While Ubuntu goes a long way to improving the user experience with Linux, even to get it to a 'standard' setup, I needed to use the console no less than 5 times. That's *needed* to, there was no GUI way to do what I was trying to do. While I personally have no problem doing that, I shudder at the idea of talking someone like my father through it.
That's pretty good, honestly. Console commands are at least straightforward to dictate. If I had to talk my sister through everything I did to get 64-bit Vista to a usable state on her laptop I'd not only shudder like an elephant on a rack lift but would probably be pulling off sizeable bits of hair less than halfway through. And I'm bald.
It also means that they've had more time to improve on both usability and their writing conventions. Not exactly something to be proud of in light of the respective results.
Generally when people talk about "free will" in this sort of sense they mean that if you must choose between A or B, before you make your choice there is some non-zero possibility that you could pick either A or B.
I just don't see what people are ultimately trying to get at with this question. Should there be something fundamentally bothersome about the fact that my will exists in conjunction with the rest of the world and is shaped by its interactions with it? Is all this supposed to somehow have an effect on my experience of consciousness and prevent me from striving to lead a futile, deterministic and happy life?
Flash eats memory and CPU in gleeful amounts and is the only way I've gotten similar results, so my wild guess is that people aren't bothering to filter ads and just leave them running in old tabs while they continue browsing. Can't confirm it, though, since I've never been able to get much details out of someone who claims to experience this.
...they have power saving measures built into computers these days so that I can choose to use mine as a toaster while the fans distract my neighbours into looking for passing aircraft.
...I sincerely think that spending a thousand euros on a new picture frame is a prudent spending choice.
...wasting computing resources on actual user tasks is just so boring.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. Debian's testing, unstable and experimental, as well as the development version of Ubuntu, are repositories that can be expected to break spontaneously on updates. Stable releases of both distributions generally only receive stability improvements over time, whereas the testing repository may actually lag behind a bit in terms of speedy security patching.
Also, running Ubuntu LTS in a server environment might be somewhat different to having the very latest release on a desktop along with an experimental compositing manager from outside the main distribution.
What are the specific problems with OS and application support you're having? Windows may be an issue if you still need applications with 16-bit components or if you have bad luck with driver support. In Linux there's trouble with closed-source browser plugins, which can be partly alleviated with nspluginwrapper, although Java 6 can still be a pain. Other than that, the support is about as good as it can be expected to get, and I've been running the AMD64 builds of both Ubuntu and XP on my desktop since when I first got a machine with support for it in 2005.
Or we may consider the humans as a profoundly degenerate species, that has lost its ability to survive in most environment.
That is, if we examine a single human being with the IQ of a bacterium. On the other hand, being smart enough to form complex societies and use available resources in non-obvious ways (without going through the tenuous process of evolving biologically or forming an instinctual behaviour) is a survival tactic as much as being extremely small and simple. We have low- and high-tech societies, scientific and rural communities, hunter-gatherers, farmers, paranoid military nuts and arrogant urbanites. People live just about everywhere from Iceland to Sahara. It would be anything but trivial to take out all of the human race at once, thanks to this diversity.
We've become so much fragile and incapable biologically, that we had to develop some intelligence to be able to circumvent those short comings.
It's also a very human thing to want to conceptualize the world as a series of unambiguously linked causes and effects that lead to a final result - probably something left over from the simpler days when we spent more time working out and running around in the forest instead of sitting in the office. But the way you put it, it's a wonder that many other species of animals survive at all without being as intelligent as we are; the only thing many mammals have going for them, for instance, is that they breed relatively quickly and are coloured in a kind of similar way to their typical environment. They share many of our biological shortcomings, but not the relative lack of dependency on our surroundings.
On the other hand, saying that a species is better or worse in the eyes of nature is sort of like saying that your car (sorry, couldn't resist) cares whether it runs out of gasoline or not. Our survival only matters as much as we care about it, and in that sense I'd say that we're in a better position when compared to bacteria. YMMV, of course.
So long as you can run a basic text editor, MS Paint and a web browser, you can call yourself a web developer. By that rationale, a 233MHz processor, 128mb of ram and a 1.5gb hard drive meets those requirements (XP min specs).
Just to remind you, in light of the GP's claim, five years ago we had the Athlon XP at around 1.5 GHz, G4 PowerMacs somewhere in about 1+ GHz and the Pentium 4 probably over 2 GHz pushing the raw clock count. As long as you have enough memory and disk space, you won't have any problems designing your web sites even if you use a good text or WYSIWYG editor alongside Photoshop and have several browser versions to test with. (And if you design your sites with Flash, I don't know or frankly even care.)
FORTRAN is part of the GNU compiler collection, so yes, it tends to be easily available wherever GCC is. The same collection also includes Java, Ada and Objective-C in addition to C and C++. If you want a complete list of languages supported on Linux, though, you should prepare for a long day.
