EU is adhere to the EU law. MS is not! This is exactly the problem. MS can't appeal to anyone, they can't get anyone to overrule the EU decision, EU is both the judge and the prosecutor in this case, and they are allowed to interpret the law that they themselves have written as they see fit. This makes it very important for them to be clear, fair and concise. MS may have broken laws and abused their position to gain unfair advantage. This is of course something that a government should control and stop, I don't disagree with that. The EU had the chance to do something right, to set a hard and fair guideline for how a corporation can conduct business in the EU and to make sure that the EU became a fair and controlled region to do business in. Instead they abuse their power and issue orders and fines that are totally idiotic. Is that too hard a word? Tell me then, what good did come from the media-free windows order? Anything good for the consumer? Anything good for competitors? Or just a lottery ticket win for the EU if MS failed to comply?
If the MS case is not handled properly and EU keeps pushing them around in a random manner, it sends a very bad signal to any business wanting to enter the EU. Companies in the EU are already fleeing to the former Soviet republics. If the EU acts like just a blue flag-waving version of the Russian mafia they will only have an incentive to hurry up.
I am european OSS enthusiast but am disguisted by the way EU acts. The mentality of european politicians is directly connected to the "sun king", Hitler and Stalin. They are elected by their deceived employees and are for all intents and purposes dictators. (The party that is willing to pay salaries for 30%-50% of the voting public has a bit of an advantage in the elections).
I predict that they will continue to milk MS until they can't get anything more. They are after money, not justice. The Media-free editions they forced on MS is a daft and stupid solution that does nothing good for anyone, least of all the consumer. It is only useful if you want to be able to say "no, not good enough, gimme gimme!"
To use an analogy more suited to this forum, the EU just said: "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further".
The EU is the really bad guy here, MS is guilty of a misdemeanor in comparison.
As the megapixel count goes up, the need for zoom lenses goes down. Suppose you shoot the finals of a 100m race with a 6 megapixel camera and a 300 mm lens. Let's say that the winning sprinter takes up about 50% of the frame, so 3 megapixels of detail covers the sprinter.
With a 12 megapixel camera, you can use a 150mm lens, and get the same 3 megapixels covering the sprinter. With a 24 megapixel camera, you can use a 75mm lens. With a 48 megapixel camera you can use a 33mm lens. When a certain resolution has been reached, a good quality 50mm or so lens is all most people - even professionals - will ever need.
Cover a tennis event, and crop out a full-page spread of Agassi from a shot that framed the entire court and most of the audience. Crop out half-page shots of any celebrities you spot among the audience from the same picture. Wildlife photographers will be able to make full-page prints of birds they didn't even see when they took the shot, etc etc.
It is about one and only one thing. Does the government have the right to limit travel?
Even though it is not on topic (since flying is not the only way of travel and the ID issue is not restricting where you are allowed to travel), that is an interesting question. However, if that is your real concern you should be more upset with the fact that the government already grants every permission to fly whatsoever over the territory it governs. You are not allowed to fly anywhere else. There are only small slivers of air that airlines are allowed to travel in in the first place.
Even worse for you - they even limit where you can walk! Already, this very moment! Try walking into military bases, nuclear power plants, or fresh water supplies. Attacking a minor detail in the process for one particular way of travel that has been restricted by the government since it was invented seems unbelievably short-sighted for a true liberty defender! It rather gives the impression that the actual fight for liberty comes second to being able to conveniently sneak off to the mistress.:)
My general point is that you are already, as a citizen of any country, abandoning truckloads of freedoms. You are not allowed to have an anonymous bank account, drive a car without a licence, shout in the library, do heavy drugs, burn down a forest, it is even forbidden to lie in court, despite the freedom of speech principle. The list goes on and on with items that are far, far more restrictive than having to show an ID to board a flight. All these restrictions are in place because it benefits the collective, and people generally accept it. The argument now is whether access to airplanes should have some limits based on the same principles, and after over 2700 dead in the 9/11 , there is a persiuasive argument to be made for it.
Requiring an ID is perhaps not a very effective security measure, but it helps. It is not possible to make it entirely safe to fly of course, but that doesn't mean that one might as well just abandon any form of security.
