Wonder at the unknown is a big theme. Religion, however, seeks to truncate that curiosity by providing invented answers that make further inquiry redundant in the minds of its believers. I do not feel that it is an uplifting theme at all. Unfortunately it will continue to be with us for a long, long time.
Any really good complex game always gets trashed on by game reviewers because they don't have the time to really learn it before dropping it and starting on the next game. So if the learning curve is hard, they just throw their hands up and go, "oooh, it's too confusing." and give up. It's kind of like trying to get someone to review the C language who's only been doing it for a week, or a review of "vi" by someone who's only been trying it for a day. If a tool or game has good value *later* but bad value *at first*, it gets a bad review. If it has good value at first, but is limited so it doesn't have good re-use value, this doesn't get reported by the reviewer who hasn't had it that long.
C) Give up on Linux, and allow Windows XP to be your desktop platform. Install Cygwin for the Unixy things you need, and then realize that most of your development work (as in, for pay) is Java-based anyway and that you might as well stick with Windows for a better desktop experience.
If Windows was a better desktop experience, then that comment would be relevant. I like Linux for the control it gives me over what happens, and that is definately part of the desktop experience. I don't understand why Linux desktops are trying to hard to emulate Windows. It's the terrible Windows look and feel that prompted me to leave it in the first place.
Now I'll say this and I'm not trolling or looking for flames.
Not intentionally, perhaps, but you did just make the implication that Slashdot is a hive mind, or at least you wish it was. It is not hypocritical for some slashdot posts to favor one thing and some to favor the opposite if those posts are coming from different members of slashdot.
And the truly nasty thing is that the incompetence of the patent office *causes* people to feel a need to flood them with more patents, which furthers the problem. Getting your idea into their patent database seems to be the only way to ensure that they don't give someone else a patent for the same idea, since their attempts to search for prior art outside their own database are obviously failing, assuming they're even still trying at all (there doesn't seem to be evidence that they are.)
Yes, it makes perfects sense. How many people link to "autoPron"? If not many, then the algorithm ranks it low. As it should be. That means it's not a well known site.
No, Google is a reference to the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which is called "google". It was meant to be a reference to the massive size of the undertaking - making a complete working catalogue of the internet.
Using "google" as a verb should be just fine... as long as you are talking about using Google to do your search.
I agree wholeheartedly. For the same reason, I never say I Photoshopped an image if I was actually Gimping it. (And that's a peeve I have with SomethingAwful.Com's Photoshop Phriday. Their rules don't specify that the images must be edited with photoshop, but they use the term.)
I don't think people are exploring the OTHER angle here - that when a product's name becomes the ubiquitous generic term for that class of products, it's good press for that product, and bad press for the rest. Every time you use "photoshop" to genericly describe the process of image editing, you are hurting the publicity of Gimp.
6 years ago. I doubt the things that made it suck went away, since they are part of the inherent design philosophy. Like using whitespace as the only separator between terms, and having no syntax more complex than a list of whitespace separated terms. Those things in and of themselves made it terrible. The emphasis seemed to be on making life easier for the parser maker, not the language's users.
Try telling that to SGI, who tried selling their machines as servers as well as desktops. One of the side effects of having machings with good graphics ability is that you also produce machines that are good a number crunching in general. The place I am referring to was a biochemistry research facility who used big SGI servers because they crunched numbers fast, and because there was a lot of scientific visualization software for SGI. But even scientists need their e-mail and web services working, and when you have a honking huge SGI in house, you make use of it.
Tcl: redeeming qualities: It had 1 and only 1 - the Tk toolkit. Tcl was the first scripting language to support a GUI on top. That's the ONLY reason it ever became popular, as far as I can tell. Once Tk got ported to more sane scripting languages, the interest in tcl faded.
I hate SGI because of all the stuff NOT related to 3d that they really suck at - like system administration and getting timely updates. To give an example of what I mean they were the last major Unix vendor to finally move off of the old sendmail.conf file format and onto the newer m4 macro-based format, which made it impossible to implement sendmail security bug fixes suggested by net security houses, since they were all couched in terms of the newer sendmail format that didn't work on SGI's. (at the time.) All in all I think SGI really knows its stuff when it comes to 3D, but they should have concentrated on 3D software and hardware for OTHER people's OS'es instead of trying to publish a unix OS themselves and wasting effort on something they weren't as good at. For programming, Irix rocks. For adminning, it's a royal pain. Unfortunately the second is required before you can do the first.
