If I remember correctly, FUSE was originally a Linux project, so it probably makes sense to use the Linux implementation of a given filesystem to use it with FUSE.
It still seems dumb, unless there's a particular reason that filesystem is better. After all, if I was on Linux, why wouldn't I just use the kernel support?
The best use I've seen for a formerly kernel-only filesystem (before this, anyway) was a ZFS port.
Maybe there's some similarity between the Linux VFS and the FUSE API, but I still find it strange.
makes Linux heads' eyes turn round like plates and mouths start dueling.
That's an exaggeration, but this is kind of important in that it removes one of the larger arguments for Linux over OS X: The absurd number of filesystems the Linux kernel supports.
Just one step closer to OS X completely displacing Linux on the high-end geek desktop.
If something costs lots and lots of time and effort to create, it will take quite a bit of resources to run as well.
Are you sure you're a programmer? Because that is the most absurdly wrong thing you've said all day...
There are decades of research into sorting algorithms, for instance, and these are focused in reducing the amount of resources they take to run, for a given set of input. In the extreme example, people often rewrite things in assembly to make them go faster on a particular machine -- are you going to tell me that assembly is slower than C because it took more time to write? Or are you going to tell me the assembly would take less time to write?
At the other extreme, any idiot can build a "while(1){fork();}" -- which eats as many resources as you throw at it.
Actually, it's just-in-time compiled and run in a VM, on modern browsers.
A language cannot, by itself, be interpreted or compiled -- that's a property of the implementation. It is, in fact, possible to have interpreted C.
Second, due to this very extreme flexibility it won't ever be very efficient.
Take a look at some of the recent work done on Javascript engines, particularly in Chrome. I wouldn't be surprised if it got at least as fast as Python or Java.
It's sandboxed, meaning it can't run natively at full speed, every operation must be scrutinized security-wise.
Actually, no. I'm fairly sure modern implementations don't do this, and I know for a fact that it's possible to sandbox something without too much of a performance hit. Exhibit A: Virtualization. Exhibit B: Unix permissions.
The rendering uses non-native extensions that lack in efficiency too.
Please be more specific. I'm sure I've seen SVG be hardware accelerated in a browser.
It's event-based meaning you shouldn't run a loop at full speed
Nor should you in any other game, really...
you need to create clock events to trigger each iteration.
Which, in an FPS, we call "Vertical Sync".
And you get a HUGE pile of compatibility issues.
RTFA -- this is one thing libraries help a lot with.
Of course, if you create a faster computer, the Nature will create programmers writing the usual in slower programming languages.
Was it ever usual to be able to open up a browser, navigate to a page, and suddenly be playing a game?
What does "easiness" (of programming) have to do with the end quality of the game?
It's not so much "easiness" as "speed", which is crucial.
If you have two programmers instead of four, your game is cheaper to make.
If you have four programmers, and your competitor also has four, if you choose something "easier", you'll get to market faster than them.
It could probably be argued that "easiness" (fancy API's etc) actually reduce the quality of games by giving tools to people who do not know how to wield them properly.
Anyone can find a way to abuse any tool. I would argue that the cleaner and easier the language, the more readable the code, and the easier it is to find out who those people are.
Contrast this with something like, say, Java or C, and someone could simply write sufficiently obfuscated and overly complex code to hide their incompetence -- for example, ObjectWrapper.
In fact, I think it may result in an influx of poorly programmed/poorly thought-out games written by people who know enough to program a web page or move a LOGO turtle.
And you don't imagine you'll get 10% of those that are worthwhile?
Remember: 90% of everything is crap. That also means: If you stop staring at the crap for a second, you might see the 10% that's actually good.
They are not even close to being identical. The syntax is very similar, in the way that JavaScript syntax is similar to C -- but the languages are quite different.
For example: AS is statically-typed, JS isn't. JS is prototypal inheritance, and I assume AS isn't (how could it be that and statically-typed?)
Despite some of the recent efforts to turn javascript into some kind of actionscript, by adding class keywords and the like, they really aren't that similar. While I haven't used actionscript, from what I understand, I'd much rather use Javascript, as a language -- the main difference is that actionscript is running in Flash, which has a lot of attractive properties for game developers.
I don't know, I think it would still be useful to use SVG. If your users have a choice between downloading your crappy little game, and downloading Firefox, I think Firefox would be the easier pill to swallow.
Then again, I'm thinking like a paranoid admin. I have no idea what typical users would do.
Possible, but definitely not "likely" in my experience.
Perhaps not... Let me count.
I know a good five or so Mac users who refuse to consider anything except a Mac... because it's what they're used to. Because they are trained by rote, and seriously, if you were to move something on their desktop, they'd be confused -- or rather, that would have been the case a few months ago. Now, EVERYTHING is on their desktop, several layers deep, and they can't find anything.
