I would say Command and Conquer and Warcraft II, both released in 1995. Dune II is certainly established the "build stuff then attack" convention, and Warcraft increased recognition, but it was C&C and WC2 that truly popularized the genre.
I'm a little unconvinced by your anecdotal evidence: 1. LILO: Recovery always worked 2. GRUB2: Recovery always worked, except once
Even if you only ever recovered with GRUB2 once and it failed, how does anybody (yourself included) know that a) you didn't screw it up, b) some other software didn't screw it up, or c) your hardware wasn't screwed up?
The full quote is much better, but SlashDot's ridiculously limiting signature length forced me to truncate it: "The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity made by those responsible for the security of a nation." -- Alan Dershowitz in Tortured Reasoning.
I do not think Windows is better for science. I wouldn't try to tell someone their choice in computing was wrong. That would make me no better than an actual Linux zealot, Mac fanboy, or Microsoft snob. I know Linux works extremely well for scientific endeavors because it still provides easy access to the basic Turing machine. Just as Windows and Java are favored in business because they offer layers of abstractions that make it easier to distance yourself from the Turing machine to represent the types of models the business world requires. It's similar to the reason Physics favors calculus (where numbers only exist to show their relationship to other numbers or are objective measurements) and Psychology favors statistics (where numbers tend to represent natural objects or are subjective measurements) yet both sciences use the scientific method (hypothesize, observe, evaluate, predict).
My point was that your post was perfectly fine until the last three sentences. They serve no purpose but to discredit the reader's own experiences as irrelevant. I understand you're trying to force the reader to examine where you're coming from (scientific programming) . The problem is that it comes across merely as an appeal to authority, and those don't work very well on an anonymous Internet. You literally say "best to keep quiet about stuff you know nothing about," which says "you clearly know nothing, don't bother talking." To me, that's one of the most offensive things to say I can think of in the context of a discussion. Is what you said so far removed from "STFU & GTFO"?
In your response to my post, you also say " However, it was you who chose to interpret this defensively and in a particular way. I cannot help you with that I'm afraid." I would caution you against this type of phrasing as well. It also comes across as condescending. Communication requires effort of two parties. You are the one trying to communicate a message. Your job is to make the words you use as clear and concise as possible, because human language is inherently fuzzy and prone to confusion. Many words have multiple definitions as well as cultural connotative and denotative meanings, and all of these meanings are valid as they serve to communicate a message. You do not have the luxury of domain-specific jargon in general language, so you must be very clear with your wording. Even then, you must expect people to misinterpret or ask for clarification. It's safe to assume you would not have tried to communicate if you did not wish to be understood, yes? The alternative is a rather deep rabbit hole. It is then very insulting to be told first I don't know anything and should not respond, and then told it's my fault for failing to understand your message. This will just make me as a listener give up and dismiss your message outright.
Now yes, you'll note I said that communication is a two way street. As a listener it is my responsibility to attempt to interpret your message as openly as possible. That is, to look for as many interpretations of your message as I can, and then, using context, try to decide on the correct one. Additionally, it is the listener's responsibility to ask for clarification when they do not understand the message. Intentionally choosing to interpret things in the most offensive way possible will simply make the speaker give up, I agree. The talking heads on what passes for television news today are far more guilty of this than most lawyers, to the detriment of understanding everywhere. My response to your post was my way -- agreeably unfair and
I got worried there for a moment. I almost thought you weren't going to be condescending, self-righteous, or pedantic. Rest assured, your actual point has been lost because you've completely offended your audience.
I agree, but in a region where higher temperatures are normal, there isn't (to my knowledge) any difference in mortality rates. The people's normal behavior in warmer regions probably already accounts for the warmer climates. That may mean the old and sick already have a way of life which naturally limits their exposure, or that parents pay more attention to children because they're aware of the effects of the heat.
It's as if a bunch of people were brought up to believe human beings aren't adaptable to some moderate temperature hikes. We are, only stupid ones aren't.
It has nothing to do with stupidity, dumbass. The issue is that human bodies adapt slower than the weather changes. People in the midwest are not accustomed to these temperatures. Especially the old, the young, and the ill.
I'm born and raised in central Michigan, but I lived a handful of years in Tucson, Arizona. It took me about two years before I could stay outside during the day as long as natives. I would simply get too hot and have to go inside, regardless of how much water I drank. One day I literally drank three bottles of water to every one my cousin drank, and I still had to go inside eventually because I was showing early signs of overheating.
However, even in the middle of January when it would drop below freezing, I never once wore a coat in Arizona. Not even a light jacket. The natives thought I was nuts. To me, it was literally never cold because of the intensity of the sun regardless of the actual temperature. Even at night I could still feel heat radiating off the ground from the day since even mid-winter the daytime temperatures were still in the 70s.
When I moved back to Michigan, it only took one winter to reset my body to this climate, but it was the coldest winter I ever remember (the weather was actually quite mild).
