Thanks, but I prefer my shutter glasses not costing 500 Euros plus waiting for them to be manufactured in addition to whatever the manufacturer wants. Because I kinda doubt they'd have shutter glasses with -11.0 cyl -0.25 sph dpt L, -10.25 cyl -0.5 sph dpt R high-refraction polycarbonate lenses in stock. And I doubt that even if they had and I was willing to shell out 600+ bucks for a peripheral I actually could use them because the glasses still wouldn't be made to fit my eyes exactly.
NVidia might have a bit of trouble with their current GPU lineup but that doesn't mean they should become a giant international optician shop.
Also, I usually don't run around in my underwear, so two layers of headgear would still work for me. But I'm from Europe; I don't know what America's stance on underwear is.
Hey, at least the USA have taken one step towards being a free, democratic nation. If they keep it up they might become a respected member of the United Nations in less than twenty years.
And then we have a graphene sheet half the mass of Delaware and its are would be-- STOP! This madness has to end now before the whole planet is enveloped in a think layer of graphene sheets!
Get your torches! We have to stop these mad scientists before they destroy the world!
I just tried it. I don't have the pictures anymore, but the explosive capacity is high enough to take out a digital camera and a kitchen table. Pretty impressive, those toilet paper supercaps.
Yes. For OS X and Linux that might work well. Unfortunately, on the Windows side EFI is only supported by Vista SP1 and later*, so it's going to take quite a bit of time (especially seeing that many XP users are waiting for Windows 7 to upgrade) until EFI drivers become feasible. I'd say that we see widespread adoption of EFI for Windows-based computers not before the Windows 7 release.
* And Windows Server 2008 and some versions of Windows for an obscure dead architecture, but neither of those are going to be common among home users.
And in a perfect world IP law would be bearable, but your rule #1 pretty much sums up why current IP law is so hard to tolerate. It allows corporations to take over our property (DRM) or even declare that it's not our property at all (modern EULAs), even though we paid for it. It's enforced by people who have no qualms about ignoring the law doing so (see MediaSentry and their clients). Collateral damage is simply shrugged off (the PirateBay raid fiasco; bonus points for getting the Swedish police to violate Swedish law). I could go on and on and on.
Yes, copyright is neccessary. Most patents are, as well. As are trademarks. But I dont think a federal IP police is necessary; in fact it's quite worrisome and will likely be abused. The media industry is going extremely overboard with what they're currently doing so it's no wonder people would rather break the law and damage an industry (let's remember that the content industry is not even that big compared to others) than submit to anything coming from organizations like MPAA, RIAA and BSA.
The content industry's recent actions have created so much bad blood that many people have no respect left for the industry and anything the industry wants. If the **AA officially started a puppy care program you could expect dog popularity do go down. They essentially declared war on everyone and everyone is shooting back. Matters like that state of the battlefield (the economy) will be considered after one party has been destroyed.
I'm not saying that's a good thing. But this industry currently is at battle with their very customers; neither side is going to back down before the very end, consequences be damned.
It's a filesystem thing. ReiserFS makes you commit murders; BeFS rats you out to the police. That's why I stick with ext2 - ext2 has had some trouble with the police in the past and will happily lie to them to protect you. No, don't use ext3 instead, that one's on the FBI's paylist.
Mac users have an advantage, too: HFS+ will insist that you have entirely too much class to stoop to something as pedestrian as common homicide.
This isn't yet default behavior in GNOME? The last time I used KDE (been Linux-less for a while) exactly that was already implemented as a menu style option. You could either have the menu list just app names or a combination of the name and what the app does, like "Web browser (Mozilla Firefox)". I would've expected GNOME to have adopted that already.
But then again, they're probably in the process of doing so but can't decide whether unchangably imposing one of the two options on the user or adding a dropdown list to the options dialog is the bigger evil.