I also know a good five or so Mac users who run Windows in a virtual machine, know about Spaces and use it, develop software for a living, build things out of wires and microcontrollers in their spare time (think Arduino), and certainly are not afraid of opening a PC and digging through it. One has a Mac Pro at home.
I'm sure they could all give you better reasons than I about why they like Macs -- I mostly run Linux, mostly on PC hardware. Maybe it's just the people I hang out with, but I seem to get about equal numbers of Mactards and Mac gurus.
If they have a windows machine for "compatability testing" and the rest of the units are Macs, you know damn well this guy couldn't "build his own"!
For what it's worth, I have worked in a place that almost exactly matches that description -- ton of macs, some leftover Windows PCs (rarely if ever used), and I ran Linux.
Everyone in that office could have built their own, if they had a reason to.
It is possible to actually like a Mac and not be technically illiterate / incapable of assembling a PC.
Talk to some rape victims about it some time and you'll find that for most it brings further embarrassment, questioning glances, people talking behind their backs about whether they "were asking for it" or are "sluts". Especially in a small town.
I live in a small town, and I find that difficult to believe -- but I'll take your word for it.
The one rape victim I know personally has very helpful (and violent) friends to protect her -- I'm not sure I want to know what happened to the attacker. That's probably colored my reaction a bit...
I'm not saying the post you're responding to is right, just that you need to check your assumptions if you're going to appeal to "logic".
I'm glad I did appeal to logic, even if I'm wrong -- it opened communication again. As long as someone is unwilling to even listen to an opposing argument, there's no debate, only shouting.
Maybe the mods overreacted, though -- me +5 insightful, snowgirl -1 troll? I don't think she was intentionally trolling.
I think that's a bit telling that every high school kid is taught what the Electoral College is, and how it works -- but of course the President didn't know until he was a candidate.
So, what are you trying to say here? That a person commits statutory rape, (by your own admission you state this to be true) and is then arrested for it, and suffers consequences for it?
The punishment does not fit the "crime", here.
I have a story of my own to tell -- one my mother often tells about a friend of hers. A girl's father found out about a relationship he didn't approve of -- maybe they ran off together -- so he decided to end it. He called the cops...
Turns out, this father was so out of touch as not to realize that his daughter had turned 18, and her date was still 17. He had to bail her out... Lucky for him it was a daughter, and not a son.
Why lucky? Because if it had been a son, and if it had been today, he would likely be on the national sex offender registry, right there with rapists and child molesters.
I am sorry, but I refuse to recognize a loving relationship between consenting adults -- one of which is younger than an arbitrary line in the sand that we draw -- as rape, molestation, or abuse. I find it disgusting that not only are we calling them these names, but that we are doing so publicly and permanently -- even if that couple ends up in a loving marriage later, one will have trouble finding work because of a permanent criminal record.
And I find it absurd that we have told these seventeen-year-olds that legally, they cannot consent. I certainly did not appreciate being "protected" at that age.
Now, in GP's case, were they being stupid? Yes! Absolutely -- profoundly stupid. Stupid enough not to wait a year, and stupid enough not to use protection effectively. And stupid enough to do it under the nose of her father, the sheriff!
I do not believe that the guy deserves to have his reputation ruined, and I certainly do not believe that he deserves a permanent criminal record, for that stupidity.
Let this be a lesson to anyone... just because someone is looking the other way when seeing you do something doesn't mean that it wasn't illegal or criminal in the first place.
Then let this be a lesson: Legality is orthogonal to morality. Just because something is criminal doesn't mean it's wrong.
I don't know what the law should be, but any law that turns a loving relationship into a sex crime is broken, and more perverse than what it was written to prevent.
A person who refuses to ever change their position is a person who refuses to learn.
I don't care what he was talking about, to me it says that my pain is less than something else.
In other words, he hurt your feelings, and damn any logic involved.
I acknowledge your pain. I acknowledge that, since I am not a rape victim myself, I cannot truly appreciate how much you have been hurt.
However, the fact that you were hurt is not a get-out-of-debate free card. I will not abandon logic to comfort you, and the point stands.
Any pain caused by this being pointed out, publicly, is less than that caused by the act itself. But being publicly identified as a victim gives you sympathy. Being publicly identified as a perp makes him hated -- in a small enough town, might even drive him out.
Certainly, you could make a case that it's deserved -- if he actually did it. So, yes, in your case -- but not every woman who cries rape has actually been raped. And people won't forget he was accused, whether or not he's actually convicted.
If you still believe anyone accused deserves that, fine -- but I hope, at least, you don't think anyone is automatically a chauvinist pig for daring to suggest it.
