I never understood that, either. If someone complains a game is too short, then it's a REALLY good game! It's fine to mention in the review if it's short so the buyer can beware, but it's something to dock points on.
Game reviews (or any review) are so subjective anyway, I feel the 1 to 5 system they use over on X-Play is probably the best. Has anyone ever seen a movie get a score of 8.375 starts out of 10? Can someone explain to me the fine difference between a game that scores a 29 out of 100 and one that gets 27 out of 100?
...just hosting some torrent files that don't point to broken torrents? I've given up on trying to watch some pay channel shows and just wait to rent the DVDs. If the video file doesn't generate countless errors, it's in some bugfuck "new and improved" video format or conatianer where the current player is at version 0.0.1 alpha. Is simple MPEG not esoteric enough for a stupid TV show?
Yeah, I know, it's not their responsibility, but I gotta rant somewhere.
Hey, Showtime and HBO and others. I'll happily pay a buck or two per show if you can make them available a week after initial airing. One engineer a few hours a week could do this. Or just ship it over to iTunes. I am not buying your channels to watch one show, so get a buck or two, or whatever fraction of a penny comes from my Netflix rentals.
The biggest laugh was when they rerouted the gas lines to blow up the power station.
It's annoying when the general public thinks it's even possible to do the magical uber-hacking Hollywood depicts, but when a Slashdotter falls victim to it, well, it's just sad.
Or maybe someone can name some of the interesting things that supposedly happened in those 60 years?
Well, based on secret Tolkein notes in my possession which I found taped to the back of a forgery of the Mona Lisa, Middle Earth developed transforming robot technology by deeply studying the Ents killed while deforesting vast tracts of land to build huge areas where people could shop for goods and services.
There was eventually a brutal war that, amongst other things, reduced all subsequent Kings of Men to whiny little sissy boys with girly hair. Something to do with a demasculation spell getting tangled up with an elven birth control device.
The technology was banned when a hobbit named Periwinkle Butler lead a jihad against "the evil devices that move of their own volition". It was actually sticken from the historical record, and people forgot all about it due to a forget spell leaking in from a parallel fantasy Universe called Xanth. This is why it's never mention in LOTR.
They don't really even have politics
Which makes then the most advanced and enlightened race in all of Middle Earth.
Oh, but you're not a BUSINESS MAJOR (angelic music), are you? Who are you to comment on the lofty and deific decisions of the BUSINESS MAJOR (angelic music) and his or her arcane ways of making (read: losing) money, snorting cocaine and making sure good ideas are thoroughly slaughtered? How dare you! The BUSINESS MAJOR (angelic music) is our Savior!
If they really want to make a dent in the terrorists, maybe they'd be better off banning chemistry classes from high schools and universities.
No, to make a real dent, use a ball peen hammer.
Or go after the training camps. I still hear news about how so and so group has training camps in such and such place. OK. Uh, can we, like, go get them, or something? I recall that was the talk at the start of the so called War on Terror. We'd go in with covert teams, come out of the darkness without warning and bring the terror back to the terrorists. Shit, I was all for *that* approach.
They encourage you to actually think about the problem you're dealing with.
No, my *paycheck* encourages me to think about the problems I deal with.
My tools help me think better by doing much of the busywork.
Trust me. A book of sine/cosine tables (for an example of The Old Way) is not going to make me think any better about an FPGA design. It's just going to use mental resources best spent elsewhere.
OK, I don't use Vista. So call the fucking cops. "Pay mucho $$$ to upgrade to some bloated pile" isn't really a good solution to anything.
So where XP had "c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents", Vista has "C:\Users\[username]\Documents".
WOW! MASSIVE difference!! You have convinced me, sir!T
Lest me expand: the point is I have a project oriented approach to things. Most engineers and other people doing anything serious on a computer will. A single bin for all music and all photos and all whatever_file_type is nonsenseical for anyone but low end users, and yet this is what we see on the "Professional" version of Windows.
If I were a video guy working multiple projects, would I keep all my clips in a common bin, or keeps the clips for each project in the appropriate project folder?
Expose is more important on Macs than Windows. I've used MAc and Windows for years, and Mac has always had a much greater tendency to end up with windows all over the place for some reason.
Then you aren't doing any major multitasking on Windows. I pine for Expose on Windows every working day. The Show Desktop followed by unminimizing the desired window helps, but is still halfassery.
As for not being able to use the Escape key to kill things, I find it incredible that a Mac guy would cite that as a Windows problem. I see the spinning beachball of death constantly in Safari, Mac Firefox, and Mac Opera, and the escape key does NOTHING to kill whatever the app is doing. I have to sit there and wait it out, or finally kill the app altogether.
