The quote you see was taken from a post by John Carmack to Slashdot a couple of days ago. So, Slashdot is essentially reporting on its own user comments and it doesn't even realize it.:)
I don't know what's up with the Win2000Mag link. Anyone figured that out?
Are you kidding? Many people are physically lazy, but very active mentally. I would consider myself to be one of those people, and I'm sure many geeks are also like this. Going out and voting, as it is now, is a physical chore. You actually have to leave the house, drive around, get registered, wait in lines, etc., and takes time. OK, I admit, I've never done it (I'm 18), but you get the idea. On the other hand, voting online would probably take 15 minutes or less from the comfort of your own home, and would require little physical exertion. In my case, I will probably vote anyway, but there are people far more physically lazy than me.
Now, what you are saying is that people who don't want to physically exert themselves also won't want to mentally exert themselves enough to decide who to vote for. That's just not true. I spend most of my time coding, which takes alot of hard thinking to do right, even though I am lazy physically. I do it soley for my own enjoyment, too. Many people are like this, especially geeks. Voting over the internet would be perfect for us. I don't think that there is any connection between physical laziness and mental laziness.
So, in summary, if people could vote over the internet, then more people would vote. Specifically, the physically lazy yet mentally active people who were too lazy to leave the house before even though they cared about the issue.
I don't know where the name "tabbed widgets" came from. In the article and in Adobe's press release they talk about "tabbed palettes", which sounds very different. Clearly, they are not talking about those popular multi-page dialog boxes with tabs at the top. Still, I haven't been able to figure out what exactly this is as the web site which Adobe put up to discuss the issue is not responding at the moment.../.ed, perhaps? Anyway, if anyone knows what "tabbed palettes" are, please do tell.
Just tried it, and it isn't what I was looking for. I want a program where when you IM someone you get a conversation window which stays open as long as you are talking to them, and you only have to type something and press enter to send it. No clicking.
What advantage does AIM have over ICQ, other than the fact that it's used by millions of AOL users (no comment on that one:)?
Well, I prefer AIM because the user interface is *so* much better. You don't have to keep clicking on all sorts of crap just to hold a conversation. The odd thing is that this has nothing to do with the protocol. ICQ clients could use the AIM interface, but for some reason every client I've seen takes after the horrable crappy original ICQ interface. Anyone know of one that doesn't?
Wasn't some group working on a unified messaging protocol?
There are several such efforts, but I think the one most likely to catch on is AOL's new open server-to-server protocol. It will unite the already existing services without requiring the users to get new software... well, maybe. AOL actually went through the whole RFC etc. process with this one, which is pretty cool.
Ahhh HELOOOOOOOO!!!! Windows NT4.0 has always had the "last known good profile" thing at start up. 2000 is just a newer implementation of the kernal.
Sorry, I was comparing it with Win9x. NT was never very useful for me since I play a lot of games, but W2K handles games very well. So, in my case, 2K is an upgrade from 9x.
Doom (1 & 2) was "focused on single-player." It had great single-player and great multi-player.
Quake 1 was "focused on multi-player." It had good single-player and good multi-player.
Quake 2 was "focused on single-player." It had terrible single-player but good multi-player.
Quake 3 was "focused on multi-player." It just sucked as far as gameplay goes.
Doom 3 is "focused on single-player." That could mean anything.
Of course, that is all my opinion. You are free to think otherwise.:) Also, I am rating the game itself with no special mods.
Anyone remeber The Lost Vikings? I want to see *that* as a 3D first-person game.
Blue screens are alot nicer under Win2k. After a few months of using it, I have only seen one. It happenned when my mother attempted to install drivers for her CDR drive, but accidently installed the Win98 drivers (the installer program didn't bother to check what operating system was running!). Anyway, upon rebooting, a blue screen came up that looked something like this (paraphrased since I don't remember the exact words):
A fatal error has occurred. [some debug info] If this is the first time you have encountered this error, reboot and try again. If you encounter the error again, press F8 when you boot your computer to get a menu with more options. [more info *in plain english* about what to do followed]
So, I rebooted, and the error didn't go away. Booted again and went into the F8 boot menu, and there was an option that said "Use last known good configuration." Believe it or not, it worked! It removed the bad drivers, and left everything else as it was. I was amazed.