In summary, I'll be pointing and laughing in six months when you get 8 inches of snow and have to shut down the entire state for a week.
The basic problem is that the screwheads in sales and marketing are looking at Apple's sales figures for iPads and comparing them to their own PC sales. But they're not realizing that tablets are a new market, or they think that they can tap that market by making the PC more like a tablet.
The basic issue is this: 1. Everybody who wants a computer and can afford a computer already has a computer. Additionally, computers have been Good Enough(TM) for about the past 5 years, so you're only going to sell a new computer when an old one fails. 2. Almost everybody who wants a tablet and can afford a tablet does not have a tablet and has never used one either.
The fundamental problem is that, well, nobody is quite sure what to do with a tablet other than read (not write) documents and read (not write) email. You can kind of access the web (if you just want to view content) and you can view videos from YouTube and some other places that have special apps. You can play the same sorts of games you can play on your phone that make you wish for a gaming controller. However, typing quickly becomes painful. Navigating large documents is unweildly. Annotating them (IMX) is absolutely dreadful. Accessing anything other than trivial content or content specifically designed for the device ranges from cumbersome to impossible. The only real Killer App... is FaceTime. And that can be replaced by Skype if they'd ever make that easier to use.
I've noticed a couple things about tablets so far: 1. Nobody gets one as their first computing device. Literally, nobody does this. People get a laptop first, then a smartphone (to replace their cell phone), and only then a tablet. 2. The tablet touch interface works very well. For some tasks. For one set of tasks, you really miss a keyboard. For a different set of tasks, you really miss a mouse. I've experienced this on any touch interface I've used. Sometimes I just want my iPad to be a laptop. I... haven't ever had the reverse problem on a computer. I've never wanted a laptop to be an iPad except to be more compact. 3. Of the people I've known so far that own an iPad or tablet that has failed, exactly zero of them are looking to replace the device. They bought the device, owned it a couple years, and found they didn't use it much.
Now, maybe they can fix these shortcomings, but I'm really not sure I see a long term market for an iPad. I see a niche market, yes, but I will be very surprised if the tablet market doesn't plateau, or if people decide not to buy a second or third tablet. Not unless they find something that tablets do really, really well that nothing else can do.
It is. At least, everywhere else I've ever been on the Internet in the past 20 odd years they're the same. Since flaming is universally frowned upon, however, the most common response to a troll is more trolling, rather than old-fashioned flaming.
SlashDot is the only place that actually tries to make a distinction -- and fails to, because it's never defined or not defined anyplace I know of.
The primary difference is Google.com has access to only two commands: Google Search and I'm Feeling Lucky and the latter is a shortcut for the former. It's very, very easy to use a command line interface when you have exactly one program command and everything else is a parameter.
You're also not understanding the primary difficulty of CLIs. It's not "oh, no, I have to type something" it's "oh, no, I have no idea what to type to do what I want, and I don't know how to figure out what I can possibly do". This is part of the much steeper learning curve. I want to reformat my Word document. What do I use? format.exe? Growing up I distinctly remember using PC DOS 2.1 and figuring out how to create a subdirectory and change to it, but I had no idea how to get back where I was or delete the directory (delete and erase certainly didn't work!). I remember being out of options and rebooting the computer and being relieved that the data disk still worked. I don't think I ever did find the rmdir command.
Say I have a document I've download or copied to my system and I want to edit it. With a GUI, I just double click and the interface launches the correct program. With a CLI, I have to know what I'm going to use to access the document. Next, I could be confronted with a program I'm completely unfamiliar with. With a GUI, thanks to strong conventions, I can probably figure out what I need to do if I'm used to MS Word and I get AbiWord or LibreOffice Writer or WordPerfect or Notepad/GEdit. With a CLI, if I'm used to nano but I have to use vi or emacs, I'm in real trouble if I have no idea how to use these programs. Even if I just have to open up a 3 line text file and change a 0 to a 1, I need to know a lot about how vi or emacs are different from nano to do that. There are no conventions that will help me.
Have you ever run a command with --help or -? as the option and just gotten a blank line? You can type and type and type and nothing at all seems to happen. tar still does that, last I knew. The program is expecting either input from stdin or output from stdout, but that's not what the user wanted. If they don't know how to issue the break command (^C) then they're just stuck. Honestly, you can't ever get "just stuck" like that in the GUI unless the program you're using is broken.
People keep focusing on him saying "keep it as an option or you can take it out all together" and taking it as an insult because they think he's saying that as a blanket statement. In other words, they're taking it wholly out of context. The important piece is "no piece of technology targeted at the consumer market should ever require that something be done via CLI". And that is absolutely right.
If you want something to be done by the average user or the consumer here's a short list of things you don't do in your program: 1. Require command-line parameters. 2. Require editing configuration files in a text editor. 3. Require editing the registry.
So what you're saying, is that open source is better but that many of the advantages don't matter to you...
