There have been a few in the Kansas City area where I live, one is still fairly successfull, the other was doing well but was shut down due to the owner getting ill.
There were also a few that failed. There were some things I noticed about what made the successfull ones successfull, and the unsuccessfull ones fail. The biggest thing was that the ones that were around for a while didn't focus just on PC games. Both of them offered (for free) space for running table top games, sold CCGs, table top books and accessories, sold PC hardware, rented time on machines to play PC games, and had a couple of TVs set up for console gaming (also for free).
They didn't focus on selling stuff as much as they focused on a place for gamers to hang out, and just happened to sell anything that one might need for gaming. Part of that was also keeping the stores fairly kid friendly. This meant keeping the older gamers from cursing loudly, as well as turning down the gore factor on games with such options. This made parents feel better about letting their kids hang out there, and the kids usually spent a good amount of money.
You know, the sound mixing thing definitely would have had a chance at getting me to give BSD a try if I had known about that a while ago when that was a bigger problem for me than it is now. I can see how a more unified system would appeal to most people. It was never something that particularly bugged me, since I guess I'm still in the mindset of seeing a collection of utilities as opposed to a unified system (maybe that's just because I come from Linux, and I might change my mind if I used something else that was more unified).
Documentation is definitely a plus, it is really aggrevating when you are trying to find out some flag for a command, and the man page is useless or non-existant. I might try installing a couple of the BSDs in virtual machines and at least giving them a fair go.
Is there anything like "BSD From Scratch" that will tell you how to bootstrap a BSD install? I think doing a LFS install was probably the most informative experience I've ever had with Linux, and it would be a nice way to learn more about how BSD works so as to get aquainted with the system from the bottom up.
I don't intend this to be a troll, I'm honestly curious. I've been using Linux since around 1998, and I've always found that it works well for me. I have a friend who swears by FreeBSD, but his zelotry makes it hard to get a strait answer about what's so great about BSD (hmm, now I know how all of my Windows using friends feel when I talk...).
So to all of you who might use this, or some other flavor of BSD as a desktop, what advantages does it offer over Linux? What are the disadvantages (other than the momentum that Linux has as a desktop OS compared to BSD)?
Right now, my email client says I have 2667 messages in my in-box. The oldest message I have dates back to January 31st, 2006. While most of these emails aren't very important, and it certainly wouldn't do much harm in deleting them, it seems to me like there isn't any reason to delete email that is less than a year or two old. My.evolution folder is only taking up 122.3MB out of the 1TB in the machine, so it's certainly mot a matter of running out of storage space. Organization is accomplished with Search Folders in Evolution, and if I need to find anything searching is fairly snappy. Given that there aren't really any down sides, I don't see any reason to not keep email around for a year or two, just in case. It's not like storing actual letters where they could pile up and take up real physical storage space, be difficult to search through, etc.
Especially when so much business correspondance takes place via email, isn't it better to be safe and keep things around "just in case" than sorry if you happen to need them?
I think a big part of the problem that people have is that they simply don't know how to read game ratings properly. I know that, personally, I usually find that when I look at the ratings for a game, along with the text of the review, it can lead me to a fairly accurate understanding about how well I will like it.
The first thing is that I think people think of the ratings system in terms of absolute "10 is a great game" "5 is mediocre" "1 is crap" scores. That's not really accurate. In general the score must be considered from within it's genre. A football game with a rating of 10 might be excellent for people who like football games, but I certainly wouldn't enjoy a football game with a 10 rating any more than a football game with a 1 rating, because I don't like football games. Likewise I might enjoy an RPG with a score of 7 or 8, but other people would find it tedious, because they don't like RPGs.
The other problem is that I think people expect scores to fall in a fairly normal distribution. The problem is that game quality isn't a normal distribution. There are a lot of games that are made that people might not consider fun, but they are at least semi-playable. If you consider a game that might get a 1 or a 2 rating, it would have to be something with severe software flaws that kept the game from even being playable. On consoles at least, no matter how bad a game is, it's rare for a game to be so bad that a determined person couldn't play it (even if they didn't enjoy themselves.). If you look higher in the ratings, it's similar. Most games tend to be clustered in the 7-9. To understand why I think you need to really understand what the ratings in that range mean. When I'm looking at a review, and I see a game with a 10, that tells me that the game is well executed and should appeal to the majority of gamers even if they aren't particularly fans of the genre of the game. A 9 generally says that the game is on par with the best games of that genre, and introduces some new concepts to extend it. A rating of an 8 generally tells me that the game is solid and people who are fans of the genre will probably enjoy it, but it might not appeal to people who aren't specifically fans of the genre, or of the series. A game with an 8 might either have a few flaws that lower the overall experience, or it might be a solid game that fails to offer anything innovative. A rating of a 7 generally says that the game is weak. A 7 tells me that someone who was a big fan of the genre or series might enjoy the game, but that there are probably some flaws that other games in the series or genre have fixed, and that the game either has some fairly large flaws that non-fans won't be able to over look, or its very formulaic and will be boring to someone who isn't a huge fan of that forumla. Finally, looking in the mid range of 3 to 6, you generally see games that are lacking something that generally a game should have, but which doesn't render the game unplayable (when I say unplayable, I mean physically the game won't run, as opposed to the game having responsive or intuitive controlls). A 5 or 6 for example says that a game probably has some severe playability issues that interfere with enjoyment of the game, as well as having some bugs and lacking features that are standard for the genre. A 3 or 4 generally says that either because of various bugs or lack of features, there isn't much "game" to the game at all.
What I think it boils down to is that games first of all need to be rated only within their own genre, because it's hard to set a single scale for games across different genres. Using a normalized scale seems intuitive, but it doesn't work because the quality of games isn't a normal distribution, instead it's skewed so that there are generally a lot of "Ok" and "so-so" games in the 7 to 8 range, a lot of games that lag behind because of various problems, and a very few gems that get the coveted 9's and 10's. It's also hard to quanticize fun. A reviewer can really only rate a game based on what he
I agree with this in general. When working with software there are several layer of abstraction that one must understand in order to really be productive. Too many people spend time learning the specifics of one OS or one distribution, and are at a loss when it comes to using something marginally different. In essence, I think it's the same problem that we berate users for. A user learns how to copy and paste something in Application Foo, but then when they open up Application Bar they are at a loss, even though both applications use the same shortcut keys, and have the "cut" and "paste" options in similar places in similarly named menus. The same thing happens with developers and admins who learn how to set up a system by clicking the right options in one GUI, but lack a detailed understanding of the general principles that apply, and so have to relearn everything when they are put in a different environment.