It turns out that Win2k is really much better than either Win9x or WinNT. I still use Linux on my primary computer, but I have a second computer next to it running W2K and I actually do alot of stuff with it.
Just a few points. You can't do anything with display lists except display static objects. Anything which is animated, or which is only partially displayed at a time (like the world) can't be put in a display list. Vertex arrays are alot faster anyway.
Also, server-side visibility determination would require tons of network bandwidth, and thus would also not work.
Finally, OpenGL may be networkable, but rendering over the network will never be possible. Yes, network bandwidth will increase, but at the same time so will the amount of geometry data that needs to be drawn every frame. Again, display lists won't work because they are not dynamic. However, an ever so slightly higher-lever protocol might work... but then that's what most games are right now.
Really, we 3D game developers aren't as dumb as you think.:) We've considered all of this already, and if there were an easy solution, we'd be using it.
I am writing a game engine. Thus, I assure you that I have been thinking about this a hell of a lot longer than you. You are full of shit. I'm not going to go into it, because if you had the slightest clue about writing games, you'd know that you HAVE TO trust the client (how can you tell a good player apart from a cheater?). Also, the server HAS TO give the amount of info that most do to the client to allow client-side prediction algorithms which hide latency. So shut the hell up.
One of the soft spots of the movie -- and this hurts the story line as it's presented on the screen -- is that despite their powers to morph, melt through walls, move people through the air, what really terrifies the renegade wing of the mutants and motivates them to wipe out the human race as it's constituted isn't some powerful enemy, but pending legislation in Congress, one of the world's least effective and menacing institutions.
The mutants are afraid that they'll be seen as outcasts. *That* is what they are fighting. You should know this better than anyone. Regardless of the effectiveness of any legislation passed, the mere passage of the bill and even the discussion leading up to it would clearly increase the fear of mutants in the general population. Senator Kelly was saying outright that mutants were unsafe to be around. Such campeign speaches could have a drastic affect on public opinion. Really, Katz, isn't this your own turf here?
Also, according to a friend of mine who was a fan of the comics (which I never read), Senator Kelly was the ultimate evil, NOT Magneto. Magneto was bad, yes, but Kelly was causing the problems in the first place by turning the human race against mutants.
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Re:A Better Written article on Why X-Windows is Ba
on
X Windows Must Die!
·
· Score: 2
This isn't FUD. It's worse. First of all, the article is actually chapter 7 of The Unix-Hater's Handbook. What do you expect from such a person? He is going through everything in Unix and exagerating every flaw, and then going on to claim every feature is actually a flaw, and then making up his own false flaws that never existed. Or, at least, that's what he does in this chapter. It is as if he doesn't actually know how to use unix. He quotes one e-mail from a guy who clearly had no clue what he was doing. The guy actually said that he could not fathom why someone would have to tell the X-Server who was allowed to connect to it. He wrote, "Oh, yes, you have have to run xauth... I give this ten seconds of thought: what sort of security violation is this going to help with? Can't come up with any model." Err... how about stopping other people from opening up porn on your display? He also didn't seem to get why his telnet session did not automatically know about X. Ugg. And then the author quotes the e-mail as an example of X's "security through obscurity". A little biased?
Sure, the article does cover many of X's actual weaknesses, but with all the mis-information around it, anyone who doesn't know about these problems already is not likely to be able to tell the real stuff from the lies.
We are not talking about scientific discovery here. No one "pirates" science. Science has always for the most part worked like the open source community does today. We are talking about media. Audio and video clips. And software.
Another thing. I am talking about exact copying. If someone remembers some information and reproduces something similar from their memory, I do not think that that necessarily counts as copying. Remember, we're talking about piracy. No one pirates a game by reproducing it themselves. That is actually not even illegal under copyright law. I'm talking about mechanical and/or digital copying.
