I'm sorry, but I'm not buying it. Even if you truly have no life what so ever outside of corroding your cognitive abilities with TV, you still have at least 8 hours per day of downtime while you sleep.
Perhaps there's a slight OCD-induced quest to download every file on TPB going on as a side show?
I started writing an elaborate reply, but I realized that there's no point; It's not a matter of deducing which idea is right if you start from different axioms.
If FOSS's goal is simply collective itch-scratching, OK. Don't expect to be relevant to anyone outside a closed community.
The sentiment expressed by Linus, that the destruction of Microsoft will be an entirely unintentional side-effect of the Open Source movement, is demonstrably incorrect exactly because of the closed-community phenomenon. Programmers build their walled gardens, and being intimiately familiar with the software they've written simply don't see faults, or don't see the faults as faults, and thus the program stagnates at near-unusability for others.
And again, if that's all one wants, fine. I personally hope to see the aforementioned blooming metropolis of open software that displaced the closed model, and if that's ever going to happen then the idea that you can't have a voice unless you've contributed has to go.
There's plenty wrong with my computer: If I try to use my video capture card without reloading a kernel module with settings looked up on an obscure wiki, it will lock my computer up dead. Mplayer has serious issues with audio sync with.flv (think multiple seconds per minute in some cases). The audio recorder programs for both KDE and Gnome are an exercise in frustration [I just want to hit the fucking red button and save a.wav, aaaaaauuugh!]. Kontact seems to be having some scaling issues as the number of messages from my RSS feeds drifts towards fifty thousand. It was very stupid of Gentoo to install x86 binaries of grub and grub-install for a no-multilib profile. It also kept clobbering my resolv.conf on boot until I killed some line in some archaic boot script.
Are you going to tell me to learn 6 or 7 codebases, from all levels of the software stack and all of them way outside my area of interest or expertise, before I'm allowed to say that these are real problems which need to be fixed? Do you seriously think I need to look up some obscure capture cards and submit documentation before bttv developers should pay attention to the fact that bttv nukes my machine upon use unless I re-modprobe it with the right -card flag, or Gentoo devs fix whatever it is that's autodetecting wrong (Mandrake 8.2 got it right nearly 5 years ago)?
And once more, if that's how you want to feel, OK. Just don't expect outsiders to take Open Source that's done that way seriously.
Is now just a bunch of generic PCs in smaller form factors. So in essence you're sticking a network layer between the rest of the computer and it's video card. So instead of network outages (which are inevitable) crippling just network operations, they now cripple everything including your ability to keep typing your office documents or looking at the email you've already got.
It's annoying as hell, but if my network craps itself I still have a working computer in front of me and I can still do a subset of what I was doing before. Not so with thin clients.
<tinfoil mode>
Of course they want to take the actual computer away from you, they want to have control over you. If they could, your "computer" would be a mindless terminal to a Big Brother Approved mainframe that spied on everything you did.
</tinfoil mode>
If we're content with small closed communities that play only to themselves, that's a perfectly valid goal. It's a lot easier, certainly. You get it the way you want and basically enter stasis.
I can tell you from experience that's what's happened to BZflag - There are still fundamental bugs in it's collision detection that have been there for about 10 years that no one has any intention of fixing. I'd estimate it's played by the same exact 1 or 2 thousand people total, and it's what they want. Never mind that about 99.5% of other game players want things like vertical aiming, hit points, terrain, and a working physics engine. Never mind that my friend honestly couldn't understand how any FPS could lack such things, the closed community has what it wants and has zero intention of venturing elsewhere. And that's their right... I just hope they know that it will never be accepted outside a tiny niche. Games might not be the best example subject, but it's the perfect demonstration of the mentality. If a community does this, it will either contently go nowhere or be furious at it's perpetual inability to match, let alone exceed, it's commercial competition.
