Apple's OS sanctity is not right because it is Apple.
Somehow, I think the world changes when you have the kind of monopoly MS does.
I'm just saying... I mean, for my own purposes, I buy most commercial software I use, and I mostly avoid commercial software so I don't have to deal with legal/moral/ethical issues.
Let's try to remember how some games got it right.
The most obvious one that comes to mind is Half-Life. The original. They do give you lots of new and interesting weapons throughout the game, but the gameplay is the same, which means you don't actually have to learn many new skills during the course of the game. My only complaint there would be Xen at the end, where the physics completely change.
But mostly, the game interface and the gameplay itself doesn't change fundamentally. What changes is the content. An example would be going into a tunnel which leads to a cliff face -- the tunnel has the feel of the vents and such, then you hit the cliff face -- completely different. Suddenly, you have to look up and down, and you have to watch your step. Get through that, and you're in a trench, trying not to get noticed till you get to somewhere you can successfully lob a grenade from. And so on.
And enough "plot" to keep you interested. They don't need a cutscene to keep things interesting.
Compare that to, say, Zelda. The entire game is discovering new and cool bits of gameplay. It's rarely frustrating, because if you make it through the first level, you've got the hang of discovering and using these new bits of gameplay. And again, no cutscenes needed, although they are there.
Or Halo 2. Gameplay is very consistent, yet you're never without a sense of place, and while there is a bit more repetition than I'd like, the story does move along, and so does the kind of situation you end up with. Sniping jackals takes a completely different kind of skill than driving a tank, or swording a bunch of Flood. Yet the learning curve is practically nil, and I don't think I ever felt cheated by suddenly being presented with a completely different game that I sucked at.
And compare that to a game that gets it completely wrong like, say, Doom 3. Absolutely nothing new. Oh, sure, towards the end you get the SoulCube, and the final boss battle is interesting. The rest of it is completely boring. I mean, there are some relatively interesting puzzles involving machines and controls, but it's almost impossible to notice those, or any bit of plot development, amid all the insane, mind-numbing repetitiveness of the levels. The only thing that changed was the environment, and it was kind of cool the first time through, when the graphics were hot shit. Now, yawn. All the cheap thrills don't work when you know where they all are, and it just isn't a fun game anymore.
One of my most frustrating games has got to be doing the minigames in Final Fantasy X. Thank God they aren't required. One night, my roommate and I decided we wanted Tidus' Legendary Weapon, which meant we had to beat the Chocobo training session. This required a wholly different skillset than anything else in that game, and in fact, was completely different than most other games I've played. It's a race -- on a bird that doesn't always want to go where you tell it -- where you must dodge oncoming traffic (seagulls) and also collect enough balloons to win. With very little margin for error -- not only do you have to be able to handle this game, but you must absolutely kick ass at it. Took the two of us about three or four hours of playing the exact same 40-second race over and over.
Or the lightning dodging. Completely unlike anything else required. Fun anyway, because after I could get to 10 or 20, I started over, got to 50, and just kept going, 200 was pretty easy. But the same roommate could never do it.
In the case of FFX, this is completely forgivable, because neither of these are required. In fact, anything actually required by the plotline was incredibly easy -- it breaks the longstanding tradition of having Omega Weapon be the most powerful enemy in the game. Omega in a pansy next to some of these (optional) Arena monsters -- roommate goes in thinking it's going to be the toughest battle ever, summons an Aeon in overdrive, unleashes the overdrive... one hit. We must've laughed for
grunt ~ # cd/boot/ grunt boot # touch a/b touch: cannot touch `a/b': No such file or directory grunt boot # touch 'a/b' touch: cannot touch `a/b': No such file or directory grunt boot # touch "a/b" touch: cannot touch `a/b': No such file or directory grunt boot # touch a\/b touch: cannot touch `a/b': No such file or directory grunt boot # touch "a\/b" touch: cannot touch `a\\/b': No such file or directory grunt boot # touch 'a\/b' touch: cannot touch `a\\/b': No such file or directory grunt boot # mount | grep boot /dev/sda1 on/boot type ext3 (rw,noatime) grunt boot # cat/proc/version Linux version 2.6.13.4 (root@grunt) (gcc version 3.4.4 (Gentoo 3.4.4-r1, ssp-3.4.4-1.0, pie-8.7.8)) #1 Wed Nov 2 21:19:24 CST 2005 grunt boot #
Yes, it's a bit of an old kernel, but maybe you're thinking of a '\', and not a '/'? No matter how you quote it, / is the directory separator, and filesystems themselves do not support escapes -- on Linux anyway. For some retarded reason, Windows filesystems do the escaping in the filesystem driver...
And we complain that Windows is bloated? Linux (as an OS) now includes not only a web browser but an office suite, and IM client, development tools, and everything else we could want?
Generally, by "pieces of the OS", we're talking about stuff in/bin and/lib. And generally, I can install packages -- not manually, but by choice -- to/usr. The difference between/usr and/usr/local has to do with a package manager, which doesn't really have a decent equivalent on Windows.
I don't think they help much when using slow ssh sessions. I mean, they do help, but usually a "slow ssh session" is mainly about latency. That is, you could type a whole line of text and wait for it to be sent, but it would go through all at once when it did. Calling it "man" instead of "manual" to save three keystrokes is pointless, because you'll almost never have an ssh session where three keystrokes is faster than six. Just type as fast as you want, and wait for it all to go through.