Now, if you still stand by what you say, stop to think for a moment. If I spend weeks, months, or even years of my life creating some wonderful piece of information, be it software, music, movies, or art, do you think that I have no right to gain something from it? To use it as I see fit? According to you, that information which I create should no longer be mine, and I should get nothing for it. That idea is so ludicrous that I'm having trouble even describing it in a way that makes sense.
Look at it this way. If it were not for me, the creator of this media, then whatever I created would not exist. Does that not give me some sort of special rights over it?
In an ideal society, people would do what they do solely to help others. However, in real life, people are greedy. Very few people are willing to spend years working on something if they are not going to get anything in return. You can talk all you want about how copyrights are supposed to be good for the people, but they are only good for the people because they encourage the creators to creat. Without copyrights, they would not creat, and we would have nothing.
It seems to me that you are just griping because you want stuff free, and you are not getting it.
That said, I write open source software as a more-than-full-time job and I don't get paid. I do it for personal entertainment. Go to my homepage and see if you must. But, as my/. user info says...
I spend my time writing open source software, not complaining when others don't.
Put more generally:
I spend my time creating free information, not complaining when others don't.
Why? Because everyone has a right to do what they choose with anything that is their sole creation.
PS. As I'm sure you know, the concept you are suggesting is commonly known as "communism", whereas I am avocating "capitolism". You'll notice that communism, as implemented by the Soviets, failed miserably, whereas capitolism, as implemented originally by the Dutch, and brought to its peak by the United States, is and incredible success. Why? Communism tried to force people to do things in a way contrary to human nature. Capitolism, on the other hand, is set up to harness human nature. Under capitolism, people benifit society by helping themselves, and thus the human race manages to advance despite its flaws. Remember, human beings hate to be forced to do things, and any system which tries to control them or limit their rights will inevidably fail.
Pirating is NOT sharing. Sharing is letting other people use your stuff at your own expense. That is honorable. Pirating is letting other people use other people's stuff at other people's expense. That is NOT honorable.
If someone creates a piece of information, they have every right to control how it is used. Don't like it? Don't use their stuff. If it weren't for them, you would not have it. You think you have a right to disrespect them?
Now, there are some artists who choose to make their works freely available. I applaud their generosity. If you want free stuff, you should be supporting these people, not fighting those who choose to do other things with their creations.
Better yet, spend a few years of your life creating something, and then give it away. Until you do, you have no right to complain.
I've been running XFree4 for several months. On Debian. Hasn't crashed yet. Either there is no problem, or nVidia's drivers are just that much better than all the other ones.:)
The only real problem I've noticed is that copy/paste ops sometimes lock the system for a second or two, and sometimes KDevelop gets screwy (menus get slow and text gets messed up). The first problem is only a minor annoyance, and the second can be fixed by restarting the program. I don't have 4.0.1 yet, so maybe these problems are fixed. Anyone know?
For Debian users who want X4 NOW: Just use the binary installer provided by the XFree86 people. It is a completely painless process. It just asks a few questions ("do you want XYZ fonts?", etc.) and does its thing, and everything works. (at least, it worked for me)
Be careful, though. Recently, potato had an update for X3. dpkg though the thing was still on my computer, so it automagically downgraded me, which completely destroyed my whole setup. I had to re-run the X4 installer from a VC, but then everything worked again.
I agree that the moderation system needs to be changed somehow, but putting a delay on it wouldn't be very fun.:) You'd have to wait for several hours before you could see what posts are good and such, and few moderators would bother going back several hours after the story was posted. I think a more fundamental change is needed, but I don't have any specific ideas. Oh well, at least I didn't get modded down for what I said.:)
You think I mean the Microsoft collective, don't you? No, I mean the Slashdot/Open Source collective. It seems that most of the people on Slashdot act as one combine collective intelligence, with just as much predudice and non-intelligence as a single person.
As one would expect, almost all of the high-scoring posts here are extremely negative, because the collective holds the opinion that Microsoft can not possibly create something good. Though some of these posts are correct, many are completely wrong. One score 5 post said nothing except that C# allowed implicit variable defining, and that this was bad. C# does not allow any such thing.
