That's silly. Let's say you're going to get one console and the top twenty games for it. For the 360, the game 20 has a score of 90 (Bayonetta). For the PS3, game 20 has a score of 89 (WipEout HD Fury). For the Wii, game 20 has a score of 86 (Punch-Out!!). You're making a big deal out of literally a few points in a 100 point scale, even though each console has a largely different set of reviewers, judging the games by different standards.
What's more important is variety. Are you really going to get both Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2? If you look at the 26 Xbox 360 games with 90+ ratings, about 10 of them are first-person shooters. Do you need that many shooters? In fact, if you pare down your 90+ list for each system by eliminating games that play similarly, you'll shorten the 360 and PS3 lists severely.
Speaking of paring down, the 9 games scoring 90+ on the Wii include both Metroid Prime 3 and Metroid Prime Trilogy. Trilogy includes corruption, so subtract 1 from the Wii's count. Oh but Trilogy is a pack of three 90+ games, sold for the price of 1, so add back 2.
Now with that correction, the Wii has 10 games with 90+ ratings. And that points out the problem of lasting value, totally unaccounted for by your metric. Game scores generally measure how good a game is while you're playing it, but completely ignore how long you'll be playing. There's no real difference between two games with a score of 90 where you'll play each for 10 hours and one game with a score of 90 that you'll play for 20 hours. Well, except the individual game has twice the value for what you pay yet counts half as much by your metric.
And that's the problem. What you're doing is similar to taking a bunch of objects, measuring their density, and summing the quantities. The result is meaningless. It will go up if you simply cut something in half. What you want to do is measure the mass, the actual entertainment value.
That's not an objective fact. It's a matter of how you frame it, and libertarians frame it badly. Beware of reification, where abstract concepts such as liberty are treated as concrete objects. It just gets you too caught up in your own point of view to reject ideas that don't make sense, because your reified concept seems so real and objective to you.
Libertarians always seem to reify liberty as a physical possession of theirs that is harmed or taken whenever government does something to them that they don't want, but not when anybody else or anything else does it. So they are more concerned with protecting the abstract concept of an individual's liberty rather than directly protecting the actual individual.
Libertarians need to realize that being mauled by a bear, getting killed by a criminal or disease, or dying of starvation all end your freedom just as much as being shot by thought police. Then they would see the need for a balanced approach to government that seeks to make us better off by broad, not narrow, criteria.
It still seems like a remarkably symmetrical and near perfect circular pattern, for something that would have non-symmetric forces (ie, gravity) acting on it. Weird.
Oh, so you subscribe to Nonsymmetric gravitational theory? I look forward to hearing your enlightened theories on advanced physics, professor!
Snarkiness aside, I must congratulate you for only saying it seems odd rather than insisting it can't be true because it defies your expectations like so many other people do. This is a great example of how our expectations can deceive us: objects in free fall behave the same way they'd behave in deep space, but since humans have virtually no experience with what free fall is like, their intuitions about it are wrong.
As you said, dual-head is standard on video cards. So when you buy a third-party video card, you get a dual-head card. Then you disable onboard video and use the new card exclusively. That's the more common setup. The only reason to keep onboard video is if you want three monitors, which is pretty rare.
Just like normal Slashdot, everybody here missed my point entirely...
What point? All you did is detail one uncommon configuration you tried that didn't work well, then you generalized by saying that the whole of Linux multi-monitor support doesn't work well. That's BS.
And you missed my point, which is that it does in fact work for most people. But you seem to think problems that affect you are serious and problems that don't affect you are minor, as evidenced by the following arrogant statement:
You most definitely haven't tried to setup a multiple display environment in any modern Linux...
Seriously, you think anyone that doesn't agree with you on this must just be inexperienced and not know what they're talking about? You don't seem to realize how rare your multi-card setup is. First of all, you can't make that setup on a laptop. Virtually all laptops these days (and even many old ones) are dual head and work out of the box. Have an external monitor plugged into your laptop? Then it will boot in clone mode. Open the display preferences and set mirror to off. Done. The problem scenario you're complaining about can't happen on laptops.
