My top demotivator for the change is the inherent weird feel of using PostgreSQL. Call me flamebait, but the problem is that it is just not MySQL.
My top demotivator for the change is the inherent weird feel of using Linux. Call me flamebait, but the problem is that it is just not Windows.
No, the "problem" (if you can call it that) is people that are simply comfortable using what they've always been using. Making a switch to a new technology will require considerable effort and in the case of these two products a substantial learning curve. Is PostgreSQL sufficiently "better" than MySQL? For some, sure... for others it probably isn't enough better to make the effort worthwhile.
Adequate horsepower has been here for a long time, at least for basic communications such as email. A grasp of the importance of privacy (and the relevance of encryption to that end) is what is lacking. Besides, if public awareness were such that the technology were in demand, you'd see motherboards with hardware encryption and drivers already in place. Perhaps, if privacy intrusions such as identity theft (and governmental abuse) continue to increase in frequency and severity, encryption-by-default will be something that Joe Average insists is in his shiny new Best Buy box. Of course, that view would be decidedly unpopular with law enforcement, but at this point in time, I consider law enforcement to be nearly as big a threat as your average phisher. I don't have anything to hide... but frankly, they have no need to know even that much about me. NOTGDB.
But when the US government does something, almost nobody says a word.
Uh... what?
I don't know where you live and I don't care, but wherever it is you apparently don't get out much. As of right now, from where I sit, it appears that a lot of people are looking at the U.S. as being just as evil as China. And people are saying a lot of words. So I don't know where you get off with the idea that the world is slamming China's leaders and giving ours a free pass. That's ridiculous.
Most American citizens that "bash China's government" have good reason to do so... your nation's stance towards the United States, both militarily and economically (as if the two can ever be treated in isolation) is most certainly not that of an ally. Or for that matter, a trading partner. A lot of damage is being done to the United States' economy and its people as a direct result of China's governmental policies, and undue influence upon our government. Don't expect us to ignore that. Does that make use "anti-Chinese"? No, not particularly... at least not those of us that are willing to make a distinction between a race of people, and a form of government. But it does mean we don't care for the way your country is run. Not that I'm enamoured of where my government is going at the moment, mainly because it's starting to take on some of the worst attributes of yours.
I think that's about the most well-reasoned comment we're going to see on this subject. This 46-year-old ex-game-programmer couldn't have put it better himself. Might as well just close this story out and move on to the next one.
Besides, any person who is turned into a murderer by a video game obviously had more than a few screws loose before picking up that joystick. Lay off blaming the video games and treat his major malfunction. The rest of this anti-video-game-violence crusade is just politics and knee-jerk overreactions by people who really ought to know better.
I liken it to the cartoons I used to watch back in the sixties... violent as hell and very entertaining. Certainly they stack up well when compared to their modern counterparts which have been completely neutered, all in the name of "saving the children". I watched them all back then: Saturday mornings I was glued to the TV set. The more violent the better. And I haven't killed anyone lately, hell, I don't even own a gun. But then again, I never had much of problem distinguishing reality from fantasy either. Anyone that does ought to get help. Taking away his video games won't make him any more sane.
The unfortunate truth is that preventing our children from ever seeing anything violent, from ever seeing violence glorified in any way, would require a major overhaul of our society and our legal system. It's out there, it will always be out there, the world is a fundamentally nasty place. Placing the onus on video games (or movies, or rap, or any other source) is to deny responsibility for our offspring, for our own actions.
Maybe we should worry more about "saving the parents". If we could save them, most of these problems would just go away.
Depends. If you're talking about a game shipped for the PC or Mac, that can be true because updates are easy to deliver. If you screw up, simply make the user download a patch. Valve's Steam is the best example of this... the damn thing updates your games automatically in the background. However, for cartridge or console-based products, it's an entirely different story. You don't get a chance to fix a problem after it has been released, so the QC requirements for products on those platforms are significantly stricter, because they have to be. That may begin to change once the Internet significantly invades the console market, and when writable media become popular: games can update themselves.
But you're right... the pressure to market can certainly shorten development cycles to the point where a game sucks. That applies to any software or engineering effort, of course, but it tends to be very obvious in the case of video games.
{sigh} sometimes Slashdotters just don't grasp subleties like irony. Or maybe they do, and would rather be rude anyway. In any event, I was trying to make a JOKE, son, and maybe a point as well. I'm probably as aware as you are of the problems with the music industry: I figured it out back in 1979 and haven't bought anything from those little bloodsuckers since. Not that I didn't buy plenty of albums and Compact Discs... I just refused to buy them new. Let someone else pay the RIAA tax.
