That doesn't change the fact that Firefox requires you to run an installer first, to put all the files in place. That is something different from still working after an OS upgrade. Nearly all Linux apps are like Firefox: there is no registry, regular apps don't put anything in/etc, and they auto-create their dot-files under ~ the first time they run. So as long as you've got all the binaries and libraries (ie: you copy your/usr to a new drive), they will still work. But, like nearly all Windows programs, they require something like APT to get all the pieces laid out in the first place.
Depends upon the competency level of the programmer. It has nothing to do with comptency. Indeed, if you package everything into a static executable, it is at least bad practice, if not incompetent. It makes a program suck up 10x as much memory as it needs to.
neither does Firefox!
Firefox certainly requires installation.
neither do a good deal of my games
What games don't require running an installer? No mainstream game I've used since the early 1990s comes without an installer!
In what alternate reality can you run a program without using the installer? Aside from a few tiny utilities (putty.exe), nearly all Windows programs require an installer. You can do the same thing in Linux too if your program doesn't have any external dependencies. The catch is that nearly all significantly-sized programs do.
Since when are hard-drive costs linear. Certainly, my 40GB iPod wasn't twice as much as my 20GB iPod. Beyond that, you hit a point where it is no longer economical to make anything cheaper. Note I said $100 MP3 player. If you can put a 1TB drive in a $100 player, nobody is going to bother making anything cheaper, because at that point, the to make a 500GB drive won't be any less than the cost to make a 1TB drive. Note how nobody makes 5GB HDD MP3 players anymore, for example, 32MB flash MP3 players...
We're already far past the point where we need to compress images, yet I've never seen any web page use anything other than jpegs/gifs (and the assorted.bmp.jpeg because someone thought you could convert a file by renaming it, but that doesnt count)
No, I don't use TIFFs for my images, but that's because my internet bandwidth is the limiting factor, not my storage space. Since I'm assuming we're talking about legally-ripped MP3s, internet bandwidth doesn't enter into the equation here. What's growing at a fast rate is disk space, not internet bandwidth.
Now, if you've got an MP3 player with 1TB of disk, even if you store everything uncompressed, you can fit 1500 albums onto the thing. Since the rate at which people accumulate music is limited by physical factors, 1500 will be a lot of albums even 20 years from now when 1TB MP3 players are $100 on pricewatch. With that kind of storage, why would you bother compressing the music? Surely, the hassle of compressing the music overrides the advantage of being able to put an extra 1500 albums you don't have onto the player?
Yes, evolution is a theory. But so is all of science. Should we put stickers on chem and physics textbooks too? It's well understood among people knowledgable about science that it is all theory. The fact that religious dumbasses who think they know absolute truth can't comprehend the idea that science doesn't claim to speak absolute truth doesn't surprise me at all.
Or gravity:) Interestingly enough, man sent a spaceship to the moon using knowledge that was only theory and not fact, and quantum mechanics (again, a theory not a fact), enabled the creation of the multi-billion dollar computer industry.
This is tangential, but I'd point out, that while the US is ranked somewhere around 30'th place in terms of key health metrics, Americans spend twice as much per capita as people in countries ranked much higher on the scale. We pay more for poorer healthcare. Sure, a properly implemented private system *might* be better than the average federal healthcare system, but so far, the best healthcare systems in the world are public, and our private system is a lot worse, and more expensive.
Sure it is. Once you hit 192KHz at 24-bit, there isn't a speaker-system on earth that can do any better, and certainly the human at the recieving end can't tell the difference. Since a human can only listen to so much music at a time, when you've got the storage to store everything lossless, why would you bother to compress it, if only to save on encoding time?
How is my example unreasonable? You have to consider *why* stereotypes sell. They sell, because they are easy, they are simple to comprehend. They take less time to process, and when all you've got is a 30-second spot, the faster your audience understands your point, the better.