If it did save time, you've got bigger problems -- "man" almost always returns a full screen of text, which (if it mattered, which it doesn't) is going to take a lot longer than waiting the extra three chars for "manual" instead of "man".
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting we change it. Learning archaic commands and function names is something of a hazing ritual in the hacker community, and they're worth it for the inside jokes anyway -- "man woman" doesn't work with "manual".
This is why shared libraries are so useful. Just modify any.BAT files to set SWITCHAR=/, and modify the shared library. Suddenly, all your programs work.
This is also why I hate the OS X "packaging" that everyone loves so much -- your app has to check for updates by itself, if it wants them, and it's designed to include all libraries within the.app, so your program never has external dependencies. Unfortunately, not having external dependencies means not being able to automatically take advantage of improvements in those dependencies.
worst of all, hide some, or all, of them by default. Thus Anna-Kournikova.jpg.exe. The old Mac OS had it right, the filetype flags were not user-created or normally visible
What, you'd rather have just "Anna-Kournikova" with no way of telling what filetype it is until you open it?
I'm going to stop you there. Extensions describe what to do with a file, not what the file contains.
And what if I want to do something other than edit that text? I don't particularly want to compile Grandma's letter, nor do I want to texturize my C program (turn " into curly quotes)...
I agree that the file extension is a dumb way to keep track of file type, but I can't say magic types are a good idea, either. And the nice thing about file extension is, barring a few collisions, type is preserved when you move it around. That.doc file you got in email is, in fact, a Word document.
eve:~ sanity$ cd test eve:~/test sanity$ ls eve:~/test sanity$ touch a eve:~/test sanity$ touch A eve:~/test sanity$ ls a eve:~/test sanity$ rm a eve:~/test sanity$ touch A eve:~/test sanity$ touch a eve:~/test sanity$ ls A eve:~/test sanity$ rm A eve:~/test sanity$
That looks pretty case insensitive to me. It's case preserving, and if you use a case-sensitive filesystem, it CAN be case-sensitive. But it's case-insensitive by default.
The difference is that arguably freedom of speech, as defined in the US Constitution, already exists.
It didn't exist when the Constitution was drafted. It still doesn't really exist, it's just an ideal we work towards every day.
After all, the Constitution doesn't say anything about shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater.
Can you imagine what kind of network this would be without Net Neutrality? Wait! You don't have to, just look at the network as it exists today! (Peering agreements, network filtering, port blocking, etc.) It doesn't exist. Passing legistlation to create something is different from passing legistlation to protect something which already exists.
Let's see... What do peering agreements have to do with anything?
Port blocking, etc, is something I've never had from my local ISP. So there do exist neutral ISPs, and I have experienced what it's like to have a fairly neutral network between me and what I'm looking for. And yes, I'd like to have that, or something close to it, preserved on a larger scale.
This makes no sense. You're saying that *with* Net Neutrality legistation, people will question their providers *more* than if they didn't have the government to protect them? Are you sure about that? Are you sure they won't just leave it to the government?
No, I'm saying that there won't be much difference either way. With or without legislation, people will trust the powers that be (God, their ISP, the government, etc) to keep the neutrality.
The difference is, with legislation, it will actually happen.
Since Google is so pathetically helpless, it is good you are there to protect them! What a strawman. This has nothing to do with Net Neutrality.
I'm simply using Google as everyone's favorite example. What if it was ATTSucks.com?
Would you please attack my points, not my examples? Or my metaphors...
No, it's not. Even Freedom of Speech does not mean the same as the right to be heard.
But it generally does mean the right to not be censored, subtly or otherwise. Surely you see a parallel?
Maybe the difference of opinion is you seeing the Internet as private property of ISPs, and me seeing it as the new commons. Or, put it this way -- I don't think everyone has the right to a free MySpace page, but I do think MySpace has the same right to my bandwidth as anyone else, even if I wish they would die a horrible death.
What? You're saying I shouldn't be allowed to voice my opinions?
No. I'm saying I wish you wouldn't. That's not saying you shouldn't be allowed.
I believe handsoff.org should go down, hard. But I don't think their ISP should do it. I don't think my ISP should block them, and I don't think Google should drop their PageRank arbitrarily.
And yes, I'd see the irony, but who's building strawmen now?
You're probably just mad I called you astroturf. I honestly don't know, there are some pretty intelligent astroturfers out there, but I can't tell whether that's righteous anger or guilty rage.
You're right, but here's why I think technical things should be taught:
People seem to realize that hackers exist -- they've seen them in the movies. They also seem to think that such hooligans are about as rare and as dangerous as getting mugged in the park. They seem to think it's OK to send confidential stuff via email, because they really never get convincing forgeries via snail mail, and because they figure it's probably about as uncommon to have email read as it is to have snail mail intercepted/read by the postman.
What they fail to understand about email is how easy it is to intercept plaintext email, how easy it is to set up PGP with a couple of trusted friends. Even then, you should understand how easy it is to set up insecure PGP (it's NOT ok to just email your public key), and how easy it can be to avoid being insecure (just read a fingerprint over the phone, or exchange USB thumb drives).
