Oh, please. "We know it's the future?" We don't even know if it's theoretically possible! We don't even have a model of a way of producing electricity from fusion that's anywhere near the efficiency of plain-oil nuclear steam generation.
Fusion is ten years away from being practical...and for all we know, it may stay that way forever.
If we were talking about banking regulations, you might have a point. But we're not, and we never were. You're welcome to stand beside whatever the hell you want. In this case, the thing next to which you're posing your precious visage is utterly irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
However, according to a friend of mine who's a Vice President at a major US bank, just putting together the portions of it that change banking regulations took weeks of study and thousands of pages of text.
Sorry, but that's bullshit. First of all, you don't have to read the actual text of the amending act that was passed by Congress. That's full of "insert here" and "delete there" and "change this to that" stuff. What smart people do is go read the relevant amended parts of the US Code. You know, that big-ass book that holds all our country's laws? Open it up. Read it. Learn.
"Weeks of study" my ass. Maybe if you're just mastering English, or if you're getting the Code a page at a time by UPS Ground.
No, they're not. Let me repeat that, just to make sure you get it: No, they are not. They're "cool" only to the extent that they serve a purpose. That purpose can be one of two things: interoperability or transparency. Because nobody reads the Open Office file formats, interoperability is a non issue. (And nobody reads them because nobody writes them; Open Office is the nichest of the niche players.) And because nobody is archiving Open Office files, transparency doesn't count, either.
Want to see XML files done right? Look at Keynote.
BSG has 13 epiodes... SG 1 has somewhere in excess of 100. Will BSG look so good with 7 or 8 seasons? I doubt it.
I think that's a dumb argument. Find me any 13 episodes of "Stargate" -- out of the 200+ that exist -- that come anywhere close to the 13 extant episodes of "Galactica," and then we'll talk.
What do you do while you are waiting for them to get to Earth
There is no Earth. It's just a myth. They're not on a journey, and they've got no destination. They're just in a struggle to survive. That's where the conflict comes from, see.
The episode where Starbuck managed the strike on the Cylon base
You mean Apollo?
The problem with the jump fuel wasn't mentioned until that episode
No, the problem with fuel was set up all the way back in the miniseries when Boomer recovered a tanker filled with tylium, and it was firmly cemented in episode 5 (I think) when the air wing expends something like half their fuel on the search for Starbuck.
Can't you feel the suck approaching if BSG went for five years?
No, apparently because I've been paying attention while you have not.;-)
Having just caught up on this thread, I see now why the other guy gave up on you. You're just rambling here. For starters, anybody who would pedantically lecture somebody else on the meaning of "irony" by providing a link to Wikipedia is probably not somebody I, personally, would want to spend any time with. But let's ignore that and see what happens.
What if he just has a perspective that is different to yours?
I'm pretty sure what he was saying was that there are absolutes. It is not possible to dismiss the fallacy of moral equivalence as being just a matter of different perspectives. There are absolute rights and absolute wrongs, and (for example) communism is just an absolute wrong. Refusing to even acknowledge this distinction in a comparison of a free society and a communist insurgency is a lie of omission.
If he wasn't trying to say that, then I'm trying to say that. Because it clearly needs to be said.
I choose to label capital punishment as state-sponsored murder.
But don't you see? You don't just get to arbitrarily put words to things. Capital punishment is not murder, by definition, because murder is the unlawful killing of a person. Calling capital punishment "murder" is just distorting the issue by using inappropriate terms solely to milk them for connotative impact.
Do you believe it's okay for a government to punish people by death for severe infringement of their laws?
Yes.
What about adultery or apostasy in the Islamic Sharia system?
If the law against adultery were applied with a guarantee of equal protection, then it would be legitimate. It isn't, so it's not. And no, apostasy can never be a crime, because that would trample all over the freedom of religion.
How is that different to the 'righteous' acts of stopping the life of a killer in the USA?
