Sure, when dozens of sales and marketing and other non-technical types start whining that their computers are "slow" because they've been loaded with unholy amounts of crapware and have seventy-two useless things starting at boot, management will often scrap the old machines and get everyone new ones. Then the cycle begins again.
The overwhelming majority of most corporate workforces could get by fine with P4 machines if they were kept clean -- this can be done through a number of means, such as policy enforcement, revoking Administrator rights on local Windows machines, applications such as Deep Freeze, or any number of other solutions working in tandem. But far too many places just hand out desktops and laptops like penny candy to their employees, let them run amok, and don't bat an eye when the employees come back six months later complaining that their nearly-new dual-core ultracomputer is "really slow" and "crashing a lot".
For the majority of people, more system resources just means more resources for the malware to consume.:P The end-user is still just running a browser (or five, sigh), Outlook, maybe Word or Powerpoint, and one or two other applications. All of which can be done very well with lower-end machines.. if they're clean.
Indeed. Clicking "Add New" and having your choice of click-to-install applications, codecs, drivers, and all dependencies met, in an all-in-one GUI window with search capabilities, is a real pain!
They should do it the Windows way. Want something new? Search Google for it, and tromp through ten or more likely results. See if you can find one that's free, cause you don't want to pirate it, now do you? By "free" I mean it should actually have full functionality and not be a crippled "demo" version, have nag screens, whine at you to register or pay in thirty days, and so on. Check out the vendor and try to be reasonably sure it's not going to install spyware or other malicious garbage on the system. Next, download an executable installer and blindly run it, having no idea who it's really from or what it's really going to do. Accept the EULAs and answer all kinds of asinine questions about where to install it, because there's no real standard. Finally, go back and clean up all the horseshit little icons, shortcuts, system tray helpers, start menu entries, startup items, and other party favors it left behind.
Or you could cough up for a CD of the software, but you'll have to go through most of the above anyway.
Seriously. You say it should be more like finding add-ons for Firefox. Well, it is, isn't it? You want add-ons for Firefox, you go to the add-ons page, search for some keyword, find one you like, and click Install. It's done. This is exactly how it works through the GUI in Ubuntu. What's the difference, really? I just don't understand your complaint.
Sure, but you're talking about the format now, not the actual media (disk, tape, CD, whatever) or equipment you'd need (disk drive, tape drive, CD drive, etc).
My point was really about the people crying foul against relying on something like an external USB drive, or an SD card reader, because "there might not be USB in the future!" or other nonsense. Maybe there won't be USB in the future, but who cares -- finding old hardware is not difficult.
To tackle the format issue, as long as you're backing up your files, why not back up the software you'd need to read it as well? Or create virtual machines and back those up while you're at it. It's not a perfect solution but it does narrow the problem significantly.
To deal with your example, if I wanted to read old Word 95 files, it's not hard to find rogue copies of Win95 floating around. I've got a VM for one just for fun. I could either give those files to the VM, or install 95 and Word95 on the ancient 486 I dredged out of storage or grabbed at a thrift store, or whatever. There are always options, and if your stuff is really that important to you, there's no excuse these days for not having a few VMs around, loaded with the appropriate software needed.
And before the hue and cry of "How will we run the virtual machines!", you've got the option of loading them on old physical hardware (using the installation media you backed up as well...), but that probably won't be necessary. I don't see virtualization going away.
The disks will be readable but you'll have no mechanical or logical way to read what's on them.
Come on, it's not really that hard. I can walk into any thrift store around here and buy an 8 track player if I really wanted to play old 8 track tapes. My father still has some reel-to-reel tapes, even. If he really wanted, it wouldn't be that hard for him to get a reel-to-reel player capable of reading the media. I've seen those in thrift stores too, and plenty of electronics nerds or audiophiles have this stuff around for no reason other than they like having it.
The point is that even today you can easily get your hands on equipment for media that nobody has used in decades. If you couldn't find one in a thrift store, a quick ad on Craigslist would turn up a few people willing to let you use their equipment, especially if you're willing to pay.
In fact, you can even get ancient computers fairly easily. Not long ago I stumbled across one of these babies for sale, a TI-99 computer. First computer I had, back when I was about five or six. Want to read those old solid-state catridges they used? The computer cost all of seven dollars or so. Computers with 5.25" drives are everywhere as well. It may have been foolish, twenty years ago, to rely on those disks for long-term backup, but certainly not for lack of equipment to read it.
The longevity of the media is certainly more important than whether or not "computers of the future" will be able to read it. It's just not that hard to find old equipment, and if it's that important to you, you'll shell out the ten bucks to get an old computer. Who cares if the media is "standard" later?
See, while I'm sure I could find a reel-to-reel player for my father's old tapes, I doubt the tapes themselves are reliable. That's why media is more important here.
Of course, if I really cared, I'd just back up to a hard drive or two, and repeat the process in another three years. An hour or two every couple of years to keep a fresh copy around isn't that much of a sacrifice.:P
If the flying part was powered by Mr Fusion they wouldn't have had any problems in the third movie. They could just take off and fly at 88 miles per hour. I can't see why an internal combusion engine attached by drivetrain to the wheels has ANYTHING to do with flying, but since they couldn't use Mr Fusion to fly off into the sunset, the engine must be involved somehow. Or maybe I'm just bored at the office at 4:40pm and giving this waaaayyyy too much thought.:)
I am fanatic about ditching unneeded services and startup items, so as soon as I noticed that stupid Google Update thing, that's exactly what I did. For some reason, it kept returning. Every single time. I uninstalled Chrome and it was still there. I had to go manually remove the directory to get rid of it.