This is pretty much the same as arithmetic -- it's easy to forget to carry a one, but it's not as if doing it properly is hard.
That's why I think at least some things should be taught which are a bit technical, and a bit beyond people's interest, but still within the realm of good stuff you should know anyway.
Here's the difference: one costs people their lives, the other costs them an hour at the local computer shop.
Or it also costs quite a lot of other people's resources dealing with the spam being sent by spyware on your computer. Crashing a car doesn't always cost lives, but it does cause damage. The difference is, when the accident is the fault of your vehicle, it's also your fault, because it's assumed that you know how to drive. When your computer is spewing spam all over the place, or being used to spread viruses/spyware or break into someone's server, it's not your fault, because it's ok to own a computer but not know how to "drive" it. We could at least require people to put forth a good effort, but most people don't even bother to slap on the off-the-shelf virus/spyware protection.
Let me ask you this: If your computer gets too slow because of spyware, you buy a new one. If your car gets totalled because you crashed into mine, should you be allowed to just walk away and buy a new one, without being liable for the damage you caused to my car? And a crash at 5 mph isn't going to kill anybody, but it will cause significant amounts of damage.
It's got nothing to do with your being a Linux user. It's because you're condescending
I think I have a right to be. But I'm trying to explain why people like me are condescending, and why we feel we have a right to be.
and because you can't fathom that some people don't have the time or the desire to learn to maintain their computers.
Ok, let's explore this one:
Next time you pull into a jiffy lube, call a repair person, go to a barber shop, buy art tools, purchase clothes or engage in any service activity whatsoever,
Here's the difference: I admit changing the oil is pretty easy, but something I don't feel like learning. But, I know to take a car to the jiffy lube every now and then. If I owned a car, I'd make sure I know how often.
I may not want to cut my own hair, but that doesn't mean I always wait till it's so long I can't see through it.
I may not build all my own stuff, but if I'm going to buy art tools, presumably I know how to do some sort of art. If I buy clothes, I don't put them on backwards. If I do put them on backwards and inside out, then I do deserve to be ridiculed for it.
Most people not only don't understand computers, but don't understand that they don't understand. They assume they know what they're doing, and attempt to do the equivalent of, say, replacing the muffler or adding a turbocharger to a car. These are the most annoying to deal with.
And most people don't understand that a typical computer does need some sort of maintenance. If you don't know how to use Windows Update, then yes, go to Jiffy Lube -- hire someone to do it for you.
If you don't know how to use a lawnmower, if you don't know how to run a dishwasher, if you don't know how to drive a car, you read the manual and learn how before you just go off mowing over the inflatable pool, or driving into a tree, or breaking all the dishes. If you don't know how to use a computer, you should not be using a computer.
I'm not saying learn absolutely everything about it, but learn something.
And that's just the practical stuff -- there's academic significance, too. Why do we learn things in science class like "how to make glue", and plenty of useless algebra in math, but no programming at all? But I'll concede that if you concede that people should at least take the practical, how-not-to-commit-digital-suicide class.
After all, if you don't want to learn about computers, why not pay someone else to use it for you? I know there are people who pay others to drive their cars for them...
Their legitimate emails are harmless. I'm sure you know this, but the easy way to tell a scam is, they'll never send you a scam message that says "receipt", and they'll never send you a real message that says "click here to verify..."
There really aren't that many sports that look good nude. Maybe I just don't like "jiggle" as much as everyone else, but really, much better to strip the swimsuit off afterwards.
The only sport that looks good nude is sex. If you don't think sex is a sport, you must've missed college.
One last point: I don't see any reason why we can't just wait and see how things turn out. What's the hurry? If there really is a need for regulation, we can regulate just as well (better, in fact) after the telcos try out their plan. If nothing else, the proposed regulations are premature, and could end up causing more trouble than they solve. Congress said as much itself when the idea was first proposed.
Because people won't see the results firsthand, or won't care as much. If every Google request is redirected to MSN, will Joe Sixpack care?
Because if I'm right, the results will be very, very painful, but if I'm wrong, the legislation can't be that bad. I don't really see how I can be wrong, though, considering the telcos have already explicitly stated that they're going to do at least some of the things we're afraid of. And in a war between Google and Mediacom, the consumer loses every time.
Because right now, the freedom we enjoy (as much of it as we do have -- some ISPs have violated neutrality already) allows us to have this discussion. If I'm right, our easiest means of discussion will be gone, and starting our own ad campaign will be that much harder.
No, not impossible, but much harder.
Here's a rather extreme metaphor: If you see Alice holding a gun to Bob's head, do you wait for Alice to shoot before you do anything? "But then we'll know what to do..." BS, you know what to do now. Talk Alice out of it or take her out, but don't think you'll somehow have more insign into how to control Alice once Bob is dead.
And yes, there are non-neutral networks now. Hopefully they will remain the minority, but we can definitely say the need for legislation is there.
It could be easier than the proposed net neutrality legislation, but I haven't heard anyone proposing any alternative -- the "Hands Off the internet" guys do nothing but say "there's no problem, so we shouldn't legislate." I've never heard them propose alternative legislation -- and why would they? They'd much rather be free to do whatever they want for as long as they can.