The stats you quote are meaningless without the resolution and color depth given. 20-30 FPS at 320x320x16 is a totally different animal from 20-30 FPS at 2048x1024x256, for example, and the difference is precisely in memory usage.
If you are saying it doesn't make BUSINESS sense for intel to cater to a small market like that, it's true. But that's not how you phrased it. You said it makes no sense for this guy to have what he has on his desktop and that's not necessarily true. It just doesn't make business sense to support it when few people have that need (But if this guy is one of that few, it was wrong of you to say his need was pointless. Not to him it isn't.)
These days people are doing 3D at higher resolutions than before, so the better technology goes to compensate for that instead of going to reduce the amount of RAM needed.
I realize the technical details weren't the thrust of the articles, but that doesn't mean they have to just randomly make things up instead of telling the truth. Look at these quotes:
Second, Intel Corp., the dominant maker of processors for PCs, loosened its tight links with Microsoft and started making chips for Linux.
Before using open-source software, tech companies must sign a license in which they promise to give away innovations they build on top of it.
Since when did Intel start "making chips for linux" (Well, I guess technically ever since the 386, in a way.)
Since when did the GPL become synonymous with all of open source? (Not that they got the GPL all that accurate in the first place.)
I'd believe that if OSX ran on something other than Mac hardware. Apple is in the position where graphics hardware flexability isn't something they have to deal with, so they can put calls in the low level drivers that might not be implementable on some video cards. Apple doesn't care because they control which cards will exist in the user's computer.
Ah, okay. That's not possible without making the entire border that wide too, because the border and the contents of the window are handled by seperate programs, and the program controlling the interior might not know that it's lower-right corner is going to get obscured by the window manager. If, to use an example that's right in front of my eyes right now, Mozilla was being run under a window manager that does what you mention, then the "lock/not lock" icon that communicates if the page is ssl encrypted would not be visible, becasue the resizer corner would cover it up.
Having such a thing really requires a system without a seperate window manager, like what Windows does - but then that causes it's own slew of usablity problems (like being unable to move a window when its application inside isn't paying attention (like when it's hung with the hourglass icon mouse.).)
The complaints you refer to have nothing to do with the design of the UI and everything to do with having control over the hardware. A Mac programmer coding OSX knows precisely what can and can't be done by the hardware. Someone coding to an open architecture, which can work over a network, can't make that assumption, so more has to be done in high-level software instead of relying on the low level graphics calls to have it implemented for you.
Scrollbars on the left only make sense if the mouse pointed the other way. Since it is slanted the way it is, putting the mouse on a left scrollbar makes the mouse image obscure some of the pane you are looking at to scroll.
It's popular because of functionality not looks. With Gnome's reduced configurability also comes reduced functionality. I used to prefer Gnome over KDE for precisely that reason, back when Gnome was more customizable than KDE. Now when I get tired of Gnome 1.x, I'll probably move to KDE instead of Gnome 2, since they seem hell-bent on destroying my desktop functionality. (Hint: I DON'T WANT a GUI that is just as bad as limiting as Windows' GUI. IF I did, I'd be using Windows.)
The main thing keeping me away from KDE has been that the window manager was developed by people who don't seem to understand that keyboard focus choice (follow/sloppy/click) needs to be a sepearate choice from window raising. (Just because I'd like to click to focus doesn't mean I want the window I click in to come to the front when I do like it does in Windows. The old Sun OpenWindows worked this way, the old fvwm and fvwm2 supported it, but few of the modern window managers seem to. I picked Gnome 1.x because it let you pick a different window manager if you want so I could fix that problem. It looks like Gnome 2.0 is taking a different tack - one I don't like.
I could actually maximize a window just horizontally, just vertically, or maximize both! Now with GNOME 2, all I can do is maximize both...
If you didn't have a use for that then it's fine that you only want to do maximization both ways, But was it right to throw the functionality away for those of us that actually found it useful? Thanks to the complainers, I have loss of vertical mazimization to look forward to when I finally have to upgrade GUIs. (I use vertical-only maximization frequently because I want to keep a window exactly 80 characters wide, but as tall as possible.)
