William Shatner has been getting consistent work for many years now. He's had supporting roles in several very successful films, from Dodgeball to Miss Congeniality. He has won last year's Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor and is currently nominated for another Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor for his role in Boston Legal, a television show with bigger viewership than the original Star Trek ever got.
I wonder, do you bullshit your way out of EVERY debate, or just those involving computers? Actually, not only do I not wonder this, but I don't care either. My previous point is entirely unaffected by this pointless argument of yours involving "waiting". Good day, sir.
Linux picked up all my hardware automatically, while Windows (XP) didn't.
Windows XP is five years old. Your Linux distribution is probably less than a month old. I wonder... after your un-patched installation of Windows XP (I'm assuming it's un-patched because, in my experience, Linux users do not know how to maintain their Windows systems since they still complain about pop-ups)... err, sorry, got off on a tangent. Anyway. After your un-patched installation of Windows XP failed to detect your hardware, did you bother installing the manufacturer's drivers? If you did, how many steps did that take? For most users, it takes one step: Double-clicking on the installation file. (Add an extra step if the required file needs to be downloaded from an easy-to-use website or, in most cases, a CD.)
Now, I realize that all of your hardware was automatically picked up by your brand-new month-old Linux distribution, but let's assume you got a piece of hardware that was not. Like, say, the standard integrated sound card that ships with Dell PCs... for whatever reason, these are NOT compatible with numerous distributions from the get-go (in my personal experience, dealing with more than one computer and more than one modern distribution), despite the fact that Dell is one of the biggest PC retailers. So, let's say that this, or in fact ANY OTHER piece of hardware was not automatically detected and working perfectly. I wonder, how many steps do you suppose it would take to fix this problem? How many pages of instructions buried in the archives of a Linux discussion group, like LinuxQuestions.org, would you need to research to do a task that should be entirely rudimentary for the user? It's completely intuitive in an outdated five-year-old operating system. Why is it not in your much more modern Linux distribution?
The thing you have to realize is that all these issues are entirely psychological. It's not that one piece of software is better and the other is worse. You have to look at who makes the software, and under what guidelines. Perhaps one of the biggest issues here is the issue of who the software is made for. It is not a typo when you read a textbook on Linux and see that it uses the terms "user" and "programmer" interchangeably. A textbook on Windows would, likewise, use the terms "user" and "housewife" interchangeably.
Do you REALLY think that the PSP, a platform specifically targetted at hip on-the-go teenagers, will have a movie library consisting of something OTHER than blockbusters created for 13-25 year old males? If your decision on buying the PSP is based on it's movie playing capability, I suggest you look into a portable DVD player instead. They're about the same price, usually have a noticibly larger screen, and have a practically limitless DVD library.
You're assuming that people are stupid enough to buy the $50 inferior product with the current year printed on the cover than the bargain bin $20 copy that takes very little effort to bring up to date through an online roster upgrade.
Well, ok, maybe they're stupid by and large, and the sales will probably reflect this for the current release when people go and buy it like sheep. However, I'm assuming that after 2 years more and more people will start to wisen up and simply not get the new Madden title for that year. That is, UNLESS EA puts in a significant upgrade. They seem to have done it this year with the whole quarterback passing thing, regardless of how fun it is. If they keep adding things, the monopoly issue won't be as bad as people think. Sure, it's still bad for innovation, as will be proven the year the license deal drops and all these other companies bring out games that are LIGHTYEARS ahead of that year's Madden, but for now, this isn't noticably a bad thing.
I'm sure there'll be a lot of comments here about the whole monopoly not causing innovation thing, except for one thing. EA is currently in the same position as Microsoft is regarding their Office suite. They may be a monopoly, but if they don't offer significant upgrades on a regular basis (once a year for EA, maybe some extra time for Microsoft), nobody will buy their product.