So the multi-card setup requires a desktop machine. Not only that, store-bought systems don't come that way. You have to open it up and install a new graphics card yourself. Do you have any idea how rare it is in the general computer-using population to open a computer at all? And those who install a video card are a subset of the population that opens their computer.
Even if we only count people that are going to use a multi-monitor setup, it's still rare to be using multiple graphics cards. If people want two monitors and their current card supports only one, they will remove the existing card (or disable onboard video) and get a dual head graphics card. The only reason not to do that is if you want three monitors. Do you really think there are more people using three monitors than two? Any way you work it, the problem configuration is a small minority and it's not fair to generalize and say that multi-monitor is trouble for anyone that wants to set it up.
What I did say is that it's no ways near as easy as with Windows. Don't believe me? Go Google "Dual monitor Ubuntu", and look at the replies to the forums... 46 PAGES of people with problems?
Confirmation bias. You can always find people on forums having problems. FYI, the thread I found has 63 pages with the last post on July 24, 2008. That's three releases behind the current version. The whole thread is outdated information. Many problems have been fixed. Most notably, it's now autoconfigured, there's a nice GUI and the drivers have matured. It's irrelevant how well obsolete versions performed. I used to have a multi-monitor setup with Windows 2000. Should I complain about its problems and portray Windows multi-monitor as inferior because of my experience? No, because my experience is obsolete and I recognize it. Why won't you do the same?
Multiple graphics cards? That's a very exotic multiple-display configuration these days now that dual-head graphics cards are the standard. So if you act like your experience with your exotic setup is typical, you can expect shocked reactions from the 99% of multi-display users currently using a single dual-head graphics card with no problems or setup difficulty.
The most common problem is having to use nvidia's setup tool instead of the standard 'display preferences' control panel because nvidia is taking forever to implement xrandr 1.3. But on the upside, they have their own (proprietary) solution to support hardware acceleration with a Xinerama setup (with similar cards).
In Linux though, unless you have a good package system and stick with strickly vanilla packages as offered by the Distro, you are screwed, blued and tattoo'd as soon as you step outside official repositories because of version specific library needs.
But just before that, you wrote:
Although Windows had DLL hell that could give people real headaches, it was fairly easy for the coders to simply change the directory where the app located specific DLL version to it's installation folder though few did.
Why is this solution acceptable for Windows but not Linux? I've seen it done plenty of times on both platforms. Do you just not know what you're talking about? Or are you biased? You are, after all, engaging in apologetics for an admitted fault of Windows when you won't allow the same defense for Linux.
Actually, I think there's a third, far more likely explanation aside from you being uninformed or biased against Linux. People judge potential tasks on a basis of reward to effort ratio. If it's high, the job is worth doing. If it's low, it's not worth doing. And when it's not worth doing, you only considered putting the blame on the effort side and not the reward side. Let's examine that.
When targeting a platform, effort refers to how much work it takes to get your application working on that platform, and the reward is how many users you gain, which is dictated by market share. Assuming the rough estimate of a Windows market share of around 90% and a Linux marketshare of 5%, then to say that the problem with the Linux platform is the ease of developing for it is to say that Linux's problem is that it's not 18 times easier to develop for than Windows. Because that's what it'd take to match the reward-effort ratios. This is an unreasonable demand.
The real problem is the other part of the equation: market share. If Linux had 90% market share instead of Windows, I bet you'd be downplaying the faults of Linux and blaming Windows's faults for lack of developer support. But it really is just a matter of market share, not the intrinsic merits of the competing platforms.
If however, I was looking at purchasing a car, and the license agreement said that I had to buy high priced tires, you can bet I wouldn't want to buy that car. If I did for whatever reason buy that car, I would be obligated to hold up my end of the license agreement.
Then you wouldn't buy any car. If that kind of arrangement were legal every car manufacturer would demand it.
Do you really not see the logical fallacy introduced by your analogy that was not invoked by the analogy in the grandparent post? I think you have some studying to do.