Every theme I've used, for all window managers has had lower-right-hand-corder resize. Which ones have you been using? My complaint is that resizability is often ONLY possible from that lower corner, and that's just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Wonder at the unknown is a big theme. Religion, however, seeks to truncate that curiosity by providing invented answers that make further inquiry redundant in the minds of its believers. I do not feel that it is an uplifting theme at all. Unfortunately it will continue to be with us for a long, long time.
Any really good complex game always gets trashed on by game reviewers because they don't have the time to really learn it before dropping it and starting on the next game. So if the learning curve is hard, they just throw their hands up and go, "oooh, it's too confusing." and give up. It's kind of like trying to get someone to review the C language who's only been doing it for a week, or a review of "vi" by someone who's only been trying it for a day. If a tool or game has good value *later* but bad value *at first*, it gets a bad review. If it has good value at first, but is limited so it doesn't have good re-use value, this doesn't get reported by the reviewer who hasn't had it that long.
If Windows was a better desktop experience, then that comment would be relevant. I like Linux for the control it gives me over what happens, and that is definately part of the desktop experience. I don't understand why Linux desktops are trying to hard to emulate Windows. It's the terrible Windows look and feel that prompted me to leave it in the first place.
Not intentionally, perhaps, but you did just make the implication that Slashdot is a hive mind, or at least you wish it was. It is not hypocritical for some slashdot posts to favor one thing and some to favor the opposite if those posts are coming from different members of slashdot.
And the truly nasty thing is that the incompetence of the patent office *causes* people to feel a need to flood them with more patents, which furthers the problem. Getting your idea into their patent database seems to be the only way to ensure that they don't give someone else a patent for the same idea, since their attempts to search for prior art outside their own database are obviously failing, assuming they're even still trying at all (there doesn't seem to be evidence that they are.)
And that difference would be what, exactly? I don't see it (from a file versioning point of view.)
Yes, it makes perfects sense. How many people link to "autoPron"? If not many, then the algorithm ranks it low. As it should be. That means it's not a well known site.
No, Google is a reference to the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which is called "google". It was meant to be a reference to the massive size of the undertaking - making a complete working catalogue of the internet.
I agree wholeheartedly. For the same reason, I never say I Photoshopped an image if I was actually Gimping it. (And that's a peeve I have with SomethingAwful.Com's Photoshop Phriday. Their rules don't specify that the images must be edited with photoshop, but they use the term.)
I don't think people are exploring the OTHER angle here - that when a product's name becomes the ubiquitous generic term for that class of products, it's good press for that product, and bad press for the rest. Every time you use "photoshop" to genericly describe the process of image editing, you are hurting the publicity of Gimp.
Google: (v) To multiply something by 10^100.
What the hell does that have to do with search engines?
6 years ago. I doubt the things that made it suck went away, since they are part of the inherent design philosophy. Like using whitespace as the only separator between terms, and having no syntax more complex than a list of whitespace separated terms. Those things in and of themselves made it terrible. The emphasis seemed to be on making life easier for the parser maker, not the language's users.
Try telling that to SGI, who tried selling their machines as servers as well as desktops. One of the side effects of having machings with good graphics ability is that you also produce machines that are good a number crunching in general. The place I am referring to was a biochemistry research facility who used big SGI servers because they crunched numbers fast, and because there was a lot of scientific visualization software for SGI. But even scientists need their e-mail and web services working, and when you have a honking huge SGI in house, you make use of it.
Tcl: redeeming qualities: It had 1 and only 1 - the Tk toolkit. Tcl was the first scripting language to support a GUI on top. That's the ONLY reason it ever became popular, as far as I can tell. Once Tk got ported to more sane scripting languages, the interest in tcl faded.
