In fact, which distro do I want? This is a whole layer of confusion that Windows and OSX don't have.
Neither Windows XP, Vista Basic, Vista Professional or Vista Ultimate has that problem!;)
And I in turn reject yours. So I'm a naive Windows user installing linux for the first time. What the hell is a Gnome or a KDE? Which one do I want?
Let me quote what you disagree with:
given the same amount of time and familiarity
I'm a naive AmigaOS user installing Windows for the first time. What the hell is an aero or a glass look? Which one do I want? Do I want the cheap or the expensive? What's the extra money going to buy me? I never had these problems. Clearly Windows isn't ready for the desktop.
Now, I'm exaggerating. But I hope it drives the point home: windows offers plenty of choices which will confuse some people.
I think a better argument is that the parent's assumption of equal time and familiarity can (close to) never be satisfied, and therefor doesn't tell us anything about the real world.
[I don't know whether I agree or disagree with this view, I'm just saying it's probably more convincing]
Last I checked (admittedly a while ago), on OS X, if you're the kind of person who knows what a library is and why it might have security vulnerabilities, if you want to patch the library you're using, you have to do it for every application. [actually you have to do that no matter whether you know or not, it's just that in the other case you won't be doing it.]
How do you go about that? Manual labor? I'm sure that's going to be great fun on your fifth security fix, with yet a new unique yet somewhat slightly overlapping set of apps this time.
Script it? Why are you doing the computer's work for it---shouldn't it be the other way around?
Has my knowledge gone stale on me? Then I withdraw what I said.
The scenario you're describing sounds like it scores high on usability. What's given up in return? One of [security, time]. Also, if one app equals one folder, you don't have the option of network-mounting all the big files in/usr/share from the (only!) one copy on your network. Point being: usability is great, but consider what is being given up by it, and why people might not want to give it up.
this would also mean we'd need altars to Gates and Torvalds in the server room, would have to burn the right incenses and make appropriate obeisances to ward off crashes.
What?? You dun... How do you make your servers work?
I too disagree with Steven's argument. But people who jump on "tubes" often do not even know the concepts behind the analogy. In a lot of cases, the people that laugh at his comment are even less informed about the topic than Stevens.
Allow me to quote the same wikipedia page, since I find Stevens's words quite illuminating in a discussion about how much of the internet he understands.
what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
In case you don't know (WTF?), Stevens is talking about an email. While I read "your own personal internet" as "the internet as seen through your eyes" and be happy about that, I suspect many of the people who ridicule Stevens understand the difference between "an Internet" and "an email".
And if we ignore those who jumped on him when it was news, I think many of those who (still) ridicule him, in particular on slashdot and similar sites, understand not only the difference between internet and email, but also know the existence of, differences between and layering of IP and SMTP. They might also know of TCP, UDP, DNS and HTTP (and know when HTTP vs SMTP comes into play in the ctx of webmail), and at least know there's something called BGP which governs routing.
They probably also understand that mail delivery in general is not slowed down two days by high volumes of non-mail traffic. It might be slowed down by a few seconds if the links are highly loaded, but the mail delay is more likely to be caused in the application layer.
It may be that Stevens has a lot of information at his disposal, but then why doesn't he use any of it to distinguish between "internet" and "email"?
But it's a slippery journalistic slope to go down once you start deciding not to publish certain elements of a story, even for what seem to be compelling reasons.
When it comes to names, I have the perfect solution. Similarly to the system for reading hash values over the phone, come up with a list of 2^n first names and 2^m last names.
Take the sha256 of the involved parties' names, and for each sum use n+m bits to invent a new pseudo-random name which is uniquely determined per input name.
will do 4GB for peanuts, which is overkill for anybody running a 32 bit OS, and covers an overwhelming majority of consumer use cases.
I think having 2 Gigs is awesome enough. It's four thousand times as much as my first computer.
To give you a sense of perspective: a three-mile bike ride down to the university and the same three miles back, that's roughly 10 km/day. Scale that number up by the same size factor and we get 40000 km. Instead of just going down to the local university, I could be circumnavigating the earth.... And get off my lawn!;)
Seriously though, what use can one put > 2 GB to? Right now, I spend 1 GB on disk cache. Say I play a game of Nexuiz. The download is ~500M of compressed data, so let's say that unpacking it and holding _everything_ in memory takes 750M. I still got 250M left. I can... uh... help me out. Why do you want 16G?
