Depends on the task (usability lecture, long)
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· Score: 1
"The goal of the computer industry is to cut down on periferals and simplify they way we use a computer."
1, No, simplifying the use is actually the job of usability. However a mouse _does_ make the computer more usable.
The keyboard (whether shortcuts or CLI) may sometimes be better when you already are used to that program, and know _exactly_ what you're doing and how. E.g., I myself do prefer, say, the Norton Commander or Midnight Commander pressing F5 to copy a file, compared to dragging and dropping file with the mouse. (And occasionally doing it by mistake or to the wrong folder).
However a large part of usability is discoverability. It's helping you use a program or function that you only use rarely, or the first time, and/or when your time is too valuable to spend months becoming an expert in a program that you'll only need for a few hours total per year.
The mouse is ideal for that. If I just got a new program for the first time, it's easier to just go with the mouse over the toolbar and maybe menus until I find the function I need, than to spend hours reading the manual.
E.g., it was easier hovering a mouse all over the Gimp's toolbox until I found the colour tool I needed, back when I briefly delved into modding (well, mostly recolouring), than to spend some time learning whatever ctrl-alt-shift-footpedal combo it has for that operation. If any. The mouse has, in fact, _saved_ me time there.
2. There are tasks where the keyboard just isn't faster, or even apropriate. I'm not even talking image editing or games. Try navigating the list of links on a site with 100 links per page (e.g., a portal site) only with tab. If you're willing to tell me that you'll be more efficient with your l33t computer skills and just a keyboard, than my just clicking on a link, I'll call bullshit on that. (Don't under-estimate how quickly a twitch-FPS-gamer can snipe that link;)
3. There are also some tasks where the CLI or keyboard being faster is just a myth. Or rather: just subjective perception.
There have been actual studies about how fast people really are with both. The CLI users invariably thought they were faster. For some tasks, yes, they actually were. But for a whole lot of tasks they weren't.
I've spent some time of my own actually watching some of the l33t unix guru coleagues using just the CLI for everything. (Real Men don't use a gui to configure a server, they edit some 100 XML files in vi, right?) They actually _weren't_ faster. They were in fact a lot slower.
Everything was a several minute long exercise in typing a couple of letters, hitting tab, more letters, tab, tab, more letters, oops, wrong directory, backspace a few times, tab, tab, more typing, oops, error, let's read the man page, more typing and tabs, etc. It really was slower than even a newbie does the same things with a mouse and a good GUI.
But they could swear that they're faster and more productive. How can that be? It boils down to subjective perception. Things that keep your brains busy make your time and your work day seem to go faster. All that typing and hitting tab and checking the options in the man page, it keeps one busy. That's why it's subjectively perceived as faster.
Now there _are_ good cases for a CLI, such as remotely administrating a server or really complex tasks that need one to write a small script. Don't bother pointing those out, I hereby officially acknowledge them as legitimate using. But locally and for mundane operations? Your using only the keyboard may count far less as "excelling in your computer skills" than you think.
Well, it would also need some kind of support from the games. If, say, MadCatz or Thrustmaster produced a gamepad with a trackball for the XBox or GameCube, it would die a silent death without the games actually supporting it.
Just pretending that it's a thumbstick wouldn't solve much, IMHO. To actually be an improvement, it would need to be read and used as a mouse: i.e., actually transmit the distance moved to the game, and not emulate a deviation from the centre position.
But again, that would need games to be prepared to accept X and Y travel distances instead of the thumbstick data.
And I really can't see anyone except Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo making the game developpers do that.
Well, dunno, for just about every console game I've played so far it's the _left_ thumbstick that gets used the most. The _right_ stick is in most non-FPS and non-RTS games not even used at all, or assigned some totally secondary role that wouldn't be any worse with a trackball.
E.g., in Jade Empire the right stick is only used for scrolling in the text boxes. Would that "suck royally" with a trackball? No, I don't think it would.
I've given a lot of thought to it after that talk with the co-worker, and I haven't come up with a single game that would "royally suck" if (only) the right stick were replaced with a trackball. Again, leaving the left stick as it is. Just the right one gets replaced in that idea.
But I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong. If you do know games where replacing (only) the right stick with a trackball just couldn't possibly work, please do share that information.
Actually not even like a gamer
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· Score: 4, Insightful
E.g., if you read the very first page of the review, about the MX1000: "As with optical mice, if you don?t make use of it for several seconds, the battery indicator turns off and the mouse goes into power saving mode."
Now I am a hardcore twitch-gamer, and let me tell you that those power saving delays are what gets you killed in multi-player. You end up doing weird stuff like slightly waving the scope around when you wait for a target as a sniper, because otherwise you have that brief wake-up delay when you do need the mouse.
I had an MX500 and went and bought an MX300 with a cord instead.
Basically my take is that it's a mouse that isn't really good for either. For twitch gaming I _really_ want a corded one, for someone who just browses the web, as you've said, a $6 mouse works just as well. So who are the target demographic that absolutely needed it?
The SFV (Stupid Fashion Victims). The people who buy for the buzzwords and the hype. OOOH, IT'S LASER!
As someone who actually spent a lot of time studying physics, lemme tell you what you probably already knew or suspected: there is nothing magical about laser light in a mouse.
Yes, you can use the coherent light wonderfully for other purposes. But an optical mouse works more or less like a camera: it compares consecutive snapshots and determines the movement from the difference. Increasing the resolution or the number of snapshots per second, yeah, that'll make it a better mouse. Putting a laser diode instead of a regular LED in it, however, won't do jack.
Logitech's problem is: the keyboards and mice business isn't a great place to be in. You won't make a big fortune by selling el-cheapo $6 mice. So they just need some buzzword to allow them to sell a $50 one instead. That's all.
And if you put up enough hype, there'll be enough SFVs that believe it. And enough sites who aren't even as much review sites, but prom queens: they just print whatever is currently popular and brings page views. They catter to stroking the ego of those who already knew which buzzword they really want to buy. If enough SFVs fall for a buzzword, those sites will dutifully print an article telling them how good it really is, and how pleased they can be with that purchase.
Because if you listen to Razer, their mice have always been the absolute best, light years ahead of anything else, etc. Never mind that the keys would stick, and other problems. Nah, it was some conspiracy that kept them from selling well.
Dunno, when someone makes that kind of bold claims about their mice, it seems to me like a review is welcome. Just to know, as a consumer, if they actually deliver.
Well, as a heavy duty console user myself, I'd damn well like to see something less half arsed than the right thumbstick for aiming. No, the touch screen on the DS isn't it either. I said _less_ half arsed.
Been talking with a gamer co-worker some months ago, and we came up with "well, why the heck doesn't anyone use a trackball?"
Just think about it. Replace the right thumbstick with a trackball, and you suddenly have a device that can actually work as well as a mouse for either FPS or RTS. (The weakest uses of a gamepad at the moment.) Or close enough. I had co-workers which were good at Half Life multi-player with a trackball, so it can't be too bad.
And it seems to me like it _can't_ be that me and said co-worker are the only smart people on Earth. Surely others had the same idea by now. So WTH is preventing Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo from making a controller like that? Did someone already patent a gamepad with a trackball, or?
E.g., I do carry a bag or two with me almost at all times, because I sometimes just want to drop by at the grocery store and buy stuff on the way home from work. And I see no point in buying a new plastic bag each time.
So basically if someone decided to accuse me of shoplifting, that bag -- even if not used at the time -- would suddenly be criminal intent. Seems bloody stupid to me.
E.g., back in college I did have half of my hard drive encrypted -- and that was before the OS itself came with encryption -- just because I didn't want the rest of my family reading my private stuff. Among other things, for a month or so at the time I tried to write a diary, and I didn't want it to be the whole family's business. ("Nosy" is too mild a word to describe my parents.)
What if at the same time, and totally unrelated, I had followed a link to some illegal site? God knows some sites had tons of redirects and links to warez sites, porn sites, etc.
Would suddenly that encryption software count as criminal intent to encrypt and traffic that illegal stuff? Even though it was never actually used to encrypt any of that?
Seems to me that linking everyday items to somehow imply premeditation and guilt, is severely flawed. Unless it is proved that the bag, or the encryption software, or whatever, was actually _used_ in committing the crime, it seems to me that mere possession doesn't really mean anything.
There are lots of things that aren't really pervasive, but that doesn't necessarily make them criminal.
E.g., my parents have rented a box at a bank to keep their documents there. Their reasoning being that in case of a fire or burglary, might as well not lose those.