It's certainly not irrelevent. Your argument is flawed. If you accept that just because a women designed a game, that doesn't mean that the game speaks for women in general, you have to accept that just because there is a character of a certain type in a game, that does not mean that the game makes an observation about women in general. It's simple logic!
Which means jack-shit. I can use that same-illogic to say that because I only know two smart black people (personally), that must mean that black people are dumb. It makes no sense!
Re:What about the studly men!?
on
Getting the Girl
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yes. Because, fundementally, objectification is distillation and simplification, something that humans do every day, are programmed to do by instinct, and must do to retain their sanity.
Do you have a gardener? We have a pretty big lawn, so we had to get a gardener. Our's is pretty good, I'll give you a number if you're interested.
Notice I didn't say "person who tends your lawn". I said "gardener". Just as I would say, "do you have a lawn mower?". I treated the person as an object, and object whose sole purpose was to care for my lawn. Of course, if I hadn't read into that statement, you'd never have given it a second thought, because it's a completely normal process. There is no malice in it, it's just a matter of reducing the amount of information we have to consider.
Except for the ones we know most closely, we consider everyone to be objects, various lumps of matter whose lives are inconsequential to us beyond the singular role they play in our own. The fact that we do so in entertainment and advertising is not only not shocking, it is to be expected, and perfectly natural.
Absolutely correct. Anybody ever bought a pair of jockies? You have to wade past poster after giant poster of six-three Calvin Klein models with their packages hanging out. And that's marketing for *men*!
Yet being female automatically makes one a dumb, busty, blonde whore? The same argument works to the benefit of the other side --- one person who displays certain qualities attributed to females does not represent females in general. This is as true if the person is a pregnant game designer, or if the person is a dumb blonde hooker.
That presupposes that men do hold a power position over women. While I agree that is true of society generally, I disagree that this is true of the video-game or entertainment industries specifically. Without proving that men in these market segments have any privlege over women, your argument rings hollow.
I think it's pointless for the feminist side of the gender debate to tackle the high-profile, but ultimately meaningless, topic of gender representation in entertainment. Entertainment thrives on creating carictures of all people, from the redneck white-male to the dumb busty blonde. Pointing out such characterizations is just restating the obvious. It's far more important to concentrate on the real gender problems in our society --- like Britney Spears extolling the virtues of "young motherhood", or the severe lack of women studying mathematics and science, or the ridiculously patriarchical system that is the US government. Those are real problems, there is no point getting distracted by imagined ones.
The image of women in games has been reduced to that of a "whore" who is expendable and there only for pleasure. Very distrubing and unfortunate.
I don't know about "Rose Rumble", but your comment about GTA: SA is entirely off-base. GTA: SA is a gangster simulator. The women in the game are whores, not because they are women, but because they are prostitutes. The main character is a two-bit crook, again, not because he's a man, but because he's a criminal! And that's perfectly logical, because the thing that GTA: SA simulates, the criminal underworld, is actually like that. I live in Atlanta, and if you walk around Midtown at night, you'll see your fair share of hookers and strip-joints. Representing that reality in a game is not demeaning to women at all, unless the women in question is a hooker or a stripper!
While popular religion often presents the idea that early Christians all believed the coming of Christ would be immediate, this is actually explicitly refuted in the Bible in II Thessalonians 2:1-3.
Fundementally, you are defending a Biblical inaccuracy. If the supposedly mistaken notion that people hold is indeed true, then it represents an error in the Bible. My point is that the argument you use to show that the notion is mistaken (and thus the Bible is not in error), is a very tenuous and far-fetched one. Further, adhering to such a tenuous and far-fetched argument is silly, considering that simple error is a much more plausible explanation, and one that is entirely consistent with the underlying understanding that as a work of man, the Bible is not infallible.
