Blaming Microsoft for your own lack of creativity and ingenuity.
That's a little unfair. Was Con not creative? He made a truly fair scheduler for linux. I wholeheartedly agree with Con. The PC is shit. Four registers, a PCI bus, and a stupid BIOS, and why do we use it? because it's compatible. If PC manufacturers didn't have to retain compatibility with the 25 year old IBM PC, then they could go out and use a decent CPU in a clever computer with fun hardware. All we ever do is make PCs faster, while making them take longer to boot. Even apple gave up on the superior PowerPC architecture because with only apple using it, the investment was leaving it behind. Instead, 1000 x86 engineers can make a chip faster than 10 PowerPC engineers, and thus we continue to use the world's most dated computer chip.
An extension of moore's law should read "the faster a computer gets, the longer it takes to boot". I miss the days of the Amiga competing with the Atari ST (and a rather crappy macintosh with a 12 inch monochrome screen), since they were different in hardware, not just software. In those days, the superior technology would always win.
There are times when I feel the urge to write "citation needed" on every single article on conservapedia, eg. on the origins of kangaroos:
"After the Flood, these kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia." [citation needed]
I mean, what the fuck?
"There is debate whether this migration happened over land with lower sea levels during the post-flood ice age, or before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart, or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters." [citation really fucking needed]
Kangaroos crossing thousands of miles of ocean on rafts.. I'm not sure these guys are strictly adhering to their anti-pot-smoking policy.
The amiga had a separate sound processor that could play samples through hardware. The atari ST could only do it through heavy CPU usage (about 30% to play an amiga mod).
The amiga had a separate graphics processor - the blitter. The ST didn't get that until the STe, and nobody made any software for it, ever. The graphics chip could also do hardware sprites (the ST had no such thing), hardware scrolling playfields (the ST had no such thing), and HAM, which effectively used the hardware to muck about with the palette. The ST could do this in software if you could be arsed.
The amiga had a separate "io" chip - the copper, which could be used to control the chips above without the CPU intervening. The atari had no such thing.
As for midi IO, you could plug a gadget into the amiga that did this, and it didn't cost much at all. I'd like to see an STFM owner plugging in a hardware sprites chip.
I had an ST and an Amiga, and programmed both, and the Amiga was way more fun.
Perhaps, but exactly how much by way of "damages" can they expect to get from you? If you download a file with bittorrent, you're enabling potentially hundreds of other people to pirate the same file while you download it. You could argue in court that that equates to lost revenue. Having a wmv codec though..?
oh you patriots "we tossed the brits out!" (well, at least, the ones that hadn't declared independence).
The congestion charge was necessary for various reasons, all relating to the same thing. Traffic couldn't -move- in london. Deliveries were turning up late, because lorries couldn't get through. Taxis were running up huge bills because of waiting in traffic. Cyclists were getting killed, bin bags were left to rot in the summer sun because the rubbish lorry couldn't get through in time, the city stunk of fumes, and all because of a few people who think spending 50 minutes driving to work in central london is a better idea than 25 minutes zipping down the tube.
I cycle to work, and it's a hell of a lot easier now I don't have to contend with 250000 people who can't get to grips with the whole "living in london" thing. It's quite simple: if you're sitting in a traffic jam, then you're contributing to it, and you have absolutely no basis to complain about it. It's not a fee, it's a deterrent. The occasional time when you actually DO need a car (eg. when you're buying furniture or something) may cost an occasional fiver, although this doesn't apply on weekends or in evenings, and who buys furniture during working hours anyway?
I read that too.. in fact, I was half way through making an idiot of myself writing a "but they all died in the last one!!" comment. Oh well. Nice to see they're dragging them out of their coffins for a new film:-)
If Dan Bernstein worked for the fire service and you phoned to say your house was on fire, he would tell you your sprinkler system was configured wrong and hang up.
I didn't say compressed digital tv looks worse than analogue, I said that compressed mpeg-4 hdtv looks worse than compressed mpeg-2 non-HD tv. As for the paying for bandwidth - I work with a broadcaster. 6mhz is easily enough for a high quality HDTV signal. Unfortunately, your average european satellite is dishing out close to 1000 channels if you include all the multi-start stuff. You don't GET 6mhz unless you pay for it. You get something closer to 2mhz.
Because there simply isn't enough bandwidth in the air itself for fast wireless. When 3G came out, an engineer I drink beer with often gave me the full SP on why video telephony would never take off. Basically, because to provide a complete service in London alone would involve putting a mast on every single street corner.
This is why GPRS is charged per packet, not for time "online" (technically, you're always online with GPRS). Each packet goes to every phone signed on that mast. Think of the multiplexing.
