Half-Life 2 had an extremely linear design and healthpacks every couple meters. It was all "run, shoot at stuff, face no consequences" imo. Some rollercoaster/shooting gallery thing.
g. It's a slab of bread with thin slices of melted sausage and a small amount of cheese-like substance. Totally not worth it. If you don't have enough money for a good enough pizza, choose other toppings?
Yes a lot of non-techies know what an IP is, but it depends what is a "techie" and what is a "non techie". Gamers do know about an IP, and I dare say that more people don't know what a "hostname" is. Yes "google.com" is a hostname that every one knows, but most people think that's an URL.
As for a home LAN I find it useful to declare the "main desktop" (which stores most or all offl-line music and movies) in the router's DHCP server, so its local IP is fixed. Then in other computers add that "main desktop" to the hosts file. So now, you can ping and reach that computer by name, no DNS server involved:). Well Windows did that already with the "NetBIOS" stuff but that works less reliably and you might have non-Windows. Nice little thing but it requires some undestanding (of what a MAC, an IP and a hostname are).
But on ipv4 it's easy to understand that "on a LAN I should use 192.168.x.x, or 10.0.0.x or such". On IPv6 it's more like "ok there's 2001: stuff and fe80: stuff, but what should I use, what's the rule for abbreviating ":0:0:0:0" into "::", how many numbers do I need?". You seemingly have to go read RFC papers to answer these questions. Also, this supposes the user even understand hexadecimal numbers.
I have to reason that a number (like "FE80") is made of four nibbles, that's 16 bit, so there's max 8 numbers in an IP. And hell, I'm looking at my wlan card's ipv6 : some numbers have three digits only. I assume leading zeroes are left out. So I'm counting five numbers, first thing is "fe80::", and there's a cryptic "/64" too at the end. Maybe it is "not hard" but it's an order of magnitude more complex than ipv4 and that sucks for kids, home users etc.
I bet most of the popular apps are front-ends to private services like f...book, google, pictures sharing services, $streaming_service etc. which invariably collect your data and try to lock you in. I question the value of a Free and Open Source OS, and of the front-end apps themselves even if they're Free and Open Source, when all the "cloudy" back-end is where the interesting stuff happens and it is locked, out of control and may be working against your interests.
Even as a desktop linux user I'm suffering from this already, what with all the tracking when browsing the web. If we want Freedom on the mobile OS we're going to need Free back-ends to go with it (i.e. if you store private data on the web/internet, you should have the option of doing it on your own server, like installing the back-end software easily on a small VM that you pay a couple dollars per month for). We need more chat apps, sharing apps etc. using open and universal protocols (like e-mail, IRC, XMPP) rather than made solely to be one customer of a single one company.
So true. Where's the metro notepad? Every GUI environment has included a notepad etc. since the 1980s. Also, half the stuff takes you to a login screen or to a store.
My last little experiment/finding was on a freshly booted Win 8 laptop, where the desktop hasn't been loaded already. So how to get to the desktop?, an option is to navigate the metro screen and to launch a random desktop app, but it's cumbersome and I have to close a program I didn't want in the first place.
So, to get to the desktop I can go to the Charms bar, click on the magnifying glass and search for the desktop! Just two or three letters (in the language the OS uses) and you find the desktop. I find doing this sort of stuff hilarious. Somehow it's more easy than Unity in Ubuntu 12.04 : there I have trouble finding the damn terminal, but I can manage to get a raw xterm at least.
You can't really just hand wave this problem away. Excavating machines are necessarily very heavy and thus extremely expensive with current tech (chemical rockets) to get to the moon. You're likely talking multiple launches of Atlas V class rockets which deliver the machines with pinpoint accuracy to the moon which then somehow have to be put together. And it isn't just the machine to do the tunnel boring, you need structural materials to support the excavation and all the other building materials for the base. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but what I am saying is that it is a VERY challenging and expensive problem for which we do not presently have the technology.
80 years from now, people will quibble that the Americans sent heavy excavating equipment to the moon with multiple Atlas V class launches and dealt with the nightmare of assembly it all.. But the Russians used a shovel?