Four or five year old HW is usable only if you don't actually do anything with your computer. My 2 year old laptop is quite ready to be replaced. It can't run a lot of new games (HL-2, Doom III) at a decent speed, it cries like a baby running CATIA or SolidEdge, takes forever to compile using g++, and can't even encode MP3s fast enough to keep up with the abysmally slow 6x CD rip speeds the DVD drive can achieve.
Sure, if all you do is use e-mail, Word, and a web-browser, you don't need a lot of power, but the people who spend $500 for a graphics card don't do just that. My next graphics card purchase will be a $500 6800 Ultra, and I'm just happy that I can softmod it into a Quadro without shelling out $1500 for the real thing.
What's the fetish for 17" monitors? When was the last time you saw a gamer with a 17" monitor? All my gamer friends have at least 19" monitors, and a good 21" can be had these days for what you paid for a 19" only four or five years ago.
Because the hosting location changes the barrier of entry to posting incorrect information. It's the same reason people trust.gov or.edu pages more than.com or.net pages. The barrier to posting something on a.gov or.edu page is higher, and thus the potential of someone knowingly posting a forgery or just plain made-up document on such a page is lower.
"I don't trust your corroborating sources listed in the primary historical document because..."????
It's not quite the same. Better:
"I don't trust *you* to provide accurate primary historical documents without third-part corroborating sources."
Ie: When I run md5sum on some Linux software, it's not that I distrust the people who released the software, rather, I distrust the vector through which I acquired the software.
While it's generally a good idea to corroborate anything you find on Wikipedia, it's kind of useless to include material from such an obviously untrustworthy source (geocities), that it *must* be corroborated by the reader. An encyclopedia, in order to maintain its academic integrity, must prove its trustworthiness to the reader, not depend on the reader to prove it themselves.
Your accusation of ad hominem attack are unfounded. Ad hominem is not invalid if it calls into question the legitimacy of the person making the argument. For example:
"Your physics theory is invalid because you are gay" is ad hominem.
"I don't trust your medical opinion because you've said previously that AIDs could be transmitted through tears" is not ad hominem.
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That doesn't change the fact that Firefox requires you to run an installer first, to put all the files in place. That is something different from still working after an OS upgrade. Nearly all Linux apps are like Firefox: there is no registry, regular apps don't put anything in /etc, and they auto-create their dot-files under ~ the first time they run. So as long as you've got all the binaries and libraries (ie: you copy your /usr to a new drive), they will still work. But, like nearly all Windows programs, they require something like APT to get all the pieces laid out in the first place.
Depends upon the competency level of the programmer.
It has nothing to do with comptency. Indeed, if you package everything into a static executable, it is at least bad practice, if not incompetent. It makes a program suck up 10x as much memory as it needs to.
neither does Firefox!
Firefox certainly requires installation.
neither do a good deal of my games
What games don't require running an installer? No mainstream game I've used since the early 1990s comes without an installer!
In what alternate reality can you run a program without using the installer? Aside from a few tiny utilities (putty.exe), nearly all Windows programs require an installer. You can do the same thing in Linux too if your program doesn't have any external dependencies. The catch is that nearly all significantly-sized programs do.
What do you think DCE is?
Since when are hard-drive costs linear. Certainly, my 40GB iPod wasn't twice as much as my 20GB iPod. Beyond that, you hit a point where it is no longer economical to make anything cheaper. Note I said $100 MP3 player. If you can put a 1TB drive in a $100 player, nobody is going to bother making anything cheaper, because at that point, the to make a 500GB drive won't be any less than the cost to make a 1TB drive. Note how nobody makes 5GB HDD MP3 players anymore, for example, 32MB flash MP3 players...
We're already far past the point where we need to compress images, yet I've never seen any web page use anything other than jpegs/gifs (and the assorted .bmp.jpeg because someone thought you could convert a file by renaming it, but that doesnt count)
No, I don't use TIFFs for my images, but that's because my internet bandwidth is the limiting factor, not my storage space. Since I'm assuming we're talking about legally-ripped MP3s, internet bandwidth doesn't enter into the equation here. What's growing at a fast rate is disk space, not internet bandwidth.
