If dates must be used, your suggestion is the best one I've seen so far. But still:
1) Dates are unnecessary. On the one hand, if I don't care when the release happened, 2009.32 is telling me too much. On the other hand, if I care when it happened, 2009.32 doesn't tell me enough.
2) You still have the problem that you can miss the end of the year and have to rename your release.
3) [subjective] A release name like 2009.32 looks ugly to me. Perhaps an Ubuntu-like approach (9.32) would help with that.
4) Why dates? This is arbitrary information that has nothing to do with the fact that this release is a new version of the previous release. If one uses dates, one may as well use millions of lines of code or something.
My argument boils down to this: Linux is a kernel. It's a technical release, so it does not need PR anywhere but within the technical community (who can easily handle Linux 112). Let the distributions worry about catchy PHB-friendly names like Ubuntu 8.10 or openSuse 11.0
If the 2.6 is not going to change, drop it, it's redundant.
So we're down to 26. I personally find a name like "Linux 28" to be cool. "Linux 41 was released today...". There's nothing wrong with big numbers: see udev.
The problem with date-based numbering is that when you go from 2008.4 to 2008.10, it looks like you missed a few releases. And if you pre-announce a release, you have to meet your deadline or else rename the release.
So they could do what Gentoo does - 2007.0, 2007.1, 2008.0, 2008.1, etc. But you still have the problem that every year, you lose count of how many releases have happened. Was there a 2007.2 or did we just go to 2008.0 because we missed the Christmas deadline due to that last-minute security bug?
They could reduce the problem by using a longer period, such as a decade. (At 6 months for a release, for example, the number will only reach 20, which is not large.) But that's somewhat arbitrary. Plus, being in the 0th decade, we don't want to have 2.6.30 be called 0.3.
To reduce the complexity on all that, just drop the dates, and what's left is a single big number. No dots, no multiple numbers, easy. Linux 112 is fine by me.
This sounds like a RAM issue more than a video card issue. I've played Civ 4 well on a very old laptop with 32mb of dedicated video memory. But it did have its RAM bumped up to a gig.
However, you MUST apply all the Civ 4 patches. Unpatched Civ 4 runs like pre-release Vista with the debugging symbols still in - it's PAINFUL. Not that I would try that, but it must be painful*:)
I hope that helps.
* this is a Slashdot mod bait. Because Slashdot hates Microsoft, a helpful post with bad geek humor in it that also bashes Microsoft must get modded up into nirvana. Get to work.
Create your very own mindless zombie alien hovering ball of goo that shoots acid thing, and unleash it against the unsuspecting online community! Design your very own oversized ultra new tech nuclear powered futuristic double barreled organic biorocket launcher weapon and fight against hordes of the deadliest community-created horror creatures. Battle with your aim against others' wit in the first ever MMOFPS in history: S I M Q U A K E
Hm, I was joking but that sounds like something I would play! DAMN YOU Slashdot for giving this idea to a guy who is not the CEO of a game developer house!
Everything on your list sans the last one, and much more could fit on a fucking LiveCD, and expand to a couple of gigabytes. Even Windows XP had all that and it fit onto a 3 gig partition easily. Microsoft has no excuse for Vista's size, other than sheer incompetence.
But the entry that totally shows how clueless your post is happens to be this one:
Multiple filesystem support
Oh please. NTFS, FAT, ISO+Joilet, UDF, a couple of network "filesystems" perhaps? The Linux kernel contains many times as many filesystems, and even if you enable all of them, your kernel image will hardly ever be more than 20-30 megabytes when you compile it. You just needed to put something on what is a short list, didn't you?
As for Most extensive driver library in existence, it's not true. Most drivers come either through Windows Update (network) or via the vendor (install CD or website). Out of the box, Windows support the bare minimum it needs to run with terrible performance.
Last but not least, all the stuff falling under monster domain features is functionality. Lots of source code which gets compiled into tiny binaries. Since when does implementing "ACLs on every resource" or "domain controls enforced" on clients require gigabytes of data?
Not really. It actually warns you if you ever try to install it on an empty partition of size less than 35 GB, and when installed on a 20 GB partition (all by itself, nothing else there yet), it refuses to install service pack 1 due to lack of space.
I know storage is cheap, but come on. It's just a kernel with a GUI. What the fuck?
They won't go back. That would be admitting "See, WoW is good, but it's not good enough, so we WILL make a better Warcraft!". At the very least it would be a fork in the franchise.
The success of WoW spelled the death of Warcraft as we knew it.
I don't know why they made WoW as opposed to WoD (World of Diablo) in the first place, the RPG being closer to the WoW concept than the RTS. But what's done is done.
Isn't WoW more like Warcraft 4? I never played WoW or Diablo, which explains my n00bish question.
By the way, there are two things I don't want to ever touch in my life, because addiction and severe negative consequences are all but certain: hard drugs and WoW.
Yes, but it would allow the emergence of another subset, consisting purely of healthy babies, that would have a probabilistically equal number of geniuses.
But the chance of a defect baby to become a new Einstein is the same (or at least, not higher) as the chance of the replacement baby (conceived after the first was aborted) to become a new Einstein.
