of us did in the 90s with the NewsPro CGI script. Back then we just called them web pages, or specificly the news part of a webpage. Maybe even 'news page'.
Podcasting: A different delivery method doesn't warrant a new name. A tv show is a tv show, whether over a cable, satalite, UHF, VHF, the internet, or on dvd/vhs. A radio show is still a radio show if you download it at a later date. Doing it over the internet is nothing new. Textfiles even has an archive of online radio shows that would now be called 'podcasts' but predate the term by years (I used to listen to hackermind back before hardware mp3 players were mainstream, and lest we not forget slashdots own geeks in space)
Spam:
I don't mind this term nearly as much, but unsolicited email and 'ads' kind of sums it up nicely.
Depends on the job you're doing. No webcams, voicechat, direct ims(read: pictures inside convos, great for screenshots), or any other 'rich' features
IRC is extendable enough that you can add it, and a few clients have tried in the past(VIRC), but theyre just not standardized enough to rely on. Tis a shame too If someone made a nice client that actually offered these features it'd save me and my friends a lot of time/effort having to switch between irc/aim depending on what is needed. I of course prefer irc when possible, but if I have a screenshot in my buffer, I'd rather click direct connect and right click -> paste picture than open ms paint, paste, save to disk,/dcc send nick (path to one-off screenshot), delete screenshot.
Because its impossible to judge gameplay on a techdemo, making the whole thing a big circlejerk.
Maybe its going to be the second coming of christ, maybe its going to be Daikatana 2: Electric Boogaloo, you just can't tell from a movie of the engine. Should I have put on a GamePro hat and said LOOKING FOR THE GAME OF THE YEAR? LOOK NO FURTHER THIS GAME WILL HAVE IT ALL. VERTEX SHADING, DYNAMIC LIGHTING, REALISTIC UBERPHYSICS, GREAT DIALOG AND AN INTERESTING STORY. even though all you know is that it can amke some nice machinema? When they come out with a playable demo, I'll grab a copy and proove myself right. Until then I'll just have to go off of intuition and trends (Name the last game that was hyped for its looks that ended up having good multiplayer gameplay. Yeah, hasn't happened.)
As engines get more and more complex the bar for entry becomes too high for anyone with a fun idea. You have to compete with everyone elses techdemo its not worth the risk to try something innovative or fun. You're stuck with watered down stuff like CS:Source instead of something interesting like CS was back in 1999.
What should they do? Fight against frivilous patents and throw out their buisness model of patenting everything? better to just pay it now than have it used against you next time someone fights your stupid lawsuit
Thats cool, but I really don't care. If I wanted a movie I'd have rented one. I bought a game because I wanted to have fun. Its still more fun to duel someone in quakeworld than doom3, and I can play qw on a p100. (Or on a much much better system with 24bit textures, particle explosions, per pixel lighting, and anything else you can think of thanks to the wonders of open source)
As for WiMax degration, its a numbers issue. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX you're looking at about 70mbit/s spread across 31 miles. Thats just not enough to compete with the 6/.7 most cable providers sell, and nowhere near what you'll get with other wired solutions (Verizion FIOS at 15/5mbit). Itd be great to be able to quickly google on your laptop from the car or fact check with wikipedia, but to sustain your irc client and try and download anything over it would be too painful day to day.
The overlapping nodes idea might work, or you might end up with serious signal overlap causing packet loss. We're still talking about mostly unlicensed spectrum here, anyone can use it for anything they want even if it ruins your service. (see 802.11b + cordless phones)
As for my dislike of relying on wireless, it is mostly latency and general reliability. As more and more people move to wireless networks, the quality degrades worse and worse, ask anyone living in dorms how their own 802.11b network is doing and you'll find most just give up. I'm biased in that I do a lot of online gaming and do most of my real work over ssh rather than locally, so I feel a random 15 second connection drop or ping spike more than most people, but theyre definately there.
Slashdot Mirror
"Windows only UNIX code so you have to run Windows to get the "full experience of UNIX","
You mean like those evil linusfollowing monopolists that depends on glibc extensions not in the bsd c library? And those assholes that don't test their c ode on various versions of solaris, aix, hpux, and all the other operating systems the auther really doesnt care about?
If you write it, you're under no obligation to make it portable. Most stuff just isnt worth the effort of even testing let alone fixing for other operating systems.