Silently installing a retarded updater that's doing who-knows-what is about one-fourth of the reason I loathe Chrome and will never use it again. I'll reserve all the other reasons I hate it for another comment, but I really don't see why getting rid of the dumb updater was such a chore, or why it was there in the first place.
it still has a rather long way to go before it will reach the ease-of-use of a recent Windows platform IMHO
Okay, but let's see how you back that up.
getting video running has been HELL
The average yob has no idea how to deal with video driver issues in Windows either.:) Unless they're gamers most of them will probably never notice that Windows isn't using the correct driver, and won't care either. Personally, since 7.04 I've never had an issue with video drivers in Ubuntu, but my point is really that to the average user, finding out what video card they even have, then going to the manufacturer's website and downloading an executable and installing it is just as mystifying as anything you had to do in Linux. To them it's all voodoo. How is it "easier" in Windows? I've fought epic battles with ATI drivers in Windows.
wifi wasn't always (properlty) recognized
In all my life I have never -- not once -- had Windows XP or Vista recognize my wireless out of the box. Half the time it doesn't get ethernet either, so I have to get the drivers using a spare machine. I realise that's my experience and your mileage will vary. Anyway, since 7.04 again, I've never had an issue with wireless under Intel, Broadcom, or Atheros. Atheros and Intel worked out of the box, and with Broadcom I had to click the little "Enable Restricted Drivers" thing -- which is prominently displayed for even a total newb to find. I haven't had to futz with ndiswrapper since the heady days of 6.06.
That being said, why do you think this is easier on Windows? Even resorting to ndiswrapper is only a couple of commands, and these days I believe there's even a GUI for it. With Windows, if wireless isn't working, you think the average zeeb knows how to find out what wireless chipset they have (Windows sure ain't gonna tell you) and install the driver properly? I've seen tons of people stumble on this under XP. Downloading and installing drivers (and then cleaning up the crapware and party favors they leave behind) is no easier than ndiswrapper, and frankly, since half these drivers insist upon installing their own network manager alongside Windows' inbuilt manager, I'd say it's harder.
ach time there is an upGRade something breaks and I'm back in the 'problem-chasing' game =(
Windows updates tend to break things all the time (and there are frequent stories on slashdot about it). With the default repositories under Ubuntu I've never seen anything break. Ever. I'm pretty sure I've never even heard of anything breaking.
Are you maybe talking about the upgrades in versions? If so, then I somewhat agree. My old vmware stuff didn't work from 7.04 to 8.04 and I had to kick it for an hour to get it going again, and a few other minor things. No big deal really, though I agree it could have been more smooth. But you cannot compare that to the Hell of moving to different versions of Windows with a straight face. Let's be real -- migrating platforms is kind of a pain no matter what. Ubuntu (actually, any Debian-based system) has been the easiest for me so far. Moving from XP to Vista is something that would make Marquis de Sade cringe. What, precisely, do you think is "easier" about Windows than Ubuntu in this regard?
Tons of Christian organizations will just give out Bibles, absolutely free of charge. Producing them costs money for the printer, the binding, the shipping, and so forth. Yet they ask for no money in return. They do it for two reasons:
1. They hope you'll like it and come around to their way of thinking.
2. They hope they might get a few secondary benefits in the form of, say, church donations or volunteer work.
The exact same thing applies to FOSS. Where the Christian might say "Here, have a Bible, I think you'll like it and ditch your current religion," the FOSS advocate might say "Here, have a Linux CD. I think you'll like it and ditch your current OS."
The FOSS organizations also hope for some secondary benefits. Instead of church donations they hope for support contracts. Instead of volunteering at the church bake sale or soup kitchen, they hope you'll volunteer to contribute patches or bug reports.
But, with both the Bible and the Linux CD, you're more than free to just take it, use it, and not donate anything back.
This cannot be difficult to understand for anyone of any age. Everyone's familiar with churches. Let them see that it's essentially the same thing.
The pre-Prohibition world was poisoned by alcohol. The pervasive use of spirits was destroying society from the bottom up. Remember, there were no 'minimum drinking age's in those times; in some communities it was not uncommon to see 8- and 9-year-olds passed out like winos in alleys.
Let's assume you're right about this. (I believe you are but I can't verify it right at this minute.)
You're saying that alcohol regulation went through three stages:
1. Essentially uncontrolled. Anyone who could get their hands on it could have it and, for the most part, society didn't care.
2. Banned completely. That didn't really solve anything, and in many ways, made it worse. At least before, you more or less knew what you were buying -- now you've got random moonshine, a raging black market, organized crime, and the rest. At least we got some cool gangster movies out of it.
3. Legal but regulated. People saw that the first two options didn't work, so it was time to make it legal but controlled. Now you know exactly what you're buying, who is selling it (they have to be licensed), who is buying it (you have to be of a certain age and provide identification).
Which of these three phases seems best?
My grandparents can remember a time when most drugs were either basically legal, or at least largely ignored. Nobody really cared what you did. That's phase one. Then came the War on Drugs, which is a near-total ban. That's phase two -- where we are now. As with phase two of alcohol regulation, it isn't working, and we've all the same symptoms: black market, drugs cut with who-knows-what, organized crime. It's probably time to consider moving to phase three. We have historical evidence that it's better than the alternatives.
I've little doubt that pre-Prohibition, the alcohol situation was out of hand, but Prohibition also proved that banning it gets you nowhere and causes more problems than it solves. Legal and regulated seems to be the way to go with substances like this.
