The customization possibilities in Gentoo are possibly its only redeeming factor. It's technically possible to build a dietlibc system or even possibly a ucLibc system off the same portage tree (reality is that it isn't all that smooth, but the idea is still good). I submit nonetheless that it still doesn't really teach you jack about how your system really works or that it even has any measurable impact on performance.
BTW, Debian's able to strip message catalogs for unused languages from its packages too. It sure doesn't require recompiling.
With music, the curmudgeons may have a point: it's objectively measurable that the dynamic range of recorded music has drastically shrunk. Listening to highly compressed audio for any length of time produces either listener fatigue or just tends to be tuned out. The only part that stands out from the compressed music on radio is advertisement (but who the hell listens to the radio these days?)
I think the music is just as good now as it was then. Or well, as vapid now as then (Sturgeon's Law most definitely applies to pop) but the state of the art in recording has measurably gone downhill.
Thanks for reminding me why you're still part of a foes list as long as my arm. I don't even particularly Linux, but you're just pathetic. I hope it never works for you.
The FISA court is largely a rubber-stamp thing, but they do serve one vital purpose: they leave a paper trail. And Congress, not the executive branch, oversees the FISA court.
They're certainly not a shining example of democratic ideals, but they are a damn sight better than the powers arrogated by this administration.
I have a basic disagreement with much of your argument. Much of it seems to rely on the assumption that consumers are rational actors and will find the information on "good apples vs bad apples". In general people aren't rational actors, they're driven by desire.
In the face of perfect information, the market is rational -- at least rational enough to work pretty darn efficiently. Of course, hardly anyone has perfect information, and in fact many suppliers actively conspire to suppress it -- this has been known ever since Adam Smith. There's actually an entire economy of information, and not in the way the term "information economy" was being thrown around. I think there was a nobel for economics recently awarded for some developments on the theory.
Limited corporate liability is only supposed to protect stockholders who did nothing else other than own stock. The reason CEOs are never punished (except for the one or two every decade or so they want to make a show of punishing) is really due to nothing more than corruption, not the concept of limited liability. It's not so much that they outright bribe politicians to stay out of jail, it's just that the politicians genuflect in the direction of whomever has the most money, because they're the only Americans worth anything in their eyes.
Companies that provide poor service and drive themselves into the ground in the face of competition are supposed to be the natural order of capitalism. Of course, the moment an airline is in any danger, they siphon cash straight from the taxpayers to keep afloat, so this strange thing called capitalism doesn't actually apply. I suppose corporate welfare is slightly better than dropping our taxes out the bomb bay doors, but I don't think it helps create an efficient market in the long run.
> Other than that there was really nothing that awful about Oblivion.
Other than the goddam compass. I like having no HUD elements at all on the screen. Thankfully I found a mod that does that for me -- no can do on the console version though.
Still, the best of both worlds is to play the PC version from my couch. Nice that Bethesda actually supports gamepads on the PC version out of the box.
Shame there isn't any way to improve the voice acting. Guess they blew their acting budget on Patrick Stewarts's five minutes worth of voice work, since I swear they had about three interns voice everyone else in the game.
The BBB does nothing of the sort in the USA. All they do is collect complaints. With enough of them, they can revoke a business's BBB Seal of Approval, if they ever bothered to display one -- the vast majority don't.
> In my experience the only way out of a Cable Company contract prior to its expiry is to be carried out feet forward in a casket.
In my experience, no cable company I've dealt with has a contract. Phone companies do. The cablecos love to point this out in their adverts.
Granny will be turning the hammer on Verizon any day now. Of course, they've got The Network following her, so they'll probably take her down before she can swing.
The thing that always amazes me about Windows is not how half-assed it is, but how half-assed it is given the amount of resources that Microsoft has to throw at the problem.
Actually, it's not surprising. It's probably some kind of corollary to Brooks' Law, but at a certain point, more resources don't help, and in fact make it worse.
MS actually does have some pretty nice command-line tools for dealing with drivers, like DevCon. It'd sure be nice if it came with Windows, but truth is that for the average userbase, it'd be like handing chainsaws to paraplegics.
I do find it odd how they just refuse to update things like paint or notepad. You know that's gotta be a frequent request from customers.
Linus originally named it 'Freax'. The admin that hosted it thought 'Linux' was a better name.
> Next was a variation of one of the Unixes (A BSD of some variety I think?)
Mach. NeXT won over a lot of people for its design, and programming it in ObjC was probably all right, but boy was it braindamaged as a Unix. OSX does a lot better with Mach, largely because it shoehorns an entire BSD kernel into it instead of forcing it to run as a "personality".
I can't think of a single Windows app Microsoft has ever shipped that's under the BSD license. It has some BSD apps with it (like FTP.EXE) but those are binaries only, certainly not distributed under the same license. What's the freaking license have to do with it anyway?