It's no more fucked-up then how the European Union operates - ya know, a Union of States where States elect ministers to the Council, not the people.
To the outside world, I present myself as a Dane, not a European. On TV, I see Danish politicians. When I go to other member states, people speak another language [except Belgium, the bastard child of the Netherlands and France] and the currency is different (that's only because we're a holdout in Denmark, though). When I think about sovereignty of nation states, I think of Denmark, Germany, France, etc.; not Europe. I think of Bruxelles as "there", not "here"; more importantly, I think of Bruxelles as the same kind of "there" as Tallin, New York, Frankfurt and Milano.
What you're saying isn't wrong. But it's glossing over a lot of differences.
take the top-two vote-getters and approtion the electors between them in each state according to the state's popular votes. Award a 2-elector bonus to the overall vote-getter.
Why only the top two?
If you get to change the electoral college, why not change it in a way that would encourage the formation of more political parties?
The more complicated they become, the larger the advantage becomes to those who look up the solution.
I'd like to submit as a counterexample the Zelda series. To put my words in the right context: I have completed Twilight Princess two times (I own it), and my gf.ex[2] had Ocarina of Time, which I played most of a good while ago.
For those of you who don't know (srsly? on/.?), it's single player. Your HP is measured on a scale from 12 to 80 (quarters of hearts), with most attacks inflicting 1 or 2 points of damage. You character "levels up" by finding items or by collecting hearts; you get a full heart container for beating a boss, and can find shards hidden in the bushes. The game has a fixed set of items: four bottles, a fishing rod, a bow plus arrows, a ball on a chain, a pair of iron boots, bombs etc., which you find at various story points; some of the bottles are hidden and found by off-storyline investigation, and some items or item enhancers (a bigger quiver) are found in side quests.
Combat is fairly easy. Even for the bosses, you fairly quickly learn how to dodge their attacks and stay nigh-invulnerable, plus there's typically a big stack of hearts available if you look around. This minimizes the impact of gathering combat gear. [one exception is the Cave of Ordeals which is pure combat, tons of fun, and completely optional].
That's for the character progression. It tends to be either (1) in lockstep with the story, or (2) not very important; something you do for completeness or (future) convenience.
The main focus, not being on combat or character progression, is on solving puzzles. Each item has between (roughly) one and three important characteristics that outline how you use them. For instance, the iron boots make you heavy, slow and give you a lot of friction. The grappling hook lets you pull objects close to you, or you close to objects, and have a limited range; it also hits the object it impacts with and travels in a straight line. The bow hits the object it impacts with, doesn't move any object, has a limitless (for practical purposes) range but shoots in a parabolic curve.
The trick is to figure out how to combine your items with your environment. In one dungeon, you jump and grab a hold of a handle hanging down from a ceiling, but nothing happens. If you put on the iron boots, you become heavy, pull the lever down, and activate something. In a later dungeon, you use the grappling hook to "jump" to a chandelier, then put on the iron boots to do the same trick.
So, each object is fairly simple on its own, having typically only a single "wear" or "use" verb (and rarely both), but complexity arises from their combination and their interaction with the environment. I think that's a fairly good of building a rich system from simple components.
The puzzles can get somewhat complex. For instance, there's a sliding block puzzle: some (~3) block reside on a frictionless ~6x6 chessboard with some squares cut off and walls on the edges; you can exert an axis-parallel force on a block, including from outside the board, but not from inside another block. Your goal is to move a subset of the blocks onto some marked squares. (think of sokoban with sticky arrowkeys and the player inside the walls if it helps you). They can get fairly demanding; less straightforward than "go kill diablo".
Yet it's one of the highest ranked games at that site which averages out other reviews.
How come?
Well, the story itself is nice. It's fairly simple:
SPOILER WARNING The villain kidnaps the princess SPOILERS END HERE... but the characters are interesting and it's told in an interesting way.
I posit this hypothesis: by emphasizing story progression and a sense of achievement (from solving puzzles) over greater combat ability (from MF'ing and tediously but trivially earned leveling), there's less to be gained from cheating--you're cheating yourself out of the feeling of accomplishment, and all your getting is a nice story and the possibility to cheat yourself in the future.
The VM takes a ridiculous amount of time to start up
A quick test: On http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~harrison/Java/sorting-demo.html you'll find 16 applets [yay for algorithm animation]. It took "a few seconds" to load that page for me. Assuming _everything_ is JVM startup time, it's 0.25 seconds per applet. While that is slow, it's isn't exactly ludicrous speed; err... lack-of-speed.
it's really intrusive when it sits in your system tray and constantly announces its new updates.