Well, I gave a Windows example, but I never specifially limited it to one OS. This is a general complaint of mine about any OS, Mac OS included.
If it helps, I fear for the next Mac OS X release. Apple is seriously into bloatware these days as well.
What the hell are you doing that you encounter 8.3 files "so many times"?
I keep seeing posts about how engineering so much better and more elegant under slide rules.
Not sure about that. It certainly took longer. And don't forget there *were* specialized mechanical calculators if engineers reallhy needed to pile on some significant digits. 10 digit precision was available way back at the end of the 19th century.
IMHO, waxing rhapsodic over slide rules is just silly nostalgia. If they were such ubergoodness, they wouldn't have fallen out of favor.
Some older engineers I have known tell me it took a month to design a low pass filter back in the 1950's.Today I can design a 250 tap digital filter in a day. And it'll be adaptive to changing signal conditions. *AND* if I wanted to another day will have it spitting out a live view of it's own response curve on a VGA signal you can hook up to any monitor.
Why not take it further? Some of the REAL feats of enginering (think pyramids & cathedrals) throughout history were done with no calculating devices at all other than someone's brain and a bunch of alges and plumb bobs.
You can have my HP RPN calculator when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.;-)
The idea of a power nap or cat nap has been around forever. I've been tired at work and had my boss say, "Hey, go to your office and take a power nap."
As for office romance, hell, it predates the existence of offices.
I entered the corporate workforce in 1989. None of this stuff was "taboo" then and it isn't now.
Did I accidently slide over to a parallel Earth in my sleep or something?
- A way to customize the File Open dialog box, with the folders you constantly use, gasp!?
Or have it open in same condition you left it. I have a lot of situations where I need Recent Files, Detail view, sorted by date, and I have to set it every fucking time the file browser opens.
Expose. Enough said.
My single most used feature under Mac OS X, especially on a laptop.
A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows.
And ditch the whole "My Documents", "My Music" and "My Pictures" Playskool crap.
Some more:
An Escape key (or some other key) that IMMEDIATELY returns control to the user no matter WHAT is happening. PREEMPT IT, DAMMIT! I've lost count of the number of times Windows has been out on the network looking for something, or loading an application I didn't really want, or loading Acrobat plugin, or something, and I can't do ANYTHING.
When I simply click to highlight a shortcut to a network resource, and the resource is down for some reason, there's a big, unescapable delay. Many time I am highlighting the icon to delete it because I KNOW the resource is gone or moved. Do not try to talk to the remote computer unless I double click. Until then that icon is just a picture.
If I drag something from one window, across a window looking at something with a slow pipe, to another window, my drag freezes in the slow pipe window for a bit. Fucking STOP that! Do not access a network resource unless DROP the item into it. Until then it is just another window. Stop trying to anticipate me.
Speaking of anticipation, and to be fair, do not start a search or other activity until I have given you all the information I intend to give. I'm looking at YOU Mac OS X Spotlight. Typing should not s tu t te r.
Enough with the 8.3 filemane system. So many times when I need to do some deep troubleshooting in Windows, I have to poke through directory after directory of ill-named files in the 8.3 style. Why are you still doing that, developers? Why?
Cancel buttons that are not cruel hoaxes like unconnected crosswalk buttons.
Progress bars that don't say "5 seconds left" for ten minutes. If you don't know, just fess up.
But people are finally catching on, and MS's strategy cannot last forever.
At the big company I work at, there is serious talk of bringing back some Macs for desktop use.
As recently as a year ago, such a thing was in the "Never Going To Happen" column
We use Solaris for all the engineering stuff, so I keep trying to push the idea that Apple has a native X-Windows solution. No more of that godamned Exceed nonsense.
You ever get the feeling sometimes that the Universe is not fully comprehensible to any being living within it?:-) There's an Unknowability Theory out there just waiting for the Nobel.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Ballmer? Is that you?
I never understood that, either. If someone complains a game is too short, then it's a REALLY good game! It's fine to mention in the review if it's short so the buyer can beware, but it's something to dock points on.
Game reviews (or any review) are so subjective anyway, I feel the 1 to 5 system they use over on X-Play is probably the best. Has anyone ever seen a movie get a score of 8.375 starts out of 10? Can someone explain to me the fine difference between a game that scores a 29 out of 100 and one that gets 27 out of 100?
...just hosting some torrent files that don't point to broken torrents? I've given up on trying to watch some pay channel shows and just wait to rent the DVDs. If the video file doesn't generate countless errors, it's in some bugfuck "new and improved" video format or conatianer where the current player is at version 0.0.1 alpha. Is simple MPEG not esoteric enough for a stupid TV show?
