Usually I disagree with these rather non-technical whiners, but I found this to be right on the money this time. Besides, there's some wonderful British humor there:
Acrobat Reader
"a reputation for being as welcome as a flatulent camel in the kitchen"
Windows Update
We've been kind and not talked about Vista.
RealPlayer
"If this software turned up at your door, you'd call the police."
"... we were given software to install. 'Disable your firewall', it commanded. 'Drop dead', we replied."
Java
"Programming languages are like sewage plants: if the average user becomes aware of them, something's gone wrong."
Yahoo
"And yes, when I ask to exit the software, that's because I really want to, not because I'm having a crisis of doubt."
Flash
"There's nothing wrong with Flash, provided you don't use it to construct web sites where people want to find information..."
Not trying to convince you otherwise, but, oddly enough, two of the three games I've played on my desktop in the past 3 years actually run BETTER in linux.
That's pretty consistent with my experience, it kinda mostly works for some things but not others. My question though is have you tried to support multiple users accounts playing games in linux? I find wine/cedega makes this challenging enough to be not worth trying. You?
why must someone be "uninformed" to use Windows.
Maybe instead they are informed of what software they wish to use, what OS it operates well with, and thus make a VERY INFORMED decision to not use an OS that would require substantial work to use with their software of choice.
preamble:
Comp. Sci. degree
DOS since 1.0
Windows since 3.0
Linux since 0.9 (experimental machine current runs Ubuntu 8.04)
shipped products written in Smalltalk, C, C++, VB, Python and Java
Very well said. I like to think of myself as well informed, but you can't pay me enough money to run Linux on a games machine I share with my teenage son. It's just too much damn work for a lower framerate.
In fact I would argue that the reason that my game machine is Vista on a quad-core is because I'm very well informed.
However, I could do all my work on a linux box but since I get 100% IT support with no arguments if I keep using whatever came with my corporate laptop why bother since it only makes my life harder and saves no money until the entire organization gives up on Windows?
I don't think you can get stand-alone applications with GWT, and even applications that just run in the browser and are loaded from a file appear unlikely, they'll always need a browser with javascript support and a webserver that can execute Java.
Actually no, you can build an application in Java with no client/server communications and have GWT generate the client javascript code and run it stand-alone or serve it as a standard web page. It really does generate (compile) a javascript version of the java code for the client.
No P.O.W. was waterboarded, as a matter of fact. If you have evidence to the contrary, please, post it here. Otherwise, post a retraction. Thank you.
A valid point, but the doublethink used to consider the prisoners NOT POWs would make the signers of the declaration of independence spin in their graves and George Orwell and Joseph Stalin nod sagely.
There are no POWs here... and no Americans in Baghdad...
I thought someone would bring that up.:P
Some Aboriginals still live out in the bush in their own little clusters.
Thats their choice.
But if you see a aboriginal you dont think "Hey there is a aboriginal". They are just another person.
Along with the asians, indians, europeans, americans, etc...
One of my classmates from high school spent five years in Alice Springs doing AIDS counseling for the local aboriginal population. He'd say you're full of it.
You might find that the young urban population is relatively tolerant. But from everyone I've talked to non-urban Australia is one of the most racist societies out there.
However, this is all word-of-mouth and hearsay so it proves nothing
Very true. Many (wealthier) families discovered in the post WWI era that they could save a great deal of money by replacing the horses and stable staff with a car. This was the reality my great-grandfather returned from the front to find, stable-boy to mustard gassed veteran in no time flat.
An "injunction against protests"? In the US? Wow! They must have really touched a nerve. Keep it up!
Of course CoS had any sense at all they'd just ignore the whole thing until it blows over... but I'm counting on CoS to blow it way out of proportion. Which is exactly what Anonymous wants.
This could be an interesting showdown, especially if the protests continue to be disciplined and, well... funny!