Now, if you've got an MP3 player with 1TB of disk, even if you store everything uncompressed, you can fit 1500 albums onto the thing. Since the rate at which people accumulate music is limited by physical factors, 1500 will be a lot of albums even 20 years from now when 1TB MP3 players are $100 on pricewatch. With that kind of storage, why would you bother compressing the music? Surely, the hassle of compressing the music overrides the advantage of being able to put an extra 1500 albums you don't have onto the player?
Yes, evolution is a theory. But so is all of science. Should we put stickers on chem and physics textbooks too? It's well understood among people knowledgable about science that it is all theory. The fact that religious dumbasses who think they know absolute truth can't comprehend the idea that science doesn't claim to speak absolute truth doesn't surprise me at all.
Or gravity :) Interestingly enough, man sent a spaceship to the moon using knowledge that was only theory and not fact, and quantum mechanics (again, a theory not a fact), enabled the creation of the multi-billion dollar computer industry.
This is tangential, but I'd point out, that while the US is ranked somewhere around 30'th place in terms of key health metrics, Americans spend twice as much per capita as people in countries ranked much higher on the scale. We pay more for poorer healthcare. Sure, a properly implemented private system *might* be better than the average federal healthcare system, but so far, the best healthcare systems in the world are public, and our private system is a lot worse, and more expensive.
the future is definately not lossless.
Sure it is. Once you hit 192KHz at 24-bit, there isn't a speaker-system on earth that can do any better, and certainly the human at the recieving end can't tell the difference. Since a human can only listen to so much music at a time, when you've got the storage to store everything lossless, why would you bother to compress it, if only to save on encoding time?
How is my example unreasonable? You have to consider *why* stereotypes sell. They sell, because they are easy, they are simple to comprehend. They take less time to process, and when all you've got is a 30-second spot, the faster your audience understands your point, the better.
It's certainly not irrelevent. Your argument is flawed. If you accept that just because a women designed a game, that doesn't mean that the game speaks for women in general, you have to accept that just because there is a character of a certain type in a game, that does not mean that the game makes an observation about women in general. It's simple logic!
Which means jack-shit. I can use that same-illogic to say that because I only know two smart black people (personally), that must mean that black people are dumb. It makes no sense!
Yes. Because, fundementally, objectification is distillation and simplification, something that humans do every day, are programmed to do by instinct, and must do to retain their sanity.
Do you have a gardener? We have a pretty big lawn, so we had to get a gardener. Our's is pretty good, I'll give you a number if you're interested.
Notice I didn't say "person who tends your lawn". I said "gardener". Just as I would say, "do you have a lawn mower?". I treated the person as an object, and object whose sole purpose was to care for my lawn. Of course, if I hadn't read into that statement, you'd never have given it a second thought, because it's a completely normal process. There is no malice in it, it's just a matter of reducing the amount of information we have to consider.
Except for the ones we know most closely, we consider everyone to be objects, various lumps of matter whose lives are inconsequential to us beyond the singular role they play in our own. The fact that we do so in entertainment and advertising is not only not shocking, it is to be expected, and perfectly natural.
Absolutely correct. Anybody ever bought a pair of jockies? You have to wade past poster after giant poster of six-three Calvin Klein models with their packages hanging out. And that's marketing for *men*!
Yet being female automatically makes one a dumb, busty, blonde whore? The same argument works to the benefit of the other side --- one person who displays certain qualities attributed to females does not represent females in general. This is as true if the person is a pregnant game designer, or if the person is a dumb blonde hooker.
That presupposes that men do hold a power position over women. While I agree that is true of society generally, I disagree that this is true of the video-game or entertainment industries specifically. Without proving that men in these market segments have any privlege over women, your argument rings hollow.