It's "better" in the same sense that using paper instead of plastic to wrap my burger makes my fast food "better". And if burger joint A uses plastic and is 5 miles away while burger joint B is 10 miles away but uses paper, well, i'm not driving further for that. It's not significant enough to overcome the inertia.
Incidentally, the fact that a third party can fork an existing program instead of writing their own from scratch is a huge difference for anything thats not trivial. It's what enabled google to create android fairly quickly for a start.
And if I were a multinational corporation with vast quantities of disposable cash like Google, that would be great. I, like most end users, am not.
I'd also point out that Google used Linux to create Android, which they in turn used to sell to others. That is, they're a software developer and vendor. Once again, open source only mattered to the computer programmers.
After a quick WHOIS search, and a bit of googling, I found that this is registered to an individual who worked in 2009 as a San Francisco Art Institute teaching assistant.
It's a joke site.
Now you tell me, I already enrolled Schrödinger's cat... not because I care about this overused meme, but because I've got money on the outcome.
Moving equipment in the rack seems absurdly risky, both for the equipment and the person moving it.
A rack alone is about 400 lbs, and a 1U server weighs about 30 lbs. Even if the rack is only half full and you're not using an in-rack UPS you're looking at half a ton. Add to that most racks are top-heavy since servers are generally installed at arm level initially. Nevermind that racks and rails aren't designed to be moved loaded, nor are they designed to cushion the impact from road travel. Everything is rigid, so you're going to risk bending rails, popping bolts or welds on the rack, collapsing the rack and damaging who knows what inside.
To me, everything is a black box. I can't read complex code and determine what it does very easily unless it's SQL or a short script, and I do not have the time to get in to it on my own. It doesn't matter to me that I can look at the code, because it would take too long for me to understand what it's even doing let alone determine the cause of my problem.
This, then, is my perception: 1. A closed source program is something written by someone I don't know and is (probably) reviewed and tested by someone else I don't know working for the same company. If it's broken, I have to go back to the same company that authored it to get it fixed, and if they don't I'm out of luck unless another company writes a similar program. 2. An open source program is something written by someone I don't know and is (probably) reviewed and tested by someone else I don't know who is working on the same project. If it's broken, I have to go back to the same project that authored it to get it fixed, and if they don't I'm out of luck unless another project writes a similar program or has forked the same program.
WOW THAT'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE.
As an end user, the only time being open source matters is when I need a program supported to changed and the authoring entity refuses to do so. With open source I can pay someone to refactor existing code. With closed source I have to pay to have the whole program rebuilt.
Thus, open source only truly matters to computer programmers. For everyone else, it doesn't change enough to be compelling.
Bigger wafers means less waste around the edges where the rectangular chips meet the circular wafer edge. This becomes very important for larger chips such as image sensors. (Not sure if the new process will be used for that, though.) Also, many manufacturing steps are applied to the wafer as a whole, and having wafers with over 2.25 times as many chips makes those steps cheaper on a per-chip basis.
Cheaper per-chip, yes, but if the production volume is too low or the cost per wafer overtakes the benefit of the added area, then it's not financially viable. And it has to subsume the costs of retooling all your chip production itself from 300mm to 450mm. What if wafers that size oxidize too unevenly, or etch unevenly, or fracture during cutting, or distort due to tension imparted at growth? It won't matter if the individual wafer has 2.25 times more usable area if it ends up being 2.5 times more expensive to bring a chip based on that to market.
I hope they (or someone else) succeeds because it will be of great benefit, but honestly I think 2017 is fairly optimistic.
I'm curious when according to you do people become Liberal in the modern American sense? Or did you mean Democrats when you wrote Democratic ?
Your questions make me think you're not familiar with US politics, so I'm assuming that is the case. Apologies if I am not correct.
In American politics when Democratic is capitalized it always means "Democratic Party." If we're referring to the form of government it is never capitalized: "democratic."
Liberal is a difficult word in US politics, as the two main parties are diametrically opposed both socially and economically, and the common third party is split. GoP is right or conservative (in the American sense) both socially and economically. The Democratic Party is left or liberal (in the American sense) both socially and economically. The Libertarian is generally conservative economically and liberal socially. Libertarian in this sense is the most purely American ideology and likely the closest to the one that the founding fathers had, but most people today acknowledge that it is not a functional system for any country of significant size or wealth (witness the robber barons of the 19th and early 20th centuries).
Additionally, there is a lot of conflation of ideas around the word "liberal" (partly related to the Cold War) so that you will find that people equate the following: liberal = liberalism = socialism = Socialism = Communism = Soviet Communism = (believe it or not) Facism = Nazism. The levels of misunderstanding here are quite profound when you actually know what the concepts being confused are, but I find this association repeating over and over again particularly with the dogma of very conservative and right-wing Republican Party, since this association tends to benefit them the most. This is not to say that the GoP has a monopoly on fearmongering or FUD, it's just my personal experience.