Yeah, I know, it's not their responsibility, but I gotta rant somewhere.
Hey, Showtime and HBO and others. I'll happily pay a buck or two per show if you can make them available a week after initial airing. One engineer a few hours a week could do this. Or just ship it over to iTunes. I am not buying your channels to watch one show, so get a buck or two, or whatever fraction of a penny comes from my Netflix rentals.
You know, I think you're right! Good idea, though. :)
The biggest laugh was when they rerouted the gas lines to blow up the power station.
It's annoying when the general public thinks it's even possible to do the magical uber-hacking Hollywood depicts, but when a Slashdotter falls victim to it, well, it's just sad.
Geez, nothing but pictures of itself! Should have named it PRINCESS.
So what happens 10 years from now when everyone has it in their vehicle and some hacker figures out a way to stall all the cars in LA?
I think someone took the latest Die Hard movie a little too seriously.
Or maybe someone can name some of the interesting things that supposedly happened in those 60 years?
Well, based on secret Tolkein notes in my possession which I found taped to the back of a forgery of the Mona Lisa, Middle Earth developed transforming robot technology by deeply studying the Ents killed while deforesting vast tracts of land to build huge areas where people could shop for goods and services.
There was eventually a brutal war that, amongst other things, reduced all subsequent Kings of Men to whiny little sissy boys with girly hair. Something to do with a demasculation spell getting tangled up with an elven birth control device.
The technology was banned when a hobbit named Periwinkle Butler lead a jihad against "the evil devices that move of their own volition". It was actually sticken from the historical record, and people forgot all about it due to a forget spell leaking in from a parallel fantasy Universe called Xanth. This is why it's never mention in LOTR.
They don't really even have politics
Which makes then the most advanced and enlightened race in all of Middle Earth.
- Oh, well, just stay here in prison and rot, elf whore. (Family Guy version)
Oh, but you're not a BUSINESS MAJOR (angelic music), are you? Who are you to comment on the lofty and deific decisions of the BUSINESS MAJOR (angelic music) and his or her arcane ways of making (read: losing) money, snorting cocaine and making sure good ideas are thoroughly slaughtered? How dare you! The BUSINESS MAJOR (angelic music) is our Savior!
If they really want to make a dent in the terrorists, maybe they'd be better off banning chemistry classes from high schools and universities.
No, to make a real dent, use a ball peen hammer.
Or go after the training camps. I still hear news about how so and so group has training camps in such and such place. OK. Uh, can we, like, go get them, or something? I recall that was the talk at the start of the so called War on Terror. We'd go in with covert teams, come out of the darkness without warning and bring the terror back to the terrorists. Shit, I was all for *that* approach.
...if I can turn in my neighbors yet.
They are getting *really* annoying.
I as going to rig their gas line to rupture, but then I cam to Slashdot and heard about this whole "police state" thing.
Well, you should bow to me more, because I don;t NEED a slide rule to know computers can't think for me.
I do not need to dick around with a slide rule to place and route a 15 million gate system on a chip.
They encourage you to actually think about the problem you're dealing with.
No, my *paycheck* encourages me to think about the problems I deal with.
My tools help me think better by doing much of the busywork.
Trust me. A book of sine/cosine tables (for an example of The Old Way) is not going to make me think any better about an FPGA design. It's just going to use mental resources best spent elsewhere.
What would Scott Tenorman pay?
OK, I don't use Vista. So call the fucking cops. "Pay mucho $$$ to upgrade to some bloated pile" isn't really a good solution to anything.
:)
:)
So where XP had "c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents", Vista has "C:\Users\[username]\Documents".
WOW! MASSIVE difference!! You have convinced me, sir!T
Lest me expand: the point is I have a project oriented approach to things. Most engineers and other people doing anything serious on a computer will. A single bin for all music and all photos and all whatever_file_type is nonsenseical for anyone but low end users, and yet this is what we see on the "Professional" version of Windows.
If I were a video guy working multiple projects, would I keep all my clips in a common bin, or keeps the clips for each project in the appropriate project folder?
Expose is more important on Macs than Windows. I've used MAc and Windows for years, and Mac has always had a much greater tendency to end up with windows all over the place for some reason.
Then you aren't doing any major multitasking on Windows. I pine for Expose on Windows every working day. The Show Desktop followed by unminimizing the desired window helps, but is still halfassery.
