These days, I prefer to think of Ubuntu as being akin to Mac OS X or Android: it's an operating system which is built on a Unix core, but it doesn't want to be a "Unix OS". So you shouldn't expect it to act like a normal Linux distribution, because it's intentionally trying to hide all the things you expect to be there. Personally, that's not what I want.
Note that a somewhat better solution is to set up your folder-o-shortcuts and then use menuApp. You don't have to worry about the size of the toolbar, since the menu is created from a single normal shortcut. I haven't tried this under Windows 8, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.
I've been thinking for a while that, with the direction Apple's been heading recently, there is the potential for a resurgence of sorts in the use of Linux by developers. Somebody needs to put together a developer-centric distro, not all simplified and "user-friendly" like Ubuntu is becoming, but also not forcing everyone down the way of the command-line (too much in that direction is why developers initially defected to Macs in the first place).
Not really. I think if you read the book (as I did), not for some high school English class (where you have to find the "correct" meaning or you fail), but on your own, without any preconceptions, it's pretty obvious what he was getting at. He makes it clear that the government, in burning books, is only doing what the people want.
I still have one, somewhere... I think it's in my garage someplace. A while back I thought that a good project might be to take it apart and replace the guts with something like a BeagleBoard.
My house is almost entirely fluorescent. The only problem I have is that probably half of the fluorescent "bulbs" have burned out in catastrophic fashion. We're talking glowing white hot, melting plastic, arcing, smoke pouring out, that kind of thing.
That's kind of funny, because the folks making it basically said that the old UI (which they built) had no consistency and that almost no thought went into the layout. They'd add a new feature and just throw the UI controls for it wherever they could find space, even if that was on a panel devoted to completely different tools.
That's the thing. When you burn coal to make power, there's no monetary incentive to encourage you to do it cleanly. You don't make more power, and hence more money, by not dumping all that crud into the atmosphere. But with nuclear, there is exactly such an incentive. If the stuff coming out of your nuclear power plant is still potently radioactive, then you're wasting money. You could be using that to make and sell more power. Nuclear energy is one of the few power-generation technologies where economic selfishness and environmental concerns actually align, at least in one respect.
I have usually waited on hold over 30 minutes just to get "support" on the line
A few weeks ago, while trying to figure out something with insert company name here's product (where company name = Symantec) we were on hold, over the course of several days, for a total of ten hours. And in the end, they never did fix the problem; we fixed it ourselves, by looking up an article on their knowledgebase.
But if not contributing to car accidents is your primary concern, you could simply not make cars. Likewise, if you're more concerned about your code not being used in a bad way, than about it being used at all, why write it?
I think that a retributive model would serve better that any purely utilitarian model. Any kind of degree of punishment can be justified as being "useful" (for some definition of useful); it is only the idea that "the punishment should fit the crime" that allows us to say that this or that punishment is excessive.
For example, under a model where deterrence is the primary goal of punishment, if the actual perpetrator of a crime cannot be found, the model demands that someone be found and punished, regardless of whether they are guilty or innocent. Indeed, it is questionable whether the words "guilty" and "innocent" have any meaning outside of a retributive justice system. In a utilitarian system, the only distinction is between punishments that are useful in some context and those that are not. The degree and target of punishment need not have anything to do with innocence or degree of guilt.
But then again, I don't think we actually have a retributive system in America. Our justice is utilitarian, based on (as you said) making money for police and private-run prisons, and "protecting" society from the objects of their fears. As long as punishment makes somebody money, and helps the masses relax, it is deemed acceptable.
Yeah, that's kind of frustrating. On the other hand, though, some people probably didn't even see the ambush. If you die in the hotel trying to protect Paul, you wake up in the jail cell, skipping the entire Anna/Gunther encounter. (And Paul lives, assuming you die before he does.)
I think Deus Ex's "choices" were better than most games, simply because you (or at least I) didn't realize they were choices. It took me probably two or three playthroughs to discover that Paul didn't have to die. A major NPC tells you to do something, you do it, right? The game can handle you disobeying it, and will actually reward you with a better outcome.
I think that's partly why DX stands up so well during repeat plays. It doesn't broadcast the choice points to you ("You're making a decision here! See how cool our game is, your decision will have ramifications!") so you're never quite certain that you've discovered all the possible options.
"many hours" - Actually, it's more on the order of weeks. The world (in terms of your movement speed) is roughly the size of Great Britain. But I agree completely. Daggerfall surpassed both Morrowind and Oblivion in creating a living world. All the little "countries" had their own cultures, with their own holidays, etc.
I played SS2 cooperatively with my brother just a couple years ago, and it seemed to work fine on Win2K & XP. Vista and 7 would probably be a bit of work, tho'...
