I was in the Netherlands recently, and was very tempted to move there at some point.
You're very right about the game being the problem. I'm sick of politicians fighting as hard as they can to get reelected. If they put half as much effort into, you know, running the country sensibly, then this country would be a far better place.
The problem is that it's not a judge that has to sign off on it.
It's the house of commons. A group that is meant to be entirely seperate from enforcing the law. They're not lawyers, they're politicians, and I have a feeling that if somebody stands up in front of them and says that someone should be detained, that's all they'll really need.
Unlike a judge, who would want a little thing called "evidence" before allowing somebody to be locked up for long enough to destroy their life, with the possibility that they'll never be charged with anything, and never know why they were detained.
This just seems like a good way to hold people for a bit longer, so that they can find *something* to charge them with.
As far as I can see it's only a matter of time until people start disappearing from the streets for extended periods of time. Odds are, most of them will be charged with a crime (whether they commited it or not) to avoid the embarrasment that the media would cause over it.
There's not a hope in hell that the Queen would veto anything put in front of her.
We're only really a monarchy in name these days. The Queen does have to sign off on anything big (changes in prime minister, new laws etc.), but I've never heard of there being any doubt whatsoever that is what would happen.
Sometimes I quite like the idea of her turning around and saying "One does not like that idea. Go away." though!
From what I've seen of their reactions to things in the past, common sense. And it's a damn good thing as well, since the commons seems to have lost most of theirs in the battle to get themselves reelected.
So what is the important stuff that the Windows display manager does, and X doesn't?
The only thing I can think of is auto-configuration when you plug in new hardware, and that's being developed at the moment.
I'm not even that bothered about it, since at least using Ubuntu it's all set up for me, and in the entire time I've been using PCs I've changed my video card less then 10 times. In almost every case I upgraded other things at the same time, and reinstalled anyway.
Maybe you've never needed to do either of those things, but I have, and being able to do it with almost no effort was wonderful. You'd be amazed how much use you can get out of a ten year old laptop when you use it as a dumb terminal and do any processing on a decent desktop machine instead.
The example of having multiple users on one machine has the potential to save schools and other public access computing facilities a fair bit of money, since in that sort of situation a single user will use only a fraction of the power available from the computers they're using anyway.
If you can get two or three people to a computer, that's £300-£600 that's been saved, even taking into consideration having to buy extra video cards and input devices.
The mailing list is full of academic arguments over color specs and other pointless things
Color specs are not a pointless thing when you're developing a display manager, which could potentially be used for color critical work.
In some environments (photo editing, movie making, etc.) knowing that what you see on the screen is exactly what you'll get in the finished article is essential to the quality of your work.
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ahhh, because Windows' display manager is truly amazing.
Now, let me just open an application on another machine, and show it on this one's X server... hmmm... what's that - I need to be running Windows 2008 Server, and have a terminal server license?
How about running multiple display managers, so that I can have more then one person using the machine with seperate monitors and input... no. Thought not.
So if I had an ad-funded website (unlikely in the current climate, but stick with me) Phorm would be screwing me out of the money I'd make for those ads, but replacing them with there own.
Something tells me that if I did the same thing with a billboard - charging customers for me to go out and paste their adverts over the top of paid for adverts at night - Clear Channel would quite quickly be attempting to sue me.
Woah there. Can I suggest you take a step away from your computer, and maybe even go outside and get some fresh air.
If you're reacting that extremely to someone not realising secure http doesn't pass a referer header I dread to think what you might do to somebody with real problems.
Do you always just crash firefox rather than quitting or something?
It's got a lot better since the RCs started to come out, but with the early betas it almost seemed easier to crash then go all the way up to that close button!
The thing that I've found in the past is that it's far easier to develop for Firefox first, and then make the changes required for Internet Explorer.
Going that way, it takes about a day to get things working right in IE once things are working. Going the other way you could easily drop a week, bouncing back and forth between the two browsers.
Firebug came first - I remember when the IE development toolbar was released, I took a brief look, and went back to using tools that work.
The only time I start IE is when I'm testing a site works in it, and even that has dropped off since I started working for a company that requires (your choice of) working web browser to access web applications.
Well, you've cetainly reaffirmed my faith in developers of educational software there.
As an experienced developer of browser-based educational software and a cyber-security consultant, I can tell you that IE is much easier to develop for than Firefox.
How can you possibly say IE is easier to develop for then Firefox?
Either way it's HTML and CSS, it's just that one of them has a renderer that actually works, and the other is broken in a multitude of ways.
And that's not even getting started on things like Firebug, which makes it far easier to develop on Firefox then with IE's "something broke, I'm not going to tell you where" model of error reporting for Javascript.
Not only that, but what if they need browser support? Who are they going to go with Firefox? Nobody, because there is nobody.
What? When was the last time you heard of Microsoft providing support for IE?
Lets take the classic example of transparent PNGs, which took years to get fixed. And that's something that thousands of developers have been screaming for - I dread to think what would result if you called up Microsoft and said "I have a really specific problem, can you fix it?"
