It's probably very common, though perhaps not a majority of P2P copying. I too track down music I've bought - and in the last 30 something years, I've had (and lost through wear, negligence or damage) a LOT of music. I don't have ANY tapes left from the 1970s/80s that are near worth playing because of the quality, and my entire LP collection is pretty much unplayable - I was a rough child:P. Not to mention not having a turntable or a system that can use one.
That's an example of at least a few hundred pieces of music that falls in the grey area of "I know -I- bought it but nobody else does for sure" that I've gradually built up part of as a collection of MP3s.
Good to see a balanced view - I tinker with photoshop just out of a love of imagery, and ALL lcds I've seen still suffer from a slight colour change between centre/edges, generally don't show colour grades that come up plainly obvious on a trinitron, and have an odd 'harshness' that I can't put my finger on, apart from being perhaps the LCD type gamma curve. For my kind of imaging, I just wouldn't use an LCD either.
That being said, I agree with your comments on their positives. Most computing ISN'T imaging-related, and for just web browsing, chatting, office work, audio etc, the LCD can win out - smaller, lighter, cooler and cheaper to run. The ghosting on games seems to be a bit of an either/or thing - some people are OK with it, others will balk at even the tiniest level.
Argh. Agreed here, people will stop at whichever step is the easiest.
When I was working a helpdesk, we had a 4-step process for installing one particular piece of software, which involved:
1. downloading 2. doubleclicking a package 3. selecting an update option 4. restarting windows.
invariably, steps 1 and 2 would be completed, and since the software was then installed and sitting on the desktop, users jump into their play mode and steps 3 and 4 were ignored entirely. some days it seemed 90% of problems were directly related to not running the update option (which then prompted a restart anyway)
All of this despite the instructions with red writing clearly saying ALL FOUR STEPS MUST BE RUN.
Of course, with a slightly better installer step 2 would start the prompting to step 3, instead of needing user interaction, which would be far more reliable than trusting a user to read instructions - which is the point I suppose.
I've come across quite a few older drives in machines that hadn't been cleaned out. One was an ancient Mac II which used to be used as a webserver, but was removed from that job in 1995, and had sat in a basement getting rustier and rustier. It was given to me in horrific condition, and the motherboard/PSU was toast, almost like it was washed through with saltwater. The HD looked a little better, and on firing it up in another machine, it clattered noisily, but still read most of the drive - on there was the website, last accessed 8 years ago. I copied that all off and archived it just because it was cool.
Oddly, the website nowadays isn't all that different:).
Another belonged to a rather fascinating lady who seemed to use her computer from 1994 when it was new, until 2002 when I came across it from an ebay sale. All of her writing (some published, some not), drafts, her academic work, and her photography was on there. She did quite a few nudes and not only had published work, but every photo taken in between used to create those images. Slightly giggleworthy, but really just rather tasteful nude photos.
One other I was given, a compaq 486, belonged to an organiser of some of the behind the scenes work for the Sydney Olympics - it had names, addresses and phone numbers of dozens of celebrities, politicians, and anyone involved in the marketing pre-games, along with correspondence to those people. A fun read but kind of boring - I didn't keep the addresses either.
The biggest coincidence I came across was ordering a computer from ebay, from a town about 800km from me. it came to me with a HD full of various word documents - what a surprise to find it had originally been used as a wordprocessing machine in the same building I work in, and several years before. It came home:).
Nothing amazingly exciting, just a few curious little moments.
You have to compile with --noesd and --killrust. at the moment there's problems with --filthybigmetalrodintheground, which only runs acceptably if there's an AMD hammer present.
Because the only thing stronger than the lust to watch more porn is the desire to download -stuff- and fill hard drives. Mixing the two is just a winning combinations.
80gb microdrives in a mobile. You heard it here first
Isn't that the whole POINT of open sourcing something?
Here you have what's obviously a good lot of html code (I'm no coder, so I don't know the exact level to which the kde stuff is used) which has become good enough to attract the attention of Apple, a large developer. They've jumped in, are using the code (as they and anyone else are free to do) and made changes to it to suit their needs, and fixed bugs. They've put it back into the pool of open code, and anyone ELSE is now free to do the same as them, just starting from a base that's not only improved by having more hands working on it, but has had a stunning level of free marketing. A mindshare increase, code improvements, and more widespread use. To me that's the whole point - the good stuff survives and is made better.
but that was the scariest part of working there sometimes, the radiation that you can't see, smell, or feel.
As opposed to that really visible, smelly textured radiation?