Quick hint: it's perfectly possible to believe both in God and in the Big-Bang - they're not at all mutually exclusive as long as you look at the bible as a book full of allegories instead of trying to believe that the English translation is literally the word of Jesus.
Perhaps that's true, but that also isn't what's usually meant by "the religious right". That term is generally understood to mean the hardline types who interpret the Bible much more literally, and attempts to lobby or legislate based on that interpretation. The lobbying is key here, for it's also possible to be a deeply fundamentalist Christian without bothering everyone else with it, and those sorts are also usually not included under the term "the religious right". At its core, the religious right is way more about politics than religion. Religion just happens to be the platform they use to try to gain political clout.
The type of person who believes in the Bible but views it as a book of allegories, in other words, is usually not the type of person who crusades against gay rights or tries to push Creationism into the classroom. That'd be the "religious right" sort; they're a small but loud minority who, unfortunately, give a lot of other Christians a bad name. Nobody likes a loud-mouthed extremist on any side of an issue.
For a lot of applications that would make sense, but it's hard to know which, and people have various uses you might not predict. For example, I'll often pop open notepad or gedit if I'm on the phone with someone and they're about to tell me something I'll only need for a couple of minutes (a phone number, an access code, whatever). It's quick and convenient and I wouldn't want to be slowed down by having it nag me about filenames and save locations every time, especially when I have zero intention of saving it.
Maybe somewhat. Maybe not. There are people who will rip and make torrents out of anything they get their hands on, just because. But really my point was mostly about the difficulty a solo, unknown artist has in getting exposure on their own. They could put their work on their website and hope people stumble across it, or they could seed torrents of it and hope to spread the word that way, but they'll forever languish in relative obscurity that way. The power of the label pushes some of that music into music store shelves, club play, airplay, and widely-distributed promotional materials that would be difficult, if not impossible, for somenoe to pull off on their own.
I'm not saying the distribution channels aren't there for solo artists of digitally-distributable work. I'm saying that if they want to make a living off their art, right now there isn't an effective way for them to market themselves and get noticed by the masses. The labels have that power by harnessing the collective bargaining power of many.
If your Windows box is just for Outlook, Evolution handles Exchange pretty well these days. I use it on my Linux machine and it works fine. The only issue I've run into is sending calendar appointments -- I can receive them just fine and they go into the calendar, but I can't seem to send them to others. Probably an easy fix but since I don't care and don' tneed that feature I haven't bothered.
Or, I hear Wine runs Outlook pretty damn well, and there is always the virtual machine option, which would also let you keep your Windows environment if you need to test against that. Just seems a waste of a piece of hardware to sit there running Windows and Outlook all day and nothing else.
This has just become a pet peeve of mine in the past couple of weeks, so feel free to ignore my blithering and carry on...
My (VoIP provider) company used to ship our customers' phones from voipsupply.com; they seem fairly reliable. I will tell you that in my experience of doing this for nearly three years, asterisk is the easy part -- the phones and all their obnoxious little quirks from various vendors are the real pain in the ass. That, and NAT traversal, which shouldn't even be a problem these days, but it is.:/
In the meantime while you wait for hardware, try softphones. They're not always as good but they get the job done. On Windows, Xlite is free and works fairly well. In Linux, Ekiga is nice, as is kphone though not as user-friendly. These things work fine with nothing but a mic and speakers (which is what my sister uses -- just talks to her laptop), but a cheap little headset is obviously better.
I know you were joking but it seems a lot of people actually think "centi-" is used incorrectly here. It is perfectly legitimate to use the prefix "centi-" to mean "one hundred", as in "centipede" (one hundred feet). In the context of SI, then yes, it specifically means "one-hundredth" but outside that context, the prefix itself means either "one hundred" or "one-hundredth".
The More You Know!
That's a little disingenuous. Suppose I buy a bag of apples at the grocery store. Much of that money is not going to the farmers who grew the apples -- it's going to whatever company collected the farmers' apples and consolidated them. Even if I wanted to pay the farmer directly there is usually no useful way for me to do so, and even if the farmer wanted to sell to me directly, there is usually no useful way for him to do so. Companies which collect goods and distribute them exist for a reason -- they have the collective economic power of many producers, and they can leverage that to get the product into stores and onto shelves where customers will see it.
For intangibles like music and books this may change in the future; the internet obviously provies many opportunities. But for right now, a solo artist still has a hell of a time making any money from his or her labor if the plan is just to market it on a website and hope people will pay. How will anyone discovery this music? The majority of people buy the music they hear on the radio, or in a movie soundtrack, or at the clubs, and a solo artist doesn't have the power to get songs on the radio or in the clubs. A label, however, does.
So, while I agree with you in principle, in practice there is no practical way to do this right now. There have only been a few artists who have been able to try the solo routine and still make a living -- the Beastie Boys and Trent Reznor come to mind. Both of them started their own labels and marketed their music online, but they were only able to pull this off because their names were already out there from their previous efforts with corporate labels. If they'd tried without an already-extant fanbase, we'd all be saying "Beastie what? Trent who?"
First, you can adjust the DPI in every desktop environment I've seen, including Windows; if it bothers you that much feel free to tinker. Second, if things are always going to appear the same size, as in "one inch equals one inch", what's the point of having a higher-resolution screen? I value my 1680x1050 resolution over the standard 1280x900 screens everyone else gets at my company -- even though the screens are the exact same size, I can have a lot more windows open and visible at a time. If everything was going to scale to the same exact size regardless of pixel count, then there would be no advantage, and no point, and we could all go back to 640x480.