Actually, the reason most games (movies, CDs) are bad is because once a medium goes mainstream (with big money behind it) a degree of risk-averseness sets in. That is, once something makes money, milk it for all it's worth because trying some thing new might lose money instead. There's plenty of creativity available... the problem is getting that creativity past the money people. The motion picture industry is a prime example of the long-term dangers of that kind of thinking: eventually the buying public gets bored with your retreads. When that happens, they stop shelling out hard-earned dollars for something they've already seen a dozen times before. However the movie studios, judging from several recent public statements, appear to be waking up to this: I'm not sure the music outfits have the wit to figure it out for themselves. But that's okay... the market with figure it out for them.
Sony damaged themselves the very instant when they decided to become a media company. They've never recovered from that, and I doubt they ever will. They've been infected by SES (Studio Executive Syndrome), a degenerative, wasting disease that is invariably fatal.
The problem is less that a given browser won't display rare font/layout X properly but that some hosts use proprietary programming techniques for their website.
The real problem is that such hosts don't see anything wrong with that.
That's not really fair to Peter Norton. The original Norton Utilities were a pretty decent package. I used them for years to help maintain a big Wildcat! BBS. Symantec eventually bought him out, but kept the Norton Utilities name for marketing purposes since it was about the best-known product of its kind at the time.
They don't do that anymore because the United States (and other industrialized nations) made indentured servitude illegal, not because of some evolution in the moral fiber of corporate leadership. Look at situations where a single large corporation provides the only employment for a town: when given that level of control there tend to be abuses. In America's case, when corporations managed to subvert the tariff system to the point where outsourcing of finished goods became profitable, yes, they had no problem with using other nations' slave labor, or something very close to that. In other words, nothing really has changed other than the level of corporate influence in government.
Just pick up a 35 watt inverter at Best Buy for $20 and jack it into your cigarette lighter, I mean, auxiliary power outlet. In addition to running/charging the laptop, you can use it to run your electric razor on days when you're running late for work and need to shave in the car.
I've spent the better part of twenty-five years in and out of manufacturing plants around the country, developing and installing industrial data acquisition and control systems. I've had run-ins with unions on more than one occasion, generally having nothing to do with what I was trying to accomplish other than that it "wasn't the way we do things around here." This is what happens when overempowered employees decide that they get to decide how a company operates. I once had a 7-foot NEMA-12 air-conditioned enclosure with some thousands of dollars of computer and interface hardware inside impaled by a pair of forklift tines. Nobody knew anything about it, of course... the report I got on the phone was, "your compouter ain't workin' right." Sure... when you jam a pair of forklift tines front-to-back through your 19" rackmount CPU it don't work right. This was a stamping plant for one of the Big Three, as it happens. And I agree with the original poster: the laziness and general inefficiency I've seen at major union shops was absolutely appalling. Granted, that's not true of all unions but it certainly seems to apply to the big ones.
Another aspect to this that I haven't seen mentioned yet is the origin of the labor union. A century and a half ago, there were no labor laws, no workers' rights, no OSHA, no government busybodies of any kind doing anything for the worker. Working children 'til they dropped (or died) was perfectly acceptable. In that environment it would have been surprising if the workers hadn't banded together to form a mutual defense. But times change, and whether unions are still deserving of the power they currently wield is a question that needs to be answered.
Actually, during the fifties "atomic power" sound cool and nobody was afraid of it. We even had the old AEC, the Atomic Energy Commission. Then it became the "Nuclear Regulatory Commissions", right off the bat a more negative-sounding term, and people began to fear the word "nuclear", and the companion trigger word "radiation". You know... kinda like Dr. Pavlov and his dogs. *ding* "NO NUKES! NO NUKES!" Granted most of those people didn't have the slightest idea exactly what it was that they were afraid of, still don't in fact, but they were afraid nevertheless. Thank the media and public ignorance for that. You can thank them for getting saccharin pulled off the market (another bit of mass hysteria) and dozens of other anti-science, anti-technology crusades over the past thirty years that have done nothing but hurt us.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah yeah, I know. It was a long day at work.
Well, presumably he already has a pair of eyeballs.
My top demotivator for the change is the inherent weird feel of using PostgreSQL. Call me flamebait, but the problem is that it is just not MySQL.
... for others it probably isn't enough better to make the effort worthwhile.
My top demotivator for the change is the inherent weird feel of using Linux. Call me flamebait, but the problem is that it is just not Windows.
