I've just moved from W98SE to W2K on my dualboot FreeBSD/Windows box (when I can play half-life under FreeBSD then I'll ditch windows. Not before).
W2K plays 3D shooters ("Tested": Unreal, Q3, QII, Half-Life, CounterStrike, FreeSpace, etc) faster and smoother than W98 *on the same hardware* (PII 350, 16MB Riva TNT, 128MB RAM, 10GB 7200 ATA66 disk - not big iron, by any means).
It seems to do better in both OpenGL and Direct3D modes - and the OpenGL is definitely better; a bunch of annoying artifacts in Half-Life (under OpenGL/W98SE) have gone away (decals not displaying correctly, etc). I run my games at 640x480x32, and they run nicely at default detail levels. Purely subjective, of course.
It also does better with lots of things running, and is generally kinder to the Win32 versions of XEmacs and ActivePerl.
W2K is not bad, not bad at all. Of course, I've souped mine up with Object Desktop from StarDock, so everything looks real purty - and ObjectZip and Control Centre give me some groovy stuff. --
But any event with a non-zero probability will occur sooner or later.
What you describe has a non-zero probability, and we're sitting here talking about it.
Who'da thunk, 4.5 billion years ago, that the flaming ball of molten rock that was the embryonic Earth would one day spawn a bunch of people who spent all day sitting around talking about how unlikely it is that we came to be here at all and therefore we probably don't exist and are making it all up anyway? --
If I believe in life after death, and there isn't, so what? I'm dead. I'm not in a position to be disappointed about it.
If I don't believe in life after death, and there is, then I get pleasantly (or unpleasantly, if all I wanted was some peace and quiet at last) surprised.
Life after death (or not) has got nothing to do with which god you choose to worship. It'll either happen or it won't, in common with everything else in the universe. No amount of wishing (which is what prayer is) will change that.
Where does your belief system leave the Hindus? The Sikhs? The Moslems? The Zoroastrians?
In the final analysis though, we'll find out all too soon. --
Actually not entirely anecdotal. I was acquainted (nothing more) with few of these repellent individuals whilst at college and University. Unsurprisingly, of the half-dozen or so that I knew, only one graduated with a degree of any kind.
They are usually adolescent males (I hesitate to use the phrase "young men"), unable to function well in normal social circumstances, sexually inadequate, physically feeble or obese, with reasonable language skills. Poor personal hygiene is often a feature.
In order to make up for their gross social, physical and sexual deficiencies (sexual partners? only if they pay for it), they invent hard sounding handles (because on IRC, the one with ops AND the cool nick is the one with the biggest dick), accumulate 0-day warez (quite what any script kiddy is going to do with a 0-day copy of Office 2000 Premium, I don't know) and try to get into cracker groups, so they can get their name on a defacement or some other achievement.
These poor, pathetic creatures need to belong so bad it hurts. Having failed completely to empathise or establish normal relationships in their own social setting, they reach out into cyberspace to find like-minded people to impress.
They are sad, sad people and if you ever met one face to face you'd probably just deck 'em there and then. --
but take your point on anonmity^Wanonymitity^Wanonimity^Whiding your identity.
Perhaps the ability to post anonymously should be restricted to registered users - i.e. if you register and log in, the system will allow you to post without attaching the fact that you did it to the post. If you see what I mean, and given that explanation you probably don't:) --
"But why, (if I may be so bold) didn't anyone seem to care when Yahoo, CNN.com etc. were being brought down by attackers?"
Because those sites exist for one reason and one reason only - to turn a profit. Sure, their admins and staff care (that, to me, is part of doing a professional job), but only in the same way I care about my servers at work. I care because my employer pays me to care.
K5 was done because people WANTED to, not because they HAVE to. And that's why I do care about K5 getting DOSed, and I don't care about BT getting DOSed. --
It is a weblog, like SlashDot. You create yourself a login, post stories, and discuss them.
However, there are some significant differences. Probably the main one is that the submission process is open - you can see the stories that are waiting to be posted, comment on them (either on an editorial "fix-that-link" level or on a topical level) and then vote on whether the story should be posted or not.
The other difference is that there is no karma - individual comments can be rated, and you can rate comments all the time, rather than waiting your turn for moderator points.
Other differences include the fact that K5 is a volunteer effort, there's no non-censorship policy (trolls/spam/rubbish get deleted) and it's non-profit.
When it returns, pay it a visit. You won't be sorry. --
The whole/. cf K5 debate is a strawman. Michael dropped a bollock, and admitted it. End of story, film at 11.
