By using an XML based file format (as I proposed in a previous comment) you get the best of both worlds. The Apache config file is a close example of what I was thinking (it's not XML, but it is XML "like".)
Yes, you get the best of both worlds. First,
it requires
more software machinery to process it, but at
least it's from a standard library (reliance
on which damages portability across unices).
Secondly, it's at least nearly human readable,
unlike our current textfiles which are entirely human readable.
So XML provides two benefits: more brittle
and dependent and bloated software; and harder to edit, read, and manage files.
The slashdorks said "You get what you pay for". They did
not say "You get what you pay for vis a vis online services."
Therefore they did indeed imply the very statement that is
debunked in your comment's parent. So there is no confusion.
In short, people who don't like WikiStyleLinks usually don't like them because they haven't given them an honest try.
Ah, the cry of the novice advocate: "if you don't agree, you don't understand". I've seen this argument used on everything from python to political theories. This argument also has about as much merit: those who advocate WikiWords or indentation for syntax or redistribution of wealth believe in the self-evident merit of the idea so much that anyone else must be deluded. Believe it or don't, it's just based on as much actual insight as the first assertion.
Ahh the straw man! I said that people who don't like wiki links usually haven't tried them because I have often encountered this resistance. Asking the question: "Have you given it an honest try?" has invariably produced the answer: "No." I'm not sure as to your answer to this question, if yes, then it is a new point of view. Fantastic!
It really just doesn't take a lot of training to get people to use brackets. People can stick brackets around phrases in existing text.
With a little more intelligence, it can be done with a javascript browser interface and no syntax at all: hilight the words, click on a "make link" button, if there's no link then do a fuzzy match (think spellchecker) on existing links, suggest them. No cumbersome textarea needed. A bit slow for my tastes (too much aiming with the mouse), but great for one-off editing.
Both of these ideas are pretty jarring with
WikiNature. The textual form of WikiMarkup is not hierarchical. It avoids the types of nesting
issues and matching concepts of HTML because documents which have these features have higher friction in the editing process. As for the javascript browswer tricks, this has higher friction in the access costs. Are all the users of the wiki using javascript at all? Are they using graphical browsers? A wiki should just work and it should work immediately and transparently for all users and all comers without exception. That's the point!
Thankfully most wikis worth using do support free link syntax, because in keeping with the wiki philosophy, freedom is good. As for the javascript trick, I've a similar thing done with in a helpdesk app, though it wasn't browser-based (it easily could be).
An application has its own set of rules, you can do all the tricks you want, because everyone is using the same system. As for the free link syntax -- I'd say Ward Cunningham's Wiki is very much worth using. As the creator of the entire concept with an ongoing healthy community after many years, they have resisted the desire to create such a thing.
As for Wiki being about freedom.. I don't think that's it. It's close though. Wikis are about unfetteredness. They are about focus on the content. They are about content vs. being about access to the content. They are about simply fixing stuff instead of discussing fixing stuff. This doesn't exactly add up to freedom, it more adds up to cooperation through individual cooperation. This can actually be aided by giving people a common ground in many areas. One of these is helping people use a common naming system.
Yes, logical partitions are fictitional. So are all partitions. They're just conventions on how to share sections of the disk. Come to think of it -- files are fictitional, so are jpegs. etc.
Or did you just mean to suggest that the namelogical partition is somehow less valid than logical drive.
Regardless of how problematic you view this
system to be, it is the normal way of slicing
the disk up into more than four chunks that can
be shared among many operating systems on the
x86 platform. You don't have to like it, but
you'd think FreeBSD -- which is native to x86
-- would support it.
As a user of real Wikis in corporate environments where communication and clarity are essential, I can heartily recommend the use of CapitalWordLinks over any special syntax.
There are lot of reasons why such links are superior, including:
Natural convergence of topics -- many times users are not sophisticated enough to search for the desired topic page before attempting to create it. People working at the same company tend to have the same idea of names for things, and the topic pages will converge even for unsophisticated users.