Yet strangely, a bunch of poorly trained, poorly funded, poorly armed locals manage to hang on in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Indeed. That problem clearly stems from America's lack of firepower and technology. It has nothing to do with how the US went in with no clear goal and no real plan, to fight against an enemy they couldn't define or usefully identify.
The OP's point is still valid anyway, since he specified nations. With formal governments who can declare formal war, sign a formal surrender. Where the enemy is obvious. Fighting against guerillas is a completely different matter, particularly when they have no nationality or government. But stealth planes and megatronic ultralasers in space aren't going to help with that.
Look, if you want to talk about money being spent on the common defense, that's fine, but the problem isn't currently a lack of funding -- it's allocation. We've all seen the video where Rumsfeld visits some soldiers in Iraq and a Marine asks him about the total lack of supplies, explaining that their vehicles don't have the armor they should and the soldiers have been reduced to trying to find scraps of ballistic glass to up-armor, and so forth. I've got a few friends in the military and I've heard them echo similar complaints.
Maybe the problem isn't money, but where it's being spent. When you're fighting a war with this sort of "enemy", your hundred million dollars is going to go a lot further by spending it on armor for thousands of soldiers than it will for a single stealth plane.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything like "Snake defeated the boss." He's a representation of you and can't do anything on his own.
Depends. I certainly never hear someone say that while referring to an action they initiated in the game (killed the guy, got the treasure, met a new contact), but it happens during other parts of the game, like cutscenes.
In fact, I just realised I did that the other day talking about Crysis Warhead. I was discussing it with some friends, and usually it's "I ran over and grabbed the ammo," or "You have to find the rocket launcher and use it against the helicopter." But at one point I was describing a cutscene and said something like "So then Psycho stops the guy from shooting the unarmed soldier." (Psycho is the name of the character, for those who don't know.)
Since the player is passively watching the cutscene rather than actively controlling the character, this seems quite natural. But it's kind of a strange context switch to make -- one minute you think of yourself as Psycho (or whoever), and the next minute Psycho is someone completely distinct from you.
I waited tables on and off for three or four years. The problem with splitting the check is usually not an issue of the waiter's mental acumen.
If the customers say up front that they'd like seperate checks, this is not a problem. If they wait until they're ready to pay before saying they want it split, but it's a small party and each person had reasonably simple orders, this is also not a problem.
The problem arises when it's a party of eleven, people are ordering more appetizers and drinks the entire time, some people are paying for themselves while others are paying for themselves plus their friend/date/spouse, and so on. Without knowing how the customers plan to do this before they order it becomes basically impossible -- you either end up with one large check that now has to be split six ways, and you have to somehow remember who was ordering what, or you thought ahead, seperated everyone, and now have to merge half of them, again remembering who was ordering what and who is paying for whom.
By the way, who gets to pay for the queso appetizer that everyone was sharing?
If you've never done this I'm not sure you can understand just how obnoxious it becomes, but hopefully I'm getting my point across. It's particularly difficult when dealing with balky, outdated workstations with interfaces that won't always let you split things the way you'd like.
Even if the waiter asks ahead of time how the customers want to handle this, it's hopeless -- most people don't think about it in advance, so at best you get ten minutes of inter-party bickering. Plus arrangements get made, deals are broken, that guy offered to buy the rest of his buddy's drinks, that other dude suddenly decided he's going to pay for that girl's dinner even though they aren't together, and people start waving breadsticks at each other and trying to prove things on napkins.
Now, here's a system that takes the waiter out of the equation. You guys want to split the check? Fine, go for it -- everyone can select what they're paying for on the little touchscreen or whatever, slide their card through, and it's done. The customers are in a much better position to do this than the waiter anyway.
Unresolved plot elements are not bad. Only in very bad fiction does absolutely everything happen in service of the ultimate confrontation. Some things just happen, and we learn about the characters in how they deal with them.
Without taking sides on this, let me just point out that Anton Chekhov famously said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." He was not referring only to guns and objects, but any other plot elements including people.
It's certainly a matter of argument whether a character who shows up and vanishes a short time later is an unnecessary plot element, or if it serves a purpose. I just wanted to show that there is more than one school of thought on this topic.
"I'm a personality prototype. You can tell, can't you. Pardon me for breathing which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother saying it oh god I'm so depressed."
Or better yet, bitmaps pasted into a Word document, sent as a screenshot. I used to get those a lot.
Then there were (thankfully less frequent) times when you'd get something like "Shortcut to Shortcut to New Document[1] [2].doc" with the user insisting they sent you an important screenshot in that.
The work on the face is okay, I guess. The problem is the background and the way no apparent effort was made to fit the subject and background together. Most of it is stuff you wouldn't necessarily notice, but your brain still expects it, so it screams at you when something's wrong.
For example, look at the right edge of the general's face and ear. (The right edge on the photo -- the left side of her face.) There's a bit of white light being reflected from the original setting. But with the flag there, the lighting makes no sense. If light was being reflected onto her from the flag -- and it would be if it were really there -- then it would have some red in it. That's just the way it works.
Her hair is completely wrong too. The right side is edged with some white line, probably thanks to a poor cutting job. But on the other side of her hair, it's too perfect. In the original you can see she has some strands going here and there, which is totally normal. When someone's hair ends with such an abrupt, perfect line, your brain knows something's wrong.
And finally, there's a huge problem with the lighting on the flag versus the lighting on the general, and that's probably the biggest mistake they made. It's very obvious the picture of the flag was taken in an environment lit differently from the environment in which the general's photo was taken. Put them together and it's immediately clear that they don't belong together.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, when dozens of sales and marketing and other non-technical types start whining that their computers are "slow" because they've been loaded with unholy amounts of crapware and have seventy-two useless things starting at boot, management will often scrap the old machines and get everyone new ones. Then the cycle begins again.
