Another former c64 user here. I remember typing in lots of those ML programs, wiling away my summer vacation... But I also cut my programming teeth there; no sooner had I learned BASIC that it seemed too slow and limiting to me, so I picked up a book on 6510 assembler, another book on the C64 architecture, and started writing self-modifying code--how else could you do what you needed in 38k of available RAM?
I still remember little dribs and drabs, like "032 210 255" was the assembled code for JSR $FFD2, the kernel jump table's address for "print a character to the screen.
I feel your pain, but is it that hard to read a few books and get your GED so you don't have to have that conversation? What if the company goes under? You may have a heck of a time getting a new position where they don't know you as well. Even if it doesn't happen today, how many companies do you know that will hire a 42 year old high school drop out?
Not trying to be a jerk here; just commenting on what I see.
I hope you're right. I can't say I'm a huge fan of his, but at the very least, he was never a simple party shill. I think we need more people in Congress who think and vote on each issue as it comes, and are not likely to bow to pressure to do everything along party lines.
I think it's great that he voted against his party before, and even if I disagree with him, I think it will be great if he votes against his party now.
So 100 days of Republican bitching has more of an effect than 8 years of relentless Bush Bashing?
In retrospect, the left clearly did not bash Bush enough. Two failed wars, deregulation of banks that have destroyed the economy, deregulation of industry which has lead to increased polution, removal of personal civil rights, the loss of our standing in the world... This vs. Obama's slight change in the tax structure to let the super-wealthy bear a little bit more of the burden, and the attempt to provide federal assistance through the depression.
The noisy ones on the extreme right wing of the Republican party should be ashamed of themselves, including but not limited to the folks on Fox who have clearly sold their souls.
I'd just rather take my side on the free market. Unlike the government that gets corrupted, private industy cannot by force of law and threat of imprisonment, take my money, my freedom or my life.
But the free market can deny you health care based on an arcane technicality, regardless of your willingness to pay. You get damned with a "previously existing condition" and you're effectively imprisoned by that condition, condemned to die, even though they've taken your money.
One single question of about twenty five regarding 'software as a service'. Your article title and selective quote does tend to give an erroneous impression as to what the article was about.
Maybe so, but you're also guilty of some selective quoting. Shortly after what you've chosen to include is...
Thus, proprietary software is something worse than an inconvenience. Proprietary software is a social problem, and our aim is to put an end to it.
Having an aim to actually remove consumers' choice as to whether they are allowed to choose proprietary software is indeed a little on the fringe-y side, you have to admit. I think that, based on this quote, the summary is fairly fair...
At least dual/live boot it. Or won't that "easy" Mac of yours accomodate such a thing?
I'm not sure if you're trolling or joking around, since you indicate later that you own or have owned one or more Macs. But dual booting on a Mac is indeed easy (without the quotes). Using Boot Camp, it's like three clicks to partition your drive. Reboot to the appropriate system disk (i.e. Ubuntu) and install on the new partition, and you're good to go.
I was going to say... if you have physical access, you can take out the hard drive, put it in another box, muck around with the data in any way you want and put it back. I'm an Apple fanboi at heart, but, geeze, this seems like a big, honkin' "What-ever!" to me.
$99 is an especially fair price for 10/10, phone service and 81 channels of cable. With Comcast, I think I pay about that much for 10/4, phone and 35 channels. While 10/4 is certainly good enough for my needs, it certainly shows that all these companies should be able to do better.
I don't know why TWC and Embarq don't believe in capitalism; they should let the market work its magic.
Oracle = Masterfully run company with shitty products
I'm not sure I agree. Love it or hate it, their core product--their database--is what runs any enterprise application where fast, reliable transactions are required. You can't run Visa or SalesForce on MySQL. It'd be great if you could, but they'd break under the load.
A buddy of mine was in a band which had really lackluster album sales, but for whatever reason, traded well on Napster (back in the day). Whenever they went on tour, wherever they went, they would fill clubs, and they'd see people in the audience singing along.
This certainly isn't the pinnacle of success; none of them are professional musicians anymore, they never got a major record deal, but they were able to support themselves for several years, and see the world, even if most of it was out of the back of a van.
Without the Internet, without filesharing, they would have remained a local also-ran.
And note, quantity could be read in two ways... 500% more per instance, or five times as many instances.