Yes, this is an aspect of the situation that has always puzzled me. Clearly they do not understand the pervasiveness of p2p protocols. If you're going to ban "p2p" don't you have to ban my HTTP and FTP servers as well? (The first rule of USENET...)
I've been sorely tempted for quite some time to re-implement something like bit-torrent to run entirely on an HTTP connection (with a SOAP like API?) just to see how long it takes the "ban the technology" freaks to try to attack HTTP as weapon of mass infringement.
In most of the world you will not get arrested for owning, or even using, a gun. (It's called hunting, and you can still do that even in the most (gun) restrictive societies such as Canada or the UK.) But if you start gunning people down in the streets there will be consequences. Why this is not obvious is a mystery to me.
Personally I have no interest in low quality (and often illegal) copies of badly written and produced movies and other media, I don't even have time to watch all the things I can access legally, but they will have to pry my Ubuntu ISOs, VMWare images, and WoW updates from my cold dead fingers.
The fact that it's not easy to create a Smalltalk compiler to JVM bytecode, does not mean that it's design is horrible...
What he said was:
As someone who tried to get a Smalltalk compiler to target the JVM, I can say from experience that it is a really horrible design
So he learned from the exercise "that it is a really horrible design". Not "that it is a really horrible design" because his goal was hard to achieve. I am no VM expert, but those people I know who are have worked on both Smalltalk and Java VMs are and the only positive thing I've ever heard about the JVM design is how exceptions are propagated on the stack.
There's lots of things I like about Java but it's a huge shame that it took almost a decade to catch up with the state of the art in Object Oriented languages.
just get a really long cable, drag it around the corner, up the stairs and into the room. You don't always have the time, patience, or foresight to run cable through the walls to every room in the house.
Yes... but I stopped doing that years ago when wireless became cheap, convenient and ubiquitous. Surely I'm not the only guy who'll remote desktop from the kitchen to the living room?
games are just another popular art form, for better or for worse.
Moreover games are an EMERGING popular art form, most emerging art forms are effectively shunned by the mainstream art world until they BECOME the mainstream. Video games as a medium are only a few decades old, and as a MASS market medium only a decade or so.
Look at the history of movies and movie making for example, how many directors, actors or script writers were recognized as artists in 1920 or 1930? Compare that with the explosion of the art form in the 50's and 60's. Note also the parallel between the censorship that occurred then with film that is now beginning with games.
People who DO look at the best of the gaming world as an art form and appreciate it as such are becoming more and more common, and as that progresses so will it's recognition by the mainstream art world. This is probably not something that will happen overnight, I expect it will take years or decades... but I wouldn't be at all surprised if 50 years from now there was not a gaming equivalent of the academy awards where some otherwise unknown will get the "Best Rendering in a Simulated World" and getting a script writing credit on the "Game of the Year" is as valued as much as one for a major film.
So it would then be ok in your book that a police officer tell you to stop driving a Audi and drive only Ford?
Well... only a fool would argue it out with the officer in situ! (While arguing with armed men is an invigorating sport it should be left up to experts... like lawyers...)
The correct approach is to stare in disbelief, say "Yes Sir" and proceed to document the hell out of the situation so you can then take your evidence to the police chief, the mayor, or whatever governmental authority the officer reports to as well as the press.
Yes, the teacher is an ass... how can you supervise an course that somehow involves the web and not know what a web browser is? But arguing the point with the teacher IN FRONT OF THE REST OF THE CLASS is just looking for trouble.
I just remembered... I once had an argument about optics with one of the guys who worked on early semi-conductors... later on he told me I was right and that the only reason I lost the argument was:
A: He was the teacher and
B: He was the teacher
In school, the teacher is always right, particularly when they're wrong AND foul tempered.
There is not a single clue of extraterrestrial life and this will be a huge moneypit.
Well... statistically it's very unlikely that we're alone, but it is possible. However it is infinitely more likely that deciding we must be alone after less than 50 years of research is a little naive.
