So they can tell now when a cosmic ray hits chip, and correct for it. But what happens when a cosmic ray hits the cosmic-ray detector and scrambles its brains, huh? Will we need a corrector for the corrector now too? And a corrector-corrector corrector? WHERE WILL IT ALL END
The cost of getting stuff up into space doesn't have to be significant.
I don't care how you power a spaceship, if you're launching it from the surface of the Earth you need to get to the top of a pretty steep gravity well. Adding your tons and tons and tons of mass to each launch means energy requirements, and fuel costs, will go way up.
Glad you asked: Orion Spacecraft Rule
For interplanetary travel, maybe. But you seriously think that it's a good idea to use powerful and frequent thermonuclear explosions for lifting a spaceship off of Earth?
You just can't get around the fact that a wire (fiberoptic or copper) still has to be laid out there for the best results. And no "destination site" is going to be laying that line anytime soon.
it's happening to me too. My normal threshold is +3 but I'm browsing at 0 now. For some reason the links in the lower right of every front-page story only read "X comments", instead of the normal "X of Y comments". Why can't we browse at our normal threshods?
What makes your analogy a false one is that the ingimp folks aren't like the marketing departments from the big companies you mentioned. They're not collecting broad 'market data', if you will, from Photoshop/PaintShop/CorelDraw/etc. users (or all SUV drivers, or all soda drinkers). They're doing exactly what you seem to want them to do, which is ask their target users how to improve the product they currently prefer.
It's as if Chrysler sold you a Jeep with sensors on the steering wheel and seat cushions. You'd already decided to buy the Jeep, and Chrysler wants to know how you use it to make future versions more comfortable and responsive.
your and your parent's post both have it wrong - applications don't work that way.
When your program has millions of dollars in marketing and focus group research behind it, and (by and large) has the features and ease-of-use that the majority of people are looking for, you can name it whatever the hell you want and it will succeed. Notice how all the apps you named come from large vendors who can provide all that. A given piece of free or open-source software won't gain widespread acceptance until it has the same featureset as its proprietary competitor (plus additional goodies as an incentive to switch), AND requires the same level of knowledge from the end-user re: installation, configuration, and error recovery, AND has enough marketing for it that people actually hear about it.
When you're in second place, you have to try harder. That's just the way it is.
Close. The open-source bits of Cedega are LGPL'd or AFPL'd. The closed-source bits (the Cedega GUI, the copy-protection modules, and IIRC some DirectX goodies), plus the binary packaging and official support, are what you actually pay for.
Why dont we have our students actually learn in school and not pander to the test mentality which has proven to be ineffective and misleading.
"pander to the test mentality." Sounds great on the internet, is utterly worthless anywhere else. Maybe you have special psychic powers that allow you to determine how well, if at all, students are learning material in school. I don't know. But how do you propose the rest of us in the real world implement your plan to figure out who to put on a college track and who to nudge towards trade school?
linux [...] comes with less of a learning curve...however still a lot more of a curve than your run of the mill windows server guy would like, I've met so many bleeding heart MS guys that would use/try Linux if they didn't have a misconception that it is infinatley harder than windows...
Wait, what? Linux has a steeper learning curve than Windows, yet Windows admins have a "misconception" that Linux is harder for them to use?
Either it's easier to use (in which case the learning curve isn't as steep as you claim), or it's not (in which case there's no misconceptions, only reality).
"but with very little work on the part of the guru," "bump up to a 2.6 kernel" "install Dropline Gnome" "Flip iniitab to runlevel 4"
...and you're attempting to recommend this distro to someone with zero Linux experience?
I'm not saying Slack is bad or anything (I know several friends who are partial to it), but if I was just starting out with a new operating system and had specific tasks and goals in mind, the last thing I'd want to do would be administrative things like upgrading my kernel. IMO the article's submitter should stick with Fedora Core or Ubuntu to start off, then move to something like Slack when they've got a little more Linux experience under their belt.
That's all well and good from an energy conservation perspective (though I have a feeling that the difference in energy consumption might not be as large as it seems at first glance). Too bad you just fucked over everyone living near or below the poverty line by removing their income tax exemption and replacing it with the most regressive form of taxation I've ever heard of. Not a great way to keep your country's economy rolling.
