Is this gonna be like the Cube, where I have an ugly wart containing the PSU hanging off a cable going down the back of my desk? Or did Apple figure out some way to build one so small I can just go from the wall to the machine with? Didn't see any details on Apple's Web site or in the Macworld link.
It was created by a bunch of university kids, and is now maintained by a bunch of other university kids plus someone who has a full-time job already.
It's a research project, not the end-all of image manipulation programs.
Nobody is forcing you to use it.
If you hate it so much, either stop using it or grab the source and get to work yourself. There's no point to plain bitching like this; it isn't constructive criticism, it's just whining by somebody who wants a perfect product to magically show up gift-wrapped on his doorstep.
Let's see... a half-hearted anti-Microsoft troll, plus a bunch of stuff about you that nobody wants to hear about. Do you really think I care that you're "a minimalist?" Or that you keep on your computer -- GASP -- things you need? Sure, people might like to know what firewall you use (the one part of your post that's actually relevant), but do you think you maybe might've included some features that not every single other firewall product has too?
They can do what they like, and me and my money just won't get involved.
So... you hate the idea of having to activate a product online, claiming it makes you feel like a "potential criminal," yet you go out and buy HL2 the very first day it's available. Everything I read about HL2 before it was released mentioned something about Steam or online authentication, and I'll bet that you knew about it beforehand too. You lost your right to complain about activation the minute you bought the game. If Steam makes you feel like a criminal, DON'T USE IT (though you can still complain about how long you had to wait to activate the game-- Valve completely dropped the ball on that one).
Staggering hypocrisy. Someone tell me again how this got modded +Insightful all the way up.
The wonderful irony of this (ex-TV reporter's) piece is that the TV journalism industry itself is largely responsible for the whole "need to know RIGHT NOW" attitude that most folks have. Breaking stories as quick as possible (which leads to better ratings and therefore more advertising revenue) was great for TV networks back when they competed with newspapers and radio. But when something comes along that can do it faster and cheaper than TV can, all of a sudden it's ok to label it irresponsible? That strikes me as hypocrisy at its finest. Cmon buddy, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?
And it's not as if he can claim that TV gets it right every time, either. Does this man not remember the TV networks calling Florida too early back in 2000? Or, how about the whole Air National Guard memo stink over the summer, which is even more ironic since the memos were first discredited on the internet?
I dunno, this guy just strikes me as someone who goes after low-hanging fruit, as it were. I bet if the blogs correctly predicted the outcome of the election he would be singing their praises to anyone who would listen.
Although how you screw up an optical scan vote is beyond my comprehension. The ones we used in Santa Cruz county in Cali were as simple as could be, and you got a copy of the ballot in a voting guide nearly a month in advance, with which to familiarize yourself.
Sometime's it's not the person's fault, it's the machine's.
We had pretty much the same situation as you described where I am (Newport, RI); everyone was mailed a little booklet showing the ballot format long in advance of election day. However, while waiting in line to vote I personally witnessed two instances where a paper ballot was filled out and fed into the optical scanner, rejected by the scanner, and was looked over by two election officials who both said "I can't find anything wrong with this ballot." The voters were then sent back in line to get another ballot and try again. No idea what caused it, but I'm not convinced that optical machines are perfect.
Thanks for wasting all that space in the writeup about irrelevant Word macro viruses, how you have problems with Windows viruses (what, like nobody else does?), and how you can't tell your friends that no Mac viruses exist (if they're computer knowledgeable, they know that already; if they're not, they probably don't care). All that stuff is clearly more important than things like, y'know, summarizing the article or something, or telling us the quality of the story you linked too. We don't need to know how it spreads; we need to know more about your personal life! Spare me.
If you're looking at the default chart, it's set to average quarter-hour rating ("AQH Rating") which is only available for select locations. Choose "Cume Persons" instead.
I'm sure that you (like many here, including myself) don't listen to much mainstream radio, if any. You don't like what they play? Everyone has different tastes, nothing wrong with that. But don't make the mistake of thinking that because you think something sucks, everyone else feels the same way too.
The interesting thing about these numbers is that no one can put a spin on this.
