Ahh, but you're still wrong, because water is not a plural noun. Regardless of its composition, it's still incorrect to say fewer water.
On the other hand, molecules is a plural noun representing individually countable things. So it would be correct to say fewer H2O molecules, and incorrect to say less H2O molecules.
You mean fewer, not less, because people are individually countable discrete units. Only use less when you're talking about something that is not composed of discrete countable units, as in less water.
The problem is that I suspect the school in questions gets special pricing on each copy of Windows by virtue of the fact that they buy it as part of a discount bundle with Office. They may not want to switch to a free (as in beer) office suite if that means they lose the discounted price on Windows.
Unfortunately, this means suggesting not only a switch from MS office, but a switch away from Windows at the same time, which make the sell twice as difficult.
Posted by Cliff on Friday April 22, @10:30AM from the we'll-publish-any-fucking-question-from-any-retard -we-can-find dept.
Fucktard asks: "I've been rooting around on the net lately checking out all the latest and greatest in new PC parts, plotting out the design for my next "Ask Slashdot" post. I'm finding lots of neat stuff, but I'm a whiner and I want something twenty times more technically sophisticated than anything that has ever been made by mankind. Therefore, I want to Ask Slashdot: WTF n00b? Why can't I have, like, anything I want?"
"I don't know how practical this is, because I'm a retarded jackass, BUT I'm looking for a car that can go 20,000 MPH and gets 800 miles to the gallon. I'd also like it to talk to me like that car from Night Rider, because I'm too socially inept to deal with real people. Oh, and while we're at it, could I get some of those awesome free-spinning chrome rims so that everyone will know how l33t I am? I also am looking to drag race the fucker through residential areas and risk hitting small children."
"This is only a test case. Had it been a real Ask Slashdot, the question would have been even more asinine. I'd like to know if there is some way someone could please track me down and kick my ass, even if it is ridiculously expensive.. (yes, this might fall into the 'more-money-than-brains' dept.)
I'd just like to poke the hornet's nest to see how it'd work."
Actually, the real problem is the fact that if some rich company brings a lawsuit against you or your small business using a patent that never should have been granted, YOU get to go broke trying to defend yourself against it. Even if you win the case, you'll go bankrupt, which makes fighting the case pointless.
The entire civil judicial system in this country needs to be changed to loser-pays-all format so that defendants vindicated in the courtroom don't still lose in reality. Lawsuits are used way too often in this country as a form of threat or financial filibuster tactic rather than as a legitimate way of enforcing true accountability for actual wrongdoing.
Anyway, THAT's the real solution to the patent mess, and to the frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits, and to every other major civil legal issue our country is facing.
Well, the animation would have been a good one if I hadn't been constantly distracted by the idiot narrator mispronouncing "patent" as "paytent", "Linux" as "Line-iks", and "GNU" as "G.N.U".
The closest thing I've seen to what the poster is looking for are power bricks (like the VoodooPower) for guitar pedalboards. But that kind of thing generally only works because the devices are all relatively low-current devices and they all share the same voltage (9 volt) rating.
Personally, I'd be happy if some manufacturer would just start making power strips with 20 outlets all spaced far enough apart from each other that you can plug all your AC-DC bricks into it without them bumping into each other or covering nearby outlets. There's got to be demand for such a thing, so why hasn't any manufacturer made one?
If they spent half as much time making OpenBSD user-friendly as they spent writing stupid geek songs no one cares about, they might actually produce something usable by ordinary people.
Or alternately, features they would like to see in a 'bookmark manager'?
I'd like to see a feature that will automatically consult an automatic database (similar to CDDB) to get "kosherized" titles for web sites that I bookmark.
For instance, instead of bookmarking, "Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matter", it should just add "Slashdot" to my bookmarks. And instead of bookmarking, "MSNBC - Today's News from MSNBC Front Page", it should just bookmark it as "MSNBC".
Even more annoying are site titles containing promotional garbage such as, "GEICO Car Insurance. Get an auto insurance quote and save today. Free online motorcycle quotes as well." What fucknut (other than some marketing schmuck at GEICO) wants THAT whole text to appear as a bookmark?
I get really sick of having to hand-edit all the site titles to be sane and utilitarian. Someone should harness the collective power of the net to solve this.