It seems people become libertarian AFTER they become rich, as they have the mistaken belief that they somehow made their wealth themselves.
No, people become Republican after they become rich, and suddenly believe they got where they are because they "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" and had no help from others, no privileges of birth, and no other contributing special circumstances, They honestly believe that the most valuable members of society are people who can succeed just by putting in extra effort, and therefore deserve extra protections and rights. They tend to see public corruption as a greater evil than private corruption.
People become Libertarian when they believe the liberal philosophy (in a classic sense) they were taught, and lack either the life experience or practical knowledge that in a vacuum people will be ruthlessly selfish rather than act towards the common good. The only way someone who is rich becomes Libertarian is if they can't stomach the social policy of the GOP (which is tailored to attract the religious social right). They tend to see both public and private corruption as evil, but seem to think natural laws will overcome that.
For completeness sake, people become Democratic when they have faith in the system of checks-and-balances and believe in the common good, without realizing that what will happen is half your money will go to the rich (because they'll get it anyway) and the other half will go to the poor (because of your social programs) and you in the middle will just be paying higher costs for everything. They tend to see private corruption as a greater evil than public corruption.
It also depends somewhat on what your life goals are and how you define success or happiness, but that's how I see it.
It must be a defect in my character or maybe my thinking, but I cannot wrap my mind around someone who is worth $250,000,000.00 worrying about boosting his stock holdings.
That's the thing about greed. It's never satisfied.
This is something that a lot of people can't seem to get their head around. Either they've had too many STEM classes in school that emphasize (rightly for their topic) the objective, or too many bad teachers that tell them some agreed upon meaning that you must regurgitate for a final essay question.
The meaning of a work is what you take away from it. Not what other people take away from it. Not what the author put there to be taken away. Nobody can be wrong about the meaning of a work because it's a subjective thing. Putting down Dune with the impression that it's boring and pointless is just as valid as the person who says it's about manipulation of society through false religion.
After years of frustration with crap drivers for ATI video cards and crap drivers for AMD chipsets from third parties (any of them) I finally switched to Intel CPU, Intel chipset, and Nvidia graphics cards. I even bit the bullet and got an Intel model motherboard and made sure the RAM I bought was on the list of tested RAM.
I have had zero problems since I bought it in 2009. Intel DP55WG, Intel i7 860, EVGA GeForce GTX 260, 8GB of a supported SKU of Kingston RAM. The biggest problem I've had (knock on wood) is that one of the case fans rattles rarely.
My playgroup's biggest problem was the amount of "system mastery" required to play the game in a timely manner. When every character has 10+ abilities which are all useful in slightly different situations using keywords like push, pull, slide, daze, stun, mark, etc., it can take an incredibly steep learning curve. Add to that all the bookkeeping you must do round-to-round for 5-6 PCs plus 5-10 monsters with abilities that have durations, cause damage each round, refresh and can be re-used, trigger off actions or events, have moving or variable areas of effect, and so on. Combat took forever. We run a session once a week for about 6 hours, and found that we struggled to run two combat encounters each night. Sure, we could structure the night better so that we had everything optimized to keep gameplay as smooth and quickly paced as possible, but that's not a fun way to play a game. D&D is about sitting around a table laughing and bullshitting with friends. I don't want to organize my game session like a business meeting. I get enough of that at work!
The other issue is that such a strong mechanical focus in the rulebooks for 4E overtakes even the storytelling and roleplaying aspects of the game. Ideas like Skill Challenges work great for things like navigating the wilderness or disarming complex traps, but the designers tried to force this mechanic into any encounter that wasn't a combat encounter. Including those better resolved with talking and roleplaying (which really doesn't need rules). Additionally, often in the published encounters we found that the author assumed the players would succeed at skill challenges or that the DM should allow unlimited retries even when you're doing things like... trying to be diplomatic or search for information in a hostile town. So it became "roll dice until I say you can continue with the story" and then "oh, you failed again? what happens... it looks like you can't continue and have no hope of picking up the trail. that's lame and defeats the purpose of running a module, so let's assume you succeeded or it's game over".
Those of us in the group that loved mechanics loved the game. Mechanically combat was fantastic. It was complex and interesting. It was never just "roll a d20 and roll for damage" over and over. Problem was... those beautiful mechanics completely got in the way of the rest of the game. 4E was a tabletop war game shoved into an RPG box. It was a really good and fun tabletop war game, but it wasn't D&D.
The only mechanical issue I had with the game is that the mechanics were too delicately balanced. It was obvious that even a +1 or -1 to a die roll was immensely important. The mechanics were so tight that it was obvious while playing it. That's... too tight. The fudge factor needs to be higher.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a luggable, not a clamshell.
I would say Command and Conquer and Warcraft II, both released in 1995. Dune II is certainly established the "build stuff then attack" convention, and Warcraft increased recognition, but it was C&C and WC2 that truly popularized the genre.