This also goes some way to explaining why HDTV is a bit of a con, especially if you're using a dish rather than cable. Firstly, if you broadcast HDTV at the same bandwidth as normal TV, even with mpeg-4, it looks worse, because the artifacts are more visible. So you could use more bandwidth for a nicer looking channel? Yep.. at cost..
For an important show, eg. a world cup soccer match, the content provider can pay the broadcaster for extra bandwidth for the 90 minute duration of the match, and it looks great. Unfortunately, if the match goes into extra time, the bandwidth lease drops, and the remaining 30 minutes of footy look like crap! I'm not joking, this actually happens.
Sure, we can reduce the wavelength and improve the compression, and it will improve over time, but the laws of physics in the realm of wireless are somewhat more restrictive than those of physical wiring, and we're a long way off getting anywhere near the quality that we're being hyped.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The BBC often co-produce stuff with other TV companies. It's not the BBC which is responsible for this, it's 3rd parties.
It's ok, because the needle is made of an ultra-soft material manufactured from dolphin bi-products. In fact, it takes over 150 dolphins to make one xbox. And the camera.. well, all I'm saying is don't buy the camera..
And I am not sure why Kubuntu, XUbuntu and the others exist. XFCE, KDE are available in the mainline Ubuntu.
The standard KDE distribution comes with loads of applications you probably won't use, and is a little overwhelming (and of course, bloated). Kubuntu have tidied it up, removed everything you probably don't need, put some alternative applications in which they prefer (eg. konversation as the IRC client instead of whatever the old one was), added lots of patches (eg. automatic flash installation when you visit a page with flash in it), and given it a prettier default theme.
In other words, they did to KDE what ubuntu did to gnome.
At risk of fanning the gnome/kde flames on this thread already, you could try kubuntu.. i'm not saying it's better, but it is different. You might be happier.
I've not noticed any of these things in kubuntu, except the movie player thing, and that's likely to be a driver issue. Try configuring the underlying player to use a different rendering target, eg. X11 or opengl instead of Xv.
For what, exactly? 160gb of hard drive space is good if you're a warez hoarder, and 2gb of ram is good if you're compiling software.
If you're just using it as an internet terminal, then both operating systems are bloated. eg. ubuntu will automatically start cupsd, even if you don't have a printer. If you're obsessed with bloat, then you could spend a week fine-combing gentoo or bsd, or try something like syllable, but ubuntu users want something that will "just work", and that means adding bloat.
They didn't die. Only last month I bought the latest porcupine tree album, and the central song on it is 17 minutes. This didn't stop it getting great reviews, or selling extremely well.
If you don't like progressive rock, then the only thing we've established is that you're not qualified to review any of it. People still like the stuff, and I'm afraid you're just going to have to accept that.
I'm sorry, but the concept album was always horrible self-absorbed exercise from the 70s. Yes, they still exist, but they're rarely any good.
<sarcasm>Oh ok, thanks for the advice. I'll stop listening to them! </sarcasm>
This is like saying "I'm sorry, but feature films were always horrible self-absorbed exercise from the 70s. 10 minute TV shows are much better!
There are people on this forum who DO like that genre of music and don't like yours. It may not be your problem if the album is in demise, but your personal taste in music (or in fact, anyones) is completely, utterly irrelevant.
There's only one Amiga/Atari ST generation game (sensible soccer) unless you count lemmings which came out absolutely everything, and, unless I'm not looking hard enough, not a single C64, Sinclair, or BBC Micro game in there.
Last ninja, carrier command, UFO.. oh forget it.. it's been said a hundred times.
Fill your boots mate, although, if you can be "moved to tears" by the purchase of a trendy gadget, then you've possibly lost all sense of perspective. Usually, I usually reserve those kind of emotions for more powerful things, like a loved one recovering from cancer, or the birth of a child. Each to their own, I guess.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
That was silly.. you could've got fifty quid for it.
"I can't think of another product launch that has been like this. When we went
into the store I was almost moved to tears, it just made you feel really
special."
"Nothing matches this - it's like going to a rock concert. As I went down the
stairs in the store I was thinking 'this is what Sting feels'."
"It feels great, oh my God, overwhelming. I never thought this day would
come - and now it finally has, it's mind-blowing,"
"I'm going to run home and ring people just to say 'Guess what, I've got an
iPhone, bye!"
Slashdot Mirror
Blaming Microsoft for your own lack of creativity and ingenuity.