Which is better, a defect baby with 0.00001% chance of becoming a great person, or a healthy baby with 0.00001% chance of becoming a great person?
Assuming that at some point some tiny little bacteria-like thingy is actually found on Mars, what guarantee do we have that it originated there, as opposed to coming from Earth as contamination during any of our Mars missions?
Of course keyboards are more efficient and are the way to the future. But TFC was about handwriting in particular, and not about what writing technology is best.
Earlier today I visited some website which had a cool applet. I'm on a 64-bit system, and Firefox 3 complained about not having the plug-in. Hmm, I vaguely remember installing it long long ago. I had to fire up Konqueror, which worked. Don't ask me why.
Now I could probably fix the problem with installing hte right package or doing 5-10 clicks in the right place, but I didn't have the time to bother.
The point of an open Java is that with an open implementation with open plug-ins, I wouldn't have to do anything at all. It would be already integrated and distributed to me as I install my OS.
One step further, web admins would know that it's integrated and working out of the box, so they wouldn't have to worry about it not being there. Ever. Such confidence in a technology (or lack thereof) can make it or break it in large numbers. This is why Flash is successful - because everyone knows you have it. (That is not strictly true, as it doesn't work in my Konqueror but does work in Firefox 3. Go figure.)
I agree with you until your last sentence. If it weren't for keyboards, we would all have to handwrite much more, and eventually learn to do it properly. My own handwriting, for instance, was perfectly fine before I practically stopped using it. Now it is horrific.
I forgot: While in symmetric cryptography your problem would be "how do I get my key to the other guy securely", with public key cryptography the question becomes "how do I prove to the guy who sends me stuff that my public key is really MY public key as opposed to someone else's, where said someone pretends to be me". This is where the certificate exchange stuff comes in.
The public key server only holds your public key - the one that was meant for anyone to see. Your private key, which is the only one that can be used to decrypt messages addressed to you, stays with you. Nobody other than the parties involved in the communication ever holds one or the other's private keys.
The "public" in "public key server" means BOTH that the key server is public AND that it is a server for public keys. The most anal-retentive name for it would be a "public public key server".
Slashdot Mirror
If dates must be used, your suggestion is the best one I've seen so far. But still:
1) Dates are unnecessary. On the one hand, if I don't care when the release happened, 2009.32 is telling me too much. On the other hand, if I care when it happened, 2009.32 doesn't tell me enough.
2) You still have the problem that you can miss the end of the year and have to rename your release.
3) [subjective] A release name like 2009.32 looks ugly to me. Perhaps an Ubuntu-like approach (9.32) would help with that.
4) Why dates? This is arbitrary information that has nothing to do with the fact that this release is a new version of the previous release. If one uses dates, one may as well use millions of lines of code or something.
My argument boils down to this: Linux is a kernel. It's a technical release, so it does not need PR anywhere but within the technical community (who can easily handle Linux 112). Let the distributions worry about catchy PHB-friendly names like Ubuntu 8.10 or openSuse 11.0
(because surely someone must care)
If the 2.6 is not going to change, drop it, it's redundant.
So we're down to 26. I personally find a name like "Linux 28" to be cool. "Linux 41 was released today...". There's nothing wrong with big numbers: see udev.
The problem with date-based numbering is that when you go from 2008.4 to 2008.10, it looks like you missed a few releases. And if you pre-announce a release, you have to meet your deadline or else rename the release.
So they could do what Gentoo does - 2007.0, 2007.1, 2008.0, 2008.1, etc. But you still have the problem that every year, you lose count of how many releases have happened. Was there a 2007.2 or did we just go to 2008.0 because we missed the Christmas deadline due to that last-minute security bug?
They could reduce the problem by using a longer period, such as a decade. (At 6 months for a release, for example, the number will only reach 20, which is not large.) But that's somewhat arbitrary. Plus, being in the 0th decade, we don't want to have 2.6.30 be called 0.3.
To reduce the complexity on all that, just drop the dates, and what's left is a single big number. No dots, no multiple numbers, easy. Linux 112 is fine by me.
This sounds like a RAM issue more than a video card issue. I've played Civ 4 well on a very old laptop with 32mb of dedicated video memory. But it did have its RAM bumped up to a gig.
:)
However, you MUST apply all the Civ 4 patches. Unpatched Civ 4 runs like pre-release Vista with the debugging symbols still in - it's PAINFUL. Not that I would try that, but it must be painful*
I hope that helps.
* this is a Slashdot mod bait. Because Slashdot hates Microsoft, a helpful post with bad geek humor in it that also bashes Microsoft must get modded up into nirvana. Get to work.
when Will Wright teams up with John Carmack
Create your very own mindless zombie alien hovering ball of goo that shoots acid thing, and unleash it against the unsuspecting online community! Design your very own oversized ultra new tech nuclear powered futuristic double barreled organic biorocket launcher weapon and fight against hordes of the deadliest community-created horror creatures. Battle with your aim against others' wit in the first ever MMOFPS in history: S I M Q U A K E
Hm, I was joking but that sounds like something I would play! DAMN YOU Slashdot for giving this idea to a guy who is not the CEO of a game developer house!