No, you do have authorization just using your password. Otherwise the thing I described wouldn't work. As long as you're an admin user the Add/Remove programs app (or the new Ubuntu Software Center in Karmic), the Update Manager, and the plugin finder (which is just a specialized instance of the add/remove app or Ubuntu Software Center) will all pop up a password prompt to gain root when they need it. No command line work needed.
I'm not going by word of mouth here. It's my primary OS.
Aside from entering your password, I'm not sure what extra steps you're referring to. It's all done through a GUI and in just a few clicks. No browser restart required either. When it's done it reloads the page automatically and you have your flash content.
I think what's there is better than what IE/Windows does, which last time I saw was just direct you to a webpage where you download an EXE-based setup program. Downloading and running an installer, and clicking through all of its dialogs as well sounds like more steps to me. I'm not sure what Safari/MacOS does.
It actually asks, when you view a site using flash, if you want to download and install flash. Click yes and it does so. That's more user-friendly than the other OSes.
That may be, but in my experience it's actually the nvidia binary blob that has trouble with fullscreen flash for some reason. The intel driver (even older versions) and nouveau do just fine.
You know, they support direct upgrading between LTS releases. That is, if you were on 6.06, you could have upgraded directly to 8.04 without the intermediate steps of 6.10, 7.04, and 7.10. And they'll be supporting a direct upgrade from 8.04 to 10.04.
I have yet to see a DVD player that doesn't pause when going between layers. Just a fault in the technology itself. I wouldn't be surprised if the PS3 still did this with the dual layer DVDs that you own.
You've had some bad luck, then. Only the earliest DVD players have that problem. Anything newer changes layers fast enough and buffers far enough ahead to avoid having to pause. Personally, I've never seen a DVD player that does have the pausing issue. I've only heard about it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's silly. Let's say you're going to get one console and the top twenty games for it. For the 360, the game 20 has a score of 90 (Bayonetta). For the PS3, game 20 has a score of 89 (WipEout HD Fury). For the Wii, game 20 has a score of 86 (Punch-Out!!). You're making a big deal out of literally a few points in a 100 point scale, even though each console has a largely different set of reviewers, judging the games by different standards.
What's more important is variety. Are you really going to get both Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2? If you look at the 26 Xbox 360 games with 90+ ratings, about 10 of them are first-person shooters. Do you need that many shooters? In fact, if you pare down your 90+ list for each system by eliminating games that play similarly, you'll shorten the 360 and PS3 lists severely.
Speaking of paring down, the 9 games scoring 90+ on the Wii include both Metroid Prime 3 and Metroid Prime Trilogy. Trilogy includes corruption, so subtract 1 from the Wii's count. Oh but Trilogy is a pack of three 90+ games, sold for the price of 1, so add back 2.
Now with that correction, the Wii has 10 games with 90+ ratings. And that points out the problem of lasting value, totally unaccounted for by your metric. Game scores generally measure how good a game is while you're playing it, but completely ignore how long you'll be playing. There's no real difference between two games with a score of 90 where you'll play each for 10 hours and one game with a score of 90 that you'll play for 20 hours. Well, except the individual game has twice the value for what you pay yet counts half as much by your metric.
And that's the problem. What you're doing is similar to taking a bunch of objects, measuring their density, and summing the quantities. The result is meaningless. It will go up if you simply cut something in half. What you want to do is measure the mass, the actual entertainment value.
Pretty sure femto refers to the radius in light years. At least, that's how I would defend it, if I had to.
Yep, 50 feet = 1.611*10^-15 lightyears = 1.611 femtolightyears!
My brain! The eyelids do nothing!
the general decline of personal liberty
That's not an objective fact. It's a matter of how you frame it, and libertarians frame it badly. Beware of reification, where abstract concepts such as liberty are treated as concrete objects. It just gets you too caught up in your own point of view to reject ideas that don't make sense, because your reified concept seems so real and objective to you.
Libertarians always seem to reify liberty as a physical possession of theirs that is harmed or taken whenever government does something to them that they don't want, but not when anybody else or anything else does it. So they are more concerned with protecting the abstract concept of an individual's liberty rather than directly protecting the actual individual.
Libertarians need to realize that being mauled by a bear, getting killed by a criminal or disease, or dying of starvation all end your freedom just as much as being shot by thought police. Then they would see the need for a balanced approach to government that seeks to make us better off by broad, not narrow, criteria.