I'm not sure why anyone would want to increase the actual volume or force, as long as they've got a relatively healthy, normal system. So I'm guessing it must be a frequency thing. Makes me think of the movie Roxanne, where the young stud says to the heartbroken Steve Martin/Cyrano character, "I couldn't get it up... the fourth time."
Back in '04, a friend of mine was volunteering for the Kerry campaign, and his email for rallying the troops against Bush and Cheney had the subject line: "Let's Lick Dick and Bush Together".
Needless to say, I remember being annoyed that my spam filter hadn't caught it, and manually deleting it without even checking to see who it was from.
A few weeks later, we were both at a dinner, and he was talking about his efforts, and I asked him to include me in his correspondence so I could help out, and he said he had, that I just hadn't ever responded. After a little back and forth, we figured out where the miscommunication was.
make some kind of "xbox360server" to host all the games as basically virtual machines across a lan,
That's still likely to be a single port, which means now everyone on the LAN is limited to a combined 100 mbits for their video. It means the concept of a LAN party just got very, very impractical.
I won't argue with anything you say but this: there's no technical reason that the game server couldn't have 2 or 4 or 128 interfaces. Pull a Cisco and build the game server into the switch and you've got a system that can fully saturate the network.
That being said, that seems like overkill, so I agree with your overall point that this service probably won't be quite what it's billed as.
Read that again, please. In fact, I suspect that if you hadn't been modded up Funny for that, you would've been modded down Flamebait just for that little paragraph.
I've never been one to put much stock in the opinions of the mods. Do you always agree with them?
And a very personal one. But if your *opinion* is that *no one* should pick an OS based on the volume of games available for it (something strongly implied by your wording), then it's a very stupid and arrogant one.
I don't have any opinions which aren't personal. They're all my own. I never said "no one". I simply said that it's among the least worthy reasons to buy a computer. I think it's silly to buy a computer based on its color, too, but if someone really wants a pink laptop, that's certainly their deal.
Your "if" makes everything true, because I can safely respond that the condition you are testing is not true.
I never said that games are bad. I gave some instances of how they sap rather than contribute to an economy, and that the choice of an OS based on the number of games is a silly way of making a choice.
I do feel that there are more productive ways of using leisure time, but I don't begrudge anyone playing games. It's only when they interfere with other elements of someone's life that I feel they're a problem.
Just as with games, listening to music can be a pure leisure activity, but with music, you can do other things at the same time. Have you ever planted a garden while pwning n00b5 in your favorite online game? I know that I listened to music while tending my garden last year and I ate fresh veggies throughout the fall because of it. There is a difference between music and video games; just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
If you'd like me to respond to your next response, you may want to curb your use of insults peppered in among your rhetoric. They don't help anything and I won't respond again if you use them.
That all having been said, if you want to play video games, play away. You really don't need my approval or anyone else's.
I didn't blast anyone, my friend. If you like games, go ahead and play them, as much as you want. If you feel like that's making you a better person, you're totally entitled to that opinion. I won't make you try to prove it.
My original opinion was that the volume of games available for an OS is not the wisest metric to determine that OS's value. Again: opinion.
Are you judging my judgement? Why do you care what I think about someone else's opinion? Why does/. even exist? Can't we all just get along?
There's plenty of reasons to buy a Windows box, and to my thinking, the least important such reason is the wide variety of games available. I personally think there are better ways to spend one's life than playing games all day and all night.
Spending 15 minutes commenting on and following up on/. threads is entertaining to me. I don't deny that there's room for pure stupid entertainment in life. But if I chose a computer just because it was compatible with/., you might question my motivation as well.
I'll argue with you on that. Whether it's iTunes or a Creative Zen or a Zune or a record or CD player, music can help keep me motivated, whether I'm coding, cleaning, walking the dog, exercising... whatever. Music can be a distraction, but in many cases, it can be a great addition to any experience.
Didn't say Mac is better. Don't know where you got that. I just was saying that the astounding plethora of games available on Windows is not, in my estimation, a valuable criterion for choosing an OS.
I remember when people used to say, "Don't buy an IBM PC; the Atari 800 has way more games!" It was a silly way to make a decision then, too. Only difference was that most people saying that were 13 instead of 30.
