me I gave up printers a 8 years ago when i realized I wasted more ink than I used. Now when i do need the rare item printed I take it to work, or use someone else's.
Given their history, I'd think Blizzard is one of the last companies you have to worry about "Planned Obsolescence" from. They still support online play for their earlier titles, and for most of their games, remove CD-Key checking after a while. There may be plenty of reasons to hate the decision on LAN play, but worry over planned obsolescence isn't really one of them.
Past performance is no indication of future gains as all those commercials go...
It is an indication, it's just not a guarantee. I do realize how pedantic that sounds, but really, we're not supposed to try to learn from history?
WTF. I think the only exception to these innovative Mac gaming companies going corporate at the expense of their initial fans is Ambrosia Software of Escape Velocity fame. Oh the days...
Initial fans or not, games still have to be profitable.
Considering that, in general, the context of the options are presented to you right away, I'd say GUI still has an edge. Documentation isn't automatically better with a CLI. It's less of a research project to see what's going to happen within a GUI. Heck, it became a de-facto standard to provide GUIs to products.
At the end of the day, we humans still navigate better by landmarks than co-ordinates.
Generally, they don't have a choice. The categories are set by freedesktop.org standards and are implemented by the distribution, not the application developer.
Hmm we're wandering into territory I'm not familiar with at all, so please forgive my windows-perspective questions.
So if I create a new app and make an installer for it, how does that end up on KDE's equivalent of a Start Menu then? Do I have to contact somebody and say "Gimme an OK to be in the Edutainment category", then they give me the thumbs up to get added to it somehow?
Well obviously. A forum is a text based system. Text commands are the easiest way to provide help. If you were getting help from someone in person maybe they'd show you how to solve your problem using a GUI. Describing GUI actions in a forum is much more difficult and error prone for both parties, that would never be my first choice when helping someone on a forum.
Can't say I agree. If you already know exactly what the syntax is the guy should run, then yeah ok, sure, you win. But if you're just trying to get a guy to see where his settings are so he can make his own choices about which buttons to push... then, no. The fundamental difference here is that with a GUI you see what all your options are. With a CLI, you're getting into nuances like non-descriptive flags and even case sensitivity. On a forum discussing GUIs, you end up giving somebody landmarks and having them work it out. With CLIs, you end up having to spoon-feed them. In this sort of situation, and given the non-real-time nature of Forums, you're actually better off describing GUIs than CLIs.
Of course, your mileage may vary, and all that jazz. I do find it amusing, though, that a simple typo can turn good CLI advice into something destructive.
I said delicate. Heh. I have lost optical media. Sometimes because it's my fault, but not always. I recently had my XBOX eat one of my games. Ask anybody with kids their stories about games and DVDs.
In any event, I've never had a enough interest in downloading images from cartridge based systems to even find out what's involved.
Why the use of this adjective? Most rocks i know of are "odd shaped"
Because it stood out from the other rocks in the area. It's easy to imagine that they had Slashdot nitpickers in mind when they wrote that. "How could they tell it wasn't just a rock that's been sitting there for ages and ages?"
My point was that if you say anything remotely bad, you are likely to get modded down. Check around on some other stories and I think you'll find it to be true.
I've been on Slashdot a long time and I totally believe you about moderation abuses on this site. I've seen seen the ones you're talking about.
But I wanted to mention there's another side to this story. The excitement over the iPhone generated a backlash. Lots of people here started looking for reasons to not like it. (I'm sure PS3 owners know what I'm talking about.) It has gotten to a point where you can tell when somebody's making a legit complaint and when somebody's just mindlessly parroting something they've heard from somebody else. I agree, there's more nuance to it than most topics, but you are talking about something lots of people here have personal experience with.
To put it a little more succinctly: The zealotry will die down when the hatred does. Again, ask any PS3 owner about that.
That's a fairly naive cost assessment. The lifespan of that SSD is much shorter than the 2.5" drive. I'd suspect that it is at least half as long, making it in fact 400 times as expensive, and (most importantly) requiring more frequent backups.
Assuming what you say is true (due to wear levelling and the utter lack of moving parts, I'm not inclined to agree), the issue I brought up is still there. It's only more expensive if you reach the threshold.
Everybody has different things to consider. Cost-per-gig is not a one-size-fits-all answer.
an 8GB drive (which costs, ooh, about £5 - hardly a "ludicrous" cost)
A 2TB hard drive costs $230. A 16GB flash drive costs $42. That is 200 times the per GB cost. If you are trying to store large volumes of data (which is what was being referred to) SSDs ARE ludicrously expensive. 200 times as expensive as hard drives. Given that an external 2.5" drive DOES fit in my pocket, and costs FAR less per GB, there is little justification for the thumb drive.
Your math only works if you have two full terabytes to fill up. If you only have 16 gigs of stuff, the cost per gig isn't that useful of measurement.
Believe it or not, I agree with your assessment, at lesat in the context of my own needs. I'm just not convinced on the 'one size fits all' argument.