The first things I see in the forum you've linked to are RARs on a RapidShare. That's not really the most trustworthy place to get drivers to run in kernel mode... Perhaps convenient enough, but I'm much too paranoid for that. I believe the Dell tech gave me drivers for a 1330 -- which was actually one of the more productive support chats I've had, except for the part where they should've been available from the beginning.
And as I said, it was Vista or Ubuntu. No pre-installed XP upgrade, I bought that separately. (I suppose "paying for Windows" would be revocation of my geek card in itself...) I figured the best dual-boot option was supported Ubuntu with XP, rather than supported Vista with Ubuntu.
That was also the excuse they gave for not providing XP drivers (it's not supported!) -- but it was apparently a question they're asked often, as they had the URLs ready.
And only Vista 32 drivers? WTF are they thinking -- on a 64-bit laptop with an option of 4 gigs of RAM? Probably the same thing they were thinking when they gave it a 100 mbit ethernet port...
And just because I can: It would very likely be legal to create and distribute a new Ubuntu CD with all of the problems already fixed. Call it "Ubuntu: XPS M1530 edition". But even if I had the skills to fix everything in the nLite ISO, as far as I know, it's not legal to distribute that -- the best I could do is link all the way back to the drivers I used, and to the nlite installer, and let people figure it out themselves.
In KDE 4.1 the 'huge chuncky panel' can be set to any desirable size
I'd very much like to know how.
And I'm sorry to bite the hand that feeds me, but the UI for doing so sucks. In KDE3, I could right-click on the panel, go to "Panel settings", and tweak everything about it, from translucency (I liked mine completely transparent) to fonts (draw a border around them, so they're visible against any background) to size (about seven increments).
In KDE4.1, on Kubuntu Intrepid, right-clicking on the panel and choosing "panel settings" gives me a completely unintuitive interface that appears to be inspired by a word processor. I cannot figure out how to change the thickness of it. Maybe the length, but even that isn't clear.
I see the potential of KDE4. I want to like it, I really do. I use it every day.
But at this rate, it looks as though it will take until KDE 4.5 to match the features available in KDE 3.5, which makes it as much a joke as Vista.
Then you get Linux's big UNIX brother to play with
Flamebait. Perhaps OS X is "Certified UNIX", but in the ecosystem of modern Unix, it's just a particularly strange BSD. Personally, I prefer Linux to BSD for many reasons.
but also many more programs than Linux will run.
Also flamebait. Many Linux programs have been ported to OS X, but not all -- it's an off-the-cuff assumption.
Perhaps you meant to say, many more shareware or off-the-(store-)shelf products. That would be accurate -- there is far less commercial software for Linux.
A powerful Mac, such as a Mac Pro with 4 or more GB of RAM is the equivalent of 7 computers in one box. It will run all of these OS at the same time and allow the user to witch between them instantly.
How much RAM to each, I wonder?
But here's the point: A powerful PC is cheaper. So long as I don't need to run OS X, I see no reason to get a Mac Pro -- and just about any other OS will run in a VM, as you've said. In fact, with Ubuntu, dual-booted XP, XP-in-a-KVM, DOSBox, and Wine, I rarely miss a Mac.
Biggest I can think of is forward-compatibility. It's no longer trivial to upgrade to XP 64-bit, which had shitty support anyway. Vista 64-bit is better than XP 64-bit, and it does kind of irk me that over half a gig of RAM on this machine is unusable on XP 32-bit.
Of course, sumdumass is right -- the support is the killer feature. Eventually, there will be no more critical security patches for XP. If that happens, what, do you expect the community to pick up the slack? I suspect most of them would rather work on ReactOS or Wine.
Unless of course you happen to know some free (speech) software that'll do the trick easily.
Look into Duplicity. I haven't used it -- this is something that's interesting enough to me that I'll probably write my own. But the software definitely exists.
The keys I got so far are so small that even just printing them on paper and having to type them back in in the unlikely scenario of me needing the offsite backup would be very acceptable;-)
Sounds like a passphrase, not a key. And I'd be using a large-ish, random key.
True. It's at least as annoying as replacing a hard drive though.
Really?
S3 downtime: You get an email, and by the time you go to look at it, S3 is probably back up and your script has taken care of everything.
Replacing a hard drive: You get an email, and you order a new drive from Newegg, unpack it, open up your NAS, and push the drive in, assuming it's hotpluggable. If not, you'll have to carefully power it down, probably open it, hook up the drive, close it, lock it, and boot it back up.
Or perhaps I'd just shrug it off with a "oh maybe tomorrow" and return to the smoking remains of my home to see if there's any *real* stuff left...
Probably. But since the things I've created are digital, I would still be pretty worried about that -- if my house burns down, there's a lot of nice things I've lost, and probably a fair amount of money. So I go to work, make some more money, get a new house, and buy more things to fill it -- just takes time, but it's all replaceable.