I remember when i first started using Linux, it was back in 1997 or 1998- if you think Linux is rough around the edges now compare it to what was available back then. Before that I had only used Windows 95, and I had very little technical knowledge (I was in highschool, and I had just taken my first programming class. At the time, we did all of our development by telneting into a Debian server. I wanted to have the same OS at home, so I brought my computer in and my CS teacher helped me to install Debian on it). When I first started I didn't really know how to do anything. I didn't have access to an internet connection, so I couldn't search for help, and I was often frustrated because I didn't really understand at the time how Linux worked. Fast forward to two days ago, I just switched from Suse to Kubuntu. It's been years since I've used a debian based distribution, but the transition has been absolutely painless. Switching over wasn't a cause for any sort of stress, or really any sort of thought whatsoever (my old machine died, when I got my new machine put together I tried to install Suse 10.0 only to find out it didn't like installing on SATA drives, and I happened to have a Kubuntu disk lying around that I had been intending to try out at some point, so I just shrugged and installed it instead).
I have to second this. I haven't played with Objective C much, but I did look into D a while ago and seems like it has a lot of potential.
The thing about garbage collection is that 80% of the time you don't need it, but the other 20% of the time not having it can really be a pain in the ass. I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that, most of the time, memory management is just something that has to be done, and it's the sort of thing that compilers are better at than humans. Sometimes though, it's a design issue- and compilers suck at design (which is why programmers exist). Garbage collection is very handy when it comes to saving the programmer from the tedium of worrying about freeing memory in a lot of circumstances, but too many languages take the power completely out of the hands of the programmer. This leads to situations where the compiler might not realize that an object is out of scope and can be freed, but the programmer knows this because it is that way by design- and yet has no way to tell the compiler this, because the compiler is "helping" the programmer. There are ways to get around these sorts of problems, but they usually end up adding to the complexity of the program.
It sort of makes me think of the saying "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, C++ makes it harder, but when you do you blow off your whole leg" and want to extend it to say "when you take away all of a programmers weapons, so they cant hurt themselves, you leave them with no way to attack the problem".
I'm not against garbage collection in general, or other tools to help developers- I use Java quite a bit and really enjoy developing in it- but in order to know when a tool is right for a job, you have to know when a tool is wrong for a job.
I think that it is true that a lot of commercial software that is available for Windows would utterly fail if it were ported to Linux, but I think that the reason has less to do with some aversion to proprietary software than the fact that Linux users value different things from their software than Windows users.
I think that Windows users in general value simplicity and consistency, while Linux users tend to value robustness and efficiency. It's not a matter of one being "better than" the other, it is simply a matter of having a different target audience. I think they key difference is that most windows users (and computer illiterate people of all OSes) want software that is written for them. Linux users (and geeks of all OSes) want software that is written for a task. Joe Windows User says "I want a program to let me burn DVDs", but Tom Linux User says "I need a program that burns DVDs". The difference seems subtle, but software made for one group rarely satisfies people in the other group.
Another big difference is Consistency. Windows (and Mac) users like things to have a consistent look and feel, and to work generally the same way. I think that's true of Linux users as well, except that no two Linux users can agree on what that same way should be, and so they want the option to customize that software to work how they want it.
I think the final big thing that is a non-issue on Windows and OS X that can make or break the deal with many Linux users is how the software is packaged. On Windows you pretty much run an installer off of a CD or download the installer. On Mac you pretty much either run an installer, or drag a folder into/Applications. In either case, it's perfectly acceptable to users of those OSes to go to the companies website and download the software, or to buy a boxed set and run the installer from the CD.
With Linux though, a lot of software won't get on a users machine unless the user can grab it from a large repository through emerge or synaptic or packman or yum or whatever package management system that user uses. Of course, this distribution method doesn't really work well for selling proprietary software (I guess a company could set up a repository for their software, and let anyone install it, then require registration the first time it's run or whatever, but that would require users to go in and add that repository to their package management system, etc.). This isn't such a big deal with big high profile applications, but it can really be a stopping point for small independent software vendors.
I think that, as much as companies make a fuss about Linux users not wanting to pay for software, and Linux not having enough market share, and the GPL being viral, it's really the problems that I've outlined that makes getting proprietary software on Linux a hurdle for many developers.
Personally, I have a number of proprietary applications running on my Linux machine, both very expensive high profile programs and less expensive applications, as well as some free-as-in-beer stuff (flash plugin, etc.). Cost wasn't an issue (if the program makes me more productive or allows me to do something I otherwise could not do, then it's worth the money), nor was the fact that it wasn't open sourced (I think that there are some domains of applications where free software is better, others where free software is catching up, and I think there are domains where proprietary software will always be ahead of free software, I always pick the program that best meets my needs- sometimes I need the source, most of the time I don't and I pick based on the merits of the program without considering it's license). The problems I outlined above were issues however, and if those problems were solved I think that it would be more reasonable for companies to release proprietary software for Linux, and I think that buying and using that proprietary software would be more appealing to myself and other Linux users.
I have a few observations on the subject. I think that the first thing that immediately lept to mind has also been the prevailing comment so far, and that is that 46% seems awfully high for men or women for doing troubleshooting, unless you count troubleshooting as saying "hmm, something's wrong.".
That aside, it seems to me that women have a higher average technological competency than men, speaking in general terms, however there also seems to be a smaller standard deviation. Of the men I know, most seem to be either geeks or luddites. Most of the men I know have only very recently started considering using cell phones (many men I know don't own one), and very rarely, if every, use a computer. On the other hand, I know very few female geeks, but I also can't think of any female luddites. Most women I know were early adopters of cell phones, and most women I know use the computer more than men, and for more versatile tasks (e.g. I know a lot of men who literally never use the computer for anything except ebay, most women I know use the computer for the web as well as email, IM, iTunes, photos, etc.).
Of course the survey contradicts my own observations, but I also think terms like "technology gadgets" are extemely vauge. In my experience, women are generally early adopters of technologies that enable creativity and communication (cell phones, IM, scanners, photo editing software, etc.) whereas men tend to be early adopters of technology that is primarily entertainment (dvd players, video games, etc.).
You were right the first time. It is an array of cards, each card contains 2 GPUs and each GPU contains 2 cores. So you have 64 cards * 2 GPUs per card * 2 cores per GPU = 256 cores total. The article is extremely poorly worded.
