Lars' original point, before the MPAA adopted him as a spokesman, was that he was Ok with Napster distributing his music as long as they asked first. What he objected to is that nobody even asked, "hey are you ok with this?" in the first place. Which sounds perfectly reasonable to me, if ignorant of the non-centralized organization of Napster.
I could never figure out why the Night Elves were Alliance and the Tauren were horde, since both races seem to have a back-story which pretty much sums to "we just want to be left alone." Frankly, I always thought they made a huge mistake by not "borrowing" an idea from Everquest and having a couple of the races available for both factions in the first place.
If nothing else, being able to play Night Elf on Horde would have addressed the imbalance issues that the servers had until Blood Elves were introduced.
(Not that they asked my opinion, but I could have told them long before release that they'd have vastly more players on the faction with the hot characters, and few fewer on the faction where every single character is an ugly monster. Duh.)
I hope you're not in charge of IT somewhere, if so your users must hate you. SMTP doesn't do calendars, that right there is enough to disqualify it as a replacement for Exchange.
As for Domino, while you can use it to distribute (crummy) apps, Notes is awful at email and calendaring because of IBMs insistance that those are "just another app". On the other hand, at least it's not misleading, as the crumminess of the email/calendaring app is on-par with the crumminess of other Domino apps i've experienced.
Considering Domino's expense (about twice what Exchange costs per seat), and the crumminess of Notes' core function (email/calendaring), the ability to write additional crummy apps doesn't sell me. You're better off using RealBasic or Filemaker to make your apps.
You're not a cowboy programmer. If you're being careful, documenting your code, and write maintainable, quality, code... you're not a cowboy.
"Cowboy programmer" doesn't mean "not formally educated." It means they swoop in to 'fix' issues at the last minute with giant masses of crappy code, then leave when it comes time to sort out the mess. A lot of organizations see the cowboys as the "heros", since they can resolve the problem quickly, but they never bother to account for the sheer mass of wasted time their solution created elsewhere.
Next thing you know Jessica Lansbury and company will be held and charged for all those terroristic threats and murder plans called "Murder She Wrote".
Jessica Fletcher, you mean? Or maybe Angela Lansbury?
I always wondered why Jessica Fletcher she wasn't the prime suspect in every single episode of that show. I mean, a novelist who writes murder mysteries-- and no matter what town she visits, and no matter what event she goes to, somebody close to her ends up murdered EVERY WEEK! If I were the FBI, I'd have her face on every police station on the east coast with a big red circle around it.
The worst part about stories like this is having to skip past the 3 dozen Slashdot posts that all say "I don't see ads because I block them! Hyuk! Hyuk!"
Yes, we all get it. Lots of Slashdotters block ads. We know. We've read it a million times on this site. Could you just shut the hell up so we can comment on the actual story? Thank you.
Poorly-designed sites. Many ad-serving networks will, by default, write out ads using Javascript's "document.write()", which means the browser can't complete the DOM tree until those ad servers respond. Since most browsers are set to only keep two active connections open at once, it's quite possible for both of those connections to be occupied by different "document.write()" scripts.
(With image requests, for example, the browser can continue rendering the page even if the image file isn't downloaded, because the IMG tag contains everything the browser needs to create a placeholder for it. "document.write()", unfortunately, doesn't.)
Well-designed websites will put the ads in iframes, so they load completely independently of the normal site. Of course, the tradeoff with this approach is that your analytics data might not be as complete.
So just to clarify: 1) You can't tell me what the Ubuntu Linux equivalent to the Registry is 2) You can't tell me/justify why you'd need to automate something like setting up monitors, when the OS should simply do that without requiring human interaction at all 3) You're unwilling to correct your typo, so I can figure out what the holy hell you were trying to tell me in that one line (but you feel compelled to tell me it's a typo!) 4) Thusly, the next line (which sounds like it's making some devastating point against me, but I have no clue what that point actually is) is completely nullified 5) You have no response to my assertion that a GUI that's worse as its job than a CLI is a bad GUI by definition
And all because you seem to think I haven't "at least taken a look at non MS Windows systems"?