No, but in alternative browsers clearing history to cover your tracks actually clears your history, In IE, the really hidden copy stays.l es.shtml has all the info you need to know.
http://www.fuckmicrosoft.com/content/ms-hidden-fi
EULA violations are a civil matter, and havn't been tested in court. This is about the DMCA. There could have been no EULA and they'd still be able to take them to court under the anti-copyprotection stuff.
- To play on a lan without internet access.
- To play from a country too far away from battle.net servers
Probably others.
You mean as simple as right clicking on a zip file and clicking extract here? Or selecting a few files and clicking add to archive?
Complaining about WinZip not being 'deadly simple' is like complaining about making tarballs by throwing files on a tape drive. Just because it supports additional bells and whistles doesn't mean you need to use them.
FTR, I use winrar and 7zip on windows, depending on what I'm doing.
"I guess that makes me naive for using tools to make my life easier."
I used tools to make my life easier, but they prefer to be called people, or occasonally minions.
Not exactly. That doesn't factor in time it takes to compress or time it takes to decompress.r ession_test.htm
Something like http://www.elis.ugent.be/~wheirman/compression/ does a better job at it.
Nor does your test factor in the many different options, like http://studwww.ugent.be/~jdebock/gimp_source_comp
Lest we not forget to use the right tool for the right job. Rars are great for moving large files across unstable mediums and patching them up with pars to deal with any quality loss. The compression ratio on rar is really great too, but at the same time its just impossible[*] to stream. Thats why we use gzip or deflate for webservers.
Now if only we can teach people to stop zipping their 300mb movies. Its fine if you're including your source material in it (demos/maps/textures for game movies f.e), but most of the time its just so they can include a readme.
[*]It's technically possible to stream content inside of rar files if the medium allows jumping around in the file. For example you can play a movie from inside a rar with mplayer if you have it all locally, or are on a network mount that can deal with seeking
This is pretty horrible. Spamisp will trash an ip's reputation, get it blacklisted everywhere, then just reassign it. Not to mention what happens with temp abuse of service (say, run a shell server and have someone spam from it for a day before you notice and catch them)
1) I don't care if someone was touched with divine intervention and learned the OneTrueWay of copy/pasting, as long as there are seperate apps that do things seperate ways, it's inferior. I don't care if its middleclicking or hitting a random keysequence, as long as its the same. None of this highlight some text in moz, paste in url bar with ^V fine, then switch to xterm, ^V and get nothing, middleclick and paste something from a seperate buffer.
/dev/dsp1, quakes on /dev/dsp0. Dont even try to wine over a sound server, at the time that blew everything up.
2) A sound server works fine, but done in userspace leads to timing issues. Okay for mp3s+notification from apps, but bad for games, and barely acceptable for movies depending on your machine. My old setup was asd on
3) Tried gaim, talked to mark a few times in the 0.9x days, wrote some scripts for it(gaim->xmms integration in 1.x), got some feature requests implemented (I'm the one that got them to not hardcode font color on tab lables as it resulted on black on black in my theme), etc. It chokes bad on any advanced features, like cams or voice chat, and tends to crash often on direct connections when someone sends bitmap data, or will only display one frame of an animated gif, or completely choke if someone inserts a non-image. Yahoos official client is the same as Aol's official linux client-- Stripped of all the features that make it worth using over something like irc.
4) Chicken and the egg. Nobody uses it for gaming because windows is better at it, thats not going to change just because a few people play ut2k4. Maybe if HalfLife(1) is ported, but thats not happening. See http://gamespy.com/stats/ for the severity of HL being important. Add up all the UT/ET/D3/ players and you're still not even half the way there. Not to mention the huge userbase of the MMORPGS, Try getting a WOW player to do anything that conflicts with them playing WOW. its not easy.
5) No software is stable. I've gotten everything I've used to break at some point, and frankly a modern XP install is no more or less fragile than an average linux install. Freedoms nice on a theoretical level, but on a practical level it really doesnt make much difference.
It's not that Linux isn't right for me, just that nothing is, and I don't have the time or motivation to change that. Maybe if I had clones or minions and a lot of money, but until then I just use the path of least resistance.
1) Inconsistant copy/paste behavior between apps.
Self explanitory really.
2) Horrible audio support
(Every card I've used on windows has done multi-open fine, but none do it on linux. at best I can get two DSP interfaces on one card which means hard configuring apps. Don't get me started on surround sound.)
