I was born to reproduce, to cover the universe with offspring.
That's just your biological urge. Every living thing has this mechanism. We also all have biological urges to A. Fuck anything that moves and B. Kill our enemies. Yet, we live in what we'd like to think to be a more enlightened society/culture, so we surpress those urges. Do you honestly, objectively, as a thinking, sentient human being, think that humans spreading like a plague across the universe is the best thing? I know that I don't. Humans are stupid and destructive.
OK, I can only assume that this would be true for most species, also... so what I'm wondering is, what non-human animals have bigger brains than humans? Any biologist geeks here know this? And if this *is* true, and there are animals with larger brains then ours, then it may be time to re-evaluate what we traditionally think of intelligent. Personally, I think that humans are an evolutionary dead end.
We already have terraforming on a massive scale right here on Earth. Massive walls. Massive dams. Massive strip mining. Flattening mountains. Canals. The irrigation of deserts. Hell, even something as simple as bulldozing a swamp for yet another Wal-Mart is terraforming. It's here. It's been here. And to answer the question... I think it's hubris, and when not done properly, you get what you have in the US... lots and lots and lots and lots of flat, paved parking lots that all look the same. We still don't adequately understand the consequences of what we do on a large scale like this (or even a small scale), but I'm guessing that it can't be good.
Paypal rocks. I wouldn't have sent money if it wasn't for paypal.
I hate to say it, but you're lumped in with all of these ignorant people asking for more government control of the Net... You see, PayPal is a private, for-profit corporation... NOT a bank. If they decide to hold your funds, not refund them, not pay you, etc. (they do this frequently.. I have lots of secondhand experience from friends and family being fucked by them) it's up to you to get a lawyer and sue them in court. If you paid with a credit card, you have federal laws making the credit card companies (Visa, MC, Amex, Discover) liable for refunding your money if you get defrauded. You got very lucky, even though you made two stupid decisons here. Next time, use your credit card, and get rid of your PayPal account.
[Tyler]In the world I see -- you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life. You will climb the wrist-think kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and laying-strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the ruins of a superhighway.
I had never heard of these guys before the other day when Slashdot had another article from them. It looks like their new advertising campaign is going great. Does anybody know what it costs to get Slashdot to start pointing to your own web site as "articles"? I don't personally have a business that would benefit, but I do have a friend who may be interested in doing the same thing that these guys at CoolTechZone.com have obviously done.
Is the real situation so that infact majority of our "first world" countries citizens can throw away the cost of a DVD player any time they want?
No, people just *think* they can. Wait until a credit crunch hits... much of the first world (especially US of Americans) will be broke. We're watching the beginnings of it now... it's exciting! Once this real estate bubble pops, everybody with those handy-dandy interest-only mortgages will be *fucked*. Then, because of massive mortgage defaults, credit will go up, and credit cards won't be nearly as cheap as they are now. It'll be just... beautiful.
Maybe the future is going to be web-based applications, and it really won't matter what your computer runs, so long as it has a decent web browser?
People still watch TV? No, I know that people still unfortunately watch TV. But is there still anything on TV that's worth recording? From last time I watched a TV for more than 30 seconds while walking past one in a public space, I seem to remember it being all crap, and that was years ago. There was *nothing* worth recording (which is probably why I haven't watched TV in years). The only TV that I watch is a pirated copy of The Daily Show that I occasionally will download. So somebody help me out here... am I so out of touch that I don't even realize what I'm missing, or are people just as stupid as ever?
Maybe the future is going to be web-based applications, and it really won't matter what your computer runs, so long as it has a decent web browser?
Maybe... but I personally think that web-based applications aren't even going to being to be widely accepted until broadband is 1. Much more widespread and 2. Much more reliable.
I don't know how long these things will take to become reality, but you're probably right.
People may respect, or even like Windows, but does anyone really "love" it in the sense that many love Linux, BSD or MacOS?
I love Windows no more than I love the hammer sitting next to me or the tape dispenser next to that. They all work as they're supposed to such an extent that I rarely think about any of them in that way. People "loving" OSX is simply a terrible side effect of consumerism gone rampant. I personally seel people "loving" any consumer product to the extent that Apple people do as a real mental illness, or at the very least, a sign that something is terribly wrong in our modern society.