While I can't answer the posters question, I really hope that someone can give a good answer to this for another reason. I'm a recent graduate, and while I have some experience working on Windows systems, and with Microsoft technology, I'm very interested in finding a development job working on Linux and with the various open source development tools.
I've gone through most of the "regular" channels in searching for a job (e.g. Monster, Dice, Hotjobs, Career Builder, my school's Career Services department), and while there are a few open source jobs, it seems like the vast majority of jobs are VB.NET, ASP.NET or C# working on Windows. While I could certainly do that, and I have applied for a few of these jobs, I went into programming because I wanted to do something I love for a living. I don't hate working in Windows, but I don't love it (Although.NET is much less painful than working with MFC, I still don't enjoy it like I do developing under Linux). It would be great to have a place where I could find job listings working with F/OSS software.
I've been playing around with this for a few hours. Running some of their demos, things seem very snappy, and the applications look better than most Swing/AWT applications. I've always been fond of the way Qt works, and I think it will be nice to have the option of using it with Java.
Of course this is still a developer preview. After playing around with it for about 4 hours, I still can't get an application to launch, except for the demos that it ships with. This is probably due to my own ineptitude, but if I'm having trouble with it, I'm sure other developers will as well. I suspect that once there is an official release, things will be made easier (or the documentation will be made clearer) and there won't be so many problems.
PS: If anyone has played around with this and had success, maybe you can help me out. I created a project in eclipse, added the qtjambi.jar file into the classpath, set the PATH to qtjambi-linux-preview/bin and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to qtjabmi-linux-preview/lib, whenever I try to launch an application, I get failed to load library: 'qtjambi'
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no qtjambi in java.library.path ...
Anyway, I think it will be really nice once I can figure out how to use it properly.
Maybe it is an honest title? Being unbias can only go so far, at some point you have to call an duck a duck, you have to call evil evil, and you have to recognize that it's beyond simple idiological differences. All politicians are motivated by their own interests, but I cannot believe that anyone in the current administration has any misconceptions that they are not destroying the country for their own short term gains. I also honestly beleive that in the past, most politicians have drawn a line, they are self serving but only to the point where making decisions that are bad for the country as a whole to serve their own interests won't go so far as bringing the whole country to it's knees. Of course it still depends on having definitions for what is good and what is bad for the country, but I think that it's hard to call any political philosophy that is based around keeping the citizens of your own country scared and poor so that they are more easily manipulated into following the moral code of your religion can be called good in the sense of the original american ideal.
It seems like the sane design would be to use the flash memory if available, but otherwise function like hard drives do today. In otherwords, if the flash memory craps out, you can still read and write to the drive, although with a performance hit.
Given, as you mention, the limited number of writes on these, it might also be neat to have using the flash as a supplement to increase speeds something that can be turned on or off from the OS. I could see that being useful in a number of ways, if it was written in a sane manner that wouldn't simply kill the flash memory too quickly from exessive rights.
I used to have to deal with this with my Aunt and Uncle. They were nice about it, never rushed me, and always offered to pay, but eventually it was still a pain to have to drive over there every week or two to remove viruses, etc.
Eventually, I sat down and talked to them about installing Linux. I didn't go into technical details, but I explained that they could do everything they did under Windows, but it would take them some time to get used to different programs. I also explained that my cousins games wouldn't work. They decided to let me give it ago, and Installed Suse 9.1 (the newest version at the time).
I set up wine and got most my cousins games working, set up seperate accounts for each family member, set up their email, etc. Since then there hasn't been a single problem with that computer. A couple of months ago, they were given another computer that is running Windows XP. After a couple of months of the same cleaning up crapware off the machine every couple of weeks, they even asked me to install Linux on it as well. Unfortunately, some software that my Uncle runs on it won't run under Wine, and I haven't been able to find any alternative to it under Linux (it's some custom software written by a friend of his that ties in various topography maps with a database keeping track of caves and other geological stuff in the area). It's funny though, with the exception of my Uncle who needs to use this software, everyone else in the family prefers the Linux box, and only uses the Windows machine for iTunes or if someone else is on the Linux box.
If you approach them diplomatically and explain that installing Linux will require that they learn things a little different, but that in the long run it will make it easier on everyone, you might be surprised how receptive non-technical people can be toward the idea. My own experience (not just with my aunt and uncle, with others as well) has show me that, while most people may not be proficient enough to install and configure Linux, if you set it up for them and then walk them through common tasks, people can run just fine with Linux.
As I understand it, if you download PHPBB and make changes to it, and PHPBB has a "download this code" link, then you have to point it to a version that contains your changes. Doing otherwise would be like me downloading, say, Linux and making a bunch of changes to the kernel, then distributing my kernel with the original source (sans my changes).
Now, if you included part of PHPBBs code in your own program unmodified, then do you have to have a link to that part of the PHPBB code, or your code, or both?
Re:Not even funny anymore
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The Hybrid Scooter
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I am from the US, and I have not yet had the opportunity to travel outside of the US, so my knowledge is based on talking to friends who live in other countries, and specifically to people who have lived in both Europe and the US.
Granted, gas is cheaper in the US than in many other places in the world, but even with relatively lower gas prices, I think that the price of gas going up effects Americans more than people in a lot of other countries. Part of it is because a lot of people in the US buy SUVs and other big gas guzzlers as status symbols, but another big part of the problem is the transportation infrastructure of the US.
The United States is a big country, it's also very spread out. Even looking at a single city within the US, things tend to be spread out over a larger area, and arranged in strange ways compared to a lot of other countries. With the exception of a few larger cities, there is also almost no form of mass transit. I live in a fairly large city, and we have nothing like a subway or street cars. There is a bus system, but it only covers a fairly small portion of down town. I would have to walk over 20 miles to get to the nearest bus stop, and I live in the city, not in a suburb. Now, 20 miles is a fairly long walk if I'm trying to get someplace in a reasonable period of time, but even if I wanted to walk, due to the layout of the city, it would still be hard to do so. For the most part, with the exception of neighborhoods and a few shopping areas, there aren't crosswalks or foot bridges going over highways. If I wanted to walk to the bus stop, I would have to either cross a 6 lane highway, or walk an additional several miles out of my way to find a safe spot to cross.
Bicylce lanes are also pretty rare around here, and the most direct route almost anywhere in this city is via interstate, which doesn't allow bicycles (and one would be crazy to try, even if it were legal).