Of course you can.
number of downloads != number of users. It doesn't matter if something has been downloaded a billion times, if everyone deletes it within five minutes of installation. And what about the OpenOffice CD I made for my friend with a 56k connection and no patience to download it? Or what about the people who get it from corporate intranet sites? Or when I download it right before my hard drive crashes, and I have to download it again?
You just cannot make those claims in this case.
Actually, you just can't get any kind of meaningful conclusion from this one piece of data.
Right now, about half the PCs out there are still running older versions of Windows. The majority of those are running Windows 98 (!). The rest of running some form of XP
Prove it. Do you have any links or statistics to back these claims up?
Longhorn isn't going to install on any current machines, most likely.
Again, can you prove this?
Now, given this statistic,
What statistic?
how long is it going to take for Longhorn to get to 50%?
50 percent of what? 50% of all PCs that run Windows? 50% of the original price? What?
You'd best believe that product is going to be shipped, during the Longhorn period, that works on the last two version of Windows, - Win2k and XP.
What does this even mean?
I'm guessing that it will take at least until 2010 before the majority of PCs have are Longhorn enabled.
What?
When that happens, it'll be a the beginning of a problem. Possibly longer if corps go kicking and screaming, which they will.
What problem? Everything you talk about boils down to "get more market share or go out of business." Well, no kidding.
oh, and since Apple has complete control over their own hardware (not to mention the fact that Firewire, not USB, is the future of the Mac platform), I doubt this whole hullabaloo worries them much.
How many digital cameras and MP3 players have been (and will be) manufactured which connect to a PC through USB before Longhorn comes out, and don't have any of this trusted bullshit built into it? How many of these devices cost $150, $200, or more? And how many people will feel like shelling out for new ones just so they can work with Longhorn?
I can see USB crippling as possibly being effective in the workplace, but if Microsoft does it in the home edition of Longhorn, nobody's even gonna pirate it (let alone pay for it). Add to that the number of tech support calls they would get from people who bougt it without knowing why their camera isn't working, and it starts to look like a disaster for Microsoft.
Which release of Windows? 98SE? ME? 2000? XP? Pro? Which servicepacks? With what patches?
The difference of course is that Microsoft had people like Raymond Chen who worked really, really hard to ensure that even the most obscure apps from umpteen years ago will still run on the latest version of Windows. I don't think you can point to a similar person, group, or organization that performs the same function for the Linux world. Whether or not the problem is real (and I think it is), the perception still exists that there's too many flavors of kernels/glibc/X server/whatever for vendors to support.
It's not that I don't know how to edit menus, it's that the current process for doing so is not intuitive. Why do I have to right-click on an entry in a given menu to see the properties of the menu itself? Shouldn't I be able to right-click the menu whose attributes I want to change instead? Who, when asked to add a new folder to the Applications menu, would think to open a Nautilus window and type in a funny URI scheme unless they've read through the user docs (and we all know how often that happens)? Sure, if you know what you're doing then these are minor issues, but what about people who are completely new to GNOME or Linux in general?
I'm extremely happy because it looks like file type handler has finally been fixed, but I read through the release notes and didn't see a word on my single biggest problem with GNOME 2.6: the damn menu editor. Specifically the fact that there wasn't one, and that adding or removing items was confusing at best.
Not that weather forecasting applets and new themes aren't nice, and not that I have a right to tell people what to work on, but shouldn't the GNOME guys worry more about basic functionality instead of minor things?
We've had CD writers, keychain drives, network storage, and a zillion types of removable media for how many years now? The iMac shipped without a floppy drive back in 1998; why is this a story all of a sudden?
If you're ever in Barcelona during the summertime and you're interested in this kind of thing, you might want to check out the Sonar festival. It's a weekend-long new media festival, with exhibitions, discussion panels, and demonstrations each day and big-name electronic music artists each night. It's put on with the help of the Barcelona Muesum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) and the Contemporary Culture Center of Barcelona (CCCB). I went in 2002 and had a hell of a time.