That's a little unfair. Was Con not creative? He made a truly fair scheduler for linux. I wholeheartedly agree with Con. The PC is shit. Four registers, a PCI bus, and a stupid BIOS, and why do we use it? because it's compatible. If PC manufacturers didn't have to retain compatibility with the 25 year old IBM PC, then they could go out and use a decent CPU in a clever computer with fun hardware. All we ever do is make PCs faster, while making them take longer to boot. Even apple gave up on the superior PowerPC architecture because with only apple using it, the investment was leaving it behind. Instead, 1000 x86 engineers can make a chip faster than 10 PowerPC engineers, and thus we continue to use the world's most dated computer chip.
An extension of moore's law should read "the faster a computer gets, the longer it takes to boot". I miss the days of the Amiga competing with the Atari ST (and a rather crappy macintosh with a 12 inch monochrome screen), since they were different in hardware, not just software. In those days, the superior technology would always win.
Aren't they not supposed to believe in Pangea anyway?
God moves in mysterious ways...
There are times when I feel the urge to write "citation needed" on every single article on conservapedia, eg. on the origins of kangaroos:
"After the Flood, these kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia." [citation needed]
I mean, what the fuck?
"There is debate whether this migration happened over land with lower sea levels during the post-flood ice age, or before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart, or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters." [citation really fucking needed]
Kangaroos crossing thousands of miles of ocean on rafts.. I'm not sure these guys are strictly adhering to their anti-pot-smoking policy.
Ok, lets clear up the ambiguities here..
The amiga had a separate sound processor that could play samples through hardware. The atari ST could only do it through heavy CPU usage (about 30% to play an amiga mod).
The amiga had a separate graphics processor - the blitter. The ST didn't get that until the STe, and nobody made any software for it, ever. The graphics chip could also do hardware sprites (the ST had no such thing), hardware scrolling playfields (the ST had no such thing), and HAM, which effectively used the hardware to muck about with the palette. The ST could do this in software if you could be arsed.
The amiga had a separate "io" chip - the copper, which could be used to control the chips above without the CPU intervening. The atari had no such thing.
As for midi IO, you could plug a gadget into the amiga that did this, and it didn't cost much at all. I'd like to see an STFM owner plugging in a hardware sprites chip.
I had an ST and an Amiga, and programmed both, and the Amiga was way more fun.
When some poor bastard has to report a story on this bloke..
Perhaps, but exactly how much by way of "damages" can they expect to get from you? If you download a file with bittorrent, you're enabling potentially hundreds of other people to pirate the same file while you download it. You could argue in court that that equates to lost revenue. Having a wmv codec though..?
oh you patriots "we tossed the brits out!" (well, at least, the ones that hadn't declared independence).
The congestion charge was necessary for various reasons, all relating to the same thing. Traffic couldn't -move- in london. Deliveries were turning up late, because lorries couldn't get through. Taxis were running up huge bills because of waiting in traffic. Cyclists were getting killed, bin bags were left to rot in the summer sun because the rubbish lorry couldn't get through in time, the city stunk of fumes, and all because of a few people who think spending 50 minutes driving to work in central london is a better idea than 25 minutes zipping down the tube.
I cycle to work, and it's a hell of a lot easier now I don't have to contend with 250000 people who can't get to grips with the whole "living in london" thing. It's quite simple: if you're sitting in a traffic jam, then you're contributing to it, and you have absolutely no basis to complain about it. It's not a fee, it's a deterrent. The occasional time when you actually DO need a car (eg. when you're buying furniture or something) may cost an occasional fiver, although this doesn't apply on weekends or in evenings, and who buys furniture during working hours anyway?
I read that too.. in fact, I was half way through making an idiot of myself writing a "but they all died in the last one!!" comment. Oh well. Nice to see they're dragging them out of their coffins for a new film :-)
If Dan Bernstein worked for the fire service and you phoned to say your house was on fire, he would tell you your sprinkler system was configured wrong and hang up.
I didn't say compressed digital tv looks worse than analogue, I said that compressed mpeg-4 hdtv looks worse than compressed mpeg-2 non-HD tv. As for the paying for bandwidth - I work with a broadcaster. 6mhz is easily enough for a high quality HDTV signal. Unfortunately, your average european satellite is dishing out close to 1000 channels if you include all the multi-start stuff. You don't GET 6mhz unless you pay for it. You get something closer to 2mhz.
Why look at wireless when we've got fibre?
Because there simply isn't enough bandwidth in the air itself for fast wireless. When 3G came out, an engineer I drink beer with often gave me the full SP on why video telephony would never take off. Basically, because to provide a complete service in London alone would involve putting a mast on every single street corner.
This is why GPRS is charged per packet, not for time "online" (technically, you're always online with GPRS). Each packet goes to every phone signed on that mast. Think of the multiplexing.
This also goes some way to explaining why HDTV is a bit of a con, especially if you're using a dish rather than cable. Firstly, if you broadcast HDTV at the same bandwidth as normal TV, even with mpeg-4, it looks worse, because the artifacts are more visible. So you could use more bandwidth for a nicer looking channel? Yep.. at cost..