Do you really think none of the Windows ME code is in Vista? I'd guess you'd be wrong.
In Soviet Russia, Russian bride fscks YOU!!!
Is that you, Bender?!
Everything on your list sans the last one, and much more could fit on a fucking LiveCD, and expand to a couple of gigabytes. Even Windows XP had all that and it fit onto a 3 gig partition easily. Microsoft has no excuse for Vista's size, other than sheer incompetence.
But the entry that totally shows how clueless your post is happens to be this one:
Multiple filesystem support
Oh please. NTFS, FAT, ISO+Joilet, UDF, a couple of network "filesystems" perhaps? The Linux kernel contains many times as many filesystems, and even if you enable all of them, your kernel image will hardly ever be more than 20-30 megabytes when you compile it. You just needed to put something on what is a short list, didn't you?
As for Most extensive driver library in existence, it's not true. Most drivers come either through Windows Update (network) or via the vendor (install CD or website). Out of the box, Windows support the bare minimum it needs to run with terrible performance.
Last but not least, all the stuff falling under monster domain features is functionality. Lots of source code which gets compiled into tiny binaries. Since when does implementing "ACLs on every resource" or "domain controls enforced" on clients require gigabytes of data?
Not really. It actually warns you if you ever try to install it on an empty partition of size less than 35 GB, and when installed on a 20 GB partition (all by itself, nothing else there yet), it refuses to install service pack 1 due to lack of space.
I know storage is cheap, but come on. It's just a kernel with a GUI. What the fuck?
Is there a copy of TFA anywhere that does not require registration?
They won't go back. That would be admitting "See, WoW is good, but it's not good enough, so we WILL make a better Warcraft!". At the very least it would be a fork in the franchise.
The success of WoW spelled the death of Warcraft as we knew it.
I don't know why they made WoW as opposed to WoD (World of Diablo) in the first place, the RPG being closer to the WoW concept than the RTS. But what's done is done.
Isn't WoW more like Warcraft 4? I never played WoW or Diablo, which explains my n00bish question.
By the way, there are two things I don't want to ever touch in my life, because addiction and severe negative consequences are all but certain: hard drugs and WoW.
I am so glad I never got around to playing the first two. That way, I'll have a good reason not to play this one - I've missed the storyline.
Think of the countless hours I saved by saving countless hours twice before!
Yes, but it would allow the emergence of another subset, consisting purely of healthy babies, that would have a probabilistically equal number of geniuses.
But the chance of a defect baby to become a new Einstein is the same (or at least, not higher) as the chance of the replacement baby (conceived after the first was aborted) to become a new Einstein.
Which is better, a defect baby with 0.00001% chance of becoming a great person, or a healthy baby with 0.00001% chance of becoming a great person?
But the best one would be: P0N-1E5
Assuming that at some point some tiny little bacteria-like thingy is actually found on Mars, what guarantee do we have that it originated there, as opposed to coming from Earth as contamination during any of our Mars missions?
And why am I unable to write in short sentences?
And your point is?
Of course keyboards are more efficient and are the way to the future. But TFC was about handwriting in particular, and not about what writing technology is best.
Earlier today I visited some website which had a cool applet. I'm on a 64-bit system, and Firefox 3 complained about not having the plug-in. Hmm, I vaguely remember installing it long long ago. I had to fire up Konqueror, which worked. Don't ask me why.
Now I could probably fix the problem with installing hte right package or doing 5-10 clicks in the right place, but I didn't have the time to bother.
The point of an open Java is that with an open implementation with open plug-ins, I wouldn't have to do anything at all. It would be already integrated and distributed to me as I install my OS.
One step further, web admins would know that it's integrated and working out of the box, so they wouldn't have to worry about it not being there. Ever. Such confidence in a technology (or lack thereof) can make it or break it in large numbers. This is why Flash is successful - because everyone knows you have it. (That is not strictly true, as it doesn't work in my Konqueror but does work in Firefox 3. Go figure.)
I agree with you until your last sentence. If it weren't for keyboards, we would all have to handwrite much more, and eventually learn to do it properly. My own handwriting, for instance, was perfectly fine before I practically stopped using it. Now it is horrific.
OK, I have certainly seem most of these thing, but shaving?! Are you serious?
Very good questions, indeed. [looks around for mod points and finds none]
I forgot: While in symmetric cryptography your problem would be "how do I get my key to the other guy securely", with public key cryptography the question becomes "how do I prove to the guy who sends me stuff that my public key is really MY public key as opposed to someone else's, where said someone pretends to be me". This is where the certificate exchange stuff comes in.
The public key server only holds your public key - the one that was meant for anyone to see. Your private key, which is the only one that can be used to decrypt messages addressed to you, stays with you. Nobody other than the parties involved in the communication ever holds one or the other's private keys.
The "public" in "public key server" means BOTH that the key server is public AND that it is a server for public keys. The most anal-retentive name for it would be a "public public key server".
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography for all the details.
I'd rather face legal action than illegal action done to me! :)