So he has TWO legitimate complaints and one minor problem. He's an idiot.
Is this a fancy way of saying he's an average user? Your average user isn't going to know anything about the legal issues surrounding codecs on Linux. All they know is that on Windows and OSX their media files play fine right after installing the OS. The habit of calling new users idiots and blowing them off saying "RTFM" is one of the things that's stunted Linux adoption on the desktop.
By his "logic", Windows is not ready for anyone. Try getting an iPod to work on it without installing software.
An iPod comes with software and instructions that make it ready and easy to install on Windows/OSX. I certainly doubt there are any instructions in an iPod box that deal with installing it on your favorite Linux distro. Which means of course that you end up online searching Google for how to use your iPod with Linux. This is one of his (legitimate) gripes. In fairness it's not a gripe with Linux so much as it is with the lack of manufacturer support, but for users this is one in the same.
True, but by not giving hard numbers they leave the door open for people to make wild assumptions.
For example, I store all my music as uncompressed PCM WAVs with an average weight of 50MB. My images are all high-resolution JPEGs with sizes around 6MB (this is actually very realistic). My email is all formatted as HTML composed using Microsoft Word with average message size being 118KB (ha - also very realistic).
This gives you a total of about 1.4 TB and the ratios all equal out the same as when using a 3MB song as your base unit.
In the end it doesn't matter because Comcast just likes to be able to pick whoever they want and cut them off at the knees. It might even be different for somebody living in a very saturated area for someone who is more rural.
If you read the article, you see that there's not an engine in the thing right now.
You are correct, it appears to be just a more technical (and perhaps better) form of the "Flying Squirrel" suit. I'm not sure how that suit would work in high-altitude drops or how it compares for surface area. Also, keeping your arms and legs spread like that over a long fall is probably pretty tiring, but being able to pull them in and drop faster might be useful.
What the hell has Bungie been doing for the past three years?
Making beeeeeeautiful water. Duh!
Seriously, I realize you're just trolling, but even trolls need food now and again so here goes.
1) Looks almost identical to Halo 2, just with the resolution bumped up and some higher rez textures. It's the same old last gen style engine. Three years of work and people getting confused in comparison shots between Halo 2 and Halo 3 is shockingly bad for what is supposed to be the killer first party tour de force for Microsoft.
I assume you're thinking of the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. It's been said over and over that the rendering engine used in the beta is not the engine that will ship with Halo 3.
2) Has the same networking setup as last gen. The rumored dedicated servers turned out to be a pipe dream. Instead Halo 3 has the same old last gen 16 player cap per game and lag prone P2P networking for games. With all of Microsoft's money you would think they could have hired someone to actually updated the networking code to next gen levels.
Considering that Halo 3 supports 4-player online co-op, I tend to doubt that the exact same netcode drives both games. I also tend to think that the game's netcode was improved and worked on just like any other part of the game. Speaking of online lag, I'm not sure what dedicated servers would solve. I could be mistaken, but usually lag in online games is due to the players' Internet connections to the host. These connections are subject to varying disruptions and considering the realtime nature of the game, any disruptions will be very noticeable. Until everyone has 10Mbit fiber connections with 3ms latency between consoles I think lag is going to be something you just have to deal with in online play.
The same almost entirely US Xbox fans who bought the first two Halos will buy Halo 3. The rest of the gaming world will go right on not caring about the game
Uh, that's usually how sequel game releases go. Previous fans buy it, people who didn't like the first couple games won't.
Your hard drive was likely still under warranty through Seagate -- did you look into it and see if they would replace it for you?
I imagine that is the least of his worries. When I lost an 80GB drive a couple years ago I would have gladly paid several times the price of a new one if I could only have gotten the contents back. While a free replacement drive might lessen the blow somewhat--as geeky as it might sound--losing a hard drive with gigabytes of content you really care about is a gut-wrenching experience. Everything from my high school days (homework, projects, work, programming, games, music... everything) was gone in one fail swoop.