Nobody will buy these games just to upgrade the rosters now, since you can download this information online. If EA wants to keep selling titles (monopoly or no monopoly, they still cost millions to produce each year) they better offer something good with each new upgrade.
The fact that that website listed the most "important" games means that the editors had to invariably pick sequels to games that have already proven to be immensely successful. That's the whole reason why they're important for the console, they're what will make people buy it.
However, if you scrolled down a bit lower, you'd see a short list of originals (except Final Fantasy and EA Games). As far as I can tell, every other launch title that isn't anywhere on that page is an original game as well.
Try running Windows Update once in a while, pal. As much as IE might be targetted by malicious websites, it would be less of a problem if Windows illiterates like yourself would actually patch their system on a regular basis.
I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. E-mail is generally used for either business communication, or something so important that you can't wait for the person to get online or get home and tell them over IM or the phone. In my experience, people just generally use e-mail for the more "important" messages.
IM, on the other hand, is used for social conversations (for the most part). How many of us need a searchable record of our social activities?
I don't see how facilitating instant internet communication fits into their "collecting all the information in the world" motto at all. It would take a REALLY anally-retentive person to want a searchable log of ALL their conversations with their friends, if that's what you're implying here.
I don't know what you're trying to say, so I'm guessing you're just trying to score some mod points here. IRC is designed for group conversations, AIM/MSN/Yahoo is designed for person-to-person conversations. Having said that, those IM services also have fully functional chat room capabilities. So basically it's just like IRC, only with more functionality and centered around people who keep a regular network of friends.
But hey, I'm sure that you've already earned yourself some "Insightful" points from someone, so mission accomplished.
Any company trying to roll out yet another instant messenger would be making a mistake. There are already three uber-popular, incompatible networks, not to mention the handful of smaller protocols. None of them really offer anything that the others don't have. Enough is enough.
We were lost. None of us knew where we were. And then Harry began feelin' around on all the trees. And then he says, "Hey guys, I got it! We on Pluto!" And we said, "Harry, how can you tell?" He said, "From the bark you dummies! (laughs) From the bark!!! (laughs)
*cue the dancing alien to finish the obscure reference*
Referring to the Xbox as THE game console is like referring to the Mac as THE personal computer.
What's up with Slashdot, and these other publications like the New York Times, talk about Xbox like it's what the kids are playing these days? It's selling like 1/5th the rate of the PS2. I don't have either of these consoles, but I'd still like to know why the less successful product in an industry composed of only a handful of competitors get this publicity.
Wikipedia = the Internet. Think about it. When someone advertises the power of the Internet, what are they talking about? They say that the Internet has information on every topic. That all human knowledge is on the Internet. Hell, you can go to Google and type "what is the meaning of life?" and get thousands upon thousands of results, including people trying to SELL you the answer in a pure example of shameless capitalism.
So, then, if we already have the Internet, what service does Wikipedia provide? I think it's clear: Wikipedia is a reader's digest of the Internet, searchable and organized. Their topics range anywhere from word definitions to summaries of historical events to debates of controversial issues (in a way that printed encylcopedias could never debate them), and including really meaningless articles like descriptions of cliche subcultures that populate discussion-based websites like Slashdot or Fark.
It's everything the Internet is advertised to be, only compact, digestable, and easily accessible to one and all. Forget going to Google and typing in search strings, only to get 99% of the results consisting of meaningless junk and people trying to sell you garden hoses. Wikipedia just has the facts and the opinions and the debates. That's it's purpose, and it accomplishes it MUCH better than the whole of the Internet ever did.
Wikipedia will never be a more trustworthy, academic source of information than any random collection of Internet websites on a particular topic. Anyone who advertises it as such is clueless. Anyone who tries to control or censor the content in any way needs to be stopped.
A good number of theologians have tried over the years to prove the existence of God using philosophical methods. They all failed.
