Germans love to complain about things -- it is part of their culture.
It is (and I am a german). But it's also one of the reasons Germany does so many things right and is well-known for its excellent engineering and science. We complain and then we strife to make things better. Many other countries complain less, but even when they complain they don't start doing anything about it, they stay at complaining.
German customer service is pretty bad.
Depends on your expectations. Yes, we don't have minimum wage slaves behind the cashiers to bag your groceries. But then again, we don't have a sizeable percentage of our people living off minimum wage, and we all consider that a good thing. I've seen more friendly customer service in many countries (I've been around some, on all continents except Australia), but friendly is not always equal to competent. And since most people around here might not be overly cheerful, what they usually are is neutral, not grump or unfriendly, so I'm usually happy with that as long as the service quality is good - and it mostly is.
Combat is used because it is psychologically received as the ultimate conflict, the one where you give everything because you can lose everything (well, your life for a start). That's why war will never go away, because any conflict that escalates beyond control will come to where it can not escalate any further because there's nothing beyond "total war". Combat is the same thing on the personal scale, you can't escalate the conflict beyond wanting to kill each other.
The problem you point out quite correctly, though, is that MMORPGs don't offer a path of escalation, they start right away with combat. That and the fact that it isn't really to the death, because you'll be resurrected anyways.
I'm experimenting with duels in my game (see below), and one option that will soon be added is to have a duel to the death, which really does mean what it sounds like - loser is dead, bye bye, character. It'll be interesting to watch what impact this has on the game, when there is no resurrection and death is as final as it is in real life.
That's the point. There are too many people in the news business today who only went to one week of statistics in university, the one where they were told how to "lie with statistics" (and yes, my prof had a special lecture about that in his curriculum).
Posting "Firefox down 0.7%" one month, and another "Firefox share declines again" a few months later is misleading and dishonest if it refers to two dips in an overal upwards trend. Everyone who's ever done statistics knows that very few graphs are monotonously rising, and even the strong rising ones have some dips in them.
The overal longterm trend can be calculated and extrapolated, and it's much more important than what it's been up or down this week, except on the stock exchange where you can actually make money on a moment-by-moment trading basis.
There is an opportunity for the open source community to create a VB compatible IDE that could compile applications for both to Windows and Linux. Please, by all the gods you believe in, NO!. The very last thing we need is all this crappy VB stuff on Linux. VB is - by rights - famous for the shoddy software created with it. And don't tell me you can write good software with VB, the fact is that the vast majority of VB software are abominations that should've never left the author's imagination.
Entice users with well thought out end to end solutions That entire chapter would've been much shorter if he had simply written: "Look to OSX for ideas on how to do it right, and to Windos for ideas on what to avoid at all costs".
Users are forced to untar, un-gzip, copy, configure and sometimes compile in order to properly install software. Has the dude used any Linux distribution during the past 5 years or so? Now I do compile stuff occasionally, but then I want to be on the bleeding edge and some of that stuff was written by me. Almost all actual applications I use rely much more on apt-get and dselect than on tar and gzip.
Linux should stop copying Microsoft feature for feature and embrace the differences and features that advanced users love. YES. Besides some of the stupid comments, he's got the basics right. Hey, wait. Some of us have been saying this for years. The problem is that too many decision makers in both KDE and Gnome believe copying windos is the road to heaven.
1) Because there is no entry in the inode data of the file you move, so the only way to update symlinks would be to scan the entire filesystem. Oh, and any potential remote filesystems. And any offline filesystems that could be mounted.
2) Same reason. Symlinks are independent of the files the link to. In some cases, that is even desired behaviour. "improving" it might break a couple applications that rely on this.
3) Right, chroot and symlinks don't mix well. However, can you come up with a solution that stays consistent throughout entering and leaving multiple chroot contexts?
Well I read your whole post and I don't see an answer.
Then read again. The answer is to demand better disabled support in other software.
If you're in a wheelchair, it's ok for you to ask for ramps and elevators. It is not ok for you to demand that nobody may use stairs at all anymore, because sometimes stairs are the best solution for the other 99% of mankind.
And no, I don't know any blind people. I do know several other disabled people, though.
