Make sure that you're not confusing communism. There are actually two definitions for communism: the "real" communism of Marx, which was entirely democratic and involved a "dictatorship of the proletariat" (i.e., the people controlled themselves), and then there's Communism (usually capitalised like that), which is what Americans call systems like the SSSR's and China's.
Communism (with a capital C) is simply an authoritarian form of socialism. Communism (with a lower-cased c) is a similar but separate system. As mentioned earlier, Americans were brought up to hate socialism and communism because of countries like the SSSR. There was a lot of FUD-spreading in the early half of the last century... heh.
As for the pop-up windows (look like speach bubbles)... I get one about every 10 mins reminding me to either: enable automatic windows updates, or sign up to MSN. I've got an ISP and an IM client, so don't need MSN. And I'm behind a firewall and don't use software that I don't trust, so really don't care that much about Windows updates (the machine seems perfectly stable as it is - why whould I want to potentially break it?)
Heh. Yeah, that is annoying for the first half-hour or so that you have Windows installed. It stops bothering you after a while, though. I don't know what the formula is. Maybe you just have to click the X enough, or it just stops popping up after a certain amount of time or after a certain amount of... pops. I dunno. It stops after a while though, heh.
As for KDE's control panel, eh. It's pretty good, yeah. If i wasn't so disillusioned with Linux right now, i'd probably love it. But alas.:/
Sigh. How come everybody hates one-button mice? I kind of wish the operating system required more keyboard and less mouse. I'm perfectly fine with doing Alt+click or whatever it is, myself. Hm. "Your computer has too much computer, and not enough type-writer"... or something like that. Heh.
As i usually do when i even suggest that i sort of like a Microsoft product, i'll have to disclaim that i'm not a really big Microsoft fan. I use Linux and i also like Macs. That said:
They've removed icons from the desktop that people are used to
This is because it's redundant. If you're "used to" Windows already, you should know how to drag and drop icons onto the Desktop, so there really shouldn't be much of a problem there. Even if you're not used to Windows, there's really only one thing to do when you first use XP: click the gigantic button at the bottom that says "START". My Computer and My Documents are in the Start menu, by default.:)
annoying "pop up" windos appear next to the clock every 5 minutes
Pish-posh. Number one, they only come up once or twice, to tell you that it's hiding some of your unused icons. Number two, how can you say that those messages are "annoying", when you consider your last statement? If you don't think people are intelligent enough to find My Computer in the Start menu, why would you assume they're intelligent enough to know that Windows is hiding some of their tray icons? Sounds like a good idea to me, if you're operating under the assumption that people don't know how to work Windows.
the control panel is re-arranged in a way that hides the more important controls away from the user (computer management console, security settings, changing the colour of your desktop or widgets)
Heh. MMC and security settings are not important to any user that doesn't know how to click the "Switch to Classic View" button that's right in plain sight on the side. As for the display settings, i don't see how those are hidden, even in category view. You click "Appearance and Themes", and then "Change the computer's theme". Seems pretty straight-forward to me. Of course, i hate category view just as much as you probably do, heh.
they've changed the theme for most applications but left the old Windows 2000 window titlebar theme for others (e.g. Command Prompt)
That's the only application i know of that has the classic Windows style. I don't know why that is. This is the only thing on your list that kind of annoys me.:')
I don't know why everybody says XP is less intuitive. I guess it's just a matter of being used to things. I know i find 98 and 2000 completely unintuitive when i use them, because i've been using XP almost exclusively for so long now. Of course, when i was using Windows 98, i knew it just as well as i know XP now... just took a few days of tinkering around to figure out what happened to everything, heh. And Windows 2000, much as i don't care for it, actually worked to wean 98-users into XP, if they ever used it (2000, that is).
I suppose i'll get modded as a troll. Oh well, i have karma to burn. Just wanted to point out that some of the stuff in XP isn't as totally random as some people make it out to be.:/
Hum. Anyway.... I suppose i see what you mean. While i understand your point, i'll give your questions a shot, out of curiosity. Heh.
Which of the above are moderated groups? The one that says "moderated" at the end, obviously... but i'm guessing by your tone that there are one or two groups in there that aren't so obvious. Heh.
Which are for experienced users, and which for newbies? I suppose alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++ would be for newbies. Granted, i wouldn't have any idea about the others.
The other ones i really couldn't even venture a guess, because i don't know C++. But yes, i guess i see what you mean. Maybe Usenet could use some work in the discussion section... hm. However, that still leaves the question, do we really want to make it popular for everybody? Maybe Microsoft's Usenet improvements would be awesome, but if Usenet gets flooded by a whole bunch of teen-agers looking for replacements for KaZaA, the quality is going to degrade; not just for binary groups, but for discussion groups also.