Try the Linux version instead;)
So for all the OSS advocates out there, stop and think for a minute before you bash Java applets.
I love them. In part for the prospect of 100% Free Software client side web applets. Also, I think they're just painful enough to code that you only do it if you have to*. At least, I haven't seen people do their entire site in a java applet.
What I have seen is the sorting algorithms demo, and an app which shows move sequences on a rubik's cube. I think both are reasonable candidates for apps delivered in a browser.
* whether that's an applet thing or a property of the core language, I don't know, but I have my own opinion.
People really eat this shit up, don't they? Not a god damned thing was funny about this, but it still got the mandatory +5 Funny like too many other lame unoriginal jokes.
Talking about the moderation is sooooo insightful.
If you can read and understand this, you don't need glasses^Wa fix for dementia.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, which distro do I want? This is a whole layer of confusion that Windows and OSX don't have.
Neither Windows XP, Vista Basic, Vista Professional or Vista Ultimate has that problem! ;)
And I in turn reject yours. So I'm a naive Windows user installing linux for the first time. What the hell is a Gnome or a KDE? Which one do I want?
Let me quote what you disagree with:
given the same amount of time and familiarity
I'm a naive AmigaOS user installing Windows for the first time. What the hell is an aero or a glass look? Which one do I want? Do I want the cheap or the expensive? What's the extra money going to buy me? I never had these problems. Clearly Windows isn't ready for the desktop.
Now, I'm exaggerating. But I hope it drives the point home: windows offers plenty of choices which will confuse some people.
I think a better argument is that the parent's assumption of equal time and familiarity can (close to) never be satisfied, and therefor doesn't tell us anything about the real world.
[I don't know whether I agree or disagree with this view, I'm just saying it's probably more convincing]
Last I checked (admittedly a while ago), on OS X, if you're the kind of person who knows what a library is and why it might have security vulnerabilities, if you want to patch the library you're using, you have to do it for every application. [actually you have to do that no matter whether you know or not, it's just that in the other case you won't be doing it.]
How do you go about that? Manual labor? I'm sure that's going to be great fun on your fifth security fix, with yet a new unique yet somewhat slightly overlapping set of apps this time.
Script it? Why are you doing the computer's work for it---shouldn't it be the other way around?
Has my knowledge gone stale on me? Then I withdraw what I said.
The scenario you're describing sounds like it scores high on usability. What's given up in return? One of [security, time]. Also, if one app equals one folder, you don't have the option of network-mounting all the big files in /usr/share from the (only!) one copy on your network. Point being: usability is great, but consider what is being given up by it, and why people might not want to give it up.
slash me gets off his soap box.
self-washing kitchens.
I think I'm way too tired right now, because I read it as something truly revolutionary, possibly verging on the contradictory: self-washing kittens.
BASIC is like any Sunday School.
I prepares you for future Microsoft indoctrination in the form of C#?
me ducks ;)
this would also mean we'd need altars to Gates and Torvalds in the server room, would have to burn the right incenses and make appropriate obeisances to ward off crashes.
What?? You dun... How do you make your servers work?
Visual Basic would be Satanism - Except that you don't REALLY need to sell your soul to be a Satanist...
Speaking as the dark lord of hell, I'm offended by the insinuation that I want to possess the souls of VB "programmers"!
costs $0 for a three disc license and $69(?) for a 6 disk license.
I can't speak for anyone else, but you lost me there...
I too disagree with Steven's argument. But people who jump on "tubes" often do not even know the concepts behind the analogy. In a lot of cases, the people that laugh at his comment are even less informed about the topic than Stevens.
Allow me to quote the same wikipedia page, since I find Stevens's words quite illuminating in a discussion about how much of the internet he understands.
what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
In case you don't know (WTF?), Stevens is talking about an email. While I read "your own personal internet" as "the internet as seen through your eyes" and be happy about that, I suspect many of the people who ridicule Stevens understand the difference between "an Internet" and "an email".
And if we ignore those who jumped on him when it was news, I think many of those who (still) ridicule him, in particular on slashdot and similar sites, understand not only the difference between internet and email, but also know the existence of, differences between and layering of IP and SMTP. They might also know of TCP, UDP, DNS and HTTP (and know when HTTP vs SMTP comes into play in the ctx of webmail), and at least know there's something called BGP which governs routing.