To make sure it's your sole source for the news.
I'm a little unconvinced by your anecdotal evidence:
1. LILO: Recovery always worked
2. GRUB2: Recovery always worked, except once
Even if you only ever recovered with GRUB2 once and it failed, how does anybody (yourself included) know that a) you didn't screw it up, b) some other software didn't screw it up, or c) your hardware wasn't screwed up?
The full quote is much better, but SlashDot's ridiculously limiting signature length forced me to truncate it: "The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity made by those responsible for the security of a nation." -- Alan Dershowitz in Tortured Reasoning.
I do not think Windows is better for science. I wouldn't try to tell someone their choice in computing was wrong. That would make me no better than an actual Linux zealot, Mac fanboy, or Microsoft snob. I know Linux works extremely well for scientific endeavors because it still provides easy access to the basic Turing machine. Just as Windows and Java are favored in business because they offer layers of abstractions that make it easier to distance yourself from the Turing machine to represent the types of models the business world requires. It's similar to the reason Physics favors calculus (where numbers only exist to show their relationship to other numbers or are objective measurements) and Psychology favors statistics (where numbers tend to represent natural objects or are subjective measurements) yet both sciences use the scientific method (hypothesize, observe, evaluate, predict).
My point was that your post was perfectly fine until the last three sentences. They serve no purpose but to discredit the reader's own experiences as irrelevant. I understand you're trying to force the reader to examine where you're coming from (scientific programming) . The problem is that it comes across merely as an appeal to authority, and those don't work very well on an anonymous Internet. You literally say "best to keep quiet about stuff you know nothing about," which says "you clearly know nothing, don't bother talking." To me, that's one of the most offensive things to say I can think of in the context of a discussion. Is what you said so far removed from "STFU & GTFO"?
In your response to my post, you also say " However, it was you who chose to interpret this defensively and in a particular way. I cannot help you with that I'm afraid." I would caution you against this type of phrasing as well. It also comes across as condescending. Communication requires effort of two parties. You are the one trying to communicate a message. Your job is to make the words you use as clear and concise as possible, because human language is inherently fuzzy and prone to confusion. Many words have multiple definitions as well as cultural connotative and denotative meanings, and all of these meanings are valid as they serve to communicate a message. You do not have the luxury of domain-specific jargon in general language, so you must be very clear with your wording. Even then, you must expect people to misinterpret or ask for clarification. It's safe to assume you would not have tried to communicate if you did not wish to be understood, yes? The alternative is a rather deep rabbit hole. It is then very insulting to be told first I don't know anything and should not respond, and then told it's my fault for failing to understand your message. This will just make me as a listener give up and dismiss your message outright.
Now yes, you'll note I said that communication is a two way street. As a listener it is my responsibility to attempt to interpret your message as openly as possible. That is, to look for as many interpretations of your message as I can, and then, using context, try to decide on the correct one. Additionally, it is the listener's responsibility to ask for clarification when they do not understand the message. Intentionally choosing to interpret things in the most offensive way possible will simply make the speaker give up, I agree. The talking heads on what passes for television news today are far more guilty of this than most lawyers, to the detriment of understanding everywhere. My response to your post was my way -- agreeably unfair and
I got worried there for a moment. I almost thought you weren't going to be condescending, self-righteous, or pedantic. Rest assured, your actual point has been lost because you've completely offended your audience.
I agree, but in a region where higher temperatures are normal, there isn't (to my knowledge) any difference in mortality rates. The people's normal behavior in warmer regions probably already accounts for the warmer climates. That may mean the old and sick already have a way of life which naturally limits their exposure, or that parents pay more attention to children because they're aware of the effects of the heat.
It's as if a bunch of people were brought up to believe human beings aren't adaptable to some moderate temperature hikes. We are, only stupid ones aren't.
It has nothing to do with stupidity, dumbass. The issue is that human bodies adapt slower than the weather changes. People in the midwest are not accustomed to these temperatures. Especially the old, the young, and the ill.
I'm born and raised in central Michigan, but I lived a handful of years in Tucson, Arizona. It took me about two years before I could stay outside during the day as long as natives. I would simply get too hot and have to go inside, regardless of how much water I drank. One day I literally drank three bottles of water to every one my cousin drank, and I still had to go inside eventually because I was showing early signs of overheating.
However, even in the middle of January when it would drop below freezing, I never once wore a coat in Arizona. Not even a light jacket. The natives thought I was nuts. To me, it was literally never cold because of the intensity of the sun regardless of the actual temperature. Even at night I could still feel heat radiating off the ground from the day since even mid-winter the daytime temperatures were still in the 70s.
When I moved back to Michigan, it only took one winter to reset my body to this climate, but it was the coldest winter I ever remember (the weather was actually quite mild).
In summary, I'll be pointing and laughing in six months when you get 8 inches of snow and have to shut down the entire state for a week.