If I lose that killer app I was working on, or that great American novel, I have to start over. I may be able to recreate it, but most likely, I will never get it back.
I searched and couldn't find what they're actually doing to ensure my data will be there always, apart from a vague "99.99% availability - or you'll get service credits" claim.
Read up on Dynamo, among other things.
More relevantly, that is now their job, not yours -- which means you can relax. It's hard, I know:)
It's a good thing we live in a Democratic Republic then, isn't it.
Which I count as a Democratic System -- I didn't say "democracy".
What you suggest is that because of an economic cycle (this is a cycle just like any other) we write laws that allow the government to use our money (yes, it's our money) to bail out companies that should not be in business because they have failing business models.
Show me where I've suggested that, and I'll give you a cookie. (Hint: I'm not martin-boundary.)
Wait, stop, backup. What kind of laptop do you have?
Dell XPS M1530. Good luck.
See, this one only comes with Vista or Ubuntu. I believe the Dell tech pulled drivers from other, similar models which can be bought with XP.
The killer was the video -- specifically, because that is, in fact, the only way to get them. Dell has some deal with nvidia where nvidia isn't allowed to distribute most laptop drivers. Go ahead and try the nvidia site -- you'll find the identical card, with a desktop driver, which won't work.
AHCI thing... what the hell are you talking about. Never once had an issue with AHCI
Might be related to the SSD, but it's actually a common, known issue. XP doesn't have the drivers out of the box. Standard way to do it is disable AHCI in the BIOS, install XP, install the drivers, then re-enable AHCI. My way was to slipstream the drivers into a new nLite'd XP CD -- way more work than I had to do for Ubuntu, which Just Worked.
I'm sorry - this isn't flamebait, but if you can't find drivers for Windows XP - you need to turn in your geek card.
Yes, you'd think so -- but it's always been a hassle.
Last time, I had to use a fucking floppy drive in order to get the RAID working on Windows, until I learned about nLite. Contrast to Linux -- all the pieces are there, if not on every livecd, then an apt-get away on every livecd.
Even when things work well, it's a pain in the ass -- typical process is, boot Linux, save the output of lspci somewhere, use that as a reference to even find out what brand to look for. Then, Google for that brand, find their homepage, crawl through Yet Another Menu of picking my exact product line and model number -- only to find that lspci hasn't lied, and there is, in fact, one driver for the most recent 500 models, and if they'd just provided that up front, I wouldn't have had to go through that selection process...
Then download and run a dozen installers, half of which want you to reboot after installation.
And that's just to get to a usable desktop -- not counting the download, next-next-next, delete-the-installer process of installing a dozen more apps I need to make it a useful desktop. (Contrast that to a single apt-get command.)
Maybe I just like exotic hardware, but that has been my experience for the past three or four years -- Linux works out of the box, with a little tweaking. Windows requires hours of pulling down drivers, updates, and manually installing software.
Maybe that process is easy for you, but regardless of "turning in a geek card", the Windows installer and base distribution has always sucked. The only reason it has a better reputation for "just working" is that it is preinstalled on everything, so your average user is never faced with the prospect of installing an OS until they learn about Linux.
I think that this is just another instance of customers locked into Win32-compatibility game. Joe Sixpack never needs more then 2GB of RAM. His Vista Home/XP home wouldn't use it anyway (OK, maybe 3GB). Applications stuck with 32-bits because, well, Joe Sixpack owns Win32 computer, not 64-bit one. DRAM companies are hostages in this game.
Well, there's that, but 64-bit Vista is supposedly good -- or, as good as Vista gets. Memory pressure will eventually force applications which actually benefit from more RAM -- like Photoshop, for instance -- to provide 64-bit versions.
There are two large problems:
First, most applications don't care. You're right -- Joe Sixpack would be better off with XP than 64-bit Vista. The only thing an extra eight gigs of RAM will buy him is more room for his spyware to expand into before he gets a new computer.
Second, memory hogs like Vista were setting higher expectations for RAM manufacturers. It's getting to where most people are buying computers with 2 gigs of RAM, at least.
So, higher expectations, and a harder fall when we find out that Joe just lost his job, and is taking a very serious look at a Linux netbook, if, indeed, he's getting a new computer at all.
Granted, 64-bits would have slowed this, but how many people are, right now, buying computers with more than four gigs of RAM? I'm not -- it hardly even bothers me that on XP, this laptop can only use 3.5 gigs.
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember correctly, FUSE was originally a Linux project, so it probably makes sense to use the Linux implementation of a given filesystem to use it with FUSE.
It still seems dumb, unless there's a particular reason that filesystem is better. After all, if I was on Linux, why wouldn't I just use the kernel support?
The best use I've seen for a formerly kernel-only filesystem (before this, anyway) was a ZFS port.