If you don't see the difference between (being admitted to be part of a community of hundreds of people who trust their lives to a tin can filled with gasoline travelling 10 km high at 800km/h working perfectly) and (walking down the street), I won't try to explain it. Fortunately most people are still able to see the difference.
Dangers of lunatics on planes aside, there is a more general problem with your position: You do not have an unalienable basic right as a human being to use someone else's airplane. They let you do it under certain conditions. You do however have an unalienable human right to choose whether you want to use their airplane under those conditions or not. That is the real freedom, and nobody is trying to remove that.
By your logic in this example, nobody could ever be arrested for anything, since everybody is innocent until proven guilty.:)
How about someone that tells his wife he is going to Seattle for a conference but is meeting his mistress in Florida?
What about him? You mean because of him it should be possible for an escaped prisoner to board a plane? We should not make it harder for criminals to board planes because it might make it harder for someone to cheat, lie and deceive someone who loves them? If that is your opinion, I simply disagree with it. I'll vote for my guy, you vote for yours.:)
Well, walking down the street is voluntary as well. Perhaps everyone walking down the street should be ID...[snip]
That would be stupid. However, we are not talking about that. The issue is not about walking down the street. It is about riding in planes. There is a difference between walking down the street and riding in a plane. It is not very subtle either so I can't really understand why you compare the two.
Some things are OK. Other things aren't. If you keep being an ass about silly things like this you might give real freedom defenders a bad rep. You might get to the point where someone says: "We want to have mandatory ID's for everything, anyone who doesn't have an ID will be thrown in jail, they must be criminal, right?"
You (and I) will protest, and the masses will go "Hey, that's the idiot who thought cheating on his wife was a basic human right and a valid reason for not letting criminals on planes. I sure as hell don't want to vote like him!". (This example is of course exaggerated).
"Travelling anonymously" was the one reason I could come up with off the top of my head for why someone might legitimately want to be able to board a plane without an ID. Terrorists won't be stopped, but maybe some recently escaped convicts, registered psychos, crackheads, anyone lacking the means to get hold of a fake or real ID.
Having to present an ID in order to do something that is voluntary in the first place is not reducing any freedom that I can think of, so even if it just helps a little it seems sensible to me.
The question of how someone could legitimately want anonymous access to tons of high-explosive fuel going 800 km/h aside, comparing ticket names to an ID makes enough sense for the above reason alone.
At least to me, as I fail to see how showing ID to do certain things that might be dangerous to others is a reduction of any meaningful freedom. Flying is not the only way to travel, so you are still free to go anonymously where you want. You just have to pick a vehicle where any one passenger can't easily cause the death of all the others on board.
Start at the bottom - do phone support. No, no, hear me out: You are practically guaranteed to get a job, and while the job itself sort of sucks (except for the harsh lessons about human nature and the initial work experience) there is one good thing about it: Networking. Call centers are gateways into the IT industry, tons of people in your situation pass through them. They work there for a while before going on to better things. Be professional and make friends, a guy vouching for you from the inside somewhere is worth years of experience.
Apply anyway. To everything you find. Hone your personal letter and interview skills. If the guy reading it thinks you might be a cool guy to have on the team you might get a wildcard. Look at ads in small town newspapers too.
Excellent! It is meant to be a OSS version of.net, which nobody understood what the heck it was either. (MS representatives tried to explain it for months).
I haven't gone a day without a linux partition since '95 and I wouldn't change my BSD server for anything else, but when it comes to the everyday versatile workstations, windows is hard to beat. (If you feel the flames growing, please remember the "versatile workstation" criteria for this statement. Unixes have areas where they are hard to beat, I know this perfectly well, no need to remind me!;)) Everything from sed, awk, vi and emacs to X11, KDE, Mozilla, OO.org, abiword, whatever you (Ok, maybe not exactly you who just went "Not me!" but many others) want, is available for windows as well as linux. So if you love your UNIX tricks and tools, but absolutely, positively must run windows apps, it makes more sense to emulate unix under windows than to emulate windows under Linux. Since the solution proposed here needs a valid windows installation to work anyway, it doesn't even make political or economical sense.
The stability flamefest is fun, but let's avoid it? 2000 and XP are both capable of uptimes in the four digits.