I'm not blaming games. I'm really just saying that 10,000 games for Windows vs. 1000 games for Mac is a dubious reason to choose Windows. All that other stuff is just my reasoning.
Slashdot Mirror
Another former c64 user here. I remember typing in lots of those ML programs, wiling away my summer vacation... But I also cut my programming teeth there; no sooner had I learned BASIC that it seemed too slow and limiting to me, so I picked up a book on 6510 assembler, another book on the C64 architecture, and started writing self-modifying code--how else could you do what you needed in 38k of available RAM?
I still remember little dribs and drabs, like "032 210 255" was the assembled code for JSR $FFD2, the kernel jump table's address for "print a character to the screen.
Those were the days.
I feel your pain, but is it that hard to read a few books and get your GED so you don't have to have that conversation? What if the company goes under? You may have a heck of a time getting a new position where they don't know you as well. Even if it doesn't happen today, how many companies do you know that will hire a 42 year old high school drop out?
Not trying to be a jerk here; just commenting on what I see.
I bet he won't change his voting behavior much
I hope you're right. I can't say I'm a huge fan of his, but at the very least, he was never a simple party shill. I think we need more people in Congress who think and vote on each issue as it comes, and are not likely to bow to pressure to do everything along party lines.
I think it's great that he voted against his party before, and even if I disagree with him, I think it will be great if he votes against his party now.
So 100 days of Republican bitching has more of an effect than 8 years of relentless Bush Bashing?
In retrospect, the left clearly did not bash Bush enough. Two failed wars, deregulation of banks that have destroyed the economy, deregulation of industry which has lead to increased polution, removal of personal civil rights, the loss of our standing in the world... This vs. Obama's slight change in the tax structure to let the super-wealthy bear a little bit more of the burden, and the attempt to provide federal assistance through the depression.
The noisy ones on the extreme right wing of the Republican party should be ashamed of themselves, including but not limited to the folks on Fox who have clearly sold their souls.
I'd just rather take my side on the free market. Unlike the government that gets corrupted, private industy cannot by force of law and threat of imprisonment, take my money, my freedom or my life.
But the free market can deny you health care based on an arcane technicality, regardless of your willingness to pay. You get damned with a "previously existing condition" and you're effectively imprisoned by that condition, condemned to die, even though they've taken your money.
One single question of about twenty five regarding 'software as a service'. Your article title and selective quote does tend to give an erroneous impression as to what the article was about.
Maybe so, but you're also guilty of some selective quoting. Shortly after what you've chosen to include is...
Having an aim to actually remove consumers' choice as to whether they are allowed to choose proprietary software is indeed a little on the fringe-y side, you have to admit. I think that, based on this quote, the summary is fairly fair...
At least dual/live boot it. Or won't that "easy" Mac of yours accomodate such a thing?
I'm not sure if you're trolling or joking around, since you indicate later that you own or have owned one or more Macs. But dual booting on a Mac is indeed easy (without the quotes). Using Boot Camp, it's like three clicks to partition your drive. Reboot to the appropriate system disk (i.e. Ubuntu) and install on the new partition, and you're good to go.
This is why I only use a punch-card-based CP/M system.
I was going to say... if you have physical access, you can take out the hard drive, put it in another box, muck around with the data in any way you want and put it back. I'm an Apple fanboi at heart, but, geeze, this seems like a big, honkin' "What-ever!" to me.
$99 is an especially fair price for 10/10, phone service and 81 channels of cable. With Comcast, I think I pay about that much for 10/4, phone and 35 channels. While 10/4 is certainly good enough for my needs, it certainly shows that all these companies should be able to do better.
I don't know why TWC and Embarq don't believe in capitalism; they should let the market work its magic.
Oracle = Masterfully run company with shitty products
I'm not sure I agree. Love it or hate it, their core product--their database--is what runs any enterprise application where fast, reliable transactions are required. You can't run Visa or SalesForce on MySQL. It'd be great if you could, but they'd break under the load.
To which product(s) are you referring?
A buddy of mine was in a band which had really lackluster album sales, but for whatever reason, traded well on Napster (back in the day). Whenever they went on tour, wherever they went, they would fill clubs, and they'd see people in the audience singing along. This certainly isn't the pinnacle of success; none of them are professional musicians anymore, they never got a major record deal, but they were able to support themselves for several years, and see the world, even if most of it was out of the back of a van. Without the Internet, without filesharing, they would have remained a local also-ran.