:P The end-user is still just running a browser (or five, sigh), Outlook, maybe Word or Powerpoint, and one or two other applications. All of which can be done very well with lower-end machines.. if they're clean.
The overwhelming majority of most corporate workforces could get by fine with P4 machines if they were kept clean -- this can be done through a number of means, such as policy enforcement, revoking Administrator rights on local Windows machines, applications such as Deep Freeze, or any number of other solutions working in tandem. But far too many places just hand out desktops and laptops like penny candy to their employees, let them run amok, and don't bat an eye when the employees come back six months later complaining that their nearly-new dual-core ultracomputer is "really slow" and "crashing a lot".
For the majority of people, more system resources just means more resources for the malware to consume.
Indeed. Clicking "Add New" and having your choice of click-to-install applications, codecs, drivers, and all dependencies met, in an all-in-one GUI window with search capabilities, is a real pain!
They should do it the Windows way. Want something new? Search Google for it, and tromp through ten or more likely results. See if you can find one that's free, cause you don't want to pirate it, now do you? By "free" I mean it should actually have full functionality and not be a crippled "demo" version, have nag screens, whine at you to register or pay in thirty days, and so on. Check out the vendor and try to be reasonably sure it's not going to install spyware or other malicious garbage on the system. Next, download an executable installer and blindly run it, having no idea who it's really from or what it's really going to do. Accept the EULAs and answer all kinds of asinine questions about where to install it, because there's no real standard. Finally, go back and clean up all the horseshit little icons, shortcuts, system tray helpers, start menu entries, startup items, and other party favors it left behind.
Or you could cough up for a CD of the software, but you'll have to go through most of the above anyway.
Seriously. You say it should be more like finding add-ons for Firefox. Well, it is, isn't it? You want add-ons for Firefox, you go to the add-ons page, search for some keyword, find one you like, and click Install. It's done. This is exactly how it works through the GUI in Ubuntu. What's the difference, really? I just don't understand your complaint.
Sure, but you're talking about the format now, not the actual media (disk, tape, CD, whatever) or equipment you'd need (disk drive, tape drive, CD drive, etc).
My point was really about the people crying foul against relying on something like an external USB drive, or an SD card reader, because "there might not be USB in the future!" or other nonsense. Maybe there won't be USB in the future, but who cares -- finding old hardware is not difficult.
To tackle the format issue, as long as you're backing up your files, why not back up the software you'd need to read it as well? Or create virtual machines and back those up while you're at it. It's not a perfect solution but it does narrow the problem significantly.
To deal with your example, if I wanted to read old Word 95 files, it's not hard to find rogue copies of Win95 floating around. I've got a VM for one just for fun. I could either give those files to the VM, or install 95 and Word95 on the ancient 486 I dredged out of storage or grabbed at a thrift store, or whatever. There are always options, and if your stuff is really that important to you, there's no excuse these days for not having a few VMs around, loaded with the appropriate software needed.
And before the hue and cry of "How will we run the virtual machines!", you've got the option of loading them on old physical hardware (using the installation media you backed up as well...), but that probably won't be necessary. I don't see virtualization going away.
The disks will be readable but you'll have no mechanical or logical way to read what's on them.
:P
Come on, it's not really that hard. I can walk into any thrift store around here and buy an 8 track player if I really wanted to play old 8 track tapes. My father still has some reel-to-reel tapes, even. If he really wanted, it wouldn't be that hard for him to get a reel-to-reel player capable of reading the media. I've seen those in thrift stores too, and plenty of electronics nerds or audiophiles have this stuff around for no reason other than they like having it.
The point is that even today you can easily get your hands on equipment for media that nobody has used in decades. If you couldn't find one in a thrift store, a quick ad on Craigslist would turn up a few people willing to let you use their equipment, especially if you're willing to pay.
In fact, you can even get ancient computers fairly easily. Not long ago I stumbled across one of these babies for sale, a TI-99 computer. First computer I had, back when I was about five or six. Want to read those old solid-state catridges they used? The computer cost all of seven dollars or so. Computers with 5.25" drives are everywhere as well. It may have been foolish, twenty years ago, to rely on those disks for long-term backup, but certainly not for lack of equipment to read it.
The longevity of the media is certainly more important than whether or not "computers of the future" will be able to read it. It's just not that hard to find old equipment, and if it's that important to you, you'll shell out the ten bucks to get an old computer. Who cares if the media is "standard" later?
See, while I'm sure I could find a reel-to-reel player for my father's old tapes, I doubt the tapes themselves are reliable. That's why media is more important here.
Of course, if I really cared, I'd just back up to a hard drive or two, and repeat the process in another three years. An hour or two every couple of years to keep a fresh copy around isn't that much of a sacrifice.
If the flying part was powered by Mr Fusion they wouldn't have had any problems in the third movie. They could just take off and fly at 88 miles per hour. I can't see why an internal combusion engine attached by drivetrain to the wheels has ANYTHING to do with flying, but since they couldn't use Mr Fusion to fly off into the sunset, the engine must be involved somehow. Or maybe I'm just bored at the office at 4:40pm and giving this waaaayyyy too much thought. :)
I am fanatic about ditching unneeded services and startup items, so as soon as I noticed that stupid Google Update thing, that's exactly what I did. For some reason, it kept returning. Every single time. I uninstalled Chrome and it was still there. I had to go manually remove the directory to get rid of it.