LOL, but there were all those comments on slashdot that the Silicon Valley is now infested by hipsters who refuse to take their fedora off and only know "Ruby on Rails!!!". Sure, just run on i686 and you have the memory savings already.
The overlord daemon is an advantage, previously we all used monitoring scripts to do things for us. The system now has it built in.
The disadvantage to the overlord daemon is when I do a google search to know wtf it is, I get answers about actual evil overlords like Satan itself or an undead evil creature. So I don't understand much what this is about and I fear that systemd is an evil overlord with huge dependencies (like a fifty meter high gritty castle) and integration with malefic gnomes.
E-cigarettes gives you the fast, abundant and finely controlled nicotine intake, with the experience of breathing hot air and satisfying the "nipple sucking" primordial reflex. They really give everything a cigarette user needs, and are cheap, especially in countries with high taxes on tobacco.. while like 95% of the toxicity just goes away. No more tars and whatever crap.
So, don't hesitate.. Do it immediately! It's even something of a Star Trek thing. Star Trek had that fake alcohol which makes you drunk without poisoning you : no hangovers (intoxication), passing out (overdose), headache. (crap alcohol does this. Note that by drinking good or decent beer and red wine I can get high alcohol intake without headaches and with less brain damage, but I don't kid myself, it's most probably still harmful)
Some years ago we played a bit of Left4Dead (on Windows), it ran well at 800x600 on a buddy's RV370 - Radeon X300SE, it used to be a highly common card. ATI dropped support because it's based on the Radeon 9700's architecture, which was several years old at that point.
PS : not sure if anyone is reading me but, I've found out I'm doing the same on a Windows 8.1 computer. The start screen is so much shit that to find and run Virtualbox I resorted to going to C:\Program Files. Done. Easier than navigating to "all apps" and finding it in the list.
Wait for a Tegra K1 tablet with keyboard (hopefully with 10" 2560x1600 display?). If that comes out, then supposedly you could run a full desktop linux OS, with X11 and latest OpenGL. Alternately, similar hardware could come out with Atom Silvermont, i.e. "poor man's" Surface Pro, or the AMD Mullins chip. You could then have fun trying to get a Microsoft tax refund.
Aw, to muck with things, a putative Tegra K1 with Windows RT would be locked up hardware so be sure to buy an Android variant instead.
This reminds me of simply navigating to C:\Program Files to launch stuff, I would do that in win9x sometimes. This is how I launched games mainly, navigate to D:\games\, pick a game folder and run the.exe (or.bat, or.com). Most games weren't "installed" anyway, either because they were DOS games or because Windows had been reinstalled but no need to reinstall the games. Later I had a quicklaunch with about ten games, the great stuff like CS 1.5, quake 3, AoE 2 etc.
nah, Ubuntu 11.04 had Unity but still offered Gnome 2 out of the box, Ubuntu 12.04 has Unity.
With Mate I miss win+d shortcut (which I had on LXDE), and I couldn't configure it, win key seems to have precedence to be a lone key that brings the menu. But now I know I can use ctrl+alt+d instead. On LXDE you have win+d, perhaps win+e and win+t (I don't remember exactly) but simply pressing the win key can't bring the menu ; I can't configure the window manager that way, it apparently thinks the win key is always a modifier. ROFL, I wish I could have it both ways.
oh well, I'm tired of internet arguments, obviously it works well for you and its heavyness is overblown. I've seen Windows 7 run really well on similar hardware too, whereas I found it too slow on my faster PC. Intel laptop with Intel chips and thus better than average chipset drivers, not overloading the system with tons of crap, not overloading the Firefox with hundreds tabs as I tend to do on a desktop.. Sure the computer can be nice.
I used to think Win 7 is shit but I can now quite tolerate it. I was not happy about the slowness (excessive disk I/O for doing just about anything) and some UI suckage. But I now feel a a lot better when using it, I even have a patched, functioning installation on my hard drive (in case I'd really need it, or to do a chkdsk on an ntfs partition).