(Which, BTW, is complete bullshit. I owned nothing but Macs for over a decade, I actually switched from OS X to Vista when OS X made a huge backslide in usability. The reason I don't use Ubuntu is because it doesn't support sleep mode on any of the laptops I've ever owned, but I try every release regardless because I'm an idiot and keep expecting it to start working.)
In summary, thanks for being a condescending prick, but I'm just going to assume I've won this little exchange and move on.
I just type lowercase SQL. The editor color-codes keywords anyway, and the interpreter hardly cares if you use caps or not. Plus I think lowercase is easier to read.
Yeah and what color hair do they have? And what town do they live in? Are any of them allergic to shellfish!? Did they like the movie The Green Mile, or do they prefer The Shawshank Redemption? THESE ARE ALL THINGS I MUST KNOW!
If there's one thing I've learned from reading Orson Scott Card books, it's that he only used that number because a hologram from the future told him to. Duh.
I'll put your registry comment down to a lack of experience with other systems (and indeed a lack of experience with the MS Windows registry) and assume you are not trolling.
Then what's the registry equivalent for, say, Ubuntu Linux?
You've also entirely missed my point about GUI configuration for a video system and that portable configuration files and/or the command line are ideal for large deployments instead of having to hire a dozen extra people to point at pictures with the mouse.
Or you can pick a system which doesn't *require* dinking around with the command line or pointing to pictures with a mouse to correctly detect the capabilities of the monitors available.
Hmm - nvidia and/or ati should GUI designers should they?
Wha-huh? You're missing at least one word there, I think-- I can't make heads or tails out of that.
You really didn't think before the reply did you?
I didn't? I have no idea what point your gibberish sentence is trying to make, so I can't really defend against it.
I used that example because it actually is a fairly good GUI but has a vast number of options it has to cover.
And I say that if it is, indeed, worse than editing a configuration file, it has a fairly bad GUI almost by definition. Regardless of the number of options.
I'll leave you to let you get back to your site that tells us all how terrible slashdot is.
If you don't realize how awful Slashdot's usability has gotten in the last year, I think you're not in a position to judge the usability of products.
Know the capabilities of the OS/DE you're running in. I don't use GTK+ apps on Windows, because they don't work with Microsoft's voice recognition or handwriting recognition features. Which is really a shame, because those features work automatically if you use the native widgets. (Heck, they work in Firefox and I'm pretty sure they aren't using native widgets.) It's a huge pain on my tablet.
Open source projects almost never support drag&drop, but drag&drop has been around long enough that it should just be expected to work. (Kudos to the open source projects that get this right, BTW.)
It's not just that the projects are started and nursed along by people who can code, but they're started and nursed along by people who can code and also: 1) Don't know the purpose of a GUI 2) Don't understand the value of a GUI
There are tons of techniques that can be used, even by a programmer, to ensure that their program is more usable than the competition.
At the most basic level, they can follow all the UI standards of the OS/DE in which they're planning to run-- that one's simple, but it's completely missed by a lot of projects. If your program is running in Windows, and your font isn't rendered with ClearType-- it's a usability bug! Fix it! If you're running in OS X and pressing the down arrow on the bottommost line of text results in a beep instead of moving the insertion point to the end of the line-- it's a usability bug! Fix it! (And a very frequent one, since a lot of OS X programmers come from the Windows world now.) If you're not following all the standards of the OS you're running in, there's your starting point.
Secondly, every time you code something with a GUI, do a hallway usability test. This consists of grabbing someone walking by in the hall, and asking them to perform whatever task your application is designed to do using the new GUI you just wrote. The less that person knows about programming, the better-- you want normal users, not power users. The point isn't to assign a simple "pass/fail" to the UI, but to get their comments and feedback. Do one of those a day, and you'll hammer out 80% of the usability flaws before the product is even released. (Of course, this involves talking to other human beings, sometimes even *gasp* girls!, so I guess that's why it doesn't get done.)