The differences are obvious. Do you not see them? Equal protection...fundamental civil liberties...do these ideas mean anything to you?
It's this devaluing of human life that allows people to march into foreign countries with guns blazing, or to pack a truck with explosives and park it under a government building
See what I mean? You just equated the liberation of an enslaved nation with the mass murder of hundreds of innocent people. You just declared that, to you, these things are precisely the same. This is obviously wrong, just like comparing watermelons to waterskis is obviously wrong. Why don't you see that it's obviously wrong?
despite the fact you think I'm slightly less than human
I've gotta go with As Seen here. The ability to tell right from wrong is a fundamental part of being human. At the very least, you've got a serious gap in your socialization.
Right and Wrong are distinctions that aren't helpful to my life
Sigh. The arrogance. That's like denying that up and down exist because "they aren't helpful to my life." Nobody asked you if they were helpful to your life, you little brat. These are natural properties that exist whether or not you think they're too red-state for your delicate sensibilities.
You would, in fact, make a perfect Chomsky reader. You've got just the right combination of ignorance and arrogance that he needs you to have in order to plant his backwards ideas in your head. Your soulless brain is fertile ground for his perversions. Off you go. Be a good little disciple. Question everything, but don't ever make a value judgment, because the only true philosophy is nihilism!
Actually, I would strongly recommend staying away from anything with Chomsky's name on it that isn't a highly technical scholarly work in linguistics.
Noam Chomsky is the best example of how somebody can be an absolute genius in one area and -- literally! --a raving lunatic with paranoid delusions in another.
It's incredibly sad. Don't be surprised if somebody someday write a Beautiful Mind-style story about Chomsky...only at this rate, such a story wouldn't have a happy ending.
It's the frequency with which it's being quoted, and the inappropriateness of the quotes. Think. What did the aforementioned comment have to do with Orwell or with 1984? Nothing at all. It was just a drive-by allusion.
No, 1984 is not "one of the most important books ever written," unless you expand your list to include tens of thousands of books. It's just that it's a book that's widely assigned to high-school students. It's pop-culture wisdom, a mile wide and an inch deep. It's the beginning of insight, not the end. C.f. Rand, Ayn, for another example of the same phenomenon.
Too many people point to 1984 as an illustration of the insidiousness of totalitarianism, when what they completely miss is the fact that 1984 is a book about the insidious of totalitarianism. It takes the insidiousness of totalitarianism as a given. The book doesn't contain a discussion about whether the slope is slippery or not; it just assumes that the slope is slippery and tells a story based on that premise.
To put a point on it, 1984 begs the whole question. Which is fine for a novel. Problem comes when people think of it as more than a novel.
Somebody who reads 1984 and thinks that he then has something insightful to say about language or society is like somebody who reads Beat to Quarters and thinks that he then can sail a tall ship around Cape Horn.
With less than 2% marketshare, Mac OS X is pretty much inconsequential
Check your figures again, please. There's no definition of "market share," either percent-of-sales-per-unit-time or percent-of-total-installed-base, for which that statement could be true. IDC consistently puts Apple around 4%, with an installed base set to exceed 40 million units during the first half of this year. (There are rumors that IDC's next projection is going to uptick sharply on the strength of the Mac mini.)
When you're talking about a market valued in the tens of billions, the difference between "less than 2%" and the actual figure of four percent is huge.
Oh, for Pete's...dude, seriously. Can't we get through one damn story without somebody making an Orwell analogy? Especially one as lame-ass as this one?
We could solve all the world's energy problems if we could just hook Orwell's corpse up to a generator to capture all the rotational energy that's currently being wasted on postmortem outrage.
Have you ever actually seen an episode of "Battlestar Galactica?" (There's no colon in the name, incidentally; I'm not sure where you got that idea.)
I enjoy watching "Stargate." It's brainless, silly fun. The good guys get themselves into some kind of mess, they stand there with clenched jaws for a while, then somehow they get out of it. Entertaining.