Anyone who is looking for an honest opinion of C# should not look here.
BTW, I am not a Microsoft supporter. I use Linux. I am not saying that C# is necessarily good, but it is no where near as bad as everyone here seems to think.
Slashdot Mirror
The quote you see was taken from a post by John Carmack to Slashdot a couple of days ago. So, Slashdot is essentially reporting on its own user comments and it doesn't even realize it. :)
I don't know what's up with the Win2000Mag link. Anyone figured that out?
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Now, what you are saying is that people who don't want to physically exert themselves also won't want to mentally exert themselves enough to decide who to vote for. That's just not true. I spend most of my time coding, which takes alot of hard thinking to do right, even though I am lazy physically. I do it soley for my own enjoyment, too. Many people are like this, especially geeks. Voting over the internet would be perfect for us. I don't think that there is any connection between physical laziness and mental laziness.
So, in summary, if people could vote over the internet, then more people would vote. Specifically, the physically lazy yet mentally active people who were too lazy to leave the house before even though they cared about the issue.
------
I don't know where the name "tabbed widgets" came from. In the article and in Adobe's press release they talk about "tabbed palettes", which sounds very different. Clearly, they are not talking about those popular multi-page dialog boxes with tabs at the top. Still, I haven't been able to figure out what exactly this is as the web site which Adobe put up to discuss the issue is not responding at the moment... /.ed, perhaps? Anyway, if anyone knows what "tabbed palettes" are, please do tell.
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Just tried it, and it isn't what I was looking for. I want a program where when you IM someone you get a conversation window which stays open as long as you are talking to them, and you only have to type something and press enter to send it. No clicking.
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Well, I prefer AIM because the user interface is *so* much better. You don't have to keep clicking on all sorts of crap just to hold a conversation. The odd thing is that this has nothing to do with the protocol. ICQ clients could use the AIM interface, but for some reason every client I've seen takes after the horrable crappy original ICQ interface. Anyone know of one that doesn't?
There are several such efforts, but I think the one most likely to catch on is AOL's new open server-to-server protocol. It will unite the already existing services without requiring the users to get new software... well, maybe. AOL actually went through the whole RFC etc. process with this one, which is pretty cool.
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Nah - All the Windows 9x people would think Linux86 was 14 years old.
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right...
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Sorry, I was comparing it with Win9x. NT was never very useful for me since I play a lot of games, but W2K handles games very well. So, in my case, 2K is an upgrade from 9x.
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Doom (1 & 2) was "focused on single-player." It had great single-player and great multi-player.
Quake 1 was "focused on multi-player." It had good single-player and good multi-player.
Quake 2 was "focused on single-player." It had terrible single-player but good multi-player.
Quake 3 was "focused on multi-player." It just sucked as far as gameplay goes.
Doom 3 is "focused on single-player." That could mean anything.
Of course, that is all my opinion. You are free to think otherwise. :) Also, I am rating the game itself with no special mods.
Anyone remeber The Lost Vikings? I want to see *that* as a 3D first-person game.
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Blue screens are alot nicer under Win2k. After a few months of using it, I have only seen one. It happenned when my mother attempted to install drivers for her CDR drive, but accidently installed the Win98 drivers (the installer program didn't bother to check what operating system was running!). Anyway, upon rebooting, a blue screen came up that looked something like this (paraphrased since I don't remember the exact words):
A fatal error has occurred.
[some debug info]
If this is the first time you have encountered this error, reboot and try again. If you encounter the error again, press F8 when you boot your computer to get a menu with more options.
[more info *in plain english* about what to do followed]
So, I rebooted, and the error didn't go away. Booted again and went into the F8 boot menu, and there was an option that said "Use last known good configuration." Believe it or not, it worked! It removed the bad drivers, and left everything else as it was. I was amazed.
It turns out that Win2k is really much better than either Win9x or WinNT. I still use Linux on my primary computer, but I have a second computer next to it running W2K and I actually do alot of stuff with it.