Complaining to management never does any good. Businesses don't care how pissed off customers are as long as they keep making money off people.
The only way to truly make a business pay attention to anything is to stop shopping there and to do everything in your power to get other people to stop shopping there, too. When their bottom line finally starts suffering, then they'll finally pay attention.
Even filing complaints with the Better Business Bureau does little good these days, as most businesses know that most consumers don't even look them up in the BBB listings.
A metric assload? Is that really a standardly defined unit of measurement? Is there an official reference assload kept underground in some secured facility that the rest of the world uses to ensure the accuracy of their metric assloads?
Or maybe an atomic assload is the ideal path to perfectly defining the metric assload?
I was playing Mario, Zelda, and Sonic music on the piano back in 1995. Played them at the piano store in the mall and in the drama room at high school during lunch breaks. I guess I should have just kept doing it until the Internet reached critical mass...
Unfortunately I believe those games were DOS-based and needed direct hardware access to specifically-supported sound cards and video cards, and used hardware DMA for the audio subsystem. Trying to run one under XP would probably result in an explosion of some kind.
Wish there were some good pinball games like that which would work under Windows XP.
A friend of mine had a portable CD player that he hooked through his home stereo with a Y-cable. He put the CD player on top of the amplifier when in use. Guess what happened? The heat from the ventilation slots on the amplifier ultimately killed the accuracy of the CD player such that it wouldn't track anymore.
My parents bought a cheap DVD player and set it on top of their TV. They don't have a home theater or stereo system, so they just use the speakers built into the TV. Plus, my dad is losing his hearing so he always has to jack the sound way up on movie to hear the dialog. Guess what? The DVD player now doesn't track right, probably due to all the vibrations being constantly sent through it by the speakers inside the TV set.
Laptop optical drives (and hard drives and screens and everything else) die frequently because people jostle their laptops around and mistreat them, so no surprise there. But if you're having as many optical drive tracking-related failures as you claim to be having, then your drives are probably getting damaged through thematic mistreatment. Make sure your drives aren't sitting on any surface that eminates heat or is carrying vibrations.
BTW, the reason heat kills tracking of optical drives is that 99% of optical drives are built with a standard type of laser-tracking mechanism. The laser head rides along a metal rod/rail on one side, and then a parallel worm gear drives the head movement on the other side. With this approach, it's crucial that the metal rod/rail and the sleeve that rides on it have a low-friction relationship so they don't catch when the worm gear on the other side is trying to slide the head around. It's also crucial that the worm gear itself have a low-friction relationship with the threaded sleeve that rides along it so that it won't catch or bump as it does its work. It's typical for manufacturers to put some special lubricant on both the worm gear and the slider rod to reduce friction -- and it turns out to be essential for the whole thing to work. If you continually expose the device to heat, or to extremely dry conditions, the lubricant dries up and then the device won't track properly anymore. I've fixed several CD/CD-ROM drives that weren't tracking right by simply opening them up and applying a safe-for-plastics (silicone-based) lubricant to the worm gear and rail/rod with a Q-tip, and then working it in evenly by putting in a full audio CD and skipping from track to track to cause the head to move along the full range back and forth a few times.
The question is unclear. The game that defines a genre is typically never the epitome of the genre. For instance, Wolfenstein 3D clearly defined the FPS genre as we know it today, but I would certainly pick a more modern and advanced FPS as the epitome of the genre.
Similarly, Super Mario Brothers on the NES clearly defined the side-scrolling platformer, but I think I would have to call it a 3-way tie among Sonic the Hedgehog 1, Super Metroid, and Super Mario World for epitome of the genre.
Personally, I always loved a well-done video pinball game. My second favorite was the Epic Pinball series for the PC. My favorite was some series that was originally done on Amiga and then ported to PC... I think it was called Pinball Madness or Pinball Chaos or something. Anyway, it was just a hair better than Epic Pinball IMHO.
Skate or Die and 720 tie for defining the skateboarding genre, but I think the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games take the cake for best representing the genre.
In my opinion, what made Douglas Adams' H2G2 books special was their combination of light-hearted wacky humor with a quite serious undercurrent of bitter socio-philosophical commentary.