But it's not even in the same class as "Battlestar Galactica." I mean, Christ, did you see the season finale? I think it was the BBC guy who described it as being so brutal and shocking that it was like watching a murder. Truer words were never spoken.
"Galactica" does not meet your Webster's definition -- which, let's be honest here, is a pretty silly definition anyway.
Let's talk instead about the difference between drama and melodrama, in the classical sense. In the classical sense, drama refers to stories that are primarily character-driven and situational, whereas melodrama is mostly concerned with plot. A movie like "Armageddon" is a melodrama in that sense, while a movie like "Closer" is a drama.
(It's not a value judgment. A movie like "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," despite being a silly teen comedy, is classically a drama. The difference lies in where the story comes from, plot or characters.)
Most science fiction stories are melodramas, particularly the ones that feature a square-jawed "John Everyman" as the lead character. These stories are traditionally centered around a plot, or a puzzle, or a mystery. "X happens."
Dramas, on the other hand, take clearly defined characters, put them in a situation, and tell the story of what happens. Think about a movie like "The Big Chill" where, basically, nothing happens at all. You just have people in a situation who are interacting.
"Galactica" follows the dramatic model. While there is certainly some plot, it's more premise or MacGuffin than anything else. Yes, there are cylons out there who are pulling the strings, but the real story comes from how the various characters react to their situation and interact with each other.
So "Battlestar Galactica" is very much not science fiction. It's not really a genre story at all. Rather, it's a high drama that just happens to be set in outer space.
Now that's good satire. I especially like this part:
it seems that labels that are native to the interface are explicitly underlined, and labels that are variable simply underline the first letter unless the user assigns a specific letter to them. letters underlined more than once are sequentially selected with each access key keystroke.
Man, i consider myself to be a moderately funny guy, but never in a zillion years could I have come up with something that crazy. I laughed until I cried.
You're not getting it. It's about that semiotic patterns that go into our language. The sentence is "open the door," not "door, open the." We think in verb-object, not object-verb.
That place right now is in the hands of OS X development shops looking to expand into Linux.
Trust me: there are no such places. That's like saying that it's great for surgeons who want to expand into leechery.
Only the most trivial Mac program could even be ported to Linux, GNUSTEP or no GNUSTEP. There are too many core system services that only exist on the Mac: Quartz, CFNetwork, NSNetService, QuickTime, font services...the list just goes on and on. Any program more complex than "Hello, World" would require a massive amount of work to down-port it to Linux, or to any other 20th-century operating system. You know, DOS 3.3, UNICOS, whatever.
Why not interleave the video with copies of the decoder?
Because then it's even harder to tell what's content and what's not!
Haven't you seen the movie Contact
I'm going to pretend your source of insight for this conversation isn't a bad science fiction movie.
I see HDD as useful for archiving video over the course of a century or two.
The hardware? Yes, certainly. Stored in a dry place free from massive temperature fluctuations, a hard drive will last indefinitely.
But it's the data that matters, not the medium itself.
The difference is that a small team of scholars would only have to write a C compiler once in a modern programming language, and then any program written in ancient C would become executable.
Sigh. I love the way you take subjects on which entire books, whole libraries full of books have been written and dismiss them with a wave of the hand.
If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, why don't you stop talking?
I should have said "people looking to change the volume" vs "people wishing to select which subsystems multimedia programs they run will use".
See, even here, you're couching the discussion in the wrong terms in order to muddy the water. We're not talking about "which subsystems multimedia programs use." We're talking about audio output. See how simple it is? Why make it needlessly complex?
several layers of menu options
Several what? What "several layers." There's one place for all system preferences, right? Then, from there, the user selects one place for all sound preferences, right? That's not "several layers." It's a damn sight better than leaving the settings scattered all over the place.
They are, you get it by clicking on the speaker icon.
But they're also available from the general "preferences" interface, right? For the love of God, at least tell me you got that right.