Don't repeat the hoary old "Linux is difficult to install" myth!
Then, can I give you my address to come over to my house to figure out why a real, printed copy of Ubuntu won't install on my generic PC that W2K installs on flawlessly?
I think the ideal may be more along the lines of 30% Apple, 30% Windows, 30% Linux, 10% (Something mysterious and new???)
Ideal??? Apparently, you don't remember the good ol' days of the Commodore/AppleII/PC clones/Amiga/PCjr/Tandy. Some people would have to run multiple computers at the same time because vendors didn't make software on all platforms. It was a nightmare for software developers, for IT people, and for users. Back in that day, if you wanted to buy boxed software, you had to read the minimum system requirement very very carefully because there were so many different platforms and configurations. You couldn't just buy a piece of software at some shithole like Wal-Mart and be sure that it was going to work on your PC.
So, to sum up... we already saw this in the 80's. And you see where it evolved to?
Wow... Lots of bad mods today. But I totally agree. Back in "the day" (early-mid 90's), I tried out lots and lots and lots of pirated software. Today, I own copies of the best in every category that I currently use (my favorite small app that I bought because of seeing & using a pirated copy, is Textpad). All the rest that I played with that I didn't like ended up getting nuked. On top of that, in my days of being a developer, I ended up having my employers buy *lots and lots* of copies of various apps that I tried pirated copies of that I couldn't afford myself (like TOAD and more recently, XMLSpy). Take what I did and multiply that by millions of geeks and you have millions (or billions) of dollars of software sold, that wouldn't otherwise be sold (because I would have had no way to try them to see if they were worth using), because of piracy.
I tried Ubuntu a few weeks ago. After the install, I got several errors related to the GUI, then I was dropped to a command prompt. Ubuntu was DOA for me. It was a generic, old-ish PC. W2K installed flawlessly an hour later (after an hour trying to dick around to get the GUI to start). Maybe it would've been fun to play with if I had lots of free time. Definitely not functional, though.
There's a mention of databases in the article summary (which peaked my interest), but the article was ONLY about web servers (snore). What kind of summary was that?
If I knew *specifically* what was wrong, I'd fix it, assuming the fix was worth the effort. We're a small retail business, and a web browser isn't critical to what we do, so in my estimate, it wasn't worth the time to even research the problem. Been using it for a while. The app did the little update indicator, we updated, it never launched again. Just hung. Again, open source doesn't help me at all. If it's broken, I'm not even going to look into it, never mind try plumbing around in source code. That's just insane. If a program can't install and launch in this day and age, it's not worth my time. So no, I don't care what the specifics are, any more than I'd try to troubleshoot a $5 alarm clock I bought at Wal-Mart.
Now if it were an *important* piece of software, like our point of sale system, even then, I wouldn't bother looking at the code. I'll call the company up and tell them to get me a fix. Fast. Much, much, much more time(and cost) efficient. (And yes, it happens on occasion, and the fix is always much, much, much easier then me (the owner) learning Java, or hiring a Java coder to look at the guts of the program).
Personally, I think it would be a mistake that they not include an HDD with the console, but considering the rumoured cost of the PS3, it is probably doubtful that it will include one at launch.
What's the point of a hard drive in a console? Put in CD. Play. Save to a little memory card thingy. A hard drive just adds to the amount of stuff that can break/get FUBAR'ed. If I want to dick around with stuff that needs a hard drive (ie: more complexity), I'll sit in front of my computer.
I do run a business, in fact. And yes, I could pay somebody a small fortune to review patches for me. With most applications, TCO is already down the toilet just with the time it would take to *find* somebody who could do it, never mind actually paying the person. Case in point... the last Firefox upgrade broke all of our machines (Firefox quit working on all of my machines... I hope that was all that was effected). IE has never done that. Insignficiant program, true, but what am I supposed to do... hire somebody to review each of Firefox's releases to tell me whether or not they'll work? Am I supposed to spend, what, $10-20K to have a Unix programmer come in to analyze the latest Firefox build and tell me where the problem is? That's insane. Instead, we simply removed Firefox from all of our machines, and went with IE, which was already properly tested before being pushed out to users. Much cheaper. Much simpler. Much quicker time for me to get back to the core of my business (which trying to get broken web browsers to work).