Maybe there's some similarity between the Linux VFS and the FUSE API, but I still find it strange.
For what it's worth, KDE has this out of the box -- the protocol helper is called fish. Works with ssh keys, ssh-agent and everything.
Never tried on OS X, though -- good luck.
makes Linux heads' eyes turn round like plates and mouths start dueling.
That's an exaggeration, but this is kind of important in that it removes one of the larger arguments for Linux over OS X: The absurd number of filesystems the Linux kernel supports.
Just one step closer to OS X completely displacing Linux on the high-end geek desktop.
If something costs lots and lots of time and effort to create, it will take quite a bit of resources to run as well.
Are you sure you're a programmer? Because that is the most absurdly wrong thing you've said all day...
There are decades of research into sorting algorithms, for instance, and these are focused in reducing the amount of resources they take to run, for a given set of input. In the extreme example, people often rewrite things in assembly to make them go faster on a particular machine -- are you going to tell me that assembly is slower than C because it took more time to write? Or are you going to tell me the assembly would take less time to write?
At the other extreme, any idiot can build a "while(1){fork();}" -- which eats as many resources as you throw at it.
First, it's an interpreter.
Actually, it's just-in-time compiled and run in a VM, on modern browsers.
A language cannot, by itself, be interpreted or compiled -- that's a property of the implementation. It is, in fact, possible to have interpreted C.
Second, due to this very extreme flexibility it won't ever be very efficient.
Take a look at some of the recent work done on Javascript engines, particularly in Chrome. I wouldn't be surprised if it got at least as fast as Python or Java.
It's sandboxed, meaning it can't run natively at full speed, every operation must be scrutinized security-wise.
Actually, no. I'm fairly sure modern implementations don't do this, and I know for a fact that it's possible to sandbox something without too much of a performance hit. Exhibit A: Virtualization. Exhibit B: Unix permissions.
The rendering uses non-native extensions that lack in efficiency too.
Please be more specific. I'm sure I've seen SVG be hardware accelerated in a browser.
It's event-based meaning you shouldn't run a loop at full speed
Nor should you in any other game, really...
you need to create clock events to trigger each iteration.
Which, in an FPS, we call "Vertical Sync".
And you get a HUGE pile of compatibility issues.
RTFA -- this is one thing libraries help a lot with.
Of course, if you create a faster computer, the Nature will create programmers writing the usual in slower programming languages.
Was it ever usual to be able to open up a browser, navigate to a page, and suddenly be playing a game?
What does "easiness" (of programming) have to do with the end quality of the game?
It's not so much "easiness" as "speed", which is crucial.
If you have two programmers instead of four, your game is cheaper to make.
If you have four programmers, and your competitor also has four, if you choose something "easier", you'll get to market faster than them.
It could probably be argued that "easiness" (fancy API's etc) actually reduce the quality of games by giving tools to people who do not know how to wield them properly.
Anyone can find a way to abuse any tool. I would argue that the cleaner and easier the language, the more readable the code, and the easier it is to find out who those people are.
Contrast this with something like, say, Java or C, and someone could simply write sufficiently obfuscated and overly complex code to hide their incompetence -- for example, ObjectWrapper.
In fact, I think it may result in an influx of poorly programmed/poorly thought-out games written by people who know enough to program a web page or move a LOGO turtle.
And you don't imagine you'll get 10% of those that are worthwhile?
Remember: 90% of everything is crap. That also means: If you stop staring at the crap for a second, you might see the 10% that's actually good.
They are not even close to being identical. The syntax is very similar, in the way that JavaScript syntax is similar to C -- but the languages are quite different.
For example: AS is statically-typed, JS isn't. JS is prototypal inheritance, and I assume AS isn't (how could it be that and statically-typed?)
Despite some of the recent efforts to turn javascript into some kind of actionscript, by adding class keywords and the like, they really aren't that similar. While I haven't used actionscript, from what I understand, I'd much rather use Javascript, as a language -- the main difference is that actionscript is running in Flash, which has a lot of attractive properties for game developers.
I don't know, I think it would still be useful to use SVG. If your users have a choice between downloading your crappy little game, and downloading Firefox, I think Firefox would be the easier pill to swallow.
Then again, I'm thinking like a paranoid admin. I have no idea what typical users would do.
Possible, but definitely not "likely" in my experience.
Perhaps not... Let me count.
I know a good five or so Mac users who refuse to consider anything except a Mac... because it's what they're used to. Because they are trained by rote, and seriously, if you were to move something on their desktop, they'd be confused -- or rather, that would have been the case a few months ago. Now, EVERYTHING is on their desktop, several layers deep, and they can't find anything.