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Just a few points. You can't do anything with display lists except display static objects. Anything which is animated, or which is only partially displayed at a time (like the world) can't be put in a display list. Vertex arrays are alot faster anyway.
Also, server-side visibility determination would require tons of network bandwidth, and thus would also not work.
Finally, OpenGL may be networkable, but rendering over the network will never be possible. Yes, network bandwidth will increase, but at the same time so will the amount of geometry data that needs to be drawn every frame. Again, display lists won't work because they are not dynamic. However, an ever so slightly higher-lever protocol might work... but then that's what most games are right now.
Really, we 3D game developers aren't as dumb as you think. :) We've considered all of this already, and if there were an easy solution, we'd be using it.
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I am writing a game engine. Thus, I assure you that I have been thinking about this a hell of a lot longer than you. You are full of shit. I'm not going to go into it, because if you had the slightest clue about writing games, you'd know that you HAVE TO trust the client (how can you tell a good player apart from a cheater?). Also, the server HAS TO give the amount of info that most do to the client to allow client-side prediction algorithms which hide latency. So shut the hell up.
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And I modded you up on the same error. Oh well, easily undone. :)
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see the comic
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The mutants are afraid that they'll be seen as outcasts. *That* is what they are fighting. You should know this better than anyone. Regardless of the effectiveness of any legislation passed, the mere passage of the bill and even the discussion leading up to it would clearly increase the fear of mutants in the general population. Senator Kelly was saying outright that mutants were unsafe to be around. Such campeign speaches could have a drastic affect on public opinion. Really, Katz, isn't this your own turf here?
Also, according to a friend of mine who was a fan of the comics (which I never read), Senator Kelly was the ultimate evil, NOT Magneto. Magneto was bad, yes, but Kelly was causing the problems in the first place by turning the human race against mutants.
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This isn't FUD. It's worse. First of all, the article is actually chapter 7 of The Unix-Hater's Handbook. What do you expect from such a person? He is going through everything in Unix and exagerating every flaw, and then going on to claim every feature is actually a flaw, and then making up his own false flaws that never existed. Or, at least, that's what he does in this chapter. It is as if he doesn't actually know how to use unix. He quotes one e-mail from a guy who clearly had no clue what he was doing. The guy actually said that he could not fathom why someone would have to tell the X-Server who was allowed to connect to it. He wrote, "Oh, yes, you have have to run xauth... I give this ten seconds of thought: what sort of security violation is this going to help with? Can't come up with any model." Err... how about stopping other people from opening up porn on your display? He also didn't seem to get why his telnet session did not automatically know about X. Ugg. And then the author quotes the e-mail as an example of X's "security through obscurity". A little biased?
Sure, the article does cover many of X's actual weaknesses, but with all the mis-information around it, anyone who doesn't know about these problems already is not likely to be able to tell the real stuff from the lies.
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You're right... this is dumb. Why do I bother with these silly arguments?
err... your "bob" person totally missed my point, but I won't go into it.
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No, they will have YOU, and all other pirates, to blame, for forcing their prices up in the first place.
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We are not talking about scientific discovery here. No one "pirates" science. Science has always for the most part worked like the open source community does today. We are talking about media. Audio and video clips. And software.
Another thing. I am talking about exact copying. If someone remembers some information and reproduces something similar from their memory, I do not think that that necessarily counts as copying. Remember, we're talking about piracy. No one pirates a game by reproducing it themselves. That is actually not even illegal under copyright law. I'm talking about mechanical and/or digital copying.
Now, if you still stand by what you say, stop to think for a moment. If I spend weeks, months, or even years of my life creating some wonderful piece of information, be it software, music, movies, or art, do you think that I have no right to gain something from it? To use it as I see fit? According to you, that information which I create should no longer be mine, and I should get nothing for it. That idea is so ludicrous that I'm having trouble even describing it in a way that makes sense.
Look at it this way. If it were not for me, the creator of this media, then whatever I created would not exist. Does that not give me some sort of special rights over it?