To take an example, I had a job interview last week. It was about 40 miles away from my house, on the other side of the city (technically it was outside of the city, but in the greater metropolitan area, and only a couple of miles outside of the city proper). The round trip in my car (a relatively small car by US standards) would have cost me about $20 with the current gas prices (40 miles each way, 80 miles total, and it would have taken probably about 1/2 a tank of gas). Assuming I were to get that job, until I could find a place to live closer to where I would be working, I would have to spend $100/week in gas. That would end up being about 15% of my paycheck before taxes, or about 20% after taxes, just to get back and forth to work.
Now say I decided to save money and the environment and use alternative transportation. I can't bicylcle there, because even after having lived in the city for 22 years, I can't think of a way to get there by bike at all, and if I did it would probably go through so many side streets just to avoid the interstates that it would take me half a day to get there. I could walk to the bus stop, but like I said, it's almost 20 miles to the nearest bus stop, and then the best I could hope for would be to get about 10 to 15 miles, and still have another 5 to 10 miles to walk. It's been around 100 degrees Farenheight here lately, with humidity at around 80 to 90 percent. Even if I were in good enough physical shape to make that walk (go ahead and make some fat, lazy american jokes if you wish, but I know there is no way I could make that walk in this heat) I don't think I would be able to arrive and still appear well groomed and professional enough to keep the job.
In short, Americans have cheap gas relative to a lot of other places, but we also are pretty much stuck driving further to get anywhere, and with fewer alternative options for other forms of transport than people in many other countries have. This is largely thanks to cities being planned out and having grown up at a time when everyone had a car or two, and gas was far cheaper than milk. Many european cities
I've always used nVidia cards, which have always worked well for me under Linux. I've never tried getting an ATI card to work because I've never heard anything other than it was sheer agony to use an ATI card under Linux.
In general, this is fine. If a hardware vendor doesn't support my OS, then I will buy from a vendor who does. In this case, nVidia hovers between "almost as good as" and "slightly better than" ATI, depending on who has most recently released a new video card, so it's not a big compromise.
I do find ATIs lack of Linux support to be disappointing now however, because those of us interested on running Linux on an intel mac are stuck with a choice between ATI and an embedded crappy video card.
Incidentally, has anyone had any luck getting Linux to dual boot with OS X on one of the newer iMacs? I'm interested in getting one, but until Autodesk offers an Intel Mac version of Maya I'm stuck on Linux (and actually, even if there were an Intel Mac version, I'm not sure I want to pay the fee to transfer my license from Linux to Mac) so I can't justify getting a new machine unless it can run Linux well with good 3D support.
Procedurally generating content is computationally expensive, and not always easily done in parallel. To procedurally generate an entire level worth of content would take a lot more time than most people would wait for a level to load, for even a relatively simple and small level it wouldn't be surprising for it to take a few hours- even with heavily optimzied code.
Things like texture synthesis can be done on the fly for simple cases, and procedurally generated models are being used today to some extent, but generating everything procedurally won't be realistic for quite a while.
The other big thing is that procedurally generated content is rarely perfect. There are some things that can be done really well, but most things require a lot of processing to minimize the weirdness that can crop up from time to time.
What it seems more likely to me that would be done is, instead of procedurally generating content on the console when the game loads, game makers will start to look more at procedurally generating content during the development process. This can help bring down the art requirements on large projects, and allow greater detail without requiring things to be run in real time.
What I've always done is putting the punctuation that belongs to the quoted phrase in the quotes, and the punctuation that belongs to a sentence as a whole outside of the quotes. Here are some examples:
She said "I'm going to the store.".
I asked "Do you need some help?" when he picked up the piano.
He said "what?".
Did she say "I like pie."?
I know it's not proper, but it's always made the most sense to me.
Re:How about acting dignified in the first place?
on
Gangs on the Internet
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· Score: 1
While I don't entirely deny the points you made, I also think that it's not entirely fair. There are a lot of people who act the way you have described, and I agree that it is loathsome. I don't think that it's fair to generalize to the entire Wiccan population though.
There are a lot of Wiccans out there who have what I like to call the "oppression complex"; though it's not entirely unique to Wiccans either. Pretty much every group of people- especially once the size of the group reaches some critical mass- has people who act like that.
There are a lot of Wiccans who dislike people using the term "Witch" to refer to Wiccans for the reasons you've outlined. At the same time though, let's not pretend that there are not other groups that take on some name that is traditionally a derogetory term with a perhaps unrelated meaning and use it as a symbol of pride (how many slashdotters proudly refer to themeselves as geeks? what about western anime fans adopting the term otaku? what about the use of the word "cunt" as a word of empowerment in some femininst circles? what about the adoption of the word "nigger" among african americans? I could go on).
As for the debate about Wicca being a new vs an old religion; I think you will find very few serious and knowledgeable practicioners who claim that Wicca is older than perhaps 1900 or so- most people would say it was invented by Gardner circa 1950 although you will occasionally see the argument that many of the ideas that were adopted by wicca originated in the 20's with a paper by an anthropologist named Margret Murray called "The Witch Cult of Western Europe" (inscidentally, I belieive this is where a great deal of the erroneous information within the Wiccan community comes from), or that it began first with the OTO and was developed by Gardner in collaboration with Alister Crowley.
Most Wiccans recognize Wicca as a new religion, and don't try to pretend that it's more than an attempt to create a modern belief system which is based off of bits of pieces of numerous older belief system.
Most of the problem I think arises from the fact that Wicca is perhaps the largest- certainly the most well known- of the neopagan religions. It is taboo enough to attract rebellious teens and attention whores, popular enough that said people will have heard about it and be able to find information (and misinformation) about it, and misunderstood enough that, by and large, the average person is unable to tell the rebellious attention whoring people who misunderstand it why exactly they are full of it.
Of course, these people aren't representitive of the entire community. As with many communities that have a high porportion of such people, those people go on making asses of themselves while everyone else ignores them and gets on with their own lives.
In short, there is nothing wrong with Wicca as a religion, and nothing wrong with people who practice Wicca. There are a lot of people who act as you describe, and rightfully need to ignored or set strait. Generalizing all Wiccans as acting like those people you described, or generalizing Wicca itself as something which leads to or encourages such behavior however is as misinformed as the people you are critisizing.
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No, actually he's under an NDA from Apple, which is why he couldn't post anything that described how Quartz actually works.