Simplicity of syntax -- wiki's main point is to make things both extremely light and simple to edit, and also not to have much context sensitivity. If you add things into the middle of paragraphs or sentences or phrases there is almost never any ancillary cleanup work of moving braces, parens, etc. around. This is why wiki-markup is so much better than something like HTML
CamelCase words suggest good naming -- The main thing that is un-elegant with the CamelCase WikiStyleNaming is very short topics, like TcP. This is good. Very vague topic names are usually not useful. What happens it the topic does not focus discussion and so the page ends up being cacaphony or abandoned instead of useful. With arbitrary naming eg [TCP], people feel free to use terrible topic names which do not promote good discussion.
Nontechnical users - lastly, users who are not technical at all can get by using the simple markup style of wikis. They don't have to match braces or look for special symbols, it's all RIGHT THERE. CamelCase is a lot clearer to such folks. Compare: MarketingTargets to [Marketing Targets]. The latter looks more clear to the programmer, but experience with large numbers of users says that the former is much more learnable and self-correcting, and is gotten right somewhere around 99.95% of the time, while the latter leads to constant errors. Trust me, I've maintained internal communication tool environment things.
In short, people who don't like WikiStyleLinks usually don't like them because they haven't given them an honest try.
1) amazon appear to have made a profit without anyone (or me at least) every receiving any spam from them (sure, i get occasional mailing list stuff, but i signed up for that when i created my account with them)... see? you dont have to piss ppl off with unsolicited emails to try and make money. sometimes you can just work hard at it (and yes, patent and sell off stuff, but they arent the only business to do it, so GET OVER IT already)
Maybe you've gotten by without getting spammed by Amazon, but I certainly have received my fair share of the pale pasty pink meat-ish substance in a can. I have been spammed by amazon over and over and over. It got to the point where I crafted special procmail rules to bounce their spams directly to abuse reporting addresses, as they were so amazingly regular.
Amazon was an early follower of the idea of 'customer spam'. This mindset would hold that any customer is fair game for spamming for the rest of their natural life. This just isn't so. The mere purchase of a single product from a vendor does _not_ entail solicitation of any and all commercial mailings the vendor can think of for the remainder of the customer's natural lifespan.
Even if your brain is so clouded as to fail to comprehend that such email is not solicited, Amazon remains guilty in multiple fashions. Specifically calling and emailing them to request cessation of said emails was acknowledged and agreed to and still the spam came. Specific opt-out boxes checked were tried and still the spam came. Temporary successful releif from spam occurred after talking to manager after manager, but then they started sending me spams asking if maybe I would like to receive more of their spams. The best of course is the meta-spams, when they would mail me unwanted mails -- which I had asked them to stop -- containing spam advertising from third parties. This was the point that I started auto-routing such emails to abuse reporting addresses. I don't know if
they ever would have stopped. Eventually
I null-routed their domains from my network, and
more recently have changed my email address.
As for your comments regarding their egregious patent, you basically assert that other people doing similar bad patent skulduggery makes it somehow more acceptable. To believe that commonality of actions makes them acceptable or unaccaptable makes you a fool, and to state the same lets us all be aware of that fact.
2) the news link in the article has what may be the worlds first html anchor of the phrase "pooh-poohed"... i think this page should be archived somewhere for posterity. im pretty sure that even winnie the poohs personal website doesnt have that phrase on it.
Yes. The Slashdot "editors" are among the majority of illiterates who never learned what hypertext was for, but yet persist in spending their lives failing to use it correctly.
Programming is no more automatable than mathematics. The two fields
are highly akin. Please refer to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.
If you mean to say that SOME of the programming that is done today --
the lower level, already explored and understood coding which
is so much reinvention of the wheel -- can be automated
I'm with you all the way. But that just moves the act
of programming towards the higher level, towards building
on that which is already written. It doesn't automate
programmint itself.