Whenever MS makes something it tends to become commonplace and easy to use. If they make windows able to run as a beowulf-like cluster, there'll be thousands of new developers with a reason and platform to make clustered applications for. Imagine getting a bunch of windows applications behaving like Apples X-code, automatically offloading heavy work to available units on the net - you could give that third overspecced laptop in two years to the PHB, not with a tear in the eye but a grin, knowing that it will spend 80% of its cycles compiling your code instead of running a screensaver.
Imagine being able to share CPU resources from a machine like you share a folder, and being able to immediately use that power for your compiler, database, renderer or whatever?
That would just rock IMHO, no matter who makes it happen.
I'm productive because I use the GUI for some things and the CLI for others. What's your excuse?
My excuse for being productive? I don't have one...;)
I agree about the CLI being useful, I never said otherwise.
Your examples are either not newbie tasks (did you notice the headline of the story?) or even easier with a GUI. You can set up connection monitoring and automatic emailing with a GUI or a CLI, the interfaces are unrelated to the task. You can convert pictures in a GUI by selecting those you want, right-click and select "convert to [format of your choice]".
Of course there are times when a GUI is not available, but that makes the discussion pointless - it doesn't mean that the CLI is preferred, it just means that's what you've got.
First, I apologise, I was trolling without knowing it it seems;)
I want the right tools for the job, and because of that I am naturally a huge fan of the CLI and wouldn't touch an OS that didn't have a powerful shell. The list was meant as a joke, pointing out that the CLI is not the right tool for newbies. If you read the article (or even - the headline;)), you see that was the key point - not whether the CLI is good or bad in general. One can of course do almost anything with a CLI, but my point was that it is not the newbie friendly way to do it.
With that in mind I have basically replied to all your points, but still:
1) View zoomable thumbnails of 1000 images named photo000.jpg to photo999.jpg and locate the ones from christmas, select those and drag them to your mail window is intuitive and easy. Starting from a blinking cursor in a CLI is hard. Sorting 1000 textfiles based on a word on line 4 in each of them is easier with a CLI, but I don't see newbies wanting to do that very often.
2) Yes, but the joke is more effective using references to things people know about;)
3) Or you could write a html-based presentation. You could make a powerpoint presentation from scratch if you happen to know the file format well enough...but if I ever wanted to do a presentation, I think I would prefer a GUI, (as would the newbies).
4) A CLI does not use graphics as part of the UI. (If it did, it would be a Graphical UI). I agree that it is possible for a CLI to launch a program that displays static pictures as you mentioned in point 1, but if the pictures are part of the UI of the application, it is by definition a GUI and you are no longer using a CLI. Some games have a CLI, but you generally play them using the GUI. (Although the idea of playing quake by issuing console commands is strangely fascinating...).
5) Yes it does - double-click the file. Or select those five there, and drag them to your mp3-player. It's way easier than typing.:)
In short, my point was that the CLI has it's places, but newbie-land is not one of them.
IANAL, but I would assume that as long as the main players are competing, then it is OK.
Competition doesn't dictate that a single vendor has to be cheap, it just gives customers a choice. Since price usually matters, the vendors will have to adjust their prices to what the market allows. A Mercedes costs up to ten times what say, a Ford does, but that doesn't mean it is ten times more expensive to produce. It just means that despite the competing market, Mercedes manages to get away with a higher price.
A Gillette razor solution costs a certain amount of money, if you don't think it gives you value, go for Wilkinson or whatever instead. If people start feeling robbed by Gillette and flee to other brands, the prices will come down, but as long as people keep buying, Gillette is doing the right thing (in the capitalistic sense) to charge as much as they can.
It's only if the main players have agreements to the effect that they will not try to compete on price that they are actually "price fixing".
I dropped IBM's like a bad habit after having witnessed three failures in six drives within a year, I will probably not buy hitachi either for at least a good while. It's irrational but they feel "tainted"!
The IBM's and two 1.2 GB seagates are the only disks I have personally known to actually fail. Naturally I stay away from seagate as well. Not that I carry a grudge or anything, I just stay clear of the fsckers. (No euphemism. Fsckers. Get it? heheh eh...*crickets*)
Western digital had a IDE compatibility issue with linux some time back (The details escape me, but I am pretty sure I'm not imagining it) so I overlook them as well. The only manufacturers I haven't experienced or heard anything bad about (yet, anyway, this being/. I imagine I will soon know why they suck and why it's SCO's fault) are Maxtor and Samsung.
