"We're not talking about metters of opinion here... we're talking about things that were tested, failed, and then the failures were explained by a better understanding of the physics."
There is almost no fact in modern physics. Therefore everything is a matter of opinion. Of course one should not reinvent the wheel, but the person who invents a truely revolutionary wheel replacement will be someone who came up with their own solution without knowledge of the wheel. Those who know of the wheel will be closed minded toward matters relating to wheels because they believe the subject has already been covered.
If everyone accepted as truth the popular beliefs of their peers we would yet be living in a flat world assaulted by mythical gods.
It is typically those who do not accept the findings of others as substitute for their own findings that change the face of human knowledge. The others at best make significant logical progressions.
Windows does more disk trashing non-stop throughout use. The only time windows does NOT swap is during idle time.
They both actually do quite a bit of thrashing on startup, loading things from disk. In Linux those things are loaded into Ram, in windows they may be loaded into real ram, or the they may be tossed into a swap file right back on the disk (Defeating the purpose of loading them to begin with I might add).
Since everything is partially or fully swapped to disk, and the system must constantly refer to the hard drive for information that should be ram, the system memory speed is effectively the hard drive speed.
This occurs in Linux as well, but Linux does not begin swapping until physical memory is exhausted (unless you use KDE, KDE reserves all your physical memory forcing the system to start swaping from the start).
There is no "only relevant factor" nor did I claim there was. But there is a most relevant factor, and the disk is it.
Considering disk speeds are nowhere near ram and cpu speeds I would say you could improve performance by increasing disk speed all day long and it would still be the major stopper.
On always swap systems like windows the hard drive is an even more severe bottleneck. Did you know that with a disk controller and a new hard drive a PII or PIII is actually snappier than a P4 or Athlon 64 (until you get into a game or math intensive task)?
Really? Never needed a codec you did not have then? Really guys, this is no secret. Microsoft fully admits that media player communicates information to Microsoft.
Maybe in some parallel universe spyware is defined by removal tools.
In my universe spyware is software that is installed through deception or duress. Media player is preinstalled with the OS, check. The second criteria is that the software monitors your activity and phones home with the information. Media player does this, check.
An antimatter rocket has to lift the weight of the unit built to contain the anti-matter. Since at present that unit would weigh far more than the weight of the fuel saved the anti-matter unit would have to be more powerful than a chemical rocket.
Umm, no. The US is a shortening of "The United States"; the USA is a shortening of "The United States of America". Legally the former is not a shortening of the latter and technically only refers to the government.
The United States is the government that runs the United States of America. However the GP is full of it, most Americans refer to themselves as Americans. America as used by Americans is indeed a shortening of the title of OUR NATION not the name of the continent.
If one could be proven wrong with one counter-example then one would not be making a generalization. Statements to the contrary make YOU look ignorant.
Perhaps you could redeem yourself with objective evidence? For instance, if you were to discover that the majority of female players on WoW did not have any night-elf female characters on their accounts; that might be compelling.
If I read between the lines correctly you are the exception rather than the rule and know it, but hate to admit it. Don't worry, you aren't the only one disappointed in the average specimen of your gender. The average tend to be fairly lackluster in either gender if you ask me. Cheers to the exceptional.:)
Any instance involving the potential for physical harm to yourself and others is NOT a valid analogy for a grammar discussion.
A driver who is driving improperly is endangering your life. In what way does that validly equate to someone using carefree grammar in informal discussion?
Without the element of danger to one party, then my analogy relates well. Annoying grammar troll corrections are similar to the annoying corrections of a backseat or passenger driver. It is only with a safety concern that the passenger or backseat driver could ever be considered justified (regardless of whether their suggestions are valid or not) in harassing a driver.
Ridiculous, women will rant about sexism and equal rights all day. But I would like to see you get a female to play an RPG for a length of time where her character can not be made to look sexy. I would also like for you to find such a game where the females do not almost all make the sexist form of character they can.
You realize that almost every benefit you mentioned is a benefit of being the market leader and not of the OS?
The only exception is ease of configuration. Even the ease of configuration issues would be quickly eliminated on Linux if it became a popular choice for consumption by the masses.
I actually provided a string of logic and reasoning to back my comments. Do you have any, or are you simply resting on random insults?
Windows has no technical advantage over alternative platforms; few would argue with that point. The windows monopoly comes from people not being comfortable administering and tinkering with their computers.