Let me ask you this: Would you rather wait till a company is spewing tons of pollution into the air and water, and then count on the free market to sort it out? I'm a relatively intelligent consumer, but it isn't my job to follow every product I made to every factory that made it to try to select which ones are paying people who pollute and which ones aren't. And even if I somehow could, if I live near one of these plants, I'm affected whether I buy their stuff or not. Would you hope that people who live near the plants somehow kick them out?
No, that's clearly an issue where government intervention is required.
the final result will probably be a compromise, one which still gives the end-users what they want (which, granted, is basically small-file HTTP and e-mail at present) at a price that makes it worthwhile. The average Internet user will probably pay somewhat less, and the average Slashdotter somewhat more (no more subsidizing of high-bandwidth users, which is inherently unfair anyway).
Yes, this is the solution to how to not run out of bandwidth while still upholding net neutrality. But I don't see what it's got to do with the "compromise" you talk about in terms of content.
If you really believe in the principle of Net Neutrality; if you believe it's as fundamental as free speech that when we try to access something called "The Internet", that Internet must not be for sale to the highest bidder... Do you see now why we don't care about the administrative overhead? How many hours of lawyer time is spent arguing for/against a particular bit of free speech? How many resources does it take for a court to decide that the KKK has as much right to public access television as anyone else? If you added it up and came up with a bill in the trillions of dollars, would you decide the Bill of Rights wasn't worth it?
I wouldn't. If you take away freedom of speech, we're not in America anymore.
Why? Did these regulations exist before, while the Internet was being developed? What has prevented non-neutral networks from destroying the Internet up to this point, and how has that changed?
Non-neutral networks didn't really exist before, and there was generally a bit of outrage (and lawsuits) when it was discovered that a network was not being neutral.
Well, now they are actually able to get away with it. Now they have an ad campaign, they have congress on their side, and the majority of the Internet is no longer educated about this subject. That means most people won't realize how it works. In fact, most people will easily be duped into thinking these violations of net neutrality are normal, or even somehow good for them.
We've also had cell phones as a testbed for this sort of thing. On a cell phone, you can only use the software or services that your provider allows, and even then, you have to pay ridiculous fees for most of them. Imagine an Internet like that -- you get to use AIM, and nothing else, and you have to pay if you want AIM to work even reasonably well.
But more importantly, why do we even have to prove anything? Look at my original post: AT&T has explicitly said that they want Google to pay them for using their pipes. Many telecoms have explicitly said that they intend to build the kind of tiered Internet that you claim it's laughable to think will happen.
I think the whole net-neutrality issue a bit hysterical, myself. The Internet was created without these regulations, it has existed up till now without them, and I believe that it will continue to survive quite well enough in their absence. The Internet is decentralized, after all; if one provider, even a major one, tried to hold the Internet at ransom, the remaining providers would just find a way around it. The topology of the Internet (even that of the major backbones) isn't set in stone; no one provider is absolutely essential to the operation of the network in the long-term.
I'm sorry if I don't share your faith in the flexibility of the Internet.
Where I live, there are only four ISPs that I know of, and only three that could actually go to my house. Two are DSL and one is Cable. Suppose I went with the cable, discontinued my land-line service, and used cell phones or VOIP. If I then discover that Mediacom isn't neutral, it's a huge hassle to switch -- and this is in a place with a reasonable amount of competition.
There are many, many places where it simply isn't an option -- you get one ISP or you get no Internet at all. I think that makes it fair to regulate them -- they are in a position to use hydraulic despotism.
And even supposing all the choice in the world, so what? Look at the music industry. If I don't want to listen to mainstream music, because I don't like the DRM-happy asshats who run it, I can always go indie. I can buy all my music from Magnatune -- $5/album, free of DRM. If I don't want to watch blockbuster movies, there's plenty of good indie films out there, and plenty of entertainment on the Internet to keep me happy.
With the Internet, that doesn't work at all. The strength of the Internet is that it connects people and things. If some tiny artist doesn't want DRM, and the big guys refuse to talk to him, he can always self-publish. If some tiny ISP wants net neutrality, and the big guys refuse to peer with them, they are SOL -- it's not the Internet if you're not able to connect to everyone else on the Internet.
No one provider is absolutely essential, but quite a few providers are. Imagine if you had to implement your own search engine, because every major engine refused to peer with your ISP?
Or, imagine if you ARE a search engine, and every major ISP refuses to peer with you? If Google refused to pay any ISP except their own, and MSN did pay, those ISPs might decide to completely degrade traffic to Google, or redirect traffic from Google to MSN. It wo
I've already sent a message to my congresspeople, I've told everyone I know, and I'm really sick of fighting about it.
There is a retarded person I know (literally retarded), and the way his mind works, sometimes you simply cannot win. For instance, he'll convince himself that it's the 20th century, right now, and there isn't a damned thing you can do to change our mind.
Our country works kind of like that. I just don't think you can reason rationally anymore, which means there's nothing I can do.
If you can get a marketing person on our side, that will help. Americans respond much more readily to smart slogans and flashy advertising. Until then, we've already lost, because they already have an ad campaign.
But I am not a marketing person, and I don't think there's anything more I can do.
My mistake, I meant, when I get more seriously back into gaming. My last major hardware purchase was a whole computer, but it wasn't just for gaming. It mostly gets used for anime and movies now, and the massive amount of hard drive space helps there. It's also used for work.