- switch the theme to Aero Basic (that's personal preference but that's a more "classic" and less messy look to me, with disabled animations) - uninstall any AV software, install "MSSE" instead. Now security is just about installing everything that's "important" from Windows Update!, you'll never deal with a crappy AV that disables itself, nags you and bully you again. - install Classic Shell, recent version. Fixes the piece of shit start menu, it makes it behave more like Windows XP's one while still looking the same as Windows 7's one. Windows 7 start menu is unusable and shitty because folder browsing is limited to a very small rectangle area, and is not cascading. Now you can see all the folder at once, just like in Windows 95, 2000 or XP. Right-click, sort by name and simply delete the useless stuff.
- also what I like on my set up, but is optional : I have two user accounts, admin and regular one. UAC prompts me for the admin password instead of just expecting me to click "yes". It's more meaningful than Ubuntu et al. prompting me for the user password to do admin tasks, btw. It helps you understand what you're doing with that random setup.exe, and you hopefully can't make your computer shittier anymore just by pressing "Yes".
Your laptop was a very high end, cutting edge one, these specs beat the average netbook or tablet (except that your hard drive is less dense). When KDE 4 first came out, people who used linux were likely to be running some Pentium III/4 with 256 to 512MB and some cheap graphics card etc. So yes, KDE was more like Vista. You're running it successfully because you have thrown hardware at it, have mundane usage of it and have had 5 years of bugfixes.
Wow that's looking sane and good, and about how I set up LXDE on my previous OS installation. At the same time it looks more modern and featured (or well, different than same old gtk2 stuff. your screenshot has some 90s/early 00s look too.)
Now, if KDE shipped with a desktop icon that says "click this to disable the ugly loads of krap that make it look like complete shit", maybe more people would use KDE. KDE just throws too much krap at you (aktivities, braindead start menu, animations and widgets etc.) Seems I can get your desktop but it would be like disabling Windows XP's crap to make it look and act like 98/XP, or disabling cruft fromVista + crapware. Except I would have to learn all of this.
On another note, maybe it would look too fat and limited on a 1024 wide or 1280 wide screen instead of your 1920 wide stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Half-Life 2 had an extremely linear design and healthpacks every couple meters. It was all "run, shoot at stuff, face no consequences" imo. Some rollercoaster/shooting gallery thing.
g. It's a slab of bread with thin slices of melted sausage and a small amount of cheese-like substance. Totally not worth it. If you don't have enough money for a good enough pizza, choose other toppings?
I can't wait to look at Unicode goatse.
Yes a lot of non-techies know what an IP is, but it depends what is a "techie" and what is a "non techie". Gamers do know about an IP, and I dare say that more people don't know what a "hostname" is. Yes "google.com" is a hostname that every one knows, but most people think that's an URL.
As for a home LAN I find it useful to declare the "main desktop" (which stores most or all offl-line music and movies) in the router's DHCP server, so its local IP is fixed. Then in other computers add that "main desktop" to the hosts file. So now, you can ping and reach that computer by name, no DNS server involved :). Well Windows did that already with the "NetBIOS" stuff but that works less reliably and you might have non-Windows.
Nice little thing but it requires some undestanding (of what a MAC, an IP and a hostname are).
Yes, why didn't they just call it "2001:192:168:x::1" ?
But on ipv4 it's easy to understand that "on a LAN I should use 192.168.x.x, or 10.0.0.x or such".
On IPv6 it's more like "ok there's 2001: stuff and fe80: stuff, but what should I use, what's the rule for abbreviating ":0:0:0:0" into "::", how many numbers do I need?". You seemingly have to go read RFC papers to answer these questions. Also, this supposes the user even understand hexadecimal numbers.
I have to reason that a number (like "FE80") is made of four nibbles, that's 16 bit, so there's max 8 numbers in an IP. And hell, I'm looking at my wlan card's ipv6 : some numbers have three digits only. I assume leading zeroes are left out. So I'm counting five numbers, first thing is "fe80::", and there's a cryptic "/64" too at the end.
Maybe it is "not hard" but it's an order of magnitude more complex than ipv4 and that sucks for kids, home users etc.
I bet most of the popular apps are front-ends to private services like f...book, google, pictures sharing services, $streaming_service etc. which invariably collect your data and try to lock you in. I question the value of a Free and Open Source OS, and of the front-end apps themselves even if they're Free and Open Source, when all the "cloudy" back-end is where the interesting stuff happens and it is locked, out of control and may be working against your interests.