You bring up an interesting, if tangential, point. Why doesn't IBM just roll its own Linux distribution? They've already spent a fortune marketing Linux to anyone who'll listen, so they can build off of that. In addition, they have the name recognition necessary to sway PHBs switching to Linux; these same folks will be the ones paying for fat support and maintenance contracts. What would the downside be?
I'm a working gamer myself, before I go next fall to the real-life Doom 3 that is Caltech
who cares?
I recently bought a Geforce 6800, quite an upgrade from the 5200 I had earlier (pretty much 10x draw rate).
Again, who cares?
...designed for 5 year olds with literally too much time on their hands.
Good thing you're going to Caltech, because you'd make a crappy English major. You can't "literally" have time on your hands. You do realize that, right?
7. ??? 8. Profit! 9. Find out you didn't really profit because 1 second later, one of those giant mutated bullet (and rocket propelled grenade) tampons walked up behind you and blasted you to hell.
Ooh, clever. I like how you combined the tired South Park cliche with the "tampon" namecalling. Real biting.
But stuff like checkpoints and repetitive gameplay like in Far Cry destroy goodwill and create dollars for other, more creative developers.
Ahh, finally something relevant. But I don't see how buying a game with a terrible save system translates into money for other developers. You already paid for the product; where else would your money go? In addition, the fact that two games from the same developer don't necessarily have the same *anything,* never mind the saving system, means that whatever you hated in the game you bought is different in the next game from the studio. And finally, who decides to purchase (or not) a game based on something like that?
Sure, I know they implemented a quicksave--but that was after the entire populace, awash with rage, found the emperor naked, so to speak.
Do you even know what that means? "The Emperor has no clothes" refers to a fable where everyone swallows a line of bullshit so they don't appear to be stupid in front of everyone else. Completely irrelevant here. Perhaps you're thinking about "closing the barn door after the horses got out," or some such.
All games should have:
An autosave that activates when you quit.
Easier said than done.
A restore in case of a computer crash.
Easier said than done.
Robust netcode.
Easier said than done.
Programmers that have more than the customary two-neuron-one-of-which-is-inhibitory brain.
Very funny. You insult game developers, but I bet you'd give your left nut to get a job as one.
So? Nobody's talking about creating a new distro. We're all thinking about existing distros that don't have the manpower to ensure that their system is properly tested with each new feature of each kernel release. Taking the time to do so means less time for adding and testing new applications and user-level features, the stuff which many more people care about.
2.4 had so many changes go in during it's [sic] "stable" life, maybe their [sic] just trying to be realistic and make 2.6 actually be more stable than 2.4 this way?
I fail to see how continuing development (as in adding new, untested features) will make a kernel more stable than freezing a feature set and only providing bugfixes for that kernel. Granted, Linus has no obligation to branch for new development, but I (and lots of other people here, apparently) think it's a really good idea and one he should have kept with.
[OT] [was: Re:Changed the view of the US?]
on
Bobby Fischer Found
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is called supply-side economics; it's a nice concept, but it doesn't work. The problem is two-fold: people are greedy, and manufacturing techniques have made human labor more and more obsolete.
Having more money in the bank does not make one more likely to start a business; why risk throwing money down the toilet on a failed startup when you can save it for a rainy day? Likewise, having more money does not make one more likely to consume more. Everyone needs certain manufactured goods, but those can be produced without human labor; that doesn't create any jobs. But the big-ticket items, by their very nature, are only available to a limited market; a small demand would not create many jobs either.* The US tried this in the 80s and it didn't work, and there's no indication that it would work now.
* and don't think that an across-the-board tax cut would help the situation. Big-ticket items would rise in price accordingly, following the classic supply and demand rules.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this gonna be like the Cube, where I have an ugly wart containing the PSU hanging off a cable going down the back of my desk? Or did Apple figure out some way to build one so small I can just go from the wall to the machine with? Didn't see any details on Apple's Web site or in the Macworld link.
ok, so...
It's free.
It's open source.
It was created by a bunch of university kids, and is now maintained by a bunch of other university kids plus someone who has a full-time job already.
It's a research project, not the end-all of image manipulation programs.
Nobody is forcing you to use it.