It still seems like a remarkably symmetrical and near perfect circular pattern, for something that would have non-symmetric forces (ie, gravity) acting on it. Weird.
Oh, so you subscribe to Nonsymmetric gravitational theory? I look forward to hearing your enlightened theories on advanced physics, professor!
Snarkiness aside, I must congratulate you for only saying it seems odd rather than insisting it can't be true because it defies your expectations like so many other people do. This is a great example of how our expectations can deceive us: objects in free fall behave the same way they'd behave in deep space, but since humans have virtually no experience with what free fall is like, their intuitions about it are wrong.
As you said, dual-head is standard on video cards. So when you buy a third-party video card, you get a dual-head card. Then you disable onboard video and use the new card exclusively. That's the more common setup. The only reason to keep onboard video is if you want three monitors, which is pretty rare.
Just like normal Slashdot, everybody here missed my point entirely...
What point? All you did is detail one uncommon configuration you tried that didn't work well, then you generalized by saying that the whole of Linux multi-monitor support doesn't work well. That's BS.
And you missed my point, which is that it does in fact work for most people. But you seem to think problems that affect you are serious and problems that don't affect you are minor, as evidenced by the following arrogant statement:
You most definitely haven't tried to setup a multiple display environment in any modern Linux...
Seriously, you think anyone that doesn't agree with you on this must just be inexperienced and not know what they're talking about? You don't seem to realize how rare your multi-card setup is. First of all, you can't make that setup on a laptop. Virtually all laptops these days (and even many old ones) are dual head and work out of the box. Have an external monitor plugged into your laptop? Then it will boot in clone mode. Open the display preferences and set mirror to off. Done. The problem scenario you're complaining about can't happen on laptops.
So the multi-card setup requires a desktop machine. Not only that, store-bought systems don't come that way. You have to open it up and install a new graphics card yourself. Do you have any idea how rare it is in the general computer-using population to open a computer at all? And those who install a video card are a subset of the population that opens their computer.
Even if we only count people that are going to use a multi-monitor setup, it's still rare to be using multiple graphics cards. If people want two monitors and their current card supports only one, they will remove the existing card (or disable onboard video) and get a dual head graphics card. The only reason not to do that is if you want three monitors. Do you really think there are more people using three monitors than two? Any way you work it, the problem configuration is a small minority and it's not fair to generalize and say that multi-monitor is trouble for anyone that wants to set it up.
What I did say is that it's no ways near as easy as with Windows. Don't believe me? Go Google "Dual monitor Ubuntu", and look at the replies to the forums... 46 PAGES of people with problems?
Confirmation bias. You can always find people on forums having problems. FYI, the thread I found has 63 pages with the last post on July 24, 2008. That's three releases behind the current version. The whole thread is outdated information. Many problems have been fixed. Most notably, it's now autoconfigured, there's a nice GUI and the drivers have matured. It's irrelevant how well obsolete versions performed. I used to have a multi-monitor setup with Windows 2000. Should I complain about its problems and portray Windows multi-monitor as inferior because of my experience? No, because my experience is obsolete and I recognize it. Why won't you do the same?
Multiple graphics cards? That's a very exotic multiple-display configuration these days now that dual-head graphics cards are the standard. So if you act like your experience with your exotic setup is typical, you can expect shocked reactions from the 99% of multi-display users currently using a single dual-head graphics card with no problems or setup difficulty.
The most common problem is having to use nvidia's setup tool instead of the standard 'display preferences' control panel because nvidia is taking forever to implement xrandr 1.3. But on the upside, they have their own (proprietary) solution to support hardware acceleration with a Xinerama setup (with similar cards).
You wrote:
In Linux though, unless you have a good package system and stick with strickly vanilla packages as offered by the Distro, you are screwed, blued and tattoo'd as soon as you step outside official repositories because of version specific library needs.
But just before that, you wrote:
Although Windows had DLL hell that could give people real headaches, it was fairly easy for the coders to simply change the directory where the app located specific DLL version to it's installation folder though few did.