Agreed. It's not their fault, but it's still not a benefit by any means. I'm in no way defending the licensing of the codecs, but as unfair as it is, it's a problem that ultimately exists on their OS.
The "main" repository and the base install certainly leave out legally objectionable packages, but I wouldn't say that installing them from the package management requires any more effort than getting Ogg Vorbis support on a Mac, or hounding the web for most of the basic codecs that are missing from XP by default. I'm not sure if the biggest problem here is simply setting your criteria to utmost divine perfection.
hmm... personally I use Gnome. it acts and feels great, even on the above mentioned Toshiba Laptop. It's also, for me, more intuitive to use on a regular basis than OSX, especially when used in an heterogeneous LAN.
Second that. Whatever else Finder may or may not be, it's pretty obvious to me that it wasn't designed for use in a networked environment.
As for Linux and audio applications, though, it depends on what you want. I could cut down a lot of Windows use time if I found a viable alternative to the likes of FL Studio or Reason - preferably with some sort of (possibly WINE-powered) support for existing plug-ins. LADSPA and JACK seem like promising platforms to build such a system on, but what's needed is a solid user interface - something that seems to be a rather common lack when it comes to FLOSS tools.
It's true that they might stumble upon something, though the evidence so far suggests that they most likely won't.
The problem is, even if they manage to stumble upon some previously unknown phenomenon, chances are that they'll either actively deny it or miss it completely in light of their warped conceptual framework and methodology. Even if they don't, scientists will still have to put the observations through proper review and in context. Either way, they shouldn't be encouraged through funding, and certainly not by betting people's lives on their superstition.
Excuse me, but that is downright irresponsible. After reading this part of the sentence I'd fallen off my chair with my eyes watering. The clamour associated with the event greatly disturbed my neighbours, who promptly filed a complaint with my landlord. Consequently, I myself would like to complain about the damage done to my reputation as an inhabitant of this tenement and as an upstanding citizen.
Seriously though, and meaning no offence, calling a crummy hypothesis such as the Electric Universe a theory in any scientific sense is giving it a lot more credit than it deserves.
You may be right. I still don't understand why you keep referring to changing the protocol in the first place.
It might help to read at least the parent post of the one you're responding to. X11 is the current protocol, and the OP seemed to call for "a little modernization" in the form of a new revision. This has nothing to do with me opposing some feature or other in the server's software distribution.
I think you may be a bit confused here. Easy configuration and automatic failsafe operation is a server implementation detail. The protocol itself is the definition of how the server has to communicate with client programs. The former is something which clients in general don't have to know or care about, while changes to the protocol will most certainly break a lot of things, and I think in the current situation it would be a solution in search of a problem.
I'm all thumbs up for making X server configuration less intimidating, it's something I've heard people complain about for as long as I've been a Linux user.
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I think it is funny how irate people get over political correctness, without realizing the irony of it all.
Yeah, with all these negative reactions I think we need to devise a new, less direct term for it to keep people from taking offense.
You might be interested to know that ATI's equivalent was also revealed a short while ago.
That's pretty good, honestly. Console commands are at least straightforward to dictate. If I had to talk my sister through everything I did to get 64-bit Vista to a usable state on her laptop I'd not only shudder like an elephant on a rack lift but would probably be pulling off sizeable bits of hair less than halfway through. And I'm bald.
It also means that they've had more time to improve on both usability and their writing conventions. Not exactly something to be proud of in light of the respective results.
This may be true, but which OS is handicapped by it?
Before or after the vendor loses interest and wants me to buy their latest line?
In other news, Vatican researchers find that the Earth contains an average of two popes per square kilometer.
Generally when people talk about "free will" in this sort of sense they mean that if you must choose between A or B, before you make your choice there is some non-zero possibility that you could pick either A or B.
I just don't see what people are ultimately trying to get at with this question. Should there be something fundamentally bothersome about the fact that my will exists in conjunction with the rest of the world and is shaped by its interactions with it? Is all this supposed to somehow have an effect on my experience of consciousness and prevent me from striving to lead a futile, deterministic and happy life?
Flash eats memory and CPU in gleeful amounts and is the only way I've gotten similar results, so my wild guess is that people aren't bothering to filter ads and just leave them running in old tabs while they continue browsing. Can't confirm it, though, since I've never been able to get much details out of someone who claims to experience this.
Maybe it just went o'er their 'eds.
So, couldn't it be said conversely that change or solidification of state is what causes observation to be possible?
Right, because...
That's a bit of an oversimplification. Debian's testing, unstable and experimental, as well as the development version of Ubuntu, are repositories that can be expected to break spontaneously on updates. Stable releases of both distributions generally only receive stability improvements over time, whereas the testing repository may actually lag behind a bit in terms of speedy security patching.
Also, running Ubuntu LTS in a server environment might be somewhat different to having the very latest release on a desktop along with an experimental compositing manager from outside the main distribution.