Thirdly, understand the GUI. Discoverability, most importantly. Emphasizing the use of spatial memory, which the vast majority of non-geeks are better at than rote memorization. Understand how the basic widgets work, and why they work that way. (When you understand why widgets work the way they do, you'll hopefully have talked yourself out of "just write your own!" Writing a menu or listbox is *hard*. Writing an open dialog is *incredibly hard*.) Be able to answer the counter-intuitive question: "what five places on the screen can the user put the cursor on the quickest?" and learn why Macintosh menus are stuck to the top of the screen. Understand Mac Classic, which got closer than any other GUI to perfection. (IMO, of course.;)
There's no reason any programmer can't do these things. They just don't want to. That's a whole different article, though, going way back to the woefully-obsolete "high priesthood of technology" attitude.
Random examples:
Just recently Slashdot covered a new open source FPS game. It's main window looks like this: http://schend.net/images/screenshots/alien_arena.png I can't even enumerate the hundreds of things wrong with just that one window. That the developers thought that UI was "good enough" to craft a *release* around... I don't even know how to reply to that.
Awhile back, I filed a bug against Notepad++ (a highly recommended-to-me text editor for Windows) because their menus didn't work. Their DROP DOWN MENUS. The ones attached to the top of the window. One of the most basic elements of a GUI, one that's been perfected for 20 years, and they don't work!! Again, I have absolutely no words for that.
As for part one - yuk! You people in cold climates should wash more often and it won't happen.
Just FYI, I live in Washington State, and I don't have toe cheese, neither does anybody I know. The point that there's something *on* his foot to pull off in the first place is the opening act of the nasty; the part where he eats it is actually the encore performance.
I can understand that - he's "eating his own dogfood"
Eating dogfood would be substantially less disgusting.;) (Yes, I know the phrase.)
Exchange is definitely the worst email server in production on any platform
I hope you're making use of hyperbole and don't genuinely believe that. Exchange is certainly not the best, but it's nowhere even close to the worst. Hell, it's arguably better than its direct competitor-- Lotus Domino-- and that's all that really matters. (It certainly uses less bandwidth than Domino.)
The real genius of Exchange isn't the server; the server's an implementation detail and nobody really cares, except hard-core geeks. The real genius is the client software, which is quite simply excellent. To the end-user, the UI of an application *is* the application. (Thus: Outlook *is* Exchange, Lotus Notes *is* Domino.) I think if more open source developers realized that simple rule, open source could be vastly more popular.
(although full backups are actually possible now so it has improved) so the email portion is easily replaced on the same or lesser hardware, but it's a matter of finding out what other portions the users require since it does a lot of other stuff.
That "lot of other stuff" is the reason it's deployed.
I disagree with the attitude to the CLI - that is the one thing that has made large linux deployments possible since you can run the same command or script on as many machines as you want.
You could do this on an older Mac using AppleScript, for example, and never leaving the GUI. Unless you find some weird way of defining AppleScript as a "CLI" (which would be a huge stretch), you can do this particular without ever leaving the GUI.
Also note that Windows designed the Registry specifically to address your problem... again without requiring a CLI. You can deploy a registry entry to thousands of machines, and they'll do your bidding.
It might make large Linux deployments more pleasant, but that's only because Linux has no other technology designed for that purpose. It's definitely "possible" to do, other OSes have already done it.
The main offender newbies hit is X windows configuration but there are now a few decent graphical ways to sort that out and you ALWAYS need a text based way to configure video so you can do something about it when the video settings are wrong.
Yah, but all you need is a "Safe Mode" (to copy a term from Windows) that boots the GUI into a resolution that's guaranteed to work on every piece of video hardware. You don't need to be able to set every single parameter from a CLI, and your OS should protect you from picking un-display-able settings in the first place. And, needless-to-say, it shouldn't crash so often as to make this a consideration.
Consider something like "powerdesk" or the multi-page nvidia or ati GUIs for video settings on MS Windows and you'll see how incredibly hard it is to have a GUI for something that only has a fraction of the options that X windows has
Yeah, but those are shitty GUIs. And even those shitty GUIs are better than a config file-- for example, they're vastly more discoverable. I can guarantee you that if those companies hired a GUI designer and made them non-shitty, it wouldn't demonstrate your point.
I frequently see this: "the CLI is good because [program with shitty GUI] sucks." No real surprise there, saying that a shitty GUI sucks.