Wrong. What they came up with is the idea of DEISM. It's the belief in God based solely on logic and reason. Hell, even Einstein was a deist. I'm not saying that it's "the one true faith", but you are just completely and utterly wrong when you say that no one has ever come up with sound logical reasoning to prove God's existence.
Maybe you should stop going around calling people retards, retard.
I don't exactly understand what you're talking about. How would trackers contribute to the transfer speeds beyond the first handful of users?
If you look at the list of peers during a torrent download and see how much they're sharing with you, I average out to about 5-10 KB/sec of bandwidth going to me from each individual peer. Out of the hundreds of peers on the torrent, no more than 20 usually upload to me personally. Given their low upload speeds (since they must divide it up among 5+ other peers besides me, and since they already have harsh upload caps to begin with), and given that they each max out at 5-10KB/sec going to just me, the transfers of torrents hardly ever go above the 200 KB/sec I mentioned above.
In contrast, a very fast dedicated server usually has enough bandwidth to give you rates over 500, 800, even 1,000 KB/sec (very rare, but it happens). While this is obviously less efficient and wastes more resources of the originating server, it's still usually faster than BitTorrent.
Whenever I get a choice of downloading either a torrent or from a decently fast server, I always go for the server. The only times where torrents are useful are when the file is so popular that the server gets bogged down too much.
The sad thing is that those servers are still often faster than most BitTorrent transfers, which usually max out at about 200 KB/sec. Nobody likes to seed torrents at their maximum upload speeds. However, while most of those game download servers are extremely slow (70-150 KB/sec), some actually DO give you downloads at over 500 or 700 KB/sec, which is much faster than your average torrent.
Since broadband providers refuse to increase our upload bandwidth beyond a certain point, thus limitting what the use of BitTorrent can accomplish, we must continue to rely on and support dedicated download servers.
Re:Still ugly fonts - this works too!
on
GNOME 2.12 Previewed
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· Score: 0, Troll
Holy shit! All this to install nicer FONTS!? Linux won't be ready for mass consumer use for at least another decade.
Stick with Windows or Mac for at least another 2-5 years. Linux really isn't well suited for basic home PC type of stuff unless you want to spend the time learning it, teaching everyone in your house how to use it, and knowing how to deal with all it's issues if they were to pop up, which, unlike in the world of Windows or Mac, are usually NOT solvable through a GUI dialogue box and require more than rudimentary knowledge of command lines and at least some basic programming skills.
I mean, unless you already know what you're getting into. And since you're posting on Slashdot, you must already have some understanding for how Linux differs, right?. In this case, you should really only have one requirement for selecting the distribution: the one that works with ALL your hardware. Download a Live CD and try out your system's response to the distribution before installing anything. In my experience, everything else is secondary to just getting your computer to actually work properly under Linux... which is a MAJOR problem with most distros at the moment.
Wrong. The cyrillic letter for 'H' is 'X'.
In any case, how is this a measure of wealth for a country to have foreign chain stores? I LIVED in the Soviet Union. I remember when the first McDonald's was built. A hamburger cost a month's salary, and the only reason there was a long line several hundred people in length is because the Russian people were so supressed that they desperately earned to try something they only read about or seen on TV.
Coincidentally, I bet you'd find it "progress" if I told you that the cost of the hamburger since then has gone down from a month's sallary to a week's sallary. Sure, there are a handful of millionaires here and there, the vast majority of whom earned their wealth by "stealing" the property and industries that the government abandoned after instituting a more free market. But for the VAST majority of Russians, which I'm assuming is something like 98% of the population, none of these "cheap" chain stores are any more affordable to them than a night at the Opera is to you.
Just adding my own confirmation that this does happen.
On a related note, the fact that Windows didn't actually have to be rebooted is kind of a testament to how far Microsoft have gone in stability control. I'm actually really impressed with this. All I had to do was kill Firefox and I'm back to normal.