It's closed source; Closed architecture; Closed development processes. They could be throwing code together like monkeys and making all this stuff up for the PR value. Who knows?
And how, exactly, am I to be any better re-assured with Open Source? I can't read the code. I don't know anybody who can. And if I do find somebody who says, "There's a bug in application X", how do I know I can believe them? This whole "everybody can check out the code thing" is really just idealistic fluff to make people feel better, honestly.
What I'm wondering is what is broken with the whole directory/folder design? I wasn't aware that there was a problem. And what's the alternative... every file is stored on the hard drive in some arbitrary location, and a query is needed for each and every file access? That seems like a *ton* of overhead to fix a problem that just doesn't exist.
And what about file systems? I know that modern file systems like NTFS are much better at optimizing file storage for large drives with millions of discrete files, but are all of the modern ones ready to handle a drive with millions of files all at root?
There has the inherent danger in this process, of dumbing everyone down.
Ni, it's called specialization. Case in point. I run a business. I run a retail business that sells stuff. I'm *not* in the business of administering/programming computers. Sure, they're an important part of my business, but MY BUSINESS is knowing my products, and offering them at reasonable prices, and educating customers. It's not "dumbing down", but specialization. The same can be said of any profession. Not everybody on the planet is supposed to be a computer programmer any more than everybody on the planet should be an auto mechanic.
If you're gonna troll, you really should do it logged in, so that more people will see your post. Granted, it would've been modded down to -1 in about a nanosecond, but still... any yahoo can troll as an AC.
Slashdot Mirror
Next, let's "study" skin color.
No, you're right. Let's ignore science and facts so that we don't offend anybody. Do you work for the Bush Administration by any chance?
I was born to reproduce, to cover the universe with offspring.
That's just your biological urge. Every living thing has this mechanism. We also all have biological urges to A. Fuck anything that moves and B. Kill our enemies. Yet, we live in what we'd like to think to be a more enlightened society/culture, so we surpress those urges. Do you honestly, objectively, as a thinking, sentient human being, think that humans spreading like a plague across the universe is the best thing? I know that I don't. Humans are stupid and destructive.
OK, I can only assume that this would be true for most species, also... so what I'm wondering is, what non-human animals have bigger brains than humans? Any biologist geeks here know this? And if this *is* true, and there are animals with larger brains then ours, then it may be time to re-evaluate what we traditionally think of intelligent. Personally, I think that humans are an evolutionary dead end.
We already have terraforming on a massive scale right here on Earth. Massive walls. Massive dams. Massive strip mining. Flattening mountains. Canals. The irrigation of deserts. Hell, even something as simple as bulldozing a swamp for yet another Wal-Mart is terraforming. It's here. It's been here. And to answer the question... I think it's hubris, and when not done properly, you get what you have in the US... lots and lots and lots and lots of flat, paved parking lots that all look the same. We still don't adequately understand the consequences of what we do on a large scale like this (or even a small scale), but I'm guessing that it can't be good.
Paypal rocks. I wouldn't have sent money if it wasn't for paypal.
I hate to say it, but you're lumped in with all of these ignorant people asking for more government control of the Net... You see, PayPal is a private, for-profit corporation... NOT a bank. If they decide to hold your funds, not refund them, not pay you, etc. (they do this frequently.. I have lots of secondhand experience from friends and family being fucked by them) it's up to you to get a lawyer and sue them in court. If you paid with a credit card, you have federal laws making the credit card companies (Visa, MC, Amex, Discover) liable for refunding your money if you get defrauded. You got very lucky, even though you made two stupid decisons here. Next time, use your credit card, and get rid of your PayPal account.
[Tyler]In the world I see -- you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life. You will climb the wrist-think kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and laying-strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the ruins of a superhighway.