No, the "problem" (if you can call it that) is people that are simply comfortable using what they've always been using. Making a switch to a new technology will require considerable effort and in the case of these two products a substantial learning curve. Is PostgreSQL sufficiently "better" than MySQL? For some, sure
Bill Could Restrict Freedom of the Press
Who is this "Bill" guy, and why is he in a position to affect our rights?
Adequate horsepower has been here for a long time, at least for basic communications such as email. A grasp of the importance of privacy (and the relevance of encryption to that end) is what is lacking. Besides, if public awareness were such that the technology were in demand, you'd see motherboards with hardware encryption and drivers already in place. Perhaps, if privacy intrusions such as identity theft (and governmental abuse) continue to increase in frequency and severity, encryption-by-default will be something that Joe Average insists is in his shiny new Best Buy box. Of course, that view would be decidedly unpopular with law enforcement, but at this point in time, I consider law enforcement to be nearly as big a threat as your average phisher. I don't have anything to hide ... but frankly, they have no need to know even that much about me. NOTGDB.
But when the US government does something, almost nobody says a word.
... what?
... your nation's stance towards the United States, both militarily and economically (as if the two can ever be treated in isolation) is most certainly not that of an ally. Or for that matter, a trading partner. A lot of damage is being done to the United States' economy and its people as a direct result of China's governmental policies, and undue influence upon our government. Don't expect us to ignore that. Does that make use "anti-Chinese"? No, not particularly... at least not those of us that are willing to make a distinction between a race of people, and a form of government. But it does mean we don't care for the way your country is run. Not that I'm enamoured of where my government is going at the moment, mainly because it's starting to take on some of the worst attributes of yours.
Uh
I don't know where you live and I don't care, but wherever it is you apparently don't get out much. As of right now, from where I sit, it appears that a lot of people are looking at the U.S. as being just as evil as China. And people are saying a lot of words. So I don't know where you get off with the idea that the world is slamming China's leaders and giving ours a free pass. That's ridiculous.
Most American citizens that "bash China's government" have good reason to do so
Defending Against Harmful Nanotech and Biotech
A teflon-coated, hermetically-sealed man-sized beryllium-alloy tank ought to do it.
Unless your nanites have a taste for such things.
I think that's about the most well-reasoned comment we're going to see on this subject. This 46-year-old ex-game-programmer couldn't have put it better himself. Might as well just close this story out and move on to the next one.
... violent as hell and very entertaining. Certainly they stack up well when compared to their modern counterparts which have been completely neutered, all in the name of "saving the children". I watched them all back then: Saturday mornings I was glued to the TV set. The more violent the better. And I haven't killed anyone lately, hell, I don't even own a gun. But then again, I never had much of problem distinguishing reality from fantasy either. Anyone that does ought to get help. Taking away his video games won't make him any more sane.
Besides, any person who is turned into a murderer by a video game obviously had more than a few screws loose before picking up that joystick. Lay off blaming the video games and treat his major malfunction. The rest of this anti-video-game-violence crusade is just politics and knee-jerk overreactions by people who really ought to know better.
I liken it to the cartoons I used to watch back in the sixties
The unfortunate truth is that preventing our children from ever seeing anything violent, from ever seeing violence glorified in any way, would require a major overhaul of our society and our legal system. It's out there, it will always be out there, the world is a fundamentally nasty place. Placing the onus on video games (or movies, or rap, or any other source) is to deny responsibility for our offspring, for our own actions.
Maybe we should worry more about "saving the parents". If we could save them, most of these problems would just go away.
What constitutes terrorism is relative to that which you are afraid.
Depends. If you're talking about a game shipped for the PC or Mac, that can be true because updates are easy to deliver. If you screw up, simply make the user download a patch. Valve's Steam is the best example of this ... the damn thing updates your games automatically in the background. However, for cartridge or console-based products, it's an entirely different story. You don't get a chance to fix a problem after it has been released, so the QC requirements for products on those platforms are significantly stricter, because they have to be. That may begin to change once the Internet significantly invades the console market, and when writable media become popular: games can update themselves.
... the pressure to market can certainly shorten development cycles to the point where a game sucks. That applies to any software or engineering effort, of course, but it tends to be very obvious in the case of video games.
But you're right
{sigh} sometimes Slashdotters just don't grasp subleties like irony. Or maybe they do, and would rather be rude anyway. In any event, I was trying to make a JOKE, son, and maybe a point as well. I'm probably as aware as you are of the problems with the music industry: I figured it out back in 1979 and haven't bought anything from those little bloodsuckers since. Not that I didn't buy plenty of albums and Compact Discs ... I just refused to buy them new. Let someone else pay the RIAA tax.