Gaming is a reason to get upgrades, but since I'm no longer a hardcore gamer -- the kind who drools over every new FPS just for the eye and physics candy -- I no longer require upgrades every year or two. Not that I no longer enjoy that kind of game, but every three or four years should be enough.
Ah, yes. A school uniform helps us learn to be a productive member of society... at McDonalds or Wall Mart. Uniform != Dress Code. Dress code good, uniform bad. I don't even follow a dress code where I work, I just shave once or twice a week.
Physical spanking is not a good thing. My parents maybe whacked me once or twice in my entire fucking LIFE. There are plenty of other, more powerful means of punishment anyway -- confiscation, time out, etc. Even better, use rewards along with or instead of punishments, or actually talk to the kids and teach them about morality. That's not the school's job, of course, but by the time it escalates to where simple detention isn't enough, it may be time to call the police anyway.
And finally, just because you've signed away someone's rights doesn't mean it's right, it just means you can't sue. You sure as hell can write the principal, or the local news stations.
I know this seems insensitive, but try not to take it as a rhetorical question. I really want to know.
I mean, my brother started homeschooling because kids were teasing him. TEASING. Would it be too hard to get your parents involved? Have them complain to the school, the school board, the local media, or simply move to another district?
There are still places where they do more than just suspend you for fighting -- they'll actually have you sit down with a counsellor and work things out. And certainly, if you were only defending yourself, you don't get suspended, you just get to take time off class to talk to the counsellor -- which is usually much more fun than the class itself.
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That would also mean the host OS would swap the guest OS's cache.
Somehow, I think the world changes when you have the kind of monopoly MS does.
I'm just saying... I mean, for my own purposes, I buy most commercial software I use, and I mostly avoid commercial software so I don't have to deal with legal/moral/ethical issues.
Let's try to remember how some games got it right.
The most obvious one that comes to mind is Half-Life. The original. They do give you lots of new and interesting weapons throughout the game, but the gameplay is the same, which means you don't actually have to learn many new skills during the course of the game. My only complaint there would be Xen at the end, where the physics completely change.
But mostly, the game interface and the gameplay itself doesn't change fundamentally. What changes is the content. An example would be going into a tunnel which leads to a cliff face -- the tunnel has the feel of the vents and such, then you hit the cliff face -- completely different. Suddenly, you have to look up and down, and you have to watch your step. Get through that, and you're in a trench, trying not to get noticed till you get to somewhere you can successfully lob a grenade from. And so on.
And enough "plot" to keep you interested. They don't need a cutscene to keep things interesting.
Compare that to, say, Zelda. The entire game is discovering new and cool bits of gameplay. It's rarely frustrating, because if you make it through the first level, you've got the hang of discovering and using these new bits of gameplay. And again, no cutscenes needed, although they are there.
Or Halo 2. Gameplay is very consistent, yet you're never without a sense of place, and while there is a bit more repetition than I'd like, the story does move along, and so does the kind of situation you end up with. Sniping jackals takes a completely different kind of skill than driving a tank, or swording a bunch of Flood. Yet the learning curve is practically nil, and I don't think I ever felt cheated by suddenly being presented with a completely different game that I sucked at.
And compare that to a game that gets it completely wrong like, say, Doom 3. Absolutely nothing new. Oh, sure, towards the end you get the SoulCube, and the final boss battle is interesting. The rest of it is completely boring. I mean, there are some relatively interesting puzzles involving machines and controls, but it's almost impossible to notice those, or any bit of plot development, amid all the insane, mind-numbing repetitiveness of the levels. The only thing that changed was the environment, and it was kind of cool the first time through, when the graphics were hot shit. Now, yawn. All the cheap thrills don't work when you know where they all are, and it just isn't a fun game anymore.
One of my most frustrating games has got to be doing the minigames in Final Fantasy X. Thank God they aren't required. One night, my roommate and I decided we wanted Tidus' Legendary Weapon, which meant we had to beat the Chocobo training session. This required a wholly different skillset than anything else in that game, and in fact, was completely different than most other games I've played. It's a race -- on a bird that doesn't always want to go where you tell it -- where you must dodge oncoming traffic (seagulls) and also collect enough balloons to win. With very little margin for error -- not only do you have to be able to handle this game, but you must absolutely kick ass at it. Took the two of us about three or four hours of playing the exact same 40-second race over and over.
Or the lightning dodging. Completely unlike anything else required. Fun anyway, because after I could get to 10 or 20, I started over, got to 50, and just kept going, 200 was pretty easy. But the same roommate could never do it.
In the case of FFX, this is completely forgivable, because neither of these are required. In fact, anything actually required by the plotline was incredibly easy -- it breaks the longstanding tradition of having Omega Weapon be the most powerful enemy in the game. Omega in a pansy next to some of these (optional) Arena monsters -- roommate goes in thinking it's going to be the toughest battle ever, summons an Aeon in overdrive, unleashes the overdrive... one hit. We must've laughed for
Which OSX? Or are they invisible to the shell also?