So which is it going to be? If we're content with FOSS being a set of walled-in gardens then by all means let's call anyone who isn't a programmer that has the gall to criticize our interfaces or feature sets a worthless freeloader and tell them to stick it up their asses. I personally hope to see a blooming open-source metropolis supplant the closed model, but if the echo-chamber submit-a-patch-or-STFU mentality wins, It Will Never Ever Happen. I'll repeat the point of my original post: There are very, very few things that will repulse potential users or developers more than snide derision at their suggestions.
tl;dr: If you put up a sign that says "free automotive help" and then tell anyone who has ideas that differ from yours to go fuck themselves, don't be suprised when people not only keep paying for car maintenence despite the availablity of a free alternative but tell others to avoid you.
Hehe... As a physics student, yes. I love cranking out perfectly-formatted reports stuffed with exquisitely-rendered equations while my friends try to keep MS Word from mangling matrices too badly.
(Not hating on Word, but it's not a science/math document layout system)
I've come to a conclusion about those who say "write a patch" if you say there's a problem with something. Either they truly don't understand just how powerfully it turns people off from using their software, or they do know and it's an intentional "fuck you" to those they decide are "outsiders."
Either way, the outcome is the same: They actively drive users away, in FOSS's case back into the comforting arms of Microsoft. It creates a rift between reality and the developer's perception of reality, which results in the project not moving towards progress but orthogonally to it, or worse away.
And here enlies the problem with the "write a patch" types: I gaurantee you I can find an aspect of your computer you aren't an expert at, and you'd be pissed at me if I threw it in your face when you asked for help. Your accountant doesn't tell you to fix your own damn tax problem, the mechanic doesn't derisively laugh because you don't know how to re-gap your own spark plugs, and as a user of FOSS I'd prefer not being snidely mocked just because I don't dedicate hours a day learning your little corner of it.
For all the egalitarianism of FOSS, there is still fundamentally a business relationship between the programmers and the users. Until we learn that and put a lid on the "write your own patch" people, it will never equal proprietary software except for a handful of diamonds in the rough.
Why so thorny? Because I've been a recipient of that attitude a few times. And not even my hardcore nerd's reverse tact filter could stop it from getting under my skin.
I routinely did 85 on hwy-170 in Los Angeles and I was in the bloody slow lane. I5? Shit, parts of that do 90 (or 95+ in the Imperial Valley parts that pass cow farms).
God help any kids who get this and then get on the highway.
Take a chill pill dude. GP wasn't making any judgement on the validity of the Aceh province independance movement; He was simply observing the neutral fact that it largely abated after the Christmas Day tsunami.
It was kind of odd... In most places (actually, now that I think back nearly everywhere) it was indeed quite good. But there were just a few lines that were like grinding gears in an otherwise clockwork mechanism.
I particularly remember the scene after escaping the Kernel's lightcycle grid when Jet and Mercury were planning what to do next. I think the other big one was "I'm inside a data transfer node... where are you?" when they're hijacking a transport out of the Kernel's domain.
S'been too long. I need to boot Windows and play again... Tron, oh Tron how I loveth thy glowing lines. Take me away from this stupid world!
Re:No Naked Black Holes?! Giggidy!
on
No Naked Black Holes
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You appear to have no idea what's going on here. Okay, first of all, the Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis in question (short version): All singularities other than the one from the Big Bang are hidden behind event horizons.
The equations of relativity, which were used to run the simulation, say nothing about cosmic censorship. The C.S.H. wasn't formulated until 50-odd years after general relativity because of a problem - relativity actually readily admits (physically-implausible) solutions that do have naked singularities, hence the censorship. Apparently, something always conspires to hide them.
This simulation confirmed the hypothesis' prediction: Even in the most violent circumstances physically realizable, the singularity ended up behind an event horizon.
Frankly, it's time we admitted it... the only way we're going to find a naked singularity is to go for a joyride in the direction of the Great Attractor in a sycamore-seed-shaped ship.
If only the original Tron had shown the whole game grid at some point so Armagetron could have a "Recreate Flynn's Escape" option. I'd do nothing but that, all day...
Seriously, I think I got that game for Christmas 2004. First modern FPS I'd ever played, and goddamn if I didn't play it for 20 hours straight. There were obviously some corny aspects, but for a tron nerd it was an eye-candy feast and a wonder to behold.