There have been a few in the Kansas City area where I live, one is still fairly successfull, the other was doing well but was shut down due to the owner getting ill.
There were also a few that failed. There were some things I noticed about what made the successfull ones successfull, and the unsuccessfull ones fail. The biggest thing was that the ones that were around for a while didn't focus just on PC games. Both of them offered (for free) space for running table top games, sold CCGs, table top books and accessories, sold PC hardware, rented time on machines to play PC games, and had a couple of TVs set up for console gaming (also for free).
They didn't focus on selling stuff as much as they focused on a place for gamers to hang out, and just happened to sell anything that one might need for gaming. Part of that was also keeping the stores fairly kid friendly. This meant keeping the older gamers from cursing loudly, as well as turning down the gore factor on games with such options. This made parents feel better about letting their kids hang out there, and the kids usually spent a good amount of money.
You know, the sound mixing thing definitely would have had a chance at getting me to give BSD a try if I had known about that a while ago when that was a bigger problem for me than it is now. I can see how a more unified system would appeal to most people. It was never something that particularly bugged me, since I guess I'm still in the mindset of seeing a collection of utilities as opposed to a unified system (maybe that's just because I come from Linux, and I might change my mind if I used something else that was more unified).
Documentation is definitely a plus, it is really aggrevating when you are trying to find out some flag for a command, and the man page is useless or non-existant. I might try installing a couple of the BSDs in virtual machines and at least giving them a fair go.
Is there anything like "BSD From Scratch" that will tell you how to bootstrap a BSD install? I think doing a LFS install was probably the most informative experience I've ever had with Linux, and it would be a nice way to learn more about how BSD works so as to get aquainted with the system from the bottom up.
I don't intend this to be a troll, I'm honestly curious. I've been using Linux since around 1998, and I've always found that it works well for me. I have a friend who swears by FreeBSD, but his zelotry makes it hard to get a strait answer about what's so great about BSD (hmm, now I know how all of my Windows using friends feel when I talk...).
So to all of you who might use this, or some other flavor of BSD as a desktop, what advantages does it offer over Linux? What are the disadvantages (other than the momentum that Linux has as a desktop OS compared to BSD)?
Right now, my email client says I have 2667 messages in my in-box. The oldest message I have dates back to January 31st, 2006. While most of these emails aren't very important, and it certainly wouldn't do much harm in deleting them, it seems to me like there isn't any reason to delete email that is less than a year or two old. My .evolution folder is only taking up 122.3MB out of the 1TB in the machine, so it's certainly mot a matter of running out of storage space. Organization is accomplished with Search Folders in Evolution, and if I need to find anything searching is fairly snappy. Given that there aren't really any down sides, I don't see any reason to not keep email around for a year or two, just in case. It's not like storing actual letters where they could pile up and take up real physical storage space, be difficult to search through, etc.
Especially when so much business correspondance takes place via email, isn't it better to be safe and keep things around "just in case" than sorry if you happen to need them?
I think a big part of the problem that people have is that they simply don't know how to read game ratings properly. I know that, personally, I usually find that when I look at the ratings for a game, along with the text of the review, it can lead me to a fairly accurate understanding about how well I will like it.
The first thing is that I think people think of the ratings system in terms of absolute "10 is a great game" "5 is mediocre" "1 is crap" scores. That's not really accurate. In general the score must be considered from within it's genre. A football game with a rating of 10 might be excellent for people who like football games, but I certainly wouldn't enjoy a football game with a 10 rating any more than a football game with a 1 rating, because I don't like football games. Likewise I might enjoy an RPG with a score of 7 or 8, but other people would find it tedious, because they don't like RPGs.
The other problem is that I think people expect scores to fall in a fairly normal distribution. The problem is that game quality isn't a normal distribution. There are a lot of games that are made that people might not consider fun, but they are at least semi-playable. If you consider a game that might get a 1 or a 2 rating, it would have to be something with severe software flaws that kept the game from even being playable. On consoles at least, no matter how bad a game is, it's rare for a game to be so bad that a determined person couldn't play it (even if they didn't enjoy themselves.). If you look higher in the ratings, it's similar. Most games tend to be clustered in the 7-9. To understand why I think you need to really understand what the ratings in that range mean. When I'm looking at a review, and I see a game with a 10, that tells me that the game is well executed and should appeal to the majority of gamers even if they aren't particularly fans of the genre of the game. A 9 generally says that the game is on par with the best games of that genre, and introduces some new concepts to extend it. A rating of an 8 generally tells me that the game is solid and people who are fans of the genre will probably enjoy it, but it might not appeal to people who aren't specifically fans of the genre, or of the series. A game with an 8 might either have a few flaws that lower the overall experience, or it might be a solid game that fails to offer anything innovative. A rating of a 7 generally says that the game is weak. A 7 tells me that someone who was a big fan of the genre or series might enjoy the game, but that there are probably some flaws that other games in the series or genre have fixed, and that the game either has some fairly large flaws that non-fans won't be able to over look, or its very formulaic and will be boring to someone who isn't a huge fan of that forumla. Finally, looking in the mid range of 3 to 6, you generally see games that are lacking something that generally a game should have, but which doesn't render the game unplayable (when I say unplayable, I mean physically the game won't run, as opposed to the game having responsive or intuitive controlls). A 5 or 6 for example says that a game probably has some severe playability issues that interfere with enjoyment of the game, as well as having some bugs and lacking features that are standard for the genre. A 3 or 4 generally says that either because of various bugs or lack of features, there isn't much "game" to the game at all.
What I think it boils down to is that games first of all need to be rated only within their own genre, because it's hard to set a single scale for games across different genres. Using a normalized scale seems intuitive, but it doesn't work because the quality of games isn't a normal distribution, instead it's skewed so that there are generally a lot of "Ok" and "so-so" games in the 7 to 8 range, a lot of games that lag behind because of various problems, and a very few gems that get the coveted 9's and 10's. It's also hard to quanticize fun. A reviewer can really only rate a game based on what he
I agree with this in general. When working with software there are several layer of abstraction that one must understand in order to really be productive. Too many people spend time learning the specifics of one OS or one distribution, and are at a loss when it comes to using something marginally different. In essence, I think it's the same problem that we berate users for. A user learns how to copy and paste something in Application Foo, but then when they open up Application Bar they are at a loss, even though both applications use the same shortcut keys, and have the "cut" and "paste" options in similar places in similarly named menus. The same thing happens with developers and admins who learn how to set up a system by clicking the right options in one GUI, but lack a detailed understanding of the general principles that apply, and so have to relearn everything when they are put in a different environment.