On Tiger, looking at a cluttered desktop:
eve:~ sanity$ cd ~/Desktop/ eve:~/Desktop sanity$ echoYes, it's a bit of an old kernel, but maybe you're thinking of a '\', and not a '/'? No matter how you quote it, / is the directory separator, and filesystems themselves do not support escapes -- on Linux anyway. For some retarded reason, Windows filesystems do the escaping in the filesystem driver...
And we complain that Windows is bloated? Linux (as an OS) now includes not only a web browser but an office suite, and IM client, development tools, and everything else we could want?
/bin and /lib. And generally, I can install packages -- not manually, but by choice -- to /usr. The difference between /usr and /usr/local has to do with a package manager, which doesn't really have a decent equivalent on Windows.
Generally, by "pieces of the OS", we're talking about stuff in
I don't think they help much when using slow ssh sessions. I mean, they do help, but usually a "slow ssh session" is mainly about latency. That is, you could type a whole line of text and wait for it to be sent, but it would go through all at once when it did. Calling it "man" instead of "manual" to save three keystrokes is pointless, because you'll almost never have an ssh session where three keystrokes is faster than six. Just type as fast as you want, and wait for it all to go through.
If it did save time, you've got bigger problems -- "man" almost always returns a full screen of text, which (if it mattered, which it doesn't) is going to take a lot longer than waiting the extra three chars for "manual" instead of "man".
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting we change it. Learning archaic commands and function names is something of a hazing ritual in the hacker community, and they're worth it for the inside jokes anyway -- "man woman" doesn't work with "manual".
This is why shared libraries are so useful. Just modify any .BAT files to set SWITCHAR=/, and modify the shared library. Suddenly, all your programs work.
.app, so your program never has external dependencies. Unfortunately, not having external dependencies means not being able to automatically take advantage of improvements in those dependencies.
This is also why I hate the OS X "packaging" that everyone loves so much -- your app has to check for updates by itself, if it wants them, and it's designed to include all libraries within the
What, you'd rather have just "Anna-Kournikova" with no way of telling what filetype it is until you open it?
And what if I want to do something other than edit that text? I don't particularly want to compile Grandma's letter, nor do I want to texturize my C program (turn " into curly quotes)...
I agree that the file extension is a dumb way to keep track of file type, but I can't say magic types are a good idea, either. And the nice thing about file extension is, barring a few collisions, type is preserved when you move it around. That .doc file you got in email is, in fact, a Word document.
That looks pretty case insensitive to me. It's case preserving, and if you use a case-sensitive filesystem, it CAN be case-sensitive. But it's case-insensitive by default.
Ever see Mind of Mencia? Generalizations are never 100% accurate, but they're funny!
Speaking of funny, how the hell did my comment get modded Insightful?
It didn't exist when the Constitution was drafted. It still doesn't really exist, it's just an ideal we work towards every day.
After all, the Constitution doesn't say anything about shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater.
Let's see... What do peering agreements have to do with anything?
Port blocking, etc, is something I've never had from my local ISP. So there do exist neutral ISPs, and I have experienced what it's like to have a fairly neutral network between me and what I'm looking for. And yes, I'd like to have that, or something close to it, preserved on a larger scale.
No, I'm saying that there won't be much difference either way. With or without legislation, people will trust the powers that be (God, their ISP, the government, etc) to keep the neutrality.
The difference is, with legislation, it will actually happen.
I'm simply using Google as everyone's favorite example. What if it was ATTSucks.com?
Would you please attack my points, not my examples? Or my metaphors...
But it generally does mean the right to not be censored, subtly or otherwise. Surely you see a parallel?
Maybe the difference of opinion is you seeing the Internet as private property of ISPs, and me seeing it as the new commons. Or, put it this way -- I don't think everyone has the right to a free MySpace page, but I do think MySpace has the same right to my bandwidth as anyone else, even if I wish they would die a horrible death.
No. I'm saying I wish you wouldn't. That's not saying you shouldn't be allowed.
I believe handsoff.org should go down, hard. But I don't think their ISP should do it. I don't think my ISP should block them, and I don't think Google should drop their PageRank arbitrarily.
And yes, I'd see the irony, but who's building strawmen now?
You're probably just mad I called you astroturf. I honestly don't know, there are some pretty intelligent astroturfers out there, but I can't tell whether that's righteous anger or guilty rage.
And stop being a lapdog and defending a company based on speculation and information from right out your ass.
You're right, but here's why I think technical things should be taught:
People seem to realize that hackers exist -- they've seen them in the movies. They also seem to think that such hooligans are about as rare and as dangerous as getting mugged in the park. They seem to think it's OK to send confidential stuff via email, because they really never get convincing forgeries via snail mail, and because they figure it's probably about as uncommon to have email read as it is to have snail mail intercepted/read by the postman.
What they fail to understand about email is how easy it is to intercept plaintext email, how easy it is to set up PGP with a couple of trusted friends. Even then, you should understand how easy it is to set up insecure PGP (it's NOT ok to just email your public key), and how easy it can be to avoid being insecure (just read a fingerprint over the phone, or exchange USB thumb drives).
This is pretty much the same as arithmetic -- it's easy to forget to carry a one, but it's not as if doing it properly is hard.
That's why I think at least some things should be taught which are a bit technical, and a bit beyond people's interest, but still within the realm of good stuff you should know anyway.