I also know a good five or so Mac users who run Windows in a virtual machine, know about Spaces and use it, develop software for a living, build things out of wires and microcontrollers in their spare time (think Arduino), and certainly are not afraid of opening a PC and digging through it. One has a Mac Pro at home.
I'm sure they could all give you better reasons than I about why they like Macs -- I mostly run Linux, mostly on PC hardware. Maybe it's just the people I hang out with, but I seem to get about equal numbers of Mactards and Mac gurus.
Software is proprietary and they use a non standard RAID format.
Sounds exactly like ReadyNAS.
Not that it matters, as a user -- doesn't it just present itself as a mass storage device, no software needed on the host box?
If they have a windows machine for "compatability testing" and the rest of the units are Macs, you know damn well this guy couldn't "build his own"!
For what it's worth, I have worked in a place that almost exactly matches that description -- ton of macs, some leftover Windows PCs (rarely if ever used), and I ran Linux.
Everyone in that office could have built their own, if they had a reason to.
It is possible to actually like a Mac and not be technically illiterate / incapable of assembling a PC.
Well it looks like SMB is your best bet for compatibility.
OS X doesn't support NFS? Linux doesn't support AFP?
Besides which, don't the better NAS boxes support pretty much everything, all at once?
Talk to some rape victims about it some time and you'll find that for most it brings further embarrassment, questioning glances, people talking behind their backs about whether they "were asking for it" or are "sluts". Especially in a small town.
I live in a small town, and I find that difficult to believe -- but I'll take your word for it.
The one rape victim I know personally has very helpful (and violent) friends to protect her -- I'm not sure I want to know what happened to the attacker. That's probably colored my reaction a bit...
I'm not saying the post you're responding to is right, just that you need to check your assumptions if you're going to appeal to "logic".
I'm glad I did appeal to logic, even if I'm wrong -- it opened communication again. As long as someone is unwilling to even listen to an opposing argument, there's no debate, only shouting.
Maybe the mods overreacted, though -- me +5 insightful, snowgirl -1 troll? I don't think she was intentionally trolling.
I think that's a bit telling that every high school kid is taught what the Electoral College is, and how it works -- but of course the President didn't know until he was a candidate.
So, what are you trying to say here? That a person commits statutory rape, (by your own admission you state this to be true) and is then arrested for it, and suffers consequences for it?
The punishment does not fit the "crime", here.
I have a story of my own to tell -- one my mother often tells about a friend of hers. A girl's father found out about a relationship he didn't approve of -- maybe they ran off together -- so he decided to end it. He called the cops...
Turns out, this father was so out of touch as not to realize that his daughter had turned 18, and her date was still 17. He had to bail her out... Lucky for him it was a daughter, and not a son.
Why lucky? Because if it had been a son, and if it had been today, he would likely be on the national sex offender registry, right there with rapists and child molesters.
I am sorry, but I refuse to recognize a loving relationship between consenting adults -- one of which is younger than an arbitrary line in the sand that we draw -- as rape, molestation, or abuse. I find it disgusting that not only are we calling them these names, but that we are doing so publicly and permanently -- even if that couple ends up in a loving marriage later, one will have trouble finding work because of a permanent criminal record.
And I find it absurd that we have told these seventeen-year-olds that legally, they cannot consent. I certainly did not appreciate being "protected" at that age.
Now, in GP's case, were they being stupid? Yes! Absolutely -- profoundly stupid. Stupid enough not to wait a year, and stupid enough not to use protection effectively. And stupid enough to do it under the nose of her father, the sheriff!
I do not believe that the guy deserves to have his reputation ruined, and I certainly do not believe that he deserves a permanent criminal record, for that stupidity.
Let this be a lesson to anyone... just because someone is looking the other way when seeing you do something doesn't mean that it wasn't illegal or criminal in the first place.
Then let this be a lesson: Legality is orthogonal to morality. Just because something is criminal doesn't mean it's wrong.
I don't know what the law should be, but any law that turns a loving relationship into a sex crime is broken, and more perverse than what it was written to prevent.
I stand by my position, and refuse to alter it.
A person who refuses to ever change their position is a person who refuses to learn.
I don't care what he was talking about, to me it says that my pain is less than something else.
In other words, he hurt your feelings, and damn any logic involved.
I acknowledge your pain. I acknowledge that, since I am not a rape victim myself, I cannot truly appreciate how much you have been hurt.
However, the fact that you were hurt is not a get-out-of-debate free card. I will not abandon logic to comfort you, and the point stands.
Any pain caused by this being pointed out, publicly, is less than that caused by the act itself. But being publicly identified as a victim gives you sympathy. Being publicly identified as a perp makes him hated -- in a small enough town, might even drive him out.
Certainly, you could make a case that it's deserved -- if he actually did it. So, yes, in your case -- but not every woman who cries rape has actually been raped. And people won't forget he was accused, whether or not he's actually convicted.