Why is this solution acceptable for Windows but not Linux? I've seen it done plenty of times on both platforms. Do you just not know what you're talking about? Or are you biased? You are, after all, engaging in apologetics for an admitted fault of Windows when you won't allow the same defense for Linux.
Actually, I think there's a third, far more likely explanation aside from you being uninformed or biased against Linux. People judge potential tasks on a basis of reward to effort ratio. If it's high, the job is worth doing. If it's low, it's not worth doing. And when it's not worth doing, you only considered putting the blame on the effort side and not the reward side. Let's examine that.
When targeting a platform, effort refers to how much work it takes to get your application working on that platform, and the reward is how many users you gain, which is dictated by market share. Assuming the rough estimate of a Windows market share of around 90% and a Linux marketshare of 5%, then to say that the problem with the Linux platform is the ease of developing for it is to say that Linux's problem is that it's not 18 times easier to develop for than Windows. Because that's what it'd take to match the reward-effort ratios. This is an unreasonable demand.
The real problem is the other part of the equation: market share. If Linux had 90% market share instead of Windows, I bet you'd be downplaying the faults of Linux and blaming Windows's faults for lack of developer support. But it really is just a matter of market share, not the intrinsic merits of the competing platforms.
If however, I was looking at purchasing a car, and the license agreement said that I had to buy high priced tires, you can bet I wouldn't want to buy that car. If I did for whatever reason buy that car, I would be obligated to hold up my end of the license agreement.
Then you wouldn't buy any car. If that kind of arrangement were legal every car manufacturer would demand it.
Quick, somebody call Phoenix Wright!
It implies rickrolling isn't malicious.
WTF are you doing that you somehow need a new layer to crop? Is it some unintuitive habit you picked up from Photoshop?
It always amazes me that people will think they're contesting a point when they're actually backing it up with more evidence...
Do you really not see the logical fallacy introduced by your analogy that was not invoked by the analogy in the grandparent post? I think you have some studying to do.
Saved your life!
See, I was going to kill you but I didn't, so I saved your life.
That's why we have judges.
No, you do have authorization just using your password. Otherwise the thing I described wouldn't work. As long as you're an admin user the Add/Remove programs app (or the new Ubuntu Software Center in Karmic), the Update Manager, and the plugin finder (which is just a specialized instance of the add/remove app or Ubuntu Software Center) will all pop up a password prompt to gain root when they need it. No command line work needed.
I'm not going by word of mouth here. It's my primary OS.
Aside from entering your password, I'm not sure what extra steps you're referring to. It's all done through a GUI and in just a few clicks. No browser restart required either. When it's done it reloads the page automatically and you have your flash content.
I think what's there is better than what IE/Windows does, which last time I saw was just direct you to a webpage where you download an EXE-based setup program. Downloading and running an installer, and clicking through all of its dialogs as well sounds like more steps to me. I'm not sure what Safari/MacOS does.
It actually asks, when you view a site using flash, if you want to download and install flash. Click yes and it does so. That's more user-friendly than the other OSes.
That may be, but in my experience it's actually the nvidia binary blob that has trouble with fullscreen flash for some reason. The intel driver (even older versions) and nouveau do just fine.
You know, they support direct upgrading between LTS releases. That is, if you were on 6.06, you could have upgraded directly to 8.04 without the intermediate steps of 6.10, 7.04, and 7.10. And they'll be supporting a direct upgrade from 8.04 to 10.04.
I have yet to see a DVD player that doesn't pause when going between layers. Just a fault in the technology itself. I wouldn't be surprised if the PS3 still did this with the dual layer DVDs that you own.
You've had some bad luck, then. Only the earliest DVD players have that problem. Anything newer changes layers fast enough and buffers far enough ahead to avoid having to pause. Personally, I've never seen a DVD player that does have the pausing issue. I've only heard about it.
Dogs eat YOU!
And that's even more effective!
I wonder if Honda or Nissan will now go for a Wii controller?
Accelerometer-based controls for a moving vehicle? I don't see why not!
And the EU is free to subtract as many browsers as it likes from the list.
[Citation Needed]