3) Major lack of applications/stuck with bad ports or buggy emulation
(Port of AIM completely lacks features, and no third party client supports direct ims with the same content types as the official client. eg, no animated gifs, bitmaps, or just inserting a file-- No official yahoo client, stuck with third party clients that dont do webcams. No IDE comparible to visual studio, or debuggers/disassemblers that can compare to whats common on windows (IDA, w32dsm, olly, softice), etc.
4) More of an extension on #3, but lack of games.
I don't care how many different toolkits you can put on tetris, its never going to compare to a game like HL or WOW
5) No reason TO switch
Really, this is the reason why I started dual booting and ended up never bothering to boot out of windows. Theres nothing I can do in linux that can't be done in windows. Task wise, all I do is chat, game, browse the web, program, listen to music/watch movies, aquire them, and general remote administrative stuff.
On linux: firefox, mplayer, openssh, gaim
On windows: firefox, mplayer, putty, winaim.
That point goes even further-- Anything worth running is worth someone porting to windows, off the top of my head: The entire cygwin project (which includes about as much stuff as your standard distro), firefox, mplayer, gaim, nmap, netcat, ettercap, etherreal, vim, and im probably missing a few.
--Sorry for the bad formatting, HTML inside a tiny slashdot comment box is a pain to write.
And exemplifies just how evil it really is.
What if we couldn't read Einsteins papers because our key is no longer valid? Or if all copies of 1984 suddenly have their keys revoked? DRM in libraries is a horrible thought. I don't care if the terms are fair so far, the concept is bad enough on its own to warrant boycott. You can't accept this stuff in your life if you want society to be an acceptable place in 20 years.
Why is the registry any easier than /etc/ config files? Joe user won't understand or use either, he'll use the frontends like YaST or tweakui or whatever.
But at the end of the day I'm glad app developers don't care about this stuff and instead focus on making a better app. If some RedHat devel wanted to come along and make easy to use forks of apps, they're free to. I won't use them unless theyre honestly better.
As it is I've been running windows XP for a few years now just because it runs everything I ran on linux(perl/vim/firefox/gaim/gnu binutils/eclipse/mplayer. anything worth running is worth porting), and has much better audio support (Try getting reliable surround sound on linux with multiple sources). Not to mention being able to game.
Only thing I'm lacking in windows is a good desktop environment, but linux lacks one
too.
Other random stuff you can do:
3 USD / gallon * radius of the earth / 10 miles per gallon in GBP
G *mass of earth / radius of earth^2
5 gigabytes / 3 megabits / second (good for download ETAs)
or just "the answer to the life the universe and everything".
Pretty much anything you can throw at it it can figure out. Would be really nice if they'd add it to google desktop search so that I wouldn't have to load firefox just to do my math.
According to http://nedron.net/fom_server/cache/62.html
HDTV is approx. 19.3 megabit/sec
Google sez:
1TB / 19.2 megabit / second in hours = 121.362963 hours
Which is actually not nearly as much of a marketing lie as I expected.
Yahoo supports voicecomm. And webcams. And offline messaging.
/your/ desktop. Speaking of which, gtalk is yet another app on my list of things that assume you want to use their skinning engine instead of the native settings. Why do developers do this? Do you really want to get/make 15 different skins just so all of your apps look right together?
I wont be impressed until they add AIM-style direct connections at least. Then theyre comparable to aim, but really no better client wise. Now, if you could convert/resize images inside (especially pasting screenshots), then it would set it ahead in my book. (And as mentioned before, webcam support).
They also don't allow customizing of fonts, which I'm glad of but will mean they'll never capture the IM crowd. They should do it gaim style, and allow it but have an option to strip it all for people that dont like others assuming they know how to style text to match
Not yet, this just shows that they're playing with jabber. Soon they'll most likely release their IM app that is just a prettied up jabber client. Heres hoping they do it right.
"I will be paying for something that I cannot use."
And thats your choice, much as I can buy a copy of doom3 even though it wont run on my gf2mx400 pci. You don't have the hardware for it, don't buy the software.
They arn't trying to find your password, just find something that has the same MD5. If kf9fqufccqhtqrthcferhwughw has the same hash as slashdot.orgbaadgerlolhy, I can login with either and slashdot wont care. Granted, it will stop a dictonary attack, but your password shouldnt be that weak anyways.