Actually, the reason most games (movies, CDs) are bad is because once a medium goes mainstream (with big money behind it) a degree of risk-averseness sets in. That is, once something makes money, milk it for all it's worth because trying some thing new might lose money instead. There's plenty of creativity available ... the problem is getting that creativity past the money people. The motion picture industry is a prime example of the long-term dangers of that kind of thinking: eventually the buying public gets bored with your retreads. When that happens, they stop shelling out hard-earned dollars for something they've already seen a dozen times before. However the movie studios, judging from several recent public statements, appear to be waking up to this: I'm not sure the music outfits have the wit to figure it out for themselves. But that's okay ... the market with figure it out for them.
Yeah ... I'd like to have a computer like that one in my basement. For that matter, I'd settle for the "mobile speaker".
Sony damaged themselves the very instant when they decided to become a media company. They've never recovered from that, and I doubt they ever will. They've been infected by SES (Studio Executive Syndrome), a degenerative, wasting disease that is invariably fatal.
What Would Be Your Ideal Futuristic Home?
Enterprise-D
The problem is less that a given browser won't display rare font/layout X properly but that some hosts use proprietary programming techniques for their website.
The real problem is that such hosts don't see anything wrong with that.
Nah ... it was some guy named Leary.
That's not really fair to Peter Norton. The original Norton Utilities were a pretty decent package. I used them for years to help maintain a big Wildcat! BBS. Symantec eventually bought him out, but kept the Norton Utilities name for marketing purposes since it was about the best-known product of its kind at the time.
They don't do that anymore because the United States (and other industrialized nations) made indentured servitude illegal, not because of some evolution in the moral fiber of corporate leadership. Look at situations where a single large corporation provides the only employment for a town: when given that level of control there tend to be abuses. In America's case, when corporations managed to subvert the tariff system to the point where outsourcing of finished goods became profitable, yes, they had no problem with using other nations' slave labor, or something very close to that. In other words, nothing really has changed other than the level of corporate influence in government.
Just pick up a 35 watt inverter at Best Buy for $20 and jack it into your cigarette lighter, I mean, auxiliary power outlet. In addition to running/charging the laptop, you can use it to run your electric razor on days when you're running late for work and need to shave in the car.
I've spent the better part of twenty-five years in and out of manufacturing plants around the country, developing and installing industrial data acquisition and control systems. I've had run-ins with unions on more than one occasion, generally having nothing to do with what I was trying to accomplish other than that it "wasn't the way we do things around here." This is what happens when overempowered employees decide that they get to decide how a company operates. I once had a 7-foot NEMA-12 air-conditioned enclosure with some thousands of dollars of computer and interface hardware inside impaled by a pair of forklift tines. Nobody knew anything about it, of course ... the report I got on the phone was, "your compouter ain't workin' right." Sure ... when you jam a pair of forklift tines front-to-back through your 19" rackmount CPU it don't work right. This was a stamping plant for one of the Big Three, as it happens. And I agree with the original poster: the laziness and general inefficiency I've seen at major union shops was absolutely appalling. Granted, that's not true of all unions but it certainly seems to apply to the big ones.
Another aspect to this that I haven't seen mentioned yet is the origin of the labor union. A century and a half ago, there were no labor laws, no workers' rights, no OSHA, no government busybodies of any kind doing anything for the worker. Working children 'til they dropped (or died) was perfectly acceptable. In that environment it would have been surprising if the workers hadn't banded together to form a mutual defense. But times change, and whether unions are still deserving of the power they currently wield is a question that needs to be answered.
How on Earth did you get modded +5 Funny?
you just described the plotline of iD's original Doom.
Actually, during the fifties "atomic power" sound cool and nobody was afraid of it. We even had the old AEC, the Atomic Energy Commission. Then it became the "Nuclear Regulatory Commissions", right off the bat a more negative-sounding term, and people began to fear the word "nuclear", and the companion trigger word "radiation". You know ... kinda like Dr. Pavlov and his dogs. *ding* "NO NUKES! NO NUKES!" Granted most of those people didn't have the slightest idea exactly what it was that they were afraid of, still don't in fact, but they were afraid nevertheless. Thank the media and public ignorance for that. You can thank them for getting saccharin pulled off the market (another bit of mass hysteria) and dozens of other anti-science, anti-technology crusades over the past thirty years that have done nothing but hurt us.
... the Slashdot crowd would never get another v14gr4 ad again! (since they have no use for it) :-)
... but how much do you want to bet that those "pen!s enlargement" ads slip right on in?
Yeah