Slashdot Mirror
William Shatner has been getting consistent work for many years now. He's had supporting roles in several very successful films, from Dodgeball to Miss Congeniality. He has won last year's Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor and is currently nominated for another Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor for his role in Boston Legal, a television show with bigger viewership than the original Star Trek ever got.
Any questions?
I wonder, do you bullshit your way out of EVERY debate, or just those involving computers? Actually, not only do I not wonder this, but I don't care either. My previous point is entirely unaffected by this pointless argument of yours involving "waiting". Good day, sir.
Linux picked up all my hardware automatically, while Windows (XP) didn't.
Windows XP is five years old. Your Linux distribution is probably less than a month old. I wonder... after your un-patched installation of Windows XP (I'm assuming it's un-patched because, in my experience, Linux users do not know how to maintain their Windows systems since they still complain about pop-ups)... err, sorry, got off on a tangent. Anyway. After your un-patched installation of Windows XP failed to detect your hardware, did you bother installing the manufacturer's drivers? If you did, how many steps did that take? For most users, it takes one step: Double-clicking on the installation file. (Add an extra step if the required file needs to be downloaded from an easy-to-use website or, in most cases, a CD.)
Now, I realize that all of your hardware was automatically picked up by your brand-new month-old Linux distribution, but let's assume you got a piece of hardware that was not. Like, say, the standard integrated sound card that ships with Dell PCs... for whatever reason, these are NOT compatible with numerous distributions from the get-go (in my personal experience, dealing with more than one computer and more than one modern distribution), despite the fact that Dell is one of the biggest PC retailers. So, let's say that this, or in fact ANY OTHER piece of hardware was not automatically detected and working perfectly. I wonder, how many steps do you suppose it would take to fix this problem? How many pages of instructions buried in the archives of a Linux discussion group, like LinuxQuestions.org, would you need to research to do a task that should be entirely rudimentary for the user? It's completely intuitive in an outdated five-year-old operating system. Why is it not in your much more modern Linux distribution?
The thing you have to realize is that all these issues are entirely psychological. It's not that one piece of software is better and the other is worse. You have to look at who makes the software, and under what guidelines. Perhaps one of the biggest issues here is the issue of who the software is made for. It is not a typo when you read a textbook on Linux and see that it uses the terms "user" and "programmer" interchangeably. A textbook on Windows would, likewise, use the terms "user" and "housewife" interchangeably.
Do you REALLY think that the PSP, a platform specifically targetted at hip on-the-go teenagers, will have a movie library consisting of something OTHER than blockbusters created for 13-25 year old males? If your decision on buying the PSP is based on it's movie playing capability, I suggest you look into a portable DVD player instead. They're about the same price, usually have a noticibly larger screen, and have a practically limitless DVD library.
You're assuming that people are stupid enough to buy the $50 inferior product with the current year printed on the cover than the bargain bin $20 copy that takes very little effort to bring up to date through an online roster upgrade.
Well, ok, maybe they're stupid by and large, and the sales will probably reflect this for the current release when people go and buy it like sheep. However, I'm assuming that after 2 years more and more people will start to wisen up and simply not get the new Madden title for that year. That is, UNLESS EA puts in a significant upgrade. They seem to have done it this year with the whole quarterback passing thing, regardless of how fun it is. If they keep adding things, the monopoly issue won't be as bad as people think. Sure, it's still bad for innovation, as will be proven the year the license deal drops and all these other companies bring out games that are LIGHTYEARS ahead of that year's Madden, but for now, this isn't noticably a bad thing.
I'm sure there'll be a lot of comments here about the whole monopoly not causing innovation thing, except for one thing. EA is currently in the same position as Microsoft is regarding their Office suite. They may be a monopoly, but if they don't offer significant upgrades on a regular basis (once a year for EA, maybe some extra time for Microsoft), nobody will buy their product.
Nobody will buy these games just to upgrade the rosters now, since you can download this information online. If EA wants to keep selling titles (monopoly or no monopoly, they still cost millions to produce each year) they better offer something good with each new upgrade.