Now I just need to get myself digitized and synthesize new voices for everyone. Really, the one thing that really intruded on my suspension of disbelief in that game was the voice acting. They must have made last-minute changes or something, because it vascillates between decent and "how can anyone this wooden get a job voice acting?" At least Wendy Carlos did the music and they got the real Alan One to do a cameo in the end.
Hearing this kind of nonsense in response to criticism of broken governments really gets old after a while. When our officials tell big business to fuck off, they run smear ads during the next election. When Russian officals tell Gazprom to fuck off, or journalists criticize Putin's government, they tend to die of extreme cranial bullet trauma.
It's like people who complain about Bernanke's inflationary policies when Zimbabwe is discussed. Does anyone actually think these are comparable?
Fools act because something must be done.
The wise act because they have something to do.
In any case, the question is how to survive the Subprime Mortgate Plane's crash-landing. In the short term, the fallout has left credit markets paralyzed with fear and waiting for the market to unjam itself would most likely prove unpalatably painful. If we aren't to act until we have a solution, what do you propose that we may act?
Long term, obviously, the solution is to bring back the regulation that stopped this nonsense from happening in the first place. Time and time again, we've seen that the markets are great at setting short-term prices and astonishingly, abysmally bad at planning for the future (witness the subprime ponzi scheme). Back in the thoroughly unregulated Robber Baron era, we'd have bank runs and financial panics like this literally every 5-10 years. Since the markets clearly can't regulate themselves to prevent this kind of screwup, the government needs to step in and do so. But this is long-term prevention to keep the Subprime Mortgage Plane from ever taking off again; What do we do now that we're stuck on it?
The implication is that the Russian government is explicitly corrupt and does not put on any pretense of enforcing the law but instead protects those with money or ties to money.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we're all quite happy that the bastards are staying cockpunched after getting cockpunched by the takedown.
Honestly, I just wanted to know where babby comes from!
Wait, shit, astronomical fail!
It's not nearly that bad... more like 3 days. I failed to realize that my 270000 figure was seconds not years.
Assume every single person on earth can do a 16-digit operation on a calculator in one second.
It would take them roughly a quarter million years with no breaks of any kind to do what this machine can do in one second.
0/10, plagarized; Original work is required for passing grade.
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying it. Even if you truly have no life what so ever outside of corroding your cognitive abilities with TV, you still have at least 8 hours per day of downtime while you sleep.
Perhaps there's a slight OCD-induced quest to download every file on TPB going on as a side show?
Meh, I signed up for gmail because my friend insisted... nothing other than that :P
I started writing an elaborate reply, but I realized that there's no point; It's not a matter of deducing which idea is right if you start from different axioms.
.flv (think multiple seconds per minute in some cases). The audio recorder programs for both KDE and Gnome are an exercise in frustration [I just want to hit the fucking red button and save a .wav, aaaaaauuugh!]. Kontact seems to be having some scaling issues as the number of messages from my RSS feeds drifts towards fifty thousand. It was very stupid of Gentoo to install x86 binaries of grub and grub-install for a no-multilib profile. It also kept clobbering my resolv.conf on boot until I killed some line in some archaic boot script.
If FOSS's goal is simply collective itch-scratching, OK. Don't expect to be relevant to anyone outside a closed community.
The sentiment expressed by Linus, that the destruction of Microsoft will be an entirely unintentional side-effect of the Open Source movement, is demonstrably incorrect exactly because of the closed-community phenomenon. Programmers build their walled gardens, and being intimiately familiar with the software they've written simply don't see faults, or don't see the faults as faults, and thus the program stagnates at near-unusability for others.
And again, if that's all one wants, fine. I personally hope to see the aforementioned blooming metropolis of open software that displaced the closed model, and if that's ever going to happen then the idea that you can't have a voice unless you've contributed has to go.
There's plenty wrong with my computer: If I try to use my video capture card without reloading a kernel module with settings looked up on an obscure wiki, it will lock my computer up dead. Mplayer has serious issues with audio sync with
Are you going to tell me to learn 6 or 7 codebases, from all levels of the software stack and all of them way outside my area of interest or expertise, before I'm allowed to say that these are real problems which need to be fixed? Do you seriously think I need to look up some obscure capture cards and submit documentation before bttv developers should pay attention to the fact that bttv nukes my machine upon use unless I re-modprobe it with the right -card flag, or Gentoo devs fix whatever it is that's autodetecting wrong (Mandrake 8.2 got it right nearly 5 years ago)?