If you hate it so much, either stop using it or grab the source and get to work yourself. There's no point to plain bitching like this; it isn't constructive criticism, it's just whining by somebody who wants a perfect product to magically show up gift-wrapped on his doorstep.
Let's see... a half-hearted anti-Microsoft troll, plus a bunch of stuff about you that nobody wants to hear about. Do you really think I care that you're "a minimalist?" Or that you keep on your computer -- GASP -- things you need? Sure, people might like to know what firewall you use (the one part of your post that's actually relevant), but do you think you maybe might've included some features that not every single other firewall product has too?
I bought HL2 the day it came out.
They can do what they like, and me and my money just won't get involved.
So... you hate the idea of having to activate a product online, claiming it makes you feel like a "potential criminal," yet you go out and buy HL2 the very first day it's available. Everything I read about HL2 before it was released mentioned something about Steam or online authentication, and I'll bet that you knew about it beforehand too. You lost your right to complain about activation the minute you bought the game. If Steam makes you feel like a criminal, DON'T USE IT (though you can still complain about how long you had to wait to activate the game-- Valve completely dropped the ball on that one).
Staggering hypocrisy. Someone tell me again how this got modded +Insightful all the way up.
The wonderful irony of this (ex-TV reporter's) piece is that the TV journalism industry itself is largely responsible for the whole "need to know RIGHT NOW" attitude that most folks have. Breaking stories as quick as possible (which leads to better ratings and therefore more advertising revenue) was great for TV networks back when they competed with newspapers and radio. But when something comes along that can do it faster and cheaper than TV can, all of a sudden it's ok to label it irresponsible? That strikes me as hypocrisy at its finest. Cmon buddy, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right? And it's not as if he can claim that TV gets it right every time, either. Does this man not remember the TV networks calling Florida too early back in 2000? Or, how about the whole Air National Guard memo stink over the summer, which is even more ironic since the memos were first discredited on the internet? I dunno, this guy just strikes me as someone who goes after low-hanging fruit, as it were. I bet if the blogs correctly predicted the outcome of the election he would be singing their praises to anyone who would listen.
Although how you screw up an optical scan vote is beyond my comprehension. The ones we used in Santa Cruz county in Cali were as simple as could be, and you got a copy of the ballot in a voting guide nearly a month in advance, with which to familiarize yourself.
Sometime's it's not the person's fault, it's the machine's.
We had pretty much the same situation as you described where I am (Newport, RI); everyone was mailed a little booklet showing the ballot format long in advance of election day. However, while waiting in line to vote I personally witnessed two instances where a paper ballot was filled out and fed into the optical scanner, rejected by the scanner, and was looked over by two election officials who both said "I can't find anything wrong with this ballot." The voters were then sent back in line to get another ballot and try again. No idea what caused it, but I'm not convinced that optical machines are perfect.
you know, it's ok if your paragraphs are more than two sentences long. Really. People do it all the time.
Nothing is worst than a bunch of dangling cables inside your computer case.
...except maybe your spelling?
I kid, I kid...
why bother giving credit where it's due when there's karma-whoring to be done?
Thanks for wasting all that space in the writeup about irrelevant Word macro viruses, how you have problems with Windows viruses (what, like nobody else does?), and how you can't tell your friends that no Mac viruses exist (if they're computer knowledgeable, they know that already; if they're not, they probably don't care). All that stuff is clearly more important than things like, y'know, summarizing the article or something, or telling us the quality of the story you linked too. We don't need to know how it spreads; we need to know more about your personal life! Spare me.
If you're looking at the default chart, it's set to average quarter-hour rating ("AQH Rating") which is only available for select locations. Choose "Cume Persons" instead.
Radio stations would have to play what people wanted to hear.
That's cute and all, and certainly plays well on slashdot, but it ends up sounding pretty stupid when you consider that the number of radio listeners has actually been growing for the past few years. Radio stations are obviously doing something right, and that something is "play[ing] what people want to hear."
I'm sure that you (like many here, including myself) don't listen to much mainstream radio, if any. You don't like what they play? Everyone has different tastes, nothing wrong with that. But don't make the mistake of thinking that because you think something sucks, everyone else feels the same way too.