It's not a pervasive thing, and it _could_ theoretically be used to hide something illegal, but that's not what they use it for. And a prosecution line of reasoning along the lines of "if it's not pervasive, it shows criminal intent" would make them both criminals. (Mind you, I'm not always on good terms with them, but "criminals" is a bit too harsh a word to call them;)
E.g., high-end sports cars are not that pervasive, and _could_ be used to try to outrun the police cars. But I sure hope it doesn't make everyone who bought a sports car automatically guilty of criminal intent and planning to flee the police to the border in that car.
E.g., I know at least two people who regularly purge their browser's history and cache. One is just clinically paranoid, (Yes, literally, believes in a world-wide conspiracy, that is secretly responsible for everything from wars to Jar Jar in Episode 1. No, literally.) The other just doesn't want his wife to find out about his porn surfing habits.
It's not that pervasive a thing to do, and it _could_ be used to hide surfing for something illegal, but none of them actually surf for anything illegal. (The paranoid one is just too paranoid, for example. He _knows_ that the conspiracy is watching him.)
So to cut to the end of a long rant, an idea like "if it's different from the norm, it can get you (extra) time in jail" seems like a very very dangerous precedent to me. Pressure to be 100% conformist and obedient can be bad enough as it is. Attaching an extra potential jail sentence to anything if it's unusual, seems to me like a very bad idea.
The whole "if you have nothing hide, you shouldn't have PGP" idea is simply stupid.
It's like saying that if you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't have a lock on your door or curtains at your windows. Hey, you could have hidden some corpses behind that door and those curtains. Yep, it shows you had criminal intent.
The whole post-9/11 idiocy that privacy==criminal intent (or even makes you an active terrorist) is getting on my nerves already.
Everyone needs _some_ privacy. Noone is a 100% exhibitionist, who'd eat, sleep, shit and surf for porn at a street corner with everyone watching. Even the most affectionate cat, if you have one, needs some time alone now and then.
Everyone has _some_ stuff they'd rather not have posted publically on a billboard in front of their house. E.g., their credit card number and SSN. E.g., the emails to their girlfriend. E.g., the pseudonym under which they posted that their boss is a retard. E.g., their medical record. E.g., their banking data. E.g., their names and passwords for sites they use. E.g., their diary.
Those are all very valid things to have encrypted. They're perfectly common everyday stuff, but nevertheless stuff which someone would have a damn good reason to encrypt. In fact, which they'd do damn well to encrypt. (Heck, I'd rate anyone 10 IQ points higher if they had their usernames and passwords in a strongly encrypted file, instead of on yellow post-it notes stuck to the monitor.)
It doesn't have to be something as criminal as hiding bodies in an underground cavern. And extrapolating that everyone who doesn't leave their front door open 24 hours a day, and doesn't post every single detail of their life (SSN, credit card number, emails, usernames and passwords included) in front of their house, is automatically a criminal... is bloody stupid. It's outright idiotic.
"It takes a fragile person to crumble under an insult especially a funny one."
The fact is that on Earth people crumble every day from being insulted. I personally know people who have burned out and dropped a line of work because a PHB kept insulting their work. I know people who are still fragile precisely because someone found it supremely funny to mock them all through high school.
We churn generation after generation of those, in fact. And yes, invariably someone else -- sometimes the whole class -- found it way funny to play a cruel prank on someone. Again.
So if in your world it's a sin to be fragile and crumble under insults, well, dunno, I'd like to know which world is that. Because in the real world, repeated insults -- that kind of video being just one in a life-long series for some people -- does cause permanent damage. In the real world _very_ few people are strong enough to simply shrug off being told daily that their hobbies suck, their clothes suck, and generally their whole life sucks, without causing some damage.
"That type of fragile person is also the type that would not go out into public in an insult magnet of a costume."
Yes, as opposed to everyone who got sent that video making fun of one of their hobbies.
Or as opposed to those playing Risk. As I remember, those were _not_ wearing costumes, they were just passing the time in the line. Well, gee, we so need someone telling people what games are socially acceptable for an age group. What next? Make fun of people playing with a GameBoy in public, because it doesn't fit their age group? Yeah, looking at the walls for hours would be so much more fun and normal.
"translation: Get off my lawn"
No, translation: if it doesn't cause any damage to anyone else, it shouldn't be anyone else's business. So if anyone can document _how_ were they grievously harmed by someone's Jedi suit, I fail to see what business of theirs it is.
On the other hand I see a group of "cool" people who have to base their self-respect on victimizing others. Again, causing very real damage every day.
"as for comparing that to dying of cancer, I feel very sad that you consider yours, mine, and everyone's geekhood to be some sort of fatal curse. I consider it to be a welcome part of my personality."
Yes, and I suppose telling a _mother_ that her child will be an outcast, and because of her at that, is gonna be just as welcome. Right.
We've had parents of autistic kids even on/. going depressed at some piece of news that a flame-retardant in their computer might cause mild autism. Telling someone basically "_you_ are the cause why your kid will fail" is a very nasty thing to tell a parent.
First of all, both Battletech and Chess are board games, played with pieces over a board. Face to face. Both MTG and Poker are card games. That's why I paired them like that: because the medium isn't _that_ different.
Chess is no more and no less a wargame than Battletech or Warhammer: it was in fact designed to be a wargame from the start, modelled after the real armies of that era. (The "bishop" was a war elephant, pawns were footsoldiers, etc.) When two people meet to play chess, it's no more and no less playing a battle than in Battletech. Except one makes you some intellectual elite, the other makes you a loser.
I'm not even talking about playing the online versions of either. (Although I can vouch for at least MegaMek as an excellent online implementation of Battletech. Open Source too. Check it out on Sourceforge.) In both cases the people are face to face, but in one of the cases that makes them nerds without a life or something.
So why is it that spending the weekend playing Poker is OK, but spending the weekend playing MTG past an age would get half the people looking down on you? Heck, if anyone heard that a co-worker lost $2000 at poker, they'd probably pat them on the shoulder and show some compassion. (Even if the kind of compassion to an addict.) But if anyone heard that an adult co-worker spent $200 (i.e., a tenth of that) on MTG cards, chances are good they'd think "gee, what a loser nerd".
Why?
Or how about football? Don't tell me that's not escaping reality, even though it doesn't involve stormtroopers or dwarves. (Although it does involve equally silly outfits.)
Now if I gathered myself and three friends on the couch and watched some good ol' american football, it would be ok and socially acceptable. But if the exact same 4 people, on the same couch, and in front of the same TV, played a 4-player game of, say, Gauntlet Legends, it would be a case of "gee, such nerdy losers. Grow up, get out more."
Why? What's so different between the two. What makes one an ok and socially acceptable way to spend your life, and the other some pathologic refuse for losers? It still involves the same people, they still meet in person, etc. Why is one of them somehow so unsocial, and why does meeting people count as "hiding from people"?
Or ok, you've met with your friends in a park, or at a cigarette break at work, and you're talking. Social enough, right? Yes, well, if you talk about yesterday's football game, it's social. But if the same people talk about yesterday's RPG or video game session, you're a bunch of nerds and losers.
Maybe it's the costumes that make it be bad? Well, no. Going in a stupid costume and with a flag painted on your face to a football match, now that counts as socially acceptable. Not the kind of "acceptable" you'd do at the office, mind you, but the kind where everyone understands "eh, people need to vent steam and act like fans now and then" or "eh, it's just a football game, it's normal". But if you go in a Jedi robe to a movie, or in a chain maille to LOTR, eeew, now that makes you such a loser.
Why? Both are wearing a costume to an event.
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Things that are basically not that different, one counts as OK, one makes you a "loser". Things that _are_ social make you "a lonely nerd" just because they're not _the_ prescribed social passtimes for the age and social group you're pegged in.
And I'd be damned if I find any other good explanation than mindless prejudice and conformism.
Well, I'm flattered. Didn't think I was posting anything that insightful there. I was just venting some steam about the conformity posse. But sure, go ahead if you want to.
There is a lost art to making fun of people, or mocking them. It involves some subtlety. You know, stuff like irony, sarcasm, insinuation and/or goading them into acting like fools themselves.
E.g., Jay Leno, back in the 90s when I still bothered watching TV at all, was funny. He could bring up all sorts of mean stuff, but... without coming and spewing insults as such. He let you fill in the dots yourself.
E.g., Dilbert manages to _occasionally_ be funny, even in all its sheer anti-management bitterness. Whereas the average "my boss sucks donkey balls and should die" blog isn't.
Just outright insulting people to their face isn't the same thing. It lacks any kind of finesse.