I never got a chance to test this, but according to Google, until you post your first "buzz", none of that information is live. Supposedly it fills in your followers and what not, but nobody can see any additional information about you until you actually go in and type "hey i'm using buzz LOL" and hit post. Again, that was how I understood the setup; I don't know if it's true.
Not just the UI (and extensions), but much of FF internals, too. Firefox is essentially a collection of libraries, written in C++, tied together with a lot of Javascript.
I'm pretty sure LucasArts still does this, even for super old games. A few years back I sent in my CD for "The Dig" along with a check for $5 or something and they sent out a replacement.
The reason police and militaries love tasers (and microwave radiation, electrical shocks, waterboarding, etc) is that they can go to town on anyone and it is the suspects' word against the cops' about how harshly they were treated.
That's not entirely true. All the newer Taser models record the date/time of each firing, along with duration, and some other data, downloadable via USB. They also spray paper chads all over the place when fired, each with a serial number printed on it, that can be matched to a particular cartridge. But yes, there aren't any physical marks on the victim (unless, of course, they die).
The official DOM API was never intended to be the interface to the DOM, merely a kind of portable backend. It was assumed that more appropriate, language-specific bindings would be built on top of this.
True, music publishers generally aren't as scummy as the *AA, but they're scummy in their own special way. They make money selling sheet music; if you can legally copy public domain music, then they don't make money. Thus, they have no incentive to promote a healthy public domain, and every incentive to keep works out of it. So you'll see things like old PD editions reissued as "edited" with no changes except for a new copyright notice. Actual, old editions that are in the PD, when available, are often insanely expensive. As a last resort, publishers will gladly let a work go out of print, rather than publish a work that is in the PD.
(I should point out for fairness' sake that not all music publishers are like this. For example, International seems to have no problem publishing public domain editions as such, and for a reasonable price; at least, my copy of Rachmaninoff's First Piano Sonata from them has no copyright.)
I thought that, under the FSF's interpretation of the GPL, both static and dynamic linking were considered "creating a derivative work" (i.e., modification). It was my understanding that you cannot link (statically or dynamically) GPL code to closed-source code. I personally think that the dynamic-linking restriction is over broad, as it prohibits things like creating GPL plugins for commercial programs, but in this case, turning GPL code into a DLL which is then required by a closed-source program is pretty clearly what the GPL is aiming at. The dynamic link is nothing more than a dodge to avoid static linking, which is definitely prohibited.
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These days, I prefer to think of Ubuntu as being akin to Mac OS X or Android: it's an operating system which is built on a Unix core, but it doesn't want to be a "Unix OS". So you shouldn't expect it to act like a normal Linux distribution, because it's intentionally trying to hide all the things you expect to be there. Personally, that's not what I want.
That scheme works great, right up until you do anything interesting, like compile and install unpackaged software from sources.
Note that a somewhat better solution is to set up your folder-o-shortcuts and then use menuApp. You don't have to worry about the size of the toolbar, since the menu is created from a single normal shortcut. I haven't tried this under Windows 8, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.
I've been thinking for a while that, with the direction Apple's been heading recently, there is the potential for a resurgence of sorts in the use of Linux by developers. Somebody needs to put together a developer-centric distro, not all simplified and "user-friendly" like Ubuntu is becoming, but also not forcing everyone down the way of the command-line (too much in that direction is why developers initially defected to Macs in the first place).
Not really. I think if you read the book (as I did), not for some high school English class (where you have to find the "correct" meaning or you fail), but on your own, without any preconceptions, it's pretty obvious what he was getting at. He makes it clear that the government, in burning books, is only doing what the people want.
I still have one, somewhere... I think it's in my garage someplace. A while back I thought that a good project might be to take it apart and replace the guts with something like a BeagleBoard.
But we decided not to, when we realized how it would sound to say "Pussy Galore went down on me today, that's the third time this week!"
Of course he doesn't want to be tracked, he wants to be the one doing the tracking.
My house is almost entirely fluorescent. The only problem I have is that probably half of the fluorescent "bulbs" have burned out in catastrophic fashion. We're talking glowing white hot, melting plastic, arcing, smoke pouring out, that kind of thing.
That's kind of funny, because the folks making it basically said that the old UI (which they built) had no consistency and that almost no thought went into the layout. They'd add a new feature and just throw the UI controls for it wherever they could find space, even if that was on a panel devoted to completely different tools.
That's the thing. When you burn coal to make power, there's no monetary incentive to encourage you to do it cleanly. You don't make more power, and hence more money, by not dumping all that crud into the atmosphere. But with nuclear, there is exactly such an incentive. If the stuff coming out of your nuclear power plant is still potently radioactive, then you're wasting money. You could be using that to make and sell more power. Nuclear energy is one of the few power-generation technologies where economic selfishness and environmental concerns actually align, at least in one respect.