There is a misconception about Japan that still persists to this day (as can be seen in your opinion) that they have Western ideals and a Western way of thinking. This is not true today and it sure as hell wasn't true in the 1940's. Just because defeat is inevitible isn't necesarily reason for them to surrender.
There is a misconception indeed, and you persist in it. Japan was not unwilling to surrender because insufficient force had been
displayed, but rather because the demands were
not made in a way that made it reasonable for
Hirohito to accept them. At the same time, the
social structure of Japan was such that while
the Emperor had not declared the war effort
over, the country would fight a useless
impossible battle to defend their country.
If the US had listened to the advice of its
own anthrolopologists employed at the time to
study japanese culture (see, for example The Chrysanthemum and the Sword), surrender
could have been obtained with no further bloodshed at all. Unfortunately, the leaders
of their time chose to disbelieve this information and fit the behavior of the Japanese into their own model of thinking, which said that
they were impossibly, irraitionally resolute, and would only surrender if impossible force and
arms were displayed. This worked, but other workable courses were yet available which were not tried.
The concept of ysing nukes is to set them off at a distance, so the presure wawe and the radiation pushes the asteroid instead of blowing it up.
I'm just curious; how can there be a pressure wave in a vacuum?
I can't say for sure what was meant, but I assume the 'wavefront' of the
electromagnetic radiation release is what is being mentioned here.
If i remember correctly, a nuclear explosion primarily releases
an initial burst of various high energy particles which react with
the surrounding matter to hand their energy off to reach the
heat etc. stage. If these particles simply smack into the asteroid,
the heat will happen on it, but more importantly the momentum of
the radiation should be imparted to it.
A traditional flash-to-gas explosive system would probably be
particularly useless in space as there is no atmosphere
to carry a compression wave, as you pointed out.
Most SB-Live models for instance always has their effects engine engaged,
like or not, changing the digital soundstream before it leaves the
system.
SPDIF is also a somewhat touchy thing, and a poorly designed
digital out card can lose some bits of fidelity I'm not sure if
this occurs with any sold cards, but it could.
Some digital out cards give you pure unadulterated sound, but
many consumer-targetted ones (Creative Labs, for isntance)
do not.
I can _easily_ tell the difference between a 640kbps mp3 and
the actual.wav file. 640kbps mp3 files do not exist. They are
out of specification, and are either nonexistent, or not mp3 files.
I know I'm just rising to the bait here, but your comments re distro compliance are totally wrong.
SuSE passed the entire compliance suite for LSB (including the FHS stuff) with one or two issues, compared with hundreds for other distributions over a year ago./sbin/init.d went out quite some time ago after discussions with the LSB committee about issues involved.
Not to mention that the LSB of that time very specifically suggested that programs of all kind were not to be in/etc. Interprested in a traditional UNIX sense, this could prohibit scripts. Also, there was a significant SySV
tradition of locating init.d scripts under/sbin. Feel free to look it up!
Anyway, SuSE remains the most compliant distribution to the FHS and the LSB in general. You don't have to like SuSE, but don't open your mouth and spew ignorance. It isn't pretty.
1) I have no idea how to "load modules"
2)I have no idea what 'proc/partitions' is
3)I don't know how to 'just mount 'em or whatever'.
So you effectively said "I don't know how to use
Linux, but I'm sure that it must suck!"
1 and 2 I could give you, but any and every
desktop system, linux manual, quickstart guide,
etc. is going to tell you how to 'mount 'em or
whatever'.
If you don't know how to use Linux, then that
demonstrates that you don't know how to use
Linux, no less, no more. It belies nothing
about the goodness or badness of Linux.
NEXT!
I think if art, most videogames are pretty lousy
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 1
My major problem with "videogames as art" is the
focus of the audience is so focused away from
anything artistic, that any merits of the medium
are almost lost.
To be more clear, many games involve doing a set
of very similar tasks over and over with mind
numbing repetition where the experience is
more of a skill-building exercise / sport /
random search / hit the button over and over
RPGfest than any sort of experience that could
be considered an 'artistic one'.