The only thing similar to it is having your house burn down. Sure insurance should cover it all, but there is no way to get back what was really lost. I suppose if nothing else it taught me the importance of hardware redundancy, though it seemed a high price to pay at the time.
'Under this interpretation, any data stored in RAM could be subject to a subpoena, as at a basic level it is a "medium from which information can be obtained" just like a hard drive. '
Okay, no problem. I'll just shut the server down and pull the hard drive and memory DIMMs out for you. Go ahead and "obtain" whatever information you like.
The first time I tried it failed (for obvious reasons - the server should be overloaded as it was 2-3 hours after the release), but after that it worked fine.
Somewhat off-topic, but if this isn't a sign of the times I don't know what is. You shelled out $50-60 of hard-earned money to buy a game immediately after it's released and what's your reward? You sit and wait for hours while the moron publisher's servers get overloaded with "activation" requests. And here in this comment, instead of showing irritation or annoyance, you just accept this as normal (not saying you weren't pissed then of course:)
Funny, I remember when you would buy a game and could take it home and play it right away. Of course technology has progressed since then - now companies can alienate honest customers while adding a few hours to the time it takes to crack the copy protection. Steam is one of the worst things to happen to computer gaming in a long time.
Oh - and Open Source? Pah-lease. A license that governs USE of the software sounds neither permissive nor open:
Troll status: Failed.
I picked a project at random that sounded neat (the multi-RDP tool) and here's the limits imposed by the license (MS-CL):
3. Conditions and Limitations
(A) Reciprocal Grants- Your rights to reproduce and distribute the software (or any part of the software), or to create and distribute derivative works of the software, are conditioned on your licensing the software or any larger work you create under the following terms:
1. If you distribute the larger work as a series of files, you must grant all recipients the copyright and patent licenses in sections 2(A) & 2(B) for any file that contains code from the software. You must also provide recipients the source code to any such files that contain code from the software along with a copy of this license. Any other files which are entirely your own work and which do not contain any code from the software may be licensed under any terms you choose.
2. If you distribute the larger work as a single file, then you must grant all recipients the rights set out in sections 2(A) & 2(B) for the entire larger work. You must also provide recipients the source code to the larger work along with a copy of this license.
(B) No Trademark License- This license does not grant you any rights to use the Licensor's name, logo, or trademarks.
(C) If you distribute the software in source code form you may do so only under this license (i.e., you must include a complete copy of this license with your distribution), and if you distribute the software solely in compiled or object code form you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.
(D) If you begin patent litigation against the Licensor over patents that you think may apply to the software (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit), your license to the software ends automatically.
(E) The software is licensed "as-is." You bear the risk of using it. The Licensor gives no express warranties, guarantees or conditions. You may have additional consumer rights under your local laws which this license cannot change. To the extent permitted under your local laws, the Licensor excludes the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.
I'm no expert on it, but it sounds strikingly similar to the GPL in terms of limits and goals. I'm sure different projects can use different licenses (just as well known FOSS projects do), so this might not apply to all the projects on the site. The point is that these projects are open-source, however they may have limits imposed the same way the GPL, CC, BSD, etc licenses do.
How is this censorship? Like any other store, Walmart chooses what they will and will not stock. Regardless of what you personally think of Walmart, they got where they are by making smart (perhaps sometimes ruthless) business decisions. I know this might be hard for some Slashdotters to believe, but what about people who want censored, or a 'radio edit' of a song? Besides, nobody is forcing you to shop at Walmart, and if you want to buy music there then you get what they sell. I don't see how the "censorship" issue is news at all.
Hurrah for dropping DRM though. Be interesting to see how long this will last and if there is any repercussion. One nice thing about Walmart is that it's big enough to just smile give the bird to the RIAA.
"The public domain is a disgrace to the forces of Evil."
That line alone made the video worth watching. However... if... I had... to... watch... much more... of... that... I think... I... would... go... insane... and start... killing... people... just to... make... the pain... stop.
Ms said that the table was a vast step forward. They did not say that they developed it. Just that they are going to build them.