"Given enough time and money, eventually Microsoft will re-invent UNIX." (author unknown)
Now once they start working on the GUI and come up with something that's more useable, maybe closer to the NeXT or OSX, Microsoft might even have a real Linux competitor!
In fact, OSS developers constantly reverse-engineer new devices and standards, and get them working properly. It is hard, but can be done. For instance, this release includes enhanced support for Centrino, which is a standard for wireless connectivity (in laptops, etc.).
Bad example, these drivers are officially supported by Intel. See, e.g. the project page.
Ok, let met get this straight: A few disableds complain because Word has better support for their specific disability?
Sorry guys, you are on the wrong train. Demand that the tools used by the state have proper support for your disabilty, that's ok with me. Stop the move entirely because the M$ lock-in, the exact reason it's all been done, raises its ugly head? Hurts just thinking about it. Maybe we shouldn't have introduced trains and planes - the first generation of those used to have stairs and wasn't exactly accessible to cripples (used literally - people with one or both legs missing).
I wouldn't be surprised to find M$ money involved here. Sending forth those with the big sympathy bonus is in the 101 if every astroturfer and lobby professional.
a) Why did they allow it to actually send out 18 million friggin spams instead of redirecting those to/dev/null?
b) Did it scare them how easily the system was compromised? Yes, the articles says "they infected it". I'm sure they didn't, they put windos on it and let it run for a while.
c) Will the spammers get off easily because of entrapment?
d) Who is putting pressure on M$ to be suddenly so interested in spam after they ignored the problem completely for years? Something big is happening behind the scenes - M$ doesn't usually do things just to look good. There's either money to be made or a monopoly position to defend.
In a single deific moment you can raise a volcano beneath your enemies, shake their cities to rubble with earthquakes,
Heya! They reinvented Populus!
Nah, just kidding. There ain't any new game ideas coming out of any major dev studio anyways, so I'm happy if they do some old stuff in a good way. It looks interesting, but it definitely has lost the "wow, this is a cool, new and unique idea" bonus.
So let me get this right: He's complaining that people write good things about something they found is so good that they've decided to have it as their daily tool of work?
Sounds like honest journalism to me. You know, much better than those foreign correspondents writing about a country they never visited.
'The day I come in front of the Gartner audience and say we have a better Unix than Linux, that'll be a good day.'
We're almost there. Remember the famous saying whose authors is unfortunately lost to time? "Given enough time and money, eventually Microsoft will re-invent UNIX."
However I will warn people to wary themselves of the slippery slope; there isn't as much ground between 'crucify the spammer' and being on the cross yourself as one might think,
No, the metaphor fails even more badly here. The point on spam is precisely that it is judged content-independently. I don't care if you advertise pills, mortgages or porn. I don't even want spam about stuff that I actually am interested in. I don't care what the text of your spam is, or what the product is.
Spam is perfectly well identified by it's old name - UCE: Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail.
If I didn't ask for it, it's some kind of advertisement, and you send out bulks of it, then it is spam. There's no slippery slope here.
despicable Pronunciation: di-'spi-k&-b&l, 'des-(")pi- Function: adjective Etymology: Late Latin despicabilis, from Latin despicari to despise : deserving to be despised : so worthless or obnoxious as to rouse moral indignation
Just because you despise it doesn't mean they don't deserve a say. Who knows, they might have something worthwhile to say about it, if only you would listen.
In fact, if someone's attitude being despised by someone else were a sufficient argument to not allow them to vote, I'm fairly certain that absolutely nobody would be left to do the voting.
Your argument is subjective. I happen to share it, to a large extend, as I'm sure most readers do. But that doesn't make it true, objective or sufficient grounds for not granting a say.
In fact, your so highly valued Free Speech is free if and only if it explicitly includes the speech of your enemies.
You have absolutely no idea about international politics, do you? Every time the UN has failed, it was due to not enough diplomacy, or more precisely, because some bullheaded fuckwit of a country (many times the USSR, quite a few times the USA) simply refused to talk, move or think, and used its veto power or other machinations to prevent any actions or progress on the topic.