If you still believe anyone accused deserves that, fine -- but I hope, at least, you don't think anyone is automatically a chauvinist pig for daring to suggest it.
The first things I see in the forum you've linked to are RARs on a RapidShare. That's not really the most trustworthy place to get drivers to run in kernel mode... Perhaps convenient enough, but I'm much too paranoid for that. I believe the Dell tech gave me drivers for a 1330 -- which was actually one of the more productive support chats I've had, except for the part where they should've been available from the beginning.
And as I said, it was Vista or Ubuntu. No pre-installed XP upgrade, I bought that separately. (I suppose "paying for Windows" would be revocation of my geek card in itself...) I figured the best dual-boot option was supported Ubuntu with XP, rather than supported Vista with Ubuntu.
That was also the excuse they gave for not providing XP drivers (it's not supported!) -- but it was apparently a question they're asked often, as they had the URLs ready.
And only Vista 32 drivers? WTF are they thinking -- on a 64-bit laptop with an option of 4 gigs of RAM? Probably the same thing they were thinking when they gave it a 100 mbit ethernet port...
And just because I can: It would very likely be legal to create and distribute a new Ubuntu CD with all of the problems already fixed. Call it "Ubuntu: XPS M1530 edition". But even if I had the skills to fix everything in the nLite ISO, as far as I know, it's not legal to distribute that -- the best I could do is link all the way back to the drivers I used, and to the nlite installer, and let people figure it out themselves.
In KDE 4.1 the 'huge chuncky panel' can be set to any desirable size
I'd very much like to know how.
And I'm sorry to bite the hand that feeds me, but the UI for doing so sucks. In KDE3, I could right-click on the panel, go to "Panel settings", and tweak everything about it, from translucency (I liked mine completely transparent) to fonts (draw a border around them, so they're visible against any background) to size (about seven increments).
In KDE4.1, on Kubuntu Intrepid, right-clicking on the panel and choosing "panel settings" gives me a completely unintuitive interface that appears to be inspired by a word processor. I cannot figure out how to change the thickness of it. Maybe the length, but even that isn't clear.
I see the potential of KDE4. I want to like it, I really do. I use it every day.
But at this rate, it looks as though it will take until KDE 4.5 to match the features available in KDE 3.5, which makes it as much a joke as Vista.
Then you get Linux's big UNIX brother to play with
Flamebait. Perhaps OS X is "Certified UNIX", but in the ecosystem of modern Unix, it's just a particularly strange BSD. Personally, I prefer Linux to BSD for many reasons.
but also many more programs than Linux will run.
Also flamebait. Many Linux programs have been ported to OS X, but not all -- it's an off-the-cuff assumption.
Perhaps you meant to say, many more shareware or off-the-(store-)shelf products. That would be accurate -- there is far less commercial software for Linux.
A powerful Mac, such as a Mac Pro with 4 or more GB of RAM is the equivalent of 7 computers in one box. It will run all of these OS at the same time and allow the user to witch between them instantly.
How much RAM to each, I wonder?
But here's the point: A powerful PC is cheaper. So long as I don't need to run OS X, I see no reason to get a Mac Pro -- and just about any other OS will run in a VM, as you've said. In fact, with Ubuntu, dual-booted XP, XP-in-a-KVM, DOSBox, and Wine, I rarely miss a Mac.
Biggest I can think of is forward-compatibility. It's no longer trivial to upgrade to XP 64-bit, which had shitty support anyway. Vista 64-bit is better than XP 64-bit, and it does kind of irk me that over half a gig of RAM on this machine is unusable on XP 32-bit.
Of course, sumdumass is right -- the support is the killer feature. Eventually, there will be no more critical security patches for XP. If that happens, what, do you expect the community to pick up the slack? I suspect most of them would rather work on ReactOS or Wine.
Unless of course you happen to know some free (speech) software that'll do the trick easily.
Look into Duplicity. I haven't used it -- this is something that's interesting enough to me that I'll probably write my own. But the software definitely exists.
The keys I got so far are so small that even just printing them on paper and having to type them back in in the unlikely scenario of me needing the offsite backup would be very acceptable ;-)
Sounds like a passphrase, not a key. And I'd be using a large-ish, random key.
True. It's at least as annoying as replacing a hard drive though.
Really?
S3 downtime: You get an email, and by the time you go to look at it, S3 is probably back up and your script has taken care of everything.
Replacing a hard drive: You get an email, and you order a new drive from Newegg, unpack it, open up your NAS, and push the drive in, assuming it's hotpluggable. If not, you'll have to carefully power it down, probably open it, hook up the drive, close it, lock it, and boot it back up.
Or perhaps I'd just shrug it off with a "oh maybe tomorrow" and return to the smoking remains of my home to see if there's any *real* stuff left...