The movie trailers look as if they capture the light-hearted wacky humor, but my big concern is that the movie will fail to capture and blend in Adams' commentary on society. And as others have pointed out, with Disney involved somehow in the making or distribution of the movie, I doubt the suits would have let much bitter or deep underlying social commentary into the film.
Do you think you actually correctly identified, related to, and captured in film format the social commentary aspect of Adams' writing?
Adams had a George Carlin-esque approach that was key: he pointed out the asinine flaws in mainstream human thinking and behavior, which are things we all notice but few dare to explicitly point out or belittle. To lose that would be a an artistic shame.
In the real world, you can't assume the person already has Subversion installed on their system... so there are a lot of earlier steps you would have to include as part of your "setup" that include getting Subversion installed onto the system in the first place.
But I guess the real complexity of CVS and SVN isn't in the commands themselves. It's in the lack of quality documentation. It's the same general problem that "man" and "info" pages have had for decades.
Sure, if you already know all the technical terminology, and if you already are familiar with things like rsh and ssh, and if you already conceptually understand what a source repository is and how it generally works, you can parse and make sense of the CVS or SVN documentation. But if you are a complete newcomer to all of it, the documentation is nearly impossible to digest.
X is defined in terms of Y, which is defined in terms of Z, which is defined in terms of A, B, and C, which are of course not even defined. This approach to documentation is totally unhelpful if you have no idea what any of X, Y, Z, A, B, or C are in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, but you're still wrong, because water is not a plural noun. Regardless of its composition, it's still incorrect to say fewer water.
On the other hand, molecules is a plural noun representing individually countable things. So it would be correct to say fewer H2O molecules, and incorrect to say less H2O molecules.
Even LESS people will use it!
You mean fewer, not less, because people are individually countable discrete units. Only use less when you're talking about something that is not composed of discrete countable units, as in less water.
The problem is that I suspect the school in questions gets special pricing on each copy of Windows by virtue of the fact that they buy it as part of a discount bundle with Office. They may not want to switch to a free (as in beer) office suite if that means they lose the discounted price on Windows.
Unfortunately, this means suggesting not only a switch from MS office, but a switch away from Windows at the same time, which make the sell twice as difficult.
Posted by Cliff on Friday April 22, @10:30AMd -we-can-find dept.
from the we'll-publish-any-fucking-question-from-any-retar
Fucktard asks: "I've been rooting around on the net lately checking out all the latest and greatest in new PC parts, plotting out the design for my next "Ask Slashdot" post. I'm finding lots of neat stuff, but I'm a whiner and I want something twenty times more technically sophisticated than anything that has ever been made by mankind. Therefore, I want to Ask Slashdot: WTF n00b? Why can't I have, like, anything I want?"
"I don't know how practical this is, because I'm a retarded jackass, BUT I'm looking for a car that can go 20,000 MPH and gets 800 miles to the gallon. I'd also like it to talk to me like that car from Night Rider, because I'm too socially inept to deal with real people. Oh, and while we're at it, could I get some of those awesome free-spinning chrome rims so that everyone will know how l33t I am? I also am looking to drag race the fucker through residential areas and risk hitting small children."
"This is only a test case. Had it been a real Ask Slashdot, the question would have been even more asinine. I'd like to know if there is some way someone could please track me down and kick my ass, even if it is ridiculously expensive.. (yes, this might fall into the 'more-money-than-brains' dept.)
I'd just like to poke the hornet's nest to see how it'd work."
Not the guy, you moron... the chicks. You think the chicks do it because they enjoy it? BZZZt! They do it because they get paid well.
This .sig has been condemned by the Southern Baptist Convention.
Well, of course it has. What hasn't been condemned by the Southern Baptist Convention?
Well, so much for ESR tirades motivating the development of user-friendly software. Anyone else have any ideas?
Yeah... try paying the developers. Nothing motivates people to do unpleasant things like money will (see: the porn industry and Fear Factor).
That's why the commercial software development model is superior in terms of responding to the desires of ordinary users.
"For those who are still frustrated with the CUPS GUI, how would you improve it?"
Close our eyes, and pretend the problem doesn't exist.
You're a FreeBSD developer, aren't you?
I absolutely HATED "Napoleon Dynamite."