Personally I just copy the working nvidia dual head file to a new machine each time instead of the hunting through a maze of twisty config options that you would hav
I'm convinced of global warming, what I'm not convinced of is that it's a problem. People say that billions will starve, people will get flooded out of their house and home-- does all of that follow from a 2 degree increase over 100 years? (Or whatever the latest prediction is.) Wouldn't the increased warmth also increase crop production? Or possibly move moisture into areas that are dry now, making agriculture possible? Say some towns do get flooded-- isn't it worth the trade-off if increased crop yields allow us to feed more people?
What if we spend our entire GDP fighting it, and it turns out it would have been a better world with it?
There's a HELL of a lot more to the problem than "is it happening or not." The real sorrow is that people are obsessed with "is it happening or not" so much that nobody moves on to the next step: "ok it's happening. Now what?"
Secondly, he also states that global temperatures have fallen for the last 11 years. I really would like to see his work.
And...
This article (http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/83), reported in the September 26 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows global temperatures rising for the last 30 years.
Can you please explain how those two things are mutually-exclusive? It's possible for the average temperature to fall over the last 11 years, and also to have risen in the past 30 years. Right?
What's that? You say my only options for broadband are Verizon, Comcast and Clearwire? And none have fiber? And their cheapest plans for fiber are twice that, monthly?
Look, assuming you're talking about American dollars (thus, located in the US), you must realize that your situation is unique. The vast majority of the population doesn't have the ISP option you have. Whatever it is-- since you didn't share your provider, I suppose you could just be bullshitting.
At this point, I have absolutely no idea who you're replying to, or what you're talking about. You've yet to explain who in the thread mentioned Office (most likely because nobody did.) Good job lowering our collective IQs by posting absolutely nonsense.
Elder Scrolls' gratification comes from completing the story and interacting with the world, not by being difficult to play. It's different than, say, Ninja Gaiden in that regard.
Slashdot Mirror
Lars' original point, before the MPAA adopted him as a spokesman, was that he was Ok with Napster distributing his music as long as they asked first. What he objected to is that nobody even asked, "hey are you ok with this?" in the first place. Which sounds perfectly reasonable to me, if ignorant of the non-centralized organization of Napster.
FYI, the MPAA rating system is voluntary. There's no law requiring you to carry ID to be let into a R-rated movie.
Blizzard the *game* studio?
I could never figure out why the Night Elves were Alliance and the Tauren were horde, since both races seem to have a back-story which pretty much sums to "we just want to be left alone." Frankly, I always thought they made a huge mistake by not "borrowing" an idea from Everquest and having a couple of the races available for both factions in the first place.
If nothing else, being able to play Night Elf on Horde would have addressed the imbalance issues that the servers had until Blood Elves were introduced.
(Not that they asked my opinion, but I could have told them long before release that they'd have vastly more players on the faction with the hot characters, and few fewer on the faction where every single character is an ugly monster. Duh.)
I hope you're not in charge of IT somewhere, if so your users must hate you. SMTP doesn't do calendars, that right there is enough to disqualify it as a replacement for Exchange.
As for Domino, while you can use it to distribute (crummy) apps, Notes is awful at email and calendaring because of IBMs insistance that those are "just another app". On the other hand, at least it's not misleading, as the crumminess of the email/calendaring app is on-par with the crumminess of other Domino apps i've experienced.
Considering Domino's expense (about twice what Exchange costs per seat), and the crumminess of Notes' core function (email/calendaring), the ability to write additional crummy apps doesn't sell me. You're better off using RealBasic or Filemaker to make your apps.
You're not a cowboy programmer. If you're being careful, documenting your code, and write maintainable, quality, code... you're not a cowboy.
"Cowboy programmer" doesn't mean "not formally educated." It means they swoop in to 'fix' issues at the last minute with giant masses of crappy code, then leave when it comes time to sort out the mess. A lot of organizations see the cowboys as the "heros", since they can resolve the problem quickly, but they never bother to account for the sheer mass of wasted time their solution created elsewhere.
Next thing you know Jessica Lansbury and company will be held and charged for all those terroristic threats and murder plans called "Murder She Wrote".
Jessica Fletcher, you mean? Or maybe Angela Lansbury?