This is basically true, however the idea behind an "innovative" product is nothing without an implementation. There was nothing especially amazing about the first iPod that Apple released - it was just another MP3 player - except for the software. The iPod's user interface was what set the device apart. In the same manner, Microsoft's implementation of the Surface UI (written completely in C# and WPF - Microsoft's own products) is, from what I've seen, very impressive. And yes, as with any UI concept the basic idea has long been discussed and long been in development by a lot of different people.
Once these tables are more readily available I anticipate seeing some cool new ways to interact with them using F/OSS software. Regardless of how much you might dislike Microsoft, they are one of the few entities that have the capital to bring a device like this to the market. However, once it's out, there is nothing stopping people from digging in and finding other great things you can do with it (see the original Xbox and all the great software now available for it).
And just to preempt the comment I'm sure is coming: I'm sure the tables will have some form of DRM or hardware locking in place. Unfortunately Microsoft will see this as the only way to protect their investment; however, there are a lot of very smart people out there, and if the tables do become popular and more of a commodity item the preventative measures Microsoft puts in place will be blown away - just like every other artificial restriction to date has.
Uhm, how do you get thousands actually open if XP cuts off all incoming connections at 10?
This is perhaps the stupidest and most incorrect thing I've read on Slashdot in some time. I know most/.'ers are so biased that they'd rather spew BS than take a few minutes to learn the truth, but this is truly a step above the rest! I salute you sir - you've taken it to an entirely new level!
For anyone interested in facts, service pack 2 for XP introduced a new limit of 10 concurrent half-open outgoing connections. By half-open, it basically is akin to calling somebody and waiting for them to pick up the phone. While their phone rings, the connection is half-open. SP2 does limit these to 10, but there is a queue, and as connections are accepted or time out, others are processed.
If you really want to, there are patches out there for the TCP DLL that allow you to change the limit of 10 to anything you want (up to the previous 65,535).
On several sites that allow commenting, people are posting the spoilers. I've already had the book ruined for me unexpectedly
Hell, that sucks. Although I haven't read the books but I'm trying to avoid spoilers. Really, I don't worry that much about explicit ones. Rather I am more concerned about subliminal spoilers. Yeah, the tinfoil hat is at full power.
Don't worry about it I guess. In the end the result should be the same. Either you'll enjoy the book or you won't. Subliminal messages are what you want to watch out for - they're harder to block.
It's just a marketing ploy by Micro$oft so they can say "look at us & all the games you can play through xbox live."
When you're done talking out of your ass, you might take a second and re-read (or just plain read) TFS.
These are backwards-compatibility updates. They allow you to play original Xbox games on the 360. So no, it's not a marketing ploy, it's called customer satisfaction. They make no money by providing these updates, they do it for gamers who own Xbox games and still want to play them.
I can understand not RTFA, but for frak's sake - RTFS!
Perhaps I should clarify: I was more meaning feature bloat, not necessarily resources (though usually the latter follows the first).
How much CPU time has 5.x used after playing for a couple hours? With 2.91 I see a similar memory footprint, and usually less than 5-8 seconds of CPU usage for several hours of playing (depends what I've been doing).
I agree that WinAmp 2.x series was and is classic. However, I actually use 2.91 because 2.95 appears to have some bugs, specifically with the windowshade mode.
I tried 3.x and 5.x but both are just too bloated an application when all I want to do is play MP3s. I don't understand why every software company feels the need to make their applications get more and more bloated with unwanted/unneeded features.
No, we are not humanoid because it is efficient, we are humanoid because that's just the way it turned out, and it wasn't detrimental to breeding.
People ascribe far too much purpose and design to evolution.
IANAB, but what you're describing comes off sounding more like random chance than evolution. I understand what you're saying about breeding, but if we're talking about other species from Earth-like planets, it seems like there are relatively good chances that they are at least recognizable as "humanoid".
I just figure that on this planet, of all the various body types, ours won out. We walk upright, probably because we began to use our forearms less and less for locomotion and instead for manipulating tools and our environment. We're bipedal because (at least on this planet) essentially every non-insect animal has four limbs. Our brains are a certain size, owing to sentience and mental capacity, and they are where they are because they're close to our sensory organs (eyes, nose, mouth, ears).