That's true, but it's still only one program, and everything you type is still a parameter passed to that one program.
The basic problem is that the screwheads in sales and marketing are looking at Apple's sales figures for iPads and comparing them to their own PC sales. But they're not realizing that tablets are a new market, or they think that they can tap that market by making the PC more like a tablet.
The basic issue is this:
1. Everybody who wants a computer and can afford a computer already has a computer. Additionally, computers have been Good Enough(TM) for about the past 5 years, so you're only going to sell a new computer when an old one fails.
2. Almost everybody who wants a tablet and can afford a tablet does not have a tablet and has never used one either.
The fundamental problem is that, well, nobody is quite sure what to do with a tablet other than read (not write) documents and read (not write) email. You can kind of access the web (if you just want to view content) and you can view videos from YouTube and some other places that have special apps. You can play the same sorts of games you can play on your phone that make you wish for a gaming controller. However, typing quickly becomes painful. Navigating large documents is unweildly. Annotating them (IMX) is absolutely dreadful. Accessing anything other than trivial content or content specifically designed for the device ranges from cumbersome to impossible. The only real Killer App... is FaceTime. And that can be replaced by Skype if they'd ever make that easier to use.
I've noticed a couple things about tablets so far:
1. Nobody gets one as their first computing device. Literally, nobody does this. People get a laptop first, then a smartphone (to replace their cell phone), and only then a tablet.
2. The tablet touch interface works very well. For some tasks. For one set of tasks, you really miss a keyboard. For a different set of tasks, you really miss a mouse. I've experienced this on any touch interface I've used. Sometimes I just want my iPad to be a laptop. I... haven't ever had the reverse problem on a computer. I've never wanted a laptop to be an iPad except to be more compact.
3. Of the people I've known so far that own an iPad or tablet that has failed, exactly zero of them are looking to replace the device. They bought the device, owned it a couple years, and found they didn't use it much.
Now, maybe they can fix these shortcomings, but I'm really not sure I see a long term market for an iPad. I see a niche market, yes, but I will be very surprised if the tablet market doesn't plateau, or if people decide not to buy a second or third tablet. Not unless they find something that tablets do really, really well that nothing else can do.
It is. At least, everywhere else I've ever been on the Internet in the past 20 odd years they're the same. Since flaming is universally frowned upon, however, the most common response to a troll is more trolling, rather than old-fashioned flaming.
SlashDot is the only place that actually tries to make a distinction -- and fails to, because it's never defined or not defined anyplace I know of.
The primary difference is Google.com has access to only two commands: Google Search and I'm Feeling Lucky and the latter is a shortcut for the former. It's very, very easy to use a command line interface when you have exactly one program command and everything else is a parameter.
You're also not understanding the primary difficulty of CLIs. It's not "oh, no, I have to type something" it's "oh, no, I have no idea what to type to do what I want, and I don't know how to figure out what I can possibly do". This is part of the much steeper learning curve. I want to reformat my Word document. What do I use? format.exe? Growing up I distinctly remember using PC DOS 2.1 and figuring out how to create a subdirectory and change to it, but I had no idea how to get back where I was or delete the directory (delete and erase certainly didn't work!). I remember being out of options and rebooting the computer and being relieved that the data disk still worked. I don't think I ever did find the rmdir command.
Say I have a document I've download or copied to my system and I want to edit it. With a GUI, I just double click and the interface launches the correct program. With a CLI, I have to know what I'm going to use to access the document. Next, I could be confronted with a program I'm completely unfamiliar with. With a GUI, thanks to strong conventions, I can probably figure out what I need to do if I'm used to MS Word and I get AbiWord or LibreOffice Writer or WordPerfect or Notepad/GEdit. With a CLI, if I'm used to nano but I have to use vi or emacs, I'm in real trouble if I have no idea how to use these programs. Even if I just have to open up a 3 line text file and change a 0 to a 1, I need to know a lot about how vi or emacs are different from nano to do that. There are no conventions that will help me.
Have you ever run a command with --help or -? as the option and just gotten a blank line? You can type and type and type and nothing at all seems to happen. tar still does that, last I knew. The program is expecting either input from stdin or output from stdout, but that's not what the user wanted. If they don't know how to issue the break command (^C) then they're just stuck. Honestly, you can't ever get "just stuck" like that in the GUI unless the program you're using is broken.
People keep focusing on him saying "keep it as an option or you can take it out all together" and taking it as an insult because they think he's saying that as a blanket statement. In other words, they're taking it wholly out of context. The important piece is "no piece of technology targeted at the consumer market should ever require that something be done via CLI". And that is absolutely right.
If you want something to be done by the average user or the consumer here's a short list of things you don't do in your program:
1. Require command-line parameters.
2. Require editing configuration files in a text editor.
3. Require editing the registry.
No, you can turn the volume up as high as you want, but it's only defined for 0 to 10.
So what you're saying, is that open source is better but that many of the advantages don't matter to you...