The windows registry insures that most users bork their systems before reaching a certain level of advanced usage. If users became too comfortable with even moderately advanced tasks (installation of software and the OS, disk management, swap configuration, cleaning up improper hardware and software problems, etc) they would soon switch to a superior system with a learning curve.
The windows registry is part of a designed system that keeps users afraid to modify configuration text files and generally to tinker, trying to figure out how things work.
A central configuration concept is nice but that is what the registry is branded as, not what it is.
The GP was correct.
"why would Microsoft want to make things harder"
Those things one does through the registry are things Microsoft does not want the average user to understand.
Remember, Microsoft has a vested interest in keeping users stupid and powerless. Much the same way that lords and kings had an interesting in keeping commoners uneducated in the past. An educated user will either move to Linux (the most developed and technically sophisticated system for the x86, *BSD is sophisticated but not nearly as developed as Linux) or MacOSX (the easiest to use and yet still developed and solid system for the PPC).
The sad thing is, that you genuinely believe that if the graphics engine is not a tech breakthrough then obviously the game has no breakthough technology...
The AI was the tech breakthrough, it had nothing to do with graphics.
Patents are NOT supposed to protect ideas, they are supposed to protect physical implementations of ideas. To ensure this, you used to be required to submit a physical working model of an invention until the government ran out of warehouse space.
Copyrights are supposed to cover written implementations of an intangible work (books, software, etc) and patents to cover physical things.
NOTHING is supposed to protect ideas.
Small developers can not afford patents, they certainly can not afford to enforce them or defend them. At best a small developer hires a lawyer and gets wacked with two or three patents from the megacorps patent arsenal. Patents have never been a tool of the little guy.
Slashdot Mirror
If you ask any physics professor he will tell you that modern physics is based upon theory yet to be disproven; not upon already proven facts.
"We're not talking about metters of opinion here... we're talking about things that were tested, failed, and then the failures were explained by a better understanding of the physics."
There is almost no fact in modern physics. Therefore everything is a matter of opinion. Of course one should not reinvent the wheel, but the person who invents a truely revolutionary wheel replacement will be someone who came up with their own solution without knowledge of the wheel. Those who know of the wheel will be closed minded toward matters relating to wheels because they believe the subject has already been covered.
If everyone accepted as truth the popular beliefs of their peers we would yet be living in a flat world assaulted by mythical gods.
It is typically those who do not accept the findings of others as substitute for their own findings that change the face of human knowledge. The others at best make significant logical progressions.
Anywhere that will hire you because of knowledge of or lack of knowledge of a specific framework is NOT a long term commitment.
How could a post that has the phrase "free as in herpes" used to refer to open source be modded anything but troll?
nonsense. All you have to do is post pro-ms nonsense and cry about how you know you'll be modded down for doing it. Then you're sure to get modded up.
Actually most of them come from perl references, for instance how to do you iterate through a hash of arrays of hashes of arrays of arrays?
Windows does more disk trashing non-stop throughout use. The only time windows does NOT swap is during idle time.
They both actually do quite a bit of thrashing on startup, loading things from disk. In Linux those things are loaded into Ram, in windows they may be loaded into real ram, or the they may be tossed into a swap file right back on the disk (Defeating the purpose of loading them to begin with I might add).
Since everything is partially or fully swapped to disk, and the system must constantly refer to the hard drive for information that should be ram, the system memory speed is effectively the hard drive speed.
This occurs in Linux as well, but Linux does not begin swapping until physical memory is exhausted (unless you use KDE, KDE reserves all your physical memory forcing the system to start swaping from the start).
There is no "only relevant factor" nor did I claim there was. But there is a most relevant factor, and the disk is it.
Considering disk speeds are nowhere near ram and cpu speeds I would say you could improve performance by increasing disk speed all day long and it would still be the major stopper.
On always swap systems like windows the hard drive is an even more severe bottleneck. Did you know that with a disk controller and a new hard drive a PII or PIII is actually snappier than a P4 or Athlon 64 (until you get into a game or math intensive task)?
Really? Never needed a codec you did not have then? Really guys, this is no secret. Microsoft fully admits that media player communicates information to Microsoft.
Maybe in some parallel universe spyware is defined by removal tools.
In my universe spyware is software that is installed through deception or duress. Media player is preinstalled with the OS, check. The second criteria is that the software monitors your activity and phones home with the information. Media player does this, check.