There is no insinuation or irony in telling a pregnant woman that her unborn son will be a nerd and never even see female genitals. It's just a very very nasty thing to say to a mother. It ranks almost up there with saying "I foresee that your son will die of cancer."
And dunno, maybe I'm just deffective or not judgmental enough to find that kind of thing funny.
And again, it's not even about SW and its fans, seein' as I'm not one. You know, I'm the guy who posted on/. that episode 4 was nothing special, and Obi Wan holds his lightsaber like he'd hold his *ahem* tool when peeing. That everyone only liked episode 4 because they saw it when they were 6 years old. I'm not really SW fan material.
I'd still find it not funny against anyone, though. Jocks, prom queens, rappers, bad managers, you name it. E.g., God knows I've posted a lot against bad management, but if anyone went to a management convention and started outright insulting random managers... dunno, I don't think I'd find that funny either.
"But seriously, there is a problem. Over 40% of males end up living with their parents into their twenties these days."
No, I don't live with my parents, in fact I live half a country away. Even visiting each other occasionally is a bit inconvenient. But I'm still left scratching my head "and the problem with being a family is...?"
See, virtually all cultures and societies used to be centred around the family until recently. Whether it was a farm or a medieval blacksmith's shop or whatever, it was _normal_ for a house to be the home for a whole extended family, and it was _normal_ at least for the firstborn to stay with the parents until they die.
E.g., when you read about the Vikings who sacked England or ended up elite bodyguards as far as Byzantium or Baghdad, those weren't really the cool ones. Those were the disinherited ones who had to fight or starve to death. The "cool" ones were those who inherited their father's farm and didn't have to fight. The ones who, in fact, lived with their parents not only into the 20's, but all the way until the parents died.
The craze about being on your own, and thinking you're so cool because you have no support, and your starving or not depends on a PHB's whims is an industrial age invention. I.e., a very recent one.
Is it really that much better. Yes, you're so cool, you live on your own, you have a big house and a car of your own. And it'll be so cool until you're old and sick. Then your choice will be to die lonely and abandoned in your home, or half-starved and still abandoned in the cheapest asylum your kids could find. Because now it would be sooo _uncool_ for your kids to have a parent in _their_ house.
We churn generation after generation who _will_ spend the last decade of their life abbandoned among strangers, and die among strangers.
Not saying that I have a better solution or anything, but it makes me sorta idly wonder... is it really that much of an improvement?
That's more or less what I wanted to post, especially seeing all the sad posts cheering that other lame dog-with-a-cigar video. I'm not even a SW fan, but I found that video lame and not funny. I just saw a lamer not even making jokes, but outright insulting people to their face because of their passtime didn't match the prescribed role for their age and social category. (Eew! They're playing Risk! That's a game for 12 year olds!) If that's funny...
It all boils down to enforcing conformity. If you don't act and dress like your prescribed role, you're an evil monster and a "loser". If you have a different passtime than the category you're pegged into, you're an evil monster and a "loser".
If you play Risk (or god forbid Warhammer 40k or Battletech) instead of Chess, or MTG instead of Bridge or Poker, you're a "loser" and an evil monster. If you spend 4 hours a day in front of the TV with a console game and a controller in hand, instead of 4 hours a day on the same TV but on sports channel with a beer can in hand, you're a "loser" and an evil monster. If you spend all weekend working on your computer, instead of working all week on your car like a Real Man (TM), you're a "loser" and an evil monster. And god forbid that you dare wear anything other than the approved uniform for your category, because that _really_ makes you an unholy monster.
If you don't want to be an evil monster, then, see, you have to dress like this, hold the beer can and remote like this while watching sports on TV, go to the same pub all the neighbours go to, etc.
Even if you want to be a rebel teenager, see, you can't just go ahead and do it your way. Nosiree, bob. Only "losers" do things their own way. To properly be a "rebel" you have to mindlessly conform to the "teenage rebel" role. Here's the approved list of rebel clothes, music, passtime and conversation topics.
Welcome to being sheep.
And it seems to me like WTH is the problem with these self-appointed guardians of conformity? Do their property values go down because someone two streets away spends too much time with a computer or watches the "wrong" movies, or what? Seems to me that whether I wanted to wear a business suit, or a spandex super-hero suit and cape, or a Jedi robe with "I went to the dark side and all I got was this stupid robe" on the back (never wore any of the three, but just saying), it ought to be noone else's business.
*sigh* Guess I might as well become a misanthrope now and avoid the christmas rush.
"solution: do not fuck up the point-and-click install next time"
It's not a question of fucking up anything. Dunno about him, but let me assure you _I_ know where the associations and options pages are on both. It's either Firefox or Quicktime that's fucked up, or some unholy interaction between both: it forgets those options.
Actually, I suspect it's Firefox, seein' as even after I set it up to open MPEGs with DivX Player, it occasionally gets a brainfart and shows them with Quicktime embedded. Usually after I used CTRL-F a few times.
Also, more like wishful thinking than real hating Quicktime or anything, but I instinctively dislike _any_ program that wants to keep itself loaded in the tray. That includes Quicktime, Real Player, Open Office, Sun's recent JVMs, and anything which tries to stay there just to seem like it loads faster, as opposed to being _needed_ all the time. (E.g., video or sound drivers.)
I don't want half my RAM full of programs I use at most once a week. Even if I was a secretary, I wouldn't need Open Office in RAM all the time. And I'm still drawing blanks what-the-heck-a-profession would use the Real or Quicktime _viewer_ hundreds of times per day, so 1 second loading time makes a difference. Porn site reviewer maybe?
It's getting to the point where you can get your machine just as stuffed without even needing spyware. All those programs "helpfully" preloading themselves can already put a low end machine into swapping.
And what really bothers me is that it's invariably a way to hide crap programming.
It used to be at some point that code quality mattered. True, sometimes you had to end up with a larger program for extra speed (e.g., unrolling loops or special cases as separate functions) or for extra functionality. But not with stuff like loading 100 MB of Java VM, and several seconds of just pure initializing that, just because that's the buzzword of the day. And in any case, if your program took too painfully long to even load, it used to be _your_ problem, not the user's.
Now we just preload it and act like, w00t, our bloat loads instantly. We're so l33t. Too bad the user's machine now swaps, but now it's suddenly the user's problem, not ours. We can just call the user an idiot and move on.
Dude, there is no exaggerating: Riddick is a full 5GB, and as far as I know so is Jade Empire. Whether that's because of movies or what-the-f-word-ever, I wouldn't know, but they _are_ a full DVD.
Actually Jade Empire doesn't even have FMV on that DVD. The extra movies are on the second DVD.
And it will slowly get worse, because the space for textures increases quadratically with texture size. You need 4 times more space for 256x256 textures than for 128x128 textures, and again 4 times more for 512x512.
And they'll need those for HDTV games. Try playing KOTOR on the PC with the minimum quality textures instead of the 512x512 maximums, and see how butt-ugly that looks. Yeah, staying with low res textures would sooo help sell a HDTV game.
We also need more and more of them.
So you propose... what? To cut down on actual game content to stay download-friendly?
Briefly that idea seems to me just about as dead in the water as Nintendo's staying with cartridges back in the N64 days. Imposing an artifficial limit on size does not a better game make.
Though, to Nintendo's credit, at least the cartridges did have a major load time advantage, while the download everything idea doesn't have any.
<sarcasm> Well, yes, because obviously I have no other use for my internet connection for _days_ than to download a game. Surely it'll be no problem take a break from downloading anything else, and for that matter from playing anything online, just to download a game.
And it makes so much sense to download 5 GB worth of game data (I can think of a few XBox games which, yes, are a full DVD) for days, and then find I can finish the game in 10 hours. Because that's about how long it took to finish, say, Fable. Or find out that I don't even like the game at all.
'Course, blimey, I'll then just give up gaming for another few days until the next game downloads. Because, of course, being a gamer is about _not_ playing games, but merely twiddling thumbs for days while a game downloads.
And then there's the issue of games I purchased last year, but feel like playing again. Of course. It's so obvious: a console will come with a couple of terrabytes hard drive to keep all the games I buy until I feel like playing them again. That or I'll gladly spend another few days downloading to get a nostalgic fix of Sega GT 2002.
Just owning the DVD and just popping it in to play it _now_ is sooo last century. Spending days downloading is the way of the future. </sarcasm>
Firearms from the 1300, and in fact everything before the minnie ball (i.e., the rifled barrel) were pathetically inaccurate and short range.