The biggest chance I can see for differences are mostly due to climate. A brighter/more intense sun might mean differences in skin makeup. A colder climate might mean fur. Small things like perhaps six fingers/toes are probably guaranteed. I really am just pulling this all out of thin air, never had a class on it, so if I'm wrong I'm sure someone will correct me. I just figure that unless we're talking about some weird silicon-based aliens from a volcano planet, it seems reasonable to expect something of a resemblance.
Slightly off-topic, but I'd suggest changing that to yum -y update && shutdown -r now. Using "&&" in leiu of ";" will prevent the system from rebooting if the call to yum isn't successful (can't contact a server, whatever). On many systems you can even replace "shutdown -r now" with simply "reboot".
Is it me or do tags like "Dupe" no longer show up?
I think Tags were revamped a while ago, and as a result the fun tags don't show up anymore.
Personally, I don't bother with them any longer. When you could tag something "fud", "yes", "no", "itsatrap", "omgponies", "09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0", etc it was a fun way to comment on a story (even if it is the epitome of groupthink). I thought the tags gave Slashdot users another interesting way to communicate, and to express the general sentiment of a story.
Sorry Taco, but Tags are boring and useless now. Bring back the old ones or do away with these.
No dragging? I stopped watching when it went from sci-fi to soap-opera-in-space.
THANK YOU! I thought I was the only one getting sick and tired of anticipating science fiction and instead, week after week, finding myself tuned in to All My Cylons.
As much as I love good portions of the show, it's fairly obvious (he says so right in the commentaries) that Ronald Moore is pulling the story out of his ass week after week, and that if the Cylons really do have a plan, they never shared it with him. With this announcement, he must figure that either A) he can't keep that up and he doesn't want to sit down and write the overall arc or B) he's tired of fans whining about his "character-oriented" masterpieces such as A Day in the Life and Unfinished Business.
I'd love to see the show go on longer, but not if the last season was any indication of things to come.
Slashdot Mirror
So he has TWO legitimate complaints and one minor problem. He's an idiot.
Is this a fancy way of saying he's an average user? Your average user isn't going to know anything about the legal issues surrounding codecs on Linux. All they know is that on Windows and OSX their media files play fine right after installing the OS. The habit of calling new users idiots and blowing them off saying "RTFM" is one of the things that's stunted Linux adoption on the desktop.
By his "logic", Windows is not ready for anyone. Try getting an iPod to work on it without installing software.
An iPod comes with software and instructions that make it ready and easy to install on Windows/OSX. I certainly doubt there are any instructions in an iPod box that deal with installing it on your favorite Linux distro. Which means of course that you end up online searching Google for how to use your iPod with Linux. This is one of his (legitimate) gripes. In fairness it's not a gripe with Linux so much as it is with the lack of manufacturer support, but for users this is one in the same.
30000*songs = 250000*pictures = 13000000*emails 1 song = 3MB => 1 picure = 360KB => 1 email = 6.92KB Seems right
True, but by not giving hard numbers they leave the door open for people to make wild assumptions.
For example, I store all my music as uncompressed PCM WAVs with an average weight of 50MB. My images are all high-resolution JPEGs with sizes around 6MB (this is actually very realistic). My email is all formatted as HTML composed using Microsoft Word with average message size being 118KB (ha - also very realistic).
This gives you a total of about 1.4 TB and the ratios all equal out the same as when using a 3MB song as your base unit.
In the end it doesn't matter because Comcast just likes to be able to pick whoever they want and cut them off at the knees. It might even be different for somebody living in a very saturated area for someone who is more rural.
If you read the article, you see that there's not an engine in the thing right now.
You are correct, it appears to be just a more technical (and perhaps better) form of the "Flying Squirrel" suit. I'm not sure how that suit would work in high-altitude drops or how it compares for surface area. Also, keeping your arms and legs spread like that over a long fall is probably pretty tiring, but being able to pull them in and drop faster might be useful.