If you want support for Firefox there are forums, IRC channels, and a publicly viewable bug tracker. I'd imagine that if you waved enough money at them the Mozilla Foundation would be quite happy to get a problem you have fixed pretty damn quick as well.
This may sound like an odd choice, but I think one of the best story-entwined games I've seen recently has been Call of Duty 4.
Sure, there wasn't a lot of storyline going on beyond "there's a bad guy trying to take over this country... sort him out", but since it was largely following two infantry grunts, that's ok by me. You're average Marine probably doesn't get much more information then you got in the game. "Go here, protect this tank until it can be fixed". "You're helicopter just got shot down." etc.
Maybe we need to stop making games that ask you to save the world single handed, and start to look much more deeply at the situation that you as a player are dealing with right now.
The other thing I'd like to see is less pre-written dialogue for your character. My favourite games are the ones where I'm not forced to sit around while my character says a load of crap I'd never even consider saying in that situation. Let me develop my character, rather then filling in all the blanks for me.
I have high hopes for Fallout 3, although at the same time I'm worried it's going to be another game where I can do whatever I want, so long as I don't care about it making no difference to the world.
It takes a fraction of the time needed to make a site that was built in Firefox to work in IE compared to making a site built in IE work with any real web browser.
In most cases I can build the site using Firefox, knowing that'll it'll be 99% the same in Safari, Opera, and whatever other browsers you can think of. Then I just need an IE specific stylesheet (that'll be full of nasty hacks) to make everything look right in IE as well.
And that's not taking into account the extensions that make life so much more pleasant. Firebug alone must have saved me several days of tracing bugs this year.
Depends which segment of internet users you're looking at.
Certainly the w3schools is probably wildly off for the majority of internet users, since the people visiting the site are probably involved in web design or development, and are far more likely to be using a different web browser.
Windows XP is now only available for UMPCs, and other low-spec machines that can't run Vista.
Presumably Microsoft's idea of a low-spec machine is something with 80GB of hard disk space, which is why they won't sell it to go on machines with more.
You can backup the SQL database files, but what if the data hadn't been paged out to disk yet? Stuck in cache somewhere that got erased when the machine powered off?
You replay the binary logs of any transactions that were run since the last backup.
I'm not saying it's not a big problem because it's a game - I play lots myself, and understand the frustration when things break. I'm saying it's not a big problem because whether your tracking forum posts, medical records, or game players, when it gets to the database and hardware level, it's all the same thing.
These are solved problems. The headline may as well be "sysadmins adminster systems for Sony". The only reason this is getting any coverage is because they mentioned MMOs at some point.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in the Netherlands recently, and was very tempted to move there at some point.
You're very right about the game being the problem. I'm sick of politicians fighting as hard as they can to get reelected. If they put half as much effort into, you know, running the country sensibly, then this country would be a far better place.
Of course we don't. The Australians won't let us in without skills they need now.
Believe me, if I could get residence in Australia just by stealing some fruit, every market in London would fear my name.
The problem is that it's not a judge that has to sign off on it.
It's the house of commons. A group that is meant to be entirely seperate from enforcing the law. They're not lawyers, they're politicians, and I have a feeling that if somebody stands up in front of them and says that someone should be detained, that's all they'll really need.
Unlike a judge, who would want a little thing called "evidence" before allowing somebody to be locked up for long enough to destroy their life, with the possibility that they'll never be charged with anything, and never know why they were detained.
This just seems like a good way to hold people for a bit longer, so that they can find *something* to charge them with.
As far as I can see it's only a matter of time until people start disappearing from the streets for extended periods of time. Odds are, most of them will be charged with a crime (whether they commited it or not) to avoid the embarrasment that the media would cause over it.
There's not a hope in hell that the Queen would veto anything put in front of her.
We're only really a monarchy in name these days. The Queen does have to sign off on anything big (changes in prime minister, new laws etc.), but I've never heard of there being any doubt whatsoever that is what would happen.
Sometimes I quite like the idea of her turning around and saying "One does not like that idea. Go away." though!
From what I've seen of their reactions to things in the past, common sense. And it's a damn good thing as well, since the commons seems to have lost most of theirs in the battle to get themselves reelected.
Our mail stores at work can fill 8TB quite happily (although they're on big network attached storage boxes, not ZFS).
So what is the important stuff that the Windows display manager does, and X doesn't?
The only thing I can think of is auto-configuration when you plug in new hardware, and that's being developed at the moment.
I'm not even that bothered about it, since at least using Ubuntu it's all set up for me, and in the entire time I've been using PCs I've changed my video card less then 10 times. In almost every case I upgraded other things at the same time, and reinstalled anyway.
Maybe you've never needed to do either of those things, but I have, and being able to do it with almost no effort was wonderful. You'd be amazed how much use you can get out of a ten year old laptop when you use it as a dumb terminal and do any processing on a decent desktop machine instead.
The example of having multiple users on one machine has the potential to save schools and other public access computing facilities a fair bit of money, since in that sort of situation a single user will use only a fraction of the power available from the computers they're using anyway.
If you can get two or three people to a computer, that's £300-£600 that's been saved, even taking into consideration having to buy extra video cards and input devices.