In that case you have absolutely no right whatsoever to complain about vendors not supporting Linux. Why should anyone go out of their way to support a niche OS? Is 3D acceleration neccessary in a datacenter? No, so why should NVidia, ATI and Intel ship accelerated drivers for their hardware? X11 also runs on fairly generic, unaccelerated drivers and users who are smart enough to run Linux are smart enough to set up a dualboot system. Besides, you can always reverse engineer the Windows drivers under the DMCA interoperability exception.
If you want mass-market hardware and software to support Linux you have to make Linux a mass-market OS. If you insist that Linux should be for techical users only you confine it to that niche and substantially lower any interest companies outside that niche have in supporting it (after all, writing printer drivers for an OS that's never going to have more than 1% market share on the desktop is less profitable han telling Linux users to just buy a PostScript-compatible laser printer).
It's actually a useful adjective to describe things that do one or more of the following for the sake of doing them:
- Turn a desktop application into a web application that has half the features and one tenth the speed. Everything is better when run inside a browser.
- Add a shoutbox or blog. If there already is a shoutbox or blog, add another. This also applies if you're writing a forum or even an internal accounting app.
- Use a Photoshop-generated interface that looks like a regular website but with more rounded corners.
- Use JavaScript (or, in heavy cases, Flash) for everything, even rollover effects.
- Use even more JavaScript. The more JS the better.
- Hey, Google hosts JS libraries. Use those as well. Sooner or later you're bound to use some function from there.
- In fact, have your site load things from as many domains as possible. google-analytics.com is nice, but you surely can cram some maps.google.com and IntelliTXT in there. If your site doesn't require the user to contect at least ten domains it's outdated.
- Keep users from disabling JavaScript in order to get past the layer ads by making it impossible to use the site without JS enabled. AJAX is your new god.
The sad thing is that I didn't even have to exaggerate much.
Partition formats aren't the issue. Everyone and their dog can read FAT32 and you don't really need a journaling filesystem with multiple datastreams for a read-only 64 meg chip containing some files.
I think however, that we're not likely to see wide support for this stuff. Most people will probably only add the Windows driver (to flash size and thus keep cost down) and have the update URL point to a part of their website that gets reorganized (and thus invalid) six months later. Most corporations don't get the concept of nonvolatile URLs. And of course the technology has to be suported by Windows - ad unless Microsoft gets the idea on their own they're not likely to implement it. Apple might do it (because Apple loves improving usability through technology) and the Linux devs might (because they can), but Microsoft probably wouldn't care until either they come up with an incompatible version of their own, the technology becomes an ISO standard or (most likely) both.
If we really want this to happen, we need to work it out, have a company submit it to ECMA and have ECMA submit it to ISO. And of course, we need to find some way to pay for all of that.
Of course then we have to decide what kind of driver to put onto the machine. Do we use regular OS-specific drivers? For which OSes? Will there be a convenient way for people to obtain the driver wthout using this feature? Or do we use drivers in some kind of common format? Will drivers using that compatibility layer be performant enough? Which format will we use? Will that format be open? After all, Microsoft is going to invest a lot of money to have the Vista driver model be the standard because that means less work for them - and parts of the Vista driver model might be encumbered.
And so on and so on and so on. True Plug and Play is doomed to remain a pipe dream, I fear.
No, he didn't. The big tradeoff between copper and fiber is that copper is lighter than itself, thus enabling you to build a cheap antigrav infrastructure with it; fiber, on the other hand, is reknowned for its dietary advantages. In the end it all boils down to how you want to solve the problems many Americans have with their weight.
- He bought it
- He tried to install it
- The installer balked at the end
- He looked up the problem in third-party forums
- He booted into Safe Mode
- He installed it
- The game refused to run
- He looked up the problem in third-party forums
- He formatted the hard drive
- He reinstalled Vista
- He reinstalled his usual drivers and software
- He reinstalled the game
- The game refused to run
- He uninstalled all software that was not absolutely neccessary
- He uninstalled the game
- He couldn't reinstall the game because he was past the three-installation limit
The solution:
- He downloaded a superior (read: cracked) version of the game via BitTorrent
- He installed the cracked version
- He played the cracked version
Heavily DRMed games sometimes fail to install or run on entirely legit installations because they conflict with your burning software/task manager/random driver or because the installer only properly works in Safe Mode or because the DRM's DVD check is fundamentally incompatible with Vista (as was the case with early Bioshock versions). And it's often impossible to properly debug the situation because you get exactly three shots at installing the game.