The only thing that makes/. more resistant to this type of attack is the fact that there are a couple (or more) people who look after this site *full time*.
K5 is a *volunteer* effort. The people running it have fulltime jobs elsewhere. It's done for love, not money. The ads pay for hosting costs and suchlike.
It's also fundamentally different - it's not the free-for-all that/. is. Spam there once, and you'll get warned. Spam there twice, and you'll be banned. Trolls are deleted.
How this policy is going to scale up to the zillions of posts/users, I dunno. Sturgeon's law says 90% of everything is crap. Well, weeding the crap out of a couple of dozen posts is easy. Weeding the crap out of a couple of hundred, somewhat less so.
Maybe K5 will always stay low volume - there's no incentive for penis bird idiot fuckwit boy and his like there - because the one thing they feed on, seeing their posts, disappears. --
Basically, allow all users to moderate stories as they come in. Crap gets dropped, good stuff gets posted. Your users then get to read stuff they want to read.
You also want to reserve the right to delete trolls and spam and stuff, and one way of eliminating a lot of the rubbish is to have no anonymous posting at all. --
And very, very infuriating that the actions of one individual can take away something that has provided so much pleasure and information for so many.
If you, Mr Skript Kiddy, are reading this, beware. This is not the end of the story.
Speaking with Rusty and the gang on IRC I could feel the frustration and anger mounting since Monday.
I guess the best way of describing it is as if you provided a reading room of your *own* books, catalogued on your *own* time for people to use. And then one person came in, tore up the books, pissed on the floor and then disappeared.
"* Provable existance - This is by choice. Why? I leave that as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: Think about celebrities and their problems with friends)"
I would love to know what this sentence means.
"* Never left a signle trace - This is wonderful example of duality in interpretation. Depending on your basic views, the whole world: genetics, the atomic/superstring structure, the digestion biology the galaxies, the Sun, the earth's rotation, the life cycles and life itself are examples of structure, information and thought. How often do you see that in the remnants of a fire cracker?"
Eh? Precisely what do the remnants of a firecracker and the rotation of the earth have to do with each other?
"Faith - You have a lot of reading to do on this subject, I see. Start with a concept description."
"And the "evidence" of a few pieces of bone consist of the entire basis for the rediculous claims of the evolutionists. Pieces of bone which exist in no order and are often found in places which contradict evolutionary "theory"."
Well, that's 100% more evidence than YOU have...
"As for the Truth of the Bible, something which should be self-evident to anyone that searches for the meaning of creation, you dismiss it out of hand."
Well, of course I do. Like any reasonable person. It's a big book of metaphors and allegory. If you take the bible as literal truth then you might as well leave any scientific discussion now - because you're basically saying "no matter what you say, and no matter what actual evidence you have, what I *believe* is absolute truth". IOW, you're saying that MY beliefs (founded in empirical, repeatable, verifiable scientific fact) have to be subject to criteria that yours do not ("it's in the bible so it must be true").
It doesn't matter whether there was a nutter called Jesus running round approx 2K years ago claiming to be the son of god and pretending to heal people.
Religion is bad. It causes people to abandon reason and rationality.
I don't need religion to help me make sense of the universe. I need science and reason. --
"This so-called theory is just another attempt by Dawkins and his cult of "blind watchmakers" to derail the Truths that have been revealed to all of us through the words of our Lord."
Revealed how? On SlashDot? ZDNet? Weekly World News? Full page ad in Time? Through any *verifiable*, *repeatable* channel at all?
Hume blows you away every time. You're asking me to believe that it's the most likely explanation for the existence of everything that the entire universe was created, as it is today, in 6 days by an omnipotent omnipresent being whose completely unprovable existence has never left a single trace of physical evidence anywhere?
Wow. I can see why they call it "faith". As in "belief without cause". --
Slashdot Mirror
W2K plays 3D shooters ("Tested": Unreal, Q3, QII, Half-Life, CounterStrike, FreeSpace, etc) faster and smoother than W98 *on the same hardware* (PII 350, 16MB Riva TNT, 128MB RAM, 10GB 7200 ATA66 disk - not big iron, by any means).
It seems to do better in both OpenGL and Direct3D modes - and the OpenGL is definitely better; a bunch of annoying artifacts in Half-Life (under OpenGL/W98SE) have gone away (decals not displaying correctly, etc). I run my games at 640x480x32, and they run nicely at default detail levels. Purely subjective, of course.