I remember when i first started using Linux, it was back in 1997 or 1998- if you think Linux is rough around the edges now compare it to what was available back then. Before that I had only used Windows 95, and I had very little technical knowledge (I was in highschool, and I had just taken my first programming class. At the time, we did all of our development by telneting into a Debian server. I wanted to have the same OS at home, so I brought my computer in and my CS teacher helped me to install Debian on it). When I first started I didn't really know how to do anything. I didn't have access to an internet connection, so I couldn't search for help, and I was often frustrated because I didn't really understand at the time how Linux worked. Fast forward to two days ago, I just switched from Suse to Kubuntu. It's been years since I've used a debian based distribution, but the transition has been absolutely painless. Switching over wasn't a cause for any sort of stress, or really any sort of thought whatsoever (my old machine died, when I got my new machine put together I tried to install Suse 10.0 only to find out it didn't like installing on SATA drives, and I happened to have a Kubuntu disk lying around that I had been intending to try out at some point, so I just shrugged and installed it instead).
I have to second this. I haven't played with Objective C much, but I did look into D a while ago and seems like it has a lot of potential.
The thing about garbage collection is that 80% of the time you don't need it, but the other 20% of the time not having it can really be a pain in the ass. I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that, most of the time, memory management is just something that has to be done, and it's the sort of thing that compilers are better at than humans. Sometimes though, it's a design issue- and compilers suck at design (which is why programmers exist). Garbage collection is very handy when it comes to saving the programmer from the tedium of worrying about freeing memory in a lot of circumstances, but too many languages take the power completely out of the hands of the programmer. This leads to situations where the compiler might not realize that an object is out of scope and can be freed, but the programmer knows this because it is that way by design- and yet has no way to tell the compiler this, because the compiler is "helping" the programmer. There are ways to get around these sorts of problems, but they usually end up adding to the complexity of the program.
It sort of makes me think of the saying "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, C++ makes it harder, but when you do you blow off your whole leg" and want to extend it to say "when you take away all of a programmers weapons, so they cant hurt themselves, you leave them with no way to attack the problem".
I'm not against garbage collection in general, or other tools to help developers- I use Java quite a bit and really enjoy developing in it- but in order to know when a tool is right for a job, you have to know when a tool is wrong for a job.
I think that it is true that a lot of commercial software that is available for Windows would utterly fail if it were ported to Linux, but I think that the reason has less to do with some aversion to proprietary software than the fact that Linux users value different things from their software than Windows users. /Applications. In either case, it's perfectly acceptable to users of those OSes to go to the companies website and download the software, or to buy a boxed set and run the installer from the CD.
I think that Windows users in general value simplicity and consistency, while Linux users tend to value robustness and efficiency. It's not a matter of one being "better than" the other, it is simply a matter of having a different target audience. I think they key difference is that most windows users (and computer illiterate people of all OSes) want software that is written for them. Linux users (and geeks of all OSes) want software that is written for a task. Joe Windows User says "I want a program to let me burn DVDs", but Tom Linux User says "I need a program that burns DVDs". The difference seems subtle, but software made for one group rarely satisfies people in the other group.
Another big difference is Consistency. Windows (and Mac) users like things to have a consistent look and feel, and to work generally the same way. I think that's true of Linux users as well, except that no two Linux users can agree on what that same way should be, and so they want the option to customize that software to work how they want it.
I think the final big thing that is a non-issue on Windows and OS X that can make or break the deal with many Linux users is how the software is packaged. On Windows you pretty much run an installer off of a CD or download the installer. On Mac you pretty much either run an installer, or drag a folder into
With Linux though, a lot of software won't get on a users machine unless the user can grab it from a large repository through emerge or synaptic or packman or yum or whatever package management system that user uses. Of course, this distribution method doesn't really work well for selling proprietary software (I guess a company could set up a repository for their software, and let anyone install it, then require registration the first time it's run or whatever, but that would require users to go in and add that repository to their package management system, etc.). This isn't such a big deal with big high profile applications, but it can really be a stopping point for small independent software vendors.
I think that, as much as companies make a fuss about Linux users not wanting to pay for software, and Linux not having enough market share, and the GPL being viral, it's really the problems that I've outlined that makes getting proprietary software on Linux a hurdle for many developers.
Personally, I have a number of proprietary applications running on my Linux machine, both very expensive high profile programs and less expensive applications, as well as some free-as-in-beer stuff (flash plugin, etc.). Cost wasn't an issue (if the program makes me more productive or allows me to do something I otherwise could not do, then it's worth the money), nor was the fact that it wasn't open sourced (I think that there are some domains of applications where free software is better, others where free software is catching up, and I think there are domains where proprietary software will always be ahead of free software, I always pick the program that best meets my needs- sometimes I need the source, most of the time I don't and I pick based on the merits of the program without considering it's license). The problems I outlined above were issues however, and if those problems were solved I think that it would be more reasonable for companies to release proprietary software for Linux, and I think that buying and using that proprietary software would be more appealing to myself and other Linux users.
I have a few observations on the subject. I think that the first thing that immediately lept to mind has also been the prevailing comment so far, and that is that 46% seems awfully high for men or women for doing troubleshooting, unless you count troubleshooting as saying "hmm, something's wrong.".
That aside, it seems to me that women have a higher average technological competency than men, speaking in general terms, however there also seems to be a smaller standard deviation. Of the men I know, most seem to be either geeks or luddites. Most of the men I know have only very recently started considering using cell phones (many men I know don't own one), and very rarely, if every, use a computer. On the other hand, I know very few female geeks, but I also can't think of any female luddites. Most women I know were early adopters of cell phones, and most women I know use the computer more than men, and for more versatile tasks (e.g. I know a lot of men who literally never use the computer for anything except ebay, most women I know use the computer for the web as well as email, IM, iTunes, photos, etc.).
Of course the survey contradicts my own observations, but I also think terms like "technology gadgets" are extemely vauge. In my experience, women are generally early adopters of technologies that enable creativity and communication (cell phones, IM, scanners, photo editing software, etc.) whereas men tend to be early adopters of technology that is primarily entertainment (dvd players, video games, etc.).
Hmm, then the article was really poorly written. I spent several minutes pondering over what they were trying to say and it was still not very clear.