Trying to get well over a hundred nations with different cultures, governments, languages, to agree on anything is about a hundred times as difficult as your "america first" would allow you to believe, unless you consider steamrolling over everyone else and forcing your attitude, believes and values on them a proper method. And that includes free speech, free internet, basic human rights even. They aren't as basic as you think. Heck, most of them weren't basic in the US 200, 100, some even 50 years ago!
The US has not abused its ability to manage the internet namespace to date. Given its track record,
Given it's recent track record, the rest of the world is pretty much counting down towards the day of that abuse, and/or discussing whether it hasn't already happened (the.iq TLD, for example).
Consider first that France demanded that eBay remove auctions of historical WWII Nazi items from their site.
Consider next that Germany outlawed Wolfenstein 3D because it contained various symbols of the WWII Nazi regime, despite the game hardly being sympathetic to the Nazis.
Consider that the US requires fingerprints to enter, that it fines people and wants to pass laws because nipples are seen on TV or in video games, that it has laws that allow the state to hold any (terrorist) suspect indefinitely without charges, contact with a lawyer, or any other basic rights, and that it's federal police runs a system that scans all e-mail of its citizens (carnivore), I don't think you're the one to speak about "freedom".
If one of these countries were to piss us off, and especially if we went to war with them, it's certainly technically feasible for us to disallow them access to our root servers, and even to block all of their IPs from accessing US content.
Which they probably don't care that much about. But you can also take away their TLD with everything underneath it, which they probably do care about. Can you say.iq ? (for americans and others who don't know:.iq is Iraq's TLD and has still not been handed back to the elected iraqi government...)
You can give Dear Leader a say in Internet administration, but you can't make him share that authority with the rest of the country.
Absolutely! Except that I don't think that - even though you could - that you should give G.W. Bush a say in Internet administration. I mean, he really doesn't understand most of it, don't you think?
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Germans love to complain about things -- it is part of their culture.
It is (and I am a german). But it's also one of the reasons Germany does so many things right and is well-known for its excellent engineering and science. We complain and then we strife to make things better. Many other countries complain less, but even when they complain they don't start doing anything about it, they stay at complaining.
German customer service is pretty bad.
Depends on your expectations. Yes, we don't have minimum wage slaves behind the cashiers to bag your groceries. But then again, we don't have a sizeable percentage of our people living off minimum wage, and we all consider that a good thing.
I've seen more friendly customer service in many countries (I've been around some, on all continents except Australia), but friendly is not always equal to competent. And since most people around here might not be overly cheerful, what they usually are is neutral, not grump or unfriendly, so I'm usually happy with that as long as the service quality is good - and it mostly is.
Combat is used because it is psychologically received as the ultimate conflict, the one where you give everything because you can lose everything (well, your life for a start). That's why war will never go away, because any conflict that escalates beyond control will come to where it can not escalate any further because there's nothing beyond "total war". Combat is the same thing on the personal scale, you can't escalate the conflict beyond wanting to kill each other.
The problem you point out quite correctly, though, is that MMORPGs don't offer a path of escalation, they start right away with combat. That and the fact that it isn't really to the death, because you'll be resurrected anyways.
I'm experimenting with duels in my game (see below), and one option that will soon be added is to have a duel to the death, which really does mean what it sounds like - loser is dead, bye bye, character. It'll be interesting to watch what impact this has on the game, when there is no resurrection and death is as final as it is in real life.
the overall trend for Firefox is upwards.
That's the point. There are too many people in the news business today who only went to one week of statistics in university, the one where they were told how to "lie with statistics" (and yes, my prof had a special lecture about that in his curriculum).
Posting "Firefox down 0.7%" one month, and another "Firefox share declines again" a few months later is misleading and dishonest if it refers to two dips in an overal upwards trend. Everyone who's ever done statistics knows that very few graphs are monotonously rising, and even the strong rising ones have some dips in them.
The overal longterm trend can be calculated and extrapolated, and it's much more important than what it's been up or down this week, except on the stock exchange where you can actually make money on a moment-by-moment trading basis.
Shady business tactics - in other words, business as usual for M$.
;)
What part of this constitues news?
Some of his comments are good, some are abysmal:
There is an opportunity for the open source community to create a VB compatible IDE that could compile applications for both to Windows and Linux.