And once more, if that's how you want to feel, OK. Just don't expect outsiders to take Open Source that's done that way seriously.
Is now just a bunch of generic PCs in smaller form factors. So in essence you're sticking a network layer between the rest of the computer and it's video card. So instead of network outages (which are inevitable) crippling just network operations, they now cripple everything including your ability to keep typing your office documents or looking at the email you've already got.
It's annoying as hell, but if my network craps itself I still have a working computer in front of me and I can still do a subset of what I was doing before. Not so with thin clients.
<tinfoil mode>
Of course they want to take the actual computer away from you, they want to have control over you. If they could, your "computer" would be a mindless terminal to a Big Brother Approved mainframe that spied on everything you did.
</tinfoil mode>
It comes down to what you want from FOSS.
If we're content with small closed communities that play only to themselves, that's a perfectly valid goal. It's a lot easier, certainly. You get it the way you want and basically enter stasis.
I can tell you from experience that's what's happened to BZflag - There are still fundamental bugs in it's collision detection that have been there for about 10 years that no one has any intention of fixing. I'd estimate it's played by the same exact 1 or 2 thousand people total, and it's what they want. Never mind that about 99.5% of other game players want things like vertical aiming, hit points, terrain, and a working physics engine. Never mind that my friend honestly couldn't understand how any FPS could lack such things, the closed community has what it wants and has zero intention of venturing elsewhere. And that's their right... I just hope they know that it will never be accepted outside a tiny niche. Games might not be the best example subject, but it's the perfect demonstration of the mentality. If a community does this, it will either contently go nowhere or be furious at it's perpetual inability to match, let alone exceed, it's commercial competition.
So which is it going to be? If we're content with FOSS being a set of walled-in gardens then by all means let's call anyone who isn't a programmer that has the gall to criticize our interfaces or feature sets a worthless freeloader and tell them to stick it up their asses. I personally hope to see a blooming open-source metropolis supplant the closed model, but if the echo-chamber submit-a-patch-or-STFU mentality wins, It Will Never Ever Happen. I'll repeat the point of my original post: There are very, very few things that will repulse potential users or developers more than snide derision at their suggestions.
tl;dr: If you put up a sign that says "free automotive help" and then tell anyone who has ideas that differ from yours to go fuck themselves, don't be suprised when people not only keep paying for car maintenence despite the availablity of a free alternative but tell others to avoid you.
Hehe... As a physics student, yes. I love cranking out perfectly-formatted reports stuffed with exquisitely-rendered equations while my friends try to keep MS Word from mangling matrices too badly.
(Not hating on Word, but it's not a science/math document layout system)
I've come to a conclusion about those who say "write a patch" if you say there's a problem with something. Either they truly don't understand just how powerfully it turns people off from using their software, or they do know and it's an intentional "fuck you" to those they decide are "outsiders."
Either way, the outcome is the same: They actively drive users away, in FOSS's case back into the comforting arms of Microsoft. It creates a rift between reality and the developer's perception of reality, which results in the project not moving towards progress but orthogonally to it, or worse away.
And here enlies the problem with the "write a patch" types: I gaurantee you I can find an aspect of your computer you aren't an expert at, and you'd be pissed at me if I threw it in your face when you asked for help. Your accountant doesn't tell you to fix your own damn tax problem, the mechanic doesn't derisively laugh because you don't know how to re-gap your own spark plugs, and as a user of FOSS I'd prefer not being snidely mocked just because I don't dedicate hours a day learning your little corner of it. For all the egalitarianism of FOSS, there is still fundamentally a business relationship between the programmers and the users. Until we learn that and put a lid on the "write your own patch" people, it will never equal proprietary software except for a handful of diamonds in the rough.
Why so thorny? Because I've been a recipient of that attitude a few times. And not even my hardcore nerd's reverse tact filter could stop it from getting under my skin.
I routinely did 85 on hwy-170 in Los Angeles and I was in the bloody slow lane. I5? Shit, parts of that do 90 (or 95+ in the Imperial Valley parts that pass cow farms).