Maybe because Google doesn't actually have a monopoly in any of the product areas they compete in? Are you really going to argue that Google is the sole provider of email, online advertising, or desktop searching? The only area in which you may have a point is search engines (even though there are plenty of alternatives there, too). But guess what? It's not illegal to have a monopoly unless you use anti-competitive practices to acquire or maintain it. Since Google by all accounts has done nothing wrong, nobody is complaining.
The interesting thing about these numbers is that no one can put a spin on this.
Of course you can.
number of downloads != number of users. It doesn't matter if something has been downloaded a billion times, if everyone deletes it within five minutes of installation. And what about the OpenOffice CD I made for my friend with a 56k connection and no patience to download it? Or what about the people who get it from corporate intranet sites? Or when I download it right before my hard drive crashes, and I have to download it again?
You just cannot make those claims in this case.
Actually, you just can't get any kind of meaningful conclusion from this one piece of data.
Right now, about half the PCs out there are still running older versions of Windows. The majority of those are running Windows 98 (!). The rest of running some form of XP
Prove it. Do you have any links or statistics to back these claims up?
Longhorn isn't going to install on any current machines, most likely.
Again, can you prove this?
Now, given this statistic,
What statistic?
how long is it going to take for Longhorn to get to 50%?
50 percent of what? 50% of all PCs that run Windows? 50% of the original price? What?
You'd best believe that product is going to be shipped, during the Longhorn period, that works on the last two version of Windows, - Win2k and XP.
What does this even mean?
I'm guessing that it will take at least until 2010 before the majority of PCs have are Longhorn enabled.
What?
When that happens, it'll be a the beginning of a problem. Possibly longer if corps go kicking and screaming, which they will.
What problem? Everything you talk about boils down to "get more market share or go out of business." Well, no kidding.
oh, and since Apple has complete control over their own hardware (not to mention the fact that Firewire, not USB, is the future of the Mac platform), I doubt this whole hullabaloo worries them much.
How many digital cameras and MP3 players have been (and will be) manufactured which connect to a PC through USB before Longhorn comes out, and don't have any of this trusted bullshit built into it? How many of these devices cost $150, $200, or more? And how many people will feel like shelling out for new ones just so they can work with Longhorn?
I can see USB crippling as possibly being effective in the workplace, but if Microsoft does it in the home edition of Longhorn, nobody's even gonna pirate it (let alone pay for it). Add to that the number of tech support calls they would get from people who bougt it without knowing why their camera isn't working, and it starts to look like a disaster for Microsoft.
Which release of Windows? 98SE? ME? 2000? XP? Pro? Which servicepacks? With what patches?
The difference of course is that Microsoft had people like Raymond Chen who worked really, really hard to ensure that even the most obscure apps from umpteen years ago will still run on the latest version of Windows. I don't think you can point to a similar person, group, or organization that performs the same function for the Linux world. Whether or not the problem is real (and I think it is), the perception still exists that there's too many flavors of kernels/glibc/X server/whatever for vendors to support.
It's not that I don't know how to edit menus, it's that the current process for doing so is not intuitive. Why do I have to right-click on an entry in a given menu to see the properties of the menu itself? Shouldn't I be able to right-click the menu whose attributes I want to change instead? Who, when asked to add a new folder to the Applications menu, would think to open a Nautilus window and type in a funny URI scheme unless they've read through the user docs (and we all know how often that happens)? Sure, if you know what you're doing then these are minor issues, but what about people who are completely new to GNOME or Linux in general?
I'm extremely happy because it looks like file type handler has finally been fixed, but I read through the release notes and didn't see a word on my single biggest problem with GNOME 2.6: the damn menu editor. Specifically the fact that there wasn't one, and that adding or removing items was confusing at best.
Not that weather forecasting applets and new themes aren't nice, and not that I have a right to tell people what to work on, but shouldn't the GNOME guys worry more about basic functionality instead of minor things?
We've had CD writers, keychain drives, network storage, and a zillion types of removable media for how many years now? The iMac shipped without a floppy drive back in 1998; why is this a story all of a sudden?