I always wondered why Jessica Fletcher she wasn't the prime suspect in every single episode of that show. I mean, a novelist who writes murder mysteries-- and no matter what town she visits, and no matter what event she goes to, somebody close to her ends up murdered EVERY WEEK! If I were the FBI, I'd have her face on every police station on the east coast with a big red circle around it.
NASA: We already have top men on that.
Slashdot: But wh--
NASA: Top. Men.
(My favorite line. Uttered by the actor who played Porkins, IIRC.)
The worst part about stories like this is having to skip past the 3 dozen Slashdot posts that all say "I don't see ads because I block them! Hyuk! Hyuk!"
Yes, we all get it. Lots of Slashdotters block ads. We know. We've read it a million times on this site. Could you just shut the hell up so we can comment on the actual story? Thank you.
Poorly-designed sites. Many ad-serving networks will, by default, write out ads using Javascript's "document.write()", which means the browser can't complete the DOM tree until those ad servers respond. Since most browsers are set to only keep two active connections open at once, it's quite possible for both of those connections to be occupied by different "document.write()" scripts.
(With image requests, for example, the browser can continue rendering the page even if the image file isn't downloaded, because the IMG tag contains everything the browser needs to create a placeholder for it. "document.write()", unfortunately, doesn't.)
Well-designed websites will put the ads in iframes, so they load completely independently of the normal site. Of course, the tradeoff with this approach is that your analytics data might not be as complete.
So just to clarify:
1) You can't tell me what the Ubuntu Linux equivalent to the Registry is
2) You can't tell me/justify why you'd need to automate something like setting up monitors, when the OS should simply do that without requiring human interaction at all
3) You're unwilling to correct your typo, so I can figure out what the holy hell you were trying to tell me in that one line (but you feel compelled to tell me it's a typo!)
4) Thusly, the next line (which sounds like it's making some devastating point against me, but I have no clue what that point actually is) is completely nullified
5) You have no response to my assertion that a GUI that's worse as its job than a CLI is a bad GUI by definition
And all because you seem to think I haven't "at least taken a look at non MS Windows systems"?
(Which, BTW, is complete bullshit. I owned nothing but Macs for over a decade, I actually switched from OS X to Vista when OS X made a huge backslide in usability. The reason I don't use Ubuntu is because it doesn't support sleep mode on any of the laptops I've ever owned, but I try every release regardless because I'm an idiot and keep expecting it to start working.)
In summary, thanks for being a condescending prick, but I'm just going to assume I've won this little exchange and move on.
I just type lowercase SQL. The editor color-codes keywords anyway, and the interpreter hardly cares if you use caps or not. Plus I think lowercase is easier to read.
If Tor wasn't designed taking human nature into effect-- well, it was designed wrong. How come they didn't learn the lessons of email?
Yeah and what color hair do they have? And what town do they live in? Are any of them allergic to shellfish!? Did they like the movie The Green Mile, or do they prefer The Shawshank Redemption? THESE ARE ALL THINGS I MUST KNOW!
If there's one thing I've learned from reading Orson Scott Card books, it's that he only used that number because a hologram from the future told him to. Duh.
I'll put your registry comment down to a lack of experience with other systems (and indeed a lack of experience with the MS Windows registry) and assume you are not trolling.
Then what's the registry equivalent for, say, Ubuntu Linux?
You've also entirely missed my point about GUI configuration for a video system and that portable configuration files and/or the command line are ideal for large deployments instead of having to hire a dozen extra people to point at pictures with the mouse.
Or you can pick a system which doesn't *require* dinking around with the command line or pointing to pictures with a mouse to correctly detect the capabilities of the monitors available.
Hmm - nvidia and/or ati should GUI designers should they?
Wha-huh? You're missing at least one word there, I think-- I can't make heads or tails out of that.
You really didn't think before the reply did you?
I didn't? I have no idea what point your gibberish sentence is trying to make, so I can't really defend against it.
I used that example because it actually is a fairly good GUI but has a vast number of options it has to cover.
And I say that if it is, indeed, worse than editing a configuration file, it has a fairly bad GUI almost by definition. Regardless of the number of options.
I'll leave you to let you get back to your site that tells us all how terrible slashdot is.
If you don't realize how awful Slashdot's usability has gotten in the last year, I think you're not in a position to judge the usability of products.