" Both of those words you mentioned apply to phenomena that never existed before. "
Not really.
Blogging:
The only thing relatively new about blogging is the content being stuff we don't care about. It's no different than what most of us did in the 90s with the NewsPro CGI script. Back then we just called them web pages, or specificly the news part of a webpage. Maybe even 'news page'.
Podcasting:
A different delivery method doesn't warrant a new name. A tv show is a tv show, whether over a cable, satalite, UHF, VHF, the internet, or on dvd/vhs. A radio show is still a radio show if you download it at a later date. Doing it over the internet is nothing new. Textfiles even has an archive of online radio shows that would now be called 'podcasts' but predate the term by years (I used to listen to hackermind back before hardware mp3 players were mainstream, and lest we not forget slashdots own geeks in space)
Spam:
I don't mind this term nearly as much, but unsolicited email and 'ads' kind of sums it up nicely.
"whether you measure it in microns per millenium or lightyears per femtosecond."
Whats really impressive is google can convert those two fine
1 lightyear per femtosecond in microns per millenium
Depends on the job you're doing. No webcams, voicechat, direct ims(read: pictures inside convos, great for screenshots), or any other 'rich' features
/dcc send nick (path to one-off screenshot), delete screenshot.
IRC is extendable enough that you can add it, and a few clients have tried in the past(VIRC), but theyre just not standardized enough to rely on.
Tis a shame too If someone made a nice client that actually offered these features it'd save me and my friends a lot of time/effort having to switch between irc/aim depending on what is needed. I of course prefer irc when possible, but if I have a screenshot in my buffer, I'd rather click direct connect and right click -> paste picture than open ms paint, paste, save to disk,
Because its impossible to judge gameplay on a techdemo, making the whole thing a big circlejerk.
Maybe its going to be the second coming of christ, maybe its going to be Daikatana 2: Electric Boogaloo, you just can't tell from a movie of the engine. Should I have put on a GamePro hat and said
LOOKING FOR THE GAME OF THE YEAR? LOOK NO FURTHER THIS GAME WILL HAVE IT ALL. VERTEX SHADING, DYNAMIC LIGHTING, REALISTIC UBERPHYSICS, GREAT DIALOG AND AN INTERESTING STORY. even though all you know is that it can amke some nice machinema?
When they come out with a playable demo, I'll grab a copy and proove myself right. Until then I'll just have to go off of intuition and trends (Name the last game that was hyped for its looks that ended up having good multiplayer gameplay. Yeah, hasn't happened.)
As engines get more and more complex the bar for entry becomes too high for anyone with a fun idea. You have to compete with everyone elses techdemo its not worth the risk to try something innovative or fun. You're stuck with watered down stuff like CS:Source instead of something interesting like CS was back in 1999.
What should they do? Fight against frivilous patents and throw out their buisness model of patenting everything? better to just pay it now than have it used against you next time someone fights your stupid lawsuit
Thats cool, but I really don't care. If I wanted a movie I'd have rented one. I bought a game because I wanted to have fun. Its still more fun to duel someone in quakeworld than doom3, and I can play qw on a p100. (Or on a much much better system with 24bit textures, particle explosions, per pixel lighting, and anything else you can think of thanks to the wonders of open source)
As for WiMax degration, its a numbers issue.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX you're looking at about 70mbit/s spread across 31 miles. Thats just not enough to compete with the 6/.7 most cable providers sell, and nowhere near what you'll get with other wired solutions (Verizion FIOS at 15/5mbit).
Itd be great to be able to quickly google on your laptop from the car or fact check with wikipedia, but to sustain your irc client and try and download anything over it would be too painful day to day.
The overlapping nodes idea might work, or you might end up with serious signal overlap causing packet loss. We're still talking about mostly unlicensed spectrum here, anyone can use it for anything they want even if it ruins your service. (see 802.11b + cordless phones)
As for my dislike of relying on wireless, it is mostly latency and general reliability. As more and more people move to wireless networks, the quality degrades worse and worse, ask anyone living in dorms how their own 802.11b network is doing and you'll find most just give up.
I'm biased in that I do a lot of online gaming and do most of my real work over ssh rather than locally, so I feel a random 15 second connection drop or ping spike more than most people, but theyre definately there.