Regardless of the fact that there are many
artistic elements involved in both the design
and the craft of the game, most games feature
a primary audience experience which is
anything but artistic in nature. An example
of this is Wolfenstein 3D, which has you
shooting the same enemies with the same weapons
over an inordinately long list of similar
levels. This experience is not, in fact,
artistic in any way. It bears no relationship
to the interaction of a new idea or image etc.
which is the interaction with art.
It is of cousre possible that you could have
a secondary audience experience, where you
are watching, or are mentally distanced from
your own playing where you can derive an
artistic experience from the same game. But
this is definitely a secondary experience.
There DO exist games which provide a primary
audience experience which might be considered
artistsic. An apple II game which involved
controlling two games with one joystick, each
which would change into another game periodically
might be primarily an artistic experience.
Heaven and Earth, as it has been explained to
me is a set of very different activities,
puzzles, and koans wended together into a whole.
Both of these games primarily are presenting
the user with a novel, challenging, perhaps
thought provoking experience, and one that
at least on the first pass is in no way based
on repetition, skill-building, etc. and thus
does not detract from a possible artistic
experience.
Fundamentally, I feel that whether or not most
videogames are art, they are pretty horrid,
in that they do their best to direct any and
all attention away from any of their artistic
merits. Music and movies do not do this, and
TV does it less. A true success of a
videogame-as-art would be one where the primary
experience itself was artistic, impressing
upon the audience new ideas and thoughts which
are previously foreign to them, not merely
a plotline.
Craft does not require art. Craft can be purely
utilitarian.
Being a cooper is a craft. Constructing a
purely utilitarian barrel is not art, nor does
it require art to lead the way, merely engineering.
Many craftsmen DO incorporate what you describe
above, but not all.
There is a general blocking of anything, and
everything, which is not MSIE. It may be
that when this first aired, it was
accurate that changing a single letter would
allow the page to load successfully, but at this
point they are blocking _all_ unknown browsers.
My junkbuster setup identifies itself as GD/2.0,
primarily because I've never seen a website
that did anything useful with the client-id
besides offer me the wrong software (I'm
a multiplatform house!)
I generally get generic webpages, or stupid
front pages telling me to stay out (read
the dumb javascript, type in a URL).
So, the following browsers are rejected:
wget, w3m, mozilla, GD/2.0,
FRUITCAKECITY/9.3, etc., etc., etc.
Clearly, this is a general block of all non-IE,
rather than Opera and Mozilla specifically.
You see, Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom,
knows that no one could EVER design a standards
compliant web browser but them.
That's right, wget is not standards compliant,
even though it contains NO HTML CODE AT ALL!It doesn't even have anything to do with the
'standards' they are making noise about.
Oh well, lies lies lies...
If you can resist the urge to troll and flame, your karma will inevitably creep above the extra-point threshhold, never to return.
Yes, and if you can resist the urge to post except when you actually have something worthwhile to say, your karma will remain below that threshold. And really, that would be an even bigger boost to the great Signal to Noise Ratio in the sky.
There are more valid chess positions than there are atoms in the known universe.
If you need me to find the calculations I can.
A complete chess database is not possible.
Perhaps a complete *enough* database is possible,
where responses to all moves are known
which are winning.. However, I'm not sure
how you'd ARRIVE at such a tree without a
complete exploration.
As a new owner of a PalmOS device, I couldn't disgree more.
The palm is very simple. It doesn't cover a lot of ground. You can select buttons, you can enter text, you can choose menus, and the like. This leaves no excuse for the laundry list of issues I've had with my device so far. To list a few:
Why do I have datebook and datebook+? What is the difference? Why do I have both? If they're redundant, and I can use one or othe other, why can't I delete Datebook, which seems to do less. Do they share data? They seem to. Is all data accessible from both, or only some?
The Welcome application seems useless after the first runthrough. I don't need to be taught about the graffiti again. Why can't I remove it like I can some other applications? I've actually created a category called 'trash heap' for application icons I never plan to use again but can't make go away. This kludge on my part is largely defeated by the default 'All' category mentioned below.