They probably also understand that mail delivery in general is not slowed down two days by high volumes of non-mail traffic. It might be slowed down by a few seconds if the links are highly loaded, but the mail delay is more likely to be caused in the application layer.
It may be that Stevens has a lot of information at his disposal, but then why doesn't he use any of it to distinguish between "internet" and "email"?
But it's a slippery journalistic slope to go down once you start deciding not to publish certain elements of a story, even for what seem to be compelling reasons.
When it comes to names, I have the perfect solution. Similarly to the system for reading hash values over the phone, come up with a list of 2^n first names and 2^m last names.
Take the sha256 of the involved parties' names, and for each sum use n+m bits to invent a new pseudo-random name which is uniquely determined per input name.
Only on slashdot? ;)
will do 4GB for peanuts, which is overkill for anybody running a 32 bit OS, and covers an overwhelming majority of consumer use cases.
I think having 2 Gigs is awesome enough. It's four thousand times as much as my first computer.
To give you a sense of perspective: a three-mile bike ride down to the university and the same three miles back, that's roughly 10 km/day. Scale that number up by the same size factor and we get 40000 km. Instead of just going down to the local university, I could be circumnavigating the earth. ... And get off my lawn! ;)
Seriously though, what use can one put > 2 GB to? Right now, I spend 1 GB on disk cache. Say I play a game of Nexuiz. The download is ~500M of compressed data, so let's say that unpacking it and holding _everything_ in memory takes 750M. I still got 250M left. I can... uh... help me out. Why do you want 16G?
If FF had a decently manageable MSI option
So read the tutorial on building your own MSI packages and write a shell script which rolls your own?
Jimmy Carter; while he is underrated as a President
I think it's too late to spend your mod points ;)
It's no more fucked-up then how the European Union operates - ya know, a Union of States where States elect ministers to the Council, not the people.
To the outside world, I present myself as a Dane, not a European. On TV, I see Danish politicians. When I go to other member states, people speak another language [except Belgium, the bastard child of the Netherlands and France] and the currency is different (that's only because we're a holdout in Denmark, though). When I think about sovereignty of nation states, I think of Denmark, Germany, France, etc.; not Europe. I think of Bruxelles as "there", not "here"; more importantly, I think of Bruxelles as the same kind of "there" as Tallin, New York, Frankfurt and Milano.
What you're saying isn't wrong. But it's glossing over a lot of differences.
Obama's campaign to the masses was woefully short on substance, and about all anyone on the street was able to say was "change."
You must give him the fact that it worked. If what you have now is Bush, and Obama offers you change, don't you want Obama?
This will draw many many eyeballs to advertisements and clicks.
I think the strategy would work even better in the AdBlock+ user forums ;)
take the top-two vote-getters and approtion the electors between them in each state according to the state's popular votes. Award a 2-elector bonus to the overall vote-getter.
Why only the top two?
If you get to change the electoral college, why not change it in a way that would encourage the formation of more political parties?
The more complicated they become, the larger the advantage becomes to those who look up the solution.
I'd like to submit as a counterexample the Zelda series. To put my words in the right context: I have completed Twilight Princess two times (I own it), and my gf.ex[2] had Ocarina of Time, which I played most of a good while ago.
For those of you who don't know (srsly? on /.?), it's single player. Your HP is measured on a scale from 12 to 80 (quarters of hearts), with most attacks inflicting 1 or 2 points of damage. You character "levels up" by finding items or by collecting hearts; you get a full heart container for beating a boss, and can find shards hidden in the bushes. The game has a fixed set of items: four bottles, a fishing rod, a bow plus arrows, a ball on a chain, a pair of iron boots, bombs etc., which you find at various story points; some of the bottles are hidden and found by off-storyline investigation, and some items or item enhancers (a bigger quiver) are found in side quests.
Combat is fairly easy. Even for the bosses, you fairly quickly learn how to dodge their attacks and stay nigh-invulnerable, plus there's typically a big stack of hearts available if you look around. This minimizes the impact of gathering combat gear. [one exception is the Cave of Ordeals which is pure combat, tons of fun, and completely optional].
That's for the character progression. It tends to be either (1) in lockstep with the story, or (2) not very important; something you do for completeness or (future) convenience.
The main focus, not being on combat or character progression, is on solving puzzles. Each item has between (roughly) one and three important characteristics that outline how you use them. For instance, the iron boots make you heavy, slow and give you a lot of friction. The grappling hook lets you pull objects close to you, or you close to objects, and have a limited range; it also hits the object it impacts with and travels in a straight line. The bow hits the object it impacts with, doesn't move any object, has a limitless (for practical purposes) range but shoots in a parabolic curve.