Not everyone likes their roguelikes to be frustratingly difficult. Enter DoomRL, a Doom roguelike with variable difficulties (from "kinda hard" to "beyond absurd"). Plus sounds, music and Windows/Linux support (no source though).
QGtkStyle and GTK-Qt have been around forever and they work very well. GNOME/KDE integration is not some kind of unattainable holy grail, it's a package install and a couple clicks. There are a few widgets that can't be integrated for lack of a counterpart, but those widgets are also hardly ever used so they look just as out of place in their native toolkit.
Also Kopete is cross-platform these days with binaries on Solaris, BSD, Mac, Windows and Linux.
Yes, but it uses KDE libraries, which means that GNOME users would rather reformat their hard drive and install vista before using it. Because, you know, KDE takes additional precious hard drive space, which is an absolute showstopper in today's storage-limited desktop world.
Asinine, but then again Apple doesn't follow Windows UI guidelines either.
Nobody follows the Windows UI guidelines. WMP doesn't, most CD burning apps don't, every single program you get with printers, cameras etc. insists on using what looks like its own private GUI toolkit... Consistency has been seriously out since shortly after XP was released. Writing a Windows app that looks like a Windows app is like using GTK+ 1 to write a new GNOME app.
Admittedly, I'm exaggerating -- but only slightly. The multitude of non-fitting UIs in Windows is getting annoying. One of the things I like about OS X is that the users are so rabid about integration most developers actually make an effort to make their native app look native*. The same goes for Linux, but there it's because people keep submitting GUI patches until the programmer submits to peer pressure.
* Of course the iTunes UI team is a special case. The iTunes UI team is special in many ways.
Most probably it's everyone's fault. Apple wrote a faulty driver and failed to test it properly, Microsoft signed the thing without testing it properly and the user... probably did something wrong. Okay, maybe the user isn't at fault. Maybe.
I used Proxomitron to work around bugs and things I didn't like in specific websites. For example, if I actually read Slashdot Idle I'd fix the textboxes there by having Proxomitron patch the HTML sent to me by idle.slashdot.org. Or I modify my HTTP request to specfic websites - for example ones that have weird opinions on caching. Doing that with Privoxy is not quite comfortable.
I named the lookup and "Waiting for..." separately. DNS lookups occaionally do lag, whether it's from Firefox or from shell programs like dig. Among the worst sites is eBay, but that might just be because you have to resolve at least half a dozen (sub-)domains for each site displayed.
I'll look into packet loss next time I get those slowdowns; my computer uses WLAN. However, they also occur on a different computer which uses Ethernet and they occurred across three different routers. Maybe it's the connection to the ISP itself.
However, those other retailers usually don't target the hardcore power user crowd with their ads like ISPs do. I see electicity providers advertise how they're cheaper or greener than their competitors but never how I can use up to 16,000 kilowatts if I want to.
ISPs explicitly compete on how much bandwidth they give you so they shouldn't complain when you actually use it. If they advertised how they have low latencies or low packet loss I'd see a point - but with ISPs advertising how you can play online games, watch streaming video, listen to internet radio, download large files and have a VoIP call going at the same time it certainly doesn't seem like they want people to act responsibly with a resource they don't even know they have to share.