Silently installing a retarded updater that's doing who-knows-what is about one-fourth of the reason I loathe Chrome and will never use it again. I'll reserve all the other reasons I hate it for another comment, but I really don't see why getting rid of the dumb updater was such a chore, or why it was there in the first place.
Hang on a second..
:) Unless they're gamers most of them will probably never notice that Windows isn't using the correct driver, and won't care either. Personally, since 7.04 I've never had an issue with video drivers in Ubuntu, but my point is really that to the average user, finding out what video card they even have, then going to the manufacturer's website and downloading an executable and installing it is just as mystifying as anything you had to do in Linux. To them it's all voodoo. How is it "easier" in Windows? I've fought epic battles with ATI drivers in Windows.
it still has a rather long way to go before it will reach the ease-of-use of a recent Windows platform IMHO
Okay, but let's see how you back that up.
getting video running has been HELL
The average yob has no idea how to deal with video driver issues in Windows either.
wifi wasn't always (properlty) recognized
In all my life I have never -- not once -- had Windows XP or Vista recognize my wireless out of the box. Half the time it doesn't get ethernet either, so I have to get the drivers using a spare machine. I realise that's my experience and your mileage will vary. Anyway, since 7.04 again, I've never had an issue with wireless under Intel, Broadcom, or Atheros. Atheros and Intel worked out of the box, and with Broadcom I had to click the little "Enable Restricted Drivers" thing -- which is prominently displayed for even a total newb to find. I haven't had to futz with ndiswrapper since the heady days of 6.06.
That being said, why do you think this is easier on Windows? Even resorting to ndiswrapper is only a couple of commands, and these days I believe there's even a GUI for it. With Windows, if wireless isn't working, you think the average zeeb knows how to find out what wireless chipset they have (Windows sure ain't gonna tell you) and install the driver properly? I've seen tons of people stumble on this under XP. Downloading and installing drivers (and then cleaning up the crapware and party favors they leave behind) is no easier than ndiswrapper, and frankly, since half these drivers insist upon installing their own network manager alongside Windows' inbuilt manager, I'd say it's harder.
ach time there is an upGRade something breaks and I'm back in the 'problem-chasing' game =(
Windows updates tend to break things all the time (and there are frequent stories on slashdot about it). With the default repositories under Ubuntu I've never seen anything break. Ever. I'm pretty sure I've never even heard of anything breaking.
Are you maybe talking about the upgrades in versions? If so, then I somewhat agree. My old vmware stuff didn't work from 7.04 to 8.04 and I had to kick it for an hour to get it going again, and a few other minor things. No big deal really, though I agree it could have been more smooth. But you cannot compare that to the Hell of moving to different versions of Windows with a straight face. Let's be real -- migrating platforms is kind of a pain no matter what. Ubuntu (actually, any Debian-based system) has been the easiest for me so far. Moving from XP to Vista is something that would make Marquis de Sade cringe. What, precisely, do you think is "easier" about Windows than Ubuntu in this regard?
Tons of Christian organizations will just give out Bibles, absolutely free of charge. Producing them costs money for the printer, the binding, the shipping, and so forth. Yet they ask for no money in return. They do it for two reasons:
1. They hope you'll like it and come around to their way of thinking.
2. They hope they might get a few secondary benefits in the form of, say, church donations or volunteer work.
The exact same thing applies to FOSS. Where the Christian might say "Here, have a Bible, I think you'll like it and ditch your current religion," the FOSS advocate might say "Here, have a Linux CD. I think you'll like it and ditch your current OS."
The FOSS organizations also hope for some secondary benefits. Instead of church donations they hope for support contracts. Instead of volunteering at the church bake sale or soup kitchen, they hope you'll volunteer to contribute patches or bug reports.
But, with both the Bible and the Linux CD, you're more than free to just take it, use it, and not donate anything back.
This cannot be difficult to understand for anyone of any age. Everyone's familiar with churches. Let them see that it's essentially the same thing.
The pre-Prohibition world was poisoned by alcohol. The pervasive use of spirits was destroying society from the bottom up. Remember, there were no 'minimum drinking age's in those times; in some communities it was not uncommon to see 8- and 9-year-olds passed out like winos in alleys.
Let's assume you're right about this. (I believe you are but I can't verify it right at this minute.)
You're saying that alcohol regulation went through three stages:
1. Essentially uncontrolled. Anyone who could get their hands on it could have it and, for the most part, society didn't care.
2. Banned completely. That didn't really solve anything, and in many ways, made it worse. At least before, you more or less knew what you were buying -- now you've got random moonshine, a raging black market, organized crime, and the rest. At least we got some cool gangster movies out of it.
3. Legal but regulated. People saw that the first two options didn't work, so it was time to make it legal but controlled. Now you know exactly what you're buying, who is selling it (they have to be licensed), who is buying it (you have to be of a certain age and provide identification).
Which of these three phases seems best?
My grandparents can remember a time when most drugs were either basically legal, or at least largely ignored. Nobody really cared what you did. That's phase one. Then came the War on Drugs, which is a near-total ban. That's phase two -- where we are now. As with phase two of alcohol regulation, it isn't working, and we've all the same symptoms: black market, drugs cut with who-knows-what, organized crime. It's probably time to consider moving to phase three. We have historical evidence that it's better than the alternatives.
I've little doubt that pre-Prohibition, the alcohol situation was out of hand, but Prohibition also proved that banning it gets you nowhere and causes more problems than it solves. Legal and regulated seems to be the way to go with substances like this.