It's "better" in the same sense that using paper instead of plastic to wrap my burger makes my fast food "better". And if burger joint A uses plastic and is 5 miles away while burger joint B is 10 miles away but uses paper, well, i'm not driving further for that. It's not significant enough to overcome the inertia.
Incidentally, the fact that a third party can fork an existing program instead of writing their own from scratch is a huge difference for anything thats not trivial. It's what enabled google to create android fairly quickly for a start.
And if I were a multinational corporation with vast quantities of disposable cash like Google, that would be great. I, like most end users, am not.
I'd also point out that Google used Linux to create Android, which they in turn used to sell to others. That is, they're a software developer and vendor. Once again, open source only mattered to the computer programmers.
After a quick WHOIS search, and a bit of googling, I found that this is registered to an individual who worked in 2009 as a San Francisco Art Institute teaching assistant.
It's a joke site.
Now you tell me, I already enrolled Schrödinger's cat... not because I care about this overused meme, but because I've got money on the outcome.
No, you fool! Betting changes the outcome!
Moving equipment in the rack seems absurdly risky, both for the equipment and the person moving it.
A rack alone is about 400 lbs, and a 1U server weighs about 30 lbs. Even if the rack is only half full and you're not using an in-rack UPS you're looking at half a ton. Add to that most racks are top-heavy since servers are generally installed at arm level initially. Nevermind that racks and rails aren't designed to be moved loaded, nor are they designed to cushion the impact from road travel. Everything is rigid, so you're going to risk bending rails, popping bolts or welds on the rack, collapsing the rack and damaging who knows what inside.
To me, everything is a black box. I can't read complex code and determine what it does very easily unless it's SQL or a short script, and I do not have the time to get in to it on my own. It doesn't matter to me that I can look at the code, because it would take too long for me to understand what it's even doing let alone determine the cause of my problem.
This, then, is my perception:
1. A closed source program is something written by someone I don't know and is (probably) reviewed and tested by someone else I don't know working for the same company. If it's broken, I have to go back to the same company that authored it to get it fixed, and if they don't I'm out of luck unless another company writes a similar program.
2. An open source program is something written by someone I don't know and is (probably) reviewed and tested by someone else I don't know who is working on the same project. If it's broken, I have to go back to the same project that authored it to get it fixed, and if they don't I'm out of luck unless another project writes a similar program or has forked the same program.
WOW THAT'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE.
As an end user, the only time being open source matters is when I need a program supported to changed and the authoring entity refuses to do so. With open source I can pay someone to refactor existing code. With closed source I have to pay to have the whole program rebuilt.
Thus, open source only truly matters to computer programmers. For everyone else, it doesn't change enough to be compelling.
Bigger wafers means less waste around the edges where the rectangular chips meet the circular wafer edge. This becomes very important for larger chips such as image sensors. (Not sure if the new process will be used for that, though.) Also, many manufacturing steps are applied to the wafer as a whole, and having wafers with over 2.25 times as many chips makes those steps cheaper on a per-chip basis.
Cheaper per-chip, yes, but if the production volume is too low or the cost per wafer overtakes the benefit of the added area, then it's not financially viable. And it has to subsume the costs of retooling all your chip production itself from 300mm to 450mm. What if wafers that size oxidize too unevenly, or etch unevenly, or fracture during cutting, or distort due to tension imparted at growth? It won't matter if the individual wafer has 2.25 times more usable area if it ends up being 2.5 times more expensive to bring a chip based on that to market.
I hope they (or someone else) succeeds because it will be of great benefit, but honestly I think 2017 is fairly optimistic.
I'm curious when according to you do people become Liberal in the modern American sense? Or did you mean Democrats when you wrote Democratic ?
Your questions make me think you're not familiar with US politics, so I'm assuming that is the case. Apologies if I am not correct.
In American politics when Democratic is capitalized it always means "Democratic Party." If we're referring to the form of government it is never capitalized: "democratic."
Liberal is a difficult word in US politics, as the two main parties are diametrically opposed both socially and economically, and the common third party is split. GoP is right or conservative (in the American sense) both socially and economically. The Democratic Party is left or liberal (in the American sense) both socially and economically. The Libertarian is generally conservative economically and liberal socially. Libertarian in this sense is the most purely American ideology and likely the closest to the one that the founding fathers had, but most people today acknowledge that it is not a functional system for any country of significant size or wealth (witness the robber barons of the 19th and early 20th centuries).
Additionally, there is a lot of conflation of ideas around the word "liberal" (partly related to the Cold War) so that you will find that people equate the following: liberal = liberalism = socialism = Socialism = Communism = Soviet Communism = (believe it or not) Facism = Nazism. The levels of misunderstanding here are quite profound when you actually know what the concepts being confused are, but I find this association repeating over and over again particularly with the dogma of very conservative and right-wing Republican Party, since this association tends to benefit them the most. This is not to say that the GoP has a monopoly on fearmongering or FUD, it's just my personal experience.