Even as a desktop linux user I'm suffering from this already, what with all the tracking when browsing the web.
If we want Freedom on the mobile OS we're going to need Free back-ends to go with it (i.e. if you store private data on the web/internet, you should have the option of doing it on your own server, like installing the back-end software easily on a small VM that you pay a couple dollars per month for).
We need more chat apps, sharing apps etc. using open and universal protocols (like e-mail, IRC, XMPP) rather than made solely to be one customer of a single one company.
So true. Where's the metro notepad? Every GUI environment has included a notepad etc. since the 1980s. Also, half the stuff takes you to a login screen or to a store.
My last little experiment/finding was on a freshly booted Win 8 laptop, where the desktop hasn't been loaded already. So how to get to the desktop?, an option is to navigate the metro screen and to launch a random desktop app, but it's cumbersome and I have to close a program I didn't want in the first place.
So, to get to the desktop I can go to the Charms bar, click on the magnifying glass and search for the desktop! Just two or three letters (in the language the OS uses) and you find the desktop.
I find doing this sort of stuff hilarious. Somehow it's more easy than Unity in Ubuntu 12.04 : there I have trouble finding the damn terminal, but I can manage to get a raw xterm at least.
Won't you spend more $$$ on electricity for bitcoin mining than what you get out of it?, unless you steal the electricity.
You can't really just hand wave this problem away. Excavating machines are necessarily very heavy and thus extremely expensive with current tech (chemical rockets) to get to the moon. You're likely talking multiple launches of Atlas V class rockets which deliver the machines with pinpoint accuracy to the moon which then somehow have to be put together. And it isn't just the machine to do the tunnel boring, you need structural materials to support the excavation and all the other building materials for the base. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but what I am saying is that it is a VERY challenging and expensive problem for which we do not presently have the technology.
80 years from now, people will quibble that the Americans sent heavy excavating equipment to the moon with multiple Atlas V class launches and dealt with the nightmare of assembly it all.. But the Russians used a shovel?
You mean, like bread and cheese? :)
LOL, but there were all those comments on slashdot that the Silicon Valley is now infested by hipsters who refuse to take their fedora off and only know "Ruby on Rails!!!".
Sure, just run on i686 and you have the memory savings already.
But maybe you want to run slow memory hogs with pointeritis?, like interpreted dynamic languages and their runtime.
The overlord daemon is an advantage, previously we all used monitoring scripts to do things for us. The system now has it built in.
The disadvantage to the overlord daemon is when I do a google search to know wtf it is, I get answers about actual evil overlords like Satan itself or an undead evil creature.
So I don't understand much what this is about and I fear that systemd is an evil overlord with huge dependencies (like a fifty meter high gritty castle) and integration with malefic gnomes.
E-cigarettes gives you the fast, abundant and finely controlled nicotine intake, with the experience of breathing hot air and satisfying the "nipple sucking" primordial reflex.
They really give everything a cigarette user needs, and are cheap, especially in countries with high taxes on tobacco.. while like 95% of the toxicity just goes away. No more tars and whatever crap.
So, don't hesitate.. Do it immediately!
It's even something of a Star Trek thing. Star Trek had that fake alcohol which makes you drunk without poisoning you : no hangovers (intoxication), passing out (overdose), headache. (crap alcohol does this. Note that by drinking good or decent beer and red wine I can get high alcohol intake without headaches and with less brain damage, but I don't kid myself, it's most probably still harmful)
Some years ago we played a bit of Left4Dead (on Windows), it ran well at 800x600 on a buddy's RV370 - Radeon X300SE, it used to be a highly common card. ATI dropped support because it's based on the Radeon 9700's architecture, which was several years old at that point.
PS :
not sure if anyone is reading me but, I've found out I'm doing the same on a Windows 8.1 computer. The start screen is so much shit that to find and run Virtualbox I resorted to going to C:\Program Files. Done. Easier than navigating to "all apps" and finding it in the list.