Hence Windows Media Player is spyware.
What do you call media player?
If someone has VNC on their computer they probably know it. There are better programs for remote control for malicious purposes.
The problem is not detecting it (thus making those who do not know aware of it) the problem is removing it by default.
Personally I think we should be honest about the whole thing and refer to spyware removal tools as shitscoopers from now on.
An antimatter rocket has to lift the weight of the unit built to contain the anti-matter. Since at present that unit would weigh far more than the weight of the fuel saved the anti-matter unit would have to be more powerful than a chemical rocket.
Umm, no. The US is a shortening of "The United States"; the USA is a shortening of "The United States of America". Legally the former is not a shortening of the latter and technically only refers to the government.
The United States is the government that runs the United States of America. However the GP is full of it, most Americans refer to themselves as Americans. America as used by Americans is indeed a shortening of the title of OUR NATION not the name of the continent.
If one could be proven wrong with one counter-example then one would not be making a generalization. Statements to the contrary make YOU look ignorant.
:)
Perhaps you could redeem yourself with objective evidence? For instance, if you were to discover that the majority of female players on WoW did not have any night-elf female characters on their accounts; that might be compelling.
If I read between the lines correctly you are the exception rather than the rule and know it, but hate to admit it. Don't worry, you aren't the only one disappointed in the average specimen of your gender. The average tend to be fairly lackluster in either gender if you ask me. Cheers to the exceptional.
Any instance involving the potential for physical harm to yourself and others is NOT a valid analogy for a grammar discussion.
A driver who is driving improperly is endangering your life. In what way does that validly equate to someone using carefree grammar in informal discussion?
Without the element of danger to one party, then my analogy relates well. Annoying grammar troll corrections are similar to the annoying corrections of a backseat or passenger driver. It is only with a safety concern that the passenger or backseat driver could ever be considered justified (regardless of whether their suggestions are valid or not) in harassing a driver.
Ridiculous, women will rant about sexism and equal rights all day. But I would like to see you get a female to play an RPG for a length of time where her character can not be made to look sexy. I would also like for you to find such a game where the females do not almost all make the sexist form of character they can.
You realize that almost every benefit you mentioned is a benefit of being the market leader and not of the OS?
The only exception is ease of configuration. Even the ease of configuration issues would be quickly eliminated on Linux if it became a popular choice for consumption by the masses.
"This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
I actually provided a string of logic and reasoning to back my comments. Do you have any, or are you simply resting on random insults?
Windows has no technical advantage over alternative platforms; few would argue with that point. The windows monopoly comes from people not being comfortable administering and tinkering with their computers.
The windows registry insures that most users bork their systems before reaching a certain level of advanced usage. If users became too comfortable with even moderately advanced tasks (installation of software and the OS, disk management, swap configuration, cleaning up improper hardware and software problems, etc) they would soon switch to a superior system with a learning curve.
The windows registry is part of a designed system that keeps users afraid to modify configuration text files and generally to tinker, trying to figure out how things work.
A central configuration concept is nice but that is what the registry is branded as, not what it is.
The GP was correct.
"why would Microsoft want to make things harder"
Those things one does through the registry are things Microsoft does not want the average user to understand.
Remember, Microsoft has a vested interest in keeping users stupid and powerless. Much the same way that lords and kings had an interesting in keeping commoners uneducated in the past. An educated user will either move to Linux (the most developed and technically sophisticated system for the x86, *BSD is sophisticated but not nearly as developed as Linux) or MacOSX (the easiest to use and yet still developed and solid system for the PPC).
The sad thing is, that you genuinely believe that if the graphics engine is not a tech breakthrough then obviously the game has no breakthough technology...
The AI was the tech breakthrough, it had nothing to do with graphics.
Perhaps it is merely that you imply there is a difference between genius and crazy. The intelligent but sane are also known as mediocre.
Patents are NOT supposed to protect ideas, they are supposed to protect physical implementations of ideas. To ensure this, you used to be required to submit a physical working model of an invention until the government ran out of warehouse space.
Copyrights are supposed to cover written implementations of an intangible work (books, software, etc) and patents to cover physical things.
NOTHING is supposed to protect ideas.
Small developers can not afford patents, they certainly can not afford to enforce them or defend them. At best a small developer hires a lawyer and gets wacked with two or three patents from the megacorps patent arsenal. Patents have never been a tool of the little guy.