Right. Because choosing to work on a project that will be used by hundreds of thousands of people across the country couldn't be even the least bit rewarding in itself. Nobody could ever consider that job as anything but boring, and clearly indicates that I only took the job because my skills are inferior to those of every other software developer in the nation.
Frankly, it's been my experience that the fewer self-important amusement-obsessed people like you there are working on a given project, the better it generally tends to go.
Because of course the situation you describe could only ever apply to Microsoft. No other project has ever contained severe bugs that nobody knew about previously.
I know we're all supposed to hate Microsoft here, but come on. Put a little intelligence into your post next time.
more than a few people think that the whole site is part of another viral marketing campaign by Microsoft and Bungie, this time for Halo 3. Don't take it as gospel quite yet, but it would explain the total lack of engineering and scientific detail that a company of this nature should be showing to the world.
Why exactly should be give any weight to anything from and organization so ignorant as to disallow bittorrent?
uh, maybe because the guy in question is doing actual research and has nothing to do with setting his school's IT policy?
Perhaps we should also discount anything that their biology or physics department has to say. After all, their organizations can't use BitTorrent either - maybe they too should spend more time educating fools at their institution.
The author of this piece isn't looking for a great technology writer, they're looking for a great gadget reviewer. That's a huge difference. There's no way a Thompson or Burroughs or Bangs could emerge by writing about TCP packets or water desalinization. The highly specialized nature of those fields means the background knowledge needed to frame a common allegorical or metaphorical experience just isn't there.
Maybe the reason nobody is able to discuss pop culture to the satisfaction of the author is due to pop culture itself, or more specifically its ever-shortening average attention span and its ever-increasing demand for the Next Big Thing. The fact that technical knowledge provides the objects of pop culture's current desire is entirely coincidental.
But this is typical spin... the fact is that part of the power of the President, of all Presidents, is to decide on the classification of information within the executive branch of government. When something is classified as "top secret", it requires the President to say, "hey this can now be released to the public" before it is legal to actually do so. This is why we've been having these leak probes (although they haven't gone anywhere). It's called access control... it's there for a reason... and it's not to hinder an investigative probe into misconduct, but to prevent the hindering of investigations into terrorist activities.
Ahem, sorry to get "technical", but this article is not about the de-classification of documents whatsoever. It's about how the White House directly intervened in the affairs of the Department of Justice, disregarding the whole seperation of powers thing you might have heard of. It's about how the Bush administration forbade the granting of security clearances to lawyers with a proven history of competently handling sensitive material, who happened to be investigating a program which is highly embarrassing to the administration if not outright illegal. It's about the President himself weaseling out of personal responsibility by invoking the terrorism boogeyman, and people once again eating it up and swallowing it whole.
I'm curious to know if you can actually defend the actions taken by the White House mentioned in the news article, or if you get too hung up over a poor choice of words in the Slashdot write-up and re-direct the discussion (intentionally or otherwise).
A free distro is for people that know what they are doing, no wonder the guy could not do everything he wanted with what he got.
This is pure ignorance and worthless elitism.
What's the biggest advantage that Linux has over Windows in the eyes of Windows users? It's free. Most people don't care that it's OSS, they don't care that Microsoft displays monopolistic tendencies. They only hear that Linux is free, and that it might do what they need it to do. If the free version does not in fact do what they need it to do, why pay for a non-free (beer) version of an OS you're already irritated by when you still have the Windows CD lying around and can install an OS you're already comfortable with?
>This, again, is one of Linux's biggest problems: Too much fragmentation. If distro developers could put their egos aside and combine forces to create distros with some semblance of popular recognition, Linux's fortunes may change
Not at all. This is not even fragmentation. You forgot that this is FOSS here. All these distros are compatible.
To people possessing the same level of experience with Linux as the article's author, these distros are not in fact compatible. Source compatibility is good and all, but binary (or at least package-level) compatibility is far more important. Try explaining to your grandma why she can't install Debian packages on her Fedora Core machine, even though "they're both Linux, right?" and "but they both have the little foot menu in the corner of the screen."