It seems people become libertarian AFTER they become rich, as they have the mistaken belief that they somehow made their wealth themselves.
No, people become Republican after they become rich, and suddenly believe they got where they are because they "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" and had no help from others, no privileges of birth, and no other contributing special circumstances, They honestly believe that the most valuable members of society are people who can succeed just by putting in extra effort, and therefore deserve extra protections and rights. They tend to see public corruption as a greater evil than private corruption.
People become Libertarian when they believe the liberal philosophy (in a classic sense) they were taught, and lack either the life experience or practical knowledge that in a vacuum people will be ruthlessly selfish rather than act towards the common good. The only way someone who is rich becomes Libertarian is if they can't stomach the social policy of the GOP (which is tailored to attract the religious social right). They tend to see both public and private corruption as evil, but seem to think natural laws will overcome that.
For completeness sake, people become Democratic when they have faith in the system of checks-and-balances and believe in the common good, without realizing that what will happen is half your money will go to the rich (because they'll get it anyway) and the other half will go to the poor (because of your social programs) and you in the middle will just be paying higher costs for everything. They tend to see private corruption as a greater evil than public corruption.
It also depends somewhat on what your life goals are and how you define success or happiness, but that's how I see it.
It must be a defect in my character or maybe my thinking, but I cannot wrap my mind around someone who is worth $250,000,000.00 worrying about boosting his stock holdings.
That's the thing about greed. It's never satisfied.
Why can't both be right?
This is something that a lot of people can't seem to get their head around. Either they've had too many STEM classes in school that emphasize (rightly for their topic) the objective, or too many bad teachers that tell them some agreed upon meaning that you must regurgitate for a final essay question.
The meaning of a work is what you take away from it. Not what other people take away from it. Not what the author put there to be taken away. Nobody can be wrong about the meaning of a work because it's a subjective thing. Putting down Dune with the impression that it's boring and pointless is just as valid as the person who says it's about manipulation of society through false religion.
After years of frustration with crap drivers for ATI video cards and crap drivers for AMD chipsets from third parties (any of them) I finally switched to Intel CPU, Intel chipset, and Nvidia graphics cards. I even bit the bullet and got an Intel model motherboard and made sure the RAM I bought was on the list of tested RAM.
I have had zero problems since I bought it in 2009. Intel DP55WG, Intel i7 860, EVGA GeForce GTX 260, 8GB of a supported SKU of Kingston RAM. The biggest problem I've had (knock on wood) is that one of the case fans rattles rarely.
Of course this is slashdot so I should offer option (c), unsuccessful, smelly, nasty, humourless and loveless.
I have a perfectly good sense of humor, thank you very much.
My playgroup's biggest problem was the amount of "system mastery" required to play the game in a timely manner. When every character has 10+ abilities which are all useful in slightly different situations using keywords like push, pull, slide, daze, stun, mark, etc., it can take an incredibly steep learning curve. Add to that all the bookkeeping you must do round-to-round for 5-6 PCs plus 5-10 monsters with abilities that have durations, cause damage each round, refresh and can be re-used, trigger off actions or events, have moving or variable areas of effect, and so on. Combat took forever. We run a session once a week for about 6 hours, and found that we struggled to run two combat encounters each night. Sure, we could structure the night better so that we had everything optimized to keep gameplay as smooth and quickly paced as possible, but that's not a fun way to play a game. D&D is about sitting around a table laughing and bullshitting with friends. I don't want to organize my game session like a business meeting. I get enough of that at work!
The other issue is that such a strong mechanical focus in the rulebooks for 4E overtakes even the storytelling and roleplaying aspects of the game. Ideas like Skill Challenges work great for things like navigating the wilderness or disarming complex traps, but the designers tried to force this mechanic into any encounter that wasn't a combat encounter. Including those better resolved with talking and roleplaying (which really doesn't need rules). Additionally, often in the published encounters we found that the author assumed the players would succeed at skill challenges or that the DM should allow unlimited retries even when you're doing things like... trying to be diplomatic or search for information in a hostile town. So it became "roll dice until I say you can continue with the story" and then "oh, you failed again? what happens... it looks like you can't continue and have no hope of picking up the trail. that's lame and defeats the purpose of running a module, so let's assume you succeeded or it's game over".
Those of us in the group that loved mechanics loved the game. Mechanically combat was fantastic. It was complex and interesting. It was never just "roll a d20 and roll for damage" over and over. Problem was... those beautiful mechanics completely got in the way of the rest of the game. 4E was a tabletop war game shoved into an RPG box. It was a really good and fun tabletop war game, but it wasn't D&D.
The only mechanical issue I had with the game is that the mechanics were too delicately balanced. It was obvious that even a +1 or -1 to a die roll was immensely important. The mechanics were so tight that it was obvious while playing it. That's... too tight. The fudge factor needs to be higher.