Please, by all the gods you believe in, NO!. The very last thing we need is all this crappy VB stuff on Linux. VB is - by rights - famous for the shoddy software created with it. And don't tell me you can write good software with VB, the fact is that the vast majority of VB software are abominations that should've never left the author's imagination.
Entice users with well thought out end to end solutions
That entire chapter would've been much shorter if he had simply written: "Look to OSX for ideas on how to do it right, and to Windos for ideas on what to avoid at all costs".
Users are forced to untar, un-gzip, copy, configure and sometimes compile in order to properly install software.
Has the dude used any Linux distribution during the past 5 years or so? Now I do compile stuff occasionally, but then I want to be on the bleeding edge and some of that stuff was written by me. Almost all actual applications I use rely much more on apt-get and dselect than on tar and gzip.
Linux should stop copying Microsoft feature for feature and embrace the differences and features that advanced users love.
YES. Besides some of the stupid comments, he's got the basics right. Hey, wait. Some of us have been saying this for years. The problem is that too many decision makers in both KDE and Gnome believe copying windos is the road to heaven.
Sounds very much like a "Hey Bill, before you think you can take away our toy, make sure you don't lose yours" move.
The day Google starts to write their own Linux desktop is probably the one where you should really, really get rid of that M$ stock...
Answers:
1) Because there is no entry in the inode data of the file you move, so the only way to update symlinks would be to scan the entire filesystem. Oh, and any potential remote filesystems. And any offline filesystems that could be mounted.
2) Same reason. Symlinks are independent of the files the link to. In some cases, that is even desired behaviour. "improving" it might break a couple applications that rely on this.
3) Right, chroot and symlinks don't mix well. However, can you come up with a solution that stays consistent throughout entering and leaving multiple chroot contexts?
Well I read your whole post and I don't see an answer.
Then read again. The answer is to demand better disabled support in other software.
If you're in a wheelchair, it's ok for you to ask for ramps and elevators. It is not ok for you to demand that nobody may use stairs at all anymore, because sometimes stairs are the best solution for the other 99% of mankind.
And no, I don't know any blind people. I do know several other disabled people, though.
As I said in this old comment:
"Given enough time and money, eventually Microsoft will re-invent UNIX." (author unknown)
Now once they start working on the GUI and come up with something that's more useable, maybe closer to the NeXT or OSX, Microsoft might even have a real Linux competitor!
What do you suggest
Read beyond my first sentence and you'll find the answer right there.
In fact, OSS developers constantly reverse-engineer new devices and standards, and get them working properly. It is hard, but can be done. For instance, this release includes enhanced support for Centrino, which is a standard for wireless connectivity (in laptops, etc.).
Bad example, these drivers are officially supported by Intel. See, e.g. the project page.
Ok, let met get this straight: A few disableds complain because Word has better support for their specific disability?
Sorry guys, you are on the wrong train. Demand that the tools used by the state have proper support for your disabilty, that's ok with me. Stop the move entirely because the M$ lock-in, the exact reason it's all been done, raises its ugly head? Hurts just thinking about it. Maybe we shouldn't have introduced trains and planes - the first generation of those used to have stairs and wasn't exactly accessible to cripples (used literally - people with one or both legs missing).
I wouldn't be surprised to find M$ money involved here. Sending forth those with the big sympathy bonus is in the 101 if every astroturfer and lobby professional.
Thanks. I wasn't up to speed on that. It's a shame they shut down La Brea - I had some early versions running on my servers at various times.
a) Why did they allow it to actually send out 18 million friggin spams instead of redirecting those to /dev/null?
b) Did it scare them how easily the system was compromised? Yes, the articles says "they infected it". I'm sure they didn't, they put windos on it and let it run for a while.
c) Will the spammers get off easily because of entrapment?
d) Who is putting pressure on M$ to be suddenly so interested in spam after they ignored the problem completely for years? Something big is happening behind the scenes - M$ doesn't usually do things just to look good. There's either money to be made or a monopoly position to defend.
In a single deific moment you can raise a volcano beneath your enemies, shake their cities to rubble with earthquakes,
Heya! They reinvented Populus!
Nah, just kidding. There ain't any new game ideas coming out of any major dev studio anyways, so I'm happy if they do some old stuff in a good way. It looks interesting, but it definitely has lost the "wow, this is a cool, new and unique idea" bonus.