I think it's pointless for the feminist side of the gender debate to tackle the high-profile, but ultimately meaningless, topic of gender representation in entertainment. Entertainment thrives on creating carictures of all people, from the redneck white-male to the dumb busty blonde. Pointing out such characterizations is just restating the obvious. It's far more important to concentrate on the real gender problems in our society --- like Britney Spears extolling the virtues of "young motherhood", or the severe lack of women studying mathematics and science, or the ridiculously patriarchical system that is the US government. Those are real problems, there is no point getting distracted by imagined ones.
The image of women in games has been reduced to that of a "whore" who is expendable and there only for pleasure. Very distrubing and unfortunate.
I don't know about "Rose Rumble", but your comment about GTA: SA is entirely off-base. GTA: SA is a gangster simulator. The women in the game are whores, not because they are women, but because they are prostitutes. The main character is a two-bit crook, again, not because he's a man, but because he's a criminal! And that's perfectly logical, because the thing that GTA: SA simulates, the criminal underworld, is actually like that. I live in Atlanta, and if you walk around Midtown at night, you'll see your fair share of hookers and strip-joints. Representing that reality in a game is not demeaning to women at all, unless the women in question is a hooker or a stripper!
While popular religion often presents the idea that early Christians all believed the coming of Christ would be immediate, this is actually explicitly refuted in the Bible in II Thessalonians 2:1-3.
Fundementally, you are defending a Biblical inaccuracy. If the supposedly mistaken notion that people hold is indeed true, then it represents an error in the Bible. My point is that the argument you use to show that the notion is mistaken (and thus the Bible is not in error), is a very tenuous and far-fetched one. Further, adhering to such a tenuous and far-fetched argument is silly, considering that simple error is a much more plausible explanation, and one that is entirely consistent with the underlying understanding that as a work of man, the Bible is not infallible.
Four or five year old HW is usable only if you don't actually do anything with your computer. My 2 year old laptop is quite ready to be replaced. It can't run a lot of new games (HL-2, Doom III) at a decent speed, it cries like a baby running CATIA or SolidEdge, takes forever to compile using g++, and can't even encode MP3s fast enough to keep up with the abysmally slow 6x CD rip speeds the DVD drive can achieve.
Sure, if all you do is use e-mail, Word, and a web-browser, you don't need a lot of power, but the people who spend $500 for a graphics card don't do just that. My next graphics card purchase will be a $500 6800 Ultra, and I'm just happy that I can softmod it into a Quadro without shelling out $1500 for the real thing.
What's the fetish for 17" monitors? When was the last time you saw a gamer with a 17" monitor? All my gamer friends have at least 19" monitors, and a good 21" can be had these days for what you paid for a 19" only four or five years ago.
Because the hosting location changes the barrier of entry to posting incorrect information. It's the same reason people trust .gov or .edu pages more than .com or .net pages. The barrier to posting something on a .gov or .edu page is higher, and thus the potential of someone knowingly posting a forgery or just plain made-up document on such a page is lower.
"I don't trust your corroborating sources listed in the primary historical document because..."????
It's not quite the same. Better:
"I don't trust *you* to provide accurate primary historical documents without third-part corroborating sources."
Ie: When I run md5sum on some Linux software, it's not that I distrust the people who released the software, rather, I distrust the vector through which I acquired the software.
While it's generally a good idea to corroborate anything you find on Wikipedia, it's kind of useless to include material from such an obviously untrustworthy source (geocities), that it *must* be corroborated by the reader. An encyclopedia, in order to maintain its academic integrity, must prove its trustworthiness to the reader, not depend on the reader to prove it themselves.
Your accusation of ad hominem attack are unfounded. Ad hominem is not invalid if it calls into question the legitimacy of the person making the argument. For example:
"Your physics theory is invalid because you are gay" is ad hominem.
"I don't trust your medical opinion because you've said previously that AIDs could be transmitted through tears" is not ad hominem.