Sounds a bit like the ISPs' PR departments have no connection with reality... I think if we put the tech and PR departments of any big ISP into a single room they'd do a Thunderdome reenactment: Two departments enter, one department leaves.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, but I prefer my shutter glasses not costing 500 Euros plus waiting for them to be manufactured in addition to whatever the manufacturer wants. Because I kinda doubt they'd have shutter glasses with -11.0 cyl -0.25 sph dpt L, -10.25 cyl -0.5 sph dpt R high-refraction polycarbonate lenses in stock. And I doubt that even if they had and I was willing to shell out 600+ bucks for a peripheral I actually could use them because the glasses still wouldn't be made to fit my eyes exactly.
NVidia might have a bit of trouble with their current GPU lineup but that doesn't mean they should become a giant international optician shop.
Also, I usually don't run around in my underwear, so two layers of headgear would still work for me. But I'm from Europe; I don't know what America's stance on underwear is.
Hey, at least the USA have taken one step towards being a free, democratic nation. If they keep it up they might become a respected member of the United Nations in less than twenty years.
And then we have a graphene sheet half the mass of Delaware and its are would be-- STOP! This madness has to end now before the whole planet is enveloped in a think layer of graphene sheets!
Get your torches! We have to stop these mad scientists before they destroy the world!
I just tried it. I don't have the pictures anymore, but the explosive capacity is high enough to take out a digital camera and a kitchen table. Pretty impressive, those toilet paper supercaps.
Yes. For OS X and Linux that might work well. Unfortunately, on the Windows side EFI is only supported by Vista SP1 and later*, so it's going to take quite a bit of time (especially seeing that many XP users are waiting for Windows 7 to upgrade) until EFI drivers become feasible. I'd say that we see widespread adoption of EFI for Windows-based computers not before the Windows 7 release.
* And Windows Server 2008 and some versions of Windows for an obscure dead architecture, but neither of those are going to be common among home users.
And in a perfect world IP law would be bearable, but your rule #1 pretty much sums up why current IP law is so hard to tolerate. It allows corporations to take over our property (DRM) or even declare that it's not our property at all (modern EULAs), even though we paid for it. It's enforced by people who have no qualms about ignoring the law doing so (see MediaSentry and their clients). Collateral damage is simply shrugged off (the PirateBay raid fiasco; bonus points for getting the Swedish police to violate Swedish law). I could go on and on and on.
Yes, copyright is neccessary. Most patents are, as well. As are trademarks. But I dont think a federal IP police is necessary; in fact it's quite worrisome and will likely be abused. The media industry is going extremely overboard with what they're currently doing so it's no wonder people would rather break the law and damage an industry (let's remember that the content industry is not even that big compared to others) than submit to anything coming from organizations like MPAA, RIAA and BSA.
The content industry's recent actions have created so much bad blood that many people have no respect left for the industry and anything the industry wants. If the **AA officially started a puppy care program you could expect dog popularity do go down. They essentially declared war on everyone and everyone is shooting back. Matters like that state of the battlefield (the economy) will be considered after one party has been destroyed.
I'm not saying that's a good thing. But this industry currently is at battle with their very customers; neither side is going to back down before the very end, consequences be damned.
In that case you use a compatible operating system or don't play games.
Or, of course, don't bitch about Linux being popular with non-geeks.
It's a filesystem thing. ReiserFS makes you commit murders; BeFS rats you out to the police. That's why I stick with ext2 - ext2 has had some trouble with the police in the past and will happily lie to them to protect you. No, don't use ext3 instead, that one's on the FBI's paylist.
Mac users have an advantage, too: HFS+ will insist that you have entirely too much class to stoop to something as pedestrian as common homicide.
This isn't yet default behavior in GNOME? The last time I used KDE (been Linux-less for a while) exactly that was already implemented as a menu style option. You could either have the menu list just app names or a combination of the name and what the app does, like "Web browser (Mozilla Firefox)". I would've expected GNOME to have adopted that already.
But then again, they're probably in the process of doing so but can't decide whether unchangably imposing one of the two options on the user or adding a dropdown list to the options dialog is the bigger evil.