As far as the feeling of having made a good deal goes, nothing that happens in the marketplace ever bodes well for the one who pays top dollar for anything. In the computer industry this lesson is learned, (or at least tought) faster than in most other industries.
Is there no performance of any kind, male, female, supporting or main in ROTK that is worthy even a nomination? Once you accept that it is fantasy, I think the actors did fine jobs. Hard to pick any single outstanding "oscar moment" though. The best "acting" scenes are in the other movies IMHO.
Can't really think of anyone in LOTR that would deserve a nod before Depp though, so I guess it doesn't matter.
Even stranger is the lack of a nomination for Cinematography. I must have misunderstood something, how can ROTK not get one for that?
They are now at the stage where they remove CPU's and add fancy 3D-interfaces to compensate. A machine like deep blue with today's hardware would dish out humiliating defeat to anyone, including Kasparov. In order to continue the amusing and money-making man vs machine challenges they need some "cripple" obviously, but I fear we'll see the day when headlines scream "Kasparov draws the Nintendo gamesquare!" if this continues. Someone will probably call that a proof of machine inferiority as well.;) I think a more fair and honest way to keep the playing field level would be to prevent reprogramming between matches, have multiple random human opponents so no opponent-specific tweaking can be made. Let the top 5 players challenge the computer in turn. If any of them manages to win, humans still rule. When even that is not enough, remove the multi-gigabyte opening databases from the chess program. The openings have been analysed and evaluated by humans over the course of chess history, and without that knowledge I'm sure Kasparov, or any half-decent grandmaster for that matter, would play circles around any machine for decades to come.
Slashdot Mirror
EU is adhere to the EU law. MS is not!
This is exactly the problem. MS can't appeal to anyone, they can't get anyone to overrule the EU decision, EU is both the judge and the prosecutor in this case, and they are allowed to interpret the law that they themselves have written as they see fit. This makes it very important for them to be clear, fair and concise. MS may have broken laws and abused their position to gain unfair advantage. This is of course something that a government should control and stop, I don't disagree with that.
The EU had the chance to do something right, to set a hard and fair guideline for how a corporation can conduct business in the EU and to make sure that the EU became a fair and controlled region to do business in. Instead they abuse their power and issue orders and fines that are totally idiotic. Is that too hard a word? Tell me then, what good did come from the media-free windows order? Anything good for the consumer? Anything good for competitors? Or just a lottery ticket win for the EU if MS failed to comply?
If the MS case is not handled properly and EU keeps pushing them around in a random manner, it sends a very bad signal to any business wanting to enter the EU. Companies in the EU are already fleeing to the former Soviet republics. If the EU acts like just a blue flag-waving version of the Russian mafia they will only have an incentive to hurry up.
I am european OSS enthusiast but am disguisted by the way EU acts. The mentality of european politicians is directly connected to the "sun king", Hitler and Stalin. They are elected by their deceived employees and are for all intents and purposes dictators. (The party that is willing to pay salaries for 30%-50% of the voting public has a bit of an advantage in the elections).
I predict that they will continue to milk MS until they can't get anything more. They are after money, not justice. The Media-free editions they forced on MS is a daft and stupid solution that does nothing good for anyone, least of all the consumer. It is only useful if you want to be able to say "no, not good enough, gimme gimme!"
To use an analogy more suited to this forum, the EU just said: "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further".
The EU is the really bad guy here, MS is guilty of a misdemeanor in comparison.
As the megapixel count goes up, the need for zoom lenses goes down. Suppose you shoot the finals of a 100m race with a 6 megapixel camera and a 300 mm lens. Let's say that the winning sprinter takes up about 50% of the frame, so 3 megapixels of detail covers the sprinter.
With a 12 megapixel camera, you can use a 150mm lens, and get the same 3 megapixels covering the sprinter. With a 24 megapixel camera, you can use a 75mm lens. With a 48 megapixel camera you can use a 33mm lens. When a certain resolution has been reached, a good quality 50mm or so lens is all most people - even professionals - will ever need.