Like, take my ' !list ' example. If a whole bunch of teen-agers start fooling around on Usenet, you're going to get a bunch of them joining, like, alt.music (for example; i don't know if that's a real group), and posting requests for Ja Rule MP3s. That's a big price to pay for making Usenet a little easier, i think. So... yeah, alright, you've opened my eyes about how difficult it may be for people to get the right discussion groups. But my original sentiment remains, unless you can shoot that down too.:)
Sure, but the average person doesn't even need to know IMAP or POP3 to check their email. They put in their user name, their password, their mail server (which is, more often than not, mail.[YOURISP].[TLD]), and that's it. They click receive, and... "you've got mail". Heh. Not really any more difficult than going to an ATM or anything, is it? I mean, obviously i'm a little biassed, but it doesn't strike me as difficult at all, if you just read what's on the screen.
Exactly: it's great, but only if you know where to look. Sounds as though Microsoft's ideas on this one are steps in the right direction. I'm a Usenet veteran, but still find it difficult to identify a group that's relevant to me when I first want to explore a new subject.
I really have no idea what you're talking about. I got into Usenet when i was 14 years old (i'm 16 now), and i was subscribed to all the groups i like within 2 or 3 minutes of downloading the groups from my server for the very first time. Of course, i only use Usenet for binaries, but i have taken part in discussion once or twice. It's not difficult at all.
How do you have to "know where to look" any more than you do when you're on the Web or on a peer-to-peer network? With any modern client, you just go to the groups list, you type in something you're looking for, like "movies" or "cartoons" or "microsoft" or "support" or "food", or whatever, and then it'll display a list of all the groups that match. You subscribe to them, you download the headers, and there's your messages. I fail to see how it's any more difficult than email or Google.:/
Really, i'm not sure i want Microsoft to mess with Usenet. Sure, it could be improved, but really most of the room for improvement is up to the clients. Grabit is extremely easy to use if you want binaries, and Outlook Express will work for most discussion-type uses (though there are better solutions, i'm sure). Having support for nesting would be nice, but i'm not really informed about the Usenet protocol, so i'm not sure how that would work./me shrug
Also, even if Microsoft did make the experience more convenient or whatever, do we really want that? Didn't people have a huge problem when AOL made the Internet "more convenient" for people that didn't know what they were doing? If Microsoft makes Usenet easier for "n00bs" (and i use that word with much prejudice) to get onto, i wonder how decent the experience will actually turn out to be. I know i've never downloaded a fake file from Usenet, but i've done so from KaZaA a dozen times. And the rush of people that have no idea what they're doing has certainly degraded the quality of IRC, with people who have no idea about chat etiquette, or people who just can't plain read instructions. (It's particularly annoying when some 13-year-old joins a chat channel and sits there and tries to ' !list ' a couple times, for example.)
I just don't think it's a good idea. They're either going to try to ruin Usenet outright, or they're going to indirectly ruin it by flooding it with people who have no idea what they're doing.
Yeah, really. Currently i'm a big XFS fan, but i've heard a lot of great things about Reiser. That said, i'm not going to switch over to Reiser until i see some good information that suggests that it's worth it. What the advantages are, what the disadvantages are, what happens if you do this or that, numbers about speed or whatever, et cetera, et cetera. I've seen a few good comparisons, but they're either all numbers, or all conjecture.:/
I'd also like to see it compared to JFS and maybe ext2 (if not just for reference).
Heh. I can turn my ringer off for free. Unless there are massive mosquito problems in Korea, i really don't see the use in this. Why would you go, like, hunting or hiking or whatever, and take your cell phone with? Isn't the idea of those activities to... get away from stuff like cell phones?
Likewise. That's a good question, and sometimes i honestly don't know. They'll probably realise it, sadly enough, when they're not quite making that wonderful pile of money every week like they expected to be when they were in high school playing Halo.:p
I'm not anti-Xbox. I said that for two reasons. One, i just find it humourous to call it XBOZ. Probably distasteful to everyone else, but i think it's funny. Heh. And two, i used the Xbox as the example, because the Xbox's market is all about violence- and/or sex-based games. The GameCube, for example, wouldn't work in that capacity. PS2 is kind of in between.