In that case you have absolutely no right whatsoever to complain about vendors not supporting Linux. Why should anyone go out of their way to support a niche OS? Is 3D acceleration neccessary in a datacenter? No, so why should NVidia, ATI and Intel ship accelerated drivers for their hardware? X11 also runs on fairly generic, unaccelerated drivers and users who are smart enough to run Linux are smart enough to set up a dualboot system. Besides, you can always reverse engineer the Windows drivers under the DMCA interoperability exception.
If you want mass-market hardware and software to support Linux you have to make Linux a mass-market OS. If you insist that Linux should be for techical users only you confine it to that niche and substantially lower any interest companies outside that niche have in supporting it (after all, writing printer drivers for an OS that's never going to have more than 1% market share on the desktop is less profitable han telling Linux users to just buy a PostScript-compatible laser printer).
It's actually a useful adjective to describe things that do one or more of the following for the sake of doing them:
- Turn a desktop application into a web application that has half the features and one tenth the speed. Everything is better when run inside a browser.
- Add a shoutbox or blog. If there already is a shoutbox or blog, add another. This also applies if you're writing a forum or even an internal accounting app.
- Use a Photoshop-generated interface that looks like a regular website but with more rounded corners.
- Use JavaScript (or, in heavy cases, Flash) for everything, even rollover effects.
- Use even more JavaScript. The more JS the better.
- Hey, Google hosts JS libraries. Use those as well. Sooner or later you're bound to use some function from there.
- In fact, have your site load things from as many domains as possible. google-analytics.com is nice, but you surely can cram some maps.google.com and IntelliTXT in there. If your site doesn't require the user to contect at least ten domains it's outdated.
- Keep users from disabling JavaScript in order to get past the layer ads by making it impossible to use the site without JS enabled. AJAX is your new god.
The sad thing is that I didn't even have to exaggerate much.
Partition formats aren't the issue. Everyone and their dog can read FAT32 and you don't really need a journaling filesystem with multiple datastreams for a read-only 64 meg chip containing some files.
I think however, that we're not likely to see wide support for this stuff. Most people will probably only add the Windows driver (to flash size and thus keep cost down) and have the update URL point to a part of their website that gets reorganized (and thus invalid) six months later. Most corporations don't get the concept of nonvolatile URLs. And of course the technology has to be suported by Windows - ad unless Microsoft gets the idea on their own they're not likely to implement it. Apple might do it (because Apple loves improving usability through technology) and the Linux devs might (because they can), but Microsoft probably wouldn't care until either they come up with an incompatible version of their own, the technology becomes an ISO standard or (most likely) both.
If we really want this to happen, we need to work it out, have a company submit it to ECMA and have ECMA submit it to ISO. And of course, we need to find some way to pay for all of that.
Of course then we have to decide what kind of driver to put onto the machine. Do we use regular OS-specific drivers? For which OSes? Will there be a convenient way for people to obtain the driver wthout using this feature? Or do we use drivers in some kind of common format? Will drivers using that compatibility layer be performant enough? Which format will we use? Will that format be open? After all, Microsoft is going to invest a lot of money to have the Vista driver model be the standard because that means less work for them - and parts of the Vista driver model might be encumbered.
And so on and so on and so on. True Plug and Play is doomed to remain a pipe dream, I fear.
No, he didn't. The big tradeoff between copper and fiber is that copper is lighter than itself, thus enabling you to build a cheap antigrav infrastructure with it; fiber, on the other hand, is reknowned for its dietary advantages. In the end it all boils down to how you want to solve the problems many Americans have with their weight.