Cover a tennis event, and crop out a full-page spread of Agassi from a shot that framed the entire court and most of the audience. Crop out half-page shots of any celebrities you spot among the audience from the same picture. Wildlife photographers will be able to make full-page prints of birds they didn't even see when they took the shot, etc etc.
It is about one and only one thing. Does the government have the right to limit travel?
:)
Even though it is not on topic (since flying is not the only way of travel and the ID issue is not restricting where you are allowed to travel), that is an interesting question. However, if that is your real concern you should be more upset with the fact that the government already grants every permission to fly whatsoever over the territory it governs. You are not allowed to fly anywhere else. There are only small slivers of air that airlines are allowed to travel in in the first place.
Even worse for you - they even limit where you can walk! Already, this very moment! Try walking into military bases, nuclear power plants, or fresh water supplies. Attacking a minor detail in the process for one particular way of travel that has been restricted by the government since it was invented seems unbelievably short-sighted for a true liberty defender! It rather gives the impression that the actual fight for liberty comes second to being able to conveniently sneak off to the mistress.
My general point is that you are already, as a citizen of any country, abandoning truckloads of freedoms. You are not allowed to have an anonymous bank account, drive a car without a licence, shout in the library, do heavy drugs, burn down a forest, it is even forbidden to lie in court, despite the freedom of speech principle. The list goes on and on with items that are far, far more restrictive than having to show an ID to board a flight. All these restrictions are in place because it benefits the collective, and people generally accept it. The argument now is whether access to airplanes should have some limits based on the same principles, and after over 2700 dead in the 9/11 , there is a persiuasive argument to be made for it.
Requiring an ID is perhaps not a very effective security measure, but it helps. It is not possible to make it entirely safe to fly of course, but that doesn't mean that one might as well just abandon any form of security.
If you don't see the difference between (being admitted to be part of a community of hundreds of people who trust their lives to a tin can filled with gasoline travelling 10 km high at 800km/h working perfectly) and (walking down the street), I won't try to explain it. Fortunately most people are still able to see the difference.
:)
Dangers of lunatics on planes aside, there is a more general problem with your position: You do not have an unalienable basic right as a human being to use someone else's airplane. They let you do it under certain conditions. You do however have an unalienable human right to choose whether you want to use their airplane under those conditions or not. That is the real freedom, and nobody is trying to remove that.
By your logic in this example, nobody could ever be arrested for anything, since everybody is innocent until proven guilty.
How about someone that tells his wife he is going to Seattle for a conference but is meeting his mistress in Florida?
:)
What about him? You mean because of him it should be possible for an escaped prisoner to board a plane? We should not make it harder for criminals to board planes because it might make it harder for someone to cheat, lie and deceive someone who loves them? If that is your opinion, I simply disagree with it. I'll vote for my guy, you vote for yours.
Well, walking down the street is voluntary as well. Perhaps everyone walking down the street should be ID...[snip]
That would be stupid. However, we are not talking about that. The issue is not about walking down the street. It is about riding in planes. There is a difference between walking down the street and riding in a plane. It is not very subtle either so I can't really understand why you compare the two.
Some things are OK. Other things aren't. If you keep being an ass about silly things like this you might give real freedom defenders a bad rep. You might get to the point where someone says: "We want to have mandatory ID's for everything, anyone who doesn't have an ID will be thrown in jail, they must be criminal, right?"
You (and I) will protest, and the masses will go "Hey, that's the idiot who thought cheating on his wife was a basic human right and a valid reason for not letting criminals on planes. I sure as hell don't want to vote like him!". (This example is of course exaggerated).
"Travelling anonymously" was the one reason I could come up with off the top of my head for why someone might legitimately want to be able to board a plane without an ID. Terrorists won't be stopped, but maybe some recently escaped convicts, registered psychos, crackheads, anyone lacking the means to get hold of a fake or real ID.
Having to present an ID in order to do something that is voluntary in the first place is not reducing any freedom that I can think of, so even if it just helps a little it seems sensible to me.
...is harder if you need a vaild ID to board.
The question of how someone could legitimately want anonymous access to tons of high-explosive fuel going 800 km/h aside, comparing ticket names to an ID makes enough sense for the above reason alone.