>You're not gonna win-over an already confused user by presenting him or her with 50 more obscure and semi-obscure choices
Nobody does that. Mandriva will present you Mandriva commercial offerings and nothing else. Go check their website if you don't believe me. Yes, what you are saying is stupid, you just have to realise it.
I believe the OP was referring to the fact that there are too many seperate distributions, not that each distribution has too many versions (though, contrary to your belief, that actually can be the case - see x86/x86_64/PPC install media, optional paid access to support and repositories, and a host of other things your average Windows user would find confusing).
>That person is just gonna say "fuck it" and stick with what he or she knows: Windows
Fortunately, most people don't really know Windows. That's why those that don't have a geek at hand or did not get a new PC still have Windows 98 (if they manage to keep it until today, meaning not connected to the Internet at least).
More snobbery. Windows does what most normal people want - plays games, runs shitty custom-written VB apps so you can take work home from the office, and lets you browse the Web. Why should you (or anyone else) give a shit if someone doesn't "really" know Windows, as long as they're happy with it?
>Also, people want to install something with staying power. Half the distros out there are gonna be gone in a couple of years, replaced by a whole new set. How can you have faith installing something you've never heard of?
That's true. But Linux distros have that fantastic feature : it's very easy to dissociate the user files from the OS, which means easiness to change distro.
Once again, this doesn't pass the grandma test.
Windows lets people do what they want. Right now, Linux doesn't. End of story. If the Linux community wants Windows users to switch, the onus is on us to make it easier for them to do so. That means, IMHO: fewer distros, package-level software compatibility, fewer but higher-quality applications, tighter WM/DE/Xorg integration, and (probably most of all) a user base that's actually helpful instead of elitist.
Slashdot Mirror
So they can tell now when a cosmic ray hits chip, and correct for it. But what happens when a cosmic ray hits the cosmic-ray detector and scrambles its brains, huh? Will we need a corrector for the corrector now too? And a corrector-corrector corrector? WHERE WILL IT ALL END
The cost of getting stuff up into space doesn't have to be significant.
I don't care how you power a spaceship, if you're launching it from the surface of the Earth you need to get to the top of a pretty steep gravity well. Adding your tons and tons and tons of mass to each launch means energy requirements, and fuel costs, will go way up.
Glad you asked: Orion Spacecraft Rule
For interplanetary travel, maybe. But you seriously think that it's a good idea to use powerful and frequent thermonuclear explosions for lifting a spaceship off of Earth?
You just can't get around the fact that a wire (fiberoptic or copper) still has to be laid out there for the best results. And no "destination site" is going to be laying that line anytime soon.
Maybe you should try telling that to Google. I bet they'd be pretty surprised.
it's happening to me too. My normal threshold is +3 but I'm browsing at 0 now. For some reason the links in the lower right of every front-page story only read "X comments", instead of the normal "X of Y comments". Why can't we browse at our normal threshods?
what's that in Libraries of Congress per second?
fantastic post. thanks.
...except that Google has been serving Flash advertisements for quite a while now, and image advertisements for even longer.
wire fraud
I do not think it means what you think it means. Or does the USPS throwing out letters you attempt to send to a specific person constitute mail fraud?
Marathon 2 was released for Win95, but M1 and Moo were Mac-only.
Of course, with Aleph One and tons of free content available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, everyone can play it now.
What makes your analogy a false one is that the ingimp folks aren't like the marketing departments from the big companies you mentioned. They're not collecting broad 'market data', if you will, from Photoshop/PaintShop/CorelDraw/etc. users (or all SUV drivers, or all soda drinkers). They're doing exactly what you seem to want them to do, which is ask their target users how to improve the product they currently prefer.
It's as if Chrysler sold you a Jeep with sensors on the steering wheel and seat cushions. You'd already decided to buy the Jeep, and Chrysler wants to know how you use it to make future versions more comfortable and responsive.
your and your parent's post both have it wrong - applications don't work that way.