The trick is to figure out how to combine your items with your environment. In one dungeon, you jump and grab a hold of a handle hanging down from a ceiling, but nothing happens. If you put on the iron boots, you become heavy, pull the lever down, and activate something. In a later dungeon, you use the grappling hook to "jump" to a chandelier, then put on the iron boots to do the same trick.
So, each object is fairly simple on its own, having typically only a single "wear" or "use" verb (and rarely both), but complexity arises from their combination and their interaction with the environment. I think that's a fairly good of building a rich system from simple components.
The puzzles can get somewhat complex. For instance, there's a sliding block puzzle: some (~3) block reside on a frictionless ~6x6 chessboard with some squares cut off and walls on the edges; you can exert an axis-parallel force on a block, including from outside the board, but not from inside another block. Your goal is to move a subset of the blocks onto some marked squares. (think of sokoban with sticky arrowkeys and the player inside the walls if it helps you). They can get fairly demanding; less straightforward than "go kill diablo".
Yet it's one of the highest ranked games at that site which averages out other reviews.
How come?
Well, the story itself is nice. It's fairly simple:
SPOILER WARNING ... but the characters are interesting and it's told in an interesting way.
The villain kidnaps the princess
SPOILERS END HERE
I posit this hypothesis: by emphasizing story progression and a sense of achievement (from solving puzzles) over greater combat ability (from MF'ing and tediously but trivially earned leveling), there's less to be gained from cheating--you're cheating yourself out of the feeling of accomplishment, and all your getting is a nice story and the possibility to cheat yourself in the future.
And we've just nearly finished porting everything to 64 bit. I'd rather emulate 128 bit on 64 bit hardware than do that again.
But we all learned the lesson in the progress, right? From now one, everyone uses proper typedefs in their code, right?
The VM takes a ridiculous amount of time to start up
A quick test: On http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~harrison/Java/sorting-demo.html you'll find 16 applets [yay for algorithm animation]. It took "a few seconds" to load that page for me. Assuming _everything_ is JVM startup time, it's 0.25 seconds per applet. While that is slow, it's isn't exactly ludicrous speed; err... lack-of-speed.
it's really intrusive when it sits in your system tray and constantly announces its new updates.
Try the Linux version instead ;)
So for all the OSS advocates out there, stop and think for a minute before you bash Java applets.
I love them. In part for the prospect of 100% Free Software client side web applets. Also, I think they're just painful enough to code that you only do it if you have to*. At least, I haven't seen people do their entire site in a java applet.
What I have seen is the sorting algorithms demo, and an app which shows move sequences on a rubik's cube. I think both are reasonable candidates for apps delivered in a browser.
* whether that's an applet thing or a property of the core language, I don't know, but I have my own opinion.
So the java solution is something like this:
typedef int int32;
typedef long int64;
#ifdef bit32
typedef int word;
#else
typedef long word;
#endif
Except that due to design reasons, you don't have typedef or ifdef.
Did I get that right?
it definitely is deliberate.
They could just be incompetent.
Anyone else misread the title?
Yeah, I did.
First I thought they were Baking off, but nahh... the days of TCP/IP bake-offs are long gone.
Then I thought they were Acking off; that is, saying "Yea', I gud yer data" in the language of TCP, but I couldn't make sense of the "off".
Next I thought they were Hacking off, but I couldn't figure out what they hacked off, or of what they hacked it.
But finally I got it right: Network Neutrality Defenders Quietly Taking Off. Finally they've gone airborne and started doing some real work!
Nice troll. Could you please get my uncle's horse o... I mean, get off my uncle's horse.
People really eat this shit up, don't they? Not a god damned thing was funny about this, but it still got the mandatory +5 Funny like too many other lame unoriginal jokes.
Talking about the moderation is sooooo insightful.
If you can read and understand this, you don't need glasses^Wa fix for dementia.
GP> those do me the favor of pointing out they were just being sarcastic
Parent is just being sarcastic. I think you've heard what parent said plenty of times, and hopefully you've learned that it's a joke.
But if not, just to avoid you worrying: they're not out to get you. Parent is sarcastic.
[My conscience said someone had to say it. You can all move along now]
Fascinating point.
If you're intrigued by his ideas, I'm sure you can find a subscribe button on his slashdot journal ;)