Damn, one more thing I forgot:
Know the capabilities of the OS/DE you're running in. I don't use GTK+ apps on Windows, because they don't work with Microsoft's voice recognition or handwriting recognition features. Which is really a shame, because those features work automatically if you use the native widgets. (Heck, they work in Firefox and I'm pretty sure they aren't using native widgets.) It's a huge pain on my tablet.
Open source projects almost never support drag&drop, but drag&drop has been around long enough that it should just be expected to work. (Kudos to the open source projects that get this right, BTW.)
There's a little more to it than that.
It's not just that the projects are started and nursed along by people who can code, but they're started and nursed along by people who can code and also:
1) Don't know the purpose of a GUI
2) Don't understand the value of a GUI
There are tons of techniques that can be used, even by a programmer, to ensure that their program is more usable than the competition.
At the most basic level, they can follow all the UI standards of the OS/DE in which they're planning to run-- that one's simple, but it's completely missed by a lot of projects. If your program is running in Windows, and your font isn't rendered with ClearType-- it's a usability bug! Fix it! If you're running in OS X and pressing the down arrow on the bottommost line of text results in a beep instead of moving the insertion point to the end of the line-- it's a usability bug! Fix it! (And a very frequent one, since a lot of OS X programmers come from the Windows world now.) If you're not following all the standards of the OS you're running in, there's your starting point.
Secondly, every time you code something with a GUI, do a hallway usability test. This consists of grabbing someone walking by in the hall, and asking them to perform whatever task your application is designed to do using the new GUI you just wrote. The less that person knows about programming, the better-- you want normal users, not power users. The point isn't to assign a simple "pass/fail" to the UI, but to get their comments and feedback. Do one of those a day, and you'll hammer out 80% of the usability flaws before the product is even released. (Of course, this involves talking to other human beings, sometimes even *gasp* girls!, so I guess that's why it doesn't get done.)
Thirdly, understand the GUI. Discoverability, most importantly. Emphasizing the use of spatial memory, which the vast majority of non-geeks are better at than rote memorization. Understand how the basic widgets work, and why they work that way. (When you understand why widgets work the way they do, you'll hopefully have talked yourself out of "just write your own!" Writing a menu or listbox is *hard*. Writing an open dialog is *incredibly hard*.) Be able to answer the counter-intuitive question: "what five places on the screen can the user put the cursor on the quickest?" and learn why Macintosh menus are stuck to the top of the screen. Understand Mac Classic, which got closer than any other GUI to perfection. (IMO, of course. ;)
There's no reason any programmer can't do these things. They just don't want to. That's a whole different article, though, going way back to the woefully-obsolete "high priesthood of technology" attitude.
Random examples:
Just recently Slashdot covered a new open source FPS game. It's main window looks like this: http://schend.net/images/screenshots/alien_arena.png I can't even enumerate the hundreds of things wrong with just that one window. That the developers thought that UI was "good enough" to craft a *release* around... I don't even know how to reply to that.
Awhile back, I filed a bug against Notepad++ (a highly recommended-to-me text editor for Windows) because their menus didn't work. Their DROP DOWN MENUS. The ones attached to the top of the window. One of the most basic elements of a GUI, one that's been perfected for 20 years, and they don't work!! Again, I have absolutely no words for that.
As for part one - yuk! You people in cold climates should wash more often and it won't happen.
Just FYI, I live in Washington State, and I don't have toe cheese, neither does anybody I know. The point that there's something *on* his foot to pull off in the first place is the opening act of the nasty; the part where he eats it is actually the encore performance.
I can understand that - he's "eating his own dogfood"
Eating dogfood would be substantially less disgusting. ;) (Yes, I know the phrase.)
Exchange is definitely the worst email server in production on any platform
I hope you're making use of hyperbole and don't genuinely believe that. Exchange is certainly not the best, but it's nowhere even close to the worst. Hell, it's arguably better than its direct competitor-- Lotus Domino-- and that's all that really matters. (It certainly uses less bandwidth than Domino.)
The real genius of Exchange isn't the server; the server's an implementation detail and nobody really cares, except hard-core geeks. The real genius is the client software, which is quite simply excellent. To the end-user, the UI of an application *is* the application. (Thus: Outlook *is* Exchange, Lotus Notes *is* Domino.) I think if more open source developers realized that simple rule, open source could be vastly more popular.