Wait for a Tegra K1 tablet with keyboard (hopefully with 10" 2560x1600 display?). If that comes out, then supposedly you could run a full desktop linux OS, with X11 and latest OpenGL. Alternately, similar hardware could come out with Atom Silvermont, i.e. "poor man's" Surface Pro, or the AMD Mullins chip. You could then have fun trying to get a Microsoft tax refund.
Aw, to muck with things, a putative Tegra K1 with Windows RT would be locked up hardware so be sure to buy an Android variant instead.
This reminds me of simply navigating to C:\Program Files to launch stuff, I would do that in win9x sometimes. This is how I launched games mainly, navigate to D:\games\, pick a game folder and run the .exe (or .bat, or .com). Most games weren't "installed" anyway, either because they were DOS games or because Windows had been reinstalled but no need to reinstall the games. Later I had a quicklaunch with about ten games, the great stuff like CS 1.5, quake 3, AoE 2 etc.
nah, Ubuntu 11.04 had Unity but still offered Gnome 2 out of the box, Ubuntu 12.04 has Unity.
With Mate I miss win+d shortcut (which I had on LXDE), and I couldn't configure it, win key seems to have precedence to be a lone key that brings the menu. But now I know I can use ctrl+alt+d instead. On LXDE you have win+d, perhaps win+e and win+t (I don't remember exactly) but simply pressing the win key can't bring the menu ; I can't configure the window manager that way, it apparently thinks the win key is always a modifier.
ROFL, I wish I could have it both ways.
oh well, I'm tired of internet arguments, obviously it works well for you and its heavyness is overblown. I've seen Windows 7 run really well on similar hardware too, whereas I found it too slow on my faster PC. Intel laptop with Intel chips and thus better than average chipset drivers, not overloading the system with tons of crap, not overloading the Firefox with hundreds tabs as I tend to do on a desktop.. Sure the computer can be nice.
I used to think Win 7 is shit but I can now quite tolerate it. I was not happy about the slowness (excessive disk I/O for doing just about anything) and some UI suckage. But I now feel a a lot better when using it, I even have a patched, functioning installation on my hard drive (in case I'd really need it, or to do a chkdsk on an ntfs partition).
- switch the theme to Aero Basic (that's personal preference but that's a more "classic" and less messy look to me, with disabled animations)
- uninstall any AV software, install "MSSE" instead. Now security is just about installing everything that's "important" from Windows Update!, you'll never deal with a crappy AV that disables itself, nags you and bully you again.
- install Classic Shell, recent version. Fixes the piece of shit start menu, it makes it behave more like Windows XP's one while still looking the same as Windows 7's one. Windows 7 start menu is unusable and shitty because folder browsing is limited to a very small rectangle area, and is not cascading.
Now you can see all the folder at once, just like in Windows 95, 2000 or XP. Right-click, sort by name and simply delete the useless stuff.
- also what I like on my set up, but is optional : I have two user accounts, admin and regular one. UAC prompts me for the admin password instead of just expecting me to click "yes". It's more meaningful than Ubuntu et al. prompting me for the user password to do admin tasks, btw. It helps you understand what you're doing with that random setup.exe, and you hopefully can't make your computer shittier anymore just by pressing "Yes".
Your laptop was a very high end, cutting edge one, these specs beat the average netbook or tablet (except that your hard drive is less dense). When KDE 4 first came out, people who used linux were likely to be running some Pentium III/4 with 256 to 512MB and some cheap graphics card etc.
So yes, KDE was more like Vista. You're running it successfully because you have thrown hardware at it, have mundane usage of it and have had 5 years of bugfixes.
Wow that's looking sane and good, and about how I set up LXDE on my previous OS installation. At the same time it looks more modern and featured (or well, different than same old gtk2 stuff. your screenshot has some 90s/early 00s look too.)
Now, if KDE shipped with a desktop icon that says "click this to disable the ugly loads of krap that make it look like complete shit", maybe more people would use KDE. KDE just throws too much krap at you (aktivities, braindead start menu, animations and widgets etc.)
Seems I can get your desktop but it would be like disabling Windows XP's crap to make it look and act like 98/XP, or disabling cruft fromVista + crapware. Except I would have to learn all of this.
On another note, maybe it would look too fat and limited on a 1024 wide or 1280 wide screen instead of your 1920 wide stuff.