A QAM tuner might be nice, but I don't know if that's how my cable company actually sends any of its signals. All I have and care about is basic cable, but I just don't know if I'll be reduced to using an IR Blaster and sticking my PC after the cable tuner just to record anything at all. Both things are very much not ideal. Honestly, it reminds me of the hassle that cable was in the mid 80's.
I replaced my Hauppauge with an ATI Theater 650, which only works under Windows, but it blows Hauppauge out of the water in terms of image quality. Except it has a tendency to magnify signal quality problems -- the minor flickering that channel 12 (CW) suffers from turns into major rolling and jumping for a full second or so til it regains sync.
> how exactly is WoW supposed to open up ports on my router?
It's called UPnP. Most home routers speak it, and most decent BT clients use it. It's convenient, and not really a security risk if your router's smart enough to not enable it on the WAN interface. Sadly, some actually do.
we'll probably see a reengineering of the protocol stack in operating systems to add cryptographically signed RST's or something to restore the functionality without leaving it vulnerable to this kind of interference.
You could require RST packets to carry a secure sequence number that's valid within the current window. This might require a bit of extra state in the TCP layer (but it's stateful anyway, so no big loss), or I suppose the sequence generator algorithm could be made to run in reverse. The trick is how you detect such extended functionality in the first place -- TCP was never designed with capability negotiations in mind.
I guess at that point, comcast will just start dropping packets or fuck around with ICMP messages.
GP: sorry about the snark, you were talking about the comparison of 1/l/I -- yeah, Consolas was designed to be a "programmer font". I imported it into Linux, but I end up having to use other fonts in emacs, since Consolas doesn't look so hot without AA (emacs on win32 does do AA though, big win there!)
> here's my take on Consolas's 1/l/I differentiation. Essentially, it's Courier New.
They look different when you're not using a screenreader or braille term, which you obviously are.
Or maybe you mean Lucida. The new fonts are basically less heavy versions of the ones in the middle column, because cleartype made the old fonts appear too black.
Slashdot Mirror
The customization possibilities in Gentoo are possibly its only redeeming factor. It's technically possible to build a dietlibc system or even possibly a ucLibc system off the same portage tree (reality is that it isn't all that smooth, but the idea is still good). I submit nonetheless that it still doesn't really teach you jack about how your system really works or that it even has any measurable impact on performance.
BTW, Debian's able to strip message catalogs for unused languages from its packages too. It sure doesn't require recompiling.
With music, the curmudgeons may have a point: it's objectively measurable that the dynamic range of recorded music has drastically shrunk. Listening to highly compressed audio for any length of time produces either listener fatigue or just tends to be tuned out. The only part that stands out from the compressed music on radio is advertisement (but who the hell listens to the radio these days?)
I think the music is just as good now as it was then. Or well, as vapid now as then (Sturgeon's Law most definitely applies to pop) but the state of the art in recording has measurably gone downhill.
Thanks for reminding me why you're still part of a foes list as long as my arm. I don't even particularly Linux, but you're just pathetic. I hope it never works for you.
It's about the FBI pulling Ministry of Truth revisionism on online court records. YRO actually is an appropriate category. Your right to know.
> Go Gentoo (PS, a great way to get FORCED into learning about your Linux system!)
Watching compiler messages scroll by does not constitute learning how a system works.
The FISA court is largely a rubber-stamp thing, but they do serve one vital purpose: they leave a paper trail. And Congress, not the executive branch, oversees the FISA court.
They're certainly not a shining example of democratic ideals, but they are a damn sight better than the powers arrogated by this administration.
Oh wait, I forgot: we're at war. Forever.
I have a basic disagreement with much of your argument. Much of it seems to rely on the assumption that consumers are rational actors and will find the information on "good apples vs bad apples". In general people aren't rational actors, they're driven by desire.
In the face of perfect information, the market is rational -- at least rational enough to work pretty darn efficiently. Of course, hardly anyone has perfect information, and in fact many suppliers actively conspire to suppress it -- this has been known ever since Adam Smith. There's actually an entire economy of information, and not in the way the term "information economy" was being thrown around. I think there was a nobel for economics recently awarded for some developments on the theory.
Limited corporate liability is only supposed to protect stockholders who did nothing else other than own stock. The reason CEOs are never punished (except for the one or two every decade or so they want to make a show of punishing) is really due to nothing more than corruption, not the concept of limited liability. It's not so much that they outright bribe politicians to stay out of jail, it's just that the politicians genuflect in the direction of whomever has the most money, because they're the only Americans worth anything in their eyes.
Companies that provide poor service and drive themselves into the ground in the face of competition are supposed to be the natural order of capitalism. Of course, the moment an airline is in any danger, they siphon cash straight from the taxpayers to keep afloat, so this strange thing called capitalism doesn't actually apply. I suppose corporate welfare is slightly better than dropping our taxes out the bomb bay doors, but I don't think it helps create an efficient market in the long run.
> Other than that there was really nothing that awful about Oblivion.