If you're ever in Barcelona during the summertime and you're interested in this kind of thing, you might want to check out the Sonar festival. It's a weekend-long new media festival, with exhibitions, discussion panels, and demonstrations each day and big-name electronic music artists each night. It's put on with the help of the Barcelona Muesum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) and the Contemporary Culture Center of Barcelona (CCCB). I went in 2002 and had a hell of a time.
You bring up an interesting, if tangential, point. Why doesn't IBM just roll its own Linux distribution? They've already spent a fortune marketing Linux to anyone who'll listen, so they can build off of that. In addition, they have the name recognition necessary to sway PHBs switching to Linux; these same folks will be the ones paying for fat support and maintenance contracts. What would the downside be?
I'm a working gamer myself, before I go next fall to the real-life Doom 3 that is Caltech
...designed for 5 year olds with literally too much time on their hands.
who cares?
I recently bought a Geforce 6800, quite an upgrade from the 5200 I had earlier (pretty much 10x draw rate).
Again, who cares?
Good thing you're going to Caltech, because you'd make a crappy English major. You can't "literally" have time on your hands. You do realize that, right?
7. ???
8. Profit!
9. Find out you didn't really profit because 1 second later, one of those giant mutated bullet (and rocket propelled grenade) tampons walked up behind you and blasted you to hell.
Ooh, clever. I like how you combined the tired South Park cliche with the "tampon" namecalling. Real biting.
But stuff like checkpoints and repetitive gameplay like in Far Cry destroy goodwill and create dollars for other, more creative developers.
Ahh, finally something relevant. But I don't see how buying a game with a terrible save system translates into money for other developers. You already paid for the product; where else would your money go? In addition, the fact that two games from the same developer don't necessarily have the same *anything,* never mind the saving system, means that whatever you hated in the game you bought is different in the next game from the studio. And finally, who decides to purchase (or not) a game based on something like that?
Sure, I know they implemented a quicksave--but that was after the entire populace, awash with rage, found the emperor naked, so to speak.
Do you even know what that means? "The Emperor has no clothes" refers to a fable where everyone swallows a line of bullshit so they don't appear to be stupid in front of everyone else. Completely irrelevant here. Perhaps you're thinking about "closing the barn door after the horses got out," or some such.
All games should have: An autosave that activates when you quit.
Easier said than done.
A restore in case of a computer crash.
Easier said than done.
Robust netcode.
Easier said than done.
Programmers that have more than the customary two-neuron-one-of-which-is-inhibitory brain.
Very funny. You insult game developers, but I bet you'd give your left nut to get a job as one.
Thank God for the foelist.
So? Nobody's talking about creating a new distro. We're all thinking about existing distros that don't have the manpower to ensure that their system is properly tested with each new feature of each kernel release. Taking the time to do so means less time for adding and testing new applications and user-level features, the stuff which many more people care about.
2.4 had so many changes go in during it's [sic] "stable" life, maybe their [sic] just trying to be realistic and make 2.6 actually be more stable than 2.4 this way?
I fail to see how continuing development (as in adding new, untested features) will make a kernel more stable than freezing a feature set and only providing bugfixes for that kernel. Granted, Linus has no obligation to branch for new development, but I (and lots of other people here, apparently) think it's a really good idea and one he should have kept with.
This is called supply-side economics; it's a nice concept, but it doesn't work. The problem is two-fold: people are greedy, and manufacturing techniques have made human labor more and more obsolete.
Having more money in the bank does not make one more likely to start a business; why risk throwing money down the toilet on a failed startup when you can save it for a rainy day? Likewise, having more money does not make one more likely to consume more. Everyone needs certain manufactured goods, but those can be produced without human labor; that doesn't create any jobs. But the big-ticket items, by their very nature, are only available to a limited market; a small demand would not create many jobs either.* The US tried this in the 80s and it didn't work, and there's no indication that it would work now.
* and don't think that an across-the-board tax cut would help the situation. Big-ticket items would rise in price accordingly, following the classic supply and demand rules.