A few weeks ago, while trying to figure out something with insert company name here's product (where company name = Symantec) we were on hold, over the course of several days, for a total of ten hours. And in the end, they never did fix the problem; we fixed it ourselves, by looking up an article on their knowledgebase.
But if not contributing to car accidents is your primary concern, you could simply not make cars. Likewise, if you're more concerned about your code not being used in a bad way, than about it being used at all, why write it?
I think that a retributive model would serve better that any purely utilitarian model. Any kind of degree of punishment can be justified as being "useful" (for some definition of useful); it is only the idea that "the punishment should fit the crime" that allows us to say that this or that punishment is excessive.
For example, under a model where deterrence is the primary goal of punishment, if the actual perpetrator of a crime cannot be found, the model demands that someone be found and punished, regardless of whether they are guilty or innocent. Indeed, it is questionable whether the words "guilty" and "innocent" have any meaning outside of a retributive justice system. In a utilitarian system, the only distinction is between punishments that are useful in some context and those that are not. The degree and target of punishment need not have anything to do with innocence or degree of guilt.
But then again, I don't think we actually have a retributive system in America. Our justice is utilitarian, based on (as you said) making money for police and private-run prisons, and "protecting" society from the objects of their fears. As long as punishment makes somebody money, and helps the masses relax, it is deemed acceptable.
Yeah, that's kind of frustrating. On the other hand, though, some people probably didn't even see the ambush. If you die in the hotel trying to protect Paul, you wake up in the jail cell, skipping the entire Anna/Gunther encounter. (And Paul lives, assuming you die before he does.)
I think Deus Ex's "choices" were better than most games, simply because you (or at least I) didn't realize they were choices. It took me probably two or three playthroughs to discover that Paul didn't have to die. A major NPC tells you to do something, you do it, right? The game can handle you disobeying it, and will actually reward you with a better outcome.
I think that's partly why DX stands up so well during repeat plays. It doesn't broadcast the choice points to you ("You're making a decision here! See how cool our game is, your decision will have ramifications!") so you're never quite certain that you've discovered all the possible options.
"many hours" - Actually, it's more on the order of weeks. The world (in terms of your movement speed) is roughly the size of Great Britain. But I agree completely. Daggerfall surpassed both Morrowind and Oblivion in creating a living world. All the little "countries" had their own cultures, with their own holidays, etc.
I played SS2 cooperatively with my brother just a couple years ago, and it seemed to work fine on Win2K & XP. Vista and 7 would probably be a bit of work, tho'...
I never got a chance to test this, but according to Google, until you post your first "buzz", none of that information is live. Supposedly it fills in your followers and what not, but nobody can see any additional information about you until you actually go in and type "hey i'm using buzz LOL" and hit post. Again, that was how I understood the setup; I don't know if it's true.
Not just the UI (and extensions), but much of FF internals, too. Firefox is essentially a collection of libraries, written in C++, tied together with a lot of Javascript.
I'm pretty sure LucasArts still does this, even for super old games. A few years back I sent in my CD for "The Dig" along with a check for $5 or something and they sent out a replacement.
That's not entirely true. All the newer Taser models record the date/time of each firing, along with duration, and some other data, downloadable via USB. They also spray paper chads all over the place when fired, each with a serial number printed on it, that can be matched to a particular cartridge. But yes, there aren't any physical marks on the victim (unless, of course, they die).
The official DOM API was never intended to be the interface to the DOM, merely a kind of portable backend. It was assumed that more appropriate, language-specific bindings would be built on top of this.
True, music publishers generally aren't as scummy as the *AA, but they're scummy in their own special way. They make money selling sheet music; if you can legally copy public domain music, then they don't make money. Thus, they have no incentive to promote a healthy public domain, and every incentive to keep works out of it. So you'll see things like old PD editions reissued as "edited" with no changes except for a new copyright notice. Actual, old editions that are in the PD, when available, are often insanely expensive. As a last resort, publishers will gladly let a work go out of print, rather than publish a work that is in the PD.
(I should point out for fairness' sake that not all music publishers are like this. For example, International seems to have no problem publishing public domain editions as such, and for a reasonable price; at least, my copy of Rachmaninoff's First Piano Sonata from them has no copyright.)
I thought that, under the FSF's interpretation of the GPL, both static and dynamic linking were considered "creating a derivative work" (i.e., modification). It was my understanding that you cannot link (statically or dynamically) GPL code to closed-source code. I personally think that the dynamic-linking restriction is over broad, as it prohibits things like creating GPL plugins for commercial programs, but in this case, turning GPL code into a DLL which is then required by a closed-source program is pretty clearly what the GPL is aiming at. The dynamic link is nothing more than a dodge to avoid static linking, which is definitely prohibited.