I'd rather spend a few percent of the money spend on weaponry on a wasted effort to detect alien life than to turn around in a decade or a century to discover that we're not alone... AND THEY DON'T LIKE US.
Slashdot Mirror
but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.
Can you give an example of a competing technology that is practical for backing up 1TB daily? Short of having your own tape/cd burner farm?
Usually I disagree with these rather non-technical whiners, but I found this to be right on the money this time. Besides, there's some wonderful British humor there:
Acrobat Reader"a reputation for being as welcome as a flatulent camel in the kitchen"
Windows Update
We've been kind and not talked about Vista.
RealPlayer
"If this software turned up at your door, you'd call the police."
"... we were given software to install. 'Disable your firewall', it commanded. 'Drop dead', we replied."
Java
"Programming languages are like sewage plants: if the average user becomes aware of them, something's gone wrong."
Yahoo
"And yes, when I ask to exit the software, that's because I really want to, not because I'm having a crisis of doubt."
Flash
"There's nothing wrong with Flash, provided you don't use it to construct web sites where people want to find information..."
That's pretty consistent with my experience, it kinda mostly works for some things but not others. My question though is have you tried to support multiple users accounts playing games in linux? I find wine/cedega makes this challenging enough to be not worth trying. You?
preamble:
Very well said. I like to think of myself as well informed, but you can't pay me enough money to run Linux on a games machine I share with my teenage son. It's just too much damn work for a lower framerate.
In fact I would argue that the reason that my game machine is Vista on a quad-core is because I'm very well informed.
However, I could do all my work on a linux box but since I get 100% IT support with no arguments if I keep using whatever came with my corporate laptop why bother since it only makes my life harder and saves no money until the entire organization gives up on Windows?
They seem to be making some progress on the prototype now. http://www.terrafugia.com/weeklypic.html
Actually no, you can build an application in Java with no client/server communications and have GWT generate the client javascript code and run it stand-alone or serve it as a standard web page. It really does generate (compile) a javascript version of the java code for the client.
You mean... you won't make us an offer we... we can't refuse?
... the moon is a harsh mistress!
No P.O.W. was waterboarded, as a matter of fact. If you have evidence to the contrary, please, post it here. Otherwise, post a retraction. Thank you.
A valid point, but the doublethink used to consider the prisoners NOT POWs would make the signers of the declaration of independence spin in their graves and George Orwell and Joseph Stalin nod sagely.
There are no POWs here... and no Americans in Baghdad...
One of my classmates from high school spent five years in Alice Springs doing AIDS counseling for the local aboriginal population. He'd say you're full of it.
You might find that the young urban population is relatively tolerant. But from everyone I've talked to non-urban Australia is one of the most racist societies out there.
However, this is all word-of-mouth and hearsay so it proves nothing
Don't worry, I'm sure it wasn't because your joke was lame or anything...
Very true. Many (wealthier) families discovered in the post WWI era that they could save a great deal of money by replacing the horses and stable staff with a car. This was the reality my great-grandfather returned from the front to find, stable-boy to mustard gassed veteran in no time flat.
An "injunction against protests"? In the US? Wow! They must have really touched a nerve. Keep it up!
Of course CoS had any sense at all they'd just ignore the whole thing until it blows over... but I'm counting on CoS to blow it way out of proportion. Which is exactly what Anonymous wants.
This could be an interesting showdown, especially if the protests continue to be disciplined and, well... funny!
Yes, this is an aspect of the situation that has always puzzled me. Clearly they do not understand the pervasiveness of p2p protocols. If you're going to ban "p2p" don't you have to ban my HTTP and FTP servers as well? (The first rule of USENET...)
I've been sorely tempted for quite some time to re-implement something like bit-torrent to run entirely on an HTTP connection (with a SOAP like API?) just to see how long it takes the "ban the technology" freaks to try to attack HTTP as weapon of mass infringement.