Looks fun in any case.
What the hell has Bungie been doing for the past three years?
Making beeeeeeautiful water. Duh!
Seriously, I realize you're just trolling, but even trolls need food now and again so here goes.
1) Looks almost identical to Halo 2, just with the resolution bumped up and some higher rez textures. It's the same old last gen style engine. Three years of work and people getting confused in comparison shots between Halo 2 and Halo 3 is shockingly bad for what is supposed to be the killer first party tour de force for Microsoft.
I assume you're thinking of the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. It's been said over and over that the rendering engine used in the beta is not the engine that will ship with Halo 3.
2) Has the same networking setup as last gen. The rumored dedicated servers turned out to be a pipe dream. Instead Halo 3 has the same old last gen 16 player cap per game and lag prone P2P networking for games. With all of Microsoft's money you would think they could have hired someone to actually updated the networking code to next gen levels.
Considering that Halo 3 supports 4-player online co-op, I tend to doubt that the exact same netcode drives both games. I also tend to think that the game's netcode was improved and worked on just like any other part of the game. Speaking of online lag, I'm not sure what dedicated servers would solve. I could be mistaken, but usually lag in online games is due to the players' Internet connections to the host. These connections are subject to varying disruptions and considering the realtime nature of the game, any disruptions will be very noticeable. Until everyone has 10Mbit fiber connections with 3ms latency between consoles I think lag is going to be something you just have to deal with in online play.
The same almost entirely US Xbox fans who bought the first two Halos will buy Halo 3. The rest of the gaming world will go right on not caring about the game
Uh, that's usually how sequel game releases go. Previous fans buy it, people who didn't like the first couple games won't.
Your hard drive was likely still under warranty through Seagate -- did you look into it and see if they would replace it for you?
I imagine that is the least of his worries. When I lost an 80GB drive a couple years ago I would have gladly paid several times the price of a new one if I could only have gotten the contents back. While a free replacement drive might lessen the blow somewhat--as geeky as it might sound--losing a hard drive with gigabytes of content you really care about is a gut-wrenching experience. Everything from my high school days (homework, projects, work, programming, games, music... everything) was gone in one fail swoop.
The only thing similar to it is having your house burn down. Sure insurance should cover it all, but there is no way to get back what was really lost. I suppose if nothing else it taught me the importance of hardware redundancy, though it seemed a high price to pay at the time.
Wow. Slashdot really needs a moderation option of "-1, Just Plain Wrong".
'Under this interpretation, any data stored in RAM could be subject to a subpoena, as at a basic level it is a "medium from which information can be obtained" just like a hard drive. '
Okay, no problem. I'll just shut the server down and pull the hard drive and memory DIMMs out for you. Go ahead and "obtain" whatever information you like.
The first time I tried it failed (for obvious reasons - the server should be overloaded as it was 2-3 hours after the release), but after that it worked fine.
:)
Somewhat off-topic, but if this isn't a sign of the times I don't know what is. You shelled out $50-60 of hard-earned money to buy a game immediately after it's released and what's your reward? You sit and wait for hours while the moron publisher's servers get overloaded with "activation" requests. And here in this comment, instead of showing irritation or annoyance, you just accept this as normal (not saying you weren't pissed then of course
Funny, I remember when you would buy a game and could take it home and play it right away. Of course technology has progressed since then - now companies can alienate honest customers while adding a few hours to the time it takes to crack the copy protection. Steam is one of the worst things to happen to computer gaming in a long time.
If that's not progress, I don't know what is.
Troll status: Failed.
I picked a project at random that sounded neat (the multi-RDP tool) and here's the limits imposed by the license (MS-CL):
I'm no expert on it, but it sounds strikingly similar to the GPL in terms of limits and goals. I'm sure different projects can use different licenses (just as well known FOSS projects do), so this might not apply to all the projects on the site. The point is that these projects are open-source, however they may have limits imposed the same way the GPL, CC, BSD, etc licenses do.