Er... that may be so, but how many of those jocks had their N64s and PlayStations almost solely for playing racing, sports, and the occasional shooting game? I don't know what the article's talking about, but when i think of "gamer", i think of somebody who plays A LOT of games, and very involving, generally time-consuming games. Like RPG- and CounterStrike-players. Those are the people that "parents" and "the media" are talking about, i think. Not the 3-or-4-hours-a-week kind of gamer.:/
I think it's a great idea, personally. So many kids today are... like... i can't really put it any other way. Illiterate fucking idiots. Try joining Yahoo! Chat some time. I dare you. It's scary how bad it is. And the consensus is "Who cares, it's not important. I don't need to know anything about this". Maybe it's just Iowa, but, like, i'm going into twelfth grade next year, and there are actually a surprising number of kids that can't pronounce simple words like "consequences". Really.
Those same kids, however, are very interested in TEH XBOZZZZ and all that. If you could somehow make education fun, like "Typing of the Dead", and things like that, i think it would work. The problem is, right now, that education games aren't fun. Not to most kids. Even the younger kids are being influenced by the older ones into thinking that anything that even remotely involves something other than porn or guns is bad. As such, i think i have a formula that may well be important to note in this instance:
*breasts* + *violence* + * = FUN GAME
Knowing this, i think we need to add more, like, shooting games and things to the educational genre. Quake III: Preposition Death Match. Dead or Alive Volleyball: XTREME Spelling Mastarz. Things like that.
Yay for this. I've been waiting for this (and so have a few friends) for a long time. I don't care for the Neuros, but i'm hoping this will lead to Vorbis support for something that's not retarded, like the (now-dead) Rio or the iRiver. My RioVolt is starting to wear out on me, but i'm hanging on to it until a good Vorbis/MP3 (gotta have both) hardware solution is available. I can't really say i have a lot of high hopes for that, though. People don't really seem too interested in Vorbis, and AAC is obviously "supposed to be" the next-generation audio format. Sigh.
and I found out that Ogg files were smaller, and of higher quality, than MP3 files that were equivalently-encoded from the same WAV file
Um... what are you talking about? Vorbis files are as small as you make them. You would assume that if they were "equivalently-encoded", they would be approximately the same bit rate (and thus roughly the same average file size). Quality is another story, but to say that the Ogg files were of a higher quality, you would almost invariably assume that that means it's smaller, considering you're discussing lossy codecs. If i said MP3 was of a "higher quality" when compared to Ogg, you would obviously assume i meant at the same bit rate. If i meant "MP3 is higher quality at 320 kbps than Ogg at 16 kbps", that would be retarded.
I don't know where i'm going with this, but what you said seemed dumb at the time.:/
Heh, in a way, this already happens. Hard drive manufacturers use the "metric" prefixes when they say how large a hard drive is. An 80-gigabyte hard drive means it can store 80 billion (80'000'000'000) bytes.
Meanwhile, the "common" use of those formerly-metric prefixes has come to reflect powers of 2. So, where "kilo"- means "1000" in SI, it means "1024" to our computers. If i transferred a 78-gigabyte file to your empty 80-gigabyte hard drive, it wouldn't fit.:p
Err... maybe i'm missing the point here, because i noticed that they did use different terminologies ("design data rate of", as opposed to "signal at"), but....
Wouldn't, like, "full" speed be faster than "high" speed? Considering that you can't get much higher than full...?
Slashdot Mirror
Communism (with a capital C) is simply an authoritarian form of socialism. Communism (with a lower-cased c) is a similar but separate system. As mentioned earlier, Americans were brought up to hate socialism and communism because of countries like the SSSR. There was a lot of FUD-spreading in the early half of the last century... heh.
Well, if you're a gamer, i can see that, i guess. Not like anybody buys Macs for gaming, though. :)
Heh. Yeah, that is annoying for the first half-hour or so that you have Windows installed. It stops bothering you after a while, though. I don't know what the formula is. Maybe you just have to click the X enough, or it just stops popping up after a certain amount of time or after a certain amount of... pops. I dunno. It stops after a while though, heh.
As for KDE's control panel, eh. It's pretty good, yeah. If i wasn't so disillusioned with Linux right now, i'd probably love it. But alas. :/
Sigh. How come everybody hates one-button mice? I kind of wish the operating system required more keyboard and less mouse. I'm perfectly fine with doing Alt+click or whatever it is, myself. Hm. "Your computer has too much computer, and not enough type-writer"... or something like that. Heh.