(ok, I just thought a bit more, and I suppose a hot acrid lava of molten core would probably assault all your senses and be a good indication that it carried a little radiation... for a moment or two anyhows:)
It's unfortunate, but true. I also use linux - and love it. I use it enough to know very well I could (with minor sacrifices) dump my Mac and use nothing but Linux.
I also know that I'm not in the majority, and the people who are not into using-computers-for-the-sake-of-using-computers have a completely different set of priorities than I do. My clients, relatives, friends who aren't geeks, workmates - don't want to "use an OSS system" or "use a free OS" or "use an elegant solution" or "use what is technically brilliant". They want to click and type and send emails. They want to press a button and have their digital pics up. they want to "download the internet".
Any OS can do that, but only one has the absolute mass to continuously carry itself through mindshare of people who spend 99.99% of their lives NOT computing.
Re:This could make The Gimp cozy for MacHeads??
on
GTK+OSX for Mac OS X Aqua
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
All the current macheads (if most of my experience with fellow graphic artists is anything to go by) will look at the gimp and go "wtf?". Some will head towards it because it's free, but the biggest benefit will be to future macheads, switchers, and people who haven't yet thrown themselves into graphics. While I prefer photoshop (alright, it's the main reason I use a computer at all), it's all about choice.
There are other players - a quick hunt for mp3 players at www.versiontracker.com shows up a good variety of ones which work, and fill various niches, however iTunes is one of those apps that's a well put-together mix of dead-simplicity and good functionality.
xmms runs under OSX - but requires an XFree86 to display anything. mpg123 also runs, and runs well as a pure player.
If a scripting addition to iTunes gives access to playlists and the organisation someone already has in place, I can see that being very useful.
The "overpriced PC dealer" also charged her $220 for 16Mb of 72-pin RAM. In 2000. Thats very easy to find for $10 MOST anywhere else. Hence, you presumed, and you are wrong.
The Mac was a 604e machine for less cost than the PC Ram. I even mentioned in my post that this was a 2nd hand machine. You presumed, you are wrong, and you should work on your comprehension too.
3% or 90% means absolutely nothing when it comes to who you know who can support the machines. She has a computer now that if problems arise she needs to pay someone else to fix it. That's mindless. Making a decision while ignoring your personal situation, and ignoring the reality of what's around you is just plain stupid.
Partly because of the fun of it, but to combat bloatware a culture of making things small, in a practical sense, needs to exist. Apache may be size X, and if the belief is embedded in coders that size X is the minimum to do a job, it won't even be -considered- by the majority that things could be done more efficiently
Even knowing a webserver exists that is 1/10th the size and runs in 1/10th the memory can give pause to thought, and keep the knowledge open that things can always be made smaller. In 1990 the entire internet was run on machines rarely quicker or more powerful than 386s or 68030s - it would be sad to see a culture of "You can't have a server online that's under 500mhz and a gig of ram" develop - without tiny coding projects like this, that's all too possible.
Nope sorry, in OS9 window titles are smaller, menu fonts are smaller, menu titles aren't as wide by far, menus aren't as long for the same number of items, tabs are smaller, sliders are smaller, radio buttons are smaller, fonts in control panels are smaller, lists are smaller...
drop down menus are the same size.
Which OS are you looking at again?
Nope, I'm the same. While I use OS X and love its internals, the theme (no matter how slow or quick it may be) is blah. I'd rather be looking at the old style OS9/Platinum look. It's clean, takes up minimal screen real estate and kept out of the way.
Then again, OSX and Windows are commercial OSs which as part of their marketing focus is the look - it does attract some people one way or the other and if Joe & Jane User choose one over the other cos it's flashier, there's an extra sale.
That doesn't quite explain why perfectly good open source desktops are blindly following this kind of mess, however.
Slashdot Mirror
Sooner or later these silly patents will have to run out... won't they?
*rushes off to patent the concept of links to other pages on either the right or left side of a page*
It's probably very common, though perhaps not a majority of P2P copying. I too track down music I've bought - and in the last 30 something years, I've had (and lost through wear, negligence or damage) a LOT of music. I don't have ANY tapes left from the 1970s/80s that are near worth playing because of the quality, and my entire LP collection is pretty much unplayable - I was a rough child :P. Not to mention not having a turntable or a system that can use one.
That's an example of at least a few hundred pieces of music that falls in the grey area of "I know -I- bought it but nobody else does for sure" that I've gradually built up part of as a collection of MP3s.