There's no technical reason Windows can't have a good Unix environment on top of it.
Of course there is: The copy/emulation/rip-off is never as good as the original.
A point that windos proves again and again and again and again and [loop detected, breakpoint forced]
So let me get this right: He's complaining that people write good things about something they found is so good that they've decided to have it as their daily tool of work?
Sounds like honest journalism to me. You know, much better than those foreign correspondents writing about a country they never visited.
'The day I come in front of the Gartner audience and say we have a better Unix than Linux, that'll be a good day.'
We're almost there. Remember the famous saying whose authors is unfortunately lost to time? "Given enough time and money, eventually Microsoft will re-invent UNIX."
However I will warn people to wary themselves of the slippery slope; there isn't as much ground between 'crucify the spammer' and being on the cross yourself as one might think,
No, the metaphor fails even more badly here. The point on spam is precisely that it is judged content-independently. I don't care if you advertise pills, mortgages or porn. I don't even want spam about stuff that I actually am interested in. I don't care what the text of your spam is, or what the product is.
Spam is perfectly well identified by it's old name - UCE: Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail.
If I didn't ask for it, it's some kind of advertisement, and you send out bulks of it, then it is spam. There's no slippery slope here.
despicable
Pronunciation: di-'spi-k&-b&l, 'des-(")pi-
Function: adjective
Etymology: Late Latin despicabilis, from Latin despicari to despise
: deserving to be despised : so worthless or obnoxious as to rouse moral indignation
Just because you despise it doesn't mean they don't deserve a say. Who knows, they might have something worthwhile to say about it, if only you would listen.
In fact, if someone's attitude being despised by someone else were a sufficient argument to not allow them to vote, I'm fairly certain that absolutely nobody would be left to do the voting.
Your argument is subjective. I happen to share it, to a large extend, as I'm sure most readers do. But that doesn't make it true, objective or sufficient grounds for not granting a say.
In fact, your so highly valued Free Speech is free if and only if it explicitly includes the speech of your enemies.
too much diplomacy
You have absolutely no idea about international politics, do you? Every time the UN has failed, it was due to not enough diplomacy, or more precisely, because some bullheaded fuckwit of a country (many times the USSR, quite a few times the USA) simply refused to talk, move or think, and used its veto power or other machinations to prevent any actions or progress on the topic.
Trying to get well over a hundred nations with different cultures, governments, languages, to agree on anything is about a hundred times as difficult as your "america first" would allow you to believe, unless you consider steamrolling over everyone else and forcing your attitude, believes and values on them a proper method.
And that includes free speech, free internet, basic human rights even. They aren't as basic as you think. Heck, most of them weren't basic in the US 200, 100, some even 50 years ago!
The US has not abused its ability to manage the internet namespace to date. Given its track record,
.iq TLD, for example).
Given it's recent track record, the rest of the world is pretty much counting down towards the day of that abuse, and/or discussing whether it hasn't already happened (the
Consider first that France demanded that eBay remove auctions of historical WWII Nazi items from their site.
Consider next that Germany outlawed Wolfenstein 3D because it contained various symbols of the WWII Nazi regime, despite the game hardly being sympathetic to the Nazis.
Consider that the US requires fingerprints to enter, that it fines people and wants to pass laws because nipples are seen on TV or in video games, that it has laws that allow the state to hold any (terrorist) suspect indefinitely without charges, contact with a lawyer, or any other basic rights, and that it's federal police runs a system that scans all e-mail of its citizens (carnivore), I don't think you're the one to speak about "freedom".
If one of these countries were to piss us off, and especially if we went to war with them, it's certainly technically feasible for us to disallow them access to our root servers, and even to block all of their IPs from accessing US content.
.iq ? (for americans and others who don't know: .iq is Iraq's TLD and has still not been handed back to the elected iraqi government...)
Which they probably don't care that much about. But you can also take away their TLD with everything underneath it, which they probably do care about. Can you say
You can give Dear Leader a say in Internet administration, but you can't make him share that authority with the rest of the country.
Absolutely! Except that I don't think that - even though you could - that you should give G.W. Bush a say in Internet administration. I mean, he really doesn't understand most of it, don't you think?