In most of the world you will not get arrested for owning, or even using, a gun. (It's called hunting, and you can still do that even in the most (gun) restrictive societies such as Canada or the UK.) But if you start gunning people down in the streets there will be consequences. Why this is not obvious is a mystery to me.
Personally I have no interest in low quality (and often illegal) copies of badly written and produced movies and other media, I don't even have time to watch all the things I can access legally, but they will have to pry my Ubuntu ISOs, VMWare images, and WoW updates from my cold dead fingers.
What he said was:
So he learned from the exercise "that it is a really horrible design". Not "that it is a really horrible design" because his goal was hard to achieve. I am no VM expert, but those people I know who are have worked on both Smalltalk and Java VMs are and the only positive thing I've ever heard about the JVM design is how exceptions are propagated on the stack.
There's lots of things I like about Java but it's a huge shame that it took almost a decade to catch up with the state of the art in Object Oriented languages.
Yes... but I stopped doing that years ago when wireless became cheap, convenient and ubiquitous. Surely I'm not the only guy who'll remote desktop from the kitchen to the living room?
Only replying because there is no -1 for being flabbergasted
best practices ... beyond the scope of a tutorial or a book WTF?
Though that does explain a lot of the schlock out there that passes for code...
In Communist Cuba, source opens you...
Moreover games are an EMERGING popular art form, most emerging art forms are effectively shunned by the mainstream art world until they BECOME the mainstream. Video games as a medium are only a few decades old, and as a MASS market medium only a decade or so.
Look at the history of movies and movie making for example, how many directors, actors or script writers were recognized as artists in 1920 or 1930? Compare that with the explosion of the art form in the 50's and 60's. Note also the parallel between the censorship that occurred then with film that is now beginning with games.
People who DO look at the best of the gaming world as an art form and appreciate it as such are becoming more and more common, and as that progresses so will it's recognition by the mainstream art world. This is probably not something that will happen overnight, I expect it will take years or decades... but I wouldn't be at all surprised if 50 years from now there was not a gaming equivalent of the academy awards where some otherwise unknown will get the "Best Rendering in a Simulated World" and getting a script writing credit on the "Game of the Year" is as valued as much as one for a major film.
Patience Grasshopper, waiting is... you grok?I'm hoping that wooshing noise you heard before you posted was the joke going over your head.
So it would then be ok in your book that a police officer tell you to stop driving a Audi and drive only Ford?
Well... only a fool would argue it out with the officer in situ! (While arguing with armed men is an invigorating sport it should be left up to experts... like lawyers...)
The correct approach is to stare in disbelief, say "Yes Sir" and proceed to document the hell out of the situation so you can then take your evidence to the police chief, the mayor, or whatever governmental authority the officer reports to as well as the press.
Yes, the teacher is an ass... how can you supervise an course that somehow involves the web and not know what a web browser is? But arguing the point with the teacher IN FRONT OF THE REST OF THE CLASS is just looking for trouble.
I just remembered... I once had an argument about optics with one of the guys who worked on early semi-conductors... later on he told me I was right and that the only reason I lost the argument was:
In school, the teacher is always right, particularly when they're wrong AND foul tempered.
someone is going to think of a CPU with 4096 -- 16383 -- and yes, even 32,768 discrete 1 bit cores (!!)
That is either the most brilliant, or the stupidest idea ever... and I can't make up my mind which
Perhaps my mind would work better if I could address more than a byte at a time? (Or a bit? Damn my head hurts...)
Grab your ankles and get comfortable.
Comfortable? That word you're using, I don't think it means what you think it means.
Well... statistically it's very unlikely that we're alone, but it is possible. However it is infinitely more likely that deciding we must be alone after less than 50 years of research is a little naive.
I'd rather spend a few percent of the money spend on weaponry on a wasted effort to detect alien life than to turn around in a decade or a century to discover that we're not alone... AND THEY DON'T LIKE US.