Why are some of the graffiti strokes so nonsensical? A colon is a downup stroke. A stroke to the right enters a space, while a stroke to the left erases text? To enter a colon I have to start at the top, strike down and back up again? That bears no relation to a colon at all.
If the menu makes a menu bar appear at the top of the screen, and nothing else is up there normally, why doesn't clicking at the top of the screen activate the menu? The net result of this is that a lot of functionality of the applications is effectively "hidden" so that it is difficult to learn.
Why are there (i) help icons only on the screens I don't need any help with, but none for the elements I find confusing?
The buttons available surrounding the graffiti area seem extremely arbitrary. One lets me select applications, one brings up menus, one brings up the calculator, and one is a search tool. There is no way to meaningfully distinguish them other than memorization.
If i can select categories for my applications, why does PalmOS insist on starting me off with the "ALL" category which destroys any utility of these categories by presenting all applications? Why can't i delete the "all" category?
Why is a button devoted solely to bringing up the calculator? I don't have any desire to even HAVE a calculator application.
Speaking of modal issues, if i accidentally tap instead of stroke, how do I cancel the punctuation entry? So far my only solution is to enter the bogus punctuation and then delete it.
Is it possible to duplicate a record, so that I can create a fillout document and then fill it out several times? This question actually stumped 5 employees of Palm Computing Inc.
When in the text editor in a created document, i can tap the stylus anywhere in the text to move the insertion point. If i tap the stylus somewhere outside the text, the insertion point does not move. The technical side of me knows that there is no 'document' or whitespace
characters reaching that point, but there is no visual distinguishment at all, and i can't exactly hold down the spacebar to get the cursor over there, so what's with the restriction? I'm not
editing source code here, it could be a little less strict on document structure.
This is a bit farther out, but I think reasonable: Why can't i combine functionality? Why can't a memo contain several todo items, or refer to them? If i'm taking notes on a project, why can't i mark sections of the project done that I'm working on in a manner that has any association?
You may not agree with all these issues, but
I believe you will find most of them stand. The Palm device, for something so trivial, suffers from far more than its share of usability issues.
I've honestly looked for this on the intenret and failed.
The question is: What do the letters 'USA' as
stand for as spraypainted on roadways, bridges, embedded into metal lids to access boxes, etc.
To best this challenge, do the search WITHOUT entering the actual expansion of the letters. Searching for information you already know on
the internet is kind of pointless.
I would appreciate the answer, however, as a seperate request.
Slashdot Mirror
sendmail.cf is not designed to be readable
it's generated by m4 macros.
Bad example.
XML is not really readable either, it's nested
tree structures with lots of encumbered syntax
-josh
Yes, you get the best of both worlds. First, it requires more software machinery to process it, but at least it's from a standard library (reliance on which damages portability across unices). Secondly, it's at least nearly human readable, unlike our current textfiles which are entirely human readable.
So XML provides two benefits: more brittle and dependent and bloated software; and harder to edit, read, and manage files.
Now you're confusing things.
The slashdorks said "You get what you pay for". They did
not say "You get what you pay for vis a vis online services."
Therefore they did indeed imply the very statement that is
debunked in your comment's parent. So there is no confusion.
Except on the part of Mr. Taco.
I'd love a python-related job!! What do you do?
Even if you need no people, I'd love to know
where to knock in general. I don't know
who's using python professionally.
Ahh the straw man! I said that people who don't like wiki links usually haven't tried them because I have often encountered this resistance. Asking the question: "Have you given it an honest try?" has invariably produced the answer: "No." I'm not sure as to your answer to this question, if yes, then it is a new point of view. Fantastic!
Both of these ideas are pretty jarring with WikiNature. The textual form of WikiMarkup is not hierarchical. It avoids the types of nesting issues and matching concepts of HTML because documents which have these features have higher friction in the editing process. As for the javascript browswer tricks, this has higher friction in the access costs. Are all the users of the wiki using javascript at all? Are they using graphical browsers? A wiki should just work and it should work immediately and transparently for all users and all comers without exception. That's the point!