The fact that that website listed the most "important" games means that the editors had to invariably pick sequels to games that have already proven to be immensely successful. That's the whole reason why they're important for the console, they're what will make people buy it.
However, if you scrolled down a bit lower, you'd see a short list of originals (except Final Fantasy and EA Games). As far as I can tell, every other launch title that isn't anywhere on that page is an original game as well.
SP1? Welcome to five years ago!
Try running Windows Update once in a while, pal. As much as IE might be targetted by malicious websites, it would be less of a problem if Windows illiterates like yourself would actually patch their system on a regular basis.
I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. E-mail is generally used for either business communication, or something so important that you can't wait for the person to get online or get home and tell them over IM or the phone. In my experience, people just generally use e-mail for the more "important" messages.
IM, on the other hand, is used for social conversations (for the most part). How many of us need a searchable record of our social activities?
I don't see how facilitating instant internet communication fits into their "collecting all the information in the world" motto at all. It would take a REALLY anally-retentive person to want a searchable log of ALL their conversations with their friends, if that's what you're implying here.
I don't know what you're trying to say, so I'm guessing you're just trying to score some mod points here. IRC is designed for group conversations, AIM/MSN/Yahoo is designed for person-to-person conversations. Having said that, those IM services also have fully functional chat room capabilities. So basically it's just like IRC, only with more functionality and centered around people who keep a regular network of friends.
But hey, I'm sure that you've already earned yourself some "Insightful" points from someone, so mission accomplished.
Any company trying to roll out yet another instant messenger would be making a mistake. There are already three uber-popular, incompatible networks, not to mention the handful of smaller protocols. None of them really offer anything that the others don't have. Enough is enough.
We were lost. None of us knew where we were. And then Harry began feelin' around on all the trees. And then he says, "Hey guys, I got it! We on Pluto!" And we said, "Harry, how can you tell?" He said, "From the bark you dummies! (laughs) From the bark!!! (laughs)
*cue the dancing alien to finish the obscure reference*
Referring to the Xbox as THE game console is like referring to the Mac as THE personal computer.
What's up with Slashdot, and these other publications like the New York Times, talk about Xbox like it's what the kids are playing these days? It's selling like 1/5th the rate of the PS2. I don't have either of these consoles, but I'd still like to know why the less successful product in an industry composed of only a handful of competitors get this publicity.
Wikipedia = the Internet. Think about it. When someone advertises the power of the Internet, what are they talking about? They say that the Internet has information on every topic. That all human knowledge is on the Internet. Hell, you can go to Google and type "what is the meaning of life?" and get thousands upon thousands of results, including people trying to SELL you the answer in a pure example of shameless capitalism.
So, then, if we already have the Internet, what service does Wikipedia provide? I think it's clear: Wikipedia is a reader's digest of the Internet, searchable and organized. Their topics range anywhere from word definitions to summaries of historical events to debates of controversial issues (in a way that printed encylcopedias could never debate them), and including really meaningless articles like descriptions of cliche subcultures that populate discussion-based websites like Slashdot or Fark.
It's everything the Internet is advertised to be, only compact, digestable, and easily accessible to one and all. Forget going to Google and typing in search strings, only to get 99% of the results consisting of meaningless junk and people trying to sell you garden hoses. Wikipedia just has the facts and the opinions and the debates. That's it's purpose, and it accomplishes it MUCH better than the whole of the Internet ever did.
Wikipedia will never be a more trustworthy, academic source of information than any random collection of Internet websites on a particular topic. Anyone who advertises it as such is clueless. Anyone who tries to control or censor the content in any way needs to be stopped.
That was just about the most worthless comment I've ever read. Do you even KNOW what deism is?
It's probably more to do with the fact that you started reading Slashdot.