I think you've just defined why a Microsoft majority market share is monopolistic... Change anything in your computer to another company and it will work great. Change the OS and you won't be able to run your stuff... and this isn't Apple/Linux' fault. I dare you to find a licensing cost for win32 and DirectX so that other software vendors can utilize them in their OS.
PS2s are cheap now, and I know they've had linux running on them for some time. Has anyone managed to get something like ClusterKnoppix running on PS2 hardware? A renderfarm of slim PS2s sitting on a bookshelf would be kind of neat looking.
The lack of RAM on-board a PS2 (or even a PS3) would make that exercise little more than academic.
Maybe Tom is a secret Linux fan and is hinting that Windows isn't a component but a tax. Or maybe he's just really bad at math.
If he really is trying to say that Windows is a tax and not a component on a render farm then he shouldn't be giving advice on how to build them.
Render nodes are not like a webserver in the sense that your bases are mostly covered with Open Source alternatives. Many apps are either limited on their platform support or at least components of them are. Lightwave, for example, has a Linux-based render node, but won't work with some of the plugins that get sent to it because they're Windows-only. MotionBuilder isn't supported on Linux at all. After Effects, to the best of my knowledge, won't run on Linux either. Depending on the software and on your goals with the render farm, which OS you use is a very important reason for functionality reasons. You could save a few $$ by using Linux, but you may possibly pay for that with loss of functionality.
To use a fashionably inaccurate metaphor: Comparing OS's for use with rendering is like comparing an XBOX 360 and a Wii, not like comparing a 360 to a PS3 like you're suggesting he's implying.
So by your thinking, it's "tough tits" for the cable company if I steal cable from my neighbor? If I find a way to hack cellular communication and use it for free calling? If I hack into a company that uses wifi?
Every single example you've mentioned means taking something from somebody else.
Slashdot Mirror
me I gave up printers a 8 years ago when i realized I wasted more ink than I used. Now when i do need the rare item printed I take it to work, or use someone else's.
Heh. "I don't need oil, I take the bus!"
In short: The past performance of other companies in similar situations is an indication of what's to come. Right?
Given their history, I'd think Blizzard is one of the last companies you have to worry about "Planned Obsolescence" from. They still support online play for their earlier titles, and for most of their games, remove CD-Key checking after a while. There may be plenty of reasons to hate the decision on LAN play, but worry over planned obsolescence isn't really one of them.
Past performance is no indication of future gains as all those commercials go...
It is an indication, it's just not a guarantee. I do realize how pedantic that sounds, but really, we're not supposed to try to learn from history?
WTF. I think the only exception to these innovative Mac gaming companies going corporate at the expense of their initial fans is Ambrosia Software of Escape Velocity fame. Oh the days...
Initial fans or not, games still have to be profitable.
Considering that, in general, the context of the options are presented to you right away, I'd say GUI still has an edge. Documentation isn't automatically better with a CLI. It's less of a research project to see what's going to happen within a GUI. Heck, it became a de-facto standard to provide GUIs to products.
At the end of the day, we humans still navigate better by landmarks than co-ordinates.
It only sucks in office until OO.o can implement it.
Correct. After that, it sucks in both of them.
That's because Microsoft has moved on to something new and OO hasn't carbon copied it yet.
It'd be nice if the developers weren't trying to defend themselves to victory.
Erm... What about disliking unfair practices and monopolistic tendencies makes you "braindead" exactly.
You mean besides parroting a meme, operating from a simplistic generalization, and showing resistance to important details relating to the context?
Generally, they don't have a choice. The categories are set by freedesktop.org standards and are implemented by the distribution, not the application developer.
Hmm we're wandering into territory I'm not familiar with at all, so please forgive my windows-perspective questions.
So if I create a new app and make an installer for it, how does that end up on KDE's equivalent of a Start Menu then? Do I have to contact somebody and say "Gimme an OK to be in the Edutainment category", then they give me the thumbs up to get added to it somehow?
Well obviously. A forum is a text based system. Text commands are the easiest way to provide help. If you were getting help from someone in person maybe they'd show you how to solve your problem using a GUI. Describing GUI actions in a forum is much more difficult and error prone for both parties, that would never be my first choice when helping someone on a forum.
Can't say I agree. If you already know exactly what the syntax is the guy should run, then yeah ok, sure, you win. But if you're just trying to get a guy to see where his settings are so he can make his own choices about which buttons to push... then, no. The fundamental difference here is that with a GUI you see what all your options are. With a CLI, you're getting into nuances like non-descriptive flags and even case sensitivity. On a forum discussing GUIs, you end up giving somebody landmarks and having them work it out. With CLIs, you end up having to spoon-feed them. In this sort of situation, and given the non-real-time nature of Forums, you're actually better off describing GUIs than CLIs.
Of course, your mileage may vary, and all that jazz. I do find it amusing, though, that a simple typo can turn good CLI advice into something destructive.
Whattya know, they finally fixed that.
So what keeps a developer from putting their app in a stupid place?
Organising the start menu by software manufacturer name is user centric?
That's up to the software developers. Or would you like me to bitch about every app beginning with K?