Good to see a balanced view - I tinker with photoshop just out of a love of imagery, and ALL lcds I've seen still suffer from a slight colour change between centre/edges, generally don't show colour grades that come up plainly obvious on a trinitron, and have an odd 'harshness' that I can't put my finger on, apart from being perhaps the LCD type gamma curve. For my kind of imaging, I just wouldn't use an LCD either.
That being said, I agree with your comments on their positives. Most computing ISN'T imaging-related, and for just web browsing, chatting, office work, audio etc, the LCD can win out - smaller, lighter, cooler and cheaper to run. The ghosting on games seems to be a bit of an either/or thing - some people are OK with it, others will balk at even the tiniest level.
Argh. Agreed here, people will stop at whichever step is the easiest.
When I was working a helpdesk, we had a 4-step process for installing one particular piece of software, which involved:
1. downloading
2. doubleclicking a package
3. selecting an update option
4. restarting windows.
invariably, steps 1 and 2 would be completed, and since the software was then installed and sitting on the desktop, users jump into their play mode and steps 3 and 4 were ignored entirely. some days it seemed 90% of problems were directly related to not running the update option (which then prompted a restart anyway)
All of this despite the instructions with red writing clearly saying ALL FOUR STEPS MUST BE RUN.
Of course, with a slightly better installer step 2 would start the prompting to step 3, instead of needing user interaction, which would be far more reliable than trusting a user to read instructions - which is the point I suppose.
I want to know how you'd wedge the little light-keys off and move them around to confuse co-workers. that's gonna be hard...
I've come across quite a few older drives in machines that hadn't been cleaned out. One was an ancient Mac II which used to be used as a webserver, but was removed from that job in 1995, and had sat in a basement getting rustier and rustier. It was given to me in horrific condition, and the motherboard/PSU was toast, almost like it was washed through with saltwater. The HD looked a little better, and on firing it up in another machine, it clattered noisily, but still read most of the drive - on there was the website, last accessed 8 years ago. I copied that all off and archived it just because it was cool.
:).
:).
Oddly, the website nowadays isn't all that different
Another belonged to a rather fascinating lady who seemed to use her computer from 1994 when it was new, until 2002 when I came across it from an ebay sale. All of her writing (some published, some not), drafts, her academic work, and her photography was on there. She did quite a few nudes and not only had published work, but every photo taken in between used to create those images. Slightly giggleworthy, but really just rather tasteful nude photos.
One other I was given, a compaq 486, belonged to an organiser of some of the behind the scenes work for the Sydney Olympics - it had names, addresses and phone numbers of dozens of celebrities, politicians, and anyone involved in the marketing pre-games, along with correspondence to those people. A fun read but kind of boring - I didn't keep the addresses either.
The biggest coincidence I came across was ordering a computer from ebay, from a town about 800km from me. it came to me with a HD full of various word documents - what a surprise to find it had originally been used as a wordprocessing machine in the same building I work in, and several years before. It came home
Nothing amazingly exciting, just a few curious little moments.
For the past two years, hundreds of extraordinary UFO-like images have been gleaned by a Spanish-based team using two space-based satellites.
As opposed to the normal land-based satellites we're all used to?
You have to compile with --noesd and --killrust. at the moment there's problems with
--filthybigmetalrodintheground, which only runs acceptably if there's an AMD hammer present.
Because the only thing stronger than the lust to watch more porn is the desire to download -stuff- and fill hard drives. Mixing the two is just a winning combinations.
80gb microdrives in a mobile. You heard it here first
Isn't that the whole POINT of open sourcing something?
Here you have what's obviously a good lot of html code (I'm no coder, so I don't know the exact level to which the kde stuff is used) which has become good enough to attract the attention of Apple, a large developer. They've jumped in, are using the code (as they and anyone else are free to do) and made changes to it to suit their needs, and fixed bugs. They've put it back into the pool of open code, and anyone ELSE is now free to do the same as them, just starting from a base that's not only improved by having more hands working on it, but has had a stunning level of free marketing. A mindshare increase, code improvements, and more widespread use. To me that's the whole point - the good stuff survives and is made better.
And ellen said it was a really good paper.
/tmp... and Safari devoured my /tmp, and I had to link it again but it wasn't as good..."
but the paper was devoured.
"It was a really good
...and making backup organisms would be more pleasurable than waiting for a tape unit to finish whirring
but that was the scariest part of working there sometimes, the radiation that you can't see, smell, or feel.
:)
As opposed to that really visible, smelly textured radiation?