Some would call it not lumping two orthagonal functions together into the same program.
Well, that's really it, isn't it? That's the problem in a nutshell. On the one hand you've got computer programmers who think that different functions dealing with the same basic subject belong in different places. On the other, you've got users who just want to find the damn sound settings. See why Gnome is such a disaster?
In the case that it is not, the user can adjust the volume by going to the speaker icon, which is aways visible and is located in a prominent position that is even familiar to users who have used the Mac OS and Windows.
Yes and no. On a Mac, sound volume is accessed through System Preferences, so a Mac user won't know to look at the menu bar --er, sorry, the "panel" --to find that and other similar controls. And on Windows, the icon is on the opposite side of the screen...leading to the conclusion that the brain surgeon who thought up the idea of putting a speaker icon on the menu bar --crap, the "panel" --really just wanted to do what Windows does, but changed it just to be a little bit different.
And that's really what it all boils down to. "We're going to copy other people's interfaces, but change them to be a little different. We're not going to stop to think that maybe it's good to collect all preference controls in the same place so the user only has to deal with one interface. Instead, we're going to scatter shit all over and send the user on a damn snipe hunt when all the want to do is select headphones instead of speakers."
The more I read OpenSource (really Linux) advocates flaming Sun for some imagined misdemeanor or other the more I tend to conclude that Sun has been remarkably forbearing with the community
How long do you think it's going to be before Sun says "Screw you guys, we're going home?"
How do you know they didn't? Because the authors of PostgreSQL didn't drink the Gnu Kool-Aid, companies like Sun are free to build great products on top of the open-source work.
(Well, we all hope the products are great. Most of the time they're crap, but why not try optimism for a change?)
Yes, I think the person who wrote the summary revealed a little more of his own ignorance than he meant to. I don't consider calling "vec_add" inside a loop to be a black art.
Ah that depends on your perspective. Assuming the poster is writing English, I think you'll find that they spelt "colour" correctly.
I'm startled by the number of people who didn't get the joke.
In Commonwealth countries, the word we use as a synonym for hue is spelled "colour," and the word we use for a shade of black is spelled "grey." In the US, it's "color" and "gray."
The guy wrote "colour" and "gray," which means that one of those two words was misspelled. But we can't know which one, see, because we don't know from context which regionalism he's using. So when I said that he misspelled one of them, but didn't specify which, I was being clever.
Get it? It's a joke, ya dumbasses. A statement meant primarily to amuse. And along come all these dipshits who think they know what's going on and feel compelled to correct me. Sheesh.
(By the way, anti-Americanism is so 2003. It's 2005 now, the year of the ink-stained fingertip. Get with the program.)
A newbie will have no reason to ever access the controls in the MSS.
The fact that you separate your body of users into "us" and "newbies" is a big, big error, in two ways. First, you're dismissing an entire class of users by assuming that they're not going to want to do something; that's not a valid assumption. And second, you're assuming that a class of people -- whatever the opposite of "newbies" is --are okay with a needlessly complex user interface. Also not a valid assumption.
The controls that you talk about for adjusting sound settings are all accessed via the litle sound icon at the top left of the screen
Why just there? Why are all the sound controls not grouped together in a Sound control panel? Why are they spread out all over creation?
In fact, he's most likely to adjust the volume by using the little knob on his speakers!
You're assuming that the user has third-party external powered speakers with a volume knob on them. In my experience, this is hardly ever true.
Please don't presume to let your experience of using a computer dictate what others may wish to do.
Physician, heal thyself.
If I wanted to use a system that let the ignoance of newbies get in the way of doing more advanced things, then I'd use Windows.
Linux is doomed to obscurity and commercial failure as long as the people responsible for its future keep acting like snobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, please. "We know it's the future?" We don't even know if it's theoretically possible! We don't even have a model of a way of producing electricity from fusion that's anywhere near the efficiency of plain-oil nuclear steam generation.
...and for all we know, it may stay that way forever.