It also does better with lots of things running, and is generally kinder to the Win32 versions of XEmacs and ActivePerl.
W2K is not bad, not bad at all. Of course, I've souped mine up with Object Desktop from StarDock, so everything looks real purty - and ObjectZip and Control Centre give me some groovy stuff.
--
Well, yes.
But any event with a non-zero probability will occur sooner or later.
What you describe has a non-zero probability, and we're sitting here talking about it.
Who'da thunk, 4.5 billion years ago, that the flaming ball of molten rock that was the embryonic Earth would one day spawn a bunch of people who spent all day sitting around talking about how unlikely it is that we came to be here at all and therefore we probably don't exist and are making it all up anyway?
--
Nobody loses.
If I believe in life after death, and there isn't, so what? I'm dead. I'm not in a position to be disappointed about it.
If I don't believe in life after death, and there is, then I get pleasantly (or unpleasantly, if all I wanted was some peace and quiet at last) surprised.
Life after death (or not) has got nothing to do with which god you choose to worship. It'll either happen or it won't, in common with everything else in the universe. No amount of wishing (which is what prayer is) will change that.
Where does your belief system leave the Hindus? The Sikhs? The Moslems? The Zoroastrians?
In the final analysis though, we'll find out all too soon.
--
No disrespect, but you do reply to things at some length, and very, very quickly.
:)
You can't catch this fish any more, though
--
You very, *very* nearly got a bite out of me...
Have a biscuit! Good troll!
--
Actually not entirely anecdotal. I was acquainted (nothing more) with few of these repellent individuals whilst at college and University.
Unsurprisingly, of the half-dozen or so that I knew, only one graduated with a degree of any kind.
They are usually adolescent males (I hesitate to use the phrase "young men"), unable to function well in normal social circumstances, sexually inadequate, physically feeble or obese, with reasonable language skills. Poor personal hygiene is often a feature.
In order to make up for their gross social, physical and sexual deficiencies (sexual partners? only if they pay for it), they invent hard sounding handles (because on IRC, the one with ops AND the cool nick is the one with the biggest dick), accumulate 0-day warez (quite what any script kiddy is going to do with a 0-day copy of Office 2000 Premium, I don't know) and try to get into cracker groups, so they can get their name on a defacement or some other achievement.
These poor, pathetic creatures need to belong so bad it hurts. Having failed completely to empathise or establish normal relationships in their own social setting, they reach out into cyberspace to find like-minded people to impress.
They are sad, sad people and if you ever met one face to face you'd probably just deck 'em there and then.
--
but take your point on anonmity^Wanonymitity^Wanonimity^Whiding your identity.
:)
Perhaps the ability to post anonymously should be restricted to registered users - i.e. if you register and log in, the system will allow you to post without attaching the fact that you did it to the post. If you see what I mean, and given that explanation you probably don't
--
"But why, (if I may be so bold) didn't anyone seem to care when Yahoo, CNN.com etc. were being brought down by attackers?"
Because those sites exist for one reason and one reason only - to turn a profit. Sure, their admins and staff care (that, to me, is part of doing a professional job), but only in the same way I care about my servers at work. I care because my employer pays me to care.
K5 was done because people WANTED to, not because they HAVE to. And that's why I do care about K5 getting DOSed, and I don't care about BT getting DOSed.
--
"No information was destroyed"
Actually, the database was corrupted at one point, and K5 rolled back about 9 hours, losing any posts and story submissions in that time.
So yes, information was lost.
--
It is a weblog, like SlashDot. You create yourself a login, post stories, and discuss them.
However, there are some significant differences. Probably the main one is that the submission process is open - you can see the stories that are waiting to be posted, comment on them (either on an editorial "fix-that-link" level or on a topical level) and then vote on whether the story should be posted or not.
The other difference is that there is no karma - individual comments can be rated, and you can rate comments all the time, rather than waiting your turn for moderator points.
Other differences include the fact that K5 is a volunteer effort, there's no non-censorship policy (trolls/spam/rubbish get deleted) and it's non-profit.
When it returns, pay it a visit. You won't be sorry.
--
The whole /. cf K5 debate is a strawman. Michael dropped a bollock, and admitted it. End of story, film at 11.
/. more resistant to this type of attack is the fact that there are a couple (or more) people who look after this site *full time*.
/. is. Spam there once, and you'll get warned. Spam there twice, and you'll be banned. Trolls are deleted.
The only thing that makes
K5 is a *volunteer* effort. The people running it have fulltime jobs elsewhere. It's done for love, not money. The ads pay for hosting costs and suchlike.