(ok, I just thought a bit more, and I suppose a hot acrid lava of molten core would probably assault all your senses and be a good indication that it carried a little radiation... for a moment or two anyhows
the LCDs in iMac's have one of the highes't radiation outputs of any.
I think your foil helmet needs changing.
Hooray for sense!
It's unfortunate, but true. I also use linux - and love it. I use it enough to know very well I could (with minor sacrifices) dump my Mac and use nothing but Linux.
I also know that I'm not in the majority, and the people who are not into using-computers-for-the-sake-of-using-computers have a completely different set of priorities than I do. My clients, relatives, friends who aren't geeks, workmates - don't want to "use an OSS system" or "use a free OS" or "use an elegant solution" or "use what is technically brilliant". They want to click and type and send emails. They want to press a button and have their digital pics up. they want to "download the internet".
Any OS can do that, but only one has the absolute mass to continuously carry itself through mindshare of people who spend 99.99% of their lives NOT computing.
All the current macheads (if most of my experience with fellow graphic artists is anything to go by) will look at the gimp and go "wtf?". Some will head towards it because it's free, but the biggest benefit will be to future macheads, switchers, and people who haven't yet thrown themselves into graphics. While I prefer photoshop (alright, it's the main reason I use a computer at all), it's all about choice.
One more tool, with its place.
klez always made me think of a bundled lesbian that came with KDE...
just don't touch it, as it gets very hot.
tell me about it. I was dared to lick a store display one. I did and it burnt.
b.
It appears when your thumb info is incorrect on your tivo, it'll search out the WRONG face donor, and you'll get one you never really wanted.
Slashdot Editor spokeswoman Ellen Feiss said "It was a really good face... My tivo devoured it. Then I got a transplant and it wasn't as good".
Stay tuned tomorrow for more adventures of Punxatawny Phil, as ground hog day continues on Slashdot.
There are other players - a quick hunt for mp3 players at www.versiontracker.com shows up a good variety of ones which work, and fill various niches, however iTunes is one of those apps that's a well put-together mix of dead-simplicity and good functionality.
xmms runs under OSX - but requires an XFree86 to display anything. mpg123 also runs, and runs well as a pure player.
If a scripting addition to iTunes gives access to playlists and the organisation someone already has in place, I can see that being very useful.
You are presumptuous and wrong.
The "overpriced PC dealer" also charged her $220 for 16Mb of 72-pin RAM. In 2000. Thats very easy to find for $10 MOST anywhere else. Hence, you presumed, and you are wrong.
The Mac was a 604e machine for less cost than the PC Ram. I even mentioned in my post that this was a 2nd hand machine. You presumed, you are wrong, and you should work on your comprehension too.
3% or 90% means absolutely nothing when it comes to who you know who can support the machines. She has a computer now that if problems arise she needs to pay someone else to fix it. That's mindless. Making a decision while ignoring your personal situation, and ignoring the reality of what's around you is just plain stupid.
Partly because of the fun of it, but to combat bloatware a culture of making things small, in a practical sense, needs to exist. Apache may be size X, and if the belief is embedded in coders that size X is the minimum to do a job, it won't even be -considered- by the majority that things could be done more efficiently
Even knowing a webserver exists that is 1/10th the size and runs in 1/10th the memory can give pause to thought, and keep the knowledge open that things can always be made smaller. In 1990 the entire internet was run on machines rarely quicker or more powerful than 386s or 68030s - it would be sad to see a culture of "You can't have a server online that's under 500mhz and a gig of ram" develop - without tiny coding projects like this, that's all too possible.
Nope sorry, in OS9 window titles are smaller, menu fonts are smaller, menu titles aren't as wide by far, menus aren't as long for the same number of items, tabs are smaller, sliders are smaller, radio buttons are smaller, fonts in control panels are smaller, lists are smaller... drop down menus are the same size. Which OS are you looking at again?
Next comment, you might like to stick to reality.
I'm typing this on OSX 10.2 - with a pretty basic 8Mb ATI card. Seems to run.
Nope, I'm the same. While I use OS X and love its internals, the theme (no matter how slow or quick it may be) is blah. I'd rather be looking at the old style OS9/Platinum look. It's clean, takes up minimal screen real estate and kept out of the way.
Then again, OSX and Windows are commercial OSs which as part of their marketing focus is the look - it does attract some people one way or the other and if Joe & Jane User choose one over the other cos it's flashier, there's an extra sale.
That doesn't quite explain why perfectly good open source desktops are blindly following this kind of mess, however.