Fusion is ten years away from being practical
If we were talking about banking regulations, you might have a point. But we're not, and we never were. You're welcome to stand beside whatever the hell you want. In this case, the thing next to which you're posing your precious visage is utterly irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
However, according to a friend of mine who's a Vice President at a major US bank, just putting together the portions of it that change banking regulations took weeks of study and thousands of pages of text.
Sorry, but that's bullshit. First of all, you don't have to read the actual text of the amending act that was passed by Congress. That's full of "insert here" and "delete there" and "change this to that" stuff. What smart people do is go read the relevant amended parts of the US Code. You know, that big-ass book that holds all our country's laws? Open it up. Read it. Learn.
"Weeks of study" my ass. Maybe if you're just mastering English, or if you're getting the Code a page at a time by UPS Ground.
native XML files are enormously cool
No, they're not. Let me repeat that, just to make sure you get it: No, they are not. They're "cool" only to the extent that they serve a purpose. That purpose can be one of two things: interoperability or transparency. Because nobody reads the Open Office file formats, interoperability is a non issue. (And nobody reads them because nobody writes them; Open Office is the nichest of the niche players.) And because nobody is archiving Open Office files, transparency doesn't count, either.
Want to see XML files done right? Look at Keynote.
BSG has 13 epiodes ... SG 1 has somewhere in excess of 100. Will BSG look so good with 7 or 8 seasons? I doubt it.
;-)
I think that's a dumb argument. Find me any 13 episodes of "Stargate" -- out of the 200+ that exist -- that come anywhere close to the 13 extant episodes of "Galactica," and then we'll talk.
What do you do while you are waiting for them to get to Earth
There is no Earth. It's just a myth. They're not on a journey, and they've got no destination. They're just in a struggle to survive. That's where the conflict comes from, see.
The episode where Starbuck managed the strike on the Cylon base
You mean Apollo?
The problem with the jump fuel wasn't mentioned until that episode
No, the problem with fuel was set up all the way back in the miniseries when Boomer recovered a tanker filled with tylium, and it was firmly cemented in episode 5 (I think) when the air wing expends something like half their fuel on the search for Starbuck.
Can't you feel the suck approaching if BSG went for five years?
No, apparently because I've been paying attention while you have not.
Having just caught up on this thread, I see now why the other guy gave up on you. You're just rambling here. For starters, anybody who would pedantically lecture somebody else on the meaning of "irony" by providing a link to Wikipedia is probably not somebody I, personally, would want to spend any time with. But let's ignore that and see what happens.
...fundamental civil liberties ...do these ideas mean anything to you?
What if he just has a perspective that is different to yours?
I'm pretty sure what he was saying was that there are absolutes. It is not possible to dismiss the fallacy of moral equivalence as being just a matter of different perspectives. There are absolute rights and absolute wrongs, and (for example) communism is just an absolute wrong. Refusing to even acknowledge this distinction in a comparison of a free society and a communist insurgency is a lie of omission.
If he wasn't trying to say that, then I'm trying to say that. Because it clearly needs to be said.
I choose to label capital punishment as state-sponsored murder.
But don't you see? You don't just get to arbitrarily put words to things. Capital punishment is not murder, by definition, because murder is the unlawful killing of a person. Calling capital punishment "murder" is just distorting the issue by using inappropriate terms solely to milk them for connotative impact.
Do you believe it's okay for a government to punish people by death for severe infringement of their laws?
Yes.
What about adultery or apostasy in the Islamic Sharia system?
If the law against adultery were applied with a guarantee of equal protection, then it would be legitimate. It isn't, so it's not. And no, apostasy can never be a crime, because that would trample all over the freedom of religion.
How is that different to the 'righteous' acts of stopping the life of a killer in the USA?