Other than the goddam compass. I like having no HUD elements at all on the screen. Thankfully I found a mod that does that for me -- no can do on the console version though.
Still, the best of both worlds is to play the PC version from my couch. Nice that Bethesda actually supports gamepads on the PC version out of the box.
Shame there isn't any way to improve the voice acting. Guess they blew their acting budget on Patrick Stewarts's five minutes worth of voice work, since I swear they had about three interns voice everyone else in the game.
> ok so why are they not focusing on these "nodes"?
Three guesses as to how storm supernodes get installed.
True, but Comcast would require keeping a lot more state to do a sequence number attack.
In the end, it's just about making it harder. They route your packets, so they're the ultimate MITM.
The BBB does nothing of the sort in the USA. All they do is collect complaints. With enough of them, they can revoke a business's BBB Seal of Approval, if they ever bothered to display one -- the vast majority don't.
> In my experience the only way out of a Cable Company contract prior to its expiry is to be carried out feet forward in a casket.
In my experience, no cable company I've dealt with has a contract. Phone companies do. The cablecos love to point this out in their adverts.
Granny will be turning the hammer on Verizon any day now. Of course, they've got The Network following her, so they'll probably take her down before she can swing.
> Personally at this point, I don't think anything can kill him....
Holy water?
The thing that always amazes me about Windows is not how half-assed it is, but how half-assed it is given the amount of resources that Microsoft has to throw at the problem.
Actually, it's not surprising. It's probably some kind of corollary to Brooks' Law, but at a certain point, more resources don't help, and in fact make it worse.
MS actually does have some pretty nice command-line tools for dealing with drivers, like DevCon. It'd sure be nice if it came with Windows, but truth is that for the average userbase, it'd be like handing chainsaws to paraplegics.
I do find it odd how they just refuse to update things like paint or notepad. You know that's gotta be a frequent request from customers.
You haven't been around long enough to remember the GNULix troll, do you? Around the same time as the whole Natalie Portman thing, I believe.
(my slashdot uid's a fairly fresh one, I've had other accounts)
Linus originally named it 'Freax'. The admin that hosted it thought 'Linux' was a better name.
> Next was a variation of one of the Unixes (A BSD of some variety I think?)
Mach. NeXT won over a lot of people for its design, and programming it in ObjC was probably all right, but boy was it braindamaged as a Unix. OSX does a lot better with Mach, largely because it shoehorns an entire BSD kernel into it instead of forcing it to run as a "personality".
I can't think of a single Windows app Microsoft has ever shipped that's under the BSD license. It has some BSD apps with it (like FTP.EXE) but those are binaries only, certainly not distributed under the same license. What's the freaking license have to do with it anyway?
> Could it be that (shock and surprise!) you are not the target market for the wii?
Fine. Then can we stop comparing them with sales figures for other markets?
A QAM tuner might be nice, but I don't know if that's how my cable company actually sends any of its signals. All I have and care about is basic cable, but I just don't know if I'll be reduced to using an IR Blaster and sticking my PC after the cable tuner just to record anything at all. Both things are very much not ideal. Honestly, it reminds me of the hassle that cable was in the mid 80's.
I replaced my Hauppauge with an ATI Theater 650, which only works under Windows, but it blows Hauppauge out of the water in terms of image quality. Except it has a tendency to magnify signal quality problems -- the minor flickering that channel 12 (CW) suffers from turns into major rolling and jumping for a full second or so til it regains sync.
The funny thing is, another name for WiMax that was being commonly slung around was, get ready for it, 4G
> how exactly is WoW supposed to open up ports on my router?
It's called UPnP. Most home routers speak it, and most decent BT clients use it. It's convenient, and not really a security risk if your router's smart enough to not enable it on the WAN interface. Sadly, some actually do.
we'll probably see a reengineering of the protocol stack in operating systems to add cryptographically signed RST's or something to restore the functionality without leaving it vulnerable to this kind of interference.
You could require RST packets to carry a secure sequence number that's valid within the current window. This might require a bit of extra state in the TCP layer (but it's stateful anyway, so no big loss), or I suppose the sequence generator algorithm could be made to run in reverse. The trick is how you detect such extended functionality in the first place -- TCP was never designed with capability negotiations in mind.
I guess at that point, comcast will just start dropping packets or fuck around with ICMP messages.
Knee-jerk bitching because it's Microsoft seems to be business as usual. If Apple did it, you'd hail it as innovative genius.
GP: sorry about the snark, you were talking about the comparison of 1/l/I -- yeah, Consolas was designed to be a "programmer font". I imported it into Linux, but I end up having to use other fonts in emacs, since Consolas doesn't look so hot without AA (emacs on win32 does do AA though, big win there!)
> here's my take on Consolas's 1/l/I differentiation. Essentially, it's Courier New.
They look different when you're not using a screenreader or braille term, which you obviously are.
Or maybe you mean Lucida. The new fonts are basically less heavy versions of the ones in the middle column, because cleartype made the old fonts appear too black.