I hate SGI because of all the stuff NOT related to 3d that they really suck at - like system administration and getting timely updates. To give an example of what I mean they were the last major Unix vendor to finally move off of the old sendmail.conf file format and onto the newer m4 macro-based format, which made it impossible to implement sendmail security bug fixes suggested by net security houses, since they were all couched in terms of the newer sendmail format that didn't work on SGI's. (at the time.) All in all I think SGI really knows its stuff when it comes to 3D, but they should have concentrated on 3D software and hardware for OTHER people's OS'es instead of trying to publish a unix OS themselves and wasting effort on something they weren't as good at. For programming, Irix rocks. For adminning, it's a royal pain. Unfortunately the second is required before you can do the first.
The stats you quote are meaningless without the resolution and color depth given. 20-30 FPS at 320x320x16 is a totally different animal from 20-30 FPS at 2048x1024x256, for example, and the difference is precisely in memory usage.
If you are saying it doesn't make BUSINESS sense for intel to cater to a small market like that, it's true. But that's not how you phrased it. You said it makes no sense for this guy to have what he has on his desktop and that's not necessarily true. It just doesn't make business sense to support it when few people have that need (But if this guy is one of that few, it was wrong of you to say his need was pointless. Not to him it isn't.)
These days people are doing 3D at higher resolutions than before, so the better technology goes to compensate for that instead of going to reduce the amount of RAM needed.
Since when did Intel start "making chips for linux" (Well, I guess technically ever since the 386, in a way.)
Since when did the GPL become synonymous with all of open source? (Not that they got the GPL all that accurate in the first place.)
I'd believe that if OSX ran on something other than Mac hardware. Apple is in the position where graphics hardware flexability isn't something they have to deal with, so they can put calls in the low level drivers that might not be implementable on some video cards. Apple doesn't care because they control which cards will exist in the user's computer.
Ah, okay. That's not possible without making the entire border that wide too, because the border and the contents of the window are handled by seperate programs, and the program controlling the interior might not know that it's lower-right corner is going to get obscured by the window manager. If, to use an example that's right in front of my eyes right now, Mozilla was being run under a window manager that does what you mention, then the "lock/not lock" icon that communicates if the page is ssl encrypted would not be visible, becasue the resizer corner would cover it up.
Having such a thing really requires a system without a seperate window manager, like what Windows does - but then that causes it's own slew of usablity problems (like being unable to move a window when its application inside isn't paying attention (like when it's hung with the hourglass icon mouse.).)
The complaints you refer to have nothing to do with the design of the UI and everything to do with having control over the hardware. A Mac programmer coding OSX knows precisely what can and can't be done by the hardware. Someone coding to an open architecture, which can work over a network, can't make that assumption, so more has to be done in high-level software instead of relying on the low level graphics calls to have it implemented for you.
Scrollbars on the left only make sense if the mouse pointed the other way. Since it is slanted the way it is, putting the mouse on a left scrollbar makes the mouse image obscure some of the pane you are looking at to scroll.
It's popular because of functionality not looks. With Gnome's reduced configurability also comes reduced functionality. I used to prefer Gnome over KDE for precisely that reason, back when Gnome was more customizable than KDE. Now when I get tired of Gnome 1.x, I'll probably move to KDE instead of Gnome 2, since they seem hell-bent on destroying my desktop functionality. (Hint: I DON'T WANT a GUI that is just as bad as limiting as Windows' GUI. IF I did, I'd be using Windows.)
The main thing keeping me away from KDE has been that the window manager was developed by people who don't seem to understand that keyboard focus choice (follow/sloppy/click) needs to be a sepearate choice from window raising. (Just because I'd like to click to focus doesn't mean I want the window I click in to come to the front when I do like it does in Windows. The old Sun OpenWindows worked this way, the old fvwm and fvwm2 supported it, but few of the modern window managers seem to. I picked Gnome 1.x because it let you pick a different window manager if you want so I could fix that problem. It looks like Gnome 2.0 is taking a different tack - one I don't like.
If you didn't have a use for that then it's fine that you only want to do maximization both ways, But was it right to throw the functionality away for those of us that actually found it useful? Thanks to the complainers, I have loss of vertical mazimization to look forward to when I finally have to upgrade GUIs. (I use vertical-only maximization frequently because I want to keep a window exactly 80 characters wide, but as tall as possible.)
Every theme I've used, for all window managers has had lower-right-hand-corder resize. Which ones have you been using? My complaint is that resizability is often ONLY possible from that lower corner, and that's just silly.