The differences are obvious. Do you not see them? Equal protection
It's this devaluing of human life that allows people to march into foreign countries with guns blazing, or to pack a truck with explosives and park it under a government building
See what I mean? You just equated the liberation of an enslaved nation with the mass murder of hundreds of innocent people. You just declared that, to you, these things are precisely the same. This is obviously wrong, just like comparing watermelons to waterskis is obviously wrong. Why don't you see that it's obviously wrong?
despite the fact you think I'm slightly less than human
I've gotta go with As Seen here. The ability to tell right from wrong is a fundamental part of being human. At the very least, you've got a serious gap in your socialization.
Right and Wrong are distinctions that aren't helpful to my life
Sigh. The arrogance. That's like denying that up and down exist because "they aren't helpful to my life." Nobody asked you if they were helpful to your life, you little brat. These are natural properties that exist whether or not you think they're too red-state for your delicate sensibilities.
You would, in fact, make a perfect Chomsky reader. You've got just the right combination of ignorance and arrogance that he needs you to have in order to plant his backwards ideas in your head. Your soulless brain is fertile ground for his perversions. Off you go. Be a good little disciple. Question everything, but don't ever make a value judgment, because the only true philosophy is nihilism!
I really did, Dave.
Actually, I would strongly recommend staying away from anything with Chomsky's name on it that isn't a highly technical scholarly work in linguistics.
...only at this rate, such a story wouldn't have a happy ending.
Noam Chomsky is the best example of how somebody can be an absolute genius in one area and -- literally! --a raving lunatic with paranoid delusions in another.
It's incredibly sad. Don't be surprised if somebody someday write a Beautiful Mind-style story about Chomsky
It's the frequency with which it's being quoted, and the inappropriateness of the quotes. Think. What did the aforementioned comment have to do with Orwell or with 1984? Nothing at all. It was just a drive-by allusion.
No, 1984 is not "one of the most important books ever written," unless you expand your list to include tens of thousands of books. It's just that it's a book that's widely assigned to high-school students. It's pop-culture wisdom, a mile wide and an inch deep. It's the beginning of insight, not the end. C.f. Rand, Ayn, for another example of the same phenomenon.
Too many people point to 1984 as an illustration of the insidiousness of totalitarianism, when what they completely miss is the fact that 1984 is a book about the insidious of totalitarianism. It takes the insidiousness of totalitarianism as a given. The book doesn't contain a discussion about whether the slope is slippery or not; it just assumes that the slope is slippery and tells a story based on that premise.
To put a point on it, 1984 begs the whole question. Which is fine for a novel. Problem comes when people think of it as more than a novel.
Somebody who reads 1984 and thinks that he then has something insightful to say about language or society is like somebody who reads Beat to Quarters and thinks that he then can sail a tall ship around Cape Horn.
With less than 2% marketshare, Mac OS X is pretty much inconsequential
Check your figures again, please. There's no definition of "market share," either percent-of-sales-per-unit-time or percent-of-total-installed-base, for which that statement could be true. IDC consistently puts Apple around 4%, with an installed base set to exceed 40 million units during the first half of this year. (There are rumors that IDC's next projection is going to uptick sharply on the strength of the Mac mini.)
When you're talking about a market valued in the tens of billions, the difference between "less than 2%" and the actual figure of four percent is huge.
Oh, for Pete's ...dude, seriously. Can't we get through one damn story without somebody making an Orwell analogy? Especially one as lame-ass as this one?
We could solve all the world's energy problems if we could just hook Orwell's corpse up to a generator to capture all the rotational energy that's currently being wasted on postmortem outrage.
Have you ever actually seen an episode of "Battlestar Galactica?" (There's no colon in the name, incidentally; I'm not sure where you got that idea.)
I enjoy watching "Stargate." It's brainless, silly fun. The good guys get themselves into some kind of mess, they stand there with clenched jaws for a while, then somehow they get out of it. Entertaining.
But it's not even in the same class as "Battlestar Galactica." I mean, Christ, did you see the season finale? I think it was the BBC guy who described it as being so brutal and shocking that it was like watching a murder. Truer words were never spoken.