I said delicate. Heh. I have lost optical media. Sometimes because it's my fault, but not always. I recently had my XBOX eat one of my games. Ask anybody with kids their stories about games and DVDs.
In any event, I've never had a enough interest in downloading images from cartridge based systems to even find out what's involved.
Downloading a game ISO has only one purpose. The playing of that game, without paying for it.
No, it doesn't. Optical media is delicate.
Why the use of this adjective? Most rocks i know of are "odd shaped"
Because it stood out from the other rocks in the area. It's easy to imagine that they had Slashdot nitpickers in mind when they wrote that. "How could they tell it wasn't just a rock that's been sitting there for ages and ages?"
its orbit will decay and it will burn up in the atmosphere
That's just a ridiculously elaborate cremation.
... that's totally awesome!!!
Your second link is bad, simple 'shopped promo material. This is how Doom3 graphics actually look like: http://i31.tinypic.com/28b4d3q.jpg
Set GL_LensCap to 0, you fool.
My point was that if you say anything remotely bad, you are likely to get modded down. Check around on some other stories and I think you'll find it to be true.
I've been on Slashdot a long time and I totally believe you about moderation abuses on this site. I've seen seen the ones you're talking about.
But I wanted to mention there's another side to this story. The excitement over the iPhone generated a backlash. Lots of people here started looking for reasons to not like it. (I'm sure PS3 owners know what I'm talking about.) It has gotten to a point where you can tell when somebody's making a legit complaint and when somebody's just mindlessly parroting something they've heard from somebody else. I agree, there's more nuance to it than most topics, but you are talking about something lots of people here have personal experience with.
To put it a little more succinctly: The zealotry will die down when the hatred does. Again, ask any PS3 owner about that.
Someone who successfully rebooted a series just wasted talent at it instead of launching a new one.
That rationale only works if another good gaming idea was overlooked to get there. Chances are that probably was not the case.
and Tempest (too bizarre to describe) ...
I read somewhere that Tempest was supposed to be bugs crawling out of a hole. Or, at least, that was what inspired it.
That's a fairly naive cost assessment. The lifespan of that SSD is much shorter than the 2.5" drive. I'd suspect that it is at least half as long, making it in fact 400 times as expensive, and (most importantly) requiring more frequent backups.
Assuming what you say is true (due to wear levelling and the utter lack of moving parts, I'm not inclined to agree), the issue I brought up is still there. It's only more expensive if you reach the threshold.
Everybody has different things to consider. Cost-per-gig is not a one-size-fits-all answer.
an 8GB drive (which costs, ooh, about £5 - hardly a "ludicrous" cost)
A 2TB hard drive costs $230. A 16GB flash drive costs $42. That is 200 times the per GB cost. If you are trying to store large volumes of data (which is what was being referred to) SSDs ARE ludicrously expensive. 200 times as expensive as hard drives. Given that an external 2.5" drive DOES fit in my pocket, and costs FAR less per GB, there is little justification for the thumb drive.
Your math only works if you have two full terabytes to fill up. If you only have 16 gigs of stuff, the cost per gig isn't that useful of measurement.
Believe it or not, I agree with your assessment, at lesat in the context of my own needs. I'm just not convinced on the 'one size fits all' argument.
I think you've just defined why a Microsoft majority market share is monopolistic... Change anything in your computer to another company and it will work great. Change the OS and you won't be able to run your stuff... and this isn't Apple/Linux' fault. I dare you to find a licensing cost for win32 and DirectX so that other software vendors can utilize them in their OS.
The word you're looking for is de-facto.
PS2s are cheap now, and I know they've had linux running on them for some time. Has anyone managed to get something like ClusterKnoppix running on PS2 hardware? A renderfarm of slim PS2s sitting on a bookshelf would be kind of neat looking.
The lack of RAM on-board a PS2 (or even a PS3) would make that exercise little more than academic.
Maybe Tom is a secret Linux fan and is hinting that Windows isn't a component but a tax. Or maybe he's just really bad at math.
If he really is trying to say that Windows is a tax and not a component on a render farm then he shouldn't be giving advice on how to build them.
Render nodes are not like a webserver in the sense that your bases are mostly covered with Open Source alternatives. Many apps are either limited on their platform support or at least components of them are. Lightwave, for example, has a Linux-based render node, but won't work with some of the plugins that get sent to it because they're Windows-only. MotionBuilder isn't supported on Linux at all. After Effects, to the best of my knowledge, won't run on Linux either. Depending on the software and on your goals with the render farm, which OS you use is a very important reason for functionality reasons. You could save a few $$ by using Linux, but you may possibly pay for that with loss of functionality.
To use a fashionably inaccurate metaphor: Comparing OS's for use with rendering is like comparing an XBOX 360 and a Wii, not like comparing a 360 to a PS3 like you're suggesting he's implying.
So by your thinking, it's "tough tits" for the cable company if I steal cable from my neighbor? If I find a way to hack cellular communication and use it for free calling? If I hack into a company that uses wifi?
Every single example you've mentioned means taking something from somebody else.
You all know better, cut it out.