A good number of theologians have tried over the years to prove the existence of God using philosophical methods. They all failed. Wrong. What they came up with is the idea of DEISM. It's the belief in God based solely on logic and reason. Hell, even Einstein was a deist. I'm not saying that it's "the one true faith", but you are just completely and utterly wrong when you say that no one has ever come up with sound logical reasoning to prove God's existence. Maybe you should stop going around calling people retards, retard.
I don't exactly understand what you're talking about. How would trackers contribute to the transfer speeds beyond the first handful of users?
If you look at the list of peers during a torrent download and see how much they're sharing with you, I average out to about 5-10 KB/sec of bandwidth going to me from each individual peer. Out of the hundreds of peers on the torrent, no more than 20 usually upload to me personally. Given their low upload speeds (since they must divide it up among 5+ other peers besides me, and since they already have harsh upload caps to begin with), and given that they each max out at 5-10KB/sec going to just me, the transfers of torrents hardly ever go above the 200 KB/sec I mentioned above.
In contrast, a very fast dedicated server usually has enough bandwidth to give you rates over 500, 800, even 1,000 KB/sec (very rare, but it happens). While this is obviously less efficient and wastes more resources of the originating server, it's still usually faster than BitTorrent.
Whenever I get a choice of downloading either a torrent or from a decently fast server, I always go for the server. The only times where torrents are useful are when the file is so popular that the server gets bogged down too much.
What does legality have to do with anything?
The sad thing is that those servers are still often faster than most BitTorrent transfers, which usually max out at about 200 KB/sec. Nobody likes to seed torrents at their maximum upload speeds. However, while most of those game download servers are extremely slow (70-150 KB/sec), some actually DO give you downloads at over 500 or 700 KB/sec, which is much faster than your average torrent.
Since broadband providers refuse to increase our upload bandwidth beyond a certain point, thus limitting what the use of BitTorrent can accomplish, we must continue to rely on and support dedicated download servers.
Holy shit! All this to install nicer FONTS!? Linux won't be ready for mass consumer use for at least another decade.
Since we're all geeks, maybe you'll understand this explanation best:
Think of the difference between synchronous and multithreaded processing.
Stick with Windows or Mac for at least another 2-5 years. Linux really isn't well suited for basic home PC type of stuff unless you want to spend the time learning it, teaching everyone in your house how to use it, and knowing how to deal with all it's issues if they were to pop up, which, unlike in the world of Windows or Mac, are usually NOT solvable through a GUI dialogue box and require more than rudimentary knowledge of command lines and at least some basic programming skills.
I mean, unless you already know what you're getting into. And since you're posting on Slashdot, you must already have some understanding for how Linux differs, right?. In this case, you should really only have one requirement for selecting the distribution: the one that works with ALL your hardware. Download a Live CD and try out your system's response to the distribution before installing anything. In my experience, everything else is secondary to just getting your computer to actually work properly under Linux... which is a MAJOR problem with most distros at the moment.
Wrong. The cyrillic letter for 'H' is 'X'. In any case, how is this a measure of wealth for a country to have foreign chain stores? I LIVED in the Soviet Union. I remember when the first McDonald's was built. A hamburger cost a month's salary, and the only reason there was a long line several hundred people in length is because the Russian people were so supressed that they desperately earned to try something they only read about or seen on TV. Coincidentally, I bet you'd find it "progress" if I told you that the cost of the hamburger since then has gone down from a month's sallary to a week's sallary. Sure, there are a handful of millionaires here and there, the vast majority of whom earned their wealth by "stealing" the property and industries that the government abandoned after instituting a more free market. But for the VAST majority of Russians, which I'm assuming is something like 98% of the population, none of these "cheap" chain stores are any more affordable to them than a night at the Opera is to you.
Just adding my own confirmation that this does happen.
On a related note, the fact that Windows didn't actually have to be rebooted is kind of a testament to how far Microsoft have gone in stability control. I'm actually really impressed with this. All I had to do was kill Firefox and I'm back to normal.