I never think that Penny Arcade comics are funny
Thank goodness I'm not the only one!
Actually, the real problem is the fact that if some rich company brings a lawsuit against you or your small business using a patent that never should have been granted, YOU get to go broke trying to defend yourself against it. Even if you win the case, you'll go bankrupt, which makes fighting the case pointless.
The entire civil judicial system in this country needs to be changed to loser-pays-all format so that defendants vindicated in the courtroom don't still lose in reality. Lawsuits are used way too often in this country as a form of threat or financial filibuster tactic rather than as a legitimate way of enforcing true accountability for actual wrongdoing.
Anyway, THAT's the real solution to the patent mess, and to the frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits, and to every other major civil legal issue our country is facing.
Well, the animation would have been a good one if I hadn't been constantly distracted by the idiot narrator mispronouncing "patent" as "paytent", "Linux" as "Line-iks", and "GNU" as "G.N.U".
The closest thing I've seen to what the poster is looking for are power bricks (like the VoodooPower) for guitar pedalboards. But that kind of thing generally only works because the devices are all relatively low-current devices and they all share the same voltage (9 volt) rating.
Personally, I'd be happy if some manufacturer would just start making power strips with 20 outlets all spaced far enough apart from each other that you can plug all your AC-DC bricks into it without them bumping into each other or covering nearby outlets. There's got to be demand for such a thing, so why hasn't any manufacturer made one?
If they spent half as much time making OpenBSD user-friendly as they spent writing stupid geek songs no one cares about, they might actually produce something usable by ordinary people.
Or alternately, features they would like to see in a 'bookmark manager'?
I'd like to see a feature that will automatically consult an automatic database (similar to CDDB) to get "kosherized" titles for web sites that I bookmark.
For instance, instead of bookmarking, "Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matter", it should just add "Slashdot" to my bookmarks. And instead of bookmarking, "MSNBC - Today's News from MSNBC Front Page", it should just bookmark it as "MSNBC".
Even more annoying are site titles containing promotional garbage such as, "GEICO Car Insurance. Get an auto insurance quote and save today. Free online motorcycle quotes as well." What fucknut (other than some marketing schmuck at GEICO) wants THAT whole text to appear as a bookmark?
I get really sick of having to hand-edit all the site titles to be sane and utilitarian. Someone should harness the collective power of the net to solve this.
Bull. 2029 to 2035 gives us ~6 years to prepare.
You've never had any experience trying to get the government to actually do anything concrete, have you?
Complaining to management never does any good. Businesses don't care how pissed off customers are as long as they keep making money off people.
The only way to truly make a business pay attention to anything is to stop shopping there and to do everything in your power to get other people to stop shopping there, too. When their bottom line finally starts suffering, then they'll finally pay attention.
Even filing complaints with the Better Business Bureau does little good these days, as most businesses know that most consumers don't even look them up in the BBB listings.
A metric assload? Is that really a standardly defined unit of measurement? Is there an official reference assload kept underground in some secured facility that the rest of the world uses to ensure the accuracy of their metric assloads?
Or maybe an atomic assload is the ideal path to perfectly defining the metric assload?
I was playing Mario, Zelda, and Sonic music on the piano back in 1995. Played them at the piano store in the mall and in the drama room at high school during lunch breaks. I guess I should have just kept doing it until the Internet reached critical mass...
Try Balls of Steel
Egads. That sounds like a penile-enlargening workout video for men.
Yeah, that was it! Those games rocked.
Unfortunately I believe those games were DOS-based and needed direct hardware access to specifically-supported sound cards and video cards, and used hardware DMA for the audio subsystem. Trying to run one under XP would probably result in an explosion of some kind.
Wish there were some good pinball games like that which would work under Windows XP.
Two short stories:
A friend of mine had a portable CD player that he hooked through his home stereo with a Y-cable. He put the CD player on top of the amplifier when in use. Guess what happened? The heat from the ventilation slots on the amplifier ultimately killed the accuracy of the CD player such that it wouldn't track anymore.
My parents bought a cheap DVD player and set it on top of their TV. They don't have a home theater or stereo system, so they just use the speakers built into the TV. Plus, my dad is losing his hearing so he always has to jack the sound way up on movie to hear the dialog. Guess what? The DVD player now doesn't track right, probably due to all the vibrations being constantly sent through it by the speakers inside the TV set.