It's also fundamentally different - it's not the free-for-all that
How this policy is going to scale up to the zillions of posts/users, I dunno. Sturgeon's law says 90% of everything is crap. Well, weeding the crap out of a couple of dozen posts is easy. Weeding the crap out of a couple of hundred, somewhat less so.
Maybe K5 will always stay low volume - there's no incentive for penis bird idiot fuckwit boy and his like there - because the one thing they feed on, seeing their posts, disappears.
--
And don't have a "no censorship" policy.
Basically, allow all users to moderate stories as they come in. Crap gets dropped, good stuff gets posted. Your users then get to read stuff they want to read.
You also want to reserve the right to delete trolls and spam and stuff, and one way of eliminating a lot of the rubbish is to have no anonymous posting at all.
--
And very, very infuriating that the actions of one individual can take away something that has provided so much pleasure and information for so many.
If you, Mr Skript Kiddy, are reading this, beware. This is not the end of the story.
Speaking with Rusty and the gang on IRC I could feel the frustration and anger mounting since Monday.
I guess the best way of describing it is as if you provided a reading room of your *own* books, catalogued on your *own* time for people to use. And then one person came in, tore up the books, pissed on the floor and then disappeared.
It's a sickener and no mistake.
--
Sure, it's a troll.
But it's a good one.
--
Hume's principle is about *probability*, not belief.
--
In a DnD environment, do this:
:)
myprog | grep somepattern | sort | uniq
No graphical tools exist that I can think of that would let me do this. However, if they do exist, I want them
--
I'm bored and it's better than work at the moment.
--
"* Provable existance - This is by choice. Why? I leave that as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: Think about celebrities and their problems with friends)"
f aith
I would love to know what this sentence means.
"* Never left a signle trace - This is wonderful example of duality in interpretation. Depending on your basic views, the whole world: genetics, the atomic/superstring structure, the digestion biology the galaxies, the Sun, the earth's rotation, the life cycles and life itself are examples of structure, information and thought. How often do you see that in the remnants of a fire cracker?"
Eh? Precisely what do the remnants of a firecracker and the rotation of the earth have to do with each other?
"Faith - You have a lot of reading to do on this subject, I see. Start with a concept description."
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=
Particularly sense 2.
Get a grip on your own use of English before knocking mine. "thoughted"?
--
"And the "evidence" of a few pieces of bone consist of the entire basis for the rediculous claims of the evolutionists. Pieces of bone which exist in no order and are often found in places which contradict evolutionary "theory"."
Well, that's 100% more evidence than YOU have...
"As for the Truth of the Bible, something which should be self-evident to anyone that searches for the meaning of creation, you dismiss it out of hand."
Well, of course I do. Like any reasonable person. It's a big book of metaphors and allegory. If you take the bible as literal truth then you might as well leave any scientific discussion now - because you're basically saying "no matter what you say, and no matter what actual evidence you have, what I *believe* is absolute truth". IOW, you're saying that MY beliefs (founded in empirical, repeatable, verifiable scientific fact) have to be subject to criteria that yours do not ("it's in the bible so it must be true").
It doesn't matter whether there was a nutter called Jesus running round approx 2K years ago claiming to be the son of god and pretending to heal people.
Religion is bad. It causes people to abandon reason and rationality.
I don't need religion to help me make sense of the universe. I need science and reason.
--
is no evidence at all. Sorry.
It's a book of middle-eastern faery tales. Some of which are nice, and some of which are nasty.
--
"This so-called theory is just another attempt by Dawkins and his cult of "blind watchmakers" to derail the Truths that have been revealed to all of us through the words of our Lord."
Revealed how? On SlashDot? ZDNet? Weekly World News? Full page ad in Time? Through any *verifiable*, *repeatable* channel at all?
Hume blows you away every time. You're asking me to believe that it's the most likely explanation for the existence of everything that the entire universe was created, as it is today, in 6 days by an omnipotent omnipresent being whose completely unprovable existence has never left a single trace of physical evidence anywhere?
Wow. I can see why they call it "faith". As in "belief without cause".
--
Vi is a very powerful editor with a seriously sucky interface.
Notepad is a very limp and pathetic editor with a very easy interface.
--
Here:
--
http://www.alexchiu.com/spacestation/grav1.htm
And it's "grammar", not "grammer".
--
"X11 is not an effective DeskTop GUI."
Damn right it's not.
It's a protocol.
--