When your program has millions of dollars in marketing and focus group research behind it, and (by and large) has the features and ease-of-use that the majority of people are looking for, you can name it whatever the hell you want and it will succeed. Notice how all the apps you named come from large vendors who can provide all that. A given piece of free or open-source software won't gain widespread acceptance until it has the same featureset as its proprietary competitor (plus additional goodies as an incentive to switch), AND requires the same level of knowledge from the end-user re: installation, configuration, and error recovery, AND has enough marketing for it that people actually hear about it.
When you're in second place, you have to try harder. That's just the way it is.
Close. The open-source bits of Cedega are LGPL'd or AFPL'd. The closed-source bits (the Cedega GUI, the copy-protection modules, and IIRC some DirectX goodies), plus the binary packaging and official support, are what you actually pay for.
Why dont we have our students actually learn in school and not pander to the test mentality which has proven to be ineffective and misleading.
"pander to the test mentality." Sounds great on the internet, is utterly worthless anywhere else. Maybe you have special psychic powers that allow you to determine how well, if at all, students are learning material in school. I don't know. But how do you propose the rest of us in the real world implement your plan to figure out who to put on a college track and who to nudge towards trade school?
Sure, you dumbed down your curriculum to a 5th grade level, but you're school scored 100!
ah, irony...
linux [...] comes with less of a learning curve...however still a lot more of a curve than your run of the mill windows server guy would like, I've met so many bleeding heart MS guys that would use/try Linux if they didn't have a misconception that it is infinatley harder than windows...
Wait, what? Linux has a steeper learning curve than Windows, yet Windows admins have a "misconception" that Linux is harder for them to use?
Either it's easier to use (in which case the learning curve isn't as steep as you claim), or it's not (in which case there's no misconceptions, only reality).
"but with very little work on the part of the guru,"
"bump up to a 2.6 kernel"
"install Dropline Gnome"
"Flip iniitab to runlevel 4"
...and you're attempting to recommend this distro to someone with zero Linux experience?
I'm not saying Slack is bad or anything (I know several friends who are partial to it), but if I was just starting out with a new operating system and had specific tasks and goals in mind, the last thing I'd want to do would be administrative things like upgrading my kernel. IMO the article's submitter should stick with Fedora Core or Ubuntu to start off, then move to something like Slack when they've got a little more Linux experience under their belt.
That's all well and good from an energy conservation perspective (though I have a feeling that the difference in energy consumption might not be as large as it seems at first glance). Too bad you just fucked over everyone living near or below the poverty line by removing their income tax exemption and replacing it with the most regressive form of taxation I've ever heard of. Not a great way to keep your country's economy rolling.
Right. Because choosing to work on a project that will be used by hundreds of thousands of people across the country couldn't be even the least bit rewarding in itself. Nobody could ever consider that job as anything but boring, and clearly indicates that I only took the job because my skills are inferior to those of every other software developer in the nation.
Frankly, it's been my experience that the fewer self-important amusement-obsessed people like you there are working on a given project, the better it generally tends to go.
Because of course the situation you describe could only ever apply to Microsoft. No other project has ever contained severe bugs that nobody knew about previously.
I know we're all supposed to hate Microsoft here, but come on. Put a little intelligence into your post next time.
wow. so?
more than a few people think that the whole site is part of another viral marketing campaign by Microsoft and Bungie, this time for Halo 3. Don't take it as gospel quite yet, but it would explain the total lack of engineering and scientific detail that a company of this nature should be showing to the world.
Why exactly should be give any weight to anything from and organization so ignorant as to disallow bittorrent?
uh, maybe because the guy in question is doing actual research and has nothing to do with setting his school's IT policy?
Perhaps we should also discount anything that their biology or physics department has to say. After all, their organizations can't use BitTorrent either - maybe they too should spend more time educating fools at their institution.
The author of this piece isn't looking for a great technology writer, they're looking for a great gadget reviewer. That's a huge difference. There's no way a Thompson or Burroughs or Bangs could emerge by writing about TCP packets or water desalinization. The highly specialized nature of those fields means the background knowledge needed to frame a common allegorical or metaphorical experience just isn't there.