God help any kids who get this and then get on the highway.
Your microwave takes 6 hours to make popcorn? Dude, you need a new microwave.
Tom? Tom, it's R Kelly. Listen, you... you gotta come out of the closet, Tom.
Take a chill pill dude. GP wasn't making any judgement on the validity of the Aceh province independance movement; He was simply observing the neutral fact that it largely abated after the Christmas Day tsunami.
It was kind of odd... In most places (actually, now that I think back nearly everywhere) it was indeed quite good. But there were just a few lines that were like grinding gears in an otherwise clockwork mechanism.
I particularly remember the scene after escaping the Kernel's lightcycle grid when Jet and Mercury were planning what to do next. I think the other big one was "I'm inside a data transfer node... where are you?" when they're hijacking a transport out of the Kernel's domain.
S'been too long. I need to boot Windows and play again... Tron, oh Tron how I loveth thy glowing lines. Take me away from this stupid world!
You appear to have no idea what's going on here. Okay, first of all, the Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis in question (short version): All singularities other than the one from the Big Bang are hidden behind event horizons.
The equations of relativity, which were used to run the simulation, say nothing about cosmic censorship. The C.S.H. wasn't formulated until 50-odd years after general relativity because of a problem - relativity actually readily admits (physically-implausible) solutions that do have naked singularities, hence the censorship. Apparently, something always conspires to hide them.
This simulation confirmed the hypothesis' prediction: Even in the most violent circumstances physically realizable, the singularity ended up behind an event horizon.
Frankly, it's time we admitted it... the only way we're going to find a naked singularity is to go for a joyride in the direction of the Great Attractor in a sycamore-seed-shaped ship.
If only the original Tron had shown the whole game grid at some point so Armagetron could have a "Recreate Flynn's Escape" option. I'd do nothing but that, all day...
'Nuff said.
Seriously, I think I got that game for Christmas 2004. First modern FPS I'd ever played, and goddamn if I didn't play it for 20 hours straight. There were obviously some corny aspects, but for a tron nerd it was an eye-candy feast and a wonder to behold.
Now I just need to get myself digitized and synthesize new voices for everyone. Really, the one thing that really intruded on my suspension of disbelief in that game was the voice acting. They must have made last-minute changes or something, because it vascillates between decent and "how can anyone this wooden get a job voice acting?" At least Wendy Carlos did the music and they got the real Alan One to do a cameo in the end.
Hearing this kind of nonsense in response to criticism of broken governments really gets old after a while. When our officials tell big business to fuck off, they run smear ads during the next election. When Russian officals tell Gazprom to fuck off, or journalists criticize Putin's government, they tend to die of extreme cranial bullet trauma.
It's like people who complain about Bernanke's inflationary policies when Zimbabwe is discussed. Does anyone actually think these are comparable?
Fools act because something must be done.
The wise act because they have something to do.
In any case, the question is how to survive the Subprime Mortgate Plane's crash-landing. In the short term, the fallout has left credit markets paralyzed with fear and waiting for the market to unjam itself would most likely prove unpalatably painful. If we aren't to act until we have a solution, what do you propose that we may act?
Long term, obviously, the solution is to bring back the regulation that stopped this nonsense from happening in the first place. Time and time again, we've seen that the markets are great at setting short-term prices and astonishingly, abysmally bad at planning for the future (witness the subprime ponzi scheme). Back in the thoroughly unregulated Robber Baron era, we'd have bank runs and financial panics like this literally every 5-10 years. Since the markets clearly can't regulate themselves to prevent this kind of screwup, the government needs to step in and do so. But this is long-term prevention to keep the Subprime Mortgage Plane from ever taking off again; What do we do now that we're stuck on it?
The implication is that the Russian government is explicitly corrupt and does not put on any pretense of enforcing the law but instead protects those with money or ties to money.
See also: Russian Mafia.
Evolution has hardwired it into our brains: Killing fellow tribe members is bad for survival, ergo it will be perceived as immoral.
All 3 of your GTFO of my Slashdot and go back to /B/.
/B/)
(in b4 wat's