Probably. But since the things I've created are digital, I would still be pretty worried about that -- if my house burns down, there's a lot of nice things I've lost, and probably a fair amount of money. So I go to work, make some more money, get a new house, and buy more things to fill it -- just takes time, but it's all replaceable.
If I lose that killer app I was working on, or that great American novel, I have to start over. I may be able to recreate it, but most likely, I will never get it back.
I searched and couldn't find what they're actually doing to ensure my data will be there always, apart from a vague "99.99% availability - or you'll get service credits" claim.
Read up on Dynamo, among other things.
More relevantly, that is now their job, not yours -- which means you can relax. It's hard, I know :)
It's a good thing we live in a Democratic Republic then, isn't it.
Which I count as a Democratic System -- I didn't say "democracy".
What you suggest is that because of an economic cycle (this is a cycle just like any other) we write laws that allow the government to use our money (yes, it's our money) to bail out companies that should not be in business because they have failing business models.
Show me where I've suggested that, and I'll give you a cookie. (Hint: I'm not martin-boundary.)
Wait, stop, backup. What kind of laptop do you have?
Dell XPS M1530. Good luck.
See, this one only comes with Vista or Ubuntu. I believe the Dell tech pulled drivers from other, similar models which can be bought with XP.
The killer was the video -- specifically, because that is, in fact, the only way to get them. Dell has some deal with nvidia where nvidia isn't allowed to distribute most laptop drivers. Go ahead and try the nvidia site -- you'll find the identical card, with a desktop driver, which won't work.
AHCI thing... what the hell are you talking about. Never once had an issue with AHCI
Might be related to the SSD, but it's actually a common, known issue. XP doesn't have the drivers out of the box. Standard way to do it is disable AHCI in the BIOS, install XP, install the drivers, then re-enable AHCI. My way was to slipstream the drivers into a new nLite'd XP CD -- way more work than I had to do for Ubuntu, which Just Worked.
I'm sorry - this isn't flamebait, but if you can't find drivers for Windows XP - you need to turn in your geek card.
Yes, you'd think so -- but it's always been a hassle.
Last time, I had to use a fucking floppy drive in order to get the RAID working on Windows, until I learned about nLite. Contrast to Linux -- all the pieces are there, if not on every livecd, then an apt-get away on every livecd.
Even when things work well, it's a pain in the ass -- typical process is, boot Linux, save the output of lspci somewhere, use that as a reference to even find out what brand to look for. Then, Google for that brand, find their homepage, crawl through Yet Another Menu of picking my exact product line and model number -- only to find that lspci hasn't lied, and there is, in fact, one driver for the most recent 500 models, and if they'd just provided that up front, I wouldn't have had to go through that selection process...
Then download and run a dozen installers, half of which want you to reboot after installation.
And that's just to get to a usable desktop -- not counting the download, next-next-next, delete-the-installer process of installing a dozen more apps I need to make it a useful desktop. (Contrast that to a single apt-get command.)
Maybe I just like exotic hardware, but that has been my experience for the past three or four years -- Linux works out of the box, with a little tweaking. Windows requires hours of pulling down drivers, updates, and manually installing software.
Maybe that process is easy for you, but regardless of "turning in a geek card", the Windows installer and base distribution has always sucked. The only reason it has a better reputation for "just working" is that it is preinstalled on everything, so your average user is never faced with the prospect of installing an OS until they learn about Linux.
I think that this is just another instance of customers locked into Win32-compatibility game. Joe Sixpack never needs more then 2GB of RAM. His Vista Home/XP home wouldn't use it anyway (OK, maybe 3GB). Applications stuck with 32-bits because, well, Joe Sixpack owns Win32 computer, not 64-bit one. DRAM companies are hostages in this game.
Well, there's that, but 64-bit Vista is supposedly good -- or, as good as Vista gets. Memory pressure will eventually force applications which actually benefit from more RAM -- like Photoshop, for instance -- to provide 64-bit versions.
There are two large problems:
First, most applications don't care. You're right -- Joe Sixpack would be better off with XP than 64-bit Vista. The only thing an extra eight gigs of RAM will buy him is more room for his spyware to expand into before he gets a new computer.
Second, memory hogs like Vista were setting higher expectations for RAM manufacturers. It's getting to where most people are buying computers with 2 gigs of RAM, at least.
So, higher expectations, and a harder fall when we find out that Joe just lost his job, and is taking a very serious look at a Linux netbook, if, indeed, he's getting a new computer at all.
Granted, 64-bits would have slowed this, but how many people are, right now, buying computers with more than four gigs of RAM? I'm not -- it hardly even bothers me that on XP, this laptop can only use 3.5 gigs.
In that sense, libertarian philosophy is actually only different in where libertarians choose to draw that line of "necessity".