At least to me, as I fail to see how showing ID to do certain things that might be dangerous to others is a reduction of any meaningful freedom. Flying is not the only way to travel, so you are still free to go anonymously where you want. You just have to pick a vehicle where any one passenger can't easily cause the death of all the others on board.
Start at the bottom - do phone support. No, no, hear me out: You are practically guaranteed to get a job, and while the job itself sort of sucks (except for the harsh lessons about human nature and the initial work experience) there is one good thing about it: Networking. Call centers are gateways into the IT industry, tons of people in your situation pass through them. They work there for a while before going on to better things. Be professional and make friends, a guy vouching for you from the inside somewhere is worth years of experience.
Apply anyway. To everything you find. Hone your personal letter and interview skills. If the guy reading it thinks you might be a cool guy to have on the team you might get a wildcard. Look at ads in small town newspapers too.
I can't figure out if mono is...[cut]
.net, which nobody understood what the heck it was either. (MS representatives tried to explain it for months).
;-)
Excellent! It is meant to be a OSS version of
This means Mono is a success!
I haven't gone a day without a linux partition since '95 and I wouldn't change my BSD server for anything else, but when it comes to the everyday versatile workstations, windows is hard to beat. (If you feel the flames growing, please remember the "versatile workstation" criteria for this statement. Unixes have areas where they are hard to beat, I know this perfectly well, no need to remind me! ;))
Everything from sed, awk, vi and emacs to X11, KDE, Mozilla, OO.org, abiword, whatever you (Ok, maybe not exactly you who just went "Not me!" but many others) want, is available for windows as well as linux.
So if you love your UNIX tricks and tools, but absolutely, positively must run windows apps, it makes more sense to emulate unix under windows than to emulate windows under Linux. Since the solution proposed here needs a valid windows installation to work anyway, it doesn't even make political or economical sense.
The stability flamefest is fun, but let's avoid it? 2000 and XP are both capable of uptimes in the four digits.
Whenever MS makes something it tends to become commonplace and easy to use. If they make windows able to run as a beowulf-like cluster, there'll be thousands of new developers with a reason and platform to make clustered applications for.
Imagine getting a bunch of windows applications behaving like Apples X-code, automatically offloading heavy work to available units on the net - you could give that third overspecced laptop in two years to the PHB, not with a tear in the eye but a grin, knowing that it will spend 80% of its cycles compiling your code instead of running a screensaver.
Imagine being able to share CPU resources from a machine like you share a folder, and being able to immediately use that power for your compiler, database, renderer or whatever?
That would just rock IMHO, no matter who makes it happen.
I'm productive because I use the GUI for some things and the CLI for others. What's your excuse?
My excuse for being productive? I don't have one...;)
I agree about the CLI being useful, I never said otherwise.
Your examples are either not newbie tasks (did you notice the headline of the story?) or even easier with a GUI. You can set up connection monitoring and automatic emailing with a GUI or a CLI, the interfaces are unrelated to the task.
You can convert pictures in a GUI by selecting those you want, right-click and select "convert to [format of your choice]".
Of course there are times when a GUI is not available, but that makes the discussion pointless - it doesn't mean that the CLI is preferred, it just means that's what you've got.
First, I apologise, I was trolling without knowing it it seems ;)
;)), you see that was the key point - not whether the CLI is good or bad in general.
;)
:)
I want the right tools for the job, and because of that I am naturally a huge fan of the CLI and wouldn't touch an OS that didn't have a powerful shell. The list was meant as a joke, pointing out that the CLI is not the right tool for newbies. If you read the article (or even - the headline
One can of course do almost anything with a CLI, but my point was that it is not the newbie friendly way to do it.
With that in mind I have basically replied to all your points, but still:
1) View zoomable thumbnails of 1000 images named photo000.jpg to photo999.jpg and locate the ones from christmas, select those and drag them to your mail window is intuitive and easy. Starting from a blinking cursor in a CLI is hard. Sorting 1000 textfiles based on a word on line 4 in each of them is easier with a CLI, but I don't see newbies wanting to do that very often.
2) Yes, but the joke is more effective using references to things people know about
3) Or you could write a html-based presentation. You could make a powerpoint presentation from scratch if you happen to know the file format well enough...but if I ever wanted to do a presentation, I think I would prefer a GUI, (as would the newbies).