An application has its own set of rules, you can do all the tricks you want, because everyone is using the same system. As for the free link syntax -- I'd say Ward Cunningham's Wiki is very much worth using. As the creator of the entire concept with an ongoing healthy community after many years, they have resisted the desire to create such a thing.
As for Wiki being about freedom.. I don't think that's it. It's close though. Wikis are about unfetteredness. They are about focus on the content. They are about content vs. being about access to the content. They are about simply fixing stuff instead of discussing fixing stuff. This doesn't exactly add up to freedom, it more adds up to cooperation through individual cooperation. This can actually be aided by giving people a common ground in many areas. One of these is helping people use a common naming system.
Yes, logical partitions are fictitional. So are all partitions. They're just conventions on how to share sections of the disk. Come to think of it -- files are fictitional, so are jpegs. etc.
Or did you just mean to suggest that the name logical partition is somehow less valid than logical drive.
Regardless of how problematic you view this system to be, it is the normal way of slicing the disk up into more than four chunks that can be shared among many operating systems on the x86 platform. You don't have to like it, but you'd think FreeBSD -- which is native to x86 -- would support it.
As a user of real Wikis in corporate environments where communication and clarity are essential, I can heartily recommend the use of CapitalWordLinks over any special syntax.
There are lot of reasons why such links are superior, including:
In short, people who don't like WikiStyleLinks usually don't like them because they haven't given them an honest try.
Maybe you've gotten by without getting spammed by Amazon, but I certainly have received my fair share of the pale pasty pink meat-ish substance in a can. I have been spammed by amazon over and over and over. It got to the point where I crafted special procmail rules to bounce their spams directly to abuse reporting addresses, as they were so amazingly regular.
Amazon was an early follower of the idea of 'customer spam'. This mindset would hold that any customer is fair game for spamming for the rest of their natural life. This just isn't so. The mere purchase of a single product from a vendor does _not_ entail solicitation of any and all commercial mailings the vendor can think of for the remainder of the customer's natural lifespan.
Even if your brain is so clouded as to fail to comprehend that such email is not solicited, Amazon remains guilty in multiple fashions. Specifically calling and emailing them to request cessation of said emails was acknowledged and agreed to and still the spam came. Specific opt-out boxes checked were tried and still the spam came. Temporary successful releif from spam occurred after talking to manager after manager, but then they started sending me spams asking if maybe I would like to receive more of their spams. The best of course is the meta-spams, when they would mail me unwanted mails -- which I had asked them to stop -- containing spam advertising from third parties. This was the point that I started auto-routing such emails to abuse reporting addresses. I don't know if they ever would have stopped. Eventually I null-routed their domains from my network, and more recently have changed my email address.
As for your comments regarding their egregious patent, you basically assert that other people doing similar bad patent skulduggery makes it somehow more acceptable. To believe that commonality of actions makes them acceptable or unaccaptable makes you a fool, and to state the same lets us all be aware of that fact.
Yes. The Slashdot "editors" are among the majority of illiterates who never learned what hypertext was for, but yet persist in spending their lives failing to use it correctly.
Programming is no more automatable than mathematics. The two fields
are highly akin. Please refer to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.
If you mean to say that SOME of the programming that is done today --
the lower level, already explored and understood coding which
is so much reinvention of the wheel -- can be automated
I'm with you all the way. But that just moves the act
of programming towards the higher level, towards building
on that which is already written. It doesn't automate
programmint itself.
This is pretty silly.
1) User comes onto some IRC channel, and makes some foolish requests.
2) People on the channel give less then amazingly helpful answers.
3) User gets his back up because he doesn't undertand the unhelpful answers.
4) IRC channel people kick him out.
5) Ego brused, poor user writes longwinded complaint to project staff.
6) Project lead is far more juvenile than user; a pissing contest ensues.
short form: foolish and juvenile users should stay away from pissy and volatile developer retards.