"Galactica" does not meet your Webster's definition -- which, let's be honest here, is a pretty silly definition anyway.
Let's talk instead about the difference between drama and melodrama, in the classical sense. In the classical sense, drama refers to stories that are primarily character-driven and situational, whereas melodrama is mostly concerned with plot. A movie like "Armageddon" is a melodrama in that sense, while a movie like "Closer" is a drama.
(It's not a value judgment. A movie like "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," despite being a silly teen comedy, is classically a drama. The difference lies in where the story comes from, plot or characters.)
Most science fiction stories are melodramas, particularly the ones that feature a square-jawed "John Everyman" as the lead character. These stories are traditionally centered around a plot, or a puzzle, or a mystery. "X happens."
Dramas, on the other hand, take clearly defined characters, put them in a situation, and tell the story of what happens. Think about a movie like "The Big Chill" where, basically, nothing happens at all. You just have people in a situation who are interacting.
"Galactica" follows the dramatic model. While there is certainly some plot, it's more premise or MacGuffin than anything else. Yes, there are cylons out there who are pulling the strings, but the real story comes from how the various characters react to their situation and interact with each other.
So "Battlestar Galactica" is very much not science fiction. It's not really a genre story at all. Rather, it's a high drama that just happens to be set in outer space.
Now that's good satire. I especially like this part:
it seems that labels that are native to the interface are explicitly underlined, and labels that are variable simply underline the first letter unless the user assigns a specific letter to them. letters underlined more than once are sequentially selected with each access key keystroke.
Man, i consider myself to be a moderately funny guy, but never in a zillion years could I have come up with something that crazy. I laughed until I cried.
You rock, dude.
You're not getting it. It's about that semiotic patterns that go into our language. The sentence is "open the door," not "door, open the." We think in verb-object, not object-verb.
That place right now is in the hands of OS X development shops looking to expand into Linux.
...the list just goes on and on. Any program more complex than "Hello, World" would require a massive amount of work to down-port it to Linux, or to any other 20th-century operating system. You know, DOS 3.3, UNICOS, whatever.
Trust me: there are no such places. That's like saying that it's great for surgeons who want to expand into leechery.
Only the most trivial Mac program could even be ported to Linux, GNUSTEP or no GNUSTEP. There are too many core system services that only exist on the Mac: Quartz, CFNetwork, NSNetService, QuickTime, font services
Why not interleave the video with copies of the decoder?
Because then it's even harder to tell what's content and what's not!
Haven't you seen the movie Contact
I'm going to pretend your source of insight for this conversation isn't a bad science fiction movie.
I see HDD as useful for archiving video over the course of a century or two.
The hardware? Yes, certainly. Stored in a dry place free from massive temperature fluctuations, a hard drive will last indefinitely.
But it's the data that matters, not the medium itself.
The difference is that a small team of scholars would only have to write a C compiler once in a modern programming language, and then any program written in ancient C would become executable.
Sigh. I love the way you take subjects on which entire books, whole libraries full of books have been written and dismiss them with a wave of the hand.
If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, why don't you stop talking?
I should have said "people looking to change the volume" vs "people wishing to select which subsystems multimedia programs they run will use".
...leading to the conclusion that the brain surgeon who thought up the idea of putting a speaker icon on the menu bar --crap, the "panel" --really just wanted to do what Windows does, but changed it just to be a little bit different.
See, even here, you're couching the discussion in the wrong terms in order to muddy the water. We're not talking about "which subsystems multimedia programs use." We're talking about audio output. See how simple it is? Why make it needlessly complex?
several layers of menu options
Several what? What "several layers." There's one place for all system preferences, right? Then, from there, the user selects one place for all sound preferences, right? That's not "several layers." It's a damn sight better than leaving the settings scattered all over the place.
They are, you get it by clicking on the speaker icon.
But they're also available from the general "preferences" interface, right? For the love of God, at least tell me you got that right.