There's a reason why in all independence war movies you see them walking up to 100 paces, lining up, firing from there, then charging with the bayonets. Because that was the range of those muskets, and even at that range it was so inaccurate as to make the whole thing mostly for suppression.
It also took a long time for those guns to start to penetrate a knight's armour. You can look at history and see one moment when the full plate was discarded in favour of concentrating all weight all in a super-thick breastplate and helmet. That was the moment when finally they started to penetrate a knight's full plate armour.
So basically knights continued to exist as long as they were still a formidable force on the battlefield. That's all there is to it. They could and did stand a hell of a chance against guns, which is why they continued to be used.
And IMHO you're also mixing up two _very_ different events. The knights as nobility, and the rise and fall of that institution, is _not_ the same thing as the rise and fall of cavalry as a weapon of war.
Cavalry had survived long after the aristocratic institution of knighthood had fallen. Cavalry was used as late as WW2, and sometimes even successfully. Even _Germany_, otherwise remembered by everyone for panzer warfare, still had cavalry units in the 30's.
Cavalry survived that late because as late as WW1 it had still been a damn useful and powerful weapon of war.
So basically chivalry and medieval honour had _nothing_ to do with it. Knights didn't go obsolete overnight in 1300, simply because guns in 1300 were just not yet enough to stop a cavalry charge, that's all.
Now I can see the uses of a bayonet, and we sure trained with them too. But:
1. if you look back at WW2, the way urban combat was fought was not charging with a bayonet in every room. It was by throwing in a grenade before they lobbed one at you. If you were lucky, now you'd have a room full of enemy body parts. If you were unlucky, they had a stairwell full of your (and your squad's) body parts.
2. It's not _that_ hard to shoot someone up close. Anything from SMG to assault rifle means you can basically put enough bullets in the air until someone falls down. Now you might have a problem if you're within 1m of the enemy, but then again, you probably shot each other long before you were anywhere near that distance.
And even if we're talking bolt action rifles, even in WW2 there were ways around their being unwieldy in close combat. E.g., the Germans liberally issued pistols (including any pistols captured from the enemy) to soldiers. Whereas the Soviets produced unholy quantities of SMGs.
3. It's probably just me, but I didn't find the assault rifle with bayonet to be that handy a close combat weapon. To be honest, in really cramped quarters I think I'd be quicker and more accurate just holding the bayonet in my hand. I can slash and jab with it about 3 times in the time it takes it do one of those "and step and *thrust*" maneuvers.
Yes, nothing by itself is enough, not even XA transactions, but it can make your life a _lot_ easier. Especially if not all records are under your control to start with.
E.g., the bank doesn't even know that the money is going to reserve a ticket on flight 705 of Elbonian United Airlines. It just knows it must transfer $100 from account A to account B.
E.g., the travel agency doesn't even have access to the bank's records to check that the money have been withdrawn from your account. And it shouldn't ever have.
So you propose... what? That the bank gets full access to the airline's business data, and that the airline can read all bank accounts, for those integrity checks to even work? I'm sure you can see how that wouldn't work.
Yes, if you have a single database and it's all under your control, life is damn easy. It starts getting complicated when you have to deal with 7 databases, out of which 5 are in 3 different departments, and 2 aren't even in the same company. And where not everything is a database either: e.g., where one of the things which must also happen atomically is sending messages on a queue.
_Then_ XA and ACID become a lot more useful. It becomes one helluva lot easier to _not_ send, for example, a JMS message to the other systems at all when a transaction rolls back, than to try to bring the client's database back in a consistent state with yours.
It also becomes a lot more expensive to screw up. We're talking stuff that has all the strength of a signed contract, not "oops, we'll give you a seat on the next flight".
Yes, your tools discovered that you sent the order for, say, 20 trucks in duplicate. Very good. Then what? It's as good as a signed contract the instant it was sent. It'll take many hours of some manager's time to negotiate a way out of that fuck-up. That is _if_ the other side doesn't want to play hardbal and remind you that a contract is a contract.
Wouldn't it be easier to _not_ have an inconsistency to start with, than to detect it later?
Basically, yes, please do write all the integrity tests you can think of. Very good and insightful that. But don't assume that it suddenly makes XA transactions useless. _Anything_ that can reduce the probability of a failure in a distributed system is very much needed. Because it may be disproportionately more expensive to fix a screw-up, even if detected, than not to do it in the first place.
For example, don't think "home user losing the last porn pic", think for example "corporate databases using XA transactions".
The semantics of XA transactions say that at the end of the "prepare" step, the data is already on the disc (or whatever other medium), just not yet made visible. That, basically all that could possibly fail, has in fact had its chance to fail. And if you got an OK, then it didn't.
Introducing a time window (likely extending not just past "prepare", but also past "commit") where the data is still in some cache and God knows when it'll actually get flushed, throws those whole semantics out the window. If, say, power fails (e.g., PSU blows a fuse) or shit otherwise hits the fan in that time window, you have fucked up the data.
The whole idea of transactions is ACID: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability:
- Atomicity - The entire sequence of actions must be either completed or aborted. The transaction cannot be partially successful.
- Consistency - The transaction takes the resources from one consistent state to another.
- Isolation - A transaction's effect is not visible to other transactions until the transaction is committed.
- Durability - Changes made by the committed transaction are permanent and must survive system failure.
That time window we introduced makes it at least possible to screw 3 out of 4 there. An update that involves more than one hard drive may not be Atomically executed in that case: only one change was really persisted. (E.g., if you booked a flight online, maybe the money got taken from your account, but not given to the airline.) It hasn't left the data in a Consistent state. (In the above example some money have disappeared into nowhere.) And it's all because it wasn't Durable. (An update we thought we committed hasn't, in fact, survived a system failure.)
Indeed, those _are_ a part of the Windows TCO. Paying for example the salaries of the IT people to deal with those, is indeed a part of what a company really pays for a license of Windows.
Of course, it also shows another thing: if Windows really was that unstable and virused every 5 minutes, like Linux zealots like to claim, your average corporation would have one IT guy for every 5 to 10 employees just for that. Seems to me like they don't.
But that's another thing for another discussion. In the meantime what remains is that, yes, I see you understand TCO.
"Actually, your whole linguistics game is silly. It is indeed free (in the price context, not necessarily the freedom one), because free means it costs $0. Sure there are other benefits and costs associated with any purchase - and you're free to assign practically arbitrary monitary values (is that a person's time in India or in San Jose) to those costs or benefits; but they have nothing to do with the price."
No, you just do the usual mistake of acting as if "price" was everything, and ignoring the TCO. Whereas for a business it's the TCO that says how much money they have to pay, and the product's price is just a small part of it.
There is nothing "arbitrary" about assigning a monetary value to time: your company actually pays very real money for your time: your wage. And they also pay very real money to the admins, tech support people, IT people, etc.
Yes, that does mean different costs in Delhi than in San Jose. Which, yes, can mean that Solution A can cost less than Solution B in Delhi, but Solution B may be the cheaper one in San Jose. E.g., if Solution A has the lower price but needs more labour. Welcome to the real world.
That's what all the talk about TCO and ROI is about: how much _total_ money will it cost my company to use Solution A instead of Solution B. Not "conceptual" money, not "arbitrary monetary values", but very very real money from its bank account.
Mind you, most vendors will lie their ass off about TCO, or just use "lower TCO" as just a buzzword without any actual figures to back it up either way. But just saying, usually the actual TCO in a particular case -- and I mean the actual number you pay, not the buzzword -- bears no relationship to strictly the cost of the product.
Just because a Windows XP OEM license is, what, 160 Euro or so, and a burned CD with Linux is abour 1 Euro, it doesn't mean that the actual TCO will be only that for either of them. The TCO for Windows will be higher than the 160 Euro, and the TCO for Linux will be higher than the 1 Euro. What will ultimately make or break the TCO advantage of either, i.e., if ultimately the Linux solution really ends up cheaper than Windows, or the other way around, is how much admin and user time each of them wastes.
And again that's also the point most of us nerds fail to address when talking to management, or when flaming management. A lot act both on/. and IRL as if price was the only factor. As if the TCO for something was literally $0 because you can download it of Freshmeat. In Real Life it can't possibly be $0. Ever.
And claiming that something is literally free, as in $0, will just tell your boss "ignore him, he's talking out of the ass again."
It's not a matter of being left-wing or right-wing or an Adam Smith zealot, it's just the way RL works: everything has a cost, and time _is_ money. Very literally. Very real money.
Slashdot Mirror
"The goal of the computer industry is to cut down on periferals and simplify they way we use a computer."