And note, quantity could be read in two ways... 500% more per instance, or five times as many instances.
I'm not sure why anyone would want to increase the actual volume or force, as long as they've got a relatively healthy, normal system. So I'm guessing it must be a frequency thing. Makes me think of the movie Roxanne, where the young stud says to the heartbroken Steve Martin/Cyrano character, "I couldn't get it up... the fourth time."
Back in '04, a friend of mine was volunteering for the Kerry campaign, and his email for rallying the troops against Bush and Cheney had the subject line: "Let's Lick Dick and Bush Together".
Needless to say, I remember being annoyed that my spam filter hadn't caught it, and manually deleting it without even checking to see who it was from.
A few weeks later, we were both at a dinner, and he was talking about his efforts, and I asked him to include me in his correspondence so I could help out, and he said he had, that I just hadn't ever responded. After a little back and forth, we figured out where the miscommunication was.
make some kind of "xbox360server" to host all the games as basically virtual machines across a lan,
That's still likely to be a single port, which means now everyone on the LAN is limited to a combined 100 mbits for their video. It means the concept of a LAN party just got very, very impractical.
I won't argue with anything you say but this: there's no technical reason that the game server couldn't have 2 or 4 or 128 interfaces. Pull a Cisco and build the game server into the switch and you've got a system that can fully saturate the network.
That being said, that seems like overkill, so I agree with your overall point that this service probably won't be quite what it's billed as.
Read that again, please. In fact, I suspect that if you hadn't been modded up Funny for that, you would've been modded down Flamebait just for that little paragraph.
I've never been one to put much stock in the opinions of the mods. Do you always agree with them?
And a very personal one. But if your *opinion* is that *no one* should pick an OS based on the volume of games available for it (something strongly implied by your wording), then it's a very stupid and arrogant one.
I don't have any opinions which aren't personal. They're all my own. I never said "no one". I simply said that it's among the least worthy reasons to buy a computer. I think it's silly to buy a computer based on its color, too, but if someone really wants a pink laptop, that's certainly their deal.
Your "if" makes everything true, because I can safely respond that the condition you are testing is not true.
If you'd like me to respond to your next response, you may want to curb your use of insults peppered in among your rhetoric. They don't help anything and I won't respond again if you use them.
That all having been said, if you want to play video games, play away. You really don't need my approval or anyone else's.
I didn't blast anyone, my friend. If you like games, go ahead and play them, as much as you want. If you feel like that's making you a better person, you're totally entitled to that opinion. I won't make you try to prove it.
My original opinion was that the volume of games available for an OS is not the wisest metric to determine that OS's value. Again: opinion.
You clearly either didn't read or didn't understand my post.
Right! I don't think anyone is saying, "I'm buying a [Windows|Mac|Linux|CPM-80] box because slashdot works better on it!"
All I'm saying is that buying Windows because there's lots of games for it is a silly motivation.
Are you judging my judgement? Why do you care what I think about someone else's opinion? Why does /. even exist? Can't we all just get along?
/. threads is entertaining to me. I don't deny that there's room for pure stupid entertainment in life. But if I chose a computer just because it was compatible with /., you might question my motivation as well.
There's plenty of reasons to buy a Windows box, and to my thinking, the least important such reason is the wide variety of games available. I personally think there are better ways to spend one's life than playing games all day and all night.
Spending 15 minutes commenting on and following up on
Hear hear. Although I wouldn't go so far as to tell them not to breed. That's kinda hardcore.
I'll argue with you on that. Whether it's iTunes or a Creative Zen or a Zune or a record or CD player, music can help keep me motivated, whether I'm coding, cleaning, walking the dog, exercising... whatever. Music can be a distraction, but in many cases, it can be a great addition to any experience.
Didn't say Mac is better. Don't know where you got that. I just was saying that the astounding plethora of games available on Windows is not, in my estimation, a valuable criterion for choosing an OS.
I remember when people used to say, "Don't buy an IBM PC; the Atari 800 has way more games!" It was a silly way to make a decision then, too. Only difference was that most people saying that were 13 instead of 30.
I'm not blaming games. I'm really just saying that 10,000 games for Windows vs. 1000 games for Mac is a dubious reason to choose Windows. All that other stuff is just my reasoning.