How is this censorship? Like any other store, Walmart chooses what they will and will not stock. Regardless of what you personally think of Walmart, they got where they are by making smart (perhaps sometimes ruthless) business decisions. I know this might be hard for some Slashdotters to believe, but what about people who want censored, or a 'radio edit' of a song? Besides, nobody is forcing you to shop at Walmart, and if you want to buy music there then you get what they sell. I don't see how the "censorship" issue is news at all.
Hurrah for dropping DRM though. Be interesting to see how long this will last and if there is any repercussion. One nice thing about Walmart is that it's big enough to just smile give the bird to the RIAA.
No, obviously the rock was made of kryptonite, which leads to one prime (bald) suspect...
Look, I know he's Slashdot's favorite whipping boy, but would it be possible to leave Ballmer out of just one discussion!?
Disney teaches Copyright
Haha!
"The public domain is a disgrace to the forces of Evil."
That line alone made the video worth watching. However... if... I had... to... watch... much more... of... that... I think... I... would... go... insane... and start... killing... people... just to... make... the pain... stop.
Ms said that the table was a vast step forward. They did not say that they developed it. Just that they are going to build them.
This is basically true, however the idea behind an "innovative" product is nothing without an implementation. There was nothing especially amazing about the first iPod that Apple released - it was just another MP3 player - except for the software. The iPod's user interface was what set the device apart. In the same manner, Microsoft's implementation of the Surface UI (written completely in C# and WPF - Microsoft's own products) is, from what I've seen, very impressive. And yes, as with any UI concept the basic idea has long been discussed and long been in development by a lot of different people.
Once these tables are more readily available I anticipate seeing some cool new ways to interact with them using F/OSS software. Regardless of how much you might dislike Microsoft, they are one of the few entities that have the capital to bring a device like this to the market. However, once it's out, there is nothing stopping people from digging in and finding other great things you can do with it (see the original Xbox and all the great software now available for it).
And just to preempt the comment I'm sure is coming: I'm sure the tables will have some form of DRM or hardware locking in place. Unfortunately Microsoft will see this as the only way to protect their investment; however, there are a lot of very smart people out there, and if the tables do become popular and more of a commodity item the preventative measures Microsoft puts in place will be blown away - just like every other artificial restriction to date has.
If not, you can always order it after-market: http://www.delorean.com/dmcstore/onlinestore-searc h.asp. POST prevents me from linking, but search for flux capacitor. :)
I stand by what I said.
So fuck off, moron. How's that?
Resorting to profanity has clearly given you the upper hand. I should have known better than to rebuke your original post.
Uhm, how do you get thousands actually open if XP cuts off all incoming connections at 10?
/.'ers are so biased that they'd rather spew BS than take a few minutes to learn the truth, but this is truly a step above the rest! I salute you sir - you've taken it to an entirely new level!
This is perhaps the stupidest and most incorrect thing I've read on Slashdot in some time. I know most
For anyone interested in facts, service pack 2 for XP introduced a new limit of 10 concurrent half-open outgoing connections. By half-open, it basically is akin to calling somebody and waiting for them to pick up the phone. While their phone rings, the connection is half-open. SP2 does limit these to 10, but there is a queue, and as connections are accepted or time out, others are processed.
If you really want to, there are patches out there for the TCP DLL that allow you to change the limit of 10 to anything you want (up to the previous 65,535).
See? Learning is fun!
On several sites that allow commenting, people are posting the spoilers. I've already had the book ruined for me unexpectedly
Hell, that sucks. Although I haven't read the books but I'm trying to avoid spoilers. Really, I don't worry that much about explicit ones. Rather I am more concerned about subliminal spoilers. Yeah, the tinfoil hat is at full power.
Don't worry about it I guess. In the end the result should be the same. Either you'll enjoy the book or you won't. Subliminal messages are what you want to watch out for - they're harder to block.
Yeah, I mean, General Failure outranks the Colonel, right?