;)
1, No, simplifying the use is actually the job of usability. However a mouse _does_ make the computer more usable.
The keyboard (whether shortcuts or CLI) may sometimes be better when you already are used to that program, and know _exactly_ what you're doing and how. E.g., I myself do prefer, say, the Norton Commander or Midnight Commander pressing F5 to copy a file, compared to dragging and dropping file with the mouse. (And occasionally doing it by mistake or to the wrong folder).
However a large part of usability is discoverability. It's helping you use a program or function that you only use rarely, or the first time, and/or when your time is too valuable to spend months becoming an expert in a program that you'll only need for a few hours total per year.
The mouse is ideal for that. If I just got a new program for the first time, it's easier to just go with the mouse over the toolbar and maybe menus until I find the function I need, than to spend hours reading the manual.
E.g., it was easier hovering a mouse all over the Gimp's toolbox until I found the colour tool I needed, back when I briefly delved into modding (well, mostly recolouring), than to spend some time learning whatever ctrl-alt-shift-footpedal combo it has for that operation. If any. The mouse has, in fact, _saved_ me time there.
2. There are tasks where the keyboard just isn't faster, or even apropriate. I'm not even talking image editing or games. Try navigating the list of links on a site with 100 links per page (e.g., a portal site) only with tab. If you're willing to tell me that you'll be more efficient with your l33t computer skills and just a keyboard, than my just clicking on a link, I'll call bullshit on that. (Don't under-estimate how quickly a twitch-FPS-gamer can snipe that link
3. There are also some tasks where the CLI or keyboard being faster is just a myth. Or rather: just subjective perception.
There have been actual studies about how fast people really are with both. The CLI users invariably thought they were faster. For some tasks, yes, they actually were. But for a whole lot of tasks they weren't.
I've spent some time of my own actually watching some of the l33t unix guru coleagues using just the CLI for everything. (Real Men don't use a gui to configure a server, they edit some 100 XML files in vi, right?) They actually _weren't_ faster. They were in fact a lot slower.
Everything was a several minute long exercise in typing a couple of letters, hitting tab, more letters, tab, tab, more letters, oops, wrong directory, backspace a few times, tab, tab, more typing, oops, error, let's read the man page, more typing and tabs, etc. It really was slower than even a newbie does the same things with a mouse and a good GUI.
But they could swear that they're faster and more productive. How can that be? It boils down to subjective perception. Things that keep your brains busy make your time and your work day seem to go faster. All that typing and hitting tab and checking the options in the man page, it keeps one busy. That's why it's subjectively perceived as faster.
Now there _are_ good cases for a CLI, such as remotely administrating a server or really complex tasks that need one to write a small script. Don't bother pointing those out, I hereby officially acknowledge them as legitimate using. But locally and for mundane operations? Your using only the keyboard may count far less as "excelling in your computer skills" than you think.
Well, it would also need some kind of support from the games. If, say, MadCatz or Thrustmaster produced a gamepad with a trackball for the XBox or GameCube, it would die a silent death without the games actually supporting it.
Just pretending that it's a thumbstick wouldn't solve much, IMHO. To actually be an improvement, it would need to be read and used as a mouse: i.e., actually transmit the distance moved to the game, and not emulate a deviation from the centre position.
But again, that would need games to be prepared to accept X and Y travel distances instead of the thumbstick data.
And I really can't see anyone except Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo making the game developpers do that.
Well, dunno, for just about every console game I've played so far it's the _left_ thumbstick that gets used the most. The _right_ stick is in most non-FPS and non-RTS games not even used at all, or assigned some totally secondary role that wouldn't be any worse with a trackball.
E.g., in Jade Empire the right stick is only used for scrolling in the text boxes. Would that "suck royally" with a trackball? No, I don't think it would.
I've given a lot of thought to it after that talk with the co-worker, and I haven't come up with a single game that would "royally suck" if (only) the right stick were replaced with a trackball. Again, leaving the left stick as it is. Just the right one gets replaced in that idea.
But I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong. If you do know games where replacing (only) the right stick with a trackball just couldn't possibly work, please do share that information.
E.g., if you read the very first page of the review, about the MX1000: "As with optical mice, if you don?t make use of it for several seconds, the battery indicator turns off and the mouse goes into power saving mode."
Now I am a hardcore twitch-gamer, and let me tell you that those power saving delays are what gets you killed in multi-player. You end up doing weird stuff like slightly waving the scope around when you wait for a target as a sniper, because otherwise you have that brief wake-up delay when you do need the mouse.
I had an MX500 and went and bought an MX300 with a cord instead.
Basically my take is that it's a mouse that isn't really good for either. For twitch gaming I _really_ want a corded one, for someone who just browses the web, as you've said, a $6 mouse works just as well. So who are the target demographic that absolutely needed it?
The SFV (Stupid Fashion Victims). The people who buy for the buzzwords and the hype. OOOH, IT'S LASER!
As someone who actually spent a lot of time studying physics, lemme tell you what you probably already knew or suspected: there is nothing magical about laser light in a mouse.
Yes, you can use the coherent light wonderfully for other purposes. But an optical mouse works more or less like a camera: it compares consecutive snapshots and determines the movement from the difference. Increasing the resolution or the number of snapshots per second, yeah, that'll make it a better mouse. Putting a laser diode instead of a regular LED in it, however, won't do jack.
Logitech's problem is: the keyboards and mice business isn't a great place to be in. You won't make a big fortune by selling el-cheapo $6 mice. So they just need some buzzword to allow them to sell a $50 one instead. That's all.
And if you put up enough hype, there'll be enough SFVs that believe it. And enough sites who aren't even as much review sites, but prom queens: they just print whatever is currently popular and brings page views. They catter to stroking the ego of those who already knew which buzzword they really want to buy. If enough SFVs fall for a buzzword, those sites will dutifully print an article telling them how good it really is, and how pleased they can be with that purchase.
Because if you listen to Razer, their mice have always been the absolute best, light years ahead of anything else, etc. Never mind that the keys would stick, and other problems. Nah, it was some conspiracy that kept them from selling well.
Dunno, when someone makes that kind of bold claims about their mice, it seems to me like a review is welcome. Just to know, as a consumer, if they actually deliver.
Well, as a heavy duty console user myself, I'd damn well like to see something less half arsed than the right thumbstick for aiming. No, the touch screen on the DS isn't it either. I said _less_ half arsed.
Been talking with a gamer co-worker some months ago, and we came up with "well, why the heck doesn't anyone use a trackball?"
Just think about it. Replace the right thumbstick with a trackball, and you suddenly have a device that can actually work as well as a mouse for either FPS or RTS. (The weakest uses of a gamepad at the moment.) Or close enough. I had co-workers which were good at Half Life multi-player with a trackball, so it can't be too bad.
And it seems to me like it _can't_ be that me and said co-worker are the only smart people on Earth. Surely others had the same idea by now. So WTH is preventing Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo from making a controller like that? Did someone already patent a gamepad with a trackball, or?
E.g., I do carry a bag or two with me almost at all times, because I sometimes just want to drop by at the grocery store and buy stuff on the way home from work. And I see no point in buying a new plastic bag each time.
So basically if someone decided to accuse me of shoplifting, that bag -- even if not used at the time -- would suddenly be criminal intent. Seems bloody stupid to me.
E.g., back in college I did have half of my hard drive encrypted -- and that was before the OS itself came with encryption -- just because I didn't want the rest of my family reading my private stuff. Among other things, for a month or so at the time I tried to write a diary, and I didn't want it to be the whole family's business. ("Nosy" is too mild a word to describe my parents.)
What if at the same time, and totally unrelated, I had followed a link to some illegal site? God knows some sites had tons of redirects and links to warez sites, porn sites, etc.
Would suddenly that encryption software count as criminal intent to encrypt and traffic that illegal stuff? Even though it was never actually used to encrypt any of that?
Seems to me that linking everyday items to somehow imply premeditation and guilt, is severely flawed. Unless it is proved that the bag, or the encryption software, or whatever, was actually _used_ in committing the crime, it seems to me that mere possession doesn't really mean anything.
There are lots of things that aren't really pervasive, but that doesn't necessarily make them criminal.
E.g., my parents have rented a box at a bank to keep their documents there. Their reasoning being that in case of a fire or burglary, might as well not lose those.