Or it also costs quite a lot of other people's resources dealing with the spam being sent by spyware on your computer. Crashing a car doesn't always cost lives, but it does cause damage. The difference is, when the accident is the fault of your vehicle, it's also your fault, because it's assumed that you know how to drive. When your computer is spewing spam all over the place, or being used to spread viruses/spyware or break into someone's server, it's not your fault, because it's ok to own a computer but not know how to "drive" it. We could at least require people to put forth a good effort, but most people don't even bother to slap on the off-the-shelf virus/spyware protection.
Let me ask you this: If your computer gets too slow because of spyware, you buy a new one. If your car gets totalled because you crashed into mine, should you be allowed to just walk away and buy a new one, without being liable for the damage you caused to my car? And a crash at 5 mph isn't going to kill anybody, but it will cause significant amounts of damage.
I think I have a right to be. But I'm trying to explain why people like me are condescending, and why we feel we have a right to be.
Ok, let's explore this one:
Here's the difference: I admit changing the oil is pretty easy, but something I don't feel like learning. But, I know to take a car to the jiffy lube every now and then. If I owned a car, I'd make sure I know how often.
I may not want to cut my own hair, but that doesn't mean I always wait till it's so long I can't see through it.
I may not build all my own stuff, but if I'm going to buy art tools, presumably I know how to do some sort of art. If I buy clothes, I don't put them on backwards. If I do put them on backwards and inside out, then I do deserve to be ridiculed for it.
Most people not only don't understand computers, but don't understand that they don't understand. They assume they know what they're doing, and attempt to do the equivalent of, say, replacing the muffler or adding a turbocharger to a car. These are the most annoying to deal with.
And most people don't understand that a typical computer does need some sort of maintenance. If you don't know how to use Windows Update, then yes, go to Jiffy Lube -- hire someone to do it for you.
If you don't know how to use a lawnmower, if you don't know how to run a dishwasher, if you don't know how to drive a car, you read the manual and learn how before you just go off mowing over the inflatable pool, or driving into a tree, or breaking all the dishes. If you don't know how to use a computer, you should not be using a computer.
I'm not saying learn absolutely everything about it, but learn something.
And that's just the practical stuff -- there's academic significance, too. Why do we learn things in science class like "how to make glue", and plenty of useless algebra in math, but no programming at all? But I'll concede that if you concede that people should at least take the practical, how-not-to-commit-digital-suicide class.
After all, if you don't want to learn about computers, why not pay someone else to use it for you? I know there are people who pay others to drive their cars for them...
Same to you.
Their legitimate emails are harmless. I'm sure you know this, but the easy way to tell a scam is, they'll never send you a scam message that says "receipt", and they'll never send you a real message that says "click here to verify..."
I probably should post this anonymously, but...
There really aren't that many sports that look good nude. Maybe I just don't like "jiggle" as much as everyone else, but really, much better to strip the swimsuit off afterwards.
The only sport that looks good nude is sex. If you don't think sex is a sport, you must've missed college.
Because people won't see the results firsthand, or won't care as much. If every Google request is redirected to MSN, will Joe Sixpack care?
Because if I'm right, the results will be very, very painful, but if I'm wrong, the legislation can't be that bad. I don't really see how I can be wrong, though, considering the telcos have already explicitly stated that they're going to do at least some of the things we're afraid of. And in a war between Google and Mediacom, the consumer loses every time.
Because right now, the freedom we enjoy (as much of it as we do have -- some ISPs have violated neutrality already) allows us to have this discussion. If I'm right, our easiest means of discussion will be gone, and starting our own ad campaign will be that much harder.
No, not impossible, but much harder.
Here's a rather extreme metaphor: If you see Alice holding a gun to Bob's head, do you wait for Alice to shoot before you do anything? "But then we'll know what to do..." BS, you know what to do now. Talk Alice out of it or take her out, but don't think you'll somehow have more insign into how to control Alice once Bob is dead.
And yes, there are non-neutral networks now. Hopefully they will remain the minority, but we can definitely say the need for legislation is there.
It could be easier than the proposed net neutrality legislation, but I haven't heard anyone proposing any alternative -- the "Hands Off the internet" guys do nothing but say "there's no problem, so we shouldn't legislate." I've never heard them propose alternative legislation -- and why would they? They'd much rather be free to do whatever they want for as long as they can.
Let me ask you this: Would you rather wait till a company is spewing tons of pollution into the air and water, and then count on the free market to sort it out? I'm a relatively intelligent consumer, but it isn't my job to follow every product I made to every factory that made it to try to select which ones are paying people who pollute and which ones aren't. And even if I somehow could, if I live near one of these plants, I'm affected whether I buy their stuff or not. Would you hope that people who live near the plants somehow kick them out?
No, that's clearly an issue where government intervention is required.
Yes, this is the solution to how to not run out of bandwidth while still upholding net neutrality. But I don't see what it's got to do with the "compromise" you talk about in terms of content.
If you really believe in the principle of Net Neutrality; if you believe it's as fundamental as free speech that when we try to access something called "The Internet", that Internet must not be for sale to the highest bidder... Do you see now why we don't care about the administrative overhead? How many hours of lawyer time is spent arguing for/against a particular bit of free speech? How many resources does it take for a court to decide that the KKK has as much right to public access television as anyone else? If you added it up and came up with a bill in the trillions of dollars, would you decide the Bill of Rights wasn't worth it?