Let's look at how my brother did with Bioshock:
- He bought it
- He tried to install it
- The installer balked at the end
- He looked up the problem in third-party forums
- He booted into Safe Mode
- He installed it
- The game refused to run
- He looked up the problem in third-party forums
- He formatted the hard drive
- He reinstalled Vista
- He reinstalled his usual drivers and software
- He reinstalled the game
- The game refused to run
- He uninstalled all software that was not absolutely neccessary
- He uninstalled the game
- He couldn't reinstall the game because he was past the three-installation limit
The solution:
- He downloaded a superior (read: cracked) version of the game via BitTorrent
- He installed the cracked version
- He played the cracked version
Heavily DRMed games sometimes fail to install or run on entirely legit installations because they conflict with your burning software/task manager/random driver or because the installer only properly works in Safe Mode or because the DRM's DVD check is fundamentally incompatible with Vista (as was the case with early Bioshock versions). And it's often impossible to properly debug the situation because you get exactly three shots at installing the game.
Not everyone likes their roguelikes to be frustratingly difficult. Enter DoomRL, a Doom roguelike with variable difficulties (from "kinda hard" to "beyond absurd"). Plus sounds, music and Windows/Linux support (no source though).
QGtkStyle and GTK-Qt have been around forever and they work very well. GNOME/KDE integration is not some kind of unattainable holy grail, it's a package install and a couple clicks. There are a few widgets that can't be integrated for lack of a counterpart, but those widgets are also hardly ever used so they look just as out of place in their native toolkit.
Yes, but it uses KDE libraries, which means that GNOME users would rather reformat their hard drive and install vista before using it. Because, you know, KDE takes additional precious hard drive space, which is an absolute showstopper in today's storage-limited desktop world.
Nobody follows the Windows UI guidelines. WMP doesn't, most CD burning apps don't, every single program you get with printers, cameras etc. insists on using what looks like its own private GUI toolkit... Consistency has been seriously out since shortly after XP was released. Writing a Windows app that looks like a Windows app is like using GTK+ 1 to write a new GNOME app.
Admittedly, I'm exaggerating -- but only slightly. The multitude of non-fitting UIs in Windows is getting annoying. One of the things I like about OS X is that the users are so rabid about integration most developers actually make an effort to make their native app look native*. The same goes for Linux, but there it's because people keep submitting GUI patches until the programmer submits to peer pressure.
* Of course the iTunes UI team is a special case. The iTunes UI team is special in many ways.
Most probably it's everyone's fault. Apple wrote a faulty driver and failed to test it properly, Microsoft signed the thing without testing it properly and the user... probably did something wrong. Okay, maybe the user isn't at fault. Maybe.
You can still be Batman.
So in short: Don't turn off your laptop unless you need to and avoid turning it on unless you plan on using it for a while.
I used Proxomitron to work around bugs and things I didn't like in specific websites. For example, if I actually read Slashdot Idle I'd fix the textboxes there by having Proxomitron patch the HTML sent to me by idle.slashdot.org. Or I modify my HTTP request to specfic websites - for example ones that have weird opinions on caching. Doing that with Privoxy is not quite comfortable.
I named the lookup and "Waiting for..." separately. DNS lookups occaionally do lag, whether it's from Firefox or from shell programs like dig. Among the worst sites is eBay, but that might just be because you have to resolve at least half a dozen (sub-)domains for each site displayed.
I'll look into packet loss next time I get those slowdowns; my computer uses WLAN. However, they also occur on a different computer which uses Ethernet and they occurred across three different routers. Maybe it's the connection to the ISP itself.
However, those other retailers usually don't target the hardcore power user crowd with their ads like ISPs do. I see electicity providers advertise how they're cheaper or greener than their competitors but never how I can use up to 16,000 kilowatts if I want to.
ISPs explicitly compete on how much bandwidth they give you so they shouldn't complain when you actually use it. If they advertised how they have low latencies or low packet loss I'd see a point - but with ISPs advertising how you can play online games, watch streaming video, listen to internet radio, download large files and have a VoIP call going at the same time it certainly doesn't seem like they want people to act responsibly with a resource they don't even know they have to share.
Sounds a bit like the ISPs' PR departments have no connection with reality... I think if we put the tech and PR departments of any big ISP into a single room they'd do a Thunderdome reenactment: Two departments enter, one department leaves.