It's not a pervasive thing, and it _could_ theoretically be used to hide something illegal, but that's not what they use it for. And a prosecution line of reasoning along the lines of "if it's not pervasive, it shows criminal intent" would make them both criminals. (Mind you, I'm not always on good terms with them, but "criminals" is a bit too harsh a word to call them;)
E.g., high-end sports cars are not that pervasive, and _could_ be used to try to outrun the police cars. But I sure hope it doesn't make everyone who bought a sports car automatically guilty of criminal intent and planning to flee the police to the border in that car.
E.g., I know at least two people who regularly purge their browser's history and cache. One is just clinically paranoid, (Yes, literally, believes in a world-wide conspiracy, that is secretly responsible for everything from wars to Jar Jar in Episode 1. No, literally.) The other just doesn't want his wife to find out about his porn surfing habits.
It's not that pervasive a thing to do, and it _could_ be used to hide surfing for something illegal, but none of them actually surf for anything illegal. (The paranoid one is just too paranoid, for example. He _knows_ that the conspiracy is watching him.)
So to cut to the end of a long rant, an idea like "if it's different from the norm, it can get you (extra) time in jail" seems like a very very dangerous precedent to me. Pressure to be 100% conformist and obedient can be bad enough as it is. Attaching an extra potential jail sentence to anything if it's unusual, seems to me like a very bad idea.
The whole "if you have nothing hide, you shouldn't have PGP" idea is simply stupid.
It's like saying that if you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't have a lock on your door or curtains at your windows. Hey, you could have hidden some corpses behind that door and those curtains. Yep, it shows you had criminal intent.
The whole post-9/11 idiocy that privacy==criminal intent (or even makes you an active terrorist) is getting on my nerves already.
Everyone needs _some_ privacy. Noone is a 100% exhibitionist, who'd eat, sleep, shit and surf for porn at a street corner with everyone watching. Even the most affectionate cat, if you have one, needs some time alone now and then.
Everyone has _some_ stuff they'd rather not have posted publically on a billboard in front of their house. E.g., their credit card number and SSN. E.g., the emails to their girlfriend. E.g., the pseudonym under which they posted that their boss is a retard. E.g., their medical record. E.g., their banking data. E.g., their names and passwords for sites they use. E.g., their diary.
Those are all very valid things to have encrypted. They're perfectly common everyday stuff, but nevertheless stuff which someone would have a damn good reason to encrypt. In fact, which they'd do damn well to encrypt. (Heck, I'd rate anyone 10 IQ points higher if they had their usernames and passwords in a strongly encrypted file, instead of on yellow post-it notes stuck to the monitor.)
It doesn't have to be something as criminal as hiding bodies in an underground cavern. And extrapolating that everyone who doesn't leave their front door open 24 hours a day, and doesn't post every single detail of their life (SSN, credit card number, emails, usernames and passwords included) in front of their house, is automatically a criminal... is bloody stupid. It's outright idiotic.
"That country, is Lichtenstein"
ROFL. I'd mod you funny if I could mod answers to my own posts. Well, that country is actually Germany, but still, you gave me a good laugh.
"It takes a fragile person to crumble under an insult especially a funny one."
/. going depressed at some piece of news that a flame-retardant in their computer might cause mild autism. Telling someone basically "_you_ are the cause why your kid will fail" is a very nasty thing to tell a parent.
The fact is that on Earth people crumble every day from being insulted. I personally know people who have burned out and dropped a line of work because a PHB kept insulting their work. I know people who are still fragile precisely because someone found it supremely funny to mock them all through high school.
We churn generation after generation of those, in fact. And yes, invariably someone else -- sometimes the whole class -- found it way funny to play a cruel prank on someone. Again.
So if in your world it's a sin to be fragile and crumble under insults, well, dunno, I'd like to know which world is that. Because in the real world, repeated insults -- that kind of video being just one in a life-long series for some people -- does cause permanent damage. In the real world _very_ few people are strong enough to simply shrug off being told daily that their hobbies suck, their clothes suck, and generally their whole life sucks, without causing some damage.
"That type of fragile person is also the type that would not go out into public in an insult magnet of a costume."
Yes, as opposed to everyone who got sent that video making fun of one of their hobbies.
Or as opposed to those playing Risk. As I remember, those were _not_ wearing costumes, they were just passing the time in the line. Well, gee, we so need someone telling people what games are socially acceptable for an age group. What next? Make fun of people playing with a GameBoy in public, because it doesn't fit their age group? Yeah, looking at the walls for hours would be so much more fun and normal.
"translation: Get off my lawn"
No, translation: if it doesn't cause any damage to anyone else, it shouldn't be anyone else's business. So if anyone can document _how_ were they grievously harmed by someone's Jedi suit, I fail to see what business of theirs it is.
On the other hand I see a group of "cool" people who have to base their self-respect on victimizing others. Again, causing very real damage every day.
"as for comparing that to dying of cancer, I feel very sad that you consider yours, mine, and everyone's geekhood to be some sort of fatal curse. I consider it to be a welcome part of my personality."
Yes, and I suppose telling a _mother_ that her child will be an outcast, and because of her at that, is gonna be just as welcome. Right.
We've had parents of autistic kids even on
First of all, both Battletech and Chess are board games, played with pieces over a board. Face to face. Both MTG and Poker are card games. That's why I paired them like that: because the medium isn't _that_ different.
Chess is no more and no less a wargame than Battletech or Warhammer: it was in fact designed to be a wargame from the start, modelled after the real armies of that era. (The "bishop" was a war elephant, pawns were footsoldiers, etc.) When two people meet to play chess, it's no more and no less playing a battle than in Battletech. Except one makes you some intellectual elite, the other makes you a loser.
I'm not even talking about playing the online versions of either. (Although I can vouch for at least MegaMek as an excellent online implementation of Battletech. Open Source too. Check it out on Sourceforge.) In both cases the people are face to face, but in one of the cases that makes them nerds without a life or something.
So why is it that spending the weekend playing Poker is OK, but spending the weekend playing MTG past an age would get half the people looking down on you? Heck, if anyone heard that a co-worker lost $2000 at poker, they'd probably pat them on the shoulder and show some compassion. (Even if the kind of compassion to an addict.) But if anyone heard that an adult co-worker spent $200 (i.e., a tenth of that) on MTG cards, chances are good they'd think "gee, what a loser nerd".
Why?
Or how about football? Don't tell me that's not escaping reality, even though it doesn't involve stormtroopers or dwarves. (Although it does involve equally silly outfits.)
Now if I gathered myself and three friends on the couch and watched some good ol' american football, it would be ok and socially acceptable. But if the exact same 4 people, on the same couch, and in front of the same TV, played a 4-player game of, say, Gauntlet Legends, it would be a case of "gee, such nerdy losers. Grow up, get out more."
Why? What's so different between the two. What makes one an ok and socially acceptable way to spend your life, and the other some pathologic refuse for losers? It still involves the same people, they still meet in person, etc. Why is one of them somehow so unsocial, and why does meeting people count as "hiding from people"?
Or ok, you've met with your friends in a park, or at a cigarette break at work, and you're talking. Social enough, right? Yes, well, if you talk about yesterday's football game, it's social. But if the same people talk about yesterday's RPG or video game session, you're a bunch of nerds and losers.
Maybe it's the costumes that make it be bad? Well, no. Going in a stupid costume and with a flag painted on your face to a football match, now that counts as socially acceptable. Not the kind of "acceptable" you'd do at the office, mind you, but the kind where everyone understands "eh, people need to vent steam and act like fans now and then" or "eh, it's just a football game, it's normal". But if you go in a Jedi robe to a movie, or in a chain maille to LOTR, eeew, now that makes you such a loser.
Why? Both are wearing a costume to an event.
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Things that are basically not that different, one counts as OK, one makes you a "loser". Things that _are_ social make you "a lonely nerd" just because they're not _the_ prescribed social passtimes for the age and social group you're pegged in.
And I'd be damned if I find any other good explanation than mindless prejudice and conformism.
Well, I'm flattered. Didn't think I was posting anything that insightful there. I was just venting some steam about the conformity posse. But sure, go ahead if you want to.
There is a lost art to making fun of people, or mocking them. It involves some subtlety. You know, stuff like irony, sarcasm, insinuation and/or goading them into acting like fools themselves.
/. that episode 4 was nothing special, and Obi Wan holds his lightsaber like he'd hold his *ahem* tool when peeing. That everyone only liked episode 4 because they saw it when they were 6 years old. I'm not really SW fan material.
E.g., Jay Leno, back in the 90s when I still bothered watching TV at all, was funny. He could bring up all sorts of mean stuff, but... without coming and spewing insults as such. He let you fill in the dots yourself.