:)
Funniest thing on Slashdot so far today (even if it is only 01:30), but I would have thought General Protection Fault outranks the Colonel
It's just a marketing ploy by Micro$oft so they can say "look at us & all the games you can play through xbox live."
When you're done talking out of your ass, you might take a second and re-read (or just plain read) TFS.
These are backwards-compatibility updates. They allow you to play original Xbox games on the 360. So no, it's not a marketing ploy, it's called customer satisfaction. They make no money by providing these updates, they do it for gamers who own Xbox games and still want to play them.
I can understand not RTFA, but for frak's sake - RTFS!
5.31 with classic skin here. 1387 tracks, 21.75GB, 5.8M memory used. really bloated.
Perhaps I should clarify: I was more meaning feature bloat, not necessarily resources (though usually the latter follows the first).
How much CPU time has 5.x used after playing for a couple hours? With 2.91 I see a similar memory footprint, and usually less than 5-8 seconds of CPU usage for several hours of playing (depends what I've been doing).
WinAmp 2.95 is the great one.
I agree that WinAmp 2.x series was and is classic. However, I actually use 2.91 because 2.95 appears to have some bugs, specifically with the windowshade mode.
I tried 3.x and 5.x but both are just too bloated an application when all I want to do is play MP3s. I don't understand why every software company feels the need to make their applications get more and more bloated with unwanted/unneeded features.
No, we are not humanoid because it is efficient, we are humanoid because that's just the way it turned out, and it wasn't detrimental to breeding.
People ascribe far too much purpose and design to evolution.
IANAB, but what you're describing comes off sounding more like random chance than evolution. I understand what you're saying about breeding, but if we're talking about other species from Earth-like planets, it seems like there are relatively good chances that they are at least recognizable as "humanoid".
I just figure that on this planet, of all the various body types, ours won out. We walk upright, probably because we began to use our forearms less and less for locomotion and instead for manipulating tools and our environment. We're bipedal because (at least on this planet) essentially every non-insect animal has four limbs. Our brains are a certain size, owing to sentience and mental capacity, and they are where they are because they're close to our sensory organs (eyes, nose, mouth, ears).
The biggest chance I can see for differences are mostly due to climate. A brighter/more intense sun might mean differences in skin makeup. A colder climate might mean fur. Small things like perhaps six fingers/toes are probably guaranteed. I really am just pulling this all out of thin air, never had a class on it, so if I'm wrong I'm sure someone will correct me. I just figure that unless we're talking about some weird silicon-based aliens from a volcano planet, it seems reasonable to expect something of a resemblance.
yum -y update; shutdown -r now;
Slightly off-topic, but I'd suggest changing that to yum -y update && shutdown -r now. Using "&&" in leiu of ";" will prevent the system from rebooting if the call to yum isn't successful (can't contact a server, whatever). On many systems you can even replace "shutdown -r now" with simply "reboot".
Is it me or do tags like "Dupe" no longer show up?
I think Tags were revamped a while ago, and as a result the fun tags don't show up anymore.
Personally, I don't bother with them any longer. When you could tag something "fud", "yes", "no", "itsatrap", "omgponies", "09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0", etc it was a fun way to comment on a story (even if it is the epitome of groupthink). I thought the tags gave Slashdot users another interesting way to communicate, and to express the general sentiment of a story.
Sorry Taco, but Tags are boring and useless now. Bring back the old ones or do away with these.
No dragging? I stopped watching when it went from sci-fi to soap-opera-in-space.
THANK YOU! I thought I was the only one getting sick and tired of anticipating science fiction and instead, week after week, finding myself tuned in to All My Cylons.
As much as I love good portions of the show, it's fairly obvious (he says so right in the commentaries) that Ronald Moore is pulling the story out of his ass week after week, and that if the Cylons really do have a plan, they never shared it with him. With this announcement, he must figure that either A) he can't keep that up and he doesn't want to sit down and write the overall arc or B) he's tired of fans whining about his "character-oriented" masterpieces such as A Day in the Life and Unfinished Business.
I'd love to see the show go on longer, but not if the last season was any indication of things to come.