I had never heard of these guys before the other day when Slashdot had another article from them. It looks like their new advertising campaign is going great. Does anybody know what it costs to get Slashdot to start pointing to your own web site as "articles"? I don't personally have a business that would benefit, but I do have a friend who may be interested in doing the same thing that these guys at CoolTechZone.com have obviously done.
Is the real situation so that infact majority of our "first world" countries citizens can throw away the cost of a DVD player any time they want?
No, people just *think* they can. Wait until a credit crunch hits... much of the first world (especially US of Americans) will be broke. We're watching the beginnings of it now... it's exciting! Once this real estate bubble pops, everybody with those handy-dandy interest-only mortgages will be *fucked*. Then, because of massive mortgage defaults, credit will go up, and credit cards won't be nearly as cheap as they are now. It'll be just... beautiful.
Maybe the future is going to be web-based applications, and it really won't matter what your computer runs, so long as it has a decent web browser?
People still watch TV? No, I know that people still unfortunately watch TV. But is there still anything on TV that's worth recording? From last time I watched a TV for more than 30 seconds while walking past one in a public space, I seem to remember it being all crap, and that was years ago. There was *nothing* worth recording (which is probably why I haven't watched TV in years). The only TV that I watch is a pirated copy of The Daily Show that I occasionally will download. So somebody help me out here... am I so out of touch that I don't even realize what I'm missing, or are people just as stupid as ever?
Maybe the future is going to be web-based applications, and it really won't matter what your computer runs, so long as it has a decent web browser?
Maybe... but I personally think that web-based applications aren't even going to being to be widely accepted until broadband is 1. Much more widespread and 2. Much more reliable.
I don't know how long these things will take to become reality, but you're probably right.
Cross platform development has gone a long ways in the past 5 years, let alone the past 20.
Please don't tell me you're talking about client-side Java...
People may respect, or even like Windows, but does anyone really "love" it in the sense that many love Linux, BSD or MacOS?
I love Windows no more than I love the hammer sitting next to me or the tape dispenser next to that. They all work as they're supposed to such an extent that I rarely think about any of them in that way. People "loving" OSX is simply a terrible side effect of consumerism gone rampant. I personally seel people "loving" any consumer product to the extent that Apple people do as a real mental illness, or at the very least, a sign that something is terribly wrong in our modern society.
Don't repeat the hoary old "Linux is difficult to install" myth!
Then, can I give you my address to come over to my house to figure out why a real, printed copy of Ubuntu won't install on my generic PC that W2K installs on flawlessly?
I think the ideal may be more along the lines of 30% Apple, 30% Windows, 30% Linux, 10% (Something mysterious and new???)
Ideal??? Apparently, you don't remember the good ol' days of the Commodore/AppleII/PC clones/Amiga/PCjr/Tandy. Some people would have to run multiple computers at the same time because vendors didn't make software on all platforms. It was a nightmare for software developers, for IT people, and for users. Back in that day, if you wanted to buy boxed software, you had to read the minimum system requirement very very carefully because there were so many different platforms and configurations. You couldn't just buy a piece of software at some shithole like Wal-Mart and be sure that it was going to work on your PC.
So, to sum up... we already saw this in the 80's. And you see where it evolved to?
Well, "pirated" in the sense that I initially used it longer than the trial period.
Wow... Lots of bad mods today. But I totally agree. Back in "the day" (early-mid 90's), I tried out lots and lots and lots of pirated software. Today, I own copies of the best in every category that I currently use (my favorite small app that I bought because of seeing & using a pirated copy, is Textpad). All the rest that I played with that I didn't like ended up getting nuked. On top of that, in my days of being a developer, I ended up having my employers buy *lots and lots* of copies of various apps that I tried pirated copies of that I couldn't afford myself (like TOAD and more recently, XMLSpy). Take what I did and multiply that by millions of geeks and you have millions (or billions) of dollars of software sold, that wouldn't otherwise be sold (because I would have had no way to try them to see if they were worth using), because of piracy.