Some would call it not lumping two orthagonal functions together into the same program.
Well, that's really it, isn't it? That's the problem in a nutshell. On the one hand you've got computer programmers who think that different functions dealing with the same basic subject belong in different places. On the other, you've got users who just want to find the damn sound settings. See why Gnome is such a disaster?
In the case that it is not, the user can adjust the volume by going to the speaker icon, which is aways visible and is located in a prominent position that is even familiar to users who have used the Mac OS and Windows.
Yes and no. On a Mac, sound volume is accessed through System Preferences, so a Mac user won't know to look at the menu bar --er, sorry, the "panel" --to find that and other similar controls. And on Windows, the icon is on the opposite side of the screen
And that's really what it all boils down to. "We're going to copy other people's interfaces, but change them to be a little different. We're not going to stop to think that maybe it's good to collect all preference controls in the same place so the user only has to deal with one interface. Instead, we're going to scatter shit all over and send the user on a damn snipe hunt when all the want to do is select headphones instead of speakers."
Great attitude.
But Open Office is a big ol' steaming pile of crap. It's 1990s stuff. Why hasn't that horse been taking out back and put down yet?
As long as Linux programmers are trying to catch up to 1997, the platform is doomed.
It's misspelled, but it means "provoking laughter." The word is "risible."
It's a good word. Vocabularies are nice. Everybody should have one.
The more I read OpenSource (really Linux) advocates flaming Sun for some imagined misdemeanor or other the more I tend to conclude that Sun has been remarkably forbearing with the community
How long do you think it's going to be before Sun says "Screw you guys, we're going home?"
How do you know they didn't? Because the authors of PostgreSQL didn't drink the Gnu Kool-Aid, companies like Sun are free to build great products on top of the open-source work.
(Well, we all hope the products are great. Most of the time they're crap, but why not try optimism for a change?)
Yes, I think the person who wrote the summary revealed a little more of his own ignorance than he meant to. I don't consider calling "vec_add" inside a loop to be a black art.
Ah that depends on your perspective. Assuming the poster is writing English, I think you'll find that they spelt "colour" correctly.
I'm startled by the number of people who didn't get the joke.
In Commonwealth countries, the word we use as a synonym for hue is spelled "colour," and the word we use for a shade of black is spelled "grey." In the US, it's "color" and "gray."
The guy wrote "colour" and "gray," which means that one of those two words was misspelled. But we can't know which one, see, because we don't know from context which regionalism he's using. So when I said that he misspelled one of them, but didn't specify which, I was being clever.
Get it? It's a joke, ya dumbasses. A statement meant primarily to amuse. And along come all these dipshits who think they know what's going on and feel compelled to correct me. Sheesh.
(By the way, anti-Americanism is so 2003. It's 2005 now, the year of the ink-stained fingertip. Get with the program.)
A newbie will have no reason to ever access the controls in the MSS.
The fact that you separate your body of users into "us" and "newbies" is a big, big error, in two ways. First, you're dismissing an entire class of users by assuming that they're not going to want to do something; that's not a valid assumption. And second, you're assuming that a class of people -- whatever the opposite of "newbies" is --are okay with a needlessly complex user interface. Also not a valid assumption.
The controls that you talk about for adjusting sound settings are all accessed via the litle sound icon at the top left of the screen
Why just there? Why are all the sound controls not grouped together in a Sound control panel? Why are they spread out all over creation?
In fact, he's most likely to adjust the volume by using the little knob on his speakers!
You're assuming that the user has third-party external powered speakers with a volume knob on them. In my experience, this is hardly ever true.
Please don't presume to let your experience of using a computer dictate what others may wish to do.
Physician, heal thyself.
If I wanted to use a system that let the ignoance of newbies get in the way of doing more advanced things, then I'd use Windows.
Linux is doomed to obscurity and commercial failure as long as the people responsible for its future keep acting like snobs.