4) A CLI does not use graphics as part of the UI. (If it did, it would be a Graphical UI). I agree that it is possible for a CLI to launch a program that displays static pictures as you mentioned in point 1, but if the pictures are part of the UI of the application, it is by definition a GUI and you are no longer using a CLI. Some games have a CLI, but you generally play them using the GUI. (Although the idea of playing quake by issuing console commands is strangely fascinating...).
5) Yes it does - double-click the file. Or select those five there, and drag them to your mp3-player. It's way easier than typing.
In short, my point was that the CLI has it's places, but newbie-land is not one of them.
Sorting and sharing your digital photos using bash and pine!
Office work part 1: Emacs+bc = Excel!
Office work part 2: Q1_presentation.txt - who needs powerpoint?
Nethack or rouge? - the wonders of computer gaming.
Your own jukebox, easy as mpg123!
IANAL, but I would assume that as long as the main players are competing, then it is OK.
Competition doesn't dictate that a single vendor has to be cheap, it just gives customers a choice. Since price usually matters, the vendors will have to adjust their prices to what the market allows.
A Mercedes costs up to ten times what say, a Ford does, but that doesn't mean it is ten times more expensive to produce. It just means that despite the competing market, Mercedes manages to get away with a higher price.
A Gillette razor solution costs a certain amount of money, if you don't think it gives you value, go for Wilkinson or whatever instead. If people start feeling robbed by Gillette and flee to other brands, the prices will come down, but as long as people keep buying, Gillette is doing the right thing (in the capitalistic sense) to charge as much as they can.
It's only if the main players have agreements to the effect that they will not try to compete on price that they are actually "price fixing".
I dropped IBM's like a bad habit after having witnessed three failures in six drives within a year, I will probably not buy hitachi either for at least a good while. It's irrational but they feel "tainted"! /. I imagine I will soon know why they suck and why it's SCO's fault) are Maxtor and Samsung.
The IBM's and two 1.2 GB seagates are the only disks I have personally known to actually fail. Naturally I stay away from seagate as well. Not that I carry a grudge or anything, I just stay clear of the fsckers. (No euphemism. Fsckers. Get it? heheh eh...*crickets*)
Western digital had a IDE compatibility issue with linux some time back (The details escape me, but I am pretty sure I'm not imagining it) so I overlook them as well. The only manufacturers I haven't experienced or heard anything bad about (yet, anyway, this being
As far as the feeling of having made a good deal goes, nothing that happens in the marketplace ever bodes well for the one who pays top dollar for anything. In the computer industry this lesson is learned, (or at least tought) faster than in most other industries.
Discuss this test release on fedora-test-list. ;-)
So we're not supposed to discuss it here?
Is there no performance of any kind, male, female, supporting or main in ROTK that is worthy even a nomination? Once you accept that it is fantasy, I think the actors did fine jobs. Hard to pick any single outstanding "oscar moment" though. The best "acting" scenes are in the other movies IMHO.
Can't really think of anyone in LOTR that would deserve a nod before Depp though, so I guess it doesn't matter.
Even stranger is the lack of a nomination for Cinematography. I must have misunderstood something, how can ROTK not get one for that?
Commodore already did it in the 80s!
They are now at the stage where they remove CPU's and add fancy 3D-interfaces to compensate. A machine like deep blue with today's hardware would dish out humiliating defeat to anyone, including Kasparov. ;)
In order to continue the amusing and money-making man vs machine challenges they need some "cripple" obviously, but I fear we'll see the day when headlines scream "Kasparov draws the Nintendo gamesquare!" if this continues. Someone will probably call that a proof of machine inferiority as well.
I think a more fair and honest way to keep the playing field level would be to prevent reprogramming between matches, have multiple random human opponents so no opponent-specific tweaking can be made. Let the top 5 players challenge the computer in turn. If any of them manages to win, humans still rule.
When even that is not enough, remove the multi-gigabyte opening databases from the chess program. The openings have been analysed and evaluated by humans over the course of chess history, and without that knowledge I'm sure Kasparov, or any half-decent grandmaster for that matter, would play circles around any machine for decades to come.