(although full backups are actually possible now so it has improved) so the email portion is easily replaced on the same or lesser hardware, but it's a matter of finding out what other portions the users require since it does a lot of other stuff.
That "lot of other stuff" is the reason it's deployed.
I disagree with the attitude to the CLI - that is the one thing that has made large linux deployments possible since you can run the same command or script on as many machines as you want.
You could do this on an older Mac using AppleScript, for example, and never leaving the GUI. Unless you find some weird way of defining AppleScript as a "CLI" (which would be a huge stretch), you can do this particular without ever leaving the GUI.
Also note that Windows designed the Registry specifically to address your problem... again without requiring a CLI. You can deploy a registry entry to thousands of machines, and they'll do your bidding.
It might make large Linux deployments more pleasant, but that's only because Linux has no other technology designed for that purpose. It's definitely "possible" to do, other OSes have already done it.
The main offender newbies hit is X windows configuration but there are now a few decent graphical ways to sort that out and you ALWAYS need a text based way to configure video so you can do something about it when the video settings are wrong.
Yah, but all you need is a "Safe Mode" (to copy a term from Windows) that boots the GUI into a resolution that's guaranteed to work on every piece of video hardware. You don't need to be able to set every single parameter from a CLI, and your OS should protect you from picking un-display-able settings in the first place. And, needless-to-say, it shouldn't crash so often as to make this a consideration.
Consider something like "powerdesk" or the multi-page nvidia or ati GUIs for video settings on MS Windows and you'll see how incredibly hard it is to have a GUI for something that only has a fraction of the options that X windows has
Yeah, but those are shitty GUIs. And even those shitty GUIs are better than a config file-- for example, they're vastly more discoverable. I can guarantee you that if those companies hired a GUI designer and made them non-shitty, it wouldn't demonstrate your point.
I frequently see this: "the CLI is good because [program with shitty GUI] sucks." No real surprise there, saying that a shitty GUI sucks.
Personally I just copy the working nvidia dual head file to a new machine each time instead of the hunting through a maze of twisty config options that you would hav
I'm convinced of global warming, what I'm not convinced of is that it's a problem. People say that billions will starve, people will get flooded out of their house and home-- does all of that follow from a 2 degree increase over 100 years? (Or whatever the latest prediction is.) Wouldn't the increased warmth also increase crop production? Or possibly move moisture into areas that are dry now, making agriculture possible? Say some towns do get flooded-- isn't it worth the trade-off if increased crop yields allow us to feed more people?
What if we spend our entire GDP fighting it, and it turns out it would have been a better world with it?
There's a HELL of a lot more to the problem than "is it happening or not." The real sorrow is that people are obsessed with "is it happening or not" so much that nobody moves on to the next step: "ok it's happening. Now what?"
Secondly, he also states that global temperatures have fallen for the last 11 years. I really would like to see his work.
And...
This article (http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/83), reported in the September 26 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows global temperatures rising for the last 30 years.
Can you please explain how those two things are mutually-exclusive? It's possible for the average temperature to fall over the last 11 years, and also to have risen in the past 30 years. Right?
Ok I demand fiber for $15/month!
What's that? You say my only options for broadband are Verizon, Comcast and Clearwire? And none have fiber? And their cheapest plans for fiber are twice that, monthly?
Look, assuming you're talking about American dollars (thus, located in the US), you must realize that your situation is unique. The vast majority of the population doesn't have the ISP option you have. Whatever it is-- since you didn't share your provider, I suppose you could just be bullshitting.
They signed a bad business deal, and that's somehow Microsoft's fault?
Look, I'm sorry that the business world isn't all soft and cuddly, sometimes people who aren't careful (like Spyglass wasn't) get hurt. Tough shit.
At this point, I have absolutely no idea who you're replying to, or what you're talking about. You've yet to explain who in the thread mentioned Office (most likely because nobody did.) Good job lowering our collective IQs by posting absolutely nonsense.
Elder Scrolls' gratification comes from completing the story and interacting with the world, not by being difficult to play. It's different than, say, Ninja Gaiden in that regard.