Quick hint: it's perfectly possible to believe both in God and in the Big-Bang - they're not at all mutually exclusive as long as you look at the bible as a book full of allegories instead of trying to believe that the English translation is literally the word of Jesus.
Perhaps that's true, but that also isn't what's usually meant by "the religious right". That term is generally understood to mean the hardline types who interpret the Bible much more literally, and attempts to lobby or legislate based on that interpretation. The lobbying is key here, for it's also possible to be a deeply fundamentalist Christian without bothering everyone else with it, and those sorts are also usually not included under the term "the religious right". At its core, the religious right is way more about politics than religion. Religion just happens to be the platform they use to try to gain political clout.
The type of person who believes in the Bible but views it as a book of allegories, in other words, is usually not the type of person who crusades against gay rights or tries to push Creationism into the classroom. That'd be the "religious right" sort; they're a small but loud minority who, unfortunately, give a lot of other Christians a bad name. Nobody likes a loud-mouthed extremist on any side of an issue.
For a lot of applications that would make sense, but it's hard to know which, and people have various uses you might not predict. For example, I'll often pop open notepad or gedit if I'm on the phone with someone and they're about to tell me something I'll only need for a couple of minutes (a phone number, an access code, whatever). It's quick and convenient and I wouldn't want to be slowed down by having it nag me about filenames and save locations every time, especially when I have zero intention of saving it.
Maybe somewhat. Maybe not. There are people who will rip and make torrents out of anything they get their hands on, just because. But really my point was mostly about the difficulty a solo, unknown artist has in getting exposure on their own. They could put their work on their website and hope people stumble across it, or they could seed torrents of it and hope to spread the word that way, but they'll forever languish in relative obscurity that way. The power of the label pushes some of that music into music store shelves, club play, airplay, and widely-distributed promotional materials that would be difficult, if not impossible, for somenoe to pull off on their own.
I'm not saying the distribution channels aren't there for solo artists of digitally-distributable work. I'm saying that if they want to make a living off their art, right now there isn't an effective way for them to market themselves and get noticed by the masses. The labels have that power by harnessing the collective bargaining power of many.
If your Windows box is just for Outlook, Evolution handles Exchange pretty well these days. I use it on my Linux machine and it works fine. The only issue I've run into is sending calendar appointments -- I can receive them just fine and they go into the calendar, but I can't seem to send them to others. Probably an easy fix but since I don't care and don' tneed that feature I haven't bothered.
Or, I hear Wine runs Outlook pretty damn well, and there is always the virtual machine option, which would also let you keep your Windows environment if you need to test against that. Just seems a waste of a piece of hardware to sit there running Windows and Outlook all day and nothing else.
This has just become a pet peeve of mine in the past couple of weeks, so feel free to ignore my blithering and carry on...
My (VoIP provider) company used to ship our customers' phones from voipsupply.com; they seem fairly reliable. I will tell you that in my experience of doing this for nearly three years, asterisk is the easy part -- the phones and all their obnoxious little quirks from various vendors are the real pain in the ass. That, and NAT traversal, which shouldn't even be a problem these days, but it is. :/
In the meantime while you wait for hardware, try softphones. They're not always as good but they get the job done. On Windows, Xlite is free and works fairly well. In Linux, Ekiga is nice, as is kphone though not as user-friendly. These things work fine with nothing but a mic and speakers (which is what my sister uses -- just talks to her laptop), but a cheap little headset is obviously better.
I know you were joking but it seems a lot of people actually think "centi-" is used incorrectly here. It is perfectly legitimate to use the prefix "centi-" to mean "one hundred", as in "centipede" (one hundred feet). In the context of SI, then yes, it specifically means "one-hundredth" but outside that context, the prefix itself means either "one hundred" or "one-hundredth". The More You Know!
That's a little disingenuous. Suppose I buy a bag of apples at the grocery store. Much of that money is not going to the farmers who grew the apples -- it's going to whatever company collected the farmers' apples and consolidated them. Even if I wanted to pay the farmer directly there is usually no useful way for me to do so, and even if the farmer wanted to sell to me directly, there is usually no useful way for him to do so. Companies which collect goods and distribute them exist for a reason -- they have the collective economic power of many producers, and they can leverage that to get the product into stores and onto shelves where customers will see it.
For intangibles like music and books this may change in the future; the internet obviously provies many opportunities. But for right now, a solo artist still has a hell of a time making any money from his or her labor if the plan is just to market it on a website and hope people will pay. How will anyone discovery this music? The majority of people buy the music they hear on the radio, or in a movie soundtrack, or at the clubs, and a solo artist doesn't have the power to get songs on the radio or in the clubs. A label, however, does.
So, while I agree with you in principle, in practice there is no practical way to do this right now. There have only been a few artists who have been able to try the solo routine and still make a living -- the Beastie Boys and Trent Reznor come to mind. Both of them started their own labels and marketed their music online, but they were only able to pull this off because their names were already out there from their previous efforts with corporate labels. If they'd tried without an already-extant fanbase, we'd all be saying "Beastie what? Trent who?"
First, you can adjust the DPI in every desktop environment I've seen, including Windows; if it bothers you that much feel free to tinker. Second, if things are always going to appear the same size, as in "one inch equals one inch", what's the point of having a higher-resolution screen? I value my 1680x1050 resolution over the standard 1280x900 screens everyone else gets at my company -- even though the screens are the exact same size, I can have a lot more windows open and visible at a time. If everything was going to scale to the same exact size regardless of pixel count, then there would be no advantage, and no point, and we could all go back to 640x480.