You were right the first time. It is an array of cards, each card contains 2 GPUs and each GPU contains 2 cores. So you have 64 cards * 2 GPUs per card * 2 cores per GPU = 256 cores total. The article is extremely poorly worded.
While I can't answer the posters question, I really hope that someone can give a good answer to this for another reason. I'm a recent graduate, and while I have some experience working on Windows systems, and with Microsoft technology, I'm very interested in finding a development job working on Linux and with the various open source development tools. .NET is much less painful than working with MFC, I still don't enjoy it like I do developing under Linux). It would be great to have a place where I could find job listings working with F/OSS software.
I've gone through most of the "regular" channels in searching for a job (e.g. Monster, Dice, Hotjobs, Career Builder, my school's Career Services department), and while there are a few open source jobs, it seems like the vast majority of jobs are VB.NET, ASP.NET or C# working on Windows. While I could certainly do that, and I have applied for a few of these jobs, I went into programming because I wanted to do something I love for a living. I don't hate working in Windows, but I don't love it (Although
I've been playing around with this for a few hours. Running some of their demos, things seem very snappy, and the applications look better than most Swing/AWT applications. I've always been fond of the way Qt works, and I think it will be nice to have the option of using it with Java.
Of course this is still a developer preview. After playing around with it for about 4 hours, I still can't get an application to launch, except for the demos that it ships with. This is probably due to my own ineptitude, but if I'm having trouble with it, I'm sure other developers will as well. I suspect that once there is an official release, things will be made easier (or the documentation will be made clearer) and there won't be so many problems.
PS: If anyone has played around with this and had success, maybe you can help me out. I created a project in eclipse, added the qtjambi.jar file into the classpath, set the PATH to qtjambi-linux-preview/bin and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to qtjabmi-linux-preview/lib, whenever I try to launch an application, I get
failed to load library: 'qtjambi'
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no qtjambi in java.library.path
...
Anyway, I think it will be really nice once I can figure out how to use it properly.
Maybe it is an honest title? Being unbias can only go so far, at some point you have to call an duck a duck, you have to call evil evil, and you have to recognize that it's beyond simple idiological differences. All politicians are motivated by their own interests, but I cannot believe that anyone in the current administration has any misconceptions that they are not destroying the country for their own short term gains. I also honestly beleive that in the past, most politicians have drawn a line, they are self serving but only to the point where making decisions that are bad for the country as a whole to serve their own interests won't go so far as bringing the whole country to it's knees. Of course it still depends on having definitions for what is good and what is bad for the country, but I think that it's hard to call any political philosophy that is based around keeping the citizens of your own country scared and poor so that they are more easily manipulated into following the moral code of your religion can be called good in the sense of the original american ideal.
It seems like the sane design would be to use the flash memory if available, but otherwise function like hard drives do today. In otherwords, if the flash memory craps out, you can still read and write to the drive, although with a performance hit.
Given, as you mention, the limited number of writes on these, it might also be neat to have using the flash as a supplement to increase speeds something that can be turned on or off from the OS. I could see that being useful in a number of ways, if it was written in a sane manner that wouldn't simply kill the flash memory too quickly from exessive rights.
I used to have to deal with this with my Aunt and Uncle. They were nice about it, never rushed me, and always offered to pay, but eventually it was still a pain to have to drive over there every week or two to remove viruses, etc.
Eventually, I sat down and talked to them about installing Linux. I didn't go into technical details, but I explained that they could do everything they did under Windows, but it would take them some time to get used to different programs. I also explained that my cousins games wouldn't work. They decided to let me give it ago, and Installed Suse 9.1 (the newest version at the time).
I set up wine and got most my cousins games working, set up seperate accounts for each family member, set up their email, etc. Since then there hasn't been a single problem with that computer. A couple of months ago, they were given another computer that is running Windows XP. After a couple of months of the same cleaning up crapware off the machine every couple of weeks, they even asked me to install Linux on it as well. Unfortunately, some software that my Uncle runs on it won't run under Wine, and I haven't been able to find any alternative to it under Linux (it's some custom software written by a friend of his that ties in various topography maps with a database keeping track of caves and other geological stuff in the area). It's funny though, with the exception of my Uncle who needs to use this software, everyone else in the family prefers the Linux box, and only uses the Windows machine for iTunes or if someone else is on the Linux box.
If you approach them diplomatically and explain that installing Linux will require that they learn things a little different, but that in the long run it will make it easier on everyone, you might be surprised how receptive non-technical people can be toward the idea. My own experience (not just with my aunt and uncle, with others as well) has show me that, while most people may not be proficient enough to install and configure Linux, if you set it up for them and then walk them through common tasks, people can run just fine with Linux.
As I understand it, if you download PHPBB and make changes to it, and PHPBB has a "download this code" link, then you have to point it to a version that contains your changes. Doing otherwise would be like me downloading, say, Linux and making a bunch of changes to the kernel, then distributing my kernel with the original source (sans my changes).
Now, if you included part of PHPBBs code in your own program unmodified, then do you have to have a link to that part of the PHPBB code, or your code, or both?
I am from the US, and I have not yet had the opportunity to travel outside of the US, so my knowledge is based on talking to friends who live in other countries, and specifically to people who have lived in both Europe and the US.
Granted, gas is cheaper in the US than in many other places in the world, but even with relatively lower gas prices, I think that the price of gas going up effects Americans more than people in a lot of other countries. Part of it is because a lot of people in the US buy SUVs and other big gas guzzlers as status symbols, but another big part of the problem is the transportation infrastructure of the US.
The United States is a big country, it's also very spread out. Even looking at a single city within the US, things tend to be spread out over a larger area, and arranged in strange ways compared to a lot of other countries. With the exception of a few larger cities, there is also almost no form of mass transit. I live in a fairly large city, and we have nothing like a subway or street cars. There is a bus system, but it only covers a fairly small portion of down town. I would have to walk over 20 miles to get to the nearest bus stop, and I live in the city, not in a suburb. Now, 20 miles is a fairly long walk if I'm trying to get someplace in a reasonable period of time, but even if I wanted to walk, due to the layout of the city, it would still be hard to do so. For the most part, with the exception of neighborhoods and a few shopping areas, there aren't crosswalks or foot bridges going over highways. If I wanted to walk to the bus stop, I would have to either cross a 6 lane highway, or walk an additional several miles out of my way to find a safe spot to cross.