As for not being able to use the Escape key to kill things, I find it incredible that a Mac guy would cite that as a Windows problem. I see the spinning beachball of death constantly in Safari, Mac Firefox, and Mac Opera, and the escape key does NOTHING to kill whatever the app is doing. I have to sit there and wait it out, or finally kill the app altogether.
Well, I gave a Windows example, but I never specifially limited it to one OS. This is a general complaint of mine about any OS, Mac OS included.
If it helps, I fear for the next Mac OS X release. Apple is seriously into bloatware these days as well.
What the hell are you doing that you encounter 8.3 files "so many times"?
More than you, it seems.
Cheer up, it's nearly Christmas.
I keep seeing posts about how engineering so much better and more elegant under slide rules.
;-)
Not sure about that. It certainly took longer. And don't forget there *were* specialized mechanical calculators if engineers reallhy needed to pile on some significant digits. 10 digit precision was available way back at the end of the 19th century.
IMHO, waxing rhapsodic over slide rules is just silly nostalgia. If they were such ubergoodness, they wouldn't have fallen out of favor.
Some older engineers I have known tell me it took a month to design a low pass filter back in the 1950's.Today I can design a 250 tap digital filter in a day. And it'll be adaptive to changing signal conditions. *AND* if I wanted to another day will have it spitting out a live view of it's own response curve on a VGA signal you can hook up to any monitor.
Why not take it further? Some of the REAL feats of enginering (think pyramids & cathedrals) throughout history were done with no calculating devices at all other than someone's brain and a bunch of alges and plumb bobs.
You can have my HP RPN calculator when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
The idea of a power nap or cat nap has been around forever. I've been tired at work and had my boss say, "Hey, go to your office and take a power nap."
As for office romance, hell, it predates the existence of offices.
I entered the corporate workforce in 1989. None of this stuff was "taboo" then and it isn't now.
Did I accidently slide over to a parallel Earth in my sleep or something?
I understand your basic point, but I don't think living in a cave is significantly low-risk compared to living in an average city.
:)
This does, of course, assume that it's one cultural evolutionary step from caves to cities.
And we can learn from those and improve and lower the risk further.
Or we can go hide in caves.
Because, I'm sorry, but wind and solar are not going to cut it by themselves.
- A way to customize the File Open dialog box, with the folders you constantly use, gasp!?
Or have it open in same condition you left it. I have a lot of situations where I need Recent Files, Detail view, sorted by date, and I have to set it every fucking time the file browser opens.
Expose. Enough said.
My single most used feature under Mac OS X, especially on a laptop.
A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows.
And ditch the whole "My Documents", "My Music" and "My Pictures" Playskool crap.
Some more:
An Escape key (or some other key) that IMMEDIATELY returns control to the user no matter WHAT is happening. PREEMPT IT, DAMMIT! I've lost count of the number of times Windows has been out on the network looking for something, or loading an application I didn't really want, or loading Acrobat plugin, or something, and I can't do ANYTHING.
When I simply click to highlight a shortcut to a network resource, and the resource is down for some reason, there's a big, unescapable delay. Many time I am highlighting the icon to delete it because I KNOW the resource is gone or moved. Do not try to talk to the remote computer unless I double click. Until then that icon is just a picture.
If I drag something from one window, across a window looking at something with a slow pipe, to another window, my drag freezes in the slow pipe window for a bit. Fucking STOP that! Do not access a network resource unless DROP the item into it. Until then it is just another window. Stop trying to anticipate me.
Speaking of anticipation, and to be fair, do not start a search or other activity until I have given you all the information I intend to give. I'm looking at YOU Mac OS X Spotlight. Typing should not s tu t te r.
Enough with the 8.3 filemane system. So many times when I need to do some deep troubleshooting in Windows, I have to poke through directory after directory of ill-named files in the 8.3 style. Why are you still doing that, developers? Why?
Cancel buttons that are not cruel hoaxes like unconnected crosswalk buttons.
Progress bars that don't say "5 seconds left" for ten minutes. If you don't know, just fess up.
But people are finally catching on, and MS's strategy cannot last forever.
At the big company I work at, there is serious talk of bringing back some Macs for desktop use.
As recently as a year ago, such a thing was in the "Never Going To Happen" column
We use Solaris for all the engineering stuff, so I keep trying to push the idea that Apple has a native X-Windows solution. No more of that godamned Exceed nonsense.
Is that you Karl Rove?
And there's a small chance an asteroid may wipe us all out, and yet we persevere.
If we never did anyting until there was zero risk, we'd still be living in caves.
You ever get the feeling sometimes that the Universe is not fully comprehensible to any being living within it? :-) There's an Unknowability Theory out there just waiting for the Nobel.