For an important show, eg. a world cup soccer match, the content provider can pay the broadcaster for extra bandwidth for the 90 minute duration of the match, and it looks great. Unfortunately, if the match goes into extra time, the bandwidth lease drops, and the remaining 30 minutes of footy look like crap! I'm not joking, this actually happens.
Sure, we can reduce the wavelength and improve the compression, and it will improve over time, but the laws of physics in the realm of wireless are somewhat more restrictive than those of physical wiring, and we're a long way off getting anywhere near the quality that we're being hyped.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The BBC often co-produce stuff with other TV companies. It's not the BBC which is responsible for this, it's 3rd parties.
It's ok, because the needle is made of an ultra-soft material manufactured from dolphin bi-products. In fact, it takes over 150 dolphins to make one xbox. And the camera.. well, all I'm saying is don't buy the camera..
And I am not sure why Kubuntu, XUbuntu and the others exist. XFCE, KDE are available in the mainline Ubuntu.
The standard KDE distribution comes with loads of applications you probably won't use, and is a little overwhelming (and of course, bloated). Kubuntu have tidied it up, removed everything you probably don't need, put some alternative applications in which they prefer (eg. konversation as the IRC client instead of whatever the old one was), added lots of patches (eg. automatic flash installation when you visit a page with flash in it), and given it a prettier default theme.
In other words, they did to KDE what ubuntu did to gnome.
sounds like you need to try a different distro :-)
At risk of fanning the gnome/kde flames on this thread already, you could try kubuntu.. i'm not saying it's better, but it is different. You might be happier.
I've not noticed any of these things in kubuntu, except the movie player thing, and that's likely to be a driver issue. Try configuring the underlying player to use a different rendering target, eg. X11 or opengl instead of Xv.
You simply don't need the extra on linux
For what, exactly? 160gb of hard drive space is good if you're a warez hoarder, and 2gb of ram is good if you're compiling software.
If you're just using it as an internet terminal, then both operating systems are bloated. eg. ubuntu will automatically start cupsd, even if you don't have a printer. If you're obsessed with bloat, then you could spend a week fine-combing gentoo or bsd, or try something like syllable, but ubuntu users want something that will "just work", and that means adding bloat.
20 minute songs [allmusic.com] deserved to die.
They didn't die. Only last month I bought the latest porcupine tree album, and the central song on it is 17 minutes. This didn't stop it getting great reviews, or selling extremely well.
Here's one review.
If you don't like progressive rock, then the only thing we've established is that you're not qualified to review any of it. People still like the stuff, and I'm afraid you're just going to have to accept that.
I'm sorry, but the concept album was always horrible self-absorbed exercise from the 70s. Yes, they still exist, but they're rarely any good.
<sarcasm>Oh ok, thanks for the advice. I'll stop listening to them! </sarcasm>
This is like saying "I'm sorry, but feature films were always horrible self-absorbed exercise from the 70s. 10 minute TV shows are much better!
There are people on this forum who DO like that genre of music and don't like yours. It may not be your problem if the album is in demise, but your personal taste in music (or in fact, anyones) is completely, utterly irrelevant.
Probably gets very little email from humans too :-)
Nerds also need to wear shoes.. although I haven't seen too many articles about shoes (except maybe cowboy neil's high heels..)
What's this got to do with "news for nerds"?
There's only one Amiga/Atari ST generation game (sensible soccer) unless you count lemmings which came out absolutely everything, and, unless I'm not looking hard enough, not a single C64, Sinclair, or BBC Micro game in there.
Last ninja, carrier command, UFO.. oh forget it.. it's been said a hundred times.
Maybe I'm just getting old.
Fill your boots mate, although, if you can be "moved to tears" by the purchase of a trendy gadget, then you've possibly lost all sense of perspective. Usually, I usually reserve those kind of emotions for more powerful things, like a loved one recovering from cancer, or the birth of a child. Each to their own, I guess.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
That was silly.. you could've got fifty quid for it.
Whereas Otis Spunkmeyer is probably the worst name for someone who makes food..
From this article..
"I can't think of another product launch that has been like this. When we went into the store I was almost moved to tears, it just made you feel really special."
"Nothing matches this - it's like going to a rock concert. As I went down the stairs in the store I was thinking 'this is what Sting feels'."
"It feels great, oh my God, overwhelming. I never thought this day would come - and now it finally has, it's mind-blowing,"
"I'm going to run home and ring people just to say 'Guess what, I've got an iPhone, bye!"
You SAD, SAD, HORRIBLE, PATHETIC people..
It's just a phone!!