They've removed icons from the desktop that people are used to
This is because it's redundant. If you're "used to" Windows already, you should know how to drag and drop icons onto the Desktop, so there really shouldn't be much of a problem there. Even if you're not used to Windows, there's really only one thing to do when you first use XP: click the gigantic button at the bottom that says "START". My Computer and My Documents are in the Start menu, by default. :)
annoying "pop up" windos appear next to the clock every 5 minutes
Pish-posh. Number one, they only come up once or twice, to tell you that it's hiding some of your unused icons. Number two, how can you say that those messages are "annoying", when you consider your last statement? If you don't think people are intelligent enough to find My Computer in the Start menu, why would you assume they're intelligent enough to know that Windows is hiding some of their tray icons? Sounds like a good idea to me, if you're operating under the assumption that people don't know how to work Windows.
the control panel is re-arranged in a way that hides the more important controls away from the user (computer management console, security settings, changing the colour of your desktop or widgets)
Heh. MMC and security settings are not important to any user that doesn't know how to click the "Switch to Classic View" button that's right in plain sight on the side. As for the display settings, i don't see how those are hidden, even in category view. You click "Appearance and Themes", and then "Change the computer's theme". Seems pretty straight-forward to me. Of course, i hate category view just as much as you probably do, heh.
they've changed the theme for most applications but left the old Windows 2000 window titlebar theme for others (e.g. Command Prompt)
That's the only application i know of that has the classic Windows style. I don't know why that is. This is the only thing on your list that kind of annoys me. :')
I don't know why everybody says XP is less intuitive. I guess it's just a matter of being used to things. I know i find 98 and 2000 completely unintuitive when i use them, because i've been using XP almost exclusively for so long now. Of course, when i was using Windows 98, i knew it just as well as i know XP now... just took a few days of tinkering around to figure out what happened to everything, heh. And Windows 2000, much as i don't care for it, actually worked to wean 98-users into XP, if they ever used it (2000, that is).
I suppose i'll get modded as a troll. Oh well, i have karma to burn. Just wanted to point out that some of the stuff in XP isn't as totally random as some people make it out to be. :/
Hum. Anyway.... I suppose i see what you mean. While i understand your point, i'll give your questions a shot, out of curiosity. Heh.
Which of the above are moderated groups? The one that says "moderated" at the end, obviously... but i'm guessing by your tone that there are one or two groups in there that aren't so obvious. Heh.
Which are for experienced users, and which for newbies? I suppose alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++ would be for newbies. Granted, i wouldn't have any idea about the others.
The other ones i really couldn't even venture a guess, because i don't know C++. But yes, i guess i see what you mean. Maybe Usenet could use some work in the discussion section... hm. However, that still leaves the question, do we really want to make it popular for everybody? Maybe Microsoft's Usenet improvements would be awesome, but if Usenet gets flooded by a whole bunch of teen-agers looking for replacements for KaZaA, the quality is going to degrade; not just for binary groups, but for discussion groups also.
Like, take my ' !list ' example. If a whole bunch of teen-agers start fooling around on Usenet, you're going to get a bunch of them joining, like, alt.music (for example; i don't know if that's a real group), and posting requests for Ja Rule MP3s. That's a big price to pay for making Usenet a little easier, i think. So... yeah, alright, you've opened my eyes about how difficult it may be for people to get the right discussion groups. But my original sentiment remains, unless you can shoot that down too. :)
Sure, but the average person doesn't even need to know IMAP or POP3 to check their email. They put in their user name, their password, their mail server (which is, more often than not, mail.[YOURISP].[TLD]), and that's it. They click receive, and... "you've got mail". Heh. Not really any more difficult than going to an ATM or anything, is it? I mean, obviously i'm a little biassed, but it doesn't strike me as difficult at all, if you just read what's on the screen.
I really have no idea what you're talking about. I got into Usenet when i was 14 years old (i'm 16 now), and i was subscribed to all the groups i like within 2 or 3 minutes of downloading the groups from my server for the very first time. Of course, i only use Usenet for binaries, but i have taken part in discussion once or twice. It's not difficult at all.
How do you have to "know where to look" any more than you do when you're on the Web or on a peer-to-peer network? With any modern client, you just go to the groups list, you type in something you're looking for, like "movies" or "cartoons" or "microsoft" or "support" or "food", or whatever, and then it'll display a list of all the groups that match. You subscribe to them, you download the headers, and there's your messages. I fail to see how it's any more difficult than email or Google. :/
Really, i'm not sure i want Microsoft to mess with Usenet. Sure, it could be improved, but really most of the room for improvement is up to the clients. Grabit is extremely easy to use if you want binaries, and Outlook Express will work for most discussion-type uses (though there are better solutions, i'm sure). Having support for nesting would be nice, but i'm not really informed about the Usenet protocol, so i'm not sure how that would work. /me shrug
Also, even if Microsoft did make the experience more convenient or whatever, do we really want that? Didn't people have a huge problem when AOL made the Internet "more convenient" for people that didn't know what they were doing? If Microsoft makes Usenet easier for "n00bs" (and i use that word with much prejudice) to get onto, i wonder how decent the experience will actually turn out to be. I know i've never downloaded a fake file from Usenet, but i've done so from KaZaA a dozen times. And the rush of people that have no idea what they're doing has certainly degraded the quality of IRC, with people who have no idea about chat etiquette, or people who just can't plain read instructions. (It's particularly annoying when some 13-year-old joins a chat channel and sits there and tries to ' !list ' a couple times, for example.)