There is a misconception indeed, and you persist in it. Japan was not unwilling to surrender because insufficient force had been
displayed, but rather because the demands were
not made in a way that made it reasonable for
Hirohito to accept them. At the same time, the
social structure of Japan was such that while
the Emperor had not declared the war effort
over, the country would fight a useless
impossible battle to defend their country.
If the US had listened to the advice of its
own anthrolopologists employed at the time to
study japanese culture (see, for example The Chrysanthemum and the Sword), surrender
could have been obtained with no further bloodshed at all. Unfortunately, the leaders
of their time chose to disbelieve this information and fit the behavior of the Japanese into their own model of thinking, which said that
they were impossibly, irraitionally resolute, and would only surrender if impossible force and
arms were displayed. This worked, but other workable courses were yet available which were not tried.
I can't say for sure what was meant, but I assume the 'wavefront' of the electromagnetic radiation release is what is being mentioned here. If i remember correctly, a nuclear explosion primarily releases an initial burst of various high energy particles which react with the surrounding matter to hand their energy off to reach the heat etc. stage. If these particles simply smack into the asteroid, the heat will happen on it, but more importantly the momentum of the radiation should be imparted to it.
A traditional flash-to-gas explosive system would probably be particularly useless in space as there is no atmosphere to carry a compression wave, as you pointed out.
Most SB-Live models for instance always has their effects engine engaged,
like or not, changing the digital soundstream before it leaves the
system.
SPDIF is also a somewhat touchy thing, and a poorly designed
digital out card can lose some bits of fidelity I'm not sure if
this occurs with any sold cards, but it could.
Some digital out cards give you pure unadulterated sound, but
many consumer-targetted ones (Creative Labs, for isntance)
do not.
I can _easily_ tell the difference between a 640kbps mp3 and .wav file. 640kbps mp3 files do not exist. They are
the actual
out of specification, and are either nonexistent, or not mp3 files.
I know I'm just rising to the bait here, but your comments re distro compliance are totally wrong.
SuSE passed the entire compliance suite for LSB (including the FHS stuff) with one or two issues, compared with hundreds for other distributions over a year ago. /sbin/init.d went out quite some time ago after discussions with the LSB committee about issues involved.
Not to mention that the LSB of that time very specifically suggested that programs of all kind were not to be in /etc. Interprested in a traditional UNIX sense, this could prohibit scripts. Also, there was a significant SySV
tradition of locating init.d scripts under /sbin. Feel free to look it up!
Anyway, SuSE remains the most compliant distribution to the FHS and the LSB in general. You don't have to like SuSE, but don't open your mouth and spew ignorance. It isn't pretty.
You wrote:
I'm a total newbie, so:
1) I have no idea how to "load modules"
2)I have no idea what 'proc/partitions' is
3)I don't know how to 'just mount 'em or whatever'.
So you effectively said "I don't know how to use
Linux, but I'm sure that it must suck!"
1 and 2 I could give you, but any and every
desktop system, linux manual, quickstart guide,
etc. is going to tell you how to 'mount 'em or
whatever'.
If you don't know how to use Linux, then that
demonstrates that you don't know how to use
Linux, no less, no more. It belies nothing
about the goodness or badness of Linux.
NEXT!
My major problem with "videogames as art" is the
focus of the audience is so focused away from
anything artistic, that any merits of the medium
are almost lost.
To be more clear, many games involve doing a set
of very similar tasks over and over with mind
numbing repetition where the experience is
more of a skill-building exercise / sport /
random search / hit the button over and over
RPGfest than any sort of experience that could
be considered an 'artistic one'.
Regardless of the fact that there are many
artistic elements involved in both the design
and the craft of the game, most games feature
a primary audience experience which is
anything but artistic in nature. An example
of this is Wolfenstein 3D, which has you
shooting the same enemies with the same weapons
over an inordinately long list of similar
levels. This experience is not, in fact,
artistic in any way. It bears no relationship
to the interaction of a new idea or image etc.
which is the interaction with art.