Laptop optical drives (and hard drives and screens and everything else) die frequently because people jostle their laptops around and mistreat them, so no surprise there. But if you're having as many optical drive tracking-related failures as you claim to be having, then your drives are probably getting damaged through thematic mistreatment. Make sure your drives aren't sitting on any surface that eminates heat or is carrying vibrations.
BTW, the reason heat kills tracking of optical drives is that 99% of optical drives are built with a standard type of laser-tracking mechanism. The laser head rides along a metal rod/rail on one side, and then a parallel worm gear drives the head movement on the other side. With this approach, it's crucial that the metal rod/rail and the sleeve that rides on it have a low-friction relationship so they don't catch when the worm gear on the other side is trying to slide the head around. It's also crucial that the worm gear itself have a low-friction relationship with the threaded sleeve that rides along it so that it won't catch or bump as it does its work. It's typical for manufacturers to put some special lubricant on both the worm gear and the slider rod to reduce friction -- and it turns out to be essential for the whole thing to work. If you continually expose the device to heat, or to extremely dry conditions, the lubricant dries up and then the device won't track properly anymore. I've fixed several CD/CD-ROM drives that weren't tracking right by simply opening them up and applying a safe-for-plastics (silicone-based) lubricant to the worm gear and rail/rod with a Q-tip, and then working it in evenly by putting in a full audio CD and skipping from track to track to cause the head to move along the full range back and forth a few times.
The question is unclear. The game that defines a genre is typically never the epitome of the genre. For instance, Wolfenstein 3D clearly defined the FPS genre as we know it today, but I would certainly pick a more modern and advanced FPS as the epitome of the genre.
Similarly, Super Mario Brothers on the NES clearly defined the side-scrolling platformer, but I think I would have to call it a 3-way tie among Sonic the Hedgehog 1, Super Metroid, and Super Mario World for epitome of the genre.
Personally, I always loved a well-done video pinball game. My second favorite was the Epic Pinball series for the PC. My favorite was some series that was originally done on Amiga and then ported to PC... I think it was called Pinball Madness or Pinball Chaos or something. Anyway, it was just a hair better than Epic Pinball IMHO.
Skate or Die and 720 tie for defining the skateboarding genre, but I think the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games take the cake for best representing the genre.
Maybe it is conspiratorial of me to make that suggestion but really... why else would they do it?
Yeah, because you know, mistakes never ever happen, and Microsoft never ever ships bugs they didn't mean to put in their software in the first place.
Stupid jackass.
In my opinion, what made Douglas Adams' H2G2 books special was their combination of light-hearted wacky humor with a quite serious undercurrent of bitter socio-philosophical commentary.
The movie trailers look as if they capture the light-hearted wacky humor, but my big concern is that the movie will fail to capture and blend in Adams' commentary on society. And as others have pointed out, with Disney involved somehow in the making or distribution of the movie, I doubt the suits would have let much bitter or deep underlying social commentary into the film.
Do you think you actually correctly identified, related to, and captured in film format the social commentary aspect of Adams' writing?
Adams had a George Carlin-esque approach that was key: he pointed out the asinine flaws in mainstream human thinking and behavior, which are things we all notice but few dare to explicitly point out or belittle. To lose that would be a an artistic shame.
In the real world, you can't assume the person already has Subversion installed on their system... so there are a lot of earlier steps you would have to include as part of your "setup" that include getting Subversion installed onto the system in the first place.
But I guess the real complexity of CVS and SVN isn't in the commands themselves. It's in the lack of quality documentation. It's the same general problem that "man" and "info" pages have had for decades.
Sure, if you already know all the technical terminology, and if you already are familiar with things like rsh and ssh, and if you already conceptually understand what a source repository is and how it generally works, you can parse and make sense of the CVS or SVN documentation. But if you are a complete newcomer to all of it, the documentation is nearly impossible to digest.
X is defined in terms of Y, which is defined in terms of Z, which is defined in terms of A, B, and C, which are of course not even defined. This approach to documentation is totally unhelpful if you have no idea what any of X, Y, Z, A, B, or C are in the first place.