Bicylce lanes are also pretty rare around here, and the most direct route almost anywhere in this city is via interstate, which doesn't allow bicycles (and one would be crazy to try, even if it were legal).
To take an example, I had a job interview last week. It was about 40 miles away from my house, on the other side of the city (technically it was outside of the city, but in the greater metropolitan area, and only a couple of miles outside of the city proper). The round trip in my car (a relatively small car by US standards) would have cost me about $20 with the current gas prices (40 miles each way, 80 miles total, and it would have taken probably about 1/2 a tank of gas). Assuming I were to get that job, until I could find a place to live closer to where I would be working, I would have to spend $100/week in gas. That would end up being about 15% of my paycheck before taxes, or about 20% after taxes, just to get back and forth to work.
Now say I decided to save money and the environment and use alternative transportation. I can't bicylcle there, because even after having lived in the city for 22 years, I can't think of a way to get there by bike at all, and if I did it would probably go through so many side streets just to avoid the interstates that it would take me half a day to get there. I could walk to the bus stop, but like I said, it's almost 20 miles to the nearest bus stop, and then the best I could hope for would be to get about 10 to 15 miles, and still have another 5 to 10 miles to walk. It's been around 100 degrees Farenheight here lately, with humidity at around 80 to 90 percent. Even if I were in good enough physical shape to make that walk (go ahead and make some fat, lazy american jokes if you wish, but I know there is no way I could make that walk in this heat) I don't think I would be able to arrive and still appear well groomed and professional enough to keep the job.
In short, Americans have cheap gas relative to a lot of other places, but we also are pretty much stuck driving further to get anywhere, and with fewer alternative options for other forms of transport than people in many other countries have. This is largely thanks to cities being planned out and having grown up at a time when everyone had a car or two, and gas was far cheaper than milk. Many european cities
Actually, I always wondered if John Romero was related to George Romero. It would kinda make sense.
I've always used nVidia cards, which have always worked well for me under Linux. I've never tried getting an ATI card to work because I've never heard anything other than it was sheer agony to use an ATI card under Linux.
In general, this is fine. If a hardware vendor doesn't support my OS, then I will buy from a vendor who does. In this case, nVidia hovers between "almost as good as" and "slightly better than" ATI, depending on who has most recently released a new video card, so it's not a big compromise.
I do find ATIs lack of Linux support to be disappointing now however, because those of us interested on running Linux on an intel mac are stuck with a choice between ATI and an embedded crappy video card.
Incidentally, has anyone had any luck getting Linux to dual boot with OS X on one of the newer iMacs? I'm interested in getting one, but until Autodesk offers an Intel Mac version of Maya I'm stuck on Linux (and actually, even if there were an Intel Mac version, I'm not sure I want to pay the fee to transfer my license from Linux to Mac) so I can't justify getting a new machine unless it can run Linux well with good 3D support.
The US is at war with Iraq.
The US has always been at war with Iraq.
Procedurally generating content is computationally expensive, and not always easily done in parallel. To procedurally generate an entire level worth of content would take a lot more time than most people would wait for a level to load, for even a relatively simple and small level it wouldn't be surprising for it to take a few hours- even with heavily optimzied code.
Things like texture synthesis can be done on the fly for simple cases, and procedurally generated models are being used today to some extent, but generating everything procedurally won't be realistic for quite a while.
The other big thing is that procedurally generated content is rarely perfect. There are some things that can be done really well, but most things require a lot of processing to minimize the weirdness that can crop up from time to time.
What it seems more likely to me that would be done is, instead of procedurally generating content on the console when the game loads, game makers will start to look more at procedurally generating content during the development process. This can help bring down the art requirements on large projects, and allow greater detail without requiring things to be run in real time.
What I've always done is putting the punctuation that belongs to the quoted phrase in the quotes, and the punctuation that belongs to a sentence as a whole outside of the quotes. Here are some examples:
She said "I'm going to the store.".
I asked "Do you need some help?" when he picked up the piano.
He said "what?".
Did she say "I like pie."?
I know it's not proper, but it's always made the most sense to me.
While I don't entirely deny the points you made, I also think that it's not entirely fair. There are a lot of people who act the way you have described, and I agree that it is loathsome. I don't think that it's fair to generalize to the entire Wiccan population though.
There are a lot of Wiccans out there who have what I like to call the "oppression complex"; though it's not entirely unique to Wiccans either. Pretty much every group of people- especially once the size of the group reaches some critical mass- has people who act like that.
There are a lot of Wiccans who dislike people using the term "Witch" to refer to Wiccans for the reasons you've outlined. At the same time though, let's not pretend that there are not other groups that take on some name that is traditionally a derogetory term with a perhaps unrelated meaning and use it as a symbol of pride (how many slashdotters proudly refer to themeselves as geeks? what about western anime fans adopting the term otaku? what about the use of the word "cunt" as a word of empowerment in some femininst circles? what about the adoption of the word "nigger" among african americans? I could go on).
As for the debate about Wicca being a new vs an old religion; I think you will find very few serious and knowledgeable practicioners who claim that Wicca is older than perhaps 1900 or so- most people would say it was invented by Gardner circa 1950 although you will occasionally see the argument that many of the ideas that were adopted by wicca originated in the 20's with a paper by an anthropologist named Margret Murray called "The Witch Cult of Western Europe" (inscidentally, I belieive this is where a great deal of the erroneous information within the Wiccan community comes from), or that it began first with the OTO and was developed by Gardner in collaboration with Alister Crowley.
Most Wiccans recognize Wicca as a new religion, and don't try to pretend that it's more than an attempt to create a modern belief system which is based off of bits of pieces of numerous older belief system.
Most of the problem I think arises from the fact that Wicca is perhaps the largest- certainly the most well known- of the neopagan religions. It is taboo enough to attract rebellious teens and attention whores, popular enough that said people will have heard about it and be able to find information (and misinformation) about it, and misunderstood enough that, by and large, the average person is unable to tell the rebellious attention whoring people who misunderstand it why exactly they are full of it.
Of course, these people aren't representitive of the entire community. As with many communities that have a high porportion of such people, those people go on making asses of themselves while everyone else ignores them and gets on with their own lives.
In short, there is nothing wrong with Wicca as a religion, and nothing wrong with people who practice Wicca. There are a lot of people who act as you describe, and rightfully need to ignored or set strait. Generalizing all Wiccans as acting like those people you described, or generalizing Wicca itself as something which leads to or encourages such behavior however is as misinformed as the people you are critisizing.