Maybe the reason nobody is able to discuss pop culture to the satisfaction of the author is due to pop culture itself, or more specifically its ever-shortening average attention span and its ever-increasing demand for the Next Big Thing. The fact that technical knowledge provides the objects of pop culture's current desire is entirely coincidental.
But this is typical spin... the fact is that part of the power of the President, of all Presidents, is to decide on the classification of information within the executive branch of government. When something is classified as "top secret", it requires the President to say, "hey this can now be released to the public" before it is legal to actually do so. This is why we've been having these leak probes (although they haven't gone anywhere). It's called access control... it's there for a reason... and it's not to hinder an investigative probe into misconduct, but to prevent the hindering of investigations into terrorist activities.
Ahem, sorry to get "technical", but this article is not about the de-classification of documents whatsoever. It's about how the White House directly intervened in the affairs of the Department of Justice, disregarding the whole seperation of powers thing you might have heard of. It's about how the Bush administration forbade the granting of security clearances to lawyers with a proven history of competently handling sensitive material, who happened to be investigating a program which is highly embarrassing to the administration if not outright illegal. It's about the President himself weaseling out of personal responsibility by invoking the terrorism boogeyman, and people once again eating it up and swallowing it whole.
I'm curious to know if you can actually defend the actions taken by the White House mentioned in the news article, or if you get too hung up over a poor choice of words in the Slashdot write-up and re-direct the discussion (intentionally or otherwise).
A free distro is for people that know what they are doing, no wonder the guy could not do everything he wanted with what he got.
This is pure ignorance and worthless elitism.
What's the biggest advantage that Linux has over Windows in the eyes of Windows users? It's free. Most people don't care that it's OSS, they don't care that Microsoft displays monopolistic tendencies. They only hear that Linux is free, and that it might do what they need it to do. If the free version does not in fact do what they need it to do, why pay for a non-free (beer) version of an OS you're already irritated by when you still have the Windows CD lying around and can install an OS you're already comfortable with?
>This, again, is one of Linux's biggest problems: Too much fragmentation. If distro developers could put their egos aside and combine forces to create distros with some semblance of popular recognition, Linux's fortunes may change
Not at all. This is not even fragmentation. You forgot that this is FOSS here. All these distros are compatible.
To people possessing the same level of experience with Linux as the article's author, these distros are not in fact compatible. Source compatibility is good and all, but binary (or at least package-level) compatibility is far more important. Try explaining to your grandma why she can't install Debian packages on her Fedora Core machine, even though "they're both Linux, right?" and "but they both have the little foot menu in the corner of the screen."
>You're not gonna win-over an already confused user by presenting him or her with 50 more obscure and semi-obscure choices
Nobody does that. Mandriva will present you Mandriva commercial offerings and nothing else. Go check their website if you don't believe me. Yes, what you are saying is stupid, you just have to realise it.
I believe the OP was referring to the fact that there are too many seperate distributions, not that each distribution has too many versions (though, contrary to your belief, that actually can be the case - see x86/x86_64/PPC install media, optional paid access to support and repositories, and a host of other things your average Windows user would find confusing).
>That person is just gonna say "fuck it" and stick with what he or she knows: Windows
Fortunately, most people don't really know Windows. That's why those that don't have a geek at hand or did not get a new PC still have Windows 98 (if they manage to keep it until today, meaning not connected to the Internet at least).
More snobbery. Windows does what most normal people want - plays games, runs shitty custom-written VB apps so you can take work home from the office, and lets you browse the Web. Why should you (or anyone else) give a shit if someone doesn't "really" know Windows, as long as they're happy with it?
>Also, people want to install something with staying power. Half the distros out there are gonna be gone in a couple of years, replaced by a whole new set. How can you have faith installing something you've never heard of?
That's true. But Linux distros have that fantastic feature : it's very easy to dissociate the user files from the OS, which means easiness to change distro.
Once again, this doesn't pass the grandma test.
Windows lets people do what they want. Right now, Linux doesn't. End of story. If the Linux community wants Windows users to switch, the onus is on us to make it easier for them to do so. That means, IMHO: fewer distros, package-level software compatibility, fewer but higher-quality applications, tighter WM/DE/Xorg integration, and (probably most of all) a user base that's actually helpful instead of elitist.