Color specs are not a pointless thing when you're developing a display manager, which could potentially be used for color critical work.
In some environments (photo editing, movie making, etc.) knowing that what you see on the screen is exactly what you'll get in the finished article is essential to the quality of your work.
Ahhh, because Windows' display manager is truly amazing.
Now, let me just open an application on another machine, and show it on this one's X server... hmmm... what's that - I need to be running Windows 2008 Server, and have a terminal server license?
How about running multiple display managers, so that I can have more then one person using the machine with seperate monitors and input... no. Thought not.
I could go on, but I think you'll get the point.
To easy - the proxies inserting ads could just recalculate the has, and insert their own headers instead.
Holy crap... is this a moment where someone on
So if I had an ad-funded website (unlikely in the current climate, but stick with me) Phorm would be screwing me out of the money I'd make for those ads, but replacing them with there own.
Something tells me that if I did the same thing with a billboard - charging customers for me to go out and paste their adverts over the top of paid for adverts at night - Clear Channel would quite quickly be attempting to sue me.
That ones easy - just add this to your user stylesheet:
ul#commentListing { display: none; }
I'm going to call bull on that... either that, or you're doing XUL based protein folding.
My laptop has 2 gig, and Firefox has never got anywhere near eating that.
Woah there. Can I suggest you take a step away from your computer, and maybe even go outside and get some fresh air.
If you're reacting that extremely to someone not realising secure http doesn't pass a referer header I dread to think what you might do to somebody with real problems.
It's got a lot better since the RCs started to come out, but with the early betas it almost seemed easier to crash then go all the way up to that close button!
The thing that I've found in the past is that it's far easier to develop for Firefox first, and then make the changes required for Internet Explorer.
Going that way, it takes about a day to get things working right in IE once things are working. Going the other way you could easily drop a week, bouncing back and forth between the two browsers.
Firebug came first - I remember when the IE development toolbar was released, I took a brief look, and went back to using tools that work.
The only time I start IE is when I'm testing a site works in it, and even that has dropped off since I started working for a company that requires (your choice of) working web browser to access web applications.
How can you possibly say IE is easier to develop for then Firefox?
Either way it's HTML and CSS, it's just that one of them has a renderer that actually works, and the other is broken in a multitude of ways.
And that's not even getting started on things like Firebug, which makes it far easier to develop on Firefox then with IE's "something broke, I'm not going to tell you where" model of error reporting for Javascript.
What? When was the last time you heard of Microsoft providing support for IE?
Lets take the classic example of transparent PNGs, which took years to get fixed. And that's something that thousands of developers have been screaming for - I dread to think what would result if you called up Microsoft and said "I have a really specific problem, can you fix it?"
If you want support for Firefox there are forums, IRC channels, and a publicly viewable bug tracker. I'd imagine that if you waved enough money at them the Mozilla Foundation would be quite happy to get a problem you have fixed pretty damn quick as well.
This may sound like an odd choice, but I think one of the best story-entwined games I've seen recently has been Call of Duty 4.
Sure, there wasn't a lot of storyline going on beyond "there's a bad guy trying to take over this country... sort him out", but since it was largely following two infantry grunts, that's ok by me. You're average Marine probably doesn't get much more information then you got in the game. "Go here, protect this tank until it can be fixed". "You're helicopter just got shot down." etc.
Maybe we need to stop making games that ask you to save the world single handed, and start to look much more deeply at the situation that you as a player are dealing with right now.
The other thing I'd like to see is less pre-written dialogue for your character. My favourite games are the ones where I'm not forced to sit around while my character says a load of crap I'd never even consider saying in that situation. Let me develop my character, rather then filling in all the blanks for me.
I have high hopes for Fallout 3, although at the same time I'm worried it's going to be another game where I can do whatever I want, so long as I don't care about it making no difference to the world.
It takes a fraction of the time needed to make a site that was built in Firefox to work in IE compared to making a site built in IE work with any real web browser.
In most cases I can build the site using Firefox, knowing that'll it'll be 99% the same in Safari, Opera, and whatever other browsers you can think of. Then I just need an IE specific stylesheet (that'll be full of nasty hacks) to make everything look right in IE as well.
And that's not taking into account the extensions that make life so much more pleasant. Firebug alone must have saved me several days of tracing bugs this year.
Depends which segment of internet users you're looking at.
Certainly the w3schools is probably wildly off for the majority of internet users, since the people visiting the site are probably involved in web design or development, and are far more likely to be using a different web browser.
Windows XP is now only available for UMPCs, and other low-spec machines that can't run Vista.
Presumably Microsoft's idea of a low-spec machine is something with 80GB of hard disk space, which is why they won't sell it to go on machines with more.
And who decides if the network is congested?
You replay the binary logs of any transactions that were run since the last backup.
I'm not saying it's not a big problem because it's a game - I play lots myself, and understand the frustration when things break. I'm saying it's not a big problem because whether your tracking forum posts, medical records, or game players, when it gets to the database and hardware level, it's all the same thing.
These are solved problems. The headline may as well be "sysadmins adminster systems for Sony". The only reason this is getting any coverage is because they mentioned MMOs at some point.