Yet strangely, a bunch of poorly trained, poorly funded, poorly armed locals manage to hang on in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Indeed. That problem clearly stems from America's lack of firepower and technology. It has nothing to do with how the US went in with no clear goal and no real plan, to fight against an enemy they couldn't define or usefully identify.
The OP's point is still valid anyway, since he specified nations. With formal governments who can declare formal war, sign a formal surrender. Where the enemy is obvious. Fighting against guerillas is a completely different matter, particularly when they have no nationality or government. But stealth planes and megatronic ultralasers in space aren't going to help with that.
Look, if you want to talk about money being spent on the common defense, that's fine, but the problem isn't currently a lack of funding -- it's allocation. We've all seen the video where Rumsfeld visits some soldiers in Iraq and a Marine asks him about the total lack of supplies, explaining that their vehicles don't have the armor they should and the soldiers have been reduced to trying to find scraps of ballistic glass to up-armor, and so forth. I've got a few friends in the military and I've heard them echo similar complaints.
Maybe the problem isn't money, but where it's being spent. When you're fighting a war with this sort of "enemy", your hundred million dollars is going to go a lot further by spending it on armor for thousands of soldiers than it will for a single stealth plane.
Some planning would have helped too.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything like "Snake defeated the boss." He's a representation of you and can't do anything on his own.
Depends. I certainly never hear someone say that while referring to an action they initiated in the game (killed the guy, got the treasure, met a new contact), but it happens during other parts of the game, like cutscenes.
In fact, I just realised I did that the other day talking about Crysis Warhead. I was discussing it with some friends, and usually it's "I ran over and grabbed the ammo," or "You have to find the rocket launcher and use it against the helicopter." But at one point I was describing a cutscene and said something like "So then Psycho stops the guy from shooting the unarmed soldier." (Psycho is the name of the character, for those who don't know.)
Since the player is passively watching the cutscene rather than actively controlling the character, this seems quite natural. But it's kind of a strange context switch to make -- one minute you think of yourself as Psycho (or whoever), and the next minute Psycho is someone completely distinct from you.
I waited tables on and off for three or four years. The problem with splitting the check is usually not an issue of the waiter's mental acumen.
If the customers say up front that they'd like seperate checks, this is not a problem. If they wait until they're ready to pay before saying they want it split, but it's a small party and each person had reasonably simple orders, this is also not a problem.
The problem arises when it's a party of eleven, people are ordering more appetizers and drinks the entire time, some people are paying for themselves while others are paying for themselves plus their friend/date/spouse, and so on. Without knowing how the customers plan to do this before they order it becomes basically impossible -- you either end up with one large check that now has to be split six ways, and you have to somehow remember who was ordering what, or you thought ahead, seperated everyone, and now have to merge half of them, again remembering who was ordering what and who is paying for whom.
By the way, who gets to pay for the queso appetizer that everyone was sharing?
If you've never done this I'm not sure you can understand just how obnoxious it becomes, but hopefully I'm getting my point across. It's particularly difficult when dealing with balky, outdated workstations with interfaces that won't always let you split things the way you'd like.
Even if the waiter asks ahead of time how the customers want to handle this, it's hopeless -- most people don't think about it in advance, so at best you get ten minutes of inter-party bickering. Plus arrangements get made, deals are broken, that guy offered to buy the rest of his buddy's drinks, that other dude suddenly decided he's going to pay for that girl's dinner even though they aren't together, and people start waving breadsticks at each other and trying to prove things on napkins.
Now, here's a system that takes the waiter out of the equation. You guys want to split the check? Fine, go for it -- everyone can select what they're paying for on the little touchscreen or whatever, slide their card through, and it's done. The customers are in a much better position to do this than the waiter anyway.
Unresolved plot elements are not bad. Only in very bad fiction does absolutely everything happen in service of the ultimate confrontation. Some things just happen, and we learn about the characters in how they deal with them.
Without taking sides on this, let me just point out that Anton Chekhov famously said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." He was not referring only to guns and objects, but any other plot elements including people.
It's certainly a matter of argument whether a character who shows up and vanishes a short time later is an unnecessary plot element, or if it serves a purpose. I just wanted to show that there is more than one school of thought on this topic.
I thought it was pretty funny. In fact, it's number one in my book.
"I'm a personality prototype. You can tell, can't you. Pardon me for breathing which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother saying it oh god I'm so depressed."
Or better yet, bitmaps pasted into a Word document, sent as a screenshot. I used to get those a lot.
Then there were (thankfully less frequent) times when you'd get something like "Shortcut to Shortcut to New Document[1] [2].doc" with the user insisting they sent you an important screenshot in that.
The work on the face is okay, I guess. The problem is the background and the way no apparent effort was made to fit the subject and background together. Most of it is stuff you wouldn't necessarily notice, but your brain still expects it, so it screams at you when something's wrong.
For example, look at the right edge of the general's face and ear. (The right edge on the photo -- the left side of her face.) There's a bit of white light being reflected from the original setting. But with the flag there, the lighting makes no sense. If light was being reflected onto her from the flag -- and it would be if it were really there -- then it would have some red in it. That's just the way it works.
Her hair is completely wrong too. The right side is edged with some white line, probably thanks to a poor cutting job. But on the other side of her hair, it's too perfect. In the original you can see she has some strands going here and there, which is totally normal. When someone's hair ends with such an abrupt, perfect line, your brain knows something's wrong.
And finally, there's a huge problem with the lighting on the flag versus the lighting on the general, and that's probably the biggest mistake they made. It's very obvious the picture of the flag was taken in an environment lit differently from the environment in which the general's photo was taken. Put them together and it's immediately clear that they don't belong together.