E.g., Dilbert manages to _occasionally_ be funny, even in all its sheer anti-management bitterness. Whereas the average "my boss sucks donkey balls and should die" blog isn't.
Just outright insulting people to their face isn't the same thing. It lacks any kind of finesse.
There is no insinuation or irony in telling a pregnant woman that her unborn son will be a nerd and never even see female genitals. It's just a very very nasty thing to say to a mother. It ranks almost up there with saying "I foresee that your son will die of cancer."
And dunno, maybe I'm just deffective or not judgmental enough to find that kind of thing funny.
And again, it's not even about SW and its fans, seein' as I'm not one. You know, I'm the guy who posted on
I'd still find it not funny against anyone, though. Jocks, prom queens, rappers, bad managers, you name it. E.g., God knows I've posted a lot against bad management, but if anyone went to a management convention and started outright insulting random managers... dunno, I don't think I'd find that funny either.
"But seriously, there is a problem. Over 40% of males end up living with their parents into their twenties these days."
No, I don't live with my parents, in fact I live half a country away. Even visiting each other occasionally is a bit inconvenient. But I'm still left scratching my head "and the problem with being a family is...?"
See, virtually all cultures and societies used to be centred around the family until recently. Whether it was a farm or a medieval blacksmith's shop or whatever, it was _normal_ for a house to be the home for a whole extended family, and it was _normal_ at least for the firstborn to stay with the parents until they die.
E.g., when you read about the Vikings who sacked England or ended up elite bodyguards as far as Byzantium or Baghdad, those weren't really the cool ones. Those were the disinherited ones who had to fight or starve to death. The "cool" ones were those who inherited their father's farm and didn't have to fight. The ones who, in fact, lived with their parents not only into the 20's, but all the way until the parents died.
The craze about being on your own, and thinking you're so cool because you have no support, and your starving or not depends on a PHB's whims is an industrial age invention. I.e., a very recent one.
Is it really that much better. Yes, you're so cool, you live on your own, you have a big house and a car of your own. And it'll be so cool until you're old and sick. Then your choice will be to die lonely and abandoned in your home, or half-starved and still abandoned in the cheapest asylum your kids could find. Because now it would be sooo _uncool_ for your kids to have a parent in _their_ house.
We churn generation after generation who _will_ spend the last decade of their life abbandoned among strangers, and die among strangers.
Not saying that I have a better solution or anything, but it makes me sorta idly wonder... is it really that much of an improvement?
That's more or less what I wanted to post, especially seeing all the sad posts cheering that other lame dog-with-a-cigar video. I'm not even a SW fan, but I found that video lame and not funny. I just saw a lamer not even making jokes, but outright insulting people to their face because of their passtime didn't match the prescribed role for their age and social category. (Eew! They're playing Risk! That's a game for 12 year olds!) If that's funny...
It all boils down to enforcing conformity. If you don't act and dress like your prescribed role, you're an evil monster and a "loser". If you have a different passtime than the category you're pegged into, you're an evil monster and a "loser".
If you play Risk (or god forbid Warhammer 40k or Battletech) instead of Chess, or MTG instead of Bridge or Poker, you're a "loser" and an evil monster. If you spend 4 hours a day in front of the TV with a console game and a controller in hand, instead of 4 hours a day on the same TV but on sports channel with a beer can in hand, you're a "loser" and an evil monster. If you spend all weekend working on your computer, instead of working all week on your car like a Real Man (TM), you're a "loser" and an evil monster. And god forbid that you dare wear anything other than the approved uniform for your category, because that _really_ makes you an unholy monster.
If you don't want to be an evil monster, then, see, you have to dress like this, hold the beer can and remote like this while watching sports on TV, go to the same pub all the neighbours go to, etc.
Even if you want to be a rebel teenager, see, you can't just go ahead and do it your way. Nosiree, bob. Only "losers" do things their own way. To properly be a "rebel" you have to mindlessly conform to the "teenage rebel" role. Here's the approved list of rebel clothes, music, passtime and conversation topics.
Welcome to being sheep.
And it seems to me like WTH is the problem with these self-appointed guardians of conformity? Do their property values go down because someone two streets away spends too much time with a computer or watches the "wrong" movies, or what? Seems to me that whether I wanted to wear a business suit, or a spandex super-hero suit and cape, or a Jedi robe with "I went to the dark side and all I got was this stupid robe" on the back (never wore any of the three, but just saying), it ought to be noone else's business.
*sigh* Guess I might as well become a misanthrope now and avoid the christmas rush.
"solution: do not fuck up the point-and-click install next time"
It's not a question of fucking up anything. Dunno about him, but let me assure you _I_ know where the associations and options pages are on both. It's either Firefox or Quicktime that's fucked up, or some unholy interaction between both: it forgets those options.
Actually, I suspect it's Firefox, seein' as even after I set it up to open MPEGs with DivX Player, it occasionally gets a brainfart and shows them with Quicktime embedded. Usually after I used CTRL-F a few times.
Also, more like wishful thinking than real hating Quicktime or anything, but I instinctively dislike _any_ program that wants to keep itself loaded in the tray. That includes Quicktime, Real Player, Open Office, Sun's recent JVMs, and anything which tries to stay there just to seem like it loads faster, as opposed to being _needed_ all the time. (E.g., video or sound drivers.)
I don't want half my RAM full of programs I use at most once a week. Even if I was a secretary, I wouldn't need Open Office in RAM all the time. And I'm still drawing blanks what-the-heck-a-profession would use the Real or Quicktime _viewer_ hundreds of times per day, so 1 second loading time makes a difference. Porn site reviewer maybe?
It's getting to the point where you can get your machine just as stuffed without even needing spyware. All those programs "helpfully" preloading themselves can already put a low end machine into swapping.
And what really bothers me is that it's invariably a way to hide crap programming.
It used to be at some point that code quality mattered. True, sometimes you had to end up with a larger program for extra speed (e.g., unrolling loops or special cases as separate functions) or for extra functionality. But not with stuff like loading 100 MB of Java VM, and several seconds of just pure initializing that, just because that's the buzzword of the day. And in any case, if your program took too painfully long to even load, it used to be _your_ problem, not the user's.
Now we just preload it and act like, w00t, our bloat loads instantly. We're so l33t. Too bad the user's machine now swaps, but now it's suddenly the user's problem, not ours. We can just call the user an idiot and move on.
Dude, there is no exaggerating: Riddick is a full 5GB, and as far as I know so is Jade Empire. Whether that's because of movies or what-the-f-word-ever, I wouldn't know, but they _are_ a full DVD.
Actually Jade Empire doesn't even have FMV on that DVD. The extra movies are on the second DVD.
And it will slowly get worse, because the space for textures increases quadratically with texture size. You need 4 times more space for 256x256 textures than for 128x128 textures, and again 4 times more for 512x512.
And they'll need those for HDTV games. Try playing KOTOR on the PC with the minimum quality textures instead of the 512x512 maximums, and see how butt-ugly that looks. Yeah, staying with low res textures would sooo help sell a HDTV game.
We also need more and more of them.
So you propose... what? To cut down on actual game content to stay download-friendly?
Briefly that idea seems to me just about as dead in the water as Nintendo's staying with cartridges back in the N64 days. Imposing an artifficial limit on size does not a better game make.
Though, to Nintendo's credit, at least the cartridges did have a major load time advantage, while the download everything idea doesn't have any.
"Speed? so you wait a few days for the download"
<sarcasm>
Well, yes, because obviously I have no other use for my internet connection for _days_ than to download a game. Surely it'll be no problem take a break from downloading anything else, and for that matter from playing anything online, just to download a game.
And it makes so much sense to download 5 GB worth of game data (I can think of a few XBox games which, yes, are a full DVD) for days, and then find I can finish the game in 10 hours. Because that's about how long it took to finish, say, Fable. Or find out that I don't even like the game at all.
'Course, blimey, I'll then just give up gaming for another few days until the next game downloads. Because, of course, being a gamer is about _not_ playing games, but merely twiddling thumbs for days while a game downloads.
And then there's the issue of games I purchased last year, but feel like playing again. Of course. It's so obvious: a console will come with a couple of terrabytes hard drive to keep all the games I buy until I feel like playing them again. That or I'll gladly spend another few days downloading to get a nostalgic fix of Sega GT 2002.
Just owning the DVD and just popping it in to play it _now_ is sooo last century. Spending days downloading is the way of the future.
</sarcasm>
Firearms from the 1300, and in fact everything before the minnie ball (i.e., the rifled barrel) were pathetically inaccurate and short range.