In an ideal society, people would do what they do solely to help others. However, in real life, people are greedy. Very few people are willing to spend years working on something if they are not going to get anything in return. You can talk all you want about how copyrights are supposed to be good for the people, but they are only good for the people because they encourage the creators to creat. Without copyrights, they would not creat, and we would have nothing.
It seems to me that you are just griping because you want stuff free, and you are not getting it.
That said, I write open source software as a more-than-full-time job and I don't get paid. I do it for personal entertainment. Go to my homepage and see if you must. But, as my /. user info says...
I spend my time writing open source software, not complaining when others don't.
Put more generally:
I spend my time creating free information, not complaining when others don't.
Why? Because everyone has a right to do what they choose with anything that is their sole creation.
PS. As I'm sure you know, the concept you are suggesting is commonly known as "communism", whereas I am avocating "capitolism". You'll notice that communism, as implemented by the Soviets, failed miserably, whereas capitolism, as implemented originally by the Dutch, and brought to its peak by the United States, is and incredible success. Why? Communism tried to force people to do things in a way contrary to human nature. Capitolism, on the other hand, is set up to harness human nature. Under capitolism, people benifit society by helping themselves, and thus the human race manages to advance despite its flaws. Remember, human beings hate to be forced to do things, and any system which tries to control them or limit their rights will inevidably fail.
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That is disgusting.
Pirating is NOT sharing. Sharing is letting other people use your stuff at your own expense. That is honorable. Pirating is letting other people use other people's stuff at other people's expense. That is NOT honorable.
If someone creates a piece of information, they have every right to control how it is used. Don't like it? Don't use their stuff. If it weren't for them, you would not have it. You think you have a right to disrespect them?
Now, there are some artists who choose to make their works freely available. I applaud their generosity. If you want free stuff, you should be supporting these people, not fighting those who choose to do other things with their creations.
Better yet, spend a few years of your life creating something, and then give it away. Until you do, you have no right to complain.
------
I've been running XFree4 for several months. On Debian. Hasn't crashed yet. Either there is no problem, or nVidia's drivers are just that much better than all the other ones. :)
The only real problem I've noticed is that copy/paste ops sometimes lock the system for a second or two, and sometimes KDevelop gets screwy (menus get slow and text gets messed up). The first problem is only a minor annoyance, and the second can be fixed by restarting the program. I don't have 4.0.1 yet, so maybe these problems are fixed. Anyone know?
For Debian users who want X4 NOW: Just use the binary installer provided by the XFree86 people. It is a completely painless process. It just asks a few questions ("do you want XYZ fonts?", etc.) and does its thing, and everything works. (at least, it worked for me)
Be careful, though. Recently, potato had an update for X3. dpkg though the thing was still on my computer, so it automagically downgraded me, which completely destroyed my whole setup. I had to re-run the X4 installer from a VC, but then everything worked again.
------
I agree that the moderation system needs to be changed somehow, but putting a delay on it wouldn't be very fun. :) You'd have to wait for several hours before you could see what posts are good and such, and few moderators would bother going back several hours after the story was posted. I think a more fundamental change is needed, but I don't have any specific ideas. Oh well, at least I didn't get modded down for what I said. :)
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I'm already forced to pay taxes; no way am I going to willingly pay for a bunch of jackasses.
I wasn't aware that there was a difference.
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Thank you for demonstrating my point so well.
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You think I mean the Microsoft collective, don't you? No, I mean the Slashdot/Open Source collective. It seems that most of the people on Slashdot act as one combine collective intelligence, with just as much predudice and non-intelligence as a single person.
As one would expect, almost all of the high-scoring posts here are extremely negative, because the collective holds the opinion that Microsoft can not possibly create something good. Though some of these posts are correct, many are completely wrong. One score 5 post said nothing except that C# allowed implicit variable defining, and that this was bad. C# does not allow any such thing.
Anyone who is looking for an honest opinion of C# should not look here.
BTW, I am not a Microsoft supporter. I use Linux. I am not saying that C# is necessarily good, but it is no where near as bad as everyone here seems to think.
Go ahead, mod me down. I have karma to spare.
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