I just don't think it's a good idea. They're either going to try to ruin Usenet outright, or they're going to indirectly ruin it by flooding it with people who have no idea what they're doing.
I'd also like to see it compared to JFS and maybe ext2 (if not just for reference).
Ahh. You got the obligatory RIAA comment in. Good show, gov'nor! :)
I was under the impression that X11 was the primary graphical environment for UNIX....
Personally, i think the New Beetle is the greatest car of all time. And i don't care what anybody else, be it male or female, thinks of that. :'D
Heh. I can turn my ringer off for free. Unless there are massive mosquito problems in Korea, i really don't see the use in this. Why would you go, like, hunting or hiking or whatever, and take your cell phone with? Isn't the idea of those activities to... get away from stuff like cell phones?
Ehh... why would i buy a ring tone that i can't even hear?
Likewise. That's a good question, and sometimes i honestly don't know. They'll probably realise it, sadly enough, when they're not quite making that wonderful pile of money every week like they expected to be when they were in high school playing Halo. :p
That's a fair point, but for kids and teen-agers "important" and "fun", more often than not, are the same thing.
I'm not anti-Xbox. I said that for two reasons. One, i just find it humourous to call it XBOZ. Probably distasteful to everyone else, but i think it's funny. Heh. And two, i used the Xbox as the example, because the Xbox's market is all about violence- and/or sex-based games. The GameCube, for example, wouldn't work in that capacity. PS2 is kind of in between.
Er... that may be so, but how many of those jocks had their N64s and PlayStations almost solely for playing racing, sports, and the occasional shooting game? I don't know what the article's talking about, but when i think of "gamer", i think of somebody who plays A LOT of games, and very involving, generally time-consuming games. Like RPG- and CounterStrike-players. Those are the people that "parents" and "the media" are talking about, i think. Not the 3-or-4-hours-a-week kind of gamer. :/
Kekekeke get it???/2/2
Those same kids, however, are very interested in TEH XBOZZZZ and all that. If you could somehow make education fun, like "Typing of the Dead", and things like that, i think it would work. The problem is, right now, that education games aren't fun. Not to most kids. Even the younger kids are being influenced by the older ones into thinking that anything that even remotely involves something other than porn or guns is bad. As such, i think i have a formula that may well be important to note in this instance:
*breasts* + *violence* + * = FUN GAME
Knowing this, i think we need to add more, like, shooting games and things to the educational genre. Quake III: Preposition Death Match. Dead or Alive Volleyball: XTREME Spelling Mastarz. Things like that.
Yay for this. I've been waiting for this (and so have a few friends) for a long time. I don't care for the Neuros, but i'm hoping this will lead to Vorbis support for something that's not retarded, like the (now-dead) Rio or the iRiver. My RioVolt is starting to wear out on me, but i'm hanging on to it until a good Vorbis/MP3 (gotta have both) hardware solution is available. I can't really say i have a lot of high hopes for that, though. People don't really seem too interested in Vorbis, and AAC is obviously "supposed to be" the next-generation audio format. Sigh.
Um... what are you talking about? Vorbis files are as small as you make them. You would assume that if they were "equivalently-encoded", they would be approximately the same bit rate (and thus roughly the same average file size). Quality is another story, but to say that the Ogg files were of a higher quality, you would almost invariably assume that that means it's smaller, considering you're discussing lossy codecs. If i said MP3 was of a "higher quality" when compared to Ogg, you would obviously assume i meant at the same bit rate. If i meant "MP3 is higher quality at 320 kbps than Ogg at 16 kbps", that would be retarded.
I don't know where i'm going with this, but what you said seemed dumb at the time. :/
Heh, in a way, this already happens. Hard drive manufacturers use the "metric" prefixes when they say how large a hard drive is. An 80-gigabyte hard drive means it can store 80 billion (80'000'000'000) bytes.
Meanwhile, the "common" use of those formerly-metric prefixes has come to reflect powers of 2. So, where "kilo"- means "1000" in SI, it means "1024" to our computers. If i transferred a 78-gigabyte file to your empty 80-gigabyte hard drive, it wouldn't fit. :p
Wouldn't, like, "full" speed be faster than "high" speed? Considering that you can't get much higher than full...?
Can somebody explain that to me? :/