I wouldn't. If you take away freedom of speech, we're not in America anymore.
If you take away net neutrality...
</soapbox>
Non-neutral networks didn't really exist before, and there was generally a bit of outrage (and lawsuits) when it was discovered that a network was not being neutral.
Well, now they are actually able to get away with it. Now they have an ad campaign, they have congress on their side, and the majority of the Internet is no longer educated about this subject. That means most people won't realize how it works. In fact, most people will easily be duped into thinking these violations of net neutrality are normal, or even somehow good for them.
We've also had cell phones as a testbed for this sort of thing. On a cell phone, you can only use the software or services that your provider allows, and even then, you have to pay ridiculous fees for most of them. Imagine an Internet like that -- you get to use AIM, and nothing else, and you have to pay if you want AIM to work even reasonably well.
But more importantly, why do we even have to prove anything? Look at my original post: AT&T has explicitly said that they want Google to pay them for using their pipes. Many telecoms have explicitly said that they intend to build the kind of tiered Internet that you claim it's laughable to think will happen.
I'm sorry if I don't share your faith in the flexibility of the Internet.
Where I live, there are only four ISPs that I know of, and only three that could actually go to my house. Two are DSL and one is Cable. Suppose I went with the cable, discontinued my land-line service, and used cell phones or VOIP. If I then discover that Mediacom isn't neutral, it's a huge hassle to switch -- and this is in a place with a reasonable amount of competition.
There are many, many places where it simply isn't an option -- you get one ISP or you get no Internet at all. I think that makes it fair to regulate them -- they are in a position to use hydraulic despotism.
And even supposing all the choice in the world, so what? Look at the music industry. If I don't want to listen to mainstream music, because I don't like the DRM-happy asshats who run it, I can always go indie. I can buy all my music from Magnatune -- $5/album, free of DRM. If I don't want to watch blockbuster movies, there's plenty of good indie films out there, and plenty of entertainment on the Internet to keep me happy.
With the Internet, that doesn't work at all. The strength of the Internet is that it connects people and things. If some tiny artist doesn't want DRM, and the big guys refuse to talk to him, he can always self-publish. If some tiny ISP wants net neutrality, and the big guys refuse to peer with them, they are SOL -- it's not the Internet if you're not able to connect to everyone else on the Internet.
No one provider is absolutely essential, but quite a few providers are. Imagine if you had to implement your own search engine, because every major engine refused to peer with your ISP?
Or, imagine if you ARE a search engine, and every major ISP refuses to peer with you? If Google refused to pay any ISP except their own, and MSN did pay, those ISPs might decide to completely degrade traffic to Google, or redirect traffic from Google to MSN. It wo
I've already sent a message to my congresspeople, I've told everyone I know, and I'm really sick of fighting about it.
There is a retarded person I know (literally retarded), and the way his mind works, sometimes you simply cannot win. For instance, he'll convince himself that it's the 20th century, right now, and there isn't a damned thing you can do to change our mind.
Our country works kind of like that. I just don't think you can reason rationally anymore, which means there's nothing I can do.
If you can get a marketing person on our side, that will help. Americans respond much more readily to smart slogans and flashy advertising. Until then, we've already lost, because they already have an ad campaign.
But I am not a marketing person, and I don't think there's anything more I can do.
What, "real games"? Well, think of it this way -- what is "real money"? Much of the "real money" we spend today is not physical.
Reality is how we define it. However, I do believe that bits, in the form of games, have much more reality than promises and ideas about future bits.
My mistake, I meant, when I get more seriously back into gaming. My last major hardware purchase was a whole computer, but it wasn't just for gaming. It mostly gets used for anime and movies now, and the massive amount of hard drive space helps there. It's also used for work.
Gaming is a reason to get upgrades, but since I'm no longer a hardcore gamer -- the kind who drools over every new FPS just for the eye and physics candy -- I no longer require upgrades every year or two. Not that I no longer enjoy that kind of game, but every three or four years should be enough.
Ah, yes. A school uniform helps us learn to be a productive member of society... at McDonalds or Wall Mart. Uniform != Dress Code. Dress code good, uniform bad. I don't even follow a dress code where I work, I just shave once or twice a week.
Physical spanking is not a good thing. My parents maybe whacked me once or twice in my entire fucking LIFE. There are plenty of other, more powerful means of punishment anyway -- confiscation, time out, etc. Even better, use rewards along with or instead of punishments, or actually talk to the kids and teach them about morality. That's not the school's job, of course, but by the time it escalates to where simple detention isn't enough, it may be time to call the police anyway.
And finally, just because you've signed away someone's rights doesn't mean it's right, it just means you can't sue. You sure as hell can write the principal, or the local news stations.
I learn better on my own anyhow.
I know this seems insensitive, but try not to take it as a rhetorical question. I really want to know.
I mean, my brother started homeschooling because kids were teasing him. TEASING. Would it be too hard to get your parents involved? Have them complain to the school, the school board, the local media, or simply move to another district?
There are still places where they do more than just suspend you for fighting -- they'll actually have you sit down with a counsellor and work things out. And certainly, if you were only defending yourself, you don't get suspended, you just get to take time off class to talk to the counsellor -- which is usually much more fun than the class itself.