I tried Ubuntu a few weeks ago. After the install, I got several errors related to the GUI, then I was dropped to a command prompt. Ubuntu was DOA for me. It was a generic, old-ish PC. W2K installed flawlessly an hour later (after an hour trying to dick around to get the GUI to start). Maybe it would've been fun to play with if I had lots of free time. Definitely not functional, though.
There's a mention of databases in the article summary (which peaked my interest), but the article was ONLY about web servers (snore). What kind of summary was that?
If I knew *specifically* what was wrong, I'd fix it, assuming the fix was worth the effort. We're a small retail business, and a web browser isn't critical to what we do, so in my estimate, it wasn't worth the time to even research the problem. Been using it for a while. The app did the little update indicator, we updated, it never launched again. Just hung. Again, open source doesn't help me at all. If it's broken, I'm not even going to look into it, never mind try plumbing around in source code. That's just insane. If a program can't install and launch in this day and age, it's not worth my time. So no, I don't care what the specifics are, any more than I'd try to troubleshoot a $5 alarm clock I bought at Wal-Mart.
Now if it were an *important* piece of software, like our point of sale system, even then, I wouldn't bother looking at the code. I'll call the company up and tell them to get me a fix. Fast. Much, much, much more time(and cost) efficient. (And yes, it happens on occasion, and the fix is always much, much, much easier then me (the owner) learning Java, or hiring a Java coder to look at the guts of the program).
Personally, I think it would be a mistake that they not include an HDD with the console, but considering the rumoured cost of the PS3, it is probably doubtful that it will include one at launch.
What's the point of a hard drive in a console? Put in CD. Play. Save to a little memory card thingy. A hard drive just adds to the amount of stuff that can break/get FUBAR'ed. If I want to dick around with stuff that needs a hard drive (ie: more complexity), I'll sit in front of my computer.
I do run a business, in fact. And yes, I could pay somebody a small fortune to review patches for me. With most applications, TCO is already down the toilet just with the time it would take to *find* somebody who could do it, never mind actually paying the person. Case in point... the last Firefox upgrade broke all of our machines (Firefox quit working on all of my machines... I hope that was all that was effected). IE has never done that. Insignficiant program, true, but what am I supposed to do... hire somebody to review each of Firefox's releases to tell me whether or not they'll work? Am I supposed to spend, what, $10-20K to have a Unix programmer come in to analyze the latest Firefox build and tell me where the problem is? That's insane. Instead, we simply removed Firefox from all of our machines, and went with IE, which was already properly tested before being pushed out to users. Much cheaper. Much simpler. Much quicker time for me to get back to the core of my business (which trying to get broken web browsers to work).
It's closed source; Closed architecture; Closed development processes. They could be throwing code together like monkeys and making all this stuff up for the PR value. Who knows?
And how, exactly, am I to be any better re-assured with Open Source? I can't read the code. I don't know anybody who can. And if I do find somebody who says, "There's a bug in application X", how do I know I can believe them? This whole "everybody can check out the code thing" is really just idealistic fluff to make people feel better, honestly.
What I'm wondering is what is broken with the whole directory/folder design? I wasn't aware that there was a problem. And what's the alternative... every file is stored on the hard drive in some arbitrary location, and a query is needed for each and every file access? That seems like a *ton* of overhead to fix a problem that just doesn't exist.
And what about file systems? I know that modern file systems like NTFS are much better at optimizing file storage for large drives with millions of discrete files, but are all of the modern ones ready to handle a drive with millions of files all at root?
There has the inherent danger in this process, of dumbing everyone down.
Ni, it's called specialization. Case in point. I run a business. I run a retail business that sells stuff. I'm *not* in the business of administering/programming computers. Sure, they're an important part of my business, but MY BUSINESS is knowing my products, and offering them at reasonable prices, and educating customers. It's not "dumbing down", but specialization. The same can be said of any profession. Not everybody on the planet is supposed to be a computer programmer any more than everybody on the planet should be an auto mechanic.
If you're gonna troll, you really should do it logged in, so that more people will see your post. Granted, it would've been modded down to -1 in about a nanosecond, but still... any yahoo can troll as an AC.