What are the specific problems with OS and application support you're having? Windows may be an issue if you still need applications with 16-bit components or if you have bad luck with driver support. In Linux there's trouble with closed-source browser plugins, which can be partly alleviated with nspluginwrapper, although Java 6 can still be a pain. Other than that, the support is about as good as it can be expected to get, and I've been running the AMD64 builds of both Ubuntu and XP on my desktop since when I first got a machine with support for it in 2005.
You'd better take that Logic 101 again; it's not his burden to come up with references for numbers he didn't present.
That is, if we examine a single human being with the IQ of a bacterium. On the other hand, being smart enough to form complex societies and use available resources in non-obvious ways (without going through the tenuous process of evolving biologically or forming an instinctual behaviour) is a survival tactic as much as being extremely small and simple. We have low- and high-tech societies, scientific and rural communities, hunter-gatherers, farmers, paranoid military nuts and arrogant urbanites. People live just about everywhere from Iceland to Sahara. It would be anything but trivial to take out all of the human race at once, thanks to this diversity.
It's also a very human thing to want to conceptualize the world as a series of unambiguously linked causes and effects that lead to a final result - probably something left over from the simpler days when we spent more time working out and running around in the forest instead of sitting in the office. But the way you put it, it's a wonder that many other species of animals survive at all without being as intelligent as we are; the only thing many mammals have going for them, for instance, is that they breed relatively quickly and are coloured in a kind of similar way to their typical environment. They share many of our biological shortcomings, but not the relative lack of dependency on our surroundings.
On the other hand, saying that a species is better or worse in the eyes of nature is sort of like saying that your car (sorry, couldn't resist) cares whether it runs out of gasoline or not. Our survival only matters as much as we care about it, and in that sense I'd say that we're in a better position when compared to bacteria. YMMV, of course.
Just to remind you, in light of the GP's claim, five years ago we had the Athlon XP at around 1.5 GHz, G4 PowerMacs somewhere in about 1+ GHz and the Pentium 4 probably over 2 GHz pushing the raw clock count. As long as you have enough memory and disk space, you won't have any problems designing your web sites even if you use a good text or WYSIWYG editor alongside Photoshop and have several browser versions to test with. (And if you design your sites with Flash, I don't know or frankly even care.)
FORTRAN is part of the GNU compiler collection, so yes, it tends to be easily available wherever GCC is. The same collection also includes Java, Ada and Objective-C in addition to C and C++. If you want a complete list of languages supported on Linux, though, you should prepare for a long day.
The "main" repository and the base install certainly leave out legally objectionable packages, but I wouldn't say that installing them from the package management requires any more effort than getting Ogg Vorbis support on a Mac, or hounding the web for most of the basic codecs that are missing from XP by default. I'm not sure if the biggest problem here is simply setting your criteria to utmost divine perfection.
Second that. Whatever else Finder may or may not be, it's pretty obvious to me that it wasn't designed for use in a networked environment.
As for Linux and audio applications, though, it depends on what you want. I could cut down a lot of Windows use time if I found a viable alternative to the likes of FL Studio or Reason - preferably with some sort of (possibly WINE-powered) support for existing plug-ins. LADSPA and JACK seem like promising platforms to build such a system on, but what's needed is a solid user interface - something that seems to be a rather common lack when it comes to FLOSS tools.
Some people call it luck, others call it engineering.
The problem is, even if they manage to stumble upon some previously unknown phenomenon, chances are that they'll either actively deny it or miss it completely in light of their warped conceptual framework and methodology. Even if they don't, scientists will still have to put the observations through proper review and in context. Either way, they shouldn't be encouraged through funding, and certainly not by betting people's lives on their superstition.
I might as well quote from my own reply, which said "this part of the sentence". As said, no harm intended.
Excuse me, but that is downright irresponsible. After reading this part of the sentence I'd fallen off my chair with my eyes watering. The clamour associated with the event greatly disturbed my neighbours, who promptly filed a complaint with my landlord. Consequently, I myself would like to complain about the damage done to my reputation as an inhabitant of this tenement and as an upstanding citizen.
Seriously though, and meaning no offence, calling a crummy hypothesis such as the Electric Universe a theory in any scientific sense is giving it a lot more credit than it deserves.
It might help to read at least the parent post of the one you're responding to. X11 is the current protocol, and the OP seemed to call for "a little modernization" in the form of a new revision. This has nothing to do with me opposing some feature or other in the server's software distribution.
I think you may be a bit confused here. Easy configuration and automatic failsafe operation is a server implementation detail. The protocol itself is the definition of how the server has to communicate with client programs. The former is something which clients in general don't have to know or care about, while changes to the protocol will most certainly break a lot of things, and I think in the current situation it would be a solution in search of a problem.
I'm all thumbs up for making X server configuration less intimidating, it's something I've heard people complain about for as long as I've been a Linux user.