There's a reason why in all independence war movies you see them walking up to 100 paces, lining up, firing from there, then charging with the bayonets. Because that was the range of those muskets, and even at that range it was so inaccurate as to make the whole thing mostly for suppression.
It also took a long time for those guns to start to penetrate a knight's armour. You can look at history and see one moment when the full plate was discarded in favour of concentrating all weight all in a super-thick breastplate and helmet. That was the moment when finally they started to penetrate a knight's full plate armour.
So basically knights continued to exist as long as they were still a formidable force on the battlefield. That's all there is to it. They could and did stand a hell of a chance against guns, which is why they continued to be used.
And IMHO you're also mixing up two _very_ different events. The knights as nobility, and the rise and fall of that institution, is _not_ the same thing as the rise and fall of cavalry as a weapon of war.
Cavalry had survived long after the aristocratic institution of knighthood had fallen. Cavalry was used as late as WW2, and sometimes even successfully. Even _Germany_, otherwise remembered by everyone for panzer warfare, still had cavalry units in the 30's.
Cavalry survived that late because as late as WW1 it had still been a damn useful and powerful weapon of war.
So basically chivalry and medieval honour had _nothing_ to do with it. Knights didn't go obsolete overnight in 1300, simply because guns in 1300 were just not yet enough to stop a cavalry charge, that's all.
Now I can see the uses of a bayonet, and we sure trained with them too. But:
1. if you look back at WW2, the way urban combat was fought was not charging with a bayonet in every room. It was by throwing in a grenade before they lobbed one at you. If you were lucky, now you'd have a room full of enemy body parts. If you were unlucky, they had a stairwell full of your (and your squad's) body parts.
2. It's not _that_ hard to shoot someone up close. Anything from SMG to assault rifle means you can basically put enough bullets in the air until someone falls down. Now you might have a problem if you're within 1m of the enemy, but then again, you probably shot each other long before you were anywhere near that distance.
And even if we're talking bolt action rifles, even in WW2 there were ways around their being unwieldy in close combat. E.g., the Germans liberally issued pistols (including any pistols captured from the enemy) to soldiers. Whereas the Soviets produced unholy quantities of SMGs.
3. It's probably just me, but I didn't find the assault rifle with bayonet to be that handy a close combat weapon. To be honest, in really cramped quarters I think I'd be quicker and more accurate just holding the bayonet in my hand. I can slash and jab with it about 3 times in the time it takes it do one of those "and step and *thrust*" maneuvers.
Yes, nothing by itself is enough, not even XA transactions, but it can make your life a _lot_ easier. Especially if not all records are under your control to start with.
E.g., the bank doesn't even know that the money is going to reserve a ticket on flight 705 of Elbonian United Airlines. It just knows it must transfer $100 from account A to account B.
E.g., the travel agency doesn't even have access to the bank's records to check that the money have been withdrawn from your account. And it shouldn't ever have.
So you propose... what? That the bank gets full access to the airline's business data, and that the airline can read all bank accounts, for those integrity checks to even work? I'm sure you can see how that wouldn't work.
Yes, if you have a single database and it's all under your control, life is damn easy. It starts getting complicated when you have to deal with 7 databases, out of which 5 are in 3 different departments, and 2 aren't even in the same company. And where not everything is a database either: e.g., where one of the things which must also happen atomically is sending messages on a queue.
_Then_ XA and ACID become a lot more useful. It becomes one helluva lot easier to _not_ send, for example, a JMS message to the other systems at all when a transaction rolls back, than to try to bring the client's database back in a consistent state with yours.
It also becomes a lot more expensive to screw up. We're talking stuff that has all the strength of a signed contract, not "oops, we'll give you a seat on the next flight".
Yes, your tools discovered that you sent the order for, say, 20 trucks in duplicate. Very good. Then what? It's as good as a signed contract the instant it was sent. It'll take many hours of some manager's time to negotiate a way out of that fuck-up. That is _if_ the other side doesn't want to play hardbal and remind you that a contract is a contract.
Wouldn't it be easier to _not_ have an inconsistency to start with, than to detect it later?
Basically, yes, please do write all the integrity tests you can think of. Very good and insightful that. But don't assume that it suddenly makes XA transactions useless. _Anything_ that can reduce the probability of a failure in a distributed system is very much needed. Because it may be disproportionately more expensive to fix a screw-up, even if detected, than not to do it in the first place.
For example, don't think "home user losing the last porn pic", think for example "corporate databases using XA transactions".
The semantics of XA transactions say that at the end of the "prepare" step, the data is already on the disc (or whatever other medium), just not yet made visible. That, basically all that could possibly fail, has in fact had its chance to fail. And if you got an OK, then it didn't.
Introducing a time window (likely extending not just past "prepare", but also past "commit") where the data is still in some cache and God knows when it'll actually get flushed, throws those whole semantics out the window. If, say, power fails (e.g., PSU blows a fuse) or shit otherwise hits the fan in that time window, you have fucked up the data.
The whole idea of transactions is ACID: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability:
- Atomicity - The entire sequence of actions must be either completed or aborted. The transaction cannot be partially successful.
- Consistency - The transaction takes the resources from one consistent state to another.
- Isolation - A transaction's effect is not visible to other transactions until the transaction is committed.
- Durability - Changes made by the committed transaction are permanent and must survive system failure.
That time window we introduced makes it at least possible to screw 3 out of 4 there. An update that involves more than one hard drive may not be Atomically executed in that case: only one change was really persisted. (E.g., if you booked a flight online, maybe the money got taken from your account, but not given to the airline.) It hasn't left the data in a Consistent state. (In the above example some money have disappeared into nowhere.) And it's all because it wasn't Durable. (An update we thought we committed hasn't, in fact, survived a system failure.)
Indeed, those _are_ a part of the Windows TCO. Paying for example the salaries of the IT people to deal with those, is indeed a part of what a company really pays for a license of Windows.
Of course, it also shows another thing: if Windows really was that unstable and virused every 5 minutes, like Linux zealots like to claim, your average corporation would have one IT guy for every 5 to 10 employees just for that. Seems to me like they don't.
But that's another thing for another discussion. In the meantime what remains is that, yes, I see you understand TCO.
"Actually, your whole linguistics game is silly. It is indeed free (in the price context, not necessarily the freedom one), because free means it costs $0. Sure there are other benefits and costs associated with any purchase - and you're free to assign practically arbitrary monitary values (is that a person's time in India or in San Jose) to those costs or benefits; but they have nothing to do with the price."
/. and IRL as if price was the only factor. As if the TCO for something was literally $0 because you can download it of Freshmeat. In Real Life it can't possibly be $0. Ever.
No, you just do the usual mistake of acting as if "price" was everything, and ignoring the TCO. Whereas for a business it's the TCO that says how much money they have to pay, and the product's price is just a small part of it.
There is nothing "arbitrary" about assigning a monetary value to time: your company actually pays very real money for your time: your wage. And they also pay very real money to the admins, tech support people, IT people, etc.
Yes, that does mean different costs in Delhi than in San Jose. Which, yes, can mean that Solution A can cost less than Solution B in Delhi, but Solution B may be the cheaper one in San Jose. E.g., if Solution A has the lower price but needs more labour. Welcome to the real world.
That's what all the talk about TCO and ROI is about: how much _total_ money will it cost my company to use Solution A instead of Solution B. Not "conceptual" money, not "arbitrary monetary values", but very very real money from its bank account.
Mind you, most vendors will lie their ass off about TCO, or just use "lower TCO" as just a buzzword without any actual figures to back it up either way. But just saying, usually the actual TCO in a particular case -- and I mean the actual number you pay, not the buzzword -- bears no relationship to strictly the cost of the product.
Just because a Windows XP OEM license is, what, 160 Euro or so, and a burned CD with Linux is abour 1 Euro, it doesn't mean that the actual TCO will be only that for either of them. The TCO for Windows will be higher than the 160 Euro, and the TCO for Linux will be higher than the 1 Euro. What will ultimately make or break the TCO advantage of either, i.e., if ultimately the Linux solution really ends up cheaper than Windows, or the other way around, is how much admin and user time each of them wastes.
And again that's also the point most of us nerds fail to address when talking to management, or when flaming management. A lot act both on
And claiming that something is literally free, as in $0, will just tell your boss "ignore him, he's talking out of the ass again."
It's not a matter of being left-wing or right-wing or an Adam Smith zealot, it's just the way RL works: everything has a cost, and time _is_ money. Very literally. Very real money.