It is of cousre possible that you could have
a secondary audience experience, where you
are watching, or are mentally distanced from
your own playing where you can derive an
artistic experience from the same game. But
this is definitely a secondary experience.
There DO exist games which provide a primary
audience experience which might be considered
artistsic. An apple II game which involved
controlling two games with one joystick, each
which would change into another game periodically
might be primarily an artistic experience.
Heaven and Earth, as it has been explained to
me is a set of very different activities,
puzzles, and koans wended together into a whole.
Both of these games primarily are presenting
the user with a novel, challenging, perhaps
thought provoking experience, and one that
at least on the first pass is in no way based
on repetition, skill-building, etc. and thus
does not detract from a possible artistic
experience.
Fundamentally, I feel that whether or not most
videogames are art, they are pretty horrid,
in that they do their best to direct any and
all attention away from any of their artistic
merits. Music and movies do not do this, and
TV does it less. A true success of a
videogame-as-art would be one where the primary
experience itself was artistic, impressing
upon the audience new ideas and thoughts which
are previously foreign to them, not merely
a plotline.
Craft does not require art. Craft can be purely
utilitarian.
Being a cooper is a craft. Constructing a
purely utilitarian barrel is not art, nor does
it require art to lead the way, merely engineering.
Many craftsmen DO incorporate what you describe
above, but not all.
There is no blocking of specific webclients.
There is a general blocking of anything, and
everything, which is not MSIE. It may be
that when this first aired, it was
accurate that changing a single letter would
allow the page to load successfully, but at this
point they are blocking _all_ unknown browsers.
My junkbuster setup identifies itself as GD/2.0,
primarily because I've never seen a website
that did anything useful with the client-id
besides offer me the wrong software (I'm
a multiplatform house!)
I generally get generic webpages, or stupid
front pages telling me to stay out (read
the dumb javascript, type in a URL).
So, the following browsers are rejected:
wget, w3m, mozilla, GD/2.0,
FRUITCAKECITY/9.3, etc., etc., etc.
Clearly, this is a general block of all non-IE,
rather than Opera and Mozilla specifically.
You see, Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom,
knows that no one could EVER design a standards
compliant web browser but them.
That's right, wget is not standards compliant,
even though it contains NO HTML CODE AT ALL!It doesn't even have anything to do with the
'standards' they are making noise about.
Oh well, lies lies lies...
If you can resist the urge to troll and flame, your karma will inevitably creep above the extra-point threshhold, never to return.
Yes, and if you can resist the urge to post except when you actually have something worthwhile to say, your karma will remain below that threshold. And really, that would be an even bigger boost to the great Signal to Noise Ratio in the sky.
There are more valid chess positions than there are atoms in the known universe.
If you need me to find the calculations I can.
A complete chess database is not possible.
Perhaps a complete *enough* database is possible,
where responses to all moves are known
which are winning.. However, I'm not sure
how you'd ARRIVE at such a tree without a
complete exploration.
I dunno, I'm not sure that a little 69 really ever caused anyone harm.
and promptly cancelled it due to lack of interest.
I did order one myself, but it was contingent on the +SGML component which would have cost me a pretty penny.
As a new owner of a PalmOS device, I couldn't disgree more.
The palm is very simple. It doesn't cover a lot of ground. You can select buttons, you can enter text, you can choose menus, and the like. This leaves no excuse for the laundry list of issues I've had with my device so far. To list a few:
You may not agree with all these issues, but I believe you will find most of them stand. The Palm device, for something so trivial, suffers from far more than its share of usability issues.
I've honestly looked for this on the intenret and failed.
The question is: What do the letters 'USA' as stand for as spraypainted on roadways, bridges, embedded into metal lids to access boxes, etc.
To best this challenge, do the search WITHOUT entering the actual expansion of the letters. Searching for information you already know on the internet is kind of pointless.
I would appreciate the answer, however, as a seperate request.